Marie and Andrew Yang talk politics and action around affordability

Good evening, folks. It's so good to see everybody. Hey, I took a break for about a couple of months doing a couple of very large media projects that took all of my inches to get them done, but we're done now. So tonight I have Andrew Yang, former presidential candidate, joining us. But before I talk about Andrew, and I'm very excited to get to that, I wanted to let you know what we're going to talk about tonight. So tonight, affordability real talk, right? Not just platitudes and pie-in-the-sky policies, but what will really move the needle, what organizations are moving the needle, what politicians will move the needle, all the things that are solutions that actually work in real life and every day. So that's why I'm thrilled to have Andrew Yang. So I'll go ahead and introduce him. So Andrew Yang, so excited. He is former presidential candidate from, Andrew, 2020? Yep, that's right. From the 2020 cycle. What caught my eye about Andrew, folks, in 2020 when I was running my race, my congressional race, was UVA, universal basic income, because I'm a fan and I think there's going to be a time and a place for it. And we just have to figure out how it works with the rest of the ecosystem. But the great thing about Andrew is, is he has this very rich education and combination of tech solutions background. He's the current CEO of Noble Mobile, full disclosure, I'm a fan. I use it for all my political work. And the reason I wanted to have him on is that I think Andrew and his team have created solutions not unlike Mark Cuban has for pharmaceuticals. So with that, I'm going to welcome Andrew Yang. So good to have you. Thanks for having me, Marie. Such a pleasure. I didn't realize that you'd been tied up in some major project. So excited to see what you've been working on, but thrilled to be here with you tonight. Well, we'll see how this all pans out. It's been a little squirrely. So I wrote a book over the last, I published a book last year with some good friends at Kohler. And this year, I did my first, that was my second book. This is my third book coming up and we'll see that in 2027. And it's a work of fiction. So it's a legal thriller. So we'll see. We'll see what happens. But so first and foremost, Andrew, I think the word and phrase of the hour is AI, right? So artificial intelligence, our job market, we're seeing it, right? Like it's real now. It's very tangible to us what's going on with AI. Now, should we fault any clear proportion of the job market that we're losing with AI, but clearly it has an effect. So I'd love for you to talk broadly about AI, its real effect. And if there's any quantification of that, we'd really appreciate that and talk kind of broad strokes. Of course, Marie, I've been passionate about this since 2018, 2019, 2020. I am friendly with many Silicon Valley types who were totally confident that AI was going to come down the pike and automate a very significant proportion of American jobs. The example I used all the time on the trail was call center workers, which most people can understand. There are hundreds of thousands of call center workers and AI can do that job. Now that's one that we can all see. The other one I talked about on the trail a lot was driving, truck driving in particular, Uber drivers. There are millions of Americans who drive for a living. What I did not forecast in 2020 was that white collar work would actually be the first category of jobs that's really going to be impacted to end mass. And our conversation is very, very timely because AI agents have just been released that can replicate, can surpass the work of humans in financial, legal, marketing, and programming. And so this is only a two week old development where there's been a lot of hype around AI, a lot of buildup. And then when these agents hit the marketplace on January 30th, there was a tremor in the stock market. And I'm not someone who likens the stock market to the stock market. It's just values and the top handful of Americans own most of the stock. But when the stock market has a massive reaction to something, it's important. And what happened was software companies, including giants like Salesforce and Microsoft, lost billions and billions of dollars worth of value the next 24 hours because people said to themselves, wait a minute, if AI can code anything under the sun for me, why am I going to pay Salesforce or these other enterprise software companies millions of dollars on a per employee basis when I can customize software to my own needs? And we're still trying to figure out what the heck that's going to mean. But the reality is that millions of American white collar workers are going to lose their jobs in the coming weeks and months. I was confident of this back in 2020. I'm 100% confident of it now. And it pains me to say this. But I talked to various CEOs, and they tell me confidentially, they're going to fire thousands and thousands of their workers. For the most part, they're in the process of doing so. I talked to a senior executive at a Fortune 500 company who said they're firing thousands of workers. I then went online to say, have they announced it? They have not. There's going to be a gutting of offices around the country. The way I try and analogize it is that if you imagine factories in the 80s and 90s when robots and machines started showing up, and they replaced the manufacturing workers, the same thing is happening right now with knowledge workers. The first population that's feeling the brunt of it is college grads who aren't getting hired. And if you look at the numbers there, the proportion of college seniors that had a job offer has already plummeted. And you're seeing an unemployment rate among college graduates that's at parity with non-college graduates, which is the first time that's ever happened. And unfortunately, that's going to get much, much worse. I'm energized about this because this is happening right now. And I wish that we were doing many, many more dramatic things, including something like a universal basic income. By the way, Dario Amadei, the CEO of Anthropic, which is the company behind these new agents, has been raising his hand to the press and saying, hey, we're going to automate away 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs in the next five years, and unemployment's going to spike. And we should listen to him. And then the next thing he said is, you should tax off the AI companies and start distributing the gains. We should listen to him again. Unfortunately, we have an administration that's not responding to this. I mean, there are a lot of news items out there. To me, this is the story. The gutting of white-collar work is the story, because it's going to have the broadest social and economic effects. It's going to be very, very bad for millions of Americans. And I wish we had done more. There are times I talk to my team, I wish we had done more in 2020, though I don't know what more we could have done. Looking back on it, I don't think that the Democratic Party was ready for what was to come. Well, it was prescient, right, what you said. It was very interesting because the first time I learned of universal basic income was probably 2016, I started reading about it. My challenge was, that sounds interesting. How do we increment it? How do we fit it into welfare, SNAP, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid? How does it fit with all of the public social services, right? How does that work? It can be done. I'm a foreign management consultant, you and I understand how that can be done. It's just a lot, right? And it would have to be phased in and all the things. But taking it back to unemployment, help me understand some of the bridges and the channels we use to fix unemployment, because now there's just jobs that are not necessary anymore, right? There's roles and jobs in many companies that aren't as necessary. And as upsetting as that is, I'm just a big fan of reality, right? So I live in the real world. My son is going through this right now, he's a 20-something, and he just got, his job was taken away to AI, he works in politics. And my daughter last year had a similar problem. So tell us what companies, public-private partnerships could do, some solutions. Well, right now, major companies are grappling with what to do with their existing workers, where imagine if you're the CEO of a company, I mean, I don't want to name names, I do talk to some of these folks, but let's say it's a consumer company. You have a very large customer service staff, and your team comes to you and says, hey, we can replace 5,000 workers with AI and just have a lean, mean team of 500 plus the AI, we'd save a ton of money, our competitors are doing this, we should do this. And if you're in that situation, what do you do? And if you do something, do you announce it? Do you come clean? There are various companies that are making large layoff announcements, and then they're inserting AI into the press release. And I've seen people say, that's not actually AI, there are other reasons, you overhired, et cetera, et cetera. And it's hard to parse out a corporate statement because, for example, Verizon fired 13,000 people in October, Amazon said they're laying off 16,000, Amazon said it was AI, Verizon sort of hinted at it. Now, you don't know what's going on in the guts of these companies, but the biggest fork in the road is, number one, what do these companies decide to do with these workers? And unfortunately, right now, they're deciding to jettison very large numbers of them. And then the second thing is, what do they communicate to the market or to public officials? And there are more and more folks, especially really in the last two weeks, I mean, this is like a right now story. There are folks who are going to public officials saying, we have to do something, or you have to do something. The tough part is that every company that's publicly traded finds itself in a bind, because if they were to do something, let's say they were to decide to adopt AI in that department, their stock would take a beating eventually. And the executives in question, and as you as a consultant know this, the executives in question are concerned about their own jobs. They would say, you know what, if I don't make this move. So what I ask corporate leaders to do is to at least come clean. Just say, look, we are doing this and our hands are somewhat tied. And if we're going to do something for these workers, it needs to be public-private and very significant in scale. And that's the rub, right? So folks, we are very clear on the problem, right? That AI is affecting all industries, not just white collar, but blue collar jobs, all of the things, right? In terms of policy and legislation, I think a big job production program would solve that. So if we look back to FDR days, right? And FDR came in and said, I'm going to create all these public works jobs. It worked pretty well. We actually need new infrastructure and there's money out there for infrastructure and all the things. So that's one idea that, and public and private can work together on infrastructure jobs and creating. What would be interesting to me, and I'd love for you to vamp something on this, Andrew is, so guess what? Climate issues have not gone away, even though this administration is pretending they've gone away, right? So what if we had a conservation core of everything from, cause that is inclusive of engineers, scientists, day workers, wage workers, high-end tech workers, all the things, right? So if we were to develop a modern day public works program, that's a public-private program that could work, right? Yeah, that's exactly the sort of thing we should be doing, Marie. And we have a massive need and shortage of electricians and technical teams to go in and retrofit buildings, even to equip them with solar panels and windows that don't let heat escape, that are more energy efficient. There are so many things that we could and should be doing. And to get there, you would need a government that decided, you know what, we're going to try and solve major problems and employ large numbers of people at the same time and train people for these roles, because you have a lot of folks who are short on the technical skills. I mean, the major mismatch in American life right now is that you're going to have an overabundance of college grads and law school grads and white-collar workers and not a market need for them. And that breaks my heart because, you know, it's like a lot of these kids, students were sold a bill of goods, you know, and that makes me sad. And then at the same time, you have a real shortage of folks with certain technical skills that aren't necessarily, I'm not talking about, you know, coding or software, those type of technical skills, which unfortunately are also going to be in terms of market need. You know, and you have very, very accomplished coders saying, I am now obsolete. I just saw it and, you know, I'm shaken by it. Now that coder, that senior coder who's making that announcement online is probably a millionaire, honestly, because if you've been in Silicon Valley for X years, you probably made enough money where, you know, you're going to be fine. It's really the folks that are coming out of school. And I do talk to professors who have computer science graduates who can't get jobs for the first time in their career. So that's not what I mean by technical. What I mean by technical is folks who can walk into an old building and like rip out the old wiring and try and install a newer wiring. So it's technical training, apprenticeship, vocational, and there's a massive shortage of that throughout the U.S. So that would be a move that you could make. But even if you were to do everything right, it would take years for it to bear fruit. And you would have a generation that wasn't trained for that sort of work that often has debt, school loans that aren't being forgiven. Right. And we've been, I'm forever the optimist. So every decade that we have a huge problem like this in the late seventies, early nineties, we lost all these manufacturing jobs. Manufacturing went overseas and we lost it to automation for sure. As you said, we did figure it out. We didn't figure out how to replace jobs. So we just didn't plan for this. So I'll just say we should have listened to you and folks like you a little bit more in 2020, because here we are six years later and we don't have a plan. Right. So this is not necessarily even a party based thing. I will just say that while the Republicans don't want to do it and are ignoring the problem, they say there is no problem, which is not accurate. My brethren in the Democratic Party haven't done anything about it. So I think it does take a fresh, I talked about a crop of new guard candidates that are very important. We need not just younger people, but people that think differently going into politics, that they are solution driven and aren't afraid to ruffle feathers. So I'm hoping that whether it is a conservation corps of engineers and all types of workers, it is a climate group, it is whatever that both private sector and as well as government comes together. I want to move over to the role of UBI moving forward. We've identified there's going to be a problem. Technology is going to take over more and more. Hopefully we swallow it and embed it in a way where it's not as painful. But how do you see UBI, Universal Basic Income, for those that are just coming on, how do you see that developing in the coming decades? I think the recognition of the need for it is going to be sky high. If you look at the numbers around, for example, regulation of AI, and this is another mismatch, 80% of Americans want more regulation of AI, and a majority think that it's going to impact their job security, and they're right. But then you look at our political class, and the Trump administration just cheerleads the data centers and AI and says it's necessary for beating China. And then some Democrats are in the same camp because their economic numbers are also contingent upon the data centers being built and the rest of it. So there's a real chasm between what most Americans want on this and what both parties are delivering. And there are going to be figures that end up trying to address this by saying, look, 80% of Americans want more regulation of AI, 72% of Americans want Universal Basic Income or some version of it. And the question is, how do we get there? But I think it's common sense at this point, you know what I mean? When I was running in 2020, folks thought I was the magical Asian man from the future who wanted to give everyone money, and it was very futuristic, and now we're here. And we're going to have to think a lot bigger. One of the major missed opportunities of this past number of years was that the Democrats didn't have a primary in 2024, because if they had, this would have been one of the major issues, I would think. I think so, too. Yeah, because if you had a bunch of candidates, then at that point, chat GPT would have already been adopted by tens of millions of people, and the AI companies were going full bore. So if you'd had a primary, then candidates would have said, hey, guys, what are we going to do about this? And then maybe we'd have more things on the table. I agree. I wish we had it for many reasons. So tell us more, and then I do want to talk about your newest project, Noble Mobile, but tell us more about the good guys out there, and I'll define that for you. So our tech entrepreneurs like you and Mark Cuban, great examples of people that are addressing affordability in an everyday kind of way. So Mark, is it three or four years ago, he started it now, where he's bringing the cost of drugs down because he's negotiating outside the country, bringing them in, and a bunch of different cost-saving measures. You have addressed cell phone usage. Are there others out there that you feel like really get it? They're the good guys that are helping with affordability. Well, first, let me acknowledge that it's been a very disappointing time for Silicon Valley, for techies. There were a lot of folks who saw the scope of the problems and were willing to consider adopting very, very big, broad solutions, even when I was running for president. And a lot of those folks have now just adopted very strict business concerns and said, you know what, I'm just going to get in good with this administration. I'm going to, you know, run up our stock price and let the rest sort it out. And that is a real failing of leadership. Like we could use much more leadership from the tech sector, in my view. And you referenced me and Mark Cuban as, you know, examples of people who are trying to do wholesome things. I mean, I was certainly inspired by cost-plus drugs. But let me be the first to say that you need government to have its act together, to have a shot at addressing these problems, because they're so big. And to me, a commercial solution, like what Mark's doing or what I'm doing, is something of like a fallback compromise measure. Because I'll just speak for myself. It's like, look, I've been trying to get things done through policy, and I'm still trying to get things done through policy. But, you know, like I'm realistic where this administration's not going to do a lot of the things that I want to see happen. And I'm not willing to wait. So is there something I can do to attack the cost structure of the average American household? And so if you look at the average, like my thesis is that poverty is eminently solvable. Americans should have more money. GDP right now is maybe $84,000 per capita. And AI is going to increase that number to over $100,000. And so at what point, if you have GDP at that level, do you start distributing the gains more broadly? And in my opinion, it's yesterday. You know, it's like the only opportunity or silver lining in this era is that you might be able to transition from the scarcity economy that we're all programmed with to an abundance economy where you assume like there's more than enough to go around. And I'm going to suggest 100,000 ahead is enough to go around. So on the path to abundance, one of the things that you should be doing is trying to get down the costs of decent life in America. And if you look at the average household costs, this is the list, probably not shocking anyone, but it goes number one, housing, number two, healthcare, number three, education, number four, food, number five, fuel, including heating, number six, transportation, number seven, media, entertainment, leisure. And then number eight is connectivity or data. You know, what Hasan Minhaj calls a rectangle of sadness. And so the average American spending $83 a month on our wireless bill, and I'm going to out myself, Marie, I was spending $150 a month on Verizon. Same. Wow. You made me feel so much better, Marie, because I'm a little bit ashamed now. All right. So Andrew Yang, $150 a month. Average American, $83 a month. Average European, $35 a month for the same stuff. And so if you look at that $48 a month Delta times the hundreds of millions of us that have cell phone plans times 12 months, you have $100 billion a year in extra spend on wireless connectivity relative to other industrialized countries. $100 billion a year. And of that $100 billion a year, $11 billion is going to Verizon shareholders every year in the past 6.5% dividend. $7 billion is going to AT&T shareholders. So that gets you 18 of the 20 immediately. And then you have another $5 to $10 billion in marketing spend. If you wanted to get aggressive, you could include store leases, like you do a lot of things. But you can see that there's massive bloat. And that if we could get your cell phone bill in half, we would save you about $500 a year times all the years you're going to be a customer might be $20,000 to $30,000. And then you put an interest rate on that and compound it, you wind up with $40,000 to $60,000. So the average American is giving Verizon or AT&T a down payment on their own retirement over the course of our lives. We're donating a car to our wireless provider. So what we've done with Noble Mobile is we've licensed hundreds of millions of dollars worth of data from T-Mobile and made it available to Americans at our cost. It's essentially cost plus data, where the average Noble user spends $42 a month on their wireless, which is about half the national average. And because we return any money for unused data to you at the end of the month, you have an incentive to use your rectangle of sadness a little bit less. So the average American on Noble uses 17% less screen time after they join because we just tend to like money. And so if you're paying me to use my phone a little bit less, I do scroll a little bit less. I don't pick up my phone when I'm at dinner with friends. So Noble Mobile, our goal is to cut billions of dollars out of this $100 billion worth of bloat and return it to the American people in the form of savings and also incentives to look up and hopefully get a better relationship with your phone. Yeah. And what I like about that model so much is that you and the customer, meaning Noble Mobile, and you are partners, right? We're solving this affordability problem together and you're having to have thinner margins as a business person. And then that person is agreeing to take better care of their health, right? Our margins are very thin and I'm going to do something very dramatic now as the magical Asian man from the future. Anyone on this call who sees this, if you go to noblemobile.com slash yang, you can get three months for free. And that is like $250 worth of data for the average American household. But you're right, Marie. The truth is we're accepting lower margins. We are. Because I'm here to try and get more money into your pockets and it turns out you can run a fine business charging something reasonable. I do want to push on a point that I experienced and you probably experienced too. If you're an American and you traveled abroad to let's say Europe, Verizon charges you 10 bucks a day. AT&T charges you 12 bucks a day. You could come home with a cell phone bill that's like $100, $200 on top of a domestic bill that they don't discount even though you didn't use any data because you were away. And again, I'm ashamed of this, but I'm not alone. I had a $500 Verizon bill the month I went to Europe. And that's because they charged me 10 bucks a day and I was away. So it added up to like $500 and that's insane. The carriers are only charging, they're being charged $2 a day to put you on a foreign carrier's network. And so they're upcharging you by 400% or 500% just to pad their margins. There's so much price gouging going on in the wireless industry, it's nuts. So with Noble, we charge you five bucks a day when you're abroad and we cap it at 10 days per billing cycle and then we discount your domestic data. So that European vacation that month, you might end up paying like 80 bucks in total for the month instead of like hundreds of dollars. If you just adopt sensible business practices, you can reduce the average American cell phone bill by 50% or more. Okay, so I'm going to put you on the spot. One of the reasons I desperately wanted to talk about AI, you've done a great job of kind of outlining the contours and some of the solutions. How can we pressure as American citizens and American consumers, how we pressure CEOs and C-suite to do more of the cost plus Mark Cuban model, the Noble Mobile, Andrew Yang model, and whoever else is doing it. How do we put pressure on them, Andrew? Everybody on this call wants to know, how do we pressure these guys to do the right thing and have a little less margin in their life, a little less greed, and make life a little more affordable? How do we do that? You know, the truth is, Marie, a lot of this is baked into the system if you're a publicly traded company. Let's say you're Verizon, you have a stock, and you have to reward shareholders somehow. And so the two ways you can reward shareholders are one, demonstrate that your profits are growing, your revenue are growing, which is tough, honestly, in a saturated marketplace where everyone has a wireless plan. So your choice really then is to raise prices, is number one, if everyone has a cell phone plan, or number two, it's to cut costs, which means cutting head count. So it's very, very hard for a publicly traded company to cut its own margins. If you look at a company like Cost Plus Drugs, it's a private company and Mark started it. Mark, I don't need crazy margins. We're doing the exact same thing with Noble Mobile. And one of the things I will share with you, Marie, is that when I went raising money for Noble Mobile, I was pretty explicit. I was like, look, guys, we're going to build a fine business. You know, we're not going to be a unicorn. Yeah, we're not going to gouge anyone. We're going to be like the guys of it. And conventional investors weren't that excited. Honestly, I had one investor say something that haunted me, but I'll share it with you all. He said, Andrew, love you, want to back you. If you start anything with AI in the name, we will invest right now. And I was like, that is not what I'm trying to do. Marie Forleo Right. That's not the objective. Andrew Horowitz Yeah, I'm trying to save people money on their cell phone bills. But because I'm kind of a stubborn soul, I actually took the reluctance of that VC and other VCs as a good sign, because I'm like, okay, I get it. Folks aren't going to invest in this to try and maximize their returns. This is going to be a values-based business, and I'm going to have to try and find the right investors. So the truth of it, Marie, is when you say, hey, how do we put pressure on companies to do the right things and not be as exploitative? I would try and find a business that's non-public. Because if it's a publicly traded company, it has a growth imperative, and it's left with very little choice or else the managers are going to lose their jobs. Marie Forleo Well, here's I have a little ad. I'll build on your note there. The note is, folks, is buy from private companies, right? Make companies that are doing the right thing or that are not publicly traded, make them profitable and reward them for doing good things. The more we reward those that are doing the right thing, guess what? The folks that are competitive with them in the publicly traded space are going to see it. So folks, buy from private companies, small companies, mom and pops, all the things. I can't say this enough, is that when a company partners with you and you feel partnered with and you're solving an affordability problem together, that's the company you want to be with. So I have one final question. We're heading towards the end here, Andrew. Oh, no, I'm enjoying this so much, Marie. Marie Forleo Well, if you have time. Actually, I lied. I have two. Okay. So I have one more financial question. So what if there was a huge VC and PE and maybe angel investor network, combination of all those types of money people, right? That where they decided, you know what, this affordability thing isn't going to go away. Our current administration is cuckoo for cocoa puffs and fully incompetent and malignant and maniacal, right? Let's just be honest about what they are. The Trump administration is, and they're beyond corrupt. There's a word I keep looking for this new synonym for beyond corrupt. I haven't found it yet, but they're the most corrupt administration ever. So put that aside because you always have to plan ahead. So we have to wait till 2028 to have a decent partner in DC. So what if there was this massive board of, you know, financiers, whether it was, you know, private equity, DC, angel network, whatever it is that planned for this objective. And there was like a council. And what if Andrew was on it and you built a fund for affordability solutions for private companies that thought the way that you and Mark did? What if you did that? Yeah, that's the dream. I would love nothing more than to take a shot at each of these in turn. And you got to start with the biggest. I mean, housing is the biggest problem because no one can afford to buy a home. The average age of a first time home buyer now is 40, which is insane. I mean, like you should, they're called starter homes for a reason, you know, I mean, you're supposed to be starting out. I mean, no offense. I mean, I'm past 40, but you guys know what I mean? Like 40. So we need to take a shot at building many, many more housing units. And I'm thrilled that folks have wised up to the fact that we have all these red tape restrictions on building housing. It's affordable, whether it's in, you know, a blue area or red area, urban area, rural area, like whatever. We just need to build more housing. And a lot of folks who are supposedly liberal have been tacitly approving restrictions on building affordable housing in their neighborhoods because they would bring the value of their home down. And as soon as they're in a neighborhood, they don't want it to change human nature, but not great. It's like bad on policy. So I would love to see what can be done about building many, many more affordable housing units. Health care, for sure. What Mark is doing with generic drugs is a dream. There is so much bloat in the health care sector. And this is one of the tensions, too, that's happening, Marie, is that if you look at the job reports of the past 13 months, you'll see that all of the jobs that have been created have essentially been in the health care sector. And we have an aging population. So you can kind of see it's like, OK, we need folks to be employed. But then one person's job is another cost, really. As a society, we're spending 18, 19 percent of GDP on health care, and we're not getting great results. But there are a lot of jobs that are getting baked in there. And a lot of the folks that are even on this call who are white-collar workers are thinking to themselves, OK, let's say I believe Yang and you should believe me, that AI is coming and it's going to blow up a lot of white-collar jobs, which it is. Like, what do I do? Where do I go? And the first thing you might think is health care, because it's tougher to automate, which it is, by the way. And it's highly regulated and everything else. But one of the big opportunities is to try and bring down costs in the sector. And because you have publicly traded insurance companies and device companies, the rest of it, you know what they do every quarter? They have to show growth. So how do you show growth in the sector? Teacher, I have an answer. Teacher, I have an answer. It's called Medicare for All. You take care, you take the back office. So there's seven major insurance carriers. You take their back office, you make it our current Medicare system. One universal back office now. You still have all the health care providers and all the hospitals, all the clinics, all the everything, right? If we can get rid of insurance companies, and by the way, the system would absorb all those employees. So it's a bunch of hoo-ha. When people say that those two million employees would lose their jobs, they wouldn't. They would get absorbed into the system quite readily. And there probably would be more jobs because there's going to have to be a watchdog group and all the things, right? So for me, it's, you know, Medicare for All is one of those solutions. And there's going to have to be some companies that will migrate them over, right? I'm pro single-payer health care, Medicare for All, public option like that. There's no other way. I mean, you can see. It's like UBI, right? It's going to come, baby. It's going to come. God willing. Because you have all, again, these industry players are like, oh, I have to make more money. I have to show growth for my stock to grow. So what do they do? They raise prices all the time. I mean, one of my jokes is that, you know, the note that no one has ever, no American has ever received from their insurance company? Great news. Rates are lower this year. Like no one has ever gotten that note. I mean, and so at some point now there's going to be a flight to safety. And, you know, like we're going to need folks taking care of, you know, aging Americans. So number two is health care. Number three is education, which is own ball of wax. And it does pain me that people are going to be graduating from schools and not have the jobs that they would have expected. So going down the list, anything we can do to lighten, and those are, by the way, the big three by dollar. It's housing, health care, education. And so if there are ways to reduce the costs of any of those three, that's a dream. When I saw what Mark did with Cost Plus Drugs, I reached out to him. He and I are friendly or friends. And I said, congratulations, Mark. It's freaking awesome. Like we should be doing more like that. And then I set about thinking, like, is there anything I can tackle? And I landed on wireless. So, you know, very excited to be following in his footsteps. So that Money Network, it's 739 Chicago time on February 11th. So I'll check back on June 11th and see how you're doing on that board. Okay. Well, yeah, I'd love nothing more. I mean, shoot. You know, all we need is a third company. You know, my joke is that three makes the movement. So, you know, Mark and then we need one other person tackling. My preference would be if they were tackling housing. I know that would be amazing. And you know, what's frightening is that when you have people like Pulte in the White House, that has been, that I mean, I hate to be mean and I'll just call him out. He's been chiseling people for seven decades, his whole family. So, you know, I don't have hope for the housing market. I'm actually going to throw out a housing solution and it's not a solution. It's like a helpful measure. It's a company called Padsplit. And you can look it up padsplit.com. What it is, it's just renting a spare bedroom. And because the folks who tend to rent a spare bedroom, most of the time are folks who are doing service jobs. It's a win in both directions. You can build like, you don't have to build affordable housing. It's like an immediate step. So again, not a cure-all. But if you have a bedroom and you want to rent it, check out Padsplit. And if you need a bedroom, you can check out Padsplit. So again, let me emphasize that I'm not someone who thinks that commercial solutions work for all these things. But I admire the folks who are at least taking shots at improving the situation marginally. Most people who know me know I want very dramatic steps to be taken. You know, I do think we should be giving money quickly and broadly, especially now that AI is here in force. Yeah. I mean, I just think that someone much smarter than me will have a better idea than that money board, but with the objective of addressing affordability. But someone's got to do something dramatic like that in addition to the jobs program we talked in the first 15 minutes. But I do want to get to your book. Throw that sucker right up for me, dude. Show me your book. Oh, thank you. So this is my shot at doing something kind of positive because I knew this was going to be a grim time. It's called Hey, Yang, Where's My Thousand Bucks? And Other True Stories of Staggering Deaths. The alternate title was Hey, Am I Racist or Are You Andrew Yang? Which I have also been asked. But it's like personal accounts of running for president and other stories in the last number of years. So, you know, like if you just want something that like I think is like a positive read, you can check it out. But, you know, like I told like I'm very, very like I'm very, very sad about what we're going through as a country. And unfortunately, I do think this AI buzzsaw is coming into being literally as we speak. I'm disappointed in all our leaders. The first time I started reading heavily about AI was probably 2021. And I was I even tried to bring it up when I was in Congress and people just said, we have much bigger fish to fry. And I'm like, guess what? That's the fish. Oh, no, no, no. Andrew, this was in subcommittees where technology was the topic. I'm not kidding. Like it drove me crazy. Well, thank you for trying to make happen. Well, I didn't get very far. So but my final question is the question I ask, I guess, at the end every single time. It is what are we ignoring at our own risk right now? What is something that you feel like is really simmering that we're ignoring that should be paid attention to? So let's say you agree with us that AI displacing millions of Americans is the problem or one of the biggest problems, which I believe it is. And then you have 80 percent of Americans who are for some regulation of AI. Seventy two percent are for universal basic income. Again, GDP is going to exceed one hundred thousand per head in the next, my opinion, four or five years. And so what is keeping us from having some of these policy measures actually implemented? I think that's the elephant in the room that we ignore too much. And and one of the things I try to convey to people is like, look, you know what else is 80 percent approval in America trying to get money out of politics? You look that up like conservatives, progressives, everyone wants to get money out of politics, but then money is dominating politics in a way. So what is that disconnect? And I'm going to suggest that that disconnect is that popular will is getting refracted along ideological and party lines and making it so that we're being falsely set up and divided against each other instead of being able to come together and get things done that most of us can agree on. You know what else conservatives and liberals agree on? Drugs are too expensive, like the health care system needs an overhaul. I've talked to conservative farmers in Iowa and other states and they're like, oh, yeah, totally on board with that. So there's a massive trick being pulled on us that we're being taught. It's like, oh, you know why we can't get what we want? It's because of like this side or that side. It's like there's like this set of funhouse mirrors that's dividing us from each other. And if we could overcome that and come together and say, look, might not agree on everything, but we can agree on the fact that AI displacing millions of us is a very bad thing and we should be taking these measures, like that to me is the way out. And the two-party system in many ways is designed to stymie that if you look at it, because just, you know, it's design. Like we're struggling through some of the like this, the most consequential design flaw in the history of Western civilization where we're living with it right now, we're suffering through it. And if we can resolve that design flaw, then many, many good things are possible. If we can't, unfortunately, there are going to be a lot of people on this call and calls like it that are left wondering, it's like, why is it that we, the American people, cannot get the policy that most of us want and that we deserve? Right. And we're seeing, we just saw polls last week that identified that 70% of the country, it feels the same way about housing, that affordable housing is a problem. So now all of a sudden they've established a housing subcommittee, but, and that'll be a dogfight, but you're right. It's that if we had money out of politics and we had multiple parties, not just two, I think we'd be in a lot better space because you'd have to do a lot more coalition building and a lot less fighting over money. So. Yes. But right now it's like, you don't need to solve the problem. You just need to like be slightly less unlikable. Amen, my brother. Amen, my brother. Well, this has been a delight, Andrew. Folks, go ahead and take a peek at a really great affordability solution that's real and tangible, noble mobile. And Andrew, I just love chatting with you and wishing you the best success on your book. So we'll have you back again. Thanks everybody for being here tonight. Enjoy the hank out of this. Let's do more together. You're a rock star. I paid him to say that you guys. No, no, very much not. All right, guys. Have a great day and have a good night. Be well. Thanks for joining. Let's do more.