Jonathan Herzog

And it just shows you how hard it is to extrapolate from any of these events because we're running against Donald Trump.

And so there are a lot of other factors at play.

But certainly Pete had an incredible ground game in Iowa that led many, many people to be comfortable with him as president.

as their second choice or what have you.

Well, so what's incredible, Nathan, is that, again, our candidate literally started fundraising from his Gmail address book.

This is a guy who, you know, first generation American, son of immigrants, had started out his career in entrepreneurship.

His businesses had flopped until one took off.

And then the lion's share of his career was building Venture for America to help

promote entrepreneurship in cities that needed a boost after the financial crisis.

We didn't really have a whole network of connections and donors and capital and relationships to work off of.

Really, the innovation was born out of the necessity where many of the people who were drawn to Yang and to the campaign,

came to it from, again, these long-form, substantive one, two, three-hour podcasts where we would dive into the data and the fact that American life expectancy had declined for three years consecutively before Trump, before COVID.

uh the data that we saw this great divergence between gdp and the increase in the stock market um and the returns to labor or even life expectancy itself and so we had this really high need for cognition uh audience that then to your point about having um a brand identity around it um so much of being gang gang and being um uh math and data friendly is

is kind of wrapped into people's identity and just essence of their being.

So following the Joe Rogan podcast, that was kind of our big reveal and the big moment in early 2019.

And in order to qualify for the first Democratic debate, which was always the kind of first order goal in the early stages, we had to secure 65,000 individual contributions from American adults.

And so we have these very objective metrics

established by the DNC for polling and for fundraising.

And so it was really a matter of how do we reverse engineer?

We know we have these really specific, explicit outputs.