I'm very pleased this afternoon to be joined by Sharon McMahon, a former law and government teacher,

who has built up a massive following teaching civics and providing basic information of people who seem to crave it when they can find it.

Welcome.

Thank you.

Thanks for inviting me.

Tell us a little bit about yourself and how you found your way to being a huge civics influencer, which I suspect you did not suspect was your

path five years ago.

Probably not.

No.

I mean, as you mentioned, I'm a longtime teacher, a long-time classroom teacher.

So that's where a lot of my background knowledge in these topics comes from, from obviously

both university learning, but also from the classroom.

And I decided in 2020 that rather than get involved with a thousand different conversations on social media in which people were spewing nonsense,

demonstrably false nonsense, rather than get involved in all of those conversations that I was just

going to start making some fact-based nonpartisan explainer videos about how

things actually worked. And those videos became popular. They took off. I started getting

lots of media requests where it turns out that there's just not a lot of places that somebody

can go to get some of their basic questions answered

in a way that doesn't feel like you're being judged or that you feel stupid for asking

and in a way that is accessible. So, you know, my very first video was about how the

electoral college works. I was somebody on one of my friends' Facebook posts

was commenting about how somebody might graduate from the electoral college. And I was like,

...