This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:00] Tad Stoermer: You are absolutely right. I was absolutely wrong. And that is exactly the question that we need to be asking, because we need to make sure that we are restoring these voices that have been forcefully excluded from the narrative, so we can understand the narrative at all.

[0:23] Heather Vickery: Hey, everyone, welcome to Was It Chance?, the podcast about embracing opportunity. Alan, you're an asshole. All I'm doing is saying hi with my hands. This is why I can't get through an intro, because he does stupid things to distract me. Hey, the podcast about embracing opportunity and taking intentional risk for your creative life. I'm Heather Vickery. And I'm Alan Seales. And Heather and I started off as two perfect strangers who met by chance and embraced opportunity. So now you get to listen. Heather, you're such an asshole. I can't get through an intro. Listen as we chat with other successful people about the risks they've taken to put themselves on a path to creative success. How you doing, Heather?

[1:05] Alan Seales: Hi, honey, I'm good. I don't really think you're an asshole, but people who listen and don't watch us on Spotify are probably like, why does she mess up every intro? And I need them to know it's you. They text me and they're like, why does she mess up every intro? And I always say, it's you, not me.

[1:23] Heather Vickery: See, it's funny, our guest here is like, oh, I'm in an interview with my child, my toddler.

[1:29] Alan Seales: Yeah, and me. So I appreciate that. You're in a role. Okay, fine. Look, we're sponsored again by Celsius today.

[1:34] Heather Vickery: We're not sponsored by Celsius. I wish we were. We should be. Kiwi guava. I like this flavor.

[1:39] Alan Seales: Okay, you're gross. That's nasty. Just drink water.

[1:43] Heather Vickery: You're a kiwi guava. Water doesn't caffeinate me. Okay, we need to focus on this podcast interview. Focus. Should we talk about our guest?

[1:48] Alan Seales: Yeah. Yeah. Okay, you guys, we have worked really hard to get this guest on the show.

[1:56] Heather Vickery: Oh, yes, we have. We have scheduled and rescheduled so many times. I cannot remember the number of times, but it was all worth the wait. You guys are going to be so glad to be sitting in on this conversation.

[2:10] Alan Seales: That's way too much buildup. That is way too much buildup.

[2:16] Heather Vickery: No, I have been excited because we are in the mutual social media fan club with one another. Today, we are joined by Tad Stoermer, who is a historian, a filmmaker, an educator who's gone viral on TikTok for debunking the patriot myth and re-educating audiences on American history.

[2:28] Alan Seales: Oh, and you know, while he's at it, trying to preserve history, which is a really big job given the current administration's efforts to actively erase it.

[2:39] Heather Vickery: Yeah, right. So with a PhD in history and a career spanning Colonial Williamsburg, Harvard, and Johns Hopkins. I can't even say that. Johns Hopkins.

[2:46] Alan Seales: Johns Hopkins. It's not easy to say.

[2:53] Heather Vickery: Tad brings a fresh approach and a unique conversation, and I'm so excited to have you here, Tad. Welcome.

[3:04] Tad Stoermer: Hey, I'm thrilled. I wish I deserved that introduction. And all of those things bear the added virtue of being true. So I appreciate that.

[3:10] Alan Seales: Then you do deserve them.

[3:21] Tad Stoermer: Yeah, no. We're almost the same person because for three years off and on, I lived in Williamsburg working at Busch Gardens.

[3:35] Alan Seales: Yeah, totally the same. So we're almost totally the same person. What's the history of Busch Gardens?

[3:39] Heather Vickery: No, don't. I don't want to know the history of Busch Gardens. I don't care. Let's compete with, we have alcohol money. Let's compete with Disney.

[3:48] Alan Seales: Oh, crap. We're not doing as well. All right. Let's just stick around.

[3:55] Heather Vickery: That's funny. That's basically Busch Gardens. And obviously we are recording, well, people are watching and listening. We're recording this late Friday afternoon, and I need to remember that this is not Alan's best time. Like you're just plugging it out, right? Because you're wired right now, buddy.

[4:05] Alan Seales: I've had a long week. You've had a long week. I've had a long week. So has America. So there you go.

[4:15] Heather Vickery: America's had a long week. Do you remember Animaniacs from when we were younger?

[4:20] Alan Seales: Oh my God. No, no, no. Sorry. No, it was Tiny Toons. It was Tiny Toons where it was the tiny Daffy, I think, that would get in the elevator and later go down to hold and later go up and later go down. You remember this? So I'm just thinking like stock market go up, stock market go down, tariff go up, tariff go down. That's all I'm thinking about with our political climate.

[4:31] Heather Vickery: This is a great, I think a really great time because I don't know that folks listening really know what I mean when I say you educate people on the patriot myth. So can you give us the Cliff's Note version, Tad, of what the patriot myth is?

[4:48] Tad Stoermer: What is the patriot myth? The patriot myth is the lie that Americans have been told about the founding of the United States, who it was founded by, what it was founded for, and that it was essentially founded by virtuous, noble patriots who wanted to establish a country that was for universal freedom and liberty for all. So the lie is that it was done in a positive light.

[5:18] Heather Vickery: I'm legitimately asking you a question. I'm trying to understand this. Because all those things are good and you're saying it's not true.

[5:25] Tad Stoermer: And I'm saying that that's not true. And therefore, the patriots have been set up on an artificial pedestal, and that informs a lot of really bad modern things like the originalism interpretation of the Supreme Court and a lot of things, particularly the far right likes to own, which is that the country represented by the patriots, which was inherently exclusionary and oppressive and brutal, and the country that they established, which in fact strengthened slavery, didn't put into the road to abolition of slavery, that that world is the one that needs to govern everything that we do, that we need to always default to what Thomas Jefferson thought about something, what James Madison thought about something, we need to genuflect every time that we mentioned George Washington.

And that world, therefore, needs to control ours to the exclusion of everything that's happened in the 250 years since. And so when we think about how we interpret, I don't know, the Second Amendment, or even the First Amendment now, or the 14th Amendment, it has to be in the spirit of and literally using the words of these founders, because they were perfect. They achieved a government that cannot be changed, because it was the greatest invention ever made possible by the human mind. This is the language that is used. Yeah. And therefore, it keeps us from changing the Constitution, which is insane. However, because we have this artificial veneration for all things founders, so because of the Patriot myth, we have this mythology that has been foisted upon Americans, particularly since World War Two, that indoctrinates them essentially, with the perfection of the founding, and the unquestionable achievements of these patriots, when the minute that we can deconstruct that, the minute that we get to know actually what it was and get to know these people as human beings, and all of the people who were involved, then we have a much more realistic understanding of what America was, what America became, what it is today, how we relate to one another, and what we can do to make things better.

[7:37] Heather Vickery: I've seen Hamilton, I know the founding fathers.

[7:42] Tad Stoermer: Oh boy, don't get tad started on Hamilton. I should have warned you, shit. I gotta tell you, I am in a worse position at the moment about Alexander Hamilton than I have ever been. What a colossal asshole, Alexander Hamilton.

[7:55] Heather Vickery: Hold on, I'm dialing in Lin-Manuel right now.

[7:58] Tad Stoermer: Okay, go ahead, he's on speaker.

[8:00] Tad Stoermer: I am writing part of my book about, right now I'm writing part of it on the Bill of Rights, and so I'm going through the New York ratifying convention, and going through basically the tactics that he and James Madison came up with for taking their little perfect pet project, which is the constitution that emerged from Philadelphia in 1787. And what they wanted to do was ram it down the throats of every single other American. They wanted no amendments, no changes, no debate. They wanted every single state just to go ahead and vote up or down, all or nothing. And then their argument was, if you don't vote for it, the entire country is going to collapse into this orgy of anarchism and licentiousness and violence, and it was all going to be over within months.

This is the most perfect thing ever done. You can't even question it. That was their strategy, and they desperately tried to do it. If you had the country that they wanted, there would be no such thing as the Bill of Rights. He opposed the Bill of Rights every single step of the way. He thought they weren't necessary. He didn't care that that wouldn't create the kind of strong government that would make America respectable on the world stage and create a commercial giant, which was all he really cared about. And he got mean and personal real quickly with everybody who criticized him, everybody who wasn't. And of course, this is what gets him killed. And frankly, good on Aaron Burr for saving the United States from what would have become under any more years of Alexander Hamilton.

[9:30] Heather Vickery: Maybe you should make a new Broadway musical, Tad, The Anti-Hamilton. I don't know. It could take off with the right script.

[9:37] Tad Stoermer: Anti-ham. Anti-ham. I love that. Anti-ham.

[9:44] Heather Vickery: I have so many questions, and I'm slightly going off script here, but you said something that reminded me of something else I heard you say quite a while ago. Because of the patriot myth, because of what everybody thinks the founding fathers were so great and wonderful, and somebody said they would be rolling over in their graves right now. And you were like, no, they wouldn't. And I'd love to hear you talk about that. What's that mean?

[10:09] Tad Stoermer: Well, because this is essentially the country that they wanted. The idea that the current regime is operating in any way in ways that they wouldn't have agreed with actually suggests that we need to know more about the reality of these patriots. People say, oh my gosh, George Washington would hate it. George Washington would love it. One of the things that the patriots to a person would not have accepted, would not have understood, and would have fought against is anything close to a multiracial democracy. They would have hated the multiracial. They would have hated the democracy. So what they wanted and what they created was a government of, for, by, and for a small group of white guys calling the shots and everything.

And the part of the patriot myth is that they said all of these things. They were very clear in all of these things on the country that they wanted to create and the country that they in fact created. But you have to work very hard to achieve the success of the patriot myth because you have to do a lot of pretending, pretending that they didn't say things that they said, that they didn't do things that they did, that you keep narrowing them down to these caricatures. When if you look at Jefferson and if you look at Madison, you look at Hamilton, but you look at Washington, they would be thrilled that there are people today who are in fact operating by their spirit in order to restrict voting rights, in order to make sure that the mob rule, the anarchic mob rule of democracy wasn't going to infect their virtuous republic.

And that, oh my gosh, there are non-white people, particularly what terrified them were free black people who were at all involved in society, much less in the political process. And this is something that they are consistent with almost to a person. I was just reading this, what Patrick Henry in the Virginia ratifying convention said about how I oppose slavery, but it is absolutely the height of ridiculousness to consider ever ending it. That is the greatest level of absurdity and everyone agreed with it. Why? Because as Washington said, as Madison said, that we cannot have a society in which black people are.

[12:50] Tad Stoermer: Black people are existing along free white people.

[13:50] Tad Stoermer: The Founding Fathers were not your heroes.

[14:17] Alan Seales: You're going to get back up though, it's the theme of this podcast. What did you do as a younger Tad to take a chance and dive into what attracted you to the history?

[14:28] Tad Stoermer: He has this work in his big work.

[14:30] Alan Seales: Yeah, like this is a major project to just all of a sudden find yourself in?

[14:36] Tad Stoermer: The first step of it, I worked in Congress. I worked in the Senate because I was told in college that it would be much better to be an amateur historian on a professional lawyer salary than to be a professional historian.

[14:57] Tad Stoermer: That was a professor who was not very happy with his job. So I went I went to law school and then I ended up working in the US Senate. I worked on campaigns that worked in the Senate. And I was always being sort of a fan of history and understanding the kind of language that we were using in the Senate. Everything, particularly Senate procedures, informed by Jefferson's rules of procedure. There is a history to everything that's sort of embedded. But in that. But I was very interested in, OK, we're talking about the Constitution. We're talking about changes to the Constitution. This is back in the 90s. And I wanted to I wanted to know more. I was like, OK, let's figure out what the big point was.

So I did a lot of reading up on it while I was still on Capitol Hill and I contacted a couple just reached out to them. This is just the days we barely had email. I reached out to two historians whose work I really liked. And I was like, hey, I'm this kid working on Capitol Hill and I love your work and I want to know what you think about this stuff. And so I started this correspondence with two of them and they became friends and colleagues. And later, one of them asked me, well, I'm about to retire, but I've got time enough for one more graduate student. You want to you want to ditch it and come work with me as my last? And so I said, hell, yeah. So I that was Jack Green at Johns Hopkins. And so I went to who's a legend.

And so I quit and went to graduate school at Hopkins to start working with him. And then he is the one who told me our very first day that, OK, everything that I tell you and everything that you read might be wrong. Question it all. I love that question. It all these days anyway. But, yeah. And to hear somebody that you respect so much and who you just believe that almost everything coming out of his mouth is right for him to say, just as your knee jerk should be immediately question, figure it out because you're bringing a perspective. I mean, not just me, but any student, anybody who's approaching this kind of stuff is bringing a perspective that nobody else has. You're bringing your own bundle of all of your experiences and all of your impressions.

So always, always question it. And so that's kind of that level of understanding. OK, well, now my approach to understanding history is one of just endless inquiry. It's just endless asking questions. And then once you get an answer to that one, then hopefully it informs your broader view. And then you it sparks the next question and it sparks the next question. I mean, I feel that way about leadership. Like that's the answer for pretty much anything is to be more curious and ask more questions. That's and that's that's absolutely the kind of approach that we try to take with digital media today, which is what makes that space, the digital ecosystem so exciting and such a great place to work with questions like this, is that you can you can just so vastly broaden the kind of audience that you're that you're engaging with.

And Heather, you know this better than I do, probably is that because you're connecting with people of such varied experience, then it requires you to be it requires you to revisit yourself. Maybe maybe I am wrong. Maybe I need to revisit what it is that I'm thinking and the process by which I've come to those conclusions in my evidentiary basis. So it makes you go back to things like reading the New York ratifying convention records and hating Alexander Hamilton more. But you wake up every day knowing that you could be wrong, too. You could be and that you have to continue to make sure that that because it's always an endless process of inquiry, that your job isn't to be the smartest person in the room, that your job is to make sure that everybody is as smart and as inquisitive and as engaged as absolutely possible.

And that makes every day new when you're when you're looking at issues that you think are settled. And that's kind of what leads you to the Patriot myth, which kind of that hit me between the eyes by accident one day.

[19:25] Alan Seales: OK, so that was my next question is, first of all, when did you realize like you were kind of into history? Like this was maybe something you wanted to know a lot more about. And then when did you realize everything you've been taught was a lie?

[19:36] Tad Stoermer: We're going to take a quick break. Stay tuned for more of the episode.

[19:40] Tad Stoermer: And now we're back. Wow. When did I realize I have always been interested in history. There is a picture of me and I'm five years old, 1976, wearing a Continental Soldiers outfit at Valley Forge during the Bicentennial. And it's never it hasn't. We need that picture. It's great. It's a great picture. And it's never stopped since then. But what really hit me, what really hit me was and I was like, damn it. After decades of teaching this and studying this, thinking that, wow, have I screwed this up? Was what when it really happened, when things kind of like really opened my eyes was actually just a couple of years ago. It was after Joyce Floor, George Floyd during that summer. And I was in the middle of producing a set of sort of a digital media series that we were going to go with.

And I had some nice names attached to it. It was it was going to be called Who Are You With? And so it was supposed to help. We got we had a streaming deal for it. And it was about going to different different museums that had been struggling through the pandemic and sort of trying to tell their story and also tell a broader story, the value of public history. So, you know, whether that was going to be Plymouth Patuxent or whether that was going to be sites like that in the US and Canada, then George Floyd happened. And I started I one of my my co-executive producer is this wonderful actor named Noel Bursey, who's a who's on Marvel. She's on Cloak & Dagger. And she is from New Orleans and has her family has this wonderful black history.

And she was telling me about her about wanting to be a part of this, but sort of thinking about, do we is this really what we need to be doing right now in terms of what history not just was kind of nice to be told, but what needed to be told? And I step back and I thought a bit about that and thought about about, oh, hold on, that given given what was going on, was there was I wrong about this? I was recommended to me, so I picked it up. I picked up a book by Taya Miles, who teaches at Harvard, and it's called All That She Carried. And it is it is the journey of Ashley Sack. It is about essentially it's a it's about material culture, but it's about this artifact that has miraculously survived because it was belonged to an enslaved woman.

And that she had kept throughout her whole life, and it had belonged to her mother, and it was given to her by her mother on the day that she was sold when she was 12. And it's just a sack that has some stitching in it, and it had included some included some other very small things like shells and seeds and things. And I read it and in reading that book in the first two chapters, I realized that my entire approach to understanding American history had been wrong, that I had gotten through Johns Hopkins and Harvard and the University of Virginia and even working on the American Revolution and the colonial period and the founding and doing it with some of the best scholars in America and not have ever having had to pick up a book like this.

That took seriously the perspective of black Americans. And because you all you could always get it's all segregated when you're when you're in school, if you're if you are even doing something and you're doing it in a sensibly in a responsible way and trying to to understand the American founding you. The way that graduate education is sort is situated now is that you can segregate out black history, you can segregate out, you know, gender history, you can separate these things out and just focus on political thought. I could so I could focus on the founding of the United States without, in fact, having to read more than one or two books on slavery, which can just be abstracted out instead of coming to the realization that, wait a second, one out of every five people in 1776 is owned.

And you have to take them. So you can't just write off. You can't write off 20 percent of the population when you're talking about men of their time. You can't write off 20 percent of the population. You can't look at 18 books about the 5000 Baptists that were in Virginia and how they caused the American Revolution and not think about how the fact that most almost half of Virginia's population was enslaved. We're just going to write those people off and we're going to say that somehow they were excluded from the intellectual movements of the period, either that somehow they're that these ideas about enlightenment and about freedom, that it stopped at their skin color or their legal status. And in that that took me all my own personal deconstruction of a couple of months of falling apart and under and reengineering where I was in understanding American history. And not that I wasn't and not that it wasn't that it wasn't necessarily a lie, but it was so misleading because of the way it had been distorted by the academy. And so you get into this process.

[25:40] Tad Stoermer: You want to understand why that's happened, how that's happened. You want to understand how pervasive it is in American culture, and you want to understand in almost a sociological way what its impact has been on how it's shaped American political culture and sort of American behavior. Then I went madly, absolutely down that rabbit hole. I ended up in World War II in this very strange way in terms of the creation of this thing that we can call it as a proper noun, the patriot myth, which is the way it is turbocharged and manufactured during World War II by the Office of War Information as an effort of the United States government to cohere white Americans behind the war effort because they're not inclined enough to fight the Nazis, but you need them to mobilize, and black Americans who are not inclined to fight for a country that's not fighting for them.

They are sympathetic to the prejudice against Asian Americans, and so they're not terribly enthusiastic about supporting the war effort, so they need to be mobilized. There is this enormous effort by an office that existed for four years that involves Walt Disney, and it involves Frank Capra, and it involves all of these major figures across media and across history to create a cohering national myth that will create an identity that will join people together and paper over their differences at least for as long as it takes to actually fight the Nazis. It's there from the beginning. The patriots start to create the myth themselves, but then it is turbocharged and shoved into American culture during World War II.

Seventy percent of all Hollywood films during World War II are censored by the Office of War Information to make sure it is in line with the patriot myth and American identity. Look at even today, literally today, 2025, where Russia's still always the bad guy. That's an example of unconscious bias that we are being taught over and over and over again. Whether or not Russia's doing good or bad things, I'm not taking sides. I'm just saying that from a young age, Russia's always been the bad guy, right? Well, they kind of were.

[28:19] Alan Seales: They kind of were, yes. But my point, I guess I'm—

[28:21] Tad Stoermer: Or maybe not. Tad, are you going to say they were not?

[28:23] Alan Seales: Well, hold on. I got two part questions.

[28:24] Tad Stoermer: No, no. Russians are fine people.

[28:28] Alan Seales: That's true. Correct. Yes. Okay.

[28:30] Tad Stoermer: So two part questions. One, we're saying be taught to question everything we read, but history is written by the victors. So what we're being taught is passed down by those who want us to hear their side of the story. It's interesting. What you said just sparked something is that it's not only written by the victors in retrospective. It's written to achieve victory in the present and into the future. It is shaped. It is active. It is directed. It is a tool. And that's why you get the Russians are always the bad guy. Because coming out of World War II, you quickly switch from, well, the Nazis are the bad guys. The patriot myth works so well against the Nazis that once they got rid of the Office of War Information, they transitioned all that information over to the new Department of Defense.

And they thought, we've got a new enemy. We're now going to weaponize this in our war against communism and our war against the Soviet Union. And that's when it really took off. And so fascism just goes away quickly. And then the new bad guy in the narrative ends up being communist of all sorts, even though there are never that many communists in the United States. Actual communists and the Soviet Union in a way that by the time you get to when I was in the army in the late 80s in Germany, when the wall came down, we were surprised that everything that we had been told about the Soviet Union was wrong. Why? Because that's why the Soviet army collapsed. We were told that they were incredibly powerful, that they could go ahead and accomplish all of these things.

And then we find out very quickly that their tanks aren't running, that they've got to go ahead and sell off even their radio equipment to the black market in order to feed themselves. But for 40 years, you're told this. And it is part of the mass American culture where you have to have this bad guy. But this bad guy has to be so clearly painted in opposition to the very, very good guys in order to explain and in order to really represent the reason why America is the greatest country on Earth, where it's sort of this is where American exceptionalism comes from. And it comes from the fact that we are better than everybody else. Why? Because we have the best government possible. We have the best culture possible.

We have the best economy possible. This is when America is great. Why is it great? Because we have all of these very special aspects to who we are as a people. But that always means this is all parenthetical, who we are as a white people, who we are as a white culture.

[31:20] Tad Stoermer: And once you start seeing that parenthetical running, when people say, oh, my gosh, that you can't unsee it, then you're like, oh, my gosh, people talk about, well, what weren't things great in the 1950s? You think, well, if you're a white person, great for you. Yeah. Yeah. Great for you. So you always have to ask that question. It's like, oh, hold on. Or who? Only the GI Bill was introduced to specifically build up suburbs for white people.

[31:41] Alan Seales: Yeah, absolutely. So you have black soldiers getting back from World War Two who are not experiencing that.

[31:48] Tad Stoermer: Yeah, there is a film that was produced in 1948 by a wonderful director named Leo Horowitz. And it was about that subject. It was about it. Wait a second. We've got these black soldiers coming back from fighting for us and they're coming back to a segregated South. They're coming back to no meaningful, despite the Civil Rights Act passed by Truman, no meaningful expansions of civil liberties in the South. And they're being treated. I mean, they're being lynched, right? They're being treated. They're being they're having violence committed against them. They're in uniform. And that film, this just goes to show you about how hard the Patriot Man has to work. That film was banned within three months of release and it hasn't been able to be seen by any audiences until I think maybe about 10 years ago where you can now see it. It was suppressed so entirely. And then Horowitz himself ended up being branded as a communist and blacklisted and was, you know, thrown out of Hollywood for, you know, 18, 20 years.

[33:01] Alan Seales: Wow. Crazy. OK, so go ahead.

[33:12] Tad Stoermer: It's a lot. It's a lot. But it's fascinating. First of all, I just don't know how your brain holds all this information at once. But we're in this interesting space now where the wheels are coming off of all of that. Right. The strong, powerful, better America, the rest of the we're still working on about half of the country recognizing that. But the rest of the world sees it very, very clearly right now. So the wheels are coming off. We're in the process. We need to preserve education. We need to preserve history. And, you know, I feel grateful we live in this beautiful little blue bubble in the suburbs of Chicago. You know, my sixth grader had a whole section. I think I might have we might have chatted about this on TikTok, but of hidden history.

Yeah. Her white teacher said, let's talk about all the history that's hidden, the things that you don't know because, you know, nobody listens to them. Nobody talks about these stories. So what do we do with all of this, given our current circumstances? Like, I don't I don't have any more of that question. What the fuck do we do with all of this?

[34:18] Tad Stoermer: One of the things that I think is a lost opportunity for so many people who don't want to engage in this and who don't want to see that in history is how much inspiration, how much actual hope, how much actual actual heroes there are in that story, that if you want to see the things that actually might make you feel great about being an American, it's by looking at all the people who have been left out, that there is a this wonderful through line in American history isn't that America has been great from the start because of these privileged white guys. It's because of the persistent, almost superhuman levels of resilience and hope and the creation of love and the creation of life in the face of the most unimaginable kinds of oppression that one could ever see.

But it is the what black Americans have had to go through and then still be able to achieve great things and do amazing things to be able to create incredible forms of beauty and incredible forms of fellowship and life and love that to be able to see that to be able to see people who have been oppressed and to see the tools by which they were not just that they didn't just used to survive. They used it to as much as they could, given the level of oppression to thrive within that and to understand that you could take inspiration for wherever you are in your life that that no matter what there are people who were able to find their inner resources and build their communities and identify with each other in ways that had nothing to do with a flag or nothing to do with a piece of paper had nothing to do with an institutional structure had to do with with an inner strength that they were able to develop and then they were able to connect with each other as a community until you get to the point where you look at.

I find it so amazing to look at the what is one of the worst periods of American history, which is reconstruction as failure, but to see that within several years of the end of slavery and all of these pseudoscientific ways in which white people tried to explain a way you couldn't do and you could do and slavery because black people, of course, weren't capable of anything. But then within just several years, you end up with the creation of the historic what are now the HBCUs. You see this explosion of literature and art and political thought and science from Carver to Du Bois to Ida Wells. This is from people who are coming from a background of having been enslaved to go from there to this to this flourishing culture that creates all of these amazing things within a very short period of time, only, of course, for it to be slammed again by the Supreme Court and by and by and by southern southern southern white governments.

But I mean, until you get to like to the Wilmington coup, until you get to the late 1890s and Plessy versus Ferguson. But you are able to sort of see that. I mean, it's the evolution of the evolution of jazz, the evolution of all these amazing things that you can that just puts a lie to every single criticism ever put on them. And then to understand that if we were able to see the American story, if you want to replace, if you want to find a different kind of narrative, if you find the American narrative, it is in resilience against oppression that that isn't not just short term, it's generational. But it can then but that doesn't mean that it's about something that doesn't.

[38:31] Tad Stoermer: You really got to be willing to play the long game. You got to be, you have to identify what your values actually are and understand that the protection and the preservation of those values is what's really important in developing the strategies to do that so that when you have the chance, then you can, in fact, learn.

[39:06] Heather Vickery: But what I'm hearing, and I want to ask this question, is there's hope and we have proof that if we're resilient and we work together, we're going to find our way through this.

[39:17] Tad Stoermer: Well, that's it. The one thing that people can't do is be quick about it, is to be hasty about it, is to want it to happen right now. The problems that we are facing, the challenges that we're facing, were not created in a day. They've been created over decades.

[39:40] Tad Stoermer: Yeah, centuries. And the kind of white disaffection has been created over generations. The kind of preparation that this particular regime has put into place for this moment has also been the product of decades in the making. They know exactly what they're doing. And so anybody who thinks, who wants this to stop quickly and easily needs to prepare to be disappointed very quickly. Instead, think about what I talk about, which is to focus on concentric circles of values.

[40:21] Tad Stoermer: That's kind of begin with you in the mirror and then work out to you and your home and work out to you and your community. And then to work out from there as to what are the kinds of things that you really deeply care about, that you want to work to preserve, that you want to work to protect. And that is the both the short-term win and the long-term win is that you just got to lean into those things and to understand that if that's what survives at the end of five years, ten years, fifteen years, we're not talking about the midterms. This is already collapsed.

[40:59] Tad Stoermer: So what within your community, your home, yourself, what can you essentialize that represents a win? And that's tough for a lot of people. And it should be, but Americans, particularly white Americans, have been very comfortable for a very long time and not had to make those kinds of distinctions.

[41:16] Heather Vickery: We're going to take a quick break. Stay tuned for more of the episode.

[41:20] Tad Stoermer: And now we're back. It's interesting. I mean, you bring up like the current administration and, I mean, obviously he's there because pretty much half of the country agrees with this. And when you're looking at pure populist voting numbers, right? And then you think back to the Civil War, the time of the Civil War, there were 19 free states and 15 slave states, right? So it's almost all, there were still more people that wanted free, but still it was almost equal.

[41:59] Tad Stoermer: So in 250 years, we've actually gone in the wrong direction because now it's more equal than it was. So what are we supposed to do with this? I mean, for, I guess for you, like speaking personally, when you learned all this, what made you start to act publicly, to build a platform, to get this word out? What started you down this path? And then how can the rest of us join in, piggyback on this, help get the word out?

[42:22] Tad Stoermer: I started by looking in the mirror and that I am an exceptionally privileged person, right? Hey, I'm a straight Anglo-Saxon, cisgender white male who went to the Ivy Leagues for crying out loud. If it's not going to be me, it better damn well be that the people who have been the most comfortable are the people who are in a position to be able to, for other people who will listen to.

[42:48] Tad Stoermer: And I started off by teaching, because I teach at Johns Hopkins, that by focusing on, well, maybe I can just focus on, you know, my students. But then as I became more active in terms of public history, what I saw was that working through traditional forms in public history, museums, place-based stuff, that that wasn't going to do it, right? You can't, there are a lot of people who say, well, you change people one person at a time. No, you don't change people one person at a time. You change, you can change people a hundred thousand people at a time. You just have to change them every single day, a hundred thousand people at a time.

[43:33] Tad Stoermer: And you have to keep doing it. So what surprised me was, and this was, you know, in terms of a lot of the things that you talk about and that you know so much about, is that what surprised me is how open people were to being part of that process. So I, in understanding, and again, this came through the pandemic when digital media really became a big term for public history engagement. I needed to know, so I could teach to my students. I'm definitely a believer that if you haven't done it, you can't teach it, right? And you don't have any business teaching it.

[44:09] Tad Stoermer: And so I needed to be able to teach my students how to engage through social media, which I firmly believe is a great tool for good. It can be. And what I, so I kind of waited, I didn't do a whole lot of social media myself, just enough to kind of focus and be able to sort of teach on it. And then I sort of lurked on TikTok for about a year, just to understand how it worked, to understand the dynamic, the digital ecosystem.

[44:37] Tad Stoermer: So I, you know, read Taylor Lorenz and sort of tried to really understand what was going on and not be the, you know, hey kids, I'm going to go ahead and do these trends. So I just tried to really deeply understand it so my students will understand it. And so we could honestly talk about different audiences for different platforms, about how that different dynamic works and how, if you want to use it for marketing, that's great. Then you could follow trends. That's fantastic. You're not going to change anybody.

[45:09] Tad Stoermer: If your goal is to engage and to move them, then you've got to talk to them. It's got to be a conversation that this can't be this, this lens just has to be a window that I'm seeing both of you on the other side of is that you're not thousands of miles away. You are right there in front of me and everybody else is right there in front of you. And it's a proper conversation that you're having, that you're connecting with people. There's nothing virtual about it. That's just technical, that's just technology.

[45:30] Tad Stoermer: And so if you embrace it in that way, you understand who you might be talking to, then you can really get a lot out of it. And especially if you take your ego out of it, that this isn't about likes. It's not about the metrics. It's not about, this is about, well, am I able to connect even with one person? But it just so happened that the first, I finally had enough with one post that somebody made and I made a post and my very first post went viral.

[46:05] Tad Stoermer: I overnight had 10, 15,000 followers. And it went, you know, it has hundreds of thousands of views. That was my very first post. And for people to, for people, what surprised me was how engaged people were. Of course, there are the trolls, but once you know how to kind of manage those people, you're able to sort of see even the people who disagree with you. You're like, okay, well, there's an opportunity for discussion here.

[46:31] Tad Stoermer: And that's, you know, 150,000 followers later. It still has that now. And then to understand how Instagram works and how to be able to go over there. And I think in four months, and this is just a matter of instruction in when Instagram, when TikTok was going to go dark the first time, the first time I switched a bit to Instagram. And I think I'm about to hit 40,000 followers on Instagram, which has a much, much, much different audience.

[47:09] Tad Stoermer: And I think that I now have something like 4,000 subscribers even on YouTube, which again is a much, much different audience. But do you understand all of those dynamics and your ability to go ahead and your ability to engage people in different ways? If you understand those different dynamics, then you really have an opportunity to do something.

[47:32] Tad Stoermer: So to kind of get back to your original question is that I thought that if I didn't in fact use my privilege for this kind of good, for this moment, right now, then I am part of the problem. I'm part of the problem that perpetuated all of this in the first place, because so much has been perpetuated by people who know better, who aren't saying anything.

[48:11] Tad Stoermer: People who have gotten this education and aren't saying anything. And that's not okay, which is why I'm harder on other white people, particularly harder on white people on the left than I am on anybody. Because these are people who should absolutely know better and need to be speaking out more because the people who have been burying the burden, who have been burying the burden of this fight are tired.

[48:39] Tad Stoermer: They're tired of the performative alliances. They're tired of people sort of like reaching back in and pulling James Madison quote out of their back pocket. If an enslaver is your hero, then you've got problems.

[48:55] Heather Vickery: Yes, with your message.

[48:57] Tad Stoermer: Ted, what did your contemporaries think when you had this awakening, we could call it that, and you did not go quietly into that good night, my friend. You were like, okay, I looked in the mirror, I call myself on my bullshit. And then you just forged into taking this message out to make this impact and to do these things that you're saying. What did people say? And how much risk was involved in that for you?

[49:23] Tad Stoermer: Oh, my professional community has changed considerably. Yeah, that because I'm part of two different professional communities, right? As an academic historian, my friends who are and colleagues who are historians of the revolution and the founding and sort of now resistance. Although I might be one of the few historians of resistance at this point. But then also the public history community. The public history community has changed a bit more than my academic history community.

[49:57] Tad Stoermer: My academic history community doesn't understand digital media at all. And so they don't understand why I'm just not sitting there writing books that I can just sort of still put on a shelf that nobody will read or talk about. Or if I'm being critical, they have problems with the fact that I am critical of the historiography itself and the fact that it has left out so much.

[50:19] Tad Stoermer: But I learned, just as a quick moment, I learned from a wonderful professor at Brown named Seth Rockman. When I was a fellow at Brown, and every time he teaches early American history there, and every single event, he would show up no matter what it was about, but particularly if it was about early American history, he would ask one question. It's great that you're talking about republicanism. It's great that you're talking about Thomas Jefferson, what about enslaved people?

[50:50] Tad Stoermer: And he was indefatigable about it. He just persisted every single time. And at the time, I was like, what an asshole. That's not what we're talking about. And then I have apologized to him since then, saying you are absolutely right. I was absolutely wrong. And that is exactly the question that we need to be asking, because we need to make sure that we are restoring these voices that have been forcefully.

[51:51] Tad Stoermer: They do not think that public history is about picking a side. They don't think it's about activism. They don't think it's about being loud. It's about a phrase that I now hate with every fiber of my being. What we need to do is push the needle. We can't make people uncomfortable. We have to make people uncomfortable. And I had lots of friends at Colonial Williamsburg and Mount Vernon and all of these places, and I then saw them as being, well, understood them accurately as being actually major parts of the problem. And that has gotten me kicked out of a lot of clubs, so to speak. But, you know, you got to take that, right? I mean, that's fine. Then I don't want to be a part of that club at all.

Even the professional organizations, I used to be part of the National Council on Public History, but I had to quit that because this is a moment where institutions got to stand up and they're not. But you've got to say that. You got to say that. Yeah, there's no, for somebody like me, there is no quiet quitting for this, right? You've got to make sure that we're saying these kind of things or else the problem just gets perpetuated.

[53:06] Heather Vickery: I just have to go on record as saying, and this doesn't necessarily need a response, but you say this all so matter-of-factly, it's really fairly rare for a white man of your status and your privilege to own all of this and to take this responsibility. And it's just, I love it because it's such a role model. And I love that you're fucking teaching, and I love that you have a kid, and I love that you're on these platforms where people are being exposed in ways they wouldn't because we don't have a lot of people we can look up to in this way who are saying, you have to quit loudly. You have to say why. You have to start with yourself and you have to let go of your ego. So personally, I just want to say thanks. And Alan has a question.

[53:53] Tad Stoermer: And I really appreciate it. But you know what is the easiest, what makes that all kind of easy? And you know this as well as I do, is that kid. I've got a three-and-a-half-year-old who thinks the world of me, and he doesn't know a damn thing about what I do other than he thinks that I fight bad guys.

[54:17] Heather Vickery: And you do.

[54:17] Tad Stoermer: But he thinks the world of me. He doesn't know the letters out of my name. He doesn't know anything about anything about me other than I'm just dad. And that is, when I see him, and I know that in an hour I'm going to be playing baby Stegosaurus and watching Bluey, and that kind of centering of what really matters. But the broader extension of that, it's not just what really matters in terms of him and his life, although there's nothing more important to me than that and my wife, but is that I owe it to his future. There's a battle there to be fought. And damn it, it's not going to be because I didn't do something, or I didn't say something, or because I was afraid that I didn't get a book contract, or I didn't get a speaking gig, or something like that.

That's where we are right now. The issues are so much bigger than that, that I've got an obligation to, and this is where you learn a lot from studying resistance history, from people who'll never know who I am, and that's OK. So I'm an older parent, and I am not going to be there for much of what, to see what he's going to go through. But I'm going to make sure that he and his cohort, he and his generation are going to, they're going to face a lot of challenges, from climate change to political disruption, and they've got to have the tools that they need to be able to succeed on their own terms. And that's something else I take seriously.

[55:52] Heather Vickery: I was going to ask you earlier, again, this is going back to the, you know, our history is written by the victors sort of thing, is that now, you know, you're uncovering, we're uncovering that history, as we've been taught for decades and decades, isn't accurate, right? And it's coloured through a lens of the victors, the white people. And the trolls, the people who disagree with you, how do you deal with those in regard for the argument that they come to you and saying, well, how, if you're saying what we believe is wrong, how can you prove that what you're saying is not wrong?

[56:28] Tad Stoermer: Well, there are two, yeah, yeah, that, and that makes sense. I mean, there are two, there are two ways that I approach it. One is that, yeah, I approach it like a scholar, I try to study it, I try to sort of see whether there are patterns in there and try to really, really see, truly understand phenomenologically what's going on in terms of responses. And that's also another place where you can see a lot of differences between different digital platforms in the nature of the comments and how you get referred to and how other people will post about you. That's kind of interesting and a little scary. And one of the things that we learned was that all of these sites, Mount Vernon, Colonial Williamsburg, these heritage sites, they actually operate as almost breeding grounds for white supremacy thought and for pseudo history and for this historical denial where they can say positive things about slavery and just get away with it.

And then because it's Mount Vernon's base, it's Colonial Williamsburg's base, and they have safe spaces for them that I encourage everyone to always go to and disrupt and make sure there's no safe places for these people. But then that's one part of it is sort of just sort of trying to understand it as a phenomenon. And then you can kind of see more broadly, both strategically and tactically what you can do about it. But then there is the more substantive approach to understanding those folks who are tackling particular kinds of difficult history. And the great thing is when you can distinguish those folks who actually are of good faith, that's a little hard to do through digital media sometimes.

But people who are understandably, because of how persistent that the mythology that Americans have been taught have been, is that they are deeply emotionally connected to this narrative, to this story. And they do want to know, well, how do I know that you're right? And the great thing is that what you have are the source. And the one thing it is that is that do not take my word for it. None of this can be about just listen to my video and take my word for it. It is, okay, well, how do I always ask, how do you know what you know? And how does this person who's talking to me know what they know? And it can't just be, well, I've got fancy letters after my last name or fancy schools behind me.

That can't be it for anybody. It's got to be, I can show you my work. I can bring receipts. So if you want to, for example, if we want to talk about, we're talking about the patriots and their fear of black people. Well, here you go. Here are, here is what they said, and I'm just going to send them to you. And you just read them. And if you've got issues with their veracity, if we talk about their provenance or anything like that, well, we can talk about that. But the important thing for what I do is that it bears the added virtue of being true that and true in the sense of, of verifiable, that this is evidentiary based. This is there, there's, there's real, there are receipts there. And because you can bring the receipts, you can get people on that kind of basis.

And you can work on that because people are not, and there are plenty of people who are on the, on the other side of this, let us say, who are, are willing to start to engage you in that way as long as they're there. But what you can't do is have that just emotionally sort of in terms of defense mechanisms. You can't emotionally have them kind of really drag you down, like what happens to so many people who do this, who aren't, who don't have the kind of privilege I have. I mean, that the kind of attacks that I get and the kind of threats that I get are nothing compared to the people who do this, who are, who identify as women or identify as people of color or identify as trans, is that, that the kind of attacks that they get, I get nothing compared to what I get. You know, the worst that I get is that they, you know, they call me whatever names that you want. I don't care. You cannot be precious in this work.

[01:00:51] Tad Stoermer: Yeah, you, you, you can't, but I understand that you, you really do, that some people really need to be defensive, but that's why you need people, I think, like me out there.

[01:00:59] Heather Vickery: Correct.

[01:01:00] Tad Stoermer: Being as loud as, as, as you can about this.

[01:01:04] Heather Vickery: We're going to take a quick break. Stay tuned for more of the episode. And now we're back.

[01:01:09] Tad Stoermer: There are some people out there who you just, as like, I say every now and then, who are in, of good faith, of good hearts and good minds. And, and, and that if you can meet to the point where you don't have to agree with my interpretation of something, we just have to agree to get to a point of common ground when it comes to the fact base. Wherever you go from there, I'm not here to turn you into, you know, an AOC loving socialist. I'm not here to do that. It'd be great if I did, but it would be, yeah, I mean, that's, that's, that's the logical conclusion for, you'll find that you'd be able to reach, but you don't have to. You can still be, you know, you can, you do you. But the key point is to make sure that you, wherever you are, even if you want to still end up being a white supremacist bastard, but you damn well know why.

[01:01:59] Heather Vickery: Yeah, yeah.

[01:02:00] Tad Stoermer: Defend that.

[01:02:01] Heather Vickery: Awareness. You're picking it.

[01:02:02] Tad Stoermer: Oh yeah, you're picking it, you're on it. And this is what we do a lot when, with folks who are just these stands of people like George Washington. It's like, well, why do you have to talk about slavery and George Washington all the time? Well, he had to deal with it every day. He had to talk about it every day. If you love him so much, you might as well. And if you want to, but if you're going to do that, then to make sure that you're pushing people, but just on that point where you can't get personal with people, which I, you know, I, I, I find that a little distasteful, even when I do it sometimes. When you get mad at idiots, but, but if you pull back from that and you try to keep it on some sort of basic levels that, you know, you just, if you're going to be, if you're going to be a bastard covered bastard with bastard filling, then you've got it, then know it and own it. Have the courage of, of that, of that bastard loving conviction. You, you do you, but you probably not based it on any kind of lies because then you get into trouble with the rest of us.

[01:03:04] Heather Vickery: I love that. I don't even know where to start with this. I mean, I feel like we could continue to talk forever. Jesus. Okay. Talk, talk to us real quick. Just wrap up here. Tell us about your future projects, how we can connect with you, how we can join, join in and, and help support you in your message.

[01:03:20] Tad Stoermer: Yeah. Oh, my, my, my big project that is occupying almost all of my time is the, the book that I'm writing. It's I was approached by Steerforth Press, which is part of Penguin Random House to they thought they, they said, you know what we need right now of resistance history of the United States. And you're the guy to do it. Please do an audio book. I need that in an audio book format. And I, and I'm going to be reading the audio book. I can't wait. So, so, but, but that's, that is what's occupying me right now. And it's one of the, but I gotta tell you it while it was so, you know, it was gratifying for that to happen. But for somebody to say, okay, we're in this moment, you're the guy.

[1:04:11] Tad Stoermer: The Founding Fathers Were Not Your Heroes was the most difficult project of my entire life, and not because of the structure. It's because of the content that a resistance history of the United States is deeply problematic. The United States doesn't have a resistance history. It has a history of protest. There's a new book coming out this month, A Protest History of the United States, which I expect is going to be quite good. It has a protest history. It has an opposition history, but the history of actual resistance, of actually pushing back against power, of actually no permission. This is an oppressive authority. We're going to take back our rights or push for more rights in the face of actual power.

Because American history, U.S. history is dominated by white people. That's exactly the point. You have to interrogate that. That's not resistance. That's civil war. There is some internalizing conflict, but that's not resistance. That's just your share of power. To look at resistance, I have to really look and to make sure that it's not just one loss after another. What you have is a book of 15 chapters of people getting their asses kicked from trying to resist. That is a big part of American history. There are resistance moments in American history that we can, in fact, learn lessons from. Through those resistance moments, there are resistance movements that lose a lot more than they gain.

They are all about playing the long game. They're all about persistence. They're all about resilience. They're all about finding hope. What I've done is that every single chapter is about an element of resistance that an example can go ahead and explore. For me, that is relatable for modern audiences, and that is actionable. It's something that you can, in fact, see and do. You can not only relate to, but it's something that can be in front of you. Even if it happened in 1797, this is something that you can relate to. The hardest part has been making sure that you're navigating those moments, which reveal that real resistance is a long-term thing. When you're engaging in digital media and talking a lot about resistance, which I spend almost all my time doing now, it's that people want very quick fixes to this.

The first thing you've got to tell people is that real resistance is about the long term. It's not about achieving victory. It's about making victory possible. Those are two very different things. It talks to you about your mindset. I love that. I cannot wait. I'm going to have to wait. You're going to have to wait. If he's got to get his manuscript out by September 1st, we have to wait a whole other year and a half to get this book, but that's okay. March. It's supposed to be due. It's supposed to be published. They're fast-tracking it. Good. Every little bit of it. The minute that the manuscript's in, I actually have to get into the studio to start recording it. That's exciting. I can't wait. I appreciate all of it. I want to very quickly just say that I think that we can all resist in so many small ways. My work is about reminding people that joy is resistance.

[1:08:32] Heather Vickery: I love that about your work. I think I've told you that on social media. That is such a huge element. There has to be those reminders about why you resist. Even within that about resistance, I was reading an account of a French resistance fighter the other day to give myself a little more perspective. He left this one great passage, and he said that, yeah, we were soldiers in the night, but we found joy in the day. I love that. We lived, and it was, yes, the best of times, and it was the worst of times, but we were soldiers in the night, and we found joy in the day, that we needed these regular reminders of what we were resisting for. That's the kind of thing that you've got to be able to laugh, and you do such a good job with, is that you've got to be able to find... I know that you struggle with that sometimes, too, in terms of sharing it, but you do such a good job of bringing folks back to say, you know what, you've got to find... Even if you are the pessimist in the mirror, you've got to remind yourself of those moments and give yourself as many of them as you can.

[1:10:01] Tad Stoermer: Thank you.

[1:10:03] Heather Vickery: Wow. Thank you. Thank you for sharing everything. We got to have you back again. We really do have to have you back, maybe after the book's out, yeah, because we could talk forever and ever. Tell folks how they can find you. I wanted to have you on the show, Tad, because I think you're cool, and I wanted to have this conversation, but also I wanted people to be exposed to things that I don't think they're getting in other ways, and I hope they're like, I need to follow this guy. I need to know more so that you can be the resistance. How can they find you?

[1:10:40] Tad Stoermer: Yeah. Resistance starts with you, and it starts with one word. No, that's how resistance starts. But yeah, I'm all over the place. I'm Tad Stoermer on TikTok and Instagram and YouTube and Patreon and Substack, and it's all the same stuff. I mean, I put different things in different places, but that's where I am. I'm all over digital media.

[1:11:06] Heather Vickery: Tad, thank you so much.

[1:11:08] Tad Stoermer: Oh, definitely. Thank you, Heather. This has been really such a pleasure. And I'm going to need a signed copy of the book, so just let me know where I purchased that when it's time.

[1:11:15] Tad Stoermer: No, you won't need to. You won't need to. I'll send it to you.

[1:11:19] Heather Vickery: Thank you so much. All right, take care, and we'll have you back. First of all, I'm such a fan of Tad. It's quite rare in 2025 to find a somewhat older—he's not old, but older—seasoned white man who—I mean, Tad was always liberal, right? He's not a recovering conservative, but who can realize that everything he's ever learned and loved—I mean, he told us, what, was he five doing Civil War reenactments? Or Revolutionary War? I don't remember exactly. But to say, holy shit, everything I've ever been taught and believe in is foundationally incorrect, and I'm going to relearn it all. And not only am I going to relearn it all, I'm going to tell everybody I know, and we're going to change this narrative in an effort to actually save democracy and the country. That is a level of integrity we do not see very often from anyone anywhere.

[1:12:32] Alan Seales: From anyone anywhere, and to your point, people of a certain age that are seasoned to Tad's level of seasoning. I agree.

[1:12:41] Heather Vickery: You're not old, Tad. We love you, but—

[1:12:43] Alan Seales: You're not old. You're seasoned. We know that.

[1:12:47] Heather Vickery: But the way you say that makes it sound like he's kind of old. He's actually not old.

[1:12:50] Alan Seales: Well, he's 162. No, he's not. He's not. He's probably 32. So yeah, I have such respect for this man and for everything he's doing. And just, again, another one of these people that we've had the privilege of talking to who is just unapologetically themselves and feels so passionately about what they feel passionate about that they can't help but teach others.

[1:13:21] Alan Seales: And he's so good at it, right? What I appreciate, if you follow him on TikTok, which is how I found him, it's just very straightforward. He's not shaming anybody. He's not making anybody feel bad. He's like, look, here, these are the actual facts. And also, you know, I wrote the website for—it wasn't Mount Vernon. I don't know, something. He's so seasoned in U.S. history, and he threw it all out and was like, none of it's true. We have to do better. And it does give me a lot of hope. I'm excited for this book.

[1:14:02] Heather Vickery: It's really nice. I can't wait to see his book. I agree. I absolutely agree.

[1:14:06] Alan Seales: To see his book, to read his book. Because I just love history in general, right?

[1:14:10] Heather Vickery: Me too.

[1:14:11] Alan Seales: But to see it through a different lens that we didn't realize was missing so much accuracy.

[1:14:21] Heather Vickery: We don't. We're certainly not.

[1:14:22] Alan Seales: You don't know what you don't know. And I love his message. And now I even catch it, like, there was a clip that came out the other day of Al Gore. We don't see Al Gore very often anymore, but he was passionately saying how the Founding Fathers would not, you know, they didn't build it to be like this. And I appreciate the perspective, and we need to be angry, right? But I see those things and I think differently. Like, they didn't necessarily build it to be like this with the tariffs and with the taking advantage of people. But the oppression, yeah, they were pretty into that. But everybody's getting screwed right now. So it just changes the way you see everything.

[1:15:06] Heather Vickery: And that's the thing about awareness. Once you know, you don't unknow. And that's the thing about, you know, we've talked about this. We've talked about it from a privilege or from understanding where things are just sort of subliminally programmed onto us with television and books and programming and commercials and all of this. Once you see it, you do not unsee it. It's just getting people there.

[1:15:28] Alan Seales: Yeah. Like taking chance, actually, I think, right? Once you recognize, oh, I am intentionally embracing this opportunity, this risk, this chance, that's exciting. You put a different intention behind it, you get a different result than just letting life happen to you.

[1:15:46] Heather Vickery: I agree. I 100% agree. And I want to know what you listeners think after you have listened to this episode. So let us know. Connect with us on the socials on YouTube, Blue Sky, and TikTok.

[1:16:00] Alan Seales: Yeah. And then email us. Email us at wasitchancepodcast at gmail dot com. Got it. That's us. We would love to have you rate and review us on whatever podcast app you're listening on. It means a lot. Thank you all for being here. We really appreciate it. You've been listening to Was It Chance? The podcast about taking intentional risk, embracing opportunity. I read that backwards, but that's cool. We're glad you're here. Come back next time. I'm Heather Vickery.

[1:16:32] Alan Seales: And I'm Alan Seales.

[1:16:40] Heather Vickery: That's what you do. You say it backwards. You do the finger thing.

[1:16:43] Alan Seales: I'm Alan Seales. Bye guys.