Review: Hubris, Lack of Direction Cheapen ‘Hey Yang, Where’s My Thousand Bucks?’

Two rules come to mind when it comes to basic commandments for any writers: “Write what you know” and “Read the room.” The former is a pithy and reliable rule that usually helps keep novice writers in their lanes. Write what you know and you’ll never run out of subject matter. You might not break any new ground, but at least you’ll be able to stake your claim to well-trodden territory. Raise your flag and see who will salute.

It’s the second rule, to “read the room,” that isn’t always understood or followed. Writers need the ability to read the room if they want to sell their message. Make sure your narrative is compatible with your audience. If a former Democratic Presidential candidate wants to present a humorous take on a world that’s actually in flames, the results are going to be disastrous. I believe Andrew Yang’s new book Hey Yang, Where’s My Thousand Bucks? is proof that failing to read the room can result in a text that’s both foolish and irrelevant.

Nothing can be taken away from the accomplishments of Andrew Yang, now in his early 50s. He left his life as an entrepreneur to become an improbably successful 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, outlasting over a dozen more established competitors and establishing a group of followers that called themselves “The Yang Gang.” Yang left the Democratic party after losing the nomination. He ran an unsuccessful campaign for mayor of New York City and co-founded The Forward Party, a third party movement that doesn’t seem to be making any major waves. His companies Humanity Forward, Venture for America, and

Noble Mobile all work toward economic stability and social responsibility.

This is all well and good, but credibility in your professional life does not make for a strong book. The title refers to Yang’s campaign promise to provide a guaranteed universal income to citizens in need. He appears on the dust cover jacket, wearing a wide smile and waving a wad of cash at the camera. The problem is that Yang seems more interested in dropping a collection of B- and A-level celebrities who campaigned for him, donated, or otherwise found themselves in his radar: filmmaker Darren Aronofsky, comic Dave Chapelle, Jeremy Lin, Jon Hamm, Henry Golding, Channing Tatum, Emma Watson, Katy Perry and Orlando Bloom, The Cure’s Robert Smith. Comics Norm Macdonald and Bob Saget are posthumously cited as supporters.

The problem is that this celebrity naming gets exhausting and makes this much more ponderous than it needs to be. Yang has a good narrative in this book, but it doesn’t start until the 3rd chapter. We meet Andrew the “...quiet, nerdy, sensitive kid obsessed (along with his older brother) with Dungeons and Dragons."

Andrew lived in a 96% white town and ended up going away to Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. He’d morphed from the trope of the nerdy Asian to the “very very angry” Asian.

There’s a lot of missed opportunities here. Yang could have written a narrative from his perspective as an Asian student at Phillips (certainly a rarity in 1990).

Take this line: “I came out of Exeter with a newfound sense that the top kids in the country were no better than me.”

The fact that he doesn’t elaborate on that observation demonstrates his failure to follow another basic writing rule: Show, don’t tell.

Yang goes to Brown and becomes a buffed, strong “Angry Asian guy” who sees basketball as therapy. Law school left him with major debt and at the age of 30 he becomes the head of the Manhattan Prep Education company. This is all covered in Part I (“How It All Started”) and Part II (“Lucky Breaks.”) By the time he brings us to Part III, (“Just Do Everything Right,”) the story of his campaign starts. He cites “irrational self confidence” as a reason he started this quest. “People were not encouraging,” he writes. “Maybe they had talked to my Mom.

Perhaps I wasn’t as cool as I’d thought?”

Yang tells us his campaign worked because he had a “fun, scrappy team of true believers” whom he led with a sense of humor and “seized on anything positive and made a big deal out of it.” The frustrating part of this section is that while we believe his impressions, we don’t get to see it played out. Did he keep a campaign diary? That would have helped. The problem is that he takes us from the humble beginnings of barely an audience to 15 months later, a Los Angeles rally in 2019 with seven thousand people. A total of 175,000 people bought his book The War on Normal People. He does the talk show and podcast circuit with Joe Rogan, Bill Maher, The View, and more:

“It felt like a double life. There was my campaign life, complete with team, entourage, rental vehicles…Then there was my home life, when I would act like a homebody for thirty-six hours…”

It’s another lost opportunity. Yang fails to deliver and expects his audience to fill in the missing pieces. The biggest problem with this book comes when Yang starts in with his examination of Trump 2020 and an overall critique of the Democratic party. Yes, we know Trump gave off “Messianic vibes” and built his energy on a WWF approach. “Democrats have never understood this or had any response to it.”

Yang continues:

“When is the last time you saw a Democrat be funny?” he writes. “The problem with the Democrats is that they are practice politics.”

Of course, Yang could not have foreseen the chaos of summer/fall 2024, when Joe Biden withdrew as the Democratic candidate and replacement Kamala Harris had 107 days to win the campaign. Is a lack of Democratic humor really the problem here? The biggest problem is this observation Yang inexplicably felt the need to include:

“The only time I considered joining the Trump team was when Trump started walking into UFC events with cabinet members. I’d watch it on TV and think That’s dope! Maybe I should give them a call. Of course I wouldn’t actually do that, but I was impressed.”

Maybe Yang is the problem here. The Emperor’s wardrobe certainly fooled a lot of people in 2016 and 2024, and Yang is no different from the people he’s criticizing.

The second half of Hey Yang, Where’s My Thousand Bucks? is proof that the narratives are at loose ends. He could have written a good book about life at Phillips Exeter, or a daily account of his campaign. Instead, there is a chapter on his battle (and eventual meeting) with racist stand-up comic Shane Gillis. There is a reprint of his questionable op-ed on masculinity, his alliance with (and introduction of) independent presidential candidate Dean Phillips, and his April 2024 night as a stand-up comic opening for Dave Chapelle. It’s this flirtation with the transphobic Chapelle that’s an impediment to really appreciating Yang’s message (whatever that is). One chapter (two pages) is simply a listing and summary of his five books (including the one we’re reading). The filler in this book gets annoying.

Hey Yang, Where’s My Thousand Bucks? includes a subtitle “and other true stories of staggering depth.” It’s certainly written with humorous intentions, but by the end of the book Yang just comes off solipsistic and disingenuous. We learn early on that one of his campaign’s hashtags, #MATH, meant “Make America Think Harder.” By the end, we learn one of his friends told him “Man, you are the most punk rock person I know.” There’s a strong and meaningful story here, about Asian immigrant success and innovative resilience, but Yang can’t get beyond his hubris to pull it off.