Andrew Yang may help get us across to the other side, where his policies won’t matter any more.

When word of the “$1000 a month for everyone” policy started popping up among crypto-twitter, I dismissed it. At face value, it seemed not much more than marketing hype, and necessary as it came from an unheard-of aspiring candidate.

Recently, Andrew Yang has been making the rounds, giving long-form interviews with high profile YouTubers and political commentators. I began listening to one out of curiosity, and have since dug in. While I am not endorsing or opposing this candidate or any of his policies, I can say he’s the most thoughtful contender for office ever that I know of. And, he’s considering the big, ominous challenges that are looming around the corner, that no one else really seems to care about.

Last month, someone I follow recommended The Sovereign Individual as one of the most important books to read. Always keeping an eye out for good works missing from the public library, I put in a request for them to buy it and received the email that it was in last week. I cracked it open last Friday, and began reading about “mastering the transition to the information age.”

It was the next day that I seriously listened to a comprehensive interview with Yang for the first time. He began by mentioning the challenges the Fourth Revolution (from the Industrial Age to the Information Age) will bring about, and how urgent it is to prepare ourselves for it. I’m not sure what the odds are that I just started reading from his playbook as he is gearing up for the debates, but I am excited.

I believe he is the one candidate who is considering how to get us as a people through the turbulence ahead. A main idea of The Sovereign Individual is the decline of the 20th century nation-state. I’m beginning to see Yang’s policies through these lenses, and it’s intriguing. If his primary goal is navigating through this transition, he would be unique among his peers for this critical foresightedness. And, even if I disagree with a lot of his lesser policies, it is a bit ironic as they won’t matter so much — government power will largely cease to exist as we move beyond industrial mechanization of power. We just have to make it there.