Who is that guy? Andrew Yang’s presidential campaign draws crowds, money and an expected spot on the Democratic debate stage.

A two-hour podcast interview in February with Joe Rogan, a stand-up comedian, television host and mixed martial arts commentator, put Yang on the map. Rogan boasts an audience of millions — particularly young men — and has a devoted following on Twitter and Reddit, where some fans have half-jokingly referred to his show as “Oprah for Dudes.”

After the Rogan podcast, Yang’s Twitter followers jumped eightfold — going from roughly 34,000 to 287,000 in a little over a month. Online fans started creating thousands of memes and videos on Facebook, Instagram and other social media, spreading his campaign further.

 .. In substance and in style, Yang presents himself as a candidate relentlessly of the future. He warns that the United States is on the brink of a major job apocalypse, spurred by an increasing use of robots and artificial intelligence in the workplace that ultimately will eliminate the need for human employees.

“What we did to the manufacturing workers we are now going to do to the retail workers, the call center workers, the fast-food workers, the truck drivers, and on and on through the economy,” Yang declared at a rally in Chicago in March. “This is a crisis.”

.. Yang has particularly fixated on the plight of truckers. Speaking at a recent rural issues forum in Stuart, a tiny town in western Iowa, a state where the trucking industry employs an estimated 98,000 drivers, Yang pointed to an incident in February in which scores of truck drivers snarled traffic on Indianapolis-area highways in protest of mandated electronic monitoring devices that track their hours.

“What are the truck drivers going to do when the robot trucks come and start driving themselves?” Yang asked.

A murmur went through the audience of about 200 people. An older man in jeans and a trucker cap shook his head at the thought. “Chaos,” the man said.

This is where Yang’s “Freedom Dividend” comes in. The $12,000 given annually to every U.S. adult up to age 64 would be funded in part by a 10 percent “value added tax” on technology companies such as Amazon, Google and Facebook, which he estimates would generate roughly $800 billion a year. (Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, owns The Washington Post.)

.. “You could call this the tech check,” Yang said. He has dismissed critics who say the money, paid out regardless of an individual’s income or employment status, would encourage people not to work. He argues that the added financial security will spur people to create businesses or go back to school, or take risks they might not otherwise take. “This isn’t about people being lazy,” he said.

He has also pitched the concept, for which he has not stipulated an overall cost, as a pro-business, pro-economic development idea that could potentially revive dying small towns.

“Some of [that money] would float up to Amazon. You’d buy an extra toaster or something, but most of it would stay right here because you would be investing in car repairs you had put off, and then tutoring for your kids, the occasional night out, trips to the hardware store,” Yang said in Iowa.

To prove his point, Yang decided to use his own money to give $1,000 a month to two people for a year — someone in New Hampshire, the other in Iowa, the first voting states. In late December, Yang began sending a monthly check to the Fassi family in Goffstown, N.H.

In 2017, just as his daughter Janelle was beginning her freshman year at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, N.H., Charles Fassi was laid off from his job as a manager at a small chemical services company. Fassi, 49, said he felt suicidal, wondering how he could support his family.

While Fassi is now back at work, the family still struggled financially. Janelle met Yang at a Young Democrats of New Hampshire event and submitted an application for her family to be a test case for the monthly payments. After interviewing the family, Yang presented the first $1,000 check on New Year’s Eve. Fassi said the money has been mainly used to help pay for Janelle’s tuition, but Fassi said he and his wife are thinking of starting their own business.

“One thing I like about Andrew is that throughout all of this, he’s never asked us to vote for him. He’s never asked us to do anything for his campaign. He’s never tried to tell us what we can tell the media or anybody about this,” Fassi said. “When he came to our house, he said he was just trying to start a conversation. It wasn’t about him becoming president.”

That was enough to land Yang in the “top tier” of 2020 candidates that Fassi is considering voting for, though he is wary of the idea that people might think Yang is trying to buy his support. “I want to see how far he can go,” Fassi said, adding that he wasn’t comfortable backing a “fringe candidate.” He added that he likes Sen. Elizabeth Warren of neighboring Massachusetts, and soon he and his family will house a staffer working for another Democratic candidate, Sen. Kamala D. Harris of California. “I was like, ‘Why not? I like Kamala Harris,’ ” he said.

Yang has yet to pick the Iowa recipient — his campaign is taking applications — but after the Des Moines Register questioned the legality of his spending, Yang’s campaign told the paper he would amend his Federal Election Commission report to list the $4,000 in checks he had written so far as gifts.

A native of Schenectady, N.Y., Yang is the son of Taiwanese immigrants who came to America in the 1960s. Yang recalled that he and his older brother were two of the only Asian American students at the local public school and were picked on. Later, as a student at Phillips Exeter Academy, the prestigious boarding school in New Hampshire, he was a self-described nerd and goth kid.

He studied political science and economics at Brown University before graduating from Columbia Law School. After briefly working at a big law firm, Yang joined a test-prep start-up, which was later sold and earned him “some number in the millions” that gave him enough to quit his job and launch his White House bid.

The fact that Yang is unabashedly noting his Asian ancestry makes it all the more strange that his candidacy has found fans in the alt-right, many of whom have reframed his pitch on universal basic income as a quest to save white America. White nationalist Richard Spencer has tweeted approvingly of Yang, describing him as “the most grounded presidential candidate of my lifetime.”

Yang has repeatedly disavowed the support, even as his campaign has found it difficult to eradicate the racist memes spread by some of his fringe backers in chat rooms where Yang’s campaign has tried to mobilize supporters. “I honestly don’t get it,” Yang said. “I don’t look like a white nationalist, so I am sort of surprised that anyone who’s in that camp would be like, ‘Ooh, that’s my candidate.’ ”

Indeed, Yang’s crowds are notable for their diversity. Darrin Lowery, a 51-year-old social worker from Chicago, turned out after hearing Yang make his pitch to black voters on “The Breakfast Club” radio show. His warning about the dangers of automation had hit home with Lowery.

“The Kmart is closed, the Sears is closed. All these different businesses are closing, and I wonder what these people who don’t have advanced degrees are going to do?” said Lowery, who is black. “I do think he’s a long shot, but the more people hear him, I wonder.”

Angie Shindelar, a 53-year-old math teacher from Greenfield, Iowa, came to hear Yang speak in Stuart at the behest of her children. “Everything feels like it’s about bashing Trump or reacting to Trump instead offering some vision looking forward,” Shindelar said. “He’s the first person I’ve really heard that is looking forward and has vision in a way that can maybe overcome some of that division.”

Andy Stern, a former president of the Service Employees International Union who is friendly with Yang, cautioned that Yang needs “a breakout moment.”

“I don’t think people are looking at Andrew yet and say he’s someone who can win,” said Stern, who, like Yang, is an evangelist for a universal basic income.

Yang believes his moment could be the debates, and he’s already thinking of how much time he’ll have to make an impression.

“I’ve done the math, and I’ll have approximately 12 minutes of airtime . . . 10 to 12 minutes to introduce myself to the American people,” Yang said, probably exaggerating the time any candidate onstage is likely to have. “They are going to say, ‘Who’s that person standing next to Joe Biden?’ And hundreds of thousands of people are going to go Google ‘Andrew Yang’ or ‘Asian presidential candidate’ or whatever. . . . And then they’ll say, ‘Oh, that’s Andrew Yang.’ ”

Want to raise successful kids? Harvard, MIT study says doing one thing at age 4 could make them happier and wealthier in life

Thanks to modern science, there are a number of effective — yet obvious — strategies to smart parenting. But last year, a group of researchers at MIT, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania found that one of the best things parents can do for their children is to have frequent back-and-forth exchanges with them. 

The findings suggest that doing this at an early age (typically between ages 4 to 6) will help develop, foster and improve what is perhaps one of the most important skills that contribute to success in life: Communication.

What’s more, a number of studies have supported the idea that children with stronger communication skills are more likely to have healthier relationships, longer marriages, higher self-esteem and overall satisfaction in life.

.. We talk to our kids all the time — both directly and indirectly. “Sit here.” “Hurry, we’re going to be late.” “Great job!” “No, don’t do that.” “Alexa, read us a bedtime story.” The secret, however, is to have back-and-forth conversations.

For the study, researchers evaluated 36 children using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to identify the differences in how the brain responds to different conversational styles.

They found that the Broca’s area, a region of the brain that focuses on speech production and language processing, was much more active in children who engaged in more back-and-forth conversations. Children who had more activation in that region of the brain scored higher in tests of language, grammar and verbal reasoning skills.

“The really novel thing about our paper is that it provides the first evidence that family conversation at home is associated with brain development in children,” John Gabrieli, the senior author of the study, told MIT News. “It’s almost magical how parental conversation appears to influence the biological growth of the brain.”

.. Back in 1995, a landmark study found that children from higher-income families appeared to have much greater language and communication abilities, and it was thought to be correlated with the fact that those children were exposed to about 30 million more words during the first years of life, compared to children of lower-income families.

But findings from this recent study suggest that the “30 million word gap” isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

“The conversational turn-taking seems like the thing that makes a difference, regardless of socioeconomic status,” Gabrielli said. “Such turn-taking occurs more often in families from a higher socioeconomic status, but children coming from families with lesser income or parental education showed the same benefits from conversational turn-taking.”

The point isn’t to have deep philosophical conversations with your children, but to instead carry conversations that require back-and-froth dialogue.

It’s not difficult to make that leap, and they’ll benefit in significant ways in the long run; interactive conversations help improve communication skills as a whole, and that’s a necessity for success in any future career. When it comes to your child’s success, maybe talk isn’t so cheap after all.

How Friendship and Quiet Conversations Transformed a White Nationalist

We’d heard Derek Black, the former white power heir apparent, interviewed before about his past. But never about the friendships, with other people in their twenties, that changed him. After his ideology was outed at college, one of the only orthodox Jews on campus invited Derek to Shabbat dinner. What happened over the next two years is like a roadmap for transforming some of the hardest territory of our time.

MR. STEVENSON: In fact, we — I remember, the first time that Derek was invited over, I was very explicit with people that this was not “ambush Derek” time. This was not some opportunity to yell at him for the wrongness of his beliefs, because I knew that he would — first of all, he’d spent his whole life defending this ideology. I hadn’t spent my whole life attacking the statistics and other things that they built their ideological convictions on. And as a consequence, I knew that shouting at him — or, at least, I felt that shouting at him at something like that, or having anybody else at the table do so, would just immediately put him on the defensive, and he’d never come back. So I was very explicit that people were not to discuss his background at the table, or the white nationalism, more generally.

MS. TIPPETT: But you say it in such a matter-of-fact way. I feel like right now, in our country, we forget that if we really want people to change, that <strong>it has never happened in human history that somebody changed because someone else told them how stupid they were.</strong> What was that experience like for you? You must have wondered, when you first went, are they going to grill me about this? Or, will I be put on the spot?

MR. BLACK: I think I was less worried about being grilled than what actually happened, where I wasn’t grilled…

[laughter]

…and had to spend, ultimately, years of really enjoyable time among people who — the fact that I was friends with them was contradictory to my worldview. And that was a lot more uncomfortable than had I been grilled, because I had a background doing media interviews since I was 12 years old, where people say, “How do you believe in hate?” And I had crime statistics and IQ statistics and a history of American white supremacist statements from the founding fathers, and other things like that that tend to confuse people when a 14-year-old explains to them why all the races should be separated.

And I was pretty comfortable with that position. I thought it was important, and I knew how to do it, and if it had been a big argument, I would’ve had statistics, I would have misused social science, and I would have not changed their mind and not changed my own mind, but I would’ve at least known what was going on. I think the real thing that happened, where I was just at a Shabbat dinner for two years, and I had to say, “Well, I think my ideology is very anti-Semitic.”

.. MR. STEVENSON: I think it’s also worth pointing out that over those two years, I was legitimately friends with Derek. It was not some sabotage project where I was going undercover or something. I was legitimately — felt like I was — especially, over time, counted him amongst my closest friends, even when I frankly didn’t know exactly where he stood.

MS. TIPPETT: And you weren’t asking.

MR. STEVENSON: At first, as I mentioned, I was afraid that if I were to ask that the defenses would go up, and that that would be the end of it. Later on — well, after two years, it’s a little awkward. We’d even play games, because he knew that I knew, and I knew that he knew. It was — so there would be awkward things. I screwed with him once, at this conference that he mentioned. I knew that he was doing it, he was organizing it. So I asked him, “What are you doing this weekend?”

[laughter]

He said, “I’m going to see some family.” I said, “Where?” I said, “What are you doing?” So it was a little cat-and-mouse game.

MR. BLACK: My answer was, “I’m going to a family reunion,” which was not untrue. My entire family was there.

[laughter]

MS. TIPPETT: What else was going on?

MR. BLACK: Well, it was a seminar that I had founded the year before in response to being outed at New College. I had been very uncomfortable with the fact that so many people at this college really detested what I was representing, even though I thought it was super-correct. So in response to that, the first year, I had organized this seminar up in the mountains of Tennessee, where people, where a small group would come together, and we would talk about the best ways to argue with anti-racists and to convince people that white nationalism is correct. And this was a year later, after that initial one, and I was a lot less certain of what I believed, and I was going back to it for…

MS. TIPPETT: Moral support?

.. MS. TIPPETT: So what happened is that you never made — the Shabbat dinners never became conversations about white nationalism. But then, gradually, over a period of time, in my understanding, Derek, individuals would bring something up with you, and you’d — I don’t know. I feel like you all — you handled this so well, and feels like the campus handled it well. So you would end up taking a walk with somebody, and they would say, “I really — I want to understand this,” and that started a different level of conversation.

MR. BLACK: People I met at the Shabbat dinners — in particular, one person who did the brunt of all this labor of listening to me explain this ideology and what-all is my evidence for it, and why am I so convinced this is true; and then doing the labor to say, <strong>“You are misusing crime statistics. Here’s how statistics works,”</strong> and having that sort of conversation happen sort of naturally. It was from meeting at the dinners but then being on a small campus and doing things like, “Let’s go down to the bay to watch the sunset and just spend time as people.” And eventually, it becomes sort of awkward that “We’ve never talked about that you believe in a reprehensible political ideology, and you’re advocating something terrible, and you seem kind of nice; how do you reconcile that?”

[laughter]

MS. TIPPETT: And you knew each other well enough that they could actually say it to you that way.

MR. BLACK: Yeah, because it was lower stakes than being on an interview for MSNBC or something. It was not that I had to make my points and try to get some converts; it was that I trusted this person. I liked this person. I respected this person. And I wanted to explain why I think this is correct, because “It’s clearly correct. If you don’t want to accept that it’s true, that’s a decision you can make. But it’s an uncomfortable truth.” And that was the position I was coming from.

.. you got to a point where — when you trotted out your arguments that you were so skilled in and so comfortable with, but it did actually become a conversation. You were actually able to listen to a different way of seeing even those arguments that felt so clear to you.

.. MR. BLACK: I wanted to be someone who used evidence and believed something because it was demonstrable, not because it was some gut feeling. And if the way we were using generalized IQ statistics from around the world was illegitimate because the IQ test is culturally normed, and you can’t go around the world giving it to people, and say, “Look, I’ve discovered the different intelligence of the races” — if that’s actually an illegitimate piece of evidence, I didn’t want to use it, which is why, at the time, I thought, “I’m becoming a better white nationalist. I’m becoming better at arguing this, because I now understand how these things are being misused.

And it’s only at the end, where piece after piece after piece is removed, and all I’m left with is the fact that I think that I can be friends with Jewish students and with people of color, but my belief system says that they should all be removed from the United States, and I don’t have any support for thinking that anyone is better off — all that is, is a hateful ideology.

.. you wrote this, “I would never have begun my own conversations without first experiencing clear and passionate outrage to what I believed from those I interacted with.” And yet, as we’ve been speaking, that process of you being able to interact with them and take in that outrage was the seed that got you to that point. So — but I would like to hear about how you are thinking, these days, about this line between civility and outrage and activism.

.. MR. BLACK: I worry that my story gets told as a piece of evidence that the only way that you change people’s minds is by having friendly conversations with them, when it’s clearly not true. It’s essential that you speak up loudly and condemn something that’s wrong. That’s what happened at college. It wasn’t just these conversations. The context for those conversations was that an entire community of people that I had gotten to know for a semester before they knew who I was, and who I respected, clearly had come to a very intelligent conclusion that what I was advocating was morally wrong, was factually wrong. And I found that very unpleasant, and I didn’t want to listen to it, and it initially drove me to organize a seminar to try to make white nationalists be more confident in what they were believing.

.. do you think you — without those quiet conversations, would the outrage alone have brought you around?

MR. BLACK: No; the outrage alone would have made me a more firm adherent to being a white nationalist. But the quiet conversations couldn’t have happened without the outrage.

.. And there is a difference between being aggressive and being strong. There’s a difference between being vociferously opposed, in this case, to the white nationalist ideology and other hateful ideologies, and taking steps to harm an individual who subscribes to those ideologies. Even an ideology which is as reprehensible as most of us, probably all of us in this room, believe white nationalism to be, once you cross the line to saying, “He’s forfeited his rights as a human being; he’s forfeited his right to human dignity by virtue of having those beliefs” — maybe the Nazis said that the Jews forfeited their rights to human dignity by virtue of being Jews. Where does it end? So to be strong, no question, is important. But there is a difference between being strong and violating the humanity of another person.

.. it was grounded in empathy; that the reason why I was not willing to listen to the argument that sounded very straightforward — that we should work towards inclusion, not separation — was because I didn’t empathize with people who weren’t part of my in-group. And I thought I wasn’t necessarily doing anything bad to them, but it was also, the priority was the people who were within my in-group.

And <strong>what changed was feeling that people who were not in my in-group were being negatively impacted by my actions and that I should care about that.</strong> And trying to reconcile that I should care about people who are negatively impacted by my actions, and I’m still doing the actions, became very difficult. And it really was empathizing with people who were not “supposed” to be part of my group and increasing the number of people who were in my group — that’s the universal thing that I think came out of what I learned from coming through that, because it can — everybody has in-groups.

.. what, right now, makes you despair, and where are you finding hope?

MR. STEVENSON: Sure. So I don’t think I would use the word “despair,” because I think the word “despair” makes it seem as though there is no hope. But there is certainly a tendency, I think, increasing trend to only associating with people who agree with you, who have the same worldview, have the same opinions as you. And that’s psychologically pleasing, and it’s maybe fun, but the terrible cost of that is that you run a very real risk of losing empathy for people who disagree with you. And that’s why I see people — people who are my friends, who I love dearly, think nothing to say, “I hate so-and-so.” “I hate Republicans,” or, “I hate Democrats.” Do they know what they’re saying?

As far as hope, I think that the underlying spark of goodness that’s within each and every one of us and within everybody in the world is ultimately gonna win out; that this empathy that people can generate and feel — you can’t stop it in the long run.

.. <strong>I spent a lot of time trying to be a good activist for a bad cause.</strong> And I spent a lot of time seeing the ways that my predecessors had been successful at that, whether it’s winning campaigns or building organizations in large numbers, and so, cultivated arguments that found fertile ground. And that led us to think that we were not only right, but that with time, everybody would see that we were right, and agree.

.. And now I think I’m back to being confident. <strong>People do want inclusion; they do want to make a fair society. I think just about everybody does, wants there to be a society where we are not limited, where we’re not oppressed because of our group. And it’s just very hard to do that.</strong>