Andrew Yang's Campaign Against the Coming Dystopia

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This is Radio Atlantic.

I'm Isaac Dover.

I just spent four days in Iowa, most of it at the Iowa State Fair, and besides all sorts of fried food served on sticks, it was a great place to find presidential candidates.

20 Democrats spoke there, and then at a big fundraising dinner called the Wingding.

Iowa, of course, is the first state to vote on a presidential nominee, and it has a history of launching unlikely candidates, starting with Jimmy Carter, whose win there in 1976 helped turn the Iowa caucuses into a major event.

On this week's show, I spoke to maybe the unlikeliest candidate this year, Andrew Yang.

But his campaign is looking less unlikely by the day.

He's raised more money and consistently polled higher than almost anyone but the 2020 frontrunners.

And he's already qualified for the September debates.

Most of the field won't, which puts this first-time politician ahead of a good number of senators and governors.

Here's Yang on Friday, a few hours before I sat down with him, speaking at the fair.

This is how you start a revolution in Iowa.

Because all you need is 40,000 Iowans and then a vision sweeps the country.

So what is the the vision?

What the heck am I talking about?

How are we gonna solve for this?

If you've heard anything about me, you've heard this.

There's an Asian man running for president who wants to give everyone $1,000 a month.

Right?

Universal basic income.

That's Yang's signature policy.

And if you tuned in to either of the debates, you'd know it.

Yang had a knack for turning every question back to that policy.

So what is fueling his candidacy?

Curiously, it seems to be his willingness to tell Americans that things are even worse than we think they are.

Yang says big tech companies are vacuuming up American commerce.

They're automating away the jobs that most Americans do, and it's only going to get worse.

He says Silicon Valley will keep on accelerating the changes.

Here he is again in Iowa, where the most common job is truck driver.

They say they're 2% from getting rid of truck drivers.

Now, that's a big 2% because you can't have trucks slamming into things at a 2% error rate.

I mean,

that's not a good plan.

But to bet against these engineers and investors eventually solving for the last 2% is a losing bet because you're betting against the amassed capital and technology of our entire society trying to get rid of truck drivers.

So what's that going to mean for the 3.5 million Americans who drive a truck for a living?

Or the 7 million Americans who work in truck stops, motels, and diners that rely on the truckers getting out and having a meal?

Yang's message is one about lost jobs and things getting worse.

But people, especially people on the internet, really like it.

So what's his campaign's deal?

Is it nihilism, fatalism, or is it, as he said it to me, actually just realism with an optimistic twist?

Whether or not this somehow ends with him in the White House, it strikes me that he's onto something deeper about where politics is.

So about an hour before he spoke at the Wing Ding dinner, I met him at his hotel, the beautiful best Western holiday lodge off the highway in Clear Lake, Iowa.

Yeah.

Here's our conversation.

So

there is a difference to when you got into this campaign and now that you have been on two debate stages and you've made the third debate stage.

But people still seem to want to think of your candidacy as not on par with the other candidacies, including some of those that have not made the debate stage.

What do you say to those people?

Well, I'm a numbers guy, and so I tend to look at the number of donations we receive, the amount of web traffic we get, our polling numbers here in Iowa and New Hampshire, and other states.

And as you just suggested, we have already outperformed a dozen or more senators, governors, congressmen, and women.

And we are, by any

objective measurement, one of the top eight campaigns in the race.

And so that's what I think of us as.

And I am surprisingly cool with people who would tend to minimize this campaign because it just makes our continued rise all the more exciting.

You know, every campaign, every organization likes to prove people wrong.

And so the more people doubt us, the more fun it is.

But, I mean, to be dismissed as a joke still doesn't get at you ever?

Well, I feel that's happening less and less in many, many quarters.

And so that's a great feeling.

And as you know, I was here at the Iowa State Fair last year, and I was there earlier today.

And it's a dramatic difference from last year to this year.

So to the extent that we're somehow being slighted right now, I have to say it feels great relative to being the anonymous Asian man wandering the fair last year.

So

I do.

But you were not anonymous at the fair.

You had a lot of people around you and a lot of press around you.

The fun thing about this, Isaac, is that the more people pay attention to mainly campaign, the more they dig into some of our ideas, which is, do they actually notice stores closing where they live?

They generally do because 30% of stores are closing.

It'd be so unusual if you didn't see stores closing.

And then

do they agree that's because of Amazon?

And then had they heard in the news that Amazon pays zero in taxes?

What does that mean for our shared future?

So the further we go in this campaign, the more people reckon with our ideas.

And that's the important thing, because if we can get the American people to recognize what the real problems are, then we can actually perhaps come together and solve them in a meaningful way.

Throughout, though, I mean, you've got your yang gang, right?

I guess what do you think of it?

Who is the yang gang?

It's an eclectic group of people,

and

it is

a group of people that some of them seem,

you took some heat for the people who were doing it as like a joke to support you.

But it's not just that.

And by any stretch of the imagination, you have a lot of people who show up, a lot of people who are in t-shirts at events more than many of the other candidates that are out there.

So who are they?

What is the Yang Gang?

Well, it's a massive group now of hundreds of thousands of americans so it's very difficult to come up with like a description that would somehow fit hundreds of thousands of people right now we've received

170 000 uh donations at this point i mean and then you you know that if you've received 170 donations from 170 000 different americans and so you know that for every american who takes out their credit card and decides to donate there are probably five to ten other americans Americans who are like, oh, love, love that guy.

I'm Yang Yang.

They just haven't busted out their credit card.

Or who saw you on the debate stage and thought, well, who's this guy?

But some of that seems like because it's novelty and some of it because they're hearing what you're saying and saying, oh, yeah, that makes sense to me.

Whether or not they

are going to ultimately be voters for you.

I mean, I think that's happening with the race overall.

It's sort of the shopping period still.

But I had people responding to the debates saying, who's this yang guy?

Or I like that.

I mean, I'm a whatever voter, but that's interesting.

Oh, there are gonna be a lot of people that are fired up about actually getting out and voting.

We're gonna shock the world because, right now, who are they polling?

They're polling likely Democratic voters that have landlines oftentimes in Iowa and New Hampshire.

There are a lot of people that are going to come out for this campaign that are not getting polled.

The polls systematically underestimate our strength.

We're going to shock the world come next February.

And like you said, the intensity, I mean, if you look at the size of the crowds we draw, we've had rallies of thousands of people around the country in Seattle, Los Angeles, certainly New York, San Francisco, Austin.

Like we have massive rallies.

If we plant a flag in a particular city, we'll get hundreds, thousands of people.

And they're not going to be casual.

They're going to be people that are hardcore

about the fact that we need to evolve to an economy that actually works for us, for human beings.

That we're on a right now a path to

self-destruction, really.

Because if your GDP is going up and your life expectancy is going down, that's not the ride you want to be on.

Well, I'll use your word hardcore.

The hardcore yang gang is who?

It seems to me like it's a lot of younger men,

from what I've observed of the people that rallies.

It's people who seem somewhat either

not engaged in politics before or disaffected by politics.

Does that seem right?

I think there's a significant proportion of our support that's coming from people that haven't traditionally loved politics.

But that describes a huge number of Americans.

Sure, what about young men?

Does that seem

the yang gang probably does skew young for sure and it may skew male.

We had our rise because of long form conversations on podcasts.

Not quite like this one, but you know what I mean.

And so there's like a real communion around the ideas behind this campaign and the fact that our politicians are not up to the task of actually solving the challenges of the 21st century because most of them barely understand the challenges of the 21st century.

And that's not a knock on them.

They're very, very excellent at being what and who they are, but we need something a bit different to start solving the problems on the ground.

Okay, we're going to take a quick break.

We'll have more with Andrew Yang in a moment.

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Has it been weird?

You've now done two debates with

Joe Biden was on stage with you both times,

as well as a lot of other candidates, well-known politicians.

Has it been weird getting to be in these rooms with them and not just in the debates at the or here for the wing ding dinner

or whatever else is going on?

You're in that league now, at least on the same stage, if not.

I mean, are they treating you nicely?

The Democratic field tends to be quite nice to each other.

Maybe

it's a collegial thing or it's like a rational thing.

Have you gotten to know any of them?

Yeah, I have.

We're around each other quite a bit, as you know.

And there is a shared experience because only we know what it's like to go to that union hall and say, this is my vision.

Like, let's make this happen.

So,

who are the ones that you're friendly with on the trail?

Well, I just shared a bro hug with Corey Booker just in the parking lot just a minute ago.

No,

Marianne Williamson and I get along famously.

I'm friendly with Pete.

I'm friendly with Tulsi.

Friendly with John Hickenlooper.

His wife and I went to the same high school.

So as you can tell, I mean, like, it's very common for us to be friendly towards each other.

Like, during breaks, we talk to each other.

I'm friendly with Kamala.

Like, you know, it's...

Yeah.

But

friendly of, like, you're not, like, texting with any of them otherwise.

I do text with some of them.

Like, we know, we have have each other's cell phones and we text each other occasionally.

What do you text about?

Sometimes it'd be it would literally be like nice job on like that debate.

So, you know, it's like someone debate on a night that's not mine.

Obviously, I'm not texting them during the debate being like, oh, good point.

You're not allowed to have the cell phones, technically.

But, you know, I've received text messages from other candidates congratulating me on a performance.

Yeah, it's like we're friendly with each other.

Is it nerve-wracking at all?

You mean the debate stage or running for president or what?

The debate stage, I guess.

You know,

the debate stage definitely takes some getting used to because it's like this distributed media hit over two hours and ten people.

It's like a very, very, well, but also, like, you're on national television.

There you are.

That's.

Yeah, but you know, I'm on national television almost every day nowadays, so it's not like

that's, you know, it's like, oh my gosh, a camera.

I mean, you'd have to be a pretty shitty presidential candidate to be like a TV camera.

Get that thing away from me.

I mean, unfortunately, you have to be like, ooh, TV camera.

Well, let me put it to you this way.

At the Fish Fry in South Carolina in June, when you got on stage, you,

I mean, that's a weird event.

We were there.

It's Friday night.

Everybody got whatever their two minutes on stage in a blue t-shirt, matching blue t-shirt.

And you got up and it was like the beginning of a wrestling match or something.

You was like, hello, South Carolina.

And you were like leaning into the mic.

That's got to be weird.

And I would imagine, though, that getting used to being at the events is a different thing from then, okay, now here you are on stage next to all these people.

It's true there are different dynamics of different things.

Like a salon is different than a rally is different than a news appearance is different than a debate.

So you're right that it's a different format.

It's a different dynamic.

It definitely took some getting used to, but now I feel quite comfortable.

When you were on the debate stage in Detroit, you were one of the people on stage with you was Jay Inslee, and he said a line, which he says all the time, and he's not the only one who says it.

But in talking about climate change, which is his issue,

he said, we're the first generation to feel the effects of climate change.

We're the last generation that can do something about it.

You then got a lot of attention because when the climate change question came to you, you said, well, we have to think about moving to higher ground, which seems to me like

your thought on this is, let's get real.

Maybe

that Inslee's wrong, that it it is too late to do something about it.

Well, what he said is correct.

We are the first generation to feel the effects of real life, and we're the last generation to do something about it.

But it's also correct that we're late to the game.

The last four years have been the four warmest years in recorded history already.

We're seeing the effects.

We're feeling the effects.

A UN report just came out yesterday that said we're going to be okay if half the world goes vegetarian immediately.

Another report came out that said Greenland's ice pack is melting at the rate projected in 2050, 30 years from now.

So you look at these data points and scientists say it's like this is much worse than even our most pessimistic projections.

And you have to look around the world.

We're only 15% of global emissions.

And these other developing countries are going to use the dirtiest,

cheapest forms of energy available because that's just where they are in their development.

And so we would need to not just curb our own emissions, which as you can tell is not like going to happen immediately tomorrow with this legislature and the rest of it.

Then we'd somehow have to export clean renewable energy sources to the rest of the world and have them adopt it immediately.

And even then, we'd still likely be seeing negative effects from climate change because it's not like that undoes all the damage that's already being done.

If anything, we have to be proactive and invest billions of dollars in reforestation and seeding oceans and trying to mitigate some of the worst effects, including, and this like my move people to higher ground is like a metaphor for a look, people need to be able to protect themselves.

And that when you saw a hurricane like Katrina, what happened?

All the poor people that couldn't go anywhere just ended up underwater and

disaster-stricken.

And so, and what happened to people who had more resources who had an SUV they could climb into?

They freaking drove to Houston.

So it's not literally like, oh, we're all going to move to higher ground.

But it is sort of like everybody needs to deal with it.

Climate change is here.

There is a sort of fantasy-level conversation that we sometimes have about this, where it's like, we can reverse it and we'll go back to the way that the world used to be 100 years ago.

It's not going to be that.

And it seems like that that's part of the

running theme of your candidacy, that we just have to accept that the world has changed.

Do I have that right?

You do have that right.

That is correct.

The world has changed, the world is changing.

We can't put the genie back in the bottle, try as we might or wish as we might.

We have to start dealing with the world as it is.

And at the Iowa State Fair, you were asked about farm insurance.

And it seemed like your answer was that the right thing to do is not to just give farmers money to rebuild and replant their farms, but to think about what to do differently, right?

But that can run into a politically tricky space, right?

Because that's not what people maybe want to hear all the time.

Well, we should certainly help communities rebuild.

They're hit by a disaster.

It's not like, well, you know, this place is a floodplain, so we're not going to give you money to rebuild.

I mean, that's what societies are for, is to help people that have been

struck by natural disasters.

But

if you have a point where you can actually make a choice and say, look, are we going to invest tons of money in developing an area that we think has a high chance of

having

problems wrought by climate change in the years to come, we should start rethinking some of those incentives, particularly for private developers.

Because private developers respond to the incentives, and so if you say, Look, this is not some place where we particularly want you to develop, these are hard things and hard conversations.

But again, we have to deal with the world as it is, not as we wish it were.

Yeah, I mean, because that's again to what you were talking about at the state fair, the automation of trucks, right?

You said, okay, well, we've got a two percent crash rate right now, and that needs to get cleaned up.

But anybody who thinks that that's not going to get cleaned up is making a bad bet that

there's enough investor pressure and enough scientific advancement that we will get to that.

And we just have to accept that there will be trucks driving down the highway outside here and everywhere else that are automated.

And that means that people are going to be without jobs who were truck drivers.

I just wonder,

is that nihilism?

Or is it...

Is it just being clear-eyed about where we are?

I certainly wouldn't think of it as nihilism.

I mean, we're trying to preserve our way of life in various ways, and the future we want to avoid is trucking riots saying no robot trucks, which in my case, in my mind, would be very, very likely barring some sort of intervention.

Because even now, dozens of truckers protested the digital monitoring of their driving time in the Midwest a few months ago.

So, if you think they don't like digital monitoring of the driving time, imagine when they don't have a job and it's the robot truck.

I mean, that's going to be orders of magnitude more violent.

Now, I'm not someone who thinks that we should just proceed with technological advancement willy-nilly and say, like, oh, you can't stop progress.

But in this case, if you look at it, you can't stop progress across every industry.

I mean, we're seeing it with retail right now.

I mean, it would not be realistic to say, we're going to save the strip malls.

I mean, you know, like, though I do have a mall re-development act.

So, some things we should try and convert into community spaces and whatnot.

But the automation of

car and truck driving would likely save tens of thousands of lives a year, would save tens of billions of dollars, would help make the environment cleaner because it would dramatically lower emissions in various ways.

And so, these are not things that we should be shying away from.

If we're supposed to be the hub of innovation in a modern economy and we're saying no to autonomous vehicles, and then meanwhile, Germany and other places will be adopting them.

You know, this is not a way to build a competitive economy and society over time.

But it also feels like we're not going to say no to autonomous vehicles, right?

I don't think we're going to say no.

Because in America, everything follows the money.

And even now, municipalities and states are bending over backwards for the autonomous vehicle companies saying, ooh, ooh, like try out your stuff here.

We'll develop like a fake city so you can run over some crash test dummies.

So, you know, you don't see a lot of resistance.

I just, when you see other politicians, they talk about, oh, we're going to bring manufacturing back.

Make America Great Again has within it embedded this idea of, well, we're going to bring these jobs back.

When Donald Trump was running, he went to a coal country.

We're going to get those coal jobs back.

When Democrats, Republicans, whoever talks about bringing back a sector of the economy that's gone, it seems like that's something they say on the campaign trail, and then they wait until the next campaign to say it again.

And in between, those jobs go away.

Well, I think it

goes away, right?

Just

so

I don't think it's that astute.

It's just sort of

it's pretty obvious.

I wonder though,

do you think that politicians are being naive?

Are they being dishonest when they're not talking about it this way?

You know what they're being, Isaac?

They're being politicians.

If you're a politician, your incentives are to make with a happy talk and then get elected

and then solving the problems is secondary because you know you have to raise money you have to try and get re-elected but no one ever back checks you no one ever says like did you bring those coal mining towels back it's like oh you you know you did it like that that doesn't really happen very much

and unfortunately now our both our political discourse and our population are not exactly going to dig into people's claims and verify and double check like the institutional mistrust is too

So you're a politician.

The incentives are to say we can do this, we can do that, we can do the other thing.

And then meanwhile, society falls apart.

I think people would say, well, they're being optimistic and you're being

is it realistic or is it cynical?

Well, if you read my book,

most of it's just facts and figures.

So, you know, it's not me being like, oh, like, this could happen.

It's like, this happened.

Did we automate away 4 million manufacturing jobs in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Missouri, Iowa?

Categorically, yes.

Like, you know, here's the,

here, here's the set of numbers.

So we have to start getting real.

And the thing that's convinced me, Isaac, that this is much worse than I'd even thought is like, I have this whole case that I've built.

It's like, you know, a book, PowerPoint deck, like all this stuff.

Very, very, very few journalists ever care about the facts.

pursue the facts, question the facts.

Everyone's like, facts, book, PowerPoint, like, you know, whatever.

Like, let's talk about your tie or something.

You know, like, like, there's just no.

Because you didn't wear a tie on either debate stage.

Yes.

Talk about your lack of tie more accurately.

So this case I'm making, I'm just like, holy crap.

Like, I'm making this case.

I'm on the national debate stage.

I'm, by any estimation, like a top eight presidential candidate in the Democratic field.

And so few people in the media in particular are actually reckoning with the facts of the case that I'm making.

No one's looking at it and scratching their chin and being like, huh, is it true that the rate of industrial adoption of robots carefully maps to the rate of people voting for Donald Trump in 2016?

Yes, it does.

You can go voting district by voting district and see the correlation.

It's straight up.

Like, does anyone be like, huh, maybe, maybe that's one of the.

Why do you think that you were the person who said, I mean, you're not,

you weren't a political person.

Your life was not looking at how voter trends mapped onto economic trends.

And there are any other number of people who might have done this, but you're the one.

Why do you think it was you?

Search me, in the sense that

I wish that hundreds, thousands of people were making the same case.

I mean, now they are, thanks to the yang gang.

But

what I'd suggest is that I just don't have any incentives.

You

I just follow the facts.

When I wrote my book, I was prepared for whatever path the research would take.

I had to triple check dozens of numbers because I was like, there's no way these numbers are right.

Like, there's no way that our life expectancy has declined for three years in a row.

There's no way that we shed all these manufacturing jobs, the retraining programs were a total bust.

There's no way that 40% of American children are born to single parents.

There's no way that, you know,

it's like over and over again, I was like, that can't be right.

And I'd be like, oh gosh, it is right.

Like the picture that the data paints is quite clear and dark and dystopian.

And our politicians don't have a real interest in flipping the rock over and seeing what's underneath.

It led to Donald Trump being our president, in my opinion, because he came on the scene and said, look, there are all these problems, and I'm going to present to you a bunch of imaginary xenophobic nonsense solutions.

And

Democrats looked at that and said, well, this is ridiculous.

Like, who could ever buy this crap?

And then there are millions of Americans who felt, well, at least like they're acknowledging some of the problems.

And if you talk to Trump voters, do they really think he was going to bring the jobs back or like build the wall even?

I mean, they might have thought he was going to build the wall.

Some of them.

Yeah, some of them.

But a lot of them were like, you know, it was all just like

a metaphor or something where.

Yeah, or a feeling of, you know, he,

this system the way things are wasn't working for me it's not working I can't make my bills I can't deal with any of this and

we just need to like break it we need to burn it down and he will break it and burn it down and and some of that it feels to me like was people who knew that he might not have been their particular cup of tea personality-wise or disagreed with him on issues that now have been sort of filtered through into racism and the xenophobia.

There are people who were aware of that who voted for him and did it with the acceptance of it because they

knew that in their minds the system needed to be broken.

Whether or not you agree with that argument, there are people who felt that way, for sure.

I agree with you.

And the thing that I've been asking is that you have to reckon with the fact that tens of millions of Americans were so desperate that they were willing to roll the dice on a narcissist reality TV star as our president.

That is the reality.

We have to own that reality and face it and figure out, okay,

if our circumstances were so bleak that tens of millions of Americans decided that burning the house down with

the narcissist reality TV star was the direction to go in, then what do we do about those underlying trends and causes?

Well, but this is why, I guess, nihilism is the word that I use, but you talk about bleak circumstances.

You said when you looked at the facts and figures, it was dystopian, right?

Yeah.

So is your vision just sort of dealing with the dystopia?

Well, unfortunately, the dystopia is set to accelerate

because we're just now having artificial intelligence lead the lab and hitting our big businesses.

I spoke to a conference of 70 CEOs and I asked how many of you are looking at having AI

automate away thousands of back office clerical workers.

Every single single hand went up.

So it's about to get really hairy and nasty.

We're in the third or fourth inning of the greatest economic transformation in our history, what experts are calling the fourth industrial revolution.

And our politicians are not talking about it.

It's somehow taking me to press this issue and bring it to the fore.

And we need to wake people up.

I mean, that the

and this is the reality of why Donald Trump's our president today is that we've already blasted away millions of American jobs and people feel like they have lost a path forward.

Is your idea though that this can actually be dealt with or is it that we need to just accept it and

live through it?

Is there any way to fix things?

Is there any way to make it not dystopia or is it about living, finding a way to live in the dystopia rather than being consumed by the dystopia?

Well, this is the great opportunity.

that we're in the midst of, Isaac.

And when I wrote my book, I did not think I was going to head this direction, but it actually happens immediately.

Because if you start accepting that we're automating away not just these blue-collar jobs, but also radiology jobs, I was an unhappy corporate attorney for five months, and I know you can automate that job.

Like,

it's independent.

I was only an intern at a law firm, but I am sure that what I did could be automated.

But I wasn't really paid that much money.

I was paid a fair amount.

So, when you accept these circumstances, that we're going to be competing against technologies that have a marginal cost of near zero, and it's not like, oh, if I just charge a little less, like, you know, they'll still let me lawyer their stuff.

It's like, oh, it's actually actually that, not going to work that way.

Then quickly you have to say, okay, then how are we going to start valuing our time?

Like, what does a 21st century economy look like in a way that actually serves our interests and not the the capital efficiency machine.

And so you come to something like universal basic income, where everyone gets $1,000 a month, $12,000 a year, which would be a game changer for tens of millions of American families.

And then you start broadening the definition of what we think of as work.

My wife's at home with our two boys, one of whom is autistic, and her work right now is valued at zero.

That's the case for millions of American women right now.

And so if you start to expand what we think of as work, you get the boot off of everyone's throats.

And then you could see this whole different human-centered trickle-up economy take root.

Here in Iowa, a thousand bucks a month would mean an extra 40,000 jobs in Iowa because the money would go to car repairs and daycare and food and the occasional night out and little league sign-ups and all of that.

But it's not like the robots are taking over, the world is burning, and let's just make the best of it.

Well, we can build an economy and society we're actually proud of, and we actually don't have a choice but to head very powerfully in this direction.

Because if we try and patch the dam,

which is essentially what a lot of our politicians are making a case for, it's like, what's that?

Like, this is happening?

Don't worry.

We can go back.

Like, what's that?

Climate changing?

Don't worry.

We can stuff that.

It's not too late to fix it.

That's what we get at.

And that's, I think,

one of the main themes that you hear in the Democratic primary debate overall.

It's like, yeah, Donald Trump is terrible, they all say,

but, you know, we can

fix it.

Like, we go back to it, right?

Like, yeah.

You know,

Biden is the one who embodies this the most, where he says, four years of Trump will be an aberration, eight years we'll never be able to go back, but

we'll never be able to recover from, however, he says it.

But embedded in that is the idea that like if he, if he is the president, then in 2021, it'll feel like where things were on November 7th, 2016.

That is very much the message.

And my message is that we have to go forward.

We have to turn the clock forward.

We have to accelerate our economy and our society.

We have to evolve in the way we think of ourselves and work and value.

These are massive challenges, but we have no choice but to undertake them because the alternative is truly terrible.

So this is hopefully a very optimistic, uplifting message.

Like the freedom dividend, a human-centered economy, valuing unvalued work.

entrepreneurship, arts, creativity, service, volunteerism,

people doing what they actually have inside of them as opposed to what the market arbitrarily says, like, oh, you're worth 12 bucks an hour.

You're a truck driver, you're getting paid 46,000.

Five years from now, you're going to be worth zero.

You know, it's like, deal with that.

I mean, if we let the market determine our value, we are sunk.

So we need to come up with different ways of both measuring economic value and our own value in our society as fast as possible.

Do you think that you're ahead of your time in thinking about this?

Is this where, is this a political argument or is this do you think where

10 years from now, more people are going to just be signed on with you rather than signed on with the way that you're thinking about things?

I'm sure that over the coming, and 10 years is too long, man.

I mean, we don't have that much time.

So like over the coming 10 weeks, you're going to see many more people sign on to my vision for the country and this set of ideas.

You know, 10 years, I mean, shoot.

I'm very confident, though, that this movement is going to grow and grow because so many Americans see that our current politicians are not up to the true challenges of this time and that we need a different set of solutions.

I, in Detroit, when we were there for the debate, took a ride on the People Mover, which goes around and around.

It's really bizarre.

It's sort of a monument to bad municipal planning.

And there were two guys who were in yang t-shirts on the People Mover, I guess, doing the same thing that I was doing.

And I was listening to their conversation, and these are,

I don't know,

they were there clearly to be part of your team for the debate.

I don't know if they were on staff.

So I'm not going to hold you to that entirely.

But they did seem, when I was asking about

Yangang supporters who are young men, they seemed sort of the prototypical

caricature that people have of it.

They were talking about how neither of them have full-time jobs and they like driving Uber and Lyft because that way they can get around having a full-time job and it's nicer that way and they're looking forward to getting their $1,000 a month.

I think that there are some people who would look at guys like that and others of the supporters and say, you know, and some of the ideas that you have and say, oh, you know, you got to grow up and think about things differently.

And

I actually agree with that sentiment.

We do need to grow up and think about things differently.

Right.

Because what you're saying is that the people who are not thinking about things in this way are the, right?

Like, they're the ones who are stuck stuck in the.

Yeah, I mean, if you think about it, why are we trapped in this subsistence labor model?

Why is it that a job is nine to five or ten to six, and my wife's work is not a job?

You know, it's like we're 94% of the new jobs created in the U.S.

are gig temporary contractor jobs at this point.

And we still just pretend it's the 70s where it's like, you're going to work for a company.

You're going to get benefits.

You're going to be able to retire.

You'll have your 401k or whatever.

Even though we've totally eviscerated any retirement benefits, but somehow you're going to retire.

Like, it's going to work out.

And young people look up at this and be like, this does not seem to work.

And we're like, oh, it's all right.

It's not all right.

You know, and so we do have to grow up.

I couldn't agree more.

We are sitting here in the best western in Clear Lake.

Is this the glamour of the presidential campaign trail that you expected when you got into it?

Well, at least I'm enjoying this conversation with you.

I mean, that's fun.

Like, you know, a year ago, I was alone in the best western.

So, you know, this is a real upgrade, Isaac.

I mean, it did strike me that when I was kind of walking in here to ask you about nihilism and the best western in Clear Lake is maybe the right

atmosphere to ask about that.

I enjoy campaigning.

I enjoy seeing different parts of America, but I will say that my seven years running venture for America, I saw parts of the country I'd never seen before, and I was blown away by the gulf between

Missouri and Manhattan or,

you know, Michigan and San Francisco, or whatnot.

Like, like, there's you feel like you're traversing dimensions and decades and ways of life, and not just hopping a few time zones.

Now, I love America, I love going all over the place.

Like, I, you know, I love it here in Iowa,

but it is true that I think if certain people in certain parts of the country really knew what was going on in some of the other parts of the country,

they would be

stunned and not in very positive ways.

So, let's end with this.

Measure success for me.

Is it only getting to the Evil Office?

Is that

the only way that this campaign is a success for you?

I'm running for president to help solve the problems of the 21st century.

And if we can solve those problems and I'm not the president, I will be thrilled.

No, I actually

am not a maniac where I'm just like, I must be president.

Like I happen to think that.

Do you feel like some of your your colleagues in the race are that way?

I mean, I happen to think that the fastest way to implement these solutions will be by winning the election and becoming president.

But I want to help solve the problems.

And I'm happy to say there are a lot of Americans that want to join me in solving the problems.

So that's the work we're set to do.

All right.

Well, we'll end it there here in the best western.

Thanks for being here on Radio Atlantic.

Thanks, Isaac.

It's been a real pleasure.

I admire your work a lot.

We'll cut that part out.

Yeah, yeah, sorry.

That'll do it for this week of Radio Atlantic.

Thanks to Kevin Townsend for producing and editing this episode, and to Catherine Wells, the executive producer for Atlantic Podcasts.

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