The Daily Stoic - Kermit Roosevelt III on Theodore Roosevelt and the Collapse of Honor (PT 1)

Episode Date: January 10, 2024

On this episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast, Ryan talks with American author, lawyer, and legal scholar Kermit Roosevelt III on Honoring and doing what is right, Why peoples values and sense of honor are collapsing, How many people know who Marcus Aurelius is because of Gladiator, and his book The Nation That Never Was.Kermit is an American author, lawyer, and legal scholar. He is a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a great-great-grandson of United States President Theodore Roosevelt and a distant cousin of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Roosevelt worked as a lawyer with Mayer Brown in Chicago from 2000 to 2002 before joining the Penn Law faculty in 2002. Roosevelt's areas of academic interest include conflicts of law and constitutional law. He has published in the Virginia Law Review, the Michigan Law Review, and the Columbia Law Review, among others, and his articles have been cited twice by the United States Supreme Court and numerous times by state and lower federal courts.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating, and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are, and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives. But first, we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors.

Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of The Daily Stoke Podcast. I'm gonna take you way back to the Ryan Holiday who had never read Mark's Realises Meditations. Right, I've told you this story. I'm at a conference, I'm going to take you way back to the Ryan Holiday who had never read Mark's Re this is meditations. I've told you this story, I'm at a conference, I'm in college, and I go up to Dr. Drew, if you remember him, from MTV and Love Line, and he was speaking in the conference and I asked him for a book recommendation. So he recommends the Stokes who recommended Epic tea to specifically, but I went back to my hotel room and I bought that book and another one that he recommended. And you know what that book was? So book by Edmund Morris called the Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. It's a three-part series of biographies on Theodore Roosevelt. And they're incredible.

That was an amazing book, totally open up. I never read a biography like that. I don't know if I'd read any books like that. And actually the story of young Theodore Roosevelt, which he tells so brilliantly in that book, is the story that I tell in part three, the inner citadel chapter of the obstacle is the way. And it's a book I think about to this day, it's a person I've read about many, many times. And so I don't know how I first heard about today's guest, Kermit Roosevelt, the third. Another amazing book where I first heard of Kermit Roosevelt. It's one we carry in the painting porch. I've raved about many times the river of doubt

about theodore Roosevelt's trip down a river in the Amazon where he very nearly died. And as I was talking to Kermit Roosevelt, the third, who is theodore Roosevelt's great, great, grandson, he read that book and loved it and Kermit Roosevelt, a company's Roosevelt on that journey. And he was like, is he going to make it? And I was like, literally him making it, if he hadn't made it, Kermit Roosevelt III would

not exist. But the point is, even if he liked that book. So when I first heard about Kermit Roosevelt III, they would not exist. But the point is, even he liked that book. So when I first heard about Kermit Roosevelt III, I think I read an article that he'd read because he happens to be a legal scholar. He's a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania. And he's an expert on reconstruction specifically, which is a topic I'm fascinated with. And he's not not some minor lawyer either. He is an expert on constitutional law. He's been published in many different law reviews. His articles have been cited twice

by the United States Supreme Court. Numerous times by state and lower federal courts, he was a lawyer with a mayor Brown, and he joined the Penn Law faculty in 2002. He's written a bunch of really interesting books including a number of novels, but he came out to the Daily Stoke Studio here in Bastrop, Texas and did an amazing interview. I was so excited to talk to him. I can't wait for you to listen to that interview now.

I remember very specifically, I rented an Airbnb in Santa Barbara. I was driving from San Francisco to Los Angeles. I just sold my first book and I'd been working on it and I just needed a break, I needed to get away and I needed to have some quiet time to write. And that was one of the first Airbnb's I ever started with and then when the book came out and did well, I bought my first house.

I would rent that house out during South by Southwest and F1 and other events in Austin. Maybe you've been in a similar place. You've stayed in an Airbnb and you thought yourself this actually seems pretty doable. Maybe my place could be an Airbnb. You could rent a spare bedroom, you could rent your whole place when you're away. Maybe you're planning a ski get away this winter or you're planning on going somewhere warmer while you're away, you could Airbnb your home and make some extra money towards

the trip. Whether you use the extra money to cover some bills or for something a little more fun, your home could be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca-host. I'm Afroher. I'm Peter Freigapel. And in our new podcast Legacy, we explore the lives of some of the biggest characters in history. This season, we delve into the life of Pablo Picasso, hugely interesting, important influential artist, certainly the greatest of the 20th century, perhaps the greatest of all time, but a man with a complicated, difficult,

personal side too that makes us look at his art in a different way. The ultimate giant of modern art, and someone who everyone has heard of or seen a Picasso work, or the Picasso brand on something. But who was he, as a person, as a husband, as a lover, he was a genius and he was very problematic? Follow Legacy Now, wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge entire seasons of Legacy Add Free on Amazon Music, all by subscribing to Wondery Plus on Apple podcasts, all the Wondery app.

And so John Tyler still has grandchildren who are alive, which seems unreal to me. Yeah. And then I met a guy, he was born in Bachelors County. He lived in Austin. His name was Richard Overton. He died maybe three or four years ago. But he was born during the heroes of Elts presidency. He was the oldest man in the world when he died. Oh wow. So like, you know what I mean? Like, great, great, great, seems like it would make sense. And then also, so history feels, I guess what I'm saying is history feels a very far away. And then it's also sometimes like one life, two life to go to go back to it. Yeah, there are people who've lived through things that seem like incredibly remote.

Yes. Looking back on that. Well, I heard this other weird one. This is me just learning out a little bit. But okay, so Jimmy Buffett wrote Margaritaville in Austin. He ate at this Mexican restaurant in Austin that was the first or second place to have a Margaritaville in Austin. He ate at this Mexican restaurant in Austin that was the first or second place to have a Margarita machine. That's not what's weird about the story. What blew my mind is it was owned by the grandson of this guy named Joe and Joe had come to America from China to build the railroads in the 1870. So you go Margaritaville, which feels like this modern beach song, is like two handshakes away from importing immigrant labor to build the railroads in this country. Yeah. Well, we're a pretty young country. Yeah. I mean, even the Roosevelt name goes back basically before the US, right? Oh, yeah.

Like, pretty quickly. Yeah. And, yeah, we tend to, like, that was so it was weird to meet Richard and go, okay, this guy goes, like, he was the oldest living veteran when he died in the United States. And I was like, well, who was the oldest living veteran when he was born? And it was like a guy in the Black Hawk War, which Lincoln fought against. Yeah.

And so like, yeah, you think it's all very distant and then it's actually not that distant and then that ties into the ideas in your book, which is like, this story is not this thing that's been written, it's not like the Odyssey. There was written like thousands of years ago and has passed down to us. It's like still being written

and some of the people who wrote good big chunks of it, not good chunks, but big chunks of it, are like still here and you realize like, they were just making it up. Yeah. Well, I think about that too, when I think about historical moments that I lived through that now seemed so distant to my students.

You know, and I'm like the 80s when I was a kid, are now as far away from us as the 40s were when I was growing up, which just doesn't seem possible. Why I get that we have some high school kids that work in the bookstore and realizing like to them close from the 90s are retro and cool again. And to them, those clothes are as distant to them as hippie clothes were to me in the 90s. Yeah, I feel like it's different somehow though. Like the time is 30 years doesn't mean as much as it used to because like the year 2000, I feel like that's different somehow though. Like a time is 30 years doesn't mean as much as it used to. Because like the year 2000, I feel like that's still sort of the modern world.

Whereas when I was young, like the 60s, I was like, oh, that's so old. But don't you think that's actually something that we forget about the past, which is like how things that had finished were in the past, were in distant memory to those people. So we go, okay, that was just 30 years ago or 40 years ago. And then, so you go, yeah, in the 1840s, or, you know, as they're, let's say in the lead up to the Civil War, as they're sort of hammering these things out. Like, the founding of the country itself is not this far off, like, ossified permanent thing. But like, a thing that their parents did,

or their parents' parents did, and therefore isn't really as set in stone as it feels like to us. Yeah, I know, absolutely. So in the anti-bellum period, it's like 50 years ago. It's definitely their grandparents where they... Yeah. And then the other thing is that they had a really different

conception of the founding, I think, than we do now, which is exactly what you were saying, which is it's this dynamic moment when there are lots of different understandings of how society should be organized and what political concepts mean out there. Yes. And it's not like the single moment that we can look back at and find the one objective

true meaning of things. But it is interesting how much change or not change a human life can progress through. Like I was just reading about this guy. You might have heard of him. You know who Thomas went with Higginson is? He was a Harvard grad. He's kind of this underrated historical figure. So he comes from this wealthy Boston family,

a Cambridge family, and he's a translator of Epic Titus. And he becomes pen pals with this lady named Emily Dickinson. He leads a black regiment of troops in the US Civil War. And so he signs one of the first calls for a national women's convention for women's rights. Again, like women's rights, abolition, we don't see as happening at roughly the same time, but they do, right? And then I was reading about him. So I was like, wow, this is incredible life. There's this philosopher who's also engaged in the main issues of the day. And then I go, when did he die? And then I'm reading this thing. And he, his like, he, he was part of a,

a literary conference with Jack London and up in Sinclair before he died in 1911. And so the idea that he's stretching from like, before the Civil War, when they're deciding, you know, when it's an actual discussion about whether black people should have rights or whether women should have rights. And then flash forward to the early to mid-19, like the early 1900s,

when like there's machines and like these modern figures are also around, it just kind of blows your mind how much happened in that period and how much these questions were being still debated. Yeah. And the same question's keeping. Of course. That's the other thing. Like, one thing about the book is how much our understandings of certain things like

the Declaration of Independence change. And then the other thing that I was really struck by writing it was how much sort of echo there is. And it is almost, so like fashion sort of moves in 30-year cycles. American history kind of moves in 100-year cycles. Okay. It looks like and we've had like 30 year cycles. American history kind of moves in 100 year cycles. Okay. It looks like and we've had like three of them. Yeah.

I have a, here I have a theater reservoir to quote you in my like, because I thought of when I was reading the book as I liked to post every fourth of July. He said, in name we had the Declaration of Independence in 1776, but we gave lie by our acts to the words of the Declaration of Independence until 1865 and words count for nothing in so far as they represent acts.

That's very still. Isn't that interesting? Yeah, act a nonverba, deeds not words. And so yeah, we had this sort of story and actually the ongoing debate is like, we've always had this story, we've always had these ideals. And then it's this sort of generational conflict or argument about whether we're going to live up to them or not or how they apply or not. Like I thought that's one of the interesting things in the book that like that all men

are created equal, you have a good chunk of the United States in the early days who believe that that means that slave owners should not be discriminated against. Yeah. Right. So the principle of equality can mean lots of different things to different people. And that's one of the concepts that you see sort of floating around in this indeterminate way at the founding, and then it's just fought over. Yeah. People just argue for their perspective, and actually eventually it does come to military force. Yes. And then even in the Roosevelt era, there's these Supreme Court arguments where basically the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, which seem like they're pretty fucking clear, are being used

actually for the opposite of what they're intended to mean. That basically, it's sort of protecting sort of moneyed interests and protecting basically everyone but the individuals from exercising those equal rights and access to things. Which isn't sort of, you'd think like, that's just obviously not what they're intended to mean. And yet, when it makes its way into the courtroom, kind of like what's up is down and down is up and somehow they manage to make successful

in the sense that they work, successful arguments that actually know. It wasn't intended to do this thing that it was obviously intended to do. Yeah, and actually that's something that you see with a lot of different constitutional provisions. And it was sort of amazing to me teaching constitutional law year after year where I would get to these cases, and I was like, geez, that's really not

what this was supposed to be doing. Like, first amendment is not supposed to protect the rights of corporations to drown out the individual speaker. That seems kind of contrary to the purpose. The 14th amendment is not supposed to protect the rights of corporations to drown out the individual speaker. Yes. That seems kind of contrary to the purpose. The 14th amendment is not supposed to prevent the government from trying to increase racial equality. That's kind of the opposite.

But the explanation for all of that is pretty simple, which is that power takes over. And so you put in constitutional provisions that are supposed to protect politically weak groups and the powerful capture them and use them for their own purposes. And it's just sort of a phenomenon about how power operates in society, I think. I think that's an underrated or an under-under-under- understood part of American history.

Or the story I've come to understand about American history is that we sort of get these democratic institutions, we get this system. And then basically what happens through some stuff that was very clearly spelled out at the beginning, whether we're talking about the three-fifths clause, whatever, is it's basically captured by this sort of slave holding aristocracy or oligarchy that basically just controls the lever of power for the government for most of American history.

And it's only been kind of in these punctuated periods where that hold is lessened, that you get some of the breakthroughs, but that's basically how it's worked. Yeah, and what I would say, what I would add to that is, I think that's by design. So, you know, what is the point of the three-fifths compromise? What does it do? What does everyone understand at the time it's going to do? It tilts the whole national government in favor of slavery. Yeah.

Because you've got the House of Representatives. Obviously, the three-fifths compromise gives the slave states more representatives. And then because a state's number of electors is determined in part by its number of representatives, they get more voice in picking the president. And then because the president nominates judges, they get more voice in the composition of the judiciary. And that's why for the first 70 or 80 years of its existence, America is controlled by the slave power, basically. Right. Yeah, interesting. And then that sort of changed my understanding of Jim Crow, too, which is like, it's not that they just invent this idea of segregation. Even, like, obviously, it's racially motivated.

Obviously, it's a sort of a status quo, or a box of whites are supposed to be separate, they don't want mixing the race, et cetera. But that if you understand that at a deeper level, it's just a reversion to the status quo that was the three fifths compromised. It makes a lot of sense. Like, basically the Civil War blows apart the hold,

the illegitimate hold that these people have in the levers of power because they're, for the first time, you have an actual form of representative government, right, where like, it's not artificially skewed by not counting certain populations. Now they're like, well, we'll count these populations again, but we just won't let them vote through fear of intimidation and reprisals and, you know, pull taxes and all these other complicated things. It's just the sort of stat, it's trying to get back to this thing

that I guess goes back to the very founding, which is you have a good chunk of the colonies where like we don't want to be a part of it unless we get to do it our way. And almost like in a lopsided marriage, where you just have to sort of accept this fundamentally unfair status quo or the other person leaves. Yeah, so the Civil War and Reconstruction are this incredible break in American history that I think we just we downplay. Yeah, and we downplay it in part because we gave up. So with the Civil War, there's like the military defeat of the South, with reconstruction, there's a fundamental restructuring of the American constitutional order because all of a sudden the federal government is the good guys.

Yeah. Right. At the founding, the founders are thinking about the state militias fighting off the red coats. They're thinking the national government is dangerous. The states are the protectors of liberty. And reconstruction basically turns that upside down because the national government is the force for liberty.

The states are the bad guys. And politically they change it too because the three-fist compromise has been superseded. And now you've got, you know, the former Confederates being barred from office with section three of the 14th Amendment. And Congress actually during Reconstruction, they send out the 14th Amendment to be ratified. And this is something that people, I always never taught this in school. I don't know how it's taught now. But they send out the 14th Amendment to be ratified. And it gets rejected gets rejected. 10 of the 11 former Confederate states rejected, Tennessee ratifies. And then also like Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky.

So if you think of sort of founding America, they reject the 14th Amendment and Congress then annihilates 10 of the former Confederate states, the ones that said no. Congress says your governments are dissolved, no governments exist in these states, and then they basically make new states. So they say, here's who your political community is, right? You don't get to define yourself the way the Declaration of Independence talks about,

it is like one people wanting to govern themselves, we're gonna tell you the formerly enslaved or citizens. And we're gonna tell you who gets to vote too, because now you're gonna have constitutional conventions, you're gonna write new constitutions, the formerly enslaved get to participate in those the former Confederates don't. So Congress is basically making new states,

and it's the new states that ratify the 14th Amendment. That gives us, in my view, like basically a new American nation. Very different, very different founding principles. But the problem is the former Confederates don't accept that. So the US Army has to fight basically a counterinsurgency war to support the racially integrated reconstruction governments and eventually the will of white America

to maintain this counterinsurgency campaign fades away. And that's when the federal troops were thrown, that's when Reconstruction is overthrown. And again, we don't teach this very well, I think, but it's just, it's by violence. Have you read, it's a novel from a round map here and it's called The Fools, Aaron? No, I haven't.

It was written by Albian Torhe. Torhe? I don't know. He's one of Theodore Roosevelt's friends. He's, he's the, you know, the, I write about this in Courageous Calling, but there's this famous letter between him and Theodore Roosevelt where Theodore Roosevelt is explaining why he invited Booker T. Washington to dine with him at the White House.

And he says, I know it's gonna kill me in the Southern States, but the fact that I consider that it would kill me in the Southern States is why I did it. Like, he's like, I did, I didn't want to be the person that didn't want to do what's obviously the right thing for political reasons. But he writes this novel called The Fool's Aaron, which is loosely based on his experience,

in that he's an officer in the union. The war goes well, but he fights in the South, and kind of falls in love with it. And he moves to Alabama, or some of the plot of the novels, he moves to Alabama, and he's just going to be an American in Alabama because this is all the United States. And he sort of quickly discovers that that's not how it is. And that the people who just waged this horrendous war, their minds didn't change

because they were beaten on the battlefield. And he sort of discovers that also it wasn't even that they'd sort of rationally gotten to think what they had thought, but that there was this whole reinforcing structure that had existed that made it impossible to question like that. There are all these laws in place and a culture of intimidation that said, hey, if you question any of these institutions, of intimidation that said, hey, if you question any of these institutions, well, in shoe, well, intimidate you, we'll destroy everything you have. And so he describes it as this fool's errand, thinking that you could go into the south during reconstruction and reconstruct it, right?

He basically bumps into the unreconstructed south for which his basic conclusion was like, there is an army big enough in the world to sort of occupy and change these people's minds. It's okay, it's just, I found it would be a very, so it's this interesting sort of contemporaneous documentation of what must have been a lot of the feelings that led into the abandonment of reconstruction. And the way that, like an equivalent today might be like, you and I don't feel as strongly about vaccines as the people who are anti-vaccine. And so at a certain point, we're just like,

let's just go on and live our lives. Do you know what I mean? Like when you bump up into something that is so fundamentally irrational and deeply held and based on all these different factors, I think you, you do notice that sort of collapse in collective will, it's hard for a big tent of people to get together and stay activated around an issue for a long period of time when you're coming up against a deeply entrenched sort of minority, but what would you call it? Like a sort of veto style power.

Do you know what I mean? Yeah, well, so this is another one of the problems with the democratic system. Is it like the passionate minority tends to get its way. Yeah. Because you can just hold out until eventually the other side gives up or compromises to some degree. Yeah. And also because in a lot of these situations, the passionate minority is willing to wreck

everything. Yes. If they don't get their way. So there are several moments in American history where some Americans are like, we must all come together or the nation will be destroyed. The nation will fail. So the revolution is a moment like that. The constitution is a moment like that.

And then there are some people who are like, fine, but if we don't get what we want, then there will be no America. Right. And historically, that's the slave owners. Yes. And they're demanding concessions to slavery and basically they get them every time. Right.

To go back to that divorce analogy, because you're like, well, I don't want to break up and you are willing to break up. And so you have all the power. Yeah. And then that's what happens exactly like with the end of reconstruction. Yes. Because the white Americans in the North are not willing to keep fighting. And the white Americans in the South

are willing to keep fighting. And so eventually you get the compromise, the compromise of 1877. And isn't this also like understanding that is helped me understand the playbook of the civil rights movement in that the South was like, well, let's just try that again, right? So the North basically leaves the South alone

for like 80 or 100 years. And this whole sort of reversion to the old mean comes about in different name, different practices, but the South still essentially has the same power, the same veto power over any kind of change that would disrupt the status quo. They sort of have, they have the representation as if their population was X,

but they only have to speak for, you know, 50% of X, right? And so when the North gets nosy again and says, hey, we don't really like that you can't do this. And we're gonna send people on buses from the North to the South. And we're gonna say, you know, schools have to be desegregated. We're gonna mandate on a federal level which is certain ideas of equality and justice. The South says to itself, and then also to the North,

what if we just make that so difficult again that your will collapses? And it almost, I mean, it very well could have happened that way. Like, it seems, it seems because it didn't though that way. It seems like they were all, they were sort of fighting against the inevitable tide of history, but it had worked literally every time

up until that point. Yeah, and I mean, it did and it didn't work that time. Because yes, we get the Boating Rights Act, we get integration, we get the 101st Airborne in Little Rock, enforcing the desegregation degree. But we had all that in reconstruction, right? We had the US Army there, enforcing people's civil rights. We had racially integrated governments,

we had racially integrated schools and police forces. We had real multiracial democracy in the South, and then we lost it. And we had the second reconstruction, right? That's what people call the civil rights movement. And we had integration, and we had the Voting Rights Act. And then there was opposition to it. And Ronald Reagan, in 1980, starting his campaign, says that he believes in states' rights, and he's going to appoint Supreme Court justices who will follow the original understanding.

And if you're thinking, okay, states' rights, original understanding, where is he giving that speech, Philadelphia? You're like, okay, it's about the founding. But he's talking to Philadelphia, Mississippi, not Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. States rights has a slightly different flavor there. So what you get with the Reagan Revolution and the idea of originalism and the new federalism, which is about States rights, is presented as sort of a return to founding principles. And I was like, oh, that's not bad because we all love the founding. 1776 is great. But what it's doing is rolling back the second reconstruction.

Yeah, really. And the point of rolling back the first reconstruction wasn't really to go back to the founding. It was to go back to the Confederacy. So the really important question, I think, is when we're looking at the values that are being put forward in the name of the founding, are we actually really getting

neo-confederate values? And with the Reagan revolution, I think that's kind of the direction that we were moving in. And now, like, if you look at what the Supreme Court has done recently, Shelby County, gutting the Voting Rights Act, that's very much the redemption playbook, right? That's the undoing of reconstruction. That's the undoing of multiracial democracy. playbook, right? That's the undoing of reconstruction, that's the undoing of multi-racial democracy. Everyone leaves a legacy. For some, the shadow falls across decades, even centuries. But it also changes. Judgment is revised. Summer redeemed. Others are torn down. From Wundery and Gohanger Pubcasts, I'm Afwahherch. I'm Peter Frankapan.

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Follow how I built this on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to how I built this early and add free right now on Wondery Plus. So I've kind of been working on this theory, which is there's this kind of like dark matter inside the human race, the sort of dark energy that it seems like we sort of slay, whether it's with the founding, whether it's with these compromises, whether it's with the Civil War, whether it's with the Civil Rights Movement. And then there is, there does this idea of trying to revert, trying to go back to redeem, seems

to be it's this sort of yin and yang, right? What is the motivating factor of it, right? Like the slave power ceases to be the slave power exactly, right? It morphs into a different set of policy. And you could argue they're kind of weakening a little bit, right? Because we don't literally want to abandon them, but we do want to keep them as a cheap source of labor. Or, you know, it's not, you know,

there isn't de-Santis isn't George Wallace, right? But there is this kind of energy that doesn't seem to go anywhere, but that people know is there, and certain politicians, certain interests, certain writers, certain filmmakers, right, if you're talking about birth of any, like, there's always this sense that it's there, and it's very powerful, very volatile, but you can tap into it if you want. What is that?

I don't know. I mean, I think that's like, that's a psychological question. Where does that come from? I think that, and why is it so persistent? Well, it's got to have some sort of hardwired basis in the human brain, I would think. So people do understand in group and out group pretty easily. And you can make them fear people that you designate as the out group. Sure. So a lot of politics works that way.

Yeah. Where they're saying, if you don't vote for me, these other people are going to come and get you. Yeah. Right. They're going to take your job people are gonna come and get you. Yeah, right, they're gonna take your job or they're gonna kill you. Somebody has to be the person getting fucked, basically.

Is the primal belief and someone saying, oh fuck those people, so they don't fuck you. And you better make sure it's not you. Yeah, yeah. Because if you look at American history, like equality, which we like to think of as this unifying American value, equality is the really divisive thing. Yeah, because equality typically requires the dismantling of hierarchy

and people don't like that. Right. So they resist it. Right. If if the society is like this, you would think, well, who, who would mind this? Right. It's actually more like this. And so a lot of people are opposed to it.

Yeah, a lot of people are opposed to it. A lot of people are told that they should fear it. Also, if you give these people power, they're going to do terrible things to you. Right. The only other kind of similar dark matter, like if you, I've anti-Semitism seems to be an equally persistent, probably longer, like more global phenomenon where it's like,

there are periods where we're not doing it. And then somebody's like, you know what we have it and dust it off in a while, but can really get the people going. And then it kind of starts with these illusions, and then it gets more and more overt until it gets so intolerable that you get a broad enough coalition to do something about fighting it.

You know what I mean? Right, well, so anti-Semitism, I think there is kind of a psychological explanation for that that makes sense because it's the kind of thing that people tend to believe. So it's useful from an evolutionary perspective to like see patterns. Because if you can put things together, you can figure out what the rustle and the bushes means or you can figure out what someone else is trying to do and what their plans are. So people have this agency detector that looks at a pattern of events

and it's like something is behind that, something's making that happen. Yeah. Because if you're right about that, then you've figured out something useful. But it's a little bit overactive, maybe. And it makes people see patterns where they aren't actually there.

And it makes them attribute agency to things that are just sort of random. And so people are very willing to believe that there's some group out there causing all these things. Some group out there pulling the strings. And that's kind of the form that anti-semitism takes. So it fits very naturally into people's minds. I think, you know, not that it's necessarily the Jews, but that there's some group there.

It's the Illuminati, the Freemasons, and anti-Semitism just fits into that slot. And I think it's a way that people naturally think. And don't you think it's also, going back to the Greeks and Romans, the demagogue figure, the sort of populist speaker, the one who needs to come to power, but is sort of not part of, I don't wanna call it the elites,

but is not sort of ordinarily endowed, they're needing to create a new constituency to control power. They tend to rely on those tricks. It's a very activating sort of persuasive tool that people have been doing for thousands of years. So they're talking about antisemitism or racism in the United States. It's this way, like it's this way to get power.

Like I'm rereading Robert Penn Warren's Kingfish right now. Oh yeah, all the King's men, all the King's men. And obviously I read it maybe 10 years ago when I lived in New Orleans and I'm reading it now and it's just like, it's remarkable how, oh, this is just politics today. Like he's talking about newspapers and rallies,

today we're talking about social media and rallies, but it's the same thing. Yeah, and it puts me very strongly in mind of Trump, actually. When Trump is like, I am your vengeance. Yes. And in all the Kingsman, he's like, give me that meat axe and I will swing it for you. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, it's sort of a terrifying moment, I think. And not wrong. I mean, there's this line in the book where Jack is this sort of person who should know better, the the the the enabler political advisor. He's like sort of talking to all his rich friends from back home and he says something like, how could you do this, blah, blah, blah? And he's like, it's just a job. But he's like, but don't you think if our government had been serving the people

instead of its own interests for basically the entire US history, there would not be an opportunity for a person like this. And you go, that's true, like that is true. And there's an argument you can make as you're trying to understand how someone like Trump is possible. It explains it. And then at the same time, you realize that that's the rationalization that people who want to ride that rocket ship tell themselves even though they should know better. Yeah, I mean, people are always willing to hear that they're being lied to and they're being ripped off and they deserve better and really they should be better off than they are. And sometimes it's true, but you're not going to have a perfect government. People are always going to be dissatisfied. and then weaponizing that dissatisfaction, and then particularly turning it on scapegoats

and vulnerable groups, like that's a really bad thing. Of course. But it's always possible, and there's not really anything in the system that prevents people from doing that. So that's kind of the other big hole in our system, which is basically the founders, maybe they were too reliant on the idea of classical virtue.

It was this idea that like, well, and we'll just hope or expect. I mean, there's the idea that ambition checks ambition, but there was this sense that there was things you could do, but a man or woman of honor simply would not do. And I think one of the things that we've learned over the last couple hundred years is like, no, they'll definitely do it. Someone will do it. Yeah. Yeah. That's why the framers were so wary of democracy. And the 1787 Constitution, it's really not that democratic. It's sort of as democratic,

as the states want to be, to some extent. In the election of representatives, you can vote for a federal representative if you're allowed to vote for the most numerous House of the state legislature. Otherwise, people get no direct voice under the 1787 Constitution. You can look at like the Federalist papers and what they say about the presidency and the electoral college. Because there they are concerned about what if a demagogue becomes president?

Sure, because you're creating chief executive right office who's gonna have a lot of power, it would be terrible if a bad person got into that position. And that's what the electoral college is supposed to prevent. And you can, you know, you can read all of the things that Hamilton is saying in the federal's papers about how it's impossible that we'll ever get a bad president because the electors will be so wise and virtuous and they'll exercise their discretion and a demagogue could maybe fool

the people of one state, but never abroad enough swath of the country to gain power. I don't know, it's all just sort of sad looking back how naive it was. Yes, it was. Right. There was this sense, I think, that the final check in all these different things was a person's personal sense of honor or reputation, right? And like, pretty early on, they had a sense that that wasn't going to work when you look at like an Aaron Burr figure. Yeah, Burr, exactly. But yeah, it was remarkably vulnerable to just someone without a sense of shame. Yeah, and I think there was a kind

of classism. Yeah, and that also. Sure. And that classism in that also, that they thought, the common people might be fooled, the common people might not be virtuous, but we've got some sort of elite buffer, right? That's what the electoral college was supposed to be. That the elites will protect us because they have discernment and good values. Yeah, and that they were all, they'd all read the same books and believed the same things and had the same values. And as the country grew and grew and grew, it's no longer like 20 people. You know what I mean? Like it's, it becomes so much more vulnerable to, like, I mean, I think when you look at 2020, it's not just that it comes down to like a handful of votes in

some key states, but that beyond that when someone decides not to accept those results, it comes down to like three or four people who decide not to go along with it, you know, whether it's, you know, a secretary of state in one state, or you know, like just certain people, just one or two people who are like, you know, someone in Michigan on some elections board doesn't vote the way that they think he's going to vote. Someone in Georgia, it's like, it's just a handful of consciences, not this incredibly robust series of interlocking checks and balances, but more like exceptions than the rules. Yeah, no, I think that's true. So when we look back on that and we're like, oh, the system held democracy survived, it is true. It was really close. And one of the things that people are doing in reaction to that is they were purging election officials who they thought wouldn't go along with it in 2024. And

some of that was stopped in the 2022 elections because the Trump supported candidates didn't do as well as people thought they would. But you don't have to replace a lot of people. Yeah, for it to work. Yes. Yeah, there's this quote, I'm forgetting who it's from, but he says something like, the duty of a person is to act as if the fate of the world is on their shoulders. Right, which is this kind of ancient, it's somewhat grandiose, but it's also this kind of ancient idea that like, who you are matters, your sort of personal sense of honor and duty, your job,

these things really matter. And you can see where people who are acting that way end up stopping terrible things from happening. And then you see the converse being true, also where the person who says, well, I should just do what's in my interest here, or I don't want to be the one that takes the heat. You can see how people making individual decisions to just go along with what they're being asked to do.

Sort of has the effect of putting the responsibility onto someone else and not themselves. Does that make sense? Like this idea that you enter politics or you enter public life or you enter a profession was the law or medicine or journalism because you have this code that you live by, how are you operating business as though you are a fiduciary. These are like kind of principles that really,

they seem antiquated until you get in these sort of high stakes, you know, situations where a person not acting that way shows you why you really need people to be steeped in those ideas from an early age. Yeah, and this is something that the legal profession has been asking itself, I think, because you sort of expect politicians to behave in a self-interested way, and politicians don't necessarily have a loyalty to some external code, but the lawyers are supposed to. So you look at Trump's adventures through the legal system in challenging the 2020 election.

And mostly the judges did a pretty good job. You know, so we feel like the judges have been socialized appropriately. You know, I don't think that the Supreme Court justice is that Trump appointed, feel a personal loyalty to him. I think, you know, they're pretty mainstream, conservative rule of law kind of people.

But there were a lot of lawyers who went along with Trump. There were a lot of lawyers who were trying to help him, and pretty high prestige lawyers. So something went wrong with the legal profession there. There were people who were willing to abandon the rule of law, truth, and democracy for something. What is that? Because I think it's a societal issue. I don't think it's just a political Trump issue. It's a sort of collapse of a sense of,

I got into this for a reason. These are the, there's not many lines of work left where someone would say, I, I swore an oath unironically, and it would mean something. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Well, you know, that's what the whole section three of the 14th Amendment litigation is about now, like you took an oath to support the Constitution and then you engaged in insurrection.

Yes. And that should have consequences. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, I used to tell my law students that one way of understanding what my whole Constitutional law course was about was when you're sworn into the bar, you're going to take this oath to support the Constitution. What does that mean? Yeah.

What are you pledging your support to? Yes. And what does it mean to support it? Yeah. And maybe it's a, maybe it's partly a collapse of religion, like even the swearing of an oath on a Bible had some sort of significance to people that maybe is slightly lessened, but it does, it does. There's almost like a, it feels like to go like, I swore in oath, I said I was going to do this thing or not do this thing. And therefore, to do it and blow up my career seems

silly or immature or do you know what I mean? Like there's, it almost seems more than old fashioned. It seems immature or silly. This idea of like, this is my code, and I have to follow it, come hell or high water. Yeah, I think it's sort of related to the death of expertise, maybe. There's a collapse in the whole idea of things external to people that are real and matter, and things that can provide a scaffolding or a framework or a guide for your life in a meaningful way.

Yeah, it's like identifying with your profession as something that matters, right? Like whether you're like, I'm a brick layer, and this is how a brick layer operates, and this is what a brick layer's work site looks like, and these are the standards that I hold myself to, all the way up to, yeah, I'm the president and I sworn oath.

The idea of like taking that seriously and not cutting corners or making accepting expediencies or the logic of expediency. Maybe I'm making up that it previously meant more, but it seems like it did. Well, I think it did mean more. I mean, the problem that I have with this is that whenever you go back to the idealized past, you often find that it's based on hierarchy and oppression. Yes. We're applied inconsistently.

Yeah. But I think it is true that a sort of professional pride or professional creed, you know, or belief that there's a right way to do things and it's important to do them the right way, would actually be really helpful. Yeah. There's a story of Theta Rosvoa, like,

when he was in his sort of cowboy days, he's managing this herd, and these two cowboys come to him and they've rounded up a couple cows that are clearly not his. And he tells them to let them loose and then fires them. They go, well, you're firing us. We were going to give you like these free cows. And he says, you know, if you steal from someone else, you'll steal from me, right? This sort of sense of like not only am I not going to benefit from it, but I'm not going

to let you poison like the whole system, like this whole thing operates on kind of an honor code. And that idea feels antiquated. I don't know. I don't know who's teaching that idea and then who's enforcing it to the point where, enforcing it early enough to the point where it becomes kind of a second nature. It becomes part of person's identity. I don't think that people are really.

I mean, when I think about it, I had teachers, I had coaches growing up who did take that kind of attitude and tried to instill that set of values. And I don't see that as much in schools now. Well, don't colleges have a huge problem with sort of academic honesty and cheating and... Oh, yeah. I don't know how it compares to the past, but it's sort of routine now that you can't give students any opportunity to cheat because you know that some significant number will.

So the system has to be sort of impossible to cheat. You can't rely on the honor of the students. on the honor of the students. Viking committed to exploring the world in comfort journey through the heart of Europe on an elegant Viking longship with thoughtful service, cultural enrichment, and all inclusive that's sad. And then also, it creates a system where the response is you make the system harder and harder to cheat, as opposed to addressing it from the other end of the problem, which is raising or teaching people who don't cheat, even when there's opportunities to cheat, right? Right. But at a certain point, by the time it gets to the teacher or the professor or the dean,

that pie is baked. Yeah, by the time they're in college, it's too late. Yeah. But it's hard, you know, it's hard, it's hard even to, obviously, this is what everyone tells themselves when they're cheating, but when the whole system seems rigged and corrupt and not exactly pursuing, not exactly set up around virtue or values to begin with, this is where the human mind gets very good at saying, well, why shouldn't I get mine?

Right. And now we have lots of people telling us that the system is not fair. But the truth is, it's not, right? And it never was. Yes. So again, it's sort of going back to the idea that there was a time when there was a certain privilege class

for whom things seemed sort of fair and it would work out if you played by the rules, and that probably did rely on the exploitation of other people. And so in some ways, it's good that people lose faith in the system. I don't know. I'm sort of going in circles here because gosh, it would be great if everyone had these virtues and values that would get them to do the right thing independent of some external enforcement mechanism. But on the other hand, that usually relies on a hierarchical society and that's

why there isn't conflict, that's why there's stability because you've got this stable hierarchy. And so in some ways, I think it's good for people to question authority and distrust the system. Yeah, I heard an interesting take on the marshmallow test, which is supposed to test your ability to delay gratification and as a sign of your, you know, oftentimes your likelihood of success, right? So give it to kids that go, you want one marshmallow now, you want two marshmallows later. And, you know, the kids that delay the gratification tend to go on to be more successful. But they also found something common between the kids that didn't delay the gratification. And is that, that they came from different

environments, right, an environment where they don't trust you. When you say they don't trust adults or authority figures that say, if you do this, you'll get this payoff. And so you understand, like, you take that to understand, like the whole school system is made up nonsense, right? It's like, hey, if you study and work hard, you'll get these grades, which don't mean anything, but actually they do mean anything, mean things, then you'll get into a different school, we play this game again, then you get into a different school,

we play this game again. And eventually, you'll get into a different school, we play this game again, then get into different school, we play this game again. And eventually, you'll get better preferential access to jobs and all the things that America promises. But only if you accept this made up construct as being legitimate and you not only accept it as legitimate, you act as if it's legitimate and you trust it. Right? And so if you have been repeatedly lied,

if you look around you and you see the wrong side of America, you quote, that great Langston Hughes poem, like if you have a different view of what America is, you're like, why would I do my homework? Why would I want to graduate with good grades? Why would I trust that if I finish high school and then mortgage my future to go to college, it'll all work out for me. Everything else you've told me has been a lie or has been an illusion.

And so you get that cynicism and that disinterest in following the laws or trusting it. And then we blame it on the person and say, oh, they're lacking in virtue or self-control or ambition or initiative or whatever. But really they're responding quite rationally to the truth of what the system is, and we have just been given a privileged, unrepresentative version of that same system.

Yeah, I think that's exactly right. That makes a lot of sense. I think I have read that about the Marshmallow test that actually, if you don't believe the person who says you're going to get two Marshmallows, then the rational thing to do is to grab what you can. And yeah, like that's the short-term gratification, utility maximization that is rational, but it also leads to all of the collective action problems, and then society falls apart. But the point, the point that like, this is not a failure of will on the part of the individual, but a rational reaction to what society has taught them is very powerful.

Yeah, I mean, I find that even with some of the discussions about 1619 project or critical race theory, some of these sort of views of history, your whole book is about the stories we tell ourselves. And you look at some of these stories and you go, you're ripping out the hope, you're ripping out the good things, you're showing only the bad things. It's just sort of a jaundice or a cynical view, you're tearing things down. And yet it's also not untrue, right? Like, the more you study history and you dive deeper into this stuff, sometimes I go, actually, I'm not sure they're going far enough. I think it's worse.

You know what I mean? Like, when you really, when you look at what reconstruction could have been and then how it ended, when you look at how segregation wasn't you drink at this water fountain, I drink at this water fountain, it was, if you even look at my water fountain, I will kill your entire family. I will cut off your generals and stuff them in your mouth, and then I will kill you, cut off your generals and stuff them in your mouth, and then I will kill you, and then you will try to file charges, and I will show you that I also control the local and the federal legal system.

And you know, it's so bad that there, it's hard to look at it and not lose any of the high-minded stuff at all. Yeah. Right. It's hard to look at it and not sort of feel like you're being a fool. Yes. That's why I think he called it like a fool's errand. Like it's, it's, um, yeah, you think, you think back to what the legal system was, like, for fetch, like, you think about what the legal system was, you fight in World War II. You leave the segregated zone, you fight in World War II, you come home and, like, some And like some local sheriff just pokes out both of your eyes, or, you know, and then gets off.

Like that was the American legal system like when my grandfather was alive. Right. Not like an isolated incident either, but like very common. Yeah, no, very common in reaction to black military service, because that's the promise of a quality like that. Yes, no very common in reaction to black military service Yes, that's the promise of a quality like yes the path to full citizenship

So that was actually something that was very trigger on yes No, you talked about that in the book that basically black veterans are not just triggering in the sense that there's this kind of over overreaction in the South But that it's also what the those those overreactions prompt the northern overreaction, like even in someone like Harry Truman, like Harry Truman is a racist, raised by racists, right? Like his mother won't stay in the Lincoln bedroom

when he's president. And so he obviously knew what the South was. He knew that what sort of day-to-day white supremacy the status quo was. And it wasn't super bothered by it. Like, he seemed like a decent person, but he wasn't super bothered by it. But it wasn't until a handful of veterans black and then also some Native Americans who are so mistreated by the system that he goes, okay, that's enough, right? Like, you've overdone it,

and that's when he gets involved. And so, they really do spur kind of this, maybe you call it a third founding of America, which is what the civil rights movement is to me. Yeah, I mean, I call it the Second Reconstruction. I think of this as like cycles. Yeah. There are these two different ideologies basically in America and they rotate and we have sort

of brief moments when we move towards equality and then there's a backlash that always lasts a lot longer. So I think of like the civil rights movement as the second reconstruction, I think of the period following that starting in about 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan as the second redemption. So redemption is what we call the overthrow of reconstruction. And I think that's the moment that we're in now. And that explains what the Supreme Court is doing in the Voting Rights Act.

And that explains Supreme Court decisions against affirmative action. It's a rollback of the gains of the civil rights movement. And you're starting to see the outcroppings of people reacting to the reaction. This is what the protests after George Floyd, this is what Black Lives Matter, this is people starting to develop a coalition again to say, are we going to do this? Like are we going to do something about this, or are we going to see the fields to the people who seem like they care a lot more than we do. Right. So maybe it's the beginning of the third reconstruction. I mean, historically, if it's 100-year cycles, we're a little early. We're going to have to wait like another 20

years. But who knows? Maybe we can go faster this time. Maybe, hopefully. But also, I think what's interesting, I was gonna ask you about that. Like, it is remarkable that the lost cause mythology and that school of history, which down even to my generation, a lot of what we learn is the descendants of that. How much that comes from the north, from the northern institutions.

Like at one point, when Kennedy is fighting against these recalcitrant southern governors, he basically goes, maybe my Harvard professors didn't explain the Civil War like properly to me. He would, because all those guys, those were the guys that were writing biographies of Lee and, you know, if you think about when Kennedy went to school, that idea had captured. We talk about how now the conservative trope is that these higher ed has been captured by the certain ideology. Actually historically, those institutions were captured by the certain ideology, actually historically

that institutions were captured by a very different ideology for a good chunk of American history, but how it is strange how pervasive those ideas came from sort of northern elite institutions. You know what I mean? It's not like the South was churning out these thinkers necessarily. Yeah. Well, I mean, so some of them were from the South, but definitely the North was willing to go along with that in the name of unity. Yeah. Because the whole task, I think, that intellectuals have felt their faced with is finding a story that will bring Americans together.

And so the idea, it just sort of depends on which Americans you're trying to bring together. But so the idea, like America's founded in 1776, and everyone's great, and then we split apart into the North and South, and when you say it that way, the North and the South, it sounds like those are two equally legitimate parts. Yes. If you say we split apart into the North and the South, it sounds like those are two equally legitimate parts.

If you say we split a part into the United States and traitors, then it sounds a bit different. So we say North and South, the North and South split a part, and then they reconcile, and basically they reconcile with the overthrow of reconstruction, because that's what happens. And so that's the story that we tell, like the birth of America, the birth of our modern America is like 1876. And there's that painting, the spirit of 1776, the spirit of 76. It's painted in 1876. It goes around the country as a way to unite Americans in the name of the founding, but what's really being restored is the racial hierarchy. And so we go along with that, like we have this idea, that telling a story

where reconstruction was a mistake and it's overthrow restored the natural order of things, that will bring Americans together and we can move forward. And that's what we do up until like the 1950s. And it does produce a stable society with, you know with a relative absence of conflict, but it's built on, as you said, racial violence and lynching. And the stability is just that descent is suppressed in this hierarchical society. And then you get the civil rights movement and the story is sort of disrupted. And people are like, well, this isn't really working. We can't focus on 1876, as our unifying moment.

That's, I think, when we start looking back to 1776. And we're like, you know, we have to accept the values of reconstruction. We do believe in equality. We're going to say we believe in equality. But we don't want to say the 14th Amendment and the Gettysburg address because that upsets people in the South. So we're going to say 1776 and the Declaration of Independence. Yeah, they have one point, one of the sort of peace offerings from the South. I think the Salon Alexander Stevens,

maybe they go to Lincoln. Hey, I know we're fighting this like terrible war. What if we hit paws on it and we invade Mexico instead? Right? They were proposing a war because the French are then fucking around in Mexico, right? Emperor, Maximilian or whatever. So they go, what if we reunite and wage war on someone else? And that seems like insane, obviously, right?

And effectively though, you're dating the sort of reconciliation of America to reconstruction, you could also go, it's just a little while later during theater Roosevelt's time when we attack Spain. That's what brings us together. We fight this war. There's war heroes from the north and the south. We focus, we just look towards the ocean. And then that's also what makes us an empire. And then shortly thereafter we have this colonial war in the Philippines. We're bound together by the fact that we've got the problems of empire, which is also a really ancient historical idea.

The emperor would go, things are going aren't going so well in Rome. Let's go over here, right? And so, you know, we fancy ourselves so different, but it is, it is kind of strange how you can cross your eyes just a little bit and see that that's how it went. It's the same, it's the same moves for an over again, like the external enemy brings us together. Yeah, blood and circuses. Yeah.

Just like, let's get distracted by something and yeah, that that's what happened. It almost doesn't feel like back. Like you go, oh, did they think that would work? And then that is what happened, right? Like, no, the North held out, they understood they had better resources and, you know, their strategy was more sound.

They held out, but they won the, they won the other part of the war, the other way. Yeah, they won the battle for historical memory. Yeah. It is crazy. I was gonna tell you another thing I was thinking of. I'd rather stand, but I would talk about generations. I saw this meme actually last night. And it was apparently Eulissi's S grant, his great grandson

writes is an author. And his great great grandson was an author and he's a great great grandson is an author also and the joke was I will study war so my son can study the law so my son can study art so his son can write gay vampire novels which is what he writes about. Yeah and I just thought I was like so perfect just the arc of the generations and and it is interesting how the stakes of the stuff kind of get lower, like they become less existential. But that also, like, that's the arc of one story. Yeah, no, I think that's great. Well, I want to write a vampire novel.

You should. Next, the next novel I write as soon as I have time, it's going to be vampires. Really? Not gay vampires. Maybe gay vampires. I haven't committed on that. I think it's gonna be vampires. Really, not gay vampires. Or maybe gay vampires. I haven't committed on that. I think if you live forever, you just end up trying everything. Yeah, so.

Right. So you studied philosophy, right? You were gonna be a philosopher, is that what you wanted to do? Well, I wanted to be a novelist, but I thought the teaching would be a good way to do that with a little bit more of security. Yeah.

So I wanted to teach, and I was trying to decide between law school and graduate school and philosophy. And my parents basically talked me at a law school. Because it's more practical. Yeah, what they said was it's actually easier to get a law teaching job than a philosophy teaching job, which is true, very few philosophy slots that open up. And if you do get a teaching job, you'll be working on things that matter to people, which at the time I didn't really care about as much,

I was like, wow, but philosophy is so interesting. Yeah. And philosophy can actually transform people's lives, of course. But professional philosophers tend to write on topics that are pretty narrow and inaccessible. So they were right about that. And then they also said, and if you don't get a teaching job, your law degree is worth something. Whereas your philosophy PhD is not going to do much for you if you're not teaching philosophy. So all of that made sense. And I went to law school. And I'm really happy with the way it worked out actually because now I do feel like I'm working on topics that matter and I'm trying to say things that could have some impact.

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 it would really help the show. We appreciate it. I'll see you next episode. Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic early and add free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts.