Summary: <p>How does an entrepreneur go from starting a business to wanting to run for president? Andrew Yang discusses the journey his life has taken from “scrappy entrepreneur-type” to a 2020 presidential candidate. He talks about what sparked his interest in running for office, the growing student loan debt, the shifting technological and economical policies, and much more.</p> <p></p> <div class="sonix--embed-container" style="display: block;"> <div class="sonix--embed-text" style="text-align: left;"> <h1 style="font-size: 18px; color: #3E3E3B; text-decoration: none; font-weight: 700;"><a href="https://sonix.ai/" style="text-decoration: none; color: #3E3E3B;" target="_blank" title="Andrew Yang.mp3 | Convert audio-to-text with Sonix">Andrew Yang.mp3 | Convert audio-to-text with Sonix</a></h1> <p style="font-size: 14px; color: #3E3E3B; text-decoration: none;">I had not spent time in Michigan or Ohio or Louisiana or Alabama or western Pennsylvania before starting Venture for America and I saw firsthand the aftermath of the automation of millions of manufacturing jobs where a place like Detroit was built for a population of one point seven million people and it now has six or two to eighty thousand people. So despite the heroic efforts on the ground a lot of parts of Detroit you look up and they just blasted out abandoned neighborhoods. And so I thought oh my gosh like the devastation in these communities and not just economic devastation but there was a lot of human devastation and cultural devastation. There's a lot of despair a lot of anger. And so when Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016 I looked into the numbers and I found that the single biggest variable that explain the movement towards Trump in Michigan Ohio Pennsylvania and Wisconsin was the adoption of industrial robots in each voting district where the more you'd automated away jobs the more people moved towards Trump. And you're on the West Coast and we know this but my friends in Silicon Valley are 100 percent confident that we are going to automate away millions more jobs in retail truck driving and transportation customer service food prep and on and off throughout the economy. And I realize that we're in the third inning of the greatest economic and technological transition in human history and the third inning has already given us Donald Trump.</p> <p style="font-size: 14px; color: #3E3E3B; text-decoration: none;">And it's only going to accelerate and take off as artificial intelligence gets better and better. And so I went to our political leaders and said Guys this is the core problem. We've automated away four million manufacturing jobs in the swing states and we're about to triple down on that. What are we going to do. And the political leadership that I met with including many Democrats really didn't have any answer like they do. They just were. Completely unequipped with trying to address this which in a way you know it shouldn't be shocking because this is an unprecedented level of change. But some of the answers were just so dispiriting they were like We can't talk about this. We should study this more. I mean things that are just ridiculous on the face and then the third big one was that we need to educate and retrain Americans for the jobs of the future. And as you know from having read my book I looked into the data on federally funded retraining programs and we're really really terrible at it. The success rates are between zero and thirty seven percent and fewer than 10 percent of workers qualify. So are our political leaders are suggesting a fantasy to the biggest set of economic and technological changes in history. And so that's when I realized that someone needed to bring real </p> </div> </div>
