Transcript: Andrew Yang and Eric Weinstein on The Portal podcast episode 8

The following transcript was generated by a machine and not edited by any human – so it’s full of of errors. I’m posting the transcript because the podcast is excellent and a crappy transcript is better than no transcript. Questions/comments: get me on Twitter @mgmobrien.

Eric Weinstein 0:08
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 0:17
Thank you for keeping the portal open late for it.

Eric Weinstein 0:20
Oh my god. Thanks for bringing the energy you just come fresh off this rally MacArthur Park. You’re indefatigable the Energizer Bunny.

Andrew Yang 0:27
Yes. We just had a 6000 person rally 7000 8000 I lost track. I was counting manually. No, it wasn’t but

Eric Weinstein 0:35
and I should say that your hat is make America think harder.

Andrew Yang 0:39
Yep. But it’s portals all about

Eric Weinstein 0:41
max it while we’re trying. We’re trying. So we don’t want to keep you up late because we want you supercharged charged for tomorrow. So let’s just dig right into it. Andrew, I’m remembering that we were having this dinner at the Zazi in San Francisco and you’re impressing the hell out of my wife and myself. And I said that guy’s going places. She says How can he is it it’s these are different times.

Andrew Yang 1:05
Thank you.

Eric Weinstein 1:06
So am I right that this is a this is happening?

Andrew Yang 1:09
Oh, it’s happening big time. I mean

our campaign is growing by leaps and bounds by all of the measurements you would ordinarily measure a presidential campaign. Crowd size fundraising. facism. Print. Hello, that’s

Eric Weinstein 1:25
Yeah, I guess the Yang gang is absolutely fanatical. Trust me. I encounter them all the time on social media.

Andrew Yang 1:29
Well, I love the Yang gang. Thank you Yang gang. 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 and certainly when we campaign, I mean, now. We draw crowds of either hundreds or thousands depending upon where we are.

Eric Weinstein 1:52
It’s amazing. Now, let’s just dig into it. We’re in this totally bizarre situation. I don’t think the institutions have failed. Up to just how dire our situation they have now 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, it’s not really been afraid. Am I wrong about that?

Andrew Yang 2:17
No, I agree with you, you know, and and in many ways, if you’re just living life, not plugged into all of the institutional decay, then you just go out and the sun shining and the birds are chirping. And, you know, like you said, the physical world is still more or less sound, barring the occasional heat wave and unseasonal weather pattern. So

Eric Weinstein 2:41
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 50s and 60s. But that hasn’t been true for a long time. How far off am I?

Andrew Yang 3:19
Well, that’s what the number is saying. I’m a numbers guy, where if you look at the economy of the 70s, you had a certain level of buying power among the middle class and certain split in terms of the gains from the economy among different parts of society. And then the lines diverged, starting in the 70s. 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 70s and you can see the disconnect in the lived experience of most of Americans in most of the country where they’re trying to catch on that things have changed. And I mean, it’s dark, it’s dark,

Eric Weinstein 4:06
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 and gallows humor? Definitely. There’s, there’s a place for that.

Andrew Yang 4:19
Well, you know, I naturally,

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 4:31
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 4:50
Well, certainly, I would never claim omniscience or that I’m going to get everything right. I mean, I make mistakes all the time to ask my wife. She’d be like, yeah, you screwed up this other day. But we You and I were talking before the camera 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 and not have it produce existential level harm. 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, there there are two things I’ve thought about. It’s like, there’s the way the President makes you feel, right. And then there’s 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, Ah, that guy What’s he doing? You know, and the same is true in reverse. Like if brock obama did something decent, and human, it made me feel good. didn’t necessarily, you know, like change my commute? already big. Sure. 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, wants someone who seems

solutions oriented write

Eric Weinstein 6:19
positive and positive, dated, data friendly.

Andrew Yang 6:22
Yeah, they’re friendly and genuinely wants to just try and make people’s lives better. I think that would make people feel better. But then there’s a reality of trying to solve the problems from the perch at the top of the government. Yeah. 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 6:50
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 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. And you don’t want to get rid of the incentive structure that allows people to, you know, take a dream and turn it into something.

Andrew Yang 7:34
I love the dream. I love work. I love entrepreneurship. Yeah.

people doing great stuff.

Eric Weinstein 7:40
So I think that there’s a theory that there’s sort of a series of economic theories that haven’t actually been developed. 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 really don’t tell the truth. And I’m very worried how let’s talk about your your your first term in office which is going to happen.

Andrew Yang 8:16
Who ain’t 21 who inauguration day it’s gonna be a blast. You’re gonna be there P is going to be there Yang gang is gonna be there we have a giant party. Wait,

Eric Weinstein 8:25
wait, wait, wait a second, get 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’ve selected for sociologists who are friendly to the institutions and hostile to our people, what do we do?

Andrew Yang 8:52
My team is going to be a blend of different people with different experience sets from different industries, even different ideas. geologies 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 gonna stamp it with outsiders, then

Eric Weinstein 9:19
Donald Trump’s problem,

Andrew Yang 9:21
yeah, like, you’re not gonna get anything done, you’re you’re, 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 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 to make cultures work. And so you need to have a blend of people that are like, Look, hey, I get it. I’m a new figure and you’re concerned. And one of my principles is that I don’t fault people for the incentives that have formed them. Mm hmm. 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 The fabric of DC for 20 plus years, and they are 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 there have been times have been for years and years. And so what you don’t want to do is you don’t want to get there and be like, I’m gonna, like turn everything upside down. I’m like, attack everyone with the immune system, we’ll just actually, you know, the macrophages will descend on you. And yeah, and then you’ll never get anything and everything that

Eric Weinstein 10:37
so that 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 chastise, who have been this class of people miss advising our government throughout the 80s 90s early part of this

Andrew Yang 11:00
Well, and that’s the dark part for all of us that we sense that there’s really limited accountability in DC, like you can give bad advice and screw something up, and you keep your job. You know, your Think Tank still there, like it like no one goes back and says, Hey, your white paper turns out it was completely mistaken. Like that play, that’s not the way that town works or that, you know, many government institutions work. So that’s the, the challenge is that you have to try and make changes within this incredibly institutionalized environment. And so you need a combination of people that are well intended, you bring them in and say, Look, this is gonna feel like brain damage. You’re gonna come in, right and you’re gonna be like, especially if you can’t come in with a background like you and I might have from technology or entrepreneurship, where you look up and you’d be like, wait, you have how many people doing one 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 Valley types through the red day by the window that did a repair job. So the goal has to be to bring in patriots who understand that they’re not going to have like an enjoyable time trying to turn the battleship, but that if they turn the battleship three degrees to the right, they can do more good since they were in another environment where they turned it you know, like Andrew,

Eric Weinstein 12:37
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 Revenge of genius or Revenge of people who actually know how to do things and care enough. We’re ready and want to be mobilized and want to be called up who’ve been sitting You know, with major league skills and 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 helped 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 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 happy that 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 sake, I mean, this is this is a class of people that needs to lose.

Andrew Yang 14:18
Yeah. And a lot of them are gonna lose their mind administration and like, I’m not a generally vindictive person. No, it’s not like, you know, so.

Eric Weinstein 14:26
I hope he has a happy, wonderful life.

Andrew Yang 14:28
Yeah, exactly. It’s the kind of thing where it’s like, hey, guess what? You had a lot of influence and authority. In one era, it’s over now. You know, not going to unduly try and make your life miserable or anything but know exactly where

Eric Weinstein 14:42
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, 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 14:58
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 15:16
Can I hit you with another one that’s really comical for me? Sure. I watch the graphics that have your name in relationship to the other competitors. And I know who the network’s are afraid of, and they’re afraid of you. They’ll do a linear perspective graphic and you’ll be the guy on the very far end and

Andrew Yang 15:34
the presenter will notice that that does seem to be something about I don’t

Eric Weinstein 15:38
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 don’t know if you’re familiar in magic with the concept of magicians choice. No, not so a magician engages in a trick with magicians choice. Let’s say that. I want you to choose See out of A, B and C. So I give you the option pick two, 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, we’ll throw B away Now which one of 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,

Andrew Yang 16:23
like what idea companies choice, this is

Eric Weinstein 16:25
what 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 some is not for the American people. And we

Andrew Yang 16:46
it’s one reason I’m here, man,

Eric Weinstein 16:48
when 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 network’s don’t want running and the thing that I hate Hate is that we’re in this William Tell situation where we’ve got to run against our own party.

Andrew Yang 17:06
Yeah, well, you know, again,

Eric Weinstein 17:08
you may not want to say that, and I understand why, but I’ll be damned if I’m gonna 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 17:19
Thank you, Eric. And I can say that this man is the head of pirate radio for the 21st century.

Certainly one of the tide chiefs of it.

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 leery of the people that they think are on the outside. But one of the themes of this era is that there are more of us on the outside that are catching on, and that the stranglehold that means company’s had on our attention 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, contractor, whatever. That

Eric Weinstein 18:19
was very funny one of the members of The Washington Post, which, you know, says that democracy dies in darkness that 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’s like, remarkably, there’s nothing I can possibly contribute to the conversation. It’s just

Andrew Yang 18:38
unlikely.

Eric Weinstein 18:40
It’s pretty hard to imagine that it’s a pro. Everything’s been

said, Eric. Yeah.

been the only stuff that hasn’t is wrong. So what I’d love to do is to talk about some some sort of new ideas, 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. Yeah, please. Okay. So one of the things that piece,

Andrew Yang 19:03
I want to say that I quote this man all the time, I’ve learned a great deal from him and his wife, and that he’s one of the most profound economic thinkers that I’ve encountered, and I met a lot of fucking people.

Eric Weinstein 19:17
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 is 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 19:41
Yeah, you know, I don’t have any native desire to be President. I didn’t feel

Eric Weinstein 19:47
that you ever did. And it’s one of the reasons I love the fact that you’re running.

Andrew Yang 19:51
Yeah, I think my one of my main qualifications to be president. Yeah, 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 you do like geeky, like the ceremony? Like it seems like like it’s counterproductive. And no I haven’t I think that might help me do a better job.

Eric Weinstein 20:20
So let’s try to geek out on a couple of ideas that P and I’ve been playing with see what you think. Yeah, I love it. 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. Yep. There are other issues about the dignity of work. And 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 and

Andrew Yang 20:49
we hope you have a reason to get up and do something.

Eric Weinstein 20:51
Amen. You know, the thing is,

we’ve been thinking about this paradigm from object oriented programming, which is The difference between is a versus has. So if a Lamborghini can play a an FM broadcast through its speaker, you could technically find out that, by some definition, the Lambert 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 bricklayer or, or a teamster, you know completely 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 22:12
Yeah, I love it so much and I couldn’t agree more.

Eric Weinstein 22:15
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 of an agent. But without it I’m worried that you know, the sort of the power of that Chicago style thinking pushes us back into humans is widgets.

Andrew Yang 22:37
Well, humans is widgets is predominant. And you can see it at every turn. Or even if you ask a kid, what do you want to be when you grew up? It’s, you know, they’ll say I want to be a fireman, astronaut, Baker, scientist, whatever it happens to be. And by the numbers we are more work obsessed now than we perhaps have ever been. And trying To break up our identities sure 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, you’re a dad, you’re, like a consumer of, of hunting gear or you know, like you. There’s more to you than being a trucker when they have shaped their life, right around being a trucker, because, you know, it’s literally, you’re behind the wheel for 14 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, just things are all men. It’s like, Come on 94%. 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 their role in this real life like almost circulatory system, where it’s like they’re piloting this blood vessel that has a bunch of Home Depot crap in the back or whatever the heck they’re transporting, like a daily basis. 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 spending time with their their families is pretty much the opposite of the way our civilization functions. Right now,

Eric Weinstein 24:41
when we saw these deaths of despair, discussed by economists in the, you know, the heartland of America, we saw this demographic crisis that happened when the Soviet Union fell apart with you know, the mortality crisis. All sorts of people were dying of alcoholism, heart attacks and stress. So this is a really serious thing. We have figured out that the restoration of human meaning and dignity as different from employment,

Andrew Yang 25:13
you had something like a dozen disenfranchised taxicab drivers and limo drivers killed themselves. You know, last year, like one of whom killed himself in front of City Hall. I mean, like, Did his self destruction cause meaningful ripples in our society? You know, most people watching this or listening this right now. It’s like, oh, that should happen. Like, you know, that like, but 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, right, and you know, they’re dead.

Unknown Speaker 25:44
But

Eric Weinstein 25:46
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 and in a world that is currently exploring this idea of toxic masculinity from some place that it might have been reasonably defined in blowing it up past past that point, it’s a very dangerous thing to see a world that sort of thinks that, you know, like, all straight white guys are okay when in fact many of them are very vulnerable and and

Unknown Speaker 26:15
by the numbers by the numbers right,

Eric Weinstein 26:17
you know, and yeah, it’s

Andrew Yang 26:19
so the and this is one of the themes that when you talk about trying to define people 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 than women do. Because if you were to say to a woman, hey, you’re a parent, you’re, you know, sister, you’re right, 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 But

Eric Weinstein 27:00
I think they’re facing a big one coming up, which is that you’re gonna 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 30 year mortgage I can see enough stability in my future I can

Andrew Yang 27:46
and 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 No, that’s a legitimate, like, thing to be upset about. That does not mean like if if someone is struggling, like it ends up reaching different groups in different ways, right? And you can’t say it’s like, oh, your struggles are somehow more valid than other. So just to wrap around this thought so I think that the division of our identities into like work and non work, right. 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, you tend to have relatively self destructive patterns of behavior manifest relatively consistently and quickly, where unemployed men volunteer less than employed men, despite having much more free time as an example. substance abuse tends to go up in very self destructive behaviors, a lot of time spent on the computer goes up, which so that’s a combination of

gaming and some other things.

And porn and porn, I’m sure is, you know, I didn’t, I mean, I kind of implied it in but I was thinking, you know,

Eric Weinstein 29:20
look, this is a free radio station effectively, and we’re going to be able to say that that’s one of the things that maybe deranging us, we don’t know what its effects are.

Andrew Yang 29:28
Yeah, no so 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, right, that they will not show the same patterns of self destructive behavior that men do. Now, of course, women, obviously you know, hate to be unemployed. But the the thing that I joke about that sort of true is that women, however, are never truly idle, in the sense that they always Find like, well, this is a treat like like ways to be productive contributors in a way that so hidden, we’re struggling with

Eric Weinstein 30:08
family 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 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 shift the burdens to times of their life when they can better afford it. What do you think about that?

Andrew Yang 30:49
Yeah, so just to sort of show the other side of the coin so men volunteer less if they’re unemployed, unemployed, even though that doesn’t make any sense in terms of their free time. Women show higher rates of volunteers men going back to school when they have more more time. So it’s just the numbers show clear patterns of like different responses to non work related time or idleness. But I’m with you in the fact that right now trying to map everyone’s economic prospects to the market, the markets, valuation of our wages, right? has all sorts of distorting effects. And, Tim, 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

Eric Weinstein 31:44
basic part of it.

Andrew Yang 31:46
Yeah, it’s like you put 1000 bucks a month into people’s hands. And then that would allow us all to make different types of decisions, really, from almost day one of our adulthood.

Eric Weinstein 32:02
Let’s try a few other things that I think might be interesting. One thing that wins presidential campaigns 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 bloc that nobody’s figured out how to speak to. And I think I have a couple of these that are candidates. I’d like to please.

Andrew Yang 32:24
Yeah, I’d like this. Maybe I’ll find a new audience to

Eric Weinstein 32:27
Melbourne. Okay. So the first one that I have, you know, so these are things like soccer moms was one from years past or excerpts between rural and suburbs, where people didn’t realize that they 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 underperformance 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. Yeah, teachers can’t handle the kid Nope. And there’s just this maddening loss of human brilliance that is flushed down the toilet.

Andrew Yang 33:11
Have you come up with a name for this group?

Unknown Speaker 33:13
Well,

Eric Weinstein 33:16
I often refer to these as kids with learning superpowers. And I talked 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 30 people to make the economics work. 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? 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. It’s been 45 generation Really?

Andrew Yang 33:56
Well, yeah. I’m very public about the fact that my My older son is autistic and know that and that when we put them in various environments, I mean, there were very, very sharp struggles. And to me a typical is the new normal, like neurologically typical. 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 families have someone either in the family or someone in their social circles that resembles the description 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 are different.

Eric Weinstein 34:47
And yet these are very often the people we’re going to found new fields, we’re going to find new drugs for us, we’re going to think in such different a new uncorrelated fashions that the are very often the people that I value the most. And you never know whether things gonna work out because the kid every every year is sustaining more and more trauma. Yeah, whereas these other kids, it’s like, you know, I remember looking at the neurotypicals as 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 was that, 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 35:36
Well, someone described it as, like you’re getting regular low grade psychic beating. It’s pretty and, and that’s something that you obviously wouldn’t wish upon anyone, much less little kids.

Eric Weinstein 35:50
Yeah. And by the way, the autism thing you know, I don’t know whether your child is high functioning or not, but it’s certainly the case that a lot have 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 work with abstractions very often. I think of you know, I’m on top of this. I’m colorblind. And I always make the point that I see camouflage,

Andrew Yang 36:18
you know that you’re wearing bright purple right now stop it.

Eric Weinstein 36:25
myself before I let my girlfriend now wife make these decisions. I don’t make terrible.

Andrew Yang 36:31
You look great. Yeah, it looks great. I’m sure.

Eric Weinstein 36:36
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. 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’s a story about immigration that’s a 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 redistribution, then people get angry or protective of the tool. And one of the things that I think that’s very important is a huge chunk of America is highly zenefits, xenophobic. They like foreigners, they like traveling abroad, they like

Andrew Yang 37:34
food music, you probably read righteous mind by Jonathan Haidt. You’re probably friends with john right. Yeah, I figured continue because it’s what it reminds me of.

Eric Weinstein 37:42
Okay. The thing is, is that Xena philic restriction lists are a good chunk of this country if you do a poll, and you allow for all four boxes, Xena Felix in a phobic restriction list. expansionist Xena philic restriction ism is a giant cohort. nobody speaks to it because if you say anything about restriction ism, the media will instantaneously label you as 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 I agree 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, or you should not be

Andrew Yang 38:37
angry at someone who’s angry about the immigrants. This is because because there’s something like you said, it’s like, you know, in some ways someone can have a very legitimate grievance around the fact that there have been these instruments of wealth transfer that had been imported into our midst.

Eric Weinstein 38:57
So I call these the Americans who redistributor wealth, immigrant entrepreneurs, right? And the idea is that if they could use puppy dogs to redistribute 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’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 benefit 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 39:48
I agree. Great. Yeah. And, you know, I think I may be able to help in this regard.

Eric Weinstein 39:55
I think you’re perfectly positioned for this.

Andrew Yang 39:57
You know, I’m part I’m the son of immigrants who loves

This country loves that immigrants have been an incredible source of dynamism. But you know, you can’t have open borders and unrestricted immigration, I understand the sentiment where people are struggling with the fact that our country has brought many people in either intentionally or unintentionally, in ways that are changing our economy and society in ways that like some people have legitimate

Eric Weinstein 40:37
problems with it. 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 40:57
and that’s one of the natural reactions Is that if the current president says one thing, then you know, the right thing to say the exact opposite, but then nuance gets lost. And then unfortunately, we end up falling into, that’s why he authorized camps

Eric Weinstein 41:11
we have, it’s so important not only to defeat the current president, but also to defeat the kleptocratic center of, of our own party, as well as the regressive left that proposes is 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 41:38
Yes, that’s the slogan.

Eric Weinstein 41:39
Yeah. And that that thing is, is that it is moot. It’s a question.

Andrew Yang 41:42
It also happens to be the truth. It’s not just like, I know,

Eric Weinstein 41:45
that’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 die. And 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 They 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 42:09
I am animal style in and out. I am Andrew Yang is animal stop. Let me give you I agree that I can change the political conversation in a way that many Americans find very exciting and productive. Because 25% of Americans are politically disengaged, including I’m sure some people watching this. And I believe it’s up to 48% self identify as independent, which is almost twice what I identify as other demos are so

Eric Weinstein 42:38
close to identifying is independent. 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, you

Andrew Yang 42:50
know, the two party system, I mean, I agree, that’s why I’m running. I’m running as a Democrat and 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 that. And what

Eric Weinstein 43:04
I really want to do is I want to read, 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 were, you know, effectively heretics housed inside the Harvard’s and MIT and Caltech. And I think we’ve gotten rid of that kind of

Andrew Yang 43:35
where they are. They’re then they’re scared shitless to, like, say the wrong thing, or else though?

Eric Weinstein 43:39
Do you remember the time? You remember the situation where MIT turned over? Aaron Schwartz

Andrew Yang 43:44
didn’t laugh cuz I mean, it’s dark. Blue should laugh. No, no, I

Eric Weinstein 43:48
mean, I’m for laughing at the dark.

Andrew Yang 43:50
Yeah, I laugh at the dark. Yeah, you know, it’s a

Eric Weinstein 43:52
it’s like everybody knows that. But you’re not allowed to do it in public. So screw that. You know that we had the situation with this guy, Aaron Schwartz. You know, Aaron No, did you?

Andrew Yang 44:01
I’ve, you know, a friend of friends.

Eric Weinstein 44:03
Yeah, you know, and this guy almost certainly was a pretty pure hearted human being who was fighting the good fight, and as opposed to shelter those people and instead they cooperate, you know, in turning them over as

Andrew Yang 44:17
soon as you get the institutional incentives in a particular direction then like, I mean, this is not a near and like this is just like recent goods in recent memory. But you know, I stuck up for Shane Gillis, this comedian that had said it,

Eric Weinstein 44:30
I saw that and the idea that you know, you were in a position to say, Look, I’m the candidate, per se.

Andrew Yang 44:37
Yeah, so if anyone should be offended, it’s me and so I think he shouldn’t lose his job over it. Well, this is the

Eric Weinstein 44:42
thing that the quality of mercy or forgiveness or just recognition that there should be space for remorse and redemption. This is what makes so much of the intolerant left field cult like And I thought what you were doing was you were showing the best aspects of a truly compassionate left,

Andrew Yang 45:05
I was trying to be a human being, you know, like, you looked at him being like, well, like, is that a job losing offense, but then the fact that NBC ended up firing him was entirely consistent with our corporate incentives? Because if you look at it, say, like, well, is this person that we’ve invested a lot in? That’s 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 advertisers 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 gonna be firing me like a he’s almost certainly gonna be fired, because that’s what the corporate incentives

Eric Weinstein 45:44
I understand. So one of the things that I’m really interested in doing but

Andrew Yang 45:47
I still made me sad, like I was like, hey, this would be unusually

human and forgiving. If they decided to

Eric Weinstein 45:55
wait. 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 goods. So for example, I slap ads on my podcasts. And what I suffer from sponsors. And 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, which doesn’t know that I’m going to say something positive, and maybe they’d become sponsors. Maybe they don’t. But the other one is risk advertisers, 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 that it’s worse, right? Because if we don’t fix the economic models, we can’t have deeper discussions because everybody’s gonna run away at the first sight of trouble. And so part of what we’re trying to do ultimately with the additive tising

Andrew Yang 47:00
this pirate radio pre advertising, what do you think? I mean, I love it. It’s like leave it to you to try and solve that kind of problem, or I got it. Some of the things

Eric Weinstein 47:09
that I want to talk about is demographics.

Andrew Yang 47:11
Oh, yeah, please. Okay. So let me first say, I am a parent of a neurologically a typical young person. I agree with you that I think that many of people 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 contributed and highly distinctive ways still deserve schools that can support and accommodate them. And that, to me, these kids are like, the shorthand I use is that they’re spiky. You know, it’s like you have very high capacities in some respects or a different point of view, and then real challenges and other respect. And so if I send you into a social environment, were there 30 kids, for one teacher, you’re going to have a terrible, terrible Time, you know, and that’s 100% predictable. And so if then you have like a critical mass of people that resembled this, then you should try and design institution that takes that into account. And I feel so deeply for families that struggle with this like you struggle with it sounds like you’re absolutely experiencing it. I have started with it. And you NPR, you know, me and Evelyn, like we have an unusual level of ability to try and, you know, manage situation. And I meet single moms around the country who have, you know, autistic or neurologically typical 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 the fact that there are all of these kids that are heading into these schools that are getting

you know, more than low grade psychic beatings.

Eric Weinstein 48:55
Oh my god. This is why I leave my my DMS open on Twitter and this is one of the numbers One things I do it for is people write to me and they say, No, you’re really busy. But I just want to tell you, nobody’s ever spoken to my situation you’re proud of something I’m always ashamed of. And

Andrew Yang 49:10
I guarantee you I’m not the first presidential candidate with autism in the family. Yeah. And the fact that on the first talking about it, is to me long overdue and ridiculous. And

Eric Weinstein 49:20
Amen. 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 not the only ones going through. I want to see I want to see more money going to figure out how do we diversify the classroom of the future? Yeah. So that the load isn’t borne by people who don’t fit the economics of the teaching model.

Andrew Yang 49:44
Yes. And part of it is 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 neurological a typical kid. And so what we have to do is talk about inverting the model. You have to look at the education of our children as an investment. 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 a typical and remarkable then that pays for whatever support or

Eric Weinstein 50:28
I mean, I had a very well known Professor revealed to me that he couldn’t read papers in his field just can’t read, you know, and he, he has to figure out what the paper is likely to be saying. There is such a weird world of unexpected achievement.

Andrew Yang 50:49
And this is the demon the demon that we have to slay anyways, is that the negative externalities are not being encompassed within the budgets of various institutions. Very well said, but but then also, were foregoing all of the potential positive value creation or generation from proper investment in our human capital. And another dimension to and this is like neither here nor there. But I was just with Dean Kaman 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 forgone utility of keeping something away from, from people, like if you had something and

Eric Weinstein 51:35
it was the African like cost to the regulation. Yeah,

Andrew Yang 51:37
he had like, so 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 Betsy would amputated. And so by you’re 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 a 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 that. The big problems are that our measurements are really primitive. And it ends up and you end up with binary incentives, where 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. sidelined. What went in sidelined is like a euphemistic way for saying destroyed.

Eric Weinstein 52:49
I know, one of the things I wanted to do at some point. 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 53:24
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 particular, it’s like, oh, you made a mistake. And 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 large scale society wide investments, where like, of course, you can’t get that stuff. Right. You know, it’s like, yeah, and the problem is that the political incentives are for everyone to try and avoid like a negative headline. Or something that’s

Eric Weinstein 53:53
like a lot of us are very disagreeable, very difficult to deal with. And, you know, I saw you pick up endorsements from people like Ilan Musk, you know, which is is that I hear his, his personal life being criticized, like, I don’t really care. This guy is responsible for SPC, how much? 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 54:33
Yes, I cannot agree more. And, you know, I consider myself it’s pretty funny because I, you know, I think I had, in many ways, like a highly conventional upbringing that helped, like I feel like I’m sort of a hybrid, where, to the extent that I was highly contrarian, or dissimilar. You know, it’s like, I You know, I came up through a series of institutions in an era where, you know, I think I learned to adapt, but then I look at my boys and I think to myself that you know that that their way of life is going to be very very different than than mine I’m sure yours too because we came of age in a different era.

Eric Weinstein 55:20
Well, this is true. I mean, I was just talking about this actually breath Bret Easton Ellis sitting in that chair that you know, I grew up as part of this free range world largely before a ton Pat’s got kidnapped in the milk carton kids changed everything. I worry about the sort of, we were to free range and these kids are to shelter that we have to find some new new mix, but I want to get to another

Andrew Yang 55:43
me one more demographic. Okay.

Eric Weinstein 55:45
Yes, let’s do it. And then we’ll close it out. I want to talk about something which really makes me angry and excited. I think that America has, without question, some of the finest sort Horses 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. Yeah, 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. 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 are 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 appropriate levels? Yep, 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 58:11
That’s an incredible

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 58:24
it’s the biggest bargain in the world. It’s just the future you’re investing.

Andrew Yang 58:28
It’s just right now we’re so brainwashed by a market driven thinking that if there’s not some short term profitability tied to it, or there’s no drug company funding in those lines that and this is something that the government historically has been the leader in where they 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

Eric Weinstein 59:09
unfathomably significant. 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 59:19
Yep. Yeah. And right now the Yeah, that, to me, this is a role where historically the government has led and you need a government willing to make long term sustained investments that may only pay off way down the road and may not pay off, but you still need to be able to make them well. So

Eric Weinstein 59:40
you know, the other weird part of this is that by using our own people, and letting 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 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 the right of its own people to give the middle finger because irreverence is the secret of American ingenuity.

Andrew Yang 1:00:31
Yeah. Yeah. And you know that this reminds me of a joke that they told artificial intelligence, which is how far behind is China than the US and AI? And the answer is 12 hours.

News. They, you know, obviously, they wake up, and then they see what we did. I

Eric Weinstein 1:00:47
can’t tell you how fantastic it is to have you come into the studio. You’re coming off of this big rally and 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. would

Andrew Yang 1:01:00
love this to man, this, this feels to me, like half a conversation, we’re gonna have to have the second half at some other time. So if you enjoyed this combo, let Eric know. And then hopefully they’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. Well, our average donation is only $25. So our fans are even cheaper than Bernie’s, which no one even knew could be a thing in politics. But here it is. 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. 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. Eric’s and PS and you all watching at home to say I prefer this to the stuff I’m getting Through the cable TV network. Well,

Eric Weinstein 1:02:02
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. Having a kind of a mature person who’s not easily bought or swayed, who’s speaking in a way that nobody knows what he’s going to say next has been hugely positive for the entire process.

Andrew Yang 1:02:21
Well, thank you, you know, the only the only currency I answer to is his ideas and humanity like you, you know, you put a good idea in front of me or a good person. I listen. Well, you’ve been that way since before all the success so we wouldn’t we wish you continued success. we’ll have you back here next time. You’re in LA with a little bit of time

Eric Weinstein 1:02:44
would love that brother. All right. Thanks. You’ve been through the portal with Andrew Yang, presidential candidate for 2020 and telling us to make America think harder.

Andrew Yang 1:02:54
Yes, this man is gonna make you think harder all the time.

Eric Weinstein 1:02:57
All right. Well, everybody