Moonshots with Peter Diamandis - How AI Is Impacting Politics & Accelerating the Need For UBI w/ Andrew Yang | EP #61

Episode Date: August 31, 2023

In this episode, Peter and Andrew discuss the challenges and potential solutions for modern democracy including reinventing voting systems, potential threats from AI in the upcoming presidential elections, and UBI (Universal Basic Income).  03:13 | AI vs. Democracy in 2024 37:05 | Elon For President? 44:59 |Reducing Fear: UBI Explored Andrew Yang is an American businessman, attorney, and politician. He was a candidate in the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primaries and the 2021 New York City Democratic mayoral primary. Yang is the co-chair of the Campaign for a Human-Centered Economy. His signature policy was a universal basic income (UBI) of $1,000 a month as a response to job displacement by automation. Yang has been credited with popularizing the idea of universal basic income through his candidacy and activism. Visit Andrew’s website Visit the Forward Party website  _____________ Get my new Longevity Practices book for free: https://www.diamandis.com/longevity  _____________ I send weekly emails with the latest insights and trends on today’s and tomorrow’s exponential technologies. Stay ahead of the curve, and sign up now: Tech Blog _____________ Connect With Peter: Twitter Instagram Youtube Moonshots and Mindsets Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Volatility has continued to be a hot topic. I think the Fed does have other cards to play. Are these mega cap tech companies here to stay? Never before has there been a better time to be an ETF investor. BMO ETFs presents Views from the Desk, a show all about markets and investing with ETFs. New episodes every Thursday morning. morning. air behind on this one too I'm sure. Our founding fathers were not fans of direct democracy. The founding design was look we'll have different coalitions, we'll come together, we'll come apart, we'll do different things. They never imagined that you'd wind up in these two increasingly polarized tribes. Most people say listen if you're sending people 500 bucks a month it's going to be

used for beer and Netflix. The challenge is trying to prepare us for abundance in a time when scarcity actually, unfortunately, is the lived experience of many of our fellow Americans and humans. Hi everybody, Peter Diamandis here with Moonshot. Today we have an incredibly brilliant guest. His name is Andrew Yang. You may know him as the head of the Forward Party who ran for the U.S. presidential election in the last cycle. He's also a businessman, an entrepreneur. We're going to be talking about two things that are his moonshots. One, how do we fix democracy? And he's got some brilliant ideas, including how do we reinvent how we vote so you can vote for almost anyone who puts their hands up. Imagine a vote between Mark Cuban and Tony Robbins for president.

We're going to go someplace like that. The other side is universal basic income. As we have technological unemployment, AI and robotics, is UBI a real thing? What does the data show? How do you fund it? All right, join me with Andrew Yang. And if you love conversations like this and want me to bring them to you, please subscribe to this show. It means a lot to me and gives me the fuel to really go out there and bring the smartest, most brilliant moonshot engineers on the planet directly to you. Let's jump into the episode. Everybody, welcome to Moonshots. I'm here with a friend and someone who got a standing ovation at Abundance 360. The first, I'm not sure I want

to call you a politician. I want to call you an entrepreneur. I want to call you a changemaker in the political realm. Andrew Yang. Andrew, good to see you, my friend. Oh, great to be here, Peter. And yeah, I'm something of, I dislike the title politician, so I appreciate your exempting me. Yeah, you're far more than that. And you're a strategist and an innovator. And I'm excited to jump into it. As is usual, before we dive into a show, let me ask you, what is your moonshot? Most people who sat in the 2020 race, remember my moonshot was universal basic income, which is eradicating poverty in our time. And that's still the vision, the goal. But I've now identified that there's an intermediate

moonshot, which is fixing American democracy so that it actually can solve meaningful problems effectively. So doing that first, and then hopefully we can turn back to eradicating poverty. All right, well, let's jump into both of those moonshots. But before we do, I've got a question for you. And it's a conversation I've had going on with a number of AI experts on this podcast, which is the coming U.S. election, 2024, looks like catnip for AI disruptors, for deep fakes, for people who want to get in there and sort of cause trouble. What is your thought about how AI, generative AI, is going to start playing a role in the next 18 months? Yeah, I think it's going to be a big part of this cycle and not in a good way. And I try to explain to folks, look, imagine if the incremental cost of video and email, a text, an image is zero, and I can make those images or videos true to life convincing, and they're

completely made up and fabricated. Where you saw even recently, there was, I think, a picture of the Pentagon being on fire and stock markets moved before anyone could say, wait a minute, that was AI generated. Now, you can imagine that times 100 or 1,000 in this next cycle. I'd almost advise people down the stretch is just turn off your social media feed because I think it's going to be that cacophonous, unfortunately. I can imagine that. I mean, I'm wondering how much democracy is going to be threatened in the near term, like the 2024 presidential elections. Mo Gadot, who's been on my podcast a few times, who wrote Scary Smart, calls it patient

zero for the disruptions that we're going to see from AI. Now, I'm the guy out there saying AI is the most important invention ever that's going to help us solve humanity's grand challenges, uplift, you know, create abundance, all those things. But I can imagine patient zero being the elections and making Cambridge Analytica look like, you know, kindergarten. I can imagine both of those things too, Peter. I mean, I tell people, look, if you want to improve the human condition, AI could be the most positive development in generations, maybe ever in human memory, really, in terms of alleviating Alzheimer's and cancer. I know you're working on aging, which is the greatest, you know, the greatest. As hard as I can.

I know, I mean, it's fantastic. I'm super glad you're doing it. But in the interim, this 24 cycle could end up being patient zero. Do you think that politicians out there are ready for this? Do you think the existing parties are ready? Are they scrambling?

Are they scared? Are they in the heightened sense of, oh, my God, how do we either use this or defend against this? Well, one of the reasons why I don't think you're seeing much in the way of countermeasures or concerns or precautions or whatnot is that most political figures are more like rats in a maze than anything. You know what I mean? Can we just stop with rats? Well, they're just going out there and they're thinking, okay, what do I need to do to keep my seat, to raise this money, to make this person like me, to get this positive press cycle, to get this social media post to, you know, like get more likes. I mean, like that's where most people's heads are. And the system wide problem of eroding or

collapsing trust and integrity of our democracy fall by the wayside. I mean, one of the things that I'm arguing now is that America's democracy is actually very, very dysfunctional and has been for quite some time. But if you're an existing political figure, your problem is not fixing the dysfunction. Your problem is just fulfilling your role within the maze or within the cage. I mean, one fact I think most people know, but I just want to put a fine point on it. Most elected officials in D.C. spend between 30% and 60% of their days dialing for dollars. So imagine if you had half your schedule calling rich people, and then the other half the time theoretically legislating or running around meeting people or constituents.

You don't have a lot of bandwidth left over for trying to insulate the system from AI. I can imagine that. But I bet you there are forces out there that want to utilize AI to tilt the next election cycle. Is the US government ready to call it out when they see it or defend against it? Have you been in any of those conversations? I've been in rooms with various folks who are making the case to government officials or the government officials themselves. We're totally unprepared, truthfully. The current American political system is reactive, not proactive. And so we're going to go through at least one cycle of real, real damage before anything meaningful is done. I imagine that, right? We had been talking about airplanes being used for terrorism for a long time. And it was 9-11 that got people to change behavior. We've

been talking about pandemics for a long time. And it was finally COVID that got us to accelerate vaccine development. I'm afraid that we don't take action until there's a disaster and the horse is out of the barn. Yeah, we're going to be one disaster behind on this one, too, I'm sure. On the flip side, AI could play a massive role in helping to educate the electorate on what's going on. My biggest problem as a voter here in California is I go to the polls. I look at all of these individuals and what's being voted on. And I'm busy.

I've had very little time to get educated on them. And getting a clear answer is really hard. And you're dependent upon these commercials that you may or may not have seen. There's got to be some mechanism that, you know, better generative AI can sort of position the situations and compare and contrast them and allow me to make a decision. But is that happening? Or do people not want that? I would love to help make that happen in the form of the forward party. You're right that most people right now both have too much information overload and not enough information simultaneously. It's a good time. You show up. It's one reason why, what is the main form of political communication you see? It's just someone's name, really. They're just trying to get their name imprinted

into your mind so that when you show up, you can vote for them. It's very seldom the political party. One of the dirty secrets in California and the rest of the country is that most of us don't have a two-party system. You have a one-party system. Where you are in California, there's zero suspense, I guess, I'm guessing. It's going to be a Democrat. And so which flavor of Democrat? You're not sure. So you show up and then it's going to be a name you recognize, perhaps. It's one reason why at the federal level, you have a 94% re-election rate for incumbents. 94% that's... Yeah, 94% congressional incumbent re-election rate and only a 15 to 20% approval rating of

Congress writ large. So that they've drawn a completely uncompetitive, unrepresentative system and then told us, hey, it's a two-party system, you're competing, like they're not. In California, you know, Democrats run everything, they have three quarters of the legislature, they're having conversations with themselves. And by the way, in California, they're not delivering on things like homelessness or public safety or education. But then they just pat you on the head and say, well, what are you going to do? Like you're stuck with us. And if you go to a place like Texas,

it's the reverse where the Republicans would be like, what are you going to do? So that there is very, very little actual competition in the system. It's one of the things that we're trying to change. I have to say when you stood on the stage of A360 and spoke your heart, I was so impressed at what you had to say. And you had standing room only in your follow-on. It's nice to hear, and I'm not going to call you a politician, a presidential candidate and a political entrepreneur thinking logically about this. And so one of the things, you know, that's important for people to realize, and hopefully you realize this in grade school,

is we don't actually have a direct democracy. We have a representative democracy. And I assume that's because, you know, when America was born, the idea of getting everybody in the country to actually vote was not viable. But it is viable now. Can you talk to how is technology, how could technology save the American or democracy, American political system? So our founding fathers were not fans of direct democracy, as you observe.

And it wasn't because there was some logistical limitation. Really, they just didn't trust people that much, honestly. They said, you know what, we're going to have this representative system. We're going to sort it out. And you have three branches. And you also had these two legislative bodies, one of which was supposed to be a little bit more close to the people in the form of the House of Representatives, and then the Senate was supposed to be more elevated, if you will, and deliberative, though they did not envision our founders, the two party system. George Washington famously warned against political parties on his way out. John Adams said two parties would be a great evil across the land. James Madison said you can't have factions that don't shift. And so you had

this representative system that was set up that did not reckon with the fact that you'd have the domination of these two parties the way that took place. And even then, the two parties until the, let's call it the 70s, 60s and 70s, were sort of like vanilla and French vanilla. They weren't that opposed. And if, you know, a Republican brought a Democrat home as their boyfriend or girlfriend, you know, the parents were like, cool. You were more concerned about, let's call it race or religion than you were party, because the two parties were not that dissimilar. And then over the last 40 some odd years, then the two parties have started to peel off ideologically and polarize in the way that they have. So you have now this urban versus rural, educated versus less educated, diverse versus more homogeneous, etc. Like these things that are becoming more and more entrenched.

And none of this, by the way, is in the founding design. Like the founding design was, look, we'll have different coalitions, we'll come together, we'll come apart, we'll do different things. They never imagined that you'd wind up in these two increasingly polarized tribes that now don't need to deliver for us. And this is why so many Americans are so frustrated, is that with this 94% re-encomment, you know, incumbent re-election rate, and the fact that 90% of districts are drawn to be either blue or red, non-competitive in the general, the big myth in American life is that our leaders have to please 51% of us to stay in office. It's just not true. The reality is they just need to placate or please the folks who vote in either the Democratic or the Republican primary, which is generally between 10 and 14 percent of people in the district.

So if I'm a member of Congress, I just need to placate the most extreme folks in my party and then I'm on a glide path to reelection. I don't normally get into politics in this program, but I do want to talk about your roadmap, your solutions, because I do think that technology can play a role in some of those solutions. And I want people to hear what's coming and what's possible. I also want to get to the importance of UBI in this period of AI and robotics, which we'll get to in a moment. But let's continue on with this. So what is the roadmap for fixing democracy? And just to note, you have a book coming out called The Last Election, right around the time this episode is coming out. Is it on this subject? Well, the last election is a piece of fiction,

actually. I'm trying to drag people into the message in different ways. And so we decided just to have this political thriller about an independent presidential candidate that's loosely based on Mark Cuban. Sorry, Mark. And then what happens throughout that election with this new independent candidate. How much of the book did Chad GPT write for you? Unfortunately, I finished the book with my writing partner before Chad GPT really hit the scene. So, you know, Zero, unfortunately. But the book I wrote about our political system is called Forward, Notes on the Future of Our Democracy.

It's now out on paperback. So, I've written a couple of books on this subject. But I was trying to codify and lay out what most Americans sense on some level. It's been fun on some occasions, like, frankly, at Abundance 360, where you talk to entrepreneurs, leaders, technologists, builders, and then you say to them, hey, you know this allergy you have to politics? It's totally rational. And what's irrational is the setup, where you have a bunch, a series of fictions that are presented to the American people about our political system that after you start digging in, you realize, okay, they're not true. And then the question is, how do you actually fix it? So that's what I've now been involved in. And I'm happy to say we're actually making

some progress. Awesome. And I fall into the camp where, listen, talk to me about anything, just not politics, right? If I want to fix something, I'm going to start a company. I'm going to go and work on fixing it. The last thing I want to do is get involved in politics. And I have lost belief in the political process to fix problems. I believe that entrepreneurs are individuals who find juicy problems, building your product or service, demonetize, democratize it, and solve that problem. I think you are a very smart and wise man, Peter. I spoke to 20 business leaders, and I actually posed this question. And they were CEOs, they were, you know, very, very eminent folks. And I said, how many of you, at some point in your career considered

running for political office, and a majority of hands went up, because, you know, that these are accomplished people. And then I said, how many of you have now concluded that you should not run for office, because the system is so irrational, you're going to get dragged through the mud. And even on the chance that you managed to prevail over the machine, you're not actually going to get anything done anyway. And then they all laugh, but then all of their hands go up. Reasonable people have just drawn this conclusion based on evidence because they're smart. So the system is stacked against us. I said years ago, with due respect to yourself, my friend, anyone who wants to run for president shouldn't be allowed to.

It should be a drafted position for some of the smartest operators on the planet. I totally agree. And I also said to that group of business leaders, I said, I don't know you all that well, but I would put you all in charge of the country ahead of the people who are actually running the country 100 times out of 100. And they all laughed and they said, yeah, like we would, too, because they're rational. They'd be evidence based. They'd just be trying to get things done.

Their motivations would be generally good, all of which doesn't apply to the current. So is there is there a path forward? to the current. So is there a path forward? I mean, you know, obviously, the forward party is been doing a lot of the strategic thinking. And we can talk about what the forward party is. I view myself as really a libertarian capitalist, if I had to position myself in some fashion. But what is your roadmap? How do we make change here? How do we save ourselves from what's happened in this two-party system? Thank you, Peter. I have many friends who would describe themselves the same way. What I'd say is the whole path is to make the fiction real.

Now, how the heck do you do that in real life? Which fiction real. Now, how the heck do you do that in real life? Which fiction real? The fiction is that our leaders need to make 51% of us happy and deliver for us in order to keep their jobs. Ah, instead of just the 10% to 12%? The 10% to 12% in the primary electorate and the wings with their 94% re-elect rate. So how the heck do you make the fiction real? So it turns out that because our founding fathers did not like political parties, there's not a word about being a Democrat or Republican

anywhere in the Constitution. And all of the party mechanisms are established at the state level. It's all made up. Now, if you wanted to, you could change those mechanics in each state. And in 25 states, you could do so via ballot initiative, where 50.1% of the people in that state decide to, they could, for example, get rid of party primaries in that state. Now, as I'm saying this, it sounds made up and impossible. But just understand what this means. It means any candidate who wants to run independent of the party, they all go up against each other at the same time. Yes. Imagine an all-party primary where you run as a libertarian, I run as forward party, there are two Democrats, there are three Republicans, what have you.

And we all line up and make our case to the folks in that state. And then the top four of us get through to a general election. And then the winner is chosen via ranked choice voting. Now, this is not a thought experiment. Everything I just described happened. You mean a democratic process? You mean a democratic process. Yeah, I mean a democratic process. you know what, for any statewide race, it's all candidates in the same mega primary, and then the top four get through and are put through ranked choice voting to determine who wins. Now in 2022, when you had a genuinely democratic process, you know what happened? Sarah Palin lost to a woman named Mary Peltola, who in the conventional system would not have won, but Mary Peltola,

because of ranked choice voting, managed to win by, I think, four points in the second or third round of voting. Same principle, a woman named Lisa Murkowski, who's the incumbent one, despite voting to impeach Donald Trump, and she managed to defeat a Trump-endorsed challenger named Kelly Shabaka because a majority of Alaskans said, look, maybe I didn't love her decision on that one, but I generally think Lisa Murkowski is a reasonable person. In a conventional system where Lisa Murkowski and Kelly Shabaka just went through a Republican primary, Shabaka wins easily. Lisa Murkowski's approval rating among Alaskan Republicans went down to 8% when she voted to impeach Trump. But there's no Republican primary anymore. By the way, half a dozen US senators went to Lisa Murkowski on the Senate floor and said, we envy you so much, you don't have a primary. Imagine if all of the senators inS. all of a sudden could say no to their party's base and instead would go to their constituents and say, I'm going to make 51% of you happy, our decision-making policy improves just like that.

Everybody, Peter Diamandis here. I've been asked over and over again, what do I do for my own health? Well, I put it down in this book called Peter's Longevity Practices. It's very readable in just an hour. In the book, I cover longevity diet, exercise, sleep, my annual found upload, meds and supplements, longevity mindset. It's literally consumable in just an hour's time. Hopefully to incentivize you to make a difference in your life,

to intercept the technologies coming our way. If you want this, it's free. Just check out the link below and download it right now. So what enabled Alaska to put that ballot forward and get it supported? I would assume that the, you know, the political parties would have fought it tooth and nail. That is right, Peter. But it turns out that Alaska is a very cheap media state. You and I could be on Alaskan TV tomorrow if we so desired. So the ballot initiative in Alaska

to get rid of the primaries costs $6 million. The same ballot, I know, it's the best bargain in history. I mean, you get Sarah Palin out, you get Kelly Shabak out, and it's evergreen. It's not like you have to spend

$6 million every cycle. You spend $6 million just to get rid of the primaries. You know where else they wanted to get rid of. I love Alaska. It's a frontier state, right? The frontier mindset is still there. And good for them to lead the way. But I want to paint this picture because it's so important.

So then the same principle applied in Nevada. Now, a lot of people listening to this think, okay, Alaska's weird. Nevada's a little bit more normal. And like you said, the two parties decided to fight this ballot initiative tooth and nail. But the winning advertisement in Nevada was a military veteran looking at the camera saying, I went overseas to defend our country for years. I came back and I can't vote in our primaries. And I don't think that's right. Why couldn't he vote in the primary? Because you need to be a registered Democrat or Republican to participate in either primary. And he was an independent, like 50% of military

veterans. And like, at this point, 50% of Americans functionally. So that ad went out on Nevada TV, and millions of Nevada and saw it and were like, that guy should be able to vote. So the Democratic Party came out against it. The Republican Party came out against it. But 53% of Nevadans said, that guy should be able to vote and I should be able to vote for whomever I want in an all-party primary. So what we're doing is we're going state to state and then flipping over the primary system, because if you put it in front of the American people, of course they want to be able to vote for whomever they want. The fact that our tax dollars are subsidizing these party primaries is ridiculous. It's distorting everything.

And the only people it's good for are the people embedded in the machine who don't want to have to actually submit themselves to us. I love it. It's got my vote for sure. I mean, it's like, wait, this sounds really logical. It's logical. And if someone wants to dig into this, the progenitors of this set of reforms, it's Michael Porter, who's a Harvard Business School professor and godfather of management consulting, and a woman named Catherine Gale, they co-authored a book called The Politics Industry that said, you know why we're seeing our political system flail and fumble this way? It's because of bad incentives in the system. And the way to fix the incentives is to get rid of the party primaries, and here's how to do it. So the ballot initiative in Nevada costs $17 million, which is more than the six in Alaska. If someone

were to say to me, how much does it cost to fix American democracy, I would say approximately $200 million, which in our world, Peter, is a very manageable sum. That's nothing. Yeah. In the context of a system where we're going to spend $8 billion beating each other up and hating each other in 2024. Just one of the Forbes 500 individuals listening here, please just, you know,

Please get in touch with me. You can grab me on socials, Andrew Yang. Peter has my number and email. But how does the $200 million Fix Democracy, check it out. You run the same ballot initiative that won in Alaska and Nevada in 10 states. It fails in five of them, but that's okay. You succeed in five, and then you liberate 10 US senators to do whatever they think is best and not be enthralled to their parties on either side. do whatever they think is best and not be enthralled to their parties on either side, that changes the nature of American politics. And that's very, very real. That's very, very doable.

That's huge. And that's, again, it's the first piece of clear and logical thinking I've heard in a while. So thank you for making that. Thank you for explaining that. What's next on a roadmap? Where do we, you know, okay, we'll pull that off. What's the next step in heading us towards a true democracy? So I concluded all of these things now about 18 months ago. And so I've been running around with forward. Now, let's say that we pull off what I'm describing. We get rid of the party primaries in five states. Ten U.S. senators are all of a sudden lucid and clear thinking. With lots of time on their hands. I mean, it's pretty wild. They'd be like, hey, all of a sudden I'm reasonable again. They have their own opinion. Yes, they have their own opinion.

And in the other 25 states, you have mayors and county executives and city council members and occasional members of Congress also throwing off the yoke of the false blue versus red and saying, I'm also part of this new positive independent political movement forward. Now, you fast forward to the next cycle. This is the great frustration that you and many others share, is that we might be faced with a Joe Biden, Donald Trump rematch in 2024. God forbid. And it's patently ridiculous. By the way, what do you put the odds that that could happen or would happen? The odds are very high, because Trump will probably win the Republican nomination despite his legal troubles. He's up 20 some odd points.

Joe Biden, by all accounts, is running again. There's some rumor that he's going to step aside at the last minute next year. But, you know, I'll believe it when I see it kind of thing. So the Biden-Trump rematch combined age 160 is very much on tap. Nothing against, you know, folks of an advanced age, but these are not the octogenarians you want. There are a couple others I know I'd be fine with, but these are not the two. Before age reversal has been implemented, yes. Yes. You know, these aren't the 80-year-olds you want. Anyway, but it's just a clear emblem of how bizarre and dysfunctional a two-party system is that in a country of 330 million people, those will be the choices.

I mean, gosh, Peter, I was with you at Abundance 360, and I could almost just throw a rock and just take any of the people that the rock hits and say, you'd be a better choice than Joe or Donald Trump. So if we get presented with this choice, many Americans are going to be looking for an alternative. My organization forward, what we'll be doing is we'll be trying to organize swing voters in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, genuinely independent swing voters and say we're going to go with whichever party is on board with getting rid of the party primaries and implementing right choice voting and reforming the system itself. So that's our project for 2024. But I'm going to project in the not so distant future, let's call it 2028. We can all vote for, so this will be fun. Let me set the stage a little bit more. So imagine there was an independent presidential primary, where it's primary where it's Mark Cuban, The Rock, me, Oprah, Matthew McConaughey, Justin Amash, Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, whoever your favorite figures are. I don't know if you want to throw someone into this mix, Peter, if I've missed someone that you like.

Is this, they have to agree or are they being drafted? Either for the sake of the Texas side. Maybe we'll throw Tony Robbins and Elon into the mix too. Holy cow. So Elon, unfortunately, is not born in the US. So there's like that. Tony is. But Tony Robbins, love, love, love it.

Jeff's going to, he's got the Washington Post. He's building rockets. He's got to be something new he's going to go do. Let's throw Tony and Jeff into the mix. Sure. And we can all vote in this primary on our smartphones. Say, I like Tony. I like Andrew. I like Mark Cuban. And then our vote is verified via a personalized QR code that gets sent to our mailing address. You scan it. Congratulations, your vote has been verified. Millions of Americans are participating in actual democracy.

And then the legacy parties would be left saying, no, none of that is real. What is real is waiting to hear what 6% of Iowans think in February. And then millions of Californians and New Yorkers and everyone else would be like, wait a minute, that makes zero sense. I don't give a shit what Iowans think any other time. Why am I caring this time? Or no offense to anyone, because I love you all, but like South Carolina, New Hampshire, I mean, you could just like throw whatever the heck the early basket of states.

I mean, I went through this process. Only 6.5% of Iowans participated in the Democratic caucus I was a part of. It's probably going to be a not that much higher percentage of Iowans in this Republican caucus. So let me get this straight. There's a process by which you raise above some threshold, and I don't care if you're the Cardassians or whomever, if you want to run for president, what would be the criteria for getting yourself on this digital ballot? This is so fun, Peter, because those 20 people, your 20 people, whomever, most of them know

that if they ran for president as a Democrat or Republican, it would be miserable. You know, that they would get shivved the same way that we've seen, let's call it Mike Bloomberg get shivved the same way that we've seen, let's call it, Mike Bloomberg get shivved or whomever. But if you got to run in this independent primary, then you could genuinely make your case. You could be positive. There's not a machine trying to oppress you at every turn. And real Americans could get behind you and vote for you in real time. So the wonder of this is that a political party can design its nomination process however it wants. The Democrat and Republican Party have

chosen to design it in a particularly anachronistic, nonsensical way, not because they think it's smart, but mainly because of inertia and they prefer to control. It gives them control, of course. It's just control, right. And part of that control has been the media, where if you see how the media covers various candidates, and I was part of this too in my book Forward, they very much have their thumb on the scale for certain candidates. And so that's how they try to make sure that their chosen candidate or candidates win.

But now all of that's falling apart. And so what is the new process that replaces it all? You and I both know, and everyone listening to this know, the tech, for what I'm describing, is completely mature. A political party can, again, nominate however it wants. The only things that you need are number one, some heavyweights who are willing to run in this kind of process. And number two, ballot access in all 50 states. Now the ballot access is if you had to put a price tag on it, maybe it costs you about $50 million. Now the forward party already has legal recognition in about eight states. We're kind of marching towards 20 by the end of 2024, let's say.

So this is the infrastructure so that reasonable candidates actually can submit themselves genuinely to the American people without the massive gatekeeping function of the two legacy parties that just want to keep everyone out. I love it. It's the way it should be. I mean, we move millions of dollars and some people, billions of dollars on Bitcoin on your smartphone. You have all of your functions in life in verified fashion, why not vote? That's brilliant. Now, you've mentioned Mark Cuban three times. Have you spoken to him about this? I have, and he is one of my top draft picks for this endeavor. If you don't know, check out his Cost Plus Drugs. I mean, he's literally saving Americans.

Yeah, I do know the company. It's amazing. Yeah, it's amazing. Great stuff. Love you, Mark. Yeah. So listen, I think this is a fantastic idea. And at this point, hopefully, it's not just about being a popular individual. It's hopefully going to be being popular and being intelligent and having good policies.

I mean, why do people say this wouldn't work? I mean, I would imagine people say, well, a populist politician or president doesn't have the experience that's needed to run. They have to rise through the ranks of local, state, and federal politics? Most people have not dug into it even that deeply, Peter, honestly. Most people just knee-jerk think, well, third party, hopeless, Ross Perot, Ralph Nader, Jill Stein, et cetera, et cetera. Now, if they looked at the numbers, they would see that now 49% of Americans self identify as independents almost twice as what identify as Democrat or Republican, that this

kind of internet voting is now very, very doable and natural for Americans in a way it was not even in the 90s. But their reservations are not the ones you just cited. Because most Americans are fed up. They would happily take a reasonable human that is not of the machine at this point. They just don't think it's possible because of the conditioning, particularly from the media, that you must choose either column A or column B and nothing else exists. Yeah. I think people don't realize the influence the media has on politics. And we, for I don't know what reason, think of the media as still Conkrite.

You know, what's his name? Howard. Walter Conkrite. Walter Conkrite. Yes. I mean, it's independent. It's truthful. It's, you know, representing, It's representing truth in the American way.

But that's anything but. Well, this podcast will probably get a similar audience to one of the major cable channels. And a much cooler audience, I will say. A much better audience. Thank you. I'm proud. Most of the people watching this are not tuned in. Yeah, they're entrepreneurs.

They care about changing the world. And the mindset is, let's find out where we can make things better, up and to the right. It's interesting, right? Because maybe it's going to be Twitter. Maybe it's going to be Google. Maybe it's going to be some other platform. But the platforms exist for full verification and to reach everybody in in america well you talk about the media i mean i think that's what motivated elon and um buying uh twitter slash x now is that he thought you know

this is going to be one way i can actually uh try to improve the nature of the messages that are getting out um but what i'm describing it's right there for us, man. The fun thing is you can imagine who would run and a lot more excellent people would run if they thought they would be treated fairly. Do you think the US people would change the rules about being born in the US if Elon wanted to run? I don't know, but I'd certainly love to test that proposition out. I was with Arnold Schwarzenegger not that long ago. I said, you should test that proposition out. But here's one of the fun things, Peter. Let's say that this independent primary does come to pass. I'm just going to speak for myself. If I were part of it, and let's say I lose to, I'll keep using Mark just as my example. I would then endorse Mark and say, Hey man, like let me go campaign for you around the country and you could campaign

anywhere. You'd end up with a team of a dozen high powered surrogates and something of an administration or a cabinet in waiting. And the American people would be like, that crew is as a crew. I would trust her much, much more than the current freaking panoply of, you know, frankly, mostly second raters.

I love it. You're right. Once it flips, you've got, you know, 30 incredible influencers ready to back the independent candidate. Yeah, that's the vision, man. It's going to be the Avengers of rationality and, you know, true progress. And so can people, have you written up these ideas in a concrete fashion someplace? So if you go to Forward Party, that this is the movement, I have not written up the

independent primary plan, though there have been, frankly, versions of this that have been written up. I've written up the other stuff around getting rid of the party primaries, shifting to an all-party primary rank choice voting. I'm going to be excited to get energy behind the 2028 plan. One reason why I'm not hammering that that hard is because we are stuck in 2024 right now to our earlier conversation. And so we're trying to organize independent swing voters in swing states to try and keep the current thing from collapsing. I love it. And this, in fact, is the digitization and democratization of democracy in this regard. It's making the fiction real, Peter.

And the way you described me before, my dad was a PhD in physics out of Berkeley. So when I saw Oppenheimer, I was like, oh my gosh, this is like the freaking family tree in action. My brother is named after Ernest Lawrence, who's Josh Hartnett's character. Lawrence of the Labs, yeah. which is Josh Hartnett's character. But I'm a deeply flawed politician, shall we say, in that I just want to try and make things work better.

I would prefer to be doing something else, very frankly. I mean, I'm like you where you also are trying to solve problems and you've wisely said, you know what, I'm going to solve the problems that are solvable through entrepreneurship in the private sector. For better or for worse, the problems I started getting animated about, like poverty, were things that I thought you needed the public sector to solve. And then now I've gotten very deep into the, okay, how the heck do you build a functional public sector? Well, I wish you luck and I'm going to help spread your meme virus here of those two approaches because they're the most logical, smartest approach I've heard. So thank you for that.

Hey everybody, this is Peter. A quick break from the episode. I'm a firm believer that science and technology and how entrepreneurs can change the world is the only real news out there worth consuming. I don't watch the crisis news network I call CNN or Fox and hear every devastating piece of news on the planet. I spend my time training my neural net the way I see the world by looking at the incredible breakthroughs in science and technology, how entrepreneurs are solving the world's grand challenges, what the breakthroughs are in

longevity, how exponential technologies are transforming our world. So twice a week, I put out a blog. One blog is looking at the future of longevity, age reversal, biotech increasing your health span the other blog looks at exponential technologies ai 3d printing synthetic biology ar vr blockchain these technologies are transforming what you as an entrepreneur can do if this is the kind of news you want to learn about and shape your neural nets with go to demandist.com backslash blog and learn more. Now back to the episode. Andrew, let's flip to your second moonshot, which is the idea of universal basic income. So the idea, just to lay it out as I understand it, and I welcome your modification here, is as AI and robotics and other exponentials, AI and robotics and other exponentials, 3D printing, AR, VR, blockchain, start to disrupt job markets and people lose their jobs to technology.

That we need to do a few things. One of them is going to be to help level up those individuals, upskill them to better skills. help level up those individuals, upskill them to better skills. But potentially, at least in the interim, is give them reliable income, a universal basic income that allows them to put food on the table, get insurance, not feel panicked, perhaps get a better education, perhaps invest in whatever tech they need to start a small business. And it's about human dignity to a large degree and getting rid of fear, because there's going to be a lot of fear as AI steps in in a bigger way in the next few years. I'll say one more thing, and then this is your platform, and you did a huge amount

to, I don't want to say necessarily popularize, but educate people about universal basic income, which I'm grateful for. The other thing I wanted to mention is it is something that's not a theoretical concept. It's been implemented and tested and studied over dozens, if not hundreds, of experiments, both in the United States and around the world. So that's my setup for it. I want people to understand this is coming because we need a countervailing force to the fear that people have about potentially losing their jobs. I love the way you frame that, Peter. The way I describe it is that you have a mindset of abundance and possibility and optimism and entrepreneurship. And then you have a mindset of scarcity, fear, us versus them, xenophobia, and negativity towards technology, honestly.

and negativity towards technology, honestly. And so which of these things is winning? Which of these is going to win? I think you'd be hard pressed to say that nationwide, the mindset of optimism and possibility is winning. It's definitely winning at Abundance 360, which was a blast. I go there and it's like, I was uplifted because here are people who are literally building the future.

But then, you know, you drive a few hours in any direction and you wind up in like a, let's say, a different mindset. And so the question is, how do we help people transition? There are a lot of very smart folks who are deep in AI who've also been studying the effects of UBI or cash relief programs. And one of the things I think is going to appeal to folks like you is that right now we have the worst of all worlds where we're spending so much money and energy on dysfunctional administration of programs that are really punitive and dehumanizing. I spoke to thousands of Americans who are on various aid programs. And the single biggest thing that motivates them is fear. They are scared stiff of losing their benefits. There was a woman in Iowa who said to me,

I would like to volunteer for my local nonprofit, but I'm scared to because I'm on disability. And I'm afraid that if someone saw that I could volunteer, they'd take my money away. And so you listen to that story and you think, my gosh, like, what have we done? This woman's getting the money, but instead of using the money to live a better life, she's staying in because she's afraid of being seen as able-bodied. I mean, like that's what's happening right now for millions and millions of Americans where we've set up this unfeeling machine above them that they do not trust at all, by the way, and said, hey, your subsistence is going to be reliant upon your staying on the

good side of this bureaucracy. And if you fill out the form wrong, we're going to pull the rug out from under you. I mean, like, I've spoken to military vets who are in this boat. I've spoken to so many Americans. And it's, we can do better, let's say. Yeah, Giselle sent me an article, we can do better, let's say. Yeah, Giselle sent me an article which framed it as insecurity versus inequality as the issue people are facing. They don't feel secure. They do not feel secure in the least.

And if we can change that, then we have a much better chance of building a society where if someone else makes some rapid advance, you look at it and say, oh, good. Maybe that's good for me in some way. Right now, unfortunately, it's more like, look at that jerk over there who's doing well. I'm not seeing any of that. Yeah. So you've studied this. If you had to, you know, most people say, listen, if you're sending people 500 bucks a month, it's going to be used for beer and Netflix. And it's a waste of money, for God's sakes. Why are you going to spend my tax money to do that? How do you respond to that? What's the data show? The data shows that people tend to spend the money on food, fuel, shelter, books for their kids, activities for their kids. And the biggest example of that data set was the enhanced child tax credit that was implemented in 2020 and 2021 in the U.S., in 2020 and 2021 in the US, where it lifted millions of American kids out of poverty.

And 130 economists who looked at it said, we should keep doing this because the money is getting used very, very effectively. And American politics being what it is, we then pulled the plug on that, even though there were so many, literally, there were Nobel laureates saying this is the best thing we've done in a generation to alleviate poverty. But the data is there for anyone to find. You also saw decreases in things like domestic violence, child abuse. I mean, if you put a little bit of money into people's hands, you talked about the data, Peter, there was one study I found very, very compelling out of an Indian tribe in North Carolina

where one tribe started giving people a certain amount of money because they had a casino, honestly. There was another tribe that didn't. I've got it here. It's the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians casino dividend in North Carolina and giving them no strings attached between $4,000 and $6,000 per year is that particular one.

Yeah, and you probably have it there that you had the kids learn better and even their personalities became more conscientious, more trusting. They were in an environment where they could... Improved education, mental health, decrease in addiction and crime. Yeah.

Yeah. And by the way, if you wound up with people who do turn to crime and drugs, we end up paying for that too in ways big and small. I mean, like we're spending $30,000 to $50,000 per individual per year who is homeless or incarcerated in our country. So if it hits our institutions, it's a lot more expensive than that $4,000 and $6,000 that those kids got. or Nick did. We've seen this in Alaska since 1982. Alaska's had their fund funded by oil. I mentioned North Carolina. We've had experiments in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Iowa, North Carolina,

Seattle, Denver, Gary, Indiana. A number is a big study done in Stockton, California, Canada, A number is a big study done in Stockton, California, Canada, England, Brazil, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands has done a number, Finland, Iran, Kenya, Namibia, India, China. So, I mean, this has been done hundreds of times. This has been done hundreds of times. And as I read through the details here, it's consistent that this investment has super positive outcomes. I haven't read any place where it's had negative outcomes or a waste of money. Yeah, it's much more effective than, frankly, starting up a new bureaucracy and then saying, hey, guys, improve the lives of people that are not you.

One of the organizations in this space that some people might have heard of is GiveDirectly, which is it transfers money directly to people in developing countries. Now, there's probably some skepticism among your audience, rightly so, of kind of a nonprofit industrial complex or an NGO industrial complex. There's probably that mistrust when it comes to certain government bureaucracies that are terrible at administering benefits in a, like, frankly, a sane way. This skips the middleman and gets the resources to where it'll actually do good. And I've been a donor to GiveDirectly. I think it's a brilliant, super low overhead, minimized overhead process. On a personal level, Peter, the way that you and I do this probably is we just tip really well.

Because you're around someone that's like, hey, this is going to be dollar for dollar. Yeah. And it's such a beautiful thing when someone unexpectedly gets a large tip and you know for that evening, that moment, you've changed their life. Yeah, it's a great, great feeling. I highly recommend it. Yeah. Yeah. So the question becomes, where does this money come from?

You know, can we afford it? And I'd like to play a few conversational games here. I remember Jeff Bezos and a few other folks said, well, if we're going to start to see technological displacement of jobs, and a robot takes a house cleaning job, or a robot takes a factory working working job or an AI takes a physician's job. Why don't we just tax that robot and that AI for that work it's being done and then use that tax base to fund a UBI program? Does that make sense? I think taxing AI makes a lot of sense. I think the practice of it might be a little bit trickier. Where the money comes from, for starters, I don't know what people are going to receive this. So our data right now is worth hundreds of billions of dollars a year to various companies.

Your data is going to be worth more than others, Peter. Thanks. But we're not seeing a dime of that. So one of the proposals I had was, look, there should be a data dividend where I'm not one to hold back certain forms of development, but if you're going to be buying and selling my data, maybe I should see what's going on and get a cut. And that could be the start of multi-hundreds of billions of dollars type measure. AI itself could also, and one of the examples I use is that

there are 2 million Americans who work at call centers still. And let's say that AI is going to be able to do that job pretty soon. How much do those 2 million Americans pay in taxes right now? I'm going to guess that they do pay taxes. And then the question is, will the tech company that uses the AI pay anywhere near that level in taxes? History suggests it will not. And so you'll wind up replacing tax paying humans with AI that we might not see that kind of revenue from unless we change the system. You know, I've had this conversation with Elon, and we've been trying to go back and forth on when we're going to do another podcast together on the subject of abundance. And you know, his first reaction is, yes, we're going to

have full up abundance post post-AGI. And I get that. Once we have artificial general intelligence, which leads rapidly to artificial superintelligence, and let's put away the dystopian scenarios, the Terminator, and we have AI, we're heading towards what I would call technological socialism. We're heading towards what I would call technological socialism. You know, being a good capitalist entrepreneur, the term socialism and communism sort of like are knives into you. But technological socialism is an idea where technology is taking care of you. And it's what will happen, right? AI, your best physician in the world will be in AI.

Your best diagnostician, your best surgeon will be in AI and a robot. And those things will rapidly demonetize towards zero cost. Your best educator, we saw this with Sal Khan, who's a real hero, as you had said on stage. He is a hero. I had dinner with Sal last month, and what a privilege. Yeah, he's such a sweet man and a brilliant entrepreneur. And so the things that we spend a large amount of money on, today we spend a disproportionate amount on health care and education. A lot of Americans are nodding right now, Peter.

and education. A lot of Americans are nodding right now, Peter. Well, and what we're going to see is the very best healthcare and the very best education is eventually going to be free because it's going to be delivered by these AI or AGI systems, right? It's the cost of electricity. And so that's going to be a significant, I mean, if there are costs to living, so we spend our money on, we spend our money on health, on education, on transportation, eventually an autonomous Uber will be four times cheaper than owning a car. And if you don't need to live in downtown Manhattan or downtown Boston, because your job is there, because you can commute via Zoom, or because you can commute in an autonomous Uber back and forth, and the hour of travel time is usable, then you can live someplace where the real estate is four times cheaper and still have a beautiful

backyard. So we're heading towards a world of massive demonetization, I think, and efficiency of our time. So I think the cost of living should go down while the standards of living go up. Do I have it wrong in any way in your mind? I love the vision, and I agree with the megatrends. The problems are twofold. Number one is the regulatory problem. And this is where the public sector comes back in. Let's say I invented AI that could do the job of a surgeon tomorrow.

You wouldn't see that happen in hospitals because the surgeons would just lobby the legislators and say, hey, it's got to be a human surgeon. Or at a minimum, it's got to be a human surgeon advising the AI. So there's this regulatory capture that's going to make it rough. Now, there are certain sectors, and I'm going to use my call center worker example, where legislators aren't going to give a shit about them. They don't have a lobby. So there you'll see it go very rapidly. It's one reason why this political reform is so important is because there's going to be a race toward regulatory protection. It's like, who's going to be viewed as like, oh, indispensable human worker can't replace you?

The AMA. By the way, why do we have a physician shortage in the U.S. of humans? I mean, which is one of the reasons why AI doctors will be such a massive value add. It's because of the American Medical Association artificially keeping the number of doctors low because they didn't want I just thought people got smarter and people got smarter and realized they don't want to actually spend four years in medical school five six seven years with internship and residency come out such massive debt just at the time that AI is going to take their job so that's why no no because if you think about it they're all of these folks who are below the line in terms of applying to medical school. You know, I'll make an insert Asian joke here. Anyway,

so there's been an artificially curbed supply. And then you know that those professionals are going to lobby very, very furiously. And it's not just the doctors themselves. You see it with certain device manufacturers where, do you know Dean Kamen by chance? I was with him for dinner at his home in New Hampshire on Friday night. Yes. Oh my gosh. All right. So, Dean told me a story, might've told you too, where he invented a portable dialysis machine, which would improve people's standard of living dramatically. But then the folks who profit from inpatient dialysis said, no, no, no, that's not safe. And their motivation was obviously that they make a whole lot more money.

It's actually evil. It's evil. There's a lot of evil going on in the system because people are making money off of the inefficiency. And they will fight, fight, fight to keep the inefficiency because that's their business now. So the future you're describing is the future that would be happening in the absence of this regulatory capture. But there are going to be some folks who get displaced very summarily. And so managing this transition in both groups is a must. And right now, the question is, how can you coax some folks being like, look, guys, you're going to be okay, but AI is going to start doing this lifting for us, or this surgery for us. And you're not going to starve to death, you'll be fine. And then also go to the folks whose work is made irrelevant very quickly. Yeah. By the way, for those who don't know Dean Kamen, you may know him as the creator of the Segway,

which is unfortunate because the things that he's actually done in the world have been so extraordinary. One of the most brilliant inventors on the planet, creator of implantable infusion pumps, the Luke arm, the iBot, and I don't know, 1,500 patents. One of the most generous brilliant individuals

He'll be joining us at a 360 this year. We'll spend five days with him in a few different dimensions both. He's got a Company right now we toured it a few myself my few my abundance members called the Advanced Regenerative Manufacturing Institute It's government-funded good thing for the good thing the government's doing. They're basically regrowing organs. You give them a skin sample and they turn that skin sample into induced pluripotent stem cells and then grow a pediatric heart, a bone ligament bone, new islet cells for your pancreas. It's amazing. The guy is one of the most brilliant engineers on the planet. Dean Kamen is a genius and a force for good. And it surprised me not at all that you had dinner with him last week. And his, of course, his most important invention is FIRST, which is his high school, junior high school, high school level educational program that is in 85,000 schools around the world.

Teaching the next generation robotics, indeed. You know, like movable wheelchairs that help people live more functional lives. I mean, the guy's improved a lot of people's existences. uh people's existences so i get the idea that we're going to have uh ingrained um biases and uh self-motivation keeping things the way they have that's always been the case right um i'm sure it falls eventually i mean there will be a point where when you see that human surgeon coming at you and you say oh no no no, no, no, I do not want that human touching me. You know, I don't know how much coffee they had, if they had a fight with a boyfriend or girlfriend last night. I want the robot. I want the robot that has seen this

surgery a million times and cost, you know, a hundred times cheaper. I want it doing the surgery. And so the question becomes, you know, we're going to have to be data-driven evolution. And I think we're going to see it's not going to be a little fuzzy. It's going to be the AI is making the right diagnosis 99 times out of 100 compared to the human. And one of the biggest problems is humans make a lot of mistakes. Yep. the human. And one of the biggest problems is humans make a lot of mistakes. Yep. I mean, your entire, uh, had a fight with their partner or, uh, got drunk or something. I mean, that stuff's real. You know, it's not like our physicians are superhuman or whatnot. I mean, like they,

they're, I mean, they have problems and their problems do not keep them from coming in and operating on us or whatever the case may be. So we're going to have, I hope, the cost of living is going to demonetize. I mean, it has tremendously, right? But we don't count those things that have demonetized. We don't count the fact that our communications are world class, as good as the president of nations had decades ago. And it's free video conferencing on FaceTime or Zoom. I mean, that's insane. We don't count that. We don't count all of the free entertainment we have, the free knowledge, even free AI we have. But the things that we do pay for, there's going to be demonetization pressures. I agree, Peter.

And in many ways, someone once described me, in a flattering way, as wanting to be America's wet blanket. I just want everyone to chill out while we make this set of transitions. And right now, Americans are getting the opposite of more chill, shall we say? Yeah, getting stressed out. Yeah, we're getting stressed out, inflamed, and polarized, and scarcity is taking over, and more and more insecurity, as Giselle put it. So I see my role as trying to make it so that we can actually enjoy the bounty of this incredible Amazing time to be alive.

Yes, it's extraordinary. One of the other ideas that one of my A360 members has spoken about, I think you've spoken about this as well, is basic living as a service, a community where for 250 bucks a month, you get housing, internet, water, food. What else do you want to throw in there? Right? So a fixed cost and entertainment, entertainment, sure. Which I love that idea, because at scale, this is what technology can do, it can it can give us a constantly demonetizing, meeting all our basic needs, and allowing you to earn a living that allows you to put away money and reinvest it. Yeah, I joked, Peter, at one point, it's like we have to enter the era of terrible artwork because we just have people who are able to chill out and paint terrible paintings

or whatever the heck it is, you know what I mean? Some of them will be awesome, I'm sure, but also terrible. Yeah, Sadhguru, I don't know if you know Sadhguru. I was on stage with him years ago in St. Petersburg, and we had dinner afterwards, and he said something that has never left me. He says, technology allows humanity to finally take a vacation from survival right he he's totally right and we've been operating under this resource constraint mindset and institutional setup and everything else where it's zero sum

and we're about to hit a point where a lot of these goods will have essentially zero marginal cost. And then what do you do in an era of abundance? What does that become? We're not set up for it. And in many ways, I feel like the challenge is trying to prepare us for abundance in a time when scarcity actually, unfortunately, is the lived experience of many of our fellow Americans and humans. Agreed. I mean, one of the last points I want to touch base with you on here, because I think it's fundamental to solving UBI in an actual functional way is that of purpose. I think as living a human experience, as a biological individual, we need purpose.

And just surviving is not that, and just being given money isn't that. Any thoughts on this? When I was running for president, Peter, I had visions of an American exchange program, where when you were graduating from high school, you'd go to another part of the country and live with a family who, by the way, would send their kids someplace else too. So they'd probably be nice to you. Maybe you'd even trade. What a great way of creating globalization and peace, right? Yeah. So,

then you'd be like, hey, when someone says something negative about those folks in the red or blue zone, you'd be like, I actually hung out with them and they're perfectly fine. And they're just like us. Like, I had notions of various types of national competitions, not because it necessarily had economic value, but because people need structure, purpose, fulfillment, goals, community. If you were to rewind to an earlier point in American life, maybe your church or religious group served a particular role in your life. Now, that has gotten replaced, unfortunately, by this is going

to hurt you in your heart, but it's been replaced by politics in some people's lives. So, we do need to imbue more communities with the sense of structure, purpose, fulfillment, goals. And one of the big misconceptions about me has been that I was somehow unmindful of that. I mean, I'm or I mean, I like to work, honestly. Now, I'm very, very fortunate where I get to do very, very meaningful, purposeful work. And I genuinely feel like, hey, if I weren't here, very meaningful, purposeful work. And I genuinely feel like, hey, if I weren't here, something wouldn't get done. So that's a good feeling. And that the goal has to be to try and make it so that more people have that feeling. And even if it's not something society wide, like maybe you or I am working on, it can be something as simple as today, I'm going to be

very important to helping my neighbor, you know, clear their garage or care for their children or what have you. One of the things that people hopefully realize is a lot of the jobs, not all, but a lot of the jobs that robotics and AI will take are jobs that were not the jobs people dreamed of doing when they were kids. Right. It didn't dream of being a waiter or cleaning apartment buildings or whatever it might be. But that was the job that you could get to put food on your table or get insurance for your family. And so the question really is, fine, let tech take those jobs that are dull, is, fine, let tech take those jobs that are dull, dangerous, or dirty. And how do we enable that individual now to level up to what they dreamed about? How do we allow people to dream into a

bigger purpose? And I think AI as their co-pilot to help them educate themselves and do things they didn't think they could do is critical. And I think it's almost we have to split what you do for a living to make money separate for what you do for a purpose, right? Yeah. And one thing, Peter, that you suggested just now is that there is a distinction between how men and women or boys and girls experience this phenomena. And studies have borne this out, by the way, that if you have an idle man, they volunteer less than an employed man, even though they have more time. than an employed man, even though they have more time. And their consumption of drugs and gambling and some other things go up.

And so the sense of purpose and usefulness that you're describing is vital to stave off both personal and community self-destruction. And one of the things that Americans are experiencing at higher levels, unfortunately, are those things. Deaths of despair continue to rise. And there's an asymmetry in terms of how men and women are faring in contemporary American life, where now only 40% of incoming college students are men, as an example.

And so there has to be a massive investment in things that help men in particular find a way forward. In the absence of these kinds of measures, many men will go down dark rabbit holes and roots. And that's where the negativity takes over. Yeah. And unfortunately, it is also the case for younger men in their teens when hormones hit, and they're not fighting the lions on the savannas of Africa. Yes. And this is something I feel very deeply where, you know, again, I've been very fortunate, but I remember as a young man, when I started a company and did not work out, and my Asian parents, frankly, pretended to their friends that I was still a lawyer and doing well.

That, you know, you feel like this challenge to your self worth. Now, I was, again, very fortunate in that in my case, I joined another startup. And then... Which is what makes America great. Yeah, yeah. It's what makes America great. But there are lots of young men in particular who don't have this set of opportunities. And then for them, they kind of shrink inward. I'm also the parent of two young boys. So it's one reason why I feel this.

As am I. Oh, yeah. So you feel this too. And, you know, I mean, instinctively, like your kids will be fine. My kids will be fine. One of my boys on the autism spectrum has particular challenges. But I see American boys in different circumstances, and a lot of them, you know, if they don't find a productive direction, it'll turn inward in ways that are not positive. I want to thank you, Andrew, for having the courage to run for president. It is something I will never do.

Not for me, but... Not even in an independent primary where people can vote on their smartphones, Peter? Where you can actually talk steds? If logic actually rules... Okay, it's a non-zero, but it's still... I'd rather spend my time solving the world's biggest problems. In many ways, my goal will be to make it so that awesome people like you have a higher chance of throwing your hat in the ring.

That is currently the case. Currently, I would totally get it. All right. But listen, I love the idea of Mark Cuban versus Tony Robbins versus Kim Kardashian on the independent spectrum for election. It would be a fun, fun election. I mean, we could actually pay for the entire thing with just the reality TV rights. And we would run the table, Peter, genuinely, because so many Americans would look up. I mean, two-thirds of Americans want an alternative to the two-party system.

If you had that battalion, everyone would be like, okay, we're totally doing that. We would win. I mean, you know, and this is something we should be building towards as quickly as possible. Yeah, yeah. Well, thank you for your moonshots, my friend. Just to remind folks, again, it is to reinvent and fix the democracy, no small challenge, and then to help birth UBI as a program that is recognized, understood, and rolled out, not just here in the United States, but through an example in the United States, I think, around the world.

I'm looking forward to a time when kids are dreaming of the types of moonshots they had when I was a kid, right? Being an astronaut, go to the moon and moonshots that really make the world a better place. So where do we find you on social media, Andrew? Well, what a vision, Peter. We'll fight alongside you to make it real for kids around the world. You can find me at AndrewYang.com, Andrew Yang and most social media platforms, or you can go to forwardparty.com. But let's actually build a version of the future we know is possible. It's not going to happen without us. I love it. And watch out for Andrew's

new book, The Last Election. And remember, the hero is Mark Cuban. and remember the hero is Mark Cuban. But don't tell Mark that. Pal, thank you for your vision, and I'm going to help spread your word because I believe in what you're saying. It makes a heck of a lot of sense. Well, thank you, Peter. It's about abundance, my friend.

It is.