The Daily Stoic - Ken Burns on Bringing History’s Greatest Stories Back to Life (And Why Doing So Matters)

Episode Date: November 16, 2024

With over 40 documentaries under his belt, Ken Burns is one of the most iconic filmmakers of our time. His newest documentary, which features a brand-new filmmaking style from the director, explores the life and work of Leonardo da Vinci and marks the first non-American subject in any of his films.On today’s episode, Ken talks with Ryan about the significance of Stoicism among the Founders, the complexities of historical figures like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, plus the inspiring legacy of Da Vinci.Ken Burns has directed and produced historical documentaries for over 50 years. He has earned seventeen Emmy Awards, two Grammy Awards and two Oscar nominations so far throughout his career and his latest project, Leonardo da Vinci, is premiering on November 18. 🎥 Ken Burns latest documentary on Leonardo da Vinci premieres November 18 on PBS!Follow Ken Burns on Instagram @KenLBurns and on X @KenBurns.Check out Ken Burns’ full catalog of documentaries: https://kenburns.com/the-films/✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow us:  Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to the daily Stoic early and ad free right now. Just join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcast. I've been traveling a bunch for the tour that I'm on and I brought my kids and my wife with me when I went to Australia. When I'm going to Europe in November, I'm bringing my in-laws also. So, we're not staying in a hotel. We're staying in an Airbnb. The first Airbnb I stayed in would have been in 2010, I think. I've always loved Airbnb, that flexibility, size, location. You can find something awesome. You want to stay somewhere that other guests have had a positive experience. I love the guest favorites feature that helps you narrow down your search to the most popular, coolest houses. I've been using Airbnb forever. I like it better than hotels. So I'm excited that they're a sponsor of the show.

And if you haven't used Airbnb yet, I don't know what you're doing, but you should definitely check it out for your next family trip. We've got a bit of a commute now with the kids and their new school. And so one of the things we've been doing as a family is listening to audio books in the car.

Instead of having that be dead time, we wanna use it to have a live time. We really wanna help their imagination soar and And listening to Audible helps you do precisely that. Whether you listen to short stories, self-development, fantasy, expert advice, really any genre that you love, maybe you're into stoicism. And there's some books there that I might recommend by this one guy named Ryan. Audible has the best selection of audiobooks without exception and exclusive Audible originals all in one easy app. And as an Audible member, you choose one title a month to keep from their entire catalog. By the way, you can grab Right Thing Right Now on Audible.

You can sign up right now for a free 30-day Audible trial and try your first audiobook for free. You can get Right Thing Right Now totally for free. Visit audible.ca to sign up. Welcome to the weekend edition of The Daily Stoic. Each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down,

be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoke Podcast. I sometimes think about things I'm gonna tell my kids that technologically make me seem extremely old. Like we had a truck when I was in elementary school,

it was this little old tiny Toyota pickup truck and it didn't have a clock in it. And we would have to turn on the radio. We listened to KFBK in Sacramento because on the way to school or wherever we're going, because it would save the time every 15 minutes. Like a car didn't have a clock. And I thought maybe I was making this memory up

and then a couple of years ago I was at a car dealership and they had like a version of this truck. It was like a year newer. And I went in there and the person had put a little clock, like a dollar clock, like a egg timer kind of clock. They'd stuck it in there because it seriously didn't have a clock. I don't know.

There's just stuff like that. You feel like you're gonna tell your kids and they're gonna be like, what are you talking about? I was trying to explain dial-up internet to my kids. This one is not quite as crazy, but it does pertain to today's guest. I lived in Silver Lake. My wife and I were not married.

We were living together in this little shotgun apartment house thing in Silver Lake right off the Wayne Street. And we had a Wii and she came home one day. She's like, this is going to blow your mind. And she put in this disc that she'd ordered and it like somehow set up the Wii to be wifi enabled. And then we put Netflix on our Wii and we were streaming and then we put Netflix on our Wii and we were streaming Netflix on our TV. This is like when Netflix started to experiment with streaming before they'd switched.

We had a Netflix account where they would send us DVDs which we would watch on the Wii. And then it was like when people say they remembered when TV switched from black and white to color, I remember when Netflix switched from physical discs to streaming. And there was a ton of stuff on Netflix, but like it was all stuff I guess

that could get the rights to pretty cheaply. And I remember almost immediately watching all 10 hours of Ken Burns' The Civil War. And I'd read a little bit about The Civil War, but I wasn't quite a Civil War nerd yet. And it just, it just blew my mind. It was just amazing. And then, again, you think this stuff's gonna be nerdy,

what does it have to do with anything? And then a couple days later, I'm at American Apparel and we're trying to design some web ads, and Doug Charney goes, what if we had kind of like a Ken Burns effect on this thing? And I knew what he was talking about. And I go, oh yeah, this is why it's cool to do stuff. Anyways, it's mind blowing to me

that I got to talk to Ken Burns. He's been making documentaries for 50 years. There's actually a quote from the late historian Stephen Ambrose who said, "'More Americans get their history from Ken Burns "'than any other source.'" Which is actually a responsibility. There's a thing they say about Mark Shrevely that he had all the power in the world, but he proved himself worthy of it. source, which is actually a responsibility.

There's a thing they say about Mark Scurrilis that he had all the power in the world, but he proved himself worthy of it. I would say Ken Burns has proved himself worthy of the immense audience that he has and the obligation they're in to deliver, like not propaganda, not feel good reassuring history, but real history.

And I've learned so much from his stuff. Most recently, I was watching this one that Steve Rinella is in which I loved about the American Buffalo And so his new one about Leonardo da Vinci's is incredible And when I was interviewing Wright Thompson a couple weeks ago, he mentioned the Ken Burns Civil War documentary He's got an amazing documentary in the Holocaust Ben Franklin Muhammad Ali country music with Central part five If you go to KenBurns.com, you can see like an insane portfolio of projects. He's just amazing.

So I've been trying to get him on the podcast for a very long time. He couldn't do it last year, but he did refer me to Jeffrey Rosen, who was on. We had an awesome discussion about his book, The Pursuit of Happiness, about the intersection of stoic philosophy and the American founding.

And it turns out Ken Burns knows a ton about this too. So we really had an in-depth discussion, not just about America, but also about the stoics. I'm recording this before the election. When you're listening to this, I don't know how things shook out. I am cautiously optimistic, but the stoic part of me knows

that hope and fear are the same. There's obviously a right choice here, and millions of Americans may, as you'll hear us talk about in this interview, that have decided to throw that great stoic experiment into jeopardy. I hope not. I hope that when you hear this,

we'll be breathing a sigh of relief. But if you need something to distract yourself, and there is something about ancient history about the great figures of the past that can restore you and inspire you and also just allow you to stabilize yourself in the moment. And Ken's latest documentary, Leonardo da Vinci is a new two-part, four-hour documentary.

Comes out on November 18th and 19th at eight and 10 p.m. on PBS, pbs.org, and the PBS app. If you haven't read the Isaacson book on da Vinci, you're missing out. He's gonna be a character in my new book on wisdom, which I don't have a title yet for, so I was really excited to watch this. You can follow Ken on Instagram,

at Ken L. Burns, and on X, at Ken Burns, and you can see a on Instagram at Ken L. Burns and on X at Ken Burns and you can see a lot more of his work at his website at KenBurns.com. Huge fan of this guy this conversation more than exceeded my expectations and it's funny if you watch the video of it which we'll post on the Daily Soap Podcast YouTube channel I'll link to that in today's show notes but he has a big fluffy dog in the background which I love to see as well. So thanks to Ken Burns for coming on, enjoy. So anyone tallied up how many hours of documentaries

you've done at this point? I was trying to think about how many hours I've watched, but I didn't know what the total was. I think some bored person determined that you'd have to stay up for two weeks, night and day without bathroom breaks or food to do it. I apologize in advance for those who are trying this absurd trick.

Yeah, that seems like a bad way to consume your body of work. I feel like they come out at just the right pace where you watch it, you can sort of slowly make your way through it. And just when you're coming out of the other side, you start to hear that there's a new one in the works. And then you get excited about that one.

So, you know, I was sort of warned by the critics when I'd go to the Television Critics Association in LA, starting with the Civil War in 1990 that nobody was gonna watch it. Because everybody was MTV MTV and they said the same thing about baseball and jazz and the history of the World War II and the national parks. By then it was YouTube and kittens and balls of yarn. By the time of the Roosevelts in 2014 and Vietnam in 2017 and country music in 2019, nobody ever says it.

They know that in fact with so much stuff, binging is what people do, which is a way of kind of putting, you know, applying a kind of discipline to content. The content that's washing over us, that's drowning us, you binge in order to actually exert a little bit more control. So bingeable stuff suddenly is no longer in competition with MTV videos or cats with balls of yarn on YouTube. Yeah, we're supposed to believe that people don't have attention spans anymore and then your stuff's more popular than ever. Yeah, it's, you know, I've always, I've stayed my entire professional life happily with public broadcasting in which so many people

have sort of advised me that this is some idiotic way to do it. And, you know, I sort of think it's like Aesop's fable of the tortoise and the hare. You know, the hare is sexy. He's got the sneakers. It's, you know, but it gets tired pretty quickly and lies down. And then we just kind of plot along. But we end up making the best children's, the best science, the best nature, the best public affairs, and I'm told the best history on the dial, which saying dial betrays my age. But I'm happy to do it. And I'll give you an example with the Vietnam film. Eighteen hours, 10 and a half years to make, I could have gone to a streaming service or a premium cable and gotten the money I needed for it instantly in one pitch,

but instead of having to spend 10 years of the 10 and a half years raising money, but they wouldn't have given me 10 and a half years, it would have given me a couple or two and a half or something. And so I'd be sitting here apologizing to you about why it wasn't good. And instead, every one of those films that will occupy

two weeks of your life, night and day, are director's cuts. You know, I would say my favorite of all of yours, and I think I've seen pretty much all of them, I think the address is my favorite. Not because it's the shortest, but that's one of the most beautiful things. It's not the shortest.

By far, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty, the Shakers are all an hour. Yeah, I'm so happy that you said that. I feel so blessed and lucky that I know somebody who thinks each one of my films is my best. Because people are always trying to reverse engineer it and say, what's your favorite film? And then I have to say, what's your favorite kid?

And if you don't have kids, then you don't know what I'm talking about. And it just, you know, is like, you end up running off the road into the muck and you can't have kids, then you don't know what I'm talking about. And it just, you know, it's like you end up running off the road into the, into the muck and you can't get out. But I feel just very, very blessed. And most of it has to do with the people that I work with, you know, the kind of commitment to process and holding to that.

Every film's got such a unique mentor connected to it, like Lewis Mumford with the Brooklyn Bridge or, you know, Wynton Marsalis for jazz, whoever it might be. You always feel like you've just been graced with some great teacher to help you understand it and get over the summit of understanding. I watched the address before I had kids and to watch those kids struggle with such an

amazing piece of material, I don't know, I remember crying watching it before I had kids, now I'm not sure I could watch it again. So just to catch everybody up, it's about kids with learning differences or layers, ADHD, executive function, dyslexia. It's all boys at a tiny school, which is a sort of a... There's no place else to go. Their families can't deal with them. Their schools have made their lives miserable and this is the last resort. So they're there and they come back from Thanksgiving vacation and they're asked to memorize and

then publicly recite the Gettysburg Address. I mean, it would be tough for you and me to do that and we could do it. Ten complicated, really complicated sentences and he uses the word here like nine times and he moves it around like rearranging the furniture in each sentence. Just when you think you've got it, then you put it in a different place. And they do it. And they do it. And so it just becomes... And I found out that the school, which had been around for like 50 or 60 years doing this, had never been to Gettysburg. So I just raised a little bit more money and I rented a bus and I got them down to Gettysburg and found a motel that gave us

cheap rooms and a restaurant that gave us, you know, a reduced thing. And I just took them on a tour and then I had them all recited again right near where Lincoln did it. And it was just like one of the most special things. And my crew, Chris Darling and the cinematographers and the sound people were all, you know, embedded. The kids just forgot about us after a while. So nice. I'm writing about Lincoln now in the book that I'm doing. His ability in that address to get to the essence

of the most complicated thing in American history in such a short amount of space. There's that, the orator who went before him, you know, says to him, you know, you got in two minutes what I struggled to do in two hours. And can we just say that Edward Everett was like the jazz, he was like the John Coltrane of speaking. And like he speaks for two hours

and people hang on every word and they watch him go off on these digressions and they wonder whether he comes back. And sometimes there is applause when he comes back to the main theme and there's just this gasp. And so it's not like, oh, he droned on for two hours. It's just that in two minutes, in 10 sentences, this guy creates the, you know, our declaration of independence is the 1.0 and

this was the 2.0. We really do mean it and we're going to try better and we're going to do this by remembering the sacrifice of the people who fought in defense of the Union. And it is just, it may be the greatest speech ever in the English language, ever. The irony that it talks about how no one's going to remember these words, but there are some exceptions, you know, your Lincolns and your Churchills who managed to get the words so precisely right that they actually do endure and matter. That's right. That's exactly right. And it's so interesting because it's really partisan times, obviously. We're in the middle of a civil war, but it's partisan within the North.

There are lots of people who are like tired of it, don't want to send their sons, think we should let them go, are pro-slavery, whatever it might be. So, the Chicago Times, I think it was, said, the cheek of every American must tingle with shame as he reads the silly flat dishwatery utterances of the man who has to be pointed out to intelligent foreigners as the President of the United States. And I just, you know, when people talk about, you know, how partisan things are at any time,

and it's really bad now, but it's always had that kind of, that you could take the Gettysburg address and treat it that way. What I'm saying and the thing that I'm writing now, I'd be curious what you think of it, is, so Lincoln, first off, the idea that he improvised a version of this address just at the White House during essentially right

after Gettysburg and then that what we see in the address is this much more refined version. We don't give Lincoln enough credit as an editor and a writer. He's just this pulp. But, you know, Alexander Stevens in the cornerstone speech, you could argue does an equally good job of expressing the essence of the Confederacy. It's just a horrible conclusion. And so he says, our new government foundations are laid. It's cornerstone rests upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man, that slavery subordination to the superior races is natural and normal condition.

This new government is the first in the history of the world based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. Just polar ends of the moral spectrum, but are both capturing the essential truths of their position. One makes you turn away in shame and the other lifts you up. Well, it's sort of like, you know, Lenny Riefenstahl was a great filmmaker,

but, you know, Lenny Riefenstahl was a great filmmaker, but, you know, I'm sorry. It goes back to the essence of stoicism, right, which is virtue. And there's nothing virtuous in Alexander Stevens' thing that has no moral center. It is, as you say, well articulated, like the poetry of Lincoln's. And Lincoln has, on his side side the moral right and the virtue that is behind it. And this is a close reader in Lincoln of the Bible and of philosophy and of Shakespeare

and of the declaration and the constitution and understands the sort of the things that are in play in the American experiment that aren't sort of obvious in our normal dialectical preoccupation with red state, blue state, you know, young, old, gay, straight, male, female, rich, poor, whatever it is that we're think that we're understanding because we can make a them. He understands a kind of complex we or us that is attractive to me. I know totally. And I think what Stevens does is he lays out the truth

of his position. So clearly that even 180 years of lost cause mythology can't fully erase it. He gets it there. Yeah. He just lacks the fundamental humanity and self-awareness to see how horrible what he's saying is. Yeah Well, this is this is the problem. I don't know why we've called this institution peculiar. It's nothing but abhorrent

It's so ensure I'm working right now on a big massive series on the history of the American Revolution And and as many people have tried to put their thumb on the scale and make it all that, that, that it is a cause, the Patriot cause is a cause of supporting slavery. Those people in the South who are slave owners sometimes flock to the, the Patriot cause a, because a British governor in Virginia who's been deposed and is floating in the Chesapeake Bay is saying, look, if you are the slave of a rebel, not a slave of him, not a slave of somebody who's a loyalist, but a slave of rebel, come to me and I will free you eventually.

So there's already kind of an absurdist thing. But the language of the frustration with Britain is an escalating rhetoric that is eventually saying he is enslaving us or they, the parliament, is enslaving us. And it's so interesting that there's kind of blinders on from the very beginning among people that own other human beings. And there's other like John Lawrence, whose father is the head of the Continental Congress, president of the Continental Congress for a while, writes to his dad and says, look, here's our opportunity, let's free our slaves.

And his father's like, what, what? So you've got this generational stuff in which some people see the monumental hypocrisy and some don't. Even the authors of our catechism, Jefferson, you know, we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. He owns hundreds of human beings and doesn't see the contradiction of the hypocrisy or more importantly sees fit to free them in his lifetime or most of it. I'm Lindsey Graham, host of Wondery Show American Scandal.

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devious scheme. Follow American Scandal on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Experience all episodes ad free and be the first to binge the newest seasons only on Wondery Plus. You can join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple podcasts or Spotify. Start your free trial today. Did you know that after World War II, the U.S. government quietly brought former Nazi scientists to America in a covert operation to advance military technology? Or that in the 1950s the US Army conducted a secret experiment by releasing bacteria over San Francisco to test how a biological attack might spread without alerting the public?

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Luke Lamanna on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. To listen ad free, join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app. I was talking to Wright Thompson, the sports writer, just has this incredible book about Emmett Till coming out. It's worth studying historically so you can see how it happens to individuals. But the transition of slavery from tolerated, peculiar institution, we are torn about it as Jefferson was, to within a generation, it being a positive good that Stevens would would describe it

as is just an indictment of the human ability to, to take a terrible thing and convince ourselves that it's not terrible. So we don't have to do anything about it doesn't stop at Alexander Stevens, you know, you you you lose the war, but you win the peace. You've got everybody believing from birth of a nation to gone with the wind and on that Reconstruction is a bad period and that the heroes are our own homegrown Al-Qaeda or ISIS called the Ku Klux Klan. You reimpose, brutally reimpose right supremacy.

Jim Crow, lynchings, you put the Confederate flag, which isn't the flag of the Confederacy. It's one battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia. The only reason why it's put into the flags after 1954 is Brown versus Board of Education, right? It goes into the, because that's the flag that the Ku Klux Klan did in their night raids. And then you got Ron DeSantis saying, well, you know, people learn some good skills in slavery as slavery was like the Florida technological school, right? Yeah, right. It's like the Nickel Boys, you know, I mean, like, oh, really? This is where you go to

to learn some some applicable skills, or as Donald Trump would say, black jobs. But cognitive dissonance as this force in human history is so fascinating. And I feel like that's what your documentaries in many ways is an exploration of, because you get into the human beings. And yeah, in Vietnam, you're looking at both sides and you're able to see how they were both convinced equally of that. But just cognitive dissonance as being this kind of director of world events strikes me as an under explored theme. Yeah, I mean, it might be good in the purposes of a conversation like this, where we can intellectually pursue it. But in storytelling, you just, you kind of don't want to do it, you just accept it. And what you say is that human beings prefer not to be disciplined,

which is the sort of the birthright, right? I mean, pursuit of happiness is not about stuff. It's about lifelong learning. And so, and finding how to lead a virtuous life. Everybody understood that, but now we don't. We think it's, oh, if I just get more stuff, I'll be okay. It's a marketplace of things rather than the marketplace of ideas. So the laziness allows this kind of cognitive dissonance to come in because then you can get whole groups of people who are voting against their self-interest. I remember when the Affordable Care Act had just been passed and President Obama came to my state of New Hampshire and I traveled across the state with my young daughter to go and listen to him, talk about it, and there were protests outside, right? And one sign was so confusing to me. I went up and I said, you know that Medicare and Medicaid are a government program.

Yeah. Because he was talking about get the government out of the health care. And, you know, save my Medicare or something like that. And I went, you know that these are government programs. And he goes, no, they're not. Right. And it's just like, you know, you can, there was a somebody, I'm sure you saw it on the streets, uh, interviews, uh, where somebody would mistakenly on purpose say that it was about Joe Biden. You know, did you know that Joe Biden, uh, no claim that he had bone spurs and got out of the draft and what that's outrageous, you know, this just proves he's unqualified and whatever.

And they go, Oh, I'm sorry. It was Trump who did it. He goes, well, good for him. He got, you know, it's like they can literally hold both of these things in their, their heads and, and not see the obvious and I would think shameful and embarrassing, humiliating contradiction, but that's human beings for you. Well, yeah, like Obama care is very unpopular, but the's human beings for you. Well, yeah, like Obamacare is very unpopular, but the Affordable Care Act is very popular, and they're the same thing. And you will find, you know, one of the things

that's interesting to look at, and I don't think I can, there's a real metric that I can prove, but in the last hundred years, the three most successful legislative agendas of any administration are obviously FDR number one and LBJ number two. But number three is probably Joe Biden, right? And almost all of those were done on partisan votes, whereas opposed to voting rights and

civil rights and Medicare and Medicaid had Republican participation, as did many of the New Deal stuff. But people will vote against a Joe Biden program and then go home and take credit for it. And the thing about Joe Biden, which is to me, so miraculous and Washingtonian, not just in giving up things, is he was cool with that. He understood the dynamics of politics. Of course, he's not going to vote for it, but he's going to go home and take credit for it. And all I care about is some guy in his district is doing it. But that guy in his district still thinks that Biden is, you know, the worst person on earth. And he's the one who's doing it. So the ability of people to vote in this country against

their interests, self-interest is just stunning and amazing to me every single day. Well, cognitive dissonance is fascinating to me because it tries to make things very simple when in fact they're very complicated. And I heard you have a sign in your office that just says it's complicated. In neon, yeah, in cursive, lowercase cursive. I put it there because, you know, let me, I just have to be honest, there's not a filmmaker, myself included, that when a scene is working, you don't want to touch it. Yeah. is working. You don't want to touch it. But we're always finding stories are the supreme position

of a form on the wild and an unformed human experience. And then you find something that contradicts it undertow, whatever it is. And so people tend not to kind of go there. And we go there all the time. And I just wanted to reinforce it, to say it was okay to destabilize a working scene in order to serve a larger thing, which is this nuanced and complicated portrait of the United States. It only gets more interesting. I mean, it's not melodrama. Melodrama is where every villain is perfectly villainous and every hero is perfectly virtuous.

It just doesn't work that way. You know, this revolution film, I was describing it a couple years ago to some of the funders and people who are helping us raise money. And it was all in two or three years ago, it was all in the midst of the anti-woke thing. And I realized I'd been talking for a long time and it sure sounded woke, even though it was just an attempt to tell a more complicated story about a period when we'd rather leave in amber. You know, they always just great men thinking great thoughts and they did and they're there and they do.

They are great thoughts, but it's really much more complicated than that. And I could see that, you know, sort of the energy draining and finally somebody got up the nerve to say, so Ken, who's emerging as the most important figure. And I said, Oh, George Washington. And you just all of a sudden, because it's complicated. It's complicated. But I love that so much. Because in my study of history, it goes exactly like that. So you take the Civil War, you learn as a

kid, it's all about slavery. And then you read a bunch of books, and you actually study and it becomes much more complicated. But then you read and study a lot about it. And it gets simple again, right? It's all slavery. It's all slavery. I mean, there is there But then you read and study a lot about it and it gets simple again, right? It's all slavery. It's all slavery. I mean, there is nothing in, you know, Lincoln's elected in early November of 1860.

At the end of November, South Carolina, the first state to secede, always been anxious to secede since before Andrew Jackson worried that somehow their dominance in Congress and the presidency, the Southern dominance would eventually ebb and they would have to give up their slaves, their free labor. So there is nothing in the South Carolina articles of secession that mentions nullification or interposition or whatever the watchwords, nobody's talking about states' rights, nobody's talking about economic or whatever, except as regard to slavery, and they use the term slavery,

slavery, slavery, slavery. So I just go back to South Carolina and say, look, this is what it is, and then everybody follows suits. Do not pretend, because you can take any economic, political, or social excuse for the war and bring it back to slavery. If you configure around free labor, you socialize in different ways. You have different networks for meeting people and do that. If you socialize around a plantation-based, slave-based labor, you have different social

sorts of things. If it's political, you're fearing the one thing that worries you is that somebody could outlaw slavery and that you didn't have a way to stop that. And then economic is the most ghastly one, which is that excuse just comes down to the fact that the 4 million Americans owned by other Americans in the South, 9 million people in the South, four million are slaves. That's their greatest value is in the human beings they own

in a country that proclaimed to the world, for score in five years before, that all men were created equal. And to go to the revolution, you learn as a kid about George Washington, there's the myths of the cherry tree and he's the founder and you see the picture of him crossing the Delaware, and then you really study him. And, you know, there's things that make you go, hey, hi, yeah, I don't like

that. You know, you read the, the letters about recovering his lost slaves, or, you know, you, and it becomes complicated. And then you read and you study about him more. And you come out the other side and you go, this was a great man. So there's, I think Oliver Wendell Holmes had this thing about how he doesn't have any interest in simplicity on this side of complexity, but he's all about the simplicity on the other side of complexity. That's a really, really, really good way to put it right. I love that. That's very important. I have Stone is the one who admonished an acolyte who was disappointed in his admiration for

Thomas Jefferson by saying that history is not melodrama, but tragedy. And that's the essence in which everybody is complicated. The heroes have feats of clay and the villains have aspects that are good. I mean, in our film, we introduce in the opening moments of episode two, this superb general who helps Ethan Allen take Fort Ticonderoga, and his name is Benedict Arnold. And it isn't until the middle of the sixth episode that he isn't anything but one of the best generals that Washington has, you know, wounded severely in the loss at Quebec, wounded severely in the same leg again at the unbelievable victory that Washington's not responsible.

He's got losses in a couple of minor victories like Trenton and Princeton. They're important for morale, but they're not losses at Germantown and Brandywine. Most important, the biggest loss is in Long Island, Brooklyn, the biggest battle of the revolution. And he's got only one victory, but he's standing next to a French army and has got a French fleet out there. But Horatio Gates, an incompetent general, wins Saratoga because he's got Daniel Morgan and, more importantly, Benedict Arnold, who's everywhere in the battle. And you don't learn until the 6th that it changes. It's complicated.

And that's the wonderful thing about it. And that's kind of a simple, like the simple paradox that things are complicated kind of captures the essence of what it means to acquire wisdom, which is what I'm writing about now. It's like you reduce it all down and all you can reduce it down to is that it is complicated. Right, well, so what happens is, as I was saying,

is that we have this predilection to make things dialectically perfect. Like, everything is binary, right? Young and old, red-shape, whatever it is. But it's not. There's nothing binary. And so by insisting on that, we lose the subtlety and the nuance that complication always brings.

And we know it in our own lives. We tolerate it in our friends, in ourselves, in our children, all of the things that's going on. And so, what I gave a commencement address a few months ago at Brandeis and I said, you know, the opposite of faith is not doubt. Doubt is central to faith. The opposite of faith is certainty. That's the death. I mean, a judge, Learned Hand, could there ever be a more, a better name for a judge than Learned Hand said, liberty is never being too sure you're right. And so what happens is, is that you're not just means testing.

That's sort of the cliche. What you're doing is just everything requires a, okay, but can I look at this a little bit longer? You know, I mean, Washington, as you point out, wins the climactic battle with the French help, and then he's going, wait a second, these black people have to go back to their owners. And he spends the rest of the time, I mean, they're finally down in Fonce's Tavern in lower Manhattan with four Brits

and three Americans who are adjudicating. If you can prove that you've been with this British guy for a year, then you're free and you can sail with him or you're owned by a loyalist. You can sail out of here still a slave or free now. But if you haven't, you know, so a mother's got the papers, but the daughter doesn't. So the daughter buy and mom sails off to Nova Scotia. I mean, it's like Sophie's Choice, all these different places. And the author of that is in many respects, or a symbolic author of that is George Washington.

And yet he's the hero of the whole shebang. So I would disagree slightly though, the greatest judge name, and you would probably be the only person I could nerd out about this on the podcast, the greatest judge name is Judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis. No, I hate that. What is our bleeping FCC rules?

You're good. You're good. No, no, no. He's brought in to clean up the game after the Black Sox scandal of 1919 when the White Sox threw the World Series to get gambling money and then steadfastly opposed integration ever since. I'm not saying he's a good person. I'm saying it's a great name. Well, let's just say if Learned Hand looked like Judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis, then we'd have the perfect thing because Kennesaw Mountain Landis looks like that.

But you know, Kennesaw is named after this battle, you know, in the Civil War. So he's like Woodrow Wilson, who I consider the most overrated president, because he's just a racist. He re-segregates the civil service. Didn't need to. Thought Birth of a Nation was like history written with lightning, we think he said, when he screened it at the White House, which we know he did. So he's not in my top 10 or top 20 presidents because he's just a racist. Yeah. No, I mean, he's just a racist. Yeah. No, I mean, he's a great example of what you're talking about where you have the villains

who have some good traits and then you have the great people who have some bad traits. You just see how you can have your brain broken by ideas as a kid and you can't get them out. You can't get them out, right? And that's the thing. Like the deep state, you know, the deep state doesn't exist because if the deep state existed, he couldn't have gotten down the escalator in 2015. So it's just an excuse to be bad and stupid and racist. And so that means that the deep state is actually, as Hofstadter said, the paranoid style in

American politics, it might be those 30, 33% of the population that are just unrequited racists and authoritarian and whatever. So, they're always going to be there and sometimes they're tamped down and you can't really recognize them at times. Other times, you've got somebody that they've got a champion demagogue, and suddenly they rise up and even to dominance. And so the deep state may in fact be those people who cannot learn or unlearn the bad stuff they've been taught, you know?

So I'm doing this series on the cardinal virtues. So I did courage, discipline, I just did justice. And one of the things I say at the end is I feel like there's this kind of dark energy in human history. There's some dark matter inside human beings. Oh, sure. And it goes from issue to issue, era to era, thing to thing.

And it's in all of us, but in some people it's stronger. And what the really dangerous thing is when you get types of politicians or moments that instead of tamping that energy down or blocking it, brings it to the surface and encourages it. So I just saw this phenomenal new movie, which I hope gets released. I think it will be that the Trump campaign

is trying to stop called The Apprentice. And it was a sneak preview of the Telluride Film Festival. I knew nothing about it, which is, of course, the best way to go in it. And I presumed that it would be about the show, right? But it wasn't. It was about the transfer of evil from Roy Cohn to Donald Trump, who in the beginning is, got aspects that are sympathetic. You can see a human being somewhere in there and in and in cone, he looks abjectly evil. By the end of the film, Cone is dying of AIDS and he there's a glimmer of humanity in his anticipated mortality and he sees or at least I think he sees the monster that he has created, who is without guile, without shame, who is singularly trying to bottle the most negative and divisive aspects

as a strategy of advancement, which is... I mean, even with McCarthy, you know, I mean, Donald Trump doesn't drink, but McCarthy probably, you know, lost it at the Army McCarthy hearings, but you know, is dead within a couple of years, I think from alcohol and whatever. But to see this and to see even, you know, the modicum of humanity in Trump at the beginning and then the absence of it at the end and the little bit that, that it just flashes in, in the, in the mortality that Cohn, who is dying of AIDS as a gay man, pretending he's not gay and doesn't have AIDS and the lie that he has to live at every moment, but he's already imparted to his most cherished, both ways, disciple and teacher, the evil that has infected our politics.

Yeah, there's a line from Seneca who was closer to that than we might like to think of such a great stoic because Seneca is the tutor of Nero. Yes. And he writes in one of his plays, he could never speak about what he saw and did with Nero because he would have been killed. So you can only talk about it in fiction. But he has this line about how evil deeds return upon their teacher. Yeah. And that's what you see in Roy Cohn is he is the knife is

stuck in by the person he taught. Oh, yeah, the knife in and it's so the film is beautiful and Sebastian Stan plays Trump without a hint of caricature. It's beautiful. It's all there. It's all great acting. And then Jeremy Strong is one of the finest performances I've seen in years as Roy Cohn. I mean, just I had a chance they were there and I had a chance to just tell them both what, you know, startlingly great. And it was made by an Iranian director, now Iranian American, I think,

but he was just calling balls and strikes. So there's, it will not make everybody, obviously the pro-Trumpers, the people who think that he's the second coming of Jesus Christ, but it's uncomfortable even for those who are adamantly against Trump because he has to extend to him as I have stone was saying, the tragedy of human life that there is an element

of humanity in this person who seems so inhumane in his actions. The timelessness of that struggle, I was just talking to Francis Ford Coppola about his new movie, which is basically the Catiline conspiracy crashing into the to Robert Moses. I was just gonna say I didn't I haven't seen it and I want to

see it and and I love Francis and he's great and I think he's really taking a lot I'm anxious to see his his failure or not. These these grand projects are so beautiful because you talked about one of the important things is courage. Yeah, but just that like since Cicero, we have been battling against the demagogues that rise up and try to encourage people's worst impulses

and the shamelessness of it. And then you have in Robert Moses, a person who starts out with some idea of being a public service and becomes addicted to power and control and and, you know, fundamentally lacks any kind of empathy or understanding or love of his human beings. And just just how that energy is always there. And there, there are great men like, like, like Lincoln

who allow us to triumph over it and then there are not great men who decide to tap into that energy and use it for their own advancement. Yeah, this is the story of human beings. I mean, people like to say that history repeats itself, it does not, right? No event has happened twice.

We're not condemned to repeat what we don't remember. Though we take Seneca's words that maybe there's karma. You know, I mean, essentially, it's a sort of Roman version of karma. But Mark Twain is supposed to say we can't really verify it. I think it sounds like something he'd say because it's perfect. He said history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. But Ecclesiastes says, what has been will be again, what has been done will be done again, there's nothing new under the sun, which suggests that human nature doesn't change. All of that complex negotiation between greed and generosity, between venality and virtue, between discipline and dissipation,

between honor and hypocrisy, all of those things are at constant battle, not just between, but within human beings. And that's what makes the science so relevant and what makes the storytelling so powerful because stories are unlike arguments, stories are able to contain the complexity and the undertow that is present in everything and everyone. Well, and it's like human nature doesn't change, but what humans can do is invent things, structures, systems, precedents, examples that check that human nature. So America is itself an invention along those lines,

power checking power, but then Washington calling on the example of Cincinnati's to resign and to hand over power. That is an invention. That's a choice. He's not triumphing over human nature. No. He's setting a precedent. Right, and he's putting in the guard rails

that the system is also putting in. And it's so interesting when they're that summer when they're arguing over the constitution is Jefferson's in Paris and he's writing to Madison. He says, what happens if someone loses election and then doesn't want to step down? And Hamilton, who's going to end up sort of ideologically in the other party when parties begin to coalesce is saying, what if some unscrupulous person should, you know, ride the whirlwind and reap the storm, whatever it is? But they're all worried about Donald Trump. And nobody, I mean, Aaron Burr maybe comes remotely close, but Richard Nixon looks like a choir boy for his crimes.

You know, they anticipated 248 years later, exactly the kind of dilemma that we're on the horns of. But I would say it's not so much they were anticipating it, but their understanding of history, specifically Catalyne. That's exactly it. No, no, no, you're absolutely right. That's much more precise. This is in our DNA. And so they were saying, what can we do? What are all

the possible scenarios, like a chess master or a football coach? What do we, what do we need to do in order to block that play? And we know that because look at Seneca and Nero and look at this and look at that. I mean, Seneca and Nero didn't invent it either. It's been going on for as long as there have been human beings. It's fascinating. Well, I loved the new documentary also. I didn't get through the whole thing yet,

but I'm fascinated with DaVinci, obviously. What made you decide? I mean, I wouldn't say you're exclusively about American history, but- It's true about American history until this one. And sort of accidental, I was working on a film I wouldn't say you're exclusively about American history. It's true about American history until this one. And sort of accidental, I was working on a film about Benjamin Franklin and one of his biographers is Walter Isaacson, a friend, and we were at dinner and he tried to sell

me on DaVinci and I was like saying, I can't do it, I can't do it, I don't do this. And he said, but they're both scientists and they're both great artists and they're, you know, this and that. I go, Walter, please. And I got out and I talked to my oldest daughter, Sarah Burns and her husband, David McMan, who we've been making films with like Central Park Five, Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali. And, and, and, and they said, we'll do it. That sounds fine. And I suddenly realized, yeah, what was the whole thing about

Only American? And we had to invent a whole kind of, they had to invent a whole grammar to do this. They moved to Italy for a year. It's been great to be an old dog being taught new tricks and the child is father to the man. That's very Da Vinci of you. It's very Da Vinci. What happens is, can we say, he's the most inspiring person I've ever come across? If we use 10% of our brain as a cliche, he's using 75%. He doesn't see the

distinctions between, you know, as the PBS ad says, you know, inventor, painter, scientist, anatomist, botanist, whatever, he doesn't see those distinctions. The Mona Lisa is a great work of science and the scientific dissections are great works of art. But even then I've just created a dialectic that he's not participating in. He's just as the filmmaker Guillermo del Toro said, he's determined to interrogate the universe about everything. And when you think about it, he doesn't have a telescope,

he doesn't have a microscope, he's just got his own eye. And he figures out stuff about the workings of the human heart, for example, and the heart valves that can't be proven until we have MRIs in the 1970s, but he's dead right. Just about how the valves work. Exactly right. And he's experimenting on calves' hearts and on human stuff, and he's using water and grass seed to follow the flow, and he's using pieces of silk as a thing, and he's got it. And he's using pieces of silk as a thing and he's got it. He's anticipating all these other things and he doesn't have calculus. He's way before Galileo, who didn't have calculus either, but before Newton and before Einstein,

he's doing stuff with gravity at that level. He's figuring out that humans can do their own powered flight. He just doesn't have materials light enough to do it. But 450 years later, guess what? Humans learn how to do that. And the art he left behind, though only 20 paintings, half of which are incomplete, are among the greatest works of art of all time.

And he's clearly, regardless of your tastes in painting, he has got the most famous painting on earth. There's a line in Marks Aurelius' Meditations, he's thanking one of his mentors. He says for... Did you say Marcus Aurelius? I did, yes. He's one of my favorite guys. I don't think like Twain but spiritual. I don't think he ever wrote a bad sentence. I don't either. I think that's got to be if

you're going to keep doing some European documentaries. Let's just see a Marcus Aurelius one. Marcus Aurelius, that's really tough then, right? But he says I think from Antoninus' stepfather or maybe his philosophy teacher, European documentary. Let's just say a Marcus Aurelius one. Marcus Aurelius, that's really tough then, right? But he says, I think from Antoninus' stepfather, or maybe his philosophy teacher, but he says, you never let me be satisfied just getting the gist of things. Yes.

And I feel like that's Da Vinci in a nutshell. He doesn't even know what that word means. No, so I went to Hampshire College. I went in the second year of its existence. It was an experimental college. Then in 1970, when it's opened, I went in the second year of its existence. It was an experimental college. Then in 1970 when it's opened, I went in the fall of 71. It's still open and it's still experimenting and still doubling down on this incredibly secret sauce that I just, it would take me an hour to describe, but their motto, the

Latin motto is non satis-curi, to know is not enough. And it's what it just means is that, you know, that's all we do is we kind of accumulate this stuff, but it's the synthesis of it. It's what Leonardo is doing all the time. He's asking questions, but then he's experimenting. And he says he's a disciple of experience, which is of course, in the good observational

Aristotelian tradition you're observing, but this is a renaissance now. So we've opened up ties to all sorts of places around the world and we have Muslim influence and they're mathematicians and they're experimenters. So the word in Italian means both, you know, seeing things, but also experimenting on them. And he is, I mean, I've never met a more inspiring person. I'm just a broken record. No, he says somewhere in one of his journals, or he's writing a letter, I forget, but it's like, you know, to do a painting of someone you have to have you have to have dissected at least three

corpses of similar. And he's not saying, hey, you know, dissect one or look at a drawing of a corpse. He's like, you have to personally take apart three human women to be able to paint the face of the Mona Lisa. And you just get a sense of, you know, Hemingway would talk about the iceberg, like the depth underneath every decision he made, the real knowledge as opposed to the approximation in Da Vinci is just, it's literally incomprehensible. Incomprehensible. I made a film about, in the late 90s, about Mark Twain.

And I interviewed one of his biographers, Ron Powers, who said that Twain was an enormous noticer. Like he'd look at you and he could tell just by watching you what was in your pockets, right? And I think Leonardo's like that, but exponentially so. That is to say, there's not the American confidence guy that's sort of behind, you know, both Tom Sawyer, who's getting his friends to paint his fin or Huck Finn, who's lighting out for the territories and coming to some profound understandings about humanity only at the same time. That is to say the humanity of his partner on the raft,

Jim. But he's asking these cosmic questions and that it's not necessary. He's not really saying you have to dissect three bodies he just says I cannot paint unless I know how the organs inside a person I can paint somebody but I also need to paint the intentions of their mind painting them's easy getting the intentions of their minds how we open the film is the hard part and he got the hard part so all of us out there who've spent parts of our lives making jokes about Mona Lisa's smile.

Once you see this film, once you get to the scene on the Mona Lisa, you will never ever make a joke about it again, because incorporated in her is the fact that this person has taken inanimate objects and brought them to life, which makes him, as the scholar Francesca Borgo says, the Italian scholar says, a painter god. He's a wizard, man. He's a wizard.

There's something fraudulent about our normal conceptions of alchemy, but when you're really in the game of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts, you then have forced us all back onto the question, well, what is the difference? If the sum of the parts is here and the whole is here, what's that? And that's the big mystery of life where one and one doesn't equal two, which it has to to make a bridge stand or a house stand or a rocket takeoff, but one and one equaling three, which is what we want from our life, our philosophy, our love, our faith, our art. And that's the compelling and improbable calculus that we have to come to terms with.

And we need the Shakespeare's and the Mozart's and the Bach's and the Twain's and the Lincoln's and the Leonardo's, I would suggest above all else, to give us the roadmap towards that kind of life of inquiry. To bring up the humor of Twain there, I thought one of the striking things sort of towards the beginning of the documentary is where one of the Italian scholars says, you know, Leonardo was fun to be around.

He was great company. He was humorous. Serge Bromley, yeah. He's a work of art before he creates the art. And so you begin to, and we don't have much proof of this in any other triangulations. He's not going to toot his own horn. I mean, his very little biographical detail that we know about him, born out of wedlock, know that he was probably gay, got arrested for sodomy.

So maybe that's yet has a household of male companions. So okay. But in you know, very little things very little things, mother comes to visit, he notes, and then a year later he lists all the expenses of burying her. It's like you want to know more, but in a way it's liberating because all of that kind of tawdry tabloid stuff just kind of falls by the way and you just have to say, well, what did he do next? What did he say next? What did he write about next? And none of it was published in his lifetime. It took centuries for people to understand his genius and influence on all that was going on. His most famous

painting at the time of his death was probably The Last Supper, which was locked away in a dining room of a monastery outside of Milan. And then there's several other paintings that were available, but not that many. We think of Vermeer with 36 or whatever it is, having few. He's got 20 and half of them are incomplete. That's just amazing. But what he left is so startling. And those codexes, all that voluminous writing,

he's lefty, so he's writing backwards in a mirror script, with illustrations, some of them the slightest sketches, remind you of kind of the grace that Matisse had, or Picasso, just a couple of lines and you got the emotion. Or super complicated drawings, or the Mona Lisa, you're dealing with somebody who's operating on all cylinders at all time. Plutarch, who I think is maybe the greatest biographer of all time, he says that you can kind of tell about a person from these like little anecdotes,

these little insights that sort of reveal the whole person. And to me, the one I've always loved about Da Vinci is that he would go into the marketplace and buy birds to let them go. Let them go, yeah. We tell that story, one of our commentators does it. It's a wonderful, it could actually be apocryphal, and you can tell the way this scholar is saying it,

that it's sad, but that is the essence of it. And it's so interesting that, because he was born out of wedlock, his father was a well-known notary and sort of accountant slash lawyer in Florence, and his mother was more of a lower class peasant variety, a working, wasn't scandalous for anybody, but it meant that Leonardo couldn't be named after the family names that were used in the family. So he's named after a saint who was a patron saint of freedom, which I just thought, okay, this is, we're coming back to the same themes that have animated all of my work. That tension is complicated because what is freedom? Everybody's talking about, you know, don't,

don't tread on me or now don't snack on me a little kitten. I got a meme the other day of a kitten saying don't snack on me that, you know, freedom is two things. It's intention, what we need and what I want. And they're not always the same. And that makes it complicated. And that's where the source of so much of the American story is. But it turns out to be so much of the human story. And Leonardo embraces that in every brushstroke.

Well, as we wrap up, I did want to ask you about Stoicism because you connected me with your friend, Jeffrey Rosen, who wrote a fascinating book about the interplay between the founders and Stoicism. But I'm just curious how you came to it, what your relationship to it is. Well, I think I come to it just the way students do and are taught about it, but I think that it was Jeff who had made it come alive

as understanding that it was part of a continuum of self-discipline. We, I don't wanna say denial because that's always a risky word and people kind of get tough, but it is about denial. It's like feeding something else rather than the impulse to not being controlled by passions, but be controlled by something else, which is this search, the pursuit of happiness. And I think that's why Jess's book is so good because we are, just as Leonardo did, jumping

over the darkness of the Middle Ages to go back to a classical tradition to take and learn stuff, but also realize that even they were limited in what they could understand and he could expand on it. So too, our experiment in Republican government, distilling a century or more of enlightenment thinking, becomes this stoical act of self-discipline and it

only occurs, you know, there's a great line in the declaration well after the famous first and second sentences, the second sentence being the operative one, in which he says, all experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable. And then he goes on to list all the things that the king has done wrong, the complaints, which most of the declaration is. But up until that point, he's basically saying that heretofore, everybody's been a subject. And now we have an opportunity to be something else. He didn't call it a citizen, but that's what would eventually be called.

And in order to be a citizen, there was a huge amount of responsibility, not just freedom takes work and all of that truisms. It's just that you have to work on yourself, that the pursuit of happiness is about self-discipline and about becoming better and learning throughout your entire life. And so then you've re-engaged, you've reinvigorated a stoic philosophy in the modern terms of the creation of the first country in which, A, religion, there was no established religion, and that B, individuals, albeit white men of property free of debt at the beginning, have basic human liberties, which are phenomenally articulated and designed pretty well in the Constitution.

The idea that it's born in a kind of appreciation of Stoicism and that our founders are themselves leaping back over that same dark ages to pull up this stuff and see us based more on a Greek and Roman model of ideals and disciplines and stuff than anything that's coming out of the existing monarchies, which are essentially authoritarian rule. Yeah, the idea in Stoicism, as I take it, is that the greatest empire is command of ourselves. And what Jefferson is saying is, hey, instead of the king being in charge, you're going to be in charge. We're going to set up rules and structures. I think that's the other thing. Yes, America was

founded on the idea of freedom. But the other side of that coin was always that you would have a people of virtue who were imposing self-discipline and limitations on themselves. Washington giving us the Christ-like example of, I have power and I'm going to give it away. I don't have to, but I'm going to because it is the right thing to do. Exactly, that's exactly right. And that joyously connects the complicated country that we live in and struggle to understand

with the genius of Leonardo and with the earlier antiquity that has been as potent a force in our lives in the works of William Shakespeare and in all of the things that command our attention. It's a kind of blessed, you know, there's lots more to learn, non-status kirei too. To know is not enough. Well, since you're a lover of Marcus Rios, I'll give you this quote. My favorite translation is the Hayes translation,

which he did for the modern library. And he says, this is what Marcus really says he learned from his brother Severus. He says, to love my family, truth and justice. It was through him that I encountered Thrasya, Helvidius, Cato, Dion and Brutus and conceived of a society of equal laws governed by equality of status and of speech and of rulers who respect the liberty of their subjects above all else. Yeah.

And you don't think that our founders aren't aren't imbibing Marcus Aurelius. It's all there. The catechism is just being rewritten. It's it had already been written. Well, and in that Jeffersonian way of Marcus Aurelius is perfectly expressing the idea that he himself is not even close to living up to,

but that future generations pick up that work, as Martin Luther King said, and we live out the meaning of the creed, even if he could have never conceived that we would actually take him literally. Yeah, yeah, and Jefferson too, right? All men are created equal, but he owns hundreds of human beings

and doesn't see the contradiction of the hypocrisy and doesn't see fit contradiction of the hypocrisy and doesn't see fit to free many of them in his lifetime. It's just great and he's temporizing and he could, you know, it's not like you would say, well, he was a man of his time. His neighbor freed all his slaves and begged his neighbor, Thomas Jefferson, to free this. His cousin freed his slaves, begged him to do that. He didn't.

He just bought more Italian statuary and more French wine and went deeper and deeper into debt. And as we know, in the household, what's going on that his dead wife's half sister, Sally Hemings, is going to father a lot of children that is going to set this American narrative. I mean, it's like, that's the heart of the American narrative. Everything is contained in the story of Thomas Jefferson. I did an email for the Daily Stoic. We send out this email every day. It's a stoic inspired thing. And like you, you know, you think, hey, I'm going to do this kind of nerdy stuff. It's

only going to resonate with a few people just like me. A million people get this stoic note every morning. And I wrote this one where I was contrasting Washington and Jefferson. I'd be curious what you think. because so they both obviously understand there's problems with slavery. But Washington is the sort of disciplined stoic guy and Jefferson is much more the French Epicurean. That's right. Washington is financially able to free his slaves at the end of his life. And Jefferson is so hopelessly in debt, even if he knew it was wrong and wanted to, he couldn't.

And so part of living inside your means, part of being self-sufficient, there's a moral component there because it allows you to do the right thing that is hard because you can afford to and it is a viable choice for you. John Adams being the most stoic of them, and he can make his money off of his own labor.

He doesn't have to steal it from other people. He doesn't have to steal it from, that's a perfect description. And Washington has that discipline to not dissipate, and therefore gives him a little bit of power over one of the main sources of his wealth, which is, you know, free labor. Yeah. You can rise above his own self-interest, if only partially.

And Jefferson said, oh, slavery, you know, slavery is like holding the wolf by the ears. You don't like it, but you don't dare let go. Well, everybody seems to be able to let go who want to let go. So why don't you, Tom, want to let go? Well, because Monticello was nice. Yeah. And it's a remember he's, he's, it looks like, I mean, Mount Vernon's a plantation. He's not trying to say anything other than, you know, this is a plantation. But Monticello is like, Oh no, this is a, this is a neoclassical thing. And I've invented dumbwaiters so you don't actually have to see the fact that this is a slave operation, that this is a plantation.

He disguises it and it's sort of like, pay no attention to that. It's an amazing dissembling, which we still continue to do in this country. And it may be part of that 30, 33% that is in all of us that manifests itself as the worst aspects of human character. Well, thank you so much for doing this and for your amazing work. I will put in one final plug, not just for the Da Vinci documentary, which is great,

but I think your American Buffalo one is incredible too. And I'm a huge Steve Rinella fan, so I was excited to see him in there. Steve Rinella is really fantastic. He's a good stoic, I would say. That book is one of the great American history books. He's the bee's knees. Yep. Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes,

that would mean so much to us and would really help the show. We appreciate it and I'll see you next episode. If you like The Daily Stoic and thanks for listening, you can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music. And before you go, would you tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey on Wondery.com slash survey.