Andrew Yang points to GDP growth as proof U S could do a lot more for people and families

Welcome back to the Takeout. You might recall Andrew Yang's 2020 presidential campaign. It had a fair amount of social media sizzle. And during it, he talked about something called the UBI, universal basic income, giving everyone a thousand dollars per month. Yang lost, which as he writes in his new book, has caused lots of people to yell at him more than once. Hey, Yang, where's my thousand bucks? Well, here's some of my conversation with him about that and the future of artificial intelligence. Andrew Yang, great to have you here. We love to have fun here. So I'm just going to read the title of the book and I hope you brought it with you. Hey, Yang, where's my thousand bucks? Yes, I'm carrying it right now. Good. I have a stack of bills. My assistant will be waiting outside to take it from you. Yes, I do get asked this on the streets of New York and other places. The other question I have gotten is, hey, am I racist or are you Andrew Yang, which is the alternate title of the book. What is the origin of the thousand bucks? Well, the thousand bucks was my version of universal basic income that I campaigned on in 2020. I said that I was going to come and displace millions of Americans and we should start distributing the gains quickly. Crazy, I know. I mean, now people come to me every day and say, well, you know, you are ahead of the curve. Right. And universal basic income is something you and I've talked about before. You can watch the O.G. version of The Takeout to see our session on that. It's an idea rooted in the Nixon administration in the 60s. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, when he worked for the Nixon administration, wrote an entire book about it. Yeah, we could alleviate poverty at scale in this country. We've already done it or come close to doing it. We cut child poverty in half in 2021 as one example. And GDP now is around eighty four thousand dollars a head. It's going to go past one hundred thousand per person with AI, which is going to have a lot of negative effects, which we'll probably talk about. But it's certainly going to increase top line growth. So at some point you have to look up and say, wow, we can actually do a lot more for people and families and explain the basic construct of universal basic income. So, again, not Andrew Yang's idea. Martin Luther King, Thomas Paine, a lot of other people were four versions of it. But you just get a certain amount of money every month. No questions asked to meet your basic cash. Yeah, I mean, there are different ways to structure it, but universal basic income generally means cash in your hands and you don't go through the process in the modern welfare state of qualification forms, et cetera, et cetera. It's a universal major. You know, everyone gets it. No questions, no stigma. You know, you're a citizen and no imaginary line where you are or aren't qualified for assistance. Yeah, you are a citizen and stakeholder of the richest, most advanced society in the history of the world, which is the United States. And a thousand dollars a month is eminently doable. And there have been areas where this has been tested in our country. Yeah, there are various communities that have had versions of it. And what you saw was an increase in conscientiousness and agreeableness among children, which I dare say would be very good as a parent. You know, people put the money toward educational materials and fuel and food and transportation, getting to and from their job. So a lot of the scary stories about what people do with money aren't borne out by studies or reality. They do practical things with money. They do what most of the people watching and it makes their lives better and a little bit happier might do. What's major is you talk to someone, be like, look, I would use the money for very wholesome things. But like that guy over there is, you know, I mean, that you but the studies show that most people would do what you and I would do. So the book talks a little bit about your presidential campaign. Was that something you are glad you did or you regret that you did? Oh, gosh, I'm so grateful. Now I look now I look back so positively on, you know, meeting thousands of Americans around the country, making a case I ran in order to accelerate the adoption of something that could alleviate poverty at scale and grateful to everyone who got behind me and the campaign. It's like a once in a lifetime experience, or maybe not once in a lifetime, because who knows? Who knows it again? Stay tuned. You write in the book that when you would give your normal speech, it started off when you were getting this process dry and it didn't really land. And then the more vulnerable you became, the more relatable you became, the more the crowd showed. What's that process like as a human being? I recommend that everyone run for president because I do not recommend that everyone run for president, ladies and gentlemen. Well, we're going to agree to disagree on that. But for me, it certainly is a journey where I had facts and figures and a PowerPoint deck and then people were like, yeah, you know, interesting because it turns out people are more interested in supporting a person than they are a deck or an idea. And that was a journey for me. I make the mistake over and over again where I think the next thing is going to be like the last thing. And it turns out that running for office, particularly president, turns into a very deeply personal experience pretty quickly. Even though one of the things that your supporters gravitated to was a slogan or a hat or a shirt that said math. So they had an expectation that they would get more slide deck with Andrew Yang than, say, somebody else. Yeah, they'd be disappointed if there weren't some numbers. But math was an acronym that stood for Make Americans Think Harder, which did not work, obviously. We didn't quite catch on. Yeah, we didn't think hard enough, my opinion. And my campaign was born of the harsh reality that AI was coming down the pike and was going to take a lot of jobs. Let's drill into that. Where are we now? What do you foresee in the next one or two years? It's shocking, Major, because it's changing almost daily. But I think millions of Americans are going to lose their jobs in the next 12 to 18 months. Millions of Americans who have jobs now will not have them in 18 to 24 months. Yes, that's right. What kind of jobs? Call center jobs, programmer, designer, marketing analyst, anything with the word analyst or research in it. Consultant, lawyers, accountants, most white collar jobs are going to shrink because you now have AI that can do knowledge work much, much faster and more powerfully. I talked to the CEO of a publicly traded tech company and he said to me privately, we're going to fire 15% of our workers and then we're going to fire 20% probably two years later, and then we're going to fire another 20% two years after that. So there are going to be decisions like that made at just about every major publicly traded company. Because the competitive imperative for publicly traded companies only runs in one direction. Yeah. And if a company, by the way, did not do this, their stock price would plummet over time because everyone's going to have this competitive dynamic. Can I do more with less? Can I do more with fewer people? And so when you cut workers, your stock goes up and CEOs are under a lot of pressure themselves to deliver. And so there's going to be an unfortunate competitive dynamic where the more ruthless you can be on headcount, the more you get rewarded.