How America’s Government Teacher Proves Doers Beat Critics

0:00:08 History favors the doers and not the critics. The people that history smiles kindly upon are the
0:00:13 people who actually do things. They did not just stay home and say, the government did my family
0:00:20 wrong, and so my entire life is going to be consumed with avenging this injustice. They had
0:00:25 every right to be upset about what happened, but the reason history smiles kindly upon them is
0:00:30 because of what they did, not because of what they complained about.
0:00:40 Hello, it’s Guy Kawasaki. This is the Remarkable People podcast, and for the upteenth time,
0:00:46 we are on a mission to make you remarkable, and we go all over the place looking for remarkable people,
0:00:53 and from time to time, we find some, and we found one today. Her name is Sharon McMahon.
0:01:02 She’s a former high school government teacher, but now she’s a social media sensation, and she’s done
0:01:10 that not with makeup and food and all that kind of stuff, but a much more important topic. She explains
0:01:18 complex political and legal issues with clarity, accuracy, and civility. That’s not three words you
0:01:25 usually hear when people explain government issues. She’s really known as America’s government teacher,
0:01:34 and she’s built a community of millions of people. Her non-partisan platform is at Sharon Says So,
0:01:40 and she has a really great website called The Preamble. Her mission is to educate, empower,
0:01:48 and restore faith in democracy. What a remarkable goal, and she’s doing this one fact at a time.
0:01:52 Welcome to the show, Sharon. Thanks for having me. I’m so happy to be with you.
0:02:00 Oh, Sharon. So, the first, it’s kind of a dumb question, but how many people get your last name
0:02:08 wrong? Because it’s spelled M-C-M-A-H-O-N, but it’s pronounced, I could make a joke about taking the
0:02:16 hole out of it, but anyway, but it’s pronounced McMahon. So, do most people like mispronounce it or
0:02:21 say it wrong? Oh, yeah. Well, it has a silent ho in the middle of it, Guy. There’s a silent ho
0:02:26 in the middle of McMahon. And my students used to point this out to me all the time. When on the
0:02:32 first day of class, I’d be like, I know there’s silent letters. It’s pronounced McMahon. And they’d
0:02:37 look at their schedule cards and look up at me. And one boy actually did raise his hand one year and
0:02:43 say, did you know you have a silent ho in the middle of your last name? And the girl sitting next
0:02:49 to him was like, well, better than a loud one. You know, like teenagers will always make a joke about
0:02:56 anything. So, yes, McMahon, like a lot of Gaelic last names, it has its silent letters in English,
0:03:07 and this is just one of them. All right. I got your latest newsletter, and it covers the topic of the
0:03:15 whole Epstein scenario here. So, my first question for you is, it seems to me that we’re at a state where
0:03:22 it’s in Trump we trust. So, really, what difference does it make about this whole thing, whether the
0:03:29 list comes out or it doesn’t come out or exists or it doesn’t exist? Like, what are we in this big
0:03:31 conniption about?
0:03:35 Well, I think there’s a few things at work here. The first one is that people have very legitimate
0:03:41 concerns about the sex trafficking of minors. That is a very legitimate thing to want to see
0:03:47 people brought to justice over. So, that’s the sort of underlying tension of all of this.
0:03:54 The second thing is that there have long been rumors of high-profile people on both sides of the aisle,
0:04:00 like Bill Clinton and also Donald Trump himself, that they are somehow on this list. And that’s
0:04:05 certainly not an exhaustive list of alleged people. Like Prince Andrew, for example, we know he was
0:04:11 involved with Jeffrey Epstein. I don’t even know if there is a list in the sense of, here’s my master
0:04:18 file. You know, on October 2nd, Bill Gates paid me the following amount of money. I don’t know if it
0:04:22 takes the form of an actual list. Again, I don’t know if Bill Gates is on any of these things. I just
0:04:29 threw that name out there. But chances are good that it’s not just a little black book of names, that
0:04:37 it is a large interconnected web of evidence that includes videos, pictures, text messages, emails,
0:04:44 receipts, flight logs. Like there’s probably a lot of things that all coalesce to forms the basis of
0:04:50 what people refer to as the list. And then the other thing that people are really up in arms about
0:04:57 is that Donald Trump campaigned on releasing the Epstein list. This was something that he brought up
0:05:02 over and over again. He is a vice presidential candidate, now the vice president, brought it up
0:05:07 over and over again. His children brought it up. Conservative commentators brought it up. So the
0:05:14 reason people are so up in arms about it at this moment is that they have been led to believe that
0:05:22 there is a list of criminals. And now they’re being told the list doesn’t exist. The list was made up by
0:05:29 Democrats, the radical left to use against me. So they literally have had the rug pulled out from
0:05:34 underneath them. That’s how some people feel in this moment. And it makes them feel cognitive dissonance,
0:05:39 that everything that I believed and have been saying for years and years, I’m now just being
0:05:46 gaslit and told is not real. That creates feelings in somebody’s brain that they don’t particularly enjoy.
0:05:52 So I think that’s really just in a nutshell, the basis of the uproar about it.
0:05:58 But do you think if the list came out, any votes are going to change? I mean, MAGA is still going to
0:06:02 vote for Trump, right? And it’s not like they’re going to say, oh, we should have voted for Kamala.
0:06:06 No, I don’t think they’re going to change their mind about voting for Democrats. I don’t think
0:06:11 that’s the case. No. And I do think if there is a list in the sense that a little black book,
0:06:18 there probably are Democrats and Republicans in it. There probably are. That’s not even a stretch to
0:06:24 imagine it. A lot of people are like, listen, if there’s Democrats on it, let them go to jail too.
0:06:29 I don’t care which party you’re a part of. I’m not trying to protect one side. Let them all go to
0:06:38 jail. But I do think there is a very loyal fan base who will never abandon their devotion. But there are
0:06:44 some who might change their mind. Enough about Jeffrey Epstein. I want to know, looking back,
0:06:51 was there a plan going forward? Did you say, I’m teaching high school, but I’m going to be a social
0:06:58 media, you know, media sensation? Was there a plan or did it just sort of organically happen?
0:07:07 No, there definitely was no plan. I would never have envisioned this for myself. I view this as
0:07:14 doing the next needed thing. And that’s something that I love to think about because so many of our
0:07:21 forebears, remarkable people from history, for example, have just continued to do that. They could
0:07:27 never have imagined for themselves some elevated station in history. They just kept doing the next
0:07:36 needed thing. And no, this whole thing started in 2020, when everybody was sitting at home during the
0:07:41 pandemic, and we were all chronically online, and we had watched every single episode of Tiger King.
0:07:50 And we had all watched Love is Blind. We’d come to the end of Netflix, basically.
0:07:58 And I found myself at home with time on my hands that I had never had before because I’d always been
0:08:05 busy with children and jobs. And I started noticing some problems on the internet where people were just
0:08:11 being confidently wrong on the internet about things that were not real. And I started making some little
0:08:14 fact-based explainer videos. And that’s how all of this started.
0:08:24 I don’t know if you know this, but a similar story is that Julia Child was a spook. She worked for the OSS.
0:08:31 And then she moved with her husband to France and fell in love with French food. And that’s how Julia Child
0:08:36 became Julia Child. We’ve covered a lot of people in this podcast who started off in one thing and
0:08:43 completely changed in just the circumstances of their life. And I think that’s an important lesson
0:08:47 that as Steve Jobs said in his commencement address, you can only connect the dots looking
0:08:54 backwards, right? It’s a great story. We love this kind of story. I enjoyed reading your book quite a
0:09:01 lot. Thank you. And the first question that came to my mind when I read your book was, who did the cover
0:09:07 image? How did you come up with that cover image of the woman with the American flag? And yeah, exactly.
0:09:14 Whose idea was that? Yeah. Oh my gosh. I could spend an hour and a half telling you the saga of
0:09:22 this cover. It was done by a designer that works for Penguin Random House, who published my book. And this
0:09:29 concept of his was fantastic. We did go through several iterations of this concept. We talked about,
0:09:34 does the figure on the cover need to be older or younger? What kind of clothes should she be wearing?
0:09:40 How should her hair be styled? And ultimately we landed on this figure. She has her hair in a bun
0:09:48 and she’s wearing a blouse with a little bit of lace on the collar. And I liked her because she could be
0:09:53 anyone at any time in history. People wear their hair like this today. They wore it like this in
0:10:03 the 1800s. So I loved her for that reason. But the early versions of the cover were laughably funny,
0:10:09 done by a different designer, not the one who ultimately made this. But they almost all involved,
0:10:17 it was almost like if you went to chat GPT and typed in, come up with a cover for a history book that
0:10:25 illustrates the concepts of small and mighty. And every single time it came up with a picture of a
0:10:31 painting, old school painting of mountains. And it almost always had like a river running through it.
0:10:39 And then in the bottom was a very small man in some kind of camping gear with like a fishing pole,
0:10:47 or a canoe. This is not even exaggeration. There’s probably 15 iterations of mountains and outdoorsmen,
0:10:52 because it was like something small and something mighty. And it’s like a historic painting.
0:11:04 So I kept saying, this is not good. This is not good. And it took us a long time to finally arrive
0:11:09 on the cover. And I’m so happy we kept up with it. Because ultimately, it turned out really well,
0:11:17 I feel like. Well, that is a great cover. And that image is extremely powerful and interesting image.
0:11:22 Thank you. You know, we’re still stuck on the cover. So what one author to another,
0:11:29 I’m going to go down some rat holes. Yeah, Sharon, there are more than 12 people in your book,
0:11:36 your book says 12. And it also kind of says that they’re unknown, not famous. And I would make the
0:11:44 case that Danny Noe and Booker T. Washington are hardly unknown. So what’s the story with the subtitle?
0:11:50 So to me, it’s not that every single person in the book is somebody you’ve never, ever heard of.
0:11:55 It’s not that somebody is, “Oh gosh, I’ve just never heard of a person who was in the Senate for many
0:12:00 decades.” Although I would argue that most people don’t know who Daniel Inouye is, just because they
0:12:05 don’t pay attention to these things, right? And many of them might know that he was a war hero,
0:12:11 but they don’t know the story of how he became a war hero. And they don’t know about how he was basically
0:12:17 like, “I gave this arm fighting fascism. And if you want me to give this one to fight the communists,
0:12:21 then I’m willing to do it.” Like they don’t know all of the ins and outs of their story.
0:12:26 And then the sense of Booker T. Washington, most people know that he was the founder of Tuskegee
0:12:34 Institute. They study him in the concept of one of the schools of thought in the Reconstruction era,
0:12:40 post-Civil War time period about how the Black community sort of evolved. They study him and then
0:12:46 they study W.E.B. Du Bois sort of in contrast with each other, but they never know the story of how he
0:12:55 worked with a man to build 5,000 schools throughout the American South. To me, there are many unsung aspects
0:13:01 of some of these people. Maybe you’ve heard their name. If you’ve ever flown through the San Jose
0:13:06 airport, you maybe have seen the Norman Mineta San Jose airport, but you didn’t know about him.
0:13:07 You didn’t know his whole story.
0:13:13 Yeah, Sharon, I want you to know there’s several little weird intersections here. So first of all,
0:13:21 I’m from Hawaii. My father used to be a senator in Hawaii, not a federal senator, a state senator.
0:13:27 So we were friends with Daniel Inouye and Spark Matsunaga and Patsy Mink and all those people.
0:13:35 So that’s connection number one. Connection number two is that I live in Santa Cruz and I fly out from
0:13:40 Norman Mineta airport to Daniel Inouye airport. That’s my regular Riles.
0:13:46 I love that. I love that connection. That’s so fun. What are your recollections of him?
0:13:48 I would love to know from your perspective.
0:13:53 No, I was just a young punk. What the hell did I know? My father’s hanging around with all these people.
0:14:01 And when you see somebody who’s lost an arm, it’s kind of shocking, right? And this guy really put his
0:14:10 life on the line. And I am Sansei. So my parents were on this thing about we have to prove that we’re
0:14:18 worthy as Americans and we want to be more American than American. Yes. 442. And I’ve been to Manzanar.
0:14:26 So yeah, it’s, it’s a very, very interesting thing. So my next question about your book and my God,
0:14:32 I must confess, I consider myself pretty well read, but until I read your book, I never heard.
0:14:39 I hope I don’t butcher his name too much. Gouverneur Morris. I never heard of him until
0:14:45 you read your books. First of all, how do you find somebody like that? Is it because you’re a history
0:14:51 teacher? Like how could I be? I’m 71 years old. I read a lot. I studied a lot. I’m well-educated. I
0:14:57 never heard of him. Yeah. Well, you pronounce his name correctly. So that’s the first part. That’s
0:15:03 good. You got that right. I’m two for two. Right. Yeah. How do you find people whose stories have
0:15:09 been largely hidden from the public is a great question. And in the case of Gouverneur Morris,
0:15:14 he is an example of somebody who’s just hiding in plain sight. Because the people whose stories are
0:15:21 well-documented, especially from the 18th and 19th centuries, the people whose stories are well
0:15:27 documented are people who were famous in their lifetime and people with money. And so that was
0:15:32 almost always white men. That’s who was famous in their lifetime and had money, especially during
0:15:38 the 18th century when Gouverneur Morris was most active. So his stories are actually quite well-documented.
0:15:44 His family was wealthy. He had a home that was named after him called Morrisania. Here he is writing the
0:15:49 preamble to the constitution, best friends with Alexander Hamilton. So his story is actually very
0:15:56 well-documented. But the thing that’s interesting to me is why don’t we know about it? Why do we put
0:16:03 some of these people on the money? And some of these people are like, huh? Who? When they did actually
0:16:09 really consequential things. And that untangling the answer to that question is very interesting
0:16:15 to me. Why do some people go down in the annals of history as heroes and some don’t? But the best tip
0:16:20 I can give you if somebody is really interested in going down their own rabbit holes and uncovering
0:16:29 people that maybe were not super well-known to them is when you’re reading, take note of the names of the
0:16:35 tiny little side characters that are maybe in a footnote or that are maybe just a passing mention.
0:16:42 And eventually it becomes like one of those things where when you write it down, you’ll start seeing
0:16:49 their name pop up more often. And you’ll start building this little web in your mind and it might
0:16:56 trigger you to start doing research specifically on that person. Like most people don’t know that his son
0:17:01 became one of the founders of the Republican Party, which of course elected Abraham Lincoln.
0:17:08 So chances are very good his son, Governor Morris Jr. probably had a relationship with Abraham Lincoln
0:17:13 that is probably not very well documented. But regardless, make notes.
0:17:21 So obviously, you like his writing. And obviously, the preamble is a very, very potent piece of
0:17:27 writing. It’s beautiful piece of writing. Is there a modern version of him? Or is there someone like, you
0:17:34 know, that other people, I don’t know, let’s say from 1950 to today, is there anybody who’s like this writer,
0:17:40 this communicator, this communicator, this person doesn’t necessarily have to die because he used a
0:17:47 whale bone to perform cell surgery. But is there another person like him?
0:17:55 That’s a really great question. I would not necessarily say there is somebody in government
0:18:01 that I would point to and say that person a lot of governmental power. But I would say somebody else
0:18:07 who’s writing has had a lasting impact on the United States is Martin Luther King. He certainly
0:18:13 it’s not a one to one comparison. But here we are still reading letter from a Birmingham jail.
0:18:22 We’re still reading the text of his speeches. And his writing has undoubtedly impacted a modern America
0:18:33 in major ways. So what do these 12 plus people have in common that you want us to learn from them?
0:18:38 That’s such a great question. I love that question. I’ve thought about that quite a bit.
0:18:42 I think there’s a few things that I’d love for people to take away and sort of tuck in their pockets.
0:18:49 The first one is that it is very easy for us to think that in order to make
0:18:55 a real impact in the world, to make real positive change, that we have to, number one, have access to
0:19:03 the levers of power, that we need to have family money or fame, fame in our lifetimes, that we need
0:19:09 to be a person who belongs to a certain socioeconomic group, that we need to have a certain kind of looks
0:19:15 or come from a certain ethnic background. And over and over, history demonstrates that that is simply
0:19:24 not true. History favors the doers and not the critics. And the people that history smiles kindly
0:19:31 upon are the people who actually do things. And you can see, it’s a great, Daniel Inouye and Norm
0:19:37 Mineta, great examples of people who actually did things and did not just stay home and gripe about their
0:19:43 lot in life. They did not just stay home and say the government did my family wrong. And so my entire
0:19:49 life is going to be consumed with avenging this injustice. They had every right to be upset about
0:19:55 what happened. They had every right. And people would understand if that had been their perspective. But
0:20:03 the reason history smiles kindly upon them is because of what they did, not because of what they complained
0:20:08 about. So again, don’t take this as me minimizing what happened to them. That’s not the intent in
0:20:14 any way whatsoever. So that’s the next thing is that history favors the doers and not the critics.
0:20:20 The third thing I would love for people to think about or take away is something that I mentioned at
0:20:25 the top, which is that if you ever find yourself in the position of, “I don’t know what to do about
0:20:30 this,” all you have to do is scroll social media or watch the news for five seconds. And you’re like,
0:20:36 this whole thing is a dumpster fire in a train wreck. And it’s all just an unmitigated disaster.
0:20:41 It’s really difficult to know where to even begin. What am I supposed to do about famine
0:20:50 on another continent? Everything is insurmountable. And I would say that the best thing that you can do
0:20:55 today is the thing that the people in this book all did, which is the next needed thing.
0:21:02 And they continue to do the next needed thing and the next needed thing. And over time,
0:21:07 they grew their capacity. They grew in their understanding of how the world worked.
0:21:15 They made new connections. Over time, their capacity grew. They did not just start one day
0:21:21 and say to themselves, “I’m 18 now. It’s time for me to change the world.” They thought about what would
0:21:29 be a thing that I could do that would help a person, that would help someone. And they continued to build
0:21:35 on that. And that’s available to every single one of us, no matter our resources, no matter our age,
0:21:43 no matter our station in life, we can all do the next needed thing. I would also argue that the next
0:21:52 needed thing for many of us is going to be something that you are going to do for one person that you wish
0:22:00 you could do for everyone. So many of the people in this book did for one person what they wish they could do
0:22:08 for everyone. They educated one child. They taught one classroom of children. They built one school,
0:22:16 or helped to build one school. They gave one speech that made a difference for somebody. They washed one
0:22:25 person’s close. I could continue. And it doesn’t mean that nobody else deserved to have those things as
0:22:33 well. It meant that we are all intended to do for one person what we wish we could do for them all
0:22:41 and continue to build in our capacity to impact.
0:22:50 Well, Sharon, you are just a built-in TikTok reel.
0:22:51 Oh my God.
0:22:56 We could just break that up into little pieces and put it on TikTok.
0:23:03 It kind of reminds me of the old story about all the, what was it, starfish or something
0:23:07 that are stuck on the sand and there’s thousands of them and, you know, somebody throws one
0:23:09 back and they say, well, what difference does it make?
0:23:11 The thousands of them are going to die.
0:23:13 And they say, well, not that one.
0:23:14 That one’s back in the ocean.
0:23:15 Okay.
0:23:18 So let’s take it to do the next needed thing.
0:23:23 But is it more dangerous to do the next needed thing?
0:23:28 I mean, I guess if you were in Alabama and you did the next needed thing, that was pretty
0:23:34 dangerous, but it seems to me you watch CNN and it’s ICE and it’s DHS and everybody’s getting
0:23:36 arrested and rounded up.
0:23:39 It looks pretty risky to do the next needed thing.
0:23:45 Are we riskier today or has it always been risky for people who are doers?
0:23:51 That’s a great question.
0:23:55 There are many things today that are unprecedented in history.
0:23:58 I don’t think we can ignore that fact, especially in American history.
0:24:03 Maybe not in world history, but in American history, there are many things that are unprecedented
0:24:13 But if you were a person of color in 1920s throughout much of the South and portions of the Midwest,
0:24:21 the chances that you could be physically harmed or killed or imprisoned for simply showing up
0:24:31 to vote, attempting to vote, there are hundreds of stories like that, or just being a woman walking down the street in Alabama.
0:24:40 I talk about this in the book too, that there are women who literally were walking home from church, you know, a car full of white men pull over and sexually assault them.
0:24:51 And nothing was ever done to bring those people to justice, and they eventually gained apologies from the state for the fact that they intentionally ignored their cases.
0:24:58 So, there is always inherent risk involved in doing the next needed thing.
0:25:05 This is not the first time that risk has been involved, and it certainly won’t be the last time that risk has been involved.
0:25:13 But if we continue to go back to the story of Daniel, anyway, would we tell him, you know what, you should have just not gone for broke?
0:25:17 Right?
0:25:18 Is that the message?
0:25:19 It was too risky?
0:25:21 Don’t try to fight the Nazis.
0:25:24 Stay back and just hope for the best.
0:25:32 He is a hero in the minds of many because he was willing to do the next needed thing.
0:25:44 So, I do acknowledge that there is very real risk, and I am not saying that everybody needs to go out there and put themselves in harm’s way, especially physically harm’s way.
0:25:47 For some of us, the next needed thing is teaching preschoolers, right?
0:25:53 For some of us, the next needed thing is making a meal for a shut-in or visiting with an elderly person who can’t drive anymore.
0:25:56 For some of us, the next needed thing is starting a podcast.
0:26:03 Not every next needed thing is risky, but risk has always been involved, and that’s part of what makes it worth it.
0:26:04 Great answer.
0:26:07 Do you know who Olivia Juliana is?
0:26:08 I do.
0:26:17 When you describe doing the next needed thing and taking risks and standing up for what’s right, her name pops right into my mind.
0:26:18 She really does this.
0:26:20 She’s been a guest on this podcast.
0:26:21 She was great.
0:26:29 She really puts herself out there and is willing to make herself a target if she feels like she is doing the right thing.
0:26:33 Well, I would say it’s Julia 1 and Matt Gaetz 0 right now.
0:26:44 You know, many people in your book worked with their enemies, which doesn’t seem to be a popular kind of philosophy these days.
0:26:49 Can you explain, you know, how they work with their enemies and the lessons there?
0:26:55 It’s such an important lesson, and it’s a lesson that I don’t like, Guy.
0:26:57 I wish it wasn’t the lesson.
0:27:10 I said this recently that every moral tradition in the world, regardless of if that’s secular or if it’s faith-based, they all have something in common, which is some version of the concept of love your neighbor, right?
0:27:12 Like every moral tradition has this.
0:27:25 And one of the realizations that you might come to when you’re an adult is that loving your neighbor also means loving your enemy because your enemy is also your neighbor.
0:27:28 And I don’t like that, Guy.
0:27:29 I don’t like it.
0:27:35 My enemies are weird and they’re gross, and I don’t want to love them.
0:27:38 And I think that’s a really common way to feel, right?
0:27:41 Like my enemy is actively wishing me harm.
0:27:42 I don’t love you.
0:27:44 It’s a very normal reaction.
0:28:04 But I will say that absent this concept of loving your neighbor or loving your enemy, almost all of the important changes that have happened in the United States that have created lasting, meaningful impact have happened because people were willing to work with people who were not like themselves.
0:28:08 They were willing to work with people who were willing to work with people who were willing to work with people that they might consider their enemies.
0:28:12 And there’s an example in the book of a woman named Septima Clark.
0:28:18 She’s one of my personal heroes who is told that she’s not allowed to teach in Charleston public schools because she’s black.
0:28:20 She wasn’t even allowed to teach other black students.
0:28:26 And eventually, she gets elected to Charleston school board.
0:28:28 And that is the best revenge, right?
0:28:31 The best revenge is becoming their boss.
0:28:32 You wouldn’t hire me.
0:28:33 Now I’m in charge of you.
0:28:34 It’s great revenge.
0:28:39 But when she gets to be an old woman, people ask her, what have you learned?
0:28:43 What, like, throughout your whole life, what have you learned?
0:28:51 And without giving away everything that happens in the book, she’s eventually fired from her job as a teacher and goes on to start teaching adults.
0:28:57 And some of the adults she teaches become the heroes of the civil rights movement.
0:28:58 She teaches John Lewis.
0:28:59 She teaches Rosa Parks.
0:29:11 And had she not continued doing the next needed thing, had she just been like, you know what, it’s time to just sit home and bake brownies, she would not be the mother of the civil rights movement.
0:29:14 But when she gets to the end of her life and people say, what have you learned?
0:29:23 She doesn’t say, I’ve learned that all people who look like this are my enemies, or all people who think this way are my enemies.
0:29:33 She says, I’ve learned that I can work with my enemies, because they might have a change of heart at any moment.
0:29:41 And how would your enemies ever have a change of heart if you are not there to turn the light on for them?
0:29:52 The idea that you can accomplish things, especially politically, on your own, is not really well supported in a complex democracy like the United States.
0:29:56 You have to have people to cooperate with.
0:30:07 And both Norm and Danny are great examples of being able to build those kinds of coalitions, where they got people to cooperate with them who maybe wouldn’t cooperate with them on other things.
0:30:11 We might not agree over here, but we can agree on this thing.
0:30:24 And if we want to do things that are meaningful for our neighbors, meaningful for the country, we have to be willing to work together in every way that we can, even if it doesn’t mean that we agree on everything.
0:30:25 Is there a line?
0:30:27 Is there a point too far?
0:30:31 Are you saying that you’re going to conceive of how you can work with Stephen Miller?
0:30:34 Why do you have to go there, guy?
0:30:36 Why Stephen Miller?
0:30:38 I’m just teasing.
0:30:39 Go ahead.
0:30:42 Well, I mean, you know, love your enemies.
0:30:43 Love your enemies.
0:30:44 I don’t like it.
0:30:45 I don’t want to do that.
0:30:48 My enemies are weird and gross, as we’ve established.
0:30:51 Okay, here’s what I would say.
0:30:55 You are not required to light yourself on fire to keep other people warm.
0:31:04 And working with your enemies doesn’t mean let murderers move into your house.
0:31:11 It doesn’t mean be best friends with them and let them have access to all of your innermost thoughts and feelings.
0:31:23 What it does mean is for the good of all, being willing to work with people with whom you disagree, for the betterment of others.
0:31:24 Not for your own benefit.
0:31:29 Not for your own, you know, like, well, I wanted a million dollars, so I cooperated with Stephen Miller.
0:31:35 Not, I really wanted to get some paved roads, so I went ahead and cooperated with Hitler.
0:31:38 That’s obviously a very far extreme example.
0:31:43 Most Americans do not have proclivities towards murderous dictators.
0:31:47 So I do think there are certainly exceptions to this concept.
0:31:50 Some people are just better off in prison, right?
0:31:52 Like, I don’t need to make public policy with you.
0:31:53 You should go to jail.
0:31:59 But if we’re talking about the concept that’s found in the preamble to the Constitution,
0:32:05 which is that America at her best is just, peaceful, good, and free.
0:32:07 That we are working for the common good.
0:32:12 And that sometimes means working with people with whom you have significant disagreement.
0:32:13 Okay.
0:32:15 But don’t ask me to work with Stephen Miller.
0:32:20 I’m just teasing.
0:32:21 He’s not going to call me.
0:32:22 Trust me.
0:32:27 I’m looking forward to seeing your Instagram photo, the two of you.
0:32:27 You mean Steve.
0:32:28 Oh, yeah.
0:32:29 Yeah.
0:32:29 Yeah.
0:32:29 Yeah.
0:32:30 All right.
0:32:31 Generative AI.
0:32:35 Is it time for a new constitution?
0:32:39 Or should we be working on constitution 2.0?
0:32:43 I don’t know that it’s necessary to scrap the constitution altogether.
0:32:56 I think the basic concepts of three separate co-equal branches of government that check and balance each other, that separate powers, I think those are good concepts to understand and to live by.
0:33:00 Those are things that are present in most democracies around the world.
0:33:05 I do think, however, it is definitely time to update the constitution.
0:33:08 We have not updated the constitution since the 90s.
0:33:16 And we have not made like really sizable, meaningful, big changes to the constitution in many, many, many decades.
0:33:27 And there’s a lot of evidence that the framers of the constitution fully intended for us to go in and update the document as frequently as was needed.
0:33:30 They put two different ways of how to update it in the document itself.
0:33:35 If you guys need to change anything, here’s one way you can do it, here’s another way you can do it.
0:33:41 They fully anticipated that they could not know everything that would happen in the future and that people would need to make changes.
0:33:45 So I absolutely think it is time to update the constitution.
0:33:53 I have a running list in my mind of ways in which I would like to update the constitution if it were ever up to me, which it’s not.
0:33:58 But if it ever were, I already have ideas of some of the things that I’d like to do.
0:34:00 Well, give us some of those ideas.
0:34:08 Well, a lot of my big ideas about updates to the constitution involve changes to our electoral system.
0:34:15 The current version that we have landed at is nothing like what was envisioned by the framers.
0:34:18 And I’m not saying the framers, we have to adhere to what they were saying.
0:34:21 I’m just saying we’re not anywhere close to what they were envisioning.
0:34:25 A lot of our ideas have proven to be detrimental for the country as a whole.
0:34:27 Most people don’t agree with them.
0:34:35 And the few things that I really think are important to change is the way that money is involved in politics.
0:34:38 I don’t think billionaires should be able to essentially buy elections.
0:34:42 And most Americans don’t either.
0:34:46 80% of Americans don’t think billionaires should be able to buy elections.
0:34:50 They don’t want to be controlled by a bunch of billionaire oligarchs.
0:34:57 They want to have their own voices matter more and to not feel like nobody ever listens to me because I don’t have billions of dollars.
0:35:01 So I do think we need to reform campaign finance.
0:35:07 We need to radically change how elections are run in the United States in the sense of how they’re funded.
0:35:14 We should, this is true of almost every other democracy, have a very compressed election cycle.
0:35:23 The reason it costs a billion dollars to run for president, that is how much each party has spent over the last two election cycles, a billion dollars each time.
0:35:25 Ridiculous waste of money.
0:35:30 The reason it takes that amount of money is because of how the election system is set up.
0:35:34 If we changed it, we could have elections in six weeks.
0:35:36 It would not cost billions of dollars.
0:35:39 Voters would probably be better engaged.
0:35:44 You can engage with something for six weeks much more easily than you can engage with it for two years.
0:35:45 Right?
0:35:46 The fatigue is real.
0:35:59 The other ideas that I have for changing the election system in the United States involves having a designated national primary election day as opposed to allowing primary elections to just be piecemealed around the entire country.
0:36:15 Why can’t we have one presidential primary where everybody gets to vote on who they want the candidates to be instead of letting a couple of states like Iowa and New Hampshire essentially dictate who the candidates are going to be for the rest of us?
0:36:22 That’s not fair to people who live in, say, Connecticut, who have very late elections in the election cycle.
0:36:35 And by the time they get to vote on something, this is true of a friend who lives in South Dakota as well, by the time the South Dakota presidential primaries come around, there is almost always nobody to vote for.
0:36:40 You’re basically just going and checking a box for the one candidate that is left.
0:36:46 Why should the people of South Dakota or Connecticut have absolutely no say in who the candidates are?
0:36:51 If we change how candidates are selected, we will change governing behavior.
0:36:56 And if we remove the money piece from the equation, we will change governing behavior.
0:37:00 They will not be beholden to billionaires and corporate special interests.
0:37:04 They will care more about their constituencies than about the people with deep pockets.
0:37:06 So I could keep going.
0:37:09 This is a topic I obviously care about.
0:37:11 But those are just like a couple of my ideas off the top.
0:37:15 But you did not mention electoral college.
0:37:16 Do you think?
0:37:18 Well, I think that’s part of it, too.
0:37:19 I think we need to get rid of the electoral college.
0:37:25 The electoral college is preventing the proliferation of additional political parties.
0:37:29 The healthiest democracies have between four and nine political parties.
0:37:34 That is where the most people feel well represented by their government.
0:37:38 Too many people today do not feel well represented.
0:37:40 A great example of this are Catholics.
0:37:45 Catholics have strong social justice teachings as part of their church beliefs.
0:37:50 They really believe in helping the poor, helping elderly, the sick, et cetera.
0:37:53 But they are also strongly pro-life.
0:37:55 And they would say they’re pro-life from womb to tomb.
0:37:56 They don’t believe in abortion.
0:37:59 They don’t believe in the death penalty.
0:38:02 And neither party represents that position.
0:38:07 And so consequently, you have some American Catholics voting Democrat and some voting Republican.
0:38:10 If you are a white Catholic, you’re more likely to vote Republican.
0:38:13 If you’re a Catholic of color, you’re more likely to vote Democrat.
0:38:18 There is no candidate that represents that viewpoint of millions.
0:38:33 And the two-party system creates this us versus them binary that eliminates the cooperation that is present in other healthy democracies amongst parties where you have to work with people to get something done.
0:38:40 So the Electoral College winner-takes-all system, first of all, the framers never intended for it to be winner-take-all.
0:38:43 It was never intended for it to be winner-take-all.
0:38:49 And for the first four to five decades of the United States, it was not winner-take-all.
0:38:56 The idea that whoever wins the popular vote in a state gets all of that state’s electoral votes, that is not how it was designed to work.
0:38:57 And that’s not how it worked at the beginning.
0:39:06 It only started working that way as states decided that they could consolidate their own political power if they all conspired to vote the same.
0:39:10 I would absolutely eliminate the Electoral College as we know it.
0:39:13 There is no reason that we should not have one person, one vote.
0:39:15 There’s no reason for that, in my opinion.
0:39:29 Now, it seems to me that whether you’re a Democrat or Republican, whenever you hear a proposal like that, you’re not thinking about the big picture of democracy and one person, one vote and all that.
0:39:33 You’re thinking, does this give me an advantage or a disadvantage?
0:39:36 I mean, they cannot get past that.
0:39:37 How do we get past that?
0:39:39 Yeah, no, no.
0:39:47 If you’re a Republican, you say, we cannot go to a pure popular vote because our candidate didn’t win the most popular votes in the last few elections.
0:39:50 We need to stick with the Electoral College system.
0:39:52 How are we ever going to change that?
0:39:57 Well, the Electoral College is the ultimate DEI, isn’t it?
0:40:02 We’ll just start calling it election DEI.
0:40:10 That it’s giving unfair what they perceive as unfair advantages to states that have not earned them.
0:40:12 That’s essentially what’s happening.
0:40:25 We have states like Wyoming that have fewer than a million people who have an outsized amount of political power in comparison to states like California that have obviously like 37 million people.
0:40:46 So how we will change it is by convincing enough people that they are not being well represented by government and that our current zero sum game is not going to yield different results 20 years from now than it is in 2026 or 2028.
0:40:52 That if we are going to continue to keep doing what we’re doing, we’re going to continue getting the same results.
0:40:54 Americans have done tougher things before.
0:40:57 I know it seems like, how will we ever change it?
0:41:00 We spent hundreds of years enslaving Africans.
0:41:10 We spent hundreds of years telling women that they were men’s property and had no right to own anything on their own and no right to vote.
0:41:13 America can change for the better.
0:41:15 We can make progress.
0:41:16 We have to believe it’s true.
0:41:18 Up next on Remarkable People.
0:41:29 If that means that Barack Obama goes to jail for committing a crime because we have the rule of law, then Barack Obama goes to jail for committing a crime because we have the rule of law.
0:41:32 And the same should be said of Matt Gaetz.
0:41:38 If Matt Gaetz commits a crime, we are a nation of laws, not a nation of men.
0:41:39 Then he should go to jail.
0:41:45 Do you want to be more remarkable?
0:41:51 One way to do it is to spend three days with the boldest builders in business.
0:41:59 I’m Jeff Berman, host of Masters of Scale, inviting you to join us at this year’s Masters of Scale Summit, October 7th to 9th in San Francisco.
0:42:10 You’ll hear from visionaries like Chobani’s Hamdi Ulukaya, celebrity chef David Chang, Patagonia’s Ryan Gellert, Promises’ Phaedra Ellis Lampkins, and many, many more.
0:42:14 Apply to attend at mastersofscale.com slash remarkable.
0:42:18 That’s mastersofscale.com slash remarkable.
0:42:21 And Guy Kawasaki will be there too.
0:42:26 Become a little more remarkable with each episode of Remarkable People.
0:42:31 It’s found on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
0:42:35 Welcome back to Remarkable People with Guy Kawasaki.
0:42:50 You mentioned the influence of money on elections, and it seems to me that really kind of kicked off lately with a Supreme Court decision, right?
0:42:55 Where it basically made it so that corporations have a vote.
0:43:02 Now, you say in your book that your least favorite Supreme Court decision was Dred Scott.
0:43:05 Is that still true?
0:43:10 Have we made even worse Supreme Court decisions since you wrote the book, like, you know.
0:43:12 A couple years ago.
0:43:14 A president can do anything, you know.
0:43:25 Yeah, I still have to say that Dred Scott is still the worst Supreme Court decision because it has to do with the fundamental humanity of people.
0:43:37 But do I think the notion, the Supreme Court decision that presidents have absolute immunity over all things that are not part of their presidential duty, is that a dangerous idea?
0:43:39 I absolutely think it is.
0:43:40 I absolutely think it is.
0:43:46 But Dred Scott was really applied to the fundamental humanity of today millions and millions of Americans.
0:43:51 So, it still gets my vote as the worst Supreme Court decision ever.
0:43:52 But the second one.
0:43:54 The second one.
0:43:56 But the second one.
0:43:57 Which one is the second worst?
0:43:59 Gosh.
0:44:14 There were some pretty bad decisions surrounding the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, where they said that that was perfectly permissible to go ahead and incarcerate U.S. citizens, including children, who’d been accused of no crime and no wrongdoing.
0:44:28 And then they, of course, only recently overturned in sort of a side note of a different decision, only recently acknowledged the ridiculousness of that decision.
0:44:42 So, to me, when we’re talking about casting entire groups of people based on ethnicity or race as less than, those are some of our most dangerous ideas.
0:44:46 Because that is a path to dehumanization.
0:44:51 And if you can dehumanize somebody, you can convince people to do anything.
0:45:03 If this group of people over here is not fully human in your eyes, you can convince people to treat them abhorrently, which is exactly what happened throughout the hundreds of years of American history when we enslaved people.
0:45:05 That’s what we did to Native Americans.
0:45:07 That’s what we did to Japanese Americans.
0:45:09 That’s what Hitler did to Jews in Germany.
0:45:10 I could continue.
0:45:16 But that posture of dehumanization is always a dangerous one.
0:45:20 And don’t you think we’re well down that path right now with Alligator Alcatraz?
0:45:23 What’s the difference between that and Manzanar?
0:45:24 I’ve been to Manzanar.
0:45:28 Manzanar is not as bad as the videos of Alligator.
0:45:31 I can’t even say it ever.
0:45:31 Alcatraz, yeah.
0:45:35 I absolutely do think that we are heading down that path.
0:45:36 I absolutely do.
0:45:48 I recently wrote a social media post about this exact topic in which I had run across an influencer who has 5 million followers on YouTube and millions of followers on Facebook.
0:45:55 And he had put up a post that said the first van load of prisoners has arrived to Alligator Alcatraz.
0:46:04 And he showed a picture of the van and then he wrote, into my veins, meaning like, yes, like that’s like the posture of what he was doing.
0:46:12 And the responses to that post, but when I came across it not long ago, there were over 22,000 responses to that post.
0:46:23 And nearly every single one said such horrific dehumanizing things about the people who were being imprisoned in Alligator Alcatraz.
0:46:25 This is not about immigration, actually.
0:46:29 What I’m talking about right now is not should we have immigration enforcement.
0:46:31 It’s not do some people need to be deported.
0:46:39 What I’m talking about is the unmitigated dehumanization of people who are being imprisoned in these facilities.
0:46:44 They were saying things like, and I absolutely do not endorse these ideas.
0:46:45 This is just an example.
0:46:51 Be sure to throw some rice and beans in the water because the alligators like Mexican food.
0:46:57 That’s just one example of the tens of thousands of comments.
0:47:04 So I took a few screenshots and posted this on my social media so people could see, number one, I’m not making this up.
0:47:08 Number two, these are not isolated incidents of like a handful of bad actors.
0:47:13 These are thousands and thousands of comments that are all saying very similar things.
0:47:20 And that number three, if they can convince you to get on board with dehumanizing people, they can convince you of anything.
0:47:24 Every atrocity in human history has begun with dehumanization.
0:47:26 It’s a dangerous road to be on.
0:47:28 It absolutely is.
0:47:29 And some of us are on it right now.
0:47:36 And you know that many of those people who posted those comments identify as Christians.
0:47:37 Yes, they sure do.
0:47:39 I posted this too.
0:47:45 This horrible comment came from a woman whose profile picture says, daughter of the king.
0:47:47 Is that how you want to represent your church?
0:47:50 Is that how you want to represent yourself as a follower of Christ?
0:47:56 You want people to believe that this is how the followers of Christ think of other human beings?
0:47:59 I said this, some of y’all need to come get your friends.
0:48:05 Some of y’all need to come get your friends from church and be like, I don’t know what you’re doing, but this ain’t it.
0:48:07 This is not it.
0:48:11 And I don’t want anyone listening to this to think that I am anti-Christian.
0:48:13 That is not the point that I’m trying to make at all.
0:48:24 I’m saying there’s a big dichotomy between the teachings of their faith and the way they are conducting themselves in public while also putting Bible verses in their bios.
0:48:25 That’s happening.
0:48:34 So can I ask you this, that you hold yourself out as non-partisan.
0:48:42 Now, it seems to me that today many people define non-partisan as they agree with what I say.
0:48:47 And the moment you disagree, you are no longer non-partisan.
0:48:51 It is not possible to be non-partisan and disagree with me.
0:49:03 Now, someone listening to this podcast is going to say she is a diehard, hardcore, liberal, DEI supporting, LG, just everything.
0:49:06 So what’s your response to that?
0:49:11 If you said that vaccines prevent measles, someone’s going to say you’re not non-partisan.
0:49:12 That’s true.
0:49:18 How do you prove you’re non-partisan when you say something that other people disagree with?
0:49:20 Yeah, I love that question.
0:49:27 Because people believe now that something’s true if I agree with it.
0:49:29 And if I disagree, it’s a lie.
0:49:32 That’s the standard that many people operate from.
0:49:45 To me, I am operating from a perspective of I care more about the principles of democracy than I do about any party allegiance or allegiance to any leader.
0:49:48 I do not belong to a political party.
0:49:55 I will call out people from both sides of the aisle who are not upholding the principles of democracy.
0:50:06 If that means that Barack Obama goes to jail for committing a crime because we have the rule of law, then Barack Obama goes to jail for committing a crime because we have the rule of law.
0:50:09 And the same should be said of Matt Gaetz.
0:50:14 If Matt Gaetz commits a crime, we are a nation of laws, not a nation of men.
0:50:15 Then he should go to jail.
0:50:21 So, to me, this is not about, I do not care actually in the slightest about political parties.
0:50:28 I think in many ways, the current two-party system we have is very damaging to the American psyche.
0:50:36 It really does create this good versus evil, us versus them that is very, very difficult to engage in any kind of constructive conversations with.
0:50:42 So, again, I do not care about allegiance to a person or party and that is what I mean by non-partisan.
0:50:46 I do not work for some party that pays me to do things.
0:50:50 I do not advocate for all members of this party.
0:50:53 I am not going to these party events.
0:50:54 I do not care about your parties.
0:50:59 I do not care about the big picture principles of democracy.
0:51:04 And there are people on both sides of the aisle who also care about that.
0:51:13 I recently had the chance to interview Condoleezza Rice, who was George W. Bush’s Secretary of State National Security Advisor, now directs an institute at Stanford.
0:51:20 Lifelong conservative Republican who I firmly believe cares about the principles of democracy.
0:51:23 I firmly believe that she does.
0:51:33 You might not agree with all of her ideas, but the two of you can probably get together and say, the right way to settle our disagreements is through the democratic process.
0:51:36 She’s a very interesting person.
0:51:40 I interviewed her once and she grew up in, whatchamacallit.
0:51:40 In Birmingham.
0:51:41 Yeah, in Birmingham.
0:51:44 She grew up in segregated Alabama.
0:51:45 Yes.
0:51:50 With the German shepherds and the water hoses and all that.
0:51:58 She told me something very, very interesting I’ve kept in my mind till this day, which is you cannot believe you’re a victim.
0:52:06 Because if you believe you’re a victim, that gives you the victim mindset and you will not, you know, do what you have to do.
0:52:11 You will not help other people because you believe you’re a victim.
0:52:18 Although some people legitimately are victims, she was warning against adopting the victim sort of mindset.
0:52:20 I hear exactly what she’s saying.
0:52:29 Also, one of the things she said to me that was one of my takeaways is that before somebody wants to change something, they should really take the time to understand it.
0:52:39 And this is a great example of the fight that’s happening with the Department of Education where there’s a current push to sort of fire everybody that works at the Department of Education and dismantle it.
0:52:53 And yet, I recently encountered this, that if you ask people who want to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education, if you ask them what does the Department of Education do, they cannot tell you.
0:52:55 They cannot tell you.
0:53:01 They think that it sets curriculum, that it dictates to states what they have to teach.
0:53:05 They truly do not understand what the Department of Education does.
0:53:18 Perhaps, like Condoleezza Rice suggests, we should take the time to fully understand something before we seek to change it so that we don’t make grievous errors in our efforts.
0:53:23 If I’m a surgeon, I should fully understand how the heart works before I take a scalpel to it.
0:53:30 Just so people understand this, the other McMahon family is no relation whatsoever, right?
0:53:34 No relation to Linda, the current Secretary of Education.
0:53:38 Unlike Linda, I actually have classroom experience.
0:53:42 And you probably don’t like professional wrestling.
0:53:44 And I’m not a professional wrestler.
0:53:48 Also, I understand what the Department of Education does.
0:53:59 She could not tell an interviewer what IDEA is, which is a very important federal education law about why we have to educate students with disabilities.
0:54:08 Well, you know, there are other people who believe that the writ of habeas corpus is the ability of the president to remove anybody from the country.
0:54:10 That’s kind of a problem, too.
0:54:11 That’s a problem.
0:54:12 I concur, yeah.
0:54:19 I only went to law school for one week, but I know what the writ of habeas corpus is.
0:54:22 So, listen, you obviously are outspoken.
0:54:27 Can you talk about the toll that it takes upon a person to be as outspoken as you?
0:54:30 It actually is really hard sometimes.
0:54:32 It actually really is.
0:54:35 It’s hard to do what you believe is the right thing sometimes.
0:54:49 There are times that I end up on the wrong side of TikTok, as they say, or the wrong side of Instagram, where people are taking my videos or my comments and they’re making fun of me.
0:54:57 And they send hundreds or thousands of people my way to send me terrible messages and they tell me to kill myself and they are threatened to kill me.
0:54:59 And all of these kinds of things happen.
0:55:17 One of the big challenges right now is actual personal security, like with what happened with the lawmakers in the state of Minnesota, where a man knocks on their door pretending to be a police officer and shoots them, assassinates one woman and her husband and tries to assassinate another man and his wife.
0:55:22 And it came out later that he had a list of more than 70 people.
0:55:22 Yeah.
0:55:24 And he’s from Minnesota, where I am from.
0:55:26 I was on vacation when this whole thing went down.
0:55:33 But one of the first thoughts that I had after hearing this story was I could be on that list.
0:55:35 I could be on that list.
0:55:41 I would guess that more people in the state of Minnesota know who I am than knows who Melissa Hortman is.
0:55:45 I am not saying that I’m not inflating my own importance.
0:55:46 She actually is a lawmaker.
0:55:50 She actually does important things or did important things in the state of Minnesota.
0:55:56 But she’s just not on the internet making a household name of herself.
0:55:57 She was doing the real work of governing.
0:56:03 So it did not seem far-fetched that I could be on his list.
0:56:05 And I don’t know if I am.
0:56:08 Law enforcement never contacted me to say, you were on the list.
0:56:11 Fortunately, he was arrested and is probably going to go to jail for the rest of his life.
0:56:20 But that’s a very real, especially in today’s political moment, it’s a very real concern for people in my line of work.
0:56:26 It’s not just the mental health aspect of people tell you to kill yourself all the time.
0:56:28 It’s not just the hate that you get.
0:56:33 There’s also a growing personal safety concern.
0:56:37 And that also has a mental health component as well.
0:56:44 I cannot believe that Heather Cox Richardson doesn’t think like this, too.
0:56:51 If I were her, if I were you, if I were, you know, many people like this, it’s got to be top of mind.
0:56:54 I haven’t asked Heather about it in a long time.
0:56:59 But I know Heather is like really good friends with Joanne Freeman, who is also a political historian.
0:57:03 And she actually has written a book called The Field of Blood, Joanne Freeman has.
0:57:05 Heather and Joanne used to have a podcast together.
0:57:11 And The Field of Blood is about political violence in the United States Congress.
0:57:20 So they are both very, very, as political historians, well-versed with our country’s proclivity towards political violence.
0:57:23 And I don’t know how she’s dealing with it.
0:57:24 I honestly don’t know.
0:57:28 But I know that she lives in the Northwoods like I do.
0:57:31 I live on a dirt road in a rural area.
0:57:34 I know she lives in the rural Northwoods as well.
0:57:37 That hasn’t stopped people from coming to my house, though.
0:57:40 That hasn’t stopped people from showing up at my office.
0:57:53 And when you do public appearances, that’s also like I have to have personal security for public appearances and venue security for public appearances just because you don’t know.
0:57:56 I recently won a First Amendment award from the Freedom Forum.
0:58:06 And we had to have a whole security meeting about what are we going to do to make sure this event is not disrupted by somebody and we had to have metal detectors.
0:58:08 And it’s a very real concern.
0:58:09 And it weighs on you.
0:58:10 Wow.
0:58:13 Okay, my last question for you.
0:58:26 Let’s suppose that you can go back in time and you can go back and you’re with Gouverneur Morris and you’re with the people drafting the Constitution.
0:58:30 And you go back and you say, listen, I’m from 2025.
0:58:40 Let me give you boys some advice here about how you should write the Constitution so it doesn’t screw everything up two or three hundred years from now.
0:58:45 What advice would you give those people about the Constitution 1.0?
0:58:47 Listen here, gentlemen.
0:58:49 I got some thoughts.
0:58:51 I got some thoughts for you.
0:58:58 The first thing is that Gouverneur Morris was a very strong advocate against enslavement.
0:59:00 He did not believe in slavery.
0:59:07 And there’s been much that has been made about like, what should the framers have done when they could not agree on this issue?
0:59:18 But if I could go back in time and change their minds about anything, I would have to change their mind about the role of women and the role of minority groups in the United States.
0:59:28 Native Americans, African Americans, and all other minority groups who have been systematically and legally discriminated against and excluded.
0:59:49 If I could change their minds about one thing, that would be it because we have robbed ourselves of hundreds of years of important thought and progress and inventions and people who have been intentionally excluded from the conversation.
1:00:07 If you look at, say, the scientific advancements of women in the subject of physics at the early part of the 20th century, specifically in Germany, where there were not as many discriminatory policies against women, the scientific contributions of women to physics are incredible.
1:00:18 And we have robbed ourselves of hundreds of years of the participation of women and people of color.
1:00:22 And we don’t even necessarily know everything that we’ve missed out on.
1:00:23 Okay.
1:00:26 I wish it were possible for you to go back in time.
1:00:27 Yeah, same guy.
1:00:30 We’d be a better country today.
1:00:31 I can promise you that.
1:00:43 We would be a better country today if we had not chosen to codify into law our systematic exclusion and discrimination of certain groups of people.
1:00:44 We would be better off today.
1:00:57 Well, you know that there are probably people out here listening and they’re saying, well, but, you know, because I know you address this in your book where they’re saying to themselves, we banned slavery before anybody else.
1:01:05 So we took the high road and, as you say, well, maybe you can explain why that’s total bullshit.
1:01:05 It is.
1:01:16 Somebody made that up as a talking point of like, well, we abandoned slavery way before Afghanistan, as though that is like some great thing to pat ourselves on the back for.
1:01:24 The United States was actually among the last of the Western world to ban chattel slavery.
1:01:26 We were among the last, not the first.
1:01:30 So whoever is parroting this talking point, look with them on suspicion.
1:01:35 They are either not informed or they’re intentionally lying to you about what real history is.
1:01:43 But the concept of like states’ rights has always been one that has been used as a tool of discrimination.
1:01:48 There are times where things do belong in the hands of locals.
1:01:58 What people need to educate children in inner city Los Angeles is different than what people need to educate children in rural Iowa.
1:02:05 It’s very obvious that these are not the same groups and we need local control over these kinds of things.
1:02:08 So there are aspects of government that should belong in local hands.
1:02:19 But throughout the entirety of U.S. history, over and over and over again, the states’ rights argument has been used to enact discrimination.
1:02:23 What exactly do you want the right to do?
1:02:30 Especially if you’re thinking about in the early part of the United States, what is it that the Southern states want the right to do?
1:02:31 Enslaved people.
1:02:33 That’s what they want the right to do.
1:02:53 And our acquiescence to the idea of states should be able to choose for themselves how they want to conduct all aspects of their governance, it has led to the systematic legal discrimination against many millions of people.
1:03:01 Well, if you think about it, Roe versus Wade reversal was a reversion to state, like let every state decide.
1:03:14 It is, and I understand that abortion is not equivalent to enslavement, and I’m not going to make an equivalency argument, but it is the same kind of example of states to be able to decide for themselves what they want to do.
1:03:17 It is a slippery slope that we have to contend with.
1:03:20 Does that mean that states can now ban interracial marriage?
1:03:28 Can states now make it so that only children of certain colors are allowed to be educated?
1:03:31 That’s what happened in the 1950s in Prince Edward County, Virginia.
1:03:34 They just decided, we’re not going to educate black children.
1:03:38 We’re going to give tuition vouchers to private schools for white children, and black children get nothing.
1:03:39 That’s what happened.
1:03:47 So I don’t know that there’s a really strong, compelling case when it comes to civil rights issues.
1:03:51 Not about which roads should get paved or true local issues.
1:03:56 But when it comes to civil rights, we should all have equal protection under the law.
1:03:58 That’s in the Constitution.
1:04:03 And a child from Alabama should have the same equal protection as a child from New York.
1:04:12 I think that is a perfect way to end this episode of Remarkable People.
1:04:16 We’re in one hour, 11 minutes, and 31 seconds into this.
1:04:25 And I actually have a lot of other questions I would want to ask you, but I think less is more.
1:04:32 I just had a guest on from Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and we were discussing less is more.
1:04:35 And so we’re going to go with the less is more theory.
1:04:36 You’ll just have to invite me back.
1:04:37 Yeah.
1:04:38 Anytime.
1:04:42 We could have a weekly podcast with you, Sharon.
1:04:48 Now that I learned how to pronounce your name, I mean, you know, I’m good to go.
1:04:48 That’s right.
1:04:49 I’m good to go.
1:04:49 That’s right.
1:04:50 You’re all set.
1:04:51 That’s right, guys.
1:04:52 All righty.
1:04:55 And I have a friend in Minnesota.
1:04:56 I hope you know.
1:04:57 Do you know Andrew Zimmern at all?
1:04:58 Yes.
1:05:00 I don’t know him personally, but I know who he is.
1:05:00 Of course.
1:05:01 Yes.
1:05:05 If you ever want an introduction to Andrew Zimmern, he’s a fantastic person.
1:05:08 Certainly very well known in a food scene in Minnesota.
1:05:08 Yeah.
1:05:09 Yeah.
1:05:09 Yeah.
1:05:16 I will tell you a funny story about Andrew Zimmern, which is, you know, basically he really became famous by eating bizarre foods, right?
1:05:18 All over the world.
1:05:22 Salted shark and I don’t know, teriyaki guinea pigs and whatever.
1:05:30 And since you have some clear fascination with Hawaii, I’ll tell you, I said, Andrew, is there anything you will not eat?
1:05:32 And he said, spam.
1:05:35 And I told him, I’m from Hawaii.
1:05:37 Spam is a delicacy, Andrew.
1:05:38 You’re killing me.
1:05:41 Spam is also made in Minnesota.
1:05:46 Like the spam, one of the spam factories is in Minnesota.
1:05:50 Oh, that’s better than lute fish or whatever that is.
1:05:50 That is true.
1:05:52 Take spam any day.
1:05:56 All right, Sharon, we’re going to let you go.
1:05:57 Thank you very much.
1:06:08 Let me thank the Remarkable People team, which is, of course, Madison Neismar, co-producer with Jeff See, Shannon Hernandez, sound design, Tessa Neismar, researcher.
1:06:14 And thank you so much, Anna, be sure to check out her book.
1:06:23 I mean, just give us a 30-second plug for your book because I found that it’s 12-plus people who are small and mighty.
1:06:39 Yeah, the small and the mighty are stories of people who did not begin life from a station of power and privilege, but who nevertheless managed to change the course of American history in really unexpected and, in many cases, delightful ways.
1:06:44 This is Remarkable People.