senior reporter with The Root,

and I'm here with 2020 presidential candidate, Andrew Yang.

- Hey man, thanks for having me, it's great to be here.

- Right on, right on.

I promise, I will be really kind to you.

- Oh good, you know, I got that vibe from you.

- Listen, I wanna talk to you

about the social media support that you've been getting.

We see hashtags like secure the bag and Yang Gang,

so tell us, who are the members of the Yang Gang?

- So I've been running for president for more than a year,

and the name Yang Gang bubbled up a long time ago,

and so we've had the Yang Gang

as like our official, you know, campaign headquarters

for a while, but then what you're talking about

is I became something of a social media phenomenon

over the last six weeks or so.

You know, like, the enthusiasm, I have to say,

when I go to college campuses,

it seems like it tends to skew young,

and very internet-y, like they make a lot of memes.

The energy at our rallies is sky high,

where we just had a rally of 3000 people

at San Francisco and then 1,000 in Chicago.

We were joking, it's like man,

we can plant the flag in a lot of places,

and apparently like hundreds,

maybe thousands of people come out.

So we're gonna test that out.

I'm doing a national tour starting in mid April.

But when you see the energy in person,

then it makes you very excited

about all the enthusiasm online,

because it's translating into the real world.

It's not just people making memes,

it's actually people who wanna

come out and make real change.

- You talked about how capitalism

doesn't center real people and you've called

for a more human-centered capitalism.

What exactly does that mean?

- Capitalism right now, it's become

this winner take all economy, particularly in the US.

You have this crony capitalism, and like,

you know, really wealthy interests just pulling the strings,

and then you talk about competition,

and a lot of the biggest industries

are getting much less competitive.

Like, you see consolidation in the big tech companies,

you see consolidation in

the big banks and financial companies.

So we need to start using different measurements

to try to drive our economy and society forward,

where if you just lose capital efficiency,

we're gonna lose more and more

to software, robots, AI, and machines.

So we should, instead of using GDP and capital efficiency,

we should be using things like

how our kids are doing, our own mental health

and freedom from substance abuse,

average income and affordability, clean air and clean water,

and then use those as the actual

measurements of economic progress.

- Everything that you're saying

sounds like you're centering people,

which to me seems like the antithesis of capitalism itself,

and it sounds like you are calling

for a reform to capitalism.

- We need to evolve as fast as possible,

because if you just rely upon capital efficiency,

and the example I used in a lot of context is look,

there are three and a half million Americans

who drive trucks for a living.

So in 10 years, if you have

trucks that can drive themselves,

it doesn't matter if you're a really hardworking,

attentive truck driver or a shoddy one.

The robots gonna beat both of you, you know what I mean?

It's not dependent upon your own individual characteristics.

So if we use who can drive the truck better,

everyone loses, you know?

And so we need to have better measurements

than that as fast as possible.

I think of it evolving to the next stage of our economy,

but I 100% agree that if you just use capital efficiency

as a measuring stick, we're all gonna lose.

- One of your main goals is to implement

what you've called a universal basic income.

- The freedom dividend.

- [Terrell] Yes, there you go, the freedom dividend.

You talk about the humanity of just the GDP.

- Yes. - Right.

So just tell us exactly what that entails.

- Well, so, GDP is something we made up

almost 100 years ago during the Great Depression,

and I'd like to talk about my wife.

My wife's at home with our two boys,

one of whom is autistic,

and her work every day counts as zero on GDP.

So GDP is not measuring the right things.

So if we were to measure how our kids are doing

and how we're doing, like how we're thriving or not thriving

that's actually the measurement

for our economy that we need to

move towards as fast as possible.

And the great thing is, as president,

when I'm in the White House in 2021,

all I have to do is just walk down the street

to the Bureau of Labor Statistics and say

hey guys, GDP, almost 100 years old, kind of useless.

And so we're gonna update it to things

like how our kids are doing, how our environment is doing,

how we're doing, like whether we're mentally healthy,

because there's a mental health crisis in this country.

- You make that sound a lot easier

than what many people think it actually will be.

- Well, taking the measurements is pretty easy,

but then changing the way our economy

functions is obviously a little trickier.

- Which is the point, right?

So how do you plan on working with congress

in order to carry that out?

Because what you're saying immediately

is gonna pop up in people's mind like you're a socialist!

And you wanna give people free stuff!

Then you're gonna scare the hell out of people.

- You know, what I'm happy to say

is that millions of Americans are waking up

to the reality that we can't use

these twentieth century frameworks

for problems of 2020 and beyond.

It's not like people in, you know, 1914

when they're drawing this stuff up

were like artificial intelligence,

like self driving vehicles.

They didn't see a lot of this stuff coming.

One thing I'm happy to say is that as president,

I actually don't need congress's approval

to change the statistics, like that's not

a congressional thing, that's like

an agency thing, a branch.

You literally can just walk down the street

and say hey guys, let's use some new stats.

- How come no one else has done that?

- Well, it's because we've been focused on the wrong things.

If you look at the big measurements

that we're using for the economy,

it's GDP, which is like near a record high,

stock market growth, which doesn't affect

the bottom 80% of Americans, for the most part,

and then headline on employment rate,

which even though it looks good right now,

there are millions of Americans

that have just dropped out of the workforce,

including one of out five prime working age American men.

So they just have the wrong measurements,

and as someone who's done a few things

that required you to actually see where you're going,

like, if you have the wrong measurements, you're doomed.

So I can't speak to why we've been

hanging on to this GDP measurement for a hundred years,

even though the inventor of GDP

even said this is a terrible measurement

for national wellbeing, we should never use it as that.

- So we need to completely get rid of that,

and replace it with something that deals more

with how human beings-- - How we're doing, right.

And one of the things I said to Breakfast Club

in that interview was that

the median African American net worth

is projected to be zero by 2053,

and now