Shubham (or Shuby as he's known by many of his virtual friends) made it far into the first season of The Circle based on a combination of brains and authenticity. He doesn't react, he thinks through every decision he makes. He's undyingly loyal. He keeps his word. He doesn't play the politics of The Circle. Shubham gets by with an innocent charm that you rarely see these days on TV or a social media landscape dominated by performative influencers. So, in Episode 11 of the Netflix reality show, when the players in The Circle must pick the person most likely to run for president, the decision is unanimous: Shubham.

Little did The Circle or the audience know how accurate that pick was.

When he's seeing his name pop up as everyone's pick for the player most likely to run for president, Shubham mentions—for the first time—that he was the youngest person to run for Governor of California in 2018. I thought it was just Shubham being silly, until I did a little research and found out that this is 100 percent true.

Shubham Goel did run for Governor of California in 2018. And if I had known (and lived in California) at the time he would have fully had my vote.

He was 22-years-old, and he ran as an Independent (which I can forgive him for). He actually had a pretty damn good platform, which involved tax cuts for farmers to improve irrigation during the water crisis. He also wants to improve housing for lower income people and streamline Medicare.

But this, I think, is the most interesting part of his platform, according to his adorable website:

We must dramatically improve the mental health of Californians. Social media companies have used the variable rewards effect to hook us to use their platforms (the same psychological tricks that casinos use to create addicted gamblers). As a result, everywhere you go, people are on social media sites for hours and hours. This has made people generally unhappy, and our mental health has suffered. I will ban social media usage for kids in K-12 schools across California and encourage workplaces, schools and our government to advocate for less time on these sites and more time outdoors. We will measure happiness with quarterly happiness surveys to California residents and learn from the data what we can do to improve happiness. As governor, I will also encourage and incentivize people to spend more time outside. We will offer different monthly treasure hunts in local districts for groups of 2 or more where we will give digital clues to them on finding the location of the “treasure”. The team that wins each treasure hunt will each get 20% tax credits for the rest of the year so these treasure hunts will be great at getting people to go outside and work together as a group.

While I don't think the governor would actually have the power to ban social media for kids in K-12 schools, I like where his head is at! Twitter is the gutter of humanity! Shuby was so against social media he literally ran for governor just to destroy it. Then, he went on a social media reality show, where he made some lifelong friendships using only social media. Love the dramatic irony!

Here's an adorable letter he wrote to the Modesto Bee about why he's running for governor:

I am running because I want to show people that you don’t need to be either rich or good looking or charismatic or corrupt or a D-list celebrity or politically well connected (nepotism) to make a difference. All you need is courage, hopefulness and a will to stand up for what you believe in.

I'm pleased to report that our sweet boy Shuby did not get last place in this election. He got second to last out of 27 candidates with his 4,020 votes, according to Ballotpedia. Given his new status as a beloved reality star, he definitely has the name recognition to run for governor again. Then again, the wholesome and genuine nature of The Circle isn’t exactly a good primer for the toxicity of American politics.

Matt Miller Culture Editor Matt is the Culture Editor at Esquire where he covers music, movies, books, and TV—with an emphasis on all things Star Wars, Marvel, and Game of Thrones.

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