Andrew Yang

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Welcome to The Ticket.

I'm Isaac Dover.

Well, it's been over a month of sheltering in place,

and it's incredible how much things have changed, despite so little seeming to change day by day now.

Where they're headed?

Who knows?

The presidential campaign is pretty much frozen in in place with Donald Trump doing his briefings and Joe Biden trying to keep up from his basement studio.

And at the same time, we've seen a tremendous change in what's possible politically.

Modern candidates are defined by seemingly impossible signature policies.

Bernie Sanders, the Medicare for All, Donald Trump in the border wall.

But one 2020 candidate had an impossible policy that all of a sudden wasn't just possible, it was bipartisan law.

That would be Andrew Yang and Universal Basic Income.

Yang wanted to give every American $1,000 a month.

We're not quite there yet, but in principle, that policy took a huge step forward in the $1,200 stimulus check sent out just this month.

He's glad that the idea is working, but doesn't take real pleasure in it becoming so necessary so quickly.

And much like what differentiated him from the rest of the field in the Democratic presidential race, he's much less optimistic about what comes next.

Take a listen.

The last time that you and I sat down was six weeks ago.

It feels like maybe a thousand years ago.

We were in Keene, New Hampshire, when you were in the process of realizing that you were going to drop out.

I wrote something about you dropping out then that I'm just going to read to you.

There was a line in it that said,

will his $1,000 a month universal basic income become law?

Probably not.

But at this point, it's about as real as Donald Trump's border wall or Bernie Sanders' Medicare for All.

So that was February 11th that published.

That feels like a long time ago in a lot of ways.

Well, we just got $1,200 stimulus checks, or at least tens of millions of Americans did.

And we all have a very strong sense that that's not the last check we're going to get.

So it's certainly been a very eventful last two months in the darkest way possible.

We're living a version of universal basic income right now.

This pandemic has clarified for all of us that we need to rethink how to get value into people's hands when we're all trapped in our homes, but also how we're going to humanize the economy after we come out of our homes eventually.

Because the reality is that of these millions of jobs that have disappeared, many of them are gone for good.

It's not the case that Macy's is going to rehire all of its 130,000 furloughed employees.

It's not the case that these millions of workers are all going to be welcomed back with open arms.

You know, a friend who advises corporate CEOs said that every CEO is telling him that they're looking at automating jobs away forever.

They're looking at smaller office footprints, higher levels of remote work.

They're making the decisions now.

So this is not, unfortunately, just a blip.

This is a transformation that's going to change the way of life for millions of Americans for years and years to come.

And universal basic income, to me, needs to be front and center in ways that we can build paths for many of the people that have lost their jobs for good.

The big idea that you had was the UBI.

Since you dropped out, Pope Francis is behind it.

Donald Trump is behind it.

Does it feel like you won anyway, even though you obviously are very far from having won the race?

It doesn't feel like I won because of all of the

despair and harm that's happening around the country.

No, first and foremost, I'm just someone who is trying to improve people's lives.

And the fact that so many lives have been disrupted and devastated, like it's hard to feel anything, but sympathy.

I mean, I feel glad that my campaign advanced this idea of putting money into people's hands right when we needed it.

So on that level, I'm grateful to everyone who supported my campaign,

but it's impossible to feel like a winner when people are suffering so much.

To me, we need to adopt it in full, which is to say at a minimum, look, for every month you are in quarantine, you get this money.

And we should look at doing it in perpetuity going forward, given the level of economic disruption.

Because if you look at the industries that have been upended, I mean, it's not just the obvious ones.

Everyone's gotten kicked to the curb.

So we need to try and rebuild our economy and society on the way out.

It's clear to me that we need a Marshall Plan scale initiative to rebuild the country.

And that's what I'll be pushing Joe on.

And that's what I hope to be a part of.

Imagining that this situation is like a rubber band where we're going to snap back to normal is just not realistic.

The future that you had sketched out on the campaign trail was one where automation was becoming more and more part of our lives and

that you talk about truck drivers and all those jobs being lost and thinking about what happens to not only the truck drivers jobs but all the other jobs that are connected to them or self-checkout or whatever it would be.

I'm wondering, when you were thinking about the future, you were not ever talking about a pandemic and this kind of change to the world and the economy.

Are there things that this situation has opened up to you that you didn't realize where things were in the country or in society before, and now you can see them a little bit more clearly?

Unfortunately, this pandemic is accelerating many of the trends I was deeply concerned about, where we're experiencing 10 years worth of transformation of our economy in 10 weeks.

Because if you're a transportation company or a grocery store, you're scaling up your investments in robots and technology because they don't get sick and you can just send them in.

And at this point, there's even a consumer preference for not dealing with a person.

There has been this,

in my opinion, somewhat misplaced point of view that's like, oh, people want to deal with people.

People don't want to deal with robots or machines or self-driving cars or self-driving trucks.

And now all that's out the window.

So to me what i was concerned about is coming true before my eyes in a compressed time frame and that's very very

concerning

so

your

thought coming off of the campaign before coronavirus was part of our lives was to do a sort of pilot program on ubi to raise money and then pick a couple of people did you have a number that you had picked of the number of people you'd pilot with uh

and and then essentially do ubi for them and see what happened right and now we're all living a giant trial

we're living a giant trial but but it's also it's also what happened is that you instead of doing a thousand dollars a month you shifted to a much more immediate and much smaller injections of money to people whether sometimes it's like twenty dollars even is it can be enough to make a difference in a person's life at this point that's exactly right we raised several million dollars with a plan of running universal basic income trials in various communities and then tracking results, which we are still hoping to do and planning to do.

But in this context,

we pivoted to just giving money to people who needed it in a form of economic relief.

Our first big

Grants were $1,000 to 1,000 families in the Bronx that were identified as struggling economically through an organization there, Neighborhood Trust, which was a financial counseling org to the working poor in the Bronx.

So then we had a very high level of confidence that not only would they get the money, they would also get a financial counseling session on top of it.

Not just a blank check.

Yeah, so that was the first move.

And then we started giving micro grants initially between $250 and $500 to people, but then we were overwhelmed by the demand, where I think right now we're up to around

30,000 plus requests, which, if you do the math on that, would be $15 million

if we were to give them each $500.

And we didn't have $15 million.

We're still trying to raise money.

But we just started giving out $20

and sending nice messages saying, like, look, we can't do everything we want, but here's $20.

And we started doing that in part because when we did that a little bit, people expressed just how grateful they were that anyone actually is trying to help them.

Like, you know, like there's such a sense of isolation and hopelessness and despair among many

Americans right now that even just getting 20 bucks via PayPal and like, you'll be all right and we care about you actually seem to really help people in a very meaningful way.

So we've been now

giving between $20 and $500 depending upon our resources.

So I'm all about championing universal basic income.

Everyone knows that.

But we're in the midst of a crisis right now.

And the best thing we can do is just help people get through it.

So that's what my organization shifted towards for the duration of this crisis.

The messages we are getting are overwhelming.

There's just so much despair and trauma and economic insecurity and a very bleak sense of the future or unclear sense of the future.

And it's very hard.

to navigate that level of uncertainty.

Are there any that have struck you that without revealing private details about the person who sent it to you, any that have stayed with you?

The main message I've gotten is that they do not think that our institutions are going to help them.

Like they've filed for unemployment and have not heard back.

They've called day after day and just never gotten through to anyone.

They've filed for a refund, but it went to their preparer and they don't know what's going on or it got sent to an old address.

There's like a very high degree of frustration and hopelessness where our institutions are concerned.

It's one reason why even sending them 20 bucks makes them feel like, okay, like something actually good is happening.

Someone's trying to help.

But right now there's this sense that it's almost like the help is on this pedestal and they're meant to like jump up and try and get it.

It's like, it's, it's.

It's right there.

You can just get it if you just fill out the paperwork, right?

Yeah, it's not like if you just call the state unemployment office, they'll get to you and it's like, oh, it turns out that no one picks up or you're a number million in line.

I just call every day.

Like that, there's that's a very consistent theme to the messages we're getting.

Another one is health care where people don't know what to do.

They are uninsured.

They're having a health problem.

They don't really want to go to the hospital because they're afraid that the hospital is overrun by COVID-19 patients.

I'd say those are two of the very consistent messages we get.

Another issue that you've been dealing with, and it's sort of a weird segue here, but there's so much to talk about, is the question about

bias against Asian Americans, racism against Asian Americans.

And

you've been drawn into that debate.

You've kind of put yourself into that debate.

You riled some people up by your take on what the sort of approach for Asian Americans at this moment should be.

Can you just walk through your thinking of what it is?

I'm pretty sure that the vast majority of Asian Americans have experienced some level of elevated mistrust, suspicion, even hostility and aggression over the last number of days because millions of Americans' lives have been upended, in some cases worse.

And then they see someone of Asian descent and they associate them with this virus.

And of course, it's made much, much worse by the fact that President Trump called it the China virus.

And a lot of people looking up being like, what's wrong with calling it the China virus?

That's where it's from.

And then you see someone with an Asian-looking face and you think, oh, like, I mean, there are reports of hundreds of assaults, stabbings, beatings.

You know, a friend's kid said they were called the China virus at school before the school shut down.

So this is a massive problem that's being experienced by Asian Americans around the country every day.

And

we have to do everything we can to try and bring the country together and let people know that there is no racial component to this virus in the sense that the virus doesn't distinguish between any of us.

And Asian Americans were nowhere near the origin of this virus, had nothing to do with the Chinese government making decisions to cover up the severity of what was to come.

We're just like you.

We're just trapped in our house trying to provide for you know our families and Asian Americans are a disproportionate number of the healthcare workers on the front lines 17% of doctors are Asian American.

And one, I'm a numbers guy, everyone knows that.

The proportion of Asian Americans that are using the crisis text line went from 5%, which is about what we are the population pre-crisis, to 13% in the midst of the crisis.

So up two and a half times as a proportion of the U.S.

population.

And that to me says it all.

I mean that Asian Americans are so distressed and afraid and anxious that they are seeking help at two and a half times the level of the population.

For people who want to defeat Donald Trump in the fall, and I'm obviously one of them, this is a crucial issue because he's trying to escape his own incompetent handling of the virus by framing it as a foreign effort and racializing it.

Like if you call it the China virus, then it's like U.S.

versus China, Donald Trump standing up for the U.S.

It's not that he completely mishandled a phenomenon that experts have been warning about for years and disregarded health care experts and advisors.

It's that it's like this Chinese attack.

And so that's a framing that he's going to rely upon very heavily going into the fall.

We're going to take a short break.

We'll be back with more with Andrew Yang in a moment.

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And you had a tweet the other day that said you're worried about the way that this, the pandemic will stifle entrepreneurship.

I'm deeply concerned about entrepreneurship being stifled for a generation.

I was concerned about this pre-crisis because if you look at the rates of business formation among young people, they plummeted to a multi-decade low for years.

And then you have this crisis, which destroyed hundreds of thousands of small businesses.

So if you were an entrepreneur over this past number of years, you're getting pummeled right now.

And then if you imagine the environment afterwards, one of the things I said during the campaign was that we talk about how the internet is great for entrepreneurship.

It is not.

It is great for subsistence labor.

And that if you rewind a couple generations, what businesses would people start?

Maybe a flower shop, maybe a hardware store, maybe a sporting goods store.

And then all of those things got demolished by a combination of big box retail and the internet, where starting a flower shop makes much less sense if you can just order flowers from the internet.

That is accelerating where if you come out of this crisis and say, okay, like young person, start a business.

They're like, wait a minute, like what business am I going to start?

Like ordinarily, I might start a business that might involve people getting together at my restaurant, you know, like at this

co-working space, at like whatever the heck I'm going to dream of.

But now those opportunities are lower, and my appetite for risk is lower.

Everyone's appetite for risk is lower.

This is something I'm deeply afraid of.

And we've already started to see it where you have these press stories about how entrepreneurship is doing great because you have Airbnb and Uber and these billion-dollar unicorns.

And it's not the case again.

You know, like the culture of silicon valley has changed where the big business goal of a new company is not to build the next hewlett packard out of your garage it's to get bought by uh one of the behemoths for a hundred million dollars and then investors happy you're rich you hang out there maybe they use your company's offering maybe they they don't but at that point you don't care

And that's like, I mean, that's terrible for innovation.

That's terrible for entrepreneurship.

The trends are very, very negative.

There's something really

human about entrepreneurship that if it gets lost, we are lost.

We need to appreciate it because so much work goes into it.

And seeing all of that work get washed away breaks my heart.

You spent your campaign talking about the intrinsic value of people versus the GDP measurement of people.

GDP versus happiness, essentially, about things that we think about in our personal lives, what makes us human.

So,

you know,

I think a lot of people in the middle of this pandemic and trying to think about how we got to this place where so quickly everything seems to have just collapsed and looking ahead to what seems like, you know, at least a couple more months minimum of life being really different and probably a year and a half, two years before

we have

vaccines and masks aren't part of our lives.

Where is humanity now in your mind?

Humanity is at a real crucial turning point to me.

And that's one thing that's so destructive about this virus.

the way we show that we care about ourselves, our family members, our community members is by either staying home or staying away from people when you're out there.

You know, the fact that I'm not going to see my mother and my kids aren't going to see their grandparents for months,

you know, and you know that's the right thing to do, but you feel like you're losing some of the last years that your kids might have to spend with their grandparents,

you know, that like that, that's inhuman.

That's actually the opposite of the way we're wired.

The way we're wired is not to try and avoid grandma, you know, It's to try and treasure the last years of her life.

And

one of the misconceptions that people have is that history is like a pendulum and that if we go too far in one direction, we'll

go the other direction where because right now we're so isolated, we're going to come out of this more unified and together.

and we'll be able to solve the biggest problems that have been bearing down on us like

climate change, like a dehumanizing economy, like a polarized political system that has kept us being able to solve any of our problems.

And that's not the way it works, really.

Like we're being tested right now, and the evolution or progress is going to be a fight.

You know, it's going to be a fight just like it was before this crisis.

And in some ways, the forces on both sides, I believe, are going to be stronger.

Because

to me,

dysfunction is is one of the demons that we've been struggling with for years where we have this epidemic of insecurity that is destroying lives and families and communities but it's also destroyed any sense of cohesion or a sense of common purpose and this crisis has

exacerbated that disintegration in many ways.

I mean, we had a mental health crisis before this time, and we know that that's going to spike in households and families and communities around the country.

I mean, we have these positive visions of like, oh, you're trapped in your home with your families.

You know, in many households, that's going to be an environment of like high stress, child abuse, sexual abuse, like all sorts of ills.

So

The challenge of trying to have us come together and improve civilization is going to be more important than ever right now.

And even trying to go back to normal is, in my mind, one,

it's not possible.

But two, you have to try to rebuild the country in a bigger, more profound way on the way out.

We need a Marshall Plan-style initiative to rebuild the country.

And it needs to be gargantuan.

It needs to be historic and almost unprecedented, given the scale of the needs.

Are you optimistic or are you cynical about where we're headed?

I am determined to do everything I can to fight for a better future.

I mean, that was true before.

And that doesn't sound optimistic, Andrew.

This campaign.

Well,

you and I have spent some time together.

You spent some time together.

I think one of your first stories about me was talking about my bleak vision of the future.

Because what I wrote about then was something that was true, is that you were talking about how things were not getting better and we had to deal with it and not pretend that they weren't getting better.

And the way that it came up in a high-profile sense,

starting in the second debate in the primary that was in Detroit,

there was a question about climate change and what could be done to mitigate it.

And a lot of the candidates said,

well, we've still got time to change everything.

And you said, well, people have to move to higher ground, maybe, right?

That like the waters are going to rise, that we have to deal with it.

And

what I think connected to a lot of people with your campaign was that sense of like, you know, politicians telling us it's all going to be okay.

It's not all going to be okay.

And we should stop pretending that.

So now this is a much worse situation, at least immediately worse situation for a lot of people than things felt, you know, last August when I wrote that article.

100%.

No,

I

think this next couple of years is going to be, as you said, very rocky because the virus is going to be part of it at every moment.

We're not going to have a vaccine that we can broadly distribute to every American for optimistically 18 months, 24 months.

The thing I'm optimistic about is that if we make certain decisions,

like for example, just sending everyone $2,000 a month for the duration of the crisis,

it would make things better.

You know, the crisis has clarified it for many people, but millions of Americans were suffering before the coronavirus came along.

So the hope I have is that if we start trying to solve this immediate problem, we can actually make progress on the other big problems and we can start making progress on climate change.

We can start making progress on a lot of things.

When When I said before that we're experiencing 10 years of change in 10 weeks, it could be that that acceleration also includes accelerating the solutions.

Or the problems.

You were

getting faster too.

The solutions.

Let's close with this.

You, that night in New Hampshire when you were dropping out of the campaign, I asked you about what your future in politics and government might be like.

We talked about the possibility of running for mayor of New York City, which is a race that's open in 2021.

We talked about the possibility of joining an administration.

At that point, we didn't know who the nominee was going to be, but now we know that Joe Biden is the nominee, so maybe a Biden administration, should he win.

Do you find that

these last six weeks have made you more interested in being involved in politics and government or more interested in trying to do things from the outside?

That's a great question.

I'm motivated to do everything I can to solve these problems.

And I think government has to be a big part of the solution.

You know, you don't have the right level of resources in philanthropy or other parts of the economy without government being involved.

So my thinking on that

hasn't changed in the sense that if you want to be a part of the solution, the reality is that government is going to be a bigger part of our economy and our society moving forward than it has been at any point in our lives.

That's just the reality.

And for people, people listening to this podcast are probably generally into politics, so they're kind of used to it.

But, you know, it's like if you didn't care, you said, like, oh, I'm just going to try and stay out of that stuff, you're going to be missing where a lot of the most important decisions get made.

So I hope.

You were talking about how you need to give those $20 checks or PayPal infusions because people aren't getting what they need out of government.

So does that make you think that your better use is inside or outside?

Well, this is the great challenge, Isaac, is that does government have massive problems?

Yes, it does.

Is government necessary to solve the problems we're dealing with right now?

Yes, it is.

And both those things are true.

So it's very difficult.

It's the frustration that many Americans have.

And if you looked up over this past number of months or years and just threw up your hands and said, I don't want to deal with politics.

Like, you know, this stuff just oppresses me.

It's exhausting.

Like, I would look at you and be like, yeah, that's a very rational

approach.

So

I'm prepared to do everything I can to try and move the solutions across the finish line.

I think that

government has to be the central part.

of solving some of these problems.

But I will say that

I think that I'm fortunate enough, thanks to the people who've supported my campaign, where I have a lot of the platform and visibility that

public figures do, regardless of whether or not I'm holding office at a moment in time.

And that's been something I'm anxious to exercise.

We reached millions of people through the campaign, had almost half a million donors.

Many of them are more enthusiastic than ever about our vision for the country.

So I think that there are ways we can move the vision forward either inside or outside of government.

For someone who is proud of being a non-politician, that was a very politician type answer of not committing one way or the other.

I'm learning, Isaac.

No, I'm kidding.

I never learned.

All right.

I'm going to let you get back to all the rest of the stuff that you have, your exciting schedule in quarantine.

Andrew Yang, thanks for being here on the ticket.

Thank you.

Stay safe, Isaac.

That'll do it for this week of The Ticket: Politics from the Atlantic.

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