We've all been conditioned to market logic. We're like, 'Look, we all have to be positive contributors in the market economy,' and like, if you become obsolete, then you must reskill yourself, and like, now everyone's going to become a welder, electrician, or whatever. And it's [__] You know, it was [__] when we said the coal miners were going to become coders. It's [__] now. Like, it's [__] when we said the factory workers are going to become nurses. Like, it's [__] now when we say college grads are all going to become handymen. Especially when 60% of college graduates are women and 2.8% of electricians are women. So it's like, you look at that math and be like, 'Oh, what's going to happen here?'
I'm Jon Favreau, and you just heard from today's guest, Andrew Yang. You might remember Andrew's 2020 presidential campaign, where he came from nowhere to end up on the Democratic primary debate stage, mostly based on his universal basic income proposal to give every American a monthly $1,000 check. He also spent that campaign warning people that AI was coming to take all of our jobs. Well, here we are. Yang was unsuccessful in that campaign, but it turns out he was ahead of his time on AI. So, when I heard he was in LA, I wanted to invite him on to talk about how he sees AI now, whether he still thinks his old UBI proposal is the right way to deal with the coming job displacement, and how our political system should deal with it all. You might also remember that after his 2020 bid, Yang left the Democratic Party to start the Forward Party, the goal of which is to elect independent-minded candidates and reform the electoral system. So, I wanted to dig into that as well and get his thoughts on the Democratic Party as it stands today. We also talked about his new book of essays, Hey Yang, Where's My Thousand Bucks? And for fun, why he's decided to join the cast of a new television game show, Nation's Dumbest. It was a fun, freewheeling conversation that I hope you'll find interesting. We'll get to it in a moment, but before we do,
if you're not yet a paying member to Friends of the Pod, what are you doing? In addition to it being the best way to support your favorite pro-democracy independent media company, becoming a paying subscriber gets you access to this show ad free, as well as ad free episodes of all your favorite podcasts. Plus, Friends of the Pod get access to special behind-the-paywall shows like Pod Save America Only Friends, Dan Pfeiffer's Polar Coaster, and our least offline podcast, Terminally Online. Head on over to crooked.com/friends to subscribe today. All right, here's Andrew Yang. Andrew Yang, welcome to Offline.
Hey, thanks for having me. It's great to be here.
Um, all right. I got to start with The Nation's Dumbest.
Uh, because I have watched the first episode.
What a place to start. [laughter]
So, for people who don't know, you are a contestant on a new reality/game show called Nation's Dumbest, along with celebrities like Carmen Electra, JoJo Siwa, Steve-O from Jackass. It's currently airing Wednesdays at 9:00 p.m. on Fox.
So, it's a series of trivia challenges where the winner each week gets to leave the show. And then the last contestant standing is the nation's dumbest. One episode has aired. You did not win the first week.
I know, you can't. [laughter]
You were close. You were one of the final two.
Oh, thank you for watching.
I know you can't divulge what happens tonight, Wednesday, though people will be hearing this episode on Sunday. How are you feeling about doing the show now that the first episode has been out in the world?
Well, thanks for asking, John. [laughter] I did get a bunch of text messages being like, 'Hey, like, I'm seeing you on TV at this show. That is not your usual activity.' I feel good about it because I made friends with Ice-T and Steve-O and Dr. Drew and Matt Liner and a bunch of the other contestants, because you're trapped. It's sort of an intense environment. Haria Baldwin asked me, 'Have I been on a reality TV show before?' [laughter] And then I said, 'Only if you count running for president.' And then everyone got a laugh out of that. So it's been a good experience. The best part is that I watched the first episode with my kids, who are 10 and 13, and it was one of the few things we've come together and watched as a family. And the kids were like, 'Oh, you didn't know that or you didn't know that.' And so that was actually a joy.
I know. I watched with my six-year-old, and he had a few answers. Like, he knew some—the trivia is, it's interesting. It's, it's maybe like middle school level trivia, but some of it is harder than you think. Like, there were questions that I got, but I was like, if I was there under all the pressure, I could see myself [__] that up.
Well, thank you for understanding, John, because it's true. You're surrounded by these floodlights, and there are 20 camera people, and they're like, 'Yang, like, I'm going to describe this exercise.' [laughter] 'What? What? What is it?' I'm just like, 'Oh, man.'
Do you—I—do you feel extra pressure on the show? Because I feel—
I'm supposed to not be a dumbass. Is that what you're saying? [laughter]
I feel like they, they like sought you out to try to—I don't know—like, because they have, you know, some people you don't expect to be that smart. You're on there, and some of the other contestants are like, 'You're the presidential candidate. You better get this right.'
Yeah. I certainly did feel some more pressure, and I joke that my career will be over if I wind up being the nation's dumbest [laughter] officially, like losing to everybody. But I realized when—so first they reached out to me, and I have a call with producers asking them, 'Why me for this show?' And they said, 'We're looking for a politician or journalist that people don't hate,' which was very flattering.
And, 'think you'd be good for this. It's like, Are you smarter than a fifth grader?' And I realized that if I turned it down, it was primarily because I would be uncomfortable with it or daunted by it. I wouldn't be turning it down for the right reasons. You know, I had some friends saying, 'Don't do it. You're going to look dumb. It's going to be bad for your image.' And I was like, 'These are not excellent reasons to say no.' [laughter] It feels like I'd be wussing out. So I said yes. I definitely had second thoughts during some of the tapings about that decision and major life decisions that preceded it. But now, you know, watching it as a family, it's actually been really fun. And different friends have gotten a kick out of it. Look, my co-host and co-founder Jon Lovett went on Survivor and only lasted one episode, and that is the greatest gift of content to me and to—
That would be the gift that keeps on giving. You share that clip over and over again. [laughter] A somewhat serious question about it. Like, I've heard you say that one reason you thought the show was worth doing is that, you know, a prime time network audience reaches a lot more people than political shows like this, or at least a different audience than those shows. How do you think about getting attention, and what kind of attention is valuable, or is it all valuable? Because as a presidential candidate who came out of nowhere and ended up where you did, you clearly figured out something about how to capture people's attention at a time when it's become an incredibly scarce resource.
Yes. That's why I have a thriving consultancy on that very thing. No, I don't. [laughter] Yeah, I say—and I wrote this in my Substack—I say yes to doing podcasts that are much less cool than this one. I mean, this is like a real one. [laughter] And I knew that a couple million people minimum were going to watch this Fox reality TV show. And when I ran for president, it's funny, John—you know, when you're a needle mover, and because people on the street will say to you like, 'Hey, I saw you on this or I heard you on that.' And you're like, 'Oh, that one actually reaches normal people.' And then there are a lot of things you do that just disappear immediately, right? And so I thought, well, look, this is going to get in front of millions of people, and I've been in Iowa and Ohio and Michigan, and a lot of those people are not tuning into like political news, right? But that server at the diner could be like, 'Hey, saw you on this, saw you on that.' And so it felt valuable in that way. Because I think one of the issues we have is the fragmentation of media and the siloing and the polarization, everything else. So, if you could reach someone just trying to relax at home with their kids, like after a hard day's work, I thought that was a win.
The thing you got attention for during your 2020 presidential run was your prediction that automation and AI were coming for millions of jobs. And people treated you like, in your words, the magical Asian man from the future. Now, you know, Dario Amodei says it, Sam Altman, Bernie Sanders. Why do you think your prescient warning wasn't taken more seriously back then?
Well, I don't knock anyone or blame anyone because back then saying artificial intelligence was going to come seemed kind of like Terminator or, you know, sci-fi, and now it's very much with us. I drove—I came here in a Waymo. I don't know what that says about me. Anyone out here, like, ridden or not ridden?
I've ridden in one. Yeah.
Yeah, they're everywhere here. And I feel like a lot of my stuff in 2019, 2020 aged very well—a little bit too well. And when I get asked now, it's like, 'Hey, how are you feeling?' I feel really, really despondent that we are in the place we are. I think this is going to be terrible for many, many Americans. It's going to suck up tons of value into this super vortex of AI, capital, data centers, processing power, and millions of Americans are going to look up being like, 'What happened to my job? Why is my kid home from college?' and doesn't have a job that requires a degree. And it makes me angry and sad on behalf of those families. So—I mean, I'll be a little more light-hearted for a sec. So, I was with Dave Chappelle, who introduced me and said, 'Here's a guy who got everything right in 2020, but no one listened because he's Asian.' And then got a laugh. [laughter] I mean, I made the case that I made to the best of my ability. And now the truth is that I feel more troubled by our institutional inability to respond to the problems of our time than I do anything else.
Yeah. And especially true around AI. I mean, there is some debate still over the scale of the job loss that's coming in the—
We're going to debate it even as they [__] disintegrate [laughter] beneath our feet. You know what I mean?
Well, that's—I shouldn't laugh because it's terrible. You know, I think you said back in February, you think that millions of white-collar workers are going to lose their jobs in the next 12 to 18 months due to AI. You know, the data sort of tells a couple different stories. Yale's Budget Lab has been tracking this monthly, and they show 55,000 explicitly AI-attributed layoffs last year. That represents just under 5% of all layoffs. On the other end of the spectrum, Stanford finds employment for young workers in AI-exposed jobs down 13 to 20%. Even that larger number measures the problem in the tens of thousands. So if you think like millions are coming, what are the numbers? What are the current studies and measurements missing?
Sure. The easiest people to fire are the ones you haven't hired yet. And I run a company, Noble Mobile. We have offline parties. I mean, people— [laughter] we co-brand—
Yeah, we'll come back to that, sure.
And Noble Mobile has 100% not hired junior engineers and data analysts and other folks that we would have hired just a few months ago because of AI. And if you extrapolate that through the economy—Noble Mobile is not a huge company, but there are millions of companies like us who are each saying, 'You know what, I don't think I'm going to hire that whippersnapper, instead I'm going to have this person use AI tools.' And that's happening 100%. I mean, we're here in Los Angeles, and I think there are a combination of things that are happening to LA, but I would argue that AI is one of the forces that's hurting media production and studios and folks who used to show up to work and shoot in these studio lots every day. So, I'm very happy to be the guy who's like, 'Look, I think it's millions,' and then have that conversation. And if someone comes to me later and is like, 'Yo, Yang, it was really only 700,000. Haha.' Then—
The millions weren't until five years from now. [laughter]
Yeah. Yeah. It's like, 'Oh, you screwed up by 18 months.' Because there are so many people who have been right there saying, 'We're going to decimate a bunch of jobs,' who now have changed their tune. And they haven't changed their tune because they actually think differently. It's because they've been told, 'Yo, stop freaking people out.' Like, people are very negative on AI. The approval rating I saw was 26%. It's incredibly unpopular. Two different people threw a Molotov cocktail and shot at Sam Altman's house. And so there genuinely was a coming together where they were like, 'We have to stop freaking people out about job loss.' Everyone then—like, the CEO of Goldman Sachs writes a New York Times op-ed being like, 'Everything's going to be fine.' Meanwhile, I talked to someone internally at Goldman Sachs who's like, 'Oh, yeah, we're going to fire 40% of our own people.' So, you know, who do you want to believe? [laughter] It aggravates me. So many people are full of it on this because they'll say one thing in public and then their organization's doing something different.
Well, then the other argument you hear is, yes, the transition is going to be rough, and transitions between, you know, economic revolutions often are, but what happens is new jobs are created where old jobs disappear. What's your level of confidence that that also happens this time around, or is this a transition that is different than industrial to post-industrial to information economy and all that?
Yeah, this time is different. It's going to be terrible. And, [laughter] you know, I have numbers that I can attach to these things if people are interested. I mean, I'll throw one number out there. There may be 2.9 million Americans who work in call centers doing customer service still to this day. And AI is going to do a number on that. We can see that very, very clearly. And then imagining that those people are going to get reskilled to what exactly? Like, no one really knows. So, and you know, you then look at the two to three million Uber drivers, and maybe it's like a partial income, but still, I mean, they might be keeping their family afloat. Those are the obvious ones. There are a bunch of inobvious ones ripping through various orgs.
And I think the entire comparison to the industrial revolution is very, very limited and dumb, honestly. I mean, but I hear it all the time. Not—I mean, you're kind of strawmanning it too. Because we've all been conditioned to market logic. We're like, 'Look, we all have to be positive contributors in the market economy,' and like, if you become obsolete, then you must reskill yourself, and like, now everyone's going to become a welder, electrician, or whatever. And it's [__] You know, it was [__] when we said the coal miners were going to become coders. It's [__] now. Like, it's [__] when we said the factory workers are going to become nurses. Like, it's [__] now when we say college grads are all going to become handymen, especially when 60% of college graduates are women and 2.8% of electricians are women. So it's like, you look at that math and be like, 'Oh, what's going to happen here?' It's like, is everyone just going to change who they are so that— Yeah. It's, yeah, I—you can sense where I am on this particular topic.
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So then the question is, what to do about it? You've talked about how it's time to stop taxing labor and start taxing AI.
What does taxing AI look like to you? Token tax, payroll tax equivalent? Like, what's the—there's a bunch of different proposals out there.
Yeah, I like a token tax. I think it's very direct and measurable. I like a value-added tax, and we're the only major economy that doesn't have one. It's very hard to game your way out of if you're a major company. It would include AI in the data centers. And more and more value is going to flow towards these global tech companies, and we're not going to see meaningful tax revenue. So that's really the problem to solve. If you solve that, then you can get more of the value into people's hands. I mean, the economy might be 31 trillion dollars. Now AI is going to grow the top line. It's just the issue is that most people are not going to feel those benefits in a meaningful way. So there are two mechanisms. One is how do you get the tax revenue, and number two, how does that family feel like it's going to benefit them?
And do you think—so obviously, you know, your big proposal is universal basic income.
Yes. Thousand dollars a month.
Yep. Freedom dividend. Might have to ratchet that up a little bit.
I was going to say, so that was my next question. Like, what, is UBI still the answer? Is it the only answer? Like, how—if we're taxing these AI companies now, then what do we do with it?
We should distribute it quickly and broadly to the American people. And I'll tell a story which I don't think is in my book, which I appreciate you listening to.
And have you written a book, John?
So, did you get a note from your publisher saying, 'Hey, AI wants to absorb your book into the Borg, and they want to pay you $2,500 for the privilege.' Did you get that letter?
I didn't get that yet. Unless someone got it that I didn't. [laughter]
No, I don't think I got it. It might have been right before. Yeah. Not yet. So the point is that our data right now is getting sold and resold for about $300 billion a year, and no American is seeing a dime of that. AI models are now the foundation of these multiple-trillion-dollar companies that are IPOing, and most Americans are not going to see a dime of that unless they somehow get access to the IPO, etc., etc. And so having that value get returned to the American people—if you think about it in those terms, it's actually very, very sensible, and it becomes increasingly necessary as all of this accelerates, would be my argument.
I'm just trying to think of like how this actually works, because right now the revenue of all of the AI companies combined is, you know, it's like what, a few hundred billion dollars globally. That's right now.
And so the worry is that the value from the companies comes after the jobs are just gone, right?
And again, that like, you know, so UBI—that's your old proposal—that's 1,000 a month. That's like a what, $3 trillion proposal a year?
Yes. It comes to a lot less than that because of existing benefits and a bunch of other things,
But let's say order of magnitude like that. That's what we're talking about. I think that's the kind of move that we should make. Right now, US GDP might be 84,000 per head. So, if you think about something for each American to get—if you were to say 12,000 or 15,000, that might sound like a lot of money if you compare it to other things that we currently have coming out of the government. But if you compare it to $84,000 in GDP per person with an up arrow attached to it because of AI—you know, it's going to get to 90,000, it's going to get to 100,000. So at what point do you go to Americans and say, okay, you know, 100,000 per head, everyone's getting 15, and that's going to help us manage the greatest economic and technological transformation in the history of our species.
Yeah, you know, like, that is what I mean, that's what we're looking at right now. I understand the political argument for a universal program like this. When we're talking a transformation of this scale and a problem this large, do you worry that handing out, you know, $1,000 a month or a couple thousand, whatever it scales up to, to people who are pretty wealthy, is taking away resources that could be targeted to helping people through this transition in other ways than just giving them cash? Or maybe it's even giving people who need it more cash. Or maybe it's not even the amount of money. Maybe it's targeting it towards a specific group of people who are going to be more likely to be displaced by AI than other people.
Yes. All right, check it out. If you look at our history, the major other time where we saw this displacement was the trade adjustment assistance, TAA, which was meant to help the displaced manufacturing workers when we started kicking their jobs to Asia, let's say. And we were bad at actually targeting and delivering that at that time, when you could actually point to the town in Ohio and say, okay, we're gutting this factory, like let's try and help people. With AI, it would be very, very difficult to target in any intelligible way, because you know, you have a little company here, you have a big company there, you have folks never being hired. And so when you start looking at the difficulty of targeting, and that any intelligent system is drawing in money from the big winners anyway, whether it's through a value-added tax or an AI tax, then you don't care. And using the most extreme example, it's like if Jeff Bezos gets an extra 2,000 a month, but we're bringing in tens of millions of dollars or more from either his company's activities or him personally, then you don't care about sending the dude $2,000, especially if it eases the administration problem, and it makes it seem fair, politically palatable, appealing to folks. We're just shitty at targeting the gains. And if you start trying to target, you end up in a TAA-type problem. And I'd urge anyone who thinks that we can do this to go look at the history of what happened with the TAA program, because it did not go well. And that was easier to identify than what we're looking at now.
Yeah. You lose—and you lose efficiency, and it's just—it's harder to target it.
It's really sad when you actually see what happened with that program and the displaced manufacturing workers in Ohio and Michigan, where you had a giant waiting list of people to sign up and they never end up getting benefits. Then even if they did get through the program, the impact wasn't what people hoped for.
Why tax and a check rather than ownership—giving everyone ownership of the AI companies and the upside?
I'm open to anything. Okay. You know, it's like I—
I know that's like some of the proposals too, is like, you know, everyone gets a little piece of the upside, and I don't know what you thought about that.
Yeah. No, no, I'm open to it. I think one of the fears I have, I will say—and one reason I love starting a conversation with something like universal basic income—is that let's say that people via the government now become shareholders of some of these companies, and then we can all be like, 'Yay, we have shares,' and then the stewards of that are like, 'Okay, we're going to chill and see and wait,' and then 'I got rid of your jobs but then I'm still not feeling any benefits,' even though technically my government—because we have—you understand. We have two problems in this current environment. One is where's the value flowing in, and then how is it coming back out.
So then the other option that's sometimes seen as like an alternative to UBI is like redistributing work, right, and not just money. So there's job guarantees, shorter work week, work sharing, like they've done in Germany, wage insurance. What do you think about all those?
Again, I'm very, very open-minded, and I love a shorter work week. Love that. The one I dislike the most is something like a job guarantee, because I think you wind up with [__] make-work jobs and people justifying. So my joke with Bernie—we were talking about in 2020—and you know, he was for jobs guarantee and I was for universal basic income. And my joke was, why not distribute gray overalls while you're at it and like a pickaxe? It's like, that's where this lands. But I understand the spirit of it. And I do have an Asian joke here, which is like, I'm Asian, so I love work. [laughter] Like, I love people working. I just think people ideally are creating work for themselves, starting initiatives, organizations, nonprofits, working their faith community, like doing things that they want to do and that they're passionate about. The big challenge of this era, John, is trying to define an economy around human flourishing at a time when our labor will not be meaningful in terms of economic output. And that's a very hard thing to actually accept.
Well, then it is—then it's like the—but then I think like that the problem is so big that, I mean, unless we are giving people, you know, a $70, $80,000 a year salary through UBI, which is—I mean, that's incredibly, incredibly expensive. Like, how are we—do you see a future where like no one's working, where like 90% of the labor is automated and AI is doing it? Like, how severe do you think it gets?
Yes. So I'm 51, and what I say to people is that I'm at an age where if I don't get dumber in a given month, it was a good month. Meanwhile AI might get twice as smart during that month. So saying that, oh, if I take this course or, you know, do this, I'm going to be able to compete, is stupid. It's like the goalposts are just sprinting away from me by the time I even get to the starting block. Like, it's crazy, right? So then after you accept that, then it becomes a question of, okay, how do we make it so that people have a place to go for structure, purpose, fulfillment, community, values, training? You know, when I wake up in the morning, what am I going to do? Right?
And to me, the only satisfactory vision is that we make it so that I have a place to go based upon things that a) I want to do and b) that we need more of. And the three things that most of us can agree on in this dimension would be health and wellness, education, nurturing, and caretaking, and arts and creativity.
Okay. These are three things that most people can look at and be like, 'Okay, AI won't completely eliminate the need for those things.'
Well, here's the thing, is that AI could, for example, do the art much better than I could, but that is not necessarily the point. We're going to redefine the economy around personal fulfillment. Yes, like that. These are things that we have decided we value as a society, because right now we're in this most dangerous of times, which is what we actually value as a society is just getting [__] done, capital efficiency, and we've all brainwashed ourselves into, you know, like hustle mode and like grindy, grindy, and like, you know, all the stuff. And then if someone falls by the wayside, we have mock sympathy for them for like a split second, be like, 'Oh, it sucks for them,' and then be like, 'Oh well,' turn away. Meanwhile, in this case, AI is going to get many, many more of us, and it has nothing to do with my intellect or education or work ethic or character—it doesn't matter, you know, it's like, it's better than me.
And so what we have to do is we have to say, okay, AI is going to do a lot of work and robots are going to do a lot of work very powerfully and effectively. So what do we care about? What do we want more of? What do we want to spend our time doing? So one of the illustrations I pose is that at this point we should all be getting paid to go to the gym. You know, it's like instead of us paying, like, we should be getting paid, and then the personal trainer who's there, all energetic, there to whip us into shape and whatnot, should also be getting paid. And they could be paid in wellness bucks. And then they could take those wellness bucks and then, you know, use it on a salad or use it to go to the game or use it—and they get recognized for the wellness bucks, and like, we could get wellness bucks showing up.
Uh-huh. Who's paying us the wellness bucks?
So, what we need to do, in my opinion, is build a multivariate human-centered economy, okay, around multiple pursuits. And then if you have these wellness bucks as an example, the wellness bucks would be monetized by the federal government. If I was in charge, I'd be like, 'Look, there's an exchange rate, whole thing. You can take wellness bucks and turn them into stuff. You can go to Chipotle, [laughter] get a burrito. You can live great on the wellness bucks.' You can live well on the education and nurturing bucks. And the example I used on the trail is that we have an autistic son. My wife spent years at home with him. The market economy value is at zero, right? We all know that's perverse and that that's immensely valuable. And so she could be getting these nurturing bucks. I mean, we'd have a better name. They'd all be called Yang Bucks, honestly. No. [laughter] And then arts and creativity. If someone paints a mural or goes and performs live, which I love, like at the cafe or whatnot, instead of counting on the charity of strangers, which like, you know—it's very—I always, by the way, give money to any musician I pass, because I have a reputation to uphold, and I'm like—there could be a camera. But the government would say, 'Look, this new currency is real.' Everyone would doubt it at first. They'd be like, 'Oh, like, it's bullshit.' [laughter] But then after you have a bunch of people taking action on it and then realizing that they can carry a balance and do these things and even trade it with each other and do it, you could stimulate billions and billions of dollars worth of activity in each of these dimensions that could occupy millions of Americans very happily, and do it at a fraction of what it would cost if you were paying people in USD.
Okay, this is like a sort of utopia that's sort of on the other side of the transition,
Right? Like, say we could get this. Well, no, by the way, we have to get there as soon as possible.
Well, that's what I'm, but because this chasm in the middle is going to consist of us all freaking out, our kids coming home getting depressed and dysfunctional, feeling like they don't have a place in the world, and eventually we start killing each other, if they're not already there.
No, that's what I was getting at, is that the transition, regardless of what's on the other side of the transition, is the most precarious part here because of politics, right? Yeah. And, you know, 80% of Americans want more regulation. You've got politicians from Bernie Sanders to Ron DeSantis attacking data centers.
I was thinking about something my old boss Barack Obama said to the New Yorker a couple months ago. He said he's been working on helping lawmakers come up with an AI agenda that's not simply a knee-jerk 'screw the billionaires and tech' thing, because the genie's out of the bottle. And he said he worries that without a proactive agenda, some of the populist impulses could go in bad directions that don't actually help people, or reinforce some of the anti-democratic trends we've seen. As usual with him, he's sort of understating the issue here. But it does seem like this could supercharge all of the political trends we have seen over the last decade in ways that are quite destructive, and I wonder how you think about sort of navigating that challenge.
Yeah. The path of least resistance is disintegration, conflict, strife, hatred, like the whole nine. Yeah. And, um, I am Asian. And so one of the things I joke about with my community is like, look guys, we all know that when the wheel of hate turns, it will land on us relatively early on the list. And so we have to try and keep the country strong and whole and together, and keep us from turning on each other. I think it's a noble ambition that Barack is laying out. But right now, let's take wealth inequality as something I think we can all agree is driving nastiness and polarization, anger and frustration.
AI is going to supercharge it all. I mean, anyone sane can see that. And so what you'd have in the best of worlds would be government acting as a counterweight, bringing the folks to the table and saying, look guys, pitchforks are going to come, let's try and figure this out. Like, we don't all want to be using Chinese AI. And by the way, I have an AI joke I'm going to share. This is, it's fun. How far behind the US is China in AI?
Twelve hours, because they wake up and see whatever we did.