I think the main gift I have is that I don't socialize well. And I'm sure there are a lot of folks in Silicon Valley who are like, 'I'm smarter than these people. I think I can do a better job,' but then they don't actually run for president.
What is your updated take right now on the impending effect of AI?
When I was running for president, I would talk about blue-collar examples and I would talk about truck drivers. I should have gone immediately to management consultants, law school grads, coders. I mean, if I'd been running around being like, 'Hey, coders, you're effed,' back in 2018, it would have seemed very far out.
If you lose 15 million jobs in the course of 3 years, that's revolution. That is very bad.
You're seeing, by the way, political violence. You're seeing flare-ups. You're seeing deaths of despair. Anyone who thinks that that's off the table isn't paying any attention.
Welcome to the Miners One podcast, where we interview the most interesting people in the world about the winding paths that they have taken to tackle the journeys that they have chosen to go on. Very excited today to welcome two people, actually, one of my partners, Mark, on his first appearance on the Miners One podcast, and someone that, you know, I've kind of seen from afar and admired from afar, Andrew Yang. He's done a lot of different things in his life, but Mark, you've known Andrew for a long time. Tell us a little bit about him.
Yeah. So, I've been lucky enough to know Andrew now for more than 25 years. Really excited to co-host him today. He's the only person I know who's actually been a successful entrepreneur, presidential candidate, author of five, now six books, provocateur, math guy, dad, husband, regular guy, and, lucky to say here, old friend. Really excited to talk to you today about a number of things, but maybe the first is, given the extraordinary career path and the choices you've made. One of the things we talk about a lot at South Park Commons is agency, and how the best entrepreneurs in the world, the people who really bend the arc of history, are people who just do things. They don't ask permission. They just go and get things done. And your career speaks to that in spades. From the Venture for America work to, most extraordinarily, the run for president. I still remember the day you showed up at Garden Health to tell me you were running, and I was very confused at first — running for president of what? And then you actually made an incredible go of it. I'd love to talk about where this agency comes from. Like, what was it in your childhood? What is it that drives you that has allowed you to continue to do things that are really extraordinary, from starting your own political party to now building and running your own business?
You know, I was the son of immigrants and felt out of place when I was a kid, but then also like a sense of struggle that I wanted to overcome. And so I think there was like a chip on my shoulder for a lot of my life. And my mom said to me when I was a kid, it's like, 'Look, if you don't succeed, it's just because you didn't try hard enough. Like your ability level is higher than anyone around you. So if you fail, you didn't exert yourself.' And I took that to heart. I was like, 'All right, I guess if someone else can do it, I should be able to do it.' And Mark was an early influence on me where I saw him running a company called Small World, and then thought like, 'Holy [__], this guy that's not that much older than me, he's like running his own company. Like I need to try and figure out how the hell you end up running your own company. That guy figured it out, so let me try and figure it out.' Of course, it ended up not being that easy. You know, I did start a company that failed. You know, it's not that hard to start a company. It's just much harder to start one that goes anywhere. And so I had a number of stumbles and falls that my Asian parents were very happy to remind me of throughout my 20s. But some of the experiences I had when I was a kid that really hurt me were like getting turned down by girls. And like I felt like if you, you know, can withstand rejection from Noel Ver boys or whoever the heck the girl is, then getting rejected by a company or an investor or a voter is like small potatoes. I was very sensitive as a kid, and so I think it kind of thickened my skin for later.
That's fascinating. I hope Noel knows how important she's been in shaping the future of American politics. I am curious, though, because one thing people do sometimes after failures is a flight to safety, right? You could have taken a big job at a safe company, and instead you kept doing things that were entrepreneurial.
Yeah. So I started out as an associate at a big law firm called Davis Polk & Wardwell that some of you know because it's very fancy. Left after 5 months. So that was my flight from safety. And then start a company that flops, another company runs out of money, another company sort of doesn't achieve its goals. And there was a point in there — I will say this to your audience who are going to, you know, then like — I probably would have fled to safety if safety had been there. I'm like, so I mean, I became a nightclub promoter. I became a test prep tutor. I did a bunch of side hustles because I thought, well, [__], I need to be able to rely upon myself and assume that my company is going to, like, you know, be shaky. Because in some cases, the company — I mean, the company I started ran out of money. So that's on me. But then the next company I joined was, you know, run by other people and ran out of money. So at a certain point, you're like, 'Oh, I guess I should just expect things to run out of money.' And those experiences too toughen me up because it's like, you know, you have a couple of companies fail. I used to joke that no one knows you have a net worth of negative $100,000 unless you're stupid enough to tell them. But if you just met me, you might think I was like a smart guy who had, you know, something going for him and not realize I was a total failure. I guess I really did get toughened up through a set of failures throughout my 20s.
Let me ask a question here, which I've often thought about, which is, you know, I think there's a classic study that shows that people's perceptions around how well markets perform in general are a function of essentially how well did the stock market do when they first entered the workforce. Like, was the stock market booming or kind of like was it like kind of going up or going down when they were in their early 20s, and that kind of forms your perception of like, are markets — do the markets generally go up or do they generally go down, right? Are you default optimistic or pessimistic? So, one of the things I often think about is that I had the good fortune early on in my career to meet someone who is who I still deeply admire today. This is Mark Zuckerberg. Zuck is like in some ways a personification of you can just do things, right? And I learned from him that like age is not kind of a barrier. Like all it is is like a kind of high agency and will, and you can just like there's no problem that you can't tackle if you put your mind to it. So, and you obviously were lucky enough to meet Mark Jacobstein kind of early in your career to kind of like show you that same path. Does that resonate? Like, do you think that this is a function really of this is like a lot of like people's penchant for risk is really kind of path dependent on really like the formative years early in their career, right? Which means that, you know, we really like, you know, something like SPC obviously can play a big part because, you know, and a lot of the other kind of, you know, institutions in the same ilk.
I do think those early exposures shape your perception of the way things go. When I was starting out, it was '99, 2000, and so it's like the waning days of the first tech bubble. And then my company died when the bubble burst. I remember NASDAQ went from 5,000 to 2,000, and companies I'd literally attended launch parties for a few months earlier were shutting down all around me. And so seeing that, you realize like, oh wow, it really all can go away, and bubbles definitely exist and burst. And you know, I saw people ride the hype train up and then ride it down, and a lot of my friends who are entrepreneurs were struggling for the next couple of years. And my wife jokes sometimes that she thinks I'm always waiting for the shoe to drop, somewhat negatively. I don't know if you guys read my book from the presidential run, 'The War on Normal People,' but it's fairly dark. It's fairly dystopian. It's like, hey, AI is going to come, it's going to eat the jobs, like blah blah blah. And I remember when I was doing research for the book, I was like, am I just very pessimistic? And I'm an entrepreneur, so I'm very optimistic by action, but am I pessimistic by outlook? But then I looked at the facts and I was like, no, no, I'm actually pretty confident that this stuff, you know, is going to head in this direction.
I want to ask more about that because there's an extraordinarily extraordinary dichotomy here between you wrote a book, you know, 'The War on Normal People,' and I think you were one of the first people to talk about AI is going to change workforce dynamics in really profound ways. And I think your quote from just a day or two ago was about 40 million jobs that we're going to lose, and I don't think you're wrong. I think hopefully there's a sort of Jevons paradox and lots of other productivity increases will help absorb a lot of that, but there's going to be a lot of pain. And you were one of the very first people to talk about it in a very blunt and real way, and it led to conversations about UBI and a bunch of other things we can talk about. You're also the same person who wrote 'Smart People Should Build Things,' which is a deeply optimistic book about the fact that the smartest people should be making stuff and maybe not working for Davis Polk and maybe, you know, think about not going to McKinsey instead, like make stuff. And you have the pessimistic piece and the optimistic piece, and how they all sort of fit together for you and what you do with that tension.
So again, I consider myself optimistic by action. Like I wake up every day saying, okay, Noble Mobile is going to save Americans billions of dollars and get us off of our phones. You know, stop the brain rot, touch grass, look up. So it's all very positive. That said, I also listen to data and numbers. And what happened to me was I ran Venture for America, which had very, very positive goals, and realized that for every startup that creates 50 or 100 jobs, there is going to be an innovation that decimates 10 times as many jobs. And so it's like, well, like if I'm going to be clearheaded about this, I'm pouring water into a bathtub that has giant holes ripped in the bottom. So like, does it make sense to keep pouring water? Now, if someone comes to me and says, 'Hey, my jam is pouring water,' I'm like, 'Fan-fucking-tastic.' Like, you know, do that. Love it. You know, you employ those 50, 100 people, you're going to change their lives and careers. I mean, I've done that, and it's some of the stuff I'm the proudest of. But having traveled the country even at that point, you see that first, high school graduates outnumber college graduates in this country 2 to 1. And a lot of the innovations I hoped that would employ lots of people just aren't going to employ a lot of what I called normal people, because like the normal person in America is not a college graduate even today. I mean, you know, even after this number of years, like I think the proportion of college graduates in this country might be 38%. And so I started to enlarge my perspective, Mark. I think like I'm really today very positive about my life, my family's life. I'm positive about your lives, the two of you, because I have a feeling they're pretty good. But then, you know, I took a look around by the numbers and was like, 'Yo, this is going to go really, really poorly for like the two million call center workers, the 2.8 million truck drivers, the three million clerks, or like whatever the categories were.' And so that's when I started to think about running for president because I thought that was the only thing that could make a difference at the right scale.
I will give you a bunch of credit. You saw that [__] a lot, like a lot earlier than most people. Like, and you know, I live — me and Mark — we live in a world where a lot of people like to make predictions, but I think you saw that way earlier than most, and it's obviously accelerated even in the last like two or three years. So that's props on that. That's — that is, you know, a lot of people think, yeah, that's props.
And I actually — it's related to a question that I had in general. You've seen trends before people. So you were talking about job displacement and what it was going to mean before anybody else, and UBI before anybody else, and then it was actually Sam who came along soon thereafter, and I think probably largely inspired by you. You're also like the first Democrat to talk about, you know, the problems of cancel culture and folks being overly woke, and problems with two-party systems and the need for things like ranked-choice voting. You've always been, I think, out ahead and a provocateur. I mean, now, you know, talking about the addiction to mobile phones and the fact that we all need to be spending more time IRL, which I think is absolutely true and incredibly important. So, talk to me about like the systems that help you to do this. I mean, you're obviously very sharp. There's lots of smart people who don't see the future so well. So I'm curious about like, is there a thing that helps you to do that? Is there a reason you think that that's been sort of part of your DNA?
I think the main gift I have is that I don't socialize well. And by that, what I mean is like if you stick me with a bunch of people that all went to fancy schools, and like because you know — you know, Mark, I know where you went. I don't know, but I assume it was pretty fancy.
Not as fancy as Mark. You know, I went to Carnegie.
Fancy-ish. Fancy.
Yeah. It's like I am around these people and I just think to myself like, you know, that these people are a slice of a slice of a slice very often. And like I don't think it defines reality. That's the main thing.
And so then when I try and figure out what defines reality, I just look for numbers like, okay, like this is the closest thing I can find to it, and then I try and follow those. I took a test a little while ago trying to identify my political alignment by personality, and I came up completely neutral. Like, you know, I'm just pretty much.
You can feel that, I think, in very good ways in that case. Andrew, you strike me as one of the people who maybe I've met who has the highest score on agency, because most people have all these, you know, provocative ideas but they don't act upon it. They just kind of like have theories, but you actually have the remarkable tendency to go and actually do something about it, and you've done this multiple times. That's very rare, even in Silicon Valley, which I think is probably the best crucible for high agency in the world, in my opinion. But you having done so in multiple domains, that's very rare.
Oh, thank you. I mean, I certainly see Silicon Valley as the crucible, and when I spend time there, I get invigorated. I feel like, oh yeah, like these are people who are doing things. I just think I've picked different domains that a smart person would avoid like the plague, like politics.
It's a tough lifestyle. I still give, you know, your wife a lot of credit for sort of letting you go do that. I gotta say.
Yeah. I mean, I visited Iowa 25 times and Italy zero times in my life. So that's some distinct travel itineraries. But I felt — by the way, you'll appreciate this, Adia, from that comment — if someone starts a business and you ask them how much time are you going to put into this, they'll be like, 'I have no idea, but it's probably at least a minimum of five years,' because you know companies take a while. And so when I decided to run for president, I said I just need to do everything perfectly in my power for realistically it was only like, you know, two years and three months. You know, I declared in February 2018, and also not being, you know, like diluted, like I thought it was probably going to end before the end of the nomination process. So I was like, okay, I just need to be awesome and nearly superhuman for two years, which if you were to say to an entrepreneur, 'Can you do that?' They'd be like, 'I can do two years. I can do two years of just about anything,' you know? Whereas starting a company like I am doing now with Noble Mobile, it's like if you said, 'Hey, I'm going to do this for two years,' you're a [__] terrible entrepreneur because you're like, 'What the [__] you going to get done in two years?' So in a way, I tried to frame it as like running for president was actually easier than some other undertakings.
And more highly leveraged. I mean, this is one of these things, you know, you live in Silicon Valley for long enough and we like to think we're sort of the center of the universe and the companies that we build are going to change the most impactful thing you can do in human society. And I don't want to underestimate the importance of technological advancement. But President of the United States runs a pretty — has a pretty big budget and a pretty big finger on the lever, as we know, for good or for bad. And so I do think it's interesting. Sometimes you get people from DC out here and they're like, you know, people in Silicon Valley are kind of full of themselves. I think it's a useful perspective and reminder every once in a while.
Well, this is a frustration I'm going to express to you guys. I just want to share this with you, too. So, I can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that I had no intention of running for president as late as 2017, because Venture for America operated in 12 cities and none of them were in Iowa or New Hampshire. I could easily have been like, 'Hey, we're going to roll out in Iowa City and Manchester, New Hampshire,' and I never did because I had no intention of, you know, running for that office. One of the things that moved me was watching the Republican presidential primary debates in 2016 and thinking, 'These people are [__] terrible.' Like, you know, you watch them, and some of them I'm sure like maybe some of you know and worked with Carly Fiorina as an example, but like I watched a bunch of these others and I was like, these guys, man. Like I'm like — I mean, I didn't — even then at that point I did not think like, 'Oh, I'm going to do this myself,' but I thought like I'm at least as smart as these guys, and I'm pretty sure I have, you know, like better ideas and better intentions. And I'm sure there are a lot of folks in Silicon Valley to that point, Mark, who are like, you know, 'Hey, I'm smarter than these people. Like I think I can do a better job.' But then they don't actually run, you know, unless their name is Tom Steyer or like a couple of people that have gone down this path. And so that step — look, I don't think everyone should run for president, though. I do think more people should run for president. You know, I think that would be like better, interesting, more dynamic. There's like that sense that so many folks I know from some of these elite circles look and say like, 'I could do better,' but then their life is too good, you know, and then they stop there.
It'd be interesting. I haven't thought about this as to whether or not it is that their life is too good or that even for the folks who are entrepreneurs like, 'I'm going to change the world and make a business,' and it's super hard to do, think like running for president, that's crazy. I mean, like who am I to run for president? I still — I mean, I do remember the day we met at Garden Health and you were like, 'I'm running for president,' and I literally thought to myself, 'President of what?' Because it is such a — like the idea is you do it from the establishment. You weren't already a congressman or a senator or like — it's just a very odd idea, and it shouldn't be. Like we're a democracy. Like our original framers, like they were farmers.
Two rules. It's just natural-born citizen and 35 years of age. There's not like, 'And you have to be an office holder and you have to do like...' No. Very importantly, you can only have done it for a total of eight years.
Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's true too.
Whenever anybody who is in the arena is being criticized by, you know, kind of like the peanut gallery, I'm just like, man, if you haven't been in the arena, then you have no right to kind of like comment on like, you know, what can or should be done. If you've never been an entrepreneur, it's so difficult to criticize people who are going through the journey. Like how do you know kind of like the vicissitudes and the ups and downs of the roller coaster? I mean, you know this — like this is probably your third or fourth company. It is super [__] hard to start a company, right? And if you have never started one, you don't actually realize just the magnitude of difficulty of dealing with your own emotions on a day-to-day basis that you just never have to face if you kind of are frankly like your paycheck is kind of guaranteed on a day-to-day basis, where if an entrepreneur you kind of have to generate that payroll like, you know, every two weeks. So coming back to your point, I'm like, it's great that Tom Steyer is maybe running for, you know, I don't know, it sounds like he might be running for governor of California.
He's running for governor.
And, you know, Tom spoke at SPC a few years ago. And I'm like, listen, I don't know how far you're going to get, but it's a lot of respect for the fact that you're out there doing something, right? Like, you're actually doing something. And I wish more people did it. Frankly, like I'm looking at myself. I'm like, why? I can't run for president because I'm not a — you know, I'm a naturalized citizen, but why can't I think about being a senator or congressman or something, right? And the fact that I don't makes me think about...
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