Andrew Yang 谈 Looksmaxxing、Meme Politics 与 AI 末日

Today's guest, Andrew Yang, was a presidential candidate in 2020, ran for New York City Mayor, and was one of the first people publicly warning about the rise of AI. Artificial intelligence is coming. It's actually already eating up the most common jobs in our economy. In this episode, he breaks down what the future might actually look like and what you need to do to make it in 2026.

Dude, I just read in one of your articles that your wife bought you some personal training sessions, and I wanted to start with this. I watched you in the Graham Stephan interview, and then coming on here, you’re looking good, man. I don’t know exactly what it is, but you’re looking good.

Yeah, that did happen. My wife got me a package of workouts, and I was like, “Oh, crap, she’s trying to tell me something.” So I’ve got to get in there and stay vital for your partner.

Yeah, you’re looking good, man. I appreciate you coming on. Look, I don’t know how familiar you are with me, so I wanted to start with a little introduction and give you some background on myself and who you’re speaking to in the audience today.

My quick lore is that I’m an internet hustler kid. I started flipping sneakers and trading Supreme when I was 16, and then the next game in town was sports cards, so we started trading sports cards. We found NFTs through sports cards. I dropped out of college and basically said to myself, “I’m going to pursue this outside of the means and get it by any means necessary on the internet.” You end up in crypto.

Crypto fizzled off a little bit and got into a weird spot, and recently we’ve transitioned into a lot of geopolitics and trading everything. Most recently, we’ve been talking about Iran and the oil trade, and I think this stream has evolved into trying to learn more about the world and figure out these opportunities and how to make it.

If I had to pin down the average viewer of the Thread Guy stream—and my name is Michael in real life—it’s a 24-year-old kid who realized that the traditional American dream social contract is broken for the first generation. Go to college, get a degree, get married, get a corporate job, buy a nice house, have a white picket fence, have 2 kids, and feel comfortable financially, socially, and culturally. That’s sort of been broken for the first time.

We have this community that I think will represent a larger and larger percentage of the upcoming generation: hustlers trying to make it outside of the system because they feel like that’s the only way to survive in 2026. I wanted to set the stage that this is the energy we’re coming from, and I’m pretty honored to have you on the stream today.

Thanks, Michael. That’s super helpful. I can relate to many aspects of that. To follow up on that, I know you’re a numbers guy. Can you paint the picture of what the average 24-year-old man in America looks like in 2026?

First, I’m going to rewind to when I was 24. I made—I was going to say “mistake,” but I can’t really classify it as a mistake—I went to law school after college and then became an unhappy lawyer for 5 months before quitting that job.

My Asian parents freaked out. I owed 6 figures in law school loans. I used to call them my mistress because I was sending a check to a phantom family to support their lifestyle. In my case, I started a company that flopped, became a nightclub promoter and a test-prep tutor, and then joined a healthcare software company as my day job.

I had 3 jobs for a number of years in my mid-to-late 20s. I dare say that when I was going through this in the early 2000s, things were a lot better and easier than they are for a 20-to-24-year-old today. When I left the firm, I moved in with a friend, and I was paying $1,000 a month after discounts for a bedroom in Manhattan.

Wow.

I tried to figure out how much that same situation would cost now, and it might be 3 times as much.

At least. Maybe. It was a 2-bedroom, 2-bath, so you could probably get that done for $3,000, probably. I was in a studio that was $1,500 for a while, and now that’s probably $4,000.

The situation has gotten a lot worse for a young man. The costs have gone up, the opportunities have gone down, and a lot of young guys are trying to figure it out. I appreciate the community you’ve built and the fact that you’re trying to help, Michael.

As a numbers guy, it’s much, much worse now for a 27-year-old man than it was when I was in the same situation.

Yeah, it’s a tough spot. I’m fortunate to have done well over the last couple of years and found a niche that I can fit into and do well in, but a lot of my friends are in tough spots.

You go to university, you’re 23, you come from a good family, you’re smart, you’re talented, and you have a degree, but you end up in this “What the fuck do I do next?” spot. I think you articulated it well.

As a follow-up, where is all the money going, per se? Who is winning in 2026? If the money isn’t going to the younger, new-grad generation, where is all of the capital flowing?

The easiest way to visualize it is the K-shaped economy, where the top 20% are hoovering up most of the value. The top 20% tend to be old, and that’s one of the issues you face as a young person.

I considered myself a young person for most of my life until relatively recently, which makes me a little bit sad, I’m not going to lie, Michael.

But I told you you look good, though, man. I wasn’t lying.

No, thank you. I appreciate that. I’m still young at heart.

When I talked to young people while I was running for president, I said, “Look, you should either be really pissed off or really sad, because our generation has you all over.” It wasn’t really my generation—I’m Gen X. It was really the boomers, but I included myself. I was like, “I personally was not responsible at all. I’m trying to unfuck you all. I’m trying to get it all back.”

The winners are the top 20%, and that maps to people who are at least 50, 55, and older. I did an interview with a friend of mine named Thiccy on the internet. He’s a really talented trader, and we were talking about this K-shaped phenomenon.

He gave this take, which is basically that capitalism in all societies ends in a K-shape, and that the idea of a middle class is a one-off phenomenon made possible only by how the cards played out after World War II in America. This idea of a prosperous middle class is not a sustainable outcome that can exist historically. What do you think about that?

I disagree in terms of sustainability, because when it originated after World War II, it was the result of a set of policy choices. There was the GI Bill, and they said, “Hey, you come back from the front, and now we’ll pay for college.”

You also had a bunch of tailwinds going on. The economy grew very nicely for several decades, so you didn’t have to be a hero to do well.

You could have a middle class indefinitely if you just chose to do so as a country. I think about other societies that have taken certain costs off the table. Let’s say you’re a Nordic country and you say everyone is going to get healthcare. I would make an argument that just about everyone in that society is functionally middle class because they get subsidized, free, or nearly free healthcare, education, and maybe even housing in some instances.

You go over there, and everyone’s pretty chill.

The U.S. has a singular advantage—multiple advantages. We have the global reserve currency, our GDP per capita is $84,000, and we’re the richest, most advanced economy in the history of the world. If we wanted millions more Americans to be middle class, we could make it happen like this.

What is the bottleneck there? Is it incentives, the structure of existing government, or something in the system?

One of the comparisons I make for people, Michael, is that I ask what percentage of Americans approve of Congress, which is anchoring you low. This was in my Iced Coffee Hour conversation, but it’s about a 15% approval rating and a 94% incumbent reelection rate.

You look at that and you’re like, “How the heck does that math out?” The way it works out is that 90% of the districts in the U.S. are drawn to be either quite blue or quite red. You have no choice. You know it’s going to be a Democrat.

Where are you physically based, Michael?

I’m in New York. I’m from Virginia, and I just moved from L.A.

Oh, wow. Okay. If you’re in New York, you know a Democrat is representing you, so there’s zero suspense in the matter.

And that’s the way it shakes out in 90% of these districts. So we have something of a faux democracy right now, where what most of us want doesn’t matter. And then that’s how you wind up with a shrinking middle class and diminishing prospects for the young. By the way, that really plays out in terms of age very clearly: old people vote, old people control the purse strings, and old people are like, “You mess with our stuff and you’re going to get it.” Young people are coming up being like, “What’s going on? What’s going on?”

The happening?

Scott Galloway calls it a wealth pump, where there’s just been a wealth pump to older generations.

The wealth pump. I like that framing. On the topic of this K-shape, there are 2 sides of it, right? Which is like—

By the way, I also don’t want to be too negative, because it concerns me that a young person would be like, “Oh, there’s no use trying.” One of the things I want to suggest is this West Point model of development that I took to heart when I was in my 20s trying to figure stuff out.

At West Point, they make every cadet report to an upperclassman above them. Then, as soon as they become a sophomore, they give them a freshman they’re responsible for. So every cadet ends up with at least 3 people they’ve reported to and 3 people they’ve led. There’s a lead-and-be-led framing to your development.

I tried to adopt that in my 20s. I went to work at a startup for a more experienced entrepreneur, trying to download stuff from him. But I also became a nightclub promoter, which is something that I ran. I think these things are really powerful. If you have something you’re responsible for, it does not need to be anything that dope. It can be a running club, a carpool, fantasy football, or whatever the heck. Just something that you lead and run—I think that’s important.

Then, having someone—and it could be, and I mean, Michael, I’m sure you’re extraordinarily helpful and useful to people that follow you—but it’s even better if it’s in an organization where they work for the person. I worked for a more experienced entrepreneur, and I was downloading stuff.

Sometimes you’re downloading stuff you don’t want to do. Sometimes it’s, “This is actually a cautionary tale,” because I had multiple companies that failed, honestly. My first one failed, and the next one I joined failed. But I saw the way CEOs were doing things, and sometimes it’s like, “I’m not going to do it like that.” It’s really useful to have those experiences.

You want to try and get yourself into someone’s orbit that you can learn from, and you want something that you’re responsible for. It does not need to be enormous.

This is off-topic from what I was about to follow up with, but how soon after starting your first company did you realize it was going to fail, before you actually stopped working on it?

What a great question. I love it so much. I leave my corporate job, again much to my parents’ chagrin. Let’s call it February. I’d been in the job for 5 months—I started in September, and I leave in February.

After a little more than a year, I was like, “This is not going to work. It is going to go bust.” I was probably on it in full for 18 months, so I’d say the last 6 months the writing was on the wall. I was like, “Yo, we’re doomed.” It’s sort of negative to be like that. I mean, I was right that we were doomed, but it’s a tough realization for sure.

I’ve been in a relationship like that. I think it’s similar, right?

Yeah, sometimes for sure. Yeah, sometimes. One of the jokes I tell, too, because if you’re a successful entrepreneur, people are like, “Oh, stick with it. Perseverance, grit, determination.” I had this joke where I was like, “Quitting is an underrated skill.” You’ve got to know when to call it quits.

Yeah, that’s a good take. I like that take. Going back to you saying you don’t want to come on here and just be a doomer, and you’re not talking negatively, there are 2 ways to look at this K-shape thing. Number 1 is, how do we fix it politically and structurally? The second side, which is what I’m particularly interested in, is: especially for young people, how do you get into the upper—

Yeah. How do you get to the top of the K? Look, I would love to fix it structurally, but they always tell you in the airport, right? Put the mask on before you put somebody else’s.

I 1,000% agree with you, man, on both sides. That’s what young people should be thinking: “How do I get on the good side of the K?” And also, how do we fix it structurally?

I’m going to spend just a very brief period of time on how to fix it structurally, because I’m all about it. As I went through the gerrymandering and polarization, the 2-party system is designed to make it so we can all be ignored. What you need to do is get beyond the 2-party system.

I started the biggest 3rd party by resources, the Forward Party. I joke that it’s not that hard to start the biggest 3rd party by resources because the other ones are so shitty. But if you want to fix things structurally, the 2-party system has to go. There’s no way this system is going to fix what’s been broken.

If anyone wants to check out some of the stuff I’m doing, you can go to my TED Talk 2024, which is around structural reform, forwardparty.com, or my Substack, where I write a newsletter every week about how we can try to fix things.

Now, to the stuff you really care about, which is how you can get yours. I do think this lead-and-be-led model is helpful. Try to find someone you can learn from, and also be put in a position where you actually have to live with your decisions.

The thing you run does not need to be spectacular. When I became a nightclub promoter, which sounds super cool, one of the reasons I did it was that I could do it with no money. What you needed was an email list and a venue that would let you occupy it.

Right now, there’s actually an opportunity because these venues desperately need people. People aren’t partying as much, going out as much, or drinking as much. If you went to a venue and could actually deliver a couple hundred people, some of whom might drink and spend money, you could get really good value.

The deal that I tended to strike at the time was: you get 20% of the bar past a certain guarantee in every venue, plus 20 free drinks. You can have your friends drink for free, get a table, maybe a bottle, and be a baller spending zero money. If you can beat the minimum, you can go home with $1,000 or something, which is what I ended up doing in my 20s.

You can do this with zero capital. All you need is social capital and a good mailing list. I wasn’t heady enough to think that I could solo be the list guy, so I recruited this indie rocker named Mike Skinner and this beautiful woman named Amy Englehardt. I said, “Look, we’re going to call ourselves Ignition NYC.”

This was before R. Kelly made “Ignition” less cool. No offense, R. Kelly. Whatever. We had this list, and it was born out of the fact that at one of my birthday parties in my 20s, a lot of people I didn’t know showed up and drank. I was like, “Maybe there’s a business here.”

You can try to find a business that does not require money. I would make these decisions, good or bad, and learn. If you can find a hustle that doesn’t require money but requires other kinds of capital, you should try to take advantage of it. I find party promoting to be great training for entrepreneurship.

I prepared by listening to—I don’t know, listening to The Iced Coffee Hour, obviously listening to Rogan, listening to 3 or 4 interviews. I didn’t hear you really talk about the promoting, or how good of a nightlife promoter were you? Where did you rank on the skill level of New York City promoters?

In terms of New York City promoters, probably not that high because I wasn’t doing it for a living. It was a side hustle. But I vividly remember the high point of my promoting career was New Year’s Eve. Hundreds of people came out, and to get in the door was like $100, so we made a lot of money.

What was funny was that you were doing things, and maybe we weren’t making that much money in September. We weren’t making that much money in October. But then that freaking December 31 event made up for it because everyone needed a place to go, and they were willing to pay through the nose for it.

That was a real high point. You can tell my excitement and pride relating it even now, years later. Awesome times, awesome memories, awesome relationships.

How much did you make on New Year’s Eve 2004?

I think, as a group, we made around $10,000. There were three or four of us. I felt like the king of the world because I ended up inviting all my friends, had a great time, drank for free, and got to treat everyone great. Then I had $10,000 at the end of the night, and I gave my partners $2,500 or whatever. Their eyes bugged out, too. I just felt like that was the greatest thing ever.

The easiest way to build a friendship is to make money with somebody. I really believe that to be true.

Yeah. In January, it took them a minute to figure out some of the expenses, but on January 5th, when I was giving this money to people, it felt like such a baller move. I think I was 22 at the time.

I’m pretty terminally online, and I recognize that I live in a bubble. Twitter is a bubble within itself, and you can become susceptible to a singular narrative that gets spun and repeated by the same people. You can lose yourself in this wash cycle, if you will.

Among the trading communities especially, there’s this framing that gets thrown around a lot about the permanent underclass. Everybody loves to say that you have X amount of years to reach X amount of money to escape the permanent underclass, or that you’ll be one-shotted by AGI, or inflation and a currency crisis will take you to zero. Do you believe that it’s just forever going to be harder to make it as time goes on, and that there’s some finite time period or overarching pressure to do it right now?

As the numbers guy, I can say with a high level of confidence that it has gotten harder, and it will get harder still. That said, for the individual, you should take this as, “Okay, maybe I have to work a little harder and hustle a little more.”

One of the things I think I said in another context is, let’s say I told you that if you were born in the 1960s in America, you had something like a 93% chance of doing better than your parents.

Wow.

That was the American dream. You were born in the ’90s, and you’re down to 50%. If you’re born later than that, you’re below 50% and declining. Maybe now it’s 40% or 39%.

Absent something awesome happening, like me becoming president and trying to spread the gains everywhere—which is totally what I would do, because that is, in my mind, the only sensible move in the AI age—the probability is going to keep dropping.

But even if I were to take someone by the arm and say, “Let’s say you’re in a class, and 32% of the people in this class are going to succeed,” you’d think, “Okay, I need to be in the top 32%.” If I were to say, “Bad news. Next year it’s 29%,” you’d be like, “Well, shoot. That’s worse than 32%, but I guess that’s the job.”

Individually, you should always approach things like you’re going to make it through whatever gate. Will the gate get narrower? Yeah, it will.

That number being below 50% and dropping is alarming.

Oh, yeah. It’s trash, man. We should all be pissed off. The American dream was that you do better than your parents. The economy’s done fine—the top line is growing. If you hold risk assets, you’re great. Everything else is—

I like your take.

I do want to break down my perspective on this, too. I had a six-figure corporate job that I left, and then one company did not work out, and another company didn’t work out. I still owed these law school loans, so I felt very insecure and like a failure for years. My parents would lie about what I did professionally.

I ended up getting this CEO job. Frankly, I got named CEO of a very small education company when I was 30, and then, as CEO, it did well and was bought when I was 34. But between the ages of 25 and 34, I felt like things were always very shaky.

When I met my now-wife, she made more money than I did, as an example, which we didn’t realize until a little bit later. Her parents did not like me because they thought I was a loser. I remember stuff like that pretty vividly, because you don’t forget.

I didn’t become a quote-unquote success until I was around 34, and I did not hit my stride until I was 30 or so. If someone’s in their 20s and thinks, “If I haven’t made it by the time I’m 30, it’s done,” that’s what I want to disabuse people of. If you had found me at age 29, you would have said, “I don’t know where this is going to go.” Then you find me at age 34, and you’re like, “Oh, it’s fine.”

I was fueled by the uncertainty, difficulty, and insecurity throughout my 20s, and for decades afterward.

Also, piggybacking on this topic, I’m 24. At some point, I would like to have kids, and I would like to imagine that my child can get to 18 and succeed in whatever the current environment looks like.

Mapping that out, it’s like, “All right, we’ve got to be good here for at least another 25-plus years.” If I only have 2 years to make it, I don’t necessarily love how that plays out.

That’s my point: you have much more than 2 years to make it. I’m just going to talk about this as a guy. If you had found me at age 29, you’d have said, “I don’t know what’s going on.” Then at 34, it’s like, “Oh, cool.”

Not coincidentally, I got married when I was 36. My brother probably won’t get married until he’s 45 or something along those lines. As a guy, if it clicks for you at any point, you can probably start a family, because we actually have much longer windows for that sort of thing.

You have a ton of time. That’s what I’m saying to any of the guys out there. Even for myself, I felt like a failure throughout my 20s, it clicked for me later, and then I got married after that. Getting married at 36 is fine. You should not feel this pressure that you have to figure it all out in 1 or 2 years.

I like that take. Honestly, thank you for sharing it. I think it’s good to say at this stage.

Going to some of the AI stuff, there was an article from the very popular finance Twitter account Satrini titled “The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis.”

Oh, yeah. I remember.

I referenced it by name because I know you quote-tweeted it. The basic premise is that AI is going to be so good—better than advertised—that it’s going to lead to mass firing, a lack of demand for a lot of existing SaaS, and the ability to create software as a commodity out of thin air. It’s so good that we go into a deflationary recession, and the success of AI basically creates the downfall of the American economy.

You quote-tweeted this and talked about it a little bit. I read it on stream. In our circle, this was cinema for a week straight. What is your take on the thesis Satrini laid out in the article?

I thought it was really well done, and elements of it were very realistic. If you look at mainstream media, everything they talk about has a bias toward, “It’s going to be all right,” and gradual change. Citrini was like, “No, we are fucked.” I loved that energy and clarity.

There are going to be a lot of people who are affected. The comparison I make is that we used to have millions more manufacturing workers than we do now, and they were displaced by automation and globalization throughout the ’80s and ’90s. Those communities have never recovered.

If someone had come to them and said, “Look around this plant. Look around this town. Look around this community. It’s all going to be gone in 10 or 15 years,” they would have said, “That’s madness.” But that is what happened.

What I try to compare this to is, “Look, guys, AI is to knowledge workers what machines were to factory workers.” I’m sure if I had found a factory worker in 1985 and said, “Can a machine replace you?” they would have said, “Of course a machine cannot replace me, because what I do is so singular. No one can do what I do.”

Then you come back, and that dude is long gone. There are entire companies that are going to be driven into obsolescence by AI.

I know with the Satrini article, there were people unpacking various aspects of the scenario, saying, “Okay, this may be—no, this is—” and so on. But I thought directionally it was very strong.

The thing that was alarming in the rebuttals to Satrini was that the most common one was, “Hey, you idiot. This timeline is too fast.” Yeah, it’s not going to be 2 years; it’s going to be 4. That doesn’t solve your premise, right? “The timeline is too fast” was the strongest rebuttal.

Maybe it was, “Hey, you idiot. You said DoorDash was going to be vamped. DoorDash is fine.”

That’s one of the things that I can’t stand about it. I wrote a book saying AI was going to take the jobs, and it came out back in 2018. I ran for president in 2020. Then people will find some detail and be like, “Hey, this detail is not right.” So I’m like, “Look, that detail is totally irrelevant to the thrust of this projection.”

People tend to get very nitpicky. Something you referenced, piggybacking off of that, is that the day after we read the Citrini article on stream, the next thing we covered was the Luddites.

I’m from Northern Virginia, which is the data-center capital of America. I go back to my hometown, I drive around, and it looks like a completely different place. There are data centers everywhere you look—massive, giant buildings everywhere.

We learned about the Luddites, and there’s this growing tension. Jack Dorsey and Block lay off 4,000 employees, 25% of their staff, and cite AI. Then these $100 billion data-center build-outs are being stopped, halted, or put on pause by 10 protesters.

I’ve been playing with this thesis that the most profitable job in 2027 or 2028 is going to be a data-center protester. Amazon is going to say, “Fuck you, we’ll just give you $1 million to shut up and go away. Just come work for us.”

Do you think this Luddite concept is going to evolve in 2026 or 2027 into a class war?

I’m sure there’ll be episodes. The most obvious targets to me are going to be robotaxis. You’ve already seen a couple of people trashing Waymos or whatnot because they’re really obvious targets. They can’t defend themselves. You can sense, “I can stand in your way. You can’t run me over, you stupid thing.”

Will there be folks who decide to quasi-organize and trash some machines and robots, Luddite-style? Totally. That anger’s going to be there, for sure. I don’t know if it’s going to become a full-fledged social or political movement, but there are going to be flashes of anger and reprisal.

The thing I learned about the Luddites is what happened to them. They got killed.

Yeah, they just killed them.

The Luddites made the mistake of being too organized. If you all get together and become an organization or a group, they’ll kill you. But if you’re asymmetric—one way here, one way there—

If you’re just random people coalescing, trashing stuff, and then disappearing, there’s a little less urgency to hunt you down and kill you.

That’s crazy. I don’t want to reference a ton of it because I feel like you get bombarded with questions from the Joe Rogan interview, which was pretty funny. I was listening to it the other day just to get the full context.

If you played that interview on TV today, you could ask, “When was this from?” It was 2019. Other than a couple of nuances, it could pass for being done in 2025, which is wild.

You made a comment—I don’t want to misquote you—that we were in the third inning of the AI revolution in 2019. What inning are we in now?

We’re nearing the fifth inning or so. I’m shocked at how quickly innings 4 and 5 have gone. I can’t believe the total, one-sided capitulation on the part of our political leadership behind the AI wave.

All the Silicon Valley people in D.C. were like, “We’re doing this. It’s data centers. Let’s make $1 trillion or $2 trillion, or whatever the number is.”

Yeah, fifth inning.

What does the sixth inning look like?

I’d say the Luddite types start arriving around inning 6 or 7. I’m not excited about going too much further down this progression, in the sense that—and I’m sure you saw one of my Substack posts—I think it just gets really ornery, gnarly, and angry. That’s ahead.

On this topic, you mentioned that you’re surprised at how fast the Valley capitulated here, and then you have this concept of taxing the AI lab tokens.

What is your take on the idea that the United States is in a global arms race against China and other nations—China specifically—to win and achieve superintelligence, whatever that looks like? Any attempt at AI safety, alignment, or anything that would halt the progression of AI is treated as a national-security risk. Even though there are risks that come with moving this fast, we have no choice but to keep pushing until we drive off the cliff.

I think that’s super dumb, for a number of reasons. I joke about it: the arms race with China is not going to be won or lost based on the last $10 spent. If I say, “We’re going to tax you $10,” does that mean we’re going to lose? You’d agree that $10 doesn’t matter.

I’d make an argument that you could make that number very, very large, and it would not materially affect the competition, because the competition is going to be won based on the model’s ability to self-improve. As long as you have that at the core, I can tax you over here, and it’s not going to matter for the competition.

The other major thing is that you’re already seeing the world essentially split into different AI ecosystems. That’s going to be the case no matter whether there’s a tax or not. Certain parts of the world—let’s call it Europe and the West—are going to use American AI, and China is going to have its own.

Let’s say we had much better AI models. Would China be like, “Your models are better than ours. We should start using yours”? Of course not. They’d be like, “Fuck that.” There’s going to be the Chinese AI ecosystem and the Western American AI ecosystem.

After you accept that that’s the way it’s going to shake out, you should become more comfortable putting guardrails in.

Do you believe in the existence of the arms race as a concept, though?

I think it’s vital for American interests that we become as advanced as possible in AI.

That’s a fair take. One follow-up on this AI-Luddite discussion is: how responsible are Sam Altman, Dario, and the leaders—the public figures of these labs—for the narrative being pushed and the animosity toward AI?

It feels like every day Dario goes on his podcast from Entropic and says, “75%, 50%, 100% of white-collar Americans are going to lose their jobs to AI.” Are they pushing this narrative to raise venture capital, or are they pushing it—and what you’d call fearmongering—to genuinely help and warn people about what’s coming?

How responsible are they for the anger toward AI?

My read on it is that Dario is actually saying what he thinks is going to happen. He was saying it, and people were like, “Really?” Then some of the new Claude agents came out, and people were like, “Oh, wow. He might actually have been onto something there.”

I think Dario, in particular, is sincere. Then he said, “You should tax us,” which obviously no one picked up because our leaders are too out to lunch to do the obvious thing.

If I were in charge, I’d say, “Well, yeah, we’re going to tax you. We’re going to tax all of these compute inputs.”

Right now, the average person thinks AI is going to eat my job. AI might lead us into nuclear war. AI is going to make my kids anxious and depressed faster. My kid is going to want an AI boyfriend or girlfriend instead of a real one. The average American is thinking, “Why am I supposed to be happy about this?”

If you can actually send them a check and say, “Hey, AI got you this money,” they’d be like, “Oh, okay, that’s cool. I can use this money on something I’m actually excited about.”

There are some tech leaders who are realizing that this massive backlash is coming in sentiment because the pendulum has been way, way over on this side.

I have a different read on the way these guys are handling it than you do. I think Dario is sincere.

I think some of the other AI companies totally think they're going to decimate millions of jobs, but they don't care. [Laughter] They've already—

And have I been in private conversations with some of these people where they're like, “Oh, yeah, that's happening”? Yeah, I have. That's a good point about Dario. He has been doing this for a while, too. He's been saying this for a while, and he did make the tax comment.

One more thing on AI job displacement: I learned about this concept, Jevons paradox, which is kind of a fun one.

Oh, yeah, I know. They're going to—

Let me go back for a second. I hear you complain, very validly, that people will refute your predictions for AI's displacement of workers with, “Ah, but it's always played out this way in history, so it'll play out again.” They don't have a rationale or reason as to why it will happen. It's happened before in other examples. It's a pretty low-IQ rebuttal. It has no substance.

There's this concept of Jevons paradox, which you're obviously familiar with. As technology advances and becomes more efficient, demand for it only goes up. When the Industrial Revolution happened, we created new jobs. When the internet revolution happened, we created more jobs. I couldn't have imagined I'd be running a media company based around a finance stream, interviewing a presidential candidate, 15 years ago. A new job was created; I could never have conceptualized that this would be a thing.

People apply it to AI: “Like every other technological revolution, this has happened. Why would it not happen again this time?”

Sure. I'm going to say two statements, and I believe both these statements. AI is going to create many new jobs that we cannot predict. Millions of Americans are going to lose their jobs to AI. Both those statements are 100% true.

AI is totally going to create some new jobs that we don't see coming. The issue in my mind is that many of those jobs that are going to be created are going to be for different people, in different places, with different skills than the jobs that got eliminated. The jobs that got eliminated are going to be many, many times higher.

The comparison I make for white-collar folks is when the internet came and did a number on local newspapers. Some people would say, “Oh, well, there'll be some new media jobs,” which there were. But for every 10 local reporters that lost their jobs, maybe you had 1, 2, or 3 who worked at BuzzFeed or wherever. And now BuzzFeed is disappearing, too. The numbers just don't match up.

People are really, like you said, lazy, where they're like, “Oh, the Industrial Revolution happened before.” When I was in a debate the other day, I said, “Why do we have Labor Day today?” The reason we have Labor Day is because there were violent strikes that killed dozens of people, and then D.C. came out and said, “You guys need a holiday.” Here's a freaking holiday for labor as part of the peace offering.

If you imagine violent riots occurring and people dying at a high scale—and, by the way, this was also the comparison people make as a favorable one: “Hey, we went through this before and it was okay”—was it okay? You had anarchy and communism, violent deaths, and all of this tumult. That was in a simpler time, where I'd argue that you had a much less complex economy, with fewer people and a bunch of other things.

The other thing that's madness to me is that business people will say this and be like, “Wait a minute. Are you actually making an argument for how society's going to unfold in 2026 based on something that happened 125 years ago?” If I were to pitch you an investment and be like, “Hey, 125 years ago, people did this,” you'd be like, “Why do I give a flying [expletive] what people did 125 years ago?”

[Laughter] I'd be trying to sell you buggy whips.

That's actually a valid take. Going a step further, I want to talk about markets a little bit. A friend of mine, a prominent Twitter figure, is Based 16z. He wrote this article called “Loot and Rob.” The basic premise of this article is that America has reached this late-stage empire capitalism where the only response left from the elite is to take as much as humanly possible, as quickly as possible, and run.

Some examples are, one, every company staying private for as long as humanly possible: extract every venture dollar, go public, SpaceX at $1.5 trillion, and retail gets rinsed. Or how much money was made, how many billionaires were created, from pure grift and extraction events where retail gets rinsed and stocks are trading at zero?

Or Donald Trump Jr. buys a drone company 2 weeks before we strike Iran. Or the president launches a memecoin and then launches a second meme. It's this basic premise that we're speed-running the Soviet oligarch playbook. Nobody really has a reason to try and play correctly: steal, take, and run for the hills.

Is this happening? How do you feel about this?

Wow. I think this is a very savvy observation. I made the argument in my book, The War on Normal People, that we either come together and start spreading the wealth and the bounty—and this is as someone who's a serial entrepreneur, a founder-capitalist—or AI plus capitalism is going to be no one's idea of a good time unless we start doing things differently.

I said if we don't do this, then it's going to become every man for himself. That's what your friend is describing: “At this point, all bets are off. Let's just all get ours.” And that is where you wind up if you don't have any kind of coherence or cohesiveness.

Yes. It feels like the prisoner's dilemma a little bit, right? Somebody in power goes for the cornucopia, and then everybody else is like, “Fuck, I have to get mine right now.” We're starting to see it.

One of the things I want to say, too, is that I'm a dude. I'm a wholesome dude. I try to do positive things. But I also make sure that my family's going to have a roof over their head and my kids are going to be able to go to school.

Even some of the best people I know, who donate millions of dollars to good, wholesome things, are doing it at a level where it's not going to threaten the roof over their head. I think Teddy Roosevelt said something to this effect. Or, what you said with the airplane crashing: everyone gets their own mask.

If you're coming up in the world, get your own mask. Teddy Roosevelt was like, “Your first job is to take care of yourself and your family and make sure that you're good.” Then, after you are in a position where you can do a little bit extra—

By the way, there are different forms of value and currency. You might be broke, but you're like, “Look, I've got some hours to spend, so I'm going to use those hours on this or that.” That's one of the main things if you're young. One of the traps is to think about everything as financial currency. You have time, energy, attention, network, passion.

I remember being a broke 20-something-year-old and saying, “Okay, what can I bring to the table?” You bring a lot of stuff to the table that's not money. You would trade it for money if you could, and there are instances when you can trade it for money. But sometimes you do something because you believe in it and it's wholesome, and maybe it leads to good opportunities.

There are 3 legs to the tripod. There is the commercial, which is totally cool if that's the main focus. Then there is the philanthropic, which for a lot of folks is a sideline. And the third is political.

I have rotated among all 3 of these, and at any moment in time, I'm doing all 3, honestly. Even now. You should see yourselves in that way as having different forms of value you bring to the table.

I like the tripod framing. Another follow-up on where late-stage capitalism is headed is that we're trading all the time. We've pretty definitively entered a period where the market is the core metric for success in America.

Not necessarily does everybody agree with that, but the president and people in the country are saying the market is success in America. There is this moment that, as a young person and young trader, is just scarred in my brain forever. It's Pam Bondi at a hearing about Jeffrey Epstein, and she gets asked a question—I don't know verbatim what it was—about Epstein.

Her response is something along the lines of, “Why are you attacking me? You should be thanking President Trump. The Dow is over 50,000. SPX is over 7,000. They said it would never be possible. He could never do it. He did it. Why are you asking me about Jeffrey Epstein at a Jeffrey Epstein hearing?”

Maybe this has been the case in prior administrations, where the market is the proxy, but it's so in-your-face, the curtain pulled back in 4K for the entire world to see.

What are the implications of the market equaling success, or being viewed as the metric for success one-to-one?

I think that's messed up in the sense that if you look at who holds market wealth, it is the top of the K. Maybe the top 20% hold 90% of the market wealth.

It used to be that fewer than 50% of Americans were even in the market at all. The median level of stock-market investment for an American family was zero. Now that number has crept over 50%. It's maybe 54% who are in the market.

But if you're in the bottom 40% of Americans, you don't have a single share of stock. I think there are people watching this who can't imagine that. It's like, "What the fuck? You have to be in the market." But I think it's messed up to equate how a country is doing with how the top 20%, or even 54%, are doing.

You have 340 million people in this country, and they all matter. So using the market as a proxy, to me, is not where you want to be. It sends a bad message, to your point. When I was running for president, I would say, "Look, let's put some slides up showing how people and families are doing, and then take it from there."

People and families are not doing so well. The average American is broke or can't afford various things. If you use that as your measuring stick, then you'd have a clearer picture.

Is this new? I wasn't really paying attention in 2012 or 2008 to how prior administrations were run before Trump won, probably. Is this a new idea?

As usual, Trump has taken it to a whole new level. Past administrations would sometimes reference the stock market, but it was considered bad form to point at the stock market and say that's how we're doing.

The joke among crypto communities and even public-company founders is that whenever the developer or founder is referencing the price or the chart, run for the hills. It's like, "Developer talking about price? Get the fuck out." It's never good.

That is a very good principle. I agree with it. There were some companies—I’ve never run a public company—but there are some companies where they banned everyone from looking at the stock price. If you're looking at the stock price, then what the fuck are you doing? You've got to be just trying to build and make something better.

I want to ask one more follow-up on the market being the only thing that matters. I want to talk about the Iran situation. I want to preface this by saying that I don't want to misconstrue what I'm about to say. There is a literal war being fought, lives are being lost, Americans are dying, cities are being destroyed, and deepest condolences. I totally recognize the severity of the situation.

I also think there is a figurative war being fought in the order books and in the market, particularly on oil and the way it's trading. We've identified this very clearly: Trump and the US administration are planning good announcements right before the market opens and futures open. They're planning escalations after the market closes.

February 28, the first strike into Iran, was a couple of hours after Friday's market close. On the contrary, Iran, and the speaker of the parliament, frequently makes these comments. One was along the lines of, "You can't print atoms." Basically, you can manipulate the oil price in the market, but eventually there's a shortage. You can't print atoms.

The second was before futures opened yesterday. He made this comment basically saying, "It's going to open green. They're manipulating it. Monday's market open will be red." So both sides are fighting a double-sided war over the price of oil. The higher the price of oil goes, the more validity there is to Iran winning. The lower it is, the longer Trump has to carry out whatever sort of ambiguous war goals he has in Iran.

Is this something that you're also witnessing, and what do you make of that?

Oh, yeah. You're witnessing it because you can see Trump trying to placate or shift market sentiment. What was it today? "Hey, we're in negotiations for an end to the conflict." And then everything goes up.

He's just trying to buy time. The more economic pain there is, particularly if it manifests in higher gas prices, the worse it is for him politically. So anything he can do to forestall it. And you're right, Iran is on the other side of that.

I don't even really know what my question is on it, but I'm pretty new to geopolitics and navigating these headlines, which is almost impossible because both sides are posturing. There's no civilian camera footage; it's banned in the GCC countries. You have no idea what's real. There are AI videos.

Do you think there's a scenario in which the United States leaves Iran better positioned than it was on February 27?

I certainly hope so. I'm someone who despised the Khomeini regime. I have Iranian friends whose families desperately wanted to not be oppressed and brutalized by that regime. We're talking about a country of 90 million or so.

Anything we could do to get rid of that regime, including decapitating the leadership, I was for. I see their regime as evil, and I believe there's a chance that the reality on the ground is better in Iran.

Is that clear right now? No, it's not. Is there a probability? Again, totally unknown and unknowable. But I have Iranian friends who still hold out hope.

Thanks for your perspective on it. One more markets question, and then we can move over. What do you think the implications are of an entire generation—pretty much everybody after me—being programmed to speculate on everything and trade everything?

When I was in high school flipping sneakers, it was a little bit weird. But if you're a 15-year-old kid now and you're running Shopify bots to sell Supreme, it's just normal. Plus Kalshi and Polymarket, which I see on the screen behind you.

Do you know this analyst Nate Silver? I heard you reference him in a couple of interviews. I have the book written down, "On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything."

It's funny because you, by the way, fit this to a T. You're an arbitrage finder and optimizer. You're trying to find inefficiencies, and when you find a mispricing, you're like, "I can make some money on this." You're a hustler. There are a lot of guys who want to learn from you and want to be like you.

I'm friends with Nate Silver, and I was commenting to him, "Dude, reading your book actually felt so familiar." I'm also one of these guys. He calls them Riverians, for the river. You have the river in the village: villagers are chilling, and life doesn't change that much. Riverians are financiers, investors, entrepreneurs, and developers, and we're kind of on that border, on that edge.

I commented, "You know what? I'm a Riverian who actually cares about the village, too." In my opinion, the village is going to get swept away—many of them by AI. Some Riverians aren't going to do that well either, because AI is going to do a number on a lot of people.

I want to wrap this into what I'm doing now with Noble Mobile, just to help people understand it. Some people watching this remember my 2020 campaign. Maybe you liked me. What I realized is that people liked me because they sensed I was trying to make them less broke, which I am.

I think putting money in your pocket and in the pockets of all the people who follow you would be the win. I was trying to do that through running for president and our political system, and I still might do that again. But being an entrepreneur, I don't want to wait. What can I do right now?

I don't know if this is true for a guy like you, so please educate me, Michael. Most 24-year-olds I meet are on their parents' wireless plans or on a family plan. Is that true for you as well?

I actually shouldn't be, but I am. I shouldn't be, but I am. I pay my mom every month for my phone bill, but I shouldn't be.

No, no, it's all to the good. You're allowed to. Don't worry, totally normal. Now, I'm just going to imagine for a second that someone is like me, where you were on your own.

I was paying Verizon $150 a month just for my own phone. That's atrocious, though I do know people who do worse. The average American spends $83 a month on wireless.

Do you happen to know how much you're spending?

It's in that ballpark—$85 to $100, I would say. $85 to $100 would be normal, average. The average European is spending only $35 a month. That delta of $48 a month comes to about $600 a year. Over the 50 years you're going to be a customer, that's like $30,000. Then you put an interest rate on it and compound it, and it's probably more like $80,000.

That’s why I thought if I can get you the best possible value on your wireless, it’s the equivalent of helping save for your retirement—tens of thousands of dollars. This is based on Mark Cuban’s company Cost Plus Drugs. Cost Plus Data didn’t have a great ring, so we called it Noble Mobile. Anyone watching this, if you go to noblemobile.com/Yang, it’s the best deal around. I think we’re giving people 3 free months if you’re a fan of mine, and that would save the average consumer $250. The way Noble Mobile works is it’s $50 for unlimited wireless. Any data you don’t use, we give you the money back. You have an incentive to bank it, and then we pay 5.5% interest on your savings, which is a very aggressive interest rate, I might add. The goal is to make it so you’re paying close to what Europeans are paying at $35. The average Noble Mobile user is paying $42 a month and getting a 5.5% interest rate. So do check out noblemobile.com. This is Yang’s attempt to make your phone plan a way to make money and not spend it.

Why is everyone not using it? What is the blocker?

The blocker, in this demo's case, is that you're on your family's plan and you're like, "Oh, am I going to talk to my mom about switching?" No—which you probably should, by the way.

Totally should.

But for the average person in your demo, they're not paying the bill.

Interesting. And what is the blocker in the millennial demo?

In the millennial demo, a lot of people—I'll use myself as an example—have literally zero experience switching carriers. It's kind of like a bank: you get locked in, and then you're just—you're Bank of America. They block my card and do dumb things, but I just—I'm a Bank of America guy, you know.

No, yes.

So it's inertia, but the average person doesn't love Verizon or AT&T. By the way, since you guys are finance types, Verizon is paying a 5.5% dividend. It's like $11 billion to its shareholders a year. AT&T is paying $7 billion in dividends. So that's where everyone's money is going. It's going to shareholder dividends.

That's crazy.

It's crazy. If you do the math on the $48 a month times everybody, Americans are spending an extra $100 billion a year on our wireless service relative to Europeans. This is the biggest consumer gouging that no one has noticed. The whole thing is bananas. Now that I've said this out loud, you're going to realize you cannot turn on any TV programming or anything without being bombarded by wireless ads, because there's just so much money.

This is not an ad, but my mom has been telling me to get off her plan for the last year. This might be it, Mr. Yang.

This might be it, Michael. You did me a solid. I’m going to do you one back. If you change, you’ll realize, “Oh my God, it’s the same. We’ve all been overpaying for a commodity.” Please do join Noble, and I’ll come back on and we can talk about your experience. Drop me a line. Deal.

Deal. Going back to some political stuff, I have this take about what I call meme politics. I basically think that the boomers, for whatever reason, hyper-overindexed to appeal to the terminally online Twitter-zoomer crowd. You skip a couple of cutscenes, and then you end up where the White House's official Twitter account is posting Call of Duty montage edits while we're in the middle of a war in Iran.

I think you actually did a very good job of this. I think this speaks to Zoran winning the race in New York as well, which is that the young generation pretty desperately just wants somebody who at least pretends to know what they're doing and is serious and in charge. You look around, and everybody is like, "I just wish somebody could be serious and could not talk about the market." Everybody wants an adult in the room, but the adults in the room seem to think that everybody wants a friend.

I have this take that I did this presentation on stream that we have reached the death of meme politics. I also think this speaks to Zohran. I also think this speaks to the rise of Nick Fuentes, who I know is a controversial figure. Nick Fuentes is young—I think he's under 30—and gets on stream every day with a suit and a mic. He's an incredible orator, and he takes this thing very seriously, like your life is on the line because it matters. Do you have a take on meme politics and how we got to this outcome?

Yeah. People respond to energy and metrics. Social media is extraordinarily easy to measure. It's become the currency, the coin of the realm, and so political figures are really attracted to it. Politicians really want to be cool—that's the shorthand. Can I be cool if I'm not on cable news and I don't have a social media following? In that domain, maybe not. At least that's what they think.

There is a generation of folks who are like, "Look, I don't need it. I don't need the visibility." They say, "I'm a workhorse, not a show horse." I love those people. But that's more and more an endangered species in Washington today.

What do you make of someone like Nick Fuentes, and more broadly, the rise of influencers in politics and the role that they will play in appealing to a completely—look, I look around at a lot of the Zoomers, and I'm like, these people don't give a damn about politics. Most of them. Most of my friends couldn't care less. Nobody cares.

But if a younger person meets them where they are, with some level of entertainment as well, you see the rise of a Fuentes-like figure who captures this audience, and all of a sudden we do politics now.

I confess to not knowing much about Fuentes. But the bigger picture is that people want to be entertained, people want to be stimulated, and people want to feel like there's someone of their generation speaking to them.

If you feel like you know a person, you're like, "Oh, okay," and then you start kind of lining up with their point of view. I think this is particularly true for men. Democrats and the legacy media have done a terrible job of talking to men. They even hired consultants to tell them how to talk to men, which is, by the way, the first sign of what you shouldn't do.

That's how you do it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, yeah. You just actually engage as a human being. Ideally, you have someone who understands men somewhat, maybe because they are one.

A consultant came to me and said, "Hey, what do we do?" And I was like, "Just watch UFC and WWE programming for 3 months." They looked at me like I was kidding. I was like, "No, no, I'm dead serious. That stuff is much more what men are watching than whatever you're putting out."

By the way, I am a UFC fan. I was a big WWE fan when I was growing up, so I get it. You're an example, in my opinion, in a positive way—and maybe me, too—where you put yourself out there and then some people see you and say, "Okay, I like what this guy's about. I'll tune in and see what they're doing."

There are benign versions of it. There are less benign versions of it. But it's the way we experience reality today.

It's a good point. You turn on college basketball, watch UConn, and instantly you're in. I think it's a good take.

Following up on some of this political stuff, I just moved from California. Man, I love California. Hopefully I get to come back at some point. But it's a little bit of a mess.

There's this David Friedberg clip that went super viral, and he's basically saying that California pensioners should be concerned about getting paid out because the California government is an absolute mess. They've mismanaged their funds. They're essentially bankrupt.

It's such a shame that L.A. looks the way that it does and California looks the way that it does because, in my opinion—I know you're from New York—California is it. That is the state. I'm in entertainment, pseudo-entertainment. Hollywood is what you dream about.

How would you save California?

Dude, it makes me so sad. There's some statistic going around about how Los Angeles County lost more people and jobs than any other county in the United States. It's madness. I think that number is something like 45,000 Hollywood jobs gone, and a lot of those people left the state.

You have to make Hollywood competitive, and the simplest way to do that is: whatever the heck tax breaks are being ladled out in Vancouver, London, or Atlanta, say, "We're going to beat them. We're going to beat them." This is essentially an industry town, and you've emptied out the lots—the filming lots, the studio lots.

The number of shoot days has gone down 50%, and that's not just actors. That's grips, makeup artists, caterers—everybody who had to feed the crew, you name it. So, yeah, I'd see it as an element of national competitiveness.

On the job-loss thing, 3 months ago, Ben Affleck did this clip on—was it Rogan? I don't know—talking about how AI will never replace film writers, and film is too precious. Then, 3 months later, he sells an AI film company to Netflix for like $100 million or something. Did you see that?

Oh, yeah, I did see that. And, you know, good for him-ish. The major problem for us all, Michael, is—again, this is a good way to go full circle—it's just like that factory worker in the Midwest in the '80s and '90s being like, “No machine can do my job.” But it's like, “Let's see about that.”

Unfortunately, every craftsperson should take pride in their work and their craft and say, “You can't replace every nuance of what I do.” But this is a cold, cruel economic reality. One of the reasons I know this is because I was an unhappy corporate attorney for 5 months, and AI could 100% do that job much better than I could. I was like, “I have all this education and debt. In any case, I should do that job.”

I got a couple more for you, and I'll sign off with a story in a minute. I want to ask you one cultural question. Speaking of California politics and California, I'm not sure if you're familiar with Clavicular. Do you know who that is? Clavicular?

Yeah, it's an influencer of some kind.

He's a looksmaxing guy, and his whole bit is to ascend. He's getting jaw surgery and shooting peptides, trying to look as good as humanly possible. He's sort of risen among the younger demographic. They love this guy, and there's this cultural shift toward, “If I can't get rich, I'll separate myself by looking as good as possible,” right? Clavicular has this take—

I want to stop there and say, by the way, in my 20s, the gym was one of my best friends. What he just said—“If I can't make it, I'm going to look good”—did I do that? I did do that, because it was a way to get out my sexual frustration or whatnot.

You don't need to go to a nice gym. I went to a shitty one in downtown L.A., actually. You don't even need to join a gym. Just go for jogs or runs, or do pull-ups or push-ups. But I did a ton of that. A 24-Hour Fitness is optimal.

Yeah, it's all good. Clavicular has this take that if the 2028 race is Newsom versus J.D. Vance, Gavin Newsom is going to win because he looks better. In my little mentally ill Twitter bubble, everyone's been piling on J.D. Vance because he's a little bit heavy.

I don't know if he's listening or what it was, but he went into an interview recently and looked better. He was slim, his face looked good, maybe debloated. He just looked better in the interview.

So, I have a serious question. Do you think about looksmaxing and physical appearance, and the impact they have on anyone's ability to be a successful political candidate? Are you conscious of this?

Just about everyone I know who runs for office does something in terms of getting into shape. I think Chris Christie got his stomach stapled. You can kind of tell when someone's gearing up for a campaign based on whether there's some change in their appearance for the positive.

The reverse is true, too, where people joke that when Al Gore went into the woods, he started graying, grew a giant beard, and became the man in the woods. It's a very clear tell.

Wow. Do you have a team? Do you have a physical-appearance advisor or something?

I wrote some jokes in one of my books about how my campaign manager took me aside and was like, “Yo, dude, you need a makeover.” I was like, “What the fuck?” I was an old man.

Then they took me to the mall and a hairstylist and all this. I was ticked off at the time, but, yeah, it's just one of the things that happens.

If it makes you feel better, I was also pulled aside for this conversation as it relates to the stream. They said, “You cannot get on the Andrew Yang interview with a polo on. Go get a suit.” So here we are.

Well, you did look very sharp, Michael. May the suit serve you well in other environments, too.

Thank you, Andrew. I know you have to go soon. I want to tell you a quick, true story that happened this weekend, and then I'll let you do a sign-off and give some advice.

I posted Friday night. By the way, you guys answered super quickly to agree to come on, and I really appreciate it. We had a little poster made up—shout-out to Elliot on the design team—the Thread Guy stream, Thread Guy, Andrew Yang. I tweeted it and pinned it to my profile.

On Saturday, one of my friends invited me out. He said, “Look, I have this date. It's this girl's birthday party. She has 7 friends, all girls, and I can't find a guy. You have to come.” I said, “All right, love it. My life sucks. I'll do it, fine.”

Sucks? Nothing, man.

Yeah, yeah. Fine. If you want to force me, I'll go.

So, I go to this event and walk into an apartment. It's me, my friend, and 7 girls, none of whom know me. They're very attractive girls, and the vibe is horrific. I walk in, and these people don't know me, I don't know them, and they don't want to know me. No eye contact. I say, “Hi, I'm Michael,” and there's complete and utter disinterest across the board.

Except this one girl looks at me and says, “I kind of think I know you.” Maybe, whatever. We're there for 30 minutes. I'm on Twitter, reading Andrew Yang's Substack articles in this apartment and having a beer.

Then we go to this first club. We're there for 20 minutes, and it's the same thing. I'm talking to different people, a different group, but this one girl again says, “I know you from somewhere.”

We're there for 2 hours, and I'm ready to go. It's 1:00 in the morning, and I'm ready to go home. They're like, “Just come with us to one more club.” I'm like, “All right, fine.”

So, we go to this restaurant-bar thing and wait to get a table. We're all standing in a circle, and I'm on the outskirts. I'm not talking to them, but I'm with them. It's a little weird.

One girl looks at me and says, “How do I know you?” I say, “I have this Twitter thing. I run a stream.” She asks, “What's your name on Twitter?” I say, “I'm Thread Guy on Twitter.” She goes, “You're Thread Guy on Twitter?”

She opens her phone, goes on Twitter, searches Thread Guy, clicks on the profile, and the pinned tweet is the Thread Guy stream interview with Andrew Yang. She looks at her phone, looks at me, looks at it again, and goes, “Holy, you're talking to Andrew Yang.”

She turns to the group and shows the other girls. Every girl in this circle looks at me and goes, “Holy, how do you know Andrew Yang?” Individually, they all go on their phones. “You have to see this.” In their Memories, there's a picture of them at a rally, a picture they took of you, or a Yang Gang tweet they made in 2019.

Every single girl is like, “Oh my God, how did you get Andrew Yang on the stream?” So, I stay for 30 minutes and have the best time. When we're leaving, I couldn't even get a handshake when I walked into that apartment. When I walked out, I was getting 5-second bear hugs, hand squeezes, phone numbers, Instagram—whatever you got.

Yang Gang hot girls for Yang Gang. Andrew, I could not make this story up. You saved my Saturday night in a way that I could not make up if I tried.

This makes me so happy, Michael. Oh my gosh. Thank you to all of the ladies who helped make Michael's night spectacular, and thank you for the warmth and support. I really, really appreciate it.

You know what I need to get you, Michael? I need to get you a copy of this book, “Hey, Yang, Where's My Thousand Bucks?” I don't know if you have a copy, but I'll DM you. Just DM me your address, and I'll send it your way. It's about my misspent 20s, and earlier and later, in large part.

Dude, I love that so much. We were meant to have this conversation and connect. You were meant to be in that apartment with them, and I hope you end up staying in touch with somebody.

Yes, and it will go right back there in the back. I'll reach out and get the address. Thank you.

So, as a wrap here, I know you have to go. We talked about a lot, a lot of it relatively doomer, but I always say that expecting the worst-case scenario is a bad way to live life, but pretending it doesn't exist is even worse.

And so, I think it’s really important that we recognize it, discuss it, and be open about it. We need to address the elephant in the room, if you will. Can you give some concluding advice to the 24-, 30-, or 21-year-old who’s watching this stream, is a fan of our community and what we’re doing, and is really this young hustler who wants to be part of the river and make it by any means necessary?

You just hear outside noise: treeny this, deflation this, recession this, white-collar job this, Dario this. What do you tell people to do practically to get to that upper bound of the K-shape before they can go back and fix the system as a whole?

I’ll tell you what I did, because maybe it’ll be the most relevant. I started a company that did not work out, and then I joined another company. That company had some sexiness to it. It was a healthcare software company with some fancy investors and the rest of it.

Then I had this friend who’d started a tutoring company, and he came to me and said, “Hey, do you want to take over the tutoring business?” At first, I turned him down because I was like, “No, I’m part of this healthcare software company.” Then I turned to him later and was like, “Wait a minute. Let’s discuss.”

It took a real adjustment in my head because when I became the CEO-in-waiting, and then the CEO of that tutoring business, all of a sudden everything you just described about what the market was doing or macro trends just went out the window. It was all like, “Okay, can I help my students achieve their goals, and can I get more students tomorrow?” I just did that for four or five years.

By the way, not coincidentally, during that time I met Evelyn, whom I would later marry. The point I want to make is that you have to focus on yourself, your immediate surroundings, your immediate opportunities, your family, and your friends.

I just put my head down and grinded. I also hit the gym very regularly during that time, for five or six years. Then you build brick by brick, and a little while later you have a structure of some kind.

That building process can be going to the lab and, frankly, working off some of your negative emotion. It can be trying to build a business, build a following, or build whatever. But you’ve got to tune out the noise.

When I looked at it at that time, I actively avoided my friends in law school because they were all fancy lawyers making all this money, and I thought I was this loser because I had started this company that flopped and worked for some company that no one had ever heard of. But that’s the stuff that will help you get somewhere, and it’s what’s enabled me to do anything I’ve done since.

By the way, I’m in Noble Mobile’s offices, and you see the Noble behind me.

Sick.

It’s the same. You show up every day and try to make customers happy, make your reports happy, bring on good people, and let that sort of thing happen.

Do not let what’s going on in the world infect the way you feel about yourself and your own prospects. The truth is, it doesn’t matter. You want to be educated and be plugged in, but focus on your own goals.

It’s funny for me, because now I’m this public figure and I’ve got lots of followers. Even for me, I participate on social media every day. But then I tune it out and I’m like, “Okay, what do I have to do to help reach my goals?”

Just focus on your own goals. Write them down, too. Write down your own goals, focus on them, tune out the noise, and you’ll be fine.

I love it. Andrew Yang, honestly, absolute pleasure. I’m extremely grateful you came on. I think it was a particularly exciting one because a lot of the stuff you talk about, we also talk about and harp on day in and day out.

You’ve got a fan here, and I think you’ve got quite a few more in the chat. So thank you for today, thank you for Saturday, and good luck.

Dude, I just had an idea. I don’t know how many of your people are in New York, but we should run this back live or something. You should come to my apartment and do it here.

Yeah, yeah, maybe we’ll do that. We’ll talk after.

Okay, we’ll talk after. Absolutely, bro. It sounds like a plan.

Andrew Yang, this was a pleasure, man. Thank you so much.

I’ll see you again, Michael. And really, everyone, keep your heads up. Focus on your own business, not anyone else’s business.

You’re the GOAT, Andrew Yang. I’ll see you soon, brother. Have a good one.