Welcome to Axis Prerata, where we usually take just 10 minutes to get you smarter on the collision of tech, business, and politics, but this is a special weekend edition in which we're re-upping an interview we did back in December with Andrew Yang, one of the 2020 presidential candidates on the Democratic side.

We mostly talked about universal basic income, which is Yang's big campaign platform. Enjoy.

We're joined now by Andy Yang, an entrepreneur who once started an education company and then

created something called Venture for America, which was designed to help entrepreneurs create

jobs in underserved cities like Baltimore and Detroit.

And now he is a candidate on the Democratic side for president in 2020.

Let's start with branding.

You talk about universal basic income, but also say you want to call it a freedom dividend.

Is there a distinction between these two things or is it purely to make it more palatable?

Well, universal basic income is a policy that goes back to the founding fathers. Thomas

Payne was for it. And then in more recent years, Milton Friedman was for it. Martin Luther

King was for it. So universal basic income is a very broad policy where everyone in a society

gets a certain amount of money to meet basic needs. And so there are many varieties of universal

basic income. And my actual proposal is a freedom dividend where every adult between 18 to

64 will get $1,000 a month. So the freedom dividend is my proposed form of universal basic income.

Give me the basic argument for this in the sense of, and particularly you say every American between 1864,

so it sounds like this is not a means tested sort of thing.

Yeah, that's right.

You have to destigmatize it.

You have to universalize it.

And you also have to take out the administration of it because there have been many, many examples of administrative programs that have ended up creating more bureaucracy and

have failed to streamline the system, particularly when you're talking about 126 existing welfare

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