The Daily Stoic - Historian Thomas Ricks on Stoicism and the Founders

Episode Date: January 9, 2021

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.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoic, 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, to sit with our journals and to prepare for what the future will bring.

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I built this, wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen early and add free on the Amazon or Wondery. Hey, it's Ryan, welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoke Podcast. It's 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 traders stormed the capital of the United States of America and attempted to stop the certification of an election. 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 Stoke, Steve Hanselman called me, hey, I'm sending me this book, you've got to read it. And as soon as I read it, I reached out to have Tom Rick's on the podcast because this is exactly connected to what we talk about here at Daily Stoke. 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, epicurionism, 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 Rick 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. This is exactly what the founders were worried about. 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, you know, Ulysses S. Grant said,

look, there's two sides of this issue. There's the traders and the not traders. 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 gonna have him on to talk about some of his other books soon, but we need 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. 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 to. There seem 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? I think a couple of things. First, there was no sort of routineization. That actually comes later in America, the routineization of spelling with no websters dictionary. And it's a very political act. No websters and aging federalists, and he wants people to spell words all the same way. And I think this is really the last readout of federalism. It 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 know what Webster contributes. The 18th century is kind of wild for crazy spellings, capitalizations. It's kind of a wild west field to language that I really enjoy. 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. Well, they would find the notion of spelling the name correctly and oddity. There is no correct way.

I love the way that in one angry letter George Washington spells anonymous. It reads to me like Annen Omnis. He's mad. He's anonymous, Annen Omnis letters that officers are writing the Namsan Kim at the end of the week. So you titled the book First Principles and I think it's a great title because you essentially correct the firm wrong with the premise of the book is what did the people who created this country

believe and where did they get those beliefs from? Absolutely. And to agree 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. There are idols in their role models where the great philosophers and political figures of

ancient Greece and Rome, especially Rome, and especially the decline of the Roman republic, the people who have tried to stop the decline. So, Cato, Cicero, a few other people around them, and then some of the philosophers of the generals. 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 illusions and the nods and the the subtle quotations and the

influences. It's it's this we're in this strange it that you would even have to write your book is almost a bit of a commentary in and of itself. 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, you know, 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 revolution 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 the center of our political universe, the US capital is named for a human role, the capital in 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. And if you called someone a Catalan 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. And that's right. In the 18th century by contrast, one of the most popular plays of the century was the play K-Dop 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 codes

for the revolutionary era, not realizing they were quoting, is the equivalent these days of quoting Casa Blanca or Ghostbusters? Well, I've joked on the podcast a few times that Cato was the Hamilton of its day. Very, yeah, that's a very good way of putting it. And I haven't occurred to him here. 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, ancient Rome that share them up. It sounds like a Monty Python scene. We're in Valley fours. What are we going to do? Let's put on a musical. But, but it is interesting too. Stoicism appears in the book, you know, a few times. I would have argued that maybe that that 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.

So someone like Washington sort of gets it through pop culture and maybe a few books here there. And then Jefferson is reading Seneca in the original Latin. And certainly Washington wasn't doing that. Ten. Europe and 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 a literate.

And. Adams says no, he wasn't a literate. And Adam says, no, he wasn't a literate. And I got some very good letters when I was in Congress during the war written by him. And Pickering says, written by that young Alexander Hamilton boy. He's a good writer. Washington was very conscious of his lack of education

and brought in people like Hamilton to perform skills that he was conscious of being deficient. Hey, no, very much is Washington's model Washington has the misfortune to constantly have these models, voice it on him. I would probably say, I would emphasize, is a stoic. I know you have them in your book about the stoics. Do you consider Cicero a genuine stoic? 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 is 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. You know, like John Adams turns out to be kind of the gully Allen of the American Revolution. He's cocky, he's a big whiner. He unlike the Stoics.

He constantly wears his feeling as on his sleeve. There's a great line that the novelist and historian, Charlotte, had about Cicero, which applies to Adams as well, which is that he'd love to talk about his country, and he'd love to talk about himself, and unfortunately he did both things equally as much. 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 Catalan conspiracy, which was real, as I talk about in Lives of the Stoeth, it's real, but you can't help maybe feeling that Cicero might have exaggerated it 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. Yeah, I think the feeling that Cicero was very happy to see the conspiracy come down the pike. It's a little bit like the Glee, which would Madison Grete's strains were brilliant after the revolution during the Art of the Zuckon Federation era. It's exactly what Madison needed to show that the current system isn't working, to blow the whistle and get start beating the drum for the Constitutional Convention. But Cicero very much is Adams model. And while I have some problems with Adams, I think his reputation has been inflated a lot lately. It is amazing to me that

young John Adams decides to become America's Cicero and succeeds. Yes, yes, which is interesting too, because Cicero basically decided to become Cicero. And you know, there, there's a self-madeness to both of them that you can't help but admire. There is kind of, and John Adams is the only one of our first four presidents who never owned a slave. He graduated 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 school teacher in a backwater in Massachusetts. It 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. Interesting. He is unable to find a mentor, where George Washington had a mentor, where he's Thomas Jefferson had a couple, and Jefferson becomes a mentor to Madison. John Adams almost has to mentor himself. You read his diaries and he's constantly berating himself.

Pay a little attention to girls and hunting. Pay more attention to books, because nobody else is guiding him, even the guy in whose law obviously work. 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 me as he's an epicurean. He's an anti-stolic. 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. Well, I'm 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 sort of an ideal. But I think it's fascinating your book illustrates is 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 a piccado to some degree, as he 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. And I found it remarkable how much they ended up being likely influenced that they chose.

Well, because they succeeded, we're looking at the people who made it to the presidency, who successfully designed the country. There are other people who in many ways were spectacular failures. I say would say Patrick Henry is a spectacular failure. Alex and her Hamilton succeeds. He's basically watching to his prime minister.

But how do you soon after that, consider himself a failure? By the end of the 1790s, Alex and her Hamilton says to her friend, there is no place in this country for me. It's a terrible thought. I mean, here he's 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, all of people who were virtuous, yet disrespected by their peers. Yeah, and I mean, they did become successful. So there's some survivorship bias there. I guess what I mean is it's that 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 struggled to decide who our heroes are. Yeah, and our heroes are not people you want to emulate. Some of these rock stars, the sport 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 maybe 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 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 Kato mold. Yes. Which is really a stoical mode for the presidency. 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

one wisdom from the ancient world, from the first principles you're talking about. But over the last 200 years, the why of them got lost. Like even FDR, when FDR runs for reelection, he for a third term, he's violating a Kato-esque norm put in place by Washington. And I think people thought the population would be much more upset about it than they were, 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. I think that's all correct, but I would add to that also that people thought were laws turned out to have been norms. Yes. When the striking right now is the presidential transition process, the norm. And I've dumped on John Adams a bit. So the great norm has established really by John Adams.

He is the first president to turn power over to the opposition. And on top of that, he's a one turn president. He's quite bitter about it. He's so mad, he actually leaves Washington and on the 4 AM coach to Baltimore on the day of Jefferson's inauguration. Nonetheless, he did turn over power peacefully

to his successor who is from the situation. 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 that 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. I think that's something you talk about in the book that the founders struggled with. Certainly sort of the second generation,

it was sort of realizing, or not even the second generation, right after the sort of 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 gonna be a philosophical lover of the classics. Well, this is the funny thing is that Madison, who is the most rigorous in his study of the classics, he's also younger by about 20 years than the other three we're talking about. And Madison comes to terms the classics on their head.

He knows them better than anybody else. He shows up 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 gonna pit an ambition against ambition, interest against interest. And I'm gonna disperse powers 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 reach out somehow. And so Madison would say, Riddlock is not a bug, it's a feature. He is disperse power between the states and the federal government with three branches of the federal government and two houses within the legislative branch. I was actually thinking of, you talked 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 would be the natural thing. The federal government should run elections for the federal government, for the federal office. You have the management of 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 in valid weeks ago. Got a quick message from one of our sponsors, and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned. And then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned. It is, it's tricky, right? Because that is true. I saw someone tweeting about this the other day where they were saying, it's great that we have this

decentralized system. It prevents corruption. At the same time, 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 that's bad policies. But fundamentally by not understanding how the American system works 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 seem to not be able to effectively do it. 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. 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. 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. And a Shakespearean feel for human evil as well. Yes.

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 and argument address. He says, this is an experiment. And if we blow it, if we let it fail,

it will 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. You 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 kind of more attention to the operating system that they designed, we can do better. And I mean, even in the Stoics, there's a tension between sort of what they said and what they did, right? You have Sanica writing this beautiful stuff about justice and liberty and goodness and

principle and courage. And then, you know, he works for Nero. You have Kato, even, you know, Kato 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 Realis. He writes, to my brother Severus, it was through him that I encountered Thrasia,

Helvides, Kato, Dion, and Brutus, and conceived of a society of equal laws governed by a quality 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 2000 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's an experiment in doing that.

I think that's absolutely true. On something I think that's really important that we don't talk about enough, which is political vocabulary. Having the political vocabulary, having a word to describe what is happening. And 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. Share faction. This is what we call them. All John Adams can see his faction. In fact, is a blinking red light that says this is what led to the decline of the Roman Republic, this is a form of treason. So he starts throwing opposition newspaper editors into jail because they are somehow in his mind, increasing encouraging factionalism. Yeah, 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 described 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. 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 I took. didn't sign the brief, you know, which which I took. We talked about chip Roy. I didn't know. I'm not a chip Roy fan. I mean, there are more of a chip Roy chip Roy did sign it. He didn't sign either. He didn't, but it was, there was some bogus reasoning, I thought, in his explanation.

But, but anyways, he was, 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 is a slow moving attempted coup, and I think our inability to wrap our heads around

what's talking about and maybe lacking the language that resonates with people is why you're seeing so much ambiguity and passivity in the face of what's probably the gravest constitutional threat of our the last 80, 90 years. I actually disagree with your interpretation. I don't think it's an attempt to coup. I think Donald Trump knows he is not gonna be president

starting in January 20th. 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 urchied for him not to be seen as a loser. 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. Yes. So, like when these congressmen are signing a letter that is essentially endorsing a tactic that is that if those electoral results were flipped, I mean, it would, 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. 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. It's 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. You 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. Let's see, this is, you know, Madison, and Jefferson, we're saying bad men will get into office. We are gonna 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 250 years is the resiliency of the system they designed. The Donald Trump generally was stymied. And he didn't do a lot as president. He was able to do a few things as executive executive order. And he was able to mess up far policy because the president has more

leeway there. But generally, he did not succeed in doing very much as president. That's true. That's true. Another another Prime Minister of Republican was telling me, he said, if Donald Trump was half competent, he could rule this country for 20 years. And he said that as a real fear. That's the nightmare of a competent person like Trump. And I guess it's sort of the ultimate rarity, though, even when you look historically and Stokes 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, that's the one merciful truth of history.

I mean, well, Aaron Burr is this interesting example because with Jesus' clothes 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. So Alex and our Hamilton finds himself

in the laughable position, the bizarre position of supporting Jefferson for president over Burr. This is somebody who's fought for 15 years. Oh, Mr. Jefferson. And he says, look, I still think he, you know, Jefferson be a lousy president, but at least he believes what he says he believes. And isn't that interesting how, you know, the Stokes talk about history is the same thing happening over and over again. You have at the beginning of the, that the, in the impency of the American Republic, you have one of the founders voting essentially country over party. And 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. Amazing number of it. I always, you know, you expect a few bad apples, but to have dozens of bad apples really messes up the barrel. Well, you know, we have the 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 the lack of discipline, justice, the lack of discipline, explains it. But I've been most disappointed at how the lack of wisdom, how easily people were fooled by what is not a particularly competent, well-executed disinformation, well executed sort of disinformation, you know,

demagogal model, you know, like this wasn't, this wasn't, I saw, this is beyond the coup, but I saw 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.

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

You know, people laugh at, especially fascist. And then one day they're running things. But you go back to ancient Rome and Caesar is brilliant. You know, Caesar, 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 Anthony of, uh, than, uh, than a Caesar. That's an interesting analogy. Actually, I've been thinking lately about Trump is kind of a Adam Clayton Powell, as president. Uh, in that he is, I was just reading about him in the Taylor branch,

Epic on Martin Luther King. What a fascinating figure. It's funny. I've you, are you reading Taylor Branch right now? I'm starting the third book today, actually. I've been obsessed with the, I've been reading Taylor Branch and associated books this last summer.

What got you into Taylor Branch's books? The journalist Paul Kicks, who's a great sports writer for ESPN, recommended it to me, and I just found it in credit, just so rich and so fascinating, and such an intersection of biography and history. I mean, I think it's up there with, I put it up there with the Robert Caro series on Lyndon Johnson and the Manchester series on Churchill. Very much so. In fact, 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.

It would be hard to continue that level of play for that many pages. Yeah. But sorry, you were saying you were reading about Adam Clayton Powell. Why did he? Adam, everything that Adam Clayton Powell did that antagonized the rest of the world is followers loved. Yes. You know, so he's driving around Harlem and big Cadillacs.

It clearly has a bunch of Cadillacs and he can't explain how he paid for all of them. And he kind of laughs. And his followers, they just dig this so much. In the same way, everything that bothers a lot of people about Trump is followers love. Because it's a thing to the man. 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 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. There's name another human being like that and I'll be worried that they'll be the next precedent, you know what I mean? John Kelly described Trump as the most flawed person he'd ever met. John Kelly described Trump as the most flawed person he'd ever met. Yes. Which is almost a Shakespearean. Got a quick message from one of our sponsors and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned.

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. And Marcus really is his son. Comedist. Comedist. I think there's an element of communist there. Comedist loved the theater. He was kind of a frustrated actor.

Yes. And he shocked everybody by going and performing in plays and stuff, which is seen as a right. And it, Trump does not be rich, wealthy, he's not warm Buffett. He's someone who plays warm Buffett types on TV. He played a rich man. Yes. And there's a common sense aspect to that. And commoners came in, I think, quite popular and wore his welcome pretty quickly. I mean, that's the ultimate question. And the two, the two sort of big questions in stoicism is how, 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 I think that's an interesting argument. And then the other is, how does Marcus are really as the only philosopher king in history have such a god awful son? It's, yeah, there's the two failings of the, of the philosophy.

It's funny. I actually have a friend who is still in the Trump administration. And I've had a couple of conversations with them over the years. And finally, said to him, the reason 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 you, since then. Well, and it's hard to argue that really bad things haven't happened. So that's always, I think, the self-serving part of that aren't. And I think in a way that's where people have struggled. And I think 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. Yeah. Yeah. 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 that 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 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 excesses of our system.

It's funny talking about people who work for Trump reminds me of General James Mattis who become Trump's Secretary of Defense. A huge fan of Marcus Aurelius. Yes. And once told me that whatever he went into battle, he always carried a copy of the 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 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, a certain point. He said, well, it was good enough for Alexander the great. So it's good enough for me. My favorite thing from Mattis is that interview where somebody says, 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 you up at night. Yeah. That actually was a good line of it. You should interview him sometime. 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 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, a sort of embodying the grand tradition of those sort of statesmen like leaders of positions big and small that have made this country what it is. John Lewis is somebody I would add to that. Yes. Through a life of different things. Well, there's precious few these days and as a society, we don't seem to celebrate them like we used to. Well, I've had a number of people on them. I'm fascinated with Confederate monuments and the sort of argument about you leave them up. Do you take them down?

And I think one of the interesting things is like, I think for the most part we're coming around with 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? The question and Confederate monuments also is asked, who put them up, when do they put them up and what do they think they were doing when they put them up? Certainly, certainly. 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 of 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, where the people victims or where the 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 is shocked 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 even memorialize how you know memorialize it and why my daughter happens to be a public story. And she's involved in a project in Baltimore. African American cemetery in downtown Baltimore, was paved over. Now that happens all the time. Sure, 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. So you're mixing in this, well you're dissing the military here too. Sure. Well, they didn't care in the 1950s when they ran a highway over it. So it's, it's fascinating, the whole issue of memorialization. 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, um, okay, so because the Confederate monument thing is complicated, people go, oh, should, should you pull down your monument of Washington or Jefferson, they own slaves. And on the one hand, or then some people say, you should pull them down, because they did own slaves. But what I think is what I think, what we're not doing, what we should be doing,

and I'd be curious, you're taking, 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. And I think what you do well in the book that we're struggling to do is the society. It's not as simple wrestle with how they work to themselves into this moral complication so we can wrestle with our own moral complications today. Yeah, and we can be instructed by their failures as well as by their successes. My wife happens to be a story of the 19th century, what I drew a horrific book called Escape

on the Pearl about the biggest slave, attempted slave escape in American history. When a bunch of little class slaves, wine stewards, you know, violent teachers in Washington, D.C., chartered a boat to take them to freedom in Philadelphia. And the boat was captured by a steamboat and they were taken back and it became a big, big thing in the 1840s.

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 to hand. 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 to the ancient world of slavery, I wanna mention another issue here that really surprised me is the founders stood on ancient slavery as a justification. Yes, yet ancient slavery generally was very different than modern American race-based slavery. Proc foremost, it was not race-based. Anybody could be a slave. In fact, the word slave comes from the sloths

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 give themselves a free ride using the justification of slavery in the ancient world while residing over a much harsher system of slavery. I was I afforded to. I just wrote an email for the Daily Stoke list about this. There's a Jefferson wrote about this in notes from Virginia or whatever the book was called. He was talking about. He said, you know, in the ancient world,

you know, the Romans, they had epicetus, they had tarants, they had Cyrus, they had these brilliant slaves. And he said, that's why the Romans weren't as strict on their slaves, as 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 the irony is, I mean, first off, Phyllis Wheatley was a brilliant slave, but the difference is the Romans allowed the slaves to read and write. That was punishable by death in large, you know, good chunk of the South in at this time. And so it's fascinating that 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. Yeah, and then 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. American fabric in the Constitution, the fundamental law of the land, the endorsed slavery. And as a result, two and a 50 years later, we are still pulling out these strands. And 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. 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. Different times than does it Republican, 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. It still is and it's dependable, especially for people with the climbing basis, but you can always play that card. Yeah, 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's seen 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, 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 ol' hypocrite. Spends his whole life writing about liberty and philosophy, yet does it living off the sweat of captive humans? Whereas, Washington, after he steps down from the presidency,

does get interested in the abolition of slavery and starts read pamphlets about it. He really did seem to have a different approach. I would say don't just 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.

So Washington gives us the country. Madison designs the country. And he's constantly in the background. I think he gets distal 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 110 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 not unusual for a politician. Yeah, you know, here's the guy who during the 1780s, the articles of Confederation period starts beating the drum for a constitutional convention. It's a constitutional convention arranged.

Is the first guy to show up in Philadelphia, having spent four years preparing for researching ancient Greek city states and maybe you could tell me, I think it's pronounced amphic, amphic, itionically, was that ring of bill? No idea. I asked the class assistant, she said, I, I, I, I, I asked the classes since you said, I'll just take your best shot. Nobody really knows.

He has all these things at his, at his, at his figure tips. And that's why we wind up with big states of small states, each having two senators, because 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 a NATO or the EU, big cities, the states of small cities, states of China too. So and then he leaves the ratification campaign with Hamilton to get the constitution ratified. And then in the 1790s, Madison and Jefferson invent the 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 of Meditation on Equality.

Daniel Allen says that a lot of a moral 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. 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, Sennaka talks about, he says, the purpose of philosophy, studying philosophy, is you turn the words into works, right? And Marcus really 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 in particular like America, is that 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. They made them real. And they helped millions of people get closer to realizing those ideals, which is,

I think this stoic idea that the Epicurian, ironically for Thomas Jefferson, the Epicurian is like, I'm gonna retreat to my garden. I'm gonna live in this little fantasy world. And this 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 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. And in that sense, United States of America is the greatest single product of the enlightenment. Yes, yes. I mean, look, Napoleon is also a product of the enlightenment and look what he did with those principles.

Killed a lot of people basically. Now 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. This has been great. I really appreciate it. I don't feel like so much. About three hours. But I believe that we have to get it fully. How about I'll go back and read your other books,

and then we'll do a discussion on those. It's funny you should mention that. I was talking to somebody who's interviewed me the other day about this book. About this book. And they said, but I want to talk about Churchill and Orwell, because I'm a Republican never Trump. 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 right? And it was a very uncomfortable position. And I think it's very similar to being a never Trumper Republican these days. All right. Well, I'll read that one and we'll have a big conversation about it. Sounds good. Thanks a lot.

Thank you so much. It was an honor. Thanks for listening to another episode of The Daily Stoke. It's mind blowing to me now that we are well over 30 million downloads at 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

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