Hudson Valley Ideas Festival at the Rosendale Theater

At this year’s Hudson Valley Ideas Festival, attendees are invited to think “Beyond the Algorithm,” with six speakers, including the festival’s creator, entrepreneur, author, and Forward Party founder Andrew Yang.

Yang and his family had been living in New Paltz for several years when he addressed the Aspen Ideas Festival in 2023 and decided that the Hudson Valley should have one too. “I thought, well, maybe I can make that happen,” he says. “That was the original idea, and I’m happy to say that the response to the first one [in 2024] was so enthusiastic that we knew we had to do it again this year.”

The presenters, a mix of authors, journalists, and entrepreneurs, are “people I’ve met out there with a point of view and something to share,” says Yang. The audience will hear from Atlantic writer Thomas Chatterton Williams on “Unlearning Race,” actor Dane DeHaan on “Hollywood in the Streaming Age,” digital creator and cultural commentator Jules Terpak on “The Future of TikTok,” journalist and novelist Ross Barkan on “The Great New York Novel,” and speaking coach Michael Hoeppner, who’ll discuss “Speaking Presidentially.” Yang himself will be taking the stage to talk about “The Path to Political Reform.”

Yang’s topic is one he’s been in the trenches working on without ceasing. Though his 2020 run for the Democratic presidential nomination failed to pan out, he rebounded to found the Forward Party (“Not Left. Not Right. FORWARD.”) in 2021. Teams in 34 states (New York included) are continuing to build a platform while recruiting candidates who rep the Forward goals, like rebuilding democracy from the bottom up, putting data ahead of ideology, and promoting old-fashioned ideas like integrity and civic engagement. “I think more and more people are waking up to the fact that the status quo isn’t working,” says Yang. “For example, several years ago if I brought up AI and its impact on the job market, it sounded like science fiction; now it’s current events, so the appetite for making changes is picking up. Some of the changes happening are, in my opinion, negative, but there’s also more room for different ideas and solutions.”

The flagship idea of Yang’s 2020 run, Universal Basic Income, is one that he also sees gaining traction as ultimately inevitable, and he even has an idea of who should foot the bill. “Our data is being sold and resold for several hundred billion a year, and we’re not seeing a dime of that,” he points out. “Instead, it’s reflected in the market cap of several large tech companies. So there’s a lot of value there that could be put to different use.”

Meanwhile, he’s “chiseling away at political opportunities, some of which may come faster than you expect,” and promoting structural reforms such as ranked-choice voting and open primaries. “I’m not going to pretend this is quick or easy, but it’s necessary,” he says. His 2024 TED talk on political reform, he notes, made the top 10. Would he ever run for office again? “Well, I enjoyed it, and [at 50] I’m still young by political standards.”

Yang’s hope for the festival is that people will come away with food for thought, be it in the form of a book or perhaps a thinker they’d like to engage with further. Tickets for the event, which runs from 10 am to 5 pm, are $10 per person for the morning or the afternoon sessions and $15 for an all-day pass.

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This article appears in April 2025.