Keynote address: Andrew Yang

Transcript:

Aisha Kareem (00:07):

Good morning. My name is Aisha Kareem. I am the Chief Architect for the Banking Financial Services Business Unit at Virtuo. I'm here today to introduce Andrew Yang, our keynote speaker. Andrew is a true visionary and a pioneer in so many ways from his work. As an Entrepreneur, Author, Philanthropist, and Non-profit leader, Andrew has shown us all how important it is to find creative solutions and create new opportunities for all, especially the underserved in our community. Now, this is very important to us at Virtuo, as we as well look at technology as a great leveler to find new opportunities to solve problems. Our philosophy of engineering first means just that looking at business challenges faced by our banks and our customers, and applying technology to solve those. Now, digital was the great game changer a few years ago. Today it's artificial intelligence. It's a major boardroom conversation, a major conversation in every conference room. Clients are aggressively looking at how can they address leverage AI to improve their customer's experience, to drive cost of efficiency, and to generally just be a better bank and a financial service institution.

(01:37)

And this helps actually make it more accessible to all. Now, we like to say we are dreamers, builders and doers, and it's that engineering background at Chua that allows us to do that, just like a keynote speaker who will be joining us in a moment. He also sees the need to be able to identify, understand, and address challenges creatively and create new opportunities for all. Now, his work with the nonprofits as an entrepreneur to his run for presidency has shown us that his vision, he has the vision to see challenges and opportunities, and he's not afraid to tackle them. So please join me in a warm welcome for our featured speaker, Mr. Andrew Yang.

Penny Crossman (02:29):

Welcome.

Andrew Yang (02:32):

Hello everyone. Great to see you.

Penny Crossman (02:34):

It is a pleasure to have you. So everyone knows, Andrew Yang is the Technology Entrepreneur who ran for president in 2020.

Andrew Yang (02:42):

Am I president yet?

Penny Crossman (02:45):

He didn't win, but he practiced.

Penny Crossman (02:49):

Millions of followers, millions of donors, and he obviously had a message that resonated with a lot of people. He's still going. He now has a new party called The Forward Party. And we're going to talk about what he's doing now. We're going to talk about why he thinks the system is broken and the political system is broken and how we might fix it. And then we'll talk a little bit about AI and what he thinks about how it could be a positive influence on society and all the negatives to be we all have to be scared of. So I guess to start off with, I think of the forward party as kind of trying to find a middle ground between these extreme extremes of far right far left that we have now, and trying to gather a community of people who have more moderate ideas is how would you describe it?

Andrew Yang (03:43):

Well, first, congratulations to everyone here for the work you're doing building the next generation of financial services. I tell people that our country is struggling between a mindset of abundance and a mindset of scarcity. And you all can help steer people towards both the reality and a mindset of abundance. And I dare say that western civilization may depend upon whether you're successful or not. So thrilled to be here with you all. What's the approval rating for US Congress as we're here together? So shout out a number. Be fun. So I heard between 10 and 30 it's right, it's about 20%. What is the reelection rate for individual members of Congress? 90, 90, 94%. So imagine if you ran a business, which many of you do, four to five people were unhappy, but you changed absolutely nothing like that. That's a reasonable summary of American politics. That's why everyone's getting so upset.

(04:44)

And the reason why those numbers are so disparate is that the country's been carved into blue zones and red zones, and they've trying to avoid competition with the other side that they don't. I mean, why compete if you can help it? And so what we're seeing then is that you have office holders who are beholden to the 10 to 12% most extreme ideological voters. And then you have media organizations separating us into tribes and teams. And then you have social media pouring gasoline on the whole thing. And that's going to get worse, not better. So what we're trying to do with forward is carve out a lane in the middle and reward people who want to be sensible actors with just data-driven evidence based policies.

Penny Crossman (05:28):

What's an example of an data driven evidence based policy?

Andrew Yang (05:32):

Well, one of the more noxious things about the current system is that it actually doesn't reward good policy at this point. And we're here in Florida, so I'll use Marco Rubio as an example. Remember a number of years ago, Marco Rubio proposed an immigration reform package. Do y'all remember this? And then what happened the next week? He recanted. He was like, ah, I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. So what happened within that week was that the folks in this party said, Marco, what are you doing? If you do this? We're going to take a beating. If you do nothing, we're fine. And it was a US senator who said this to me, this is where the system is. She said, an issue is now worth more to US unaddressed than addressed because if I address it, the base turns on me. I worked with the enemy, I compromised. I'm ideologically impure. My job security goes down. If I do nothing, I can get you mad. I can raise money, I can get votes. And so that's why the system feels the way it does. It's pretty much the opposite of the way you all run your businesses.

Andrew Yang (06:37):

Oh seriously, if you were in your business like this, it would fail very, very quickly because a person next to you would eat your lunch. But in this case, there is no person next to you, so to speak, because they, they've again carved it up in the way that they have good times in the US of A. So I'm trying to fix that. That's the mission. And believe it or not, we have a path and there there's like, there's an operational path and it can be done.

Penny Crossman (07:07):

So would you run again and you give us a sense of what that path is?

Andrew Yang (07:14):

Well, the path does not necessarily include Andrew Yang running for president. I'm going to let you in on a secret. I actually did not think I was going to be president.

(07:28)

So the path involves trying to change the incentives within the system so that reasonably people can succeed and prosper as opposed to amplifying the unreasonable and the extreme. And the way to do that is actually a very boring mechanical fix that consists of getting rid of party primaries and having it so that anyone can vote for anyone. So you have to get 51% of people to support you as opposed to the 10 to 12% on the sides. And that sounds like a magical fantasy, but it's actually been voted in three states already, and it could be up to five or six states as early as 2024. The national media is not paying any attention to it because the national media kind of enjoys the division and polarization their business models are now kind of relying on it.

Penny Crossman (08:15):

All right, so you're not saying whether you're going to run again. So let's talk about AI a little bit.

Andrew Yang (08:23):

Well, my joke about running again is apparently I have another 40 years.

Penny Crossman (08:36):

There's no rush at all. So let's talk about AI. You signed the AI pause letter a few months ago that Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, a number of other tech luminaries, signed this letter saying we should stop the development of advanced AI for six months. And you could say that was a little bit cynical for some of those people, but why did you sign it and what were you thinking?

Andrew Yang (09:04):

No, I didn't think it would happen. I thought that it would raise attention to the fact that the incentives in the current system are to go as fast as you can in different settings and there will be a problem. And our government, as usual, is very slow on the uptake. I joked with someone, it's like we could approach AI the same way we approached social media and then someone was like, how did we regulate social media? Media? And it's pretty essentially section two 30 written before Facebook was even founded by the regulatory regime made zero sense on social media. Now, I was talking to my hairdresser about this and she said, well, what's the worst that could happen with AI? And then I said, rampant identity theft, a total erosion of truth and public consciousness, unwarranted military conflict. Other than that though, could be fine.

(10:05)

No. So you can very easily play out some very negative scenarios based upon not a GI. So I'm not one of those science fiction people, even though I know I double as the magical Asian man from the future, but I'm not someone that thinks that artificial general intelligence, it's right around the corner and it's going to come up and displace the species. I'm not like that. But I think that the tools can be used by bad actors in really destructive and corrosive ways. And by the way, you're already seeing the beginnings of that. I mean, some of your businesses are seeing the beginnings of that. And one of the things we have to do is try and use these tools to strengthen relationships of trust with your customers as quickly as possible.

Penny Crossman (10:51):

So if you had to look out five, 10 years, do you see AI changing our country in the good good in some way? And if so, how?

Andrew Yang (11:01):

I mean, again, it's a set of tools and you can have very, very positive applications of these tools. I'm like, I'm innovation progress in science. You could cure cancer, cure Alzheimer's, ease climate change, come up with new materials that help make science fiction type scenarios much more realistic. I have friends who are working on each of these things. Some are working on various, I shouldn't even say this, it gets weird, but they're working on combating aging and the effects of aging in different respects. But also I just laid out some of the more negative scenarios. And so if you were to ask me, I think all of these things are on the table, realistically, there will be very positive impacts and very negative impacts. Unfortunately, I think the negative impacts will be more conspicuous in a particular way and it's going to naturally accelerate the erosion of trust in various institutions.

Penny Crossman (12:09):

So what do you think companies should be doing and thinking about as they deploy AI? Like we were talking about AI chatbots earlier, and banks are using AI in lending, in their lending decisions. They're, a lot of companies use AI in their hiring decisions, letting AI engine pick out the resumes that are the most in sync with what they're looking for. Do you think that there are certain kinds of guardrails or lines of thinking that people should take? Or do you think it's the responsibility of government to say, here's how you're going to use ai. We're going to have an AI agency that regulates everybody's use of ai?

Andrew Yang (12:50):

I think an AI dedicated agency would be a positive idea personally, but I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for that. And so companies are going to do what makes the most sense for them. AI is extraordinarily powerful at finding patterns and data and then creating rules, automating various processes, maybe making it so that your communication is much more seamless and stress free. I was telling Penny a story in the back where I've spent the last, I didn't mean I didn't spend all of this time, but I've had half a dozen calls with my private bank trying to get a basic thing done, and I'm just like, what the hell is going on? It's, shouldn't there be some AI concierge at this point that just is like, Hey Mr. Yang, you're special. Let me make this thing happen for you. Instead of me being like, ah, and the people I've been dealing with have been pleasant.

(13:49)

I'm a private client, I'm fancy already, but even that stuff has been a chore and it shouldn't be. So those are the things that companies are naturally going to deploy AI on first is like, Hey, we've got all these customer service processes. We employ a lot of humans. When you talk about using AI to hire, that's one thing. But the fact is, if I'd had that concierge AI bot satisfying my request, I would not have had to talk to those three pleasant humans. And I'm going to confess I would've been happier. I'm not calling to talk to a pleasant human. I'm just calling to get my thing done. You know what I mean? And in this case, the thing is something I needed last year too. So if you had really awesome data you'd, you'd probably would've predicted my request and just sent it to me and then I would've been super loyal instead of being irritated. So that's, I think AI's initial focus is going to be, is trying to make current transactions easier.

Penny Crossman (14:59):

Yeah, I think that's right. And a lot of banks are doing that. A lot of banks do have these chatbots. I think the trouble is they're not perfect. And so the CFPB just published a report with lots and lots of complaints from people about the chat. Bott gave me the wrong answer, the chatbot didn't respond, the chatbot wouldn't let me talk to a human. So it's a real work in progress I think is.

Andrew Yang (15:20):

A chatbot can be anywhere between wondrous and infuriating. You know what I mean? It's like if you deploy the infuriating ones, then people are going to get pissed off. I mean, no one wants to be locked in cyber hell with Incomp bot 3000 and you're like, oh god, incomp bot can't understand what I'm saying. I feel like I'm pretty articulate. I mean, that gets really freaking infuriating quick. At the same time, if you can get off the phone not talking to a human, you're like, oh, that was great. You know, do a little chat bot button pushing. So organizations have to try and be on the positive side of that as much as they can. Tools are good. It's like the good tools can be very powerful, but the bad tools can alienate customers really quick.

Penny Crossman (16:14):

So let's go back to politics really and your platform. Now. You talked a lot about universal basic income during your campaign, and I feel like that is one of the ideas that a lot of people are very interested in that everybody gets a thousand dollars a month.

Andrew Yang (16:31):

Your kids liked it. Yeah, admit it. They were like, Hey, you should listen to this yang guy.

Penny Crossman (16:37):

If you were running today or in the next election, do you still like that idea or have you changed it or have you rethought it?

Andrew Yang (16:48):

Well, I think AI is going to be phenomenally disruptive. There are 2 million Americans that work at call centers right now making 17 bucks an hour or so. And if AI is deployed effectively, I think that number is going to shrink. What percentage of Americans graduate from college?

Audience Member 1 (17:09):

42%.

Andrew Yang (17:10):

35%. So you're looking at a country that's two thirds high school grads, not most of your client base. It's cool. The top five job categories are clerical and administrative, which includes call center workers, retail, food service and food prep, truck driving and transportation and manufacturing. Those five jobs comprise about half of American jobs and they're all going to shrink. The fact that Trump won Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania was a direct result of the fact that we eliminated 4 million manufacturing jobs that were primarily in those locations. We're going to do the same thing to the job categories I just named. And what's the plan? The US already has a labor market participation rate, labor force participation rate that's low among developed countries. We're pushing more and more high school educated men in particular to the curb. We should be making massive investments in vocational and apprenticeship and a lot of other things.

(18:07)

But how many of you have confidence that our government's going to do those things in a timeframe that's actually going to be able to head off some of these mega transformations? So I think we should be thinking and acting much bigger about it, but the problem right now is that everything I just described is totally irrelevant to our politics of today. Someone winning or losing their next race, nothing to do with whether they can get vocational education up to a certain level. They, they've made it. So essentially it's like non-competitive going to have two candidates with a combined age of 160 in this next cycle. It's in a country of 330 million people. It's like, who would've picked these two now they got better over the last four years. It's like what? Really turn it around.

(18:56)

So you have a system that again, is not designed to promulgate or implement effective policy. You have the largest scale economic transformation in the history of the world. So what's the plan? And I think in that context, we should be thinking about a lot of things in a different way. I, I'm going to insert here one of my pet ideas that I hope some of you're already working on and run with. So we think about US dollar, but the truth is that each of us already is using half a dozen different currencies in our waking lives. So it could be your Amex points, it could be your restaurant loyalty punch card. It could be the Yelp review points or the Google points that you're accruing. It could be crypto or a digital currency. And Mark Cuban made a suggestion during Covid that I thought was genius.

(19:57)

He said, we should just be issuing dollars to people that can only be used at their locally owned small businesses and they disappear at the end of the month if you don't use them. Smart money and things like that. A lot of you are working in financial innovation. Like that to me has to be the future we build during this era of economic transformation. If we say to everyone, look, your job is to be capital efficient and a contributor in a market, and by the way, you're going to have you compete with AI that can do everything fast than you, like, is that going to work? You know what I mean? Everyone here in this room is not going to be on the positive end of that transformation because you're literally building it. You're educated and skilled and in these very high order organizations, but we have to know that the water level is rising.

(20:48)

And so the question is how do you get more people to be able to be buoyed with the current in an environment that we all know too? It's like our organizations are going to be under pressure to do more with less, do more with fewer people, and we can descend into happy talk. It's like, oh, we're going to, we're retrain all these people. It's like, I mean it doesn't serve your organization or business to do that. And so again, the person next to you is going to try and eat your lunch. So we have to come clean about what your incentives are. We have to come clean about what society's incentives are and then create a place for more people that are going to be on the outside looking. In the absence of that, then we're going to be in for some incredibly nasty, terrifying negative times as a country.

Penny Crossman (21:35):

What about increasing the minimum wage? Is that an option that you think would work?

Andrew Yang (21:39):

I personally am for increasing the minimum wage. What is it like seven something federally? I mean that's what I made when I was a busboy at a Chinese restaurant in the nineties. You know what I mean? It felt like a lot of money when I was 17 years old. But it's have trying to live on that now. At the same time, again, if we increase the cost of labor, there are going to be certain environments where they're going to be like what I can make do with fewer people. So I think it's the right move personally, but it doesn't solve the problem.

Penny Crossman (22:10):

And people will pay what the market will bear and what people are willing to deal with. So I know you focus a lot on the overlooked segments of the population and it seems like a lot of the ills of our society, like homelessness, people being working poor, not being able to make ends meet, are just getting more extreme. Are there any other sort of practical ideas you have for trying to solve some of that or try to, trying to raise up people who are, there's so many people who are living paycheck to paycheck.

Andrew Yang (22:51):

Yeah,

(22:53)

It does. That's going to sound funny. Alright, I'm going to give you the career arc in a nutshell. So I ran a private company that was bought by a public company in 2009. So it was like Mr. Get stuff done, startup stuff. I then started and ran a non-profit that helped create hundreds of jobs around the country and then realized that our economy was transforming in fundamental ways and that we needed to think much bigger. So now in that position and simultaneously various parts of the public sector have been performing worse and worse and you wind up with massive problems in, let's call it substance abuse, homelessness, education. And you have a political system that has no accountability or feedback mechanism If something like that fails. Now we're here in Florida, there are people that have moved here to Florida from let's call it New York or California.

(23:49)

And so if you have a place that's struggling or Chicago, if you have a place that's struggling, is there a massive political change or restoration or no, there isn't. People are just like, well, you vote with your feet, you leave, you go someplace else. And that's what qualifies as a feedback mechanism in American life. So when you talk about the failures in these public goods, you have to look at the political system that has insulated officials from having to deliver results. There is no dashboard on the Hall of Congress saying, Hey, we got to get this stuff done and if we don't get this stuff done, we lose our jobs. Again, you have a 94% reelect rate. You know how, you know, stay in office, just keep your head down, try not to piss off the 10 to 12% on the extreme and you're golden. We have a system that is breeding sheep that we call leaders and then the way they lead is by going on cable and just saying crazy shit every once in a while. And then so if you want to get to the root of why these problems seem to be festering getting worse, you have to actually get to the root of the political system and why it has created this legion of unaccountable careerists.

Penny Crossman (25:12):

So do you think we need a Yelp for Congress, something like that?

Andrew Yang (25:15):

Well again, they're in a system where unless they get primaried from within their party, and so that's why a lot of you are are in a position where you've actually met with various representatives and officials, they're pretty reasonable, and then you get them in front of a crowd or a camera and all of a sudden you're like, where the hell did this come from? You know what I mean? Because that that's the system. So you have to get into the roots of the system and make it so that what we imagine the fiction, here's the fiction, you have to please 51% of us to win office. That is the fiction. The reality is you have to keep the 10 to 12% most extreme ideologues in your party off your back to keep your job. What we have to do is we have to make the fiction the reality and then you have a chance in the absence of that, we're wasting our time.

Penny Crossman (26:01):

I want to go back, you mentioned before that automation and AI are going to kill a lot of jobs.

Andrew Yang (26:08):

Those aren't the words I used, but sure. Okay.

Penny Crossman (26:11):

You said something to out of, do you think the people in the employers, large employers have some kind of responsibility to try to do something about that? Try to keep people employed even though more and more jobs are getting automated?

Andrew Yang (26:31):

I ran a business and I occasionally did something that was not in the best interest of the business, give people healthcare that I could have gotten away with not giving them healthcare. Frankly, I could have categorized them as contractors and been like, you're on your own. But I said, you know what? I'm going to do what I thought was the right thing and give them healthcare. It was costly. I thought I could justify it in my own mind saying, look, it's good for culture and blah blah blah, but that stuff was only possible because our organization was growing. If you are contracting, then all of a sudden trying to do the right thing by people becomes a near impossibility. If you have stakeholders and shareholders and let's say you're a public company, you need to report. So I get it. I prefer good people to not good people. I prefer good people who try and do the right thing by their teams, but I think it's totally unrealistic to expect organizations to do things that are going to be against their interests over time, especially when there's going to be some startup that is operating incredibly lean in mean and is just totally AI fueled and just going to come up and try and get your business.

Penny Crossman (27:42):

So who are you rooting for in the next election and why?

Andrew Yang (27:50):

Wow, so interesting.

Andrew Yang (27:54):

I have some thoughts. Sure.

(27:58)

I'm in the camp that thinks that Donald Trump the sequel would be a catastrophe. It's like he would make the first administration look like sanity central because this time it's going to be like revenge tour and Syco fans central. You know what I mean? It's like, oh, he actually turned through three layers of relatively sane people during his four years and he's not going to make that mistake again. We're just going to start with freaking crazy people and just try and ratchet up the crazy. There's a temptation to think that this would be, I mean we're laughing because it's kind of true or it is true, but it would be a very, very malignant time in American life if he wins. So I'm for anything that can stop Trump, honestly. Now I don't have any illusions. I just refer to the fact I think he's the most likely nominee because you're dealing with a subset of of the population still. What percentage of Iowans voted in the Democratic caucus that I was a part of last cycle? See, no one knows this number. I'm anchoring you low. How low do you think it is? 13%.

(29:12)

13 is a low number. It was 6.5%. So you're looking at, again, a sliver of a sliver that these folks are competing for. You have a very restive base that Trump has a stranglehold on. So there's a reason why most of us think he's going to win is because in a lot of these contexts, he's not fighting for the general population. He's got his people and that's going to be enough to win. If you look back in 2016, when he won the Republican nomination, he actually wasn't even getting above 50%. In a lot of these races, he was getting about 40% and then there were half a dozen other candidates who were splitting up the 60%. And by the way, it looks like that's happening again, I don't think I'm giving anything away here, but it looks like the mayor of Miami's going to declare on Thursday, Francis Suarez.

(29:59)

And so you have at this point maybe 10 to 12 Republican candidates competing for the non-Trump vote. They're doing it in part because they think DeSantis is not prohibitively strong. So you are likely going to see a Trump Biden rematch. There is no labels effort that gets pilled in the press all the time for potentially running a Unity ticket. It would be something like a Joe Manchin and Larry Hogan, someone shaking his head to that. I will close with this and we don't know much time, but I was talking to Penny. Alright, here we go. So here is how you could get out of this mess potentially.

(30:46)

Let's imagine that there was a way that we could all vote in the primaries instead of just, well, we could all vote on our smartphones for Mark Cuban the Rock, Matthew McConaughey, Taylor Swift, Oprah, whomever, whole list of people. And let's say they're all running, you vote for it on your smartphone and then a postcard with a personalized QR code gets sent to your mailing address, you scan it and says your vote's been verified. Get millions of Americans participating in this grassroots effort to have someone come in and say, look, we don't want either of the 78 or 82 year old. We want this other figure who we're not worried about their physical or mental health. At any moment in time, you get millions of Americans engaged in this process and then the legacy parties would be left saying, no, no, no, none of that is real. What is real is waiting to hear what 6% of Iowans think in February. And then millions of Americans would be like, wait a minute, I don't care what Iowans think any other time of year.

(31:45)

Why am I seeding the future of my country and my family to this bizarro system that would give us these two humans in a country 330 million. I just voted in this thing, I voted for Mark Cuban. And then we're heading this direction. The tech is there, the culture is there. Two thirds of people want some kind of alternative to the two party system at this point. And the presidential process is this opening a mile wide. So if that sounds good to you, go check out forward party.com because that's the kind of, now I will say forward party is not engaging in the presidential in 2024 in this way, in part because we don't want to do anything that's going to enable Trump to win. But we are, in my mind, one or two cycles away from having a democracy that lives up to its name and that is what I'd like to see happen. Alright, and that's a fine note to conclude on, I guess. Benny, thank you so much. Thank you guys. Great. Appreciate the heck out of you. The future can still be ours.