Andrew Yang Vindicated Reflects On 2020 Campaign and AI Consequences

Welcome back to the channel. Hope you all are having a great Friday afternoon as we get ready to go into the weekend. So we're gonna do an Andrew Yang video today. Um, we used to do quite a bit of Andrew Yang videos, um, back in during his, uh, 2020 run. And we're going to be reflecting on that a little bit today, or rather he is, um, and talking about how in a way you can say Andrew Yang is being vindicated right now, right? Uh, that he might have been a little bit before his time. 2020, we're in 2026 now, and we're getting all these warnings from companies like Anthropic. Um, people are losing their jobs. We see them online all over the place. Um, all of the predictions that Andrew Yang made are coming true, something many of us who were backing Yang understood very early on. Getting things, uh, understanding them, uh, grasping them early, as many of you all well know, is very much instrumental in solving a problem. right? Does that make sense? That if you catch on to something early, um, it makes it that much easier to solve what could be a catastrophe, right? Huge problem. And even now, some people are just gonna wait right up until the time disaster hits, and, uh, then they have to reflect back on, uh, content like this, you know, unfortunately, uh, Many of you all who come in here and watch the channel, you guys, um, probably are where I start a social network that encompasses universal basic income where you actually get money while using the social network, right? Like many other social networks you're on, but where it doesn't— it, it doesn't, uh, shine through to people or dawn on people the importance of value, what we could do with these— this social network We could use the economic buildup from it, like how you see many of these billion-dollar social networks, to be able to take that value, go to the nation's capitals, go to Washington, D.C., and lobby for universal basic income, right? We can have a big network of people that push universal basic income so that we don't have to deal with this looming disaster, right? That's why it's so important. Unfortunately, no matter how many of you all watch the videos, the numbers aren't reflecting that you're going over there and join it, trying to do something against this problem instead of just waiting on the sidelines, right? When you can do something about it. But we're gonna reflect on some of the things Andrew Yang has to say here, give a little bit of commentary. See where we're at now and see how people are now starting to take this very, very seriously, right? They don't have any choice, you know, like many of us predicted. Some are home unemployed now, not knowing what to do. So let's listen a little bit and see what we come up with.

Have you here— we love to have fun here, so I'm just gonna read the title of the book, and I hope you brought it with you. Hey, yay, where's my $1,000?

Yes, I'm carrying it right now. Good.

I have a stack of bills, my sister will be waiting outside to take it from you.

Yes, I do get asked this on the streets of New York and other places. The other question I have gotten is, hey, am I racist or are you Andrew Yang, which is the alternate title of the book.

What is the origin of the $1,000?

Well, the $1,000 was my version of universal basic income that I campaigned on in 2020. I said that AI was going to come and displace Millions of Americans, and we should start distributing the gains quickly. Crazy, I know. I mean, now people come—

Yeah, I thought that was a good question. What was the significance of the $1,000? Why just pick a number like $1,000, right? And, you know, of course Yang is explaining it, right, that, you know, a lot of times as well when people speak of that, think of $1,000, you're probably looking at it's gonna be something like be able to at least cover your grocery costs, I would say a possible today, but some people might even be able to push through room and board with that. Depends on how their living arrangement is and so on. Maybe they could relocate with it, but I've always thought of it as supplemental, and I've never really looked at it as something that could take care of your every need. I think that's another mistake a lot of people make. They tend to think that the Universal Basic income is, uh, supposed to take care of your entire life. You know, that's not what it does. Where it says basic, you think bare-bones minimum basic. Maybe you're gonna have, or you might be able to get a roof over your head and food with that in there. But also, as I did research on my own and just looked around, uh, kind of found an average economically to what a person can kind of live off. If you go across the world, you know, some people can live off $1,000 and things like that. And so $1,000 to be kind of like a sweet spot, I guess you could say. But I do hear an argument from a lot of people of at least $2,000 just to cover basic needs like food and housing, which would probably be true, you know, at this stage, right? Let's listen some more.

To me every day and say, wow, you know, you were ahead of the curve, right?

And universal basic income is something you and I've talked about before. You can watch the OG version of The Takeout to see our session on that. It's an idea rooted in the Nixon administration, the '60s. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, when he worked for the Nixon administration, wrote an entire book about it.

Yeah, we could alleviate poverty at scale in this country. We've already done it, uh, or come close to doing it. We cut child poverty in half in 2021 as one example, uh, and GDP now is around—

and so, okay, I see now just like 25 minutes, so we're not going to go through the whole thing and the video would run too long. I'm just going to try to scan ahead and listen at some stuff. But now where he's talking about poverty right here, um, that sounds very altruistic and it sounds, uh, you know, it does resonate with, with a lot of people and there's nothing wrong with that, I think. But, but, uh, that's a— that message is a message that doesn't resonate with a lot of other people, you know, and you guys know exactly what I'm talking about, you know, in a capitalistic system You know, these people aren't very compassionate people, many of them. So in other words, they don't care, right? You know, whether you're poor, where you can eat or not and things like that. And so that's how come I always lend myself more over to the purpose of universal basic income is going to be more about there is a disturbance going along our economy that is so disruptive, right? It is an outside force that you can't do anything about. And of course, in this example, that would be AI automation, meaning that you can't go to work and earn money because the opportunity just isn't there. The job just isn't there because the AI took the job. That is profoundly different than saying that, you know, we should be neighborly and we should look out for one another and we should— and whereas those things do sound great and utopian-like, That people don't respond to that. That's not how capitalism works because if it worked that way, people would have been doing something about that a long time ago. So let's go through here quickly and see whatever. Let's see if we can find some major points Andrew raises.

$4,000 ahead. It's going to go past $100,000 per person with AI, which is going to have a lot of negative effects, which we'll probably talk about, but it's certainly going to increase top-line growth. So at some point, you have to look up and say, wow, we could actually do a lot more for people and families.

And explain the basic construct of a universal basic income.

So again, not Andrew Yang's idea. Martin Luther King, Thomas Paine, a lot of other people were for versions of it. But you just get a certain amount of money every month, no questions asked, to meet your basic— Cash?

Yeah.

I mean, there are different ways to structure it, but universal basic income generally means cash in your hands.

And you don't go through the—

so basically, some of the greatest minds in the history of humankind— universal basic income might be singularly one of the most greatest, uh, policies ever thought of by, by anybody. Uh, and that is because it can kind of touch on injustice, it can take— it can touch on racism, it can touch on balancing out um, uh, you know, the woes of capitalism, right? Um, it can, um, lower crime in some examples, right? It just does so much stuff, right? Um, if you're a spiritual person, um, some people look at it as a spiritual policy or feel some type of spiritual hope. Uh, it can unite, uh, political parties across the aisle to, uh, universal basic income is one of the only policies that both sides agree on, more so probably than any other policy out there. So, uh, this is probably one of mankind's greatest ideas, and anybody who gets this right would have to go down in history as one of the greatest people on the planet. Unfortunately, uh, nobody has been able to do that yet, which, which makes UBI almost up there with a utopian-like idea, right? Because people just can't seemingly get it right, not on a large scale, in any way. Um, so that's basically the, the bare bones of what it is— universal giving out money to everyone. And this policy, it just balances a lot of issues across the aisle, because the important thing about cash money is Instead of a system trying to fix a problem and compartmentalize a problem, try to fix housing, go over here, try to fix education, try to fix healthcare. With UBI, what happens is the person receiving the money can just allocate some of those funds in certain areas. Maybe you need to buy medication for the month, maybe you need to buy groceries for the month. Maybe you need extra money to pay your rent for the month. UBI could just basically be morphed to do all of those things, right?

Process in the modern welfare state of qualification forms, etc., etc.

It's a universal major, you know, everyone. If you're so profitable, why do you sell a course? Well, you know what? Here you go.

Sorry about that, guys. Sorry about that.

There are going to be decisions like that. Made at just about every major publicly traded company.

Because the competitive imperative for publicly traded companies only runs in one direction. Yeah.

And if a company, by the way, did not do this, their stock price would plummet over time.

Sound like he's talking about everyone's profit over the concern, the well-being of people. And this is a 25-minute interview. We'll try to get a link in the description so you guys can watch it. I can't go through all of these, all of the interview, because if I did, and this is my first time watching along with you guys, If I did, we'll be here for 2 or 3 hours. So I'm going to just try to scan ahead, get some points. You know, overall, I would call this vindication for Yang. Unfortunately, at this stage, it's been 6 years. People should be, you know, catching up so late. People who tuned into the channel at this point, they should very well know what's happening. But I got a problem with my watchers because Not only have they not joined the social network that could help us, um, unitedly do something about this problem before it gets worse, um, you know, a lot of people still ask, don't know what universal basic income is. And, uh, you know, when you watch content on YouTube, right, there's nothing wrong with watching entertainment. You know, some of the people come on YouTube, some of the most highly viewed, uh, content is uh, you know, entertainment, wacky stuff. People need entertainment, they need to relax, right? The boots are on their necks, they've been working hard every day. Some people don't want to deal with problems, they just want to have fun and so on. Understandably, understandably so. I don't— no problem with that. However, in a pyramid of priorities, right, uh, there has to be room where, uh, you have to be able to deal, you know, to, to put on priority, at the top of the priority, world-ending situations, right? Like AI taking all your jobs, right? We have to be prepared for those things. Like, we can't just bury our heads in the sand and expect these things to take care of themselves when you got your families to take care of, right? You got yourself to take care of, right? You can't just be sitting up there and then just, you know, come in, you know, your last day on work when they tell you can't come back to work and and you come in the house and you go, well, what are we gonna do now, right? You can't live like that, right? And so on a series of priorities, it can't just be you coming to YouTube to be entertained, right? All the time, right? You gotta have a series of priorities where, you know, there's gotta be a balance where you watch content like this and you start to take action.

Have this competitive dynamic. Can I do more with less? Can I do more with fewer people? Um, and we're now the third, uh, biggest, uh, political party in the country by resources, which is not saying a whole heck of a lot because the bar is very low. I imagine, uh, but we're growing all the time. We have—

I think he's talking about— see, so now he's getting into the action. Sounds like he's talking about the forward party he's involved with. And, um, you know, um, the thing is, uh, it's like I told people in the UBI communities, we argue a lot in there, uh, which is unfortunate as well. We should all be united or the UBI, if the UBI communities themselves can't even unite, how in the world can, you know, we expect other people to unite, right? So that is a problem. But, um, you know, it seems like he's talking about the four-party. And what I like about that is a lot of times the next question would be to someone like Yang, who brought all this to the forefront, uh, made UBI a household three-letter word, right, to where people start to pay attention on this, to this thing, and look at it as a solution going forward. Uh, after he lost the presidential elections and the mayoral, uh, elections and so on, uh, the next question of course would have been, okay, is that it? What do you do about the UBI program, you know, uh, or the UBI situation? Uh, you brought it up, you were smart enough to find it out, We don't know what to do, but we're with you if you come up with something. And so Yang comes up with the Four Party that I don't know why the Democrats and Republicans still are so strong and exist how they exist. I would have thought by now people should be fed up with them and there should be some third party that has emerged as powerful as them. Hasn't happened yet. And, uh, you know, there is a great actress, uh, um, uh, apathy in people and atrophy. You know, both, both words are appropriate here, right? And that's unfortunate, right? People have to stop walking around here lackadaisical with their heads up in the clouds, not knowing what to do. You know, what I find is when you don't know what to do, there's that old idea of Other people's money, OPM, and OPB, other people's brains. So what you have to do in cases where you don't know what to do is find people who could think at a wavelength to solve the problem, right? And you support those people, but you got to do something, right? You can't be both lacking the brain capacity and lacking the resources or money, right? That's just lacking too much stuff, because when you got the money, you can support people economically, financially, and that can help push the agenda along. Uh, if you don't got that, then you can learn from those people, brain power. Maybe you can support them in some other way, or maybe you can educate other people learning from them, right? Or support those people enough so they could be a voice for you, right? So all of those things you have to be able to work, because remember, this isn't just an exercise or a good idea. This is something that could turn around and bite you and affect you. You could be the other person on the end of that robot replacing you and wondering what happened and what to do. So this is kind of like having an insurance policy, folks. Uh, you— what do you do with insurance? You don't wait to the last minute, right, to, um, to, uh, do, you know, to prepare for the future. You're set for it because it's going to be too much of a disaster when it hits. And that's why we ask you all to take this serious. That's why Andrew Yang's asking you to take this serious. That's why so many people supported Andrew Yang and still do, because they're beginning or learning to take this serious as well as you should, so that this doesn't, uh, be you having to, uh, come home and tell your family the bad news and how are we going to survive, how are we going to eat, how we're going to pay for room and board and such, right? Very serious stuff. Remember, at the end of the day, you're your own responsibility, right? The government or nobody else is going to be ultimately able to fix a problem that's coming to your doorstep.

79 elected officials associated with us around the country, and we're going to have many more after November.

You live in New York. Trump did better in New York City and New York State than a lot of people expected. Then Zohran Mondani came along with less in a 12-month gap. Now, there are not that many Trump-Lamdani voters, but there are some. Sure. He started with social media videos talking to Trump voters. That is reminiscent of what many people described and observed, like I did in 2016, this kind of Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump orientation.

Yeah.

What does that tell you about the state of and direction of American politics?

So the direction of American politics is not left or right. It's inside outside or it's establishment non-establishment. So the reason why there are some Trump Mondani voters is that they just wanted someone to stick it to the machine and the folks in charge. And it's like, hey, you want to stick it to them?

Well, that's a good point. Yeah, that's going back to the frustration I spoke about earlier. And that is where people, you know, they get so frustrated with the machine They're just going with anybody who's against the machine, whether that be Mom Donnie or Trump or whoever appears to be an outsider. Now, unfortunately, what we find out is the people who appear to be outsiders aren't actually outsiders, right? And so the machine pushes forward. But in some cases, they are, like in the case of Mom Donnie. Uh, and so Mom Donnie to me is a symptom of what type of systems are going to have to emerge. And UBI, uh, what Momdani's doing, UBI, all of those type systems are, are very akin to one another, and they're going to be merging onto one another. You got to see offshoots of these various types ideas, which is pretty much going to involve some free service or free money. It's going to be pretty much along the same spectrum. And, um, we're going to see a lot more of that, I believe, in the future. And I think That's kind of what Andrew's, you know, talking about, you know, as well as just talking about the political portion of it, that the power— you're gonna need political power. Remember, you got to get this stuff passed through legislation. So when I talk about our social network, people say, oh, this is stupid, this is just— I should stay on these billionaire, these billion-dollar networks like Twitter or Reddit or something like that. and, uh, keep the billion-dollar corporations intact. What you have to understand is the social network we create, similar to a political party— it's not a political party, but it could— you can kind of put it in that camp. It's a way, a hub, it's an area where you can mobilize, right? And then in a group way, as we're all supportive of UBI, it's easier to lobby and organize, much like a political party, move that, that direction there to, to, to have the power, right, to go through those processes. Because even if you show up in a mob in front of, uh, the Capitol, you're still gonna have to have people to write out what you need, to write out the UBI policy. You're gonna have to have the politicians who go in there and vote it through. And so that's going to take a tremendous amount of organizations beyond just showing up in a mob. And that's what people don't get about our social network. They dismiss it, and, and it again, it comes back to bite you because we already know some of you listening to the video, some of you who are, uh, in these situations are going to be victims of the job loss and not knowing what to do and wondering why your government is impotent and fixing your problem.

The way that this resembles some of my supporters too, because everyone knows they would never send the magical Asian guy from the future who wants to give like the way the Biden administration handled the border and voted for Donald Trump and his team to change that. And they're aghast and horrified by what's been going on in terms of ICE executing American citizens on the streets of Minneapolis. Have you considered going through the UCC?

Sorry about that. Again, sorry about that.

Point to and say, who's responsible for turning the machines off if they start running amok? And right now the AI firms can't even tell you who the people are, what the plan is, and where the—

Andrew, there's no kill switch.

I know that's one reason why I and many other reasonable people are deeply, deeply frustrated and concerned by the fact that we've given these AI companies carte blanche There's a joke, but it's true. There are more rules and regulations to open a hot dog stand than there are to run a model that could impact millions of lives.

How do you assess the backlash seen in places like Indiana, Texas, Virginia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey to data centers and all the conversation about what is going to be—

So yes, this sounds like a very full encompassing video. And of course we couldn't go through this entire video. I would have liked to, We'd be here for 3, 4 hours. And I already know you guys' attention span is very, very short. When we're— they're talking about the data centers now. And probably some of you have been hearing about the data centers to run these sophisticated AI programs, to run these language models. It is consuming so much energy, so much water. And I was just watching a segment on a news story last night about the people in an area around these data centers that when they turn their water on, water barely comes out. Uh, they don't have water pressure. They barely can get enough water in. And it's crazy, right? And not to mention what other health concerns that are out there that might emerge, that hasn't emerged yet, from these data centers being in these people's communities, right? So it looks like they're gonna— they're covering all that in this interview. Overall, I just want to say that, uh, I will call this like the Andrew Yang vindication video as he reflects on the things he tried to warn us of in 2020. And what is tremendously frustrating, right? Very concerning, very frustrating. Whereas I understand that people are bogged down, right? The world keeps you so busy, you can't focus on anything. You got to be at the doctor's office, you got to be at work, you got to take the kids here, you got to do this and that. And you're already struggling to pay your bills on top of that. Now you got to worry about some type of political campaign, right? Because the people you send to government, right, to the nation's capital, to Washington, D.C., wherever you're at, they don't do their jobs, right, to, to, to take care of you. So you've given them their power to send them there, comes out, you still got to work, you still got to do that as well. And that's just how it is. It's unfortunate, but you gotta do that job and the jobs you're already doing, right? It's just— call it being unfair, call the world being unfair, but that's, that's what it's going to come down to because you're going to be a victim if you don't. Um, the, the people who don't have time to learn about this stuff or be educated about it, or they don't take it serious, they are handicapped greatly. In this situation, but they're ignorant to the fact. And so much— only so much you could do that. But for you guys who are subscribed to the channel, who watch these videos, right, and over the years it's been thousands upon thousands, hundreds of thousands of people have probably come across the Andrew Yang content we've done and such, I see no excuses for you guys, right? Every one of you all should be on our social network if you can't do anything. And the reason that is because collectively we can, right? That's given us power to go to Washington, DC to get these politicians to do something, right? It's given us economic power, it's given us media power, right? And, uh, our social network, the link's in the description. Of course, many of you all who watch the content, you already know about that. So if you're serious about that, you need to do something about it before it affects your family and affects you, right? So we're gonna go ahead and close out. Let's see what some of the final words Andrew Yang has to say. We'll try to again leave a link in the description. You watch the whole, you know, video through. I'm sure they're covering some great territory, especially if you're trying to figure out what this universal basic income stuff's all about. Very, very serious, very important, the most influential people in the world, the most, uh, in highest places are supporting this, and they're all over the place talking about it. And if you don't know what they're saying about that, that is a problem, right? That is a huge problem. You should by this time be pretty much up on what's happening with these machines and your jobs as you go to work every day. And your job is to be concerned about keeping your job.

Be required in terms of energy and real estate and resources, particularly water, to feed future data centers.

What American family is on board with their electric bills going up, uh, or maybe their water?

Let me stop right there. That was a very important point, uh, that Andrew brought up that I meant to mention in a video. And that is that when some people— even when some people say things like, um, there is no reason to give people universal basic income, that they haven't earned the money, right? And thus they shouldn't get it, right? These data centers, right, are causing people's utilities bills to increase super high, right? And so that means that whether you agree to this technology revolution or not, you gotta front the bill for whether you use it or not. You gotta front it whether you benefit from it or not, whether you lose your job to it or not. You still gotta pay the cost to keep it running, right? And your utilities and so on. And so if that's the case, right, shouldn't it then be that you at least should be able to get back that money, right? So when they talk about you don't deserve UBI or people shouldn't get it or it's free money, well, it's not really not free money. Right. You're giving them the free money to run their data centers. Right. And to impact your community and your environment in a negative way. Like what's happening?

Bills going up to service a data center in their community that someone could say, hey, this is going to drive jobs. And you're like, how many people are going to be working in a data center? I have a feeling it's going to be a lot of robots, which, by the way, it totally will be a lot of robots.

And that's the other point. You don't benefit from it at all. You don't get a job behind it. In fact, You're pushing it forward to take your job away, your opportunities. Because the thing is, they're— it's on two fronts. They're saying that the white-collar jobs are going to be the easiest to replace, or some of the easiest jobs to replace. But guess what? Also the blue-collar jobs, right? A lot of them are going to be the easiest to replace because many blue-collar jobs, remember, are going to be repetitive tasks, and that is something that machines can pick up and do very, very easily and well. Doesn't take a lot of coding to do 3 hand movements, to do 3 body movements for hours per day, right? And if you look at your job and you count the movements, what you do throughout the day, right? I know some people might think they do complex tasks, but I've actually seen a lot of jobs, especially on a blue-collar level, right? Especially if you're stocking the shelf or you're working as a cashier or something. And there's a lot of jobs like that. In fact, cashier is the most common job I know in the United States. But that— they're going to do that easy. They're going to do a lot of white-collar tasks easy. They could do programming, websites, design, a lot of stuff that you're using today. And you're going, oh, I'm amazed, I'm blown away by this. This thing can do this. I don't have to do this anymore. So if you don't have to do it, then what's happening to the jobs of the people who, who were doing that?

You know, so, uh, so there's a disconnect between what our officials are saying, um, is the right thing, which is more data centers, you know, more quote-unquote growth, um, and what American families are seeing. Because like no one necessarily wants higher bills, uh, or a giant data center.

Well, if you were a company and, uh, this technology's going to be able to replace your labor, your human labor force, and, uh, you're going to be able to— your profits are going to rise up because you don't have to pay these human workers now. Well, of course you would be saying positive things about it.

They're next to them.

What's the funniest thing you've seen in the last 5 or 6 months?

Funniest, eh? Interesting question.

Well, I'm just gonna wrap it up now. I think you guys get the gist and the point of it. Looks like they're just going to close out with a little bit, you know, a little fun banter and whatnot. Uh, that's going back to the entertainment part, which I'm a, you know, a big proponent of. I love entertainment. I'm always on YouTube a lot, and I'm watching the funny videos and things like that. It's not a problem. But the one thing I don't do is I don't take responsibility away from what I need to be doing to deal with something that's going to threaten my family, my jobs, my life, right? And that's the problem I have with Many people out there who are kind of behind, they're not educated about UBI, they're not educated about technology and where the world's going. Some of them are still on that old trope of, uh, oh, you know, the robot's gonna come in, they're going to take a bunch of jobs, but they're gonna create a bunch of new jobs that you may or may can do or may or may not be trained for. And how many of these new jobs are— is going to be created? Is it going to be proportional to the ones lost? Because guys, that sounds very, very too perfect. But in addition to that, a lot of experts and a lot of people who used to believe that are saying this time is going to be different because we never had an artificial brain before. We never had an artificial mind created before on the level of some of the technologies we're getting into now. That also past results are not indicative of the future necessarily. So there takes a great amount of faith and, uh, uh, uh, uh, kind of putting your head in the sands and just going, oh, to take care of yourself, takes a great amount of that to come up with a statement like, oh, you know, it'll take all these jobs to create new jobs like the last several industrial revolutions. That is really playing and gambling with your future. I think that's insane, right? But guys, tell me all what you think. If you want to do something about the problem, you feel powerless because much like in the interview, of course, the next question to Yang was going to be, okay, well, you know, all this stuff you ran on this thing, what's next? What are you doing to fix the problem? Yang is doing the Forward Party. He said his statistics were something like it is the third largest political party in the country, for whatever that's worth. But he is doing something. What are we doing? We're doing the social network that we build it up to be worth billions of dollars so we can go to Washington, DC with economic power, political power, lobbying, insiders there to try to push the universal basic income policy through. But we can't do that if you're watching the video and not joining the network. right? Does that make sense? So guys, hope you've, uh, been a little bit eye-opening through the video here. Uh, feel free to leave a comment. This is very, very important stuff. This might end up being probably one of the most important topics and situations in your very life, of the person's watching, simply because this might very well be the thing that takes your job and puts you and your family and not in the best situation. So guys, take it seriously. At the very least, be prepared for— be insured against it, right, for lack of a better word. And, uh, we'll leave the, the references and links in the, uh, description so you can come over, join the social network, get more education about the topic. That's all I want to say in this particular video. Hit that subscribe button, hit that like button. We'll talk to you later.