Former Presidential Candidate Gets Real About America's Future | Andrew Yang 🧢
We’re closing out the year with a candid conversation about where America is headed.
For our final episode of 2025, Halle and Steve sit down with entrepreneur and former presidential candidate Andrew Yang to talk plainly about the forces reshaping American life, from rising healthcare costs and gaps in coverage to AI-driven job disruption and the strain on the social safety net.
We cover:
🏛️ Andew’s idea of “Medicare for all who want it”
🤖 How AI is already wiping out entry-level jobs, and why he thinks America is heading toward a “bad men problem”
💸 Why he ran on Universal Basic Income which he calls “capitalism where income doesn’t start at zero”
🏥 How entrenched players restrict physician supply, shape regulation, and protect revenue even when it hurts patients
📵 His new effort to cut phone addiction and why he says parents, schools, and policymakers are waking up to the damage caused by screen-first childhoods
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About our guest:
Andrew Yang is an entrepreneur, author, philanthropist, attorney, non-profit leader, and former US presidential and NYC mayoral candidate.
After being a corporate lawyer for five short months, joining a few start-ups, and even launching his own company, Andrew eventually became CEO of an education company that became #1 in the country. He then started a national entrepreneurship non-profit, Venture for America, which worked to empower thousands of young entrepreneurs to bring economic dynamism to cities like Detroit, Cleveland, Baltimore, Birmingham, St. Louis, and others around the country. Leading the organization to become a national multi-million dollar charity, Andrew was named a Presidential Ambassador of Entrepreneurship by the White House under the Obama administration and a Champion of Change for his leadership.
After seeing the devastation that automation and the fourth industrial revolution were doing to the American workforce, Andrew decided to run for President in late 2017. Initially dubbed a "longer than long shot" candidate by The New York Times, Andrew's grassroots support, known as the “Yang Gang,” propelled him to seven Democratic primary debates, outpolling and outlasting six senators, four governors, three members of congress, two mayors, and one secretary.
With a vision to rewrite the rules of the United States economy through a “Freedom Dividend” of $1,000 a month for every American adult, Andrew’s movement around Universal Basic Income and Cash Relief engaged over 3 million combined social media followers, raised nearly $40 million dollars in an average of $35 increments, and become one of the most exciting stories in the 2020 race., According to CNN, Andrew Yang’s campaign "didn't just make history... [it] unquestionably put a sizable dent in the future as well."
As an activist, Andrew has turned his movement into a political reality, launching a non-profit, Humanity Forward, that has successfully lobbied Congress to bring billions of dollars in cash relief and stimulus checks to millions of Americans in need.
Andrew is the author of three books, including his newest work, Forward, outlining the problems in our broken system and a way forward to prevent the decline of American Democracy. He currently lives in Manhattan with his wife Evelyn and two boys, is an avid basketball fan, a commentator on CNN, and host of a weekly podcast, Forward.
The son of Taiwanese immigrants, Yang was born and raised in New York State. He attended Brown University and Columbia Law School.
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