AI, Universal Basic Income, and Noble Mobile | Qasim Interviews Andrew Yang | Let's Address This

Awesome. Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be with you. I will say, it's like such a brutally difficult time. I wake up sad a lot of days. But it's great to be with you. I mean, you're a voice of principle and humanity.

Yeah, it was in 2017, after Trump won, that I realized that I thought he won because we'd automated away manufacturing jobs in the swing states, and that my friends in Silicon Valley were going to do the same thing to retail jobs and call center jobs, and eventually driving jobs via AI. Yeah, and I did know that AI was coming. In 2018, 2019, I ran for president saying, look, we're going to need universal basic income. Even I am shocked at how fast and furious it has arrived. And so, you know, I don't want to say like, oh, I saw all of this coming. I saw a version of it coming for sure, but I am stunned by the enormity and the pace.

I wrote a piece this week about the death of office jobs, which I do think is coming our way. And it's disheartening to see so many of the things I'd forecast playing out this way, but I became convinced then that universal basic income was going to be necessary, and thought, you know what, if I spend several years traveling the country trying to popularize that idea, that's a great use of my time, regardless of whether I became president or not. And I think most people who know me would know that, you know, it's not like I grew up thinking I was going to be president or anything like that. It was just, you know, let's eradicate poverty. I mean that, and that has been the north star the entire time.

Yeah, so I've been incredibly frustrated, Qasim, at the way we've left families to struggle. And I was super excited about Mark Cuban's company, Cost Plus Drugs, because it makes generic drugs available at a very low markup, 15%, which I think most anyone would say, okay, that's reasonable. Yeah. On generic drugs, saving lives, saving people billions of dollars. And so I thought, can we cost plus something else that we all spend money on? And I'm going to have a confession right now. At the time I was exploring this, I was paying Verizon $150 a month just for myself. So, I mean, if that seems crazy to everyone, like that was my bill. It was much worse if I left the country.

And so I thought, can we get American cell phone bills down? And just for the math, the average American is spending 83. So Andrew was up here at 150, average American's 83, average European is 35. And so that $48 a month might not seem like a lot, but if you multiply it times 12, you get about $600 a year. Times the 40 or 50 years you're going to be a wireless subscriber, you get to $30,000. And then if you put any interest rate on that and compound it over time, you're looking at an extra spend of—in the aggregate, by the way, the extra spend per year from Americans is a hundred billion a year. That's the difference between 83 and 35 a month. And that hundred billion, 11 billion is going to Verizon shareholders, 7 billion is going to AT&T shareholders. Billions are going to—I mean, obviously billions is going to marketing. Like you cannot turn on any programming or go to a live sporting event without seeing one of the big wireless banners.

So I thought, wow, can we license Spectrum from one of the providers and make it available to Americans at a cost plus level where, you know, you essentially sell it wholesale and then you upcharge something quite modest, you know, in the neighborhood of Mark Cuban's 15%? So the big breakthrough was when we managed to hammer out a deal with T-Mobile, which we did. And so now you can get unlimited data on T-Mobile's network via Noble Mobile at a cost of—the average person on Noble is spending 42 a month. And the reason why it's somewhat variable is that you get unlimited data, anything you want, for 50 bucks a month, but then if you use less data, we return the money to you at the end of the month, and the average Noble user is getting eight or nine dollars back. And so you're spending 42, which is going to be half the national average of 83. So Noble Mobile launched a number of months ago. It's growing every day. And we have promos up the wazoo. Like right now, it's like $10 a month for the first three months if you're switching from one of the big carriers. But if you don't sign up for Noble Mobile, it's totally fine. I would just say make sure you're not overpaying. You know, if you're paying 83 and think, oh, that's just what it costs—there is actually no economic reason why it needs to cost that much.

Oh gosh, the next five to ten years is almost too long a time frame, Qasim. I mean, we're talking the next one to three years.

Because—wow, the AI, and I'm not saying you're going to get rid of all office jobs like that, you know, but I'm saying that there's going to be a substantial reduction, 10, 20, 30%. And the total number of white-collar jobs in this country is around 70 million. So if you were to reduce it even by 20%, you're looking at 14 million American workers. And I think that's unfortunately very realistic. I talked to the CEO of a publicly traded consumer tech company, and he said they're firing 15% of their workers, and they're going to fire 20% more in two years, and then 20% more in two years after that. And I think he's not unusual. And so if you start doing the math, you see that millions of Americans are going to get kicked to the curb. And college grads are feeling this right now, where they're coming out of school saying, okay, it's time for me to go get my first job, and big companies aren't hiring in the same way that they were. The underemployment rate for recent college grads is now over half—it's 52%. And so this is going to be deeply painful. And I get passionate about this because this is what got me into public life in the first place. I mean, Trump winning was one, but then the second is that AI is going to eat the jobs. And there's a lot more we could do.

I mean, we can afford a universal basic income. GDP right now is at 84,000 a person. AI is going to boost that over 100,000 a person. So a thousand a month is actually like very, very reasonable. And we cut child poverty in half in 2021 via the enhanced child tax credit. So we've shown that we can dramatically reduce poverty in this country. Unfortunately, because of dysfunction, child poverty shot back up to its previous level the following year when the child tax credit was allowed to elapse. But it's just political will. Like, we can do it. We can alleviate poverty in the richest country in the history of the world, and we're going to get richer at the top line because AI is going to generate a lot of value. It's just most of us will be on the outside looking in. And the mechanism ordinarily to manage that kind of adjustment is government. It's policy. Like, look, I'm super excited about Noble Mobile because it's something I can offer people right now. Like, you know, but I'm still pissed in the sense that, you know, I mean, we should be doing much, much more.

Yeah, I'm a parent as well. My kids are younger than yours—they're 13 and 10. And so for the parents out there, the first thing is college or not to college, I suppose. Now, you know, like you and I come from similar backgrounds where our families, I'm sure, emphasized education.

So it would be very strange for us to be like, hey, you know, no to college. But the education premium is shrinking quick. And, you know, one degree I'm going to call out, which I think you and I might have in common, is a law degree. And a law degree made sense when I came out, because you could get a high-paying legal job. But those jobs are going to be much, much tougher to get.

And so colleges will still very much exist. Weaker colleges are going to go out of business during this time, and if you send your kids to college—which I still think many families are going to want to do—you just want to do like a real cost-benefit. Like you might—if you get a great deal from a fine school, you might want to take that deal, that sort of thing. You want to try and avoid large debt loads that are assumed with the premise that you're going to get it back, because someone's going to pay you a lot for your training. Now, where your kids are concerned, Qasim, the best thing you can do—and this is going to sound hackneyed and trite—but the best thing you can do is teach them to be resilient, entrepreneurial, adaptable, and get into environments where they can make a contribution. And there are still going to be opportunities for hardworking, talented young people. Now, the opportunity is going to look very different than your and my generation. But I'm going to say social skills are actually going to be really key, maybe more so than some of the hard cognitive stuff. So if you're a parent like you and I are, the mission is kind of similar to what it has been, which is raise a strong, healthy, resilient, adaptable, sociable child, and they'll be able to make a path.

I want to call out two activities along the lines of what you're describing. Drama is a great way to learn communication skills, and you know, maybe even make a friend or two. Team sports—great for resilience, coachability, you know, and thinking you need to improve. So this might be the opposite of some of the stuff that I got as a kid. Yeah, you know, where I mean my parents, you know, Asian parents, they were like, yeah, have an extracurricular, it'll look good for a college app. But the main jam was, you know, crank and get good grades. And now I think being a little more three-dimensional in character development is going to be helpful.

I think that the practice is going to be very, very different, and that there are going to be fewer opportunities. But there are—I have friends who are partners at law firms right now, and they are using AI to do research, to write briefs, and they're going to cut down the number of associates they hire. So what I'd say is that what used to be a pyramid structure, where you have a bunch of entry-levels and then a few people at the top, is going to be more like a column, where you have the people at the top and then like a few people below them. But the people at the top aren't going to be graduating, I suppose, in the same way. And as someone who went to law school, I will say that the education is not that well designed for current day, because they had you go to a library and like look stuff up and do a bunch of things that may not make any sense now. Yeah, you know, so I think the field is going to change very significantly, and I would advocate against someone going to law school unless they have a very clear sense of what they want to do, and the economics work, because law school is really expensive now.

I agree with that. The corporate transaction stuff is more easily automatable.

The data is not promising. You know, you have scores going down in reading and math. You have reports of college kids showing up who can't read a book, or even get through a full-length movie. You know, I mean, it's not good. And as a parent, you know, we struggle with this. I think the main thing a lot of families have right now is like the core source of tension is screen time, because kids want as much of it as they can get. And if you're a parent, you're like, well, sometimes sure, you know, but other times no. And then, you know, but they just want it all the time. And so I wish that education was adapting more quickly. But there's really nothing forcing them to. Like if you're a university, people show up—you know, your professors, you're like, oh man, my kids aren't so good at this sort of thing anymore. It's like, well, you know, some still got to get A's, some still got to get B's—you know, you're not going to flunk the whole class. Like, if you did that, then, you know, you'd be out of a job. So I think there are going to be new things that do arise in terms of having employers be able to identify some of the communication and interpersonal skills you're talking about, because I think the grades are going to be less important.

You know, one of the policies I was pushing for during my campaign was that we should own our own data. Our data is getting sold and resold for hundreds of billions of dollars right now, and is getting used to make these AI models. And so when you have something like Noble Mobile, one of the first things we said is, okay, like let's not have any commercial relationship with our users' data. And we don't—you know, like we couldn't tell someone something about you if we wanted to, because, you know, we don't get it. And that was, you know, in some ways—I mean, it's something we had to clarify to investors. It's like, look, we're not going to pursue certain types of profit opportunities if they require us to use our customers' data in a way that they would not like. We spend more money on spam shield and things that keep you from getting weird texts, and you know, it's like pretty much we just treat our customers the way we'd want to be treated, and we wouldn't want our data to be sold and resold, and we don't like spam. Simple concept. Yeah. And so that's been the principle. But it makes me happy to be able to do that in, you know, in this industry, because right now our data really is just getting passed around company after company.

Oh yeah, that rationale didn't make any sense. They were like, hey, like equal time. It's like if Coar, you know, could have been like, oh, like, you know, we'll have someone else on too—like what, you know, like what's the big deal?