An Interview With Andrew Yang, the Outsider at Tonight’s Democratic Debate

Sep 12, 2019

Andrew Yang, a former tech executive, remains one of the least known candidates in a Democratic presidential field that includes senators, mayors, a governor and a former vice president. But by focusing on the potential impact of automation on jobs, he has attracted surprisingly loyal and passionate support. One of our technology writers has been following his campaign since before it officially began. Guests: Andrew Yang, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination; and Kevin Roose, who writes about technology for The New York Times.

For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. 

Background reading: 

• Armed with numbers, history lessons and the occasional self-deprecating joke, Mr. Yang has been preaching a grim gospel about automation. And voters are responding.
• The top 10 Democrats will share one stage for the first time starting at 8 p.m. Eastern. Here’s what to watch for.

Play Episode

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from New York Times unlikable borrow this is a lie

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today even as well-known Democratic lawmakers failed to qualify for tonight's debate Andrew Yang did Kevin ruse on what has made Yang's campaign so compelling

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it's Thursday September 12

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Kevin tell me how you know Andrew Young so I met Andrea Inge a few years ago when he was running this organization called Venture for America which he had had a couple careers he was a corporate lawyer did some startups he actually sold one of his startups and made a decent chunk of money from that and then he was trying to do this thing where he would essentially turn like recent college graduates into entrepreneurs set them up with some money and supporting them as they went off and started companies that sounds like Teach for America for business exactly that's I think the pitch that he made and so I was covering technology at the time we talked about Venture for America and you know I found it interesting but not really all that newsworthy I didn't end up writing about it but we kept in touch and then you know he emailed me sort of out of the blue in October of 2017 and it was a very cryptic email he just said like let's get together I've got a story to tell you

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and like I don't know I like to go on goose chases so I invited him out we went to Dean & DeLuca right downstairs from the Times building and he told me that he was planning to run for president and at first I was very confused looks like president of the food co-op I like the homeowners association like what could you possibly mean by running for president you know he's never held political office before I didn't even know he was particularly interested in politics and he says no no like I'm for real running for president in 2020 as a Democrat against Donald Trump this is not a joke or a stunt and he's written this book talking about some of the big ideas of his campaign and then I kind of forgot about him for a few months and then he came back one day and 2018 and said hey I filed my paperwork and I've got my first

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campaign video hello I'm Andrew Yang and I'm running for president as a democrat in 2020 so I watched the video and it was it was like interesting it was kind of homemade it was not particularly High budget we are experiencing the greatest technological and economic shift in human history it was basically him talking about his sort of central message of his campaign I came to realize that technology has already wiped out for million manufacturing jobs in Ohio Michigan Pennsylvania and other states and it's about to do the same thing to people who work in retail food service and food prep customer service transportation and I thought it was sort of interesting I hadn't heard a presidential candidate talk about issues like Ai and Automation and certainly not like make it the centerpiece of their campaign and so I was intrigued I mean here was a guy who was talking about an issue that you hear about a lot in Silicon Valley but it hadn't really become a mainstream concern yet and so

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I wrote this story I called him a longer than Longshot candidate which I thought was kind of being generous at that point and then I kind of expected that he would sort of Fade Away Into Obscurity and that I probably wouldn't write about him again and it turned out you were kind of wrong I was a little bit wrong

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please welcome Andrew

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ooh yeah I would like to welcome to Crooked media HQ Andrew Yang the supporters called themselves the Yang gang they chant PowerPoint at his rallies and wear ball caps with ma th on the front for make America think harder the of all the candidates I've seen on the trail you seem to be having the most fun are you it's a very low bar you said Trevor one candidate who will perhaps be a surprise on the stage for the next month's debates and entrepreneur Andrew Yang who made the cut ahead of several other Democrats with far more experience are you chanting USA are u.s. Yang I couldn't even tell so I wanted to catch up with Yang again he's you know obviously his situation has changed quite a bit

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since our first meeting in Dean & DeLuca Hey Kevin how are you I'm doing great so I flew to Houston where he was spending the week preparing for the presidential debate things are a little different we and you know he pulls up in his big SUV with his campaign staff trailing behind him and now you've got you know travel with an Entourage such a big entourage during the debates you've probably got you know armored SUV out there waiting for you is rented it hurts and we sit down for this interview and I asked him kind of straight up like where did I go wrong like what did I miss here what do you say well I think what people missed and unfortunately as Democrats are still struggling to pick up on this is a genuine explanation for why Donald Trump won in 2016 where if you turn on cable news the message seems to suggest that he's our president because of some combination of Russia

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racism Facebook the FBI Hillary Clinton emails and so you're like all right I guess that's why but the numbers and I'm a numbers guy the numbers tell a very clear and distinct story that the reason why he's our president is that we automated away four million manufacturing jobs in your home state of Ohio Pennsylvania Wisconsin Missouri Michigan all the swing States you needed to win he sort of said well you know it's not actually that hard to understand you don't need to know a lot about computer programming artificial intelligence to grasp the technology is having a huge influence on the labor market in the workforce is you don't need to be into technology to see the self-serve kiosks at the McDonald's or at the airport or at the CVS or any of the other places you frequent so Yang's diagnosis of the Trump election and by extension what's going on in this country is it stems mainly from technology from automation basically

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people out of their jobs and that his candidacy is compelling and his opinion because it directly confronts that right and I think if you've heard one thing about Andrew Yang over the course of this presidential campaign it's probably related to his idea for what's called Universal basic income Universal basic income or what I've rebranded the freedom dividend because it tests better is a logical Next Step which is why so Universal basic income is not a new idea it's really an idea that goes back decades where if we put money into people's hands it has so many positive effects because it would create hundreds of thousands of jobs around America but it also recognizes the kind of work my wife does who's at home with our two boys one of whom is autistic and the basic idea is every American adult gets $1,000 a month in cash no strings attached doesn't matter if you're a billionaire or you're unemployed

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Lloyd you get the same thousand dollars a month regardless it has that paid for so he's proposing to pay for it through what's called a value-added tax which is you know kind of European style tax that he thinks would most directly tax the companies that are profiting from Automation and how exactly does that solve for the problem he's diagnosed of Automation and its consequences well he believes that it doesn't solve the problem of automation but it does give people a cushion so if you lose your job because your company decides to replace you with a I having a thousand dollars a month will allow you to meet your most basic needs while you figure out what to do next while you look for a new job learn a new skill go back to school basically that having a thousand dollars a month guaranteed as the floor would make it easier for people to adapt to this sort of unprecedented technological change and he uses

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this example of a truck driver so if you're a trucker making $50,000 a year and then a robot truck comes and takes your job now you are worth zero so truckers you know obviously are threatened by automation if self driving trucks come onto the roads millions of people would stand to lose their jobs as a result and those people wouldn't just be able to immediately find something else that paid them as well as Trucking that was suited to their skills like a lot of them would need some time to figure out how to adjust and what to do next and to make that easier we would give them and everyone else $1,000 a month I mean it's not $12,000 a year is not enough to live on but it is enough to kind of serve as a as a net so that they're not experiencing the most extreme financial hardship where does yang say that we are in this process of automation so he thinks we've basically only seen the tip of the iceberg

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you know sites these studies from think tanks and academics that's a one out of three or one out of four jobs in America could be a risk of automation within the next decade and he's sort of using that to predict a mass unemployment crisis he's not saying you know this is going to be tough for a few people or a few people are going to have to find new jobs this is really about millions and millions of people being automated out of work it's going to zero out not just the trucker's of the warehouse shell vers or the retail workers I was an unhappy corporate attorney for five months which is long enough to know that a I can do that job it can edit contracts more quickly and accurately and inexpensively than the smartest human lawyer and why this why $1,000 a month to people and not what we hear most candidates and a lot of policymakers talking about when it comes to automation which is retrain workers whose skills have been supplanted by

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well Yang talks about this a lot he believes that basically that re-skilling programs don't work when I dug into the studies around the retraining programs for displaced manufacturing workers in Ohio and Michigan you found abysmal success rates of those programs that were federally funded the success rates hovered between 0 and 15 percent generally half of those workers left the workforce and never worked again and of that group half then filed for disability and you then saw surges and suicides and Drug overdoses in those communities to the point where now our life expectancy has declined for the last three years in a row so if you say as a politician we're going to retrain everyone and then you come with me to the truck stop and you actually have a clipboard and say who here wants to be retrained you will see how dumb an idea that is in real life in many many contexts does that feel right to you well there have been some interesting studies about these retraining programs I mean I would say that they don't work

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they are definitely not the cure-all I mean there have been some estimates that only sort of one out of four people can be retrained profitably by the private sector that essentially the government has to play some major role in trying to help people transition out of their old jobs in into something new and what is it that having a thousand dollars a month would allow these people to do let's take the trucker the you know 50 year old trucker loses his job probably a he to automation now $1,000 a month shows up in his mailbox what in your mind does that allow him to do that he couldn't otherwise do so first when you're looking at something like Trucking the thousand dollars a month is not enough but I've been giving the freedom dividend as you know to several families around the country right now if last number of months and I just saw one of the recipients Kyle kristensen in Iowa so Kyle is living in Iowa Falls Iowa with his ailing mom who's recovering from cancer so he's been getting a thousand bucks a month

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from me for a number of months I just saw him a few weeks ago in Iowa and he seemed like a different person and he came to me and he said I used some of the dividend on a guitar and I've been playing shows for the first time in years and this band now wants me to perform with them next week and he was so proud and he was beaming when he told me this the thousand dollars a month is in many ways about everything but the money it's about our humanity and what we would actually value its car repairs going from a crisis to an inconvenience it's home repairs and going back to school so when you translate what the money means in people's lives it means the things that make us human hmm right I mean his argument is essentially that this would radically reshape Society if we had an economy that was based upon making us happy then we would do this yesterday clearly let's imagine I'm president 2021 Freedom dividend goes out there's a town of 10,000 people in Missouri so that means

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another ten million dollars in spending power every month and then one person there besides to open a bakery which might have been a really dumb idea before the freedom dividend but now it's a good idea they open a bakery it sells muffins people like the muffins were there are cheaper ways to get those muffins to those people probably yes you know like it is the muffin is the new bakery like somewhat economically inefficient perhaps but does it make the community happy doesn't make the baker's happy doesn't make everyone its life better despite its economic imperfections yes so that is the vision of the economy we have to move towards and that certainly applies to a creative and artistic and cultural Endeavors to and the way that he's talking about it is essentially as something that would change the way we value work in the first place so you know he brings up the example of GDP gross domestic product which is the sort of Benchmark measurement we use to determine how well the economy is doing well

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buddy productivity essentially and he thinks that's the wrong measurement and so the goal should be to try and optimize not for this GDP measurement or stock market profitability and prices it should be to optimize for how we're doing our health our mental health our childhood success rates how clean our air and water are and if we had those as goals then we could harness our energies towards actually trying to improve our own lives instead of improving the bottom line of a company that is just going to proceed to automate more and more work as it's able to and I think one of the biggest misconceptions around me and the campaign and the freedom dividend is that people think it's somehow going to mitigate work it will not it will recognize the kind of work that so many of us are doing and want to do it will create more opportunities for the most human centered work the carrying the nurturing the artistic

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the entrepreneurial aspirations just the question is what do we mean by work I know my wife is working harder than I am you know and I'm running for president and right now the market value is her work at 0 so we have to think bigger about what we mean by work and value and if we succeed in that then we can create a society where more people who are going to be automated out of their jobs are going to go on to fulfilling lives that they're excited about as opposed to right now we're essentially kicking them to the curb pushing them into the void and then expecting that to go all right and I hate to say it but over time them is us and so we need to get our act together and wake up to the bigger problems and Universal basic income with theoretically make all that possible yeah that's what he's arguing

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all the way back

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this podcast is supported by cbsn the live streaming video news channel from CBS News CBS n is the original reporting in breaking news you trust from CBS News and it's always on we focus on facts not opinion it's news for everyone cbsn is perfect for cord cutters because you can watch wherever you are across all streaming devices here's how you do it download the CBS News app in any app store and then start watching cbsn right away for free this is Maggie Haberman I'm one of the White House Correspondents for the New York Times and a sometimes daily guests I remember a time in the spring of 2017 when President Trump had been trying and failing to get a bill through the house that would repeal President Obama's health care bill and I spoke to him by phone after asking for time with him and I tweeted afterwards about how he sounded on that call and very promptly was attacked by the president's Critics on the left other times I will be attacked by the president's supporters on the right when I

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nothing's like the Mueller investigation and it really isn't my job to try to please one side or the other we're not the tip of the spear for any political party or anyone view it's our job to do what we can to find the most distilled version of the truth that there is this is what we do at the New York Times every day is try to find that most honest interpretation of the truth and it requires resources and support and it's why it is so vital that people subscribe to the times

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okay so that's the logic of how this should work if it works according to plan I wonder how giving $1000 to every American actually would work kind of practically so there are Yang Skeptics out there there are people who just either don't think this is a good idea don't think it's necessary or don't think it would actually work in practice so I wanted to ask him about that giving people a thousand dollars a month like this would have unintended consequences I mean something would go wrong somewhere maybe it's that landlord start jacking up People's rent by a thousand dollars a month so the money all ends up going to landlords maybe it's that there's inflation oh well I have plans and countermeasures for those things but come on

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like how do you imagine government under a young presidency working to make sure that this actually works as intended that people actually get to go by their guitars and pay their you know car repair bills and pay their medical bills and have the kind of security that they need and that it doesn't end up just sort of getting taken up by some other part of the economy well first we need to try and make sure that you don't have rent seeking and catching behaviors but if you have a passive income of $1000 a month and your landlord tries to stick it to you you're much more portable and hard to push around now because you're like wait a minute I've got two adults in this house we got like another 2,000 a month coming in almost every other landlord has done the same thing but then you get six people together and you say you know what we're going to do in a by that Fixer-Upper I know like that that you actually end up turning people into much more flexible decision makers and it's like if you can barely make your month's rent and so you just have to

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look up whatever the landlord is telling you there are so many positive effects on that side and one of the comparisons I make is that mature companies like Verizon and Coke and Microsoft declared dividends all the time and everyone applauds management says good work and you don't no one ever asks what are the shareholders going to do with the money are we going to go around like what is this Verizon shareholder going to do with the dividend like we better make sure they spend it on the corner quote right things he's making repairs to his yacht that is not okay so when people talk about is like oh like what are you going to do with our money it's your money like you're an owner and shareholder of the richest country in the history of the world it can easily afford a thousand a month for each person the problem is that people have frankly a very paternalistic attitude towards the poor where it's like all of a sudden if you make a decision then we have to somehow police it like you're an infant or there's ridiculous or they have a cynical view about rent-seeking

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capitalism that you know if there's all this extra money floating around that landlords or Healthcare companies or investment Banks or some other than one will come along to try to take that thousand dollars a month on how to people's reputations are real that's for sure but one of the reasons why this dividend is so powerful is it makes people much harder to exploit if you imagine a waitress at a diner getting harassed by her boss and she has no choice but to keep that job to make ends meet she's getting a thousand bucks a month you can be like you know what I'm gonna quit this job and then I'll find another one and I can survive for a month or two so it empowers people it does not make us more subject to predations so as I'm listening being talked I'm kind of thinking that there's this sort of bizarre coexistence in his campaign message of like extreme pessimism and extreme optimism so his pessimistic part is like he believes that there's essentially this asteroid

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heading toward Earth right that there are these robots they're coming to take millions of jobs they're going to create mass unemployment it's going to be total societal collapse if we don't do something about it which is a very Bleak vision of the future that's like the part that sounds kind of like sci-fi and then there's this sort of extreme optimism that if you just do the thing that he says if you just give people a thousand dollars a month like humans are creative they are ambitious like if you just satisfy their needs they will find amazing things to do they will start businesses they will essentially make the decisions that you would hope they would make and that humans really are at their core good I'm optimistic about the fact that there's nothing stopping a majority of citizens of a democracy from rewriting the rules of our economy to work for us the people the owners or shareholders of this country that's the source of my optimism and you know the other thing I'm thinking is like

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yes like in a vacuum this makes a lot of sense but we're not in a vacuum you know in fact we're in a incredibly polarized political environment and it's not all about automation there's a culture War there are people who believe that immigrants are threatening the future of Western civilization and the core of Donald Trump's appeal a lot of it has been about culture and about values and about identity and that's the piece that you don't really hear Yang talking about as much and so I wanted to ask about some of that too now I know you have said over and over again that the reason that Donald Trump was elected as because we automate it away these millions of manufacturing jobs in swing states in the midwest there's also a cultural aspect of this I mean that was not the only reason that Donald Trump was allegri how do you campaign in that environment while trying to make the story about jobs and Automation and

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Bots and basic income but knowing that there's this whole other group of people who are motivated by by cultural issues the fact is if people feel like their own future is insecure and their kids Futures insecure then they become more subject as you know phobic appeals to racist appeals and so if you are dealing with a society of deprivation then unfortunately those appeals become more powerful so it's not just that people are wrongfully blaming job loss on immigrants when they should be blaming God animation it's that actually you think that the Automation in some ways causes people to be more biased against immigrants well so the automation I'm just going to try and take a very sorry I'm just trying to wrap my head around please please so let's take a town in Ohio that head is plain clothes and thousands of people lost their jobs and and it's rough so people are struggling economically and then your executive functioning of Roads because you're just trying to make ends meet and then exact function meaning like

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making ability yes discernment decision-making information processing and then you have someone pop on your TV and say hey like blaming immigrants then you're more likely to be like yeah like you know especially that's the main story you're being told Studies have shown that if you can't pay your monthly bills it imposes a mindset of scarcity that constrains your bandwidth and reduces your functional IQ by 13 points which is what you'd expect in a country where 78% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck and almost half can't afford unexpected four hundred dollar bill so if you want us to become more reasonable and rational and proactive around things like climate change then you would need to lift this mindset of scarcity that is weighing down so many of our people and replace it with at least a some sort of relative abundance and there's no realistic way to do this except through something like a basic income and can what do you make of that answer because on the face of it it's compelling but it's also kind of

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confusing well yeah I mean I think like to a hammer every problem looks like a nail you know to Andrew Young like every problem can be explained as a function of Automation and stress introduced by technology and solved with Ubi and solved with a thousand dollars a month because he's basically saying that like yes like racism anti-immigrant sentiment like gender bias these things are problems but they're not the root problem like the root problem is that people are stressed out because their jobs are changing they're worried about becoming obsolete they don't have money to fulfill their basic needs and the really stressed out and that if you just solve that problem like that will kind of solve all of the rest of the problems too and so I don't know how persuasive people are going to find this like they're a lot of people who are stressed about paying rent and they're not all clamoring for the wall at the border but I think the way that all of this sort eyes together is part of the reason that

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I think he's been able to attract and maintain this sort of devoted audience like I think when we talked in 2017 like this was essentially an argument about economics and labor I mean he was essentially approaching this as a math problem but in the years since then he's been able to sort of turn it into a discussion about what it means to be a human about what we would do if we weren't so worried about making ends meet and I think that's the part that I didn't see when I first met him was that this argument this sort of wonky economics argument about Automation and Ubi and GDP and all these other three letter acronyms that he could make it appeal to people on an emotional level my saying this is not just about giving you free money but instead he's saying like it's not about the money it's about what the money can allow you to do and that's the part that I think I missed I found that the

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a human I am the better the campaign goes and I enjoy it more and people around me enjoy it more so it's just a win all the way around and I think you know this about me it's not like I'm obsessed with becoming president you know like enter you're running for president I'm just going to remind you oh yeah I'm running and everyone knows I'm running but everyone also knows that I'm not running because of some deep native long-standing burning desire to become president of States like I'm running because we're facing some of the biggest existential problems in our history and our government does not have it shit together OK one of the last questions we've got a debate coming up in the last debate you know I think you maybe got like a couple questions off you were given a little bit of speaking time but you didn't get off any you know made-for-tv zingers so like what's your game plan going into this debate are you taking a different strategy are you kind of going to try to play the game more in terms of having these these sound

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it's that are made to be sort of clipped and replayed it's probably not in my interest to try and compete with with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris for air time I just need to make the most of the time that I have but I'm very confident that the air time I have will be impactful and that if it goes like the last debate in terms of hundreds of thousands millions of Americans finding out about my campaign and exploring the ideas more fully than that's going to be a big win for us

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and reang thank you for talking with us at I am very glad to be able to upgrade you from longer than long shot to medium long shot Dark Horse Dark Horse my preferred term thanks Doc - thanks a lot

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we'll be right back

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here's what else you need to know today we have a problem in our country it's a new problem it's a problem of nobody really thought about too much a few years ago and it's called vaping especially vaping as it pertains to innocent children on Wednesday the Trump Administration said it would ban the sales of most flavored e-cigarettes after hundreds of people became sick with vaping related illnesses and as the use of e-cigarettes by minors surges there have been deaths and there have been a lot of other problems people think it's an easy solution to cigarettes but it's turned out that it has its own difficulties during a meeting in the Oval Office the president and his aides described vaping as a dangerous new problem that required government intervention and flavored e-cigarettes as a major reason why miners take up vaping

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and the Supreme Court said it would allow the Trump Administration to enforce new rules that would forbid migrants from seeking asylum in the US if they traveled through a different country without seeking Asylum there first a federal appeals court had blocked the controversial policy which is designed to reduce Asylum applications but the Supreme Court said it could go into effect even as legal challenges move forward

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finally under a tentative legal settlement reached on Wednesday Purdue Pharma the company that created Oxycontin and played a major role in the opioid crisis we will file for bankruptcy dissolve and we emerge as a new organization devoted to helping victims of the crisis the settlement made with 22 States and more than 2,000 cities will include three billion dollars in payments from the sack where's the family that owns Purdue Pharma but it does not include an admission of wrongdoing

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that's it for the daily I'm Michael Navarro see you tomorrow

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