The Relentless Andrew Yang

Remember the Yang Gang? The bros in MATH baseball hats behind Andrew Yang’s dark-horse presidential candidacy back in 2019? Yang ran on the “freedom dividend”—his proposal for a universal basic income of $1,000 a month for every American. Many wrote him off as a futuristic Chicken Little because of his predictions of mass job loss driven by automation and AI. That part of his message, at least, is now mainstream. According to a recent MIT study, nearly 12 percent of tasks in the American labor market—representing $1.2 trillion in wages—could be performed by AI today. A Senate committee report released in October warns that America could lose nearly 100 million jobs to AI and automation within the next decade. The technology is transforming work faster than the government, companies, and employees can respond.

But few people, and even fewer politicians, seem to be talking about UBI. Maybe there are better solutions, more effective policies—but no one is talking much about them, either. Did Yang come a few years too early—or did he just have the wrong idea?  

Yang was a political outsider who had never run in an election before, yet with his UBI platform and bro-friendly delivery, he earned a spot in the presidential debates. He ended up suspending his campaign the night of the New Hampshire primary—he has joked that people dismissed him as “the magical Asian man from the future” who “wants to give everyone money.” But his goal was never to win, he told me in his office in December. “My design was to raise the alarm around AI and mainstream universal basic income.”

People stop him, Yang told me, “on the street, every day” to say: “You were right on AI, and we need universal basic income.” Or they tell him, “You were right. Run again.”

[Read: Andrew Yang doesn’t have any litmus test]

His new book, out this month—Hey Yang, Where’s My Thousand Bucks?—answers the question of what he’s been up to in the past few years, with self-deprecating humor. “The alternative title,” Yang said, had been: Hey, Am I Racist, or Are You Andrew Yang?

He sees himself as different from other politicians, for the simple fact that he’s a man who recognizes a problem and comes up with an idea to fix it. The trouble was that neither the man nor the idea were politically viable. As a politician, he didn’t capture enough voters’ trust or imagination. The other candidates might not have been offering much, but their stump speeches were familiar. UBI was solving a problem voters didn’t yet know they had.

Looking back, you might say that at least he proposed we do something … about anything. The “disease in American politics that is pushing us all into the mud is that you do not actually have to solve the problem,” Yang told me. Politicians are playing “you lose, I lose,” in which the parties take turns screwing up and returning to power. Meanwhile, “you have AI coming to eat tens of millions of jobs. And you don’t have a meaningful conversation about it.”

Since 2019, when Stockton, California, launched a basic-income pilot, more than 72 local governments in 26 states have experimented with such programs, according to a report published last year by a coalition of politicians who support UBI. The report found that the recipients experienced an increase in health and financial stability and a reduction in stress, without any decrease in employment. In some places, a significant portion of participants ended up working more during the pilot. (Other experiments have not proved to be as effective.)

UBI would, of course, be hugely expensive. But the bigger issue is that it’s politically unpopular, Robert Greenstein, the founder of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a think tank that focuses on low- and moderate-income people, told me. “No disrespect to Andrew Yang or UBI proponents. I’ve always admired their dedication,” Greenstein said, before adding the inevitable but: “They didn’t pay sufficient attention to history.”

Americans are much more supportive of in-kind benefits, such as SNAP, than they are of cash assistance. Even benefits such as unemployment insurance have become harder to qualify for in the past half century. UBI hasn’t even gotten “to first base politically,” Greenstein said, because “we have one party that doesn’t want to raise taxes on anybody” and “the other party doesn’t want to raise taxes on anybody with incomes below $400,000 a year.”

Yang wouldn’t argue with that. Politicians, he said, are afraid of alienating donors in Big Tech, even though some tech CEOs such as Dario Amodei of Anthropic have said themselves that the government should tax them more.

Yang says that Republicans tend to hate UBI because it’s a huge entitlement program and they don’t like the idea of what he describes as a “capitalism where income doesn’t start at zero.” (But he does point out that Donald Trump, whom “I disagree with on just about every front, actually senses that that money is good in people’s hands,” which is why the president sent out baby bonds and proposed tariff-rebate checks.)

[Read: Yes, cash transfers work]

But Yang sees Democrats as even worse. “If you were to say to Democrats, ‘Hey, let’s say we tax the AI companies. Maybe we should give that money to people, families, displaced workers,’ a lot of Democrats would be like, ‘No, no, no. It would be much better if we put that money to schools.’” He describes Democrats as the last of the institutionalists, sinking money into programs and systems without ever questioning how well they are working. They don’t have to bother trying to think differently, because when voters tire of Republicans, they have no choice but to come running back to Democrats.

Yang, being Yang, has another solution for that.

Yang is loquacious, tall, affable, and very smart. And did I say “loquacious”? But he is no politician, despite having run for president and, in 2021, New York City mayor. (He was the Democratic front-runner for most of the primary race, before finishing in fourth place.) He doesn’t glad-hand or try to “make you feel seen.” Instead, he just talks—assuredly, and with data. Spending time with him feels like being seated next to your friend’s chatty husband at a dinner party. When the dinner’s over, you are happy for your friend—and relieved for yourself.

Our meeting in December wasn’t the first time I had spoken with Yang. A couple of years ago, I was an unpaid speaker at a small conference that he started, called the Hudson Valley Ideas Festival. Yang is always starting something. Businesses, nonprofits, political parties.

After graduating from Columbia Law School, Yang worked briefly at a corporate-law firm, then for a failed start-up, then in a tech job, before he worked for and eventually became the CEO of Manhattan Prep, a tutoring company. Pumping high-achieving students into the graduate-school-to-white-collar pipeline made Yang question a system that concentrates the best and brightest in a handful of cities and professions. So he began Venture for America, a nonprofit that recruited graduates to work at start-ups in B- and C-list American cities and then trained them to create start-ups of their own.

Yang raised millions of dollars for the organization and was praised by the Obama administration. But according to The New York Times, Venture largely failed to deliver. A decade into the program, only about a dozen of the start-ups were still in business in the targeted cities, employing about 150 people. “Andrew comes up with these grand ideas, and he loves to obsess about them and talk about how great they are, but he doesn’t think through all the details,” Cris Landa, a former Venture for America employee, told the Times.

[Read: Andrew Yang, political Kardashian]

By 2017, when Yang left Venture for America to run for president, the “grand idea” he was obsessing over was UBI. By his own benchmark, his campaign could be considered a success. He got people talking about a future in which a million truck drivers would likely be unemployed. Yet it left him “despondent.”

Yang could see that his message wasn’t connecting with enough voters. He would give his stump speech about labor-market trends and a fourth Industrial Revolution, but even if people found it interesting, it couldn’t compete with Democrats’ traditional applause lines about unions and women’s rights. He told me that he had tried to talk about job-loss numbers that “in theory describe some objective reality, which in theory matters,” but all that people really wanted was for his message to be “crammed into a tribal language” that could be summed up as: “Trump bad.”

“I could have said any number,” Yang told me, and it wouldn’t have mattered. “I got the sinking feeling coming off the trail, like, Oh, no. We’re actually even further away from solving this problem.”

The campaign was clearly a failure, but Yang took it as encouragement to try to remake the entire political system. He joined the board of FairVote, an organization that champions ranked-choice voting. In 2021, he left the Democratic Party and co-founded, with Christine Todd Whitman and Michael S. Willner, a new party: Forward, which describes itself as a solutions-driven alternative to Democrats and Republicans. According to its website, 71 elected officials, including mayors and congresspeople, are affiliated with the party. But if you haven’t yet heard of Forward, Yang has a theory that explains why.

In 2020, Yang was hired as a commentator for CNN. He claims that he was given an option to renew in 2021, but the offer was rescinded after he became an independent. In his telling, though 45 percent of Americans identify as independents, network executives stopped thinking that he had any value once he wasn’t part of the bipartisan political system. (In a comment to Fox News Digital, CNN said that the decision was based on the conflict of interest that would arise from Yang’s “intention to launch and serve as the leader of a political party.”) He was, however, inundated with requests to appear on Fox News. “They kept saying to me, ‘Hey, Andrew, you left the Democratic Party. Like, why did they suck so bad?’ I was like, ‘I don’t think Republicans are the answer. I think the entire system needs reform.’”

In 2024, Yang endorsed Democratic Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota for president. Phillips considered President Biden’s advanced age and his lack of popularity, and broke ranks to primary him. Democrats, Yang said, responded by saying, “We’re going to malign this guy, destroy his reputation,” because “how dare he try and cut the line and run for president when he’s, like, No. 54 in our pecking order?” Yang called it an “institutional shivving.” He was even more outraged by the lengthy postmortem on the election that the Democratic National Committee eventually decided against releasing.

“I’ve got five words for their postmortem,” Yang said. “Should’ve. Held. A. Fucking. Primary.”

When Yang gets stopped on the street by people asking what he’s been up to, many times he’s in New York City’s Garment District, where the office of his new cellular-service company, Noble Mobile, is located.

Yang launched the company in September after raising more than $10 million, and he said it now has thousands of subscribers. When I visited, the elevators of the nondescript building were plastered with flyers inviting other residents to the company’s upcoming holiday party.

“The average American is sad for two reasons,” Yang said. “More, but let’s just stick with two: No. 1, they’re not able to save enough money on a monthly basis. And No. 2, they’re spending too much time staring at what Hasan Minhaj calls ‘their rectangle of sadness.’”

[From the May 2021 issue: What if Andrew Yang wins?]

Powered by T-Mobile’s network, Noble Mobile’s service is relatively cheap—closer to what Europeans pay each month. Yang’s goal, he said, was to do with mobile plans what his friend Mark Cuban did with Cost Plus Drugs and prescription medications. In addition, the company encourages customers to limit their doomscrolling—“which, by the way, is also a polarizing force”—by giving them up to a $20 credit every month that they don’t use all of their data. According to Yang, the rebate pushes the average user’s phone time down 17 percent by their second month on the service. Last year, the company threw a series of no-phones parties across the country, with dance floors, themed cocktails, and a few inches of lawn—touch grass read a sign. (Yang was a party promoter in his 20s; the instinct clearly hasn’t left him.)

Yang describes the company as a logical outgrowth of his political work, including his advocacy for UBI: “For years, the focus of my career has been to build a human-centered economy to improve the lives of Americans,” he wrote in a press release. The reality, he found, was that “government action” happens “too slowly.” In Hey Yang, you get the sense that he almost can’t believe how easy it was to start this company—at least compared with his other ambition of remaking politics.

Yang says that he gets told “every day” that he “was right,” but he also says that he isn’t smug about it. AI is still going to destroy jobs. Politically, he has hopes for Forward. Young people, he notes, don’t have the same loyalty to political parties as older generations do. When I asked if he might run for office again in 2028, he was coy, saying that he gets asked that question, too, “every day.” The end of Hey Yang could be interpreted as a future campaign manifesto; in between one-liners, Yang outlines his vision of an America where poverty is a thing of the past, workweeks are shorter, and technology serves people instead of the other way around: “In a world of numbers and data and money, can our humanity save us? I still hope so.”

But for now, all Yang can offer us is a cheaper phone plan. He seems happy about it. And yet I couldn’t help but feel a bit dispirited by the whole thing. Yang had looked around and seen that a lot of Americans were going to find themselves out of work. He had an idea to address the problem, rolled up his sleeves, and sacrificed a few years of his life by taking it on—only to discover that politics isn’t about solving problems. Politics is about politics.