Would love to take advantage of the fact it is a relatively small group of us to take questions and get to know and have a sense for what brought you here. Despite you are here in iowa, and here politics is a combination of sporting events and Community Gathering and education all in one. I have been joking that iowans are a special breed because this is one of the only places where democracy still functions the way it is intended. Someone help him . That is iowa nice. Lugging that thing they used to send teams. Now it is like one person. It is true, a sign of the times. Here in iowa, you all are very very lucky and privileged and , accustomed to being a place where democracy works as the way that it is intended. Your vote matters where im not other americans votes do not matter. They look up and see the point pipes clogged with Corporate Cash and lobbyists. Most americans say there is not much i can do about that. I am not sure it will make a difference. Here in iowa, you can flush the pipes. It is an amazing power you have. It is the envy of a lot of the rest of the country. You are little bit accustomed to it. You are like, i dont know about that yang fellow. Ill limit him the one time. You are used to having people in your living room. You see us in a way back and hopefully gives you better insight. What makes me tick is the fact that i see what lies ahead not just here in iowa, but around the country, and i felt compelled to do something about it. How did i arrive at that . My parents im going to go down to memory lane. Re memory lane. My parents immigrated and met in grad school at berkeley in california. My father is a physicist. Gegenerated 69 patents for and ibm. My mom got a masters in massachusetts, so i was a very , very nerdy kid. When i was growing up, i thought everyones dad had a phd. What is your dads phd. I learned the hard way. What did i say wrong . I grew up a very nerdy kid in upstate new york with a older brother. We were told get good grades, do well in school, that was the path to success. So i did my best to follow that advice and went to college in economics. , studied didnt know what to do so i went to law school, became a corporate attorney for five months. Thought that was a really crummy job. I know that sounds lofty like what i tried to explain to people is at least the legal job i took, the main focus was trying to imagine what would go wrong. Imagine going into an office and think of the worst thing that could happen so you could contract against them. Why am i in this office thinking about all the worst things that could happen . I should be trying to do something positive and build something. So i left that job to start a business. How many of you have started a business or a club or mailing list or anything under the sun . Raise your hand if you started something. If you started anything, you know two things. It is harder than anyone tells you and when someone asks how it is it going you say it is going , great. There is only one answer. If you say it is not going great, they dont want to join that club. Or to buy from you. You are always like, it is going great. My business went great until it failed. My parents were telling people i was still a productive lawyer because asian. It was an easier story. So business had crashed, i owed 100 school loans, about six figures because it is not like that disappeared. You go to law school, the loans are still there. I had been so invigorated that i was trying to start a company even though i failed. I said i have to try and get better at this. One question is how do you get better if you have just failed . So to me, i said i should try to find someone better than me at this and become that persons sidekick. Ive found an entrepreneur who had more experience than me and became his psychic for four years and then i became the head of another company, grew to be number one in the United States and was bought by another company in 2009. How many of you were here in in 2009, 10 iowa years ago . I cant believe the financial crisis was 10 years ago. Im sure because it was a hard time in this part of iowa because it was a hard time in most of the country, people were losing their homes all over the place. I thought i had some insight why it crashed. It was because all of these wannabes whiz kids i had gone to wall street to create these Financial Instruments that crashed the economy. So i said ok, that is terrible. We have to have Something Better for people to do than that. I quit my job and started a nonprofit with the goal of helping young people start businesses in detroit, st. Louis, cleveland, arming him, Birmingham Baltimore and other , cities around the country. As someone who had started a business and failed i thought it , is way too much to ask to move to a new city and start a business. That would never work. But i felt it would work is to send them or train them in a new city not to start a business, but to work at a business that was just getting its legs under it. And if they could work at that business a couple of years, they would grow the way i had grown. When i was a psychic or apprentice, i learned a ton. Essentially the vision was to try to get everyone the chance to learn under the wing of a more experienced company builder, or entrepreneur. ,so i quit my job to start this organization, venture for america. Is there a kid here . Yay. I am a parent as well. Ive got two boys, seven and four. When i hear a kid crying, i have the same thought every parent here does which is, is that mine . [laughter] mr. Yang in this case im like, no, its not. So i quit my job to start this nonprofit venture. How many of you have worked in a nonprofit in some context . So you have a sense as to what that looks like too. So i quit my job to start this nonprofit, and i started calling rich friends and asking them, do you love america . And then the smart among them said, what does it mean if i say yes to this answer . And then i said at least 10,000. And then 12 of them said i love america for 10,000. So i raised a couple put some of hundred thousand, my own money in and we launch this nonprofit that grew and grew to the millions, helped create several thousand jobs in 15 cities around the country. Detroit, st. Louis, etc. So much that i was honored by the Obama Administration as a champion of change. And i got to bring my wife to meet the president. So my inlaws are very excited about me for a week. Look at these pictures of our daughter with the president. My main story about president obama was he has a very large hands. You shake his hands, and his hand like envelopes you. Oh, i thought i had a normal sized hand. This is what i did for seven years. Most people think of me as a business guy. I have actually been a nonprofit guy for the last seven years. I grew up in upstate new york, went to school in new england, i had never been to ohio in and louisiana and alabama and missouri and all these places that venture for america brought me. And during those seven years, i was blown away by the gulf between different parts of this country in terms of the way the economy has evolved. Where if you fly between michigan and manhattan or st. Louis in san francisco, you feel like you are traversing decades rather than time zones, sometimes. But i was still surprised when donald trump became our president in 2016. Some of you im sure were less surprised than i was because you saw many of your friends and neighbors and family members, who were very excited about Donald Trumps candidacy. Being a numbers person and also looking you are shaking your head, you are not happy about it. We are in an environment, i imagine the majority of you reacted how did you all react when donald trump won . Cried. Mr. Yang tears, shock, disappointment. Outside of philadelphia we , used to go to Atlantic City and he destroyed that town. Mr. Yang he left a path of destruction. It is exactly the same thing. Mr. Yang yeah. Doesnt change. Mr. Yang and to me, the giant lesson, the red flag was that tens of millions of our fellow americans were so fed up with the system and business as usual that they decided to take a bet on the narcissist reality tv star. They said it cannot get worse than this current set of institutions that is not actually solving problems. Im going to take a bet on this guy. I dont think most americans had any illusions. You know donald trump wasnt , really like putting on a different type of show. I mean like we kind of knew what we were getting. I obviously did not vote for him. I was a bernie guy in 2016. But still donald trump won. And so i said ok, stop the press. I had been getting medals and awards and accolades for helping to create thousands of jobs around the country, and i have had a sinking feeling that my work is like pouring water into a bathtub that has a giant hole in the bottom. I have felt that honestly for months before donald trump wins. And then donald trump wins and im like, holy cow, this is actually heading in the other direction much faster than even i had thought. And i started digging into the numbers. If you were to turn on cable news and ask why donald trump won, what is the explanation we are getting offered by the journalism and cable news channels . Racism. Russia. Mr. Yang facebook. Fbi. Hillary clinton. Dnc. Electoral college. Hillary again. So these other reasons we are being offered by the press. But when i dug into the numbers, i found a very, very clear factor that, to me, drove Donald Trumps victory including his victory here in iowa by eight points. The reason why donald trump won is that we automated away 4 Million Manufacturing jobs in michigan, ohio, pennsylvania, wisconsin, missouri, and 40,000 right here in iowa. There is a Straight Line up between the adoption of Industrial Automation in a voting area and the movement to trump. When a factory closes or a plant closes or cuts back in a town, blue goes to red in the community. You see not just a plant dry up, but what dries up as well . The shopping centers, the property taxes, the entire Community Starts to go into a downward spiral. And then blue goes to red. So this has happened here in iowa and in all of the other swing states that donald trump needed to win and did win. And unfortunately, what we did to the manufacturing jobs is now just picking up speed. How many of you have noticed Stores Closing around where you live here in this part of iowa . Or wherever some of you are from out of town. Why are so many of your Stores Closing . Amazon. Mr. Yang thats right, amazon. Amazon is soaking up 20 billion in business every single year, closing 30 of americas stores and malls including here in iowa. The most common job in most of the state is working as a retail clerk. The average retail clerk is a 39yearold woman making between 9 and 10 an hour. If 30 of americas stores and malls close, what does that what is that retail clerks next move . It is not going to work for another store because the store across the street is not exactly hiring and booming. How much did amazon pay in federal taxes last year . Zero. That is the math. 20 billion out. Zero back. 30 of stores and malls closed. How many of you have seen a selfserve kiosk in a Fast Food Restaurant like a mcdonalds . They are going to be in every location in the country by 2021. Two years from now. Food service and food prep, third most common job in the u. S. To me the rubber hits the road when we automate truck driving. My friends in california are working on robot trucks that never need to stop. They tell me they are 98 of the way there. How many of you all know a truck driver here in iowa . Thats the most common job in over half the states in the country. There are 3. 5 million truckers in the United States making about 46,000 a year, average age, 49. 94 men. Ive talked to a bunch of truckers, and i know when they drive a truck, they have to stop after 14 hours to get out and go to sleep. I also know that only 13 of truckers are unionized. That is not an industry where everyone is in a union. 87 are part of generally small momandpop businesses. Many of the truckers you know took out massive loans to lease their cars, their trucks. So imagine if you owed 80,000 on a truck, and then you saw the robot truck hit the highway that never needs to stop. Like what is your next move going to be . Smash your truck into that truck. [laughter] mr. Yang i mean this is real, there was a protest in dc by a series of truckers the other week where they showed up and said, you cannot automate our jobs away. But you know what the financial incentives are to automate freight . 168 billion a year in cost savings. Thats not just labor. Thats equipment utilization, fuel, fewer accidents, they say. Im going to dig into this because i think it is important. So they say they are 98 of the way to robot trucks. That sounds impressive, but having a 2 error rate is very problematic when you are talking about semi trucks. You cant have semi trucks smashing into things and say, we were mostly right. [laughter] that is not going to work very well. And the trucks are really bad with snow because when it snows, the road markings get covered up and the computer cannot see it, and they dont know what to do. That is one reason why they are testing the robot trucks in arizona. Because and california. Where there is not a whole lot of snow. The question is how can they get over that last 2 . Do you remember the last time you saw tv on your cell phone . Do you remember that . First time you did that . That is 3g. We are now rolling out 5g around the country. The vision they have for the robot trucks is to equip the truck with a teleoperating software so when the truck gets confused and doesnt know what to do it alerts a teleoperator , who was sitting in a warehouse in nevada or arizona who then beams into the truck and drives it like a videogame. You know what i mean . Because there are cameras in the front. It is like you are sitting there, and you can see out the front of the cab. You take it over. And then when the computer is like ok, i know what to do again, you beam back out. What do you think the ratio will be between teleoperators and the 3. 5 million americans who drive a truck for a living right now . 1 to 10, 10 it is certainly not going to be one to one. What will that mean for the truckers or the 7 million plus americans who work in truck stops, motels and diners that rely upon the truckers getting out and having a meal . I was at iowa 80 in davenport. How many of you all have been there . They say 5000 people stop their there everyday. What happens when that number starts to drop because the truckers are robots, and they do not need to get out and have a meal . They tell me this is five to 10 years away. Ups just invested in one of these companies. 168 billion a year is enough money to move mountains. Particularly in a country like ours where everything revolves around the almighty dollar. Now this is not a donald trump problem. He is a symptom of the fact that we are going through the greatest Economic Transformation in the countrys history. What people are calling the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Here in iowa, it started on your farms which got gobbled up by mega farms and automated. And then it moved to the factories. You lost 40,000 manufacturing jobs. Factories around the state. Now it is heading to your main streets as your stores start to dry up. And then it is going to hit your highways when the robot trucks come. These waves of automation and innovation are pushing more and more of us to the sidelines. And that is why donald trump is our president today. So this is what i had unpacked in 2017. He wins, i have like a crisis of conscious where im like ok, this is not a situation where i should keep doing what im doing. This is going to go well. Because im an entrepreneur. What entrepreneurs do in the best possible case is we solve problems. And the problem i was trying to solve was the fact that i did not believe that our economy was generating enough Small Business entrepreneurship and job growth. And then i realized the problems are even bigger. I said how do you solve that set of problems . So i went to washington, dc with my facts and figures, and book and my powerpoint deck. And i said to them, what are we going to do to help our people manage this transition . First we had to explain to the American People it is not immigrants that are causing these problems. If you go to a factory in michigan, it is wall to wall robot arms and machines. It is not walltowall immigrants. The same is true in amazon fulfillment centers. Those things are also walltowall robots. That is what is closing the malls and stores. What do you think the folks in washington, dc said to me when i asked what are we going to do . Nothing. Mr. Yang i mean, nothing. Essentially it was nothing. The three answers i got were these. Number one, we cannot talk about this. That is verbatim. Isnt that great . Number two, we should study that further. Number three, we must educate and retrain all americans for the jobs of the future. And i said ok, that one sounds halfway responsible. I looked at the studies and the numbers, do you know how effective the governmentfunded retraining programs were for the manufacturing workers who lost their jobs in the midwest . 0 to 15 . That is right. Total dud. When i said look, the numbers say we are talking about 15 , 20 , 25 tops, you know what the next response was . I guess we will get better. That is what passes for responsiveness out of dc. And one person in washington, dc said to something that sent me here today. They said andrew, you are in the wrong town. No one here will do anything about this because fundamentally washington, dc is not a town of leaders, it is a town of followers. And the only way we will do anything about it is if you create a wave in other parts of the country and bring that wave crashing down on our heads. I heard this and said challenge accepted. Ill be back. Like arnold, ill be back. [laughter] mr. Yang i didnt say it like that. I didnt say it arnold style or anything. I gave this speech you believe i was making it up, some kind of made up movie super villain speech. It is a dc lobbyist speech. Turns out they are kind of similar. But its real. This is what he said. And when he said this to me, i actually got that feeling you have when someone tells you a deep and important truth. Because hes right. Washington, dc will do nothing about this. The only way anything will change is if