Former Presidential Candidate Andrew Yang Visits Ingleside

Andrew Yang, 2020 presidential candidate and founder of the political party Forward, visited Ingleside to join District 11 supervisor candidate Michael Lai for a chat on politics, Asian American representation, housing and AI.

Roughly 50 attendees sat inside the Ingleside Presbyterian Church on July 15 with complimentary boba from the Excelsior’s TS Cafe. Lai and Yang, who had endorsed Lai in the upcoming Nov. 5 election, took turns asking each other predetermined and audience questions and sharing anecdotes from their careers for the hour-long event.

“I looked around and saw that a lot of the people running had been in the political system for a long time and that's part of why I’m inspired by Andrew because he was an outsider,” Lai said during his introduction. “He came in with this entrepreneurial perspective and these bold ideas like the Freedom Dividend, the [Universal Basic Income], and I thought the way to fix San Francisco is to bring in outside entrepreneurial leadership who cares and that's why I'm running.”

Yang began by reflecting on his 202 presidential campaign and the 2024 presidential race. Yang said the country was in for turbulent and difficult years and was thinking of ways to “show Biden the door” to help prevent Donald Trump from being reelected. (Biden has since dropped out.)

Yang said AI advancements were happening quicker than anyone anticipated and that government solutions to slow it down weren’t put into effect.

“It's just going to rip through a lot of communities in various ways and one of the big changes in the last four or five years is that four or five years ago there was a sense of optimism that we could address it in a meaningful way and we got on it quickly and now I think a lot of that optimism is absent and I get that,” Yang said. “It does make me super sad.”

He also said that the current political system is not designed to solve problems like AI or issues like creating UBI initiatives such as enhancing the child tax credit, something he and his team have been working on and he favors rank-choice systems like San Francisco has.

Yang was asked what prompted him to create the Forward party.

He urged attendees to watch his TEDTalk on the party for an in-depth explanation and said that the country could not move toward utopia with the current two-party system, citing how many Americans are registered with the Independent party. He also touched on how he was working towards modernizing the voting system so people could participate in elections via their smartphones by 2028. 

To break up some of the heavier subjects, they touched on memes, celebrity endorsements, go-to boba orders, educators who influenced them and other topics.

Rounding out the conversation was a question on the suffering of news media in politics due to credibility bias issues and what improvements could be made so people could vote more intelligently.

Yang said that nowadays one's relationship to media is matched to their education level which in turn relates to their partisan beliefs and that local journalism shouldn’t be seen as a commercial enterprise but rather as a town library with public and private partnerships in funding.

“The cost of providing local journalism is approximately $2 billion a year,” Yang said. “It's not that much in the scheme of things so this is a solvable problem…It'd be really cost-efficient honestly because you can't believe in local democracy if you don't have local journalism.”

Lai noted how media consumption across cultures is vastly different leading to different realities for people and asked if Yang believed there was a way to get back to a shared reality.

“You probably can't reconstitute the media universe the way you're describing it, Michael,” Yang said. “However, as S.F. supervisor for District 11, there's a lot of stuff you can do. Who knows, man, maybe you'll end up having some kind of a fun district publication that's publicly and privately financed. You'll end up turning this place into a lab for solutions.”