Eric Weinstein: Hello, you found The Portal.
I'm your host Eric Weinstein, and we're here this evening a little bit later than
usual with my friend and presidential candidate, Andrew Yang.
Andrew, welcome.
Andrew Yang: Thank you for keeping the portal open late for me Eric-
Eric Weinstein: Oh my God.
Thanks for bringing the energy.
You've just come fresh off this rally.
MacArthur park.
You're indefatigable, the Energizer bunny.
Andrew Yang: Yes.
We just had a six thousand person rally, seven thousand, eight thousand, I lost
track.
I was counting manually.
No, I wasn't, but,
Eric Weinstein: And I should say that your hat is, make America think harder.
Andrew Yang: Yep.
Eric Weinstein: But it's-
Andrew Yang: It's what Portal's all about I suspect-
Eric Weinstein: It's math, well we're trying.
We're trying.
So we don't want to keep you up late because we want you super charged charge
for tomorrow.
So let's just dig right into it.
Um, Andrew, I'm remembering that we were having this dinner at, uh, Zazi, uh, in
San Francisco-
Andrew Yang: Yes.
Eric Weinstein: And you were impressing the hell out of my wife and myself, and I
said, that guy's going places.
She says, how candy is it?
These are different times.
Andrew Yang: Oh, thank you...
[inaudible]
Eric Weinstein: So am I right that this is uh, this is happening.
Andrew Yang: Oh, it's happening-
Eric Weinstein: Big time.
Andrew Yang: I mean uh, our campaign is growing by leaps and bounds by all of the
measurements you would ordinarily measure a presidential campaign, crowd size,
fundraising-
Eric Weinstein: Fanaticism
Andrew Yang: Well, that's, yeah, I guess
Eric Weinstein: The Yang Gang is absolutely fanatical.
Trust me, I encounter them all the time on social media.
Andrew Yang: Well, I love the Yang Gang.
Thank you yang Gang.
Uh, yeah.
The excitement is palpable and I love it.
I mean, everywhere I go now people will just say like, I support you and give me a
fist bump.
And, uh, uh, and certainly when we campaign, I mean, now we, we draw crowds
of either hundreds or thousands depending upon where we are.
Eric Weinstein: It's amazing.
Now, let's just dig into it.
We're in this totally bizarre situation.
I don't think the institutions have faced up to just how dire our situation-
Andrew Yang: No they have not.
Eric Weinstein: is.
When I go outside, for the most part, the physical world is still humming along, but
everywhere else you can see the signs that somehow the superstructure that undergirds
the simple physical reality has really been fraying.
Am I wrong about that?
Andrew Yang: No, I agree with you, you know, and, and in many ways, if you're
just living life not plugged into, um, all of the institutional decay, then you can
just go out and the sun's shining and the birds are chirping, and, you know, um,
like you said, the physical world is still more or less sound, uh, barring the
occasional heat wave and, uh, unseasonal, uh, weather pattern.
Eric Weinstein: So, the way I see it, effectively, what you have is a world of
institutions and you have the wrong people in the institutions.
In fact, what's happened is somehow that the institutions were built in an era
where things were growing rapidly.
The growth pattern changed a heck of a long time ago, almost 50 years ago.
And so for what they've done is they, these institutions have selected for
people who can continue to tell stories about growth and to kind of play games.
To keep the illusion that everything is still humming along as if it was the
fifties and sixties, but that hasn't been true for a long time.
How far off am I?
Andrew Yang: Well, that's what the numbers say, and I'm a numbers guy where if you
look at the economy of the seventies you had a certain level of buying power among
the middle class in certain split in terms of the gains from the economy among
different parts of society, and then the lines started to diverge starting in the
seventies and now they're incredibly divergent where you have
middle-class incomes essentially unchanged during that time, and then people at the
very top level absorbing more of more and more of the gains and the winner take all
economy.
But we all pretend like it's still the seventies, uh, and you can see the
disconnect in the lived experience of most Americans and most of the country where
they're starting to catch on that things have changed, and I mean, it's dark, it's
dark.
Eric Weinstein: Well, it's incredibly dark and it's worth laughing about, I think,
for that reason, because if we don't have a sense of humor about it, we're not going
to be able to easily do the work.
So I think whistling past the graveyard and gallows humor, definitely there's,
there's a place for that.
Andrew Yang: Well, I, you know, I, I naturally, um, I suppose people have said
to me that I have a very dystopian point of view, but I tend to present it in a
positive, upbeat manner.
Eric Weinstein: I think you're trying to get us through a bottleneck that you and I
both know is coming, and that, in essence, I mean, one of the things I'm very
concerned about with you is that I don't want you to promise the world that you
know how to do this.
I want you just to say that I'm the best person to handle whatever's coming next
because nobody knows what to do.
Andrew Yang: Well, certainly I would never claim omniscience so that I'm going to get
everything right.
I mean, I make mistakes all the time.
Just ask my wife, she'd be like, Hey, you screwed up just the other day.
Uh, uh, but, uh, we, you and I were talking before the cameras started
rolling, that I think it's going to be a very dark time and the goal has to be to
try and survive the darkness, um, and not have it produce existential level harm,
uh, and I believe that I can assist in that regard, but I certainly would never
say that I have all the answers or that if I'm president, I, everything's going to
work right.
Because the fact is, uh.
There, there are two things that I've thought about, it's like, there's the way
the president makes you feel-
Eric Weinstein: Right.
Andrew Yang: And then there is actually solving problems on the ground, and right
now, our experience of the presidency tends to be around the feeling.
Like if Donald Trump does something irrational, it really does not affect my
day to day existence, except for the fact that I see all the news reports and I'm
like, Oh, that guy, what's he doing?
Um, you know, and the same is true in reverse.
Like if, uh, Barack Obama did something decent and human, uh, it made me feel
good.
Didn't necessarily, uh, you know, like change my commute, or anything-
Eric Weinstein: Sure.
Andrew Yang: Um, and so there's, there's the way it makes us feel, which I believe
I can assist with just about immediately for anyone who, you know, uh, wants
someone who seems, um, solutions oriented-
Eric Weinstein: Right, positive-
Andrew Yang: And positive-
Eric Weinstein: Data, data friendly-
Andrew Yang: Yeah.
Data friendly and genuinely wants to just try and make people's lives better.
I think that that would make people feel better, but then there's the reality of
trying to solve the problems from the perch at the top of the government-
Eric Weinstein: Yeah
Andrew Yang: And that's a very different process.
I mean, I'm locked in on this idea of a freedom dividend in part because I think
it's the most dramatically positive thing we could do, that we could actually
effectuate in real life that would improve people's lives, that we can actually get
done.
Eric Weinstein: Now, I am both positive and negative about it, as you probably
remember.
What my belief is, is that we have two claims as Americans.
We have a claim as a contributor to the economy, and we have a claim as a soul
because we happen to live here, and, um, as a soul, we have certain rights as a
human being, just as a member of society.
The weaker of the two is as a soul.
But that claim still exists and in some sense, what you're calling the freedom
dividend or universal basic income speaks to the idea that there are these two
competing claims.
Um, and you, you don't want to get rid of the incentive structure that allows people
to, um, you know, take a dream and turn it into something, and-
Andrew Yang: I love the dream.
I love work.
I love entrepreneurship.
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
And this is-
Andrew Yang: I love people doing great stuff.
Eric Weinstein: So, I think that there's a theory that there's sort of a series of
economic theories that haven't yet actually been developed.
And I think one of the things that's really important to me is that we retake
the institutions because what we've done is we've selected for people who've used
very simplistic models that have had a huge effect on transferring wealth, but
have not actually mirrored our, our problems.
We've selected for the people who have, really don't tell the truth.
And I'm very worried how, let's talk about your, your, uh, your first term in office,
which is going to happen.
Who are you-
Andrew Yang: One twenty-one, inauguration day.
It's going to be a blast.
You're going to be there, Pia is going to be there, Yang Gang's going to be there,
we're going to have a giant party in DC.
Eric Weinstein: Wait, wait, wait, wait a second.
Getting ahead of us.
Who are you going to staff your government with if you're going to have the same
problem that everybody has, which once you've caught once the dog catches the
car, then what?
You've got all of these institutions which have selected for economists who don't
tell the truth, who, who've selected for sociologists, who are friendly to the
institutions and hostile to our people.
What do we do?
Andrew Yang: My team is going to be a blend of different people with different
experience sets from different industries, even different ideologies.
And I think you need some people who are DC insiders, who have relationships on
Capitol Hill if you really want to get things done because you're talking about
possibly the most institutionalized town in our society.
And so if you get there and just like, I'm going to staff it with outsiders, then no
one's going to get anything done.
Eric Weinstein: This was, this was Trump's problem.
Andrew Yang: Yeah.
Like you're not gonna get anything done.
You're just, you're just going to be fighting with the system all the time that
they're going to be like these antibodies that treat you like, uh, this hostile
agent, and then they're going to just make your life miserable, at every turn.
I mean, that, that's just the way organizations work.
It's the way cultures work, um, and so you need to have a blend of people that are
like, look, Hey, I get it.
Uh, I'm a new figure and you're concerned, um, and one of my principles is that I
don't fault people for the incentives that have formed them.
And, but by this, what I mean is like if you show up in DC and there's someone
who's been part of the fabric of DC for twenty plus years, and they are, um,
someone who've been through administrations right and left to sort of
survive the whole thing, and their goal is to just keep that function going and make
sure they get to retirement and whatnot, like, you can't blame that person for
being part of that system because that's what their incentives have been for years
and years.
And so when you don't want to do is you don't want to get there and be like, I'm
going to like turn everything upside down.
I'm going to like, attack everyone.
Eric Weinstein: Well, the immune system will just actually, you know, the
macrophages will descend on you and-
Andrew Yang: Yeah, and then you'll never get anything done.
Eric Weinstein: You'll never get anything done.
So that was one of the answers that I was dying to hear, which is, I'm going to have
to work with the infrastructure that's already there.
But then there's the second part of it, which is that I actually need to see some
people permanently ejected, called out, chastised, who have been this class of
people misadvising our government throughout the eighties, nineties, early
part of this century.
Andrew Yang: Well, and that's the dark part for all of us.
That we sense that there is really limited accountability in DC.
Like, you can give bad advice and screw something up and you keep your job, but
you know, your think tank's still there.
Like, no one goes back and says, Hey, your white paper, it turns out it was, uh,
completely mistaken, you know, like that.
That's not the way that town works or that you know, many, um, government
institutions work.
Um, so that's the, the challenge, is that you have to try and make changes within
this incredibly institutionalized environment, uh, and so you need a
combination of people that are well-intended.
You bring them in and say, look, this is going to feel like brain damage.
You're going to come in-
Eric Weinstein: Right.
Andrew Yang: And you're going to be like, especially if you come in with a
background like you and I might have from, uh, technology or entrepreneurship where
you look up and you'd be like, wait, you have how many people doing what?
And you're not allowed to do what?
You know?
It's like the story of like healthcare.gov where like the website didn't work in part
because they hired a giant consulting firm and they had all these bureaucratic
processes and then when the website didn't work, you know what they did?
They hired a bunch of Maverick Silicon Valley types and threw the red tape out
the window and then did a repair job.
Uh, so the, the goal has to be a bring in patriots who understand that they're not
going to have like an enjoyable, um, time trying to turn the battleship, but that if
they turn the battleship three degrees to the right, they can do more good-
Eric Weinstein: Sort of.
Andrew Yang: Than if they were in another environment where they turned it, you
know, like-
Eric Weinstein: Andrew, I think we're in a much more revolutionary situation and in
part to energize people.
I mean, what we're talking about is a revenge of competency, rev, a revenge of
genius or revenge of people who actually know how to do things and care enough, who
are ready and want to be mobilized and want to be called up, who've been sitting,
you know, with major league skills in, in, in, in the minors or worse.
And the fact is, is that what the institutions have done have inverted the
competency hierarchy.
I mean, you know, there's a guy that I don't understand named Brad DeLong who was
part of the group that brought in NAFTA, and they help to sell this idea that free
trade was good for everybody.
And then years later I hear, Oh, you know what free trade actually is?
There was an esoteric version, an exoteric version, the exoteric version we put on
display for everybody.
We always knew that the, in the esoteric version that was shared in the seminar
rooms, that it was a social Darwinist welfare function that rewarded you by the
cube of your wealth.
And I'd just sit there with my jaw on the floor thinking, what did you just say?
And then he says like, I don't understand, maybe we hurt people in Ohio, but we
helped a lot of Mexican peasants.
And I'm thinking, so you think that the American voters who you've called
jingoistic and, you know ultra, ultra nationalists are going to be very happy
that you've, you've denigrated their patriotism and now what they have to show
for it is, is that there are Mexican peasants who are significantly better off,
which, I mean, who doesn't want Mexican peasants to be better off?
But, for fff sake.
I mean, this is, this is a class of people that needs to lose.
Andrew Yang: Yeah.
And a lot of them are going to lose in my administration.
Like I'm not a generally vindictive person-
Eric Weinstein: No it's not I, look-
Andrew Yang: You know, so, so-
Eric Weinstein: I hope he has a happy, wonderful life.
Andrew Yang: Yeah, exactly.
It's the kind of thing where it's like, Hey, guess what?
You had a lot of influence and authority, uh-
Eric Weinstein: It's over.
Andrew Yang: Over an era.
It's over now.
Like, no, you know, not going to unduly try and make your life miserable or
anything, but, you know-
Eric Weinstein: Well, exactly.
There's nothing vindictive.
It's just, I don't want to watch the Alan Greenspan Show or the Larry Summers Show
or the Paul Krugman Show.
I don't really need, there's no reason that these people get to be in every scene
in every decade ad infinitum.
Andrew Yang: Yeah.
Again, like I said, there's really no accountability for being wrong, and so if
someone presided over an era where, you know, there was epic mismanagement, you
know, we still are asking them what the heck they think.
Eric Weinstein: Can I hit you with another one?
That's really comical for me?
Andrew Yang: Sure.
Eric Weinstein: Um, I watch the graphics that have your name in it, in relationship
to the other competitors, and I know who the networks are afraid of, and they're
afraid of you.
They'll, they'll do a linear perspective graphic and you'll be the guy on the very
far end and then the presenter will stand in front
Andrew Yang: I have noticed that, that does seem to be a, something of a
Eric Weinstein: Well, I don't think you should be bringing it up.
I think the job is for people like me to be bringing this up because they've been
playing this game, with like Ron Paul, with Bernie Sanders, and I, I don't know
if you're familiar in magic with the concept of a magician's choice.
Andrew Yang: No, I'm not.
Eric Weinstein: So a magician engages in a trick with magician's choice.
Let's say that I want you to choose, um, C out of A, B, and C, so I give you the
option.
Pick two.
And you pick A and B, and I say, okay, I'll take those away.
So now we'll look at C, or if you pick A and C, I'll say, okay, we'll take one of
those two and we'll, we'll throw a B away, now, which one do you, so eventually you
think you've made a decision, but in fact, the whole game was, is that the magician
was pushing you without your knowledge.
This is what I-
Andrew Yang: This is a media company's choice.
Eric Weinstein: This is what I think, it's media companies choice.
And we've got a situation where my feeling is that the more the Yang Gang can find
and this, this goes for Tulsi Gabbard or whoever else might be sidelined by this
game.
My feeling is is that what you're on right now is the equivalent of pirate radio.
This is samizdat for the American people, and we should be-
Andrew Yang: It's one reason I'm here, man.
Eric Weinstein: It's one of the reasons that we need to make sure that these
channels are opened to the very people that the DNC doesn't want running or the
networks don't want running.
And the thing that I hate is, is that we're in this William Tell situation where
we've got to run against our own party.
Andrew Yang: Yeah.
Well, you know, again-
Eric Weinstein: And you may not want to say that, and I understand why, but I'll
be damned if I'm going to listen to a situation in which you were, you're shut
out of airtime and you're pushed off to the side of the graphic.
Andrew Yang: Thank you Eric.
And I can say that, uh, this man is the head of pirate radio for the 21st century,
certainly one of the high chiefs of it.
Um, and to me, again, you know, you have these institutions with certain incentives
and certain relationships, and they're going to be naturally protective of the
folks that they think are on the inside and be naturally very, uh, leery or the
people that they think are on the outside.
But one of the themes of this era is that, uh, there are more of us on the outside
that are catching on, and that the stranglehold that media companies had on
our attention, um, has weakened significantly.
It's one reason why someone like me can do so well in this environment or that
someone like you can become this independent intellectual voice that
doesn't need to, you know, like get a CNN contributor contract or whatever.
Eric Weinstein: That was very funny.
One of the members of the Washington Post, which you know, says that democracy dies
in darkness, that's their tagline, but one of them said that everything you, Eric,
you have to say that's new isn't true.
And everything you say that's true isn't new.
So it was like remarkably, there's nothing I can possibly contribute to the
conversation.
It's just-
Andrew Yang: That seems so unlikely.
Eric Weinstein: I mean statistically, it's pretty hard to imagine that it's a
perfect-
Andrew Yang: Everything's been said, Eric, just give up now.
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, and the only stuff that hasn't is wrong.
So, um, what I'd love to do is to talk about some, some sort of new ideas, um, to
undergird some of the economic things that you and I have traditionally talked about
more before your meteoric rise, so let's dig into it.
Andrew Yang: Yeah, please.
Eric Weinstein: Okay.
So one of the things that Pia-
Andrew Yang: Also I want to say that I quote this man all the time, I've learned
a great deal from him and his wife, uh, and that he's one of the most profound
economic thinkers that I've encountered.
And I've met a lot of fucking people.
So, I just wanna-
Eric Weinstein: You're very kind, sir.
And one of the things that I would say is that even when I disagree with you, even
on your signature stuff, that the way I really view you is is that you're the
candidate who is most open to new ideas, and you're always up for a good
discussion, a good argument, and you'll go with whatever's best, and I find that you
are as close to non-egoic as anyone I've met running.
I mean, you really are, seem to be running out of compulsion.
Andrew Yang: Yeah.
Well, you know, uh, I, I don't have any native desire to be president.
Eric Weinstein: I didn't felt that you ever did.
And it was one of the reasons I love the fact that you're running.
Andrew Yang: Yeah.
I think my, one of my main qualifications to be president is that I just don't
socialize that much in the sense of like if you have me around a bunch of fancy
stuff, like it really doesn't do anything for me.
Like, you know, as president, I would love to do away with a lot of the-
Eric Weinstein: You do like geeking out,
Andrew Yang: Like the ceremony, like it seems like, um, like it's
counterproductive.
Um, and no, I, I ha, I happen to think that might help me do a better job.
Eric Weinstein: So let's try to geek out on a couple of ideas that Pia and I've
been playing with, see what you think.
Andrew Yang: Yeah.
I love it.
Eric Weinstein: Okay.
So one of the things that we've been thinking about is some people start
talking about the difference between the shareholder economy of the past and the
stakeholder economy of the future.
Andrew Yang: Yup
Eric Weinstein: Um, there are other issues about the dignity of work and, um, what
happens when machines replace you?
You can't necessarily defend yourself economically, but you still have a reason
to get up in the morning and do something.
Andrew Yang: Oh we hope you have a reason that you get up and do something.
Eric Weinstein: Amen.
Now, the thing is, uh, we've been thinking about this paradigm from object oriented
programming, which is the difference between is-a versus has-a.
So, if a Lamborghini can play a, an FM broadcast, uh, through its speaker, you
could technically find out that by some definition, the Lamborghini is a radio.
But that seems absurd.
It's much more sane to say that it has a radio.
Just the way it has a transmission.
We make this error, I think when we talk about workers.
We say that person is a worker, they are a brick layer or, or a teamster, you know?
Andrew Yang: Completely.
Eric Weinstein: And that what we need to do is to readjust our model of an economic
agent to a has-a model.
And so the idea is that you may have a breadwinner, and you also have a
contributor, and you also have a consumer, and therefore what it is that we do all
day long in the face of the, of the automation that may or may not get here in
dribs and drabs or come as a wave, we don't know, that we need to have a model
of humans that recognizes a need to be active in the economy whether or not the
marginal product of our labor is sufficient to take care of our family.
Andrew Yang: I love it so much and I couldn't agree more.
Eric Weinstein: Okay.
So that's, that would be the kind of a research program that we would love to try
to see undergirding a new economy that recognizes a much richer concept, uh, of
an agent, um, but without it, I'm worried that, that, you know, the, the sort of,
the power of that Chicago-style thinking pushes us back into humans as widgets.
Andrew Yang: Well, humans is, widgets is predominant, uh, and you can see it at
every turn, where even if you ask a kid, what do you want to be when you grow up?
It's, you know, they'll say, I want to be a fireman, astronaut, baker, a scientist,
whatever it happens to be.
And by the numbers, we are more work obsessed now than we perhaps have ever
been, um, and trying to break up our identities-
Eric Weinstein: Sure.
Andrew Yang: Into several aspects where you take a trucker who's on the road away
from his family four days a week and say, you know, your a dad, you're like a
consumer of, of hunting gear or you know, like you, um, there's more to you than
being a trucker when they have shaped their life-
Eric Weinstein: Right.
Andrew Yang: Around being a trucker.
Because you know, it's literally, you're behind the wheel for fourteen hours a day.
You get out, you sleep at a rest stop.
I mean, these are all consuming types of existences that are filled by hundreds of
thousands of american men, and you know, 94% of them are men.
So, you know, it's not like, Oh, he just thinks they're all men, it's like, come
on.
94% of them are.
Uh, and so if you were to go to that person and then try and have them adopt a
more holistic identity when they have essentially shaped their entire existence
around, uh, their role in this real life, uh, like almost circulatory system, where
it's like they're piloting this blood vessel that has a bunch of, um, Home Depot
crap in the back or whatever the heck they're transporting on like a daily
basis.
Um, having them have other aspects of their identity that they value to a point
where you could remove the work component and they would, you know, be cool with
going home, and, um, spending time with their, their families, um, is pretty much
the opposite of the way our civilization functions right now.
Eric Weinstein: Well we saw these deaths of despair, uh, discussed by economists
in, in the, you know, the heartland of America, we saw this demographic, um,
crisis that happened when the Soviet Union fell apart with, um, you know, the
mortality crisis.
Uh, all sorts of people were dying of alcoholism, heart attacks and stress.
So this is a really serious thing we have to figure out about the restoration of
human meaning and dignity as different from employment.
Andrew Yang: You had something like a dozen disenfranchised taxi cab drivers and
limo drivers kill themselves, uh, you know, last year, like one of whom killed
himself in front of city hall.
I mean, like did his self-destruction caused meaningful ripples in our society?
No.
Most people watching this and listening to this right now.
It's like, Oh, that shit happened?
Like, you know, like, but there's this sort of self destruction is happening all
the time, and most of them are just men quietly drinking themselves to death in
their homes and then you know, they're dead.
Uh, but-
Eric Weinstein: Well, I love the idea that you're talking about compassion for men
because one of the things that I'm finding is that it's very tough to talk in a, in
a, in a world that is currently exploring this idea of toxic masculinity from some
place that it might've been reasonably defined in blowing it up past, uh, past
that point.
It's a very dangerous thing to see a world that sort of thinks that, you know, all
straight, white guys are okay when in fact, many of them are very vulnerable
and, and-
Andrew Yang: By the numbers,
Eric Weinstein: By the numbers.
Right.
Andrew Yang: You know, and yeah.
It's so, uh, the, and this is one of the themes that when you talk about trying to
define people, um, by different aspects of their life that might have work as one of
them, but like others, the fact is, I think men struggle more with breaking up
our identities, um, then women do.
Because if you were to say to a woman, uh, Hey, you're a parent, you're, you know, a
sister, you're, um, a nurse, you're like, all of these things, I think they would be
more ready to embrace some of the non-work aspects of their identity, in part because
of the cultural load that is placed on different types of people in our society.
Eric Weinstein: Yeah but I think they're facing a big one coming up, which is that
you're going to have a huge cohort of millennial females who pretty much would,
would love to be in a situation with meaningful work, but also with a family
raising children of their own.
And there's, first of all, isn't necessarily a supply of guys who can rise
to the, I mean, you know, it doesn't have to be traditional households, but a lot of
it is going to be male, female breadwinner, somebody stays at home, it
might be the woman who's in the workforce, might be the guy staying home, whatever.
The fact is a lot of these families aren't going to form because we're not in a
position to say, I can afford a thirty year mortgage.
I can see enough stability in my future, I can-
Andrew Yang: Yeah, and that's part of the thing is that these challenges face us all
in different ways, and it's really, to me, counterproductive to disastrous, to single
out a particular subset ups and be like, Hey, you've got it wrong.
You're okay.
You know, that's a legitimate, uh, you know, like thing to be upset about that is
not, I mean, like if, if someone, um, is struggling, like it ends up reaching, uh,
different groups in different ways.
Eric Weinstein: Right.
Andrew Yang: And you can't say it's like, Oh, your struggles are somehow more, um,
valid than others.
So just to, to, to wrap around this thought, so I think that the division of
our identities into like work and non-work-
Eric Weinstein: Right.
Andrew Yang: Uh, it's one of the greatest things we have to overcome.
And by the numbers, if you lose your job and you're a man, um, you tend to have
relatively, uh, self-destructive patterns of behavior manifest, um, relatively
consistently and quickly, where unemployed men volunteer less than employed men
despite having much more free time, as an example.
Uh, substance abuse tends to go up, uh, in very self destructive behaviors.
A lot of time spent on the computer goes up, which, so that's a combination of, um,
gaming and some other things, uh, and-
Eric Weinstein: Porn.
Andrew Yang: And porn, I'm sure is, you know, I didn't, I mean, I kind of implied
it and, but I was thinking it-
Eric Weinstein: No no no, look, this, this is a free radio station, effectively, and
we're going to be able to say that that's one of the things that may be deranging
us.
We don't know what its effects are.
Andrew Yang: Yeah, no, so, uh, and that women have struggles obviously, but the
struggles take a different form in terms of, and the numbers show that women are
more adaptable to non-work idleness in that they will not share the same patterns
of self-destructive behavior that men do.
Now, of course, women obviously, you know, hate to be unemployed, but the, that, the
thing that I joke about that's sort of true is that women however, are never
truly idle in the sense that they always find like, um, like, like ways to be, um,
productive contributors in a way that men struggle with, in many respects.
Eric Weinstein: So kin work for example, where you're working for your family,
taking care of elderly parents, your kids, somebody else's kids, these things are
part of the fabric of civil society.
One of the questions I have is, should we talk about coming up with some new
financial products that get women the money they need during the period of their
life when they might need extra help in the house?
When they, when the binds that come from caring for elderly parents or children are
starting to knock them out of the workforce and trying to figure out how to
make some kind of creative structure to help, um, shift the burdens to times of
their life when they can better afford it.
What do you think about that?
Andrew Yang: Yeah, so just to sort of show the other side of the coin, so men
volunteer less if they're unemployed than employed, even though that doesn't make
any sense in terms of their free time.
Uh, women show higher rates of volunteerism and going back to school when
they have, um, more, more time.
Um, so it's just that the numbers show clear patterns of, like, different
responses to, um, non-work related time or or idleness.
Um, but I, I'm with you on the fact that right now trying to map everyone's
economic prospects to the, the market, the market's valuation of our wages, uh, has
all sorts of, um, distorting effects, and, uh, tend to, what you're suggesting that
we should just start putting money into people's hands at various points in their
lives.
I mean, that's really one of the underpinnings of the freedom dividend.
You know, my universal basic income-
Eric Weinstein: I see that that's a part of it.
Andrew Yang: Yeah.
It's like you put 1000 bucks a month into people's hands and then, um, that would
allow us all to make different types of decisions, uh, really from almost day one
of our adulthood.
Eric Weinstein: Let's try a few other things that I think might be interesting.
One thing that, uh, wins presidential campaigns that we don't talk much about is
demographers.
Demographers are sometimes asked, Tell me some group of people that we don't know
about as a voting block that nobody's figured out how to speak to.
And I think I have a couple of these that are candidates and I'd like to bounce them
off-
Andrew Yang: Oh please, yeah, I'd like this, maybe I'll find a new audience to-
Eric Weinstein: Well then, okay.
So the first one that I have, you know, so these are things like soccer moms was one
from years past, or exurbs between rural and suburbs where people didn't realize
that there were intermediate places.
So here's one that I think is huge that hasn't been identified.
Parents of super smart kids that have some kind of a learning difference that causes
them to wildly underperform in school.
This is something that makes me crazy because I think it's all over.
Once you start seeing it, you see it everywhere.
Parents are tearing their hair out-
Andrew Yang: Yup.
Eric Weinstein: Teachers can't handle the kids-
Andrew Yang: Nope.
Eric Weinstein: And there's just this maddening loss of human brilliance that is
flushed down the toilet.
Andrew Yang: Have you come up with a name for this group?
Eric Weinstein: Um, well, um, I often refer to these as kids with learning
superpowers, and I talk about teaching disabilities, which is the more dangerous
version of this, that because people don't fit into the notion of what can be
educated by one teacher teaching a room of thirty people to make the economics work,
um, my belief is that, and I'll come up with a name for it for you, but I want to
talk to all of the parents who are leading lives of despair, saying, why is my kid
wildly underperforming and I know how smart this kid is?
Why are we doing this to ourselves and why will no one speak to it?
This is, by the way, this is me and it's been in my family for four or five
generations.
Andrew Yang: It's me too
Eric Weinstein: Really?
Andrew Yang: Well, yeah.
I'm very public about the fact that, um, my older son is autistic-
Eric Weinstein: I know that.
Andrew Yang: And that when, um, we put him in various environments, I mean, there
were very, very sharp struggles.
Uh, and to me, atypical is the new normal, like neurologically atypical.
And you're right that as soon as you start seeing it, you see it everywhere.
And that the facts show that it's incredibly commonplace.
And at this point, I think most American, um, families have someone other in the
family or someone in their social circles that resembles the description, um, that
you just put out there of this group.
To me, a lot of it is that our institutions just aren't,
aren't well designed for people with different learning profiles or different
approaches to the world-
Eric Weinstein: And yet these are very often the people who are going to found
new fields, who are going to find new drugs for us, who are going to think in
such different a- uncorrelated fashions, that these are very often the people that
I value the most, and, you never know whether the thing's going to work out
because the kid every, every year is sustaining more and more trauma.
Whereas these other kids, it's like, you know, I remember looking at the
neurotypicals is as if, if I was like Cinderella, watching all the other sisters
go to the ball and I was sitting there scrubbing dishes.
Like what?
You know, every conference was, Eric is underperforming.
Eric can't meet his potential.
Eric [inaudible].
You know, at some point it's just like you don't realize how much damage you're doing
to maybe as much as a fifth of the country.
Andrew Yang: Well, someone described it as a, like you're getting regular, low grade
psychic beating.
Eric Weinstein: It's pretty good.
Andrew Yang: And, and that's something that you obviously wouldn't wish upon
anyone, much less little kids.
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, and by the way, the, the autism thing, you know, I don't know
whether your child is high functioning or, or not, but it's certainly the case that a
lot of us have the idea that we almost don't want to deal with people who aren't
in some sense on the spectrum or having some kind of ability to focus and to, um,
work with abstractions.
Very often I think of, you know, I, I'm on top of this, I'm colorblind and I always
make the point that I see camouflage better-
Andrew Yang: Did you know that you're wearing bright purple right now?
Eric Weinstein: Stop it.
That used to happen.
I used to dress myself before I let my girlfriend, now wife make these decisions.
I would make terrible decisions.
Andrew Yang: I'm just kidding, you look great.
Yeah he looks great, I'm sure I have something to do with it.
Eric Weinstein: Um, so that, that, that would be one group.
Here's another one that I think is really important.
Now, I know that you are the child of immigrants and that, you know, I'm of
course married to an immigrant.
Um, the temptation is for us to sort of be very defensive of our immigrants because
we have some forces at the moment that have become very jingoistic, and I think
that that's right.
But I also think that we have to recognize that there is a story about immigration
that's very unpleasant and ugly, which is how Americans have used immigration to
redistribute wealth amongst ourselves, and effectively the immigrant is used as a
tool of re redistribution, then people get angry or protective of the tool, and one
of the things that I think, that's very important, is, is that a huge chunk of
America is highly xenophilic.
They like foreigners, they like traveling abroad.
They like food, music.
Andrew Yang: You probably read, uh, Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt.
You're probably friends with John, right?
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
Andrew Yang: Yeah.
I figured.
Okay, continue, cause this is what it reminds me of.
Eric Weinstein: Okay.
The thing is, is that xenophilic restrictionists are a good chunk of this
country.
If you do a poll, and you allow for all four boxes xenophilic, xenophobic,
restrictionist, expansionist, xenophilic restrictionism is a giant cohort.
Nobody speaks to it because if you say anything about restrictionism, the media
will instantaneously label you a xenophobe.
Can we at least distinguish the idea of the immigrants as souls, like ourselves,
who have been an important part of our national tapestry, together with the fact
that very often they are used as instruments of transfers of wealth?
And-
Andrew Yang: I agree-
Eric Weinstein: And that we should be angry at our fellow Americans who
cynically use immigration and hide behind the immigrant to take money from one
sector and put it into their own pockets.
Andrew Yang: Or you should not be angry at someone who's angry about the, uh,
immigrants.
Eric Weinstein: Well this is the thing-
Andrew Yang: Because, because there is something, like you said, it's like, you
know, in some ways someone can have a very legitimate grievance about the fact that
there have been these, uh, instruments of, of wealth transfer that have been imported
into our midst.
Eric Weinstein: So I call these the Americans who redistribute our wealth, uh,
immigrant entrepreneurs, right?
And the ideas that, if they could use puppy dogs to redistribute our wealth,
they'd use puppy dogs because nobody can be against puppies.
Right?
And so it's a very cynical use of the Statue of Liberty.
Something that's very difficult to talk about.
But it's something that I've been talking about for a while because I think that
I'm, I'm so far in the xenophilic category, it would be comical if somebody
decided I actually had a problem.
So I, I've been bold and I haven't really had the problem, but most Americans feel
very uncomfortable talking about immigration because they have two
different feelings.
They one, have a really good feeling about the person that they know who happened to
come from Uganda or India, and they have the sense that something is wrong with the
story.
We're going to have to disentangle it and restore something that makes us feel good
about it rather than uncomfortable.
Andrew Yang: I agree.
Eric Weinstein: Great.
Andrew Yang: And, uh, you know, I think, um, I may be able to help in this regard.
Eric Weinstein: I think you're perfectly positioned for this.
Andrew Yang: You know, part, I'm the son of immigrants who loves, uh, this country.
He loves that immigrants have been an incredible source of dynamism, but, uh,
you know, you can't have open borders and unrestricted immigration.
I understand the sentiment where people are struggling with, um, the fact that our
country has brought many people in either intentionally or unintentionally, uh, in
ways that are changing, uh, our economy and society in ways that in like, some
people have legitimate, um, problems with.
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
I just think, I think we need to be able to have an open conversation about
difficult topics around this and pull them apart.
And the fact is we need, we need people to feel comfortable that it's okay to feel
uncomfortable as long as you're trying to explore it with-- The current president,
for my money, gets way too close to jingoistic sentiment.
Andrew Yang: And that's one of the natural reactions is that if the current president
says one thing, then, you know, the right thing to do is say the exact opposite.
But then the nuance gets lost and then unfortunately we end up falling into,
these polarized camps
Eric Weinstein: That's why I feel like, we have, it's so important not only to defeat
the current president, but also to defeat the kleptocratic center of, uh, of our own
party as well as the regressive left that proposes as the progressive left, and then
to take care of the constituents that are currently all over the spectrum in a new
world, and this is one of the things I love about your slogan, which is not left
or right, but forward, right?
Andrew Yang: Yes.
That's the slogan.
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
And that that thing is, is that it's moot, it's a question of-
Andrew Yang: It also happens to be the truth.
It's not just like-
Eric Weinstein: I know, that that's the thing.
It's moving out of Flatland, like we've been, we've been given this smorgasbord of
bad options and just say, Hey, I don't think I want to dine from there.
I think these things are available off menu.
Do you mind if I, if I, you know, like for example, Starbucks I think will sell you a
short cup of coffee, but they won't put it on the menu.
You have to know that to ask for it.
So I like to think of you as the guy who somehow knows that there are things that
aren't on the menu.
Andrew Yang: I am animal style at In-N-Out.
I am, Andrew Yang is animal style.
Uh-
Eric Weinstein: Let me give you-
Andrew Yang: I agree that I can change the political conversation, uh, in a way that
many Americans find very exciting and productive.
Uh, because 25% of Americans are politically disengaged, including, I'm
sure, some people watching this, um, and I believe it's up to 48% self-identify as
independent, which is almost twice what identify as either Democratic or
Republican-
Eric Weinstein: I'm so close to identifying as independent.
I, I can't stand my own party, but my feeling is I have to stay there and say,
Hey, we're out of control, in order to save the structure, because I, I-
Andrew Yang: Well, the two party system, I mean, I agree.
That's why I'm why I'm running as a Democrat.
In part it's like, well, you have these two parties.
Maybe you can turn one of them into like a highly functioning party with great ideas
and the rest of it, I mean, that's like an easier solution than-
Eric Weinstein: Look Andrew, what I really want to do is I want to ret- I want the
insurgency that you and I have been sort of a part of, this loose collection of
people who are thinking completely off the menu, to start retaking our institutions.
We always had heterodox people of high caliber who are, you know, effectively
heretics housed inside the Harvards and MITs and Caltechs, and I think we've
gotten rid of that kind of-
Andrew Yang: Or they are there.
Then they're scared shitless to, like, say the wrong thing or else they'll get-
Eric Weinstein: Well, do you remember the time, you remember that situation where
MIT turned over Aaron Schwartz?
Andrew Yang: I shouldn't laugh, cause, I mean, it's dark.
Eric Weinstein: But we should laugh.
Andrew Yang: No, no, I mean-
Eric Weinstein: I, I'm, I'm for laughing at the dark.
Andrew Yang: Yeah, I laugh at the dark, it's, you know-
Eric Weinstein: It's like everybody knows that, but you're not allowed to do it in
public.
So screw that.
You know, we had this situation with this guy, Aaron Schwartz-
Andrew Yang: Did you know Aaron?
Eric Weinstein: No.
Did you?
Andrew Yang: I've, you know, he's a friend of friends.
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
You know, and this guy almost certainly was a pretty pure hearted human being who
was fighting the good fight.
MIT is supposed to shelter those people, and instead they cooperate, you know, in
turning them over.
Andrew Yang: As soon as you get the institutional incentives in a particular
direction, and like, I mean, this is not near, and this is just like recent,
because in recent memory, but you know, I stuck up for Shane Gillis, this comedian
that, um, had said-
Eric Weinstein: I saw that, and the the idea that, you know, you were in a
position to say, look, I'm the candidate, uh-
Andrew Yang: He personally actually, yeah, and so if anyone should be offended, it's
me.
And so I think he shouldn't lose his job over it, well-
Eric Weinstein: Well, this is the thing, the quality of mercy, or forgiveness or,
um, just recognition, uh, that there should be space for remorse and
redemption, this is what makes so much of the intolerant left, feel cult-like, and I
thought what you were doing was you were showing the best aspects of a truly
compassionate left.
Andrew Yang: I was trying to be a human being.
You know, like you looked at it and being like, well, like is that a job?
Losing a fence?
But then the fact that NBC ended up firing him was entirely consistent with our
corporate incentives, because if you look at it and say like, well, is this person
that we've invested a lot in that's some, a revenue generator for us?
No, because he hadn't even worked for one day.
It's like our corporate incentives to can him and thoughts like, you know, put an
end to any controversy or advertiser or whatnot, that would be troubled by it.
Yeah.
So it's like, so if you'd asked me, it's like, Hey, do you think he's going to be
fired, I'd be like, Yeah, he's almost certainly going to be fired because that's
what the corporate incentives [inaudible].
Eric Weinstein: Well I understand that, so one of the things that I'm really
interested in doing-
Andrew Yang: But it, it still made me sad.
Like I was like, Hey, this would be unusually, uh, human and forgiving if they
decided to-
Eric Weinstein: Well, they lost a teachable moment because one of the things
that's going on is that so much of the information economy is very, very marginal
in the sense that you're almost producing a public good.
So for example, I slap ads on my podcasts, um-
Andrew Yang: Buy stuff from his sponsors, no I'm kidding.
Eric Weinstein: What I'm trying, well, what I'm trying to do is I've tried two
new models, one of which I'm calling reverse sponsorship, where I shout out
some great company, uh, which doesn't know that I'm going to say something positive
and maybe they become sponsors, maybe they don't, but the other one is
risk-vertisers, where people get to know me over long periods of time, and the hope
is that you're going to say, look, you're not going to catch me being horrible and
bigoted and all of these things, but I might say something dangerous, like
something that I just said about immigration, and will you make sure that
you will not run away from me during the period where the mob descends and the
frenzy is at its worst?
Right?
Because if we don't fix the economic models, we can't have deeper discussions
because everybody's going to run away at the first sight of trouble.
And so part of what we're trying to do ultimately with the advertising-
Andrew Yang: Look at this, pirate radio, pre-advertising-
Eric Weinstein: What do you think?
Andrew Yang: I mean, I love it.
It's like leave it to you to try and solve that kind of problem.
Eric Weinstein: Alright, I've got some other things that I want to talk about in
demographics.
Andrew Yang: Oh yeah, please.
Eric Weinstein: Okay-
Andrew Yang: So, so, so let me first say, I am a parent of a neurologically atypical
young person.
Um, I agree with you that I think that many of the people who have a different
perspective, are going to end up being contributors in highly distinctive ways.
I will say that even kids who are not going to be contributors in highly
distinctive ways still deserve schools that can support and accommodate them.
Um, and, that to me, these kids are like, the shorthand I use is that they're spiky.
You know, it's like you have, um, very high capacities in some respects or a
different point of view, and then real challenges in other respects.
And so if I send you into a social environment where there are thirty kids
for one teacher, you're going to have a terrible, terrible time.
And you know, and, and that's 100% predictable.
And so if then you have like a critical mass of people that resemble this, uh,
then you should try and design an institution that takes that into account.
Um, and I feel so deeply for families that struggle with this, like you struggle
with, it sounds like you've experienced it.
Eric Weinstein: Oh absolutely.
Andrew Yang: I have struggled with it.
And you, and Pia, you know, and me and Evelyn, like we have an unusual level of
ability to try and, you know, manage situation, um, and I meet single moms
around the country who have, you know, autistic or, um, neurologically atypical
kids that don't have the means and they live in a part of the country that does
not have like a lot of resources in place for kids that are different.
And, it breaks my heart.
Like it, the fact that there are all of these kids that are heading into these
schools that are getting, um, you know, more than low grade psychic beatings.
Eric Weinstein: Oh my God, this is why I leave my, my DMs open on Twitter, and this
is one of the number one things I do it for, is people write to me and they say, I
know you're really busy, but I just want to tell you, nobody had ever spoken to my
situation.
You're proud of something I'm always ashamed of, and-
Andrew Yang: I guarantee you I'm not the first presidential candidate with autism
in the family.
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
Andrew Yang: And the fact that I'm on the first talking about it is, to me, long
overdue and ridiculous.
Uh, and-
Eric Weinstein: Amen.
Andrew Yang: And you know, and I get, I get some of the same messages that you
get, but you know, like I want to actually try and solve the problem for those
families.
I mean, it makes me feel glad that they feel spoken to and that they realize
they're not the only ones going through it.
Eric Weinstein: I want to see, I want to see more money going to figure out how do
we diversify the classroom of the future-
Andrew Yang: Yeah.
Eric Weinstein: So that the load isn't born by people who don't fit the economics
of the teaching model.
Andrew Yang: Yes.
And part of it is that, um, that we regard the education of our kids as a cost, and
so then the city then is like, well, I can't afford to have like a teacher for
your, uh, neurologically atypical kid, um, and so what we have to do is, talk about
inverting the model, is you have to look at the education of our children as an
investment.
Uh, and then you say, what's that?
Like, these kids require, you know, like X and Y, and then we should make that
investment with the certainty, and I share your confidence in this, that you have a
couple of those kids do something highly atypical and remarkable, then that pays
for whatever, uh, support, or, teacher, or infrastructure-
Eric Weinstein: This is an underground movement.
I mean, I just had a, a very well known professor, uh, reveal to me that he
couldn't read papers, in his field, I mean, he just can't read, you know?
And he has to figure out what the paper is likely to be saying.
There is such a weird world of, of, um, unexpected achievement.
Andrew Yang: And this is the demon, the demon that we have to, um, slay anyways is
that, um, the negative externalities are not being encompassed within the budgets
of various institutions.
Eric Weinstein: Very well said.
Andrew Yang: But, but then also where foregoing all of the potential positive
value creation or generation from proper investment in our human capital, um, and
another dimension too, and this is neither here nor there, but I was just with Dean
Kamen in New Hampshire and he was talking about how the FDA, like all their
incentives are just to like regulate the shit out of anything.
And then I said to him, I was like, you know, what they should start measuring is
the foregone utility of keeping something away from, uh, from people, like if you
had something and-
Eric Weinstein: What is the opportunity cost of the regulations?
Andrew Yang: Yeah.
He had like, he had like this prosthetic limb that he was trying to give to vets,
and the FDA was making it really hard for him to do so, and he was like, are you
kidding me?
I'm trying to give limbs to Vets who've been amputated.
And so by your making it hard for me to do so, like you multiply like all of the
limbless Vets who aren't getting a limb, like, you know, it's like, so if you had
that as like an actual measurement for the FDA, it's like you need to have these
companies internalize the negative externalities of things like pollution and
the rest of it, but you almost need like our institutions, like our schools and our
regulatory agencies to start trying to somehow capture the potential gains from
investing in our kids or allowing a certain innovation into the market.
Like the, the, the big problems are that our measurements are really primitive.
Uh, and, um, it ends up, and you end up with binary incentives where, uh, you lose
a lot of the value, and so you end up being like, Hey, don't have a teacher for
your kid, so your kid's gonna, you know, just end up, um, sidelined and sidelined
is like a euphemistic way for saying destroyed.
Eric Weinstein: I know.
One of the things I wanted to do at some point, um, I actually ended up talking to
the Heritage Foundation of all people about this, was the idea of national
interest waivers so that we could have a Skunkworks with very light regulation
hanging off the side of every large company.
And the idea is that you would put some portion of a company, you could put some
portion of the company outside where the rules were effectively different because
you needed people to take massive risks, to be able to move super fast, to be
dealing with highly non neurotypical people.
Andrew Yang: And this is one of the things that drives me nuts about the political
conversation is like, you get like, they get like yelled at for a particular, it's
like, Oh, you made a mistake, dah, dah, dah.
It's like you kind of need to have an environment where you're going to accept a
certain level of mistakes, particularly when you're talking about, um, large scale
society-wide investments, where like, of course, you can't get that stuff right.
And, you know, it's like, and that, the problem is that the political incentives
are for everyone to try and avoid like a negative headline.
Um, or something that, that's-
Eric Weinstein: Look, a lot of us are very disagreeable, very difficult to deal with.
And, you know, I saw you pick up, uh, endorsements from people like Elon Musk,
you know, which is, then I hear his, his personal life being criticized, I was
like, I don't really care.
This guy is responsible for how much-
Andrew Yang: Advancing the species.
Eric Weinstein: How much adva- right, how much innovation?
If he's got a few foibles, let's give him some privacy.
Let him be in peace and just recognize that we're getting an unbelievable deal
and yet this desire to somehow stamp out outliers, I mean, outliers are essential
to the American project.
Andrew Yang: Yes, I could not agree more.
And you know, I, I'd consider myself, it's pretty funny Eric, cause I, you know, um,
I think I had, uh, in many ways, like a highly conventional, uh, upbringing, um,
that helped.
Like, I feel like I'm sort of a hybrid where, uh, to the extent that I was highly
contrarian or dissimilar, you know, it's like, I, you know, I've, I came up through
a series of institutions in an era where, um, you know, I think I learned to adapt.
Um, but then I look at my boys and I think to myself that, um, you know, that, that
their way of life is going to be very, very different than, than mine.
I'm sure yours too, cause we came of age in a different era.
Eric Weinstein: Well this is true.
I mean I was just talking about this actually breath, Bret Easton Ellis sitting
in that chair that, um, you know, I grew up as part of this free range, uh, world
largely before Etan Patz got kidnapped and the milk carton kids changed everything.
Uh, I worry about the sort of, we were too free range and these kids are too
sheltered, that we have to find some new new mix.
But I want to get to another issue.
Andrew Yang: Give me one more demographic.
Eric Weinstein: Okay.
Andrew Yang: Yes.
Eric Weinstein: Let's do it.
And then we'll, we'll close it out.
Um, I want to talk about something which really makes me angry and excited.
I think that America has, without question, some of the finest sources, um,
educationally for brilliance in STEM subjects.
And we've pretended for a very long time that Americans are not good at STEM, that
we are disinterested in STEM, that STEM careers are fantastic when many of them
are pretty shitty, and that we don't recognize that the entire STEM complex is
suffused with bullshit.
Because the model, the economic model for investing in basic research went belly up
because the, the universities were built on a growth model that was unsustainable.
And I want to stop lying.
So one, I want to start recognizing that we have high schools that have more Nobel
prizes than all of China, that we are using Chinese labor and other Asian
countries, uh, not just because we are exporting education as a good, but because
we have a cryptic labor market in basic research where we pretend people are
students when they're actually workers.
We pretend that we're importing them to educate them, but actually what we're
trying to do is use a poverty differential.
We have our own people who are really fantastic because they're not very
obedient, and instead people prefer obedient people coming in who are, are
here on temporary visas, therefore they have to follow orders.
The entire National Science Foundation, National Academy of Science complex is
bizarrely suffused with nonsense.
And because of this, we can't actually have the national academies adjudicate
what's true because they are the prime offender of this.
How do we get back to a situation which we can recognize.
That we have a Stuyvesant or a Bronx science, you know, or far Rockaway or any
of these unbelievable high schools that are turning out people who desperately
want to do STEM subjects.
They're not being paid when they finally get their degrees at an appropriate level.
Andrew Yang: Yeah.
Eric Weinstein: They've been secretly studied by our science complex because
these career paths are known to be crappy, and we have completely suffused this with
a mis-description so that nobody can actually fix any problems.
Andrew Yang: That's an incredible, uh, description.
And to me, the lack of proper resources for basic research, for things that ended
up being foundational for many of our current industries.
Eric Weinstein: It's the biggest bargain in the world.
It's just the future you're investing in.
Andrew Yang: It's just right now we're so, uh, brainwashed by market-driven thinking
that if there's not some short-term profitability tied to it or there's no
drug company funding it, or so, something along those lines that, uh, and this is
something that the government, historically.
Has been the leader in where it said, you know what, we can lay the foundation and
create paths for people to be able to do basic research, the benefits of which will
be unclear.
They may not exist.
They may not materialize for decades, but it's similar to what we're talking about
with the neurologically atypical kids, is that like a few of them pay off and then
the payoff can be, uh, unfathomably significant.
Eric Weinstein: Well we call this long vol.
investing in hedge fund land, where most things don't work out, but a few that do
pay for all of the losers.
Andrew Yang: Yup.
Yeah.
And right now the, the, yeah.
The, to me, this is a role where, uh, historically the government has led and
you need a government willing to make longterm sustained investments that, um,
may only pay off way down the road and may not pay off, but you still need to be able
to make them.
Eric Weinstein: Well, I also, you know, the, the, the other weird part of this is
that by using our own people and letting, uh, in particular China know that it can't
operate a relatively totalitarian government over there and have the benefit
of freedom over here with a pipeline for all of our innovations to immediately go
back over there, china needs to be induced in some sense to understand that they
can't get by without giving their people freedom.
And what they're right now doing is, is that they're using our freedom and a
periscope by which they can see everything that we're doing.
And if we actually cut that off, I know that the universities are going to scream
bloody murder, but what's going to happen is China's going to have to start
investing in its, in the right of its own people to give the middle finger because
irreverence is the secret of American ingenuity.
Andrew Yang: Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, this reminds me of a joke that, uh, they told an artificial intelligence,
which is, How far behind is China, uh, than the US in AI?
And the answer is 12 hours.
And you say, you know, obviously they wake up and then they see what we did.
Eric Weinstein: I can't tell you how fantastic it is.
They have you come into the studio.
You're coming off of this big rally in MacArthur park.
I know that it's late for both of us.
You're welcome anytime to come back.
I'd love to continue the conversation when you're next in LA-
Andrew Yang: I would love this too, man, this feels to me like half a conversation.
We're going to have to have the second half at some other time.
So if you enjoyed this convo, let Eric know and then, um, hopefully he'll have me
back.
And if you'd like to join the Yang Gang, you should know we are very, very cheap
gang to join.
Eric Weinstein: Is that right?
Andrew Yang: Well, our average donation is only $25.
So, um, our fans are even cheaper than Bernie's, which no one even knew could be
a thing in politics, but here it is.
Um, but you get $25 times enough people and you wind up putting up very, very big
numbers, and you'll see like, we're already into the eight digits as a
campaign, um, and we can take this whole thing, we can contend, because a lot of
people watching this right now, you're, you're ignoring politics as usual.
We can actually have a different sort of politics that takes real thinking, real
ideas, real solutions, and brings them to the highest levels of our government.
It just needs enough Erics and Pias and you all watching it at home to say, uh, I
prefer this, um, to the stuff I'm getting through the, the cable TV networks-
Eric Weinstein: Well, Andrew you know one of the things I think that's been great
about watching your meteoric rise is that you are outside of control without being
out of control-
Andrew Yang: Thank you.
Eric Weinstein: And that having a kind of a mature person who's not easily bought or
swayed is, uh, speaking in a way that nobody knows what he's going to say next
has been hugely positive for the entire process, so thank you very much.
Andrew Yang: Well, thank you.
You know, the, the only, uh, um, the only currency I answer to is, is, um, ideas and
humanity.
Like you, you know, you put a good idea in front of me or, um, a good person, I
listen.
Eric Weinstein: Well, you've been that way since before, uh, all the success.
So we, we wish you continued success, and we'll have you back here the next time
you're in LA with a little bit of time.
Andrew Yang: I would love that, brother.
Thank you.
Eric Weinstein: Alright.
Thanks.
You've been through The Portal with Andrew Yang, presidential candidate for 2020 and,
um, telling us to make America think harder.
Andrew Yang: Yes.
This man is going to make you think harder all the time.
Eric Weinstein: Alright.
Be well everybody