Thank you ITS Never Happening…, Jack, Lynette, Shirley Figueroa, Mary Lummis, and many others for tuning into my live video with Andrew Yang! Join me for my next live video in the app.
It ain’t every day you’re sitting in a car in Iowa, snow falling, talking to a man who ran for president. That’s the beauty of this journey—you show up, you ask questions, and the ancestors line up the conversation for you.
I pulled up on Andrew Yang livestream somewhere off a highway in Iowa. We got to conversating, and man... it was one of those talks that makes your brain feel like it’s doing backflips. We talked about Dr. King, union leaders getting shot through their windows, the robots taking our jobs, and why your cell phone bill is basically legalized theft.
If you think you know Andrew Yang, or you think you know American history, I promise you, by the end of this, you’ll realize you was only holding half the puzzle piece. Here is the breakdown.
The Real Dr. King Was a Radical (And a Futurist)
We started on Black History Month, but Andrew took it somewhere deeper than the textbook. He reminded me that the image of Dr. King we get fed every January—the nice, sanitized man dreaming about content of character—is a ghost. A clean version of a revolutionary.
Andrew hit me with the dots that changed my whole vibe for the rest of the day.
First, he told me about Walter Reuther. Reuther was the head of the UAW back in the day. A union legend. This man got shot through his window, his brother was killed, he got beaten up multiple times—because that’s what it took to stand up for the working man back then. He was one of the speakers right before Dr. King gave the “I Have a Dream” speech. Why? Because Reuther looked at the March on Washington and said, “This is the same movement I’m in.”
That blew my mind. The fight for Black lives and the fight for workers’ rights? Same family tree.
Then Andrew dropped the bomb. He said, “You know Dr. King was talking about universal basic income before he was killed, right?”
I had to stop him. I literally had to pause the interview because I didn’t know that. Dr. King wasn’t just marching against Jim Crow; he was looking at the future and seeing automation coming. In his book Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, he literally said that technology was going to automate jobs away. He said poor Blacks and poor whites needed to team up and abolish poverty. He was calling for a guaranteed income.
So when we see his legacy getting stripped away, his name getting used to sell mattresses or whatever, it stings. Because if he was alive today, he wouldn’t be happy with just a parade. He’d be looking at the poverty, the AI taking jobs, and the data centers poisoning Iowa’s water, and he’d say, “Y’all ain’t listening.”
The “Magical Asian Man from the Future” & The Politics of Identity
I had to ask Andrew the vulnerable question. You ran in 2019 talking about AI and $1,000 a month (the Freedom Dividend). People looked at you crazy. Now, everybody from politicians to your barber is talking about AI taking over. How does that feel?
Andrew kept it a buck. He said, look, he ran because he saw the math. He was talking about artificial intelligence before ChatGPT was a household name. But he also acknowledged that the way people received him had a lot to do with his race.
He told me a story about being on a panel with Michael Tubbs, the young Black mayor of Stockton who actually started a UBI pilot program. Mayor Tubbs told Andrew, “You can get away with saying shit I could never get away with. If I, as a young Black mayor, said we should start giving everyone money, they’d laugh me out of the room. But if you say it, people are like, ‘Oh, the magical Asian man from the future has some interesting ideas.’”
That’s that “model minority” myth in action. The same idea, coming from a Black mouth, is a threat. Coming from an Asian mouth, it’s an innovation. We gotta be real about that dynamic if we’re going to build the coalitions Dr. King and Walter Reuther were talking about.
Your Phone is Making You Poor and Sad (Here’s the Fix)
We pivoted to the rectangle in our pocket. Andrew’s new venture, Noble Mobile, ain’t just a phone company—it’s a protest.
He dropped some stats that had me tight:
The average American pays $83 a month for wireless.
The average European pays $35 a month.
That extra $48 a month times 300 million people equals $100 BILLION a year we’re getting overcharged.
A hundred billion. For a service that’s basically a utility at this point.
Andrew looked at what his friend Mark Cuban did with Cost Plus Drugs (selling generics at a fair price) and applied it to phones. He cut a deal with T-Mobile to use their network (so the coverage is the same, if not better), and now he’s selling it for around $40 a month at NobleMobile.com.
Here’s where the politics come in… I asked him the hard question we all scared to ask: “If I sign up, what you doing with my data? You selling it to ICE? Is Palantir backdooring my texts?”
Andrew’s answer was solid. He ran on a Data Use Bill of Rights when he was campaigning. He believes we should own our data. So with Noble, they stipulate that they cannot sell or resell your data. They don’t even have access to it. They made T-Mobile agree to the same terms. It’s locked down.
And the kicker? They give you money back if you don’t use data. And they pay you interest on that money. The goal is to make you look at your phone and think, “Damn, I’m rotting my brain and losing money?” It’s an incentive to touch grass.
The average Noble user uses their phone 17% less. That’s a win in my book.
“I Could Have Saved More If They Knew They Were Slaves”
As we wrapped up, I had to leave Andrew and the audience with a thought that’s been burning in my chest. I got my degree in African American Studies, and traveling this country, I realize that a lot of folks just don’t know the history—so they keep being surprised by the present.
There’s a quote, allegedly from Harriet Tubman. They asked her what she would have done differently. She said, “I could have saved more slaves if I could have convinced them they were slaves.”
If you’re looking at what ICE is doing right now, or how corporations are poisoning water in Iowa, or how they’re replacing workers with AI, and you’re shocked—you haven’t been paying attention to Black history. Don’t look at Germany for the playbook; look at the Fugitive Slave Act. Look at the indigenous folks in this country who been through this before.
We don’t need to map American horror onto other people’s stories. We wrote the book on it. We need to understand our own domestic history so we can see the future coming before it hits us.
Andrew Yang’s Challenge to Us
Andrew closed with a simple truth: Dr. King was right. The poor whites and the poor Blacks need to team up. Because right now, it’s not about us versus each other. It’s about us against the extractive industries, the megacorps, and the algorithms designed to make our kids anxious for a profit.
He said America’s slogan should be “Extracting Maximum Profit.” That’s it.
Andrew believes Americans are good. We want the same things. We just need to come together, put the phones down, and follow the money back to our common humanity.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Dr. King’s Final Fight Was Economic: He wasn’t just about ending segregation. In his final years, he was laser-focused on poverty, warning about automation, and advocating for a Universal Basic Income (Guaranteed Income). His assassination cut short a multi-racial poor people’s movement.
Coalitions Are Historical: The link between the Civil Rights Movement and the Labor Movement is real. Walter Reuther (UAW) and MLK Jr. stood on the same stage because they understood that workers’ rights and Black liberation are intertwined.
Identity Shapes Policy Reception: Andrew Yang acknowledged that his Asian identity allowed him to propose radical ideas (like UBI) that a Black politician like Michael Tubbs would have been crucified for. The “model minority” myth provides a permission structure that Black leaders don’t get.
We Are Being Financially Exploited by Telecoms: Americans are overpaying by roughly $100 billion a year for wireless service compared to Europe. Cell service has become a highly profitable utility with little resistance.
Data is Power: Your data is being sold and weaponized. Andrew Yang’s “Data Use Bill of Rights” and the Noble Mobile model (refusing to sell data) is a small act of resistance against the surveillance economy.
American History Repeats: To understand the current political climate (raids, deportations, corporate control), look at American history first—specifically the Fugitive Slave era and the treatment of Indigenous peoples—before looking at foreign analogs.
RELATED READINGS / FURTHER STUDY
Book: Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. – This is the book where he lays out his economic vision and talks about automation. Essential reading.
Essay: MLK, The Futurist by Andrew Yang – Look up Andrew’s piece connecting Dr. King to modern tech realities.
History: The Life and Times of Walter Reuther – Research the UAW’s history and the physical price paid by labor leaders.
Policy: The Data Use Bill of Rights (Andrew Yang 2020 Campaign Platform) – A blueprint for how we should own our digital selves.
Concept: Guaranteed Income – Look into the work of Mayors for a Guaranteed Income (founded by Michael Tubbs) to see how King’s idea is being piloted today.
Save Money & Protect Your Data: Check out NobleMobile.com for a phone plan that won’t sell you out.
