Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Differ We Must with Steve Inskeep

Episode Date: October 2, 2023

On today’s episode, Sharon welcomes NPR’s Steve Inskeep, who has written a number of books about history including his newest release, Differ We Must: How Lincoln Succeeded in a Divided America. In a time when it’s common to cancel or cut ties with those we disagree with, what can we learn from Abraham Lincoln about how to disagree fundamentally, while maintaining the relationship? Even when at odds with a dear friend over the issue of slavery,  Lincoln wrote, “If for this you and I must differ, differ we must.” Does Democracy require us to agree to disagree? How can this be applied to the very divided America we see today, to hold the country together? Special thanks to our guest, Steve Inskeep, for joining us today. Host/Executive Producer: Sharon McMahon Guest: Steve Inskeep Audio Producer: Jenny Snyder Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, friends. Welcome. Delighted to have you with me today. I am joined by NPR's Steve Inskeep. If you have been an NPR listener for any number of years, you will undoubtedly recognize his voice. But what you may not know is that Steve Inskeep is also an author. He's written a number of books about history, and he has a new one out about Abraham Lincoln called Differ, We Must. And there is so much to learn about America today from this story. So let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. I am very excited to be talking today to Stephen's Keep. Such a huge fan.

Thank you so much for being here. Oh, I'm delighted to do it. I loved your new book, Differ, We Must. And there is just so much to talk about because this is a book that I feel like we can learn so much from in the context of modern history, modern politics. But it's also a book about Abraham Lincoln, who Americans love. Americans are very enamored with Lincoln, are they not?

Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I grew up admiring Lincoln. And I grew up in Indiana, which is the state where he spent the bulk of his youth. So you learn about Lincoln a lot when you're a kid in Indiana. Yeah, totally. What made you think, Steve, you know what the world needs is another book about Abraham Lincoln? Because there's been a few out there. A few people have done it. There's been a few. I hesitated to take up the topic for that same reason, but I had written two other books on 19th century history and Lincoln kept coming up as a minor character. And he was somebody also that I loved and that I've had books of his speeches

around my house forever. And I finally got a thought of how to approach his life that I felt would be in some way different and distinctive and speak to our time. I love that. And I would love it if you could tell us a little bit about where the title comes from, because I think the title, it's a beautiful title. I know how challenging it is to title a book well. It's not always an easy task, but the title is really meaningful. So tell us the story behind How Differ We Must came to be. It is a phrase written by Lincoln himself. He wrote it in a letter to his best friend, the best friend of his life, a Kentuckian named Joshua Speed. Joshua Speed came from a slave

holding family, a slave owning family. They ran a large hemp farm in Kentucky. And that is the world and the environment in which Joshua Speed grew up. He later moved to Illinois, which was a free state in the years before the Civil War when some states practiced slavery and some states were so-called free states. And he disagreed with slavery in the abstract, but he had a different opinion than Lincoln about how to approach it. And Lincoln, very frankly, told his best friend he was wrong about slavery. But he said, if in this way we must differ, differ we must. And he didn't abandon that guy from the slaveholding family. He held on to him as a friend. In fact, he ended that letter saying, your friend forever. And I don't think that makes Joshua Speed any more right. He was

wrong. But that is a different way than many of us would think we're supposed to approach people we believe are wrong today. You're so right, because today it seems as though we're often judged almost solely by the company we keep. And if we're friends with a problematic person who has terrible beliefs, like owning other humans is acceptable, you keeping company with that person would be a mark on your own character. Yes, exactly. Steve is friends with him. Yeah, yeah.

We're kind of judging each other in a puritanical way. And I understand it. And particularly in this example, we have to talk carefully about it because it's slavery. I mean, slavery is really bad. There's no redeeming quality slavery. But the reality was that Lincoln lived in a democracy where white men at least, and a few black men, a few people of

other races, had the vote. And they had the vote whether they were right or whether they were wrong. And Lincoln understood that he needed the support of people who were wrong by his lights about most things if he could find a few things that they agreed on. And in the end, he got some value out of his best friend, Joshua Speed, who was important to him and loyal to the Union when the Civil War broke out. I wonder how this puritanical view of friendship has developed over the last number of years, because it didn't seem to be true in Lincoln's era, where he literally wrote to somebody who believed very differently than him and said, differ we must, your friend forever. Do you have a sense of where these puritanical beliefs came from? Well, I want to note that I think that there was some of that in Lincoln's time.

There was some of that specifically on the issue of slavery. There were people who were considered radical abolitionists who said, I want nothing to do with this terrible institution. And in fact, the Constitution is corrupted by slavery. America is corrupted by slavery america is corrupted by slavery and they tended to live in new england these radical abolitionists and they would say let's break up the country we don't even want to be in the same union with these slaveholders now again their repugnance towards slavery is something i think we can all share their attitude it's

something we can all share but the question is is, what makes sense? What works as a political strategy? Now, you asked where did it come from? I mean, of course, there's the actual original Purit can think of, it used to be that if your, and this was especially true, I think of women, if your neighbor was seen in some way as immoral, you were supposed to ostracize them. You were supposed to cut your ties with them. And that was for their own good almost. And it was definitely for the defense of the community that you should have nothing to do with someone who was seen as immoral. And so that kind of attitude has always been around. It existed then. It definitely exists in a very big way now. But there is this other attitude, which I think is more challenging and is more pragmatic and is more small d democratic. And the idea is you don't give up your beliefs.

You don't compromise your beliefs about fundamental right and wrong. But you do find alliances where you can because it's democracy and you have to. You have to have a majority for the right side or as much of the right side as you can get away with. Otherwise, you lose. You mentioned that in the book, too, that Lincoln at his core was a politician, and that we have a tendency to deify Lincoln and refer to him as a statesman and a lawyer and all of these other things in an effort to not saddle him with this moniker that we often view with such a negative connotation, like he's not

a politician. Politicians are used car salesmen. That's how we think of politicians. But you really make the case that Lincoln was a consummate politician. And I would love to hear you explain that. He was thinking a lot, I mean, all the time about what to say and also about what not to say, that. He was thinking a lot, I mean, all the time about what to say and also about what not to say, which was a cool thing to realize about him as I studied his writing more and more. He had a lot of silences. We know him for his words. We admire him for his words, some of the most eloquent speeches and letters in American politics ever written. But he would only say what he thought it was effective to say. And he would fall silent on a lot of things. He would fall silent on a lot of things about slavery, honestly, and just try to

focus on the basic fact that it was wrong, that the system was wrong, that it was unjust to the people in it, and that it wasn't good for anybody else either, and that it should end someday, even if he didn't know how. I love that each of the chapters of the book really deals with his interactions with another person. You really outline all of the ways in which these differing beliefs were explored based on his interactions with other people. And some people, even in his own lifetime, other people. And some people, even in his own lifetime, like Frederick Douglass, and people even still today, criticize him for his inaction on slavery, that it took him too long, that he didn't, you know, like he only got involved once he had really, really, really thought about it, and that he didn't condemn it heartily enough. He was kind of too soft on the topic.

Yeah, he was criticized in his time, and I think it's okay to criticize him. He deserved the criticism. He said things like, I'm not sure that the great mass of white people will accept millions of free black people among them, so maybe there should be colonization, they should be moved somewhere else. Now, that was a live idea at the time. There were some black people who were interested in it, there were some black people even who actively did it, but it derives from this fundamentally racist place of thinking that people are so different that they can't live together, or that the great mass of white people will never accept it, so we shouldn't even try it. It's okay to criticize him for those things, and Frederick Douglass did. And Douglass criticized him in the Civil War when he was

president for being so slow to take the obvious to Douglass step of decreeing freedom for the rebel slaves. Slavery was what the war was about, and enslaved labor was supporting the rebellion. So of course you needed to destroy the enslaved labor, or rather destroy the power of it, take away the power of the enslaved labor, in order to win the rebellion. Totally cool to criticize Lincoln for those things. But I would argue that Lincoln had a larger strategic purpose in mind. He wanted to keep the Union together. He wanted to keep allies for the Union that even included people who owned slaves in the early part of the war. And it was vital to do that and led ultimately in part to the victory and to the destruction

of slavery. But that had to be done in the right way and at the right time. And that was Lincoln's political struggle for which, yeah, he was criticized constantly on all sides for being weak and vacillating and deceptive and everything else. You mentioned even how people at the time who were abolitionists, like William Lloyd Garrison, that they were considered extremists of like, that, come on now, those are political extremists. And of course, they hold views today that were like, of course we should not, we should

abolish slavery. Of course we should. But they were not viewed as moderate mainstream views at the time. No, no. And that was less about their beliefs than about the way that they wanted to go about them. I don't know that Lincoln was all that different from William Lloyd Garrison in his dislike of slavery. They both said it was wrong, that it was unjust, that it should end. And the question was how. And Garrison's view, what made him seem an extremist to many people was not just that he opposed slavery, although that was enough for some

people to label you an extremist, but also that he wanted to burn copies of the Constitution, that he thought the whole country was unjust because of this, that he should not even vote, that he should not take part in the political system because he wanted to remain pure. He wanted to remain clear of it and have no participation in it. And Lincoln had a different view. In between them somewhere is Frederick Douglass, who is really one of the most fascinating figures of the whole period, and surely Lincoln's only competition for the greatest American of that century. And some people would say Douglass is ahead in that competition if it's a competition. Douglass started out as an acolyte of Garrison, also saying you should not vote, you should not participate in politics, there should be no union

with slaveholders. But Douglass concluded by the late 1840s that it was better to participate in politics, to support anti-slavery political parties, to cast his vote, because as a black man in New York State, in a northern state, he could vote, not on the same terms as white people. He had to have a property requirement, but he could vote, and he voted. He took part in politics, and he eventually joined and supported the Republican Party, which was not a perfect party in his view, was too moderate in his view, but had a chance to win, had a chance to strike a blow against slavery. I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends. And together we have the podcast Office Ladies, where we rewatched every single episode of The Office with insane

behind the scenes stories, hilarious guests, and lots of laughs. Guess who's sitting next to me? Steve! It is my girl in the studio. Every Wednesday, we'll be sharing even more exclusive stories from The Office and our friendship with brand new guests. And we'll be digging into our mailbag to answer your questions and comments. So join us for brand new Office Ladies 6.0 episodes every Wednesday. Plus, on Mondays, we are taking a second drink. You can revisit all the Office Ladies rewatch episodes every Monday with new bonus tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. I love how some of the people that you discuss in this book

are very well-known, of course, like Frederick Douglass, but some of them are very kind of obscure. I do love a good obscure person that you can connect to somebody else where you're like, dang it. I knew he knew him somehow. I love being able to uncover those kinds of little connections. And I was very interested to read about the chapter about the conspiracy theorist, Duff Green. So interesting. Tell us more about him. Oh, he's one of my favorite characters in the way that I suppose, like sometimes when the devil is a character, he's very interesting. It doesn't mean you're like the devil. He was a slave owner. He was a pro-slavery propagandist. He rose as a big supporter of Andrew Jackson,

a very important but slave-owning president who was elected in the 1820s. And he went on to be influential in multiple administrations or through the times of multiple administrations all the way through to the 1860s. He's a terrible guy, but oddly fascinating. He would write terrible things in his newspapers about people. And in one case, he so insulted a congressman that the congressman beat him up and broke his bones. And so he then repeated all the same insults in his newspaper from his hospital bed, which made him a hero of the freedom of the press. He's a terrible guy. And he became obsessed more and more with slavery as it came more and more under threat. And then finally, at the end of 1860, went to see Abraham Lincoln, who had just been elected president as an anti-slavery president. And he

tried to persuade the president-elect to agree to a kind of compromise that would enshrine slavery in the Constitution forever. And he was not entirely unknown to me because I'd written a book about Andrew Jackson and he came up. He's an unbelievable figure. But I don't think that he's known by like most people. And it's just fascinating to learn these names and to discover their stories, which are just wild and say a lot about America. What was Lincoln's reaction when he was like, hello, Mr. President-elect, I would like to make a deal with you. It's clear that Lincoln rebuffed him, but in what way? Yeah, he did turn him aside, but he didn't exactly say no. He actually wrote Duff Green a letter that Duff Green potentially could have used to suggest that Lincoln at least sort

of acquiesced with this proposed compromise. But Lincoln didn't send it directly to him. He sent it to a friend who never gave it to Duff Green, which seems to be maybe what Lincoln had kind of wanted all along, which is like, yeah, I'll write you a letter. And then he made sure he never got it. But he was still willing to listen to this dude. He's still willing to have him into the house and talk with him. And they were related by marriage distantly. And he'd been a political friend of Lincoln's for a long time. He was willing to talk and try to see what he could gain out of that situation.

It is wild when you think about how you could just go to the White House and see Abraham Lincoln. Isn't that just crazy to think about? You just show up. Yes. And just like wait a while and maybe he'll see you and maybe not. It's one of my favorite things about the Lincoln presidency. It used to be the way the president always was, I think. Yeah. And you kind of wish it was that way today. I mean, there's probably too many people in the country.

It's too easy to travel. He'd always have a million visitors. But you almost wish that like whoever is president would set aside, you know, an hour on Friday mornings to just see whoever showed up. Yeah. You could just show up if you're willing to wait. Just show up and be like, what's up? I have some things I want to discuss. And it seemed as though the president was kind of just obligated to listen to what you had to say. Like, oh, he's here. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I have read the diary of James K. Polk, an earlier president. And one of the things he says again and again is I kind of hate these

people who come to see me because they're all like, they want things from me. They want a job. They want a favor. They want stuff all the time. I can't stand it. But I have to receive them and act like I'm interested in their stuff, which sounds kind of awful, but also showed the position at that time of the president in a republic. His fellow citizens who showed up asking for five minutes of his time were his equals, and he had to treat them as such. He couldn't just turn them all away. Okay. I mean, I can't let the fact that you wrote a whole book about Andrew Jackson just go uncommented on. Anybody who's been listening to this for any period of time knows

that I have personal beef with Andrew Jackson. He doesn't know it, of course, because he's long dead, but we do. We have personal beef with each other. And of course, he's an interesting character though. In the same way that the devil is an interesting character in a play, Andrew Jackson's an interesting character. Yes. And I'm glad to talk about that book. It's still around. It's still being sold, apparently, which excites me. And it felt very meaningful to me to write that book. And for those who don't know, it's about two guys. It's about Andrew Jackson, this very important president who did a lot of terrible things, among them forcing the Cherokees to leave the eastern United States to move on the Trail

of Tears west of Mississippi. But the other person it's about is John Ross, the Cherokee chief who battled Jackson for 20 years and delayed for 20 years that move to the west. And my challenge, which may bring me a little into conflict with you, I don't know, my challenge in writing that book was to try to understand each of those guys. Each of them had terrible attributes. Even John Ross, who I think is very much the hero of this story and a democratic hero who fought through the democratic system, was also a slave owner, as some Cherokees were. They had adopted the customs of the Southern society that surrounded them.

Nobody's a saint in that book. But I found them both fascinating characters. I think Jackson is still today, deserves to be counted as an important president. Of course. Best achievement, positive achievement is bringing a lot more people into the political system. Voter participation drastically increased during his time in office, during the years when he dominated the political scene and as he founded the Democratic Party. And I think in the long run, that is good for the country, even though the platform for which he stood was a lot of things

that were just objectively bad, starting with slavery and moving on to Indian removal, which grew out of this presumption, really, that people of different races couldn't live together. You know, even the Cherokees who had changed their lifestyles to be very much like their white neighbors were presumed not to be able to live, coexist peacefully around white people. And so everybody has to be separated. So Jackson stood for terrible, terrible things. But I'm going to give him credit for exciting ordinary people about the political system. I guess I should clarify that. Exciting ordinary white people about the political system and getting them involved. I can see that. I'm willing to concede that point. I'm willing to concede that point, Steve. He was

famously against the Electoral College because he felt like it removed the voting public from the process. Of course, as a populist, he didn't like the elites and the Electoral College seemed like a bunch of elites. So I'm willing to concede that. I have issues with everything else. All the elites. Everything else. He killed a man in a duel. He was a ruthless military commander.

He stole land from people. He somehow obtained some of the land himself and profited off of it by moving slave labor there and having them raise cotton. I mean, the list of what we would categorize as crimes is pretty unbelievable. Having written about both Jackson and Lincoln, what would they have thought of each other? Oh, I think that Lincoln had some high regard for Andrew Jackson. I don't think that Jackson ever knew who Lincoln was really, although Jackson's administration appointed Lincoln a postmaster of New Salem, Illinois, this tiny settlement in Illinois when he was a very young

man. But when Lincoln, a couple of decades later, became president himself. He sometimes quoted Andrew Jackson in speeches. He, in 1857, quoted Andrew Jackson's opinion of the Supreme Court, saying that the court's opinions were just opinions and he didn't necessarily have to follow him as president. Lincoln then became president and basically followed up on Jackson's words in 1861, disregarded some things that the Supreme Court Chief Justice told him, and had Andrew Jackson's portrait hung on the wall of his office in the White House. Another thing that Andrew Jackson did, in addition to involving a lot of ordinary white people in politics, was he stuck up for the country, stuck up for the union when the slave state of South Carolina talked of nullifying

federal law. Jackson got congressional authorization to raise an army to smash South Carolina if he had to. In the end, he didn't have to, but he kept the country together. And Lincoln looked to that example. On a subject like slavery, they're so different. In terms of their personalities, they're so different. In terms of their propensity to violence, they're tremendously different. Jackson literally killed people in civilian life and tried to kill other people in civilian life. So different, but in their fundamental beliefs in the use of power to preserve the country, they were the same. So that's such a great point. And Andrew Jackson had been largely a popular president. And so it would make sense that Lincoln, being a consummate politician, would pull from previously popular politicians. And being a man

of the South, as Jackson was, it would make sense that Lincoln would try to use some of his rhetoric to potentially build a coalition with people, unionists from the South. I think that that's another way that Lincoln, I think, differs from kind of progressive thought. We have a tendency today to run down the founding fathers, so-called, and I understand why, because of the accommodations with slavery or in some cases the embrace of slavery. who he could enlist in the anti-slavery cause, because many of them did oppose slavery and seemed to have set up mechanisms for it to sort of expire, even though it had failed to do so. And so, yeah, he used the founders for what they were worth in the same way that he used living people around him for what they were worth. And I think of these things because that's how he used Jackson. Jackson was considered the greatest American since the founding fathers, more or less. And Lincoln wanted Jackson on his side and not on the other people's side, the pro-slavery side.

One of the other characters that I, of course, was very interested in this book is, I think, a character that many people find fascinating and also tragic, who is Mary Todd Lincoln, Lincoln's wife. fascinating and also tragic, who is Mary Todd Lincoln, Lincoln's wife. I mean, what a difficult hand the Lincolns were dealt. The death of their son while they were in the White House seemed like Mary and Abraham both had propensities towards depression and the totality of circumstances just continue to build and build and build and build. And I would love to hear your take on Mary Todd Lincoln. Oh, gosh. I find her a tragic figure. And the more I learn about her, I think a more sympathetic figure than she kind of had been when you know the surface version, which is just kind of that she was crazy and she

overspent as first lady and just was kind of a terrible, nasty, vindictive person. That's the surface view of Mary Todd Lincoln. And it's not totally untrue. But you learn her story and you realize some of the difficulties that she had, partly because of her gender. She was born into a wealthy family, a slave-owning family in Kentucky. But her mother died young. Her father remarried to

a very young stepmother. They never got along. It was a horrible home life. She escaped that life. And she went through life, I think, insecure. She was very smart. She was very articulate. She was very witty. She was very interested in politics, but because she was a woman, she could not practice it the way that her fiance and then husband was able to practice it. And I think she found that very frustrating to try to operate through men in the way that ambitious women had to do. She does seem to have been mentally ill in various ways. And again, that makes her a tragic figure and someone we can empathize with rather than someone we can scorn or despise. And I give her credit even maybe most of all at the end of her life, when again, people found her impossible

and terrible. And her son, Robert Todd Lincoln, had her committed to an institution, but she fought for her own emancipation. She mounted a public campaign to win her freedom and eventually got out of the institution and influenced things that were important to her. Lincoln's tomb and memorial in Springfield, Illinois, is in the location it's in because that's where she wanted it and she fought for it. And in the spirit of this book, which is about democracy and people contending with each other and dealing with different points of view,

I think we finally have to respect that this deeply, deeply flawed person stood up for herself and got something for herself by the end of her life. stood up for herself and got something for herself by the end of her life. What do you think are some of the biggest takeaways that we in the year 2023 and beyond can learn from Lincoln? You know, I think we tend to really focus on his preservation of the union and his anti-slavery stances as laudable and commendable. And that's why we hold him up as an American deity. But I love that your

book focuses on more than just that, that there are lessons we can learn from the Lincoln presidency that we can take with us today. And I would love to hear what you feel like some of those are. Lincoln understood that in a democracy, you have to deal with people you believe to be wrong because the person who is wrong still has a vote. And that's how democracy works. And here we are all worried about our democracy and keeping our democracy. If we're going to keep our democracy and do good things, that is what it takes, is dealing with people we believe to be wrong and seeing if we can build a coalition of just enough of them to move in the right direction. My friend, Noelle King, who has an excellent podcast of her own,

co-hosts a podcast called Today Explained, used to be one of my NPR colleagues, has read a lot of this book. And she said, I used to think that Lincoln succeeded because he was good. I now think Lincoln succeeded because he was smart, which I think is a great distinction. I also think he was fundamentally a good guy, even though he had views that we would definitely disagree with today. But he was politically smart. He was politically strategic. He took a long view of things. He had a particular view of the universe and of human nature, which was a little dark. And he understood that many events were beyond his control, but he tried to affect the things that he could and proved to be in the end strategically the right person

to guide the country through its greatest crisis. What would you say to somebody who's like, yeah, and Lincoln's way of dealing with people who disagreed with him was to shoot them in a war. What would you say to that person? Oh, people have said that on Twitter. Well, yeah, that's right. He just sent the army to kill him. I mean, I've heard that on Twitter. It's totally fine.

And I get it. But what really happened there was that he won a free and fair election. And leaders of 11 states decided to nullify the election, wanted to overturn the results of the election, go off and start their own country and say something is unjust here. And Lincoln's challenge was to build a coalition, a majority coalition from the majority that remained to hold the country together. And that required him to make allies of people who were radical abolitionists and also make allies of people who owned enslaved people in loyal states that remained and everybody in between those extremes. And he did it. And that was a job not for shooting people, but for politics and for patience and for

public relations and for wisdom and timing. Yeah, you mentioned exactly, like you mentioned this in the book, that how incredibly patient he was. And gosh, that is such a virtue that is really, really difficult to stomach sometimes, especially when we're talking about grave injustice. Why should we have to wait for justice? I don't want to be patient for justice. I don't want to be patient. Yeah. And I want to express two things here. Like Frederick Douglass is constantly criticizing him for moving too slowly. And Frederick Douglass is right.

Martin Luther King talked about the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. And Martin Luther King was right. And at the same time that they were right, patience was necessary because social change and social betterment is a long, slow, never-ending process. And so you get everything you can today, and then you come back and fight for more if you need to tomorrow and next week and next year. And I think that Lincoln did understand that on a fundamental level, that ending slavery was going to just take a long time. It had been around for centuries and it was going to take a long time. And even though because of the war, it ended in

just a few years, the aftermath has continued until now, hasn't it? And we've continued wrestling with the aftermath and what comes after slavery right until now. My last question is, what do you hope the reader takes away when they close the book and they have finished reading Differ, We Must? What is it that you would love to be one of the enduring messages? Wow. Well, I hope they think it's a great story because I do. And I don't claim that I wrote it well, but in terms of just the characters and the issues at play, I hope they find it a great story. And I hope that they are inspired anew about the value of our country and about the meaning of democracy, which is a never-ending process. It's never a solid state.

It's never a finished state. And freedom is never a finished state. And equality is never a finished state. Never perfectly attained, to borrow a phrase from Lincoln, but can be constantly approximated in ways that lead to the betterment of people of all colors everywhere. That's a phrase that Lincoln used in 1858. And that is what democracy is. It is okay to be dissatisfied with the slow progress because that's part of democracy. And it's okay also to be patient and to keep working at it and getting it the best way we can to pass on to our descendants. I love that. Steve, thank you so much. Thank you so much for being here today. Thank you so much for your work. I loved reading Differ, We Must.

Thank you. I really enjoyed the conversation. This is great. You can buy Steve Inskeep's book, Differ, We Must, wherever you buy your books. And you might consider ordering from bookshop.org if you want to support independent bookstores. Thank you for being here today. The show is hosted and executive produced by me, Sharon McMahon. Our audio producer is Jenny Snyder. And if you enjoyed today's episode, please be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform. And if you could leave us a review or share this episode on social media, those things help podcasters out so much. Thanks for being here today.