We spoke for an episode of The Ticket podcast.

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Yang’s key policy proposal—a universal basic income of $1,000 a month—went from an idea he was laughed at for pitching to one backed by a list of people that includes Pope Francis and President Donald Trump. But that doesn’t give him much pleasure. I asked him whether he feels as if he won the presidential race in a way. “It’s impossible to feel like a winner when people are suffering so much,” he told me. He’s glad that his campaign advanced the idea, but he’s shocked by how quickly the situation became desperate. He can easily envision how more optimistic politicians could mess up the future by not realizing how bad things have gotten.

Read: The pull of Andrew Yang’s pessimism

“One of the misconceptions that people have is that history is like a pendulum, and that if we go too far in one direction, we’ll go the other direction—where because right now we’re so isolated, we’re going to come out of this more unified and together, and we’ll be able to solve the biggest problems that have been bearing down on us, like climate change, like a dehumanizing economy, like [a] polarized political system,” Yang told me. “That’s not the way it works, really. We’re being tested right now. And the evolution or progress is going to be a fight … just like it was before this crisis. And in some ways, the forces on both sides, I believe, are going to be stronger, because to me, dysfunction is one of the demons that we’ve been struggling with for years, where we have this epidemic of insecurity that is destroying people’s lives and families and communities. But it’s also destroyed any sensible cohesion or sense of common purpose. And this crisis has exacerbated that disintegration in many ways.”

“There is,” Yang said, “a very real chance that we make mistakes on the way out” of the crisis.

After Yang dropped out of the presidential race, he started fundraising to create his own universal basic income pilot program. He partnered with a group in the Bronx to work with 1,000 families in need. The program was overwhelmed by the demand, and adapted to add microloans to the work. Then the coronavirus hit. Even as he pursued new efforts to raise more money, there was still nowhere near enough coming in and far too many stories of people who couldn’t buy food for him to keep to his original plan.

“We just started giving out $20 and sending nice messages saying like, ‘Look, we can’t do everything we want, but here’s $20.’ And we started doing that in part because when we did that little bit, people expressed just how grateful they were that anyone actually is trying to help them,” Yang told me. “There’s such a sense of isolation and hopelessness and despair among many Americans right now that even just getting 20 bucks via PayPal, and like, ‘You’ll be all right and we care about you,’ actually seemed to really help people in a very meaningful way.”