Here's Where It Gets Interesting - The Power of Storytelling in Politics with Richard Fowler

Episode Date: February 2, 2022

In this episode, Sharon is joined by FOX News and Forbes contributor, Richard Fowler, to talk about storytelling and how it shapes American politics. Richard shares how and why storytelling plays a powerful role in our democracy; people will not always remember the policy, but they will always remember the story attached to it. As well, Sharon and Richard explore how storytelling helps humanize others, enabling us to see them as an individual instead placing them in a collective category of people. Sharon and Richard discuss why polarizing issues do not have to be strictly black or white and why it is important to see the shades of gray. Join Richard and Sharon as they teach us how to empathize through listening to others’ stories and how we can spark change by telling our own. 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

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Hello, friends. Welcome. Always delighted to have you here. Today I am chatting with Richard Fowler, who is the host of The Richard Fowler Show. He's a Fox News contributor. He is a contributor for Forbes. And we are chatting about something today that is going to really move the needle for some of you. It is a strategy that we can use to make change in our communities for the better. And it might be something you haven't thought of before. It is way more than just calling your elected representatives. So let's dive into my conversation with Richard Fowler. I'm Sharon McMahon, and welcome to the Sharon Says So podcast. Richard, I am so glad you're here today. Thank you so much for coming. Oh, it's so good to be with you, Sharon. Thanks for having me. I would love to hear more about your background. Can you introduce yourself

to everybody else so we can all get to know you a little bit? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, one, I am a storyteller, so I love really good stories and I love helping people tell better stories. And that's really sort of how I got into this role. I went to GW undergrad. I'm trained as an economist, but after sort of finishing school, I graduated during the great recession. I realized that there weren't many jobs out there. And a friend of mine said, you should get involved in a campaign. And when I got involved in the campaign, I really wasn't good at being in the field, but I really found a knack for the communications department. Then one thing led to another. And before you knew it,

I was working with candidates and working with teachers unions and working with folks all across the country to tell better stories and also engaging in storytelling myself. I started out in radio, then moved to television, and I have been telling stories ever since. And so I'm happy to be here to share some stories with you, Sharon. The idea of working on a campaign is very mysterious to many people. I think that it's a bunch of like people in the Wizard of Oz behind a curtain frantically pulling a bunch of levers.

Yes. What is campaigning for real? I actually started out on electoral campaigning and very quickly I started working on actually issue campaigns. And most of my issue campaign work has really focused on education and health care, especially in education. And so when I say campaign, what I basically mean, I view a campaign as a project. Campaigns for me are things that have definite beginnings and definite endings. Right. In the case of elections, it begins when the candidate announces or prior to the candidate's announcement.

And it ends once the candidate after the election. Right. Or when the candidate announces or prior to the candidate's announcement and it ends once the candidate after the election right or when the election happens in the case of the teachers that I work with oftentimes the campaign might begin with a goal in mind so in the case of when I work with the teachers in Chicago they were negotiating a new contract with the city of Chicago for the for their services So the campaign began in earnest, and we were beginning our talking to the city of what that contract looked like. And it ended once the contract was finalized. But oftentimes campaigns could be, you know, one year, two year, three year, four years. And sometimes if you know, you're talking about a presidency, it starts, oftentimes the presidential campaign ends when the candidate is elected, but

then being governing is also a campaign, right? Like as we sort of talk about paid family leave, and we talk about Joe Biden's Build Back Better agenda, the president is actively campaigning for the passage of a piece of legislation. And then once he's done, he'll then move into campaigning to help ensure the folks who passed, helped him pass that legislation, get reelected in the midterm election. So the presidency is a group of campaigns that happen sort of consecutively. So you have the presidential campaign, then he had his American Rescue Plan, then you have getting folks vaccinated. And there are a series of campaigns that have different due dates and end dates, but they all sort of flow together in one large orchestration of what becomes a presidency. That is a really interesting way of looking at it is that these are just a series of presidential projects. And it begins with the project of getting into office. And then there are various projects that occur while they're in office. And then they have to quickly, within two years, begin the next project of trying to stay in office.

Do you feel like the American people are weary of the endless campaigns? I was actually having dinner with some friends yesterday. And one of my friends said so poignantly, he was like, I think that the American people, at least me as an American voter, I'm just tired of politicians being politicians. And I'm tired. I wish they would sometimes just get out there and tell us what they're actually thinking or actually tell us the truth or tell us what's actually happening. Right. And I think that what he was speaking to was this ideal that the American people are weary

of this ideal that there's just a constant campaign. What the American people actually want from government is to set government and forget government. And when government is working at its most optimum, right, it's when government is happening and the services and the things that you need government to do is happening and you don't even know what's happening to you. And the time, I mean, in my life cycle, I think the time when you think about it the best is if you think about almost like the beginning of Obama's second term, I don't know if you

remember that, that was so long ago, right? There was a moment in which you almost forgot that he was there, right? Like you forgot that the president was there, like the president wasn't in the news every day, like the country was just operating normally. We had come, we had gotten over the Great Recession, and we had started to move into the economy was just slowly. The economy was coming back. People were working. The biggest news headline of the day was, I want to say, was Harry and Meghan Markle getting married. There was all sorts of other things happening around us that wasn't 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue or the Capitol building.

And that is what you really want. That's when a president sees at its finest. A president sees it as finest when we're not spending 100% of time talking about the president. That's a very interesting point. People are much happier when government is just in that set it and forget it mode. The people who are not in power need those crises. They need to manufacture outrage. And this goes on both sides of the equation. They need to manufacture outrage. And this goes on both sides of the equation. They need to manufacture outrage about something so that voters will choose them instead of the people in power during the next election. What America's body politic is today is it's literally like the only way to think about

it's like football, right? You one player or one team gets the football and their goal is to run the football down the field as fast as possible and knock the other players out the way and hopefully get a touchdown. And then when the other players get the ball, right, their goal is to run the other team down the opposite direction. And as a result of that, the American people are sort of left in the middle with a little bit of whiplash, right? And this is why we have such a divided feeding frenzy when it comes to how government is done, because that's not what democracy is about. Democracy is actually about finding consensus and building consensus. Democracy is about bringing groups of people, or coalitions,

a better word, that don't often always agree on everything. That say, okay, I don't agree on this part. You don't agree on that part. Where can we find common ground to build some solutions? And here's the truth. In the end of it, we're not all going to get what we want, but we're going to slowly but surely move the country forward. And if you think about some of the best eras that we've had when government was at its finest, I mean, for me, one of the best eras that I really, when I think about, I think about Lyndon Baines Johnson's great society, right? When, when Lyndon Baines Johnson said, okay, Republicans, I know there's some of these things that you don't want to do, but we've got to get this done so we can move the country forward. And during the great

society, here's what we got done, right? We actually created a public education system that said, if you're poor, not, we're not, we're not that we're going to give you equality, we're going to give you equity. We're going to give you exactly what you need so that we can level the playing field. So if you really think about the great society, what LBJ was asking America to do is step outside yourself, think about what's happening to your neighbor and say, hmm, maybe what's happening to my neighbor is not as good as it should be. And I can compromise so that my neighbor can live the same life that I'm living. You can see that in a huge variety of issues that playing out in the United States right now. No aspect of my individual liberty

should be sacrificed for the greater good of the community. And I think that is really where a lot of our contention comes from is communitarians versus individualists, right? You see that in things like vaccine mandates and mask mandates, like those are super hot button issues right now. And you have some people on the communitarian side of things saying like, you can't just walk around and potentially infect people and people on the individualism side saying, you can't tell me what I need to have injected into my arm, right? Like this is the American conundrum. And this conundrum is not present to the same extent in many other nations. It is very uniquely American.

I think it goes back literally to this country's inception. Do you agree with that assessment or do you have a different take on it? I think that's absolutely right. And I think what coronavirus and what the global pandemic has laid bare, right, just based on how countries fared is the countries that have a community centric focus. We're all in this together. They fared so much better than countries that were divided. than countries that were divided. And then the best example is, look at the South Koreans, or look at the New Zealand's, right? Two countries that almost had their first coronavirus case when we had our first coronavirus case. And when you look proportionately, right, their death tolls were far lower, their infection rates were far lower, their testing rates were far higher. And if you look at these countries, right, they didn't have a seven, they didn't have,

I mean, obviously, proportionally, they have a small population, but they didn't have 700,000 people die from coronavirus. They don't currently have hundreds of people on ventilators. They don't currently have doctors getting on television begging people, please just give us a chance to catch up, right? They don't have any of the issues that we're facing here in America because we have this idea, like I call it this rugged individualism has gotten in the way of this idea that we're all here in America, because we have this idea, like I call it this rugged individualism, has gotten in the way of this idea that we're all in this together. Because whether we like it or not, we're neighbors, we're relatives, we're friends, we're aunts, we're uncles, we're moms, and we're dads. We have to take ourselves out of our own ability, our own selves and say,

is that person next to me a human? And I think many of the debates that we're having in this country today, the most, these controversial third rails of politics that we're having, we have them because we have failed to confer definitions on people. When we fail to define people,

it's easy to say, well, it's happening to them over there and they're not me. And to be fair and to be clear, Sharon, that goes both ways. Empathy is a two-way street. That also means that for those folks who are saying that we need to be a more just and equitable society, it means that you have to give space for folks who are saying, listen, I don't understand

equity. I don't understand what diversity and inclusion looks like. So you have to give me a little bit of room. And because I don't understand, it doesn't mean that I'm racist. I just need some space to understand. And so when we immediately say, oh, if you don't understand, you're racist, we create where we are right now, which is a whole bunch of political constituencies, all locked in concrete and nobody's willing to move. Nobody's willing to have a conversation. That's such an interesting way to illustrate it, that we have reached a point where anybody who has any question about an issue where they're like, how will we pay for these reforms? Ifamily candidate. And what that does is it says to them, well, I better not ask any more questions. I asked one simple question and a bunch of people got really mad at me. And so I guess I, my original impression was correct. And it hardens where they

are instead of making them more interested in empathy and curiosity in asking legitimate questions. So if we tell people, if we humiliate people who ask to understand, then it causes their position to harden. And I love that imagery of like, we have a bunch of people whose opinions are currently set in concrete. And apparently what we need are some jackhammers to come along and just like bust them out of where they are. Although that is easier said than done, clearly. Well, and I think that's the power of storytelling, which is why I love the work that I do,

because storytelling is that jackhammer. Think about it. When we think about Joe Biden's Build Back Better agenda, it's a perfect example of part of the problem. So in the Build Back Better agenda, it's chock full of all of these policies that are literally policies that are necessary in this country. Once you put the word elected official or politician next to their name, that person is immediately viewed with mistrust. So you have to say that that person has mistrust. When they speak about an issue, 50% of the people don't believe them. So if you are a Republican and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says something to you, you don't trust her. If you're a Democrat and Ted Cruz says something to you, you don't trust him. And in the middle, there's people who this

is their lived experience that, like I said, empathy is a two-way street and empathy doesn't have a gender or a sexuality or a race to it. And what I truly believe is that if we bring people into the room and say, here's my issue and here's my issue, I guarantee you we could come down to some real solutions. It's hard to hate people when you are looking in their eyeballs, right? Like there is just something about that where you can literally see somebody's eyes. You're sitting across the table from them. It requires far more effort to hate in that scenario than it does to just watch some people on TV and be like, dang, you know who I hate are those people over there. Once they're out there, once they're those people, it's easy to just lump everybody all together and to just decide like, they're not me and I don't

like them. And Sharon, I got to tell you, and that is somebody who, I mean, I voted for Joe Biden in the last election. I have no shame in admitting that, but it sort of speaks to how you see the political parties use identity. It's very rare that you will see folks attack a teacher because it's hard to attack the identity. Because when you say teacher, you think about your kindergarten teacher. Or for for me I think about my debate coach and the warm and fuzziness that I have for how Mr. Wakefield changed my life then impacts my thinking about teach a teacher but if you say the teacher's union that amorphous body of people right then it's very then you don't have to think about the unique individuals it's hard to hate the teacher it's hard, then you don't have to think about the unique individuals. It's hard to hate the teacher. It's hard to hate the firefighter. It's easy to hate the collective. 55 hours of listening with active noise cancelling enabled, soft microfibre cushions engineered for comfort,

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before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. So tell me more about how you view storytelling as a way to sort of jackhammer people out of their hardened concrete positions in politics. Oh, well, I love it because storytelling allows you to, for most people, but especially Americans, we are the arbiters of good stories, right? And we are the collectors of good stories. Think about growing up as a child, whether it was Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Red Riding Hood, all these stories. And they weren't necessarily like books that your mom or your dad or your parents or your guardians picked up and gave to you and flipped the books and read them to you. Oftentimes there were stories that you might've been laying in their lap, or they might've just told you by mouth, right? Because it's the stories are usually things that are passed down from generation

to generation. And stories invoke emotion, right? And they invoke feeling. And so that's the power of a really good story. And in a campaign setting, oftentimes people won't remember the policy, but they'll remember the story. And a great example of that is in 2019, when I was helping the Teachers union of Chicago try to figure out what story they were trying to tell. We were trying to figure out like, how do we tell an effective story about what the teachers are up against and what they were fighting for? And we use this story around a brave paraprofessional or teacher assistant named Willie. And Willie was a teacher assistant that was not making enough money. And he ended up

working the night shift at the Walmart stacking shelves. And he also was an Uber driver. But he loved his kids so much that after being an Uber driver and after stocking the shelves at Walmart, he still went into work every day and literally took care of his special needs children at school. And what we did with Willie is we called it the Willie calculator. And so Willie told us how much he made and then how much bills he had. And we literally created the Willie calculator. So Willie's telling us, and in the side of the screen, you have how much he's making and how much is going out. And it's always a negative number every month, a negative number

every month, a negative number. And we told the story via video. This story was so impactful, got over a million impressions, got shared from everybody from Lizzo, Sharon, Susan Sarandon, Chance the Rapper. Everybody shared Willie's story. And pre-pandemic, everybody wanted to know, how's Willie? When the contract settled, how's Willie doing? They could care less about what was in the contract. What they just wanted to know, did Willie's life get any better? Because the story of Willie connected with people. Willie was struggling and Willie was doing everything, quote unquote, that you're supposed to do. He was working really hard. He was playing by the rules. And the whole, the whole like deal of the American dream is, is if you work hard and you play by the rules,

you're supposed to be sort of guaranteed a ticket to the middle class. And for Willie, that wasn't his reality. And we told the story based on what the ideal of the American dream is and what the reality of being a working class family member in America was. And that was a shock to the system for many people, but it was also a really good story. And that's the power that storytelling has to sort of change an issue. And oftentimes, I don't think we use it as much as we should, but if we can use storytelling more, we would change so much in this country. And beyond that, I think we would move so many people to say,

hmm, maybe my political position here is not the best political position. I love that. How can somebody who wants to change something in their community, let's say they are unhappy about something that's happening at their child's school, or they want to work for paid parental leave. How can people go about using storytelling to affect change? Oh, I think it's easy. Think about how the issue affects you and then go tell people about it.

I mean, I wish it was more complicated than that, but it's really just that simple. If we have that conversation and we urge those folks to share their story, we'll realize that we haven't done enough and we're going to have to go back and do more. And doing more might mean that I might have to give some more of myself that I don't want to give. And that's not really the conversation we should be having. Because we know that if we build a society that works for the least of these, it actually benefits everybody.

And that's what LBJ's Great Society Through History taught us. If you could figure out how to help the worst, help the poorest, help the most vulnerable, everybody across the board does better. You start to grow the middle class. Entrepreneurs start to pop up all over the place. The stock market starts to grow. Why? Because more people are investing in it, right? Small businesses and big businesses start to thrive because they have more brain power, more folks going to college, more opportunities pop up, more innovation pops up. America's biggest strength is its diversity. But for us to lean into that diversity, it requires us to hear and provide and create room for all of these diverse stories instead of shutting them out. This is the dilemma that we have as a country, right? And I think it's

very interesting because I think where we sort of sit now, there's groups of Americans that don't, interesting because I think where we sort of sit now, there's groups of Americans that don't, we have a hard time in this country talking about where we make mistakes, where we like, and, and truth be told, I often find in your mistakes is actually where you find your growth. Right. And I think one of the reasons why we struggle as a country to grow is because we have a hard time of talking about the blemishes. Yeah. Right? And I mean, I'm a believer.

I think America's blemishes are beautiful, right? Because out of our blemishes have come so many great individuals and so many great people. I wrote a piece that's coming out next week around Colin Powell's memorial. And in it, I say very clearly, if it weren't for immigration, there wouldn't be a Colin Powell. If it wasn't for the fact that Colin Powell's parents were Jamaican American, many of the traits that Colin Powell exhibited that made him an exemplar general and an exemplar statesman that sort of was somebody who wrote was political, but rose above politics has everything

to do with the fact that he was part of America's immigrant experience. But if you take Colin Powell out of his immigrant experience, then you take away the essence of who Colin Powell was. But putting Colin Powell in his immigrant-ness, for use of a better word, will require, it's a shock to the system because it requires you to acknowledge that the current way that we do immigration is broken. And it requires you to acknowledge that immigration in this country is a good thing. And the debate that we're now having is literally immigrant good, immigrant bad. And really the debate that we should be having is the system in which the immigrants enter this country is outdated. So it's not about immigrant

good, immigrant bad. It's about the fact that we have a system that was written in the 1980s, and we currently live in 2021, and where we now have cell phones and computers and drones and the internet, and we have a system on how to process and how immigrants enter the country that was written at a time where the internet wasn't even invented, right? And smartphones didn't exist. Right. And we have a backlog of millions of visas. Literally, the backlog is millions of visa applications. So, I mean, I don't think there's anybody who feels like this system works great. Nobody's like, everything is running smoothly. Not the people who work in the system, not Americans on the right, not Americans on the left, not immigrants themselves. And I think

what's so interesting is that everybody wants to claim the founders and claim the constitutional intent. But I do believe that if you were to talk to some of our founders, if you read the writings of our founders very carefully, like if you were to go find one of my favorite founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin, and ask him, he'd be like, I would have thought you guys would have destroyed that constitution and written a new one already. I only gave it 20 years. So the fact that it's still there,

but I think they would be actually perplexed that we only have, you only guys, you guys only have 20 some odd amendments. By now, y'all should have 60 or 70 or 80 amendments by now, right? And so you have to ask yourself, even when you have these conversations around the founders and the founders' intent, I'll never forget, there was an interesting moment a couple months ago where Muriel Bowser, the mayor of the District of Columbia, was testifying around D.C. statehood, and they were asking her what the founders thought. And I almost wanted to say, I wish I could have sort of been her voice at the moment to be like,

well, it's really interesting you ask me that that because as a Black woman, when the founders wrote the Constitution, they never would have thought that I would be the mayor of the District of Columbia. So you're asking me a question that is almost so outdated. And so like, it's almost crazy for you to ask me the question of what the founders intent for the District of Columbia was. When the founders intent when they wrote the Constitution, I was still three fifths of a person. So you're asking me questions that you can't that you shouldn't even really ask me in this moment, because I don't think the founders envisioned the current world that we're living in. And even to that point, the people who wrote the 1980 immigration laws, I don't think they envisioned the 2021 world that we're living in, right? And the needs of the 2021 economy versus the 1980 economy. And so every time we have these questions or these conversations or these issues that are very much polarized, where it's black and white, good versus bad, the truth of the matter is there's usually 50 shades of gray at number one.

The truth of the matter is there's usually 50 shades of gray. And number one and number two, the question shouldn't be good or bad. The question should be what is causing us to say good or bad? And is there something in our policy that makes us think good or bad? Right. Same goes for how we think about health care. Health care is another one of these sort of third rails of politics that has been no. Yes, no. But really, the truth should be, well, shouldn't everybody be able to go to the doctor if they're sick? And if that's the case, shouldn't everybody be able to go to the doctor if they're sick and not worry about going bankrupt after the fact? Shouldn't that be just a basic universal

understanding? And if that's the basic understanding that we all walk in the door with, it's a lot more likely that we'll find a solution that isn't one way or another. It's a solution that actually somewhere in the middle, right? And a solution that everybody can benefit from. But instead you have, yes, no, repeal, don't repeal. And the answer is Obamacare was good, but it wasn't great. And we could do stuff to make it better. It's one of the head scratchers that I often have with it as I think about it. And I've worked in politics and I've worked with elected officials. And I think we'll never, ever get to the point where we say, that wasn't as good as we could have done. And we should give this another shot.

Or we should find a way to make this better. We should tweak this and we should make this better. But we refuse to have that conversation, number one, because I think we've taken the people out of it. We've made it so nebulous. And so we're not talking about people that are caught up in it. And number two, having that conversation makes folks uncomfortable. People don't want to be vulnerable or be uncomfortable

or acknowledge that a problem actually exists. I totally agree with you that America is not real good at having humility. We are leaders. Some of our leaders have a toxic level of pride in which they are unable to say, you know, in retrospect, there was information that I wish I had had. And I made a decision that was based on incomplete information. And my decision is the wrong one. And here is why I think we need to go in a different direction. Many of our leaders are unable to let words like that fall out of their mouth.

When was the last time you heard somebody say that? Probably Colin Powell. Yes. Right. Where he was like Iraq blemish on my record. That shouldn't have happened. You know, like he admitted when he made a mistake about something. And that is today a very unique characteristic in a leader. It is. And if we had, if we had politicians that were brave enough to do that, you know, many lives, we would say, just think about the HIV before we even get to the global pandemic and coronavirus, think about the HIV-AIDS crisis of the 80s. And if Ronald Reagan had come out and said, look, we made mistakes, we should have acknowledged it. Instead of running away from HIV-AIDS, my health department and my

administration should have ran towards it and embraced it as a public health pandemic. And we should have done everything we could to inform health pandemic. And we should have done everything we could to inform Americans about it. We should have done everything we could to research how it spreads and to research how you get it and to research how you can prevent it. If they had done that, we could have saved thousands of people. We'd have probably, it was very possible that we could have probably eliminated HIV AIDS. If at the, we says, okay, so there is something moving. Here's what we know. I have gotten, I've got the best scientists in this government working on this. Right.

And I think the, the, the opposite, the transverse is if you look at how we develop this vaccine, what this vaccine shows us is that when the world decides that they're going to work together and you bring the smartest people and you take. But oftentimes there are inherent barriers, individual barriers, governmental barriers in the way of us doing what's best for humankind. And I'm not saying this as like, you know, some sort of peace loving, let's all hold hands and sing and sit in a circle, right, and sing songs. I'm just saying this is a glowing example of what happens to like what you said earlier, when we lean into vulnerability, and we actually say, here's a problem. Here's a mistake that we made in the past. And now let's work towards a way to try to find the answer. So we

don't have to make this mistake again. I also think it is incumbent upon all of us. You know, it's easy for us to sit in our houses and be like, our leaders are toxically prideful, you know, like, I totally do that. But it is incumbent on the rest of us. When somebody is vulnerable and says, we made a mistake on that, we were wrong, I misspoke, I made the wrong choice, etc, etc. on that. We were wrong. I misspoke. I made the wrong choice, et cetera, et cetera. We should, as the voting citizenry applaud, we should applaud the fact that they changed their mind based on new and better information. That is how it's supposed to work, right? That's how it's supposed to work. What if our leaders were like, we decided that at this country's founding, if our leaders were like, we decided that at this country's founding, we were fine to enslave people. And that is what we're going with, right? That's ridiculous. Things have to change. And so when you have new and better information, when you have a societal change that is occurring, it's incumbent

upon you to change your mind. And thus as citizens, we should applaud people who have the humility to say, I'm changing my mind. And here's why. Instead, as citizens, we should applaud people who have the humility to say, I'm changing my mind. And here's why instead as citizens, we immediately label them flip-floppers. We immediately think they're weak and like, oh my gosh, they don't even know what they're doing. You know? And so it disincentivizes our leaders from ever doing that again. It disincentivizes them to change their mind based on new and better information. And again, helps cement their opinion that they're already held opinion because to change requires too much vulnerability from the American people. So some of this is on us. I think what often sometimes happens is when they make change and the change works,

there's often sometimes a snapback. And I think we saw that in the last election. So in the last election, because of the global pandemic, what states and municipalities did is they found ways to make voting easier, right? And as a result of making voting easier, guess what? More people participated, right? We had the highest voter turnout in American history. People who never voted before. They were like, wow, you could vote by mail. You could do Dropbox. At this place, you could vote 24 hours. This is great. And then states were like, because of perpetuation of a big lie, states were like, well, we're now going to make it harder to vote. And in my mind, I spent a lot of my time scratching my head. So the ideal

of democracy, right? What makes this country so great is that we have a democracy where everybody, and we really have a democratic republic, but we'll call it a democracy for the purposes of this conversation. Everybody, every two years, they get a say in their elect, who they send to Congress. Every four years, they get a say in who's a national leader. For the first time, more people than ever turned out and they engaged in this democracy. They had their voice heard. And because some folks didn't like how it went,

they were like, now we're gonna make it more inconvenient to vote. A snapback from something that actually worked. And it's like, that makes no sense. If more people are participating and the democracy is more robust, you should be trying to find ways to say, that makes no sense. If more people are participating and the democracy is more robust, you should be trying to find ways to say, well, this worked.

Now, the one problem that we have is that in certain parts and in certain neighborhoods, people are waiting four hours to vote. That's problematic. And we've got to do everything in our power to make sure that you never wait more than 30 minutes to vote.

And that should be a national standard, period. But instead, you literally have lawmakers who are like, we're going to try to make it as hard as possible for people to vote, which is anti-democratic. This is not something that should be political. This is not about political party, right? Because it shouldn't matter who gets the most votes. Getting the most votes is about what argument you're saying to the American people and how you campaign. think the most votes is about what argument you're saying to the American people and how you campaign. Having access to the ballot should be nonpartisan. It should be universal. Everybody gets access to the ballot. That's the rules to the race. Now, who runs the fastest and who crosses the finish line first? That's democracy. That's a great point. Who wins the race is democracy. The rules that we all have to agree on though. It's a little bit like to use your football analogy. We don't just halfway through a football game, decide that the rules will change that part. We're not like, Oh, we're down by two.

You know what? For the second half, everyone needs to take their shoes off. We don't just change the rules in the middle. I would love for you to tell everybody where to find you and what you're up to and where they can watch you on Fox News, where they can find you online, all that good stuff. Oh yeah. So one, thanks for having me. Two, I'm a contributing writer at Forbes. And what I do, what I, the reason why I love the work I do at Forbes is I am able to tell really amazing stories. And so I go out there and I try to find the stories that are the interconnection between policy and people, right? And where those things interconnect. So I uplift these amazing stories. So you can definitely check out my work at Forbes, at Forbes of Culture. Beyond that, you can check out my work at Fox. I'm one of a frequent co-host

on The Five. And to find out when I'm on Fox, you should follow me on social media at Richard A. Fowler. It's the same on Twitter and on Instagram at Richard A. Fowler. And check out my work there. I also always post clips. So you can always see the clips right after I'm on. We post them throughout the week and continue to engage me in the conversation there. But I always love, love, love having conversations with people. I manage my own social media. So I respond to those comments. I love responding to emails and letters and notes and IGs and DMs. So please do so. Slide into his DMs. I love it. This was fantastic. I truly appreciate your time. I have so many takeaways. I think people are going to really enjoy hearing from you. Oh, thank you. I loved being with that. This is a great conversation. Thank you so much

for listening to the Sharon Says So podcast. I am truly grateful for you. And I'm wondering if you could do me a quick favor. Would you be willing to follow or subscribe to this podcast or maybe leave me a rating or a review? Or if you're feeling extra generous, would you share this episode on your Instagram stories or with a friend? All of those things help podcasters out so much. This podcast was written and researched by Sharon McMahon and Heather Jackson. It was produced by Heather Jackson, edited and mixed by our audio producer Jenny Snyder, and hosted by me, Sharon McMahon. I'll see you next time.