Andrew Yang throws “offline” parties, where people put their phones in pouches they keep with them but don’t open till the party’s over; some of the pouches have a $20 bill, a token of Yang’s penchant for handing out money, also reflected in the $1000/month UBI that was centerpiece of his 2020 presidential campaign. He’s given away more than $16,000 received via revenue-sharing as a high-traffic user at X, finding that “a good reason to keep using it, even though the platform has gotten a lot more negative and obnoxious."
His upcoming book, Hey Yang, Where’s My Thousand Bucks? (Akashic Books, Feb. 3), is an eclectic and entertaining mix of autobiography and sociopolitical commentary, divided into numerous short chapters, and covering his early life to current projects and aspirations. I was surprised to learn the gregarious Yang was an introverted, disaffected kid. “Fuck you. You’re a loser. You suck," he’d say to himself. He was angry at the anti-Asian insults hurled at him in middle school in Schenectady, NY, and wondered if indeed he had a “small dick.” Weightlifting around the time he went to Brown helped. Once, in a laundry room, a woman noticed Yang as a “meathead,” rather than a nerd, a comment he found thrilling.
In October 2019, I offered an upbeat assessment of Yang’s political prospects, as he made unexpected headway in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. A key to his potential success, I thought, was that he couldn’t be pigeonholed as a stereotypical Democrat: “It’s possible that a large number of voters have had enough of left versus right. If so, the once far-fetched possibility of President Yang is not so implausible after all.”
That may’ve been premature rather than wrong. After a losing run for New York mayor in 2021, Yang left the Democrats and co-founded the centrist Forward Party. In Hey Yang, he approaches a possible presidential run by oddly commenting he could end his public career by announcing he loves “putting gerbils in my pants, like that Richard Gere story” from the 1980s (many readers will draw a blank), then writing: “Jokes aside, the odds of my running again are high. I like people. I love the country and those within it. And I have some ideas for how to campaign better next time. For example, imagine if we could vote on a smartphone in a primary that included everyone, including Independents?”
In 2024, Yang was an early enthusiast of Joe Biden getting out of the race, pushing the insurgent candidacy of Minnesota congressman Dean Phillips. Watching Biden deliver a halting speech to a crowd in South Carolina, Yang and his wife Evelyn were alarmed that the president “seemed old and wobbly, his skin translucent.” The crowd chanted “Four more years!” and Yang muttered to Evelyn, “Four more weeks is more like it.” After Biden withdrew, Yang was among those calling for a primary, endorsing Kamala Harris only when it was a fait accompli. “I knew I was never going to support Trump,” he writes. “Heck, trying to fix the problems that got Trump elected was what got me into public life in the first place, and to me he’s the answer like junk food is the answer to kidney disease.”
A 2025 increase in the child tax credit, pressed by Yang’s advocacy group Humanity Forward, was “the greatest achievement of my life,” he writes, continuing to propound a theme of “human-centered capitalism”: “I still think that poverty can be a thing of the past in the richest society in the history of the world. We could work three- or four-day workweeks, with AI doing untold work for us instead of replacing us. We could build an economy that serves human values and flourishing, instead of turning us all into servants to get kicked to the curb.”
Reading Hey Yang, I was struck by the disconnect between this upbeat book and current events, the latter dominated by police-state tactics and mad-king pronouncements. Possibly, the contrast between Yang’s affable problem-solving outlook and the current unfolding disaster is what’ll give him a chance if he runs again, as I think he should and will.