The Daily - An Interview With Andrew Yang, the Outsider at Tonight’s Democratic Debate

Episode Date: September 12, 2019

Andrew Yang, a former tech executive, remains one of the least known candidates in a Democratic presidential field that includes senators, mayors, a governor and a former vice president. But by focusing on the potential impact of automation on jobs, he has attracted surprisingly loyal and passionate support. One of our technology writers has been following his campaign since before it officially began. Guests: Andrew Yang, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination; and Kevin Roose, who writes about technology for The New York Times.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Background reading: Armed with numbers, history lessons and the occasional self-deprecating joke, Mr. Yang has been preaching a grim gospel about automation. And voters are responding.The top 10 Democrats will share one stage for the first time starting at 8 p.m. Eastern. Here’s what to watch for.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, even as well-known Democratic lawmakers failed to qualify for tonight's debate, Andrew Yang did. Kevin Roos on what has made Yang's campaign so compelling. Kevin Roos on what has made Yang's campaign so compelling. It's Thursday, September 12th. Kevin, tell me how you know Andrew Yang. So I met Andrew Yang a few years ago when he was running this organization called Venture for America, which he had had a couple careers.

He was a corporate lawyer, did some startups. He actually sold one of his startups and made a decent chunk of money from that. And then he was trying to do this thing where he would essentially turn like recent college graduates into entrepreneurs, set them up with some money and supporting them as they went off and started companies. Kind of sounds like Teach for America for Business. Exactly. That's, I think, the pitch that he made. And so I was covering technology at the time. We talked about Venture for America. And, you know, I found it interesting, but not really all that newsworthy. I didn't end up writing about it, but we kept in touch. And then, you know, he emailed me sort of out of the blue in October of 2017.

And it was a very cryptic email. He just said, like, let's get together. I've got a story to tell you. And like, I don't know. I like to go on goose chases. So I invited him out. We went to Dean and DeLuca right downstairs from the Times building. And he told me that he was planning to

run for president. And at first I was very confused. I was like, president of the food co-op? Like the homeowners association? Like, what could you possibly mean by running for president? Association. Like, what could you possibly mean by running for president? You know, he's never held political office before. I didn't even know he was particularly interested in politics. And he says, no, no, no, like, I'm for real running for president in 2020 as a Democrat against Donald Trump. This is not a joke or a stunt. And he's written this book talking about some of the big ideas of his campaign. And then I kind of forgot about him for a few months. And then he came back one day in 2018 and said, hey, I filed my paperwork and I've got my first campaign video.

Hello, I'm Andrew Yang, and I'm running for president as a Democrat in 2020. So I watched the video and it was like interesting. It was kind of homemade. It was not particularly high budget. We are experiencing the greatest technological and economic shift in human history. It was basically him talking about his sort of central message of his campaign. I came to realize that technology has already wiped out 4 million manufacturing jobs in Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and other states. four million manufacturing jobs in Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and other states.

And it's about to do the same thing to people who work in retail, food service and food prep, customer service, transportation. And I thought it was sort of interesting. I hadn't heard a presidential candidate talk about issues like AI and automation and certainly not like make it the centerpiece of their campaign. And so I was intrigued. I mean, here was a guy who was talking about an issue that you hear about a lot in Silicon Valley, but it hadn't really become a mainstream concern yet. And so I wrote this story. I called him a longer than long shot candidate, which I thought was kind of being generous at that point. And then

I kind of expected that he would sort of fade away into obscurity and that I probably wouldn't write about him again. And it turned out you were kind of wrong. I was a little bit wrong. Please welcome Andrew Yang. I would like to welcome to Crooked Media HQ, Andrew Yang. The supporters call themselves the Yang Gang. HQ. Andrew Yang.

The supporters call themselves the Yang Gang. They chant PowerPoint at his rallies and wear ball caps with M-A-T-H on the front for Make America Think Harder. Can I just say, of all the candidates I've seen on the trail, you seem to be having the most fun, are you? Oh, it's a very low bar you set, Trevor. One candidate who will perhaps be a surprise on the stage for the next month's debates, and entrepreneur Andrew Yang, who made the cut ahead of several other Democrats with far more experience. USA! USA! USA! Are you chanting USA or US Yang? I couldn't even tell. Andrew Yang! Andrew Yang! Andrew Yang! F.U.V.A.! F.U.V.A.! F.U.V.A.! F.U.V.A.!

So I wanted to catch up with Yang again. He's, you know, obviously his situation has changed quite a bit since our first meeting in Dean and DeLuca. Hey, Kevin. How are you? I'm doing great. So I flew to Houston where he was spending the week preparing for the presidential debate. Things are a little different. And, you know, he pulls up in his big SUV with his campaign staff trailing behind him.

And now you've got, you know, travel with an entourage. Such a big entourage. You're in the debates. You've probably got, you know, armored SUV out there waiting for you. Well, she just rented it. It hurts. And we sit down for this interview. And I asked him kind of straight up, like, where did I go wrong? Like, what did I miss here?

And what did he say? Well, I think what people missed, and unfortunately, Democrats are still struggling to pick up on this, is a genuine explanation for why Donald Trump won in 2016. Where if you turn on cable news, the message seems to suggest that he's our president because of some combination of Russia, racism, Facebook, the FBI, Hillary Clinton emails. And so you're like, all right, I guess that's why. But the numbers, and I'm a numbers guy, the numbers tell a very clear and distinct story that the reason why he's our president is that we automated away 4 million manufacturing jobs in your home state of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Missouri, Michigan, all the swing

states he needed to win. He sort of said, well, you know, it's not actually that hard to understand. You don't need to know a lot about computer programming or artificial intelligence to grasp that technology is having a huge influence on the labor market and the workforce. You don't need to be into technology to see the self-serve kiosk at the McDonald's or at the airport or at the CVS or at any of the other places you frequent. So Yang's diagnosis of the Trump election, and by extension, what's going on in this country, is that it stems mainly from technology, from automation basically knocking people out of their jobs, and that his candidacy is compelling, in his opinion, because it directly confronts that. is compelling, in his opinion, because it directly confronts that.

Right. And I think if you've heard one thing about Andrew Yang over the course of this presidential campaign, it's probably related to his idea for what's called universal basic income. Universal basic income, or what I've rebranded the freedom dividend because it tests better, is a logical next step. Which is what? is a logical next step. Which is why. So universal basic income is not a new idea. It's really an idea that goes back decades.

Where if we put money into people's hands, it has so many positive effects because it would create hundreds of thousands of jobs around America. But it also recognizes the kind of work my wife does, who's at home with our two boys, one of whom is autistic. And the basic idea is every American adult gets $1,000 a month in cash, no strings attached. Doesn't matter if you're a billionaire or you're unemployed, you get the same $1,000 a month regardless. And how's that paid for? So he's proposing to pay for it through what's called a value-added tax, which is, you know, kind of European-style tax that he thinks would most directly tax the companies that are profiting from automation. And how exactly

does that solve for the problem he's diagnosed of automation and its consequences. Well, he believes that it doesn't solve the problem of automation, but it does give people a cushion. So if you lose your job because your company decides to replace you with AI, having $1,000 a month will allow you to meet your most basic needs while you figure out what to do next, while you look for a new job, learn a new skill, go back to school. Basically, that having $1,000 a month guaranteed as the floor would make it easier for people to adapt to this sort of unprecedented technological change. And he uses this example of a truck driver. So if you're a trucker making $50,000 a year, and then a robot truck comes and takes your job, now you are worth zero. So truckers, you know, obviously are threatened by automation.

If self-driving trucks come onto the roads, millions of people would stand to lose their jobs as a result. And those people wouldn't just be able to immediately find something else that paid them as well as trucking that was suited to their skills. Like a lot of them would need some time to figure out how to adjust and what to do next. And to make that easier, we would give them and everyone else $1,000 a month. I mean, it's not $12,000 a year is not enough to live on, but it is enough to kind of serve as a net so that they're not experiencing the most extreme financial hardship. Where does Yang say that we are in this process of automation? So he thinks we've basically only seen the tip of the iceberg. He, you know, cites these studies from think tanks and academics that say one out of three or one out of four jobs in America could be at risk

of automation within the next decade. And he's sort of using that to predict a mass unemployment crisis. He's not saying, you know, this is going to be tough for a few people or a few people are going to have to find new jobs. This is really about millions and millions of people being automated out of work. It's going to zero out not just the truckers or the warehouse shelvers or the retail workers. I was an unhappy corporate attorney for five months, which is long enough to know that AI can do that job. It can edit contracts more quickly and accurately and inexpensively than the smartest human lawyer. And why this? Why $1,000 a month to people and not what we hear most candidates and a lot of policymakers talking about when it comes to

automation, which is retrain workers whose skills have been supplanted by technology? Well, Yang talks about this a lot. He believes that basically that reskilling programs don't work. When I dug into the studies around the retraining programs for displaced manufacturing workers in Ohio and Michigan, you found abysmal success rates of those programs that were federally funded. The success rates hovered between zero and 15% generally. Half of those workers left the workforce and never worked again. And of that group, half then filed for disability. And you then saw surges in suicides and drug overdoses in those communities to the point where now our life expectancy has declined

for the last three years in a row. So if you say as a politician, we're going to retrain everyone, and then you come with me to the truck stop and you actually have a clipboard and say, who here wants to be retrained? You will see how dumb an idea that is in real life in many, many contexts. And does that feel right to you? some estimates that only sort of one out of four people can be retrained profitably by the private sector, that essentially the government has to play some major role in trying to help people transition out of their old jobs and into something new. And what is it that having $1,000 a month would allow these people to do? Let's take the trucker. The 50-year-old trucker loses his job, probably a he to automation. Now $1,000 a month shows up in his mailbox. What in your mind does that allow him

to do that he couldn't otherwise do? So first, when you're looking at something like trucking, the $1,000 a month is not enough. But I've been giving the Freedom Dividend, as you know, to several families around the country right now for the last number of months. And I just saw one of the recipients, Kyle Christensen in Iowa. So Kyle is living in Iowa Falls, Iowa with his ailing mom who's recovering from cancer. So he's been getting a thousand bucks a month from me for a number of months. I just saw him a few weeks ago in Iowa and he seemed like a different person. And he came to me and he said, I used some of the dividend on a guitar. And I've been playing shows for the first time in years. And this band

now wants me to perform with them next week. And he was so proud and he was beaming when he told me this. The $1,000 a month is in many ways about everything but the money. It's about our humanity and what we would actually value. It's car repairs going from a crisis to an inconvenience. It's home repairs and going back to school. So when you translate what the money means in people's lives, it means the things that make us human. Right. I mean, his argument is essentially that this would radically reshape society. So if we had an economy that was based upon making us happy, then we would do this yesterday, clearly.

Let's imagine I'm president 2021, freedom dividend goes out. There's a town of 10,000 people in Missouri. So that means it's another $10 million in spending power every month. And then one person there decides to open a bakery, which might have been a really dumb idea before the freedom dividend, but now it's a good idea. They open a bakery, it sells muffins, people like the muffins. Were there cheaper ways to get those muffins to those people? Probably yes. Is the new bakery somewhat economically inefficient? Perhaps. But does it make the community happy? Does it make the bakers happy? Does it make everyone's life better despite its economic imperfections? Yes.

So that is the vision of the economy we have to move towards. And that certainly applies to creative and artistic and cultural endeavors too. And the way that he's talking about it is essentially as something that would kind of change the way we value work in the first place. So, you know, he brings up the example of GDP, gross domestic product, which is the sort of benchmark measurement we use to determine how well the economy is doing. Productivity. Productivity, essentially. And he thinks that's the wrong measurement. And so the goal should be to try and optimize not for this GDP measurement or stock market profitability and prices.

It should be to optimize for how we're doing, our health, our mental health, our childhood success rates, how clean our air and water are. And if we had those as goals, then we could harness our energies towards actually trying to improve our own lives instead of improving the bottom line of a company that is just going to proceed to automate more and more work as it's able to. and the freedom dividend, is that people think it's somehow going to mitigate work.

It will not. It will recognize the kind of work that so many of us are doing and want to do. It will create more opportunities for the most human-centered work, the caring, the nurturing, the artistic, the entrepreneurial aspirations. Just the question is, what do we mean by work? I know my wife is working harder than I am, you know, and I'm running for president.

And right now the market values her work at zero. So we have to think bigger about what we mean by work and value. And if we succeed in that, then we can create a society where more people who are going to be automated out of their jobs are going to go on to fulfilling lives that they're excited about, as opposed to right now, we're essentially kicking them to the curb, pushing them into the void, and then expecting that to go all right. And I hate to say it, but over time, them is us. And so we need to get our acts together and wake up to the bigger problems.

And universal basic income would theoretically make all that possible. Yeah, that's what he's arguing. We'll be right back. Okay, so that's the logic of how this should work, if it works according to plan. I wonder how giving $1,000 to every American actually would work, kind of practically. So there are Yang skeptics out there. There are people who just either don't think this is a good idea, don't think it's necessary, or don't think it would actually work in practice. So I wanted to ask about that. Giving people $1,000 a month, like, this would have unintended consequences.

I mean, something would go wrong somewhere. Maybe it's that landlords start jacking up people's rent by $1,000 a month, so the money all ends up going to landlords. Maybe it's that there's inflation. Well, I have plans and countermeasures for those things, but go on. Like, how do you imagine government under a Yang presidency working to make sure that this actually works as intended, that people actually get to go buy their guitars and pay their, you know, car repair bills and pay their medical bills and have the kind of security that they need and that it doesn't end up just sort of getting taken up by some other

part of the economy. Well, first we need to try and make sure that you don't have rent seeking and couching behaviors. But if you have a passive income of a thousand dollars a month and your landlord tries to stick it to you, you're much more portable and hard to push around now because you're like, wait a minute, I've got two adults in this house. We've got like another $2,000 a month coming in. Unless every other landlord has done the same thing. But then you get six people together and you say, you know what we're going to do? We're going to buy that fixer upper.

You know, like that you actually end up turning people into much more flexible decision makers. And it's like if you can barely make your month's rent, and so you just have to suck up whatever the landlord's telling you. There are so many positive effects on that side. And one of the comparisons I make is that mature companies like Verizon and Coke and Microsoft declare dividends all the time. And everyone applauds management, says good work. And you don't know when ever asks, what are the shareholders going to do with the money? Are we going to go around? It's like, what is this Verizon shareholder going to do with the dividend? Like we better make sure they spend it on the quote unquote, right things.

If he's making repairs to his yacht, that is not okay. So when people talk about it's like, oh, like, what are you going to do with our money? It's your money. Like, you're an owner and shareholder of the richest country in the history of the world. It can easily afford a thousand a month for each person. The problem is that people have, frankly, a very paternalistic attitude towards the poor. It's like, all of a sudden, if you make a decision, then we have to somehow police it like you're an infant. I mean, it's ridiculous.

Or they have a cynical view about rent-seeking under capitalism that, you know, if there's all this extra money floating around that, you know, landlords or health care companies or, you know, investment banks or some other, someone will come along to try to take that $1,000 a month out of people's pocket. Corporate predations are real, that's for sure. Someone will come along to try to take that $1,000 a month out of people's pocket. Corporate predations are real, that's for sure. But one of the reasons why this dividend is so powerful is it makes people much harder to exploit. If you imagine a waitress at a diner getting harassed by her boss, and she has no choice but to keep that job to make ends meet, she's getting $1,000 a month. She can be like, you know what, I'm going to quit this job,

and then I'll find another one and I can survive for a month or two. So it empowers people. It does not make us more subject to predations. So as I'm listening to Yang talk, I'm kind of thinking that there's this sort of bizarre coexistence in his campaign message of like extreme pessimism and extreme optimism. So his pessimistic part is like, he believes that there's essentially this asteroid heading toward earth, right? That there are these robots, they're coming to take millions of jobs. They're going to create mass unemployment. It's going to be total societal collapse if we don't do something about it, which is a very bleak vision of the future. That's like

the part that sounds kind of like sci-fi. And then there's this sort of extreme optimism that if you just do the thing that he says, if you just give people a thousand dollars a month, like humans are creative, they are ambitious. Like if you just satisfy their needs, they will find amazing things to do. They will start businesses. They will essentially make the decisions that you would hope they would make and that humans really are at their core good. I'm optimistic about the fact that there's nothing stopping a majority of citizens of a democracy from rewriting the rules of our economy to work for us, the people, the owners, the shareholders of this country. That's the source of my optimism. And, you know, the other thing I'm thinking is like,

yes, like in a vacuum, this makes a lot of sense, but we're not in a vacuum. You know, in fact, we're in a incredibly polarized political environment. And it's not all about automation. There's a culture war. There are people who believe that immigrants are threatening the future of Western civilization. And the core of Donald Trump's appeal, a lot of it has been about culture and about values and about identity. And that's the piece that you don't really hear Yang talking about as much. And so I wanted to ask him about some of that too. Now, I know you have said over and over again that the reason that Donald Trump was elected is because we automated away these millions of manufacturing jobs in swing states in the Midwest. There's also a cultural aspect of this. I mean, that was not

the only reason that Donald Trump was elected. How do you campaign in that environment while trying to make the story about jobs and automation and robots and basic income, but knowing that there's this whole other group of people who are motivated by cultural issues? The fact is, if people feel like their own future is insecure and their kids' future is insecure, then they become more subject to xenophobic appeals, to racist appeals. And so if you're dealing with a society of deprivation, then unfortunately those appeals become more powerful. So it's not just that people are wrongfully blaming job loss on immigrants when they should be blaming automation. It's that actually you think that the automation in some ways causes people to be more biased against immigrants. Well, so the automation, I'm just going to try and take a very... Sorry, I'm just trying to wrap my head around this. No, please, please.

So let's take a town in Ohio that had its plant closed and thousands of people lost their jobs and it's rough. So people are struggling economically. And then your executive functioning erodes because you're just trying to make ends meet. And then if I could function, meaning like decision making ability, yes, discernment, decision making, information processing. And then you have someone pop on your TV and say, hey, like blame immigrants, then you're more likely to be like, yeah, like, you know, especially that's the main story you're being told. Studies have shown that if you can't pay your monthly bills, it imposes a mindset of scarcity that constrains your bandwidth and reduces your functional IQ by 13 points, which is what you'd expect in a country where 78% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck and almost half can't afford an unexpected $400 bill. half can't afford an unexpected $400 bill. So if you want us to become more reasonable and rational and proactive around things like climate change, then you would need to lift this mindset of scarcity that is weighing down so many of our people and replace it with at least some sort of

relative abundance. And there's no realistic way to do this except through something like a basic income. And Kevin, what do you make of that answer? Because on the face of it, it's compelling, but it's also kind of confusing. Well, yeah, I mean, I think like to a hammer, every problem looks like a nail, you know, to Andrew Yang, like every problem can be explained as a function of automation and stress introduced by technology.

And solved with UBI. And solved with $1,000 a month. Because he's basically saying that, like, yes, like, racism, anti-immigrant sentiment, like, gender bias, these things are problems, but they're not the root problem. Like, the root problem is that people are stressed out because their jobs are changing,

they're worried about becoming obsolete, they don't have money to fulfill their basic needs and they're really stressed out and that if you just solve that problem like that will kind of solve all of the rest of the problems too and so i don't know how persuasive people are going to find this like there are a lot of people who are stressed about paying rent and they're not all clamoring for the wall at the border but i think the way that all of this sort of ties together is part of the reason that I think he's been able to attract and maintain this sort of devoted audience.

Like, I think when we talked in 2017, like, this was essentially an argument about economics and labor. I mean, he was essentially approaching this as a math problem. But in the years since then, he's been able to sort of turn it into a discussion about what it means to be a human, about what we would do if we weren't so worried about making ends meet. And I think that's the

part that I didn't see when I first met him was that this argument, this sort of wonky economics argument about automation and UBI and GDP and all these other three-letter acronyms, that he could make it appeal to people on an emotional level by saying, this is not just about giving you free money. But instead, he's saying, like, it's not about the money. It's about what the money can allow you to do. And that's the part that I think I missed. I found that the more human I am, the better the campaign goes. And I enjoy it more.

And people around me enjoy it more. So it's just a win all the way around. And I think you know this about me. It's not like I'm obsessed with becoming president. You know, like... Andrew, you're running for president. I'm just going to remind you. Oh, yeah, I'm running and everyone knows I'm running. But everyone also knows that I'm not running because of some deep native, longstanding, burning desire to become president of the United States. Like I'm running because we're facing some of the biggest

existential problems in our history. And our government does not have it shit together. Okay, one of the last questions. We've got a debate coming up. In the last debate, existential problems in our history. And our government does not have its shit together. Okay, one of the last questions. We've got a debate coming up. In the last debate, you know, I think you maybe got like a couple questions off. You were given a little bit of speaking time, but you didn't get off any, you know, made for TV zingers. So like, what's your game plan going into this debate? Are you taking a different strategy? Are you kind of going to try to play the game more in terms of having these sound bites that are made to be sort of clipped and replayed? that I have, but I'm very confident that the airtime I have will be impactful and that if it goes like the last debate in terms of hundreds of thousands, millions of Americans finding out about my campaign and exploring the ideas more fully, then that's going to be a big win for us. Andrew Yang, thank you for talking with us. I am very glad to be able to upgrade you

from longer than long shot to medium long shot. Dark horse. Dark horse is my preferred term. Thanks, Kevin. I appreciate it. Thanks a lot. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. We have a problem in our country. It's a new problem.

It's a problem nobody really thought about too much a few years ago. And it's called vaping, especially vaping as it pertains to innocent children. On Wednesday, the Trump administration said it would ban the sales of most flavored e-cigarettes after hundreds of people became sick with vaping-related illnesses and as the use of e-cigarettes by minors surges. There have been deaths and there have been a lot of other problems. People think it's an easy solution to cigarettes, but it's turned out that it has its own difficulties. During a meeting in the Oval Office, the president and his aides described vaping as a dangerous new problem that required government intervention and

flavored e-cigarettes as a major reason why minors take up vaping. And the Supreme Court said it would allow the Trump administration to enforce new rules that would forbid migrants from seeking asylum in the U.S. if they traveled through a different country without seeking asylum there first. A federal appeals court had blocked the controversial policy, which is designed to reduce asylum applications. But the Supreme Court said it could go into effect even as legal challenges move forward. Finally, under a tentative legal settlement reached on Wednesday,

Purdue Pharma, the company that created OxyContin and played a major role in the opioid crisis, will file for bankruptcy, dissolve, and reemerge as a new organization devoted to helping victims of the crisis. The settlement, made with 22 states and more than 2,000 cities, will include $3 billion in payments from the Sacklers, the family that owns Purdue Pharma, but it does not include an admission of wrongdoing. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro.

See you tomorrow.