Andrew Yang Discusses his 2020 Presidential Campaign | Robin Koerner

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this is Robin Koerner and I am speaking to Andrew Yang presidential candidate
for 2020 running with a D after his name and thank you for being on
the show with me I really appreciate it thanks for having me Robin I appreciate
the opportunity awesome awesome well you are the first
presidential candidate of this 2020 cycle that I've spoken to hopefully not
the last but I am I'm thrilled to be starting with you I've been looking
at some of your your stuff you know some the interviews you've done your website
and there's lots of genuinely interesting ideas that I'm hearing from
you and as I mentioned to you before you don't seem to be in one of the
boring ideological boxes that so many of our politicians are in right now in the
United States so you know that's exciting for me so now I also said to
you before I hit record that I wasn't gonna just go over the same things that
everybody else is going over with you and ask you all the same questions but
the first one will be a common question which is give us the one paragraph bio
of Andrew Yang sure I'm a serial entrepreneur and problem solver I spent
the last six and a half years helping create several thousand jobs in Detroit
Cleveland Baltimore Birmingham and I'm convinced that where the the midst of
the greatest economic and technological transformation in the history of the
country the reason why Donald Trump's our
president today is because we automated away four million manufacturing jobs in
the swing states so imagine being the guy who's getting accolades and medals
for creating thousands of jobs realizing that you're pouring water into
a bathtub there's a giant hole ripped in the bottom and that's that's really my
narrative in a nutshell which is that I'm the guy who spent six and a half
years helping create thousands of jobs around the United States so let me ask
why are you running with that D after your name what's your relationship with
the democratic the democratic party your philosophy you know it's an interesting
question I mean I ensure that running as a Democrats the right thing to do on
multiple levels one is that the mechanics of running for president
necessitate that you run as while someone who's part of the major
one of the major parties unless you're a billionaire and can fund a third party
move that's probably just gonna be doomed to fail anyway so the American
political system necessitates that you run as either democrat or republican and
I line up with the Democrats and most every policy sense around things like
reproductive rights and you know some of the other social issues like lesbian gay
bisexual transsexual you know like rights and everything else and so
running as a Democrat was a very natural decision for me I was an honorary
ambassador in the Obama White House so many friends okay so you have you're
somewhat connected in the party then at quite a high level yeah I and I many
friends in the Democratic Party as well so I'm certainly much more connected
among Democrats that I am Republicans all right well that makes sense so since
you're running for president um what do you see as the role of the president
fundamentally and I should point out that I'm sitting here with the
Constitution behind me so the right answer is actually on the wall behind me
but what do you feel is is the role of the president well you know it's really
funny you asked that Robin because I think the role of the president has
morphed over time and it's just grown and grown and become this kind of like
massive set of responsibilities that are well beyond what was originally intended
so as one example I heard that there was a period when the president just walked
into a room and then everyone would notice that he was there until someone
said you know what that's unacceptable we have to play this song every time you
walk into a room you imagine that happening the houses of topics in
different ways where the president went from being in many ways like a first
among equals in like a relatively egalitarian society that it consciously
is stewed oil tea to now it's become this giant potentate ceremonial figure
as well as the person who's meant to execute the
of the country which is the original intent and so one of my goals actually
is to try and make the presidency itself more manageable and so one of the ideas
I have had is to appoint a head of the culture who will handle pardoning
turkeys and congratulating sports teams and doing things that strike me as not
really great uses of time and so I would appoint either Oprah or The Rock or Joe
Rogan and then they would just be their own things and then everyone would win
because most Americans would rather meet them than me anyway and so I'd be doing
something else and we'll see what else we could process out there are a few
things we could do that I think would simplify the job of the President yeah
you know as a Brit by birth you know I come from a land with a
constitutional monarchy and it is a shame to me that the American president
signs more executive orders than all the kings of England going back for you know
400 years we have a ceremonial monarch and we keep it separate from politics
and I think there's a lot to be said for that but here it's almost like you vote
for a king for four or eight years and that is problematic so your point is
well-taken now you've got some really big interesting ideas on on your
website that you're that you're running on you're putting out front and center I
would like to kind of prime you into them by asking you to tell me about two
things citizens as shareholders and bad
numbers and they're kind of related so talk to me about I do or both yeah so as
you know Robin one of my key ideas is that America should have a dividend for
all citizens now $1,000 a month called the freedom dividend and this has been
an idea that's been with us since the founding of the country Thomas Paine was
for it originally and in Martin Luther King was for it Milton Friedman was for
it it passed the House of Representatives twice in 1971 under
Nixon and then Alaska adopted it 37 years ago so right
American citizens feel like our democracy has been lost to us because
now it's just been overrun by money and you're these giant moneyed interests
that are taking control of the whole apparatus and so one way to
counterbalance that is to make us the citizens the owners and shareholders and
beneficiaries of our society again and the best way to do that would be to
declare a dividend in terms of bad numbers right now we're being guided by
GDP and stock market prices and headline unemployment all of which
are deeply flawed and problematic and misleading where GDP is at record highs
but also at record highs are suicides drug overdoses mental health problems
and the American life expectancy has declined for the last three years
because of a surge in deaths of despair the last time the American life
expectancy decline for three years in a row was the Spanish flu of 1918 so we're
actually in Spanish flu territory and so if you rely upon GDP as your guideposts
and you think everything's going great but if you rely upon more basic human
measurements like how long we're living how healthy we are how mentally healthy
we are how free of drugs we are we are falling apart
so we are using the wrong numbers and we need to start using the right ones to
see how we're doing and make progress now one of the things that seems to be a
fundamental flow of pretty much everything the government does today is
it passes a law and obviously a law stands in perpetuity unless somebody
comes and you know repeals it or voc's it and they do so without mention of
success or failure metrics there's no Sun setting of anything based on success
or failure um with particular reference to your freedom dividend which is akin
to what most people know as a universal basic income which I know you want to
set it $1,000 what would be the success and failure
metrics how would you know this is made helped to make the changes you want a
American society well if you look at the Alaska petroleum dividend it's created
thousands of jobs made children healthier
decreased income inequality and it's wildly popular in a deeply conservative
state so if you saw those things happen in a population and everyone was excited
about the dividend then you'd probably think it was successful and certainly
when we're similar things have been implemented in other locations you see
an increase in physical health nutrition mental health graduation rates trust in
others relationships like everything gets better but you know this is a
democracy and so you'd have to rely upon people's desires and affirmations and so
if we do it and everyone loves it and it's probably working now that's in
that's interesting I'm wondering now if that's true um I noticed on your website
and correct me if I'm wrong I think I saw this in website that you're
interested that you promote Medicare for all full single-payer health is that
right yeah that's right we need to have a robust public option in the u.s.
because right now we're spending twice as much as other countries to worse
results and it's breaking the back so many of families and businesses every
day okay so again coming from Britain not
only do we have a monarchy we have the another institution which is the only
institution more popular than the monarchy in Britain which is the
National Health Service and I believe it's the second biggest employer in the
world after the the Chinese army right and it is socialized medicine top to
bottom now I've written about this and I certainly agree that the American system
is is a nightmare and this may shock some of the people that follow me but if
I had to choose between the American system and the single-payer system in
the UK just based on results right now and having lived with both I would prefer
the British system which seems to be more honest apart from anything else but
what you know I've thought about this and I think there's an argument for
having the free market work at the nut that the 90 percent of Medicare of
medical of health issues that aren't a catastrophic so where you would create
moral hazard if you were to have government pay for it all but then
you socialize the catastrophic the high-risk end of the curve if you like
right in Britain where we haven't done that where we've socialized it top to
bottom we have massive problems of cost not as bad as America but that's a
different discussion we have but we have you know huge cost pressures and we also
have this difficulty that it's hard to make good changes that favor health
outcomes because all practical discussions become highly politicized
because the whole thing that all healthcare is a political debate right
how do you you know how do you deal with those concerns when you're talking about
single-payer system you know I really like the idea of socializing the
catastrophic conditions I mean that that really is the problem in our system
where significant proportion of the expenses in the United States are spent
on the last year or two of life and various extreme situations and so that
is one change that we can make that would address a significant proportion
of the the cost issues in the US and one thing I would say is going to happen in
the u.s. that might address some of what you're discussing is that there's going
to be some gold-plated private concierge service in parallel to the public option
because it's America and you know that Google and the gang they're going to
have some like crazy concierge health care service and so you'll still end up
having at least a certain degree of resources and innovation getting plowed
into addressing various conditions and procedures over time so I think the u.s.
might well one of the things I I know and one of the misconceptions is that
somehow we have to find the money for this we're already spending 18% of GDP
on healthcare it's it's it's incredibly excesses in the system yeah so at this
point there's almost nothing we could do that don't feel I could help but
bring the cost down relative what we're doing now now I know that you are a
successful entrepreneur and you have been you know some of the people who
have interviewed you they've heard about your universal basic income idea and
they've tried to slap the load labeled socialist on you and you know you you
deal with that you explain why that's that's wrong but given that but with
that in mind do you also agree with um kind of I guess part of the point that I
was making that if you allow the free market in the non-catastrophic part of
healthcare you get all the benefits of the marketplace operating just for this
just like the benefits that operate you know for people buying food and
groceries right you know you wouldn't want to have socialized food even though
it's just a so you know just as essential as healthcare right so I
guess what I'm getting at is you're not being a socialist does that not make you
favor the operations of the market in health care which is hugely important
domain in everybody's lives um where they can be effective yeah so I like for
example having patients have some kind of skin in the game some cost so that
like when you utilize services that like it's not like a zero cost which which
ends up but potentially having you use can consume services you didn't really
need because what happens in the UK definitely yeah so I think having some
market-based mechanism on that side is very very useful and helpful I do
think though that healthcare is a distinct market we're having some costs
associated with it is a plus and house introduced market efficiency but health
is just a different thing where like when you get sick you know like you're
not necessarily going to operate as like an efficient economic actor in all
things you're just gonna be like what is gonna make me better you know it's like
whatever it is like you know we have to and so in in many cases it's just
something that would benefit from certain market mechanisms but it's
very dissimilar for most other consumer markets and fundamental ways okay okay
well that's true enough okay so um going back then to the the universal basic
income the freedom dividend which you want to set at a thousand dollars a
month right I know that you've made the point that a lot of conservatives
they're obviously driven by reducing the desire to reduce government interference
in their lives and by having a no-strings-attached no-questions-asked
dividend thousand dollars a month you can in principle eliminate a lot of
government interference and judgment that comes with the welfare state and a
multitude of programs how does the ubi or the freedom dividend specifically how
would it enable us to do that like what would what would the Conservatives get
what would the libertarians get in terms of eliminated programs and eliminated
intrusion by the state so libertarians love this plan in part because it's been
championed by Milton Friedman who's a patron saint of conservative economists
so what libertarians and the conservatives hate is government
bureaucracy making avoidance decisions what they like is economic freedom and
autonomy and so if everyone's getting $1,000 a month then that lightens the
bureaucracy over time and it also creates much better incentives because
if I get this dividend regardless if I do better I get to keep it but it's I
don't have some disincentive to work I don't have some distance either to
improve my station and over time you would see a shrinkage
among the enrollments of traditional welfare programs because there'd be more
people that would prefer the thousand dollars cash and I would suggest that
virtually no one is in love with 126 welfare programs that exist in the
United States I mean they're like it's the whole hodgepodge patchwork and there
are some very perverse incentives attached to many of them where if you
you know it's like there there's a friend's sister on disability who said
that she couldn't volunteer for a nonprofit because she was afraid that
she'd lose her disability benefits just like stays at home and I would
suggest that's a loser for everybody I mean obviously she should be
volunteering we thought something that she feels she can do so so for
conservatives it's the the thing that I think frustrates the heck out of most
conservatives is this thought that the government is just going to take in more
money it's going to disappear into the pipes into the bureaucracy whereas in
this case the money's going into your hands then you think like wow this is
like the best thing the government's actually ever done because it was my
money anyway and it was your money anyway you are correct about that
that's the reason why Alaska has been the one state to implement this in the
US and it was a Republican governor deep red state that made it happen
so there are very very powerful conservative ideas behind this how could
you unless laid it in such a way that you could say to the American people
here's $1,000 a month I'm gonna let you spend this thousand dollars a month
rather than the government spend it for you if you were to introduce it that way
how could you introduce it you know to implement the the freedom dividend at
the same time that you remove you know the government's ability to spend that
money on your behalf cuz I get that you can make the choice
but you could give someone a welfare as a choice but if you were gonna like make
it a political slam dunk you'd need to give the Conservatives or the
libertarians okay yeah we're going to transfer we're gonna change who spends
the money rather than spend more money I really like that that's a good thing
it's certainly the case that mean right now if you're a conservative or
libertarian you're like well in this new world I get a thousand bucks a month and
in the old world what am I getting from the government that I can actually rely
upon it's like well in theory I'm getting all these security benefits and
and you know it's like the legal protections and regimes and fire
protection and all this other stuff but there I'm sure most libertarians would
prefer the cash so it's not that you know like that I believe most people
would regard this as a significant improvement from the current government
allocation yeah I mean I would be really interested
if you had a few I guess you have folks you do policy you have like there may be
a legislative advisor director there how that could be formulated so that you
know you're not just here's the thing getting but here's the things being
taken away from the government departments that are inefficient and
spending it badly for you I'd love to see and I do want to lighten up a lot of
the inefficiencies in government I mean everyone in America knows that we have a
lot of excesses in our government bureaucracy at this point yeah yeah oh
sure okay so let's talk about government spending
the flip side of that coin government revenue let's talk about taxation
because I know you've got an interesting point to make about getting some of say
big tech and to pay as I guess you would call it their fair share into our
society so talk a little bit about that and then I also want to ask you can we
not apply the same principle to the extremely privileged domain of Finance
corporate finance the big banks where there are actual legal privileges that
these folks get to exercise to do things with money that if you or I did them
would be criminal but basically guarantee a transfer of value to people
that have make anything but just financialized things yeah so my idea to
finance the dividend is to have a value-added tax that would fall on the
Amazons and googles of the world and you probably saw the headlines that Amazon
paid zero in federal taxes of 2018 despite record profits and that's not
Amazon's fault that's our fault you know if we have a system that they can game
around that easily maybe we should upgrade our system so
the value-added tax would get us billions tens of billions of dollars
from the Amazon's of the world and it would put us in position to hopefully
again spread that bounty to ordinary citizens and the value-added tax would
also reign in some of the excesses of the financial institutions the finer
institutions are definitely co-opted our economy in many ways but the thing we
have to escape is this was zero-sum game thinking because
in many ways again I feel like it's our fault we're like if you have this system
and these people game the heck out of it again that's our fallin out there is I
mean you know we just need to do a better job of harvesting the games from
these activities to the public what do you think about the Tobin tax could you
clarify the Tobin tax is the idea of where you've got financial transactions purely
financial transactions very large sums it's a basically financial speculation
maybe yeah kind of currency speculation things like that where there's billions
tens hundreds of billions top line change hands and being traded and the
margins are small for the banks that are doing it but the profits are huge and
the Tobin tax takes a tiny sliver of each transaction so where you've got
also algorithmic stock trading for example I'm a fan of taxes that help
harvest the gains from all of these computer algorithmic trading mechanisms
that you're taking like a fraction of a penny and you do that million times
because what real economic value is getting generated they're really nothing
you just sort of like extracting some revenue out of the system same thing
with like firms that are literally investing and having faster connections
and pipes to the trading floors where it's like oh if I get in there I just
have like the fastest signal then I can front-running by computers by like a you
know like a hundredth of a second and then hundredths of a second is worth
millions of dollars and then that's that's your business I mean like is that
helped and so I'm for a Tobin tax type toll on speculation that really has nothing
but financial motivations okay so between the vit and maybe attacks like
the Tobin tax do you see this as having a positive impact on government revenue
are you actually trying to raise more money or are we going to see offsetting
benefits so for example I particularly hate the payroll tax I just kind of on
principle know the payroll tax in a way does not make any sense because we
should be trying to discourage any type of
labor a labor type arrangement so you you would be looking to more
comprehensively maybe reform our tax system so if we make value-added tax but
we can drop some of the others yeah yeah I would be in favor of that sort of
reform and trade overtime so there are things like that the u.s. we need to do
all everything in our power so we need to spend more effectively we need to
generate revenue more effectively we need to become more efficient in various
ways I mean at this point we have this legacy kludgy system that is you know on
the verge of frankly just like driving us into the ground and you have to
attack it from every angle yeah fair enough yeah that makes sense
let me change gears a little bit I haven't seen I'm sure you have been
asked about this but I haven't found that if you have yet
I'm rather concerned at be what seems to be something of a takeover of what I
call the cultural commanding Heights so the educate education the campuses and
the media by identitarian especially on the left people engaged in identity
politics but not absolutely on the left at all but I'm seeing that and as
someone that kind of cares about the founding principles I'm you know free speech
and you know I'm very much more committed to truth than to tribe and
that's one thing I like about you you seem to start with the way the world is
well your ideological box as I mentioned earlier deep do you see cause for
concern there with identity politics and the cultural commanding Heights and and
if so what do you do about it you know I think that my goal is to try and get
people focused on actionable solutions and so one of the things I suggest is
like you know what a thousand dollars a month would do it would help millions of
American women who are in exploitative or abusive jobs and relationships and
what's going to make a bigger difference to a set of people economic resources or
something else and then get people focused on the numbers and the reality
the economics because if you purport to be for certain social goals if we can
bring you in and say look they're more effective ways to reach those goals and
that should be a win so I'm with you in terms of a pursuit of
truth and impact and real solutions and I'm more of a numbers guy than a
feelings guy like I think the numbers drive the feelings overtime and so we
need to get the numbers right and then we'll have more of a lucky to be able to
address some other things okay I'm gonna I'm gonna kind of press a little bit on
this though there is there is a well-documented lack of intellectual
diversity in education in the United States now beyond anything we've seen in
history so example it's very hard to see self-identified conservatives or even
libertarians in a lot of disciplines so anything that's kind of your social
psychology for example but your history any of the literary disciplines now I
don't put words in your mouth but you're basically culturally liberal right I
think we have that in common you like diversity I mean I'm talking here to an
Asian man with, I believe, with Taiwanese background right there are
certain kinds of diversity in a society where we're rightly concerned with but
it seems the intellectual diversity if as that disappears we stop being able to
deal unbiasedly effectively with the numbers with the data and we end up kind
of you know coming off off of the tracks but that's my fear what are you saying
about what do you think about that I think that intellectual diversity is a
very positive thing and just about any setting particularly a setting that's
meant to shape the ideas of others that you know if you have culture that
promulgates really just like a single approach to the world over time that's
not going to be as productive or or constructive for the people that you're
meant to equip and train so you know it's like so I think your concern about
this is something that more and more people share and it's certainly
something that I think that many of these institutions should be attentive
to so maybe it would be fair to say that you want to begin to solve this by
example by not behaving or speaking in that way oh you know I mean what I say
is like you know I approach things the way I most naturally approach them and
but the goal is to lead by example and I will say there's a massive appetite for
this kind of discussion and approach and solutions and we can go very very far I
don't know if you saw this report called hidden tribes that came out a number of
months ago but it indicates that many people have very similar perspective to
the one you just shared you know I believe that's true and this is actually
in a way my cause for optimism I think kind of the extremist ideological even
identitarian pendulum has kind of swung as far as it will go more or less I
don't the exact maximum and what we're seeing now is folks like you
organizations like More in Common, Better Angels, Purple America there's lots of
organizations that are now the seeds of the reaction you might say - a better
way of conducting discourse of judging ideas without judging people all of that
kind of thing I agree we've come up with a nickname for this campaign it's the
revolution of reason and you know I think the revolution can go very very far
okay well here's hoping
now I mentioned your Taiwanese parentage right but if your parents are from
Taiwan is that correct yeah that's correct
um how old were you when you were, oh you were born in the United States though
right yeah how long before you were born did your parents come to the US well
they met in the mid 60's late 60s at Berkeley where they were both graduate
students then they had my brother in 1972 in San Francisco and then they
moved to Schenectady New York and I was born in 75
they were probably together for approximately six or seven years by the
time I was born and I'm guessing you're fluent Mandarin speaker you know I'm the
black sheep of the family I kept getting left back in Chinese school so my
Chinese is quite poor yeah nuff said nuff said okay so um this is a little
bit of an intro to something I'm really interested to ask you about it seems to
me that one of the biggest geopolitical issues that if we don't get right might
make all other discussions somewhat moot is the rise of China you know the the
sleeping dragon is no longer sleeping um and another reason why it's fun for me
to speak to you is that I've actually lived in Taiwan for a couple of years
and and I find that a lot of Westerners who live in Taiwan they really get
sometimes more passionate about Taiwanese independence or their right to
self-determination let's put it that way then a lot of Taiwanese um what is your
take on well let's let's I'm actually interested what do you think should be
Taiwan's future what's your what do you feel about the way it should try and go
I guess if you were there would you be voting for the you know DPP or the KMT
and how do we how do we deal in principle with the rise of China that
now seems to be coming so Orwellian with its um what they call it's social credit
system I mean it's actually it's terrifying to me as you know kind of a
Freeborn Western um in quotes how do you feel about that as some Chinese heritage
well I agree with you though it's one of the most important relationships to
navigate over time and that I think right now the US has a tendency to view
things as a zero-sum game where if China Rises that were somehow falling and and
it leads to it increase in tensions so that's what I think we need to try and
forestall avoid because it's impossible to manage the rise of AI and climate
change and various geopolitical hotspots like North Korea without some sort of
strong ties to China like it's just not going to have
so that one of the goals of my presidency will be to try and build like
a positive nonzero-sum relationship with China and that includes hopefully
maintaining current situation for for many people in the Asian continent see
would you support on principle the one China policy well you know I think the
one China policy is very deeply ingrained into Chinese culture and
heritage and I think that right now the way things are functioning to me is is
one of the better outcomes one could hope for for people in Greater China
generally and so to me anything that upsets the status quo would be something
I'd be deeply concerned about but right now I think things are going fairly well
at least as a again I'm a cultural liberal does there not become a point
where you have to say that you can't stand by as a nation like China takes
control of the lives of its people I mean now stopping people travel because
they don't have enough social credit points a lot of that's politically
motivated I mean we're looking potentially at the submergence of a free
democracy within what you might think I'm overstating it but seems quite an
orderly and increasingly Orwellian state I I'm terrified by that are you
not I think that your concerns have like a basis and you know your own
experiences and like in reality so you know it's it is the case that the
Chinese government is engaging in practices that as a Freeborn westerner
like you know you or I might may not be excited about the danger though to me is
to adopt frankly like an American lens towards what many other societies are
doing because to me that's what led us into
conflicts in Asia over the last century where you know we caught ourselves
convinced that if South Vietnam or South Korea were to go a certain direction it
would be disastrous for democracy writ large and then we wound up in multi year
multi decade conflicts that may or may not have achieved like their original
goals so to me like that the focus of the United States for better for worse
needs to be to try and restore itself at home because we are falling apart again
like dwindling life expectancy our political cohesion is that like
multi-decade lows at least you know we are not doing well if we were doing well
Donald Trump would not be our president and so if you're the leader of a country
and it's not doing well then you know what your job is your job is to try and
restore a higher degree of functionality to your own society yeah yeah okay um is
there anything else that I've not touched on that you'd like to talk about
yeah so one of the big themes of my campaign I think that you know you've
seen this in share this is that we really need to evolve in advance as a
people because right now we have this approach of capital efficiency to our
own human value it's why we talk about trying to retrain coal miners as coders
and other things it's like oh well the human worth is determined by the
marketplace of the marketplace wants coders I guess that's what we're trying
to turn you into even though that's more of a fantasy than a reality in most
cases so that the single biggest theme of the campaign is that we need to start
seeing ourselves as having intrinsic value like as human beings and try and
make this economic system work for us instead of us all being inputs into the
system because if we're all inputs into the system we will lose on an epic
historic scale we will not be able to out-compete artificial intelligence
robots and software where the marginal cost of an activity is zero or near zero
we can't win and so we have to actually change the rules of the game change the
rules of the economy to something that we can actually succeed at even as the
goalposts are moving very very quickly and that's something that I'm
sure is vital to the health of our society moving forward and for whatever
reason it's something that most other political leaders haven't been able to
get their arms around and so that's what what I'd love to leave people with is
the sense that look if we do not evolve we are going to tear ourselves apart
we're all going to lose on a scale that's historic and you can already see
it in the numbers and in the nature of what's happening in the United States of
America and I believe as we talked about earlier in this conversation Robin that
the appetite is now there that like people have woken up to the fact that
our institutions are not doing well and that our old approaches aren't going
to work and that we need to revive ourselves to the challenges of the 21st
century in the unlikely event that you don't become our next president then I
know someone likely would you consider running for Congress or any other office
where you have a platform to basically do what you're doing I mean it also
occurs to me that you know when we talk about the evolving role of the
presidency for good or for ill but most of what you talked about is legislative
of course you know the executive doesn't pass legislation it just executes sit it
would seem that someone of your ilk and and your interest would be well placed
in Congress let's say when the Senate um would you consider that like I'm open to
any role that I think helps move society forward
I mean I'm first and foremost a parent and a patriot and if I think I can move
the needle in any capacity you know I would take a long hard look at it I'm
certainly not some narcissist who's been dreaming about being president forever I
don't care so much about the labels and seating charts I just want to try and
solve problems and if that's one way I could do it then I'd be very very open
to looking at it what are some of the most memorable reactions the
you've received on the campaign trail last the interview I saw you said you'd
been to Iowa five times might be more by now what's your feeling to pick up on
what you said about people being ready which I kind of agree with yeah
specifically can give us some examples that have kind of touched you maybe a
little more than others maybe a bit personally I know I've been blown away
by the response I've gotten in communities around the country where you
think and you look at me it's like I'm like the urban Asian guy like showing up
but most of the time people realize that you're there to help that there's no
other reason that you'd be there and they really touched their touch that
you're trying to improve their lives and that in turn inspires you and that's
happened to me now dozens maybe hundreds of times on the trail I've been to Iowa
eight times I'm going back for a ninth time next week yeah yeah and the
American people are really good you know it's like that it breaks your heart what
the heck does happen to our country but the the recognition that we need to take
on a new approach is growing stronger every day
and do you find that you're being a young asian man affects anything in your
conversations with the America especially in Iowa I guess it's pretty
white everywhere you're going you know - in Iowa well the is it amazing the main
impact is that people assume I know what I'm talking about when I talk about
technology it's like looks like he knows what he's talking about
so if anything it's been positive you know I get a free for IQ points when I
give speeches with this accent so maybe you get some credibility finally to be
both an Asian guy and have British accent you got VP chosen yet I do not
then the benefit is higher and then maybe for a third step I could wear glasses I
love it Andrew this has been a real pleasure thank you for coming on to the
show doing this with me I'm sure if you're willing I would love to talk to
you again at some point and you know maybe ask
some of the same questions but also some different ones and I you know I wish you
luck not just in your campaign but in
getting the values that underpin your campaign this productive discourse
this fact-based discourse you know just into the American
conversation so thanks for what you're doing I enjoyed this conversation a great deal
and I'm sure we'll talk again as this campaign makes progress it's gonna be
quite a journey and I hope you and I get to meet personally well I hope to meet you
one day so yeah so come up here to Seattle if you haven't already they'd
love you up here yeah yeah I'm definitely come to Seattle at some point
I'll see you there all right you got it thanks so much Andrew thanks Robin much appreciated