Who are you going to staff your government with if you're going to have the same
problem that everybody has,
which once you've caught once the dog catches the car, then what?
You've got all of these institutions which have selected for economists who
don't tell the truth, who, who've selected for sociologists,
who are friendly to the institutions and hostile to our people. What do we do?
We're in this totally bizarre situation.
I don't think the institutions have faced up to just how dire our situation
is. When I go outside, for the most part,
the physical world is still humming along.
But everywhere else you can see the signs that somehow the superstructure that
undergirds the simple physical reality is really been the frame.
Am I wrong about that?
No, I agree with you. You know, and, and, and in many ways,
if you're just living life,
not plugged into all of the institutional decay,
then you can just go out in the sunshine and the birds are chirping.
And you know like you said,
the physical world is still more or less sound barring the occasional heat wave
and unseasonal weather pattern.
So the way I see it effectively what you have is a world of
institutions and you have the wrong people in the institutions. In fact,
what's happened is somehow that the institutions were built in an era where
things were growing rapidly.
The growth pattern changed a heck of a long time ago, almost 50 years ago.
And so for what they've done is that these institutions have selected for people
who can continue to tell stories about growth and to kind of play
games to keep the illusion that everything is still humming along as
if it was the fifties and sixties. But that hasn't been true for a long time.
How far off am I?
Well, that's what the numbers say.
And I'm a numbers guy where if you look at the economy of the seventies you had
a certain level of buying power among the middle class in certain split in terms
of the gains from the economy among different parts of society.
And then the lions took the divert starting in the seventies,
and now they're incredibly divergent where you have middle class incomes
essentially unchanged during that time.
And then people at the very top level absorbing more of more and more of the
gains in the winner take all economy.
But we all pretend like it's still the seventies.
And you can see the disconnect and the
lived experience of most Americans and most of the country where they starting
to catch on that things have changed. And I mean, it's dark.
Well, it's incredibly dark and it's,
it's worth laughing about I think for that reason because if we don't have a
sense of humor about it, we're not going to be able to easily do the work.
So I think whistling past the graveyard and gallows humor, definitely there's,
there's a place for that.
Well, I, you know, I, I naturally
I suppose people have said to me that I have a very point of
view, but I tend to present it in a positive, upbeat manner.
I think you're trying to get us through a bottleneck that you and I both know is
coming. And that in essence, I mean,
one of the things I'm very concerned about with you is that I don't want you to
promise the world that you know how to do this.
I want you just to say that I'm the best person to handle whatever's coming next
because nobody knows what.
Well,
certainly I would never claim a mission so that I'm going to get everything
right. I mean, I make mistakes all the time to ask my wife. She'd be like, yeah,
you screwed up just the other day.
But you and I were talking before the cameras started rolling that I think it's
going to be a very dark time and the goal has to be to try and
survive the darkness and not have it
produce existential level harm.
And I believe that I can assist in that regard,
but I certainly would never say that I have all the answers or that if I'm
president, I everything's going to work. Right. Because the fact is there,
there are two things that I've thought about.
It's like there's the way the president makes you feel, right?
And then there's actually solving problems on the ground.
And right now our experience of the presidency tends to be around the feeling.
Like if Donald Trump does something irrational,
it really does not affect my day to day existence except for the fact that I see
all the news reports and I'm like, Oh, that guy, what's he doing? You know,
and the same is true in reverse.
Like if Barack Obama did something decent and human it made me feel
good, didn't necessarily you know, like change my commute.
Where do you think? Sure. and so there's, there's the way it makes us feel,
which I believe I can assist with just about immediately if for anyone who,
you know want someone who seems a solutions oriented,
positive and positive data friendly, friendly,
and genuinely wants to just try and make people's lives better,
I think that that would make people feel better.
But then there's the reality of trying to solve the problems from the perch at
the top of the government. And that's a very different process. I mean,
I'm locked in on this idea of a freedom dividend in part because I
think it's the most dramatically positive thing we could do,
that we could actually affect your weight in real life,
that would improve people's lives, that we can actually get done.
Now, I am both positive and negative about it.
As you probably remember what my belief is is that we have two claims as
Americans.
We have a claim as a contributor to the economy and we have a claim as a soul
because we happen to live here.
And as a soul we have certain rights as a human being just as a
member of society. The weaker of the two is as a soul,
but that claim still exists.
And in some sense what you're calling the freedom dividend or universal basic
income speaks to the idea that there are two competing
claims. And you,
you don't want to get rid of the incentive structure that allows people to you
know, take a dream and turn it into something.
I love the dream. I love work. I love entrepreneurship,
people doing great stuff.
So I think that there's a theory that there are sort of a series of economic
theories that haven't actually been developed.
And I think one of the things that's really important to me is that we retake
the institutions because what we've done is we've selected for people who've
used very simplistic models that have had a huge effect on transferring wealth,
but have not actually mirrored our, our problems.
We've selected for the people who really don't tell the truth.
And I'm very worried how, let's talk about your,
your your first term in office, which is going to happen
1921 inauguration day. It's going to be a blast. You're going to be there.
He is going to be there. Yang game's going to be there.
We're gonna have a giant party.
Wait a second. Get ahead of us.
Who are you going to staff your government with if you're going to have the same
problem that everybody has,
which once you've caught once the dog catches the car, then what?
You've got all of these institutions which have selected for economists who
don't tell the truth, who, who've selected for sociologists,
who are friendly to the institutions in a hostile to our people. What do we do?
My team is going to be a blend of different people with different experience
sets from different industries even different ideologies.
And I think you need some people who are DC insiders who
have relationships on Capitol Hill.
If you really want to get things done because you're talking about possibly the
most institutionalized town in our society.
And so if you get there and just like, I'm going to staff it with outsiders,
then no one's going to see Donald Trump's problem. Yeah.
Like you're not gonna get anything done. You're just,
you're just going to be fighting with the system all the time that they're going
to be like these antibodies that treat you like a,
this hostile agent. And then they're going to just make your life miserable,
whatever return. I mean that, that's just the way organizations work,
the way cultures work. And so you need to have a blend of people that are like,
look, Hey, I get it.
I'm a new figure and you're concerned.
And one of my principles is that I don't fault people for the
incentives that have formed them. And, but by this,
what I mean is like if you show up in DC and there's someone who's been part of
the fabric of DC for 20 plus years and they are
someone who've been through administrations right and left to sort of survive
the whole thing and their goal is to just keep that function going and make sure
they get to retirement and whatnot.
Like you can't blame that person for being part of that system because
that's what there have been times have been for years and years.
And so what you don't want to do is you don't want to get there and be like,
I'm going like turn everything upside down. I'm like, attack everyone will,
the immune system will just actually, you know,
the macrophages will descend on you and yeah,
and then you'll never get anything done. You'll never get anything done.
So that was one of the answers that I was dying to hear,
which is I'm going to have to work with the infrastructure that's already there.
But then there's the second part of it,
which is that I actually need to see some people permanently ejected,
called out chastised who have been this class of people miss advising our
government throughout the eighties nineties early part of the century.
That's the dark part for all of us.
That we sense that there is really limited accountability in DC.
Like you can give bad advice and screw something up and you keep your job,
you know, your think tank is still there. Like no one goes back and says, Hey,
your white paper. It turns out it was completely mistaken.
Like that. That's not the way that town works or that, you know, many
government institutions work.