For the Next Generation

Hello all, and Happy 4th of July! I hope you are celebrating this Independence Day with friends and family.

I spoke at the high school commencement at Stuyvesant in New York last week. I thought my remarks to the next generation would be a nice way to ring in the Holiday Weekend. Have a great one!

Hello everyone it’s great to be here. My wife Evelyn, who is here with me today went to Stuyvesant. This is an amazing school with a singular place in American life.

To the parents who are here - congratulations! Many of you sacrificed a lot for your kids to get to this stage and you should see today as a real culmination of your work.

For the young people who are graduating today, congratulations as well. You have made it through one of the great high schools in the country and are on your way.

This class in particular has been through a lot. Covid came and disrupted our lives on a level that we couldn’t have imagined just a few years ago. Our neighborhoods are changed. And some of us felt as if our place in this city, our home, has been called into question for the first time in our lives.

I reflected on why I was asked to address you all today, and I realized that I may have a great deal in common with some of you. I was the son of immigrants from Taiwan who emphasized education at every turn. The message I got from my parents was to get good grades, go to a good school, get a good job and make a place for myself in this country. I imagine it’s a familiar message to many of you.

My brother is a professor at NYU today, so you know at least one of us listened. But one thing we didn’t really talk about in my house growing up was politics. My parents were never like, “You’re going to be President of the United States one day!” It was more likely to be “Clean your room” or “do your homework.” It’s possibly why, when I told my parents in 2017 that I was going to run for President, their response was less enthusiastic and more concerned.

You all likely remember my presidential run, when I appeared on your TV screens in 2019. I hope it made some of you proud.

But the decisions that led me to that stage took place over years and even decades, and probably not in the way you’d imagine. You see, I’d been disappointing or alarming my parents for a long time. When I was 25 I left my first job at a New York law firm to try to start a business. What’s funny is that my respect for my parents was one reason I left that job. It didn’t make sense to me that I was making more money than they were straight out of law school when they were actually inventing things or helping people and I wasn’t.

So I set out to start a company back in 2000. I put my heart and soul into it, reaching out to anyone who I thought could help. Starting a business was a massive challenge. Too big a challenge, as my company failed pretty quickly. That failure hurt. I remember lying on the floor wondering what I had done wrong, feeling like I would never accomplish anything.

But for years afterward, I would think, “Well, whatever happens can’t be as bad as when my company failed.” It made me very resilient and able to weather difficult situations. I joined another company that was just finding its feet. A few years later I became the CEO of a small education company that grew to become #1 in the country and was bought by a bigger company in 2009. I would not have been able to do any of that if not for my experiences as a failed entrepreneur years earlier.

As Evelyn can attest, running for President was not the result of some laid out plan. If she had known that I was going to run for office when we were first dating, she would probably have run the other direction. It was the culmination of a lot of cumulative experiences, both good and bad, successes and setbacks in equal number. I can trace it all back to that decision I made when I was 25 to start a company that I had no business starting that didn’t work out, because each experience, happy or sad, success or failure, prepared me and led me to the next.

You’re all about to head to college. And right now your biggest choice might be what course of study to pursue. You should take it seriously, because your time is important, but know that it’s not something that will determine your direction or lot in life. The average young person will now hold 12.3 jobs during your career. Even if you come in below that number, you will probably find yourself in a range of different environments doing different things. I guarantee you’ll do something at some point that you didn’t study.

Some of you are heading to your dream school in the Fall. Others of you aren’t so sure. Don’t be overly concerned. It’s the individual and what you make of your own experience that will matter, not the starting point. I know a ton of very successful people out of every school or no school, and a lot of people in reverse. What you do is going to be much more important than where you do it.

You’ve been in a very competitive environment and some of you feel immense pressure to succeed. I know that I did when I was your age. Realize that you cannot be perfect; none of us can. You are going to make mistakes. Some of them will even hurt. I know there were times when I was 20 or 25, some of my missteps felt like the end of the world, whether it was relationships or school or work. That’s fine. As long as you keep moving forward, you will come back from them and continue to grow. What feels like a life-altering failure one year can become the story you tell with a smile just a few years later.

Your class has been through a lot, but I believe that has raised, not lowered your potential. Because after what you’ve all seen and experienced, what can the world do to you now? The best companies are started in times of adversity, and the best people will emerge from this time more resilient than ever.

I have a world of confidence in you in part because I know that the country needs what you bring to the table. If my math is right, most all of you just turned 18. That means you’re an adult and can vote. In America today, so much is polarized and tribal. We can’t agree on much. And I believe that many of you here today may carry the antidote.

What is that?

Here is where I may be projecting my own nature and experiences onto you, but I’m guessing that many of you are introverts. The author Susan Cain wrote, “There’s another word for introverts: thinkers.”

In an era of social media and disagreement, we need more of the opposite: Deep thought. Reflection. Curiosity. People who think for yourselves, who form your own ideas and judgments and viewpoints. Who are truly independent because you arrived at your own conclusions and then have confidence in your beliefs.

This, to me, may be the biggest need– that you have been trained not just to work hard in pursuit of goals, yes, but that you form your own perspective as products of this exceptional high school in the most dynamic and diverse city in the world.

In America today, there are two dominant ways to interpret the world, with neither of them truly speaking for most or improving our lives. I believe it may be you all who bring a different perspective in American life that centers on solving problems while others are arguing about them.

This is a tough time, yes, but tough times breed great people, and great opportunities for the right people. You all have the potential to be the right people at a pivotal point in our country’s history. You can make this your time as long as you continue to think and learn for yourself, grow from your successes, and from your mistakes, and continue to move forward.

I know you’ll do just that. And I’m excited to see you make your mark on this city, this country, and this world in the years to come.

Congratulations Class of 2022! The future will be what you make of it. I will see you out there.

Roe v. Wade

On Friday, the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade, the 1973 case that held that women had a Constitutional right to an abortion.

We had known that this was likely ever since a draft of the ruling was leaked a number of weeks ago, but I’d personally held out hope that the Court would relent and issue a narrower ruling that left Roe intact.

On a personal level, I hate this decision and find it to be immoral, out-of-step and vastly destructive. Those who are impacted will be poor women in red states who struggle to access reproductive care or exert their own choices safely and effectively. I find it bizarre that supposedly conservative judges would overturn such a longstanding precedent with massive importance to the way of life of millions of Americans. Conservative typically means “respect institutions, including what has gone before you.” This isn’t that.

Indeed, this ruling seems to firmly cement the Supreme Court as a political institution as opposed to a judicial body. That’s intrinsically a bad thing.

Protests are now raging across the country. In the hours after the ruling, I received dozens of fundraising overtures from Democratic candidates across the country. I do think that this ruling has the potential to activate voters and energy in a way that may diminish what is expected to be a red wave in November.

But at the same time, I found myself wondering, “Why didn’t Democrats do something about this when they had the chance?” Democrats commanded legislative majorities multiple times over the last 49 years. They could have codified Roe v. Wade into law. They could have played hardball when Mitch McConnell refused to consider Merrick Garland, which I found to be incredibly cynical and corrosive. They could have asked Ruth Bader Ginsburg to step down while Obama was still in office instead of deferring to her wish to stay in until her health failed.

They didn’t do any of these things, and now the people who will pay the price will be poor women with limited resources in red states.

This ruling will categorically polarize the country for the worse. I fear for what’s left of our institutional trust which is diminishing quickly. I’m deeply saddened for the women and families who will be hurt and have their lives altered.

For me, the ruling only elevates the need for a political realignment and institutional reform. Judicial appointments are being made that cater to the desires of a relative minority of the country because that minority commands outsized influence in our unrepresentative two-party system with closed party primaries. Parties run on issues but don’t legislate. Failures fuel fundraising appeals. People become more angry and frustrated and inflamed and the two sides become more entrenched.

These are difficult times in the U.S. But we have to continue to live with each other and find avenues for coming together and allowing Americans to feel that they are being heard and respected on matters most dear to them, or we will see our country fail and ripped apart. There should be more than two parties at the table to make a more nuanced and representative case for the tens of millions of Americans who are now on the outside looking in.

Our system must evolve and move forward, even as forces seem intent on hurtling us backward and into opposing camps. Those forces are growing stronger. There is no time to waste.

Lessons from KIND

Hello, I hope that your summer is off to a great start.

Before I got into politics I was an entrepreneur. I ran an education company that was acquired by a public company and started a national entrepreneurship non-profit. My first book, “Smart People Should Build Things” was about the need to cultivate more entrepreneurs in America. I love entrepreneurship and see it as one of the answers to our problems – indeed, at its best entrepreneurship is solving big problems.

One of the country’s greatest entrepreneurs is Daniel Lubetzky. You know him as the founder of KIND Snacks, the ubiquitous bars you pick up in convenience stores when you feel like eating something healthy (try their frozen snacks, you won’t be disappointed). KIND went from just an idea to a multi-billion dollar business over the past 18 years due in large part to Daniel’s focus and indefatigability.

Daniel’s story starts in Mexico. “I immigrated from Mexico when I was 16, and I couldn’t hold any job as an employee because of my status, a lot of immigrants start businesses because we can’t be employed. I used to drive 2 hours to sell watches at flea markets on the outskirts of San Antonio. Eventually I had a couple kiosks at local malls . . .it was the fancy thing to be at the mall there.”

Daniel went to college in San Antonio and law school out West, and then went to the Middle East to try to bring people together through a non-profit called Peaceworks. “What’s interesting is how little I knew, and hence how lucky I was. Had I known how hard what I was undertaking would turn out to be, I maybe wouldn’t have had the courage to do it . . . that innocence is actually a blessing, because maybe you will make more mistakes but you will do things that are meant to be done but that others who ‘know better’ wouldn’t do.”

While running Peaceworks, Daniel got interested in healthy foods. “I was criss-crossing the United States, skipping lunch or dinner, working at my desk, wanting a healthy snack. Back in the early 2000s, snack options were nothing like today, nothing led with nutrient-rich ingredients.” KIND got started during a dark and difficult time for Daniel. “It was the toughest year of my life. I’d just lost my father. My Dad was my role model and my hero. He approached life with kindness towards all. We sat around the table and almost didn’t launch KIND. I’d just had a business setback. We’d just lost our business on a product overnight. Should we throw in the towel? I’d already been doing this for 10 years. Fortunately we decided to give it a shot. We almost didn’t launch. I almost wanted my team to give me permission to say no, let’s do something else.”

After KIND launched, it grew quickly via word-of-mouth. “We were very true to the brand. This is what it stands for. We are not going to deviate.” Some of the lessons he’d learned running Peaceworks needed to be revised. “I saw everything as an expense. Everyone who tried KIND bars would love it, but I didn’t know better and treated sampling as a cost. In 2008, our budget for sampling was $800 just for product buyers. When we finally brought in investment, we started sampling and you could see the data that it was growing like this. A few years later our sampling budget was $20 million.”

The corporate culture of KIND became something to tend carefully, particularly when you’re the CEO. “When you’re trying to be kind out of fear, it’s not the best motivator. But when you see the power of kindness, kindness is magical because it doesn’t just make the person who receives the act of kindness have a better day, it also helps the person doing the kind act feel better about themselves and it becomes addictive.”

Daniel has now achieved more business success than most of us can imagine. But he’s driven to solve bigger problems,. “I’ve been noticing the erosion of American values like creativity, resourcefulness, respect. Respect is one of the greatest things that America has that we take too much for granted but doesn’t exist in other places. What does it take to respect each other’s humanity and people who are different than them? America has always been the place I’ve drawn inspiration from, and now it’s under threat.”

Now, Daniel is trying to bring Americans together through a campaign ‘Starts With Us’ to encourage civic unity and bridge building. It Starts with Us revolves around 3 values: curiosity, compassion and courage. They are lofty ones, but the message of the campaign is that little changes in habits can change how we operate. He’s certainly right that if Americans were more curious, compassionate and courageous, we’d be in much better shape.

Says Daniel, “We share more values than most people realize. Americans have this beautiful temperament about helping those left behind. It unites us all. Giving everyone a fair chance.”

I believe that, if there’s going to be a positive movement in America, it’s going to be led by entrepreneurs like Daniel who are digging in to try and guide our country in a better direction while also admitting that business – or politics – as usual isn’t going to work. We are in a tough spot with struggling institutions and growing frustration. We need something new.

“The polarization in this country terrifies me . . . what’s happening to our nation is we’re losing that curiosity gene, that self-reflection skillset and muscle that made us the most amazing nation on earth, that hurts not just civilization, that hurts not just being a better parent, that hurts you being a better entrepreneur because how are you going to have drive and creativity if we are scared to debate and to listen to one another and to learn from one another?”

For my full interview with Daniel click here – he and I discuss the path forward and much more.

The Independent Governor

Hello, I hope the summer is going great. The January 6th hearings are highlighting for the country how deep our challenges are.

I spent a couple days in Oregon last week. The people in the state are struggling with many of the same issues as the rest of the country: affordability, public safety concerns, underperforming schools, homelessness, a shifting economy and polarization. Oregon is a blue state – Biden won it by 16 points – but most of the state’s counties are rural and right-leaning.

Betsy Johnson was a state representative for 4 years and state senator for 16 years representing Columbia County in Northwest Oregon. She is an aviator by training, operating a helicopter business and participating in international competitions; she has dropped fire retardant on a burning mountain in real life. She was a Democrat but, representing a rural area, found herself in position to be the swing vote on many issues. She became concerned that the Democratic Party was constantly beholden to certain groups, like teachers unions. She left the Democratic Party at the end of last year to run for Governor as an Independent who can work across both parties to deliver what the people of Oregon want.

And she can win.

We all know that politics today is driven in large part by money and resources. Remarkably, Betsy has raised over $6 million - enough money to be competitive by people who believe her to be the best choice for the state. And her longtime record of service has led to endorsements from former Democratic governor Ted Kulongoski and former Republican U.S. Senator Gordon Smith. People who know Betsy regard her as the common sense leader that most Oregonians – and Americans – want.

I met with Betsy while I was in Oregon and she is exactly what you’d hope for – a no-nonsense spirited problem-solver who just wants to get things done. Stories of her going above and beyond to come through for constituents are consistent and legendary.

We can sense instinctively that our current system is not delivering the kind of leadership that we need. People are fed up but don’t feel they have a choice.

With Betsy’s election, we can establish that yes, we do have a choice, and that a different approach to politics is possible.

Says Betsy: “Democracy needs to stop being so contentious. We need the parties to bring people together to get stuff done instead of running through our partisan tribal corners and just poking at each other. We need an independent governor to make the parties work together for the common good and move Oregon forward.”

I’m pleased to endorse Betsy, and – like Evan McMullin in Utah – believe her to be a potentially powerful emblem that Americans can choose leaders who will operate for the people free of the entrenched political interests and knee-jerk ideologies that have come to dominate both major parties. An Independent Governor is just what Oregon – and the country – needs. Her victory will help establish that politics-as-usual isn’t cutting it, and that if given a real choice, people will take it.

Can an Independent win in Oregon? We will find out in 5 months. I’ll be helping Betsy and hope you will too. And if it can happen in Oregon, it can happen anywhere.

The Rise and Fall of Nations

Hello, I hope that your summer is off to a great start.

As shootings plague our communities, there is a growing sense that America is struggling and in decline. That our best days are behind us and that we are unable to rise to the challenges of this time.

One of the world’s greatest investors, the founder of Bridgewater and #1 NYTimes Bestselling Author Ray Dalio, recently wrote a book, “Principles for Dealing With the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail” that tries to place our current challenges in context. Where are we in the long-term?

Dalio posits that there are 3 concurrent megacycles working against the United States at present: the end of a huge credit cycle, the latter stages of an internal order/disorder cycle, and the relative rise and fall of great powers.

First, the credit cycle.  Inflation dominates our headlines and our daily lives.  Ray describes 6 stages of a credit cycle that typically play out over 50 to 75 years – he believes we are in Stage 5 of this particular cycle which includes rising debts and increased money supply.  As public debt goes up, there are four approaches that policymakers can take:

1.     Austerity
2.    Debt defaults and restructurings
3.    Transfers of money (e.g. raising taxes)
4.    Printing money and devaluing it.

Ray suggests that #4 is always the politically easiest path, and the US is currently on this path.  He cites a striking statistic that of the roughly 750 currencies that have existed since 1700, only about 20% are still in use, and all of them have been devalued.

The U.S. has a distinct advantage of having its dollar as the global reserve currency.  However, Ray says that historically, capital has found its way out of a currency into other stores of value even if another reserve currency hasn’t been available, and that some form of devaluation of the dollar seems unavoidable.  In our interview, Ray predicts both a recession and some very difficult adjustments.

The second megacycle will be familiar to many of you: it’s what Ray calls the cycle of internal order and disorder.  This describes the rising and falling integrity of the American political system.  Again, he believes that we are in Stage 5 of a 6 stage cycle, with Stage 5 denoting ‘the Decline’ that includes bad financial conditions and intense conflicts.

Polarization is at historic levels. “History has shown us that greater polarization equals either (a) greater risk of political gridlock, which reduces the chances of revolutionary changes that rectify the problems or b) some form of civil war/revolution.”  Ray stipulates that “the odds of the US devolving into a Stage 6 (civil-war-type) dynamic within the next 10 years are [around] 30 percent . . . a dangerously high risk that must be protected against.”

Read that again; perhaps the world’s most successful investor projects a 30% chance of a civil-war-type situation in the United States within 10 years.  During our interview, he said, “the odds are higher now” than when he wrote those words in 2021.  This seems like headline news to me and a call to action.

Ray has also argued that there is a need to declare a national emergency to reform capitalism because the benefits of increased productivity are not being shared with the bottom 60%.  “I really got it when I saw that if you were in the bottom 60% you weren’t experiencing” the rise in productivity, Ray said in our interview.  This also struck me as headline news.  Ray writes, “To have peace and prosperity, a society must have productivity that benefits most people.  Do you think we have this today?”

The third megacycle is the external order and disorder cycle, which in this case is the US in relative decline while China is rising.  Ray believes that this will lead to increased friction between the two countries in terms of economic, technological, capital and geopolitical competition and conflict.  The major question is whether this will escalate into a hot or shooting conflict, which is something that the world would vastly prefer to avoid.  “The only thing that most informed people agree on is that such a war would be unimaginably horrible,” Ray writes.

These challenges are obviously massive.  “There will be a battle between humanity’s inventiveness and these . . challenges.”  Which will prevail?

We certainly have our work cut out for us.  On American politics, Ray writes that “The [peaceful prosperous] path requires a ‘strong peacemaker’ who goes out of their way to bring the country together, including reshaping the order in a way that most people agree is fair and works well.  There are few such cases in history.  We pray for them.”  Can America produce the kind of leadership that will help us avoid some of the historical patterns that Ray lays out?  A lot is riding on our answering yes to that question – perhaps the fate of the country.

To listen to my interview with Ray click here and for his video on his latest book click here. 

A Professional Bridge-Builder

I hope that you are doing great this Memorial Day with friends and family.

It’s a difficult time in America. We feel more divided than ever, with guns and abortion laws now top of mind. Imagine if your job was to bring people of different beliefs and backgrounds together every day to find common ground?

One of my favorite organizations is Braver Angels, a non-profit dedicated to building bridges between people of different parties. It started with a workshop of 10 Trump supporters and 11 Clinton supporters in South Lebanon, Ohio in December, 2016. The workshop was structured by co-founder Bill Doherty, who had decades of experience as a family therapist. Yes, the events are essentially like family therapy for our country.

Braver Angels’ Chief Storyteller is Monica Guzman, whom I interview on the podcast this week. Monica is one-of-a-kind. She grew up in New Hampshire before starting an award-winning community news and event site “The Evergrey” (‘things aren’t always black and white’) in Seattle. She is a self-described liberal but her parents voted for Trump twice. She brought dozens of Seattle progressives to Sherman County, Oregon to meet with dozens of Trump voters to see why they voted the way they did. That event was named: “Melting Mountains: An Urban-Rural Gathering.” Minds were opened on both sides. Some rural voters in attendance were motivated by things like health care costs and water rights.

Monica has written a new book, “I Never Thought of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times.” She argues that the antidote to our current sorting, othering and siloing are curiosity and real conversations.

“Secondary sources are never as good as primary sources. So why do we accept the answers [the media] gives us about who other people are and how they think?” Monica argues. She maintains that the only way to truly understand someone is by talking to them. “As conversations generate fuel, they also spin up something else: a connection. If two people are talking, they are in a relationship that has the potential to grow deeper. Always.”

As you’d imagine though, having a productive conversation is easier said than done. Monica has a wealth of experience in this and provides a ton of guidance in her book. In her view, quality conversations need time, attention, parity, containment, and embodiment. Containment – that it’s just you and the person – runs afoul of many of our modern interactions. It turns out that our social media comments are as much about the people looking at the conversation as they are the recipient. Private conversations often sound different than conversations for public consumption. Embodiment – ideally being fully present – requires, well, your physical body, which is something we often forego nowadays in the Zoom era.

Even if one is able to sit one-on-one with someone, conversations aren’t easy. Building traction and trust, avoiding assumptions, not trying to convince or win arguments, embracing complexity – each of these run against the grain of how most of us ‘talk’ to each other nowadays. Indeed, it may be why we all prefer to be sorted, where we simply interact with people we can make comfortable assumptions about politically. For Monica, if you engage thoroughly enough the goal is to have multiple “I never thought of it that way” type of moments perhaps in a given conversation.

I appreciate Monica’s perspective a great deal because she is literally walking the walk every day. It seems like a lot of work. But if enough of us become genuinely curious, it just might keep our fractured society whole. After all, what happens if we stop talking to each other, perhaps for fear that even talking to someone somehow legitimizes their point of view or that those with another perspective aren’t worth the time? The stakes are high. “We know what happens when the people we love don’t think we really see them; they go find someone who will. Someone who might exploit that basic need we all have to belong, to matter . . . Misinformation isn’t the product of a culture that doesn’t value truth. It’s the product of a culture in which we’ve grown too afraid to turn to each and hear it.”

For my interview with Monica click here.

Donate

Longshot

Hello, I hope all is great on your end.

Some big news this week – Zach’s book on the campaign comes out on Tuesday!

Chances are if you’re reading this, you were interested in or excited by my presidential campaign. The campaign would not have happened without Zach Graumann, my co-host whom I interview on the podcast this week on his new book “Longshot: How Political Nobodies Took Andrew Yang National – and the New Playbook that Let Us Built a Movement.” It’s his first book and it’s a joy to read.

Zach’s book is obviously personal to me, as it’s about my presidential campaign but also written by a close friend whom I went through a war with. It’s a wonderful book guaranteed to make you laugh and grimace and appreciate what it takes to build something that catches hold of the popular imagination using 21st century tools and media.

The book starts with Zach’s decision to join the campaign and goes on to catalogue our early struggles, how we found our footing, podcasts and social media, the birth of the Yang Gang, #MATH, planning rallies, making and prepping for the debates, wrangling with the media, campaigning in New Hampshire and Iowa and much more. Zach also distills the key decisions of the campaign with marketing principles around Identity Branding, the new Attention Economy, Authenticity and more.

Here’s a sample passage from Longshot:

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“We’re calling it . . . Yang Gang.”

Our five-person team was gathered in a standing circle in our high-ceilinged Midtown HQ in late September 2018, and I had just proudly announced the name of our new political army.

The responses were less than supportive.

“’Yang Gang’ sounds like ‘gang bang.’”

“Pretty sure people don’t wanna join a gang.”

“This is the worst idea you’ve ever had.”

I was undeterred. I raised my voice to be heard over their grumbling and continued. “When people voted for a Republican candidate in 2016, what did they say?”

Crickets.

“They said, ‘I’m voting for Ted Cruz,’ ‘I’m voting for John Kasich,’’ I answered.

More crickets. I kept going.

“But what did they say when they were voting for the Donald? They didn’t just say, ‘I’m voting for Trump.’ What’d they say?”

Blank, slightly skeptical looks all around.

Finally, Frawley came to my rescue.

“I’m MAGA,” muttered Frawley.

“Yes!” I jumped, excited that someone was at least pretending to follow along. “It was visceral. It was Part of you. It is something you identified with.”

“Yeah, but Yang Gang sounds stupid and childish and no one will like it,” Carly piped.

“Can’t we find something better?” asked Shinners as he rolled his eyes.

“I’m pretty sure Yang Gang is already a thing in Korea.” Said Frawley, looking at his phone.

No one on the staff was sold.

After some back and forth, I declared, “Well, this is only a semi-democracy.” “Yang Gang it is until you pick something better. You have one week. Otherwise . . . Yang Gang, baby!”

They didn’t come up with anything better, because Yang Gang was brilliant. We needed to differentiate to create our identity brand, and Yang Gang was a creative way to give a unique identity to our supporters and welcome them into something that felt like a community.

I can call Yang Gang brilliant because it wasn’t my idea. (I’m not always the best at generating ideas, but I am very good at seeing an idea’s potential and putting it into practice.) The name actually came from Instagram – someone posted #YangGang in the comments on one of our posts, and I immediately loved it. So catchy. It rhymed, implied community, and invoked a sense of identity. It was perfect. Maybe it wasn’t the best name for supporters of a serious presidential contender, per se, but it was perfect for us.

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Zach wrote the book that people wanted to read in a way that I could not. I love this book and highly recommend it for you or anyone in your life who was #YangGang. You can pick up your copy here and listen to the podcast convo with Zach here.

My speech at Columbia

I was invited to give a commencement address at Columbia Law School, from which I graduated in 1999, on Monday. I tried to make it helpful. I've included my remarks below - hope you enjoy them.

Columbia Law Graduation Speech, May 16th, 2022

Hello everyone, it’s a pleasure to be here addressing you today. As you know, I graduated from Columbia 23 years ago. There are graduations one attends that aren’t that big a deal. I’ve now been to a pre-k graduation for example. But this one is meaningful.

I’m told that one of the reasons I’m here today is based on student voting, so thank you for that. It’s the first election I’ve won.

You all are among the most talented intellectual products that our country has. Among the people I graduated from law school with, some became advisors to the President, the good one. Others became professors and entrepreneurs. Some others became layabouts, but let’s not mind them.

I’ve been reflecting on where I was when I was in your shoes. After I graduated I spent the summer studying for the bar, which you all will pass, and joined a law firm here in New York, Davis Polk and Wardwell. I practiced for 5 months and left to start a dot-com that flopped. It was the year 2000. I went from law firm associate to failed entrepreneur in record time.

I worked for another startup that ran out of money. And another one after that. On the side, I started throwing parties and taught test prep. This is an unusual path; you could call it unconventional and even unwise. My parents told their friends I was still a lawyer for years. I didn’t socialize much with my peers from law school during this time because I was self-conscious about the fact that I wasn’t making much money.

Years later, I would become CEO of that test prep company, which grew to be #1 in the country and was bought by a public company when I was 34. Around this time my parents started being proud of me again. I then spent 6 years training young entrepreneurs as part of a non-profit that I’d founded called Venture for America, which won me a couple of awards from the Obama White House. I got to introduce Evelyn to the President, which made my in-laws happy for about a week.

But we all know I’m not here today because I’m the former CEO of Manhattan Prep or of Venture for America. I’m here primarily because I ran for President of the United States. And if you were to track down my classmates from Columbia they would tell you that I was one of the last people they’d imagine doing something political. I was a good student but I wasn’t very social or particularly altruistic.

I ran for President because, after Trump won, I thought “Wow, things are not going well, and I should do something to help.” Very few people early on thought my presidential run was a good idea. But we ground it out until we found an audience, raised $40 million from over 400,000 Americans – and I sense that at least a few of you were among that number, so thank you - made it to 7 debate stages, mainstreamed Universal Basic Income and cash relief as a policy solution, and helped expand what people think of as possible in politics.

I was also the first Asian American man to run for President as a Democrat. Asian Americans are the most underrepresented group in the country in elected office, for reasons that some of you understand, and to the extent that I can help change that I’d be very proud. If you’re Asian, I know what your first thought was when you heard about my campaign, “Please let him not be terrible.” For everyone else, you probably thought, “Huh, that’s different.”

So that’s why I’m here speaking to you all today. Not my 5 months in the law or my startup career. And the question is, what wisdom can one take from someone who has made objectively unwise career decisions repeatedly in his career?

I know where you’re coming from. Law school graduates tend very strongly to be institutionalists. You’ve spent 3 years learning legal arguments and a degree of intellectual discipline. You are trained to be experts in rules, and rules require structures and institutions to support them. You will be recruited by high-resource firms and organizations that need smart people who can work hard. And yes, you also have certain expectations of your own careers and advancement and opportunities.

And yet, this is an era of institutional struggle. We can see it and feel it around us every day. For some of you, this is daunting and you look forward to getting into an environment where things make sense as long as you work hard and produce results. For others of you, you sense opportunities but don’t quite know how to pursue them. And at the same time, you each have your own personal lives to figure out, as you come to a point when your life decisions begin to have import and weight.

My advice to you is threefold. First, ride this new Columbia Law degree for all its worth. What does that mean? Now that you have a Columbia Law degree, people will assume that you’re smart. That means, to truly maximize the value of this degree, you have to do some things that make people question whether you know what you’re doing. Think about it: if you just did smart things from now on, then what is the point of this degree? You could have done smart things without the degree. Now that you have it, you have to make use of it. Think of it as having a “Get out of Jail free” card for the rest of your career.

Now, some parents here are groaning at this – you thought those days were over. Well, my Mom is here to tell you, those days are never over. They go on forever. But if your child plays it right, they too can be the 25th most well-regarded political figure in all the land.

Second, find a problem that you can work on for years and feel good about dedicating your time to. It could be a market-based problem. It could be trying to improve treatment for a particular group. Right now, I’m pursuing 2 related problems: alleviating poverty and reforming our democracy. These are very big projects that I can work on for years and feel good about.

Right now, you might not know what drives or animates you. That’s fine. When I was your age, the problem I was most consumed with was getting a date. I never did solve that problem until 7 years later when I met Evelyn. You can just do good work on what is in front of you while you wait, but keep an eye on what you find yourself reading about and caring about. One of the enormous virtues of your new Columbia Law degree is that, if you show up on someone’s doorstep saying, “I want to work with you to help solve the problem you’re working on” they will be THRILLED to accept your help. And I can say with total confidence that if it’s a significant problem, someone is working on it right now. Indeed, perhaps the greatest challenge that lies ahead is actually figuring out what you care about, because this process typically takes years and evolves over time, and the market will try to hide it from you, not show it to you. So lie in wait for it. Stay the person who cares about important problems and can show up on someone’s doorstep and say, “I’m here to help.”

And that leaves me with the highest ambition – have confidence that you can do what you want and make the market follow you. What do I mean? Most all of you were recruited by firms with big budgets as second-years and are going off to work for them after graduation. That’s fine. I did it too. That is the market for people like you. But eventually, you may find yourself in position where you want to do something but the market doesn’t exist yet. Know that if you work hard, you can create that market for yourself. When I ran for President, no one knew whether there was a demand for a candidate running on an idea like Universal Basic Income. I thought it existed, but I needed to work hard to find out. It took time. Now, I’m looking to do the same for a new independent approach to politics and measures like ranked choice voting. There will be times in your career where you’ll do what the market wants you to do, and there are times when you’re going to have to stand up and go against it. But if you push in a certain direction that you care deeply about and work hard enough, the market will follow you. It will spring up around you. People will reach out to help you. It’s the best feeling in the world when it happens. You form lifelong relationships. And the more of you who have that feeling, the better off our world will be.

What’s funny is that this market I’m describing is really the people around you right now. You’ll each receive a call or message from a classmate at some point in the future saying, “Hey, I’m going to run for office” or “I’m going to start this new initiative.” When you get that message, do what you can to help. We all have a role to play. If you’re on the inside of an organization, lend a hand, gather some people together, and invest some resources. We don’t all have to quit our jobs, but we do have to support the person who is trying to discover if good people care enough to move us forward.

So those are the three guideposts I have for you – make the most of your degree by testing people’s belief that you know what you’re doing, find a problem to solve that’s significant enough that you’ll care about solving it each day, and have confidence that if you do what you want and work hard at it, the market will follow you, not the other way around.

It’s no exaggeration to say that the future of civilization may rest on the choices you all make. Find that voice inside you, apply yourself with the same energy you have to reaching your goals thus far, and I have no doubt that you’ll do great.

Congratulations Columbia Law School Class of ’22! Let’s do all we can with what we’ve been given and build a future we’ll be proud to pass on.

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The Power of Crisis

When I was running for President, people would occasionally ask me questions about foreign policy. I confess, my natural focus tends to be more domestic, as I think we have plenty of problems of our own to wrestle with that will make accomplishing our goals abroad harder and harder unless we overcome them.

One of the people I turned to for guidance on foreign affairs was Ian Bremmer. This week on the podcast I interview Ian, one of the world’s foremost experts on geopolitics as the President of the Eurasia Group and GZero.

GZero refers to an idea Ian proposed 10 years ago, which is that there used to be 7 Major Democracies – the G-7 – that essentially ran the world. The G-7 consists of the U.S., Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the UK with the EU as a ‘non-enumerated member.’ Ian posited that as the West’s dominance declined, no one country or group could project a unified global agenda, and that we were living in a GZero world of different countries pushing different interests. The relative rise of China, India, Russia, Brazil and other emerging powers led to a more fragmented world order.

Ian’s new book, “The Power of Crisis: How Three Threats – And Our Response –Will Change the World” catalogues some of the biggest problems facing us all and how different countries could collaborate to combat them. What are the three threats that Ian is most concerned about? Pandemics, climate change, and disruptive technology, including AI.

With each of them, Ian suggests international collaboration. COVAX is a global initiative to ensure access to Covid vaccines in developing countries led by the World Health Organization among others. The Green Marshall Plan is an initiative proposed by the G-7 last year to help developing countries transition to sustainability. And the World Data Organization would create rules of the road for AI and use of consumer data.

Ian reserves some of his strongest language for tech and AI: “We’ll turn to the greatest threat that faces our species: the unchecked introduction of profoundly disruptive technologies . . .We’re inventing new tools, new toys, and new weapons that are changing our lives and societies faster than we can track, study, and understand their effect on us . . . lethal autonomous drones, cyberwarfare, biotechnology, and artificial intelligence (AI) are no longer the stuff of science fiction . . . These technologies are shifting the relationship between the citizen and the state—and between us and our fellow humans—in ways difficult to predict. In the process, they’re changing what it means to be human.”

In our conversation, Ian said, “Look, if one country announces that it has successfully developed quantum computers, it could invite a pre-emptive attack.” He writes, “If governments don’t keep cyberweapons out of the hands of unstable states and terrorists, the economy and security damage they inflict could be unprecedented. If governments don’t share data on developments in quantum computing, one government will eventually gain the power to defeat encryption on a global scale, rendering every other country defenseless. Even the threat of such a breakthrough could trigger World War III, which would threaten the survival of the human race. That’s why this moment is much more dangerous than the 1930s. A next world war will be fought with weapons far more destructive than tanks and fighter planes—or even atomic bombs—and the conflict won’t be limited to ‘theaters of war.’ It will be universal.”

Ian is constructive but a realist. His book opens with the importance of improving America’s politics. “Domestic politics inside the United States, still the world’s sole superpower, is broken.” Indeed, Ian’s book opens with a passage called ‘Uncivil War.’ He writes: “Americans no longer look abroad for their most dangerous enemies. They find them across state lines, across the street, across the hall. They see members of the other political party, neighbors, and even relatives as hateful, ignorant enemies who must be checked . . . It’s difficult for citizens of other countries and their governments to see the United States as a source of solutions to global problems when tens of millions of Americans consider tens of millions of other Americans to be violent radicals or irredeemable fascists.”

Yet, he observes in our interview, we are seeing Finland and Sweden join NATO as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which would have been fairly unthinkable not that long ago. Sometimes a crisis can bring people together quickly. That is Ian’s hope; that we make the most of these crises by coming together and getting ahead of them.

Still, for us the work starts at home. The moral of the story may be that if we want to tackle the world’s most pressing problems, we need to get our own house in order first. Let’s do all we can to make it happen; the world needs us to succeed.

For my interview with Ian, click here. You can also click here for my talk on the Forward Tour on how we can overcome polarization.

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The Unmooring of America

Why does it feel like Americans have become unmoored?  Decades-old laws are undone, extremes dominate, comedians get attacked onstage, and Americans are unable to agree on whether a President was rightfully elected or not.  

Jonathan Haidt wrote an excellent piece for the Atlantic “Why Americans Have Lost Their Minds,” which attributed much of the problem to social media. “Social scientists have identified at least three major forces that collectively bind together successful democracies: social capital (extensive social networks with high levels of trust), strong institutions, and shared stories. Social media has weakened all three.” 

Haidt calls it the ‘fragmentation of everything’ as “Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and a few other large platforms unwittingly dissolved the mortar of trust, belief in institutions, and shared stories that had held a large and diverse secular democracy together.” 

Haidt identifies ‘extensive social networks with high levels of trust.’  What had been the mortar that held towns and communities together? One part of it was the local paper.  People reading about high school sports or the bridge needing repair or the local charity drive were sharing an experience and perspective.   

At the same time that social media was rising, local news was dying.  More than two thousand local newspapers went out of business between 2005 and 2020 – over thirteen hundred towns and counties now have no local news source at all.  We talk a lot about journalists in American life but the reality is that thirty thousand rank-and-file reporters lost their jobs between 2008 and 2019, and the local reporter is increasingly an endangered species.  

Local papers have been tied to higher turnout in local elections, more candidates running, quality of governance and even lower cost of municipal bonds.  Said a former city council person to me in a medium-sized town, “I remember when we had city council meetings. Then, because of budget cuts, the reporter stopped coming.  You could sense a change immediately.  People’s professionalism slipped. We were more likely to cut corners.  We got less done or more done with less care.” 

Even more fundamentally, it’s hard to have an identity tied to your local community if your town doesn’t share stories.    

Recognizing the magnitude of the problem, some people are trying to fix it.  Elizabeth Green started Chalkbeat, a non-profit periodical to cover local educational issues. Steve Waldman co-founded Report for America, another non-profit to fund young journalists. 

Tara McGowan, whom I interviewed on the podcast this week has a different approach.  Tara started out as a journalist for CBS on 60 Minutes.  She worked in Democratic politics for years on digital strategy.  At some point she became deeply concerned about both local news deserts and misinformation.  

So she founded Courier Newsroom in 2019.  Courier operates digital local newspapers in Iowa, Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Wisconsin and other locations.  Courier is a left-leaning civic journalism company that delivers political information around fact-based articles like “21 spots to go on a daytrip.” 

Says Tara, “Disinformation is most dangerous in a vacuum . . . if we don’t protect democracy nothing else matters, every business’s interest is tied to this, every philanthropist’s interest is tied to this - if you’re not addressing the information ecosystem problem and incentive structure in this country, you’re not addressing any of those problems [like climate change] in a meaningful way.”

Some could take issue with the fact that a publisher like Courier with an express political bent is furnishing local news. As you’d imagine, propagandists from the right have been fast and active in filling the local news vacuum.  For example, in 2020, 80 local news sites in California were identified as a “pay-for-play” propaganda network tied to Republican operatives and corporate P.R. firms who wanted to place favorable stories.  Sinclair is often regarded as a right-leaning purveyor of local news. The void will be filled by those with the most to gain.  

In my mind, we should see local journalism as a public good that is funded philanthropically or via public-private partnerships.  A number of representatives have proposed the bi-partisan Local Journalism Sustainability Act, which would help give local newspapers tax credits and a fighting chance.  As usual given the dysfunction in Washington, the bill’s prospects are dim.  

How do we give Americans a sense of cohesion and stability again?  It’s going to be tough to get the country on the same page again.  It certainly makes sense to build from the ground up, and start with your hometown.  

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