Yang was a political outsider who had never run in an election before, yet with his UBI platform and bro-friendly delivery, he earned a spot in the presidential debates. He ended up suspending his campaign the night of the New Hampshire primary—he has joked that people dismissed him as “the magical Asian man from the future” who “wants to give everyone money.” But his goal was never to win, he told me in his office in December. “My design was to raise the alarm around AI and mainstream universal basic income.”