What Do You Mean? with Jerry W. Washington, Ed.D. Produced by Unarmored Talk Podcast.
For twenty-three years my ballot traveled by mail. It went out from Camp Pendleton, from recruiting duty in Austin, from Okinawa, and once or twice from Camp Leatherneck in Afghanistan. Every envelope went to the same county in Kansas. In our first episode, Sgt. Maj. (Ret.) Mario P. Fields asked me why I trusted it.
What Do You Mean? is a new show. Each episode, Mario and I take one What Time Binds essay, read it, question it, and talk it through. Mario set the rule in the first minute: as few opinions as we can manage, and as accurate as we can be. Episode 1 takes The Grammar of the 2026 Election, sixteen days before Election Day.
In this episode
00:00 Mario opens the show
01:00 Where “What do you mean?” comes from: Feynman and the magnets
03:58 The question that took Mario ninety days
04:59 Misunderstanding comes with language. Ask before you get angry.
07:01 Absentee ballots from Camp Pendleton to Camp Leatherneck
08:43 November 2024: the whole family votes together
10:49 Read the ballot and check the emotion
13:47 A self-check before the midterms
14:12 “Citizenship should be verified”
16:25 Where to read, and what arrives each week
18:31 Keep asking
On the record
At 14:35 I say I have always had to validate my citizenship to vote. Here is what the forms ask today. The Federal Post Card Application, the form I mailed, has the voter swear: “I swear or affirm, under penalty of perjury, that: … I am a U.S. citizen” (SF-76). The federal mail registration form must ask, “Are you a citizen of the United States of America?” New registrants also give a driver’s license number or the last four digits of a Social Security number, and the state must match it against motor vehicle or Social Security records to confirm identity (52 U.S.C. § 21083). My essay says where I stand: “I am not saying citizenship should not be verified.”
The Feynman clip
At 03:29 I say Feynman could have reached for rubber bands. In the clip, he turns that answer down himself: “if we said the magnets attract like rubber bands, I would be cheating you.” I wrote about that line in February, in Feynman’s Real Question Was “What Do You Mean?”
Twenty-three years of envelopes taught me to read every line I sign, the ballot included. Every Monday I take one word an institution bent and show the page it bent on. Subscribe and the next one is in your inbox, free.
Next on the show: What Do You Mean by Warrior Ethos?
Mentioned in this episode
The Grammar of the 2026 Election (Aug. 26, updated Oct. 9)
“What Do You Mean?” as Cognitive Infrastructure, the Start Here piece (06:17)
Richard Feynman on magnets, BBC, Fun to Imagine, 1983
Unarmored Talk, Mario’s show
Read the ballot the way you read the record. vote411.org
The comments are the appendix: tell me where the record is wrong and I will show the page or fix the line.
Jerry W. Washington, Ed.D., is a Marine Corps veteran of twenty-three years, a combat engineer by trade, an instructor at UC Irvine’s Division of Continuing Education, and the writer of What Time Binds, a record of how institutions bend words and how the page holds them to account. Sgt. Maj. (Ret.) Mario P. Fields hosts Unarmored Talk and produces What Do You Mean?
How I make this: reporting and verification are mine, drafting is a collaboration with AI tools I review, and corrections get pinned, never buried. Full process: How the bread gets made. The full transcript, lightly edited for reading, plays in sync with the audio on the web version of this post. It started as a machine transcript and was checked against the recording.
