ReThinking: Reimagining the US political system with Sharon McMahon

0:00So many of the historic figures that I admire, they had joy in their important work because they knew that what they were doing mattered. Hey everyone, it's Adam Grant. Welcome back to Rethinking, my podcast on the science of what makes us tick with the TED Audio Collective. I'm an organizational psychologist, and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking.

0:32My guest today is Sharon McMahon, author, podcaster, and government teacher. Her millions of Instagram followers call themselves the Governards. They love to geek out on how to improve democracy. This is an educational pursuit for Sharon. Despite many calls to run for office, she's not interested. I don't think that I am best suited for the halls of power. Not because I feel like, oh, I'd immediately become corrupt, but because that is often the default position. That you just care more about your job security and staying in power, consolidating your own power, than about actually making meaningful change.

1:12Sharon is the number one bestselling author of The Small and Mighty and hosts the podcast Here's Where It Gets Interesting. I brought her to Authors at Wharton for a live conversation on fixing government, and it got interesting.

1:28Sharon McMahon, welcome to Wharton. So excited to have you here. You are one of my favorite teachers, even though I feel a little deprived having never taken your class. or, to my knowledge, any government or civics class, which... You never took government? I don't remember taking one. Really? Yeah. Well, you're pretty well informed for a person who never took a government class. So, you, you know, you've figured some things out. I feel like there are some big gaps in my knowledge, which you're going to fill today. But before we get to that, I want to talk about you and your background. How did you come to know all of these things?

2:05When I was 12, I had a paper route. And that paper route required me to get up in the 4.30 a.m. freezing cold Minnesota winters and walk three miles in the dark and the cold with nothing else to do except read the newspaper. You read the newspaper while you were walking. That's right. I started reading the newspaper. And I would, you know, sort of carefully fold it up before I would deliver it to make sure that nobody could tell that I had pre-read their newspaper. I saved up my babysitting money and bought, unbeknownst to my mom, a subscription to Newsweek magazine when I was 15 years old. So the long answer really is I started young and just like filed a lot of stuff away and then went to college and became a teacher.

2:58And you know this, the best way to really solidify information in your mind is to teach it to other people. How did you get to become queen of the governors? I started doing this kind of work shortly before the 2020 election when the world seemed to be going to hell in a handbasket. It was the height of a global pandemic. The election was very contentious and I had very unique personal circumstances in which my husband had stage five kidney failure and in August of 2020 got a kidney transplant. transplant. That kidney transplant, of course, put him on immunosuppressive drugs for the rest of his life, and his health is good now.

3:37But that made the fact that we were very isolated even more pronounced. Because at the time, in August, September of 2020, there were not vaccines or treatments for COVID. And people who had renal failure at that time had a 30 % chance of death from COVID. Those are not odds anyone would take. If I was like, you have a one in three chance of dying in a car accident if you get in this car, no one would get in the car, right? Like that's too big of a risk. So that's the genesis of how this all started. So 2020, you start an Instagram account? Just out of the blue? I started just posting little explainer videos on my Instagram.

4:27I started noticing that there were a few people on the internet who were confidently wrong at him.

4:37That problem, sadly, has not entirely dissipated. A few people who are confidently wrong, they were talking about things like how one can graduate from the electoral college, how it's like a building you can go to. And none of these things are true. These are objectively false things, right? It's not a matter of opinion. So I realized in that moment that I could either spend my time arguing with random strangers on the internet, or I could actually produce some kind of content that might outlive a scroll. And so I just started making little explainer videos about how things worked. And local news channels, radio stations started calling me to come on the air and just explain what was about to happen as part of the upcoming election.

5:30When did you know that this was a thing? Probably December of 2020. I remember very vividly we were at my husband's four-month post-transplant medical visit at the Mayo Clinic. It was December, it's dark and I had this sort of harebrained idea that wouldn't it be fun if I collected a whole bunch of Venmo donations like 50 cents and then I could give it away to say like a server at a restaurant and be like here's 500 bucks and make their day like that seemed like a really fun weekend activity when we were just sort of trapped inside and overnight people sent me$14 ,000 and then by the time this was all said and done, people had sent me$125 ,000 and it was that incumbent upon me to like give away$125 ,000 responsibly, which is actually not very easy to do, but I realized that there were people who trusted me and that trust was something that I needed to take seriously and continue to take seriously.

6:45The money you've raised for charity is extraordinary. Tell us where you are now. As of tonight, it's around$10.7 million.

7:01I'm hoping that some portion of that has gone towards civics education for future me. The Adam Grant Education Fund. What have been the major causes that you've contributed to? A lot of them are things like natural disaster relief, like World Central Kitchen. They're out cooking hot meals for people who are in war zones or their homes have been destroyed by hurricanes. Convoy of Hope is a big one that we have worked with. They do a lot of disaster relief for, you know, inside the United States for things like Hurricane Helene. undo medical debt, which buys medical debt on the debt market instead of collecting on it, forgives it.

7:43We've forgiven over$300 million of medical debt with being able to do that. That's huge. That's hundreds of thousands of people getting a letter in the mail being like, your debt has been paid. Wow. Yeah. I love that this is not even your job also. Yeah, no. It's not my job. No, I don't get paid as a professional fundraiser. I didn't even have that on my radar. Like, someday you're going to raise$10 million. So what are you? Who are you? How would you identify yourself? I have actually mulled over what is my elevator pitch for somebody who doesn't know me. Number one New York Times bestselling author.

8:31Thought leader, public intellectual, corrector of stupid people on the internet. Everyone's favorite person. Oh, she's a corrector. Oh, I want to be her friend. Speed dial. Professional debunker. I've sort of reduced it down to like four lines, which is, you know, author, host, founder, creator of these different things that I do. None of which means anything to anyone. But that means nothing to anyone. Yeah. Right? If I'm like the founder of the preamble, what does that mean? If you don't know what that is? I would love to hear your feedback. I have feedback. I would love it. I have notes on how you present yourself.

9:14Okay, please do. I would like to see Sharon McMahon candidate for president. Oh, no. No. You've said that too many times. Okay, fine. I'll take candidate for governor. Or candidate for Congress. Just candidate for something. I have a lot of ideas about ways that government could be improved. I don't know if holding elected office is the most effective way to advocate for those changes. Well, that's part of the problem then, isn't it? Yes. The incentive structure from inside elected office is such that there's nothing to be gained for advocating for reforms from the inside. There's nothing to be gained.

9:53The incentive structure is loyalty to your party, which I think is part of what is broken with the system. But the loyalty to your party, no matter what they say, no matter who they nominate, no matter what they do, that's actually a dangerous idea. That's never led a single country someplace worth going. If you were running our government or part of it, what you would do differently, assuming your incentives were aligned properly. So where would you begin? Like you get to reinvent democracy in America. What's your first move? Okay, so I have a handful of things that I think kind of work in conjunction with each other.

10:35Then they would work best if they were all implemented at a similar time, which has to do with how elections are structured and run in the United States. And if we could enact these sort of electoral reforms, I think a lot of the other reforms could more easily click into place. These are things like having one national presidential primary day. This is not even a revolutionary change. There's no reason why people who live in Connecticut should not have any say over who the presidential nominees are if you have a late primary and why a couple of states should have all the say. Right. Why shouldn't everyone have an equal amount of say over who the candidates are?

11:15Why is this not happening? I mean, the reason we don't have it is because Congress hasn't made a law that makes one national primary election day. We have 50 state elections run by their state governments. The different parties have roles depending on what the state allows them to have. There's a lot of jockeying for power. Iowa and New Hampshire really like to be first, and they continue to move theirs up and up and up. This is another thing that goes along with my electoral reforms is that we don't need 18 months. There's nothing good that can happen within 18 months that is beneficial to the electorate, right?

11:51Like, all it does is exhaust us. And it makes you want to check out because you're like, I can't watch this for one more day. It's too much. In what other job that's the most complex and difficult job on earth do you spend half of your time trying to get reelected to it as opposed to doing the job? Like, this seems crazy to let incumbents campaign. Especially if you're running for, say, a Senate. The last one-third of your term is spent running for re-election. Coupled with all of these things, the way that we fund campaigns in this country is deeply problematic. It is deeply corrupt. I don't even know a single American other than the beneficiaries of this system who feel like the way money works in politics is on the up and up.

12:40that this is fair for Americans, that this is in all of our best interest, that a handful of billionaires should be able to move the chess pieces on the board without any input from the rest of us. This is not a problem other countries have. And so what that means is that this is a very solvable problem. We just have to muster the will to solve it. I would argue that we should have some kind of public funding of campaigns. And that means that the public would then be able to have oversight over how that money is spent. Each person is going to get 15 TV commercials on the public airwaves or whatever the number, the consensus is among the people who make these decisions.

13:22Can I vote for zero? Zero commercials. Who wants to see a political ad? Nobody's favorite. Nobody's favorite. Somehow candidates need to communicate with Americans. But again, the method in which candidates communicate with Americans, that's something we should be able to discuss and debate and figure out what is the best way? Is it a debate? Is it everybody gets commercials? Is it everybody gets a chance to mail something directly to somebody's house? I don't know the answer to that question, but I think that's worth exploring. These reforms all make logical sense. You know plenty of people in Congress.

14:00I imagine you've pitched some of these ideas. How do they react? They all agree. I have not spoken to one person in Congress who's like, yeah, the incentive structure is really great and I approve of it. No, they all agree that the incentive structure is very broken. Whether they'd go on TV and say it is they won't because of the incentive structure, right? To defy one's party generally means to be ostracized from one's party. A person alone is relatively ineffective in government. Well, this is like a prisoner's dilemma problem then, because you need everyone to agree to cooperate on this stance.

14:39But if people start to defect, then the whole thing falls apart. The whole thing falls apart. So in terms of what I plan to do about it, whether that comes from forming some kind of civic organization that works to advocate for these kinds of changes, starting in state legislatures and expanding to national government. I don't know the right answer. What do you think? I mean, I think that that sounds great to me. I would also advocate for a second number one New York Times bestselling book about, like, I would call it Governors. What would that book even have in it? Pictures of whales? Three of you want that.

15:15Yeah. For the rest of us, I think it's a book about how to reinvent democracy and sort of laying out the facts for how healthy democracies function and proposing a bunch of reforms that you could build a movement around. Maybe. Mm-hmm. Are you in? It's not a bad idea. Yeah. Is it a page turner though, Adam? I trust your voice to make it one. I also want to talk about The Small and the Mighty. Tell me why you decided to write this book. I think that people who read this, people who are attracted to this, feel like no matter what they do, nothing changes. That it's too easy to feel hopeless. It's too easy to feel like my life is too small.

15:57I don't have daddy's money. I don't hold elected office. I don't have some famous name. My life is small and ordinary. And yet it's not even that I long for greatness. It's that I want to feel like what I do matters. And isn't that such like a really core human desire that you want to matter? Sociologists call it mattering. Yeah. Yes. You want to matter. Cleverly. Yes. And so part of the reason I wrote these stories was just an illustration of how you don't need to have your name on the side of a weirdly shaped rocket ship in order to matter. You don't have to have done all kinds of nuclear physics to matter.

16:46I know that that is a message that so many people not just want, but need in this moment. Well, I thought you delivered it beautifully. I mean, the book is, it's tremendously inspiring and empowering. And it's also funny, as expected. Do you have a favorite character from it or story? I do. If you had to pick one? Yeah, I do have, I mean, they're all my favorites. It's kind of like your kids are all your favorites. And you do love all your kids, but sometimes your personality is a better match for one of your children's personalities. And it doesn't mean you love them more. It just means that it's just easier, right?

17:22I really love Septima Clark in this book. She's one of my favorite people. And one of the things that I always take away from her story is that her life was by no means one that you would want to trade places with. You would never look at the set of facts of her circumstances and think to yourself, I'd love to have her life. She gets married and has a baby and her baby dies. She has another baby. And then after having the second baby, she discovers that her husband has a secret second family. And then he dies. And throughout her life, she has many enemies who oppose her efforts when it comes to civil rights.

18:07She's involved in lawsuits to try to get equal pay for black teachers. She gets fired from her job for refusing to renounce her membership in the NAACP. She has people try to kill her. They try to firebomb her house. She's in multiple accidents in which she almost dies. And eventually, once she is fired, she finds so much free time on her hands. And this reminds me a little bit of 2020, when we all had more free time than we were comfortable with. She has so much free time on her hands that she decides she's going to teach adults. and one of the adults that she ends up teaching is a woman named Rosa Parks.

18:52And so she becomes the mother of the civil rights movement without ever setting that as a goal. You know, there was no vision board. There were no like yearly New Year's resolutions. She just kept doing the next needed thing. And that is honestly what so many people in this book did. They just kept doing the next needed thing. And that's something that's honestly available to all of us, right? All of us today can keep doing the next needed thing.

19:32Let's come back to the modern day then and talk a little bit more about fixing our thriving democracy here in America. What is your favorite reform from another country that you'd love to import? Hmm. That's a great question. Well, I think there's two that I can think of. One is in Jamaica, you are not allowed to speak badly of the opposing candidate.

20:01And on one hand, yeah, like, OK, free speech, blah, blah, blah. I get it. Sometimes you want to bring up something bad that somebody else has done. What if the other person is truly terrible? Shouldn't the voters know about it? But you're not allowed to personally insult the other candidate. It's not even so much of like, we must adopt these specific rules, but a posture of presenting your compelling vision for the future, as opposed to spending all of your time talking about how terrible your opponent is. It's really difficult to follow a leader who has no vision for the future, whose only vision is telling you how terrible someone else is.

20:44My other big reform that I would like to import from another country has to do with the way we structure Congress. Most other democracies do not use congressional system like we do. Congress is intractable. It's ineffective. Maybe you've noticed. It doesn't get that much done. They spend all their time having press conferences and ousting each other from power instead of actually working on behalf of the American public. I would like to sort of break the stranglehold that the political parties have on the lawmaking process. Most other countries have four, seven, nine healthy political parties that people can choose from.

21:32And then those parties must form coalitions around ideas that they want to advance so that everybody can get something that they want instead of nobody getting anything that they want. That's the system we have now. Nobody's getting anything that they want. Wouldn't be better for us to work together to build things that we can agree on as opposed to just doing nothing because we disagree on other issues. The hard part is getting from here to there, right? And I think maybe the idea I'm most excited about right now to move us there is an alternative to ranked choice voting, which you know as approval voting.

22:12I don't even expect to vote for a good candidate anymore. I just want to veto the worst ones. And approval voting strikes me as the simplest way to do this, where you just check all the candidates you would tolerate. And then the winner is the one who's least intolerable. Checked by the most people. Yes. Checked by the most people. And I read some research on this recently, which showed that one of the benefits of approval voting, aside from ruling out the people, the candidates that are most hated, is that it changes third party candidates from spoilers into real viable contenders. and that seemed like a compelling idea.

22:47What do you make of approval voting? I am a fan of approval voting and ranked choice voting. In part, it allows more people the opportunity to have a candidate that they can at least be like okay with. If I give you three choices about what to have for dinner, one is ice cream, which is the most delicious. One is broccoli, which is medium delicious. Tastes good, made right. You hate broccoli? Are you George Bush? Get out of here. I like broccoli. Some people like it. It's edible to some of us. At least a percentage of us would eat broccoli if presented with it. I'll go along with that. And then the third option is sewer runoff.

23:33If those are the three options, we could be like, okay, I guess I would be fine with broccoli or ice cream, right? Like if my first choice is ice cream, but if I can't have ice cream, I at least want an edible food. And so to speak exactly to what you're saying, too often, one of those three choices acts as a spoiler for the other ones, and you end up with the unintended consequences of electing sewer runoff for whatever office it is. Right? And a lot of people are like, but if I had had a second choice, I would have picked broccoli. Approval voting is just like, which of these items would you tolerate for dinner?

24:16That's a very simple thing to implement. A lot of these things are not easy, but they are simple. And that's the barrier, is that because they're simple but difficult, that makes people not have a lot of will to try to move that needle. Now, I think the good news about these kinds of voting reforms is that individual states can adopt them, as I understand. At what point do we get to a critical mass where enough states are doing them that the whole country gets on board? Well, it would just continue to spread around the whole country because there is no national system of voting. All of the elections are run by the states.

24:55So it would continue to just be individual states. But the tide will turn when the states who are not using it realize that their voters aren't getting the full cadre of choices like all of these other voters are. You saw in the most recent election how some states had RFK Jr. on the ballot. Some didn't have him on the ballot. If enough states started having five people on the ballot and a bunch of other states only had two, those states that only had two would quickly want to get in line. So it becomes a critical mass when you probably have maybe 15 states. That's maybe my estimate of like if 15 states were doing it, and especially if those states were larger, I think you'd see a lot of other states start to line up.

25:43It seems like a great project for your new civics organization. Let's get the 15 on board. 15 states. Do you know about the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact? No, but I want to know. It is an agreement between states that has already been signed by a whole bunch of states that will only go into effect when enough states have signed it. And the idea behind it is all of the states who sign on to it agree. Our electoral votes will go to the winner of the national popular vote rather than who wins only in our state. The winner of the national popular vote will get our electoral votes. And what that does is it's designed to eliminate the disparity between somebody winning the electoral college and not winning the popular vote, which has happened a number of times.

26:38It's sort of an end run around eliminating the electoral college constitutionally because that is a much bigger hurdle. You taught me recently that we didn't always have an electoral college where all the votes go to the winning candidate. No. How do we get to that? Yeah. How do we undo that? Yeah. States can still decide for themselves how they want to allocate their electoral votes. And two states have decided we're going to do something different. They're divided up by district and by the winner of the statewide contest in Nebraska and Maine. Every state can just decide at the state legislature level, here's how we're going to allocate our votes.

27:16So for the first 30, 40 years of using the Electoral College, there was no winner-take-all where whoever wins Pennsylvania is going to win the election. That is too much pressure for one state, okay? There's too much pressure for one state. It's also not fair to all the other states, right, that one state should have so much power, an outsized amount of power, despite not having the vast majority of people. When you look back to, say, the election of 1796, there were five presidential candidates on the ballot, and the electoral votes were spread out amongst them. They had actual choices amongst five different people.

27:59And in fact, some people wrote in other candidates. There was like an other category in 1796. Over time, states began to realize that we could have more political power if we banded all of our electors together and we all agreed amongst ourselves. Whoever wins in our state is going to get all of our electoral votes. And it was a way to sort of turn the head of the candidate of like, you're going to want to pay attention to us, our needs, our wants. Virginia wants to continue to enslave people. We're a big state. We're going to give you all of our electoral votes if you do what we want. There's nothing that says that that needs to continue to be, we don't need to continue to maintain the status quo.

28:52All right. I think it's time for a lightning round and also some pre-submitted audience questions. Are you ready? I am. Okay. First lightning question. Tell me what the worst advice is that you ever got. Care about what everyone else thinks of you. Best advice? Some good advice that I received from somebody who is sitting near me on the stage. was stop pretending like you need to be deferential and play it small all the time. Of like, oh, it's no big deal that I did that. Especially women have a tendency to like, you want to repel any compliment that comes towards you because to accept it with an open hand is regarded as what?

29:36You think too highly of yourself. Well, you have gotten quite good at accepting a compliment. Thank you.

29:47every time we used to talk you would say something nice to me and I'd be like oh you'd be like no the correct answer is thank you I don't have to do that anymore how well I did at that yes thank you for that give us an unpopular opinion that you will happily defend Meatballs are gross. Why do I want mushed up meat with breadcrumbs and eggs in it? That doesn't sound delicious to me. You've clearly never had an Alison Grant meatball. You have to invite me over sometime, but maybe you've never had Sharon McMahon broccoli. You're on. My all-time favorite description of you was in an article that lauded your golden retriever energy.

30:38That was in the Atlantic. What was your reaction to that? You're not wrong.

30:47Touche. Is it possible to be both curious and judgmental? Oh, absolutely. It absolutely is. It's possible to be curious about things you don't know and judgmental about the things that you have more knowledge on. I think so, yes. How do we have better conversations online? Well, I think it starts with both people being willing, right? It's really difficult to have an open-hearted conversation with somebody who is hell-bent on your own destruction or a troll or a Russian bot. It's really hard to have a meaningful conversation with them. So I think it starts with just asking somebody, are you open to talking about this right now?

31:34Or however you want to phrase it. Getting that sort of buy-in from both parties lets you know up front, am I beating my head against the wall? Or am I literally talking to somebody who only wants to end this conversation with the plug for their crypto scam? Okay, that's a good segue to some post-election perspective. I think one of the most depressing things I've seen lately is people proclaiming that half of America is sexist and racist and homophobic. And leaving aside the question of whether there's truth to that or not, empirically, it's counterproductive. I read some research going back to 2016 showing that after party affiliation, the single strongest predictor of voting for Donald Trump was believing your group does not get the respect it deserves.

32:23So if you want to reach people, disrespecting them and trying to shame them is only going to backfire. How do we get people to stop that? I know. Every time that I say things along those lines, too, I recently had a post that said something to the effect of people don't change their mind or their behavior about fill in the blank because you shamed them into it. If shaming permanently modified behavior, nobody would be an addict. it starts in my mind with just modeling what that looks like right like how do you teach kids how to do something it's not telling them to do it it's showing them how to do it showing them what it looks like to fill in the blank that's just like how the human mind works it works best by watching what other people do and this is one of the reasons why voting matters who we elect matters because people emulate the behavior of leaders.

33:22I think last substantive question for you before we wrap. The question says, Sharon and Adam, what's your best advice to give to some of us naturally anxious people to combat feelings of doom and gloom and instead choose hope? If we find ourselves spiraling, if we're devastated by the election, is there a mantra or a perspective that you could coach us to do or think instead? You go first. Well, I took my best crack at this in a New York Times essay earlier this week where I said, no matter what you think is coming in the next four years, you are definitely wrong. Guess what? You cannot predict the future.

34:00And that doesn't mean that all good things are coming. I'm sure there are lots of things to be worried about. But we're constantly overconfident about our ability to forecast future events. And we don't know anything about second order consequences. And world politics and American politics is basically like doing meteorology. You can get a pretty good forecast for tomorrow. You might be somewhat accurate 10 days out. And then after that, as one of our star faculty, Phil Tutlock, put it, you're about as accurate as a dart throwing chimp. And so I think every time you see doom and gloom, the best thing you can do is say the world is fundamentally uncertain.

34:38Sometimes terrible events have positive consequences. Sometimes terrible events are a wake-up call. And maybe there are some long-term silver linings in that. One of the things that I try to remind myself of, like a mantra, is I refuse to be distracted from my important work. and that every single one of us in this room, it doesn't matter if you're retired, if you're 85 years old, if you're 19 years old, every single one of us has important work on this earth. And if we are spending all of our time engrossed in things that are beyond our control, catastrophizing an unseen, unpredictable future, imagining only the most horrific of outcomes.

35:28That kind of mindset is actually a tool of the status quo. That is how we stay stuck exactly where we are. And so I frequently remind myself, I refuse to be distracted from my important work. And then I also remind myself that if people can't distract me, they will try to make it so I don't enjoy it. And having joy in your important work is part of what makes your life worth living, right? Having joy in your important work. So that's the other mantra that I remind myself frequently of. You can't stop somebody who enjoys their important work in the world. We are all beneficiaries of your focus on your important work.

36:23And I'll tell you what gives me hope is this incredible community of governors that you've brought together who love to learn and respect the truth. That gives me hope. And the fact that our favorite golden retriever is in this position gives me a lot of hope. Thank you for being here. Thank you. Thanks, everybody. Thank you. Thank you.

37:14Julia Dickerson, and Whitney Pennington Rogers.

37:24You're reminding me of when my wife signed us up for dancing lessons before our wedding, and then I was so bad that she took pity on me and quit. Was she envisioning you guys doing like the foxtrot? I think she was just envisioning me not moving like a Muppet. Which was a low bar, but too high. Did you guys just do the grip and sway then? You didn't even do that? I don't think I was allowed to dance.