we are with a presidential candidate who's also a big fan of blockchain

Andrew Yang. Andrew welcome to the show it's great to have you on. Thank you for

having me both of you it's a pleasure to be here.

Fantastic. Thank you for joining us. So I am joining from my home, I was joking with the guys its my kid's

room. Even presidential candidates have to hide from their family sometimes.

Don't we all. I'm hiding behind a green screen here. I'm just glad I have a family to hide from. True!

So I think it's great to have you on the show really you know thank

you so much for taking the time out I know you're a busy guy you're out you've

got a lot of things to do to raise awareness of your your presidential

candidacy and generating all that interest and you know I think for Yuri

and I we just wanted to have a chance to talk with you and to help

you raise a bit of awareness around your campaign and kind of get to know a

little bit about what you're doing of course from our perspective we'd love to

hear a lot more about your interests in your your view on blockchain and we've

got some questions we've put together for you, to just you know, to have

an open discussion and just kind of hear where it's all going to go and

what you see is happening. Well thank you for that and thank you for sensing that

we're incredibly aligned where my vision of the economy is very consistent with

the people who are in the cryptocurrency community and are working on blockchain

advancements where we need to move towards a more decentralized system for

sure that's more transparent and blockchain you know it's like many other

technologies where it's going to have its drawbacks at various times but the

long-term potential is staggering. And really the reason I fell

into so many friends in the community is that I found that approximately

99% of people in the blockchain community are pro Universal Basic Income

which as you may know is the central pillar of my campaign. Yes. So I arrived

at that through the reality that we are automating away millions of American

jobs we've already automated away four

million manufacturing jobs leading to Donald Trump's election in 2016 and now

we need to start evolving and to me moving toward the blockchain is part of

that evolution so one of the things we're looking at right now is we could

potentially enable voting on the blockchain in a way that would free

people up from these lines at poll stations and all these systems that

everyone's like not even sure if they're getting attacked by the Russians and the

rest of it. I was just at a meeting of people who are looking to

distribute universal basic income on the blockchain which I think is where it

will go eventually I'm also for the implementation of a national digital

currency to supplement the dollar because there are many many things that

we could do that the dollar cannot do so this campaign really and one of the

jokes I tell is that people sometimes call me a futurist but I believe I'm a

present-ist it's just that most of the politicians are stuck in the past

because that's just their experience. For sure. For me I've been a serial

entrepreneur I've worked in technology for about 20 years and I know what's

possible so with people like you hopefully we can spread that word to

people around the country. So its an interesting point

that you made least a couple of comments and in this that I wanted to pick up on one

was the transparency which as you probably know with cryptocurrency when

you get into privacy coins it creates some interesting dilemmas especially for

the IRS and for tax. The other thing that I'm wondering about so I'm just gonna

ask you these two things together is that is that you know I'm based in

London by the way Yuri's based in Boston. So as an outsider that spent most of my

last two years in the crypto world as an adviser to other companies what I've

seen is a complete absence of the U.S. being really present

mostly because of regulation because of the SEC and I'm just wondering if you

have any particular views on how we can open up the potential channels for

allowing the U.S. to really thrive in a cryptocurrency community or a crypto

community a blockchain community when there's been so much that's restricted

America while we've seen China and Korea and Japan and India and

some parts of Europe just thrive, Russia, thriving because you know

technology and people have been able to really get into it and I've seen the

U.S. just kind of fall behind on some respects. Do you have any you know

thoughts on privacy and its impact on tax and also how we can open up the

channels to really open up the doors for more innovation in crypto and

blockchain for the U.S? You know I think the second point is so key where people

think of America is like the hotbed of innovation and technology when in

reality the American, certainly the political system, is quite backward and

retrograde and incredibly bureaucratic and you can see it with the blockchain

and other crypto currencies where the U.S. is essentially throwing its hands

up and been like you know don't really have an approach here and so as a result

certainly there are many people in America who are making use of crypto

currencies but it's a it's not as supported and there's a lot more

confusion in the u.s. because the place is not as forward-looking. So I hope to

be able to change that I mean as President I believe I can start to move

America forward and one of one of the other jokes I tell is that the opposite

of Donald Trump is an Asian man who likes...his goal is to freeze time and

turn the clock backwards and we need to accelerate time and move it forwards and

that includes certainly having a much more intelligent approach to the

blockchain and other technologies that would really so I think the other thing

that's going on in the U.S. that's very painful to admit is that there's just a

lot of rent-seeking in the US and the truth is if you had the blockchain and

other technology as fully revved up then you would end up disintermediating

accounting firms and law firms and financial institutions

and those substitutions really control much of the American system where no one

wants to let anything out that's going to end up disrupting their revenue streams

Interesting. Yuri over to you. So I...you're one of the few presidential

candidates who are accepting crypto currencies on on your site which i think

is amazing and you yourself have mentioned on your website that

campaign donors have to register and also not to share your wallet address so

that people can't make untraceable donations. I'd like to hear your thoughts

on how this could eventually maybe affect politics in the future

because a lot of people who...A lot of people believe that when they hear Bitcoin or

blockchain or crypto currencies they think of launderers, your money

launderers drug dealers and then dark money so how would you approach this

idea of getting cryptocurrencies involved without that dark money aspect?

Yeah and hopefully like even my campaign can be an example of this where if it's

simply an exchange of value there's nothing sinister about it and certainly

for us I joke that you could donate chickens to my campaign as long as I

knew that it was you and like you know chickens are worth a certain amount. So you can't just

anonymously donate Ether or a Bitcoin to our campaign from SEC rulings

like you have to tell us who you are and if we were to get something anonymous

then unfortunately we couldn't make use of it so that would sort of defeat the

purpose but hopefully my campaign can shine a light on the fact that this is a

great way to exchange value and transfer value to another party and that

you know my campaigns are already collected thousands of dollars and

cryptocurrency donations and we hope that continues

it's something you know I've always want to demonstrate I'm very very

aligned with the values of the community and so hopefully like you said like we

can disabuse people of the notions that like anything to do with cryptocurrency

means you're you know a drug dealer or something. So you know the fact that you

have the you know Bitcoin mentioned on your website

is interesting because one of the things that we've seen running a YouTube show

having website and all the rest is because of the word cryptocurrency or

Bitcoin anywhere through any of our channels

we can't advertise anything and I'm wondering do you have the same problems

having a website that has we accept Bitcoin causing you any problems with

advertising and generally for all the rest of us, if you're not having any

problems, if for the rest of us who are struggling to just run any form of

advertising on anything that we do what's your thought on that about how

much we're being blocked from talking about what we're doing and how we're

educating people in crypto or blockchain? Well that's really interesting I didn't

realize that because we haven't had those problems and it could be because

we have one page that says Bitcoin and we have like hundreds of... Could be. But those

restrictions are very interesting there are you know, I'm scratching my

head thinking like why those restrictions exist that you know like I

can imagine some rationale I'm sure that whatever is being done is overly broad.

Yeah I did a facebook live video today. It was less than five minutes

long and it was a quick explainer video for people to just understand how does

mining work why it's not a Ponzi scheme and what the mechanisms are for using

computers to mine and to verify transactions like the way a bank does.

That was it. Our marketing team attempted to go ahead and just you know promote it

on Facebook to make it more widely seen. Blocked. Not allowed. We have not been

able to advertise anything on our channels across Twitter, Instagram

Facebook, YouTube. Same companies again and again here it's Facebook its

Twitter its Google and I'm just wondering you

know at what point do we kind of open this up a little bit so that you know we

have to draw a line somewhere but you know it just seems to me that...

I mean like one that surprises me but two it shows just how much clout and

distribution power is concentrating in the hands of a handful of platforms. Yes.

And in a way what it does it highlights the rationale for the blockchain and Bitcoin and other

cryptocurrencies to begin with which is that you're trying to like create a more

decentralized you know system that doesn't rely upon like five

institutions or one institution or one government or whatever it is.

That's right. ...to approve. So in a way this is like you know proof positive of the

rationale for the importance of your work it's unfortunate that we

unfortunately are beholden to a handful of tech platforms to get the word out

and certainly as the presidential candidate I mean I've got a social media

team and we're like you know Instagram living and the rest of it so I get it

and if you're not on these platforms and it's like you don't exist so you know so

entrepreneurs out there in a way what we need is we need some more decentralized

social media platforms though I don't know how you do that because of the fact

that ubiquity in that context obviously ends up driving utility. There's

definitely a number of them on the way I've come across a few of them myself

and there's a range of things that they're trying to do to create a

decentralized environment for social media and they run into similar problems

around mostly around privacy because they don't want to hold the data but in

order for their systems to actually be smart enough for provisioning the

data they run into problems of do we hold the data or do we allow the users

to control the data and it's an interesting problem because you know

we've seen what the Cambridge Analytics problem did to Facebook and so

what I see is a lot of these blockchain projects that don't want to go down that

path and yet are confronted with sometimes they need some of the data and

they're trying to figure out what the line is where the balance is so they're

not seen is doing exactly what nobody wants. Thats so interesting.

I want to tell you guys a joke that I told at this blockchain event that I spoke at earlier this week

Which was someone asked the question why is Bitcoin worth $7,000? And then the response was why is

$7,000 worth $7,000? But you know it's because what you're describing

really is you know and it took me a little while to get it it took me a

little while to understand the ethos of what was possible and what the community

is driving towards but I'm convinced that we need to move in that direction

as fast as possible that we need to replace this mindset of resource

scarcity that is taking over certainly the U.S. in a very dark way and replace it

with a mindset of abundance and future orientation and and what is still

possible and that the fact that you know we can build a very different kind of

society very quickly but we need to get our acts together and this

is one of the things I told that Bitcoin folks to so I'm running for president

you know and some people probably many of the people listening to this right

now well they think themselves wow this guy seems sort of interesting but the

but is there's no way he can win. Something along those lines.

We've heard that before haven't we? Yes so I'm heading to

Iowa for the 8th time next week and what I boil it down to for people is like I'm an

Asian guy and Asians are really good at tests. And so it so the question is like