Andrew Yang On Grace, Tolerance & Human-Centered Government

Like many, I despair of our country’s division, which is rapidly expanding in lockstep with our inability to productively communicate alongside growing distrust in institutions and the media. Also like many, I want solutions. Much of this rests with us. But we also need leadership. Across the political landscape, most elected officials understand this problem and its gravity. However, very few proffer solutions beyond the beaten path. Even fewer demonstrate a good-faith willingness to tackle the dilemma with solution-based action. Today’s guest Andrew Yang is an exception to this pattern. For those unfamiliar, Andrew is an entrepreneur turned politician best known for his 2020 presidential run and subsequent New York City mayoral bid. He’s the man who pioneered a national conversation on the power of universal basic income (UBI) to address maladies produced by widening wealth disparity. And he’s a leader I find genuine in his commitment to the greater potential of our democratic experiment, bringing forth original and bold ideas to the national conversation—ideas not always in his best self-interest. Part memoir, part campaign trail exposé, Andrew’s latest book, Forward: Notes on the Future of Our Democracy, is an instructive read on the damaged state of politics and political media as well as the broadening national divide that is eroding our humanity. A roadmap on how to repair the broken spokes of our democratic system, it also serves to announce the creation of a new third party—the Forward Party—part of Andrew’s plan to redress democratic dysfunction by disrupting America’s two-party duopoly. Today Andrew shares his story and vision. This is a relatively partisan-fee conversation about how to reimagine the democratic experiment for the betterment of all. We discuss the merits of universal basic income, human-centered capitalism, the problems with our gerontocracy, and what we need to truly progress as a nation. In addition, we discuss the perils and merits of a third political party; the role of new media in politics; the advantage of open primaries and rank choice voting; the importance of grace and tolerance; and how to modernize government’s anachronistic bureaucracy. To read more click here. You can also watch listen to our exchange on YouTube. And as always, the podcast streams wild and free on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. This conversation was an absolute pleasure. I sincerely hope you enjoy it in the spirit in which it is offerred Peace + Plants, Rich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Rich Roll?

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• 1:05Andrew Yang?

  One of the main lessons I have here is that all politics is tribal. We're not arguing over policies, really. We're arguing over team colors. It's one reason why things are going to become so disastrous. More and more Americans consider the other side either evil, or they're mortal enemies. And we can all feel that anger rising. It may well result in political violence. It already has, really. And so what you need to do is you need to try to introduce a different dynamic of tribalism. One thing I'm gonna suggest is you would need more than two tribes. And right now, if we're going to free ourselves of the duopoly, it's going to take a popular movement of independents, and Democrats, and Republicans alike.

• 1:47Andrew Yang?

  I have a clear vision for what the Forward Party can become, and I'm really excited about it. It's this unifying tribe that's positive and uplifting in politics that a lot of people have been waiting for. So we just have to take that interest and energy and show people that it can be done. And after we clear that hurdle, then the sky's the limit.

• 2:19Rich Roll?

  The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, everybody. Welcome to the podcast. My guest today is the one, the only Mr. Andrew Yang himself, arguably one of, if not the, most original thinkers on the political scene. For those unfamiliar few, Andrew is an entrepreneur turned politician, best known for his 2020 presidential run, his subsequent New York City mayor bid, and the man who actually pioneered a national conversation on the merits of universal basic income. Andrew is the author of a few books. His most recent offering is entitled Forward, which is a great book.

• 3:02Rich Roll?

  It's part memoir, but also part campaign trail expose. It's an instructive read on the dysfunctional state of politics and political media, the broadening national divide that is eroding our humanity, and it also serves as a roadmap on how to best repair the broken spokes of our democratic system. In addition, it also serves to announce the creation of a brand new third political party that Andrew has founded, the Forward Party, which is part and parcel of Andrew's plan to redress democratic dysfunction by disrupting America's two-party duopoly. But before we dive in, please allow me to indulge you with a few words from the

• 3:45Rich Roll?

  wonderful sponsors who make this show possible.

• 3:55Rich Roll?

  So I do have to say that I find myself quite energized and encouraged by Andrew's creative approach to politics. His ideas are fresh. They are nothing if not bold. And I just appreciate his genuineness, his candor, his humanness, his willingness and ability to not just think outside the box, but actually take action on new ideas. And I was very excited to talk to him. So this is it. Me and Andrew Yang having a semi-wonky, but not too wonky, relatively partisan-free conversation about how to best reimagine the democratic experiment for the betterment of all.

• 4:40Rich Roll?

  Super nice to meet you. Thank you for coming out here to do this.

• 4:43Andrew Yang?

  It's great to be here, Rich. Thanks for having me.

• 4:45Rich Roll?

  Yeah, man. So, so many things to talk about with you. I followed your journey and your trajectory. It's been super fascinating. And I think, like many, I find myself despairing about our country's division. And that's a divide that seemingly continues to expand, seems to become exacerbated daily. And that trajectory feels like it's in lockstep with this breakdown in our ability to effectively communicate in a healthy way, which is amplified by this growing distrust in our institutions and a decline in the trust that we've placed

• 5:26Rich Roll?

  in our media landscape to deliver the news and information objectively. And there doesn't seem to be a shortage of people who understand this problem, or notice it, or recognize it. Fewer, though, seem to offer solutions, even fewer creative solutions, and only a very few who demonstrate any kind of good faith willingness to actually tackle the problem and do something about it. But I do see all of that in you, which is one of the reasons why I'm excited to talk to you.

• 5:56Andrew Yang?

  Oh, thank you. So kind.

• 5:57Rich Roll?

  And you do it with, you know, kind of this beautiful, genuine nature, and with the sensibility that you're coming to the table in good faith with these original and bold ideas, and this optimism around the untapped potential of our democratic experiments.

• 6:21Andrew Yang?

  I couldn't agree more that people feel very pessimistic because polarization's getting worse and worse. You see that... More and more Americans regard their political opponents as their enemies. I'm a numbers guy, so 42% of both Republicans and Democrats consider the other side either evil or they're mortal enemies. And we can all feel that anger rising. It may well result in political violence. It already has, really, over the next number of years. And I want to suggest that your podcast, your voice, is one of the antidotes. One of my premises of the future is that people don't trust institutions anymore. They trust other people.

• 7:06Andrew Yang?

  Like, people that have been following your journey and listen to your advice and guidance and experiences have a sense of who you are, what makes you tick. And that's what we need right now. We need to bring people around to trust each other again. It starts with trusting individuals like yourself. I think that independent media, like podcasts, is actually something that we can build on to try to rebuild trust.

• 7:34Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, what's so interesting about your path is that, in many ways, you were and are the podcast candidate. I mean, you were somebody who was not getting recognized appropriately in legacy media. And then you go on Sam Harris, you go on Joe Rogan, and all the subsequent appearances that you've made on a variety of podcasts, not the least of which being Crystal and Sager. And that really advanced not only your profile, but the policy measures that you care so deeply about. And it triggered this national conversation. And as somebody, you know, thank you for those kind words, but as somebody who is a podcaster, that's really fascinating, just forensically, to observe that, in contrast

• 8:16Rich Roll?

  to the way that legacy media has always operated. And it gives me hope, and I think you're correct, in that there is a need and an appetite for long-form conversations. When you sit down with somebody and you talk to them for hours... And it's a relatively agenda-free scenario that allows people to get a real feel and sense of who you are and where you're coming from, as opposed to this clickbaity, soundbite, yell for five seconds on cable news ecosystem that we've grown so accustomed to.

• 8:51Andrew Yang?

  Yeah, it's more like how human beings interact in real life. You do sit with someone and you have a conversation. I certainly have done more than my fair share of five-minute-long cable news hits. And one of the things I say to my team is that after a cable news hit, I'd be like, "Any data? Anyone go to the website? Anyone donate?" And the answer was always "no." So I started to say, "Then why am I doing these things?" And the answer that I got was legitimacy, was that if you do a cable news hit, it actually sends a signal to voters that they're allowed to consider you, because there's a very, very significant number of voters who rely upon the media for that framing. And that's particularly

• 9:35Andrew Yang?

  true among Democrats. You probably saw, I recently left the Democratic Party, so now I'm independent.

• 9:40Rich Roll?

  I noticed.

• 9:43Andrew Yang?

  But Democrats believe in the news media to a much higher degree than anyone else. The numbers are 69% of Democrats have high trust in media. For independents, it's only 36%. And for Republicans, it's a whopping 15%. So this is maybe one of the defining elements of the parties at this point. But I was running in a Democratic primary, so having the blessing, even the tacit blessing of the cable news networks was important.

• 10:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Well, one of the more fascinating aspects of your book, which I enjoyed very much, is just your characterization of what that media complex is like from a boots-on-the-ground experience, from the perspective of you during the campaign. And it's very dispiriting to see how political media, the political media industrial complex actually operates in kind of cahoots with the political parties to advance certain narratives and mute other ones. And, you know, it's really, yes, there are podcasts,

• 10:50Rich Roll?

  but can we see a way forward to, you know, kind of transcend this quagmire that is keeping us stuck in a certain status quo that, you know, by all accounts, and certainly, you know, by virtue of what you talk about, is not functioning?

• 11:06Andrew Yang?

  Yeah, that's one of the main reasons I wanted to write this book, Rich. I came off the trail, and I will confess to everyone that I did approximately zero reflection when I was running for president.

• 11:19Rich Roll?

  How could you? There's no, it's just what's in front of you to do immediately next.

• 11:23Andrew Yang?

  Yeah, I was like a hammer where it's like, what's the nail? What's the nail? And like, you know, just do, do, do. And then when the day ends, you just kind of, you know, crawl into bed. I wasn't like, oh, I'm gonna take notes for a book. But I wanted to catalog the journey for people because I had learned so much going into the bowels of our media industrial complex and our political industrial complex. And the media's incentives are very, very distorting as to which candidates they will suppress and which they will amplify. I'm not the only candidate who is on the outside looking in. I mean, I think we all remember in 2016, Bernie versus Hillary, where they would

• 12:05Andrew Yang?

  be kneecapping Bernie at every turn. And the news media and the DNC were very much hand in glove. You know, there's a different set of issues on the other side. But being subject to that did make me very hungry to try and find alternatives. And it is one reason why I'm very confident in my new path, is that the Democrats will be like the last of the institutionalists. Even as more and more people say, wait, this isn't working, this isn't working, like, the Democratic primary voters in particular are going to be the last people saying, hang on, it is working, even when most of us have lost faith. Well, again, it is because of their trust in the news media.

• 12:46Andrew Yang?

  The news media will be hammering certain messages until the last dog dies, essentially. There is an institutional mindset and a trust that many Democrats naturally have to a higher degree. If you were to summarize where the parties are right now, the Democrats are the people who are hanging on to the fading and fumbling institutions. And then Republicans have been overtaken with this anti-institutional fervor embodied by Donald Trump. And what I'm going to suggest is that a lot of us are not on either of those sides. The Forward Party, which I founded, now is trying to call attention to the real defects and issues our institutions have, in the hopes that we can rejuvenate them, reform

• 13:31Andrew Yang?

  them, build new ones. That's the kind of positive stance that a lot of us wish existed in our politics, as opposed to the two poles, which are just going to end up more and more extreme over time.

• 13:46Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I want to get into all the Forward Party stuff, but before we do that, I mean, you mentioned this built-in, inherent trust that the Democratic Party has in institutions versus the mindset of Republicans. And that hearkens to the work of Jonathan Haidt, who looms large in your book. You cite him frequently. And his studies are quite fascinating in terms of the psychological differences between Democrats and Republicans. So can you elucidate that a little bit?

• 14:18Andrew Yang?

  Yeah, Jonathan is such an incredible philosopher, really. He's a friend as well. And his work on The Righteous Mind, how Americans can disagree on politics while still being good people, I think is one of the most important works of our time. So he makes the case that there are six universal values in human culture that transcend... National borders. They are caring, fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority, and sanctity. And it turns out that Democrats and Republicans respond to different values on that list.

• 15:02Andrew Yang?

  Democrats tend to respond more to caring and fairness, and Republicans tend to respond more to loyalty, authority, and sanctity. And then the two sides define liberty differently. And so what you see is you have news media organizations that really hammer different themes that strike that chord with their audience. It's one reason why the media organizations now don't seem very objective. They've become increasingly companies that profit from separating us into institutional camps. And they've figured out what Jonathan wrote about, which is that if you hammer certain notes or values or symbols, then you can command much more loyalty and affection. One of the main lessons I have here is that all politics is tribal.

• 15:46Andrew Yang?

  We're not arguing over policies, really. We're arguing over team colors. It's one reason why things are going to become so disastrous. And so what you need to do is you need to try to introduce a different dynamic of tribalism. One thing I'm going to suggest is you would need more than two tribes, because the last thing you ought to do is have two great warring tribes. But Jonathan Haidt's work did inform my prescription because he explains why it is that we can be so divided on multiple levels.

• 16:17Rich Roll?

  Yeah. On the one hand, it's dispiriting to hear that media companies would kind of grok that psychology and then weaponize it. On the other hand, for me, it allows me to have a deeper appreciation or level of empathy for people of different points of view to understand that they're just wired differently and they see the world differently. And it is a disposition that is constitutional rather than kind of the result of influence or environment.

• 16:49Andrew Yang?

  The single biggest concern we should have in this domain is the dehumanization of different people of different political beliefs. And Jonathan posits that a lot of this is actually genetic, where you're born with a particular psychological disposition of openness or sensitivity to threat. Or appetite for novelty and that ends up pushing you in one direction or the other. So if someone voted for Trump or approves of a certain policy, it should have nothing to do with their value as a human being or their their worth in that respect. But unfortunately, in this time, people regard folks who have different beliefs as somehow less worthwhile.

• 17:34Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, there's a lack of respect for differentiation in beliefs and ideology. I mean, I grew up in Washington DC. I grew up in a kind of inside the Beltway situation throughout, you know, the late 70s and early 80s. And my recollection of that was that there was a respect and a level of comedy between party. You would go to dinner, my parents would have dinner parties.

• 17:57Andrew Yang?

  Both sides, sure.

• 17:58Rich Roll?

  I went to school with people that were, you know, the offspring of politician X, Y, and Z. And these, these people lived in your neighborhood and in your community and there were Republicans and Democrats. And irrespective of those differences, there was a, a, a respect that seems to have been completely lost. And, you know, I'm fascinated by what has catalyzed this, you know, this divide. I mean, is it all, can it be all tracked to media? Like, is it this, you know, increasing gap in wealth inequality? Like, how do you think about how we went from there to here?

• 18:35Andrew Yang?

  One of the big lessons I've learned and I'm trying to convey to people is that if everyone follows their incentives in a reasonable way, we are sunk as a society. And you ask why it is that, and I also remember a time when it seemed like people of different parties got along as human beings and, and now they see themselves in a different light. And the reason is incentives. Where I was with a Republican senator a couple of weeks ago, and she said that it serves political interests better if you keep an issue alive than if you resolve it. Because if you keep an issue alive, you can just get people mad about it and blame the other side and raise a lot of money. And then if you resolve it, someone on your side is going to be mad at you.

• 19:17Andrew Yang?

  And one example that I posed, she didn't pose this, but that came to mind for me was when Senator Marco Rubio proposed bipartisan immigration reform a number of years ago. And then he pulled it back about a week later after getting absolutely hammered by his own party. But it was like a sign of if you do lean forward to compromise, you're going to get attacked. So the political incentives end up driving people to their corners. And by the numbers, right now, Congress has a national approval rating of about 28%. It's quite low, probably doesn't surprise anyone listening to this. The reelection rate for individual members of Congress is 92%, which is sky high. I mean, that's like a better win rate than the 2016 Warriors, or something like those

• 20:02Andrew Yang?

  lights. So you dig into that and say, how can this be that we can be so dissatisfied with Congress as a body and yet our members always get reelected? And the mechanics are such that 83% of the districts in the country are either very blue or very red. So the game for me as a representative is not to serve 51% of the voters in my community, it's to please and placate the 10 to 20% most extreme partisan voters that are going to turn out in the primary. So my political incentives then are to be more extreme and ideological than the average person. And that's why the incentives are what you just described, which is you have political incentives that reward people for being more and more partisan.

• 20:46Andrew Yang?

  You have media organizations compounding those incentives. And then now you have social media pouring gasoline on the whole thing. And this is one reason why the polarization is at a point where we can literally see ourselves devolving into civil war 2.0. And that sounds hyperbolic and negative, but a scholar named Peter Turchin has been measuring political stress and he has us presently at civil war levels.

• 21:13Rich Roll?

  That's terrifying.

• 21:15Andrew Yang?

  Yeah, and if you reflect on it, we've already seen heretofore unthinkable scenes unfolding in the United States. And the question you have to ask yourself is, is that going to get more extreme or less extreme in the days to come? I'm going to suggest it's only going to get more extreme because that's where all the incentives are driving us.

• 21:33Rich Roll?

  Right. Meanwhile, just today, I'm sure you saw the announcement that Trump made around this new social media platform that he's going to be launching, which, to my mind, I mean, I don't know what your perspective is on this, is only going to exacerbate that divide and further, you know, inflame those perverse incentives.

• 21:55Andrew Yang?

  I'm going to be fascinated to see how this unfolds. I am skeptical that he is capable of operating a true technological rival.

• 22:03Rich Roll?

  His track record isn't great on this, but we'll see, right?

• 22:06Andrew Yang?

  But it is a sign of the times for sure. And it's fascinating how these tech companies have become essentially the arbiters of information and communication for everyone, like in a public commons manner. I'm friends with some of the folks at these tech companies. There are clear excesses on that side, but I think that the issues are not what Trump and the gang are proposing. Those aren't the real problems. A lot of the problems are around our deteriorating mental health as a result of social media use, particularly among young people, particularly among teenage girls. And there are probably people that listen to this podcast who are parents who are concerned about it.

• 22:49Andrew Yang?

  The data shows that what the Facebook whistleblower, Francis Haugen, proposed, a lot of people I know in Silicon Valley already knew this. I'm sure the same is true for you.

• 22:57Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Yeah. And as a parent of teenagers, I'm hyper aware of this, and this is a subject that's come up frequently on the podcast. And it's heartbreaking. And I think the solution remains to be seen. It's a very difficult problem to tackle.

• 23:16Andrew Yang?

  I propose a couple of solutions in the book, but one thing I thought was common sense is just turn off Instagram between the hours of midnight and 8:00 a.m.

• 23:24Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 23:24Andrew Yang?

  For if you're a kid, if there's a minor, I mean, do they really need to be on Instagram during those hours? We should be able to take measures like that.

• 23:32Rich Roll?

  Yeah. It's tricky, though. As somebody who has teenagers right now, it's a very difficult thing to actually put in place.

• 23:40Andrew Yang?

  Well, you could go to the company level. I don't know. If I were president, I would seriously be talking to folks and be like, look, what are common sense measures we could take? And of course, some people would hate them, and some people would say, you know, you're being heavy-handed. But we have to look at the data. I mean, the data shows that this stuff's not great in overabundance.

• 24:00Rich Roll?

  On the subject of perverse incentives, the kind of traditional approach to that has been kind of policy piecemeal, like, let's look at campaign finance reform, let's tackle the filibuster, let's try to figure out how to overcome gerrymandering. You have a variety of solutions that are all outlined in the book, and you've got this mission statement that's based on a number of categories. But at the very top level, it's about upending this duopoly. And this is where the forward party comes in. Why is this, in your mind, the best way to deal with all of these problems?

• 24:39Andrew Yang?

  So when I went on this journey, writing this book, talking about my own experiences, and also trying to unpack this sense of frustration and despair that I felt genuinely, where my campaign achieved very unlikely levels of success, we outcompeted half a dozen senators, governors, political brand names, and yet I still felt like we were very far from delivering on some of the changes that we were fighting for. I thought the problem was that people had not heard of universal basic income, and it turns out that now that people have heard of it, and 65% of people are for it, now I realize the problem is that our government actually isn't working and isn't set up to respond to us. And so if a system's designed

• 25:20Andrew Yang?

  not to work, then you should expect it not to work. That was like one of my big takeaways. And then when you get back to first principles, it turns out that our founding fathers were anti-partisan. There's nothing in the Constitution about political parties. John Adams said that if you had two great parties, it would be an evil upon the land. This duopoly design is a design catastrophe, really. You can see it now with the rising polarization, and a lot of people sense this. 62% of Americans right now want an alternative to the two

• 25:59Andrew Yang?

  major parties. The two major parties command very low genuine loyalty. Independents outnumber Democrats and Republicans by almost two to one. The numbers are something like 44% independent, 28 Dem, 25

• 26:14Andrew Yang?

  Republican approximately. So if you were an entrepreneur, as I would consider you to be, and people listening to this might resemble this, if you're an entrepreneur and you showed up to a market, there were two companies and 62% of people wanted an alternative, you would immediately want to start a third company. You would say, hey, let's do this. Now, in politics, the mechanics make it very, very difficult to actually start a third party. But if you look around the world, the UK has five parties, Germany, seven, Sweden, eight, the Netherlands, 18.

• 26:54Andrew Yang?

  These are mature democracies that also are much more resistant to authoritarianism. Because if you have only two major parties and then one of them succumbs to bad leadership, all of a sudden, the political incentives for everyone in that party are to fall in line. You know, our guy might not be perfect, but he's better than the other team. And then you can actually find yourself in an authoritarian environment very, very quickly. It's very, very vulnerable. It's a very poor design. So the question is, how could we actually improve on the design in a short timeframe? We might have, for example, 13 months to try to improve the design.

• 27:32Andrew Yang?

  It sounds impossible, but one of the revelations that I found is that there's actually a path for us to do it, for us to make a more multi-party democracy genuinely possible, to give rise to different points of view, to give independence a voice. And because the Constitution does not talk at all about political parties, all of this is determined at the state level. So it turns out that 25 states have ballot initiative provisions where if enough people get together, we can change the way the party primaries work. In one state, Alaska, has already made this change, which I'm happy to talk about, but they shifted from closed party primaries to open primaries and ranked choice voting

• 28:17Andrew Yang?

  in 2020, and we've already seen direct results of that change. Yeah.

• 28:22Rich Roll?

  Well, historically, you know, I don't have to tell you that, that, that, you know, throughout the history of America, you know, there, there's been issues with trying to get a third party off the ground, the most famous being Ross Perot, which was rather anemic. And what seems qualitatively different about what you're doing is that the focus of, of this third party isn't necessarily completely honed in on presidential politics. It almost functions as a support group for other parties who are behind some of these policy initiatives that, that, that you support. So it's, it's kind of a broader blanket in terms of

• 28:59Andrew Yang?

  It is.

• 29:00Rich Roll?

  impacting politics from the local level all the way up to perhaps the presidential level.

• 29:06Andrew Yang?

  We, we are very practical. It's true, Rich, but I

• 29:08Rich Roll?

  You are the practical guy.

• 29:09Andrew Yang?

  Yeah, I am, I am the math guy and the operator. But I do want to rewind for a moment and say that Ross Perot got 19.3% of the popular vote in 92. And a friend of mine, who I'll, who I'll just let him remain anonymous, polled himself in 2020 and had himself at 25%. And he was an alternative to the, the two major candidates. So you are seeing significant levels of support for an alternative. I mean, I think if there was a Ross Perot-type figure now, he would do much better than 19.2%. So just to let you know, like, you know, that the precedent isn't quite as, you know, like negative as, as some might think. But we are very practical in that the forward party is focused on actually changing the

• 29:53Andrew Yang?

  mechanics. We're going to support ballot initiatives to try and shift to open primaries and ranked choice voting in states around the country. And you can participate and help as a registered Democrat, as a registered Republican, as an independent. We say you don't need to change your party registration because the fact is doing so might reduce your ability to participate in elections in 83% of the country. You know, who would do that? So job one is to actually open up the mechanics of the system. And, and I want to talk a little bit about just how dramatic this impact could be. So a Senator, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, has been in the news a lot over the last number

• 30:33Andrew Yang?

  of weeks because she is the only Republican Senator who voted to impeach Donald Trump, who is also up for reelection next year. All right. Her approval rating right now among Alaskan Republicans is 6% as a result. It's political suicide to do what she did. But because Alaska just shifted to open primaries and ranked choice voting, she doesn't have to go through just the 10 to 20% of the most partisan Republicans in Alaska. She can take her case to the general public where she now has a fighting chance to win because a lot of people liken, respect and admire Senator Murkowski. So I

• 31:16Andrew Yang?

  want people to imagine, listening to this, if we were to unlock, let's call it 10 US senators from their hyper partisan cage and let them be able to represent 51% of their constituents as opposed to just the 10 to 20% on one side, how many would then have different stances, be able to vote on principle around things like protecting our democratic institutions, our local secretaries of state from getting fired for political reasons or whatever the measures are. Like that is a real, concrete goal that we can be shooting for in 2022 that might help our country get through the next number of months.

• 31:59Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I really like this idea of open primaries and ranked choice voting. I suspect that some people watching or listening may have heard those terms but don't quite understand what they mean. We have seen ranked choice voting in a number of states. Has there been that combination though, other than the example that you just illustrated of those two working together, the open primaries with the ranked choice voting? Because we've typically seen ranked choice voting within primary races solely.

• 32:28Andrew Yang?

  That is correct. Alaska is the only state that's installed both of them in conjunction. Maine has had ranked choice voting in their elections for the last number of years and it's had very positive results. I was in a ranked choice voting election that I didn't win.

• 32:43Rich Roll?

  Yeah, in New York, California.

• 32:44Andrew Yang?

  And ranked choice voting itself.

• 32:47Rich Roll?

  That was with it, that was in the primary race.

• 32:49Andrew Yang?

  It was, which, which, you know, solved some of the problem and not all of it. But ranked choice voting generally has a moderating influence because you have to get 50.1% of voters to at least have you somewhere on their ballot. And so if you're the kind of candidate that's going to really excite 25% of people, but then turn off 60%, like, that's not a winning strategy in a ranked choice voting contest, whereas it could be a winning strategy in a plurality voting contest. So it's going to reward coalition builders. It's going to discourage negative campaigning because if I trash you, then we both look kind of bad. And the third candidate does relatively better. So it's a kind of process upgrade that can have profound impacts on both the types of leaders

• 33:34Andrew Yang?

  you elect, but also their incentives after they're in.

• 33:38Rich Roll?

  And the incentives of the voters themselves get realigned.

• 33:42Andrew Yang?

  Yes, and you know what? Another thing too, is that when you talk about a third party, what's the first thing someone says? You're going to mess it up for party X or party Y. And ranked choice voting gets rid of that spoiler effect because you can express your true preferences. You can rank the minor party candidate number one, and then your favorite major party candidate number two, and then it doesn't mess anything up for anyone. So when, when people talk about the spoiler effect, it's baked into this dupe. There's a kind of a circularity to it. It's like, well, why can't you have new parties? Oh, because you're going to screw it up for party X. It's like, well, if you change the process, then people can express their preferences in a more honest and representative way. So that's where we should be racing to as quickly as possible. This is one of the things I'm trying to convey to folks.

• 34:27Andrew Yang?

  It's like, this system is setting us up to fail. And even if you love one side more than the other, you should still be investing very, very quickly in these reforms because it's going to make it so that the system might survive the next number of months.

• 34:43Rich Roll?

  Coming back for more, but first.

• 34:54Rich Roll?

  Okay, back to the show.

• 35:00Rich Roll?

  On that point of being devil's advocate and you're gonna mess it up and all of that, what is your sense of the people who are gravitating towards the forward party? I mean, obviously, this is early days. And my sense would be that it's gonna be kind of conservative Democrats and progressive Republicans or centrist Republicans, sensible Republicans who are not far right. Is there a notion around what that balance looks like? Is it gonna be more of those Republicans versus Democrats? Or how does that parse out?

• 35:34Andrew Yang?

  I've gotten early outreach from a lot of Republicans and independents, including many military veterans and law enforcement folks who just are drawn to it. They've said to me, like, I've been waiting for something like this for a long time. But all politics are tribal, again. And the question is, who's going to be drawn to this set of solutions, this approach, this political language? And I've been joking that it's like the most reasonable, optimistic, entrepreneurial, solutions-oriented 10% of Americans. It's not 51%. That's one of the fun things about it.

• 36:16Andrew Yang?

  But in a country this polarized, if you get 10% of Americans excited about a particular movement, you actually control the agenda. If you look at the US Senate, how many senators would you need to control the agenda right now?

• 36:29Rich Roll?

  One.

• 36:30Andrew Yang?

  One. Exactly. Like, there's a chance that we get our one senator in '22. So when people look at this movement, it really is like this solutions-oriented, reasonable 10%. And that maps to different parts of the political spectrum.

• 36:53Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Without getting too partisan on any of this, I mean, I'm no fan of Donald Trump, but when I look at, when I cast my gaze at 2024, I'm trying to imagine, Forward Party or No Forward Party, the scenario under which Donald Trump does not win the election. Like, how are you thinking about that and how that's gonna play out?

• 37:15Andrew Yang?

  So I've looked at the political landscape ahead. The betting markets right now have Republicans retaking the House of Representatives at 72% next fall, which seems about right. Right now, Democrats have a five-seat advantage. Traditionally, the in-power party loses 10 to 15 seats in the off-cycle election. So, most people in DC are looking at it, saying, "Well, the Democrats have until November 22 to get anything done, because they're probably going to lose the House." So, at that point, you're not going to see many legislative victories for Democrats that they can champion heading into '24. Right now, Joe's approval rating is in the low to mid-40s.

• 37:59Andrew Yang?

  It could obviously change dramatically over the next number of months. So if you're the Democrats, who do you run against Trump? First, I'll go through the Republican field very quickly. It's going to be Trump in all likelihood. 65% approval rating, his strongest opponents have said they won't run against him. So he probably rolls through Chris Christie, Mike Pence, maybe Larry Hogan, like that kind of field. So then if you're the Democrats and you see Trump coming, you say, "Okay, who are we going to run? Joe Biden, incumbent president, defeated him once. The major drawback for Joe is that he'll be 81 years old, and his health is going to be an issue. He might visibly be showing some signs of wear. So then you look around and say, "Okay, maybe Kamala."

• 38:43Andrew Yang?

  The problem is that Kamala polls four to five points worse than Joe pretty consistently. She doesn't have a chance. So, and then if you were to try and find a third person, you can't just appoint that person. They have to go through a competitive primary, which is something the Democrats would not want to put themselves through. So it's probably Joe. So to your point, then, if you see the Biden-Trump rematch, who wins? And a lot of people don't realize that this past race was razor-thin in terms of the margin, where if 42,000 voters in three states had...

• 39:19Andrew Yang?

  Voted differently, Trump wins legitimately via the Electoral College vote. So who would you favor in terms of Biden-Trump two? You know, it's a difficult, frankly, it's a difficult scenario to feel confident about Biden winning again. And so if you're the Democrats, this is your landscape, you know, and it's a tough landscape. So that's something, that's another reason why I think that we need to be trying to think more systemically about what solutions look like. And since starting the Forward Party, I've had a lot of Democrats be like, hey, hey, you know, like, you know, pretty much like, vote Democrat all the way, like, Trump's coming, like, you know, there's no room for a distraction.

• 40:04Andrew Yang?

  And I look at this and be like, well, you know, you can obviously do what you want to do in terms of supporting Democrats, but you have to look at this map, and I'm the numbers guy. Like, this is going to be really tough. And so if that's your Plan A, it would be very wise to have a Plan B.

• 40:20Rich Roll?

  Right. Well, on that subject of policy initiatives, things that we can be doing now, in addition to open primaries and ranked choice voting, which we should point out, I can't remember whether you said it or not, these are ballot initiatives, they don't require legislative action. So these are things that can actually happen on the state level and make a real difference in the immediate future. But in addition to that, a huge piece of your platform with the Forward Party is this idea of human-centered capitalism, right? Like, the idea that we need to reconfigure our economy so that it is not so hyper-focused on GDP and start taking care of the people as opposed to just making sure that the economy

• 41:05Rich Roll?

  is churning and using that to over-index on how we're actually doing as a country.

• 41:11Andrew Yang?

  If you look at the measurements around such basic things as infant mortality, quality drinking water access, public education, life expectancy, the United States is 28th in the world on those measurements, worse for some of them. And that's been declining over the last number of years. One of the cases I was making when I ran for president is like, look, like, our quality of life is sinking into the mud. People are getting increasingly angry and distraught and resentful. So that's what we should be investing in. And my prescription at the time was, we should give everyone a thousand bucks a month. And I think that that would help a great deal.

• 41:54Andrew Yang?

  But equally important is for us to focus on the right measurements, because if you're an operator, as I am, if you have the wrong measurements, you're going to head in the wrong direction. And right now, we're pretending things are good, while people's quality of life just gets worse and worse. So we should be centering our sense of progress around how our kids are doing, our health, our mental health, our environmental quality. And then if those things decline, then you can look up and say, wow, we're really doing poorly, as opposed to right now, saying, well, we must be doing okay, because GDP is up, stock market prices are at record highs. And, you know, there's a certain subset of us that are doing well, in terms of the financial returns.

• 42:39Rich Roll?

  Other than UBI, which you've spoken about at length many, many times, obviously, what are some other ways that we can address the growing wealth disparity and this gap, which feels like the real engine behind the division that gets played out in the media and in politics?

• 42:56Andrew Yang?

  Yeah, the simplest explanation for what's going on in our country is that if you destroy a middle class, then you become subject to all sorts of terrible impulses and ideas. And our middle class has been getting decimated for Decades, starting in the mid seventies, around when I was born, actually. I was born in seventy five. I spent six years running an entrepreneurship organization because I thought the way that we could remedy this is to have people starting businesses and growing businesses all over the country. And I realized that the scope of my work was going to be far too small to try to remedy the problem in question. So if you're going to try and rebuild the middle class, it's a massive project.

• 43:41Andrew Yang?

  But there are three main things that make Americans sad in terms of their costs. Education, healthcare and housing. Each of those has gone up in price, much, much more so than incomes for one, but also than the consumer goods or media or the things that we consume. So if you were to want to try and make things better in America, you would find ways to deliver healthcare more cost effectively, you'd find ways to make education less costly and you'd try and keep the housing prices and costs under control.

• 44:14Rich Roll?

  So from the inception of this conversation around UBI that you helped pioneer and now as by dint of the pandemic actually has been tested, has your, how has your perspective on UBI evolved or changed since those early days during the presidential campaign?

• 44:36Andrew Yang?

  We're living through now real time experiments with UBI at scale, which in some ways very exciting. The biggest component is the child tax credit that has lifted millions of kids and families out of poverty. It's made people better able to learn. It's put food on the table. Four hundred forty-two economists, including Nobel Prize winners, recently signed a letter saying, keep the child tax credit because it's the best thing we have done in a long time. So that's a component that I think people are very excited about and confident in. The other component around unemployment relief has had very, very mixed effects in large part because we've tied the money to not working. And I'm around twenty

• 45:20Andrew Yang?

  Six-year-olds who say to me, "Look, I'm getting 80% of what I was making not working, so I'm not going to do anything until this train runs out."

• 45:29Rich Roll?

  I know a bunch of those people.

• 45:30Andrew Yang?

  And then only then will I turn around and start looking for a job. And I look at them and I say, "That's entirely reasonable and rational." Like, you know, like who would make a different decision? So if we're going to put money into people's hands, we should not be attaching it to not working. That's one of the big lessons that I think people should take from this time.

• 45:47Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm. How do you think about campaign finance reform and the pernicious nature of the lobbying industrial complex and the impact that that has on elected official incentives? Like, how can we get past K Street? How can we figure out how to responsibly channel money into politics without creating those types of incentives? Because short of serious campaign finance reform, like, how do we, like, to use your phrase, like, move forward?

• 46:21Andrew Yang?

  This is one of the great issues. And I talk in the book about how now we have a vitocracy, where for big companies, you'll spend millions of dollars, not just trying to get something done, but making sure something you don't like doesn't happen. And that's like this negative power now in the system. Like, you can't get anything done, but you can keep anything from getting done.

• 46:44Rich Roll?

  And that's fueled by this revolving door between K Street and the Fortune 500 C-Suites and elected office.

• 46:51Andrew Yang?

  Yes, there was an Onion headline from a long time ago, an article. You can look it up. It's like, "The American People Hire a Lobbyist to Fight for Their Interests in Washington." And I just thought it was really funny. There's like a guy in a suit in the picture being like, "I represent the American people." And then I thought about it, I was like, "That actually would make a lot of sense." And what's funny is, years later, after that headline, I started a lobbying organization, Humanity Forward, that right now is doing that very thing. It's just like in Washington DC, and it's lobbying for cash relief and data rights.

• 47:22Rich Roll?

  We want you to actually do your job.

• 47:24Andrew Yang?

  Oh, we want you to do your job for the American people and not like an interest group that has oodles and oodles of money. So if that sounds good to people, you know, you can check out Humanity Forward, and it's literally like the people's lobbyist.

• 47:36Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 47:37Andrew Yang?

  Inspired by the Onion. So...

• 47:41Andrew Yang?

  It's a major problem. We spend billions of dollars, like a vortex of $6 billion plus influencing policy, just trying to keep things fixed in place. So how do you cut through that? And the customary political answer that you'll hear is we should overturn Citizens United, try and get dark money out of politics. I agree it was a bad ruling, but it would take a constitutional amendment to overturn that ruling. And the fact is, money has had its way in politics since even before that ruling, and would find its way back in in various ways. So the best actual solution, which I think could be achievable and passable, is to put 100 democracy dollars into the hands of every American that you can just give to any political

• 48:26Andrew Yang?

  candidate you want. This has been done at a local level, and it has empowered people to all of a sudden think of themselves as investors in candidates. The number of Americans, the percentage of Americans who actually donate to political candidates right now is very low. It's something like 10%. So if you do that, you're in like the most 10%, the most engaged and activated 10% of American voters. But if you had 100 free dollars, like what would that percentage look like? You know, all of a sudden, I think you'd see it, you wouldn't get to 100% ever, because people would, some people would be like, oh, it's another scam somehow. But if you even got to 20 or 25%, that would be enough to counterbalance all of the corporate money in politics.

• 49:09Andrew Yang?

  And if you're an individual candidate, and you've got 10,000 people to support you, that's a million dollars. That's enough to run a credible congressional campaign in a lot of the country.

• 49:18Rich Roll?

  I like that idea. And short of Citizens United getting overturned, isn't there a way to create a moratorium on an elected official's ability to then transition into some kind of lobbying job or, you know, being on the board of directors of a company that donated a tremendous amount of money to them? Like, can't we at least create space between the tenure that they hold in office and whatever they choose to do when that, when they retire from that office?

• 49:53Andrew Yang?

  The revolving door is so deep, where a majority of legislators will go work for a lobbyist after their term in office. And the dynamic is very pervasive and pernicious. And it goes like this. I'm working on Capitol Hill and I have friends who resemble this. I make a certain amount of money. Their lobbyists come around and they make more money than me. Their firms like pay people six times more. And so your very natural impulses go easy on them and then get a job with them afterwards. So if you were to genuinely want to put a stop to this, you need to do something dramatic, which I'd be all for. And in some ways, people would resist this because it seems like you're, you know,

• 50:34Andrew Yang?

  like somehow rewarding legislators at a higher level, but we should pay them a lot more. And then we should throw money at them as soon as they leave office, as long as they aren't a lobbyist, essentially, to say, hey, if you go work for a nonprofit or an academic institution that's not engaged in lobbying, we'll give you an extra $100,000 a year for the rest of your life, whatever it takes. But that is the only realistic countermeasure that might work. Members of Congress get paid $174,000 a year. It's a lot of money by national standards, but a lot of people listening to this are like, oh, like, you know, like, I could see why then they turn around and make 800,000 as a lobbyist as soon as they can.

• 51:12Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Part of your whole thing here, being an entrepreneur and a technologist, is all of these ideas that you have around modernizing government and leveraging technology and blockchain to kind of bring bureaucracy into the modern era. I mean, right now, it's just, it's insane how backward it is in terms of, you know, how it, you know, how it manages its day-to-day operations. And I really like some of these ideas that you have. And in the book, I thought the story around Citizen US, that thing that you tried to start, was very instructive around what the solution could be versus kind of where we're at right now and the barriers towards getting something like that up on its feet.

• 51:57Andrew Yang?

  Yeah, I was trying to figure out how to get people money during the pandemic. And I told stories in the book about how Togo, the poor African country, actually set up a way for millions of their citizens to get money digitally. The way that the US government distributed the money was via the IRS. And that had some virtues, but it had some real defects as well. And the biggest defect in that case was that the poorest Americans don't actually file taxes, and so you'd be missing. Tons of people that are

• 52:26Rich Roll?

  Needed the most.

• 52:26Andrew Yang?

  Yeah, that needed the most. And so what some technologists associated with me came up with is like, we should have a citizens portal where you just go and then if you wanted to, we could send you money, we could send you information, you could update your passport, you might be able to get information about your local elections. Like there are things that are very, very feasible and achievable for us. And one of the jokes I tell is that if our government were a vendor, we would have switched years ago. It would have been like, this vendor is not working for me. The problem is that there's no other vendor to turn to. And so one of the things we should be trying to emphasize politically is just better systems that deliver.

• 53:07Andrew Yang?

  And right now, one of the struggles that Joe Biden is having, in my opinion, is that he gets in there and then there's a problem born of the bureaucracy inherited and everyone blames him for it. It's because we have this myth that it's like, oh, if I put a competent moral person in charge, then all of a sudden the bureaucracy will perform. And it probably won't. And so that's one reason why the parties will just continue to play you lose, I lose over and over again, because whoever's in charge, things don't work very well and we get more and more ticked off.

• 53:38Rich Roll?

  Well, there's also just a lack of expertise in government with respect to technology. I mean, we all saw, you know, the hearings with Zuckerberg and all of that. And it becomes very clear that there just isn't the depth of understanding that is needed or required to solve some of these problems, which could be solved very easily through technological solutions.

• 54:00Andrew Yang?

  Oh, yeah, it's a travesty. They got rid of the Office of Technology Assessment, which was the agency that advised Congress on technology matters in the 1990s and haven't had anyone in that capacity since. We also do have a gerontocracy in this country where the leadership is quite old and a lot of them don't understand technology natively because many of them haven't used it.

• 54:24Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm. I like this idea. One of my favorite ideas that you propose in the book is the tax Mandalorian.

• 54:31Andrew Yang?

  You enjoyed that, huh?

• 54:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 54:34Andrew Yang?

  Well, I was talking to friends about how we have like a very, very sophisticated finance and legal industry, but then you have the IRS that's kind of behind the times and under-resourced and everything else. And so one of my friends said, you know what? If you just put out a bounty and said, if I can wrangle someone who owes lots of taxes, like I get to keep 25%, you'd have private equity firms investing in that at a high level. It was like kind of jujitsu. It was like turning the sophistication of the finance industry against itself. And so we had a good laugh about that, but it was just a sign too of how we expect our government to just be limping along.

• 55:21Rich Roll?

  How has the Democratic Party, or your friends within the Democratic Party, responded to you in the wake of the book coming out and this announcement?

• 55:31Andrew Yang?

  I've been an independent for approximately two and a half weeks, and I have enjoyed it immensely. So if you're an independent, you know, now like I see how much fun it is. I mean, I genuinely felt as if my point of view changed after I just changed that voter registration information. It's kind of wild. The Democrats who reached out to me are friends and good people. Like, you know, some of them sent me generous notes, you know, others, you know, like I've just ignored it, honestly. But, but the people that know me know that I'm just a solutions-oriented builder, and I'll do whatever I think is going to work best in a particular situation and in context. And right now, if we're going

• 56:15Andrew Yang?

  to free ourselves of the duopoly, it's going to take a popular movement of independents and Democrats and Republicans alike. I have a clear vision for what the Forward Party can become, and I'm really excited about it. It's this unifying tribe that's positive and uplifting in politics that a lot of people have been waiting for. Then we talk about actual solutions and try and bring the force of popular will to bear.

• 56:50Rich Roll?

  There is this narrative out there that this book and the Forward Party is sort of a, you know, very cynical perspective, that it's a publicity grab. But it doesn't appear to really be in your self-interest to put a book out and announce a third party. I mean, nobody in the Democratic Party can publicly endorse what you're doing right now, and it becomes a political liability to kind of stand side by side with you.

• 57:18Andrew Yang?

  Anyone who thinks starting a third party is like a savvy career move, really needs to look at it.

• 57:24Rich Roll?

  Back to the podcast studio, Andrew.

• 57:27Andrew Yang?

  Yeah, you know, so, and I can actually explain the process because, you know, I think it might be instructive for people rich. So I'm unpacking my experiences and my learnings, reading books by Jonathan Haidt and Ezra Klein and Lawrence Lessig and Catherine Gale and Michael Porter, and coming to the conclusions that I came to in this book, Forward. And when you come to these conclusions, then you have to come to grips with, okay, what is an actual way out? What is a real path forward? What's the solution? And it would need to be from outside of the duopoly that actually reforms our mechanisms so that different points of view can emerge. I'm not after three parties. I'm after five parties, seven parties, you know, a democracy that will actually stand up to the test of time and listen to people.

• 58:11Andrew Yang?

  And so when you draw that conclusion, there are two ways to end this book. One is someone should do this, or two, I will do this. And it turns out that I am maybe one of the best situated people in American life to do it. And so I just did not have it in me to be like, here's this devastating crisis that's unfolding before our eyes, here's a solution, someone else take care of this, please. You know, like that, I'm just not wired that way. I mean, my last book was about a vision for the country, and I ran for president on it. So for this, if you come to this conclusion, then you think, okay, I have to take action. And so I always knew that when this book came out, I was going to start the Forward Party and try and bring this vision to people.

• 58:55Andrew Yang?

  And that's the way that, you know, it unfolded in terms of the process. But it took me a year of writing and research to figure out that this is where we should go.

• 59:03Rich Roll?

  Yeah. You mentioned on a recent podcast, on your own podcast, this idea that, you know, we're all very good at talking about the problems, but the minute somebody says, I'm actually gonna... Invest in the solution and do something about it. Everybody's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, you know, we can't do that.

• 59:20Andrew Yang?

  That's the way we're conditioned now.

• 59:21Rich Roll?

  We have to just talk about, we should have to talk about the problem.

• 59:24Andrew Yang?

  Yeah, that's a disease in American life right now is that if I talk about the problem, I'm smart and I'm sophisticated. But if I say, hey, I'm going to do something about it, then people are like, oh, no, like too controversial, too political, too inflammatory. No, so that's a problem. One of the things that I think I bring to the table is like, I will advance a solution that a lot of people are thinking about. Like, again, 62% of Americans want an alternative to the duopoly. And so if you propose the forward party, open primaries, ranked choice voting, unlock us from this death spiral of polarization, some Americans look up and say, thank God, someone's doing it, like, I'm in.

• 1:00:05Andrew Yang?

  But the kind of peanut gallery approach is like, oh, can't work, here's why, because that's one of the ways we're conditioned nowadays.

• 1:00:13Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm. When you look at countries across Europe, you obviously see democratic nations with a proliferation of parties. Why is it in America that we've never been able to do that?

• 1:00:27Andrew Yang?

  So this duopoly, again, did not happen with the founding of the country or the Constitution. It arose a number of years and decades later. The Republican Party was founded as an anti-slave northern party in the wake of the Civil War. So at this point, you had these two parties, the Democratic and Republican Party, that governed the mechanics and made it so that it's very, very difficult for a third party to emerge. Interestingly, though, the Democratic and Republican Party were not as ideological as they are now until quite recently. In Ezra Klein's book, Why We're Polarized, he goes through the 50s, the 60s, where the Democrats and Republicans are essentially interchangeable.

• 1:01:07Andrew Yang?

  They have like the same outlook, the same policy prescriptions, and Americans did not regard someone of the other party as anything, but it's like, oh, you know, that's just the other team, but we're not super different. And then the differences started emerging in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and then they've just gone up and up since then. But the mechanics have remained fixed over this time, where over the last 150 years or so, the two parties said, you know what, let's just make it so that it's one of us. And as a result, we have now, again, one of the greatest design flaws in history

• 1:01:48Andrew Yang?

  that everyone's trying to convince us is carved into a stone tablet somewhere, when really it's just, you know, two parties decided they'd rather it be one of them and not anyone else.

• 1:01:59Rich Roll?

  Yeah. When you look at countries across Western Europe, though, I mean, it's not like a third party or multiple parties is the panacea. I mean, we're seeing this rise of nationalism, you know, across Western Europe, and there are other problems that multiple parties don't necessarily inherently by and of themselves solve. But my sense is that, yes, it's these policies that are the platform of this party that you're behind that are the crucial driver. It's the part, it's having a third party itself, but it's also what is the mission of this third party?

• 1:02:33Andrew Yang?

  Yeah, and if you had a more genuinely dynamic political system, then new ideas and policies would get advanced much, much more quickly than is the case now. You're right, it's not a panacea. I mean, obviously, we'd still have problems. But I will say that it'd be much more resilient to, for example, authoritarian impulses. It would give people a sense that they could have a different point of view and run on it and not be completely marginalized and locked out of the system. Because in the majority of the country right now, and people listening to this know exactly what I'm talking about, you cannot meaningfully vote in your local elections unless you sign up for one party or another. It's a closed party primary.

• 1:03:16Andrew Yang?

  That was the case in New York City, where 900,000 people voted in the Democratic primary that I participated in, which was a significant increase, maybe like an 11% increase from the prior cycle. But there are 9 million people in New York City. I mean, essentially 10% of people.

• 1:03:34Andrew Yang?

  Decide the next mayor.

• 1:03:35Rich Roll?

  Right, right.

• 1:03:36Andrew Yang?

  And it's because you needed to be a registered Democrat four months prior to the election in order to vote. I encountered dozens, maybe hundreds of independents and Republicans who would say, hey, Yang, I want to vote for you. Like, you know, like, how do I do it? And then I'd look at the calendar and be like, hey, it's March, April, May. Like, you actually are already too late.

• 1:03:53Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that doesn't make sense. And that's why, you know, ranked choice voting without open primaries is only, you know, half a solution.

• 1:04:00Andrew Yang?

  Agree. Open primaries would allow more people to participate. And if you're lowercase d democratic, like, you know, we should all be for this. I mean, what is the counterargument? That the parties know best and you should only be allowed to vote? There are so many people who've signed up for a party, not because of their love for that party, but just because of practicality or convenience, or that they just wanted to be able to participate. Like, they have this artificial lock on everything.

• 1:04:32Rich Roll?

  It's a problem. It's a problem. It's also, on the local level, exacerbated by the fact that there's this death of local media because of the incentives built into media. Like, there's no local coverage of any meaning anymore, seemingly, which then creates that gap between the voter and truly being educated about what's going on in their district.

• 1:04:57Andrew Yang?

  Yeah, over 2,000 local papers have gone out of business over the last number of months, and it's very, very negative for our ability to come together because local papers tended to be much less polarized and polarizing. I mean, you know, how many different ways can you talk about the new store opening or the, like, the bridge being got to repair? You know, it's like, fairly objective stuff. So it makes me very sad that local journalism is dying to the extent it is. There is an act in Congress called the Local Journalism Sustainability Act that would help somewhat. But this is, to me, one of the reasons why we're spiraling in the way that we are, because the counterweight of local journalism is disappearing.

• 1:05:39Rich Roll?

  When you were running for president, how is it different than what you expected or anticipated it would be? Because a big part of the book is pulling covers on the truth behind how this whole situation operates. And it's pretty revealing for the reader to understand that what you see on television isn't exactly what's going on. There's so much more at play. And you, like when you were at the debate and you said, what are we all doing here? Wearing makeup? It's like, I think people were really like, that was so refreshing to hear. Like, let's just call this what it is. Like, what are we actually doing here? What is really going on?

• 1:06:20Andrew Yang?

  Yeah, that was a line that broke through happily. Those debates were a very odd experience, for sure. So I was a serial entrepreneur prior to running for president. And I have made the same mistake in everything I've ever done, Rich. Maybe some people can relate to this, is I thought that the new thing I was going to do is going to be somewhat similar to the last thing I did.

• 1:06:47Rich Roll?

  But how could running for president bear any resemblance to being a tech entrepreneur?

• 1:06:52Andrew Yang?

  Okay, so I was a CEO of a private company. And then I started a nonprofit, Venture for America. And if you started a nonprofit, you have to walk around, make your case, raise money, get support. And so I thought, okay, running for president will be like that. And it was not. Because it turns out, when you're a candidate, you become the product yourself. It's much more direct and personal. And I write about this in the book. You become more of an instrument where there are people around you who are just directing you, saying, do this, do that. Because your face is like the, you know, like the main value driver of the campaign. Like, if I just put my, you know, like, if I just record a quick video for someone,

• 1:07:36Andrew Yang?

  then that's like the most high-impact thing that can be done. And it was not like that when I was running a company, ever, or a nonprofit. You know, it's like, when I was running those organizations, it was more about the organization than me. And so it was a massive adjustment, having to put myself forward in that way. I'm also Asian, and like, it might not be, you know, the way I was brought up. So as a result, imagine an introvert running for president. That was really my experience. And so when I was up on that debate stage, it really did seem farcical and ridiculous. And I wanted to try and share that. And I think that one reason why people got excited about my campaign is they sensed I was like an outsider to the system, trying to make

• 1:08:16Andrew Yang?

  sense of it for the vast majority of Americans who had suspected that things maybe weren't as on the up and up. And so I hope the book conveys that set of experiences.

• 1:08:30Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, being the math guy, the practical guy, the policy wonk who wants to talk about these new creative initiatives, it's, you know, interesting to come into an awareness that, you know, people don't want to talk about policy. They don't necessarily vote on policy. And what's really impactful is a video on somebody's phone of you dancing. And that's what gets coverage. I mean, just today, like this morning, I'm like, okay, what's Andrew up to lately? Like, what's happened in the last week or a couple of days? I Google your name. And most of the top hits were all about your logo for the Forward Party, looking like Top Gun or G.I. Joe, right? It's like, most of the media

• 1:09:13Rich Roll?

  coverage is about that. So like, when you see that, like, are you like, what do I have to do?

• 1:09:19Andrew Yang?

  Well, it's funny, because that was literally just a designer, like, DM me the logo.

• 1:09:24Rich Roll?

  It's intentional, obviously. It's not a mistake.

• 1:09:28Andrew Yang?

  Yeah, I was just like, oh, I mean, I grew up in that era. Yeah, and I do talk about this in the book, where, you know, I spent three days in South Carolina, and then a one-minute video of my Dancing the Cupid Shuffle becomes the only thing anyone cares about from that trip, even though I did dozens of other things. So there's like a media environment, a social media environment, and you do want to compete. So you kind of play into it if you're smart. You know what's one of the things that I found will hold back other candidates, is that everyone is surrounded by staff and professionals who

• 1:10:05Andrew Yang?

  Are mercenaries and they'd rather lose a professional campaign than do anything high variance that might put a black mark on their resume. It reminds me of like these NFL coaches who you can tell it's like they're going to lose this game, but they're not going to do anything too crazy because like losing by seven or 10 seems more professional.

• 1:10:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:26Andrew Yang?

  So, so that, so there's like a, the political industrial complexes around all the candidates and it's one reason why people just seem like robots.

• 1:10:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that, that wing ding story that you tell about Avenatti in Iowa, I think is pretty illustrative of how the machinery operates.

• 1:10:47Andrew Yang?

  Again, I'm so grateful to you, Rich, and other independent voices. And so my vision for what we need to do to get ourselves out of this mess, we need to build a new, independent, positive, solutions oriented tribe and voice that's going to help break up the duopoly and the polarization. And we need to build a new constellation of independent media voices that people turn to and trust that's independent of the current partisan corporate media industrial complex. Those are the two great projects that I think can bring us back. And those are the two projects I'm devoting my waking life to.

• 1:11:26Rich Roll?

  Do you think it's possible to create a news channel, a cable news channel that is principled in its relative objectivity, like to create news that's a little bit, you know, more sane and grounded and less partisan?

• 1:11:42Andrew Yang?

  It is possible. One of the defects of cable news is just it's a lot of hours of programming to fill. Like if you stuck a camera in front of me and said, hey, just like fill 12 hours, like, you know, it's going to get weird.

• 1:11:55Rich Roll?

  Well, we got C-SPAN for that.

• 1:12:00Andrew Yang?

  Yeah, like you, but it is something that a lot of people want right now. And so I, when you say it's like, hey, could you create a sane news channel or cable news channel? It might not look like a cable news channel.

• 1:12:14Rich Roll?

  Hmm. What would it look like?

• 1:12:16Andrew Yang?

  Well, I think it could look like a whole-

• 1:12:19Rich Roll?

  Like Crystal and Sager.

• 1:12:20Andrew Yang?

  It would be Crystal and Sager across different categories in different formats where you could be obviously like, you know, video and podcast, but also some programming that looks like cable news channels, but isn't, you know, again, 24/7.

• 1:12:41Rich Roll?

  So with the, you know, if you just launched this party, what is it like, what's the day to day look like? Like where are you putting your focus in terms of things that you're trying to address and deal with and take care of to advance the interests of this party?

• 1:12:54Andrew Yang?

  Well, organization building, it's good fun. So if this is exciting to you listening, go to forwardparty.com and you can sign up. You might even start your own local chapter and then we'll get some of these ballot initiatives going. We will support local candidates who can be running as Republicans, independents, Democrats who are aligned with some of these goals. We are making the case to the American people in different ways. We're raising money. So it's movement building and it's a lot of work, but I am super energized and excited in part because the appetite is so great. Like I literally, I was in the hotel last night here in LA and then just like the random person at the door who was working the door just looked at me and yelled, "Forward Party."

• 1:13:38Andrew Yang?

  You know, like, like he was pumped. Another young person came up to me yesterday and said, "The Forward Party is the best thing to happen to American politics in my lifetime." So we just have to take that interest and energy and show people that it can be done. And after we clear that hurdle, then the sky's the limit.

• 1:13:53Rich Roll?

  Well, I really appreciate your original voice and I think we need more of this kind of sensibility in our public, national conversation and local conversation around politics. And I think it's really cool what you're doing. So I'm a fan, I'm a supporter.

• 1:14:12Andrew Yang?

  Thank you so much, Rich. That means a ton to me. This is going to be the tribe of reasonableness and reason. And I got to say, you're a charter member.

• 1:14:21Rich Roll?

  Well, come back and talk to me again sometime.

• 1:14:23Andrew Yang?

  Yeah, I would love that.

• 1:14:24Rich Roll?

  And if people want to learn more or get down with a forward party, you just mentioned the website for that, but pick up Andrew's new book, Forward: Notes on the Future of Our Democracy, available everywhere.

• 1:14:37Andrew Yang?

  And you can also go to andrewyang.com where like all this stuff's up, including a book tour, like I'm going around giving book talks, which have been

• 1:14:44Rich Roll?

  How has that been?

• 1:14:44Andrew Yang?

  A blast. I gotta say, Rich, some of these aren't comedy clubs. And so like I'm living out this fantasy where I'm talking about politics in a comedy club.

• 1:14:55Rich Roll?

  I was in New York, I think, when you had your first party, first book party, and I saw it all on Twitter and I was pissed.

• 1:15:04Andrew Yang?

  Oh shit, man. You should have DM me. I would have had you over immediately.

• 1:15:07Rich Roll?

  Next time. Cool, buddy. Well, take care, man, and hopefully we'll talk again.

• 1:15:13Andrew Yang?

  Definitely, Rich. Thank you.

• 1:15:14Rich Roll?

  Thanks. Peace.

• 1:15:20Rich Roll?

  That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guests, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com, where you can find the entire podcast archive, as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change, and The Plant Power Way, as well as The Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a

• 1:16:02Rich Roll?

  review and/or comment. Supporting the sponsors who support the show is also important and appreciated. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is, of course, awesome and very helpful. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, The Meal Planner, and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com.

• 1:16:29Rich Roll?

  Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo with additional audio engineering by Cale Curtis. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis with assistance by our creative director, Dan Drake. Portraits by Davy Greenberg and Grayson Wilder. Graphic and social media assets courtesy of Jessica Miranda, Daniel Solis, Dan Drake, and A.J. Akpodiette. Thank you Georgia Whaley for copywriting and website management. And of course, our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace. Plants. Namaste. [music]