Andrew Yang on How He Would Cure American Politics

What's the price tag you would put on rationalizing American democracy?

Priceless.

A US senator said to me that we're now at a point where an issue is worth more to us unaddressed than addressed. Because if I don't address it, I can get you mad, I can raise money, I can get votes. What happens if I lean across the aisle and try and solve it? I take a beating. I get attacked as working with the enemy. I'm ideologically impure. My job security goes down. So you have these 2 sides that now benefit from just inflaming and pleasing the most extreme 10 to 12%. And then you have media organizations who separate us into ideological tribes. And then yes, you have social media pouring gasoline on the whole thing. The extremes are just going to get more and more powerful until we can turn their volume down via something like mass adoption of ranked choice voting where these people get capped at a certain percentage but can't break through to a majority. By the way, they're figuring this out in reverse too where they're like, wait a minute, I like just having my sliver of a sliver that I can whipsaw everything. And if you subjected me to actual popular approval, I wouldn't do so well because I'm a maniac.

Hey everybody. I want to recommend a couple other shows that we also run. One is Moment of Zen, which I co-host with Dan Romero and Antonio Garcia Martinez. We talk about everything from tech to history, philosophy. We've also featured Marc Andreessen and Balaji on those podcasts, so I recommend you checking them out. My other show is Cognitive Revolution. It's an AI show that I co-host with Nathan Labenz.

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Andrew Yang is a former founder of Venture for America and former candidate for president of the United States. He's now focused on introducing a third party to our two-party political system. We talk about why politics is broken and how to fix it, the current political landscape gearing into 2024 elections, and an inside look as to what's involved in running for president and what he would've done differently. We also talk about universal basic income, Fixing California and Fixing Media Polarization.

Andrew, welcome to Upstream. Thanks for joining the podcast.

Great to be here, Erik. It's been too long.

Yeah, absolutely. So by way of introduction, you have— you're working on the Forward Party and you wrote a great book about why we need a third party. Talk about when you realized that the two-party system was irredeemably broken. And that you couldn't change it from the inside and had to do it from outside?

You know, Erik, I'm kind of embarrassed to say it clicked for me after my presidential campaign. So I came off the trail in 2020 still feeling very despondent and negative about the direction of American politics, even though frankly my campaign overachieved its expectations, my expectations. And so I started doing research and digging into the numbers, and here are a couple of numbers. I imagine most of your listeners are numerate. What do you think the approval rating is for US Congress right now?

Really bad. 40%? I don't know.

50%? 22%.

Oh my God.

What do you think the reelection rate is for individual members?

90%? I don't know. Very high?

94%, which is a better win rate than the Kevin Durant era Golden State Warriors. So then you ask yourself, and most people listening to this are techies or business people, and so imagine if you had a company that was pissing off 4 out of 5 customers and then you changed absolutely nothing. So you look at it and you say, well, how can this be? The reason is that 90% of the congressional districts in the US are drawn to be either blue or red. You know if you get to the general, it's going to be a Democrat or Republican. So the only way that an individual legislator can lose his or her job is not to lose a general. The general is unlosable. The only way you can lose your job is if you get primaried from within your own party, which means that you have to placate and please the most extreme 10 to 12% of voters. That's why our legislators seem so out of whack or out of step. A lot of the folks watching this or listening to this have met these legislators in person. And they seem pretty reasonable. But then you place them in a system where all of their incentives are to placate the extremes. You get 2 extremes yelling at each other. And here's the darkest part is that a US senator said to me that we're now at a point where an issue is worth more to us unaddressed than addressed. Because if I don't address it, I can get you mad, I can raise money, I can get votes. What happens if I lean across the aisle and try and solve it? I take a beating. I get attacked as working with the enemy. I'm ideologically impure. My job security goes down. So you have these 2 sides that now benefit from just inflaming and pleasing the most extreme 10 to 12%. And then you have media organizations who separate us into ideological tribes. And then yes, you have social media pouring gasoline on the whole thing. And all of this gets worse, not better. So this is what I figured out in 2020. And I said, how the heck do you interrupt this dynamic? How do you change it? It's getting worse. I realized that you can't do it from within the system. The best way to do it would be to get rid of the party primaries and install an all-party primary with ranked-choice voting. Now, that sounds like magic or impossible, but it's been done in 3 states now, Maine, Alaska, Nevada. In Alaska, you saw immediate results where Sarah Palin loses to Mary Paltola. Lisa Murkowski survives despite voting to impeach Trump because there's no Republican primary. So converting Alaska to no-party primaries cost $6 million. To convert Nevada, and it's a 2-step process, cost $17 million in 2022. What's the price tag you would put on rationalizing American democracy?

Priceless.

Well, we're spending $8 billion every 4 years hating each other. So what would you invest to try and cure it? So this is what I figured out, believe it or not, like 2020, and then I said, okay, I get it. This can't happen from within the 2-party system. You need a 3rd force. And that's when I started the Forward Party. And as we're having this conversation, the Forward Party is now the 3rd most resourced political party in the US. Now, I will admit there's a very steep drop-off between 2 and 3, but hey, we've been at this for a year and a half. At this point, 50% of Americans say they're independents. Most of the people who are watching this or listening to this just think, okay, Whatever's going on is not working. And you would never accept this in your company in any other context, but they try and condition us to be like, oh no, this is appropriate in politics. It's not. And it's going to lead us to disaster. So that's why I started Forward.

And why have third parties traditionally, third-party candidates done so poorly? And what needs to be different for them to actually have a chance? Some people say there's kind of this efficient market hypothesis for politics where it's just 50 on one side and 50 on the other and that's just how it ends up. But you think it's probably more structural. Why haven't they done well and what would need to happen for it to really compete?

Well, the main reason why it's so hard to compete is that we have this archaic plurality voting system where you get one vote, I get one vote, and then whoever gets the most votes. It has so many problems, but The main problem is that it blocks out any new entrant as the spoiler. So if you convert to ranked-choice voting in all-party primary, then anyone could vote for anyone and then you would see more dynamism, more competition. Even if it was the Republican or Democrat who won anyway, their incentives would be dramatically better because instead of just pleasing the 10% to 12% on the side, You actually have to serve 51% of the population, which is what we pretend is happening now, but it's not. That's why you wind up with these policies that just seem so out of step.

Let's say you're— if you're running again, do you believe that you have a better chance of winning as a third-party candidate, or that even if you win under the, let's say, the Democrat Party, that, you know, it's still a broken system and you can't really make the change that you want to have?

Well, one of the jokes I tell— but it's not a joke, it's serious— is that I prefer good people to not good people. I prefer moral people to immoral people, but we have to get over this mythology that if I get a good moral person into office, then our problems are solved. I mean, at this point, we have to have the experience to know, look, you get a good person in the system and then their hands are tied and we continue to be frustrated and the pendulum swings and the rest of it. At this point, the most important thing we can do is cure the system. So the question is, how do you activate a popular movement around curing the political system of its bad incentives? The answer is to do away with party primaries, which in my opinion, if you had $250 million, you could get it done in 5 to 8 states. Then imagine 12 US senators walking around that didn't have party primaries anymore. I know for a fact that half a dozen senators have gone to Lisa Murkowski on the floor of the US Senate and said, we envy you so much. You don't have a primary. Because if you don't have a primary, you could actually do what you think is right instead of being like, okay, what the heck does the base think? And I've interacted with the bases of both parties. And let me just say that they're not the common sense majority on a lot of fronts.

What is the relationship between money put in and these laws changing? Educate a non-insider audience of how that actually works.

It's so fun, man. So this is what I figured out. There are 25 states in the country that allow you to change the primary system via ballot initiative. Nevada is illustrative. $17 million was invested on getting this ballot initiative on the ballot in Nevada. The first advertisement was a military veteran looking straight to camera saying, hey, I went overseas to defend the country. I came home. I can't vote in our primaries and I don't think that's right. The average Nevadan looked up at that and said, that guy really should be able to vote. Now, the Democratic Party in Nevada spent 7 figures on legal challenges to this ballot initiative saying it's illegal, it's unconstitutional. They lost because it was totally legal, but we had— or the parties behind this ballot initiative had to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on legal fees defending it, had to spend 7 figures getting it on the ballot. Then spend millions on that advertisement and getting that advertisement in front of Nevadans. So both parties came out against this ballot initiative, but it won anyway, 53-47, because most Nevadans were like, wait a minute. Shouldn't I be able to vote for whom I want and shouldn't that military vet be able to vote for who he wants? The counterargument from the Democrats was, no, no, no. It would be too confusing to have the ability to vote for anyone of any party. There are 25 states that allow for ballot initiatives of this kind. Nevada is typical in terms of the resources required. You're looking at $20 million or so to have a shot in, let's call it Missouri or Utah or any of the other ballot initiative states. Then the other 25 states are legislative states, which means the state reps have to pass it. Now, that seems very, very difficult. But we had— there's this massive groundswell in Minnesota where they're looking at it. The governor of Connecticut came out for it last year, and that's a legislative state. This is one reason why Forward is so important because imagine if 5 to 10% of Americans who are sort of swingy and in the middle raised their hands and said, hey, what we want most of all is for this system to get fixed. Then if you have a close race like in Connecticut, Then the powers that be say, like, how do I get your 5 to 10%? Like, you know, go behind ranked choice voting and no, you know, and no more stranglehold. Like, you know, I guess I might have to hear you out because you might be the swing vote. If you even look at 2024, the presidential, there are going to be 8 swing states that decide everything. It's going to be Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, New Hampshire and Georgia. So imagine if you had half a million swingy independents in those 8 states that said, we'll support whichever party gets behind ranked-choice voting and getting rid of party primaries. You know, like, you maybe swing the whole thing. So that is the, the path. But if you had a couple hundred million dollars, you could take state-by-state shots in places like Nevada with, in my opinion, real success.

Yeah. So is that the sequencing of your plan to try to make what happened, what you guys did in Nevada, in, you know, a dozen or so states, uh, to get, uh, you know, uh, do away with primaries, as you mentioned, plus, um, and then try to pull off ranked choice voting? Like, take us to, you know, step 2 and step, step 3. Like, what happens after this?

Well, the fun thing is that the way that the Nevada ballot initiative works is that if you have an all-party primary and then it's decided by ranked choice voting, it's an all-in-one, uh, reform. But Nevada's constitution requires you to do it in 2 steps. So this is going to be on the ballot again in 2024, and I think it's going to take another 17 million because the parties this time are going to be like, oh my gosh, the people want this. We have to stop this. We have to make it so that people are under our thumb still. So if we can put this through in Nevada and then get it on the ballot in 4 or 5 other states in 2024, Arizona's looking at it. Utah. If you have a bunch of states looking at this, let's say you have 3 out of the 5 pass, then we could wake up in 2024. By the way, this would be underreported too because the media would all be like blue, red, blue, red. And then you wake up in January and you're like, wait a minute, there are now 10 US senators who all of a sudden seem a lot more reasonable and rational because they don't have party primaries anymore. And then you could have this swing coalition in the middle of the Senate Without even having, for example, like a forward party candidate have to win. This is one of the big misconceptions. So we're trying to cure the incentives. And 2024 to me is a massive opportunity, but it's also— there's a lot at stake because let's say this doesn't happen in 2024, we might not have unlimited time before the entire system kind of, you know, frankly disintegrates.

You have an upcoming book that imagines what could happen if this system disintegrates. Why don't you plug that a little bit and talk about what could happen?

Well, my last book, Forward: Notes on the Future of Our Democracy, tries to lay out this case that I'm describing, that it's like the party primaries and the polarization are tearing us apart and there is no cure from within this system. But stories are very powerful, and so we decided to try and paint a picture where it's like, how does The Last Election is the name of this political thriller. How does the last election look? And there are going to be real constitutional challenges probably as early as 2024. So unfortunately, it's not very speculative, this novel that I co-wrote with a guy named Stephen Marsh who wrote a book called The Next Civil War. So that gives you a sense of it.

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And so yeah, is the concern you have is that the person who wins just tries to keep power forever? Is it that a civil war emerges? Because like, What is sort of the disaster scenario?

Well, so I want to just paint a picture in real life, which is not what the thriller does.

It's fine.

Joe Biden is probably going to be the Democratic nominee. Donald Trump is probably going to be the Republican nominee. Combined age, 159. 60% of Americans aren't excited about either of those options. So it will show just how ridiculous the two-party system is. But let's say Trump loses. What are the odds of Trump saying, hey, it's stolen, it's fixed, we won, and go protest at your local state capital?

Probably pretty high.

I'm going to suggest that that's pretty high. And so you could have this contested election. You could have various Republicans in Congress refusing to certify, in part because those Republican members of Congress often get death threats around this. When 10 House members voted to impeach Trump after January 6th, that number was 25 or 30 just minutes beforehand, but their phones all blew up with death threats and then a lot of them stood down. And by the way, of those 10 who voted to impeach Trump, 8 were out of their seats even before the general. So Republicans knew it's essentially professionally suicidal to go against Trump. It's one reason why getting rid of these primaries is so important because Lisa Murkowski, The only Republican senator who voted to impeach Trump who was also up for reelection in 2022. But because there's no Republican primary, she managed to defeat a Trump-endorsed challenger who, by the way, would have absolutely wrecked Lisa if it was a Republican primary. And then the numbers bear that out. But she was like, look, I can go to all Alaskans. And then she managed to win.

And so is the goal ultimately of the Forward Party to have a candidate, let's say in 2028 or something, that could actually win? Or is it That would be nice, but it's more important to be a check on the current system such that you have more reasonable people in office.

We're practical and opportunistic. There are half a million local races around the country, 70% of which are uncontested or uncompetitive. So can we introduce competition? I was just in California where I imagine a lot of your listeners are. So this is super important. California is a one-party state. It's supermajority Democrat, 75% of the legislature. So let's say you're in San Francisco and you are upset about the open-air drug use or the homelessness or the public safety problems or what have you. The Democrats in power just pat you on the head and say, hey, you don't have a choice.

Yeah.

Because what are you going to do? There's no Republican real threat here. So we're just going to trade things amongst ourselves and if things get worse, not better, you're stuck. So that's the way a lot of Californians feel. So we teamed up with a group in California called the Common Sense Party, cacommonsense.org, and we said, look, let's get the 73,000 registrations necessary to start a new party in California. Then all of a sudden, if that Democrat is not delivering, you can run against them as a Common Sense Party. So if you ran as a Republican, obviously a lot of people would be like, no, no, no, but if it was Common Sense, and you're like, I have no idea how to feel about that. Let me dig into Erik and his platform and his policies, and then you'd see they're fairly common sense. So you can introduce competition into a one-party environment that speaks for the majority of the disenfranchised. The same is true in reverse in a place like Missouri where it's dominated by Republicans, and if you run as a Democrat, it's kind of a waste of time. But if you run as Forward, in Missouri, then people will be like, I have no idea what that is. It's essentially running as an independent and then you can absorb all of the minority party and then the reasonable chunk of the folks in the middle who are stuck without an option. So if you're in California and you want to make this happen, come to cacommonsense.org. You can change your registration and we'll just get past the 73,000 and then by 2024, there'll be a new ballot line.

That's encouraging. It is interesting. Silicon Valley is becoming a lot more aware about politics. partially because of the problems that we've been facing in San Francisco. But for too long, people in tech, and you know this, haven't been in tech, have just been too ready to ignore politics and say it's beneath them or that it's not their problem. But once it has kind of been so much in their face, they can't ignore it.

Yeah, I mean, it's fair. And they look around, so they just expect things to work at a certain level. And as long as things were working at a certain level, you'd be like, yeah, I've got a company to build, I got problems to solve.

Exactly.

But then when you're standing on human feces on the sidewalk, you're like, wait a minute, something's gone wrong. And then you look up and be like, why is the system so broken and unresponsive? And it's because of a total lack of competition. They've insulated themselves. Both parties have done it, by the way. Both parties are like, you know what? I prefer a noncompetitive environment to a competitive environment. And so if you raise your hand and say, I think things are going wrong, they'll caricature you as an agent for the opposite party. And that's why you need a third party like Forward. Just raise your hand and be like, look, I can be unhappy with what you're doing and not be a far right or far left lunatic. I'm part of the reasonable, exhausted, suppressed majority.

That's a great term. Speaking of competition, let's talk about why there isn't kind of real competition to Biden or Trump, who most of the country doesn't like. We mentioned some structural reasons, but if you could give any advice to any kind of anti-establishment candidates such that they would have a better chance, or anti-incumbent candidates, what would that look like?

All right. The Democratic Party, the fix is in. People have been told it is professional suicide to run against Joe Biden because he's an incumbent president. We need him to defeat Trump, etc., etc. Now, a majority of Democrats, according to polling, are uncomfortable with Biden running again because the man's going to be 82 at the end of 2024. I mean, you know, there's a 44% chance he expires before the end of his second term, and no one's allowed to speak of that, you know. So, so, uh, so a lot of people are uncomfortable, but Governor Newsom, Governor Pritzker, Governor Whitmer, Governor Murphy, all of whom want to run for president, have been told like, look, stand down and wait your turn. So everyone's just going to clap, clap, clap. for Joe, which means that the only people who will run are people from outside of the establishment. And then, by the way, the media and the DNC are going to totally ignore and suppress whoever his challengers are. Example, and this is a very, very big example, they haven't even scheduled any debates yet. They're not going to have any debates. You know what I mean? This is going to be Joe, Joe, Joe all the way.

Yeah. So that's the Democratic side, even though, again, Is it because they just think that Biden is the best shot against Trump because he's the incumbent? If they thought that someone else had a better chance, they might be encouraging him, or just no?

They don't even think that way, Erik. You could show a member of the DNC polling being like, hey, you know who does better against Trump? Governor Murphy. And then they'd be like, doesn't matter. People underestimate the institutionalization of what's going on, certainly in a thing like the DNC. I've interacted with the DNC. And these are not exactly independent thinkers and profiles in courage. You know what I mean?

What is their psychology? What's their incentive to keep Biden?

They're like the last of the institutionalists. You know what I mean? I used a couple words in an interview. They're conformist careerists. Again, it's professionally suicidal for you to raise your hand and be like, look, I talked to a lot of people and they just think Joe's Too old in the tooth. We should probably get on with the succession. That will actually get them cast out of their tribe. And so they just keep their hand down, even though privately they're saying the exact same things, by the way. Exact same things.

It's obvious.

Obviously. So that's the Dem side. Good times. And then the Republican side, Trump has a stranglehold on 40% of the base. Maybe a little bit more. And so anyone who runs against him then has to somehow get the other 60% in a field where there are already half a dozen candidates, and that's going to go up towards a dozen. So the hope was that, for some, was that it was going to be Ron DeSantis. But Ron DeSantis has now stumbled out of the block. He hasn't even declared yet, and his stuff has fallen. One of the arguments I made to a friend, which is accurate, Is that you might not like Trump or Trump's thing, but he's a version of a president. And the problem for his opponents is that you look at Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, Ron DeSantis, whomever, it's like you're not sure that they're presidential. And there's all of this energy that goes into trying to manufacture this presidential quality for them. But, you know, like, It's like, is this a version of a president that millions of Americans are going to get behind? There's a creation of a persona that Trump kind of came in with pre-bait, and it's hard to manufacture that level of energy or persona. I experienced this in the Democratic primary. There were 24 candidates. The problem is a lot of them could never get above a line where people regarded them as presidential and the energy that goes into it. If you remember what happened with Obama, all of this energy went into elevating him to that level. So a lot of the Republicans can't get that level of validation.

Yeah. Some people have compared Vivek Ramaswamy to your campaign. Obviously, you guys are very different, but in the sense that someone younger, has fresh ideas. Other people might take some of those ideas in the same way that a lot of people were inspired by your UBI ideas. And it's someone who might overachieve relative to expectations. Do you think that is possible? And more broadly, what advice might you have for Vivek?

Yeah, I saw that stuff and I saw the parallels early on and I liked it because it seemed like he was coming at it from another angle. And would appeal to a different set.

But he's leaned into MAGA stuff. Like, he's— you were trying to be a uniter and he's more, you know, taking— really trying to win the party. I guess he's playing to the incentives.

Well, I think what happened to Vivek is he actually met the base voters. And after you meet the base voters, then you're like, okay, I'm in a room full of, you know, dozens or hundreds or maybe even thousands of these folks. And it's like, I'm not going to stick a thumb in their eye. So then I just— this is, by the way, the trap that everyone's experiencing. It's one reason why this primary system is so distorting. You're around these people and these people tend to be very ideological in a way that the average American is not. Again, we might wind up with this Biden-Trump rematch even though a majority of Americans don't want it because we're ceding the ability to nominate to these slivers of the population. You know what percentage of Iowans participated in the Democratic primary? I was a part of?

No, how many?

Just take a guess.

It's fun. 20%? 30%?

6.5%.

Oh my God.

Yeah. So we're saying to a sliver of a sliver of people being like, hey, tell us what you think, but the average person is disengaged and unplugged. To the extent that there's a weakness in this system, Erik, it actually is this presidential nomination process where if you were to have a more modern accessible nomination process where let's say You and your friends could vote on your smartphone for who you think the nominee should be. You get millions of Americans to participate in that way and then verify it through a personalized QR code sent to your mailing address. Very hard to game, and you scan it and say, hey, congrats, your vote's been verified. You can vote from New York or California or Pennsylvania, wherever. Then the legacy parties would be left saying, no, no, no, that's not real. You know what is real? Waiting to hear what the 6% of Iowans think.

Yeah.

They'd be like, wait a minute, that makes zero sense. I don't give a shit what Iowans think the rest of the time. Why do I care this time? So the parties have a couple of mechanisms to lock the process down. Number one is the calendar nominating states where it's like a very, very small sliver of the population and then the media. That's one reason why someone like Trump has these massive structural advantages because you have to go compete among the sliver and then someone goes there and is like, holy shit, the sliver is really, really Into this MAGA stuff. If you go at it as a reasonable, solutions-oriented person, I think there'll be at least one Republican that takes a shot at it. You probably get 15 to 20% of the vote. And I say this because there have been candidates that tried this in a place like the Ohio Senate race, a guy named Matt Dolan. And I think he got about 20%.

Yeah, the Iowa 6% reminds me of kind of like the Yelp problem where if your reviews on a restaurant on Yelp, it's mostly the people who either hate it or love it, but it's the extremes on both sides as opposed to what does the average person think of this restaurant?

That's a reasonable summary with what we're facing, Erik. And then we have to try and empower the folks who aren't posting Yelp reviews.

Exactly. I'm curious for the incentive for the fundraisers. Give us a little bit of— my sense as being an outsider is that people fundraise, some because for the good of the system, others and maybe more so because it's in their self-interest for their companies somehow. Paint a picture of— you mentioned what's the price of rationalizing our democracy. I guess that's the more good motivations reason to donate. Why is it in people's self-interest to get involved here?

So most business people are dismayed by the state of politics. It's making their operating environment all of a sudden much more uncertain. It's also tearing their company cultures apart because people are joining their company and then they want the company to engage in politics in a way that maybe they're not into. So a lot of business leaders are supporting Forward because of what I call enlightened self-interest. Like, you know, how much is it worth to me to have this return to sanity for American politics? And most business people are not super ideological. They just want things to work better. There's a lot of mystery and confusion as to why things are so distorted. And one of the primary messages I want to get out there is like, look, they're distorted because of bad incentives. Let's fix the incentives and introduce competition into places like California. And if we had the resources to do so, it's a very, very clear path because at this point, half of Americans say they're independent and everyone's fed up.

Yeah, totally. And I'm curious to what extent there's an opportunity to get more talented people in office and to what extent that is a challenge. or would make a big difference. Because if you look at programs like Teach for America or Venture for America, which you co-founded and ran for many years, what they both did is they raised the status and career opportunities of pursuing a teaching career or getting involved in a startup in an area like Cleveland or Detroit or one of these areas. And so I'm curious if something similar could exist on getting political candidates to run in a way that is almost like YC or something for candidates where you can get really talented people.

So this is a major problem because I know and you know a lot of very talented people who will not run for office in the current environment because they think they're going to get attacked and pilloried and caricatured and the rest of it, which by the way is a very reasonable concern. So these 2 things go hand in hand, is that if you have a reasonable, rational environment, then you'll get better people running. I met with a guy in California this week who wants to run for office but is in fear of getting caricatured. By the way, he's also a straight white man, and then there's this identitarian element too where the consultants will tell you, it's like, well, that's not going to fly. In this environment. And so I told him, it's like, look, if we get Common Sense California on the ballot and you can run as Common Sense, and then you can just actually be you. You don't have to go in there and pander the heck to the base. You can just represent that exhausted majority. So forward, curing the system, and getting good people to run are all very, very much Intertwined.

Yeah. And I think there needs to be education as well, that even if you, you know, don't win and you get caricatured, you know, the process of running— and you're an example of that, and other people are examples of it— can be a career accelerator in that you build this audience, you build this credibility, you build all these skills. And while it may sting at certain times, you know, even if you don't win, although you're obviously running to win, You know, this can take you in other places as well that you might not have foreseen in advance.

Yeah, it's one reason why I think the infrastructure around Forward is so important, because if you're a Democratic candidate and you lose, there's like a holding pen for you to some extent. I mean, it, you know, like that there, they build a bit of a pipeline. They'll give you a post in the party, uh, maybe you'll get like an appointment or a media gig or something, and then you, you get to have another crack. And so we need the same thing for forward-minded independents because like you're suggesting, you might not win the first shot out. Most candidates don't. And if you run, you do build a following and credibility and a track record with a certain group of people that then can transfer to a lot of things.

Yeah, totally. Your candidacy overachieved relative to your expectations, but going back and when you reviewed and reflected, Knowing what you know now, what might have you done differently to have even more success?

This is another reason why I'm so passionate about what we're building at Forward. I remarked that Democrats are the last of the institutionalists. You can tell that's true by their relationship with the news media. 69% of Democrats say they have a high trust in corporate media. You talk to independents, that plummets to 38%. And then among Republicans, it's 15%. So the relationship with the media is very, very important in a Democratic primary. If I were to run as a Democrat, I would be working the press from day zero, and I would get a press whisperer. By the way, those people do exist where they can cajole and use relationships to try and generate neutral coverage where it would've been negative or— Sometimes positive coverage. As someone who is new to the scene, I underestimated the importance of that. Again, there's a lot of institutionalization, and that's definitely true in journalism. Unfortunately, Democratic primary voters really do take their cues from what the media is saying. It's one reason why the fix will be in for Joe so strongly.

I'm sure plenty of brilliant people who've done very well have reached out to you and said, hey, I'm thinking about running. Should I run for something locally? Should I run for something nationally? Let's say this is someone who has been very successful and has an audience already. Let's say someone like Sheryl Sandberg or something has a national audience. What would you advise someone like that? Should they run nationally? Should they run for mayor of something? When you are giving advice, how do you think about that?

I do get those calls all the time. I enjoy them. And I think it's very much case by case. I do tend to advise people to explore why they're running and then make that a reason. I think one thing that people really detest nowadays is the sense of careerism in a lot of these lifelong politicians. So I said, look, just have a reason that's deep enough that win or lose, you'll feel really good about your run. And then try and run for a position that would genuinely allow you to make a difference, uh, uh, like on that cause, on that issue.

And then in terms of give more, uh, whether it's mayor or something nationally, say more about what's involved. Like what, what's, what's the job like? You know, when do you know if you're doing well? Like, uh, you know, what do you need in order to build a real, um, candidacy?

Well, it, it's fun, Erik. So I approached My presidential campaign is a startup. And so you have your angel funders, which are essentially your friends and family, very much like a startup. Good news for them, a lot of the time the most they can give you is $2,900. And then you try and find the next rung of supporters, build a team, have some folks around you that you like and trust. Issue that a lot of folks run into if they're running from outside politics is that most of these races are actually controlled by a relatively small number of voters who are going to take their cues from, uh, like a small set of institutional leaders. And you need an overwhelming level of resources and a compelling message to even have a chance of dislodging that. And even then, you will probably fail, uh, by, by the numbers. Because a lot of the folks who are participating are inertia-bound. The average Democratic primary voter might be something like 60 years old. You know what I mean? So a lot of the folks you and I communicate with or even use social media or podcasts to communicate with, they're going to be a different demographic. A lot of them are not as politically engaged. You have to reach this, like the average mainline voter in that district or community. And by the way, those institutions are getting weaker, but they still have a stronghold in a lot of these environments. And so we keep testing it, being like, hey, can someone break through? Can someone break through? There are going to be more and more opportunities, but right now there's the startup organization building, and then there's this plugging into mature relationships. And then you get there and, oh my gosh, there's a person who their entire thing is having people kiss their ring so that they can push their people in a direction. But in some of these environments, that's all that matters. All the other stuff you do will be secondary. We saw it in the Democratic primary where nothing mattered until Jim Clyburn said, hey, we're going with Biden in South Carolina. Then 60% of South Carolinians were like, all right, Jim says so, let's do it. Then Joe Biden can get wrecked in all the states that preceded that.

It's interesting. I heard a story about how an early employee at Stripe found AOC and either managed her or worked with her and was partly responsible for her success. Although, of course, she's a natural media star herself. I'm curious, how much can it be like, hey, we're looking for someone with these demographics or these policy issues, and that's likely to succeed? Or is it Like if you were truly the YC, as in you were backing candidates, or is a lot of it just kind of, I don't want to say random, but emergent or impossible to predict what will work?

You can certainly make a difference. There are a lot of people that would be immensely gratified to be asked to run. People just love to be asked. You know what I mean? If I went to you and be like, oh, you should run for this, a lot of people would be like, maybe I should run for that.

Yeah, totally.

And then when they get interested, then they need some guidance how to build a team, what the first things to do are, the people are in that area. That's one reason why there's this freaking small army of consultants who just traffic in these things. And it's like you'd imagine where a lot of it is bullshit, but some of it's important, and then you have to really kind of parse through which is which. So if we had the institutional framework, which by the way, Forward is building, In real time, um, we could 100% enable and empower candidates who might not run otherwise or might not have as good a shot. Any independent candidate— and this is one thing that we 100% are solving for— every independent candidate has had to come up with this from square one. Like, if I'm an independent candidate for Congress in Arizona named Clint Smith, by the way, it's a real example, uh, like, who's on my team? Like, who are my consultants? And a lot of the assets and resources are blue or red. You know, it's like that. There's like the Democratic consultancies and the tech vendors and the data, and then there's the Republican versions. So if you're an independent, you're like, okay, like, what do I do with any of this? And then let's say you have an independent candidate in Georgia, like, you know, the next cycle, like, do they learn from what happened with Clint Smith? You know, um, so Forward wants to be there for those candidates and then say, okay, Here's what you're trying to do. Not gonna lie, it's not gonna be easy, but here are the lessons learned. Here's how to maximize your chance of success and here's how we can help.

Yeah, it's really interesting. I love that you guys are building the infrastructure. I wonder if there's something unique about Trump or uniquely polarizing, obviously, and when the Trump saga is over, whenever that is, and who knows when that is, but something like Forward will be even that much more palatable or possible because politics will have somewhat normalized beyond the kind of, you know, reality show?

Well, Erik, this is the thing that I think people have to recognize. Trumpism will outlast Trump. Trump has unleashed something in, uh, American politics that is persistent, and it's getting stronger, not weaker. Tim Urban, uh, called it essentially low-rung politics, uh, and it's not unique to the right. I mean, there is a left version of it. He calls them the golems essentially, and the golems have been unleashed. There are all of these Republican figures who looked at Trump's rise and been like, hey, maybe if I act Trumpy, I can go somewhere with this thing, and the base will still reward that. The base has gotten an appetite for it. It's not like after Trump fades, they'll be like, you know what I need? Another Mitt Romney type.

You know what I mean?

That's not happening.

Yeah.

The extremes are just going to get more and more powerful until we can turn their volume down via something like mass adoption of ranked choice voting where these people get capped at a certain percentage but can't break through to a majority. By the way, they're figuring this out in reverse too where they're like, wait a minute, I like just having my sliver of a sliver and then I can whipsaw everything. And if you subjected me to actual popular approval, I wouldn't do so well because I'm a maniac. But people should have no illusions that Trumpism will die out when Trump leaves the scene.

Well said. I'm going to have Tim on and I'm going to ask him this question too in a couple weeks. But this idea of even if we were able to turn the tone down, and move to a more higher-rung politics. Is it possible that the country is, is, is substantively just divided on things that are so core to everyday life of, you know, what do we teach our kids about race or teach them about gender or, you know, pro-choice or pro-life or like these fundamental issues that, you know, it's almost like Sunni and Shia or something like we're just different people and we can't, can't unite.

The numbers indicate very much otherwise, Erik. The numbers indicate that you have really 10 to 13% on each side that's engaging in this ideological conflict. Most of us are just watching it being like, what the heck is going on?

Yeah.

But because of the current media environment and social media environment and political incentives, we are amplifying the 10 to 13% on either side. And if we gave everyone equal sway, then you know what these people would be? Fringe, statistically. So that is the challenge. Now, I want to say that these forces have been building in strength for a long time, and this is going to be a rough time no matter what. If we did everything right, it would be a difficult time to manage, but we're not doing anything right right now. We're just kind of fumbling along and being like, oh, their fault, their fault. And we're going to see ourselves in really desperate, terrible circumstances. So let's start trying to do things right. And I will make a personal appeal. There are a lot of folks in tech and business who see what's going on and are very displeased by it, but they're not sure what the answer is. And I'm going to say to you, look, this system, uh, has rotten incentives, uh, it— and it's going to stay dysfunctional. It's going to get worse. Um, it's up to folks like us to invest in doing what we would do for our own businesses or operations in the American political system. And if you want to join us in doing that, please do, uh, reach out to me personally or go to forwardparty.com. But let's get this shit done, because if we don't, we're going to see an unrecognizable That's a great callout.

I hope my audience does. A couple more questions. One is, is there a path to do what you're doing for politics but for media as well? Introduce more competition on decidedly middle, more neutral issues or central issues, enlightened centrism, such that it could keep the major networks in check? Or is it more challenging? How do you see that?

I've explored this a great deal, Erik, and I do write about this somewhat. And forward. So here are the problems. The cable news networks have found that the more comfort food I give you, the more likely you are to come back to me. And if I do something challenging or deliver the straight news, you just change the channel. C-SPAN has much lower ratings than MSNBC and Fox. And by the way, MSNBC and Fox also have their own ratings challenges. I mean, it's a tough media environment, so they're just getting more and more desperate, uh, to please people. So if you had like a straight-up, uh, centrist cable news channel, the numbers would be tough. Um, so if you look around for ways to, to cure this, um, I think it starts with, uh, leaders in independent media, um, because there are a bunch of journalists that people follow who are like, look, I might not believe in these channels, but I do believe in this reporter who I read their stuff and I believe. And so you would want to build a constellation of these independent voices. But the issue though is if you're a successful independent journalist, there is no reason why you would join anything because you're like, look, people value me for my independence. And so you'll wind up with this federation effect. I was exploring a way to try and bring all this together because this is a big part of the problem. And so I was exploring doing it via SPAC because one of the only ways you could bring a lot of these independent folks to the table is if you made it worth their while. But the successful among them are already making millions of dollars a year and value their independence. So, you know, It's a really interesting problem. It's something where there's theoretically an appetite for something that's independent and nonpartisan, but the form it takes in real life is individual thinkers.

We're talking on the day of Don Lemon and Tucker Carlson just leaving CNN and Fox respectively. Not that they are the paragons of moderateness, but I suspect they'll start new media enterprises. So it'll be interesting to see how media shakes out more broadly.

And this is something, again, I want people to understand is, look, these organizations are just doing what is in their incentives. If I give you a very consistent message, you'll come back for more. I can get advertisers, et cetera, et cetera. New York Times, they figured this out. It's like, if I give you what you want, So how do you create a different set of incentives? I do think though that in order for Forward to be a political movement that reaches its potential, we need various aligned media orgs.

I want to close on the idea that you're most known for, UBI. I have 2 related questions. One is, it turns out AI is perhaps coming for the creative fields the ones we thought were safest, the artists, the writers, et cetera, maybe sooner than the truckers and the blue collar. So if AI comes for white collar work first, how does that change the politics of it? And separately, I'm curious what you think of the idea of a UBI tied to the S&P 500 or some kind of measure of corporate success such that corporates rising also signals, is aligned with I'm for trying to tie a dividend to—

it could be economic growth and productivity, it could be corporate success in the way you're describing. Someone suggested tying it to cloud computing, which could be a proxy for AI in various ways. And the politics are shifting in that people see ChatGPT and be like, wait a minute, that thing can do what I do. This could actually be a real problem for a lot of white-collar workers. And if more energy ends up behind UBI-type policies as a result— I mean, I wish we could get ahead of this curve as opposed to being behind it. We're right now in a political system that does not actually reward good policy. And that brings us full circle to the beginning of this conversation and that senator being like, oh, problem's worth more to us unaddressed than addressed. So how do you get something like effective policy? It goes back to what we're doing with Ford, which is like we'd want to have a system where people have to work for 51% of us instead of 10 to 12%. But I do think the AI conversation is speeding up very quickly because people can see it in their own organizations.

It's a great place to wrap. This has been a great episode. Thank you very much for coming on, Andrew. For people who want to get involved, obviously they can donate. What are other practical ways that people can be helpful in addition to contributing?

Well, do check us out at forwardparty.com. We have chapters in all 50 states. We're especially active in California where we're looking to get on the ballot, uh, by October. Um, there our affiliate is the Common Sense Party. It's called— and the website is cacommonsense.org. You can also, uh, reach out to me individually. I'm on Twitter @AndrewYang. Um, I post every week on andreyang.com. But let's fucking build the future that we're actually excited about. I mean, I sense your audience is a bunch of builders. And I was saying to folks, it's like everyone and everything in politics is now fear and negativity based. It's like, let's cure this thing. Let's solve this set of problems instead of just living in fear and thinking like, oh, am I going to like move to this place where the politics are saner and the taxes are lower? Fuck that shit. Let's get to work.

Yeah, I'm with you. Excited to contribute. That's a great rallying cry. Thank you, Andrew, so much for coming on the podcast.

Thank you, Erik.

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