Author Clint Smith and the History We Decide to See

On today’s episode of the podcast, Ryan talks to author and poet Clint Smith about his new book How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery, the struggle to remove confederate monuments throughout the Southern United States, how to make sense of the absurd lies that have been generationally passed down since slavery was abolished, and more. Clint Smith III is an American writer, poet and scholar. He is the author of Counting Descent, a 2017 poetry collection, and How the Word Is Passed which topped The New York Times Best Seller list in June 2021. Smith received a doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Other books mentioned on the show: Indian Givers: How Native Americans Transformed the WorldReach out to the Texas Historical Commission to help in the fight to remove the Confederate monument in Bastrop, Texas: thc.texas.gov/contact or email [email protected] to the Lockhart Texas Confederate removal campaign: https://www.gofundme.com/f/remove-the-confederate-monument-in-lockhart-txThere’s only 1 day left to sign up for The Daily Stoic Leadership Challenge! It will be a masterclass in leadership with the cadence and rigor of a boot camp. It is also a live course, which means all participants will join the course together and move through together at the same pace to their own version of the same goal—to be a great leader. Registration is now officially open over at dailystoic.com/leadershipchallenge. Registration will close TONIGHT, July 31st at midnight CST. LMNT is the maker of electrolyte drink mixes that help you stay active at home, work, the gym, or anywhere else. Electrolytes are a key part of a happy, healthy body. As a listener of this show, you can receive a free LMNT Sample Pack for only $5 for shipping. To claim this exclusive deal you must go to drinkLMNT.com/dailystoic. If you don’t love it, they will refund your $5 no questions asked. Beekeeper’s Naturals is the company that’s reinventing your medicine with clean, effective products that actually work. Beekeepers Naturals has great products like Propolis Spray and B. LXR. Visit beekeepersnaturals.com/STOIC or enter code “STOIC” to get 20% off your first order. Ladder makes the process of getting life insurance quick and easy. To apply, you only need a phone or laptop and a few minutes of time. Ladder’s algorithms work quickly and you’ll find out almost immediately if you’re approved. Go to ladderlife.com/stoic to see if you’re instantly approved today. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookFollow Clint Smith: Homepage, Instagram, Twitter, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  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,

• 0:46Ryan Holiday?

  and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring. There is only one more day to sign up for the Daily Stoic Leadership Challenge. I'm so excited. We've got a huge group of people who are lined up and ready to take this challenge with us. We're going to be talking to GMs of one of the great sports dynasties in American history. We're going to be talking to some military leaders, business leaders, entrepreneurs, people who have made it their business to study these questions of leadership. Each day, you get an email from me. It's 63 emails, more than 30,000 words of all-new content that helps you take the right steps along that week's path. There's going to be three leadership Q and A's with me.

• 1:31Ryan Holiday?

  Again, a live Office Hours video session with me. Ancient wisdom for the modern leader. It's going to be a masterclass in leadership with the cadence and rigor of a boot camp. It's also a live course, which means all the participants will join the course together. We're going to move through it together with the same goal. I'm so excited about the material we've put together for you. There is seriously just one more day. At midnight, Central Time, the challenge closes. You can't sign up after that. And then we're all going to be in this awesome cohort for the next nine weeks. I hope to see you there. Sign up now. Talk soon.

• 2:07Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, this is Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. As you know, I've taken COVID pretty seriously, got two young kids, can't be vaccinated, also because I can work from home and I felt like my sort of obligation, again, per the Stoic idea of the common good, was to do everything I could to not contribute to being a part of the problem. So I haven't been in front of an audience, I haven't given a talk, I haven't gotten to go out and do what I normally do, going on 18 months. But I did speak in front of an audience on Monday, not a huge audience, it was about maybe 30 people. And it was about something I mentioned here on the podcast before. There is a Confederate

• 2:52Ryan Holiday?

  statue about two blocks from my office here in Bastrop, Texas, and my bookstore, which is downstairs. And in the aftermath of George Floyd's murder last year, finally, some momentum gathered around removing this statue, which not only should not be there, should never have been put up in the first place, even though the Civil War happened in the 1860s, the statue goes up in something like 1910, its political implications were pretty clear. And so I donated the first $10,000 to remove it, and I've been using my platform to talk about it. We raised collectively about $50,000. We pressured the city council to agree to move it. And all was going well until suddenly, the Texas Historical Commission

• 3:36Ryan Holiday?

  stepped in and has attempted to slow or stop the whole thing. So I went down, there was an open hearing, and I went down and I talked about it. And I'm going to run my short three-minute comment here for you to listen to. My name's Ryan Holiday. I'm an author. I have a small bookstore in Bastrop, about two blocks from the Confederate monument and from the county courthouse. I also have two young children, and I was excited to tell them that this was an example, that the system working, the community rallied around an injustice. In response to an injustice, we talked to our local representatives, felt like we were making progress, this was going to be removed. And then, sir, here we are a year later and there hasn't been any progress.

• 4:17Ryan Holiday?

  And when I think about the obstacles that have come up between us and the removal of this statue, I sort of stop and think, what are we talking about here? You know, we're talking about a monument that honors the worst thing that Americans have ever done to each other. And this specifically was a statue that went up in 1910. I got to know Richard Overton here in Austin before he died. He was a black man, he was actually born in Bastrop County. He was born before this statue went up, to give you a sense of its actual historical recency. There were people alive until two years ago that predate this statue. And, you know, this is a monument to the Confederacy, the people who attempted to tear this nation

• 5:02Ryan Holiday?

  apart for the sole purpose of extending and perpetuating slavery. And this monument sits in a county that, a lot of people don't know, actually voted against secession. And, you know, this wasn't a statue put up by grieving widows or orphans. This was a statue put up three generations later. The newspaper article at the time that went up said that this was a monument celebrating the great white soul of the South, right? It was a giant middle finger to the citizens who were attempting to assert their equal rights under the Constitution, under the pledge that we just read together.

• 5:45Ryan Holiday?

  It was not an attempt to celebrate history, but to hijack history. It's based on a lie. So I beg the Historical Commission to do the right thing, to help move along, moving this statue. Show the people that the system works, that when we come together and we talk, we actually can solve things. We want people to be peaceful, we want them to follow the law, we want them to work together. We did that. But let's not put unnecessary obstacles between them and doing the right thing. Millrow famously said that you can judge a society by the statues that it puts up. I think you can also judge a society by the statues that it leaves up, that it pays public money to maintain.

• 6:26Ryan Holiday?

  And this is one of those, so please do the right thing, honor America, and please right this wrong by moving this statue. Thank you. If you want to reach out to the Texas Historical Commission, I would appreciate you doing this. And not only is there one in Bastrop that they're trying to remove, there is also one I got reached out to afterwards by some folks in Lockhart, Texas, which is the barbecue capital of the world. They are raising, they need to raise about 15,000 more dollars to remove this one. They have to do it by September. You can check out the GoFundMe campaign. Just search GoFundMe, "Remove the Confederate Monument in Lockhart,

• 7:10Ryan Holiday?

  Texas." There'll be a link in the show notes as well. But if you want to donate, that would be much appreciated. I think, obviously, all these things should go for the reasons that I'm talking about. If you want to contact the Texas Historical Commission, you can go to thc.texas.gov/contact, or you can just email [email protected]. Tell them that you think this monument should go. I would appreciate that. And I think it does make a difference. I think people want to be able to sort of do this in a vacuum. They want to be able to, you know, pretend like the implications, the consequences of it aren't

• 7:55Ryan Holiday?

  real, that it's just another sort of item of business. But that's not the case. As my episode today with a wonderful poet and author, Clint Smith, details, his book, "How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America," was an instant number one New York Times bestseller. It is basically a travel memoir slash historical narrative through some of the most controversial and provocative, and I'd say indefensible, monuments or landmarks in American history. It starts out in New Orleans. It ends all

• 8:35Ryan Holiday?

  the way at a slave market in Africa. He stops in at a Confederate cemetery. Some of the most fascinating writing that he does is about the Angola Prison, a former plantation turned maximum security prison in Louisiana. When I read a piece that Clint wrote for The Atlantic, I immediately reached out, got the book. I was so excited to talk to him. He is a great writer. This is a great book. You absolutely should read it. And I really enjoyed my conversation with him. And I'm excited to bring it to you. Check out his book, How the Word is Past: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery in America. And you can follow Clint on Instagram

• 9:18Ryan Holiday?

  as well. He is at Clint Smith III. So that's Clint Smith III. Great writer, great dude. I think you're gonna like this conversation. And I encourage all of you to wrestle with history, whether you live in America, whether you live in, wherever you live, whatever political affiliation you have, history is supposed to make you uncomfortable. It's supposed to challenge you. It's good that it does. That's how we grow. You can check out the book, Amazon, anywhere books are sold. I'm gonna start carrying it in the painted porch. So I am going to include that link in the show notes as well. And then we also talk about Jack Weatherford's book, Indian Givers, which I also enjoyed. I put

• 9:59Ryan Holiday?

  in the reading list email this month. And we're carrying in the store and people really love as well. So check out How the Word is Past. Check out Indian Givers. And we also talk about Wright Thompson's incredible piece in The Atlantic about Emmett Till. All definitely worth your time. Thanks to Clint. Enjoy this episode.

• 10:21Ryan Holiday?

  One of the things the pandemic has revealed to me, or helped me understand history, and I think it connects to the idea in the book, but curious what you think. It was illustrated to me, you know, we're looking at, you know, basically, let's say it's like 20, 25% of the population is vaccine hesitant. The vast majority of people have taken the pandemic very seriously, you know, sacrificed an immense amount, you know, put others' well-being and health above their own. And then, you know, there's clearly a percentage of the population for whom that is not just extraordinarily difficult, but sort of anathema to like, whoever they are as people. It made me think, looking back historically...

• 11:04Ryan Holiday?

  That, you know, we often look back at, say, the 1950s, or we look back at the 1850s, or 2,000 years ago, we get this sense that like, everybody was on the same page. And it sort of made me realize like, oh, actually, a small percentage of the population can hold the rest of the country, or the nation, or humanity hostage, and do incredible damage, and, and sort of define everything to everyone going forward. But at the time, we're actually not much more than a, than a faction. I mean, the South is a great example of this, like, not only did not the majority of the country want to tear the Union apart to preserve, to preserve slavery, but not even, only a

• 11:48Ryan Holiday?

  slim majority even of the South wanted to do it. It's, do you know what I mean? That, that the way that a faction can just grab hold of the machinery of government or culture, and take it to an incredibly dark, screwed up place.

• 12:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, it, it doesn't take many. And I think it's interesting, because it goes both ways, in some ways, right? Where, you know, it is, it is not the case necessarily that the vast, vast, vast majority of Southerners were, were saying, we want to secede from the Union, we don't want to be part of the United States, we want to fight a war against these states in, in the North. That is, that is not the case. But at the same time, what is also the case on the other end is that, you know, not everybody in the North was an abolitionist, right? Very few, the actual percentage of people who thought of themselves as abolitionists was pretty small, right?

• 12:44Speaker 01

  And, and, and I think that, you know, even the notions of like, what constitute, what constitutes as abolition, in our sort of collective public consciousness today, is, is like, a very limited and sort of myopic conception of, of what an abolitionist was, in the sense that like, I was taught that abolitionists were these people who, you know, were the opposite of the slaveholders, that they were the people who, you know, worked on the Underground Railroad, and fought for the emancipation of millions of enslaved people, and wanted, you know, wanted all enslaved people not only to be free, but to have the same rights as they did if they were white abolitionists. And, and you later learn that history is a lot more complicated than that, and that

• 13:29Speaker 01

  it is not that every abolitionist wanted... Believe that enslaved people, formerly enslaved people, should have equal rights. It is actually that there's a wide school of abolitionist thought in which some people thought slavery was wrong, but we should send them after they're freed to Haiti, or Liberia, or South America. Or you had people who believed that slavery was wrong, and you should, and black people should have equal rights, right? You have somebody like Thaddeus Stevens, who believed in the sort of egalitarian, in the equality of the races. And then you had somebody like Abraham Lincoln, honestly, for so much of his life, who believed

• 14:10Speaker 01

  that slavery was wrong, but that black people weren't necessarily equipped, or in a position to continue to live in the United States after slavery ended. All of that is to say, I think, you know, sometimes we like looking at history and in sort of these overgeneralized binaries with these clean demarcations that actually are not as clean as, as people would like them to be.

• 14:36Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it's been interesting watching like Texas and Florida and California during the pandemic. So they're, they're both sort of finger pointing each other, like this is the Republican response, this is the Democrat response, and using the success or failures of their respective states as somehow like sort of proof that they're right or wrong. It's like people like California is a liberal state, and look how many sort of COVID cases and deaths they have. And it's like, yeah, like 60% of California is liberal, which is a lot.

• 15:06Speaker 01

  Right.

• 15:06Ryan Holiday?

  But 40% of California is also a lot, just as, you know, Texas is, is a red state, and Florida is a red state. But there's also millions and millions and millions of people in those states that took the pandemic very seriously, even if their local governments did not, right? So it's like, I think when you look at the Civil War, or you look at an issue like slavery, it, it.

• 15:32Ryan Holiday?

  It didn't neatly sort of travel along the Mason Dixon line. There were sort of people all over the spectrum of different beliefs. And then there was, as Lincoln says, I think in his first inaugural address, you know, there was, there was this percentage of the population that would rather destroy the Union than maintain it. And, and it, I think that's something we're wrestling with today. Like, you know, generally, let's say the majority of us are on one page. That's great. But if a small minority is, you know, hell bent on getting its way or no way,

• 16:14Ryan Holiday?

  and they care a lot more than you do, you are kind of at the mercy of that faction.

• 16:20Speaker 01

  Hmm. Yeah, I mean, I think that there's, throughout history, always been something to say about people who are the loudest.

• 16:29Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 16:30Speaker 01

  And, and that doesn't mean that they are necessarily the majority. And, and kind of alluding to what we were talking to, speaking to before, is like, in some ways, it goes, it goes both ways, right? Like, there are people who, you know, are loud and wrong and disproportionately, because of how loud and predominant they seem, disproportionately impact, impact the way public policy is made. But then, you know, when it's done well, there are also people who, who are loud and make thoughtful and progressive political change, when they are not necessarily, not,

• 17:13Speaker 01

  not reflective of the majority, but, but that the people engaging in the sort of on the ground advocacy, so to speak, are not.

• 17:26Speaker 01

  Are not necessarily reflective, or not, let's not say reflective, but it is not that the majority of people are doing it, which is, so let me give a concrete example. So the civil rights movement, I think, we tend to look back at the civil rights movement, and we, we assume, because of the way that it's taught, that like, everybody was in the street, right, that like, all, you know, it just, millions and millions of black people, millions and millions and millions of white people. But in terms of like, the, the breakdown of how, how many people were directly engaged in a lot of the civil rights movement work and, and work for the black freedom struggle,

• 18:09Speaker 01

  it, it wasn't millions and millions of people, because the reality is that many people are just living their lives, because they, they have to go to, they have jobs, and they have to pay the bills, and they have to feed their kids. And so, sometimes when we look back at history, we can have a distorted sense that the thing that gets the most historical attention was something that an enormous amount of people were directly engaged in at the time. But that's not necessarily always the case, you know, because throughout history, people, most people have just been people trying to live their life outside of the sort of context of, of the, the greatest political struggles of the day.

• 18:53Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I think it's because when we look back at history, we want to identify with the people who did the right thing, who put themselves out there, who acted with courage, even though statistically, it's quite unlikely. Like, I, I was writing about this recently, like, the French Resistance, you know, how many people in France do you think participated in the French Resistance, you know, against the Nazi occupation, you know, 20%, 30%? It was like, 4%.

• 19:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 19:21Ryan Holiday?

  You know? And, and, and that's like, that's such, that, that's like, an invading nation coming into your house, and 95% of the people were like, this is the new normal, you know? Because, and, and that's not to say that everyone was a coward, but we always have our reasons, right? We, we always have our reasons why we can't get involved. And in a way, that makes the- The civil rights, it's almost strange that we tell ourselves that lie because it undermines how truly impressive something like the civil rights movement actually was, that

• 19:56Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 19:57Ryan Holiday?

  the people who did it risked everything. And they probably told themselves, hey, I'm gonna put myself out there and pretty soon, you know, there'll be millions of people behind me. But they really actually did stand alone for a very long time. And, and then a lot of, like, the leader of it was killed for that. It's only, you know, I was thinking about your book and monuments. Someone just reminded me that, like, we're about to celebrate, I think, the 10th. Is it, it's either the 10th or the 20th year anniversary of the Martin Luther King monument in Washington. That didn't, like, go up, like, right after he died. Like, that went up, like, recently. Like, they just finished it.

• 20:39Ryan Holiday?

  And, and it, that's how long, you know, one might be in standing alone.

• 20:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, and, and, and it's interesting, because, you know, on the other end, the story of the monuments of so many of the Confederate monuments that we are having these conversations about now, in many ways, those didn't go up, I think, for a different reason, until, you know, some of that, these were not monuments that went up right after the end of the Civil War.

• 21:09Ryan Holiday?

  No.

• 21:10Speaker 01

  That went up in the early 20th century, in the mid 20th century, around the civil rights movement. And then some of them, I think about the bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest, that was just removed from the capital of Tennessee. And that was put up in 1978. And Nathan Bedford Forrest is, he was the, he was a leader, a general in the Confederate Army.

• 21:34Ryan Holiday?

  I mean, he was a psychopath, like, beyond.

• 21:36Speaker 01

  The first grand wizard of the KKK. I mean, like, this is, it, the absurdity of it, right, that we put a bust of the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan in the capital of any state.

• 21:50Ryan Holiday?

  Forty years ago.

• 21:52Speaker 01

  Forty years ago, 19, almost 1980, you know? And, but part of what it reflects is that those, the people who were putting that up know that that person personified.

• 22:07Speaker 01

  The sort of the personified white supremacy and what it stood for in at its in its most abhorrent form. And I think these monuments and these busts and this iconography are put up with the specific intention to send a message about what is valued and what is not, who is valued and who is not, what history is going to shape our public policy and what history is going to be pushed aside.

• 22:35Ryan Holiday?

  No, and that's why I liked your book so much. I was actually, on Monday, I spoke in front of the Texas Historical Commission. I'm I'm part of this little group that's trying to get this Confederate monument moved off the lawn of the courthouse down the street from from my office here in Bastrop, Texas. And as I was explaining in front of the commission, to go to what we were just talking about, this county actually voted against secession, but somehow in 1910, somebody decided, you know, we needed a Confederate monument. And and one of the things that struck me, sort of looking into, like, sort of, I'm down on the floor and I'm looking up, that there's sort of three rows of these commissioners,

• 23:18Ryan Holiday?

  and they're, to a rule, like, almost all old white guys. No offense, I guess eventually I'll be an old white guy, but but it wasn't the most representative panel. But what struck me as I was sort of explaining, I was, and I'm going to run the comments at the beginning of this episode, so people have already heard them, but it's, what I was trying to say is, like, this is a monument to the worst thing that Americans have ever done to each other, right? Not just slavery, which was horrendous, but then we decided, we couldn't agree that it was it was horrendous, so let's murder each other for five years to settle, you know, who gets to decide that question.

• 24:05Ryan Holiday?

  What struck me the most, what I was trying to express is like, like, why the fuck do you guys care about this so much? Like, why, why, like, you didn't put it up? Your grandparents didn't even put it up. Like, why do you care about this so much? Like, what possesses a person in 1978 to put up a monument to, like, not just like a bad guy, but one of the worst Americans who ever lived? I can't answer that question. I feel like your book was a journey to try to explain that. But do you have any insight as to why people care so much? Like, couldn't they just not care?

• 24:48Ryan Holiday?

  And like, like, couldn't, couldn't they just? It's already like, I guess what I'm saying is like, it's, what are you getting out of inserting yourself into? Like, why are you throwing yourself in front of this monument? Like, I remember at one of the protests about the monument. I get that there's people who don't care, right? They're like, I got better things to do. It's been there for a while. But there was a group of guys that had gotten up at like six in the morning and set up lawn chairs to protect the monument, like a human shield.

• 25:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:21Ryan Holiday?

  And it just struck me like, why do you care so much? What would possess a person to do that?

• 25:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, this is, you know, this is like one of the questions that not only the book is wrestling with, but I think that we've been wrestling with as a country for, for a long time and certainly over the course of the past year or so. You know, so one of the places I go in the book, as you know, is the Blandford Cemetery. And Blandford Cemetery is one of the largest Confederate cemeteries in the country. And I went there for the Sons of Confederate Veterans Memorial Day Celebration. And it was, you know, I was a very conspicuous presence.

• 26:01Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 26:01Speaker 01

  At this event as a black man. And, but I went because I wanted to, I genuinely wanted to understand how someone comes to believe so many things that are.

• 26:16Speaker 01

  Very clearly empirically false, historically inaccurate and mythologized, right? Like, how do you come to believe that slavery was not a central cause of the Civil War? When all you have to do is look at the declarations of Confederate secession in 1861, where the states are largely saying it for themselves, where a state like Mississippi says, "Our position is thoroughly aligned with the institution of slavery, the greatest material interest in the world." Yeah, they say the quiet part out loud. Yeah, they were not vague about why they're seceding from the Union and why this war would be fought. You know, Alexander Stephens, the vice president of the Confederacy, said in his cornerstone speech, this infamous speech he said at the beginning of the conflict, where he was like,

• 27:01Speaker 01

  "Slavery is the reason for this great war that we are fighting." Like, you know, it's so direct that the idea that someone would say that that is somehow irrelevant to a conflict that ended up taking the lives of 700,000 soldiers on both sides is absurd, and yet something that many people believe. And part of what I came to realize was that, you know, for many people, history is not about empirical evidence or primary source documents or historical fact. It is a story they have been told, and it is a story that they tell. It is an heirloom that is passed down across generations through family, through lineage, through community.

• 27:45Speaker 01

  And, you know, I think about a guy I met named Jeff, who was one of the Sons of Confederate veterans, and he would tell me about how he and his grandfather would sit in the gazebo at the center of the cemetery when he was a child. And they would sit there at dusk and they would, you know, watch the deers, slalom through the tombstones and chewing grass around all of these, you know, Confederate flags that waved in the air, and how his grandfather would sing him songs. They would sing Dixie. He would tell him stories about all the brave men who were buried in the cemetery, who fought in the War of Northern Aggression, who fought against the Yankees, who were attempting

• 28:26Speaker 01

  to indoctrinate Southerners with their way of life and impose, you know, notion, customs and culture on them that was a threat to who they were culturally, but also, you know, a threat to, an existential threat to their sense of self. And now that is a story that Jeff tells his granddaughters and he brings them to this same serentery and they sit in the same gazebo and he tells this story, even though this story is not true. It's a lie. And so, the thing is, if Jeff were to accept what we just talked about, right? If you were to present Jeff with the declarations of Confederate secession, or Alexander Stevens' cornerstone speech, or the Crittenton amendments before the war that was intended, you know,

• 29:10Speaker 01

  a set of amendments that were largely attempted to assuage Southern slaveholders and say, "Okay, if you don't secede, we'll put some amendments in that make it so that your enslaved property can never be taken away from you." It failed, thankfully, because the Republicans of the day were like, "This is absurd." But it is another example of how slavery was the central cause and the catalyst to the Civil War. And, but the thing is, if Jeff is to accept that, then he would have to accept that his grandfather is a liar. And if he is to accept that his grandfather is a liar, it threatens to disintegrate so

• 29:52Speaker 01

  much of the foundation upon which he believed their relationship stood on. And if he, and if that sense of his relationship to this person who he loves, who helped raise him, who was so central to his life, if that disintegrates and if he realizes that so much of it was based on lies, then it becomes an existential crisis for Jeff because so much of who he believes himself to be in the world is tied to a person who told him stories that helped animate and shape how he moved and understood himself in relationship to the world and in relationship to American history. And it would, he would struggle to have a sense of who he is, which isn't to say that

• 30:36Speaker 01

  that is an excuse at all. Right. Because there are plenty of people who have ancestors who, you know, fought in the Confederate Army. I went to Blandford with a friend in the book who was doing his own sort of reckoning, a white friend who's realized that his ancestors had been slaveholders and that his ancestors had fought in the Confederate Army. And he was going to Blandford to do a sort of reckoning of his own and he is not, he's not a son of Confederate veterans, he is not a Confederate sympathizer, he is not a neo-Confederate, he's somebody who's like, "Man, you know, this is a part of my family history." My family fought in a war over something that is deeply shameful.

• 31:15Speaker 01

  And like, and I think it is possible to, to do that, but it is hard for many people to do because it threatens to call into question so much of who they believe themselves to be.

• 31:30Ryan Holiday?

  Got a quick message from one of our sponsors here and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned.

• 31:39Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I think at the root of this, the tricky thing is identity, right? And there's a great expression, the idea of keeping your identity small. The more you identify with, basically, the stupid, the stupider you are because it constrains you, it limits you. And like, I definitely get the idea like, hey, my grandfather told me this story. I don't want to think that he's a liar. The, the problem is identifying, right? Like, and this is something I said in my comments to the thing. I was like, look, my great grandfather on my mother's side, and I only kind of found this out somewhat recently for, for reasons I think people understand. We try not to talk about things that are unpleasant, but my, I always knew my grandmother and immigrated here from Germany in the 1950s. And it only occurred to me as I got older, like, oh, you know, how, what did your parents do, right?

• 32:24Ryan Holiday?

  My, my great grandfather fought on the wrong side in the Second World War. My dad's father fought on the right side, but my great grandfather fought for the Germans. He was drafted like a lot of Southern soldiers. But, you know, that was a very long time ago. It was a horrible thing, but it doesn't say anything about me as a person, right? I didn't benefit from this in any way. In fact, it so destroyed my family's country that they had to come here in the first place. But I think the trouble is when you find yourself identifying with these figures in the past, instead of trying to learn from them or grow from them, you know what I mean? Like, it, it, it, it doesn't say anything about me that my great grandfather did a bad thing.

• 33:07Ryan Holiday?

  It would say something about me if 70 years after he did a bad thing, I tried to put up a statue in his honor to celebrate and whitewash his accomplishments. And that's what's so interesting about this war stuff is it wasn't the grieving widows and orphans that did it. It was like two generations later for a very nefarious purpose.

• 33:33Ryan Holiday?

  And an almost inexcusable, even less excusable purpose, which was to actively redisenfranchise a whole group of people. It was, it was basically, we're talking about people seizing government and using it against another group of people. It was basically to say, um, we don't give a shit what's in the 13th, 14th, 15th amendments. That don't go around here. That's what these monuments are really about.

• 34:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, and what we see is, to your point, is that these monuments are going up in every moment where there is, uh, some potential opportunity for black mobility. Right? Like, we see it at the beginning of the 20th century, uh, when black people, when, at the beginning of the great migration, uh, when black people are moving, uh, from the south to, uh, urban cities like Chicago, Detroit, uh, New York, and even out west, like Los Angeles, and are, after World War II, uh, you have many of the, uh, white soldiers who came back from, or, excuse me, after World War I, you have many of the white soldiers

• 34:41Speaker 01

  who came back and realized that many of their jobs had been taken by, uh, black people who had come, uh, come from the south up to the north and were working in many of these factories, working in many of these places. And they hated it. They hated that the, you know, the, the demographic makeup of these cities was changing so quickly. They hated that these men were, uh, taking their, their jobs. Uh, and then black veterans similarly came back after World War I, uh, over almost 350,000 of them, and were like, we just fought a war for this country. And we're not going to come back and be subjected to second-class citizenship when we just risked our lives to, to, to defend the, the promise, uh, of this nation.

• 35:24Speaker 01

  And so, you know, you had this cataclysmic thing happening and, and what happened is that More black people were like, we're not gonna just be subjected to this incessant racism anymore. And then more white people were like, you're not gonna intrude upon our, like physically, our property and our neighborhoods, but also socially, like our sense of where we are in the American hierarchy. And it just had this, you know, enormous sort of cataclysmic effect. There was a huge sort of conflagration. We see the riots of 1919, and uprisings of 1919 throughout the country. And then around this same time, you see all these monuments go up because very, a lot

• 36:06Speaker 01

  of white people throughout the country are very intentionally trying to send a signal to black Americans about what is valued in this country and what this country stands for and who it is for. And what better way, I guess in their mind, to do that than to put up monuments to people who fought a war that was predicated on maintaining and expanding the worst manifestation of white supremacy or the most extreme manifestation of white supremacy, which was slavery.

• 36:41Ryan Holiday?

  It's interesting too, you know, I've visited a bunch of different Civil War battlefields. At the time, we had a pretty good, like, first off, if you look at like the official records from the Civil War, it's called like, it's not called the Civil War, it's called the War of Rebellion. And when you look at, you know, there's no Confederate veterans buried at Gettysburg. I remember being at Vicksburg and looking at the cemetery and then realizing, oh, the Confederate cemetery is like over there. Because when they set this up, the people who had just won this battle at this horrible cost, they weren't like, marry me, you know, bury me next to my brothers from down south.

• 37:20Ryan Holiday?

  They were, they saw these people as the perpetrators of not just the injustice of slavery as they came to understand the war, but also the injustice of treason and-

• 37:32Speaker 01

  They were traitors.

• 37:33Ryan Holiday?

  Right. And so it's so interesting to me that we had this sense then- But as we've gotten away from it, it's like the side with the most guilt has obviously worked the hardest to mythologize and change and distort what happened. And I think we're already seeing this, right, with the events of January 6th. Most people who watched it on TV see it as exactly as it is. And then there's a small percentage, not super small, but a minority of people who have a vested political and emotional motivation for presenting it as something other than what it obviously was. As a historian, as a culture, how does

• 38:18Ryan Holiday?

  a society battle that? Like, how, it's like, it goes back to your point. It's like, most people just want to go back to their normal lives. And then you've got these people motivated by cognitive dissonance and malevolence and stupidity that want to spend a lot of time litigating an event and how it gets represented culturally. How does a society fight that? Like, how do you prevent lost cause mythology from being rooted in the consciousness? It strikes me that after the Civil War, there was a part of the North that just finally said, like, we don't want to talk about this anymore. You can tell

• 38:59Ryan Holiday?

  yourself whatever you want. And that clearly, in retrospect, was an enormous mistake, a costly mistake.

• 39:06Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah, I mean, I think you're absolutely right to draw parallels between so much of what we see after the end of the Civil War and what we saw on January 6th, or now continue to see about January 6th. And, you know, I brought up Alexander Stephens and his cornerstone speech before in 1861. What's fascinating is that after the war, Alexander Stephens is, you know, writing his memoirs, he's being interviewed, and people are like, man, Alexander, you wrote this cornerstone speech in which you said the cornerstone of the new nation was the inferiority of black people, and that it was built on the premise that slavery should be perpetuated indefinitely. And this was the cause of the Civil War. Like, what do you have to say for yourself? And he's like,

• 39:52Speaker 01

  I never said that. And they're like, what are you talking about? You, you said it, we were there, it's in the newspaper, we have, we have a record of it. He's like, no, no, no, they must have misquoted me. Like, I never said anything like that, they must be twisting and misrepresenting my words. And this was like, this was what was happening with so many people who fought for the Confederacy. At the end of the Civil War, there was this sort of 19th century gaslighting that was happening, where they were telling us that what we saw and heard over the course of four years, and then really over the course of 250 years, was not actually what we saw or what we heard. And, and you see this with Jefferson Davis, you see this with Alexander Stephens,

• 40:36Speaker 01

  you see this with the entirety of the lost cause ideological project, which is, you know, that they are trying to make it so that people think that slavery was a benevolent institution. They, as the historian Olrich B. Phillips talks about, who was one of the leading historians of the early 20th century, talked about slavery as this thing that rescued black people from the savagery of Africa, gave them Christianity, gave them civilization, gave them structure in their lives, talked about them in paternalistic ways as if they were these sort of children, childlike, who needed the protection and supervision of white people. Or as John Calhoun, you know, in the 19th century, the famous or the infamous senator

• 41:21Speaker 01

  from South Carolina said, slavery is a positive good for both black and white people alike. And most people don't realize that that is the predominant view, that most people, until the mid 20th century in this country, had of what slavery was because the lost cause propaganda effort was so successful. And even to this day, you know, a 2018 Southern Poverty Law Center study showed that only 8% of US high school seniors were able to identify slavery as the central cause of the Civil War, like 8%. And, and you know, I would hope that over the course of, you know, given what's happened over the past few years, that that number would be, would be higher.

• 42:00Speaker 01

  But we live in a country in which, in which there has been an intentional systemic effort over the course of decades to prevent people from

• 42:13Speaker 01

  Thinking holistically and honestly about what has created the conditions of the society that we live in today. And when you don't understand the history, when you're not taught this history and this to your point about like, how can we combat this sort of strange gaslighting and lost cause propaganda? Part of what you have to do is proactively teach the sort of history that will not allow us to fall into the trap of thinking that the reason one community looks one way and another community looks another way is somehow because of the people in those communities, rather than what has been done to those communities, generation after generation after generation. Because once you acutely understand the contours of American history, you can look around and

• 42:56Speaker 01

  understand that the reason that this country looks the way that it does is because of a series of decisions that have designed our society to to exist and sort of manifest itself in this way. And this country can't lie to you anymore. Once you're sort of equipped with that toolkit of information. And in the process of writing this book, like, that is largely what I was kind of doing for myself. It was four years of trying to accumulate knowledge and information and a toolkit with which to more effectively understand this period of American history that I I understood on a sort of surface level, but didn't actually understand in any way that was commensurate with the impact that it had on this country.

• 43:38Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, isn't that kind of the irony of the the sort of moral panic about critical race theory? It's like, you know, history shouldn't be a political tool. It's not propaganda. And it's like, what do you think you've been taught? What do you think has been taught for the last 150 years? It has been systematically used as a political tool to not and and not even effectively, right? It was like you the education system was hijacked to cover up the crimes and to rationalize a thing. For a bunch of people that were already dead.

• 44:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:16Ryan Holiday?

  That's what I, that's what's so baffling to me about it when you talk like, cause I'll get emails from people when I talk about this stuff, you like, people will feel so intensely about it. And it's like, like, look, like, I have studied history deeply. I've been to the same places that you've been in the book. I've written about the civil war. I'm fascinated with all this stuff. It doesn't make me not like America. It just makes me see America as it actually was. And, and actually, I think the greatest civil rights leaders, I mean, what, what was so brilliant about Martin Luther King, for instance, was his ability to, to get, and Frederick Douglass as well, is get to the core of what actually America

• 44:57Ryan Holiday?

  was about and to use those documents and that idea and those ideals to, to, to show how morally hypocritical we are being and try to urge people towards those ideas, right? So like, I, I just don't get this idea that, you know, looking at the terrible things that happened in the past, uh, somehow diminish our prospects for a brighter future. On the exact contrary, you understand what happened so you can grow and learn from it and be made better. And then also ideally make restitution or, uh, adjustments to compensate for the lingering consequences of those injustices.

• 45:42Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And I think that part of the reason we can't even have a real conversation about restitution and about reparations is because we're not all operating with the same sort of like, uh, epistemological set of information, right? Like-

• 45:57Ryan Holiday?

  We don't occupy the same reality.

• 45:59Speaker 01

  We don't. We don't. We, we occupy two fundamentally different, um, if we're to sort of generalize, like two different, uh, like spheres of, of truth and knowledge. And obviously that has been exacerbated by the, uh, nature of our current media ecosystem, um, which, which I think, you know, amplifies the, the sort of worst impulses of, of so many people. Um, you know, but-

• 46:31Speaker 01

  It's one of those things where it is not as if there are not examples of what a more proactive and honest reckoning could look like, right? I mean, Germany, Germany does this, you know? And, and one of the places that I go in the book, um, to make the, to draw that comparison, I think about Angola prison. And so Angola is one of the places I go, uh, and it is the largest maximum security prison in the country, 18,000 acres wide, bigger than the island of Manhattan. It is a place where 75% of the people held there are black men, over 70% of them are serving life sentences. And it is built on top of, of a former plantation. It's basically an American Gulag. And, and so what, and yeah, what I tell people is that if you were to go to Germany and you had the largest maximum security prison in Germany, built on top of a former

• 47:16Speaker 01

  concentration camp in which the people held there were disproportionately Jewish, that place would, would rightfully and so clearly be a global emblem. You'd be like, something doesn't smell right. That, that, that just doesn't make sense. It would be absurd. It would be abhorrent. We would never allow a place like that to exist because it would run counter to all of our moral and ethical sensibilities. It would, it would, it's disgusting to even think about it. And yet, here in the United States, we have the largest prison in the country where the vast majority of people are black men serving life sentences, many of whom were sentenced as children, many of whom were sentenced by non-unanimous juries, which has since been rendered unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of the United States because it existed

• 47:56Speaker 01

  with a specific intention to continue to, uh, convict as many black people as possible, uh, who are working in these fields of what was once plantation for virtually no pay, while someone watches over them on horseback with a gun over their shoulder. And so part of what I'm exploring are what are the ways that a history of white supremacy not only enacts physical violence against people's bodies, but also collectively numbs us to certain types of, uh, structural and systemic violences that in another global context would so clearly be unacceptable. And the thing that, the reason that, that kind of thing doesn't happen in Germany is because that country, not, not perfectly, but, but proactively, is engaged in a process of saying, this, we did this thing, the Holocaust.

• 48:41Speaker 01

  And it was done in our name. And it is one of the most shameful, horrific things that have ever been done in human history. And it was not that long ago. There are people who are still alive today, who lived through what we did, who lost people they loved because of what we did, millions and millions of people. And so there are monuments, there are museums, there are. Uh, one of my favorite things is they have these kind of things called stumbling stones, which are these sort of uh, tens, you know, tens of thousands of these, these brass bricks almost, um, that are sort of slightly elevated off the ground.

• 49:22Speaker 01

  And, you know, you can't go into a Nike store or a restaurant or a yoga studio, uh, without encountering one of these bricks that has the name, um, of the person who used to live in that residence, whether it's still a residence or whether it's become a commercial property.

• 49:38Ryan Holiday?

  It forces you to bump into the injustices of history.

• 49:41Speaker 01

  All over, right? You see the name, you see the, the date they were taken, you see what happened to them. Um, and so you are regularly encountering in, uh, as part of the everyday landscape, these reminders of what was done. And so that infiltrates itself, uh, into the, the sensibilities and the public consciousness of people in that country that then informs how they make decisions about how to make amends for what is, uh, happened historically and also how to move forward, um, and, and create, uh, you know, political decisions and public policy decisions in a domestic and global context

• 50:23Speaker 01

  that are in, that are, uh, set on, uh, not making that same mistake again, or not falling into the same level of, uh, malevolence, um, that, that was once, uh, central and defining to that nation.

• 50:43Ryan Holiday?

  Got a quick message from one of our sponsors here and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned.

• 50:52Ryan Holiday?

  And what I would add to that, and I think that's what you just said is beautifully expressed, and the analogy with Engole and a concentration camp, I hadn't quite thought of. It's very, very compelling. What I would add is, this isn't just about moral penance, or like, you know, washing away blood guilt, although I actually think that is important and should be done, because a culture sort of weighed down by these things is flawed. But there's a self-interest to it, too. I mean, first off, you could argue, part of the reason Germany goes down that path is because the United States, at the point of a gun, sort of forces what they called denazification, that unfortunately, we didn't quite do in

• 51:34Ryan Holiday?

  the South after the Civil War. But I just read this fascinating book by Jack Weatherford called Indian Givers. It's not a great title, it was actually written in the 80s, but basically, it's a look at all of the sort of things that we got from the Native Americans, who we also, you know, if you want to talk about a Holocaust, we perpetuated a Holocaust here in America against the Aboriginal people. And what he was talking about in the book is all these things. And it really hit me, because I'm from California, I now live

• 52:13Ryan Holiday?

  in the South, but, you know, race is, Native Americans is more of a part of the sort of cultural conversation and history in California than race is, because it wasn't a slave state, and, you know, not really part of the Civil War. But, you know, I've had a bit, clearly had a bit of a blind spot as to the severity and the horrific tragedy of what we perpetuate against Native Americans. And reading this book, it was very eye-opening and inspiring and interesting. And anyways, one of the things he concludes the book with, and I encourage everyone to read it, is he's talking about, it's not just all the things we got from

• 52:55Ryan Holiday?

  Native Americans that we should be grateful for, but he says, "The cautionary tale is what our racism and our fear and our sort of insatiability took from us." You know, he talks about all these things that, you know, Native Americans discovered, that they brought to us, all these modern medicines at the root of this and that. Ways of hunting, ecological preservation. And he's like, as the last of these people die out, they are taking with them knowledge and understanding and a way of living that is lost to us forever. And that's been happening, he said, for 500 years. I think that's the other tragedy of this sort of distorted,

• 53:38Ryan Holiday?

  dishonest history we've told ourselves is that it hasn't served anyone well. It didn't serve, obviously, Black people well. But, you know, the perpetuation of this screwed up system and this hatred, it hasn't served America well either, you know? And I think, I think that's the big thing. You should look at history and you should learn from it, not just so you don't do bad things, but also it is through the mixing of cultures and perspectives that, that you unlock incredible power and collaboration and creativity.

• 54:20Speaker 01

  No, I think that that's absolutely true. And I think, I think all of us have to just move through the world with a level of humility and recognize that there's, there's a lot we don't know. And that like the project of our lives in so many ways is to, to both learn and to unlearn so much of what we've been taught. Part of what I loved and tried to model the book after was the sort of generosity and graciousness of so many of the public historians and tour guides and docents who I met, who are balancing this sense of generosity

• 55:04Speaker 01

  while also holding a sense of responsibility and accountability, which is to say, you know, I think about the two women that I met in Monticello, when I went to Monticello Plantation, which is, as many know, the, the home of Thomas Jefferson, one of our founding fathers and the third president of the United States. And I was on this tour, which is focused specifically on the history of slavery at Monticello. And these two women, Donna and Grace, were on the tour. And I was kind of watching them as we were on this tour by this guy named David Thorson, who, in the course of 45 minutes to an hour, had really given a masterclass on the sort of contradictions and hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance of-

• 55:46Speaker 01

  Of Thomas Jefferson and also centering the story of Monticello, not only on Jefferson, but on the hundreds of enslaved people who lived there. Because the thing about Jefferson is that, you know, he wrote one of the most important documents in the history of the Western world. He also enslaved over 600 people over the course of his lifetime, including four of his own children. He, you know, wrote in one document that all men are created equal and wrote in another document that black people are inferior to whites in both endowments and body, uh, in endowments of body and mind, as he put it. And, and so how, you know, when I went to Monticello, part of what I'm trying to get a sense of is like, how do you, as an institution, tell them honest and fuller, more robust, um, uh, and intellectually rigorous, uh, story about who Jefferson was and what he stood

• 56:29Speaker 01

  for. And so that's what David is doing. And Donna and Grace are sitting there and their mouths are kind of agape and they're clearly unsettled. And I go up to them after. And I was like, you know, I'd love to hear about how you experienced, uh, you know, what you just heard. And Donna was like, man, he really took the shine off the guy. And, and they're like, I had no idea Jefferson owned slaves. I had no idea Monticello was a plantation. These are people who, who bought plane tickets, who rented cars, who were- Have good jobs. Have good jobs, were self-proclaimed history buffs, right? And they were, they came to this site as a sort of pilgrimage to see the home of the, the founding father, you know, of, of one of the, our first presidents and had no idea that it was the home of somebody

• 57:11Speaker 01

  who enslaved hundreds of human beings. And that moment was such an important reminder to me that there are so many people across this country, just millions of people, who don't understand the history of slavery in any way that is commensurate and proportionate to the impact that it had and continues to have on this country. But, but the thing that people like David do is that they're, they are holding, as I said, this sort of like, I'm going to, I recognize that millions of us, uh, across generations have been failed by our educations and have not been presented with information that helps us more fully understand, uh, this part of American history. Have, have you been, uh, sorry, go ahead. No, I was just gonna say, but at the same time.

• 57:54Speaker 01

  You have a responsibility now that you are encountering this information to hold it and to sit uncomfortably with it and to consider what it means, how, and to put it in conversation with the story of America and of our founding fathers that you've been taught in order to recalibrate and reconceptualize how you understand, what you understand the history of this country to be. And part of what I wanted the book to do was hold that same level of both generosity and accountability, which is to say, we can't run from this information, especially when it's right in front of us. But I also recognize that in the same way that I didn't know a lot of this stuff at the beginning, many of my readers might not have known a lot of this stuff. And that's okay, as long as we are using this as an

• 58:38Speaker 01

  opportunity to say, I didn't know, but now I do, and I also want to know more.

• 58:43Ryan Holiday?

  Like, have you been to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam?

• 58:46Speaker 01

  I've not.

• 58:47Ryan Holiday?

  It's, it's like, one of the most moving, sobering things you'll, you'll ever do in your life. Like, you, you see where this, like, family of eight people, these two families, eight people, live in this, you know, tiny attic. And, and it brings home the reality of the Holocaust in a way that you, you can't, you know, comprehend in any other way. And I think that's the other, the other thing is like, when you, when you have this whitewashed, you know, dishonest view of history, yeah, sure, it might make your plantation tour, you know, slightly less uncomfortable, and you can have your plantation wedding at

• 59:28Ryan Holiday?

  one of these venues or something and not feel bad about it. But it also deprives you and us of other, transcendence, the wrong word, but deeply moving and, you know, transformative experiences. I was just reading that the National Park Service is, is taking over the forks of the road site in Natchez, Mississippi, and they're building a national park sort of monument to one of the, one of the most prolific slave markets in the United States. And

• 1:00:05Ryan Holiday?

  I think that when you wrestle with history and you're not afraid of indicting people, again, who are long since dead, what it gets you is opportunities for things like that. And it's funny, as controversial as it is right now, you can imagine 10 years from now, 15 years from now, 50 years from now, that place will have been visited by millions and millions of tourists, right, who came and learned and experienced something. So it's so funny that we're resistant to questioning and showing things in the slightest unfavorable light, but it's really ourselves and future generations who we are depriving by doing

• 1:00:46Ryan Holiday?

  it. We're not protecting anyone. We're actually depriving them. Yeah, do you know what I mean?

• 1:00:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, it's a huge disservice. And part of what I hope that we are moving toward is a sense that for so long in the history of this country, we have deprived people from understanding the totality of this history in ways that have incredibly detrimental impacts on all of our lives. And part of what has happened is that we have allowed these artificially created notions that are created with the specific intention of

• 1:01:34Speaker 01

  demarcating who has power and who doesn't, to give us a distorted sense of who deserves certain things and who doesn't deserve other things, or why certain communities look one way and why certain communities look another way. But I think this is related, I think all the time about, and this I think really became clear for me in the book, you were talking about what happens across generations with this. And I think about people who, clearly I think about the enslaved all the time. And what I think about, and especially now that Juneteenth is a federal holiday, I've been thinking about this a lot, but the idea

• 1:02:17Speaker 01

  that if we're to think about the first enslaved people coming to the United States in 1619, or what would become the United States, the British colonies that would become the US in 1619, and Virginia.

• 1:02:31Speaker 01

  You know, black people were fighting for freedom in this country from the moment they arrived on these shores, which means that the vast majority of people who fought for freedom never got a chance to see it.

• 1:02:43Ryan Holiday?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:02:44Speaker 01

  But that also doesn't mean that what they fought for was for nothing, right? Because what they did was create the space for the next generation to continue fighting, then for the next generation, and for the next generation, and ultimately, a moment opened up in history that that led to the emancipation of of black people in this country and the abolition of one of the worst things and one of the worst institutions that this country has ever had. And that is only possible because of the millions and millions of people who fought their entire lives for something that they never got a chance to see themselves. And for me, that is what all of us are called to do, right?

• 1:03:26Speaker 01

  That like my life is only possible because of generations of people who fought for something that they knew might they might never see but fought for it anyway. And so what responsibility does that give me to try to fight for and build for or build toward and write toward and create toward a better world that I might never see, that my children might never see, but that someday someone will, you know? Like, I think that that's a responsibility that we all carry.

• 1:03:54Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, Seneca has a great line, it says, "We can't choose our parents, but we can choose whose children we would like to be."

• 1:04:00Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:04:01Ryan Holiday?

  And to me, that's the choice that we have when we study history, right? Is who, it doesn't matter where you're born, what race you are, you know, you could have had a long generation, you know, a long family tree, you all fought for the Confederacy, but you can choose to be related to Frederick Douglass. Like, you can choose to be the heir to Frederick Douglass, or an abolitionist, or, you know, a freedom fighter of any kind. Like, we get to choose, we're not chained to the past in this, the past happened. But we choose whether we're going like, we choose whether we are going to chain ourselves to it. And that's what I meant about this sort of analogy with my with my grandparents.

• 1:04:43Ryan Holiday?

  Like, am I going to choose to be the descendant of my great grandfather who fought for the Germans? Or am I going to choose to be the grandson of my grandfather who landed at Normandy? Right? Am I going to choose? And then on my on that side of the family, he's from Michigan, you know, moves to California, never experiences, you know, it sort of has more of the American dream. My grandmother graduated from Little Rock High School before it was before it was desegregated. Am I good? Whose whose tradition am I going to follow it? Right? What torch am I going to carry? And it's just so strange that we willingly choose to to carry the bad

• 1:05:27Ryan Holiday?

  torch. But a lot of people choose that. It's it's it's quite surreal. Or we choose, you know what? We choose not to think about it at all. Did you read um, did you read Wright Thompson's piece in the Atlantic about Emmett Till?

• 1:05:40Speaker 01

  I did, yeah.

• 1:05:41Ryan Holiday?

  Oh, my God. Well, I what what's first off, beautiful piece. Everyone should read it. I took two things from it. One, that Carol Bryant is still alive.

• 1:05:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:51Ryan Holiday?

  That the the the woman who accused Emmett Till is still walking the earth. So we think about histories, you know, Faulkner talks about the past not being the past. I mean, she's literally not dead yet. But the the thing that struck me that I think is representative is the real cautionary is a cautionary tale of that story, is the family that owns the house and the barn where Emmett Till was murdered. The guy's like, oh, yeah, I just choose not to think about it.

• 1:06:19Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:06:19Ryan Holiday?

  Do you know what I mean? Wasn't that very striking that he could sit in his pool and not not really think about what happened?

• 1:06:26Speaker 01

  I mean, it was so revealing. I mean, and and it's in some ways clarifying. I mean, in the sense that like, You know, you mentioned plantation weddings and there was a huge part of my book, or significant part of my book that was initially about plantation weddings and we ended up cutting it because, you know, I didn't want the book to be overly sprawling and too massive and I wanted it to be as tight as possible. But what was interesting is that I went to a bunch of plantations where people hold weddings. And I just wanted to understand like how, what would motivate someone to want to celebrate

• 1:07:05Speaker 01

  one of the most joyous days of their life on the site of what I can only understand as being a place of intergenerational torture and exploitation?

• 1:07:16Ryan Holiday?

  A mini Holocaust.

• 1:07:17Speaker 01

  You know, exactly. Like, what leads to that? Is it that they know and don't care? Is it that they don't know? Or is it that they know and that is, they actually kind of relish in that, you know?

• 1:07:32Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:32Speaker 01

  And that is the sort of question, and I think it depends for each person. But I think it's tied to this idea of that dentist, you know, sitting in his pool and looking over at his barn and saying, "That is a place that was, in which this horrific thing happened." That was one of the most, you know, arguably one of the most important events in 20th century American history. Certainly, you know, in terms, in the sense that the murder and lynching of Emmett Till is part of what precipitated the Civil Rights Movement. And to look at it and be like, huh, you know, like, eh.

• 1:08:16Speaker 01

  Like, I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna, that is, that is so, it feels so distant for him. And I think that that distance is a microcosm of the distance that so many people in this country feel about these parts of history, that they feel have nothing, they believe and have convinced themselves that it doesn't have anything to do with them, when it actually has everything to do with them. It has everything to do with all of us. And the problem is that whether it be slavery or indigenous genocide or contemporary immigration issues or Japanese-American internment, I mean, all of these things that we should be deeply shameful of as a country,

• 1:08:58Speaker 01

  many of us have convinced ourselves that it is somehow over there. And that it has nothing to do with us. But but it does because we are we are here and we are part of the part of we are part of the story that will or won't be told about these things, whether we like it or not.

• 1:09:21Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, and he didn't come off as a bad person. He didn't come off as a racist or a weirdo sort of creepily into this stuff. It was just kind of a benign deliberate ignorance of the implications of a thing that was literally in his backyard. It was it was almost, I mean, Wright is such an amazing writer. This is why it hit us over the head, I think. But it was so symbolic that it really does wake you up a bit.

• 1:09:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I just learned a lot of, I think there was a lot of reporting in that piece that I just hadn't been familiar with, you know? I don't think I, I don't actually think I knew that it had happened, that so much of what happened before he was thrown into the river had happened in a barn at all.

• 1:10:22Ryan Holiday?

  I'd never heard of the barn.

• 1:10:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's just, again, it's it was a reminder for me that like even the stories we think we know, there's there's a lot of that we don't, a lot that we don't know. And, you know, the thing about writing a book like this is the research was one of the, was, I mean, the research was the reason I wrote it. It was to give my, to provide me with information in history that that was deeply important and transformative for me personally. But, you know, every new book you open provides a new level of nuance, provides a new detail, provides a new way of thinking about something that I, you know, have spent, had spent years thinking about.

• 1:11:03Speaker 01

  And that is why, you know, the scholars and historians who do this work, who dedicate their lives to this work, whether they're academic historians or public historians, are are so important because they're always, I think about somebody like Annette Gordon Reed. Whose work on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings.

• 1:11:22Ryan Holiday?

  That's why they were talking about her at Monticello. She changed.

• 1:11:25Speaker 01

  Literally changed the whole conversation in this country around how we understood Thomas Jefferson. I mean, like an exemplar of what like deep, rigorous historical work can do. They, you know, I talked to people who went to Monticello 10, 20 years ago, 30 years ago. And they're like, Monticello you went to sounds very different than the one that I went to. Cause they were not talking about any of this before. And, and to me, that, that is, that, that provides me with hope because people can change. Institutions can change. We can tell, we can gain new information and tell different stories, tell more honest stories.

• 1:12:06Speaker 01

  And I think Monticello is a place that is always attempting to, to interrogate what they do or don't do, what stories they tell and don't tell. And as a result, have evolved in the way that they have told the story of Jefferson in a way that I think is really important. And I think is a model for so many of us.

• 1:12:23Ryan Holiday?

  And look, that change is in your self-interest, right? And, and another deeply reported book that I was just thinking about is the, the immortal life of Henrietta Lacks. And then I was, I was thinking about the Tuskegee experiments. Our failure to talk about those things, atone for them, address them and learn from them. You want to talk about why certain communities are slightly more vaccine hesitant, which, you know, again, has implications for everyone. It's because we're too afraid to go deal with things. And the failure to deal with those unpleasant historical events and injustices

• 1:13:07Ryan Holiday?

  has ongoing consequences for the future that negatively affect you and your children. Like lying about the past is not a victimless crime, is I guess what I would say.

• 1:13:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I think that that's.

• 1:13:25Speaker 01

  That's absolutely true and we feel the future generations feel the effects of that. And it shapes again, like what are, you know, I so I think about the origin point of this book. And this book was written in or began being written in 2017 when I was watching several Confederate statues come down to my hometown. Statues of P G D Beauregard, Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, all these statues coming down in New Orleans. After sort of two years of litigation and political fights and battles.

• 1:14:02Ryan Holiday?

  I watched the Robert E. Lee statue come down in New Orleans. I was there. It was a pretty moving experience.

• 1:14:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, it's, uh, yeah, I wish I'd been able to be there. I watched the livestream from my home here in Maryland. And what I was thinking about was like, what does it mean that I grew up in a city in which the there are more homages to enslavers than there are to enslaved people?

• 1:14:24Ryan Holiday?

  A guy who never even went to New Orleans.

• 1:14:26Speaker 01

  Had nothing to do with New Orleans, right? Like, I mean, you know, it's, but again, is a reminder that Robert E. Lee was just an avatar.

• 1:14:34Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 1:14:34Speaker 01

  For this sort of larger message that that folks at that time were trying to send. And, you know, I thought about what it meant that I, to get to school, I had to go down Robert E. Lee Boulevard. To get to the grocery store, I had to go down Jefferson Davis Highway. That my middle school was named after a leader of the Confederacy, that my parents still live on a street named after somebody who owned 150 enslaved people.

• 1:14:57Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, not Louis Armstrong, not Little Wayne Boulevard, or you know, any, any actual heroes of that city.

• 1:15:03Speaker 01

  And, and what is, what are the implications of that? Because symbols and iconography and street names, they're not just symbols. They are reflective of the stories that people tell. And those stories shape the narratives that communities carry, and those narratives shape public policy. And public policy shapes the material conditions of people's lives, as we've talked about. And, you know, that's not to say that taking a six, taking down a 60 foot tall statue of Robert E. Lee is going to erase the racial wealth gap. But it is to say that these are all part of an ecosystem of ideas and stories that are told that shape how we understand what has happened in American history. What has happened in, in this country, what has happened in our respective cities and communities.

• 1:15:46Speaker 01

  And thus, what needs to be done in order to make amends for the harm that is that has transpired over the course of this history to build a more just and equitable and fair world. And, you know, so when we talk about this, you know, the deception and lies that are, you know, that we've been taught or that our kids are taught, that all of these things are a part of it. And like, we can, you know, I think about Jeff, who we talked about earlier in our conversation. Like Jeff could tell a different story. Jeff, instead of telling his grand, his own granddaughters the story that his grandfather told him, he could hold his granddaughter's hands, walk through that cemetery and say, "These are your ancestors.

• 1:16:29Speaker 01

  These are members of your family, and they fought a war to preserve a terrible, terrible thing. But you are not defined by the decisions that your family has made. You can make a different set of decisions, and you are not tethered to, to that history because that history does not singularly define you." And that, there are people who make that decision, and we just need more people to make that decision.

• 1:16:54Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I think, I think that's, that's another sad thing that I've realized sort of as I studied American history and the Civil War, is that we, where we real, where the lost cause mythology really deprived us of a inspiring historical narrative, came with Reconstruction. The passage of the 13th, 14th, 15th Amendments, the, the Freedmen's Bureaus, the, the immense work that we tried to do as a country to begin to address some of the wrongs of slavery before, you know, that cause was betrayed and undermined for, you know, political purposes, before we abandoned it. We almost did the right thing. You know what I mean?

• 1:17:39Ryan Holiday?

  And there's no monuments to that. Instead, we celebrate Robert E. Lee and, and Nathan Bedford Forrest. We don't study, you know, the people who...

• 1:17:51Ryan Holiday?

  We don't, we don't celebrate Thaddeus Stevens, right? Or, or the people who went down south and taught in those schools. We don't celebrate Booker T. Washington, or, you know, we don't celebrate the people who, out of the wreckage of that historical injustice, tried to push us in the right direction. And to me, that's a real tragedy. And it's a lost opportunity because then we don't get to pick up where they left off. And it, you know, it stalled us out for like a hundred years.

• 1:18:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, it absolutely did. And there's a lot of work to be done to sort of like unwedge us from, from these, a lot of the BS that's been propagated over the course of centuries. And what I wanted to do with this book was equip myself with more information, more tools, a better framework to, to make sense of, of what has happened and to, to be able to look at this country with, with clearer eyes and, and to be able to look at it with

• 1:19:07Speaker 01

  a level of clarity that I don't think I, I'd had before. And I hope that it can do that for, for the reader as well.

• 1:19:15Ryan Holiday?

  It absolutely did. It's a wonderful book. To end on a positive note, I saw the, the picture that you posted on Instagram when you were FaceTiming with your grandparents.

• 1:19:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:29Ryan Holiday?

  With the news that the book had hit number one, which is an incredibly difficult accomplishment.

• 1:19:34Speaker 01

  You know, I'm just trying to be like you.

• 1:19:37Ryan Holiday?

  But so, so tell me, tell me how that went and tell me what they think of it. Because a lot of the history that you're talking about in the book, obviously not the Civil War itself, but some of the more recent stuff, like they, they were alive for. When, when were they born?

• 1:19:52Speaker 01

  My grandfather was born in 1930, Jim Crow, Mississippi. My grandmother was born in 1939, Jim Crow, Florida. And it was so special to be able to share that with them. I mean, it was special in many ways because they are featured in the book. The epilogue is largely about the two of them and and the trip that we took to the National Museum of African American History and Culture. And, you know, one of the things that my grandfather was saying, my grandmother was saying when we talked about our visits to that museum a few years ago. She was just looking around and we were realizing how much of the history in that museum and how much of the violence documented in that museum is something that they experienced firsthand. And my grandmother kept saying, she was like, I lived it. I lived it.

• 1:20:37Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, that was news, not history to her.

• 1:20:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. And, and it also gave me a sense of, a more acute sense of our proximity to that history. And that period of time, you know, I, I'm, I feel like I was taught about slavery as if it was this thing, you know, especially when I was in like elementary and middle school, that it was this thing that happened in like the Jurassic period. You know, that it was like dinosaurs and the Flintstones and slavery, almost as if they all happened at the same time.

• 1:21:08Ryan Holiday?

  Even though the school you were in in New Orleans was probably built in the Civil War.

• 1:21:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, for sure. You know, the whole, as the historian Walter Johnson says, the whole city of New Orleans is a memorial to slavery. And, you know, I think about the National Museum of African American History and Culture and think about how the woman who opened that museum alongside the Obama family in 2016 was the daughter of an enslaved person, right? Not the granddaughter or the great granddaughter. She was the daughter of someone born into intergenerational chattel slavery. And this someone who was alive in 2016, just recently passed away. I just did, I was doing an NPR interview and one of the people who called in at his local station was talking about how she was raised by, this little woman, I believe

• 1:21:53Speaker 01

  in her seventies, talking about how she was raised by her great grandfather. And she called him Pappy. And her great grandfather was someone who was born into slavery. Right? So like, there are people who are alive today, who loved, who were in community with, who were raised by people born into chattel slavery in this country. And so when I speak to my grandparents, and that's part of what that last section of the book is about, I'm reminded that this history we tell ourselves was a long time ago, wasn't that long ago at all. My grandfather's grandfather was enslaved. So when my four-year-old son sits on my grandfather's lap, I think about my grandfather sitting on his grandfather's lap.

• 1:22:34Speaker 01

  And it is just a really intimate reminder that in the scope of human history, you know, this thing was just yesterday. And to the suggestion, any suggestion someone would have that it has nothing to do with what the contemporary landscape of inequality looks like in this country, or what our social, economic, and political infrastructure look like and how they operate. They're being morally and intellectually disingenuous.

• 1:22:58Ryan Holiday?

  Or worse.

• 1:23:00Speaker 01

  Or worse.

• 1:23:01Ryan Holiday?

  Clint, thank you so much. I love the book. I'm so glad we got to talk, and I can't wait for wherever, whatever journey the next book takes you on.

• 1:23:11Speaker 01

  I appreciate it. Thanks so much for having me.

• 1:23:15Ryan Holiday?

  There is only one more day to sign up for the Daily Stoic Leadership Challenge. I'm so excited. We've got a huge group of people who are lined up and ready to take this challenge with us. We're going to be talking to GMs of one of the great sports dynasties in American history. We're going to be talking to some military leaders, business leaders, entrepreneurs, people who have made it their business to study these questions of leadership. Each day, you get an email from me. It's 63 emails, more than 30,000 words, all new content that helps you take the right steps along that week's path. There's going to be three leadership Q and A. With me, again, a live office hours video session with me.

• 1:23:57Ryan Holiday?

  Ancient wisdom for the modern leader. It's going to be a masterclass in leadership with the cadence and rigor of a bootcamp. It's also a live course, which means all the participants will join the course together. We're going to move through it together, the same goal. I'm so excited about the material we've put together for you. There is seriously just one more day at midnight Central Time. Challenge closes. You can't sign up after that. And then we're all going to be in this awesome cohort for the next nine weeks. I hope to see you there. Sign up now. Talk soon.