Matt Mayhan, welcome to All In.

Thanks, David.

I have no idea who you are.

Who are you?

I mean, you're a guy who kind of popped up running for governor of California last minute. How'd that come about? And who is Matt Mayhan? Well, David, like everybody, I'm frustrated with the state that keeps spending more and seemingly getting less, which is why I jumped in. but to back up, I grew up in a little farming town here in California,

town called Watsonville, where your strawberries come from, home of- I do work in Watsonville. Driscoll berries, you know it well. I got greenhouses, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Working class family, mom was a teacher, dad was a letter carrier. My lucky break in life was getting into a great college prep high school on a work study scholarship. I took buses about two hours each way, worked my way through high school and college, and came back

as a public school teacher through the Teach for America program, always was very community

oriented, was interested in politics, wanted to know how to make our city, our world a better

place, ended up in the tech sector and spent about a decade building

civic tech tools to help people navigate their democracy. What did you build? I was involved

with an early Facebook application called Causes, and then went on to start a platform called Brigade

that was sort of like LinkedIn for voters. And the whole premise was to build grassroots

bottom-up power by connecting voters around issues they're passionate about, outcomes they want to see,

and help them organize to hold their elected officials accountable. After about a decade in

the civic tech space, our company was acquired. I decided to run for city council,

and I went out and knocked on 10,000 doors,

got yelled at for a lot of things

that I wasn't necessarily responsible for,

but I got a real feel for the common sense

of the residents of California who would ask questions

like, if I'm paying $20,000 a year on property taxes, why haven't my local

roads been paved in the last 15 years? And I thought that made a lot of sense. So I went to

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