Andrew Yang on Noble Mobile, UBI, and why he's done waiting for policy to catch up

Andrew Yang’s 2020 presidential campaign was based on a warning that automation and AI would hollow out the labor market and concentrate wealth in the hands of a few. At the time, ideas like Universal Basic Income felt fringe. Now Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, and Bernie Sanders are all saying versions of the same thing. An entrepreneur at heart, Yang has found a new way to put money back into the hands of the people — one phone bill at a time. On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan talks to Yang about his startup Noble Mobile, which pays you to use your phone less, ways to combat the “attention economy,” and what startups can do when the government won't move. Listen to the full episode to hear: Why Yang thinks the $100 billion gap between what Americans and Europeans pay for wireless is a startup opportunity. How a partnership with the Light Phone fits into the growing "together tech" movement, and why Yang has been throwing no-phone parties in LA and NYC. What he actually thinks of Bernie Sanders' proposed AI sovereign wealth fund, and why he's skeptical the money should flow through government at all. Why UBI isn't a salary replacement but a "landing pad,” and what Noble Mobile's $600-a-year savings has to do with it. Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Hello and welcome back to Equity Tech Crunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups. I'm Rebecca Bilon and this is the episode where we bring on industry experts to help us explore a trend in the tech world and dive deep. For years, Andrew Yang has been warning that automation and AI would reshape the labor market and concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a few tech companies. When he ran for president in 2020, ideas like universal basic income were largely considered fringe. Now, AI companies, economists and lawmakers are all wrestling with how to redistribute the wealth created by AI. Today, we're talking with Yang about being early to that conversation, his new startup, Noble Mobile, and what roles startups can play in putting money back into the people's pockets when policy falls short.

• 0:50Speaker 00

  Andrew, welcome to the show.

• 0:51Speaker 01

  It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.

• 0:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, really excited to talk to you. I mean, you've been such a part of, I guess, what's populating on my feeds for, you know, the better part of the last six years since you ran for president in 2020 on the platform of universal basic income, and that's really rearing its head around again. Do you feel like a Cassandra?

• 1:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I wish I wasn't right, Rebecca. I mean, I said AI was going to take a lot of jobs, and I believe it's doing that right now. And universal basic income, to me, should be inevitable. The question is, how quickly can we get there? And how much bad stuff is going to happen between here and there?

• 1:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, we'll get into all of that. Before we do, I want to talk about some of the good stuff and this being your company. So you're not a first time founder. I think you founded Venture for America before your political career, but you're not, you don't really identify as a VC, right? In a 2021 tweet, I think you said that you were not a venture capitalist. You started a nonprofit that helped train young entrepreneurs. So you kind of, it seems that you've taken this kind of like tech for good mindset into your newest startup today, if you want to talk a little bit about that.

• 2:08Speaker 01

  Well, thank you for the preamble, Rebecca. I mean, I certainly think Noble Mobile is tech for good, trying to channel a commodity that we all use every day of our wireless service and then make our lives better. And I'm glad that you see the values there where

• 2:27Speaker 01

  No, I believe in innovation and technology and progress, but I also think that too many companies have become extractive, really, and whether that's our attention, or wallets, or our relationships. I mean, you name it.

• 2:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. So for those who are listeners who don't know what Noble Mobile is, can you give us like a brief rundown?

• 2:47Speaker 01

  I would love to. Well, thank you. So people know me as the magical Asian man from the future who wants to give everyone money, which is true. I do think putting money into people's hands is the best thing we could do for millions of people right now. But ran for president, lost. We're not doing this from the White House.

• 3:10Speaker 01

  So as an entrepreneur, I've been trying to figure out, well, can I get money into people's hands immediately? And I was inspired by my friend Mark Cuban's company Cost Plus Drugs, where he buys generic drugs in bulk and then sells them to the American people at a 15% markup. And I called Mark and I said, man, that's genius. You're saving lives, doing something that we all hope that the market would do. But of course, you know, it took Mark throwing his weight around. And so I made a list of the things we all spend money on. And it goes housing, healthcare, education, food, fuel, transportation, media, and wireless. And so then I looked at wireless as a category.

• 3:54Speaker 01

  So I'm going to put you on the spot, Rebecca, just for fun.

• 3:56Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 3:58Speaker 01

  I'm guessing you're a Verizon subscriber, and I'm going to see if that's right.

• 4:01Speaker 00

  I'm not.

• 4:02Speaker 01

  Oh, wow. Who do you use?

• 4:03Speaker 00

  I use T-Mobile.

• 4:04Speaker 01

  Fine and good. So I was a Verizon user for 20 some odd years, and I was paying them $150 a month, which is high, just for myself, by the way, one line.

• 4:16Speaker 00

  Really?

• 4:16Speaker 01

  The average American is, I know you're like, how are you spending that?

• 4:19Speaker 00

  How is that?

• 4:20Speaker 01

  I was, I know. I mean, I've encountered worse, I'm sort of happy to say. How much do you spend?

• 4:25Speaker 00

  I think my bill is $1.50 for two lines.

• 4:29Speaker 01

  That's about normal.

• 4:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:30Speaker 01

  So $83 is what the average American spends on their connection.

• 4:36Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, no, $1.60. I'm paying $1.60. Yeah, so about that.

• 4:39Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah. $1.60 is just about average. I was well above average, but... In Europe, the average is only thirty-five dollars a month, which is less than half what we spend. And so I started trying to figure out, okay, where does that extra money go? Which amounts to, by the way, about a hundred billion dollars a year. The delta between thirty-five and eighty-three. If you multiply it times all Americans with wireless plans, which is all of us. So of that a hundred billion dollars, I could find eleven billion that was going to Verizon shareholders in the form of dividends every twelve months. Seven billion going to AT&T shareholders, about three billion going to T-Mobile shareholders.

• 5:22Speaker 01

  So that gets you twenty-one billion in profits from consumers. And Verizon is the most extreme in that they're they're paying, you know, depending upon their stock price at any moment, but they're paying maybe a five percent dividend. And so their shareholders have no illusions, like no one's paying for any growth or innovation over there. They're just coupon clipping where it's a transfer device between customers and shareholders. And so I thought, is it possible to get us closer to Europe? And so I went to the major carriers and said, hey, I'm Andrew Yang. You might have seen me from, you know, my presidential campaign, whatever it is. What's the best deal you can provide to the American people?

• 6:08Speaker 01

  And of the three subscribers, T-Mobile came forward with the best deal and said, here's what we can do. And when I looked at the numbers, I was like, wow, this would be a great deal.

• 6:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:19Speaker 01

  For a million Americans, it would cut your wireless bill essentially in half. But then the kicker was that we are essentially wholesaling this data from T-Mobile. And so if you signed up for Noble Mobile and you used less data, we could give you more money back. And so what Noble Mobile is, it's this aligned carrier where you pay us fifty dollars a month for unlimited data. And I will say I'm a heavy phone user, so I use a lot of data. But if you use less data, and this includes if you log into Wi-Fi at home or in the office, you're not really using a whole lot of data. We will pay you up to $20 back at the end of the month.

• 7:00Speaker 01

  So it's like a friendly nudge angel saying, hey, when you doom scroll and spend more time on what Hassan Minhaj calls your rectangle of sadness. Uh, this guy, you're actually costing yourself a little bit of money. And so people like money, they like rewards. So they say, wait a minute. Let me maybe, uh, look up and not mesmerize myself, uh, so much on my phone.

• 7:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:23Speaker 01

  So the average Noble mobile subscriber spends $42 a month and their screen time has gone down 17% uh, relative to their starting point.

• 7:33Speaker 00

  Amazing.

• 7:33Speaker 01

  So we think those two things are actually enormous value adds.

• 7:36Speaker 00

  Yeah. So like really using market incentives rather than like policy mandates or just, you know, um, it's, it's like the opposite of dark patterns, right? You're, you're changing behavior. Well, it's like light pattern, right? You're changing behavior in a way by giving people rewards for changing their behavior. Now, question for you. So this is $50 a month and that's for unlimited data, right? Yes. Okay. And it's also talk and text. Like, can I make a call with this? Like, do I have to have like a combined?

• 8:05Speaker 01

  In text, you keep your number, you keep your phone. Every device manufactured from 2018 on has an ESIM in it that enables you just to point it to whatever network you want it to be on. So in this case, you'd point it to Noble, which is on the T-Mobile network. Uh, and it takes about five minutes.

• 8:24Speaker 00

  This seems like a no brainer. Like is, what's the growth rate of this? When did this start and what like, can you share any customer numbers?

• 8:30Speaker 01

  We can share some numbers. So we launched in September and then now we're in millions in revenue, thousands and thousands of subscribers. We're growing all the time and it is a no brainer to your point Rebecca. And I want to insert one more fact pattern onto people that most people have experienced. So I was a Verizon subscriber. I went with my family to Europe and then I got a text message saying, hey, you're now on travel pass, $10 a day to be in Spain or wherever I was. And I just said, okay, I did that and I did that multiple times. And so I might end Up paying a hundred fifty dollars for data when I was abroad. And then when I get home, they charged me my original hundred fifty dollars.

• 9:14Speaker 01

  And so I had a three hundred dollar bill that month and was like, what? But then I thought, well, it was my bad. I screwed up. Or that's just what it costs. It turns out that it costs Verizon about two dollars to put me on that foreign carriers network per day. So why do they charge me ten?

• 9:31Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 9:31Speaker 01

  When it it only costs them two, just they like money.

• 9:35Speaker 00

  Classic monopoly tactics, right? If a company has all of the infrastructure, everyone thinks they're the only ones. Then they can use their heft to set prices. I mean, really, this is something the FTC should be looking into if it's if those numbers are actually correct.

• 9:48Speaker 01

  You know what what's crazy Rebecca is AT&T, I think, is up to twelve dollars a day, same.

• 9:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, this is why you need startups to come and disrupt, right? So like, but how do you make money if you're giving money back? Like, what's your business model there?

• 10:00Speaker 01

  So our business model, Rebecca, is to make a bit of money. But if you end up not using a whole lot of data, then you get much of the earnings back, most of the earnings even. So we're unit profitable per customer. But we just share the profits with our our subscribers with the idea that it'll make you happy. You'll stay around, maybe you'll tell your friends and family. So to use this example, which actually paints the picture. When you go to Europe on Noble Mobile, we pay the care foreign carrier two dollars a day. Then we turn around and charge you five dollars, which is a fine business. But then we cap the number of days we can do this per billing cycle to only ten days.

• 10:44Speaker 01

  And then we don't charge you for the domestic data you didn't use because it didn't cost us anything for you not to, you know, be in the US when you were in Spain or wherever. So Chelsea Handler is like an ambassador for us, for example. She went to seven different countries. And her cellphone bill that month was like seventy five dollars. And she came back and was like, I can't believe that this is the way it works. That like our service works exactly the same as it did on our old carrier. So we'll make money on that. Like, that's seventy five dollars, believe it or not, we'll make money. We just don't make hundreds of dollars on it the way that AT&T and Verizon might.

• 11:19Speaker 00

  Is it about like scale, right? So like, it's the more that you're able, like it's slimmer margins, but hopefully more people will will sign up for this kind of thing.

• 11:28Speaker 01

  That's right, Rebecca. We think that if we treat people right, then we'll grow.

• 11:33Speaker 00

  That's, they're a business.

• 11:35Speaker 01

  We don't need to be killing per customer.

• 11:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, it sounds really amazing. Like, I want to give it a go. It's similar playbook to Mint Mobile, right? They were buying wholesale network access instead of building infrastructure. But they are, they're also T-Mobile based, and I think they were acquired for $1.3 billion this year. Noble just raised a $10.3 million seed. Do you have like an exit path? Is there any risk that you're seeing?

• 11:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think Mint got acquired now a couple of years ago.

• 12:02Speaker 00

  Oh, no, that was 2023. Sorry.

• 12:05Speaker 01

  No, no, it's all good. And so our goal is to save Americans millions, even billions of dollars on their wireless spend and then get to scale. And then when we're at scale, I think we'll have a lot of interesting choices and partners. But job one is to run around and grow and let Americans know that you're being gouged and saddened.

• 12:28Speaker 00

  Sad and, yeah, that's, that's something I do want to talk to you about because you've spoken a lot about the attention partnership. But before we pivot to that, I also just want to say it's really cool that you talked to Mark Cuban about this and are inspired by his cost plus drugs because we had him on the podcast as well. And there really seems to be, you know, I don't want to say a movement, but I'm really intrigued by these types of companies that are taking things that are just a part of your everyday life that we're just like, well, that's expensive. And you're like, hmm, does it have to be? And to your point, these are expensive and they're making us sad. I think it's really cool that you guys did a partnership with the Light Phone recently.

• 13:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I love the Light Phone. And if people, I think I have one here, though this might not even be the model. Eh, people can look online for themselves. But Light Phone is a device that takes the core functioning of the phone, which is communicating with other people and maybe some like very, very core functions, and then gets rid of all the social media apps. It gets rid of all these things that bombard your attention and tend to make you sad and bring you down. And so if you use a light phone for a weekend even and a lot of their people use it seven days a week, but some just switch to it on Fridays and say, hey, this is going to be my weekend device. It makes you feel lighter.

• 13:48Speaker 01

  It's like your smartphone actually drags you down and waits you. And one of my comments is that it's rare that your neighbor in real life will come up to you and start screaming in your face. That's not like a normal occurrence, but you get the

• 14:06Speaker 00

  We're in New York, Andrew. That can be a normal occurrence.

• 14:10Speaker 01

  Even in New York, it's not an everyday thing. But your smartphone can make you feel like someone's screaming at you or you're witnessing a screaming match on social media. I mean, that happens every moment. And so when you have a light phone, you start to actually gauge what it is that's plaguing you, what you're worrying about. And then you realize, hey, wait a minute, like, you know, the birds are chirping and the sun is shining and I should call my mom. Maybe on my light phone.

• 14:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, the dumb phone movement is really picking up steam, or at least everyone seems like they're very interested in it. I don't know how many people are making the switch, but you know, we just had a big discussion on our news roundup about what they're calling like together tech, right? So startups trying to get people off their phones in this era where AI is more divisive. I think there's one startup called Board, but like B O A R D. And they help plan events where people can play live board games and things together. There's a, there's a lot. I mean, you're in New York. You see it all the time, right? There's book club bar, there's Lit Bar, there's all these places where people are coming together. There's Third Space, right? And I think you've been throwing some no phone parties in LA and NYC as well, right?

• 15:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's called Offline, OfflineParty.com. People can sign up. But we've now had over 10,000 people come out to these parties because we've had a bunch of them. And it feels like a trip back to the 90s. I'm a little bit older than you are, I think, Rebecca, but my college parties, no one had a smartphone. And so you would actually make eye contact and talk to people and meet people. At one of our parties, someone gave a guy her phone number and a napkin. And that also brought me back to the 90s because, you know, they didn't have their phones out, so they couldn't trade numbers that way.

• 15:57Speaker 00

  About writing on your palm in all the movies, right? They always wrote the numbers on the palms. That's gonna sweat off.

• 16:05Speaker 01

  It was a lot of nostalgia for me. But things were more personal back then. I would go out and you actually might meet someone. And now it seems like you can fill any empty time with this and just stare down at your phone. And so then you're not meeting the person across the room or even right next to you. You're, you know, trying to, I mean, I'm happy to say I'm not on dating apps and marriage and all that jazz. But like, you know, you're like trying to arrange the next thing instead of appreciating where you are.

• 16:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I think that that's, that's a problem that we've had because of social media, right? And just like the way that smartphones are designed to get your attention. But I think it's also obviously becoming more of an issue in the AI era, right? If we just even look at like AI companions and the way people have like relationships with their chatbots, right? There's this, there's this other thing that has similar types of incentives and dark patterns to keep you engaged. My fear is that a lot of young people and older people are going to replace meaningful relationships with, you know, just talking to AI, which seems to know you, offers no resistance.

• 17:22Speaker 00

  Just this, you know, we're talking a lot about friction maxing here at TechCrunch. It seems like

• 17:27Speaker 01

  Friction maxing, I love it.

• 17:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's like everyone wants, every tech bro is offering you no friction. And it's like, but that doesn't really make people happy, right?

• 17:36Speaker 01

  Well, Rebecca, I just mentioned I was, that I'm married. And I said at a conference recently, I said, show of hands, who's married? And most hands went up. And then I said, how many of you have friction in your marriage? And then like everyone laughed because everyone has friction in their marriage.

• 17:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:52Speaker 01

  And on the flip side, my 13 year old son actually said to my wife and I, a week or two ago, I think I'm going to have an AI girlfriend. And then we were both shocked and horrified and said, why? And he said, because it's going to be a lot easier than getting a human girlfriend. And so, you know, you're right that there is this frictionless

• 18:12Speaker 00

  We're going off the grid, kid.

• 18:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know. We, I mean, it definitely gave us a call to action.

• 18:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:20Speaker 01

  But we also felt fortunate that he actually shared that with us because there are a lot of kids that I think are thinking the same thing, but you know, like, might feel self-conscious.

• 18:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, it's good to have that kind of relationship. I mean, but you know, the the emotional toll of AI is one thing, but then, of course, there's the jobs, right? And that brings it back to like, what originally got you on the public's mind, right? So I want to talk to you a little bit about UBI today and what you think about it, right? So as you may know, Sam Altman in 2019, he funded UBI research with 14 million of his own money. Now, he says he doesn't really believe in it anymore, says fixed cash won't be enough to handle the labor upheaval, suggests things like giving people a portion of AI compute, which feels like a circular deal-inspired scheme. What are some of your thoughts on what the tech industry has proposed? Like OpenAI's public wealth fund, right?

• 19:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's clear that there's going to need to be sharing of the value that's being created as quickly and broadly as possible. And it's enlightened self-interest even for the tech companies and CEOs themselves. You have Dario Amodei of Anthropic saying, put in a token tax. You have Sam Altman saying, public wealth fund. You have Elon Musk saying, universal high income. I mean, like, any of these measures follow the same general thrust, which is all of this value is going to get sucked up into the cloud via AI. And the average person is going to be looking around saying, why is my kid home from college without a job?

• 19:51Speaker 01

  And so how do you start crossing that chasm? And so I think universal basic income is really very, very obvious and straightforward. More and more people are for it. Last I checked, 65% of Americans are now for some version of it. And anytime it gets broached, I'll tell you, like, as myself, people come up to me on the street just about every day and say, hey, you called in on AI and we need universal basic income. They just say, we need UBI. I have someone saying to me, we need UBI, most every day.

• 20:25Speaker 00

  Yeah. Is it like a supplement? Because it's not going to replace your your salary, right? Like no UBI that I get from the government or from the AI companies or whatever, wherever it comes from, is going to replace how much I'm making in my actual job if my job gets replaced.

• 20:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, it would be a supplement. It would be a landing pad. It would be a lubricant. I mean, you know, like, there are a lot of transitions that people are going to have to make, Rebecca, except the transitions are scary, the transitions are cumbersome, sometimes they're expensive. And if you have this income that you know goes with you regardless, it changes the calculus for a lot of people. And it would move us from scarcity to abundance, which is the only silver lining in this mess, where GDP right now is eighty four thousand dollars per person. AI is going to push it over a hundred thousand. And so at what point do you start providing some basic level of funds for people to meet

• 21:20Speaker 01

  their needs, either material or otherwise? And by the way, you know, with Noble Mobile, let's say, you know, the average person saves fifty bucks a month, which is around what they would save, times twelve is six hundred dollars a year, and then times the forty years, you might be a wireless subscriber. It's twenty four thousand, you put an interest rate on it and compound it, you're looking at a down payment on someone's retirement. And that money right now is just flowing up to the wireless company. So what you said earlier, which is, look, people are trying to figure out how to translate various things to people more inexpensively. I agree, that's part of this puzzle. So you have AI, it's

• 22:01Speaker 01

  going to suck up a lot of the value of the jobs. Then Americans are going to look up saying, like, how do I meet basic needs? And so then, how can we meet people's needs less expensively? And that, to me, is like a very rich vein of opportunity.

• 22:15Speaker 00

  So you seem to be, I mean, you've proven that the private market can step in and, you know, solve a lot of these problems and put money back into the wallets of everyday people. Like when we talk about UBI or whatever we want to call it, do we trust the AI companies to be the ones to suggest the policy proposals? Or do we want this to come from government? Right? So Bernie Sanders says that he's going to, he's proposing an AI sovereign wealth fund tax, right? So that's a one-time 50% stock tax on major AI companies to create a public ownership stake with proceeds distributed directly to Americans. I mean, sovereign wealth funds are things that other countries have. Norway has this, the Gulf States have this. It's made them a lot of money.

• 22:59Speaker 00

  People have really good quality of life in Norway, to my knowledge. What do you think?

• 23:03Speaker 01

  You know, I think that is the major question, Rebecca. It's like, how are we going to improve people's lives here in the States? And I think the money is going to come from the AI companies. I don't think the AI companies are just going to volunteer it necessarily. I think they'll talk about volunteering it. And then the question is, what happens when the rubber hits the road? I'm very, very pragmatic and open-minded about the way we get the value from the AI companies and into the hands of the average American. I will say there is some concern from some of the founders and entrepreneurs I know that they're like, look, if the government gets a hold of this money, it's not like it's even going to go to that person.

• 23:44Speaker 01

  It's just going to end up going to plug a hole or do something not terribly productive. And so I think there is room for a direct connection between the money and the people that might not go through the government pipes in the way that some might imagine. Because right now, if money were to flow to government, someone in government might just look around and be like, we've got a big deficit. Let's just use it to plug that. And then the, now, look, that's a legitimate point of view, and money is fungible and everything like that. But the connection here has to be direct. The benefits have to be felt by the. American who's going to be like losing their job or having their kid lose their job.

• 24:26Speaker 00

  It's like, how do you structure that kind of thing without it going through the government? It's like you can't, it makes, I don't know, it makes me uncomfortable to think about relying on AI companies creating some kind of a public wealth fund that then gets redistributed by the AI companies. It's very like keeping things within their wheelhouse.

• 24:41Speaker 01

  There genuinely is like an argument for even the most wealthy extractive companies that look, having consumers who have buying power is necessary for people to even buy your stuff. You know, like that, like that, this is, you know, the, the value all being concentrated in the hands of a handful of folks and firms is just bad for everybody. And there are some folks I know in Silicon Valley who are open to that for a variety of reasons. It could be that, you know, they just don't want to have to hire private security and like do all this stuff. I mean, a lot of them have already hired private security, but I mean, like the next level.

• 25:24Speaker 01

  So.

• 25:24Speaker 00

  What, like buying an island?

• 25:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:27Speaker 00

  Somewhere in the Mediterranean, off the coast of Albania.

• 25:30Speaker 01

  Better outside of the bunker, like, you know, trying to stay out of the bunker.

• 25:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:33Speaker 01

  So that there's an opportunity. And it is unfortunate that trust in government has plummeted so much over this last number of years. Like, it makes me sad. I mean, when I ran for president in 2020, it was very much, look, government's going to take it in and then distribute it. And government did distribute the stimulus checks during COVID. And so there is some familiarity. I'll tell you, when I was running for president in 2020, people were like, how would this even happen? How would this even work? And then I got a slew of thank yous when the stimulus checks went out because they're like, oh, this is what you were talking about. And it's like, well, not exactly, but kind of.

• 26:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Again, this is tying it back to what Noble Mobile is doing, right? You have, you're doing what policy can't in a lot of ways, right? Or at least isn't doing. Is there a lesson for startups here when we talk about, you know? There's so many people, I think, in Silicon Valley and just in the tech world generally that want to do good and somehow end up. Working at a big tech firm where their KPI is to keep you focused on a page a little longer, right? And, you know, what are some lessons that founders can take away from how you've connected the dots between, you know, your redistribution policy push for

• 26:55Speaker 00

  UBI and redistribution of wealth in a way through Noble Mobile?

• 27:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I hope people take on problems that they're passionate about and say, look, if we invest a lot of time and energy and resources and ingenuity, like we, we can make this problem better. And sometimes that problem overlaps perfectly with what investors want. And then sometimes it takes a little bit of persuading to say, hey, like, we can build a really valuable enterprise on this basis. One of the issues I think a lot of folks in your world have experienced is that, you know, a couple of ideas get really hot, like right now it's AI. And then everyone piles in and that's both entrepreneurs and

• 27:43Speaker 01

  investors. I will say Rebecca, I had at least one investor say to me around Noble Mobile, it's like, love you, Andrew, want to work with you. If you just make this an AI company, we'll invest. And it's like, well, that's not really what I'm trying to do.

• 27:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, all the money is earmarked for AI companies. That's a, that's a real problem. Yeah.

• 28:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, right. So the encouragement I would give is to both founders and investors to think bigger and more broadly about trying to tackle problems and not subscribe so much to the group think, because I think there are some valuable opportunities out there.

• 28:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, awesome. Okay. Well, we're just about out of time. Where can our listeners connect with you online?

• 28:21Speaker 01

  I am on Substack, andrewyang.com. I send out a newsletter every week, but also Andrew Yang on most social media platforms. And noblemobile.com, obviously, if you go to noblemobile.com/Yang, there's generally some deal for the Yang Gang, because I'm trying to do folks a solid. But excited to see people out there and hopefully use the abundance of this era to actually solve the problems of our time.

• 28:46Speaker 00

  Well, thank you again so much for joining us on the show. To our listeners, you can find me on all the platforms. Just look for me, just Google it. And you can find Equity at Equity Pod on Threads and X. Talk to you next time.

• 28:57Speaker 01

  Equity, double meaning, I think.

• 29:00Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 29:01Speaker 01

  I got it. The E, I'm fast like that.

• 29:06Speaker 00

  Equity is hosted by TechCrunch senior reporters and produced by Teresa Locan Solo with editing by Cal. Subscribe on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts and find out what's next at techcrunch.com/events. Thanks so much for listening and we'll talk to you next time.