The Case for an AI Tax

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This week on the Andrew Yang Podcast. So back when I was looking at this in 2019, 2020, like, to me it wasn't clear that you could identify automation in different contexts. But now it turns out that because of the compute resources and the data centers and the unfortunately being concentrated in the hands of like a small number of firms, it's actually pretty straightforward just to do a flat-out AI tax. And we are back from touring here to take some mailbag questions and also talk about this clip of mine that's gone somewhat viral over the last number of days, which is we should tax AI, not people.

Yeah, you had a little bit of a— I guess it's X now— X spurt. Twitter spurt.

Yeah, it's fun. Like, you put me on CNBC talking about AI and jobs, and then people want to watch it on YouTube afterwards, which is— I mean, I appreciate that because I think most people sense somehow that I'm one of the more honest assessors of what's going on.

It is your lane, bud. It is your lane.

It is my lane. So this is an idea that was broached first. The first time I saw it was the investor Vinod Khosla said we should not tax any income below a certain amount. And his idea was a bit different. His idea was we should tax capital gains as regular income, which— so this is actually something that someone raised to me a long time ago that I think is a very, very important idea. When you make money, let's say from Noble, what kind of tax rate you're paying typically in Manhattan? Yeah, seriously, because we all know Zach's living the bachelor life in Manhattan. So what's your tax rate?

All in federal, state, city is like 45%.

Yeah, yeah, that's about right. Now let's say you have an investment that does well and it goes up and then you sell it, like, do you know what kind of tax rate you're paying on that?

25? Capital gains is what? Isn't it the 20s? Forgive me for not knowing.

Yeah, no, no, it's fine. So long-term capital gains, I believe, is 15.

Okay.

And then short-term might be 25. Yeah. So short-term is you hold it for less than a year. So it's not even like that long-term.

Yeah.

So what that math is saying is that, hey, there's something different about investment income —versus the one you work for. —versus the one you work for. And if anything, we're privileging the investment income because we're taxing it less. So Vanneau's big idea was like, look, why are you somehow rewarding investment returns? It's like, if anything, you should be rewarding labor. So his idea was like, you should just make it one tax rate for both. And what would happen would be that Or he actually said we should just tax capital and not labor below $100K. And what that would mean is that the investor class of the United States would be paying significantly more in taxes. Right now, when we talk about the investor class and this one, the more interesting thing. So what percentage of Americans do you think own stock nowadays?

It's gotten low, right? It's like less than 20. No, no, it's actually—

so less than 20 own the vast majority of it. But in terms of own any stock, it's actually crept up in part because of Robinhood and other others.

So it used to be—

one of my favorite stats used to be that the median amount of stock market holdings in America was zero, because the person in the middle didn't own any stock. Because the number, it was actually zero, because the, the proportion of Americans who owned any stock at all was something like 48, 49%. So if you took the person in the middle, they own zero. Okay. But now the— but now the 49% has crept up because of, I'm sure, Robinhood and some other things where you own like a smidgen. So let's call it now it's like 54, 55%. So the average American now owns like a smidgen. But your instinct around 20% was right in the sense that like the top 20% own something like 90% of stock market wealth. So it's something ridiculous.

So let me ask you this and then we'll talk about your clip and I'll talk about the questions we got. When you raise the tax rate on capital gains, do you discourage investment? if you will, or put, or encourage people to put it in something like a 401k or IRA, or they put in retirement funds, um, or things that are sort of tax-delayed or tax-free vehicles. You're like, what are the repercussions of that in your opinion? Or what have you seen?

You know, I think from a public policy standpoint, you'd want that-ish. So it's funny, it's like, um, like I, I try to take advantage of every tax shelter I can because, you know, you're like, you're sane, you know. So for Like back in the day when I was— I had an employer 401(k), I maxed it out. They didn't match it, but I was still maxing it out because it's like, why pay taxes? I used to max out my Roth. Like, I still contribute to an IRA. And so if you were to say, hey, if I increase the tax rate on capital gains, you're going to flee to more of these tax havens. In theory, that's not a bad thing because we're trying to push people to save for retirement. Okay. In theory. Yeah. Or save for your kids' college. Or spend more. Which is another thing. So as a parent too, there are other accounts called 529s that are dope. So when I, when, you know, it's like, so your kid's born and I was like pretty on it. So when my kid was less than 1 year old, I opened their 529 and then when they're grandparents, you know, when his grandparents were like talking about it, I was just like, send them a link, be like, here you go. Here. Yeah, yeah. Send like, let's, let's talk more money. Well, let's talk about it. But I will say in theory, like, there's no reason you would privilege investment income relative to labor because if anything, you want people to work more. You do want people to invest, sure.

But you want to go to work.

Yeah. Yeah. Really? Like, do you, do you want people to invest more than you want them to work? I would say no. I mean, like, I'd say you want them both, but you prefer them to work.

Bezos, for example, when they talk about taxing the rich, like I'm assuming Bezos just gets paid in stock at this point. Yeah. And so that's considered investment income, I'm assuming. So he's paying whatever the long-term capital gains tax is in terms of his taxes. Now there's corporate tax rates, which are real if they're making money.

Oh, Amazon doesn't pay squat on that.

Yeah, because they don't ever make money. Yeah. Yeah. On paper. So that was one way to frankly tax the billionaires, if you will.

Yeah. I mean, so what— what the node's idea of just being like, look, let's just like start taxing investment income at regular rates. So that would balance things out. His— so his proposal, he says, is revenue neutral, which means it doesn't cost you anything. And when he does, he just swapped essentially investment income and— and trying— and I thought that idea was really interesting because he's right. In theory, there's no reason why you should be rewarding investment income versus people working. And like, yeah, and quote-unquote punishing, you know, sweat and like getting up in the morning and stuff. So, so he said, look, this is going to be revenue neutral. What it would do is it would make it harder for people to live on investment income and passive income. But, you know, that might be fine because you're talking about You know, like the top slice of the population that's really realizing that much. Yep. Maybe retirees. I'd have to look into it.

So you had said we should tax the robots, which is something I'm curious because someone asked about this and I'll give them credit for a question that a lot of people had on their mind. The question was from Diego. He said, you recently posted about taxing AI. He said, won't US AI companies just avoid these taxes? Can you talk more about the issue? And how to hold the tech industry more accountable. Thank you, Diego. And I would frame the question as this: when we were running for president, people— like, there was a robot tax idea thrown out there, and you were big on a value-added tax at the time. And I had a friend ask me this too. He's like, you know, he was sort of anti-robot tax, and now he just went viral for saying robot tax. He's like, did he change his mind, or what changed? And I said, I think I'm curious your thoughts. My, my thought was that I think it got a lot easier to, it's a lot easier to tax an AI company right now 'cause you can track it. There's like a token tax you're talking about as opposed to tracking the robot trucks or taxing the robot trucks or taxing like physical robots, which are harder to track. There's probably self-reporting that needs to happen, et cetera. The tokens, you could probably track that on paper a little easier. Is that where your head was? Or I'm curious what, yeah, no, what shifted?

Oh, part of it really is ease of, recognition and implementation. So now it would be pretty easy to have an AI tax. And Dario Amadei, when he said, hey, you should tax us, he even suggested Anthropic— CEO of Anthropic— he said, look, 3% token tax, essentially it's like 3% of revenue.

That's crazy. He's asking for it.

Crazy, right? So probably while funding lobbyists. So again, again, we should be jumping out of being like, please, Dario, like, let's start at 3%, like whatever you said. And then you would then go to OpenAI and whomever and say, hey, 3% is like the new— 3% would be letting them get off easy. You know, you might want to like turn the dial a little higher. But the fact that he volunteered 3% of revenue, which— so let's just, for— to calibrate for a second, like a very, very healthy company, normal company, because these AI companies are not normal in the least, but a very healthy normal company might have profit margins of 15%. And so if you were to do 3% of revenue it would be the equivalent of 20% of profits in like a normal business context, which would be very high. Like no sane business would be like, yo, I'm going to— I'm going to give up 20% of my profits. Right. But this is not a normal business context. These are like hyperscale, you know, the margins are whatever they are. And so then— so he's like, hey, 3% of revenue. So back when I was looking at this in 2019, 2020, like to me it wasn't clear that you could identify automation in different contexts because I thought it'd be like a million different— it would be like, like software apps and the rest of it's like, yo, like, you know, or like the kiosk at the fast food restaurant. It's like, like, yeah, like, what is it? And so I was like, look, let's just, just do what every other modern country does and do a value-added tax, which would work pretty well, honestly, because it would still encompass some of these AI things we're talking about. But now it turns out that because of the compute resources in the data centers and the unfortunately being concentrated in the hands of like a small number of firms, it's actually pretty straightforward just to do a flat-out AI tax.

So the CEO of Anthropic said they're going to wipe out 50% of white-collar jobs. Entry-level was the specifics. Okay. Well, entry-level white-collar jobs. Yeah, which is crazy. That 3% tax, let's say we implement it. What do you do with it? You know, can you— do you set up— I know we talk about— you've talked about retraining a lot, which is not great, um, very ineffective, I guess, to put it lightly. What do you think? Do you set up a new UBI fund, like transition fund?

What do you think? Yeah, I would set up like a giant worker transition fund, uh, human fund, whatever, to take the money. And so one of the things that pisses people off about our current state of affairs is if I were to send the federal government $10 billion heroically, if I was a company or individual, like nothing would happen. Like no one's life would improve. Yes. It would just mean the deficit got shrunk by like some tiny— theoretically— smidgen, maybe. And so in this instance, I would take the AI tax and stick it in a fund that was explicitly going to get distributed to— cash people.

Yeah. It's one of the things, like a lot of the problems we have education, veterans affair, like things you look at, like money is not the root of the problem. We spend more money per student nationwide with worse results. Veterans Affairs is a good example. We spend a lot of money per veteran. We still got veterans.

Yeah. I mean, some of, some of the numbers that are getting like, you know, used as cudgels, which is appropriate in many instances. New York City is spending over $40,000 per student per year, which means that in any classroom, let's say, of 30 students, and then like $1.2 million is being spent. And so then you look at it and you're like, how many teachers are there? What are the teachers getting paid?

They're not getting anywhere close to that.

They're not even— you know, I saw a stat that made me super sad where it talked about the proportion of teachers that are very satisfied with their job.

Did you see this? No. Was it so sad, man?

So it was 52% in 2008, which makes you pretty happy. Teachers are happy with their— yeah. Now it's like 12%. Oh, and apparently they're saying that the kids are just terrors now.

And like, those screens don't help.

And some of them attributed to screens. They said the kids— well, you know, they said they're not curious, they're not interested, they're not passionate, they don't read. Um, they're, you know, it's like an army of screen zombies. This podcast is sponsored by Helix Sleep. I've always been a mattress guy since my 20s. I always thought if you're gonna do something for 8 hours a day, you should try and do it right. It's why I've been so happy with my Ultra Dawn firm mattress. From Helix. I took the sleep quiz, I said I need a lot of support, and the strange thing is not only has it been a game changer for me, but it's my family's favorite mattress in the house, even though I'm the one who took the sleep quiz, not them. Don't take my word for it. Helix is the awarded mattress from Forbes, Wired, and they give you a risk-free experience where you can hang out with your mattress for up to 120 nights. I know, that's nuts. And then return it. What? It's a limited lifetime warranty. They'll ship it right to your door. Go to helixsleep.com/yang for Memorial Day sale, 27% off site-wide, exclusive for listeners of the Andrew Yang Podcast. That's helixsleep.com/yang for 27% off site-wide, exclusive exclusive for listeners of The Andrew Yang Podcast. Make sure you enter our show name after checkout so they know we sent you. Helixsleep.com/yang. Thank you, listeners. Please make sure to like and subscribe. And if you have any questions, send them to mailbag@andreyang.com and We'll do our best to answer them. Thank you. So yeah, it would be distributed to people and families. You might want to try and parse out people who are most affected, but I, you know, I might not mess around with that. To the extent that there's a population that I would be interested in trying to funnel more of the resources to, it would be people in their 20s. Yeah, because like that, that career ladder just got blown up. And so then, seriously, so yeah, what happens? I, I was reading, I think it was a Wall Street Journal article about a finance major from University of Delaware who lived in Long Island. And he, you know, graduated in 3 years, apparently, you know, like a hard-charging type. And then just couldn't land a finance job. And so, so now he's working at his parents' landscaping job in Long Island. He's like, look, You know, do I like— I mean, he's like, I enjoy aspects of the job, but do I occasionally go on LinkedIn and try and like, you know, like see if there are any openings for me? He's like, but I feel like that shit might, might have sailed already.

Yeah, I mean, this career stuff, the longer you're out of the game, it gets harder to get back in it.

Yeah, it would get harder and harder. And the thing is, like, if you were part of a family business, I think that's awesome. And I, you know, I guess I'll speak to some of like the Asian immigrant-y stuff. So some of the kids I went to school with, their parents ran restaurants or other types of, you know, businesses. And they were like, you're gonna get out of here, you're gonna, you know, you're gonna go to a good school. And so like some of my peers, um, um, you know, like, and then they would head into finance, you know, that would be like the way you make it out. Um, but some of them came back to family businesses in various ways. And I think family businesses are really special. And, um, one of my regrets growing up was that, um, you know, like, that we didn't have a— who— I don't regret—

I mean, my parents— but it would have been nice to have your own family.

Oh, it's just like, you know, I mean, there was an extended period too, like my 20s, being an entrepreneur and everything else. Um, that there's like something to owning a business and, uh, embodying it to the community. And just representing it and sort of having to deliver.

And it's yours. That's why I always like to have my own company or something like that, which is I am my own boss. You know, you're on—

but, you know, as a serial entrepreneur, like, I feel like that sense of ownership and identity just brings out the best in you. Yes. And, and, you know, the good—

I mean, it's like being— I'm not, I'm not a parent, but like, it's like the parents, it's like being the head of house responsibilities on there. Yeah, yeah. You, you walk in the office, you're like, all these people kind of rely upon Yeah, there's a pressure there, but it's a good pressure, you know, so it lights a fire under you.

Yeah, so, so for people who are— who had dreams of finance job or whatnot and then wind up in a family business, let me say that there are wonderful, beautiful things about where you are, and there are like shitty things about finance jobs, as, as Zach can attest. Yeah, I mean, there, there's like an aspect of I was, when I was at this AI conference, I was talking about how office jobs are going to get blown to smithereens. And then someone said to me, it's like, is it possible that office jobs are just kind of this weird multi-decade phenomenon from like, you know, like the post-war era to now? And then like, and then maybe we'll just go back to doing other things. And that's not the worst thing in the world. And I heard that and I was like, Look, I kind of get where you're coming from here, but it's going to be a terrible, terrible transition. Transition will suck. Yeah. For the office workers that get laid off or the kids who were trained for jobs that aren't going to be there anymore. Like, it's going to suck. Um, but it's like, you know, eventually we wind up doing things. There's something beautiful about, uh, like doing something that people in your community want and need and doing a good job regardless of whether it's like super intellectual type work.

The majority of the smartest, wealthiest people I know push paper for a living. Yes, they do. You know, they put— they're looking at numbers. I mean, it's investments or selling other people or pushing numbers on a spreadsheet.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, sure. It's like the finance, uh, yeah. I mean, because we live in New York City and like, you know, one of like— I mean, that's the industry here.

Yeah. And is that— yeah, if that changes, I agree with this, but maybe not, not maybe not a bad thing, but the transition, man, it's gonna be awful. It's gonna be awful for a lot of people. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So that, that's the, the gist of it is like tax AI, stop taxing, uh, human work because we're gonna want more of the, the latter.

I love this, man. 'Cause you, one of the things that makes it harder. So politicians, for example, like Bernie Sanders is like Medicare for all, Medicare for all, Medicare for all. And if you said, hey, like if you gave him Pete Buttigieg's proposal, like Medicare for all who want it, let's get 60% of the way there, whatever it is, he'd be like, no, Medicare for All. You before were like, the robot tax is not going to work, UBI. And now you're like, well, robot tax might work now. So you're like, I'll do a robot tax. That's fine. And UBI. Yeah. And UBI. Do you ever like— do you ever think about that, how your political instincts are to adjust with new information as opposed to most people's political instincts are the exact opposite?

Well, I mean, I feel like this thing is very, very close to where I was.

Yeah, you're not— I mean, not shifting your principles, and you almost never do, but the tactics to get there, you'll shift. Sure.

Yeah, no, I mean, it's like on this one now, I'm, I'm, I'm feeling quite sanguine, especially because one of the CEOs raised their hand and be like, oh, I'm just gonna put on a token tax. And then people be like, hmm, token tax. And again, I was like, why aren't legislators tripping over themselves, um, to say yes to that proposal?

Is that because There's a lot of lobbying money going on.

Everyone's very scared. By the way, simultaneously, and you talked about this, you mentioned it like in passing, there's a candidate who's been on the podcast, Alex Boris, who passed a very sane AI safety bill in the New York State Legislature, and now they're spending millions hammering him because they don't want him to get to Washington. He's, by the way, he has a computer science degree. He's like trained.

So I've gotten his hate mail. If you will. Yeah.

They're like, oh, we can't have that guy in Congress because he actually can see through our bullshit. Like, it's, it's bad.

Sometimes the hate mail has the opposite effect.

Like, I didn't know who he was, but now you're like, why they hate this guy?

Yeah, most people like that.

It's so jacked too. It's like they're like, oh, he worked for Palantir, which he did for, you know, a couple of years, and then he left to become like a state legislator. And so then it's the tech companies being like, he worked for one of us, like, like, hey, he must be evil. Yes, that, that, I mean, that's the—

we only hire bad people.

Yeah, he's fucking terrible to work for us. We're gonna spend millions trying to— that's funny—

destroy his— that's the game, man. This game's so nonsensical.

Um, yeah, so that— anyway, um, Alex Boris, you're in New York 12.

Let's dive into some more questions, man. We got one. This is an interesting one. And talking about fixing things. Greetings. My name is Nicholas. Thank you, Nicholas. And I am extremely concerned about what's happening in the country. So are we, bud. And want to take action. I'm originally from Georgia and I've served in the Marine Corps for 4 years, reaching the rank of Sergeant. Thank you for your service, Nicholas. I later received a political science degree and now teach civics in high school. Wow. If I am interested— yeah, we love your resume for this. Uh, if I'm interested in running for office under the Forward Party's values, how should I start? Are there people that can mentor me and help me reach my goal? We would love for you to run, Nicholas.

Um, I, I will say too, um, that when candidates come to me, um, obviously thrilled if you run under Forward Party, but that might not be practical. And in Georgia it's unfortunately an environment where you'd probably end up running as a Democrat or Republican, and then the Forward Party might be able to assist you.

To lean, tip the scale in some way.

Yeah. So what I'd want you to do is go to forwardparty.com, sign up in Georgia, and then send an inquiry. The inquiry, I'll give you a specific email address for folks in this particular situation, Spencer with a C, S-P-E-N-C-E-R, at forwardparty.com, and just write up what you described. But you sound phenomenal. Thank you for your service. Love high school teachers, love civics teachers. And that kind of patriotism is what we need in more of our electeds.

I get this question a lot. People are like, because a lot of what my book was about, like running for office now and etc. And oh yeah, yeah, yes, I So I have this, I have these two like sort of like opposite thoughts. Check out Zach's book, Long Shot. Long Shot. Yeah. And it's a good, it's a, it's a good book if you're trying to start a campaign and think about certain things. And the two thoughts are this. On one end, sort of like the way you are with entrepreneurs, if someone wants to run for office, I want to encourage that strongly because we need, especially if they seem sane. Yeah, sure. And non-purely ideological. You can be, you can have strong views without being a like a complete, like, it's called partisan. Um, so most of the time I want to encourage behavior. Um, the other piece of this is I want to be as real as possible when I talk to people because I think when we went into it, there were so many things we didn't know. And I think it's helpful to start something when you have more of a full picture. Um, it's one of the things I talked to him a lot about is the money piece, which I didn't realize how much money was like driving every day. Like, we— what, so you, you know, you make your website, you get your message, you try to go to events, you try to have rallies, you try to have you try to go to the gatherings of people in your party, et cetera, et cetera. But most of what we did was raise money. That's most what we did is calling people to donate. And the crowdfunding, it's not like you write an email or buy an email list and the funding starts pouring in. Yeah. You need to find—

It would be very strange if that happened.

You need to find this certain number of people in your life that can give a max donation or more than the $5 donation for you to get either your own salary depending on your situation, or, you know, you want that one, maybe two staffers to run your social and your day-to-day ops and etc. And so that's the hard part. But if you can solve that part, then the sky's the limit because then you can exist and then you can exist and you can raise more money and you can get more press and you can get the polling up. And then, then the real money start pulling and then you go up on TV like it's sort of this flywheel thing. But people are like, I've got no money, I've got no connection, I got nowhere to raise money and I'm going to run for office. I'm like, you should. If you, if you want, if you feel it in your heart, but it is really, really hard if it's just you out there pushing on, pulling on string or pushing on string as you say. I'm curious your thoughts on the money piece because I don't want to dissuade them, but it's also real, you know.

Let's just say you're going to find out who your friends are. Yeah, me too. You know what I mean?

Like for me, I'm like, hey, do you want to donate for this thing that I really support? But it's not me, it's my my boss, whatever it is, different ask. But when you're like, hey, will you support me? And you look a friend in the eye and they're like, I'll think about it.

So that, so that, that's going to be the Nicholas journey if he decides to take it on, which is you, you say, hey, I'm running for city council, mayor, school board, whatever it is. And then some of your friends are like, great, what can I do? Like, what's the max donation? I mean, very few people are going to give you a max donation, but Maybe they'll see you like, what's the max donation? Be like, oh, I'll do like much less than that, but it's fine.

And then the other piece I say is it's helpful to have a why, like a really strong, simply put, why I'm running. And most candidates you'll find if you ask that question, like, why are they running? Most can't answer it on the presidential level. You see, you were really good about that. Like, robots are coming, universal basic income, write the rules, the economy. But if you don't have that, it's harder to stand out. It's harder to— because the press is going to muddy your message, blah, blah, blah. Give them a simple one. They'll at least try to include that.

Dude, locally, I mean, there probably won't even be any press anymore.

Yeah. Yeah. Then, then, then it's like door knocking game. You know, you can actually win knocking on 10,000 doors.

It's the shoe leather. It's the Conrad Taylor experience. Yep. Incidentally, congrats to Conrad Taylor. Did you see how his stuff went viral?

Yeah. He's on fire, man. Yeah. Our boy DJ Conrad Taylor. Or it's just Conrad Taylor.

He was the youngest elected official in the state of New York because he just knocked on every door 3 times. So that's why we referenced him. He was, I believe, either 18 or 19 years old. The time. So he just— by the time, the third time around, people were like, don't come back, dude. Like, we said we vote for you last time to stop, stop.

That's him though. He's like, he— nobody outworks him. Nobody outworks him. Yeah, his song was, uh, I guess featured in the Brit Awards. Yeah, which I didn't realize how popular that was.

And Rosalía, huge artist apparently.

But he's— I mean, like, he's a classically trained musician. He's one of those guys, if you're at a party and there's a piano, he can play any song. Like, he's really, really talented and songs are good and getting better too.

But the point was he managed to get himself elected to city council of Binghamton, New York, just by busting his, his tail. Yeah. And so there is that too at the local level for sure.

And local, you need less money, you know, so it's, it's more doable depending how local you go. Yeah, totally. It's a good way to start.

You know, one thing that tickles everyone, though, is having signs. You just need enough money for signs.

Yeah, signs are good. Uh, yeah, and you get— if you can— if you have a powerful why and powerful charisma, can get strong volunteers to show up for you.

Yeah, I mean, in Nicholas's case, he could, uh, give his students credit for sure.

Go, hey, put everybody— here's 50 yard signs.

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Question from Rebecca. Thanks for writing in, Rebecca. On the topic of UBI. Some people may give it a negative connotation or consider it a, quote, handout, unquote. Do you consider UBI to be a human right? How is UBI not a handout?

The argument I made in 2020, which holds up even better today, is that these AI models were written on the back of our data. They're now worth billions of dollars. You see this thing about Pokémon Go? I thought it was apparently a giant data collection. Yeah, yeah.

Pokémon Go is a giant, like, picture, like, video data collection. Move, somewhat genius. I felt a little violated, but—

So I see this as people getting compensated for the value that we all unwittingly provided. Yes. And not a handout. I mean, it's like a giveback or a dividend, really, because it turns out that our data was immensely valuable.

Yeah, it's more of a right as an American citizen in some ways, I think.

Well, I love the term dividend too, because one of my comps was No company has ever in the history of the world gone to its shareholders and been like, hey, we sent you that dividend. Like, did you use it on something good? You know, it's like, oh, what'd you spend it on?

Yeah, what'd you spend it on?

It's like, well, it's, you know, it's your money. Do whatever you want. And so there's no reason why we can't treat everyone that way. I agree.

It's a good question. I think, you know, you can— a lot of ways to frame it. But I think that's the one. The Freedom Dividend, baby. Freedom Dividend. Next question. This one's— I'm actually really curious about this one. This is from Mark. Mark said Ohio House lawmakers recently approved a measure aimed at banning ranked choice voting, something we love, when no municipality in the state is actually using it yet. Some Republicans argue it's the same as counting votes multiple times, or cite Alaska, where two Republicans led in the first round, but a Democrat won with the majority of the votes in later rounds. Is there anything that can be done against simply outlawing ranked choice voting as an option? Who would even begin to address something like this?

Yes. So there have been some anti-ranked choice voting measures in conservative legislatures because they see it as bad for them, which is accurate. It is bad for them. It's bad for them in the sense that it moderates things.

It's bad for anyone on the It's bad for the extreme.

Yeah. And so if you kind of sense that you're in the minority, you have disproportionate control, then you're like, ooh, this modern voting system is bad. The current system's great. Yeah. It's like it gives us control. It gives us power. So there are folks who are trying to fight those kinds of measures. I'm on the board of one of them. It's called FairVote. And so FairVote, by the way, its game plan often is to go to municipalities and have them adopt ranked-choice voting, which requires typically a change to local law, which is more achievable. So obviously detest this kind of anti-democratic maneuvering on the part of a conservative legislature. By the way, Alaska had a proposal to essentially reverse its reforms that narrowly lost. So, you know, like, it's an ongoing battle, but the good guys go by the names FairVote and Unite America. And so if you get on the mailing list of FairVote, for example, you can see what's going on in your community. The best way to keep this from happening is to vote out legislators who want to restrict voting methods. Right, right, right. So it's not, it's not fantastic because Ohio is frankly a pretty red state now. Um, but I, I will say that anti-ranked choice voting, um, measures have generally like not performed that well, right?

By definition, it educates people on ranked choice voting if they're, you know, like a lot of people don't exist, you know, it's not easy thing to explain. That's sort of the hate mail thing I was talking about when people are like, ranked choice voting bad. Like, what is this ranked choice voting? You know what I mean?

It's like it increases awareness of it. Yeah. I mean, I certainly think ranked choice voting is one of the answers to our problems.

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All right, let's close with this, man.

We haven't updated the people on Noble Mobile. What's going on? I know exactly what's going on, but for the audience, how do you think it's going? What's new? Things to share, etc., etc.?

Yeah, we just announced that we are sponsoring Chelsea Handler's national tour. Chelsea's freaking awesome ambassador and brilliant comedienne. I mean, if you see her stuff, she's just so whip-smart. I've been impressed with her both personally and professionally. And we joke now that Noble Mobile's into the 7 figures of revenues.

And I'm not joking about that, it is real.

That's real. But then we joke, it's like, you know, our million-dollar soon-to-be multimillion-dollar, like, wireless empire. But the best thing is when people reach out, and you get this every day too, it's like, oh wow, like, it works great. Like, I'm getting money back every month. Like, you guys did what you said you were going to do. And that's an awesome feeling. We have some other spokespeople coming our way, folks like Chelsea. And because it's a just— they see it's a good thing. It's like, oh, this is actually gonna be good for consumers, good for the people that follow me. So if you haven't already checked out Noble Mobile, please do. If you go to noblemobile.com/yang, it's like the best deal around. It's like 3 free months, which would save the average American $250.

And you still get cash back, so you can—

oh my gosh, then you get cash back. So really, if you think about this rationally for just a sec, You could switch, coast on us for 3 months, get cash back, and then if it's not working for you, just switch back. And so it's just a $250 gift. Yeah. And, you know, and then you're going to find, oh, I see why they did this because the service is great and everything works great. But at a minimum, because the reason why I want to make this case too is that most people are just too scared to switch and/or like lazy or like inertia. I get it. I mean, I've switched a grand total of once in my adult life. Dave Erickson. But if someone were to say to you, look, you spend 10 minutes, you'll save $250, and then you can always just get a better deal from your current carrier, which they 100% would give you, by the way, because, you know, of the way the industry works. So I mean, that sounds like a pretty awesome freaking deal, a value prop. And most of the barrier in this instance is actually psychic.

Yes, I agree. You feel— I've never done this before. It's going to be a pain. It's going to be a pain. The big carriers try to make it a pain. We do make it— so our member experience team is awesome. Real life humans you pick up. Our Google reviews are great. Like our average response time, our customer satisfaction, great. I didn't tell you this. I was in— I went to the Players Championship, the golf tournament this weekend. Really? I went on Saturday. Where was that? So it was Thursday through Sunday, past weekend. Where? Oh, where? Sorry. It's in Jacksonville. So. So my parents live in Jacksonville. And so I was at TPC Sawgrass. It's great. Like, gorgeous. It's like a whole— it's basically like a day drinking event. Like, it's just tens of thousands of people just walk around, like, wow, having fun outside. But it's lovely. We had a good time. But I'll say this. So there's lots of people. At this thing and I've gotten most of my family to switch to Noble. My brother and his sister-in-law, they have like a package with their internet, so they're sort of tied up for a bit. So they're on Verizon still. The rest of the family's on Noble. And we have impeccable service out there and they've got, not exaggerating, SOS on their phones. And I'm like, this is my point, man. You're paying $120 a month for what? And frankly, like the T-Mobile network, which we're built on, is better outside of sort of your major, major cities. Well, it's great everywhere, but it's even better in some of these other areas. And there's, you know, sometimes you're in crowded areas, you get screwed. Not, not with, with ours, which is great.

So you should have shot an ad while you're there, man.

Yeah, seriously.

I'm just kidding. But we've all had this experience too. Like I was abroad with my family and my wife is Verizon's, and her stuff didn't work. Yeah, mine did. Yeah, we have a deal for Verizon switchers too right now.

Yeah, we do a great deal for Verizon switchers. Uh, buy Verizon.

Doesn't want to switch because she was like, we need redundancy in case one of them goes down. That's fair.

I was like, really?

Yes, really. I think she's being lazy. Yeah, I love you, Evelyn, but I don't know.

I don't know if that's true. I think I want to plug the BrainRot. Should we plug the BrainRot app? App. Sure, for us we haven't like fully launched, but it is live.

Yeah, yeah. So there's a Noble Life app now that will measure your brain rot index. You don't even need to switch your phone service, it's just a fun app. And then we give you money for any day that you don't fry your brain.

So if you have Noble, that—

then you can only get the money if you switch to Noble.

If you have Noble, you can basically get— I have my, my brain rot here, and you basically like, we track your brain rot. Keep it under 100, you're doing well. Over 100 means your brain's probably melting, and you get a little brain image. Gets worse. Very proud.

This is ex-brain child. Brain child.

See, but the best, the best part is if you're like, hey, anyone listening is like, hey, I don't know if I should switch yet, or I'm on a, I'm on a, I'm carrier locked for a couple more months, you can join for free. You don't have to switch your number yet, and you can start getting paid to use your phone less. You can try the BrainRot app. We'll give you up to $100 over a period of time for you to keep your BrainRot under 100. And then you can get— we'll grow that cash at 5.5% cashback at 5.5%. And then when you switch, you get the cashback. So fun way to try Noble before you switch, which is cool.

And we're going to do this activation of like a museum of BrainRot. Now we've got some big stuff coming. Yeah, New York, you know, Hudson Valley Ideas Fest coming up on April 25th. Yeah. Yeah. And that's it. So that, that'll be lovely. So we were, we're always out and about. Chelsea's on tour. We're going to be joining her for some of those. Noble, one of our brand values is to be out and about in the real world. So you got to walk the walk. Be human. Yeah.

Be human. With that, that's our, that's our startup date. Startup update.

Yeah. No, it's going great. Thank you for all of you who've checked it out or supported or spread the word. Yeah.

With that great episode, man.

Good to see you. Yes. Thank you, Zach. Thank you all.

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