Here's Where It Gets Interesting - The Humanity Archive with Jermaine Fowler

Episode Date: January 16, 2023

On today’s episode of Here’s Where It Gets Interesting, Sharon talks to author and public library advocate, Jermaine Fowler. Jermaine and Sharon talk about the value of seeing history outside of the binary of either unflawed or unredeemable. We, and our children, need access to a well-rounded history that’s free from white-washing or censorship. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Red One... We're coming at you. ...is the movie event of the holiday season. Santa Claus has been kidnapped? You're gonna help us find him. You can't trust this guy. He's on the list. Is that Naughty Lister? Naughty Lister?

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Let's save Christmas. There it is. Only in theaters November 15th. Interior Chinatown is an all-new series based on the best-selling novel by Charles Yu about a struggling Asian actor who gets a bigger part than he expected when he witnesses a crime in Chinatown. Streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. Hey friends, welcome. Always so excited to have you with me. I am speaking today with somebody that I think you're really going to love hearing from. His name is Jermaine Fowler, and we have

one of the best conversations about history that I've had in a long time. He's a new book out called The Humanity Archive. And I think you're going to want to hear this conversation. So let's start in. I'm Sharon McBann, and here's where it gets interesting. I am very excited to be chatting with Jermaine Fowler today. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me, Shan. We've chatted many times, and I'm so excited that we're finally able to connect and have you on the show because I am very excited to get your book,

The Humanity Archive, into the hands of more people. I think it's an important work. I think the work that you're doing is important. I know that I really appreciate going to your Instagram and seeing the content that you're producing on a daily basis. So I really think people are going to enjoy hearing from you today. Thanks for being here. Yeah, I'm so excited. I've followed you for a long time as well and very much appreciate what you do in educating people, whether it be on politics or history. You just have such a broad platform that I admire. Thank you. Okay. First of all, one of the things that we have talked about before we started recording is how views of history, lenses of history seem to oppose each other. They seem to be either you believe America is the greatest nation on earth, every single founding father was next door to a deity, that America can do no wrong,

especially when we're talking about the founding era in many history books and in the minds of many people. You might call this the 1776 view of America, right? And then on the other side, you have this view of history that tends to be much more critical of the United States, that tends to view America as inherently racist, tends to view America as founded on abhorrent ideas, like the enslavement of people. And you might call this the 1619 view of America. I don't find either of those approaches particularly helpful, because they're making so many assumptions that then go unchallenged. And I would love to hear your thoughts on that. Do you agree with me that it's not helpful to think in this binary of like either America's really good or America's really bad? I typically am against the binary because there's so much nuance and complexity to the study of history. And there very much is

right now dominating the conversation about history in the headlines in schools is this 1776 versus the 1619, which was a New York Times project that says that we should reframe American history centering the experiences of the enslaved. So it was very much a critical history versus, as you said, this American exceptionalism. We are the greatest nation on earth. It reminds me of if you are at the Capitol and the Capitol Rotunda, if you look up, there is something called the hypothesis of Washington and it has George Washington lifted to the status of a God, right? This beautiful painting. But then on the other hand, you have enslaved people who built the White House, the grounds of the White House. So there's these opposing views

that I don't think people are having a conversation amongst one another to find some balance within those narratives, right? And the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, he warned us against this type of history. It was a paper that he did called The Uses and Abuses of History, where he talked about a monumental history, which does say that people are unflawed. The great man theory of history, right? We tend to attribute a lot of history to the great people, the Alexander the Greats of history, and so on and so forth, versus the critical history, where we destroy history. We're looking for something to investigate, to find something wrong, to have that view of history. But he says, be careful. We have to have balance between these two views of history. And I think that that's not what we're seeing right now. And I think that the conversation really should be shifted to, okay, how do we teach people how to think for themselves? How do we teach people how to investigate information for themselves? I would prefer, especially when it comes to kids, that we just give them a bunch of different history books and let them figure it out. Right. And we guide them, give them patriotic history, give them economic history, give them Marxist history, give them radical history.

Let them just dive into all the different types of history and learn how to think for themselves and analyze history for themselves like historians do. It's called historiography, where you're synthesizing different views of history to come up with your own view. Take me back to when Germaine was a young man, when Germaine was a small, small child, a small fry. What were you like in elementary school? My journey really began around 12 years old in the Free Public Library, what I say is the most democratic institution on earth because everybody is represented on the shelves of the Free Public Library. So I would go there. And what really drove me into the library was that I didn't see myself represented in any depth in history books as a Black person.

So I would go to the library and I went to the Black history section. I read my way out of that section. And that kind of took me down the path to learning, down the path to knowledge. I love to learn. I love to educate myself. And I just figured at some point I wanted to share that knowledge with other people, which the Humanity Archive was born out of that. I, too, count a public library among the most influential concepts in my life. And I totally agree with you that it is among the most democratic of institutions. Librarians are not saying,

we will decide for you which books you get to read, which ideas you will be exposed to. You get to decide that for yourself. That's very true. I read a very startling statistic recently that I think it's 54% of Americans between 16 and 74 only read at a sixth grade or below reading level. So the library is a very important place. And if I could just push more people to the library and get them interested in reading, I make a lot of posts and talk about that a lot on my social medias. Like, hey, I love reading. What book are you reading this month? That kind of thing to try to push people to read more and gain knowledge that way.

The power of the written word is so transformational. If you want to be a better human, if you want to be a more educated human, get yourself a library card and ask your local research librarian for references. They have graduate degrees in pointing people to the right information, helping you locate what it is that you're looking for. Can you help me find a book about what it was like to live in Jamestown? Can you help me find a book about what the Middle Passage was like? Your local librarian would love to help you find that book. Yeah, treasure trove of information. I think what it is about reading, it's the stories. I think it's the stories. I don't know if you know this, but scientists did an experiment. When two people hear the same story,

their heartbeats often will synchronize with each other. So stories have a power to connect us. And the stories in books have a very profound power. We know that stories make us more empathetic when we read them. And that's why I try to focus a lot of what I do also on storytelling. And that aspect, again, it's all up to me about bringing people together and the power of stories is one of the most profound things we have to do that. Mm-hmm. Okay. So what was the genesis of the Humanity Archive? Well, again, it goes back to the library and more specifically, you know, again, in my history class, I didn't see myself represented. We learned briefly about

Black history, some Rosa Parks stories, some George Washington Carver stories. Most of the time it was during Black History Month. So again, that pushed and drove me to the Black History section of the library. And I remember picking up this very old book. The pages were frayed and it smelled like walnuts and it was falling apart. And it was like from 1934, it was by a man named J.A about, written about this man. He was trying to combat the racism of his time when people were saying that black people had no history. So he went to obscure libraries and traveled across the globe to castles in Europe. He went everywhere searching for black history to disprove this idea that Black people have no history. So I humbly try to put myself in that line of scholarship, right, in terms of somebody who's trying to find, overlook history and present it to the public, history that people, I can sense that they're really frustrated about, right, that they wish they would have learned some of these facts and things. Whenever they were in school, a lot of people feel like they were kind of shortchanged on what they know versus what they don't know, what they learn versus what they

don't learn. People learned about Jamestown, Virginia for three years in a row and was like, hey, why didn't we make room for something else here, right? Another perspective. So, you know, I just try to bring forth overlooked history. So the Humanity Archive was born from that. And interestingly, by learning Black history, I found Black humanity. So by traveling down this river of Black history, then I started going down the tributaries of Native American history and started learning more about ancient history. So it kind of went full circle for me where it always came back to humanity. And that's where the title of my book came from. On the one hand, trying to recover this history from what I would say is a whitewashed history,

going back to the days where people said black people had no history, where it was erased to uplift this monumental America narrative. So there did need to be a corrective, and I would say still does, but always coming back to the universal bonds that connect us all, never losing sight of that at the same time. Yeah, I love the subtitle, Recovering the Soul of Black History from a Whitewashed American Myth. And you're 100% correct that so often the stories of Black Americans are relegated to a sidebar. It's interesting because the quote-unquote father of Black history, Carter G. Woodson, he actually said that we should study not Black history, but we should study Black people

in history, right? So that brings it to that humanity, connecting it to the larger human project. And even the states that are trying to promote more black history, it's promoted as an elective right outside of the U.S. history narrative. So when you go in the bookstore like Barnes and Noble, it's like U.S. history. And then you have African-American studies or you have, you know, sociology, even, you know, black history is put in the sociology section. So, and same for women's history, indigenous history, it's all set apart as opposed to everything being in this U.S. history narrative. So, then instead of, for instance, learning that George Washington, it was quoted that he had about 25% of his army was black people, right? In the revolutionary army, you learn that as a side fact, as opposed to just learning that within the story of George Washington all, you know, as a whole in your U.S. history textbooks, right? In colleges, it's a different department. So it's not

presented as U.S. history. So I think that's a sad reality. And I think I would hope to see a day as well where we can correct that, but it's just not coming in all these years. We can each do our part, right? And sometimes the wheels of justice turn slowly. That doesn't mean we shouldn't continue to turn them. But you're absolutely right that there's this concept that white history is the history. And these other histories are little like offshoots of the history, right? That's the dominant narrative in US history

education. It's like, the history is the founding eras. They got tired of the despot king, and they don't want to pay your taxes and taxation without representation. We're out of here. We're going to fight you. Oh my goodness, we won the war. How that happen we're young scrappy and hungry can't believe it ordained by god manifest destiny you know all these things like it is the history and then there's all of these other like yeah but you know there were some women who you know were like knitting in the corner and they whispered to each other and wow you know what i mean like there's all of these little offshoots, when in reality, it is all part of the history. It's very difficult. I think we learn history all wrong anyway. We learn it from a single textbook. It's a single narrative story, as though you can fit everything within 300 pages of a textbook.

I think that ultimately, I mean, we should be learning again from multiple books, and that's how you bring it all together and allow from middle school, from high school kids to read from different books on different opinions and ideas and pull all that information together, I think, is the way that students should be learning history. I think that we don't learn it correctly in a way that's going to allow people to think for themselves. I remember going to the library as a child, as a middle schooler, and bringing home some books that were about history, about different views of the world that I knew that my parents didn't

agree with. And I remember my mom being like, why did you check this book out? And I said, I'm just interested in what it has to say. I'm not saying, well, I'm going to agree with it. I'm going to believe everything in it. But how am I supposed to know what that person believes if I don't read it? And she was like, okay. And so I, and it sounds like you as well, was allowed to read widely from a variety of viewpoints, even if it was not the viewpoint that my parents agreed with. And I think right now at this moment in America, there's this prevailing idea that,

let's just say high schoolers, we're not talking about four-year-olds here, can't handle reading something controversial, can't handle reading a diverging viewpoint than the pre-approved one. And that children should only be exposed to this very, very, and again, by children, I'm talking about people who are capable of critical thought, like middle schoolers, high schoolers, this prevailing idea that we only want our kids to read the quote unquote right information. And I wonder if you can talk about that a little bit. What is that doing to our history education? Well, firstly, it's based in fear.

I talk a lot about slavery. fear. I talk a lot about slavery. I talk a lot about the period in American history where it was called the nadir of American racism, where there was race massacres and lynchings and these horrific things that are part of American history. And one of the questions that I get is like, what age is this good for? I would put out a lecture or do an online course or something like that. So that's a question that a parent would ask trying to protect their kids to see what they're going to be watching or exposing themselves to. But, you know, every time I'm asked that question, can we sugarcoat it? Can we sanitize it from our kids, right? If you've seen some of the TV shows, you know, a lot of those are graphic and violent

and everything else. But then when it comes to American history, you're scared about them seeing real violence that happened in America. So I think the fear is often misplaced. And we need to talk about that because that's an important study. Violence still happens. Brutality still happens. A lot of these things tied to the present. So, you know, I think that we should at a certain age say, OK, like we got to teach kids this stuff probably around middle school or so. Mature middle schoolers can definitely handle that. So I think that it's very important. Visa and OpenTable are dishing up something new. Visa and OpenTable are dishing up something new. Get access to primetime dining reservations by adding your Visa Infinite Privilege Card to your OpenTable account.

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toys to stuff their stockings, and fashion like slippers to mistle their toes. Shop great deals on Amazon. This idea that children cannot handle knowing bad things, that is a very modern idea modern idea based in privilege. It is a very modern idea based in the privilege to be able to shield them from bad things. A lot of kids, they're already learning this stuff on their own. I mean, they're on TikTok talking about this history themselves. They're perusing the internet and browsing the internet and finding and digging and Wikipedia and everything else. They're perusing the Internet and browsing the Internet and finding and digging and Wikipedia and everything else. They're already exposing themselves to this history. So a lot of times parents are like one, two, three, four years too late already and engaging kids with these types of conversations when by the time you do, they're already have formulated their own thoughts about it anyway.

You know, I am friends with this woman named Dr. Becky Kennedy, and she's a parenting expert. You guys have heard me talk to her before. And she says something that you might agree with, which is we can't protect our children from knowing things. We can only prepare them for it. And if parents are saying like, my kid can't know about Emmett Till, it's too violent. You're not actually protecting them from it because if they're curious, they will find it.

They absolutely will find it. It's not hard to find. But what you're leaving behind is the opportunity to prepare them for it. The opportunity to have the conversation about why did this happen? You are leaving behind the ability to prepare them. Absolutely. And I think we have to ask, is it about the truth, right? There was this quote by

W.E.B. Du Bois, and he says that we have this idea that the negativity and the atrocity of history must be skimmed over. We like to paint great nations and great men, but the problem is that history then doesn't tell the truth. So are we trying to teach kids to find the truth or are we just trying to paint a certain narrative? And that could go either way, right? In terms of what we want them to know. As you said, a lot of parents who try to screen the books that their kids read and only want them to think the same way that they do and have this household that's kind of caught up in this group think you can only learn whatever I believe. And, you know, it's really, again, I think in a nation who, you know, is a democratic nation, you know, we should be teaching people how to think and not what to think, teaching kids how to think and not what to think.

And the more we get away from that, you know, the more we fall away from democratic ideas away from democratic ideas and a place where everybody's thoughts are represented. I would love to hear some of your own favorite people from American history. Maybe you can think of one or two that you feel like not enough people know about them and they should. Are there any characters from history that you were like, y'all need to know about this person? Yeah, I would say one person that I have a very profound respect for, and I wish that she was a household name, was Ida B. Wells. She was someone who came up in the time when lynching was very prevalent in America. So she was actually called that out. She was in Memphis and they bombed her newspaper. She had to get out of town, right?

She had to escape Memphis. She went to Chicago and she wrote a book called A Southern Whore in 1892, exposing the lynching atrocity in America. whore in 1892 exposing the lynching atrocity in America. She wrote a book called The Red Record in 1895. Even before she was doing her lynching journalism, she tried to desegregate a train. They tried to physically handle her out of the train because they wanted her to sit in the smoking car, which was full of a bunch of men during that time in the 1890s who'd smoke and curse. It wasn't really a place for a lady, right? So they tried to put her there as a Black woman. And when they grabbed her, she got in a fight with the train conductor and she sued in court.

She won the first time, but then she lost in state Supreme Court. She was just a very courageous woman. When a lot of Black leaders were arguing about civil rights and education, she was out there. She rode around with a pistol through the South, documenting these lynchings and seeing why they were happening and why all these Black people were being murdered, tied back to white supremacist thinking. And all that just kind of really inspires me as somebody who had so much courage as five foot woman. And then there's another story about hair where they didn't want black women at the front of a suffrage parade in New York. And she just kind of waited on the sidelines. And I was like, if you want to be in this parade, black women, you have to be all the way in the back. And she waited on the sidelines

and jumped into the front of the suffrage parade uh she's just a very uh inspiring figure in american history that i would definitely like people to know more about what do you wish that white people knew about black history and i and that's not a loaded question it's not a trick question if somebody were to read your, let's say they're a 35 year old white woman and they read the humanity archive. What do you hope they take away from it? What do you wish they knew at the end of the book? Well, I think that I want people to know that black history has been whitewashed. It hasn't been produced and put forth as a part of American history as a part of the whole. And this goes

all the way back to, you could think about the Constitution. I mean, slavery wasn't even mentioned by name in the Constitution. So there was always been this denial of Black existence. There's another instance of the Boston Massacre, the chaotic melee in 1770. A lot of historians note that Crispus Attucks, a Black and Indigenous man, was the first to die in the Boston Massacre. And in original depictions, they literally painted him white because he didn't fit this idea of the revolution, right? And it took abolitionists to revive his memory some 60 years later and paint him as a man of color. So you have all these instances of whitewashing.

And then today people still have a very, very hard time talking about slavery, talking about the achievements even of Black people. You get these flag post moments where you hear about a textbook calling enslaved people migrant workers. There's one instance in California where teachers tied children's hands together and made them watch an episode of Roots. Like these examples come up in the news like all the time, right? People going to plantations not wanting to hear about slavery. They only want to hear about, you know, the beautiful buildings and architecture and Black history is whitewashed. And then how do we recover that?

How do we recover Black humanity? How do we recover Black achievement? How do we recover the story of Black people as part of the American story? So in my book, I talk about the whitewashing, but then I take everybody on a journey to recover that soul of Black history, the Black fight for democracy, stories of Black heroes, but also people who are flawed everyday people just like you and me. And I think that's what I want people to take away is the whitewashing on the one hand, but then the universal humanity on the other hand. I love that.

What would you say to people who feel like we need to move on? Slavery was in the past. Nobody's enslaved anymore in the United States. Like, let's move on. Stop talking about it. Stop talking about it. Stop talking about it. That's a common refrain that you hear in certain communities at school board meetings, et cetera. Stop focusing on it. Stop focusing on race. The more you bring it up, the more you pay attention

to it, the worse it seems. What would you say to somebody who maybe has some of those thoughts? Well, I often hear that. And typically, it's a deflection, right? That's only brought up when people are talking about slavery or its connection to current injustice. And I think that people just, again, there's a lot of anti-Black history and Black history, not only what Black people have done, but a lot of the terrible things that have been done to Black people in the nation, whether it be slavery or land theft or redlining or lynching or all these things, right? So people don't want to deal with that. But there's this quote that says, a condition of all truth is to allow suffering to speak. That was a man named Theodore Adorno, a philosopher. If we're not

going to talk about the slavery, the blood, the sweat, the tears of history, then we might as well not even talk about history because we're only going to learn half the truth then if we don't talk about that. This idea that it is possible to parse out the truth of history is something that there's a lot of pushback against. there's a lot of pushback against. You hear some people who are like, who's truth? How should we judge characters of the past? How should we judge the George Washingtons and the Thomas Jeffersons of the world who undoubtedly made significant contributions to the United States, the creation of the United States, the creation of the United States, the creation of Jeffersonian democracy, et cetera, but who also simultaneously did things that by today's standards we find reprehensible. I don't need to even list them all. People know exactly what I'm talking about. The people they enslaved, the women they raped, et cetera. How, in your estimation, should we judge characters of the past like that? Well, I think that we have to, again, balance the critical with the monumental.

So usually you only get one or the other. So when you're only critical, it's kind of like radiation for cancer. You destroy healthy cells and the cancer cells whenever you target history in that way, right? So if we're looking at a George Washington and we say, well, wow, he literally had dentures made out of the teeth of enslaved people. They have a ledger from his dentist that say they paid them pennies. It's not like they even had a choice anyway. They paid them a little money, but they pulled their teeth for his dentures. But on the other hand, you have George Washington who very well might have made himself King Washington, right? So you have this idea of democracy in a history that, again, is full of czars and pharaohs and kings and queens, monarchs and dictators. So that is a precious idea of

democracy too. So to balance the critical with the idea that all men are created equal and pull out what's good and criticize the bad, I think that it's not mutually exclusive. We can do both. Isn't that what's most fair? Isn't it most fair to acknowledge somebody's accomplishments while simultaneously saying, and also he enslaved 400 people, that it's perfectly fair to describe his actual activities. There's this weird idea that like, it's not fair to describe something that he actually did. And he actually enslaved people. And he actually won the Revolutionary, helped win the Revolutionary War. He actually did both those things to only say he was an enslaver or to only say he was a Revolutionary War general. That's not fair. That's not a fair portrait of him as an individual. And that's what you get, you know,

the biographers, I think it was Andrew Jackson. And I was reading and research for my book, like some of his main biographers, you know, he owned hundreds of slaves and a lot of his biographers like barely mentioned it. They only gets like a paragraph in his biographies. But then on the other hand, you get the critical, like this guy owned all these slaves and that's the whole focus, almost a hundred percent, right? To where you lose some of the things that he did, you know, well, some of the things that he did contribute, right? So you're not gaining from it. If you only stare at the negative, I mean, it's always going to feed you, right? Negative to where you can't overlook the things that he did either. But I

think for most of American history, and I think what has made a lot of people frustrated is we've mostly gotten the monumental history of these figures. Their flaws have been hidden and the darker side of American history has been whitewashed. So I think that is where you're getting a lot of the critical history these days, people being frustrated, angry that they didn't learn these things. So, you know, they're in protest. You get Christopher Columbus statues being torn down, you know, and you see the statue kissing the ground of Christopher Columbus during the 2020 protest because, you know, people are frustrated. And I think what it really boils down to, though,

if you get down to it, is people just really want a balanced history, right? They don't want it sugarcoated. They don't want it lied. They want all sides of history. And for a long time, we've only gotten one side, the unflawed American exceptionalism. And to tell the whole story, the truth of somebody, not to pick on George Washington, he's just somebody everybody knows, to tell the truth about him is to preserve his humanity, which speaks to your platform, the Humanity Archive. To deify him is not humanity. Yeah. And to make him the great Satan is also not humanity. I think there is a way to teach history that preserves the humanity

of the characters in history. That goes for Black figures in history too. And I talk about this in my book. You apply this framework. It's a framework I have for history where I'm looking at the good and the bad. So Frederick Douglass, at one point, he dispatched Native Americans. There's one story about Harriet Tubman. She used to carry a pistol around and one guy wanted to turn back and the story goes like, you're not turning back and getting us all caught because you'll tell our location and stuff. So these people were flawed too, right? I mean, even anybody you uplift as a hero, they you know, they're human, right? Humans aren't gods, you know, they're humans. So, I mean, every story you look at, if you dig deep enough,

you're going to find flaws. Of course, like you said, some way more flawed than other and some, but at the end of the day, all humans are flawed. We have to always keep that in mind because that gives us a humility when we're studying history because it's easy to look at these dead people who are long gone in the grave and project what we want onto them right so you can make a hero out of anybody one person's hero is another person's villain right so uh what we're really doing is projecting our ideas onto historical figures you know people appropriate frederick douglas for republican causes people appropriate martin luther king for liberal cause you know and it goes all the way around. So

we really have to look at these people for who they really were, flawed human beings in their situation for what it was as well to always have humility in the study of history. There is this kind of concept of presentism, that the correct view is our view, and that we have now ascended to whatever higher plane of correct thinking, and that we should take our present ideas, values, thoughts, and beliefs, and project them onto the past. And that is also, in some ways, a very dangerous way to look at things. Absolutely. I talk about that in my book a little bit too, presentism. These arguments over, for instance, were the ancient Egyptians white or black, right? And this is a time whenever

race wasn't conceptualized in the way there was ethnicity, right? As terms of like, you know, we're Egyptians versus, you know, you're from Greece or whatever the case may be. So there was elements of people being separate based on ethnicity, but race didn't apply. So people want to appropriate ancient Egyptians for black or white or this, you know, so we're applying race to a time that it didn't exist. We could just look at it as, you it as this human civilization who did all these great things. People were losing what we could learn from them, arguing back and forth over what race they were. In my book, I have a section called Search for Truth. And I give people my framework of how I study history, because it's not just about what Jermaine thinks. There's another

quote by E.H. Carr. He was a historian. He said, you should study the story and just as much as you study the history, right? Because historians have their own biases and preconceived notions and you want to see where people are coming from, right? So as somebody who looks at myself as an educator, I wanted to give people my framework of how I study history. And a lot of that is presentism, projecting our ideas onto the past, and things that I warn against when people study history, whether it be Black history or any other history. Well, thank you so much for being here today.

I really enjoy following you. I think everybody listening can learn so much from the Humanity Archive. I'm really grateful for your time. Thanks for being here. Thank you so much for having me. I think you're going to love following Jermaine Fowler Archive. I'm really grateful for your time. Thanks for being here. Thank you so much for having me. I think you're going to love following Jermaine Fowler on Instagram at The Humanity Archive and pre-order his book, The Humanity Archive, Recovering the Soul of Black History

from a Whitewashed American Myth. I think you'll get so much out of it. I'll see you next time. Thank you so much for listening to Here's Where It Gets Interesting. If you enjoyed this episode, would you consider sharing it on social media or leaving us a rating or review on your favorite podcast platform? All those things help podcasters out so much. The show is written and researched by executive producer Heather Jackson, Valerie Hoback, and Sharon McMahon. Our audio engineer is Jenny Snyder, and it's hosted by me, Sharon McMahon. We'll see you again soon.