Historian Thomas Ricks on Stoicism and the Founders

Ryan speaks with author and journalist Thomas Ricks about his new book, First Principles, the importance of looking back at the virtues and principles embodied by the founding fathers of America, how our current political atmosphere unraveled, and more. Thomas Ricks is an American journalist and author who has won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting multiple times. He is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq and A Soldier's Duty. This episode is brought to you by Blinkist, the app that gets you fifteen-minute summaries of the best nonfiction books out there. Blinkist lets you get the topline information and the most important points from the most important nonfiction books out there, whether it’s Ryan’s own The Daily Stoic, Yuval Harari’s Sapiens, and more. Go to blinkist.com/stoic, try it free for 7 days, and save 25% off your new subscription, too. This episode is also brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. LinkedIn Jobs is the best platform for finding the right candidate to join your business this fall. It’s the largest marketplace for job seekers in the world, and it has great search features so that you can find candidates with any hard or soft skills that you need. Visit http://linkedin.com/stoic to get fifty dollars off your first job post. Today’s episode is also brought to you by Molekule. Molekule makes air purifiers that don’t just trap pollutants and impurities, but destroys them. Molekule’s air purifiers work in all sizes of rooms and are beautifully designed to match with any living space. For 10% off your first order, use promo code STOIC at Molekule.com.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicFollow Thomas Ricks:Twitter: https://twitter.com/tomricks1Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tom.ricks.921See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something that can help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance. And here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We reflect. We prepare. We think deeply about the challenging issues of our time. And we work through this philosophy in a way that's more possible here when we're not rushing to work or to get the kids to school, when we have the time to think, to go for a walk,

• 0:44Speaker 00

  to sit with our journals, and to prepare for what the future will bring. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. This is actually the second take of the intro for today's episode. I recorded this back in December, and here we are, three weeks later. And today's episode could not be more relevant. I recorded this when things were looking dicey, but well before seditious traitors stormed the Capitol of the United States of America and attempted to stop the certification of an election.

• 1:28Speaker 00

  So really, there's never been a better time for people to read the book of today's guest and to listen to this conversation. This is actually a book that my agent and co-writer of the Daily Stoic, Steve Hanselman, called me, "Hey, I'm sending you this book. You've got to read it." And as soon as I read it, I reached out to have Tom Ricks on the podcast because this is exactly connected to what we talk about here at Daily Stoic. The book is First Principles: What America's Founders Learned From the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country. It's really about the Greek and Roman philosophy, Stoicism, Epicureanism.

• 2:09Speaker 00

  What ancient Rome taught Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin and George Washington and John Adams, what it taught them, the good lessons they took from it, the flaws inherent in some parts of the system, and how, having lost sight of some of these first principles, we are now in the terrible mess that we are in. This is a conversation I was so excited to have. I'll just give you General James Mattis's blurb of the book. "Thomas Ricks knocks it out of the park with this jewel of a book. On every page, I learned something new. Read it every night if you want to restore your faith in this country." Look, this is a very relevant book. What we are seeing happening right now. This is not a drill, people.

• 2:54Speaker 00

  This is exactly what the founders were worried about. This is exactly what I've been worried about. This is exactly the kind of thing that the Stoics were concerned about. This is exactly the kind of thing, the kind of black and white, wrong situation that Stoicism is here to help guide us through. This is where you either, Ulysses S. Grant said, "Look, there's two sides of this issue. There's the traitors and the not traitors. And what side of that do you want to be on? That's the question." So, please, listen to this conversation with the great Tom Ricks. I'm going to have him on to talk about some of his other books soon.

• 3:36Speaker 00

  But read First Principles: What America's Founders Learned From the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country. We talk about Stoicism. We talk about America. We talk about right and wrong. We talk about justice. We talk about power. Talk about a lot of great things. You're going to love this interview. We moved it up in the schedule. I'm re-recording this intro because I think it's important. Be safe, everyone. Be smart and do the right thing.

• 4:03Speaker 00

  I was curious, because you address it right up in the front of the book, and I've always been fascinated by this, and I know some listeners probably have too. There seemed to be this habit of capitalizing random words, spelling names differently. What is behind that in not just the founders, but in so much of the ancient texts from around that era?

• 4:26Speaker 01

  I think a couple of things. First, there was no sort of routinization. That actually comes later in America, the routinization of spelling with Noah Webster's dictionary. And it's a very political act. Noah Webster's an aging federalist, and he wants people to spell words all the same way. And I think this is really the last readout of federalism. They've really lost to democracy. They know they're not going to have an aristocracy. And so if you can't control how people think, at least you can control their language. So that's what Noah Webster contributes. But the 18th century is kind of wild for crazy spellings, capitalizations. It's kind of a wild west field.

• 5:11Speaker 01

  It's a language that I really enjoy.

• 5:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's kind of this paradox, right? You have these sort of frontiersmen in some cases, in other cases, you have this sort of landed gentry who are obsessed with the classics and have this intense knowledge, extreme knowledge of ancient history, and yet can't seem to spell their own names correctly. It's really weird on the page.

• 5:35Speaker 01

  Well, they would find the notion of spelling the name correctly an oddity. There is no correct way. I love the way that in one angry letter, George Washington spells anonymous. It reads to me like anominous. He's mad. These anonymous, an-anonymous letters that officers are writing denouncing him at the end of the world.

• 5:55Speaker 00

  So you titled the book First Principles, and I think it's a great title because essentially, correct if I'm wrong, but the premise of the book is, what did the people who created this country believe and where did they get those beliefs from?

• 6:10Speaker 01

  Absolutely, and to a degree that I think we don't recognize, we're not even equipped as a society generally to recognize, they took their inspiration, to a surprising degree, from the ancient world. For them, remember, they didn't have rock stars, they didn't have movie stars, they didn't have sports athletes. Their idols and their role models were the great philosophers and political figures of ancient Greece and Rome, especially Rome, and especially the decline of the Roman Republic, the people who tried to stop the decline. So Cato, Cicero, a few other people around them, and then some of the philosophers in general.

• 6:55Speaker 00

  It's interesting, too, because I've got to imagine that for a good chunk of American history, that set of shared first principles would have almost been so obvious as to not be noticeable, because everyone shared that sort of classical understanding. And then today, it's hard to notice because people don't have the familiarity with these ancient teachers to notice, you know, a lot of the allusions and the nods and the subtle quotations and the influences. It's this, we're in this strange, that you would even have to write your book is almost a bit of a commentary in and of itself.

• 7:35Speaker 01

  They would find it surprising, but remember, it wasn't everybody then, it was elites. There were a tiny number of colleges in America, six or seven or eight at various times during the pre-revolutionary period. And there were a tiny number of people who had graduated from high school. Most people, let alone graduate from college. Most people who got an education were white. Most people who got more than a year of education were white males. And even then typically they got one or two years. So they really didn't know the classical world, but at the same time, they didn't have much of a political voice. But the people who led the revolution, the people who designed the country after the revolution,

• 8:18Speaker 01

  were indeed steeped in this ancient world. To them, ancient Roman history especially had the urgency of front page news. Because as they designed the country, they didn't have a lot of examples. They were trying to design a country that wasn't going to be a monarchy. And they didn't have a lot of historical examples. But you're right, we're left with a country nowadays where if you take the dollar bill out of your pocket, there's Latin on both sides. If you look at our, the center of our political universe, the US Capitol is named for a hill in Rome, Capitoline Hill. The Democratic Party comes from a Greek word, the Republican Party comes from a Latin word. So it is all around us, but we don't even see what is in front of our eyes.

• 9:02Speaker 00

  And if you called someone a Cataline or a Cato, they wouldn't understand whether that's an insult or a compliment and what the implications of those accusations would even be.

• 9:15Speaker 01

  And that's right. In the 18th century, by contrast, one of the most popular plays of the century was the play Cato by Joseph Addison, a favorite of George Washington, who was not steeped in the classics, yet really absorbed it from the culture around him. Two lines in that play are really striking. At one point, one character regrets that they have only one life to give to Rome. And another character says, give me liberty or give me death. And so when politicians quoted those, people knew what they were referring to. These days, we think they're just hot quotes from the revolutionary era, not realizing they were quoting, it's the equivalent these days of quoting Casablanca or Ghostbusters.

• 9:57Speaker 00

  Well, I've joked on the podcast a few times that Cato was the Hamilton of its day.

• 10:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a very good way of putting it. It hadn't occurred to me. Yeah.

• 10:07Speaker 00

  I mean, so popular that Washington puts it on allegedly at Valley Forge, like the depths of the America. It's even just difficult to wrap your head around a play being that important that at the depths of the darkest moment of the American Revolution, Washington is putting, having his men act out a play about ancient Rome to cheer them up.

• 10:29Speaker 01

  It sounds like a Monty Python scene. We're in Valley Forge. What are we gonna do? Let's put on a musical.

• 10:33Speaker 00

  Right. But it is interesting, too. Stoicism appears in the book, you know,

• 10:43Speaker 00

  a few times. I would have argued that maybe that Stoicism was closer to the first principles than maybe you do. But it is interesting in the book, the different paths that the founders take to their classical knowledge, right? So someone like Washington sort of gets it through pop culture and maybe a few books here or there. And then Jefferson is reading Seneca in the original Latin, you know, and certainly Washington wasn't doing that.

• 11:18Speaker 01

  Europe in his life, didn't read a lot of those books. One of my favorite moments in the book is when his vice president, John Adams, is having an argument with Timothy Pickering, who soon was to become Postmaster General. And they were arguing about whether Washington was illiterate. And Adams says, no, he wasn't illiterate. I got some very good letters when I was at Congress during the war, written by him. And Pickering says,

• 11:47Speaker 01

  written by that young Alexander Hamilton boy. He's a good writer. Washington was very conscious of his lack of education, though, and brought in people like Hamilton to perform skills that he was conscious of being deficient in. Haydo very much is Washington's model. Washington has the misfortune of constantly have these models foisted on him. I would probably say, I would emphasize

• 12:20Speaker 01

  Is a Stoic. I know you have him in your book about the Stoics. Do you consider Cicero a genuine Stoic?

• 12:28Speaker 00

  So I have him in that book as actually somewhat similar to the way you portray Adams in the book, which is a person who understood these things brilliantly, but could sort of utterly fail to actually live up to them. So Cicero is fascinating in that he's responsible for rescuing much of Stoicism from the sort of dustbin of history and he translates it and he illustrates it and tells these stories. But then when you actually look at his life, he failed to actually put into practice much of what he purported to believe.

• 13:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, like John Adams turns out to be kind of the Woody Allen of the American Revolution. He's cocky, he's a big whiner. Unlike the Stoics, he constantly wears his feelings on his sleeve. There's a great line that the novelist and historian Shalit had about Cicero, which applies to Adams as well, which is that he loved to talk about his country and he loved to talk about himself. Unfortunately, he did both things equally as much.

• 13:28Speaker 00

  Yes. And I was fascinated with Cicero because it's like Cicero seemed to be play acting through most of his life, all these ideas. And even up through the Catiline Conspiracy, which was real, as I talk about in Lives of the Stoics, it's real, but you can't help maybe feeling that Cicero might have exaggerated a little bit for his own good. And then ironically, Rome does face a real sort of constitutional crisis, a moment of truth, and Cicero is basically nowhere to be found. And in the real moment of destiny, he fails.

• 14:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think I had the feeling that Cicero was very happy to see the conspiracy come down the pike. It's a little bit like the Glee, which with Madison, Great Strains Rebellion, after the revolution during the Art of the Confederation era, it's exactly what Madison needed to show that the current system isn't working, to blow the whistle and start beating the drum for the Constitutional Convention.

• 14:34Speaker 01

  Cicero very much is Adams' model. And while I have some problems with Adams, I think his reputation's been inflated a lot lately. It is amazing to me that young John Adams decides to become America's Cicero and succeeds.

• 14:50Speaker 00

  Yes, yes, which is interesting, too, because Cicero basically decided to become Cicero. And, you know, there's a self-made-ness to both of them that you can't help but admire.

• 15:00Speaker 01

  There is, kind of, and, you know, John Adams is the only one of our first four presidents who never owned a slave. He graduates from college, his parents don't have the money to support him. He can't sit down and read Greek and Roman history like Madison does for several years to prepare for the Constitution. Adams has to go get a job, and he winds up a schoolteacher in a backwater in Massachusetts. Doesn't even have a post office. He hates teaching. He totally is unprepared to be a teacher emotionally. Eventually decides to become a lawyer. But it's striking to me that Adams never has a mentor. I think he's such a prickly figure.

• 15:37Speaker 00

  Interesting.

• 15:38Speaker 01

  He is unable to find a mentor, whereas George Washington had a mentor, whereas Thomas Jefferson had a couple, and Jefferson becomes mentor to Madison. John Adams almost has to mentor himself. You read his diaries, and he's constantly berating himself. Pay less attention to girls and hunting. Pay more attention to books, because nobody else is guiding him, even the guy in whose law office he worked. Sent him off to Boston without a letter of recommendation or introduction to anybody. Now, this may have been, I think, because Adams was making eyes at the guy's wife, which is a constant problem in this era. Thomas Jefferson is so striking to me. He's an Epicurean. Clearly, he is an anti-Stoic.

• 16:22Speaker 01

  He's into the avoidance of pain, the pursuit of happiness. And he's constantly pursuing married women through his life. And I think it's the classic epicurean recipe. It's all the rewards of romance without any of the risk of a permanent entanglement.

• 16:38Speaker 00

  Well, in one of Seneca's letters, he talks about, he says, "You must choose yourself a Cato." He says, "Sort of pick your model." And that could be a model you actually know, or it could be a sort of an ideal. But I think it's fascinating, your book illustrates this so well. It's like John Adams picks Cicero and becomes much like Cicero, but with the flaws, you know, sort of being very well pronounced. And Washington seems to pick Cato to some degree, as you said, it's also a little foisted on him, but then embodies the genius of Cato and some of the flaws. It seems like each founder kind of had a model that they were shaping their life against.

• 17:21Speaker 00

  And I was, I found it remarkable how much they ended up being like the influence that they chose.

• 17:28Speaker 01

  Well, because they succeeded. You know, we're looking at people who made it to the presidency, who successfully designed the country. There are other people who in many ways were spectacular failures. As I would say, Patrick Henry is a spectacular failure. Alexander Hamilton succeeds, he's basically Washington's prime minister, but pretty soon after that, considers himself a failure. By the end of the 1790s, Alexander Hamilton says to a friend, "There is no place in this country for me." It's a terrible thought. I mean, here he has come to this country, he's helped design the country, he has served well in the revolution and in politics. And he constantly is using different pseudonyms,

• 18:10Speaker 01

  all of people who were virtuous, yet disrespected by their peers.

• 18:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I mean, they did become, become successful. So there's some survivorship bias there. I guess what I mean is it's, it's that they, they came to take on the traits of the person that they spent so much time studying and learning about, which is also kind of a model that I think we struggle with today. Sort of who are your heroes? Right? And I think as a society, we've, we've struggled to decide who our heroes are.

• 18:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, and our heroes are not particularly people you want to emulate. Some of these rock stars and sports stars and so on. And people who we thought of as statesmen, you know, in our world today, we find out are greatly flawed. You actually just made me think of something I hadn't thought before. I think it's true that George Washington, as president, puts kind of a mold of Cato on the American presidency. We expect our presidents to be dignified, reserved, prudent, and to respect the dignity of the office. And he very much brings that to the presidency as he tries to kind of put the flesh of norms

• 19:25Speaker 01

  on the bones of the Constitution. And he establishes a lot of norms about how the president is supposed to behave. And then he steps down after two terms and turns over power gracefully to his successor. And I think that's one reason I think that Donald Trump has shocked people so much. He is so much outside that Cato mold.

• 19:42Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 19:43Speaker 01

  Which is really a stoical mode for the presidency.

• 19:45Speaker 00

  I think so. And that point about heroes, I think what Donald Trump has, and I think you can say this without actually getting into the politics in it, what Donald Trump sort of revealed is that we had all these norms, we had all these systems, these processes, these rituals, that were based on really hard-won wisdom from the ancient world, from the first principles you're talking about. But but over the last 200 years, the the why of them got lost. Like we even FDR, when FDR runs for reelection, he for a third term, he's violating a Cato-esque norm put in place by Washington. And and I think people thought the population would be much more upset about it than they were.

• 20:29Speaker 00

  But the reality is not knowing so much about why that norm had been set in the first place, it caused less of an uproar. I think what Donald Trump revealed is how much our education and our understanding of the first principles has atrophied. And so when the elites in the media get really upset about this norm or that norm, they expect that people are just going to intuitively understand why this is so important.

• 20:53Speaker 01

  I think that's all correct, but I would add to that also that

• 20:59Speaker 01

  people thought were laws turned out to have been norms.

• 21:02Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 21:03Speaker 01

  One that's striking right now is the presidential transition process.

• 21:07Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 21:07Speaker 01

  The norm, and I've dumped on John Adams a bit. So the great norm is established really by John Adams.

• 21:15Speaker 01

  He is the first president to turn power over to the opposition.

• 21:21Speaker 01

  And on top of that, he's a one-term president. He's quite bitter about it. But he's so mad, he actually leaves Washington at four on the 4 a.m. coach to Baltimore on the day of Jefferson's inauguration. Nonetheless, he did turn over power peacefully to his successor, who is from the opposition. What we've seen in the last month or so is that what people thought of as law is actually just a norm. You you do so gracefully. When you lose the presidency, you help your successor come into office. And I think we may see a period of reforms in which some of the things we thought of as norms are actually going to be made law.

• 22:01Speaker 00

  I think that's something you talk about in the book that the founders struggled with. Certainly, after the second generation, it was realizing, not even the second generation, right after the unity and the connectedness of the revolution wears off, is they realize, oh, this idea of a system founded solely on shared virtues and beliefs is very fragile and very vulnerable, and it bumps right into human nature, and that really, maybe you can't have a system that just assumes everyone's going to be a philosophical lover of the classics.

• 22:40Speaker 01

  Well, this is the funny thing, is that Madison, who is the most rigorous in his study of the classics, he's also younger, about 20 years than the other three we're talking about. And Madison turns the classics on their head. He knows them better than anybody else. He shows up at the Constitutional Convention. But as you say, he says, "We can't rely on virtue." His most famous comment is, "If men were angels, we wouldn't need a government." And so, he says, "I'm going to pit ambition against ambition, interest against interest, and I'm going to disperse power so widely that the only way you can make progress in the system is if you are willing to cut deals, find compromises, form associations, to

• 23:25Speaker 01

  reach out somehow." And so Madison would say, "Biblock is not a bug, it's a feature." He disperses power between the states and the federal government, through three branches of the federal government, and two houses within the legislative branch. I was actually thinking, you talk about the buried wisdom in the Constitution. It never occurred to me until this week how brilliant it was to have the states run elections, even for federal office. You would think it'd be the natural thing, the federal government should run elections for the federal office. Yet imagine if Donald Trump had had his hands on the lever of the election, and if the president were required to validate the results, he would have declared them invalid weeks ago.

• 24:10Speaker 00

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

• 24:18Speaker 00

  It's tricky, right? Because that is true. I saw someone tweeting about this the other day where they were saying like, you know, it's great that we have this decentralized system. It prevents corruption. At the same time, you know, there are so many other democratic nations, modern democratic nations that don't seem to have this problem. So it's this tension of like, you can have laws, you have gridlock, but the system really does require somewhat virtuous people. It requires you to buy into the myths. Like, you have to buy into the first principles where the system doesn't work. And that's the irony of Donald Trump. It's not just that he's a bad person, I think he has bad policies. But fundamentally, by not understanding how the American system works

• 25:02Speaker 00

  and having no shared understanding of the history that you talk about, he actually wasn't able to make the system do what he wanted. Because all he could think to do was sign executive orders. He couldn't, he didn't understand really how it worked. Like, he probably would have liked to rig the election, but didn't even understand at the basic level how the states run their elections and seemed to not be able to effectively do it.

• 25:25Speaker 01

  This is actually the irony for him is that he was able to stump all over norms, yet he constantly stubbed his toe on the Constitution. You know, I think he really came into office thinking the presidency was kind of a modified monarchy. And he's been shocked when it turns out, no, Nancy Pelosi doesn't work for you. She believes herself to be head of a house that's a part of a co-equal branch of government. And even the Supreme Court, he gave these people their jobs. Even they don't work for him. What kind of wacky system is this? Well, there's a lot of wisdom buried in this system. And we're seeing it emerge in various ways right now.

• 26:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's wisdom and there's a logic to it. And you have to buy into, it's only if you understand it that you can make the unwieldy, complicated bureaucratic thing work. And Lincoln, probably, I think, our greatest president, what he brings to the equation is not just a love of justice and virtue and all the things we're talking about, but he sort of has a lawyer's mind for how the whole rickety machine works.

• 26:30Speaker 01

  And a Shakespearean feel for human evil as well.

• 26:33Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 26:34Speaker 01

  And a sense of, this thing could go really badly. The other thing I want to mention here is the intense feeling that... The revolutionary generation had of America being an experiment. George Washington says this in his first inaugural address. He says, this is an experiment. And if we if we blow it, if we let it fail, it won't just have implications for us. It'll have implications for human freedom and liberty around the world. Adams talks at one point that we are about creating here a nation that will have freedom, not just for tens of thousands of people, but for thousands of millions. He actually envisions a country even bigger than we are now.

• 27:16Speaker 01

  Thousands of millions of people will enjoy freedom and liberty if we get this right. Just the other day, Barack Obama, in an interview, referred to America as an experiment in multi-ethnic, multicultural democracy. So I love the feeling these guys are saying it's an experiment, and I think it still is, and we still can blow it. But if we pay it kind of more attention to the operating system that they designed, we can do better.

• 27:43Speaker 00

  And I mean, even in the Stoics, there's a tension between sort of what they said and what they did, right? You have Seneca writing this beautiful stuff about justice and liberty and goodness and principle and courage. And then, you know, he works for Nero. You have Cato even, you know, Cato is this brilliant courageous man, but also in one sense, an utterly ineffectual politician, because you can't compromise, you can't work with other people. And so there is this kind of idea. I mean, there's a passage in the beginning of, let me read this to you, because I thought it was incredible. There's a passage in the beginning of Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. He writes, "To my brother Severus, it was through him that I encountered Thrassia, Helvidius,

• 28:27Speaker 00

  Cato, Dion, and Brutus, and conceived of a society of equal laws, governed by equality of status and of speech, and of rulers who respect the liberty of their subjects above all else." And so I love that here was a king, writing that 2,000 years ago, inspired by the first principles of the generation before him, like America. But by nature of being a king, the exact opposite of what those beliefs are. But it's that idea of maybe if we put the language out there, and it's beautiful enough, it can call us to a higher place. And America is an experiment in doing that.

• 29:04Speaker 01

  I think that's absolutely true. You know, on something I think that's really important that we don't talk about enough, which is politico-vocabulary.

• 29:13Speaker 01

  Having the political vocabulary, having a word to describe what is happening. Can you see this in the 1790s? They don't have a political vocabulary to describe what's happening as political parties are beginning to emerge.

• 29:27Speaker 00

  Sure, factions, what do we call them?

• 29:29Speaker 01

  All John Adams can see is faction, and faction is a blinking red light that says, this is what led to the decline of the Roman Republic, this is a form of treason. And so he starts throwing opposition newspaper editors into jail because they are, they are somehow, in his mind, increasing, encouraging factionalism. Yet Jefferson and Madison are saying, no, this is actually the way this country is going to have to be. But they don't, nobody has words to describe it. Nobody wants to be called a political party. I think the same way now. We kind of lack in our political vocabulary to describe some of what's happening and what our strategic goals should be going forward.

• 30:07Speaker 00

  No, I was talking to a Republican congressman about this a few days ago privately, and I said, you know, he was one who didn't sign the brief, you know, which, which I took.

• 30:17Speaker 01

  Were you talking to Chip Roy?

• 30:19Speaker 00

  No, I'm not a Chip Roy fan.

• 30:22Speaker 01

  Neither am I, but Chip Roy, Chip Roy didn't sign it, he didn't sign either.

• 30:26Speaker 00

  He didn't, but it was, there was some bogus reasoning, I thought, in his explanation. But anyways, he was, he was, so I said, you know, great job on that. And we were talking, and I said, look, like, I think even Democrats are doing themselves a disservice here by saying Donald Trump is undermining the faith in our elections. That's not the word for what's happening here. This is an attempted coup. And what I said is, what would you call this if it was happening in another country? You know, I think if there was, this is a slow-moving attempted coup, and I think our inability to wrap our heads around what's talking about and, and maybe lacking the language that resonates with people is why you're seeing so much ambiguity and passivity

• 31:11Speaker 00

  in the face of what's probably the gravest constitutional threat of our. The last eighty, ninety years.

• 31:18Speaker 01

  I actually disagree with your interpretation. I don't think it's an attempted coup. I think Donald Trump know he knows he is not going to be president, starting on January twentieth. He never thought this would succeed. What he is doing is establishing a pretext for never having to admit that he lost. Because it is psychologically urgent for him not to be seen as a loser.

• 31:38Speaker 00

  I agree with that. I don't think it could be successful or that it would be successful. But that, but if it were successful, it would be a coup.

• 31:48Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 31:48Speaker 00

  So, so like when these, when these congressmen are signing a letter that is essentially endorsing a tactic that is that, that if those electoral results were flipped, I mean, it would flip, it would, it would negate the democratic outcome of an election. And so it, I think you're, but the fact that even you and I are disagreeing goes to your point, which is we lack the language to explain what's happening.

• 32:13Speaker 01

  What is happening in front of us and what it means. I think what they're doing is simply smearing the electoral process. They are making Americans feel that they don't have free and fair elections. And that is the most unpatriotic thing you can do in this country.

• 32:27Speaker 00

  It's, uh, it's, it's surreal. And I think it goes to a point you talk about in the book that, that the founders were obsessed with character. And you know, Aaron Burr sort of is this guy who they all kind of sense has bad character. They don't quite know what to do about it, but they, I think even then realized how vulnerable the system was to people of fundamentally bad character.

• 32:50Speaker 01

  But see, this is, you know, Madison, um, you know, and Jefferson were saying, bad men will get into office. We are going to give you a constitution that is designed to accommodate human vice as well as human virtue. And I think what we've seen over the last two hundred and fifty years is the resiliency of the system they designed. But Donald Trump generally was stymied and he didn't do a lot as president. He was able to do a few things executive, by executive order. And he was able to mess up foreign policy because the president has more leeway there. But generally, he did not succeed in doing very much as president.

• 33:27Speaker 00

  That's true. That's true. I, another, another prominent Republican was telling me, he said, if Donald Trump was half competent, he could rule this country for twenty years. And he said that as, as a, as a real fear.

• 33:39Speaker 01

  That's the nightmare of a competent person like Trump.

• 33:44Speaker 00

  And I guess it's sort of the ultimate rarity, though, even when you look historically, and Stoics talk about this, and almost all the Greek and Roman plays are about this, Shakespeare certainly, bad character and competence very rarely seem to go together. That's the one merciful truth of history.

• 34:05Speaker 01

  Well, Aaron Burr is this interesting example, because he's as close as you get to Donald Trump, I think, becoming president. And Burr really did lack character, and somehow, he was a very astute politician, yet people sniffed that lack of character and recoiled from it. You know, so Alexander Hamilton finds himself in the laughable position to him, bizarre position, of supporting Jefferson for president over Burr. He said, you know, this is somebody who's fought for 15 years, Thomas Jefferson, and he says, "Look, I still think Jefferson would be a lousy president, but at least he believes what he says he believes."

• 34:45Speaker 00

  And isn't that interesting, how, you know, the Stoics talk about history is the same thing happening over and over again. You have at the beginning of, in the infancy of the American Republic, you have one of the founders voting essentially country over party. And then here we are, you know, 200 odd years later, people stuck in that same sort of ethical dilemma, and some people rose to the occasion, and a lot of people unfortunately didn't.

• 35:12Speaker 01

  An amazing number. But that's, you know, you expect a few bad apples, but to have dozens of bad apples really messes up the barrel.

• 35:24Speaker 00

  Well, you know, we have the four virtues of Stoicism, Christianity, you know, it's courage, and I think part of where we are is a lack of courage, you know, discipline, obviously a lack of discipline, justice, a lack of discipline explains it. But I've been most amazed, or most disappointed, at how the lack of wisdom, how easily people were fooled by what is

• 35:49Speaker 00

  Not a particularly sort of competent, well-executed sort of disinformation, you know, demagogue model, you know, like this wasn't, this wasn't, I saw, this is beyond the coup that we were talking about, but I saw a great headline where it was just, it was just titled like, "The Worst Coup." And like, this wasn't, I guess what I'm trying to say is, it's interesting how people have been fooled by what seems so transparently obvious to a thinking person.

• 36:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, but a lot of times in history, there's people who are kind of considered clowns, and then they get power. Franco was, Franco was kind of a clownish figure in Spain. Whoops, suddenly he's in charge.

• 36:35Speaker 00

  Right.

• 36:36Speaker 01

  Mussolini was a little bit of a clown. And suddenly Mussolini's in charge. You know, people laugh at, especially fascists. And then one day, they're running things.

• 36:47Speaker 00

  But you go, you go back to ancient Rome, and Caesar is brilliant, you know, Caesar is, that's what's so fascinating, you know, Cicero and Cato being sort of equally brilliant polar opposites, you know. Trump, I guess, is maybe more of a Mark Antony of, than, than a Caesar.

• 37:06Speaker 01

  That's an interesting analogy. Actually, I've been thinking lately about Trump as kind of a, Adam Clayton Powell as president, in that his-

• 37:15Speaker 00

  I was just reading about him in the Taylor Branch epic on Martin Luther King. What a fascinating figure.

• 37:21Speaker 01

  It's funny, I, you, are you reading Taylor Branch right now?

• 37:25Speaker 00

  I'm, I'm starting the third book today, actually.

• 37:28Speaker 01

  I've been obsessed with the, I've been reading Taylor Branch and associated books since last summer. What got you into Taylor Branch's books?

• 37:35Speaker 00

  The journalist Paul Kicks, who's a, who was a great sports writer for ESPN, recommended it to me. And I just found it incredible, just so rich and so fascinating, and such an intersection of-

• 37:51Speaker 00

  Biography and history. I mean, I think it's up there with, I put it up there with, with the Robert Caro series on Lyndon Johnson and the Manchester series on Churchill.

• 38:00Speaker 01

  Very much so. In fact, I, I thought of the Caro on LBJ, especially because I think the first Caro in LBJ is wonderful. The second's pretty good, you know?

• 38:13Speaker 00

  It would be hard to continue that level of play for that many pages.

• 38:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:20Speaker 00

  But sorry, you were saying you were reading about Adam Clayton Powell. Why did this?

• 38:26Speaker 01

  He, Adam, everything that Adam Clayton Powell did that antagonized the rest of the world, his followers loved.

• 38:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:36Speaker 01

  And, you know, so he's driving around Harlem in big Cadillacs. It clearly has a bunch of Cadillacs and he can't explain, you know, how he paid for all of them. And he kind of laughs. And his followers, like, you know, they just dig this so much. In the same way, everything that bothers a lot of people about Trump, his followers love. Because they're sticking it to the man.

• 38:54Speaker 00

  Well, I think it also, it exposes a weakness in a society based on norms, which is that shamelessness is a pretty difficult strategy to defend against and anticipate. Like you, I think when people are sort of, who comes after Trump? In some, in some respects, I think he's a completely unique animal because he's so Shakespearean in the excesses of his ego and his shamelessness and corruption and all of these things. It, there's, name another human being like that and I'll be worried that there'll be the next president. You know what I mean?

• 39:33Speaker 01

  John Kelly described Trump as the most flawed person he'd ever met.

• 39:37Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 39:38Speaker 01

  Which is almost Shakespearean.

• 39:42Speaker 00

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

• 39:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, to me, he's, I think the more ancient analog would be something like Nero. He's sort of just so beyond unqualified.

• 40:00Speaker 01

  And Marcus Aurelius' son.

• 40:03Speaker 00

  Commodus.

• 40:03Speaker 01

  Commodus. I think there's an element of Commodus there. Commodus loved the theater. He was kind of a frustrated actor.

• 40:11Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 40:12Speaker 01

  And he shocked everybody by going and performing in plays and stuff, which is seen as a right. And Trump, Trump is not a rich, wealthy, he's not Warren Buffett. He's someone who plays Warren Buffett types on TV. He played a rich man.

• 40:26Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 40:27Speaker 01

  And there's a Commodus aspect to that. Commodus came in, I think, quite popular and wore out his welcome pretty quickly.

• 40:34Speaker 00

  I mean, that's the ultimate question. And the two, the two sort of big questions in Stoicism is, and I wrote a piece about this for the New York Times, because I got offered a small job in the administration in 2016, is how does Seneca end up working for Nero? And there's this sort of complicated argument, I think, from his take of, you know, I'm the adult in the room, I'm preventing things from being less bad. And, and I think that's an interesting argument. And then the other is, how does Marcus Aurelius, the only philosopher king in history, have such a god awful son? It's, they're the two failings of the, of the philosophy.

• 41:09Speaker 01

  It's funny, I actually have a friend who is still in the Trump administration. And I've had a couple of conversations with him over the years. I finally said to him, the reason, because he has that argument, if I leave, bad things will happen. And I just said, if you don't leave, you're going to lose your soul. And that's the last thing I said to him since then.

• 41:31Speaker 00

  Well, and it's, it's hard to argue that really bad things haven't happened. So that's always, I think, the self-serving part of that arc. And I think, in a way, that's where people have struggled. And I think it's, it's tragic and there's a lot of historical analogs, but it's sort of like, if you didn't draw the line at any point over the last four years, how do you know where to draw the line? So it becomes, you kind of become trapped by your own rationalizations.

• 41:57Speaker 01

  Yep. Yep.

• 41:59Speaker 00

  I read a fascinating book about sort of the opposition to Hitler, not to make the comparison, but there was this argument among the generals, they sort of all knew that Hitler was insane, and they knew, it was like, they knew somebody should shoot him, but they didn't want to be the one to do it. And so there's this kind of thing where it's like, when everyone's keeping their powder dry, the system locks up. And I think you've seen a little bit of that in our current, the current excesses of our system.

• 42:31Speaker 01

  It's funny, talking about people who worked for Trump reminds me of General James Mattis, who becomes Trump's Secretary of Defense, a huge fan of Marcus Aurelius.

• 42:44Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 42:45Speaker 01

  And once told me that whenever he went into battle, he always carried a copy of meditations with him. I said, why? And he said, because I need to have at least 15 minutes of the day when I take my mind away from the battle. And I'll sit down with the meditations every night. Just read for 15 minutes, put my mind somewhere else. Of course, it is also the guy when asked why he located his headquarters in the battle in Iraq at a certain point, he said, well, it was good enough for Alexander the Great, so it's good enough for me.

• 43:15Speaker 00

  My favorite thing from Mattis is that interview where somebody said, I think this is a very stoic, sort of, one of those ancient quips, where they said, you know, what keeps you up at night? And he said, I keep people up at night.

• 43:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. That actually was a good line. You should interview him sometime.

• 43:33Speaker 00

  I would, I would love that. I've connected with him very briefly, but I think, you know, we were talking about sort of heroes, you know, sort of, who embodies the virtues that you're trying to celebrate as a society right now. I think, you know, he's up there with a, with a George Marshall of sort of embodying the grand tradition of those sort of statesman-like leaders, of positions, big and small, that have made this country what it is.

• 44:00Speaker 01

  John Lewis is somebody I would add to that.

• 44:02Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 44:03Speaker 01

  Through a life of different things.

• 44:07Speaker 01

  Well, there's precious few these days. As a society, we don't seem to celebrate them like we used to.

• 44:13Speaker 00

  Well, I've had a number of people on. I'm fascinated with Confederate monuments and the sort of argument about do you leave them up? Do you take them down? And I think one of the interesting things is that I think for the most part, we're coming around to the idea that, hey, they should come down. But what we struggle with is like, well, who should we celebrate? Who would if you were putting up a monument today? Let's say you put the Confederate statues aside. Who should we put a monument up? And you know, the fact that it took like 60 years to put up an Eisenhower Memorial in Washington DC sort of shows us our struggle with who are our heroes and how do we honor them?

• 44:49Speaker 01

  The question on Confederate monuments also is asked, who put them up? When do they put them up? And what did they think they were doing when they put them up?

• 44:56Speaker 00

  Certainly, certainly.

• 44:58Speaker 01

  And a lot of them are really celebrations of segregation and Jim Crow and the destruction of Reconstruction. I was thinking about this a year ago. My wife and I, just almost by accident, happened to be in Belfast in Northern Ireland and took a walking tour of the troubles, the fighting in Northern Ireland in the, over the last 40 years. And one of the subjects of this tour, and it speaks exactly to this Confederate memorial issue, was the guy was talking about the difficulty memorializing. He said, here was a bombing that killed 16 people. It was one of the first big bombings. There is no sign. Why? Because even now, we can't agree on what to say.

• 45:39Speaker 01

  Were the people victims or were they participants? Was it a murder? Was it a political act? And he said, and then why are you putting up one here when you don't put up one for the Catholic down the street who was shot by the police? And you have this constant battle over what to actually memorialize. But I think it's an important discussion to have because it does point to, what are you going to memorialize? How are you going to memorialize it? And why? My daughter happens to be a publicist. And she's involved in a project in Baltimore. There was an African American cemetery in downtown Baltimore. It was paved over.

• 46:18Speaker 01

  Now, that happens all the time.

• 46:19Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 46:19Speaker 01

  African-American cemeteries, we're totally disrespected. This is a special case because several hundred of the African-Americans were Civil War soldiers, colored troops.

• 46:30Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 46:31Speaker 01

  So you're mixing in this, well, you're dissing the military here, too.

• 46:35Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 46:36Speaker 01

  Well, they didn't care in the 1950s when they ran a highway over it. So it's fascinating, the whole issue of memorialization.

• 46:42Speaker 00

  Well, that was actually one of the things I wrote down that I wanted to talk to you about in your book, and I think it goes to where we struggle as a society right now, which is that, okay, so because the Confederate monument thing is complicated, people go, oh, should you pull down your monument of Washington or Jefferson? They owned slaves. And on the one hand, or then some people say, you should, you should pull them down because they did own slaves. But what I think, what I think, what we're not doing, what we should be doing, and I'd be curious your take, which is that the founders did own slaves, and it wasn't a horrendous moral contradiction and a shameful act. I don't necessarily know if we need to come to a conclusion about it, but we do have to wrestle with it.

• 47:27Speaker 00

  And I think what you do well in the book, that we're struggling to do as a society, it's not as simple as the founders owned slaves. It's how do we wrestle with how they worked themselves into this moral complication so we can wrestle with our own moral complications today?

• 47:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, and we can be instructed by their failures as well as by their successes. My wife happens to be a historian of the 19th century, wrote a horrific book called Escape on the Pearl about the biggest slave, attempted slave escape in American history, when a bunch of middle-class slaves, wine stewards, you know, violin teachers in Washington DC chartered a boat to take them to freedom in Philadelphia.

• 48:09Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 48:10Speaker 01

  And the boat was captured by a steamboat, and they were taken back, and it became a big, big thing in the 1840s. Her rule of thumb is, what was the person best known for? Robert E. Lee is best known for fighting a war to defend slavery. Monument comes down. Thomas Jefferson was best known for the Declaration of Independence. Monument stays up. And I think it's a helpful indicator or tool. But since we're getting into the ancient world of slavery, I want to mention another issue here. It really surprised me is the founders stood on ancient slavery as a justification.

• 48:54Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 48:55Speaker 01

  Yet ancient slavery generally was very different than modern American race-based slavery. Foremost, it was not race-based. Anybody could be a slave. In fact, the word slave comes from the Slavs, who are clearly, we would call Caucasian. And with the exception of a few places like Sparta, slavery tended not to be as harsh as American race-based slavery. Slaves had some rights, the right to petition the emperor over abuse. And their offspring, if a slave was freed, his offspring could hold public office, which was not the case in America. And so I think the founders kind of gave themselves a free ride, using the justification

• 49:39Speaker 01

  of slavery in the ancient world while presiding over a much harsher system of slavery.

• 49:45Speaker 00

  I was, I afforded to you, I just wrote an email for the Daily Stoic List about this. There's a, Jefferson wrote about this in Notes from Virginia, or whatever the book was called, where he's talking about, he said, you know, in the ancient world, you know, the Romans, they had Epictetus, they had Terence, they had Cyrus, they had these brilliant slaves. And he said, that's why the Romans weren't as strict on their slaves, is that their slaves were smarter. And he said, but look at us, we don't have any of those. And the irony is, I mean, first off, Phyllis Wheatley was a brilliant slave, but, but the, the difference is, the Romans allowed the slaves to read and write. That was punishable by death in large, you know, a good chunk of the South at this time.

• 50:28Speaker 00

  And so it's fascinating, the, the founders basically took their love of classicalism and twisted it and contorted it, almost like the Nazis did, into this perverse ideology that allowed them to rationalize a heinous, heinous act.

• 50:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, and then they...

• 50:47Speaker 01

  They don't allow slavery just to stain the American fabric. They weave it into the American fabric, in the Constitution, the fundamental law of the land. They endorse slavery. And as a result, 250 years later, we are still pulling out these strands. And, you know, people don't recognize that white supremacism was written into the Constitution. And they avoided the word race. They in fact, avoid the word slavery. But they know what they're talking about when they say, people in bondage are to be counted as three fifths of a person.

• 51:20Speaker 00

  When you had a pretty powerful sentence in the book that struck me where you said something like, and so, and throughout the rest of American history, white supremacists would choose one of the parties. At different times, sometimes the Republicans, sometimes the Democrats. But that's always been a voting block in the United States, as much as we'd like that not to be true.

• 51:41Speaker 01

  It still is. And it's dependable, especially for people with declining bases. You can always play that card.

• 51:53Speaker 00

  To go to this point of wrestling with it, though, I think, you know, where Washington shines greater than the other founders is that he seemed to come closer to realizing the ideals than any of the others. He does, he does free his slaves, you know what I mean? At considerable cost to himself, I mean.

• 52:14Speaker 01

  What's interesting is that Washington, as we're talking about it, an uneducated man is better at learning from experience. He's better at seeing what's in front of his eyes. Like, I think a lot of very intelligent people who are not well-educated, he actually reflects on experience and draws lessons from it, in a way I would say Jefferson doesn't. And that's why Jefferson is just a big old hypocrite. Spends his whole life writing about liberty and philosophy, yet does it living off the sweat of captive humans. Whereas Jefferson, Washington, after he steps down from the presidency, does get interested in the abolition of slavery and starts reading pamphlets about it.

• 52:58Speaker 01

  He really did seem to have a different approach. I would say, don't diss Madison here, though. Madison. I think is underappreciated and I think stands right after Washington. He's, I think Madison's the second most important founder. Washington wins the revolution. I don't think another general might have.

• 53:21Speaker 01

  So Washington gives us the country. Madison designs the country. And he's constantly in the background. I think he gets dissed a little bit because he is not a memorable writer. There's not no phrases that really jump out from him. He's small, five foot, five foot one, hundred and ten pounds. Sickly, suffers from some form of epilepsy throughout his life. He doesn't have a good speaking voice and he's not really a good orator. Nonetheless, and he's not very social, by the way, which is unusual for a politician. Yet, you know, here's the guy who during the seventeen eighties, the Articles of Confederation period, starts beating the drum for a constitutional convention. Gets a constitutional convention arranged. Is the first guy to show up in Philadelphia.

• 54:07Speaker 01

  Having spent four years preparing for researching ancient Greek city-states and maybe you could tell me, I think it's pronounced Amphic- Amphic- Chytonically. Does that ring a bell? No idea. I asked a classicist and she said, I'll just take your best shot. Nobody really knows. He has all these things at his, at his fingertips. And that's why we wind up with big states and small states, each having two senators. Cause he said, well, that's the way that league worked in ancient Greece, the city-states. This is sort of the ancient version of kind of NATO or the EU. Big city-states and small city-states each had two. So, and then he leads the ratification campaign with Hamilton to get the constitution ratified.

• 54:47Speaker 01

  And then in the seventeen nineties, Madison and Jefferson invent American politics, sort of the first version of it. Then he goes on and has a kind of mediocre presidency. But Madison really does so much in the background. Daniel Allen, who wrote a terrific book on the Declaration of Independence called Our Declaration, with a meditation on equality. Daniel Allen says that a lot of early American history is Madison talking to himself. So he drafts a letter from Congress to Washington. And he drafts Washington's response. And then he drafts Congress's response to Washington.

• 55:24Speaker 00

  It's fascinating, and I think maybe this is a good place to wrap up. But I think what's so brilliant about, you know, Seneca talks about, he says, "The purpose of philosophy, studying philosophy is you turn the words into works." Right? And Marcus Aurelius talks about, you know, he said, "I always had this horror of pen and ink philosophers, just the thinkers." What I think the American founders really were, and why I think they matter, even if you don't live in America, or even particularly like America, is that they were, they were true philosophers in the sense that they took their love of classical wisdom, their inspiration from the ancient world, these principles, and they made something with it.

• 56:06Speaker 00

  They made them real, and they helped millions of people real, get closer to realizing those ideals, which is, you know, I think the Stoic idea that, the Epicurean, ironically for Tom Sheffern, the Epicurean is like, "I'm gonna retreat to my garden, I'm gonna live in this little fantasy world." And the Stoic says, "I'm gonna get involved in politics, I'm gonna lead a country, I'm gonna fight in a war, I'm gonna, I'm gonna do something in the real world." And I think that's what I found so fascinating about your book, and why I think there's so much to learn from the founders.

• 56:35Speaker 01

  And in that sense, the United States of America is the greatest single product of the Enlightenment.

• 56:43Speaker 00

  Yes, yes. I mean, look, Napoleon is also a product of the Enlightenment, and look what he did with those principles.

• 56:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:53Speaker 00

  Killed a lot of people, basically.

• 56:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:57Speaker 00

  No, Tom, I love the book. It was so good to nerd out with you about this. I think everyone should read it, and I think if we want to make America great again, which I believe it should be, what we really have to do is understand these principles that made it great in the first place, and then try to get ourselves a little bit closer to realizing them.

• 57:15Speaker 01

  This has been great. I really appreciate it.

• 57:17Speaker 00

  Thanks so much.

• 57:18Speaker 01

  Three hours, but.

• 57:20Speaker 00

  I'm glad to get to flee. Let, how about I'll go back and read your other books and then we'll do, we'll do a discussion on those.

• 57:26Speaker 01

  It's funny you should mention that. I was talking to, somebody was interviewing me the other day about the book, about this book. And they said, but I want to talk about Churchill and Orwell because I'm a Republican never Trumper. And he said, I went back and read your book because I was suddenly shocked by, wow, I'm in the same position as Orwell was with the left of the 1940s. Orwell is an anti-Stalinist leftist.

• 57:46Speaker 00

  Right.

• 57:47Speaker 01

  And it was a very uncomfortable position. And I think it's very similar to being a never Trumper Republican these days.

• 57:53Speaker 00

  All right. Well, I'll read that one and we'll, we'll have a big conversation about it.

• 57:57Speaker 01

  Sounds good. Thanks a lot.

• 57:58Speaker 00

  Thank you so much. It was an honor.

• 58:01Speaker 00

  Thanks for listening to another episode of The Daily Stoic. It's mind blowing to me now that we are well over 30 million downloads of this show. It means so much to me to have all of you listen. If you want to help spread the word about the show, please leave a review on iTunes or whatever your favorite podcasting platform is. It helps a lot. And then of course, click subscribe. That's how we know how many people are listening and that, that makes sure you get the episodes as they come in. So thanks again for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast.