You! This is Radio Atlantic. I'm Isaac Dauver. I just spent four days in Iowa, most of it at the Iowa State Fair, and besides all sorts of fried food served on sticks,

it was a great place to find presidential candidates.

Twenty Democrats spoke there, and then at a big fundraising dinner called the Wing Ding.

Iowa of course is the first state to vote on a presidential nominee and it has a history of

launching unlikely candidates starting with Jimmy Carter, whose win there in

1976 helped turn the Iowa caucuses into a major event.

On this week's show I spoke to maybe the unlikliest candidate this year, Andrew Yang.

But his campaign is looking less unlikely by the day.

He's raised more money and consistently pulled higher than almost anyone but the 2020 front runners and he's already

qualified for the September debates. Most of the field won't which puts this

first-time politician ahead of a good number of senators and governors. Here's Yang on Friday

a few hours before I sat down with him speaking at the fair. This is how you start a

revolution in Iowa because all you need is 40,000 Iowans and then

the vision sweeps the country. So what is the vision? What the heck am I

talking about? How are we going to solve for this? If you've heard

anything about me, you've heard this. There's an Asian man running for a president who wants to give

everyone a thousand dollars a month, right? Universal Basic Income, that's Yang's signature policy.

And if you tuned into either of the debates, you'd know it.

Yang had a knack for turning every question back to that policy.

So what is fueling his candidacy?

Curiously it seems to be his willingness to tell Americans that things are even worse

than we think they are. Yang says big tech companies are vacuuming up American commerce.

...