Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard - Walter Isaacson Returns (biographer & historian)

Episode Date: January 7, 2026

Walter Isaacson (The Greatest Sentence Ever Written) is a biographer, historian, and Professor of History at Tulane University. Walter returns to the Armchair Expert to discuss why he embeds himself into the lives of his subjects to write about them, how empathy can get in the way of success, and discovering the secret sauce of Elon Musk. Walter and Dax talk about his interest in people that try to learn as much as possible about everything knowable, the belief that growing up as a misfit can instill the drive seen in innovators of the modern age, and why an understanding of engineering is crucial to the political and philosophical conversations taking place today. Walter explains evaluating truths in the original draft of the Declaration of Independence, the struggle and strategy to create common ground throughout American history, and his assertion as a historian that even heroes have great flaws and villains have backstories.Follow Armchair Expert on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. Watch new content on YouTube or listen to Armchair Expert early and ad-free by joining Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting wondery.com/links/armchair-expert-with-dax-shepard/ now.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondry Plus subscribers can listen to Armchair Expert early and add free right now. Join Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts. Or you can listen for free wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome, welcome, welcome to armchair expert. Experts on expert. I'm Dan Shepard and I'm joined by Monica Isaacson. Whoa. Recently married to our guest.

Walter Isaacson is back. We had him on last time to talk about the Elon book, I believe. Is that what he was here for? No, Doudna, Jennifer Doudna. Oh, right, Jennifer Downed. And then I read the Elon one afterwards. All to say, he's back with a new book called The Greatest Sentence Ever Written. I got to add, in case you didn't listen to the first Walter, which you should.

Yeah. Walter, in his own right, is the most fascinating person. And I said this in the first interview. He deserves his own biography because he was the CEO or president of CNN. Yeah. He has a whole crazy epic career before he was a biography. I know. So cool.

His new book is called The Greatest Sentence. ever written. And it's about the most powerful sentence in the Declaration of Independence and he just breaks it down word by word and how meticulous it was. It's extremely fascinating. All the compromises that are just within the sentence. Yeah. Fascinating. Please enjoy Walter Isaacson. He's an unchained square. He's an altruitsful. He's an altruvets for. Don't say anything. That's one of my questions. Yeah, you can sit there?

Can I use this? We can't nail it with a couch. This is the third iteration. We put pillows out. And what we have found is that there's no unifying architecture for a couch. Yeah. There's nothing universal that everyone agrees on.

It's always going to be polarizing a couch. I know. And I used to hate throw pillows. My life has always. I think, why do people have these? And now, suddenly, I'm like, hey, there's a pillow there. That's cool. I have the same anger about the pillows.

I love through a pet. Decrative. Oh, I hate decorative. The fact that you're just going to pitch it on the floor every night and we're going to repeat this busy work. Right, right. Oh, you guys would hate my dad. You and I have the same. I'll bring my wife next time.

You can convince her. Even at our house, we have like four throat pillars on the bed. I said, nobody's going to come see the bedroom. Why are we? Yes. It's not for show. Yeah, but it's pretty. We need a good social scientist to tackle this.

What is going on? What evolutionary... Dubner probably could do it for you. Dubner knows everything. Yeah, sure does. He's been on your show quite a bit, right? Yeah, yeah, we love him. I would throw Duckworth in the mix, too.

I'd want her eyes on this to Angela Duckworth. It's an aesthetic. It's making your nest look nice. And that's where I think the work would lie is the value of aesthetic. What aesthetic do you prioritize? It is interesting. fascinating that an aesthetic would be an essential pursuit. Well, you see, an aesthetic with no usefulness is bad.

Now, there's a Venn diagram in which something is aesthetic and useful. Oh, you wouldn't hate living with me. I just bought this little tray yesterday. It's for nothing. I don't know what I'm going to use it for it, but it's so cute. So now it's just sitting on my counter and I have to find a use for it. It's like a little candle on the table. You're not really going to like that.

Well. Yeah, like I think we would agree. decorative columns on a structure is offensive. If they don't really bear any weight or they don't serve any purpose, you're pro-colum. Well, my dad was an engineer and we grew up in New Orleans. Column heavy, but they are weight-bearing columns. So they're necessary. Right.

As we learned in Hurricane Katrina, where occasionally a column would go off. It also might be a deep, like, this is a nice space. It's inviting. so you're included into gatherings or you become an integral part of the community. If you present a beautiful environment people are drawn to, that it would facilitate gathering and fellowship and council. What is the rooms called in the Arab world that are just the whole couch on the outside and lots of beautiful cushions? Oh, I don't know.

It's a room where people gather. And it's designed to facilitate. And beautiful photos. Yeah. Okay. So we saw each other. I don't know. Did you sign an NDA about that birthday party?

Are we allowed to say we were at it? It's just reputational cost to ourselves. I think it's reputational cost. I would, I don't know. I thought my birthday party, I'd say, don't tell people you were there. Well, we've been very public about our ongoing relationship with Bill Gates, so I have nothing to hide. But I did see you there, which was a delight because when we interviewed you, I guess, five years ago or close to five years ago, it was over Zoom, which is never really quite the thing. It's amazing that you now get this in person because it is so much of a different dynamic.

Yes. Like, you can just imagine having shadowed Elon on a screen that someone held that wouldn't really work, right? And I think that in the days of AI, we're going to learn that actually physically being there counts. And when I was doing Steve Jobs, when I was doing Elon Musk, doing Jennifer Dowdner, and I did the show with you on it, my rule was, I don't do it based on interviews. I do it based on you letting me embed myself in your life for two years. and just watch you and shadow you. And so then you can make it a narrative. Okay, you mentioned as I watched you doing a Michael Lewis sit down,

which was really fascinating. We adore him as well. Yeah. You mentioned, I guess it's the Heisenberg effect. Is that what it's called? Yeah, which is when you observe something, Heisenberg said, if you observe the particle, that's a quantum mechanical thing.

Whether it's a particle or a wavelength. Exactly. So the question that Michael Lewis and I have, because we both have the same method, which is, I'm just going to ride alongside. you and watch is by watching somebody, are you changing their behavior? And to some extent, yes, but surprisingly for me, with Elon Musk in particular, me being there did not seem to change him at all because I would talk to all of his team. They'd say, you've got to come to this

meeting because he's going to really come down hard on us. And we want to make sure that, you know, you're there taking notice. And I'd come and they'd say, well, that didn't help any. You being there. Yeah, yeah. Well, you even saw like interpersonal relationship. feuds and stuff like that that you were privy to. Especially with Grimes, which is a very interesting relationship, the mother of some of his children, and Chavon Zillis, these are all really smart, talented people. You know, I didn't want to wallow in the personal life,

but the personal life is connected to the professional passion and just to the inner person. Yes. It's huge. Well, I think it approaches the most fascinating question we all kind of have with these unique geniuses is like, how are they shifting gears into interpersonal, familial, because they are in an environment most of their day

where their opinion is the most important, and they declare things, they don't really debate things. So all of us are quite interested as like, how does that work in, quote, real life? There's no one formula, but there is a through line of all the people I've written about. Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Steve John, well, Steve is a little bit different, but Elon Musk is they aren't perfect in their personal.

life. I shouldn't put Steve Jobs in that category. He had a great personal life. But, you know, Ben Franklin sort of sets up household in London with another woman. He leaves Deborah back home. Einstein was not ever going to win husband of the year aboard. And Elon, enough said. Yeah, yeah. Could you rank your subjects in most susceptible to Heisenberg effect and least susceptible? It seems like Elon's at the top as far as he was least. Least susceptible because he doesn't have emotional EQ. incoming signals very well. In other words, I'm sitting here looking at you all, and you know, we kind of know what each other thinks. Elon, his brother Kimball said that he was the one who got the empathy gene, Kimball. And so sometimes Elon just doesn't have those receptors.

Secondly, and he said this to me very strongly, he said, if you worry about what people think about you, you'll never succeed. He said, that's the problem with empathy. Sometimes empathy is really vanity because you care what other people think and you want them to like you. And he said of me, which wasn't particularly nice, he said, that's why you screwed up running CNN. You cared too much that the people there liked you and you should have gotten rid of half of them.

Empathy is not your friend when you're running something. Yeah, so A, how did you take that criticism and B, how true? Well, it had the odious smell of truth to it because I look into myself, I'm never going to get a rocket into orbit or people to want. Mars or change a whole electric vehicle or AI. I think it's partly because you have to just be hell-bent, passionate, and intense. You have to care what people think of you. You have to build teams, but you have to not obsess over wanting everybody to like you.

I want to share this with you because I think you would get a kick out of it. Maybe he already told you personally. So, yeah, we're on this trip with Bill to India. For his foundation work. Yes. And so we're traveling around with him on his plane all week. And those are really special moments because there's really no other obligation, which he has many. You can really just shoot the shit.

And of course, I had just read your Elon book. And I wanted so bad to know if he had read it what he thought. Because obviously, for people don't know, Elon really, at least at one point, hated Bill. And they had a very ill-fated tour of SpaceX where he started confronting him about shorting his stock. And then went on a tweeting campaign. All true. We're sitting there. And I said, you love Walter Isaacson, right?

And he's like, oh, yeah, yeah, I really like Walter and we're friends. I said, so did you read Elon book? And he goes, oh, yeah, yeah, it was great. I really liked it. And I was like, okay, great. Wow. And a little bit where their overlap is, the criticism from Elon just doesn't really register, it doesn't seem. He has a similar gift and that he's not terribly affected by these opinions.

Well, I think Bill has a lot of incoming criticism and he has to have a bit of a thick skin. Although I think Bill Gates actually feels it. He has a lot more empathy than people would think. I think he does. But I also think he correctly says of Elon Musk, oh, he just runs down everybody. He says nasty things about everybody. You just got to live with it. And that is true.

Yeah, he's not taking it personally. And he said, oh, and then my favorite part of the book is he goes on to talk about the chapter where he had invited the CEO and the head engineer of the solar panel company he had purchased to come down and install the solar panels on the roof of his house in Cape Canaver, whereover, wherever the hell he launches. And Bill was trying to explain the part where he starts, yelling at them on the roof at midnight. Why did you make that part?

What is that designed for? That doesn't even go with that. Have you guys ever installed it? Bill's enjoyment of incompetence being exposed was incredibly telling. Well, I'm so interested to hear this because Bill Gates never told me that. And it is totally true. And that's why you have to embed yourself. I remember being on that roof at midnight.

In Boca, Chica, Texas, he goes into what's called demon mode Elon does. And he's like, why are there these parts? He said, the best part is no part. You got to get it. And they said, well, we can't because, and he turned out to be right. And that's the sort of secret sauce of Elon Musk is he understands the details of engineering. And I think Bill Gates would appreciate that. Yes.

And you have to build in a little bit of compassion and understanding, despite the fact that they're so enriched and successful, which is, I think it's easy to overlook the frustration that, again, exist when you truly are often the smartest person in the room. What I got a glimpse in of like, oh, yeah, Bill has lived on a planet where he's been trying as hardest to get everyone to catch up to his speed. And that is frustrating. So for him to have observed another guy going through it and then letting it rip in that fashion and how much enjoyment and humor he got out of it, I was like, oh, yeah, it's just very

illuminating. You know, it's particularly interesting because those are the two smartest people I've ever dealt with, you know, Elon Musk in some ways. There are others in different types of intelligence, but Elon's intelligence is understanding material science and engineering. And engineering is a lot different than pure science or running a company. And Bill understands physics, understand science so well, but he's never been a pure physical engineer.

I'm not talking about software engineer. And they had many big disputes, Elon Musk and Bill Gates. One of them in which Elon turned out to be more right than Bill, was that you could have EVs doing things like semi-trucks that you could make batteries that could do it. And I think it's almost because Musk can visualize lithium-ion batteries and how much power they could have and how you would make the engineering.

And it's an important trait because our country is now missing this ability to totally manufacture things and learn from the manufacturing process. For example, Steve Jobs, he had so much, beauty embedded in everything he did. His design sensibility was great. His ability to understand human emotions, interactions, much better than Musk. I mean, must build a cyber truck, which still doesn't speak to most people emotion. Back to aesthetics. Yeah. I need some throat bills.

I remember walking around the design studio as he's trying to figure out what he called the chamfers, the curves on the iPhone and stuff, making it beautiful. But what Steve then did was it was then sent to China to be manufactured. Whereas Musk says, no, I've got to make my own manufacturing lines. I've got to put my desk, my engineers, and my designers right on the manufacturing lines so that they can have the instant feedback of the engineering. How do you write about these people

who are the most brilliant people in the world because then you yourself have to understand what they're talking about? Well, that's the joy of doing the book. I mean, we talked about it when I talked to, about Jennifer Dowdener and the codebreaker and CRISPR. Well, learning a little bit of biology and learning the chemistry of it,

you can learn anything. I mean, this is almost a theme of your show. I was going to say, I think we do a similar thing, which is like, oh, we have a physicist in two hours. I got to brush up on that. I got to be able to be an intermediary between the lay person and the expert. And one of the things your show does

is you can be an expert on physics at this point, music at that point, psychology, the next time. People who dive into many different subjects tend to see the patterns of nature. And that's where creativity comes from. Yeah, so I'm quite envious. Again, we just had a very tiny dose of it. We had a week of it. And you've had, at times, years of it with people.

And I remember we said out loud to each other all the time, like, this is an insane privilege. We're getting to go meet with all of the heads of tech in India and go to a secret room where it's Chatham House rules. And we're getting to hear, I don't know, six of the 20. smartest people on the planet about this topic, discuss how they're going to tackle it. And it's such a unique and special thing to be a fly on the wall of. Of all these subjects, which one did you find yourself just kind of endlessly grateful? I think it was the one I talked to you about, which is biochemistry and understanding how our cells work.

And we talk about coding and AI and stuff. Well, in the next 20 years, cells are going to be molecules are going to be the new things we have to code an engineer. So it was fun to learn that. I struggled a bit with Einstein, even though my father's an engineer, my grandfather, my uncle, so I grew up with some of this.

I was okay with the physics. It was the tensor calculus I was trying to learn for general relativity. And that may have been the wall I kind of hit. It's so hard. It's humbling when you had that wall, right? Because you can be like cruising along. Because you keep saying to yourself,

as I said to you, you can learn anything. And then, wait a minute. The tensor calculus of general, and I had Brian Green and others, and I'd understand it. He'd explain it to me. And then 20 minutes later, I'd say, wait, I can't figure it out again. Bill Gates is that way, and you saw it on your trip to India. If there's anybody who dives in and can be curious about everything from malaria and public health to nuclear power and new ways of doing it, even in the 1970s or so, he'd take these think weeks and he'd bring books with him, and he would just learn everything you could about a subject.

Leonardo da Vinci was that way. It's like, I need to learn everything about a subject. And he would dive into Euclid, because the printing press had just come to pass in 1,500 in Florence. And he'd say, I've got to get the Euclid book that's in the bookshop down by the bridge, so he could learn that.

And then he'd learn botany, and then he'd learn optics. And there are certain people in this world who try, to learn as much as possible about everything knowable. From Aristotle to Leonardo da Vinci to Bill Gates to Ben Franklin, and those are people who are interesting. Yeah, you get this sense that, oh boy,

they kind of have a comprehensive view of all the things, all the dynamics that are at play, which is so many things to juggle. We asked him, hey, of these promising longevity texts that are on the horizon, which do you think is the most promising? And he's like, well, we have a company that we work with that we're thinking doing a lot of good work. But you've got to remember, the Earth is 5.2 billion years old.

In the first cells, we have two independent cells. He took us through the evolution of every single cell to we got to mammal, also incorporating all of the geology that was happening and all the chemistry that was happening in the atmosphere and how everything was changing. And I was like, I mean, my God, this guy had to tell us the history of the planet to bring us up to speed to say where we're going next. And it took an hour.

It's interesting as you look at AI, which will be able to, absorb billions of bits of information. And the question is seeing the patterns. And that's what a great human can do is learn so many different things and then abstract patterns. And I've just been reading books about AI, which is how do you get to that level where you get the abstraction of patterns that the AI can do? It can juggle so much data.

Sort of an intuition, too. Yes. Einstein once said that every great advancement. is a leap of intuition, but every leap of intuition comes from years of having absorbed data. Yeah, that's so true. Okay, so all this to say, why have you not ever done, Bill? First of all, I tend to think childhood is a sweet spot. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, whether it's Elon's difficult childhood in South Africa. Oh, the wilderness camps, he was sent to define them. Yeah, and that we biographers believe that dad and childhood are two keys to understanding. Well, source code, which is Bill Gates' first of, I think, a trilogy of memoirs. That is as good as it gets when it comes to memoirs. There'll be a certain point. I'll write something about Bill Gates, but I can't top that book. Okay, that makes sense.

Now, you just circled the point I wanted to explore, which is certainly with Elon, the whole thing is just driven by this relationship with his father. That's the fuel in the tank. as was Steve Jobs in some interesting way in that, right, he was adopted and that whole story. So of your subjects, all are male except for Daoudna, was her driving force a mother conflict? No, it was actually a father, too.

I don't want to say that it's a pattern of everybody. But is Barack Obama, who's been on your show, his first line is, I think every successful person is either trying to live up to the expectations of his father or lived down the sins of the father. And the same is true of me is what he said. So Jennifer had a very, very supportive father who just believed she could do science

and took her on explorations. I think that was a key to the childhood there. She felt like an outsider. I think I'm handicapped like Michael Lewis. My friend grew up with him in New Orleans. We had magical childhood. We were growing up in New Orleans with wonderful parents and friends.

I think sometimes having... a rough childhood and feeling like a misfit, feeling like an outsider, instills in you a bit of that drive of how do I fit in? And you look at Leonardo, who's born out of wedlock and is not legitimated by his father, and he's gay, and he's left-handed, and he's distracted. And he goes in this small village of Vinci and finally goes to Florence, where the Medici embrace him. But you could do it. Einstein, being Jewish in Germany, yeah, you feel like an outsider. And you go down the line. Or just even alienated by their genius as well.

They feel a misfit in who they are. And Elon Musk being bullied as a kid, having a father who was psychologically abusive to him, who took the sides of the bullies who beat up Elon. Elon is slightly on the, I'm not very good with social signals scale. So he's sitting there in the corner of the bookstore growing up, all alone, reading Asimov, reading Heinlein. I saw one of the books, Stranger and a show.

strange land. It's on your shelf there. Elon would read these things and he'd feel like a stranger in a strange land. Yeah. Just to remind folks of one of the stories in that book about Elon Wright, is he had at this wilderness camp got beat up so severely by another boy that he was in the hospital for four days. And when he came home and was presented to his father, his father proceeded to shame him for losing the fight. For hours, I mean, just made him stand in front and say, your loser, you'll never amount to anything. While Kimball, the younger brother, had to watch And Kimball says it's still the most searing experience of life. And it's not to excuse things, but minimally when you're evaluating these crazy things you observe,

it is useful to remind yourself of what? That he's a person. People are people. He was forged. Yeah. He was forged. Forged by fire. I think that's titled my first chapter.

But I get some pushback and so does Michael Lewis sometimes of, oh, you're trying to explain away, Elon being demon-driven and stuff. I say, no, I'm trying to explain it. Exactly. People can flay it and excuse an explanation. Yeah, they say, you're trying to excuse them. And I say, I'm trying to explain them. You can be the judge, but I'm going to tell you what it was like, how it was growing up.

And I think successful people have some demons in them. There's a question for anybody like that. And we probably all do, even those of us with good childhoods, have a few demons. Do you harness your demons or do your demons, or do your demons harnessed? You, and Elon has spent a lifetime struggling, harnessing his demons. It's not even helpful to have a story that doesn't show all the pieces, because it's a cautionary tale, too. You need to hear about the father and the bullying and stuff so that whoever reads it moving forward knows that results in this.

May Musk, who's just this wonderful person, the mother of Elon, you've probably watched her. She's a fashion model in their 70s. But she said to me at the very beginning, And we were talking about her ex-husband, Elon's father, saying the challenge for Elon is the danger that Elon becomes his father. And you see that struggle and you see it in Luke Skywalker learning that the dark side of the forest. Well, hey, that's my father. And that's a pretty ancient struggle. Yes. You're right.

You want to explain all the sides so people understand where the demons, but you don't have a lot of drives that are in the same. insane drives unless you have a few demons. I know. And maybe that's why I'm a better observer of people than somebody's going to shoot rockets to Mars because, you know, I got some drives, but they're not insane, but they're not going to change the world

the way Steve Jobs did, the way Elon Musk did, the way Einstein did. I guess Bill's comforting in that way that his parents were, by all accounts, spectacular. His father and mother were, that's what source code, this book he did about his childhood and the Tereo Camp that they used to go during the games that they played.

Now, he was very competitive and ambitious, but his father, who just died maybe, what, five or six years ago, has got to have been one of the wisest, sweetest people. Yeah, a gentle giant, an enormous man with a big heart. And he did one of the great things for Bill Gates was he helped negotiate that original IBM contract that says, and you get to keep the source code. Yes, he is. And then the mother's incredibly admirable proportionality of pushing him to be social, and then surrendering to who he was.

So the big in the United Way, understanding that is not just about taking things, it's about giving back. I did do years ago a cover story in Time magazine on Bill, and it begins with the mother, and the mother taking Bill to a psychologist because Bill is always resisting or always refusing to do things,

and the psychologist saying to the mother, I think Mary, her name was, give it up, just let it be who he is, because if you struggle with him, he's going to win. And that's why I think Bill turned out a little bit differently. He has incredible drives. Early years of Microsoft. I mean, he is, you know.

Psychopathic. Yeah, yeah. Admittedly, he says so. But he has been somebody who has been then, it's about something larger, like taking you to India and explaining why. And all the people I've written about at a certain point realize it's not just about me and my success. It's about connecting my success to something larger than myself.

Interesting. Okay, so now having studied all these people, here's, I guess, my fear. And my conclusion is they don't come in the shape we'd like. And I think our current society has lost a little bit of tolerance for what comes with these once-in-a-generation types. We want them to also be perfect, and I think that's unrealistic. What do you think about the reality of what makes these people and what kind of tolerance we have to have society?

I think you have to have tolerances for geniuses. and that's when I was doing the Elon Musk being interviewed about him, you know, people who just really hated him and say, wait a minute, do you want a society without Elon Musk? Or George Packer wrote a great book on Richard Holbrook, who's not quite up there with Elon Musk, but this diplomat who was just such a pain in the ass. And yet, as Packer ends the book as the way I end the Elon book,

could you have had a kinder and gentler subject, still being the one getting the Dayton Accords, shooting the rocket to Mars, whatever it may be? So I think we have to tolerate, and, you know, people push back to me, but tolerate sometimes the craziness of genius. That said, I think there was a period up until about four or five years ago where we had become quite intolerant of, say, Picasso. And I think that as we got into an age where in 140 characters,

you had to declare somebody a hero or a villain. And you couldn't say, wait a minute, with Picasso. It's more complicated than that. But TSLA is more complicated than that. Yes. You know. Michael Jackson. Exactly.

And so we became a society in which either because of the algorithms of social media or the talk radio or cable news, you had to immediately declare somebody was either totally evil or totally great. Yeah, everything binary quickly. And you couldn't sort of explain, well, it's a little bit more complicated. as you said, these are humans. Yes, exactly. Do you want to have a planet in which the people who are pushing us forward?

Also have great bedside manner. Yeah, as Steve Jobs wrote, when he came back to Apple, having been sent into the wilderness in the 90s, he wrote this ad to declare what Apple was all about. Now, remember, late in his life, he recited to me and started crying. Here's the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the round pegs in the square, whole, the ones who think different. And it goes on. And then it ends with, because the people are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do. So are you going to be tolerant of the misfits of rebels, the crazy ones? Well, yes, but you also have to remember

that you can decry the bad parts of them. I mean, Shakespeare teaches that. In our current age, everything's so binary. We don't understand that, look at Shakespeare's great heroes. Even Henry the fifth by Agincourt speech whatever he kills all the prisoners in the french prisoners he does horrible likewise even the villains in shakespeare othello iago they all have back stories and nobody says hey shakespeare you shouldn't try to explain away their flaws i think we need to get back to understanding the complexity of human nature yeah i agree or just pick that i don't want anything new or i don't anything incredibly hard done i will say i think that sort of cancel culture and everything else,

pendulum is swung away from that recently and maybe too far. I can look at whether it be Donald Trump or many other people in public eye. I don't mean to get political here. They are breaking all sorts of guardrails and maybe we should be now saying, wait a minute, wait a minute, don't go there.

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you're attracted to these stories that have this driving force of a father-son relationship and you yourself not have thoughts on yours my father was the smartest person i've ever met the nicest person i've ever met the most loving person i ever met fuck you i guess is what i want to say And my mother, too, one of the smartest people I ever knew and the most supportive. And I joke with Michael Lewis, who also had a great family, is that, well, maybe that's why we're the observers, and they're the one shooting the rockets to Mars. My father was an engineer. Mechanical. Electrical was his main thing, but he had an engineering firm that did electrical, mechanical, and structural.

And so one of the things about it was he taught me, you can learn everything, as I said. and this, I think, should be the tagline of our share next one. You can learn it, which is in our house, which is still our family home in New Orleans, on Napoleon Avenue, huge basement. And we had workshops, but it was also electronics, and I'm kind of old.

We remember tubes, and you could test the tubes and change them in the radio and soldering irons and Heath kids. And we'd spend so much time doing hardware engineering and stuff. So I learned a love of science and engineering from him, and I think I went astray because then I studied history and literature and college. If I had had to do it over again, I would have become an engineer like my dad. You wish you had?

Yes, because engineers can appreciate the beauty of history and poetry, but sometimes the humanists I know, they get, oh, you know, I love Shakespeare, I love this part of history, but then you say something about a circuit and exactly what a resistor does or why a transnational. transistor makes, oh, no, I can never do science. Well, yeah, you can. Maybe not at the same pace your colleagues in class did, which is, I think, what informs people, whether they can or cannot do something. It's like, oh, did I pick it up at the same rate as the people around me? Oh, it's not for me. You know, that's a really good point, because when I went to college, I was going to do math and physics and science. And it was hard. And if you went to a Stephen Greenblatt

teaching Shakespeare, whoever you were, you'd be welcome. If you went to a physics course, and I took a couple and I took a biochem course and you weren't a scientist, you were made to feel you just don't get it, you'll never get it. So they were not as inviting as they should have been. Yeah. Well, do you think maybe then you felt like I'm not going to be as good as my dad at this,

so I might as well pivot? No, no, I don't quite know what it would, but I do think that nowadays being able to fully understand the beauty of science and engineering is crucial to being part of the political and philosophical conversation. And what I've tried to do in my books, like James Watson, another person who's complex and has been canceled,

but he writes a double helix. And it's a fun, beautiful tale inspired Jennifer Dowden, but he smuggles in a lot of science. So to try to make Einstein's special relativity, here's this patent clerk who can't get a job at a university or anything, but he's trying to learn how to synchronize clock. because people are having patent applications because the Swiss are pretty insistent

that you can clocks be synchronized. And he's saying, well, what if I wrote alongside the signal that was synchronizing the clocks would time be the same to me? So understanding through the life of a person trying to convey that science to me has a certain beauty to it. Yeah.

Okay, I wanted to ask your opinion as a professor at Tulane, whose current enrollment I looked it up this morning is 62% female, 38% boys. I didn't know that, but that's interesting. Is that something that you've observed in your time there? Are you worried about that? What are your thoughts on the changing kind of demographics of college students?

That's a good question. I'd not noticed it in particular. One of the things that I have noticed is that when people came in five, six, seven years ago, their parents would say, I just want them to learn coding. I want my boy or girl to be a great software engineer so that they'll have a job. AI comes along and chat GPT can code better than 99%

of most college coding students, but in some ways connecting human feelings and emotions to the technology, that's the skill. I've started with some of my students, including students who do AI in our own. computer science students, but also my history students, I'm pairing them. And we've created a company called Boswell & Company. And what it does is it believes that everybody's got a story worth telling. And it uses Google Gemini Notebook, but also Anthropic, to gather all the data

and my students interview people and their families, and we put it all together, and we produce a biography for them. The reason I say this is because the people who can connect the humanities to the technology will succeed. And people say AI will destroy jobs? No, AI is going to open up whole new fields. Maybe 500 people get a biography or memoir written each year. It should be 5 million. Everybody should be able to do it.

So we will have whole new products in our little company, which is doing it for people we know who ask us, commissioners, to do it. That will just show how this AI combined with the humanities will find, new products and new jobs for people. Yeah, it's almost a tall order because that's, I guess, what everyone already recognizes about him. What makes jobs so unique was that he seemingly had the emotionality of the interaction being a priority as much as how good the product itself function.

It seemed like he was very smart at recognizing you have to emotionally connect to this device. And one reason was just who he was. a great genius. But when he went to college to read before dropping out, he didn't sit there studying computer software engineering. He studied calligraphy, dance, music, art. And he really got a grounding in the humanities. And a sense, just a two-word sense, that's so important. Beauty matters. Just what you said. You said aesthetics matters, but he made it simple. Beauty matters. And we're talking about Bill. I mean, Bill made some great products. But, they both made a MP3 music player approximately the same time.

And Microsoft made the Zoom, which was really good in many ways, but Steve made the iPod, which was an object of desire. Yes. It was a declaration of your identity. Even those ads and the earbuds and everything. So understanding the emotional connection, the humanities connection, is what made the iPod beat out the Zoom. Okay, so you're not sitting at Tulane going,

where are the boys and what's happening and we got a problem on our hands. I haven't thought about that now. I'm going to have to go back. Yeah, I generally don't desire more boys to be around either, but... We probably have a problem in our society, which is the K-12 education and everything else. It used to be a sense that the world was going to be a better place

for each new generation. For example, if you're born when I was in the 1950s, you had an 80% chance of having a better life than your parents. If you're born when my students were born, say, I hate to say it, but like the year 2000. Or even in the book, you say the 80s. The book I say in the 80s, right, but also in the year 2000, you have less than a 50% chance of doing better than your parents. And so this explains a whole alienation of a new generation, but it also explains, I think, the resentments in our politics and other things. So the greatest sentence ever written is your new book, and it is conveniently coming out a month or two

before we enter our 250th year anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Happy birthday. Yeah. So that would be a very obvious reason to write this book, but I don't think that's the primary goal of the book. It was definitely a goal and a thought, which is you're about to have a birthday party, and I don't know that your family, my family's pretty well, but, you know, if I have a big extended birthday party, There people hardly can speak to on some of my cousins. But you put it aside on your birthday and you say, we're family, we're common ground.

Here's what we share. We have had this happening in our society, maybe for the past eight to ten years, where it just gets more and more polarized so that anything that happens, like should I wear a mask in COVID, anything becomes so political and partisan that we polarize ourselves on it. Well, we're about to have a birthday party. wouldn't it be nice if we could say, well, here's what we all agree on. Here's what the common ground is.

And so I wanted to do something that says, what is our mission statement as a nation? Let's read it, understand it, and for a year at least get along a little bit better to say, well, yeah, we do hold these truths to be self-evident. Yeah. Yeah, so there's a lot. We're going to go through each one. It's so cleverly broken down. But I will say what strikes me immediately is I think we do suffer from not knowing history.

Ask yourself, well, how did it come about? How did we learn to live in a group of 330 million people as one unit? And there's some stuff that predates our country. There's Hobbs and Locke. There's people that propose this notion of a social contract. And you're going to leave the wild where you have unlimited rights. You see something you don't like, kill it. Who cares?

Take what you want. we're going to give up some liberty because we believe the net benefit's going to be much larger if we give up some of our liberty so that we can coexist peacefully. So maybe just even that notion is maybe a bit more foreign of people than I think would be helpful. Yeah, you've read the book, which is great. I love that because that is how we begin, because we're doing a parsing of the sentence. We hold these truths to be self-evident. And you saw it with the word we, and what does that mean?

well, it's not we, the 62 people gathered in Philadelphia, it's the social contract that we've decided to have. And our founders, particularly Jefferson, Franklin, and to some extent John Adams, they were reading the people of that time. And you mentioned them, John Locke, David Hume, the people who are saying, how did we come out of a state of nature in the prehistoric times who are all fighting each other. And how did we agree on how to have a government? And that's what the social contract is. Rousseau writes a book.

Hobbes writes the book on it. Locke writes it. And these founders who are doing this Declaration of Independence, they base it on that enlightenment period, meaning these philosophers like John Locke, who said, how is it we come together as a society? Yeah. I think people, a lot of people at least,

have this notion that, I will live in this society and I will give up nothing to do so that it needs to be exactly how I think it should be and anything short of that is unacceptable. It's like the original buy-in is not floating around. It's like, oh, no, no, no, I'll be giving things

up to reap the rewards of all this. Yeah, I mean, it's like when I'm driving here and there's a red light, okay, I agree. Generally, stop it, rather... It's inconvenient to you. And that's part of the social contract. And if you're going to have a society, a contract isn't just, I get everything,

it's here's the deal we all hold hands and make so if you look at the declaration of independence and you look at the sentence that i call the greatest sentence it's we hold these truths and that's a contract that we've made and if we all realize that maybe just that understanding it's a social contract and then we have common ground that helps reduce the temperature a little bit of some of our partisan poisonous debates at the moment yes so as a historian lay out a little bit of the context in which they're going to write this document, because I think people might think of it as being more monolithic than it was. Like, it was anything but a unified group that it inhabited the colonies. Yeah, it's... There isn't even a total consensus in January

of 1776 that we're going to break away from the crown. But at a certain point, ingrained in us, is this notion of individual liberty. That's what Locke brings us with the social contract is. We're all in a state of nature as autonomous individuals, and then we make sort of let's hold hands and create a society. So it's based on individual rights rather than the rights of the king or the divine rights of kings or the conqueror. That notion of individual rights is so important. First of all, I don't know that everyone would just know who wrote it. You know, the wonderful thing, especially those of us who've been editors in our time, is that this greatest sentence, we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, is that one person?

then went through four drafts and then a final version. And, of course, Jefferson is the first author. He gets to write the first draft. Would you have a committee? The Continental Congress says, okay, we're about to declare independence. A decent respect for the opinions of mankind means we've got to say why. And so they appoint a committee. And maybe the last time Congress appointed a good committee,

but it has Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams on it. All making notes, scratching things out. And so, in fact, can I grab the book? Yes, please. Please, please. Right here, we do it as the opening thing. This is the first draft. I don't know where you're down with dark.

Oh, yeah, yeah. It's a mess. There is a total mess. But here it is. We hold these truths. And then you see Jefferson, he writes, to be sacred. Ah. And Benjamin Franklin was a printer.

So he had a dark black pen that did backslashes the way a printer. And he writes in self-evident. And so part of the book is just explaining that sometimes innovation is a team sport. Sometimes creativity is a collective endeavor, and that's what this sentence is about. And the forces at play, you already have burbling. You have the South's entire economy dependent on cotton production and slavery. Right, and you have Jefferson.

And they're rich, right, who's enslaving 400 people at the time? The wealthiest part of the country is the South that's dependent on slavery. You have already people in the North calling for an end of slavery in their colony. So that's already a very contentious issue. And so the way we word this is all incredibly important. And compromises are happening in all these sentences. And as Franklin said, you know, compromises may not make great heroes, but they do make great democracies.

You got to compromise. And one of the problems, though, because it's not all great. Sometimes you make a compromise that becomes sort of an original stain on the nation. And they have to do that in even the Declaration. They're writing, all men are created equal. Now, I try to explain it. They call it a self-evident truth because we all come from the state of nature. But how can they write that when one of them, Jefferson, is a major slaveholder?

He's had children with one of his very underage. And the person who is in Philadelphia in that room, when he has his mahogany desk and he has Franklin and Adams there, is Thomas Hemings, the brother of his. his enslaved mistress, also as slave. They wrestle with this. The original draft in Virginia was that all men are, and they're endowed with certain inalienable rights when they enter into a society, and that was supposed to exclude the slaves.

Jefferson knew that just doesn't wash. And so you have the great contradiction if he just says all men are created equal, and yet even at his death he doesn't free a slaves. Or his own children. Well, he doesn't free Sally Hemings, but part of the agreement with his mistress, Sally Hemings, who was enslaved, was that he would have freed their children. And he does. So it's all, once again, human and complex. But four score and seven years later, meaning when Lincoln is at the battleground of Gettysburg, when they're consecrating the cemetery there, he harks back. And he says, a nation founded on the proposition that all men are created equal. So you see. see the power of the sentence pushing us to progress. Yeah.

I just want to put one more bullet point on we, which is important. Prior to this, governments, as everyone knew, were pretty much ordained by either God or a royalty that had been anointed by God. So they were never by the people. So we is very, very powerful. That same word begins the greatest sentence ever written, and it begins our Constitution. We, the people. So you've got to understand that this isn't the...

divine right of kings or the power of conquerors. It's this notion of a society that says we will create common ground. And that's why I wrote this because I want us to understand the struggle to create the common ground. And the self-evident truths, you explain how Hume, David Hume, who Franklin was friends with and admired, said there's two kinds of truths. There's synthetic. And those are based on facts. The example you give is like Philadelphia is bigger than Boston well we're going to have to go out and do some census work to find out the answer to that versus analytic truth which is all bachelors are unmarried we don't need to go survey bachelors to find out if they're unmarried the premise of the statement is in itself self-evident so

that's the distinction and then all men obviously we're not including women we're not including native americans you point out in the book at that moment a fifth of all people in the colonies were slaves. Right. And so to start with the self-evident, Jefferson had written, we hold these truths to be sacred. And Franklin has been staying with David Hume in Scotland, the greatest philosopher of the time, as he said, somebody who wrote about contract theory, and had come up with this notion of self-evident truths, all bachelors are unmarried, versus truth you had to go around and look. Well, when you say, are created equal, Franklin says that has to be a self-evident thing, because if you actually go around and look, you'll say, wait a minute.

minute. I just talked to Magic Johnson. Walt is not equal to him. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, somebody's not equal to Einstein. But what is self-evident is that we all had autonomy in the state of nature and we came together as a society. We all had this notion of coming together as a country. So politically, we're created equal. But as you point out, they leave out a lot of people. Yeah. And so the arc of American history is delivering on the aspirations of that. sentence. And even Benjamin Franklin to me, years ago, I wrote a book about Benjamin Franklin.

He's still a hero. He had two slaves when he was a young printer in Philadelphia. He just worked in his print shop. And then he realizes that's bad. They wander off. He doesn't try to keep them. But he just knows it's something he's done wrong. And his whole life, he keeps a ledger of the irata he had made and how he rectified it. Like he ran away when he was apprenticed. He breaks the indenture to his brother and runs away. He rectifies it years later by educating his brother's son. Anyway, he realizes the great sin was having once owned a couple of slaves. Yes. And so he becomes president of the society for the abolition of slavery. He helps create schools for blacks and freed slaves in America. And his own personal arc to me is analogous to the arc of American history.

Right. That eventually we have to say it's all men will know. That's an expansive term. It's mean all humanity. That's what all men should mean. And likewise, if you're going to say created equal, you've got to make sure black or white or female, whatever it may be, we all have equal rights. I was shocked to read this in the book that Jefferson called slavery, moral depravity, and hideous blot. Yet is one of, in my opinion, as I read about all the forefathers, the most repugnant behavior in regards to his slavery. I mean, traveling Europe with a 14-year-old

that you impregnate is to me about his fucking love as a kid. So it's interesting to acknowledge that he had this contradiction that was very much alive. And it goes back to what we were saying at the very beginning. Even the heroes have great flaws. Even the villains have backstories. And we shouldn't just say somebody's all or nothing.

Yeah. Wrestling with the complexity of Jefferson is so important. And, you know, we went through a period where either every monument had to be talking down. Yes, but we probably should understand the contradictions and the dark sides of some of these people. I mean, I tend to write about Franklin because he was very self-reflective. Who you want him to be? He follows the great arc of humanity. Right.

But you can't totally dismiss Jefferson. And you should have Annette Gordon-Reed. I don't know if she's been on this show. And she wrote The Hemings of Monticello. She's at Harvard, African-American historian. But she has this wonderfully complex view of Jefferson. I need that. I've been saying I need to read something pro-Jefferson.

Well, Meacham has a somewhat nuanced thing. And obviously, Annette Gordon-Reed's book is extraordinarily good. In this book, I'm trying to say, man, this is outrageous. Taking his enslaved mistress, even as... he's written this declaration, I try to say, yes, but look at these people who together created this sentence for all of their flaws. They gave us our mission. And now it's 250 years, our birthday of that mission, because we can all agree on that sentence. Let's reflect on it. So another major tension of the time, which is not foreign to us in 2025, is there was

quite a bit of tension over how religious this text would be. That's the endowed by their creator, the next line. Right, and begins with Franklin crossing out sacred and putting in self-evident and we hold these shoes. And then the sentence goes on and, you know, have it in the book there. You can look at the edits and it says they're endowed with certain inalienable rights. And then you have what I think is John Adams' handwriting because he's the most conventionally religious. And he puts endowed by their creator. with certain inalienable rights.

So even in the editing of one half of this greatest sentence ever written, you see them balancing the role of rationality and reason with the dictates of religion and basically the divine providence that we had as a nation. They're creating a balance. We've lost that today. Nowadays, you're using the Ten Commandments to divide us.

I was at CNN when I was first studying this sentence because I was doing it from my Ben Franklin book And I go in one morning and somebody says, oh, we have a great crossfire show. Judge Roy Moore has put the Ten Commandments in his courthouse in Alabama. Federal judge says, take it down. And they're going to have to send in the Marshals. Everybody says, great, who are we going to get in favor of the Ten Commandments? Who are we going to get against?

And I'm thinking, oh, good, we have a good crossfire tonight. And then when I went back and I was saying, the founders are using religion and rationality to balance us. And here we were in the press. and there they were the politicians using the Ten Commandments to divide us. So that's another lesson we can learn from the founders, is this balance of the role of religion, the role of rationality, and the role of tolerance. I'm embarrassed to say I had never even heard the term deists until I was reading this chapter. Many of them were deists.

What are deists? Deists were very big in both Europe and the United States in the 1700s. Voltaire is, to some extent, Jefferson and Franklin are. And what Deism is, which was basically the creed of most of the people who wrote the Declaration in the North, at least, is you believe in God, you believe in God is a great creator, but he set the universe in motion, their laws. And he stepped out. Yeah.

And Einstein believes in that, too, which sets a beautiful laws and a wondrous Cosmos for us to live in, but he doesn't go around intervening. Picking World Series outcomes? Yeah, that the Saints who were here yesterday to play the Rams, I could pray as hard as I want that the Saints were going to beat the Ram, but there's no God who says, all right, I owe Walter one, you know, let's have the Saints beat the Rams. He doesn't intervene. That's the Deist Creed.

That seems to have died out entirely. I think a lot of people, Francis Collins, a great scientist who believes in God is a Christian. There are many people, I think, who believe in a benevolent creator, endowed by the creator, as our sentence writers put it, believe that the world in the universe has a miraculous set of laws. But there aren't miracles in which suddenly the laws of the universe are broken because you prayed hard enough. Yeah. It was a creator, not a super. It's not managing the apartment. Exactly. And it was also called Providence. In other words, the good Lord sets up a creation. And we owe it to divine providence to understand the beauty of that creation. But it's not individual providence where the good Lord is intervening every day and deciding, I'm going to help you out today. And they were even specifically saying, I'm not in that Jesus was the son of that thing. I think they're all very rational.

say, oh, let's pick Jefferson and Franklin, because other two who talk about it, it's in the book a bit. Franklin is the best, really, because he's a very rational person. And he believes in the creator, and he believes that worshiping is good for a society. But Ezra Stiles, who was president of Yale, right when Franklin is dying, says, okay, but do you accept the divinity of Jesus Christ? And Franklin writes back, and he says, you know, I've sort of looked at that my whole, life and I've never decided to proselytize to preach on it because I'm just not sure and it's not something I know. He said, and I've quit worrying about it because I'm going to learn soon enough the real answer. No, he was dying soon. Yeah. So if you look even at John Adams, he's that way,

which is they believe in the creator, but the notion of the divinity of Christ is something that some take on faith, but others feel they're not sure about it. Jefferson in particular takes the Bible, and he creates what's called the Jefferson Bible, where he keeps in all of the great wise things of Jesus, all of the principles and the moral principles of Jesus, but he actually takes a razor and cuts out the miracle parts, because Jefferson is such a deist and such a rationalist, he thinks that the Bible would be better if we just listen to the moral preachings, but didn't worry about how do you make, you know, loaves and fishes. He sent that book to his nephew or something?

The Jefferson Bible, you can see it in Monichello. It actually exists, and it has the razor cutouts. It's, once again, something I don't proselytize on. I think everybody should have their own set of beliefs. But I think the key there is to be tolerant. And this is what Franklin was saying. Different people are going to understand the divinity of Jesus differently. I think they all felt that we should have a respect for a great creator,

a divine power that created us. but otherwise we should be tolerant. Stay tuned for more armchair expert, if you dare. Yeah, so it's interesting. You've got these three dudes that are really nitpicking over all the wording. Even in this group of three, you've got a really wide range of how religious, like Adams, is definitely more. He's definitely more of an abolitionist than is Jefferson. You're sitting down with what would seem to be kind of unbridgeable differences.

They would seem more unbridgeable than our differences today. Yes. Our difference today is, okay, how much health care should be considered into something that's a Medicaid and Medicare. We want immigrants, but how many? We're arguing over what should be in the commons, how much health care should be in the commons, how much police protection, whatever it may be. Those are pretty simple enough arguments. compared to the ones our founders had to deal with,

and they successfully craft the sentence and then craft a declaration, and then craft what may be the most astonishingly successful Constitution imaginable. And as Franklin says at the end, when they finish that sentence, they're voting on the declaration, and then he does it with the Constitution as well. He said, I never thought this was perfect, but it's as good as humans can do.

And so with all of his flaws, let's be humble and hold hands and say, we have endowed this. That's another thing I think we've lost the appetite for a little bit is some places are just a good place to start. We're not there, but we need to start somewhere so the improvements can to come. Also, I feel like the Benjamin Franklin thing that you said, where he was very much riding his wrongs over time, nowadays, I feel like what's so upsetting is we would look, not we, but a lot of people would look at it and be like, oh, he was wishy-wash.

Or, oh, he's switch flip-flop. It's so crazy. But that's an unforgivable sin. Exactly. Again, on both sides we do this of the political spectrum. We're like, oh, now they change their mind. You can't trust them. It's like, that's called growth.

We should be able to let people change their mind. When I learn more, I change my mind. What do you do? And that's an old line that you've used. But we're stuck right now. We don't tolerate compromises or people who grow. That's what this book is about. is we started a nation with a certain aspiration,

but we had to grow and we had to get there. That's the core of it. Yeah. Okay, and then we get into what I think is the most moving part of the book and the thing that I appreciated reading most, and that is just about common ground in the pursuit of the American dream. So it's kind of define these things.

People are very familiar with the term common ground, but it had a literal beginning common ground. Right. common ground back in feudal times was the landowners and the great dukes and the urals and the they had their land but there was a certain parts of the land that were put in commons they were called the commons everybody could graze their herds or grow things there and it was for what we then called commoners that's how we get the name commoners they were the ones who didn't own land but they could graze on the commons and it comes even from john law

John Locke is a strong believer of private property. He believes that if you mix your labor with things you find in nature, you have a right to make that your private property. He is the philosopher who gives us the notion of free markets and private property. He has a caveat that says as long as there is enough and as good left in the commons. So even in Boston, Philadelphia, and in Cambridge in colonial times, there was Boston Common, Cambridge Common. We think, okay, Boston Common is beautiful,

and it has a place where the swan. No, but that was a commons where people could do it. So for me, that's the metaphor that is at the core of this sentence. What is the sentence talking about in saying a common ground? And so what they did back then was they put not just land in the common common for people to But they said, we're going to put certain things in the common. Ben Franklin did. He said, okay, we're going to put a library service in the commons. And this is Ben Franklin and his little group in Philadelphia. You need to do two seconds on what a paradigm breaker that was having

libraries. I don't think people understand the importance of just having access to books. How much that opened up your opportunity. It is the great symbolic nature of the Commons and American Dream that everybody has access to information. And Franklin said when he created, the Free Library of Philadelphia, which is the first library where everybody could come and use it. He said, we're going to create a society where anybody, whatever their birth,

whatever their background, will be able to learn as much as the wealthiest people. And that allows everybody the opportunity. That's what America's about, having the opportunity. Yeah, because books were elite. You had to be rich to own books.

And Franklin goes around as a young tradesman in Philadelphia and he goes to all the wealthy people and he says, put your books in this library, which ones can we borrow for it so we can create a community? So that was the symbolic commons. Likewise, he says, let's do a fire corps,

volunteer fire department. Even when he died, he still had his bucket by his bed because you had to keep your bucket if you're a volunteer fireman by your bed. So in his deathbed, he still has it. But when he's like 18 years old, his friends are creating a volunteer fireman. And they say, well,

Should it be for people who pay for it, or should it be in the commons? They said, wait, it's not a good idea if we let some houses burn and some don't. That's not going to help the city. So we put that in the commons. We put the night watchman corps and police in the commons. And he even does a hospital that's a public-private partnership done by people who donate, but there's a matching from the legislature and there's a lottery to pay for it because he wants to put some health care in the commons.

That's still what we're trying to do. argue how much health care should be in the commons? Should there be free charity hospitals? Should there be Medicare, Medicaid? And if we realize that our debates are simply about how much gets put in the commons, then we can disagree, but at least we know it's not some existential fight. It's just a question of balance. Yeah. I needed to read this part and be reminded of this part because what I hear mostly in our public discourse is just this hatred for billionaires. It's like a very common hatred. And we're seeing some cities move to maybe more socialist measures.

So I think I'm kind of living in the defense of the free market a lot in my head. And I am someone who thinks to Locke's point, if I make a pottery out of the clay I found in the ground, it's not your bowl. You know, I do believe that. Absolutely. And you've got Locke exactly right. The principle I was choosing not to look at is the American dream, the core of it is I can transcend my class. I mean, that's really when we get into, why did we form this country?

We were rebelling in many ways against a very hierarchical class structure that was hereditary. I'm born into nobility. I'm born into aristocracy. And so we would all agree that's not how it should be. The fundamental reason we didn't want anything to do with them is we wanted a merit-based system that would, allow you to transcend. And when I'm reminded of that, I do think, yes, the common goods are what ensure that. And they're hugely important because if we are not a place that you can transcend your social class, then we are in a nobility. We might as well be in a monarchy. And we have seen,

and I acknowledge, this increased elitism is now functioning virtually the same as inherited class when we look at the real statistics. So I just think this is a very important point. part of the book, and I was really, really grateful to be reminded what its purpose is. No matter how much you believe in private property or anything else, there's a moral purpose of saying there'll be certain things that every kid has the opportunity to have. Every kid has access to every person, and that could be K-12 education. We put that generally in the commons. It's under attack currently.

Yeah, yeah. Police protection, we put in the commons. Some extent, health care. Why do we do it? Not just because we're being sweet and generous, but because we want to be a land of opportunity, which means whatever class you're born into, we're not like the old aristocracy we were fighting against when we created this country in which if you were born into the aristocracy with land, you'd always stay there. And if you were born a commoner, it was hard to rise. We want to be a land of opportunity. And it got called the American Dream. That's the goal and the fundamental moral purpose of saying, what do we put in the commons and what do we not? Well, we can debate that, but without having some things in the common, it's not socialist to say, hey, police protection and defense should be in the commons. It should protect everybody. And likewise, debating how much health care should be in the commons, how much higher education? Should community colleges, or for

that matter, state colleges and universities, be free? Is that something we want to put in the commons, well, we can debate that. Like, no, maybe we shouldn't. And we can incrementally try things. And we can balance things. And we can say, yes, but we're going into a new, you know, when we went from the agricultural age to the industrial age 100 years ago, we put into the commons a lot more, like high school education should be in the commons. Everybody should get it for free. That started with the industrial revolution. Yeah. When we were trying to go into an industrial age, we realize, well, now we're going into a new age of AI and other things. Well, perhaps more is required to put in the commons, but that doesn't make you a socialist

to say we should put in order to have a land of opportunity, have more access to education, and you don't have to make it all or nothing. We could take some of these hugely poisonous fights we're having and saying, well, it's just a question of calibrating. How much health care should be in the commons. How much public education should be in the commons? Let's not make these existential fights. Let's look at it through the lens of what makes us a land of opportunity, what makes sure that we all have share some common ground, because the moral purpose of the commons is not just to make things a land of opportunity, but it was also to give everybody a stake in society. A buying. Yeah, a buying. Like, look, look, you may not have been born wealthier,

But you all have a stake in keeping this society. And nowadays, some of the resentment comes because people in closings, they make special VIP entrances. Well, hold on that. I have a whole section on the skyboxification. I think this is fascinating. But I just want to say, yes, if we don't have that principle that anyone here can become anything they want, we don't really have a unique take on anything.

I think that is the quintessential ingredient. And as it erodes, it's good to remember. No, that's actually the thing we should all feel pride on. That's why, for the past 50 years, we've been the engine of innovation for this world since World War II. And, yes, that notion of an American dream where everybody can rise, that was Ben Franklin's core principle when he's helping write this sentence. If you lose that, you lose something moral, which is every kid, every person deserves an

opportunity to do the best again. But you also, from a practical sense, you erode the buy-in people have for our system. They become resentful and they end up voting the extremes. These populist movements come up. Populist movements come up or left-wing movements. And so if you erode the sense that we all have a stake in society... Then communism does start looking attractive. Correct.

Or socialism or authoritarianism. And we're seeing that, not just the United States, even in Japan, but all of Europe. And so even if you don't believe in the moral reasons for having a commons, which is that everybody should get an education and be able to do well, you say, okay, but just for practical purposes, if we don't want to undermine democracy, we ought to make sure everybody buys into it. Absolutely.

Okay, so now let's talk about the skyboxification. Yeah, this is a bummer to read, and it's so true and so evident. And I am a beneficiary. I'm going to do this afternoon when I go to LAX. let's give Michael Sandel, the greatest public philosopher of our time, credit. He came up with the notion of skyboxification. It's easy enough to understand when I was young and went to Fenway Park, including with Michael Sandel, we'd all go in the same entrance,

we'd eat the same soggy hot dogs, we'd sit in the stands together. Now, even when you go and when I go, we probably get to the VIP entrance, maybe, or you do at least, and maybe we're invited to the skyboxes. and we don't all sit in the same stand. That's a metaphor for so many things in our society. And I got to add, it's a dramatic difference to the degree that now that I've been invited, I mean, I grew up looking at the outside of the red rope, but now on the inside of it, I can tell you it's so dramatically different that there are things that I wouldn't even do otherwise now.

It's so spoiling, and the gap is so big in the experience that people are right to be pissed. I guess right to be pissed is another way of saying resentment. the way I put it. But sometimes it happens to me. You go to the airport and you're in the priority lane or the clear lane and people waiting in line are giving you that look. Like there's a slight resentment. These build up resentments. Probably when I go this afternoon to L.A. I'm going to not say, well, let me give up the TSA preline or whatever it's called. But it happens in so many different ways. It used to be my father and grandfather growing up exactly where I did in New Orleans all went to the public high.

school, right in the neighborhood. Now, even K through 12 education, they're sort of a velvet rope that certain people get better. Yeah, private is huge. Health care, you name it. And it goes back, like many things. And I mention it in the book, this book is not a heavy philosophy book, but there's a paragraph that mentions it from John Locke, which is in that period they had what was called the enclosure laws. And what they did was they had the commons. Everybody got to graze their sheep on the commons, but they decided that certain people could have the right to enclose part of the commons and make it private. That has a really good impact in many ways. You get a lot more productivity if it's private. The yields go up. You have a huge agricultural revolution.

However, if you enclose off, if you fence off, if you velvet rope off, too many things, it has a bad impact. And so whether it's our understanding of our founders' personalities, or of Elon's personality, or of these things, we have to realize it's not all or nothing. There's a certain balance that, yes, we want people to be able to enclose things. We want maybe even to have velvet ropes. But if you do it too much, you get a resentful society and a society in which people cannot rise to their own talents. Maybe interesting or not, but Jefferson weirdly favored Ameritocratic elite. He doesn't come off perfectly in this book.

Both Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson start would become universities. University of Virginia and the Academy for the Education of Youth and Pennsylvania that becomes Penn, University of Pennsylvania. And they have different mission statements. What Jefferson says is the point is we are going to take the best 40, 50 kids, and we are going to groom a new meritocratic elite. and those people are going to become the leaders of society. Franklin, on the other hand, says, no, the university's purpose is to have everybody, whatever their innate talents be,

to have a chance to do the best they can with whatever assets they have, and we want everybody to move up. Well, creating a meritocratic elite, I don't blame Jefferson for all of this, but I blame my generation, which is at a certain point, maybe 50 years ago, we created a meritocracy of credentialed people

who went to the right schools. And whose children, most importantly. In practice, it became hereditary. How is it meritocratic? Yeah, we call it meritocratic because that was what James Cohn and Bryant did when they invent the SAT, and they say that's merit. People say, well, I believe in merit.

What do you mean merit? Exactly. Is the ability at ACE and SAT score pretty useful? But is that true merit? Franklin answers by saying, no, true merit is the ability to better serve your community and your country. That's what we call true merit. And so he was fighting Jefferson on that. So we created, and I mean by we sort of a baby boom generation after World War II,

a credentialed elite who went to the best colleges and got their kids in the, quote, best colleges. SAT, tutors. became the ones who thought that they could understand foreign policy better. And once again, Michael Sandell has a good book. You've got to get them on the show called The Terny of the Meritocracy. Because the Maritocracy got a lot wrong after a while, including Forever Wars and things they got us into. But anyway, there is that notion that we created a new elite.

And that wasn't the best thing to happen. And it really starts happening in the 50s, 60s, 70s, and that elite, it happened in the Clinton years. Whatever you may think of the Clinton years, it was meritocratic. And people, including Hillary Clinton, would say things like, well, you should just go to college, and that way you won't be left behind in society. What made the 65% of the people who don't finish college look down upon, and that elite view of the credentialed should run our society was a bad thing.

Yes. I think that's a big issue we've not. yet figured out how to tackle. In general, I see that as an enormous problem the left has that they are seemingly unwilling to confront. Well, is not necessarily the left? It's sort of the neoliberalism of the 70s, 80s, and 90s, which is you'll be fine if you just go to college and if you don't, it's your fault.

Yes. And then some assumption that you had the same odds of attending college as everyone else. And frankly, that if you went to an Ivy League college, somehow you're. You had more merit. Yes, yes. We have to try to understand, and this is what this book is about too, there has been a backlash of populism on the left and the right and globally. Certain people in the old neoliberal consensus who look down on the populist backlash.

And I'm saying, no, no, no. There's really a lot of reasons people to use your technical term are pissed. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the reason they're pissed is we started losing the common ground. We started losing the American dream. We started losing the notion that we should be a land of opportunity. And that's why if we're going to heal this great divide, I just hope for our 250th.

You don't have to read my book. Just read the sentence. We hold these words. And everybody should understand this sentence and say, okay, I get it. Now let's live by it. Yeah, talk about going forward. That's the last thing I wanted to talk about. Franklin said, yes, we must indeed all hang together,

or most assuredly we shall all hang separately. How can we all hang together? I think Franklin is the great guidepost because he is a great entrepreneur. He believes, like you do in many, and yes, you can succeed with private property. You can make things. He gets to Philadelphia because he's running away from being an indentured to his brother. He's got three coins in his pocket. It's the most wonderful scene.

He tips the boatman, buys the three puffy rolls, gives one away. He says, when you're really poor, you're always more generous because you want people not to think you're poor. He's always with the street coins being generous. And he comes in to Philadelphia, and it becomes a land of opportunity for him, Market Street. And he becomes from that penniless, almost not penniless, three pennies, kid to, in some ways, one of the wealthiest people in America. Hard to count, landowning and slave ownership and all that. But for somebody who creates printing shops and franchises them up and down the coast, and it becomes a publisher, he becomes enormously successful. And so that's the point of Franklin, but then he creates a group in his community and says,

okay, how are we going to serve the common ground? And that's when he forms with his leather apron club, he calls it, because there's people who go to their shops each morning, put on their leather apron, and it's not the elite, it's shopkeepers. He says, we the middling people, shopkeepers, artisans, those of us who go to work every day, We not only have the opportunity to succeed, we have to figure out what should we put in common so we become a land of opportunity. So I say, if we're going forward, try to be like Franklin, and I talk about it at the end of the book, which is he starts a street sweeping corps, a police corps, a volunteer fire department, a hospital, and of course the library, an insurance fund for widows and orphans where everybody chips in almost like you'd have social security today. He said, that's good for everybody, if we put these in the commons.

But he also has a revolving loan fund for entrepreneurs who want to start businesses. That's still today. In Philadelphia and Boston, those revolving loan funds that he started are still helping people. And he's Philadelphia, start little businesses. He is a believer in capitalism, believer in enterprise, but also in making sure everybody has an opportunity. And then he does many other things, not just these loan funds, but during his life, lifetime, he donates to the building fund of each and every church built in Philadelphia. And then at one point, they're building a new hall, which is still next to Independence Hall,

still called the New Hall. He writes a fundraising document and says, even if the mufftie of Constantinople were to send somebody here to preach Muhammadism to us, we should offer a pulpit and we should listen, for we might learn something. And then on his deathbed, he's the largest individual contributor. to the congregation Mikva Israel, the first synagogue built in Philadelphia. So when he dies,

instead of his minister accompanying his casket to the grave, all 35 ministers, preachers, and priests link arms with the rabbi of the Jews in Philadelphia and march with him to the grave. Do you say 22,000? Is that the number in the book? That's a number of people who were at the funeral procession. And then it's led by the clergy of all things.

They're witnessing this. And that's the type of nature. They were trying to create 250 years ago. That's what they were fighting for, 250 years ago. And that's what we're still fighting for today. And the sentence can still guide us. You know, so many people have hard-ons for the founding fathers. You know, these young dudes who I don't know if they've read any of the stuff.

Right. I want them to know this. Like, if you want to idolize these guys, please idolize the right stuff about these guys. Yeah. That's incredible. And you have to realize when people read my biographies, they might say, oh, I'm just like Elon. You know, when people do something that socks, I say, wait a minute, have you ever sent a rocket into orbit?

You're not, you're 5,000 satellites. My books are not how-to manuals. They are real people. So learn from the good, learn from the bad, learn the cautionary parts. But in this case, the greatest sentence ever written, there were deep flaws when they said, all men are created equal, but they did set us on the right mission. Yeah, absolutely. You're right.

The greatest sentence ever written, I am very much encouraged you. It's very short. I was going to say, if you have a short attention, this is the Isaacson book for you to take on. Walter, it's so great to have you in person. Such a difference. I really, really enjoy getting to sit down with you face to face. And I love this. I'm glad you did this.

This is really important. And I needed to hear several parts. I think we all should, you say, how can we do going forward? The two of you have a great platform to do it, but everybody listening has a great platform. Every day, wake up and say at least for our 200. 50th birthday, I'm going to try to think, what can I do that helps bring us together and unite us versus being part of the things that polarizes. We're on the same mission.

What a delight. I can't wait to have you back when you write your next book. Can't wait to be back. All right. We hope you enjoyed this episode. Unfortunately, they made some mistakes. Oh, should we tell everyone our incredible discovery last night flying back from Nashville? Yeah.

As we were checking into our flight. Yeah. That if Delta grows up and starts a company, it's like Delta company. But then she abbreviates it to Delta Co. Of course. Delta Co is Del Taco. Yeah. Oh, I can't wait for her to start.

I wonder if Del Taco will come after her for infringement. And she'll go, I've had this name. This has been my name my whole life. I counter Sue. They can't come after her because it's Delta Co. It's just pronounced Del Taco. Yeah. I mean, this is great.

She has to start one now. Like, she has no other option. I actually should look into incorporating her immediately. You really should. Sometimes you just get a little blessing lands in your lap, and that's what it felt like last night. I agree. Do you want to talk about the fact that I'm platinum?

That was embarrassing. That was pretty embarrassing. So, yes, we flew back last night because we had a really fun interview that we did in Nashville. And then we came back home, you, me, and the kids, Kristen, had come home earlier. Yeah. And we're in line ready to, you know, check our bags. And somehow we got on the subject.

Oh, I think Lincoln asked, are you platinum? She said, what are you or something? Like, what rank are you? Yeah, which I on earth would she have brought that up. I don't even know she knows about the frequent flyer rungs on the ladder. Well, now she does. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think they just overheard something.

They asked me, and I said, well, I'm platinum. But it was a sim because I had written down already that I wanted to talk to you about this. Because when I was flying out on my way to Nashville, there was a man in front of me, a young man, a young fit man. Uh-huh. Who. You left out the fit part. I did. And even the young.

I did. How young? 18? No, no, no. Like my age Oh Jesus Okay So middle aged

Oh How dare you Um No because he He was young to Have when the lady checked him in And say

Thank you for being a diamond member or whatever Yeah what are they even saying I forget Diamond Club Yeah And I overheard it And I was like

Diamond whoa But I'm planning I'm like That's the highest So, like, maybe diamonds right below it. But I don't remember them ever saying diamond to me. A lot was going out there by end. So then, you know, I checked in, thank you for being a platinum flyer, member, whatever.

And then I went and had to look it up, diamonds that above platinum. Did you do you remember how many miles you have to fly to earn that status? Like over 50 million. Yeah. Rob, do you want to look? Yeah. Rob, do you know how to look? Lifetime is three million actual miles.

Lifetime, okay. You need to spend $28,000 in medallion qualification dollars each year. MQD. MQD. MQD. Not just miles flown. It's like 11 per dollar. Okay.

I know nothing. Well, I looked it up and I was like, you know what? This guy, and then it got me so curious. I was like, who's this guy? Like, he flies so much and he's so young. Yeah. And he's so fit. Yeah.

But also, so the youth was interesting because it's like, oh, he, he flies a lot. It's not like he's like 80, then Diamond might make sense. Right. You know, it's like accumulation. Yeah. So this was very curious. Do you know I have a friend who, and maybe I've already told you this story, but he had, it must have been diamond status or something, right?

Elusive. And when you have that one. You get the free upgrade like every time. Right. You can buy a coach ticket if you're diamond. You will get upgraded to first class almost all the time. He had this crazy status and he liked to travel and he wasn't rich. Yeah.

And his weird thing was, and I remember one time it was like the end of the year was approaching and he needed another 15,000 miles. And he went online and he found, like, just started searching for like the longest trip possible for the cheapest. Uh-huh. I want to say on, like, December 30th, he flew to Malaysia and then just fucking flew back. No. That's where it's getting out of hands. So that he could keep his diamond status. Oh, but see, I get it.

I get you want you want it. You don't want to lose it. It's the lost bias or whatever they call it. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. You have a little bit of glitter, I see. You know, I put on that birthday hat at Bricktop. And I still have glitter in all these places.

places. Yeah, that thing got everywhere somehow. I have washed my face, rest of sure. I don't know. It's embedded or maybe I have consumed some and they're now getting expressed out of the pores. I think that's fun. Maybe all year there's just going to be glitter popping out. So back to line, we discover your platinum and we discover I'm gold. Well, I tell you, oh, that's weird. I just got an email. And I'm terrible at logging, putting in my when I fly. And I got a whole reason why, you know it's so boring, but it's like every time I've ever tried to use those miles, it's a fucking joke. Every time it's a blackout, every, it ends up when I've used it, it ends up being like 120,000 miles to get a coach seat or something. And I'm like, this thing's a fucking wrecking. I haven't had that. No, a lot of people have great luck with it.

And I concede to that. All to say, I go up to the counter first with the girls check in. And the woman behind the counter at some point says, like, thank you for your gold status. And then you start laughing immediately kind of behind. And then I, like, look at you. And then obviously she clocks this whole thing somehow. And so then I step away. I've checked in the bags. And now you step up and we're like, whatever, eight feet away from you.

And when she checks you and she's like, oh, my, we are so delighted to have your platinum status. She, like, scream platinum status. It was really funny. She hit platinum status like three times. She was a party. She was. It was really fun, and it was very funny. And then...

The flight? Yeah, about the far. Oh, well, yeah, you had a lot of farts and pee that you kept in. The gal next to me was asleep. Yeah. And, boy, she looked like she was really peacefully sleeping. I could not bring myself to wake her up to get out. Yeah.

And a couple things happened. One, I had to pee really bad. Yeah. Two, I had to fart so bad. I'm just really surprised you didn't do it. I couldn't do it because I was like, if this... a woman wakes up because she smells something.

I couldn't do it and I had a bad hunch it was going to be aromatic. Right. So I held it and it was so uncomfortable. And then additionally, mid-flight, Delta comes up to my seat and she goes,

will you get my bag down, daddy? And I go, I can't because she's sleeping. I can't step over, blah, blah, blah. And she looked like kind of frustrated to the point where I felt really bad. Yeah. So she left, she went back to her seat

and I was thinking, I was like, God, if you're a little, little person and you just can't reach your bag, how powerless that is. But you have a daddy and so you ask him and he says, no, I was starting feeling really kind of quite bad about it. To the degree that when we landed, I wanted, I said to her, hey, if I were you and I were little and I couldn't reach my bag and I'd be very frustrated and I'm really, really sorry, but I just really didn't want to make. And then she hit us with, she had had an enormous calamity in back. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, she had. She had poured an orange juice all over her

shirt all over her pants through her underwear so this poor girl when she wanted her luggage she was soaking what with apple juice and sticky and then the best part is she was explaining to us how she dealt with it which again i'm kind of glad i didn't get her bag because she just had to deal with it yeah true and she i think she told us she was pulling her pants down yeah but no one could see but no one could see so they could air out i just imagine like walking by in uh one of the rows and there's just this little kid with her pants down yeah just watching their iPad with her pants down. Watching not 10 things I hate about you.

Yeah. But, okay, so there was a guy next to me on the flight. And, um. Oh, I peeped him. Oh, you did. Yeah. I mean, I saw that there was, you were sitting there. Yeah, staying next to this man.

And in the middle of the flight. Sorry. Okay. I did receive a text message at one point before we took off. And I looked. And it was a text message for my friend Monica, who was several rows behind me. And she just said, I heard you cough. I am the worst, man.

I'm just, I am the worst. It's distinct, your cough. But I just know your cough. Everyone, no one else, everyone just hears people coughing. I just really can't figure out if it's a tick or I have a condition because I have a lot of stuff. It's not like I'm just dry coughing. God, this is disgusting. I'm so happy you're saying this out loud.

Because I didn't feel like I could ever say this. to you. I think you've already said this to me. I have. Yeah, about the nose blowing. I just think you have some tits. I do. Yeah. I have tics. We all have things. But like, I think you have, um, I notice it in editing. That's when I really notice it where I'm like, he's not, he, it's like, it's a tick that you're coughing and like, um, clearing and stuff and like nose blowing and stuff. Because, because, no, I don't, it's like anthropologically interesting.

Uh-huh. It's not annoying. It's fine. But is it chicken or the egg? I think I have, like, some issues. I had asthma. Yeah. I don't think it's like out of nowhere.

Right. It's entirely psychosomatic. It's not. But it's 50-50. It's 80. That might be 80-20. I mean, in here, sometimes I feel like it happens. Oh, you're really scared to say this.

I can tell me the crook-of-fif. If you're, like, a little, if you get a little, like, agitated or something, I think, I think, like, something happened. Oh, even he's saying that. I was like, like, I know that face. I just felt like, I was like, oh, yeah, it's really funny. We all, we have so many. I just want to thank everyone in my life. Like, clearly everyone in my life is very tolerant of the amount of noises I'm making.

It's fine. Who cares? Anyway, so there was a guy next to me. Yeah. And, and he was young. Yeah. And what did you say fit? Yeah.

Yeah. No, he was like, he seemed a little younger than me. So he was prime. Um, and he was reading his book and stuff. He was, it seemed like he was solo. Right? Yeah. Some point in the flight, like, look over and he's talking to the girl, a young woman, um, next to him on, but I was at him.

Yes. I noticed that too. Okay. Yeah, yeah. He was reading his book and he was just like being. I, he wasn't talking to her until all of a sudden he was into me in the middle of the flight. Like, I look over and he's just like talking, you know, and I kind of am looking and I'm trying to listen a little bit, but I have the headphones in. Yeah, you want to listen a little bit. Yeah. So I couldn't really hear, but it seemed to me they were meeting. Oh, me cute. And I was. I was like, oh my God. I'm, I'm, I'm, oh, me cute is. happening and at then this is funny yeah then I was like you got jealous yeah I did yeah I was like what the I'm sitting right here my seat hey hello I'm sitting right here diamond status platinum what are you platinum I'm sitting right here and he he hates me so

much I'm so gross he has to go across the aisle he'd rather cross the aisle exactly no but hold on Now, you got to, you can't build this argument because I was already witnessing it before you ever sat down. I know, but listen. Yeah, okay. The trolley had left the station. So, so they're falling in, like, you know, they're flirting. So they're chit chatting and I was like, oh, my God, a meat cute. And I was like, oh, man, I feel conflicted about this because I love me cute.

So I'm like, I'm happy this is happening for them, but also like, I'm right here. Like, this is so rude. It's so rude. So. So, and then... Well, it could have turned into a Challenger situation. Oh, shit. I know.

And I looked for the movie on the plane. It wasn't playing. That's your safest. So, then I would have really got his attention. Yeah. And when you nudged him and you pointed during the three-way. And then you nudged him and said, nudge her. Hey, you see what's happening here?

Does this interest you, this concept of three people getting together intimately? Okay. Okay. So then at one point, and I am on observant, and I am kind of closing my eyes a lot in the flight. So this is part of it, I guess. So then at one point, I look over and I'm like, oh, he has a wine. He hadn't had a wine or a drink or anything. But his date was going great. Exactly. I was like, oh, my God, he has a wine now. Like, they're like literally on a date. But then I look over and I was like, oh, she's not there anymore. Okay. Then I was like, oh, my God. God. She went to the bathroom. She asked him to hold her wine. I was like, what a move. Hold on a second. Well, that's an interesting conclusion. Why, why isn't it his wine? I know. Because you think you would have saw him order it? I was like, I would have known that.

I got you. You look over and the wine had just materialized. I got you. That's more. It had materialized. It was a white wine. I was like, I know her. She was like, do you mind? holding my wine like she didn't want to leave it out in the open like with this other stranger like the counterpart to me think how that guy felt i know i felt horrible for him what if you two would have caught eyes and rolled your eyes we got to be cute that would be fun but what would be more fun is if you guys just caught you guys were both watching them and then you got caught eyes with each other and you both rolled your eyes like these two losers because you were hurt yeah exactly these two assholes what the fuck

for more armchair expert, if you dare. So I was like, I put it together. I was like, oh my God, what a move. Can you rewind? But it's also a scary move because she doesn't know him. Like, he could put something in there. Yeah. He should have asked me if she was being smart.

But anyway. And then I do see her come back. And she, you know, she's smiling at him. And then she sits down and I am I'm watching at this point I'm watching them my show my TV show and he gives her the wine you were right I was right oh wow thank you then I really in my head was like they are just mean like the way she said thank you did not feel like if you held my wine right right right and I was like oh my god it's for sure meet cute how do you No, they weren't together. Then. Oh. I forgot.

We're in a Seinfeld episode. I forgot. Stop cutting to the end. Stop fast-boarding. So then. I mean, you know, stewing. Wow, you had a lot going on back there. I did.

And I was like, God, I, you know, I can't get a stylist. No one wants to meet you with me. And then there was a lot. like a second of turbulence, like not very long. Yeah, I don't even remember it. Exactly. And, you know, I'm kind of like just closed my eyes and then I look over. They're holding hands.

Monica, they were already together. Nope. They're holding hands across the aisle. I was like, oh, my, they've gone from strangers to in love. No, there's no way. They just went on the flight and they were holding hands during the turbulence. This went from zero to 100 so fast. And then I did have to think.

Wait, are they? Did they come together? But how? Because like, he was just reading his book. He wasn't talking to her pre-flight at all. I don't know. And it's still unclear. But I do think they went home together. Yeah, because they came together. No, because they fell in love. It was an eventful flight. It was. A lot happens. We got home very late. We did. Very, very late. We really did. But we had so much fun in Nashville. Yes, we did. Yes. We had a very fun birthday party. Yeah, it was your birthday. We went to your favorite restaurant. It was so good.

It was so delicious. And I want to give a shout out to my neighbor, Nate. Okay. I got so fucking lucky with our neighbors in Nashville. Yeah. One of them is Nate, my neighbor, who were the same age. Yeah. I kind of like that.

That's fun, yeah. It is. I really like it. But he has grandkids. Oh, wow. Because he started real early. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

In some ways we're living different lives because he already has grandkids. But I just, I guess if I see a guy my age that's like crazy active with his grandkids, he's so active with his grandkids. I just immediately go like, that's a fucking guy right there. Yeah. That's a stand-up dude. Yeah. And my experience having neighbors in Michigan, way different than my experience is having neighbors in L.A. In general, I don't know people that are friends with their neighbor.

I don't have a single friend in L.A. and I have 35. Right. They do not hang out with their neighbors. That's true. I'm friendly to my neighbors. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But when I go back to Aaron's house in Michigan, there's no fences in the backyards. And when it's summertime, it's like everyone's grilling, everyone's talking, people are walking back and forth in the yards.

You know, it's a community. Here we're just very anonymous. You know, there's just so many of us and we're very anonymous. And so whatever, it's just been 30 years since I had that kind of neighborly feeling. And I really love it. Yeah, it's nice. It's special. It feels like protective.

Like I got your back. I'm watching out for, hey, I notice this thing at your house and I, you know. Yeah. That is really nice. Yeah. Actually, yeah, that's funny. I noticed that when I was in, when I was home in Georgia, I was at my friend's house, Christina, kids were coming over.

Yeah. And I was like, that's so cute. And I did have that growing up also in Georgia and in Tennessee. Yeah. We would just like go to each other's houses. This in general, I do, I do cherish that whole neighborhood vibe with a bunch of little kids. It is really nice. I agree.

I think we need to do one last thing. Okay. And it's a New Year's resolution update because it's pretty comical. Okay. Which is if people remember, my resolutions were sprints. Yes. And not being affected by people's emotions. Yeah.

And so January 2nd on my birthday. Yes. And this part I feel a little guilty about, but I didn't ask anyone to do it. But I think people did sprints because it was my birthday. Sure, they did. Yeah. So it turns out like six of us. Not me.

Not you. You knew better. And mind you, we made a ton of jokes about don't get hurt. Also, I laid out this whole strategy. Like, anytime I get back into sprints, I like to do like 70% the first time, then 80 and I build my, maybe my fifth time doing sprints on full out. Yeah. There were six of us. Yeah. And my fun, I caught, my competitiveness took over. And Eric was like, I could hear Eric behind me. So I was like turning on the turbo jets. And the goal was to do six 30 second sprints, which, Again. Too long. Not to bore anyone. When I've done the sprints in the past, it's generally like 40-yard dash. Yeah. A 30-second sprint's like 200 meters. I said this on the last.

I was like, that's too long. It's too long. Anyways, on the fourth one, we're walking back, and I'm like, ooh, my calf feels dicey. But I can get through two more sprints. And then on that same walk back, Eric was like, I'm out, just tore something in my bitching. And I'm like, I'm still in, and I got a third of the way through my fifth sprint. I was like, oh, my God, I got to stop. I think I might be tearing something.

Yeah, I'm glad you stopped. All to say, the sprinting resolution is proving to be more challenging. We're hoping that was Friday. I'm hoping by this Friday, my cat feels good enough to resume. You're going to do it again. Got to. Oh, okay. But it was very comedic to wake up the following morning.

And Eric and I can't walk. We're both, like, hobbling around the house. Yeah, I know. Welcome to 50s. 50s, no. That I said, I said, no one above 35 should be doing this is hard on the body. Really too hard. Anyway, yeah, so that's over.

Also, I want to give an update to, I do have a stylist now. Yay. So, and I'm really, really excited about her, and she seems awesome. And so we're going to, we're going to give it a world. All right. Well, let's do some facts. Yes, ma'am. Okay, so Walter, I got my dad this book for Christmas, and he read it all, read the whole thing.

In an hour? It's a small book, but, yeah, he blew through it. And he loved it. He loved it. Yeah. Well, like, when he reads a book like that, will he then want to talk about some of the things he learned in or he just wants to say he liked it? He does want to talk about it, but I had to go to my room because I was tired. So he did want to talk about it

Well, no, he just said, oh, I read one of the books And you go, okay, I'm going to bed Wake me up when you don't want to talk about that book No, he just was like, yeah, it was really interesting And I mean, he said a few things about it Yeah But they were watching a movie, I don't know Like, anyway, now he's reading Sapiens

I bought him that too He had not ever read it He doesn't read a lot Not a big reader He's busy But now that he's fake retired exactly that was sort of it he was like you know i want to we had a riot talking about his retirement last night yeah yeah my sweet dad i was saying because your dad is retiring but he's also coming back

as a consultant yeah a contract or whatever and i was saying i would be a little mad if i was one of his co-workers and we threw a big retirement party on friday everyone got hammered and they had a hangover and then you got to work on money and saw a choke sitting at his desk drinking coffee you'd be like what that's not how this works i know i know luckily no one threw him a party well exactly does he sad about that you he doesn't care about anything he doesn't care about anything i love how you like we both agree your dad's one of the smartest people on the planet but then you also make room for him being the one of the dumbest people on the planet well not dumb not dumb just unaware just not like what he's not interested in he's not interested in right at

all. Like he doesn't care about a lot of things. Oh, you know, it's fun. You just don't get to see your parents in other environments often than them being your parent. You don't get to see them with their other identities. Exactly. But one of my dad's coworkers came over to pick something up. And she's a friend of my dad's too. And they worked together for long time, but now she's in another department or something. But anyway, she was chatting with. with us and like it was so fun to see like him and with her talking about their work and their history and like you know my the her his friend was like I'm glad I'm not in that department anymore it would be too sad to know you were retiring yeah and like also she loved

working with your dad yeah and then even talking about like how my dad is and I mean I shouldn't be surprised by this, but, like, the best one there. Yeah, no joke. Yeah, no doubt. Like, yeah. Oh, your damsel loved hearing that. I know. Yeah.

And, um, and I mean, it was so proud of him. Yeah. Yeah. You got a very good one. I know. There's a lot of them out there and you got a very good one. I got a really good pair. I have to say, I even, so I was getting my nails done this morning and I was talking to the nail

aesthetician and um yeah we got on the subject of my parents and we because i was talking about moving into the house and and she was like wow that's such a big deal and i was like yeah it is exciting and she was asking about like why i came and i was like oh for acting and commercials whatever and i was talking about my first commercial my first big commercial the herbal essence commercial and i forgot had some details, but I was telling the story and I was remembering that, you know, I had like, it was like three callbacks for that commercial. My agent called me and was like, can you be here in like two hours? Can you come in like two hours or doing another callback? It's like three people. It's down to three people. You and two other people. And my parents were in town. I was with them.

We were in Santa Barbara. Oh, we're their favorite place. Yes. India. And I said, I'm in Santa Barbara with my parents, like, no, I can't. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then, you know, my dad was like, what's going on? And I was like, well, there's a callback. And, you know, I can't. He was like, we're going right now. And I was like, what?

I was like, I don't think, well, and he was like, we're going. Like, I, you didn't come out here to do this, to quit on the 99th yard line. To hang out in Santa Barbara. Like, so he drove us back immediately. And then, you know, I booked it. And that was my first big commercial, and they were there. And they were there for my booking. And my dad said he sat on that trip, because, you know, obviously we had been driving around L.A.

and looking at houses and all these things. And he said, you're going to have one of those houses one day. And I'm about to move into it. It's so. And then I was telling her this. And I was like, she was like, that's, she was like, what a good dad. And I was like, he is. Like, they are.

And I really do not. It's you're right as the child I don't think about those specificities I know and I know like how good I have it but those things it's like yeah

they're just really good ones and I'm very very very lucky but yes but they drive me nuts sure they're family but that's because they're family but I love them very much so anyway

well I'm emotional know. I understand. I understand. They're nice people. Well, I have a birthday present for you. You do? Yeah. Oh, my God. Oh, my goodness. This is fun. This is a unconventional-sized box. I know. Like, generally, when you get me something, it's a clothing item, and it's in a bigger box. Okay. Do, do, do, do, do, do, do. What's a shirt? It is a clothing item in a time. Tiny Bob. Oh, my God. No way!

A Kmart shirt. It's a Kmart shirt, but it's also a Dare shirt. Oh, my God. Kids Against Drugs. Lame. I know. I thought it was a double whammy for you. Yeah, the bumper says Kmart kids race against drugs.

There's a lot going on here. Why are they Kmart kids? Exactly. How does one race drugs? Correct. How do you raise it? You can race on drugs. Yeah. It was a race. It was a race where they were against drugs.

Do you know how old you were when the shirt was made? No. You were 11 years old. Oh, wow. You were just about to start racing against drugs. Oh, I had been racing. I had been racing since I was five against drugs. And in 98, I was 23.

I was on drugs. Oh, yeah. The kids weren't really doing it for you, though, you know. They were racing me, but they couldn't keep up. No, they couldn't. Oh, my God, this is great. I just, it's a Kmart shirt. You had to have it.

Yes, and I love it. I was just telling you that I watched a YouTube video on the history. It wasn't like the history of Kmart. It was just this graph that changed. And it gave you the amount of Kmart's in different states, starting on, I think, 63 or 8. Yeah. And when it occurred to me, I had no idea. And I'm bummed about it.

Yeah. It started in Michigan. I know. That's wild. And there was so many more in Michigan all the way up until the 80s. Yeah. We were like blowing the rest of the country away. Eventually it got passed by maybe California or a couple, but it stayed really high.

I was like, oh, yeah, I was, um, my opinion of Kmart skewed by being born in Michigan. It's in your blood. I thought it was like as ubiquitous as Walmart. Right. We had a lot of them in Georgia, but maybe later. Yeah, I think later. Yeah. And, um, and in Michigan, they were more numerous than Walmart.

Wow, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's in your history and your lineage. But you told me that story, but I had already had your shirt already. I was so excited. Yeah. Okay, so Walter. So he mentioned a room where people gather that as a couch on the outside and cushions in the middle, it kind of sounds like a riddle, you know? It does. But I looked it up. It says the room design you're describing is commonly known as a conversation pit or a sunken seating area. I want one of those so bad. You do? Yes, they're kind of making a comeback I saw in some architectural magazine. Oh, wow. But as a kid, those were big in the 70s.

Oh. And so when I was a kid, they kind of had gone out of vogue, but you could still bump into them. Yeah. And I was like, I want a sunken in the living room so bad. Oh, yeah, I don't really know about them. Yeah, like, just imagine the floor levels this and then it drops down another two and a half feet so that the couch hole area square is like, so your shoulders are like just above the floor line. Interesting. Oh, I love it.

Okay, well, that's what he's talking about. It was on the back of TV guide a lot. Oh, is Bill Gates's... That's tricky. Mom named Mary. Yes. Mary Maxwell Gates. Mary Maxwell.

I like that, Maxwell. Did you have Max and Irma's down there in Georgia? Yes, we did. Yeah. Yes, we did have Max and Irma's. We were alive at the bullseye of the franchise restaurant. I know. Like, there was no such thing as a Chili's in my youth.

And then around my teenage years, all of a sudden, and it was the most exciting thing in the world. Listen, I was by a Chili's last week. And I asked my mom, I was like, have you guys been to Chili's later? She was like, we went last week. Oh, great. And I was like, I want to go. It's fucking delicious.

I know. I loved it. Yeah. They used to have chicken tacos, but they took them off the menu. They did? Yeah. Oh, no. I know.

Yeah, not caloric enough. Yeah, I guess not. Okay. Well, so that is all of the facts. That concludes the fact portion of the program. Yeah, he's too smart. What are we going to do? Thank you for my Kmart shirt, Monica.

You're welcome. Thank you so much. It was fun to open up a box. It was a trick because it was a big shirt and a small box. Yeah. I like that. That's a metaphor. Yeah.

Big things come in very small packages. Yeah. We got there. All right. Love you. Love you. Follow Armchair Expert on the Wondry app, Amazon music, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to every episode of Armchair Expert early and ad free right now by joining Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts.

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