Moonshots · 2026-03-07 · 102 min

Andrew Yang: UBI Before UHI, Solving Job Loss, and the Future of Work | #236

Andrew YangPeter DiamandisSalim IsmailDave BlundinDr. Alexander Wissner-Gross

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TL;DR

Andrew Yang’s core call is that universal high income likely requires a major political realignment, with universal basic income probably coming first. The transition problem is the 50-year-old middle manager with a mortgage, two children, and no large savings pool—not the eventual robot-rich end state. With jobs about to be “whisked away,” Yang sees the bridge as more urgent than the destination; Diamandis described Washington as being on a “multidecade tape delay” that has become catastrophic.
The labor shock is already becoming an earnings lever: fewer workers can raise margins and stock prices while hollowing out demand, offices, and the college pipeline. Block shares rose 24% after 4,000 layoffs; Yang relayed one tech CEO’s plan to cut 15% of staff, then 20%, then another 20%, while Anthropic had warned that 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs could be automated within one to five years. His own forecast—20% to 50% of 70 million US office workers displaced within 12 to 18 months—implies simultaneous pressure on commercial real estate, indebted graduates, and commuter suburbs.
Yang’s old $1,000-a-month UBI benchmark may now be too low, but the larger the floor becomes, the harder the financing arithmetic gets. He cited GDP of roughly $84,000 per capita, heading toward $90,000 and then $100,000, and a poverty threshold in the vicinity of $25,000 per person; “maybe like twice the thousand dollars a month” could therefore be necessary. Diamandis calculated that $50,000 annually for 200 million Americans would consume about $10 trillion a year—a thought experiment, not a number Yang endorsed.
Private individuals and geographically focused pilots may move before either public companies or Washington. Yang imagined AI fortunes funding $100 million or $500 million demonstrations that prove direct cash works, while shareholder duties make corporate giveaways vulnerable to lawsuits. His model is “human billionaires” acting where they live, because many would help preserve social stability but doubt that a check sent to government reaches anything useful.
Cash transfers are the emergency bridge, while cheaper basic services, subsidized employment, and infrastructure abundance are complementary longer-duration plays. Yang welcomed attacks on every household cost but argued that money can reach bank accounts faster than housing, healthcare, or education supply can be rebuilt; Diamandis proposed subsidizing one-half to three-quarters of payroll for private employers finding durable AI-era work. Data centers could also provide a “shadow UBS” by financing power infrastructure and making electricity cheaper or free locally.
The old career ladder is becoming a narrow column, leaving entrepreneurship as the most controllable path but not a mass-market answer. Yang said “the only career path you can rely on is entrepreneurship,” then immediately estimated that perhaps 80% of people are not suited to it. Trades such as plumbing, HVAC, and electrical work may hold up—he gives human plumbers at least 10 years and probably longer—but there are not enough such roles to absorb a wholesale white-collar surplus.
The decisive variable is not whether AI grows the economic pie, but whether value escapes the firms and capital owners producing it. Yang expects trillions of dollars of value and work equivalent to “millions of humans in hours instead of years,” yet the default distribution is a very small ownership slice. His more expansive answer combines UBI with paid care, wellness, creativity, and community activity: “UBI buys human coherence,” but purpose requires an economy that recognizes more than market labor.

Digest · the substance, structured for research

1. Universal high income needs a bridge through universal basic income

Elon Musk’s recorded prediction was that society could get both universal high income and social unrest. Yang’s response: UHI probably requires “a major political realignment,” with UBI as the intermediate step connecting today’s household obligations to any eventual world of robots, abundant services, and passive income.
Yang kept returning to the exposed family: a 50-year-old Fortune 500 middle manager with a mortgage, two children, perhaps a college bill approaching $250,000 to $300,000, and no assurance that the degree produces a job. “The path to me is what’s important,” because that person must survive the transition before abundance arrives.
Election cycles remain four years while AI compresses what Yang described as 40 years of change into the same interval. Diamandis’s “multidecade tape delay” in Washington has therefore gone from inconvenient to catastrophic; Yang’s bleak joke about Musk’s experience was that politics is “a blood sport” capable of frightening away even willing technologists.
Diamandis proposed cash support over the next one to three years, basic services emerging over roughly three to eight years, and abundance afterward. Yang called that “very, very optimistic” and would accept it “a hundred times out of 100”: “Utopia is a deliberate choice,” while dystopia is advancing steadily.

2. A credible income floor is already larger than the 2020 proposal

Yang campaigned on $1,000 per month in 2020, but now views that as potentially low. With GDP around $84,000 per capita and, in his telling, likely to break $90,000 and then $100,000 as AI raises output, he suggested a floor nearer $2,000 per month might better match a poverty level around $25,000 per person.
Diamandis stress-tested the upper boundary: $50,000 annually for the bottom 200 million of roughly 300 million Americans equals about $10 trillion each year. His counterweight was an economy approaching near-zero marginal labor cost, the first $100 trillion companies, and multi-trillionaires—but the exchange never established those gains as an automatic funding mechanism.
An AMA panelist’s preferred calibration was “enough to survive but not be happy,” preserving both stability and incentives for employment and entrepreneurship. His sharper framing was that UBI is “not really kind of a moral prize”; it is a stability protocol, and “the scarcest resource these days is not effort. It’s human coherence.”

3. Private fortunes may move before government or public companies

Yang’s first pathway is still government action, though he called it “vanishingly unlikely” while retaining some hope for an asymmetric opening in 2028. The second is a group of well-resourced people deciding to “get this show on the road” with direct, local demonstrations that can later catalyze philanthropy and public policy.
Anthropic supplied his clearest candidate: Yang credited Dario Amodei’s team with saying that 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs could be automated within one to five years, while also expecting extraordinary wealth and planning to give most of it away. A $100 million or $500 million regional pilot could show what social-contract repair looks like.
As a precedent, Yang cited Michael Dell and his wife, with explicit uncertainty, as having committed “I want to say $6 billion” to Trump accounts for lower-income children, perhaps around $250 per person and geographically concentrated in Texas. He also mentioned the Dalio family pursuing something similar in Connecticut.
Public companies face a different constraint: boards and shareholders could challenge spending that lacks a clear corporate benefit. Yang therefore expects “human billionaires” to act first, especially if direct giving protects their communities; he called a recurring 5% wealth tax counterproductive because wealthy targets could simply leave.

4. A 2028 realignment has capital, media, and dissatisfied voters available

Yang translated Musk’s proposed “America Party” into three requirements: perhaps $1 billion, a mass-media megaphone, and a ready popular movement. Musk already owns the platform, while Yang said roughly 50% of Americans identify as independents and cited approval ratings of 29% for Democrats and 32% for Republicans.
A new party could design its own nomination process rather than inherit Iowa and New Hampshire. Yang imagined a smartphone primary featuring figures such as himself, Mark Cuban, Oprah Winfrey, and Matthew McConaughey, with Joe Rogan moderating forums that attract voters precisely because the answers are not predetermined.
The institutional opening is larger than many assume: party rules, not constitutional scripture, dictate the primary order, and Yang argued that 42 states are habitually left “on the outside looking in.” Letting those voters participate before a nominee is settled could itself become the new movement’s proof of democratic intent.
Yang did not predict that all the pieces will assemble: “Don’t know.” He said he speaks with Anthony Scaramucci and other potential participants, has exchanged direct messages with Musk, and senses Musk is presently aligned with the administration because people in his circle say they need it—while leaving open how that alignment might evolve.

5. Cash wins on speed while universal basic services attack the cost stack

Wissner-Gross challenged UBI with supply-side alternatives: universal basic services, universal basic equity modeled on sovereign funds, or a near-free “Amazon super prime” covering essentials. Diamandis connected that idea to an Abundance XPRIZE target of $250 per month for food, housing, water, energy, and bandwidth.
Yang’s reply was “all hands on deck.” Diamandis ranked household costs as housing, healthcare, education, food, fuel, transportation, entertainment and media, then wireless. Yang emphasized that zero-cost energy would help, while both focused on housing, healthcare, and education as major targets.
Noble Mobile is Yang’s own cost-reduction experiment. He put average US wireless spending at $83 per month versus $35 in Europe—a $48 monthly or roughly $600 annual gap—and called the aggregate difference a hidden $100 billion tax, while noting Verizon returned $11 billion to shareholders over the prior 12 months.
Supply creation still loses the first race against job destruction. Even with permits magically available, new skyscrapers, healthcare systems, or education infrastructure take months or years; cash can move immediately. “It’s not one or the other,” Yang stressed, but the sequencing matters when unemployment arrives first.

6. Payroll subsidies and local infrastructure could soften the dangerous interval

Diamandis expects job losses in 2026 and a much larger wave in 2027, before major housing or service expansion can clear approvals. His bridge was to subsidize one-half or three-quarters of payroll when private employers create productive, AI-oriented roles, leaving firms—not government planners—to decide where people remain useful.
Public works produced disagreement. A host raised large government projects; Yang countered with the Cape Cod Canal, caricaturing it as one boat per day against 10 million cars needing bridges—“a huge hole in the ground” that created another problem. Yang also noted that Canadian wage subsidies can become unusable under excessive rules.
Wissner-Gross proposed a market-adjacent “shadow UBI” or “shadow UBS”: hyperscalers and frontier laboratories, already becoming dominant electricity consumers, finance the generation and grid capacity they require, then provide cheap or free power to surrounding consumers and municipalities. Yang included that mechanism in his portfolio of plausible solutions.
Existing benefits can suppress the activity policymakers claim to want. Yang recalled an Iowa woman afraid to volunteer at a church bake sale because being seen walking might cost her disability check; an AMA panelist separately invoked a 1970s Manitoba income experiment to argue that successful cash floors threaten bureaucracies’ instinct for self-preservation.

7. The social contract is fraying before mass unemployment peaks

Diamandis treated public sympathy for the accused killer of a healthcare CEO as evidence that deterioration is already well advanced. He told a group of CEOs that many young people increasingly regard successful people as inherently bad—assuming anyone who prospered must have “stepped on people” or acted malignantly.
Diamandis put the average first-time homebuyer’s age near 40 and claimed unemployment among recent college graduates exceeds 50%; a 28-year-old may therefore hold a weak degree, outstanding loans, no home, and no path out of the parental household.
Diamandis said the anger refracts through two-party politics: on the left, “capitalism bad, socialism good”; on the right, reactive and highly gendered prescriptions that he also believes fail to solve the material problem. Musk’s forecast of UHI alongside unrest feels plausible because “the unrest is unfortunately much closer than we’d like to think.”
Yang said young people gather in person about 50% less than his generation did. Diamandis interpreted even a house party as an optimistic wager on other people. Yang’s CNN focus-group punchline captured the mood: a proposed show about the future died because “people don’t like the future.”

8. AI turns staffing pyramids into columns and rewards the cuts

The market signal could hardly be clearer: Block shares rose 24% after Jack Dorsey’s company eliminated 4,000 jobs. A host framed it as Wall Street rewarding greater profitability from lower costs; Yang concluded that public-company CEOs must become “ruthless on headcount” to protect both their positions and their stock.
One public-tech CEO privately described a staged plan to Yang: fire 15% of workers, cut another 20% two years later, then another 20% two years after that. Yang believed him, adding that anyone who has worked inside a large corporation may suspect roughly 40% of staff are not indispensable.
Noble Mobile supplied the smaller-company version. After trying to hire junior engineers, its CTO decided current AI tools made the role unnecessary if a strong manager remained. The old pyramid—perhaps three juniors per senior—becomes a column with one senior and one junior, blocking the training route by which beginners become experts.
“The easiest people to fire are the people you haven’t hired yet.” That makes entry-level contraction more severe than headline layoffs suggest and accelerates the evaporation of the college wage premium. Yang expects the CEO to be among the last roles automated, while ownership concentration rises as every enterprise operates with fewer employees.

9. Human adaptability matters more than a narrowly chosen major

Yang’s blunt advice was that “the only career path you can rely on is entrepreneurship” because it gives people ownership of their future. He immediately constrained the claim: entrepreneurship is extremely difficult and probably wrong for 80% of people, including, in his candid assessment, one of his own two sons.
The durable success factors remain grit, perseverance, coachability, sociability, hustle, caring about something, and believing effort can pay off. Yang sees excessive screen time as the common destroyer: it lowers self-control and concentration, so parents should raise “an awesome ass-kicking human being” before optimizing a course of study.
Subject matter may matter less than learning how to think, care, and develop. Yang urged families to reconsider stigmatized trades—plumbing, HVAC, and electrical work—where shortages remain and debt can be avoided, while acknowledging the hosts’ challenge that humanoid robotics is advancing quickly in structured environments such as data-center construction.
Yang expects human plumbers to remain safe for at least 10 years and “probably significantly longer,” because unfamiliar homes are uncontrolled environments. Wissner-Gross’s pushback was that trades could absorb displaced professionals; Yang’s answer was numerical—you cannot employ 10 times as many plumbers—and service roles such as $35,000-a-year home healthcare aides are arduous, isolating, and chronically vacant.

10. Office contraction reaches campuses, suburbs, and household balance sheets

Yang’s viral forecast put 20% to 50% of America’s 70 million office workers at risk within 12 to 18 months. Repeating Block across thousands of employers means fewer commuters, distressed commercial districts, and a second blow to office property after COVID rather than a simple continuation of remote work.
His representative case was a roughly 50-year-old bank employee with three children, a mortgage, a degree, and a six-figure corporate job who was recently laid off. If replacements pay less or never appear, nearby homeowners begin selling; Yang’s unsettling advice was to list first because “you don’t want to be last.”
Diamandis cited rising debt and mortgage delinquencies, limited savings, and perhaps half the country effectively living paycheck to paycheck. Yang agreed and added that even apparently successful, college-educated friends reveal severe stress after borrowing to send one child to university.
Yang called the college-to-office-to-suburb path a modern invention that is about to be “uninvented,” but emphasized transition costs: families made binding decisions while it worked. His own children will probably attend college for social development and networks, yet he called that choice a far worse value proposition than universities sell.

11. Frictionless AI companionship may deepen demographic decline

Diamandis cited a 75-year-low Chinese birth rate, AI boyfriends, and survey figures showing 64% of teens use chatbots, with 12% seeking emotional support. Yang said the trend already appears at home: one son jokes about choosing an AI girlfriend while his parents answer, “No, no, real girlfriend.”
Yang’s governing word was “friction.” A chatbot is permanently available and supportive, while 15 years of marriage have been “far from frictionless”; learning to withstand false starts, conflict, and compromise is precisely what enables partnership, parenthood, and what he considers healthy personal and social development.
Wissner-Gross pressed whether artificial romance, China’s “lying flat,” and Japan’s hikikomori represent abundance rather than deprivation. Yang did not accept frictionlessness as flourishing: he wants young people meeting flesh-and-blood humans, having “misadventures and adventures,” and eventually forming families.
The gender implications remained contested. Yang argued that men without a steady paycheck may feel unworthy of partnering, prompting Wissner-Gross to flag a gendered post-scarcity vision. Asked whether AI should have rights in the arrangement, Yang offered a deliberately provisional answer: “Right now I’m pre-AI personhood. But I’m open-minded.”

12. AI regulation has broad voters but concentrated capital against it

A host cited a $265 million lobbying war chest, a 200% rise in AI-company lobbying over 24 months, and $170 million contributed during the 2024 election cycle. Yang said he mostly sees the pro-AI money: skeptics may grow daily, but “typically [they’re] not very rich.”
Yang put support for greater AI regulation near 80% and contrasted the sector’s freedom with New York, where “there are more regulations to open a hot dog stand” than to launch a large language model. He still favored a nuanced regime—choosing what to constrain rather than simply stopping development.
Companies predictably want government to stay out of the way, and elected officials want data centers, growth, jobs, and campaign support. That produces a highly business-friendly regime even though Yang believes most Americans feel differently; their position remains politically orphaned because neither Republicans nor many Democrats have adopted it.
AI will create trillions of dollars of value, but the path of least resistance leaves it with firms and their stakeholders—a “very small slice” of society. Yang reduced the distribution problem to a race: solve poverty of access in education and healthcare faster than AI concentrates power, rights, and ownership, or productivity growth can worsen poverty instead.

13. Post-work abundance still requires purpose, status, and community

Yang had no difficulty imagining the pie growing: AI can perform the work of millions of humans “in hours instead of years,” chase neglected problems, and accelerate lifesaving drugs and materials science. The unresolved question is not production but “who wins in that world and who doesn’t?”
UBI alone cannot supply purpose, development, community, values, or somewhere to go each morning. Yang’s Star Trek scenario is a multivaried economy encompassing care and nurturing, health and wellness, arts and creativity—multiple ways for people to self-organize, contribute, receive recognition, and earn rewards.
His cleanest example was that people should be paid to visit the gym, while trainers earn “wellness bucks” usable elsewhere. He compared this to his 300,000 American Express points: they cost the issuer nothing until redeemed, yet “I 100%” changed behavior to accumulate them.
Diamandis characterized the idea as “social credit” and a centralized, multivariate scheme for shaping behavior. Yang said it need not be centralized—municipalities, churches, and other local communities could assign rewards around voluntarily chosen priorities.

14. The transition playbook favors agency, ambitious AI use, and new institutions

For schools, Diamandis recommended daily AI use in collaborative groups, tracking fast-moving tools such as OpenClaw. He added an important constraint: do not use AI merely to finish ninth-grade homework; ask students to design something seemingly impossible, such as a starship to Alpha Centauri, so deployable intelligence expands ambition.
Wissner-Gross answered AI hyperdeflation with deliberate hyperinflation: if solved scarcity drives prices toward zero, governments can print enough money to make everyone nominally rich. Diamandis expects near-term inflation from UBI-style money creation followed by deflation as AI and robotics generate oversupply; Yang said that cycle made sense to him.
An AMA panelist warned that gig workers cannot wait for politics: autonomous vehicles will remove income and “no one is thinking this through for you.” Another panelist treated insurance as autonomy’s transitional governor; improving safety shifts underwriting from driver risk to systemic risk, while transportation migrates from owned cars toward subscriptions and purchased autonomous miles.
Wissner-Gross’s institutional moonshot was to convert research universities into public-benefit companies and list Harvard, MIT, or Stanford, turning campuses into giant incubators whose faculty and students share upside. The panel embraced the direction—universities as venture studios—while acknowledging that today’s schools fear losing nonprofit tax treatment.

Peter Diamandis

Given the advances of AI and robotics, we're going to have something called universal high income.

Andrew Yang

I'm not sure how you get to universal high income without a major political realignment. As dysfunctional as I thought our political system was, it's even worse.

We're here in 2026. I do think the jobs are going to get whisked away, so you're going to have rampant social unrest if we don't do something quickly. D.C. is on a multidecade tape delay. You have, like you said, the rate of change just accelerating all the time, and so what's gone from an inconvenient tape delay is now a catastrophic one.

Peter Diamandis

The disintegration of the social contract is the most important conversation that we could be having.

What's the advice for someone in college today, or someone who's a junior or senior in high school?

Andrew Yang

The only career path you can rely on is entrepreneurship and owning your own future and path, but a lot of people aren't cut out for that.

Now, that's a moonshot, ladies and gentlemen.

Everybody, welcome to Moonshots. Another episode of WTF Just Happened in Tech. Here with my moonshot mates, DB2, Dr. Exo, and AWG. And here with a friend of the pod, a dear friend of mine, Andrew Yang. Andrew, good morning to you.

Andrew Yang

Hey, Peter. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

Are you on the West Coast?

Andrew Yang

East Coast.

All right.

Andrew Yang

Yeah. For me, this is a better time than it is for you guys.

Well, everybody else on the East Coast—that's why no one complained about a 6 a.m. start this morning. We're excited to have this conversation. A lot is going on.

For us, this is typically a conversation about AI and exponential technologies, and how we get people ready for the future. One of the things we're talking about is the changes that are coming and the potential for social unrest. How do we deal with the changing social contract? We're going to talk about UBI, UHI, and a number of different subjects.

Everybody, if you don't know Andrew, he's an entrepreneur extraordinaire, a 2020 U.S. presidential candidate, which really put him on the main scene; a leading advocate for universal basic income; the founder of Humanity Forward and the Forward Party; and a national voice about AI's impact on jobs and the middle class.

We get a lot of conversations and questions around how all this talk about AI, crypto, and robotics applies to me. How does it apply to me if I'm not in the VC business? If I'm not a tech entrepreneur, I want to dive into that. So, let's jump in.

Andrew, I'm going to start with a conversation about UBI versus UHI. When Dave and I were interviewing Elon at the beginning of 2026, one of the conversations that came up was his theory that, no, we're not going to have a universal basic income. Given the advances of AI and robotics, we're going to have something called universal high income.

Let me play this short clip from our conversation, which went in a little bit of an unexpected direction.

How do we go toward universal high income instead of social unrest?

Speaker 2

So, my bet is we'll have both universal high income and social unrest.

That's my prediction.

Peter Diamandis

Well, that will make for a lot of problems. Is that your actual prediction?

Speaker 2

Yeah.

Peter Diamandis

Yeah, it seems likely.

Andrew, what's your reaction to that?

Andrew Yang

I'm not sure how you get to universal high income without a major political realignment. I'd suggest that universal basic income would probably have to come first. It would be an intermediate step.

One of the things I'd love to unpack with Elon is how he thinks we get from here to there, and also how this interacts with the person who's asking the question. Let's say you're a 50-year-old middle manager at a Fortune 500 company who's worried that your job is going to disappear. You might have a mortgage. You might have 2 kids.

How does that person wind up with a robot doing all their chores and money flowing in such that they can bring their family out to a nice meal at will? The path to me is what's important, because we're here in 2026. I do think the jobs are going to get whisked away in a lot of these firms, and that family is real.

I grew up with folks who right now are deeply concerned that they're going to lose their job, and they very well might. They don't have a huge safety net or pool of savings. Maybe they have a kid who's primed to go to college.

Then that's another part of it: What's college for? If I'm saving up $250,000 or $300,000 for my child to go to university, are they going to get a job afterward? Are they just going to come right back and live with me? Those are the questions that I hear every day.

I really got the feeling, talking to Elon, that he was eager to work on exactly the question you asked until he got to Washington. His quote actually was, "It's a blood sport," and man, did it scare him away in a hurry.

I think he was eager to work on exactly the logistics of getting from here to UBI to UHI. One thing we talk about on the pod is how short the timelines are. The election cycle is going to be 4 years no matter what, but AI is accelerating at a rate where 4 years is like 40 years. The amount of change inside any given time window is like nothing we've ever seen. So maybe we should just figure it out right now.

One of the jokes I told just yesterday, Dave, is that D.C. is on a multidecade tape delay, in part because we have 70- and 80-year-old legislators. You have, like you said, the rate of change just accelerating all the time, and so what's gone from an inconvenient tape delay is now a catastrophic one.

Andrew Yang

Yeah.

Yeah. What are you thinking about this?

I've got a bunch of thoughts. First of all, Andrew, I want to applaud you. You're the social contract interpreter for the whole world. I think that bringing UBI to the top-level discussion is one of the most important things we could be doing.

I have a quick apology for you because, a few years ago, when you were doing your presidential run, I interviewed you for 25 minutes. We finished the interview, and at the end I realized I had forgotten to hit the record button. I said, "I'm so sorry," and you were so gracious. You said, "If that interview had not been recorded, let's do it again." And we did it again, and it was fantastic. So I really want to thank you for that.

Andrew Yang

This is why I didn't win.

You can't put it on me. But I think that this is fundamental. The disintegration of the social contract is the most important conversation that we could be having, and I think you're absolutely right: UBI has to come before UHI.

The big challenge is going from a labor, union, tax, job construct to that. It's such a big leap. Public office and the public sector are not going to get us there. Have you thought about how we get there?

Andrew Yang

Oh, yeah. I think about it all the time. I think about it every day.

I'm waiting for enlightenment.

Andrew Yang

Path number 1 is that government gets its act together. That seems vanishingly unlikely, I know, but I still believe that that's more of a possibility than most. I can see some real, outsized, asymmetrical possibilities even in 2028.

Then the other path is that you have a series of—I was going to say billionaires, but they don't have to be billionaires—just well-resourced individuals who say, "Look, let's just get this show on the road."

I was encouraged by some of what Dario Amodei and the Anthropic team had put out there. They were honest. They said, "We're going to automate away 50% of the entry-level white-collar jobs in the next 1 to 5 years." I was like, "Thank goodness they came out and said it," because people might believe them.

And, B, they are going to get phenomenally wealthy, and they expect to give the vast majority of it away. They would like to shore up the social contract and find ways to keep society whole and strong.

If the government doesn't get its act together, you can see a group of tech innovators and entrepreneurs who are part of this revolution turning around and saying, "Look, we want to make sure the middle class survives this era. Here's $100 million. Here's $500 million."

Then you'd pick a locality and show what can be done, which itself might catalyze other philanthropy and, eventually, the government. Those are 2 pathways I see.

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But Andrew, just to dive into this a little bit: We're talking about UBI—every single person in the United States getting a check, very much a stimulus check, if you will, similar to what happened during COVID. What do you think the right amount of capital for a UBI payment would be to every family? Do you have a number in mind?

Andrew Yang

Well, I campaigned on $1,000 a month in 2020, which, if you run some numbers, GDP right now is around $84,000 a head.

Andrew Yang

It’s going up, up, up because of AI. So it’s going to break $90,000 and then $100,000 in the relatively near future. A thousand is probably a bit low. If you look at the poverty level now, it depends upon where you are in the country, but it might be around $25,000 a person, in that order of magnitude. And that’s per person. So you can see maybe twice the $1,000 a month might be necessary.

If we gave the bottom 200 million of the 300 million Americans $50,000 a month, you know, that’s about—

Andrew Yang

$50,000 a year, you mean?

$50,000 a year. Yes. That’s about $10 trillion allocated per year. I mean, the opportunity is, if in fact we start dividing by zero, meaning the cost of labor and AI, we’re going to—one of the other conversations we had with Elon was that we’re going to see the first $100 trillion companies and multi-trillionaires coming online.

And one of the points you bring up is: Is the money for a UBI coming from the government, or do humans start aligning with companies and the companies start providing basically that UBI? I wonder if that’s an option you’ve considered.

Andrew Yang

You know, a company is a possibility. I actually think it’s going to come from human beings. And one example would be something like what Michael Dell and his wife recently did, where they gave away—I want to say—$6 billion to Trump Accounts for generally poor kids in the Texas area. It was maybe $250 a person, but it was from an individual or their philanthropy, and it was geographically centered on where Michael lives.

And so I see that as a harbinger where you just have an individual say, like, if it was Anthropic and they lived in the Bay Area, they could be like, “Look, we’re going to do this for this region.” But to me, if a company does it, a company has a hard time justifying it, especially if they have shareholders. And even if they’re public, I mean, if they’re public, they would end up with lawsuits up the wazoo saying, “You can’t be giving company money away to do something this non-shareholder-serving.”

So I think it’s going to have to come from human beings. But by the way, one of the cases I also make is that, look—

Speaker 1

So if I’m a billionaire, which I’m obviously not, though I know you guys know some people who resemble that—

Peter Diamandis

The media sometimes presented it like I was, and then my wife’s like, “Where the heck is this billion dollars that they keep talking about?”

Andrew Yang

If I’m a billionaire and you come to me—and by the way, I think this entire billionaire tax conversation is really counterproductive. The fact is, if you actually had a 5% wealth tax, you’d have zero billionaires the next day because they’d all be in Switzerland or wherever.

Well, also, any one-time tax—it’s like, what are you doing down the road next year? How’s that going to work?

Andrew Yang

Yeah, no, they’re saying recurring. I was like, “Yeah, good luck finding someone who’s going to stick around for that.”

If you’re a billionaire and I come to you and say, “Hey, we need your help to keep America from utterly disintegrating,” you would say, “Look, I’m into it. I’m a human being. I’m sympathetic, and I don’t want my kids having armed guards around them all the time and all this other nonsense. But I’m dubious that if I send a check to the government, it’s actually going to go to anything good,” because the government is just going to end up putting it toward some debt that they ran up, some bureaucracy I can’t identify, or some other boondoggle.

I’m very, very sympathetic. And so then you’d say, “Hey, how about we skip the government step and take this right to the people and people that you care about?” I think the Dalios—Ray Dalio—they were trying to emulate what the Dells were doing in Connecticut. So I think that human billionaires are going to be the first movers in this direction, and they’re going to center it around where they live.

Let’s question how we get to UBI. The answer is, well, government could get its act together, and then everyone says, “Not a chance in hell.” Okay, path 2 is through billionaires, which you said—okay, let’s call those well-heeled people.

But one of the things that came up in Davos 4 years ago, and also again this year in a big way, is the fact that this is the first time in the history of the world that those well-heeled AI billionaires also control all media. Elon is onstage being very political in the last election while buying Twitter/X, which is one of the massive media platforms. And now those media platforms have AI all over them.

So for the first time in world history, what you described is a scenario where these billionaires give a $100 million check to a candidate. The candidate runs TV ads that elevate their campaign, and they get elected. But that’s 4 years ago. Now that same well-heeled Dario Amodei, in this case, also controls the AI voice and what it says with the training data. It’s just a very, very different scenario from anything we’ve seen before.

Alex, I want to present to you all the 2028 scenario where everything speeds up.

Andrew Yang

So, Elon was tiptoeing around this. He actually didn’t tiptoe; he just publicly said, “Hey, we should start the America Party,” at which time my phone started blowing up. And then he flipped a lot of people, where they’re like, “Oh, you can’t do a 3rd party.” It’s like, “Oh, wait a minute. Elon totally could do a 3rd party,” because you identify the obstacles, and Dave, you just touched on them.

So one is, let’s call it, for the sake of argument, $1 billion. You could probably do it on less, but let’s say $1 billion. Two, a media platform or megaphone, and he owns it. And then 3 is a popular movement. And you definitely have that lying in wait, where right now 50% of Americans say we’re independents. Democrats have a 29% approval rating. Republicans have a 32% approval rating.

So if you were to light the signal, a bunch of people would come your way. And if you are a political party, which the Forward Party is, you can design a nomination process however you like. There’s no magical scripture that says it has to be in New Hampshire and Iowa or whatever. It’s just made up. Really.

And so you could do an online vote on your smartphone—an independent presidential primary—with me, Mark Cuban, Oprah, Matthew McConaughey—“America’s going to be all right, all right, all right”—and then have a series of people. And by the way, the American public would be like, “Oh, this is actually interesting, because what are these people going to say?”

I kind of know, on some level, what all the Democrats are going to say, what J.D. Vance is going to say, but I do not know what this crew is going to say. You have Joe Rogan moderate the forum and the debate. You go around the country, and the American people would then say, “This crew, regardless of which of these people I prefer, is trying to give it back to me. I can tell, because the Democratic Party and the Republican Party have no interest in giving it back to me, but these guys do.”

And then you’d get millions and millions of people participating in this primary. The person that wins then gets Elon and Dario and the rest of it being like, “Sure, I’m more into this than I am into that.” And then we run it back. This is all on the table for 2028.

Now, will all of that come together? Don’t know. But certainly every piece is there. Exciting.

Speaker 1

Well, the timing—I mean, that last election showed how flawed the primary process is, and the timing is perfect for it. The amount of change between here and 2028 is going to be like nothing we’ve ever seen, too.

But I had no idea. I thought my whole life you’d start in New Hampshire, then you’d travel across the country to Iowa, and then—I thought that was just sort of written into law somewhere. But I had no idea you could just do it any way you want.

Andrew Yang

A thousand percent no, Dave. As a matter of fact, there are people that are trying to change the order right now within the DNC. And the RNC just demoted Iowa. Sorry, the DNC already demoted Iowa. So you won’t see Democrats going to Iowa anymore.

It’s carved in stone in that it’s a DNC rule that they fight over every 4 years. But there’s no magic to it at all. And if you think about it, there are 42 states that have been on the outside looking in. And so if you were to go to them and be like, “Hey guys, how would you like to actually choose who the nominee is going to be? California or wherever?” they’d be like, “Oh, I never get to do that.”

Because by the time it gets to California, it’s already—

Over. Yeah.

Peter Diamandis

Wow.

Speaker 1

Amazing.

Peter Diamandis

Alex, do you have any opinions on this conversation?

Speaker 2

Sure. Many. So, Andrew, first of all, it’s fun to be chatting. I’d like to maybe start by probing the implicit assumption that universal basic income, as a sort of proxy for wealth redistribution in response to perceived technological disemployment, underemployment, or unemployment, is necessarily the optimal policy versus, say, one of many alternatives.

In my mind, alternatives would be universal basic services, where the cost of energy, healthcare, housing, and other utilities drop to near zero or zero, or are essentially available for free in the same sense that breathing air is, for the most part, available for free, or Wikipedia access is free or nearly free.

Peter Diamandis

Speaker 2

So universal basic services could be somewhere in between free and, say, an Amazon Super Prime that offers everything one needs to survive for $100 per month.

Peter Diamandis

Which, by the way, is the subject of something called the Abundance XPRIZE: $250 a month for food, housing, water, energy, and bandwidth.

Speaker 2

As one possible alternative policy. Call it a supply-side version versus the demand-side UBI, where everyone gets stimulus checks, or universal basic equity, where everyone gets dividends from, say, an Alaska- or Norway-style sovereign fund. How do you reason through the thinking process behind UBI versus lots of other policy alternatives?

Andrew Yang

I’m on all hands on deck. Any solution that improves people’s lives is a win. Right now—and I think Peter knows this—I started a company called Noble Mobile that’s trying to get Americans’ wireless costs down closer to what Europeans pay.

The average American is spending $83 a month on wireless. I have a hunch that all of you are spending twice that. I was spending $150 a month on Verizon. The average European is spending $35 a month. That delta of $48 a month comes to about $600 a year for the average American. Then multiply it by all the years they’re going to be a wireless customer and by the people in their household.

By the way, Verizon gave its shareholders $11 billion in the last 12 months. You have a hidden tax of about $100 billion on the American people, Alex, in terms of our wireless connectivity. I was inspired by what Mark Cuban did with generic drugs, where he bought generic drugs in bulk and tried to make them available to the American people at a low markup. You could frame that as universal basic services. Maybe that’s not enough, but I love it. If we can get energy costs down to zero or near zero, freaking sign me up.

I’m totally down with trying to attack the cost structure at every turn. You identified fuel, which is on the list, but it’s not the main thing for Americans.

Speaker 1

Housing and healthcare—and hopefully education—under control, then you’d be making real progress.

Peter Diamandis

For the average American household right now, the cost structure goes in this order: 1. housing; 2. healthcare; 3. education; 4. food; 5. fuel; 6. transportation; 7. entertainment and media; and 8. wireless. I think we should be trying to attack each of those.

The fact is, the highest line item is housing, which relies upon local zoning ordinances and all this nonsense. It’s hard even for the federal government to come in and say, “Hey, we’re going to build 7 million new housing units,” because wealthy people get very conservative when someone’s trying to build an affordable housing complex in their neighborhood.

So I’m totally down with trying to attack the cost structure at every turn. For housing, healthcare, and education, there’s an alternative universe perhaps where we create an overabundance of supply rather than juicing demand with stimulus checks. In your mind, how would you morally weigh creating special economic zones where housing is overabundant, filled with skyscrapers, or where healthcare is driven to zero with effectively municipal-level AI, or education is purely AI? Basically, trying to solve this perceived problem from the supply side with overabundance rather than from the demand side with stimulus.

Andrew Yang

I’m all for it. I just think that right now, if you say, “Hey, which is going to be faster?” I have more confidence in our ability to transfer money into people’s bank accounts very, very quickly than I do in designing some of the solutions you’re talking about.

It’s not one or the other. Right.

Andrew Yang

It’s not one or the other. Even if you were to have the permits today to build the skyscrapers and the place, you’re talking about months or years. That’s if everything were magically in place.

Yeah. Elon’s point was that we’re going to have humanoid robots that will be able to build you whatever you want at the cost of basically energy and raw materials, and AI will deliver us health and education. In fact, AI will become your shadow worker for you, going to earn revenue for you. We can get into that. See, you were going to add.

Speaker 1

Two things. I think the UBS—the most constructive thing I’ve heard about the UBS commentary—

Peter Diamandis

Universal basic services.

Speaker 1

—the channels aren’t burned in, right? I think Andrew makes a valid point that if you want to just give money, it’s the easiest model. On the affordability question, the best framing I’ve seen is that you give people enough to survive but not be happy, and then you still have a very thriving economy. Jobs and entrepreneurship explode under this model.

One observation: in the 1970s, Manitoba in Canada—the province—gave out a UBI. They implemented this program, and it was staggeringly successful. After 2 years, they realized, “Oh my God, they don’t even need government to exist if we have this in place,” and they canceled it instantly because government wants to exist, and that’s the immune system. I think that’s the most difficult part about this: if you implement it properly, you can get rid of a lot of government services and let the market take care of it. But that’s a very hard jump for governments to make. I would really enjoy that.

Andrew Yang

One of the things that made me sad when I was campaigning was that there was a woman in Iowa who said, “Hey, I’m afraid to volunteer in my community because I might lose my disability check. I’m afraid someone might see me walking around and think that I’m healthy.” So I don’t go out; I stay in.

I thought, well, that’s really depressing. I think everyone can agree that her showing up to the church bake sale is a win for both her and the people there. So there are a lot of bad incentives in this system, a lot of paternalism, and a lot of things that make people feel like they’re subject to the bureaucracy of government in a way that’s really stifling even the most basic forms of entrepreneurship.

Peter Diamandis

Andrew, I think your answer is right on target because the small timeline differences are going to matter a lot. Job loss is a 2026 thing and then a huge 2027 thing, while building low-income housing is a multiyear process. Just getting it approved is a very long, slow process. You’re going to have rampant social unrest during that 2-year window if we don’t do something quickly.

Giving out stimulus checks is quick. I also think that subsidizing employment is very quick. The problem with stimulus checks is that when you pay somebody not to work, they lose the motivation to work very, very quickly. We saw that during COVID.

Another very quick thing is subsidizing employment, where the government says, “Look, if you find new, productive things for people to do that are AI-oriented and have a long-term future, the government will subsidize half that payroll or three-quarters of that payroll.” Put it back in the hands of the private sector to decide how to use people subsidized by the government.

Speaker 1

There’s also public works, right, where the government basically takes on large, massive projects and employs people to do those things.

Andrew Yang

Well, yeah, but the Cape Cod Canal, to me, was a massive public works project with one boat a day and 10 million cars trying to get over the bridges. It’s like you created a huge hole in the ground that is more of a problem than a solution.

Peter Diamandis

So you don’t want the government deciding. You want to put that back into the private sector, saying, “Hey, creators, find something really useful to do. Amazon, find something really useful to do. We’ll just partially subsidize it during this turbulent window.”

Andrew Yang

And, Alex, as you’re describing Canada, in Canada they do a lot of this where they subsidize, but the problem is they put so many rules and procedural barriers around it that it becomes nonsensical to try to get it. So that’s the problem there.

Alex, over to you.

Speaker 2

Yeah, I think there’s another potential interesting model that we’ve started to discuss on this podcast over the past few episodes. It looks a little bit like what we’re seeing with data centers that are being compelled—or are opting into—subsidizing electric infrastructure construction because they’re increasingly the largest consumers of the available power supply.

One can imagine a very near future where data centers, the hyperscalers, and the frontier labs behind them are essentially subsidizing electricity for consumers, to the point of offering it for free. Consumers could then use the same infrastructure that the hyperscalers are building for their own consumption.

To put that in question form, Andrew, going back to UBI versus UBS versus universal basic equity versus whatever is behind door number 4, what do you think of the possibility that, as superintelligence is driving an overabundance of supply, what we see is some sort of shadow UBI or shadow UBS? As we’re seeing with data-center builders being asked to subsidize infrastructure consumption, we could see the hyperscalers being asked to subsidize universal basic services or income for personnel, consumers, and municipalities in their general area.

Andrew Yang

Yes, I think that’s in the portfolio, Alex—things that could be helpful solves.

Peter Diamandis

I want to underscore just how far along in this process we are. You all remember when the the healthcare CEO was shot in the street and then his killer was lionized. That was X months ago, and I think things just continue to deteriorate.

I was just speaking to a group of CEOs yesterday, and young people now regard a lot of successful people as bad. You look at that and you're like, “Wait a minute. That's obviously a very troubling characterization.” Anyone who's done well must have stepped on people or done something negative or malignant.

You can characterize what inning we're in of the deterioration, but it's one reason why Dave said, “Oh, yeah, we've got to move fast.” I think we really have to move as quickly as we can because the anger is rising, and the anger is getting refracted through our two-party system in various ways.

On the left, it's like, “Okay, capitalism bad, socialism good.” The average age of a first-time homebuyer is about 40 years old now, so if you're 28, you're out of luck. You're going to get a college degree that is valueless. The unemployment rate for recent college graduates is now over 50%, so you're going to be at home with your parents. You still owe these loans. The anger is really high and rising.

On the right, it's taking this other form: this kind of reactive, hyper-genderizing of various roles and conversations and things that, in my mind, also don't solve the problem. I'm all about trying to get there as quickly as we can, even recognizing that people are going to slip through the cracks.

Even if we were to do a lot of good things, there are still going to be people who slip through the cracks. This is where Elon's “I predict universal high income and social unrest” comes in. The unrest is unfortunately much closer than we'd like to think.

Peter Diamandis

Andrew, let me throw out an idea that I've been focused on and trying to work on solutions for. We have a new pandemic coming, and this is an emotional pandemic of fear and anger that is going to be spreading, especially due to increased uncertainty and concerns over social unrest.

We need to find some vaccination mechanism, if you will, to protect us against that growing threat, because the future is a terrible place to face from a position of fear. I'm going to move us to a conversation around jobs.

Andrew Yang

Peter, I have a joke for you to lighten the mood a little bit.

I was a CNN contributor, and a number of years ago they pitched me a TV show called “The Future with Andrew Yang.” It was going to be the future of healthcare, the future of transportation, and so on. Then they ran focus groups and said, “Hey, bad news, Andrew. People don't like the future.” [laughter]

Now everyone listening to your podcast loves the future, embraces the future, and is trying to make it work for them.

This is something we're going to be announcing at the Abundance Summit. I don't know when we're going to air this episode, but one of the biggest concerns is that people's vision of the future is dystopian. Why? Because Hollywood paints every future scenario as killer robots and dystopian AI.

If that's the future you've learned, why would you want to watch Ex Machina, Black Mirror, or Terminator? We need to paint better versions of the future. We need visions that are more Star Trek. As Elon said on the podcast that Dave and I did with him, we need more Roddenberry and less Cameron in that regard.

All right, let's jump.

Andrew Yang

I used to have a slide, Peter, saying, “It's either Star Trek or Mad Max.” You kind of veer toward one or the other.

Yeah. We have these two futures in superposition, and we need to collapse the waveform into one of those.

Speaker 1

I think they're both happening. I also want to reach for some sort of Strauss–Howe generational hypothesis-type theory: it's cyclical, with some time scale of 80 years. Somehow, after World War II, tail fins were getting added to cars in the '50s and '60s, and people were reading the golden age of science fiction.

But now people are watching Lord of the Rings and fantasy rather than science fiction. Fantasy is completely overwhelming science-fiction worlds. If you look at trends over time, I guess maybe, Andrew, to put that in question form, how much of generational pessimism do you think is actually generational? How much of it is cyclical versus periodic trends, where people will eventually cycle back to optimism after something bad has happened?

Andrew Yang

Well, I'm a numbers guy, Alex, and one of the numbers that really haunts me is that young people socialize and get together about 50% less than we all did in our 20s.

Peter Diamandis

I see gatherings as optimistic events. Even if you decide to have a little party at your house, you have to assume that people will want to come. You have to assume that they'll like your food, that your house can accommodate them, and that they won't trash the place.

To me, that could go hand in hand with in-real-life social gatherings and how good people are going to feel. Right now, unfortunately, we're getting together less and less.

Speaker 1

Yeah. All right. I am going to move this conversation toward jobs. Here is a comment from the co-founder of Morning Brew, Austin, who says, “My friend who works at a large PE firm said, quote, ‘We just had a firm-wide meeting about how we don't need associates anymore.’”

That's the first slide, first topic. The second one here: Fed Governor Waller highlights unusual growth without jobs, a historic anomaly where GDP is expanding while the labor market is fragile. GDP grew 1.4% in Q4 of 2025 despite the weakest job creation since 2022. And the third story here to weave in comes from Jack Dorsey.

Peter Diamandis

Got to be Block.

Speaker 1

Yeah. Block, his company, saw its shares rise 24% after 4,000 employees got laid off. This is what Wall Street rewards: higher profitability from lower costs.

Let's paint this picture of the growing loss of jobs. There's a lot of conversation out there from other people in the tech community saying, “No, no, no. We're going to increase the number of jobs.” I think people get confused about entry-level jobs versus more advanced jobs. Andrew, how do you think about all this?

Andrew Yang

I talked to a CEO of a publicly traded tech company, and he said, unannounced, “We're going to fire 15% of our workers, and then 2 years from now we're going to fire another 20%. And then 2 years after that we're going to fire another 20%. After that, I don't know.” I take him at his word. [laughter]

You know what I mean? Especially after this Block illustration, CEOs are going to have to be ruthless on headcount if they want to keep their own jobs and if they want their stock to be healthy.

I will also say something kind of bleak and negative. But if you've been inside one of these—

Peter Diamandis

Then tell us a joke.

Andrew Yang

Yeah. Then maybe I'll tell you a joke. But if you've been inside one of these large corporations, you kind of sense instinctively that 40% of the people aren't really indispensable, shall we say? [laughter]

I've worked in startups, and in startups, everyone is—well, not everyone's indispensable all the time. But—

But there's much more of a culture of making, of finding problems and solving problems in a company, versus laying back.

Andrew Yang

Oh, yeah. And it's one reason why I love startups so much. I find them to be pure utilization of the soul: energy, talent, optimism, and so on.

I think publicly traded companies are going to fire white-collar workers very quickly, and the easiest people to fire are the people you haven't hired yet. They're not going to hire a bunch of whippersnappers, and that's showing up in the numbers, where the college premium is quickly evaporating.

I do think that these changes are going to apply to small private companies, too. I'll use Noble Mobile as an example. We were trying to hire junior engineers for the last several months, and then our CTO came and said, “Hey, I don't think we need to hire for that role because the AI tools are now good enough.”

If you have a strong managerial type, the comparison I make is that you used to have pyramids. Someone would say, “I would hire 3 juniors for every senior,” and now you have columns, so you have 1 senior and 1 junior and you're good. [laughter]

If you're a young person, you never make it into one of these environments to get trained, learn, develop, and ascend. That's one of the things that is going to be driving the despair. All these young people thought the way I did—and probably you all did, too: get good grades, get into a good school, get a good job, have a good social contract.

Speaker 1

Yeah.

Andrew Yang

The steps 3 and 4 are going to be harder and harder to find, and that's going to cause a lot of anger. If I can't get a job, can't get a house, can't get a wife or a husband, and can't have a family, that is what causes social unrest and anger toward those tech companies or those investors that made that future and destroyed the American dream that we had.

So let's bring it back.

Peter Diamandis

What's the advice for someone in college today, or someone who's a junior or senior in high school? What's the new strategy? We've talked on this podcast a lot because we're all entrepreneurs, as are you. Entrepreneurship is ultimately the future career. It's not working for somebody else; it's working for yourself. That's what I would like for my kids, though it's not cut out for everybody. What advice are you giving people?

Andrew Yang

You know, it's similar, Peter, in that the only career path you can rely on is entrepreneurship and owning your own future and path. But a lot of people aren't cut out for that. I'm actually going to look at my two boys, one of whom is 13 and one of whom is 10. One of them is definitely not cut out for that.

You're trying to guide people on a path that isn't going to be right for, in my opinion, 80% of people, because entrepreneurship is really, really difficult. One thing I say to parents is that the success factors for our kids are the same as they ever were. It's grit, perseverance, coachability, sociability, caring about something, hustle, and believing that your efforts can actually pay off.

One of the single biggest factors in whether your kids have those attributes is screen time. You give them too much screen time, and their self-control goes down, their ability to focus goes down—all this stuff. The shorthand for parents is to try and keep your kids off screens and social media to the extent you can. Try and train them to be an awesome, ass-kicking human being regardless of circumstances, and then they'll have a chance.

Knowing that their course of study might not matter is the big thing. To the extent your course of study matters, it's just how to think, how to approach things, and how to care about learning and development. The actual subject matter could be anything.

Knowing, too, that some of our kids can be channeled toward the trades and jobs that we're going to need is important. The simplest example I use—and Elon might disagree with me, but I'm pretty confident I'm right—is that we're not going to have a robot plumber anytime soon. We're not going to have a robot HVAC repair person anytime soon. All of the old buildings will still need electricians, of which there's a massive shortage.

If you have a young person who might be handy, and let's say they're a guy, it's not a bad thing. You skip the indebtedness; you skip a lot of things.

Peter Diamandis

This is also where the women become entrepreneurs and all the men become plumbers. And what was the gender angle there, Andrew?

Andrew Yang

That's great. Well, it's just that it's more likely for a man to pursue some of these trades, statistically. What we've done is stigmatized the trades for everybody. We should be saying to men in particular, trades are cool. It's a really good, solid, steady job. Don't worry about it.

Peter Diamandis

Well, if you're a data center builder, you have a hell of a future right now. There are all sorts of areas where you could apply this.

Andrew Yang

Yeah. The question is when an Optimus—or pick your favorite robot—is able to do that. Elon's vision is the next 3 years. Even if it's 8 years, the progress we're seeing in robotic software and robotic agility is stunning.

Data centers, yes, I can see robots building them in some foreseeable time frame. Plumbers, no. The human is just going to have an easier time knocking on your door, saying, "Hey, what's the problem?" coming in, and doing the thing.

Peter Diamandis

Can we talk time frames, Andrew?

Andrew Yang

Yeah, please.

When I think about the time frames here, the challenging time frame—when UBI, stimulus checks, and capital come in to sort of quell the fear and uncertainty—is the 1-to-3-year time frame. Bringing universal basic services in, I think, starts in maybe the 3-year to the 5-to-8-year time frame. I've always viewed the challenges as being the next 3 to 8 years, and then on the back side of that is abundance, where people have access to everything they need. Do you agree with that time frame and that layout?

Andrew Yang

Hey, Peter, I love your time frame because it's actually very, very optimistic. You're talking to the preeminent proponent of UBI, and if you were like, "Yeah, UBI in the next 1 to 3 years," I would take it 100 times out of 100. Even as I'm the guy who's saying we should do this and it's totally possible, I hope you're right. I hope we end up heading down this road over the timeline you laid out.

The truth of it is—and this is the Buckminster Fuller quote—that the race between utopia and dystopia will be decided in the very last moment. There's a race on, and the dystopian march is going along at a pretty nice clip, shall we say? The utopian march, in my view, is fits and starts.

That's one reason why I would urge people who have the capacity to do more to do what they can, to do what we can. Utopia is a deliberate choice, and it's going to require a group of innovators like you and all the folks that we collectively know to do what we do and build.

But maybe, Andrew, just to press this point, what is your expectation regarding the timeline for humanoid robots making themselves available for plumbing services to the broad American public?

Andrew Yang

I don't foresee robot plumbers for quite some time because the home environment is especially difficult, particularly a home you haven't been in. You'd rather send a human, and the human's not that expensive in that context. Whereas with a data center, the whole thing is controlled and controllable, and you'd still have humans in there, but you'd also have a ton of robots. I think people sense that.

Can I persuade you to put a number to "not for some time"? Is it 10 years that you think we'll get humanoid robot plumbers? Twenty years? What's the precise time scale you envision?

Andrew Yang

I think human plumbers are safe for at least 10 years and probably significantly longer.

Wow. Well, isn't that then the solution, in your mind at least, to technological disemployment? Let's just ramp up the trades, and the trades will absorb the excess of so-called white-collar surplus. Why isn't that the solution?

Andrew Yang

Oh, it's part of it, Peter. Unfortunately, there's going to be a lot of competition for those jobs. The numbers don't work out. You have a certain number of plumbers per capita, and you can't have 10 times that number.

Speaker 2

But look at the sectors with Baumol's cost disease, like healthcare. Why can't everyone—or not everyone, but the wealthiest portion of society, and this is a thought experiment, not a policy prescription—have 1 or 2 personal healthcare assistants as one of several classes? You could have personal plumbers, personal assistants, and absorb the labor surplus that way.

Andrew Yang

You're certainly going to see a significant proportion of Americans whose job it is to serve the top layer, the top 20%. You're going to see nannies, personal assistants, and personal trainers—you do now.

But I will say, if you look at home healthcare aides as a profession, the turnover is rampant because it's very difficult, isolating work, and the average compensation is $35,000 a year for a home healthcare aide. If you say, "Hey, that's going to be the job of the future," none of the people listening to this right now want to be a home healthcare aide.

In one of my jokes in one of my books, I said, "I was a home healthcare aide for 1 day, and I wanted to tap out." If you were to ask millions of people, "Bathe Grandma, and that's what you're going to do as your job forever," very few people are cut out for that. The people doing it right now are often doing it because it's the only job on offer.

They have to do it. Yeah. Hey, Andrew, you had a book come out last month. Tell us about it, and I love the title.

Andrew Yang

I'm sure it's very aptly named: Hey Yang, Where's My Thousand Bucks? You can see the image. That's me with some money. The alternate title you'll enjoy even more is Hey, Am I Racist or Are You Andrew Yang?

Oh, no. So, what's the book about?

Andrew Yang

The book is about the ins and outs of trying to make utopia happen over the last several years. I sensed that this was going to be kind of a fraught time, so I wanted to write something lighthearted and humorous while also trying to get some ideas across.

It was a really fun process, a lot easier than writing my other nonfiction books, and I'm happy to say people are enjoying it. If you want a laugh that'll make you think, I think it's a good choice.

You know, Andrew, you're going to be joining us at the Abundance Summit this coming Sunday.

Excited. Can you bring a couple of books with you?

Andrew Yang

I think I'll have a whole crate, or your team might have already ordered a crate.

Andrew Yang

Oh, great. Then I'm happy. Thank you, everybody. By the way, this is funny. Peter, have you written a book?

I have a couple.

Andrew Yang

Yeah. So then you know, and I sense maybe the rest of you have, too, but if you want to prey on someone when they're vulnerable, get to them when they have a book coming out. Then they're just like, “Oh, I have thoughts. I wrote them down.” And if you're like, “I want to hear your thoughts,” they'll be like, “Ooh, someone wants to hear my thoughts.” It's a very vulnerable place.

Alex is bringing 600 copies of Solve Everything, which is a book-slash-paper that we co-authored, mostly under Alex's genius. We're excited for both of your works of art and intelligence to make it there.

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I want to take us forward to a tweet you sent out that went viral: “The end of the office. AI will replace large numbers of white-collar jobs in 12 to 18 months. 20% to 50% of 70 million U.S. office workers could be displaced. What happens to all of this real estate?” We saw this take a sharp hit over COVID, and now it's getting a double tap to the head.

Andrew Yang

Yeah. So if you play out a block times 10,000—not to say there are 10,000 blocks, because there aren't—there are going to be private companies making choices that are quite similar. You're going to have fewer workers heading to an office. You're going to have commercial districts under tremendous pressure, which we did see under COVID. You're going to have folks questioning the value of a college degree because there's not a high-paying corporate job waiting for you on the other side.

It's going to get nasty and dark. I do rely upon some of my friends who are more normal than I am. What do I mean by that? One friend my age—I'm 51 now—and one of my jokes is that I'm lucky not to get dumber in any given month, while AI just gets twice as smart. Eventually, we just have to raise our hands and say, “You know what? Asking us all to compete against AI is probably not going to work out.”

My friend is 50 years old, has 3 kids, has a mortgage, has a corporate job at a bank, and was recently laid off. What's the next move for him? I've been very encouraging, but that's the kind of place I turn to see what the future looks like.

By the way, he's got a college degree, a 6-figure job—an educated pillar of the bourgeoisie. Then you imagine him losing his job and not being able to find another one that pays him the same, and how that plays out in his town and the surrounding suburbs, where some people are going to start selling their houses.

One of the things I put in this note—which was not just a tweet, it was a blog post that went somewhat viral on Substack—was, “You might want to put your home up for sale first, because you don't want to be last.” If you live in Westchester County or some of the Peninsula suburbs, people are going to be selling. If you can get a reasonable price at the front of the line, you'd much prefer that to trying to wait until everything starts unwinding.

We've seen, in fact, the bankruptcy rate among colleges start to skyrocket. Who wants to take on that much debt? And, like you said, the group with the highest unemployment rate is college graduates.

Yeah. You're starting to see debt delinquency rates rise and mortgage delinquency rates rise. Personal financial distress is ratcheting up. You've probably seen a lot of the stats where significant proportions—call it half—of Americans have limited savings and are living essentially paycheck to paycheck.

I know people who resemble this: college grads who have had multidecade-long careers, who I think are doing great. Then I have coffee or dinner with them, and if you press a little bit, they're super stressed because they borrowed money to send their one kid to college. I'm like, “Oh my gosh, this much? I thought you were—”

It just goes to show, too, that I'm not normal. You guys are not normal. Most of the people listening to this are not normal. If you hang out with normal Americans, it's a real splash of water. You're seeing the distress pick up by the numbers. You can look at credit-card rates and all that stuff; people are less and less able to meet their financial obligations.

Andrew Yang

You know, Alex, I agree that it's something of a modern invention that's about to get de-invented. The problem is that all of these people came of age and made life decisions based upon something that was true during their lifetimes, and that's going to become untrue.

I'd put you in the shoes of either a young person or a parent trying to decide, “Am I going to go to college?” Traditionally, going to college—I mean, I'm going to guess all of us went to college. Just a guess.

Alex has like a half dozen degrees.

Andrew Yang

Yeah, and so then, if someone comes to you and says, “Hey, guess what? That entire path got de-invented. Figure it out.” Are you going to pivot at age 17 or 18? Or, if you're a parent of a 17- or 18-year-old, are you going to say, “Hey, guess what? All that stuff's obsolete”?

I wrote another Substack post about whether college is still worth it, being honest and saying, “Look, my kids are going to college almost certainly, unless they become savant entrepreneurs or shut-ins.” Part of it is that I can afford it, and to me, them going to college is about social development as much or more than it is vocational.

Yeah, building a network and adult daycare. That's what I said, Alex. I said my strongest memory of going to Brown was my college girlfriend leaving me for another guy, and then being sad for a semester or two. My major learning from Brown was how to deal with a breakup, which I'm going to suggest is a very important life skill. It served me very well.

Speaker 1

On the other hand, simulating a breakup at a tender age can probably be afforded at a much lower cost than Brown tuition.

Andrew Yang

Probably. But again, we're in a circle where—and I was honest; I think it's disingenuous to be like, “Hey, don't do the thing that my kids are totally going to do.” My kids are going to go to college, and it's a much worse value proposition for most families than is being sold to them.

Both of those things are true. These paths are still going to be there, and lots of people are going to take them. They're just not going to lead to as steady ground.

I'm going to move us to another fun and important subject. We've sort of danced around this, which is the impact of AI on youth and on populations. Here we go: Population decline in China is extraordinary. China's birth rate is reported at a 75-year low. This demographic shift is fueling a trend, in particular because AI is being seen as a partner option. Young women in China are opting for AI boyfriends, seen as a real alternative to a life partner.

You don't have to deal with your boyfriend's snarky attitude. One in 8 teens are seeking emotional support from AI chatbots. 64% of teens use chatbots, and 12% of them use them for emotional support. Andrew, thoughts on this?

Andrew Yang

One of my kids resembles this. He doesn't interface very readily with other people generally, and so he already jokes about having an AI girlfriend. His mom and I are like, “No, no, real girlfriend.” [laughter] Then he's like, “Nah, AI—”

“Your AI girlfriend will not leave you.”

Andrew Yang

Yeah. This trend is playing out in my household. This is part of my sadness for the death of partying. If you're at home on your screen, it's hard to meet a girl [laughter] and easy to meet an AI chatbot because an AI chatbot is right there. I see this trend unfortunately growing more and more, and I wish it were otherwise.

Yeah. Other comments? I have to press on the point. Andrew, it sounds like, in some sense, you're concerned about what I think is Peter's language: a growing abundance or overabundance of romance. It's artificial romance, but it's an abundance of romance nonetheless.

At the same time, I look to China. There's this notion in China of—I think it's pronounced tang ping, “lying flat”—where, due to pressures from society, many young people are, again, sort of the cliché, choosing to opt out of the so-called rat race and instead staying home as shut-ins. In Japan, hikikomori is a similar concept. But isn't this, in some sense, a reflection of an abundance of entertainment and artificial romance? In that sense, why wouldn't you reasonably expect that, as we achieve abundance—if you think we're going to achieve abundance in other sectors as well, not just the personal lifestyle-type sectors—we come back and have this conversation, and now we're drowning in abundance in all these other areas?

And no, Andrew, I'm encouraging my children to stay away from abundance because I want them to work hard and experience a traditional, in some sense, scarcity-based lifestyle.

Andrew Yang

The word that popped into my mind is friction. I'm married; I've been married for 15 years, and it's far from frictionless. [laughter] The AI chatbot is there, ever-present and ever-supportive, and all that stuff. You have to have a tolerance for a certain degree of friction to get married and have a family.

These are things that I see as positives on multiple levels. I see them as positives personally. I see them as positives for society. I see them as positives for the species. I think reproducing is a good thing. [snorts] To be a husband and father—and, you know, wife and mother—you just have to put up with a lot.

Our young people are not used to putting up with tons of friction in their entertainments and interactions. I talk about my college girlfriend. You have a lot of false starts and trial and error before figuring out, “Oh, I like this sort of person.” That's what I want for my kids. That's what I want for other people's kids, too.

I want them to be out there meeting other real-life, flesh-and-blood humans, having misadventures and adventures, and then eventually settling down, having a family, and having kids. I don't think that's going to be easy at all. I think what we're talking about now with work is that, for men, if you don't have a steady paycheck and path, then you don't feel good about yourself, and then you don't think you're worthy of partnering. By the way, some women might agree with you [laughter] that—

This is such a gendered—I mean, just note for the record, it seems like a somewhat gendered vision for the role of post-scarcity economics. One last question, if I may. I'm curious about neither the so-called man nor the so-called woman, but the AI side. Do you have a position—or does the Forward Party, I guess, have a position—on AI personhood? Should the AIs have a say or rights in this entire discussion?

Andrew Yang

Right now, I'm pre-AI personhood, but I'm open-minded.

I love it. See, I want to go to you on this subject of AI companionship and youth. The dropping birth rate is not just China. Japan is at an all-time low. South Korea and much of the world, other than Africa and parts of India, are in massive decline. You and I both have boys who are 14. How do you think about AI and normal relationships?

Peter Diamandis

Take into account that I have a radical positivity bias in my view of the world, right? I think people will adapt. When we were growing up, our parents were like, “Oh my God, you're on the phone nonstop. That phone's going to be stuck to your ear. You don't know how to communicate with anybody else or socialize.” It was the same conversation, but something is a bit different now.

We saw a photograph. We sent our son to hang out with his friends, and he sent back a photograph of a dark basement with 6 kids sitting independently on their phones. All you could see were their cell phones; they weren't talking to each other at all. We were like, “Oh my God.” This was driving Lily to do this teenager-mindset workshop that she's doing.

Andrew, I think you dropped some really deep wisdom there. A lot of the reason we get married is to work out our deepest issues, bring our biggest traumas to the surface, and process them in the intimacy of a marriage over a number of years. If we stop having that type of relationship as adults, then that burden of processing those issues will go somewhere else.

This is going to be an interesting evolution to see where this goes. It could be that AI processes that and is able to do that. But that visceral human experience—partying, falling in love, going through that hassle, and so on—is the essence of all of this.

For years, I was convinced I wouldn't get married and wouldn't have kids. When I got married, about half the people came just to physically witness the fact that it was actually happening. [laughter] The grounding and the reality of being a human being that it brings you to—dealing with a spouse, dealing with kids, dealing with the process they're all going through, and watching that—is such a powerful thing. I can't imagine now not doing that, right?

What does it look like if somebody marries an AI and then just switches AIs over time? We'll just have to adapt to that. That's what we tell our son: “Look, an AI girlfriend can't have kids. Unacceptable. We need grandkids. Reprogram, or no college tuition for you.” [laughter]

We don't go that far, but—

Speaker 1

So, pro-natalism and also pro-UBI?

Peter Diamandis

Yeah, man. Guilty.

Speaker 1

Andrew, I am curious. Given this program here, our focus is one of the top, if not the top, AI and exponential-tech podcasts out there. It isn't about politics; it's about technology, typically. But given the fact that we have you and the Forward Party, the American Party, whatever it might be, I'm curious about your thoughts on this particular article.

Pro- and anti-AI-regulation groups are amassing a war chest for lobbying—a war chest of $265 million. Lobbying spending by AI companies surged 200% in the last 24 months. $170 million was contributed to the 2024 election cycle. Your thoughts on this topic?

Andrew Yang

Yeah. I'm not really seeing the money from the anti-AI groups. I see a lot of money from—

Typically not very rich.

Andrew Yang

Yeah, yeah, right, exactly. But, by the way, the folks who are dubious of AI—their ranks grow every day. The polling, let's say, if you were to ask a basic question like, “Should AI be more regulated than it is?” gets 80%. One joke is that there are more regulations to open a hot-dog stand on the streets of New York—definitely New York—than there are for launching a large language model.

All the money's on the other side. In my mind, if you had a nuanced, intelligent conversation, you could be like, “Okay, guys, we want to do this; we don't want to do that.” But right now, there's this massive divide. The companies want, “Look, we just want to do what we want. Stay out of our way. We're just going to do what we want.”

The vast majority of elected officials are right there with them because this is where all the money and the growth are. If you're even the governor of Pennsylvania, you're like, “Hey, we're opening data centers. I'm pro-data center. I'm pro-growth.” You're like, “Yeah, I'm on board.”

Then there's this popular sentiment that's on the other side that has not actually found its way into the political system yet because no Republican wants to pick it up yet. Very few Democrats want to pick it up yet, but it's where most Americans are. You're going to wind up with a regulatory regime that's very, very pro-business.

A lot of people listening to this will be like, “Sure.” Most Americans are just going to be looking at it like, “Yeah, that happened.” But most Americans are going to feel like they're on the outside of this one.

Peter Diamandis

I want to bring us back, before we go to an AMA section, to the conversation earlier about this idea of an American Party. What do you imagine might unfold over the next few months?

Andrew Yang

I think there's going to be an independent candidate, and they're going to get an outsized amount of support despite attacks from one side or the other.

Andrew Yang

Then the rubber's going to hit the road as to whether there are multiple candidates, a primary, a process—genuine competition. I have those conversations all the time. What's fun is that among my projects, I'm for alleviating poverty at scale via universal basic income. I don't foresee that happening without some kind of political realignment, which then makes me pro-political realignment.

Have you been having these conversations with Scaramucci as well?

Andrew Yang

Yeah. Anthony and I are in touch and friendly on it. Some of the other figures that you'd imagine, too. The ranks are growing all the time. Even folks who were in one party or another have now just thrown in the towel and said, “I'm out. I give up.”

Do you think Elon—I mean, have you had a conversation with Elon about this or DMed with him?

Andrew Yang

Elon and I have DMed, and I've talked to his team. I get the sense that right now Elon's on board with the administration and that there are a lot of people in his circle who are saying, “Look, we need the administration. We've got too much stuff.”

But I also think that folks kind of know that he lost his own purpose. If he had his brothers, I think things might look a little different.

Amazing. The big conversation here is, can AI fix poverty? The vision that I painted 14 years ago with my first book, Abundance, and the new book that's coming out, We Are as Gods, is that, in fact, we're demonetizing and democratizing access to food, water, energy, healthcare, education—all of these things.

There is a flip side to this technologically challenging societal period, where people are godlike and have access to everything they need. The biggest challenge on that front is going to be purpose. Can you use that technology to do something purposeful? Can you be a creator versus a consumer? A couch potato is the consumer, and the creator is the entrepreneur out there. It's Star Trek versus Mad Max, as you said.

Do you think that AI can, in fact, uplift every man, woman, and child?

Andrew Yang

I think it's certainly a possibility, and my goal is to try and get us there. AI is going to create trillions of dollars of value for sure. It's going to completely transform the way we work and live. The question is, who wins in that world and who doesn't?

When you say, “Can AI fix poverty?” that suggests that people who are currently poor will not be, and that's where I think we should try to go. Right now, the path of least resistance is that the trillions of dollars of value that get generated are going to be in the hands of the firms and the stakeholders in those firms. If you do the math, that's a very small slice of the population.

The question is how the value gets from within those confines out to, let's say, the broader American public, though from the look of this picture, you're thinking even bigger than America, which I love. For me, I take shots at what's happening in America, but I think there's a chance that AI does fix poverty globally.

Amazing.

Andrew Yang

I have a simple thought on this. If you can use AI to reduce poverty of access—education, healthcare, and so on—faster than you can fix the poverty of power, like rights and ownership, then you win. If AI boosts productivity while concentrating ownership, then you get worse, and poverty gets worse.

You can solve it by having AI go after poverty of access. Solve for that, and that'll help.

So much of this discussion in my mind is focusing on redistribution rather than growing the pie. I'm curious, Andrew: You talk about Star Trek versus Mad Max. What is the most Star Trekian-type scenario that you envision realistically happening over the next 10 to 20 years that radically grows the pie, beyond the separate discussion of how best to redistribute wealth?

Andrew Yang

I mean, everyone can see the pie is going to grow very, very quickly because AI is going to do the work of millions of humans in hours instead of years, and then do the work better. It'll run down all these loose ends that we never would have identified, enhance the discovery of life-saving drugs, advance materials science—everything. The pie is going to grow. It can't not in that scenario.

The most Star Trekian thing I can imagine—and this, by the way, is the vision I'm going to talk about at Abundance—is that UBI is a piece of the puzzle, but to me it's not the answer. Individuals and families want purpose, community, values, development, training, a place to go in the morning—all these things that people want.

There would be an explosion of entrepreneurship. If you put money into people's hands, of course people are going to start all sorts of new businesses and initiatives, or they're going to get out more. But the most Star Trekian thing would be if you had a caring and nurturing economy, a health and wellness economy, and an arts and creativity economy. People would get to do various things on various wavelengths and then get rewarded and recognized, self-organizing around these things.

To me, the utopian path is a multivariate economy with multiple currencies around different pursuits of human flourishing. I played Dungeons & Dragons as a kid, as well as role-playing games, so maybe it's a bit of that coming in, where you have different classes with different strengths and weaknesses and different pursuits.

One of the comparisons I make is that, at this point, we should be getting paid to go to the gym instead of paying ourselves. Someone should be paying us to go to the gym, and then the personal trainer who's there whipping us into shape should be getting these wellness bucks that he or she can then use to go to the game and live a great life.

That's the most Star Trekian thing, and I do think we can get there because it's one of the only paths that makes sense to me in terms of people living the lives they want to live.

Just to be clear on that, this is fascinating, by the way: Your Star Trek scenario is for different verticals of the economy, or different sectors, like health and wellness versus education. Do I understand correctly that you want nonfungible currencies, with one currency or credit system per sector?

Andrew Yang

Well, I mean, they could be fungible.

But not fungible between sectors? Could I trade a gym credit for an education credit?

Andrew Yang

Maybe you could. There are a couple of really fun things about this, Peter. I have 300,000 American Express points right now. How much does it cost American Express for me to have those points? Zero.

Zero, because I haven't done anything with them yet.

Andrew Yang

Did I modify my behavior to get those points? I 100% did. You can imagine, by the way, that it's also a move if I show you my American Express reward points or the money in my bank account, but it might not be a move if I showed you all the points I got visiting the nursing home or tutoring kids.

It might actually just make me a person who does a lot in the community. Then maybe I get honored at the baseball game, the way that military veterans get honored at the game. There are things that we can do that make it just like—

Social credit.

Andrew Yang

Yes. What's funny, Peter, is that I was prohibited from saying the words “social credit” because I'm Asian, and people look at it and think, “Oh, freaking dystopian Chinese authoritarian government measuring blah, blah, blah.” It's not like that. It's doing stuff that people want to do and enjoy and want to self-organize around.

Some sort of centralized, multivariate, credit-based scheme for shaping human behavior.

Andrew Yang

But it doesn't need to be centralized, to your point. You could put it in the hands of local municipalities. The church can assign it, right? The church can assign what they think is incredible support that their community needs.

There are communities doing a version of this right now, and they tend to be religious communities.

All right, I want to move us next to our AMA with our mates. Andrew, the way this works is each of us picks a question. As our guest, I'm going to ask you to go first. Where do you want to hit?

Andrew Yang

Well, geez, I have to pick number 3.

Okay. UBI is the most important topic right now. What can individuals like me do to help accelerate its adoption?

Andrew Yang

Yes, you are wise and smart. Right now, the best thing you can do is become an individual advocate. Put on social media, “I think we should adopt universal basic income.” To the extent that there are a couple of organizers and organizations around that, you should follow them. A guy named Scott Santens—S-A-N-T-E-N-S—is excellent.

Big fan of Scott.

Andrew Yang

Yeah, a big fan of Scott, and also me. You can come to andrewyang.com, and I have a Substack with hundreds of thousands of members.

Andrew Yang

I’m pushing in this direction. Then just keep making the case. When there’s a candidate who comes around, show up and ask a question: “Hey, universal basic income.” To the extent that you know folks in your community who might be able to help others, push them in that direction.

But thank you. I totally agree, Dave.

Speaker 1

Quick point there. Very quick point. Please, when you talk to people about UBI, stress that it is not socialism.

Speaker 2

Yes.

Speaker 1

Okay. Professor Blondon, your question, please.

Speaker 3

I’ll take question number 1 because it’s so hard. This is really, really tricky. I’m a public school superintendent. I want my students to be prepared for AI. I use AI daily, and I understand it. That’s a great start. But where do we begin? And that’s from Ralph Ceir Jr. [?]

Peter Diamandis

Yeah, really tough. I feel for you, specifically because: Do you guide your students to go to college or not? It’s a really tricky question.

The one hard-and-fast answer is: Encourage them to use AI as much as you can, and get them into groups. As Andrew said, there’s way too little socializing going on between people. Get them into groups that are also experimenting with AI.

The new thing is OpenClaw. There’ll be something new every single week. Keep them on the tip of the spear, and keep them talking to each other about it as they use it. The answers will emerge. The more difficult question of, “Okay, what do you study next? Where do you go next?” will hopefully resolve relatively quickly.

Right now, as long as they follow the normal path—apply to college, get in—but keep using AI daily and stay on the front end, something good will happen. Remember, the tailwind of abundance is overwhelmingly strong. Even though there’ll be a lot of disruption, job displacement, perturbed people, and social unrest, the tailwind is still in your favor in aggregate, in the macro.

The key thing for Ralph is: Please, please, please, when you’re encouraging your students to use AI, it’s not to do their 9th-grade homework or their 10th-grade homework. It’s to do something that they would consider impossible to do.

Give your students the objective of designing a starship to go to Alpha Centauri. What’s involved in doing all of those things? You’re basically giving them the superpower of deployable intelligence to go solve a challenge that they’re blown away by their ability to solve. This is about uplifting the capabilities they have.

Speaker 1

All right. Alex, over to you, pal.

Speaker 2

I’ll take the softball question, Peter. Question number 5: How is debt going to be paid in a hyperdeflationary AI economy if scarcity disappears, earnings collapse, but debt remains?

This is from Poetry to Song. It’s such a softball question. The answer is obvious: We’ll hyperinflate, and we know how to do it. If the cost of everything goes down to 0, or near 0, because we’ve solved everything, we start printing money, and everyone becomes billionaires or trillionaires.

We have the state capacity, both as a country and as a world, to hyperinflate to compensate against the hyperdeflation. That’s probably the easiest numerical way to make everyone billionaires.

Speaker 5

I’ll also take the softball one, number 2, which is: UBI—who decides how much? Only for citizens? Is it scaled to wealth? Is human effort no longer a criterion? And this is from Quietus6.

We’ve talked about this already. UBI is not really a moral prize; it’s a stability protocol, right? You find the amount that is enough for people to survive but not be happy.

Citizenship is a political choice, but the economic logic is that whoever participates in the economy needs a floor to prevent that collapse when you have this type of demand destruction. You can do it implicitly through taxes rather than means-testing the benefit side.

The scarcest resource these days is not effort. It’s human coherence. UBI buys human coherence. It buys stability.

Speaker 6

All right. I’ll take number 4.

Speaker 1

Nice work, Sam. I approve that message. I’m your biggest superfan.

Speaker 6

Well, thank you.

Speaker 1

Sam for vice president under Andrew Yang—he’s got it.

Speaker 2

Yes.

Peter Diamandis

All right. From Steve Trisha Wilson:

“As someone leaving the labor market next year for retirement, what economic disruptions should I be prepared for?”

First of all, I don’t believe in retirement. I think retirement is a four-letter word. I think you should be looking at what you do next. I think you should be looking at what you enjoy. How do you create something around a passion that you have that can still earn income and keep you in the game? Retirement is the worst thing for your longevity.

What should you be prepared for next? First of all, have you saved enough money if we hit longevity escape velocity? If you’re 65, say, and you’ve saved enough to get to 80, the average U.S. lifespan today is 79, and healthspan is 63. What happens if all of a sudden new protocols hit and you can make it to 120? That’s something to think about.

The second part of this is that we’re going to see rapid inflation, and then rapid deflation, as the cost of things begins to drop toward 0. The rapid inflation in the near term is going to come from the government just printing money around the whole UBI side. I don’t know if you agree with that, Andrew, in terms of this cycle. We basically have a ton of money being printed, like we did during COVID, and then, as AI and robotics come in and provide an oversupply of products and services, the prices begin to drop dramatically. Thoughts on that?

Andrew Yang

That makes sense to me.

Speaker 1

All right. We’re going to do a second round here of 1 question each. Andrew, you get to go first.

Andrew Yang

Wow. I have to take in the questions. I have to choose 1.

Yes.

Andrew Yang

I’ll do number 8. Why not?

If AI replaces CEOs, shareholders shed a major cost, and the means of production shift to capital owners, isn’t that the extreme version of wealth concentration?

People make jokes about CEOs being like, “Oh, the CEO is firing all these people. Why don’t we replace the CEO with AI?” I think this questioner, MGP Star, is actually hitting on something really important.

If you look at these large corporations, they’re overstaffed. You can make a decision as to who’s deciding who stays and who goes, and then people naturally become very hostile toward the CEO because that’s the decision-maker on that.

I think that in most places, the CEO will be the last to go. This is within private companies and public companies. One reason why CEOs are expensive is because you need someone, and in the scheme of the enterprise, that cost actually makes sense.

I do think, though, that wealth concentration will pick up because these firms will have fewer workers.

Thank you, Dave. Over to you, Bill.

Speaker 7

All right. I’ll take number 7, then. Many Americans rely on gig work like Uber for income. Once AI eliminates those jobs, $400 a month is gone. Who has addressed this impact?

Speaker 8

From Joe Kingtown [?].

Speaker 9

Joe King—Joe Knight, right?

Speaker 8

Right?

Speaker 7

Yeah. You have to take agency. Nobody is thinking this through for you. The amount of change and disruption is happening very, very quickly.

I think Andrew, on this pod, is one of the few guys really trying to brainstorm through it. But you see all the friction in politics. We meet with governors all the time. The rate of motion is near 0.

No one is thinking it through for you. That’s the short answer. Do not rely on somebody else to give you the path forward. Start talking to the AI. The AI will give you a better road map and a better answer to what you should do next than anyone in politics or anyone out there.

Corporations are going to be cutting these jobs. They’re not the ones to talk to. Get your AI agents up and running. Start talking to them. Ask them what you should be doing next. But you’re absolutely right. This is going away. No one’s creating a road map for you.

Speaker 1

I think it’s Joe Kingtown [?], and he’s in Houston. So, if I’m right, Joe, thumbs up. But I agree with Dave.

Nice. See, over to you, Bel.

Speaker 10

I will go with number 9. FSD—full self-driving—will tip because of insurance costs. Once people can’t afford EV insurance, adoption stalls. Isn’t affordability the real point to discuss? And this was from JSBGMC6613.

Insurance, for now, is absolutely the hidden governor on autonomy adoption, but it’s transitional, right? As safety data improves, the underwriting drops, and you flip from driver risk to systemic risk.

There’s a huge shift coming in this because we won’t be purchasing cars; we’ll be accessing cars. You flip from consumer ownership to subscription models.

I want to go back to the best model we’ve seen for this. We’ve already seen this transition in the music business, where you had 7 or 8 music studios selling you the cassette, the CD, and the DVD—selling you scarcity. Then we digitized music, and now you have iTunes and Spotify delivering abundance on a subscription model.

That transition that we’ve seen fully in music, we expect to see in transportation, healthcare, education, energy—anywhere, everywhere. Affordability matters, but it’s the path to the new model: from “I own a car” to “Do I buy miles from an autonomous network?”

Speaker 1

All right, AWG, over to you, Bel.

Speaker 2

That leaves me with number 6, which is a fun question. What’s the role of nonprofits in the AI economy? How can they safely adopt AI when they lack the tech and financial resources? This is from Gus45.

Speaker 2

Okay, so the elephant in the room, the very center, the beating heart of the AI economy, was until very recently a nonprofit: OpenAI. And it’s worth nearly $1 trillion.

I would question the premise of these pairs of questions. The modern AI economy as it currently exists was arguably created by a nonprofit that then transitioned to what it is now, which is structured as a constellation of entities. But it is essentially a public benefit company.

I would again, in the spirit of questioning the premise, question that they lack the financial resources. I think my hot take for this episode is that the OpenAI transition from nonprofit to public benefit company is, in fact, a template for the future of nonprofits in general, educational and otherwise.

One of my fever dreams is to take some of the largest research universities in this country, which are right now nonprofits, and, with the help of government, transition them over to being for-profit public benefit companies and then take them public. I’d love to take Harvard, MIT, and Stanford public on the New York Stock Exchange or the Nasdaq.

I think it would unlock an enormous amount of societal value because—

Peter Diamandis

I can’t wait to have that conversation with the presidents of universities.

Speaker 2

I’d love to. I don’t trade individual public stocks, but I’d love to buy Harvard and MIT stock on public markets if I could. There’s so much societal value, I think, that right now is being kneecapped because we have so many faculty who are doing their best to try to pretend to be employed at a nonprofit. They’re handicapping their ability to spin out companies that would be societally valuable.

Why? Because many universities—Stanford is sort of a quasi-exception, but certainly Harvard and MIT—are doing their best not to look like venture capital. And I think these universities become the largest incubators on the planet, and the faculty get ownership and upside in everything they help incubate, and all their rock-star students who succeed.

Yes.

Speaker 2

Yeah. It’s amazing. I mean, universities turning into incubators and venture studios is absolutely the only way it’s going to go—

And survive. For them to survive.

Speaker 2

But to do that, they need to escape from the sword of Damocles that they’ll be taxed as a for-profit, which right now they’re petrified of.

Yeah. Amazing.

All right, everybody. I hope you've enjoyed this AMA. Again, we're putting out three episodes on Moonshots this week. So, please subscribe and turn on notifications so you can find out when they come out. If you've got questions for the Moonshot Mates, please drop them into the comments. We read them all. If you've got any outro music that you want to send to us, send it to media@diamandis.com.

And with that, one of my favorite parts of the show, we have an incredible piece of outro music called Moonshots 2035 by Manos and Seikka. Andrew, enjoy this. I think this one is especially apropos for our conversation today.

2028 shelves went dry. 2029 cash. 2030. We didn't like it or not. We got a moonshot.

2035 we made it through. Good times, clear sky, something new. Built from the ashes from old decay.

Was that you, Peter, in that? It's all of us. This is amazing.

Oh, this is really an appropriate theme for what we're talking about: devastation coming here, and then we get to the other side.

Well, I for one feel like closing my eyes and opening them to 2035.

It does. You do that, Andrew. You'll sleep through the singularity.

I sleep through a great deal. I don't like that.

That was super fun. It was amazing. We have such an awesome community of creators that follow us and support us. Thank you for all of you generating extraordinary music, outro videos, and sometimes intro videos. We love you, Andrew. This was an amazing conversation, pal. Thank you.

Yes, for sure.

Well, thank you all. Thanks for having me, and I look forward to seeing you out at Abundance before.

Yeah, it's going to be incredible. We're on together on Sunday.

Much appreciated. See you all soon. Thank you in particular. Thank you, Sim, in particular. Bye, guys.

If you made it to the end of this episode, which you obviously did, I consider you a moonshot mate. Every week, my moonshot mates and I spend a lot of energy and time to really deliver you the news that matters. If you're a subscriber, thank you. If you're not a subscriber yet, please consider subscribing so you get the news as it comes out.

I also want to invite you to join me on my weekly newsletter called Metatrends. I have a research team. You may not know this, but we spend the entire week looking at the Metatrends that are impacting your family, your company, your industry, your nation, and I put this into a two-minute read every week. If you'd like to get access to the Metatrends newsletter every week, go to diamandis.com/metatrends. That's diamandis.com/metatrends. Thank you again for joining us today. It's a blast for us to put this together every week.