wellRED podcast - #112 - Trae Crowder + Andrew Yang!

Episode Date: April 10, 2019

Trae interviews 2020 Presidential Candidate Andrew YangwellREDcomedy.com for tickets!

And we thank them for sponsoring the show. Well, no, I'll just go ahead. I mean, look, I'm money dumb. Y'all know that. I've been money dumb ever, since ever, my whole life. And the modern world makes it even harder to not be money dumb, in my opinion, because used to you, you like had to write down everything you spent or you wouldn't know nothing. But now you got apps and stuff on your phone.

It's just like you can just, it makes it easier to lose count of, well, your count, the count every month, how much you're spending. A lot of people don't even know how much they spend on a per month basis. I'm not going to lie, I can be one of those people. Like, let me ask you right now, skewers out, whatnot, sorry, well-read people, people across the skew universe, I should say. Do you even know how many subscriptions that you actively pay for every month or every year? Do you even know?

Do you know how much you spend on takeout or delivery, getting a paid chauffeur for your chicken low mane? Because that's a thing that we do in this society. Do you know how much you spend on that? It's probably more than you think. But now there's an app designed to help you manage your money better, and it's called Rocket Money. Rocket Money is a personal finance app

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What was that a reply gift for? Just when I did something stupid. Something fat, I think, and stupid. Something both fat and stupid. But anyway, that was money well spent at first, but then I quit using it and was still paying for it and forgotten. If it wasn't for Rocket Money, I never would have even figured it out. So shout out to them.

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What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See Capital One.com for details. Hello, everybody. It is your boy, the Cho. Well-readcom, W-E-L-L-R-E-D, Comedy.com, spelled just like the podcast. That is where you can find out when we are coming to a city near you.

Well, I'm glad that you asked maniac screaming at me in the background. April 18th, 19th, and 20th, we're going to be in Portland, Oregon. April 25th, Oxnard, California. May 3rd and 4th, Salt Lake City, Utah. May 17th and 18th, Jacksonville, Florida. May 19th, Orlando, Florida, May 30th, 3rd, June 1st, New York, New York, June 2nd, New Brunswick, New Jersey. June 8th, we are in Columbia, Missouri, June 28th, and 29th.

We are in Huntsville, Alabama, June 30th, we're in Birmingham, Alabama, July 13th, and 14th. We are in Asheville, North Carolina. August 23rd, we are in Grand Rapids, Michigan. August 24th, we are in, okay, now, excuse me here, because on Twitter last week, I got in trouble for saying this wrong, and I don't remember how I was saying it the first time, therefore I don't remember what the wrong way is. August 24th, we're going to be in Traverse or Traverse City, Michigan. Either one, we're going to fucking be there and you should come to the show. August 25th, we are going to be in Detroit, Michigan.

So you can find out all of that information at well-read comedy.com. You can also sign up for our newsletter where you will find out information on shows before somebody who's so stupid that they can't pronounce Traverse or Traverse. city, Michigan fucking right the second time around. You can also grab our merch. We got T-shirts. We got tank tops. We got hats.

We got all sorts of stuff, including our best-selling book, The Liberal Redneck Manifesto, Dragon Dixie out of the dark. This podcast portion, as always, is brought to you by Smokey Boys Grilling. Smokey Boys Grilling.com. Go there, get all the rubs for all you meets, and tell the gentleman I said, Hello, they're about to start a podcast of their own. Muhog podcast, a very manly podcast about meat rubs. Also, I think people have started to figure out online that the Smoky Boys

grilling is my dad and my uncle Mike. But for those of you that don't know, that's who that fucking is. Also, carve, craft vodka, do you want to get drunk like the show? Well, let's face it. You're probably not ready for that. But if you want to get drunk like a normal person or just have a couple cocktails, you don't have to get drunk. We can all live our lives in moderation. Go to carvevodka.com and check out all the fuss about Jacksonville's first and only craft vodka distillery.

Go to carvevodka.com and carve your path today, you smelly scoundrels. This podcast is also, this is very special. This is brought to you by well-read. live in Lexington. You're goddamn right. Thank you, Maniac. You are goddamn right. That is our album that we recorded back in Lexington. It is now available for pre-order special, exclusive, very top secret news that I'm telling with everyone who listens to our podcast. Look, if you're part of the well-read newsletter, and I hope you are, stay tuned this Friday for a special newsletter with links and all other sorts of information. But as of right now, hey, Corey.

Okay, calm down, I'll tell you. The album officially comes out on April 20th. Sure is, buddy, that's 420. But pre-ordering means that you hit super hard, and you want to get some sample tracks before anyone else. So look up well-read, one word, y'all know it, W-E-L-L-R-E-D, on iTunes, or find us on on-tour Records.com. Pre-order the album, you get six.

I know they're doing it on Amazon, too. You get six free tracks immediately when you, There's two from each of us. Math is easy. If you have Sirius X-M, you're going to hear some of our tracks being played on multiple stations exclusively until the album comes out. I was just told yesterday that they were apparently playing. They played the whole album back to front five days in a row. Well, fuck me in the stupid little butt.

That's amazing. So check out Sirius XM. You can listen to it on there. Pre-order on iTunes, Amazon, all that stuff, on tour records. And if you're listening to this, it's Wednesday. and check all our social media for links of how and where to pre-order the album. I would also like to take this moment to thank you guys so much for supporting us in the way that we could record a freaking album because it means a lot to us.

You know, Trey's videos came out three years ago, almost like on the dot, and that's obviously how we got a fan base and were able to start a podcast and write a book and it was a great platform so we could, you know, put more of our insanity out in the world. But before those videos, and a lot of people still, for some reason, don't know this. And I mean, that's fine, whatever. However you got to start listening to us, I don't care. And whatever you think of us, I don't care, as long as you're listening, as long as you support us, and you're cool and you hit and you treat everybody nice.

But, you know, this is now we're entering into my 15th year doing stand-up comedy. And I think the boys of both, this is, they're going into nine. We're almost getting into a decade for them too. So we met eight or nine years ago. I know that. And we immediately started writing together and doing sketches and writing stand-up comedy together. And when you're starting out and stand-up and still, I mean, even when you're, I mean, fuck, I was 12 years in when Trey's videos hit and we were able to go on tour.

We used to just sit out on our porches. Whoever's porch, whatever city we were doing comedy. If we were in Chattanooga, it was my porch. We were in Knoxville, it was Trey or Drew's porch, whichever one. And we would sit there and we would have done the show that night. be, you know, I'm drunk, whatever. And we'd be sitting there just like, man, god damn it, I don't know what's going to happen, but we've got to pop somehow.

We've got to get something out there that people start listening to us because, God damn it, we can go on tour. Like, I know that we can tour, and we're going to tour, and we're going to sell out places, and we've had theaters in mind that we've since done, and we're going to meet the drive-by truckers, and we're going to meet Jason Isboy. God damn it, we're going to hit for them. And we did. It's amazing.

And also one of those things is that we're going to tour, and we're going to put out a record, and people are going to give a shit about it. And, man, it's making me want to cry right now because that has come true, and that was all because of you guys. So, I don't want to get sappy before we get into this podcast with Trey and presidential candidate Andrew Yang, which is a great conversation. But I still wanted to thank you all for helping us get to a place where we could not only have a successful podcast, not only have a successful tour, a successful book,

but now hopefully a successful album. And just to have something out there, I don't care. You know what, even if you don't like it, we did it, God damn it, which you will like it. It's like being at one of our, if you've never been to one of our shows and you've been trying to get out, this was recorded at one of our shows in Lexington at Comedy Off Broadway, in my opinion. I mean, I don't know where they all rank because it really just depends on Wednesday. The last time I was at one of the clubs that I consider the best clubs in the country. But Lexington is definitely up there.

It's fucking top three, I'll tell you that. Comedy Off Broadway and Lexington is amazing. If you live in Lexington, you should go there every weekend that you can afford to go there to see any comedian because if they put them up there, they're a good comedian because that place doesn't have to put up bullshit because they're too good. So, like I said, go to all those places to pre-order and just thank you guys. And I really hope that you enjoy our work. I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as we enjoyed recording it. And as much as we've enjoyed crafting that act for as long as we've been crafting that particular. act and also just know that if you've seen us recently the material on the album will be completely

different than what you've seen recently and if you saw us uh if you buy the album and you hear that material the next time you see us it won't be that material so we're we recorded the album we we fucking threw everything away and we're working on a new act for this year and uh looking forward to recording the next album so like i said um you know go to well red comedy dot com to see us on the road go pre-order on iTunes and Amazon and on tour records and check us out on serious XM radio and yeah the album comes out 420 and I'm super pumped and thank you all for sharing in this journey now here is an interview with our own Trey Crowder and presidential candidate Andrew Yang enjoy everybody and skee well well

Hey, y'all, it's Trey. I just wanted to check in with you guys. I'm still in recovery from sinus surgery. I had a couple days ago, and it's going okay. I mean, you know, that pretty much as expected. Not really many side effects. They said it could affect your voice, but I don't really hear it so far. But I don't know.

No, I'm kidding. Can you imagine? I was actually worried I'd come out talking like that. Not like that specifically, but that it would impact my voice. because I feel like I've got a pretty distinctive voice. I'm not saying necessarily distinctive in a positive way, but I do think it's undeniably, you know, recognizable, I'd like to think.

And I mean, hell, I like my voice. I like my accent and all that, and I didn't want to lose it, but it was worth the risk to have that sinus surgery, which some of y'all probably say me posting about and stuff, and if you don't know what that's about. Basically, I had chronic sinusitis or chronic sinus disease, which is pretty much I've had at least a mild form of sinus infection for about five years or so, something like that.

But I didn't, I don't know what I thought it was. Me and Drew talked recently on the podcast about our dads, just old country boy redneck types and doctors. and it's very much a thing in my family. You just, you know, you just suffer through shit. That's just how it works, you know. Or like Drew said a couple weeks ago, it's like, yeah, you know, you ain't sick if you don't go to the doctor. Everybody knows that. That's how it works.

That is sort of how it is in families like ours, and my family is very much that way. So I don't know what the hell I thought was wrong with me, but I've been, yeah, varying degrees of head cold pretty much for, yeah, like five years or so. And it had gotten to the point recently after I moved to California because I thought for a while it's because I lived in East Tennessee, which if you all know, is statistically the worst place on planet Earth for seasonal allergies. That's literally true. And I had lived there for like seven years and it had gotten way worse. But I thought that's what it was was my environment.

And I moved to Southern California and I was like, oh, well, maybe that'll help that, you know. turns out this is also one of the worst places for seasonal allergies. It's just different things in the air, but it's still allergens. So I moved from one to the other and then got even worse as far as that goes. And it got to the point this last winter, if you any of y'all saw me on the road or whatever, I don't know. You might have not like, I mean, I was sick, like sick with, imagine, you know, a moderate to pre-severe sinus infection you've had. I had that straight for three or four months. I mean, from like Halloween through March, probably.

It really only cleared up at all right before I had this surgery. And even when it cleared, and when I say cleared up, when mine was cleared up, I still was having sneezing fits every morning blowing, you know, my nose 15 times as soon as I get out of bed and all that. Like, that was me when I was fine, you know, and then it went from that to laid up in the bed sick. So I had to do something about it. So I found out I have, yeah, chronic sinus disease. And so they operated on my sinuses, sinus surgery. And there's varying degrees of that because you got all these different sinus cavities.

Sometimes some people just need one cavity operated on. You also can have a deviated septum or not. well, I had literally all of it. Every type of sinus procedure they do, they did on me, basically. It was every one of my sinus cavities and my septum was all fucked up. So it was extensive as far as that goes. And I got to tell you, having the inside of your face scraped out, not a good time. If it works the way it's supposed to work and I go back to like genuinely normal,

then it'll be completely worth it regardless. this way worse pain and discomfort still would have been ultimately worth it as long as this ends up working. I don't know that it's going to work yet, but it should. But, yeah, it's, I mean, there's way worse surgeries to have, obviously. And, but, I mean, but, yeah, it's not a good time. I'd talked to people who'd had it and mostly all they said was like, oh, it'll change your life.

It's amazing. I felt like a whole new person. And I get why they focus on that six months from now. That's probably what I'll focus on, too. but it like it really downplayed the actual procedure to the point where like I was almost scheduling meetings and interviews and stuff, you know, in the days following. And my manager and people had to basically be like, well, let's not take that chance. And I'm glad they didn't because there's no way I could have done it. But yeah, I thought I'd be down and out for 36, 48 hours or something.

But no, I'm on day five now. and I really just felt like I started to turn the corner this morning. And on top of that, yesterday was my birthday. So happy birthday to my face. That's why I thought I could get my face. It's just a brutal scalpel job. But I posted that on Facebook. I said that, you know, I decided I'd get my face an extensive surgical procedure for my birthday.

And I totally get with it's fair. It never occurred to me that that could be construed as like plastic surgery. but I started getting DMs and stuff from fans being asking about it, was it a nose job or a jawline thing or what? And it's like, God damn how much work you think I need. But I went back and reread it and I was like, yeah, okay, fine, fair enough. You know, fucking redneck moves to L.A.

He starts talking about face surgery. I mean, I guess it's, you know, I could see how people think that, but that's not what it was. It was a genuine medical procedure, and I'm on the man now. So hopefully I'll be back up and add them completely by next week. but we will see. But yeah, speaking of my birthday, my wife also pointed out to me that it was this.

I didn't even realize or hadn't thought about this, really, ever. But she pointed out that it was the 10-year anniversary of me and her meeting because we actually met on my birthday. But the reason, and I probably sound like an asshole because I don't remember. We met on my birthday in 2009. The reason I never really thought about it like that, though, is because we met when me and a group of my friends came into the bars she worked at that I would then later get a job at and work at with her. But we came into the bars she worked at to have dinner to celebrate my birthday. But it was me, my friends, and my girlfriend at the time, my college girlfriend, who I was with for like two years or whatever.

So yeah, Katie, Miss Steele yo man, I guess. But, yeah, when I first met her, I was with another girl. I didn't cheat on that girl with Katie or nothing like that. But then I started working at Crawl Daddy's with Katie. And, you know, me and the other girl were already on the way out by the time I met Katie anyway. And then, you know, the rest is history. But so, yeah, I guess that's a different thing. I had to celebrate on my birthday every year.

I'm 33, by the way, so just one more year until I can shove that in Jesus's face, am I right? Made it this far. It didn't even feel like my birthday. I don't know how people are about birthdays, but mine was just, you know, just another day. That's how I try to look at it because, you know, I mean, hell, nothing hits. And I've been feeling pretty rough anyway, so. But back to the sinus surgery, if you, if you're, I think a lot of people suffer from that shit that I had and probably but don't even realize it.

If you do, look into this shit. I still can't give a full endorsement of it yet because I'm still not out of the woods, but I've talked to a lot of people who have. And I said it was worse than I thought it would be. That's true. I'm also, A, a colossal baby. And B, for whatever reason, had gotten it into my head that it was a very minor thing, having the inside of your head scraped out.

I don't know why I thought that wouldn't be a big deal, but I did. So, but having said all that, go into it knowing you're having a for real surgical procedure and it ain't going to be fun, but it's not too bad. If you need to get it done, get it done. That's my public service announcement for this week. So with that said, about to play for y'all an interview I did with Andrew Yang. I'm assuming a lot of y'all probably heard of Andrew Yang by now. But the deal is this interview is a little old. It's a little over a year old if memory serves correctly.

is somewhere around in there, but I've talked before about I'm working on this documentary. And I always want to point out, like, I'm working on a documentary about universal basic income, but it's very much not my baby. Like, I don't want to take too much credit for it or whatever when it comes. Like, I show up when they ask me show up. I do what they ask me to do, but they are running the show. These great documentaries, Steve and Rennie are their names. They're doing a great job with it so far, but it's very much there.

passion project and I'm just along for the ride. But as part of that documentary process, they wanted me to sit down with Andrew Yang, who I will admit I had not heard of yet at the time, but they said he was running for president in 2020, and he had written a book about universal basic income. So I got the book and I read it and I was fascinated by it and I was already ready to sit down with this dude. And I was very impressed by him. And as a lot of people have since been, Because at the time, like I said, I hadn't heard of him yet. He was kind of just getting started in a way. I mean, I think he had around the same Twitter followers that I had or maybe even less.

And now, since then, he's blown plumb smoothed up and rightfully so. Because, again, he's a very impressive and very smart dude. And he's really got his head wrapped around this UBI thing. I say some of this in the interview. But when I first heard about UBI as a concept, I immediately was like, okay, well, that's what we're going to have to do. do then? Because in my mind, it was an inevitability. Like, there was no, there was no getting around it because there was this coming storm of, you know, automation, the robot uprising and all that. In my mind, that was just, there was, that was going to happen no matter what. That was going to cost us a shitload of jobs. And we were going to have to do something about it. And I didn't see any other option, but UBI. So in my mind, it was a lot of. So in my mind, it was a lot of job. So in my mind, it was a lot of job. So, like, well, we'll make it work because we'll have to make it work.

Because if we don't, it's going to be riots in the streets and people starving to death and shit because this shit's about to go down. That's how I felt about it. My point is, I didn't even know any of the political arguments around it or nothing. In my mind, I was just like, well, we're going to have to figure it out because that seems like that's probably our only option. But having said that, as I've worked on this documentary and through my conversation with Andrew and reading his book, I've since become fully on board with the concept because after learning more about it, the methodologies behind it, how it would work and all that, like it's only made the case stronger in my mind.

So I don't know how you guys will feel about it. Also, obviously, there's still a ton of challenges. There's massive impediments to the concept of a UBI in this country. And me and Andrew talk about some of those. but I still, my first point of view, I still also hold on to, which is, I mean, it's coming. The storm is coming. We're going to have to do something about it at some point. And Andrew's a guy who's trying to get out in front of it when a lot of other people, as far as I can tell, are just turning a blind eye to it.

Not everybody, but, you know, Bernie's talked about it too and everything. But Andrews really beating the street, trying to get something done about this thing. And like I said, I really liked the guy a lot. I was really impressed with the guy a lot. And so with that said, here's my interview with 2020 presidential candidate and all-around Goodfeller, Andrew Yang. Thanks, y'all. All right, Andrew Yang. Thanks for taking the time to talk to me.

I appreciate it. You know, I thought of an alias for you. John Connor. What do you think about that? Oh, I like it. Has that been proposed before? It has not. You're leading the fight against the robot uprising.

That's what you're doing, John Connor. Yeah, I'm a big Terminator fan, so I'm certainly appreciate it. Though I think my mom's not quite as badass as Sarah. Linda Hamilton, she's not doing like pull-ups against the bed frame. But no, you are out there beating the streets all the time all across this country talking to people about automation, right? I mean, you know, robot uprising is a pithy way of putting it, but sincerely automation and how it affects the economy.

the job market and what's happening. So what are you seeing out there? What is happening? Well, the big thing I'm trying to get people to learn is that this is no longer something you can look out in the horizon and say, hey, at some point in the future, our jobs will be subject to automation by robots, artificial intelligence software.

If you look at the numbers, it started a little while ago, decades ago, even, where we've automated away four million manufacturing jobs in Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin. from 2000 and 2015, and I spent six and a half years in those parts of the country seeing firsthand what that effect was. And now we're going to do the same thing to truck drivers, call center workers, retail workers, fast food workers, and on and on through the economy.

The five most common job categories in the United States are administrative and clerical workers, including call center workers, retail and sales workers, which is 10% of American workers, food service and food prep, truck driving and transportation and manufacturing is still holding on to number five. And all of those five categories are going to shrink a lot. They've already started to shrink. So this is no longer something we can look out and say, hey, it's coming down the pike. We're actually in the middle of it. Yeah, I mean, anybody that's ever called a helpline, you know, and had to push nine different buttons to maybe talk to a person, but a lot of times you never even get to a person, you've got this an automated list of options, or you go into a

restaurant and it's a touchscreen that you order from and pay and everything else. I mean, people encounter this stuff in our day-to-day lives all the time and that's exactly what we're talking. I mean, like, it's happening right now. Yeah, we're only a couple of years away from having AI that is indistinguishable from a human being when you call. Because right now, we all get annoyed at the pounding the buttons, but like, oh, get me a human, get me a human. But the technology is going to become so good that the software is going to be indistinguishable from a human on the other side. And that's really when you can get rid of a lot of workers.

And you said we're a couple years away from that? Like what is being generous, what is the timeline here for the five industries that you name specifically to just hemorrhage these jobs to automation? Like what's the actual timeline we're looking at? Well, if you look at it, call center workers are going to be replaceable in the next two to four years. Google has already demoed software that can simulate the human caller or voice operator

that the person on the other end of the line can't even tell the difference. 30% of U.S. malls are going to close in the next four years. And again, one out of 10 American workers works in retail. So these are not even like, oh, high-end AI. This is just malls are going to close. And the average retail employee is 39 years old, majority women. They make about 11 or 12 bucks an hour high school graduates. You know, no one knows what their next job opportunity is going to look like.

Truck driving is probably five to ten years away in terms of significant automation. But as you know, truck driving is the most common job in 29 states. Yeah, I'm from Tennessee, and it's huge that my maternal grandfather was a truck driver, actually, his whole life. I've known, I couldn't even tell you how many truck drivers. It's a massive industry where I'm from. Yeah, it's the most common job in 29 states. there are 3.5 million truck drivers nationwide, 94% male, average age 49, average education high school or one year of college. And most of them have chronic health problems because it's

unhealthy to sit in a truck 11 hours a day, four days a week. So that automation is going to cause massive problems. Almost one out of 10 workers in Nebraska is either a trucker or supports trucking. So you're going to have to see, and there are another 5 million Americans working. in truck stops, motels, diners, and the places that serve the truckers. So this is going to devastate a lot of parts of the country. Yeah, there's a lot of small towns you can drive through. So I live in Los Angeles now. I drove out here with my family from Tennessee. You know, we took like a week the process of moving out here. And you go through so many places that it like literally wouldn't exist, I don't think. If there weren't trucks coming through there,

you know, and people stopping and spending money at these truck stops and everything. And so, So, okay, five to ten years with the truck drivers specifically. Or, I mean, or the retail workers. I do want to say that it's not like all of the truck drivers will be automated by five to ten years. But five to ten years, you'll see the beginnings of, for example, a truck driver in the first truck and then two robot trucks following right behind them. Right. So the pot of gold to automate truck driving is about $168 billion per year, which is why some of my friends, actually, some of the smartest people in the country, are working. on solving this problem because they know there's this pot of gold of $168 billion in not

just saved labor but also fuel efficiency, equipment utilization, fewer accidents because about 4,000 people die in accidents with trucks every year. So the pot of gold is motivating some of the biggest companies in the world and some of the smartest people. Okay. So these on average 39-year-old women retail workers and middle-aged truck driving males when these jobs go away, I mean, then what happens? As of right now, okay, what do we do then?

What's the plan for those people? Where are they supposed to go? Well, right now the plan is to do nothing. And so what I did is in my book, in my research, I started studying, well, what the heck happened to the manufacturing workers that we automated away in Michigan and Indiana and Ohio? And so the numbers show that almost half of those workers never found another job again. and just left the workforce.

Right. And of those that left the workforce, almost half of them filed for disability. And so that's how they survive. They go to the government and say, hey, my back hurts. And a lot of them, in many cases, their back probably genuinely does hurt.

And then if they get on disability, then they're on disability for the rest of their lives. And if they don't get on disability, they're often drinking themselves to death, committing suicide, or getting hooked on opiates. So right now, the suicide rate in the United States is higher than it's ever been among middle-aged Americans.

It's gotten so bad that our life expectancy as a country has declined for the last two years, which is almost unheard of. Shouldn't happen, right. In a developed country, there are seven Americans dying of drug overdoses every hour now. Right. So that's what's going to happen to the truck drivers and retail workers. They're going to go down that road. And in line with what you were just saying, I want to take a minute and tell you about my hometown briefly.

So I'm from a town in Tennessee called Salina, Salina, Tennessee. It's two and a half hours from literally anywhere that you would have heard of, you know, two and a half hours from any city, middle of nowhere, very rural. We have no traffic lights. I graduated high school with about 60 people, which was abnormally large.

Typical graduating class there is about 40, very, very small rural place in Tennessee. For years and years, the center of the town's economy was this large clothing factory. It was an Oshkosh-Baghgosh factory. They make like overall kids clothes and stuff. I was born in 75, so Oshkosh Bagash was in its heyday. Right.

And so they had a big factory in Salina, Tennessee. And then in the 90s, and I know that this is kind of a bit of an overblown narrative with Mexico taking the jobs. But with this specific factory, it moved its facility to Mexico in the mid-90s. Like that did happen. But either way, that factory closed up. and overnight all those jobs left and 20-ish years later, Salina has not only never recovered, but has only just circled the drain that entire time.

And in my own family too, and in pretty much every family that I know, and it's all the things that you named with alcoholism, opioid abuse, my mother is an opioid addict who fell into it after all of that. All the entire downtown area is shuttered up and just closed door. There's no industry, there's no jobs at all. And a lot of those people, it went from a place where everybody worked, and most of those people worked in this one specific place,

and then those jobs went away. And now it's a place where even if you live there and have a job, statistically, you're probably driving two towns over. You're probably commuting almost two hours a day round trip for a job because there's just not jobs there because they left and they never came back. An interesting side note, and this is true, you can look this up for years, Clay County, the county that Salinas in, despite being a small rural southern county, was a blue county in every general election forever, basically. And then made headlines in the early primary season of 2016 for Donald Trump carrying that county by a larger margin than any other county that he'd been up until that point in the Republican primary.

So where I'm from is almost this like case study. Like you couldn't really draw it up any better than my hometown. I've seen all this stuff firsthand. And so I know that what people in places like this, or at least in my hometown, what they want to hear or be told is just bring the jobs back. You know, they want their jobs back. They don't want their jobs back.

They don't want an alternative solution right now. They're still holding on to the idea that their jobs might come back because not for nothing. They're told by a lot of people a lot of the time that they will bring their jobs back. Yeah. Politicians. Can you talk about that for a minute? The reality of that situation, those jobs coming back and where we really are and the outlook for that. Yeah, and it's not just your hometown.

No, there's a lot of salinas in America for sure. Yeah. And if you look at the stats, there's a direct correlation between the movement to Trump in each voting district and the adoption of industrial robots in that district. Now, in your hometown's case, it was that it moved to Mexico. Right. But in most towns, it is that they got automated. Yeah, they got automated. Right.

And so you can see the movement from blue to red corresponds directly. And I studied economics in college. And the economic theory is that, oh, after you automate or export these jobs, the workers will miraculously find new jobs. They'll retrain. that'll upskill and the economy will grow and everything will be better. And that logic is going to destroy us because when you look at the reality on the ground, people are actually moving across state lines at lower levels than they have in decades. It's not that the factory workers all look up and say,

oh, my factory's gone. It's time for me to move to Seattle and become a coder. I mean, like, this is exactly the kind of ridiculousness that unfortunately, many of our politicians of both stripes have been hand-werected. waving about it, pretending, really. It's a fantasy. So the reality is that as our economy grows and automates in this direction, there are going to be many, many workers that get displaced and automated in every industry, not just manufacturing like in your hometown. And so the goal has to be that we make the labor market much more dynamic, make it so that people can move, people can

possibly retrain or start their own business, though that's not going to be realistic for a lot of people. And so... Yeah, that's one thing that's brought up a lot is retraining the truck drivers, whatever. And again, and I think about my grandpa, you know, God rest of soul, love my grandpa to death. I would have loved to have seen somebody try to teach him how to code, like you said. You know, I just... It just wasn't happening. You know what I mean?

He was a truck driver. He driven the truck his whole life. And, you know, he doesn't have to worry about this. But anytime I hear somebody talking about that, I just, I can't help but kind of scoff to myself because that's just not realistic, in my opinion. Yeah, two things. One, if you look at the data around how effective government-sponsored retraining programs are,

on the rare occasions where they actually try and retrain a worker, the efficacy rate is between 0% and 37% on the high end. So we're really, really bad at it, and most people never go through any kind of retraining program. But if you think about it another step, the reason why people are so obsessed with retraining is because they're so deep in the presumption that we as human beings are just economic inputs to slot into the system.

And then if you're like, oh, what's that? You're no good as an economic input. We have to retrain you so you can be like good as another economic input. Instead of saying, wait a minute, like we are all the owners and stakeholders of the richest, most technologically advanced society in the history of the world. We can easily afford a dividend for ourselves. And if the trucks can start driving themselves, that's going to save us $168 billion a year. That's enough.

Not that I'm suggesting this is necessarily what we should do, but that's not enough to pay all the truck drivers, their current salaries, and still save billions of dollars. But right now the plan is to be like, hey, who's going to get the $168 billion? Not the truck drivers. Like, that would be crazy.

Right, yeah, yeah. So the problem is that the gains are being distributed really, really awfully, not to the people, not to the owners of the society, but it's to the very, very small handful of individuals and shareholders and companies that are benefiting from all of these trends. And after seeing all this firsthand like you have

and in dealing in this, I mean, in the depths of this issue for as long as you have, you have ultimately landed on a universal basic income as the solution in your mind to what we're talking about. Is that accurate? Yes, I have. And my campaign has rechristened it the freedom dividend in order to establish that it's something that we deserve as shareholders.

I'm huge where I'm from. Yes. Big end to freedom. I confess that we did do a few studies. Yeah. Yeah. If you could come up with a logo that involves a gun somehow, you'd just be, I'm kidding. I'm not, but I am.

So tell me about it. How would it work your freedom dividend? What are the specifics of the way you see it? So the freedom dividend would give every American adult between the ages of 18 and 64, $1,000 a month, free and clear, no questions asked. It doesn't matter if you're working, not working, how much you're making, and if you move, it goes with you. So the plan is to give everyone $1,000 and say, look, let's try and make ourselves and our economy more dynamic. And our economy is now so large, we're up to $19 trillion in GDP, up $4 trillion in the last 10 years. we can easily afford a dividend of $1,000 per adult.

And that would kick in after I'm elected president in 2020. We're going to start rolling it out in 2021. Okay. And I look, you know, spoilers here. You know, I'm on your side, man. I see a lot of this the same way that you do, because, again, I also have lived it from a different perspective of you, but I've seen it on the front lines.

And so I'm on board. For me, I first heard about the idea universal basic income and I was immediately on board with it having not really even known much else about it because in my mind I was like well we're not going to have a choice because of it's a coming storm is the way I see it we're going to have to do something and it's going to reach a point where it's just going to be the reality and people are just going to have to get over it that's pretty much where I was at but though learning more about it the more I hear about it there are actual genuine arguments there to be made in favor of it so I want to put

put to you some things that I know people say in opposition to this because I've had them said to me. I heard people talk about them. Okay, number one, you just said we can afford it. I mean, how are we possibly going to pay for this? How are we possibly going to give every adult American citizen $1,000 a month in perpetuity? How is that possible? Yes. So if you look at the headline numbers, it would cost you about $2 trillion per year,

which sounds like a lot. For context, the economy is 19 trillion and the federal budget is around $4 trillion. So $2 trillion seems like a ton. But when you start digging in, first we're already spending between $500 and $600 billion on income support programs, welfare, food stamps, disability, and the like. And so if someone's on those programs and benefits, you go to them with a choice. You say, hey, you can keep your current benefits, don't want to touch them, but if you want, you can opt in instead for the freedom dividend, which is $1,000 a month. So if someone, let's say, is getting $1,200 on disability right now, then they'll say, I'm good, and then you'll say, okay, then we'll leave you alone. But that means then you're not giving them $1,000. So if you

look at the numbers, about 25% of this $2 trillion is already being paid for because of the current programs we have in place. So that's number one. Number two, right now we're in a trap because our income tax system is really bad at getting revenue from AI, robots, software, and automation. Because the beneficiaries tend to be these really big tech companies that just move their earnings through Ireland, and we don't really see a whole lot of it. Amazon, biggest company in the world, sometimes says, hey, we didn't make any money last quarter, so zero taxes. So what we have to do is we have to join every other industrialized country in the world and have a value-added tax. So our economy is so vast now that if you had a value added tax at half the European level, it would generate about 800 billion in revenue.

And this way every Amazon transaction, we'd get a slice to be able to pay for... What does a value added tax mean exactly? Like, how does that work, a value-added tax? So a value-added tax is a system where businesses pay a tax on every bit of consumption or production. So in other words, if I'm like a car manufacturer, when I sell you the car, I will have paid a value added tax for the production process, and then most of the time I'll end up passing it along to you as a consumer. So the easiest way to think of a value added tax is essentially a consumption tax. And if you've traveled in other parts of the world, sometimes you'll see it on your receipt. It'll be like, you know, this cup of coffee was two bucks, and then there's like a vat of a certain amount.

So it's similar to like a sales tax? It's quite similar to a sales tax. But keep in mind here, every dollar from this that would go into your pocket, my pocket, everyone else's pocket. So our economy is so big now that of that at half the European level will generate about 800 billion in revenue, which gets us to about 1.3 trillion or two-thirds of the cost of the freedom dividend. Now here's where it gets great. The Roosevelt Institute projected that if you were to give every adult at that,

$1,000, shocker, it would grow the economy, which of course it would because we'd all have more money to spend in restaurants like this and on car repairs and on supplies for our kids. So if you grow the economy this way, it would end up growing it by about $2 trillion and create $4.5 million new jobs. And we'd get back 25% of that GDP growth because that's the ratio of tax revenue to GDP in this country. Imagine all the new economic activity. You get another. So you get $500 billion in new taxes by giving everyone $1,000. So now you're at $1.8 trillion of the $2 trillion. And then we're going to end up saving billions on incarceration, health care, homelessness services that we currently spend about a trillion on because people will have to go to the emergency room less.

They'll go to jail less. They'll wind up on the street less. All of those things are incredibly expensive. As soon as someone hits our system, then we start spending a fortune on them. So this is actually a much more cost effective way to keep people functional and that's how we're going to save The last portion so this freedom dividend will end up paying for itself in many respects Right, after we implement a value-out of tax to pay for a component of it. Okay, so Here's another one

How is this not just We're putting all this in the hands of the government and the government is our problem to begin with big government right? That's the problem the bureaucracy of the government you expect them to actually solve this problem through this mechanism? Oh yeah, I've heard that too. So a few things. This is actually an idea that has a very deep American heritage. Thomas Payne was for it. Richard Nixon was for it and actually passed the House of Representatives under

Richard Nixon in 1971. A thousand economists signed a letter saying this would be great for the economy. Martin Luther King was for it. So this is not some far out new idea. This was like right there on the docket. and almost passed. The only reason it didn't pass was that Democrats in the Senate wanted a higher income level than was being proposed. And there's one state that has had a universal basic income in effect for 36 years. And that state is Alaska, which is a deep red state passed by a Republican

governor. It's wildly popular. And the Republican governor made this argument. Do we really want all this money going to the government where they're going to waste it? Why don't we have the money come back to us? The people, yeah. The people. So the freedom dividend is the exact. same thing where instead of growing the government it actually shrinks it. It takes this money and gives it directly to you, me, and every American such that we can spend ourselves. If you look at the heritage, Milton Friedman was for it and Friedrich Hayek was for it. And there are two very, very conservative libertarian economists. There's a lot of libertarian support for universal basic income. It's actually not big government, it's small government. One thing that, when it

comes to taxing the rich, you know, the idea of the way our tax code breaks down and trickle down economics and one that. One thing I've always said to people is, you know, if you put more money in a rich person's hand, it goes into some nebulous offshore account that nobody knows anything about. They may not even know. But if you give more money back to a poor person, it gets spent on eggs or diapers or mill goods and services, right? You give money back to people and it actually gets injected directly back into the economy, whereas you give money to corporations and institutions or the government, it just disappears forever.

But one thing people say in response to that, when you bring that up, and I'm going to preface this by saying this particular argument up is one that I cannot stand, but I know that's one people make. Won't people just blow all this money? And won't they just, you get people an extra, you know, X amount of, you know, poor people especially.

You give them, you know, $1,000 a month. Won't they just blow it on, you know, booze or whatever, you know, gambling lottery tickets, gambling away? Like, how do you know that it'll actually get put to good use if you give it, you know, to these people, no questions asked? Yeah. So to your first point, I couldn't agree more that the entire idea of a trickle-down economy is ridiculous.

Like, if you give a wealthy person money, it's just going to sit in an account and do nothing. But right now, 59% of Americans cannot pay an unexpected $500 bill were all strapped for cash. And so if you gave anyone in the bottom 70 to 80% of the country $1,000 a month, they would end up spending it directly in the economy. Yeah. Like, that's the way we get. They have to. They have no choice, really. They need that money.

Yeah, yeah. Completely. So couldn't agree more on that. What we have to do is we have to build a trickle up economy. We have to build a people up economy. and getting money directly into people's hands, we know that would work. What is so frustrating is people are somehow, it's like, oh, we give the banks money and they'll trickle down to people.

Well, you know what would also get the money into people if you actually just give them? Cut out the middleman. Yes. So to your question about, like, oh, people are going to waste the money on, you know, things that are bad. So the thing I always turn back to is, like, look, there are trials around the world for this. and you do not see an increase in substance abuse.

In many cases, you see a reduction. Right. And that we have to look at facts and figures. But on a deeper level, we have to start believing in ourselves and the American people again. Because this is our money. This is our society. And so we have to trust ourselves to do what's best for ourselves with that money

as opposed to trusting institutions or large corporations to somehow make those decisions for us. What about people that say, okay, you talk about, you know, adding a tax to pay for this and you're taxing companies and, you know, tax the rich. Amazon. But I'm, you know, I wouldn't be subject to this tax too. Like, you know, we're all going to have to pay more in taxes ultimately, right? And, you know, why should I have to? And again, not me.

I know, I know. This hypothetical person who very much exists. Why should I have to pay these extra taxes to fund this thing that I don't have a problem with? Well, one, you would receive a thousand dollars on. month as an owner and citizen of this country. Right. And two, the way the math works out is that you pretty much have to be really, really doing great for this not to work out in your favor in terms of purchasing power. Right.

Now, the bulk of the tax are going to fall on, like, the companies that benefit the most from society. So that is your Amazon and your Googles and whatnot. Now, it's true that people out there will be like, oh, you know, like any tax, like, you know, I don't want to pay and like the rest of it. But a value added tax is a sort of thing that, again, every other industrialized country in the world has except for us. So after it comes in, then it will become a fact of life very, very quickly.

What about when you talk about selling regular people on it, the idea that people don't want what they view as a handout. Again, as we talked about earlier, they just want their job back or they want a job. they're not interested in hearing about a handout in the first place. What kind of impediment do you see that as in getting this idea out there? You know, well, what I would suggest is like, yes, you should do the kind of work that you want to do, and we need to create those jobs and businesses. And the best way to do that is to put buying power into your hands

so that you and the people in your community can start working on the things that you care about and start creating those enterprises that serve your community's needs and values. I think about Salon in my hometown we talked about earlier, how all the storefronts are shuttered now and everything. And my family was a family of small business owners before the factory left and then after it left. And they all had been closed for years now. Because the people who spent the money in my grandma's cafe or my uncle's deli... They worked at that factory.

And that factory is gone now. But if everybody in that town was getting $1,000 a month, you know, they could afford to buy donuts again or whatever. at a yes they could and so it would be able at least in theory to prop those types of things you know back up if that had been in place in Salina when everything went down you know maybe it wouldn't have been as domino effective businesses closing because people would have had the money to spend there that's exactly right when you look at the economy of the future because if you can see very clearly that artificial intelligence is real it's getting very very powerful very very fast you

have these massive technology companies. And so if you look at the future for Americans, and this is something we have to start coming to grips with, is that there is like this fantasy where you can go to anywhere and be like, oh, we have to like make you a participant in the global economy. We're somehow going to like turn you into a coder or going to make it to you like sell something that people in other parts of the world want. I mean, that stuff is highly unlikely slash unrealistic. So what we need to do is we need to build an economy like what you're describing where

it's artisanal plus. So what I mean by that is like you start a business in a town and the goal is not to make that company massive or a public company or compete with Walmart or Amazon, but it's going to fulfill the needs of the people in that town. Right. And then create jobs and structure and purpose and fulfillment. And that has to start being the goal where we start adopting priorities that are not just capital efficiency in a really narrow way. Because capital efficiency, GDP is going to keep going up, even as more and more Americans get displaced and pushed into oblivion. Yeah, it's just like when they talk about the stock market and what it's doing on the news all the time. And I've always been like my entire life growing up, it's always just been, I could have cared less about, you know, whether or not the stock market had rebounded because it had no impact whatsoever on me or any of the people I knew.

And that's one of the problems. Right now, 80% of Americans own only 8% of the stock market, and the bottom half of Americans are so, own zero. So talking about it as if it's important to Americans is just flat out wrong. Or an indicator of how people are doing, generally speaking. Yeah, so GDP, terrible measurement that we invented less than 100 years ago that we need to revise and turn into things that actually correspond to how we're doing. Like levels of engagement with work, childhood success, quality adjusted life expect, expectancy, mental health and freedom from substance abuse, things that actually would tell us how we're doing.

And then hopefully start making it possible for people to think more broadly about work. Because right now, my wife, I'm not sure if your wife's home with your kids. She is. Mine too. And you and I both know that, like, at least my wife's like working much harder than I am. Yeah. But society values her work at zero. Zero dollars, right.

You know, we have to start saying, like, look, the monetary, market is not the end-all, be-all about human needs and values. Like, the most important work that people can do sometimes, the market will be like, p's, like, you know, no value. Or you look at the truck drivers. Right now, there are times valued at, on average, about $45,000 a year. The market's about to change for their time to go from $45,000 to zero or near zero. So we have to start saying, look, the monetary market doesn't determine our worth as humans or America. That's another thing that you have thought about or talk about,

right, is the idea of a different form of currency, right? Yeah. A social currency. You're a big thinker, man. Oh, thank you.

Like, I got, so that's, I feel like you're touching on that a little bit right now, moving beyond the way we currently value things purely in terms of dollars and cents,

right? So is that part of your, is that part of your platform? Yeah, it is. And how does that, work and how does it tie into the rest of this? So being a parent, you think about this a lot, and I know you do too, where like you're going through all these things with your kids,

and there's so many things that are core to the human experience that the monetary market values at zero or close to zero. So those things go something like parenting and nurturing children, taking care of loved ones with the elderly. Increasingly, arts and creativity, and you know that. I mean, as a creative, like a lot of it, you're like, wow, like the market's not out really great at valuing a lot of that work. The environment, infrastructure, journalism, increasingly. It used to be that you'd classify an ad so you could have a local paper now. There's like no local journalism. And so it's like, well, I guess we got rid of papers. In a democracy, that's a terrible mistake. Like, how are you supposed to make good decisions if you have no idea what's

going on in your town or around you? So you have a few choices when you see all of these core human values getting zeroed out. One is to do what we're doing right now, which is nothing. Just be like, oh, that's important, and then ignore it. And then what's going to happen, it's going to decline. Volunteering in the communities, another one. We're volunteering at record low rates, in part because, again, monetary value, zero. So if you let it go, it's just going to keep going down. You could start trying to pay people for these things, but that would be disastrous for a number of reasons.

Or what you could do is you could create a new currency, which is one of my plans as president, a digital social currency that then can map to these activities. So if you're a person of any skill level, if you go out and prepare your neighbor's boiler or give them a ride or volunteer at the town center, then you will get this digital social credit that actually you can turn in for dollars anytime you want. So everyone will respond to it like it's dollars, but if you turn it in for dollars, then we will tax you on the exchange. And so then you'll be like, oh, I don't want to do that because I hate taxes. So then you'll hoard these points just the way that we, like I hoard my Amex points or whatever, like you just hoard these points and then you can exchange them with other people. This is based on a system called time banking that's an effect in a couple hundred communities

around the United States where if I do something for you, then I get a time dollar. Right. And then I can give it to someone else and say, hey, I need you to do this for me. And then they're like, okay, and then they take your time dollar. And then you can pass it around and create a whole parallel economy around social good. that we need more of. Well, again, I love all this, but I think one thing that, based on my experience and, you know, dealing with people, and I'm sure you're running this some already, but one thing you're

going to have to be prepared to deal with a lot is people hearing all this and be like, well, this guy's certainly a dreamer. This guy's got a lot of big ideas, but this is just too good to be true. This is not realistic. a lot of the, you know, that it's overly out, because a lot of this sounds almost utopian, man, you know, and what do you say to people who would lob, lob that criticism at you, that it's just not within the realm of possibility in this country right now? You know, uh...

Let's pause right there, because we're about to run out. Okay. All right. Tony. That's a deep question. I know. Anyway, so yeah, you know I'm on board, but I listen to you talk about all this, and I just imagine the time.

of resistance, I know you're going to and probably already are facing from people that basically boils down to. This guy's a dreamer and a big thinker and he's an idealist, but this is just not within the realm of possibility, not in this country and this time and place and right now. And what would you say to those people in response to that? You know, I'd say that they're not looking at our history, where again, this past the House of Representatives in 1971, which is pretty recent. been law in Alaska for the last 36 years, so there's no reason why a majority of Americans

where the owners of the society can't vote themselves a dividend. It would impact and improve the lives of tens of millions of Americans every day, would improve mental health, would reduce hospital visits and domestic violence, would improve nutrition and graduation rates. It would make American life significantly better for the vast majority of us, and there's no reason in a democracy why we can't make that a reality. right now. Hell yeah. Well, I mean, I'm, you know I'm with you, brother.

I hope you're proven correct, and I got you back. Thank you, man. In the robot uprising. Yes. Yeah, we'll be there. It'll be like, who's John Conner's friend? I'll be John Conner. And then you will be the other kid.

The other kid. I'm the other kid in the Terminator movies. Yeah, I don't know. That guy usually ends up being a Terminator, though. But I promise, I'm not a robot. Okay. I believe you. I'm in my word on that.

Yeah. I've got that canine sense of smell. Right. Well, thanks, Andrew. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. It was a pleasure, try. Absolutely.

Thank you all for listening to the way hell red podcasts weren't good, but now it is. Haters can eat out.