This is Spectator Radio, the Spectator's curated podcast collection.

Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics and the Trump presidency for the new Spectator USA website.

I'm joined today by Caroline McCarthy, who is an

advertising executive and a columnist for Spectator USA, and we're going to be discussing the Andrew

Yang phenomenon. Now, Caroline, Andrew Yang is a very unusual presidential candidate.

That he is.

On the democratic side, can you give us a little introduction to who he is, what his presidential campaign is all about, and what's going on with it?

Sure.

So people in the tech industry, myself included, first became familiar with Andrew Yang, largely

because he founded a nonprofit after

selling his company and that nonprofit is called Venture for America, which takes the sort of the

Teach for America model and applies it to the startup world by placing a highly qualified and

extremely ambitious college graduates into roles in startups in

cities in America that could use revitalization. It's a very well-respected nonprofit in the tech

world and has a lot of prominent people on its board and among its supporters. So that's sort of

where the industry found out about him in the first place.

And then his run for president was he announced it after he had written a book that I believe

was called The War on Normal People and is about the rise of automation and his belief that

the way to prevent the job losses that he sees coming

thanks to that wave of automation is by what he calls a freedom dividend, which is a $1,000

check written by the government every month to every American adult, which is the more common

term for that is universal basic income.

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