Transcript of Walter Isaacson Returns (biographer & historian)

Wndri Plus subscribers can listen to Armchair Expert early and ad-free right now. Join WNDRI Plus in the WNDRI app or on Apple podcast, or you can listen for free wherever you get your podcast. Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert. Experts on Expert. I'm Dan Sheppard, and I'm joined by Monica Isaacson. Whoa. Recently married to our guest. Walter Isaacson is back. We had him on last time to talk about the Elon book, I believe.

Is that what he was here for? No, Doudna. Jennifer Doudna. Oh, right. Jennifer Doudna.

Then I read the Elon one afterwards. All to say, he's back with a new book called The Greatest Sentence Ever Written. I got to add, in case you didn't listen to the first Walter, which you should. Walter, in his own right, is the most fascinating person. I said this in the first interview. He deserves his own biography because he was the CEO or President of CNN. Yeah. He had a whole crazy, epic career before he was a biographer.

I know. So cool.

His new book is called The Greatest Sentence Ever Written, and it's about the most powerful sentence in the Declaration of Independence, and he just breaks it down word by word and how meticulous it was. It's extremely fascinating. It's very fascinating. All the compromises that are just within the sentence. Yeah. Fastinating. Please enjoy Walter Isaacson.

He's an objetsman. He's an objetsman. He's an objetsman. He's an objetsman.

Don't say anything.

That's one of my questions.

Yeah, you can sit there.

Can I use this?

We can't nail it with a couch. This is the third iteration. We put pillows out. What we have found is that there's no unifying-Comfort level. Architecture for a couch. There's nothing universal that everyone agrees on. It's always going to be polarizing a couch.

I know. I used to hate throw pillows. My life has always got to... I think, Why do people have these? Now suddenly, I'm like, Hey, there's a pillow. That's cool.

I have the same anger about the pillows. Mostly on the bed. I love throw pillows. Decorative.

I hate decorative.

The fact that you're just going to pitch it on the floor every night and We're going to repeat this busy work?

Right.

You guys would hate my bed.

You and I have the same. I'll bring my wife next time. You can convince her. Even at our house, we have four throw pillars on the bed. I said, Nobody's going to come see the bedroom. Why? It's not for Yeah, but it's pretty.

We need a good social scientist to tackle this. What is going on?

What evolutionary- Dubner probably could do it for you. Dubner knows everything. Yeah, he sure does. He's been on your show quite a bit, right?

Yeah, we love him. I would throw Duckworth in the mix, too. I'd want her eyes on this to Angela Duckworth.

It's an esthetic. It's making your nest look nice.

That's where I think the work would lie, is the value of esthetic. What esthetic do you prioritize? It is interesting. It's fascinating that an esthetic would be an essential pursuit.

Well, you see, an esthetic with no usefulness is that. Now, there's a Venn diagram in which something is esthetic and useful. Oh, you would hate living with me.

I just bought this little tray yesterday. It's for nothing. I don't know what I'm going to use it for, but it's so cute. So now it's just sitting on my counter and I have to find a use for it.

It's like a low candle on the table. You're not really going to like that.

Well. Yeah, I think we would agree a decorative If columns on a structure is offensive. If they don't really bear any weight or they don't serve any purpose, you're pro column.

Well, my dad was an engineer, and we grew up in New Orleans. Column heavy, but they are weight gathering columns.

So they're necessary.

Right. As we learned in Hurricane Katrina, where occasionally a column would go off.

It also might be a deep like, this is a nice space. It's inviting. So you're in included into gatherings or you become an integral part of the community.

If you present a beautiful environment people are drawn to, that it would facilitate gathering and fellowship and council.

What is the rooms called in the Arab world that are just the whole couch on the outside and lots of beautiful cushions. Oh, I don't know. It's a room where people gather.

It's designed to facilitate-Beautiful throw colors. Yeah. Okay, so we saw each other. I don't Did you sign an NDA about that birthday party? Are we allowed to say we were at it? It's just reputational cost to ourselves.

I think it's reputational cost. I don't know. For my birthday party, I'd say, Don't tell people you were there.

Well, we've been very public about our ongoing relationship with Bill Gates, so I have nothing to hide. But I did see you there, which was a delight because when we interviewed you, I guess five years ago or close to five years ago, it was over Zoom, which is never really quite the thing.

It's amazing that you now get this in person because it is so much of a different dynamic.

Yes. You can just imagine having shadowed Elon on a screen that someone held. It wouldn't really work, right?

I think that in the days of AI, we're going to learn that actually physically being there counts. When I was doing Steve Jobs, when I was doing Elon Musk, doing Jennifer Doudna, and I did the show with you on it, my rule was, I don't do it based on interviews. I do it based on you letting me embed myself in your life for two years and just watch you and shadow you. Then you can make it a narrative.

Okay, you mentioned this. I watched you doing a Michael Lewis sit down, which was really fascinating. We adore him as well. You mentioned, I guess it's the Heisenberg effect. Is that what it's called?

Yeah, which is when you observe something, Heisenberg said, if you observe the particle, that's a quantum mechanical thing.

Whether it's a particle or a wavelength.

Exactly. So the question that Michael Lewis and I have, because we both have the same method, which is, I'm just going to ride alongside you and watch, is by watching somebody, are you changing their behavior? And to some extent, yes, but surprisingly for me, with Elon Musk in particular, me being there did not seem to change him at all because I would talk to all his team and they say, You got to come to this meeting because he's going to really come down hard on us. We want to make sure that you're there taking notes. And I'd come and they'd say, Well, that didn't help any you being there.

Yeah. Well, you even saw interpersonal relationship feuds and stuff like that that you were privy to.

Especially with Grimes, which is a very interesting relationship, the mother of some of his children, and Siobhán Zilleis. These are all really smart, talented people. I didn't want to wallow in the personal life, but the personal life is connected to the professional passion and just to the inner person. Yes. It's huge.

Well, I think it approaches the most fascinating question we all have with these unique geniuses is, how are they shifting gears into interpersonal familial because they are in an environment most of their day where their opinion is the most important and they declare things, they don't really debate things. So all of us are quite interested as like, how does that work in real life?

There's no one formula, but there is a through line of all the people I've written about. Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Steve is a little bit different, but Elon Musk, they aren't perfect in their personal lives. I shouldn't put Steve Jobs in that category. He had a great personal life. But But Ben Franklin sets up household in London with another woman. He leaves Deborah back home. Einstein was not ever going to win husband of the Year award. He was frisky. And Elon, enough said. Yeah.

Could you rank your subjects in Most Susceptible to Heisenberg Effect and Least Susceptible? It seems like Elon's at the top as far as he was least-Least susceptible because he doesn't have emotional EQ incoming signals very well.

In other words, I'm sitting here looking at you all, and we know what each other thinks. Elon, his brother, Kimball, said that he was the one who got the empathy gene, Kimball. Oh, wow. Sometimes Elon just doesn't have those receptors. Secondly, and he said this to me very strongly Interestingly, he said, If you worry about what people think about you, you'll never succeed. He said, That's the problem with empathy. Sometimes empathy is really vanity because you care what other people think and you want them to like you. He said, Of me, C, which wasn't particularly nice, he said, That's why you screwed up running CNN. You cared too much that the people there liked you, and you should have gotten rid of half of them. Empathy is not your friend when you're running something.

Yeah, so A, how did you take that criticism, and B, how true- It had the odious smell of truth to it because I look into myself, I'm never going to get a rocket into orbit or people to Mars or change a whole electric vehicle or AI.

I think it's partly because you You have to just be hell-bent, passionate, and intense. You have to care what people think of you. You have to build teams, but you have to not obsess over wanting everybody to like you.

I want to share this with you because I think you get a kick out of it. Maybe he already told you personally, but So, yeah, we're on this trip with Bill to India.

For his foundation work? Yes.

And so we're traveling around with him on his plane all week. And those are really special moments because there's really no other obligation, which he has many. You can really just shoot the shit. And of course, I had just read your Elon book, and I wanted so bad to know if he had read it what he thought. Because obviously, for people who don't know, Elon really, at least at one point, hated Bill. And they had a very ill-fated tour of SpaceX where he started confronting him about shorting his stock. And Then went on a tweeting campaign. All true. We're sitting there and I said, You love Walter Isaacson, right? He's like, Oh, yeah, I really like Walter. We're friends. I said, So did you read Elon's book? And he goes, Oh, yeah, it was great. I really liked it. I was like, Okay, great. Wow. In a little bit where their overlap is, the criticism from Elon just doesn't really register, it doesn't seem. He has a similar gift in that he's not terribly affected by these opinions.

Well, I think Bill has a lot of incoming criticism, and he has to have a bit of a thick skin. Although I think Bill Gates actually feels it. He has a lot more empathy than people would think. I think he does. But I also think he correctly says of Elon Musk, Oh, he just runs down everybody. He says nasty things about everybody. You just got to live with it. And that is true.

Yeah, he's not taking it personally.

And he said, Oh, and then my favorite part of the book is he goes on to talk about the chapter where he had invited the CEO and the head engineer of the solar panel company he had purchased to come down and install the solar panels on the roof of his house in He can never aware of the hell he launches. And Bill was trying to explain the part where he starts yelling at them on the roof at midnight. Why did you make that part? What is that designed for? That doesn't even go with it. Have you guys ever installed it? Bill's enjoyment of competence being exposed was incredibly telling.

Well, I'm so interested to hear this because Bill Gates never told me that. It is totally true, and that's why you have to embed yourself. I remember being on that roof at midnight in Boca Chica, Texas. He goes into what's called demon mode, Elon does. He's like, Why are there these parts? He said, The best part is no part. You got to get... And they said, Well, we can't because... And he turned out to be right. That's the secret sauce of Elon Musk is he understands the details of engineering. I think Bill Gates would appreciate that.

Yes. You have to build in a little bit of compassion and understanding despite the fact that they're so enriched and successful, which is, I think it's easy to overlook the frustration that exists when you truly are often the smartest person in the room. When I got a glimpse in of like, oh, yeah, Bill has lived on a planet where he's been trying his hardest to get everyone to catch up to his speed, and that is frustrating. For him to have observed another guy going through it and then letting it rip in that fashion and how much enjoyment humor he got out of it, I was like, oh, yeah, this is very illuminating.

It's particularly interesting because those are the two smartest people I've ever dealt with, Elon Musk, in some ways. There are others in different types of intelligence, but Elon's intelligence is understanding material science and engineering. Engineering is a lot different than pure science or running a company. Bill understands physics, understands science so well, but he's never been a pure physical engineer. I'm not talking about software engineer. They had many big disputes, Elon Musk and Bill Gates. One of them, in which Elon turned out to be more right than Bill was that you could have EVs doing things like semi-trucks, that you could make batteries that could do it. I think it's almost because Musk can visualize lithium-ion batteries and how much they could have and how you would make the engineering. It's an important trait because our country is now missing this ability to totally manufacture things and learn from the manufacturing process. For example, Steve Jobs, he had so much beauty embedded in everything he did. His design sensibility was great. His ability to understand human emotions interactions much better than Musk. I mean, Musk builds a cyber truck which still doesn't It's what I would speak to most people's emotions.

Back to esthetics. Yeah. I need some throwpill. I remember walking around the design studio as he's trying to figure out what he called the chamfers, the curves on the iPhone and stuff, making it beautiful. But what Steve then did was it was then sent to China to be manufactured. Whereas Musk says, No, I've got to make my own manufacturing lines. I got to put my desk, my engineers, and my designers right on the manufacturing lines so that they can have the instant feedback of the engineering.

How do you write about these people who are the most brilliant people in the world? Because then you yourself have to understand what they're talking about.

Well, that's the joy of doing the book. I mean, we talked about it when I talked to you about Jennifer Doudna and the codebreaker and CRISper. Well, learning a little bit of biology and learning the chemistry of it, you can learn anything. I mean, this is almost the theme of your show.

I was going to say, I think we do a similar thing Which is like, oh, we have a physicist in two hours. I got to brush up on that. I got to be able to be an intermediary between the layperson and the expert.

And one of the things your show does is you can be an expert on physics at this point, music at that point, psychology the next time. People who dive into many different subjects tend to see the patterns of nature, and that's where creativity comes from.

Yes. So I'm quite envious. Again, we just had a very tiny dose of it. We had a week of it. And you've had, at times, years of it with people. And I remember we said out loud to each other all the time, this is an insane privilege. We're getting to go meet with all of the heads of tech in India and go to a secret room where it's Chatham House rules, and we're getting to hear, I don't know, six of the 20 smartest people on the planet about this topic discuss how they're going to tackle it. It's such a unique and special thing to be a fly on the wall of. Of all these subjects, which one did you find yourself just endlessly grateful?

I think it was the one I talked to about, which is biochemistry and understanding how our cells work. We talk about coding and AI and stuff. Well, in the next 20 years, cells are going to be... Molecules are going to be the new things we have to code and engineer. It was fun to learn that. I struggled a bit with Einstein, even though my father's an engineer, my grandfather, my uncle, so I grew up with some of this. I was okay with the physics. It was the tensor calculus I was trying to learn for general relativity. That It may have been the wall I hit. Yeah, so hard.

It's humbling when you hit that wall, right? Because you're going to be cruising along.

Because you keep saying to yourself, as I said to you, You can learn anything. Then wait a minute. The tensorcalculars of general... I had Brian Green and others, and I'd understand it. He'd explain it to me. Then 20 minutes later, I'd say, Wait, I can't figure it out again. Bill Gates is that way, and you saw it on your trip to India. If there's anybody who dives in and can be curious about everything from malaria and public health to nuclear power and new ways of doing it, even in the 1970s or so, he'd take these think weeks and he'd bring books with him, and he would just learn everything he could about a subject. Leonardo da Vinci was that way. He's like, I need to learn everything about a subject. And he would dive into Euclid because the printing press had just come to pass in 1500 in Florence. And he'd say, I've got to get the Euclid book that's in the bookshop down by the Bridge. So he could learn that. And then he'd learn Botany, and then he'd learn optics. There are certain people in this world who try to learn as much as possible about everything knowable, from Aristotle to Leonardo da Vinci to Bill Gates to Ben Franklin.

And those are people who are interesting.

Yeah, you get this sense that, oh, boy, they have a comprehensive view of all the things, all the dynamics that are at play, which is so many things to juggle. We asked him, Hey, of these promising longevity techs that are on the horizon, which do you think is the most promising? And he's like, well, we have a company that we work with that we're doing a lot of good work. But you got to remember, the Earth is 5. 2 billion years old. In the first cells, we have two independent cells. He took us through the evolution of every single cell till we got to MAML, also incorporating all of the geology that was happening and all the chemistry that was happening in the atmosphere and how everything was changing. And I was like, I mean, my God, this guy had to tell us the history of the planet to bring us up to speed to say where we're going next. And it took an hour.

It's interesting as you look at AI, which will be able to absorb billions of bits of information. And the question is seeing the patterns. And that's what a great human can do is learn so many different things and then abstract patterns. And I've just been reading books about AI, which is how do you get to that level where where you get the abstraction of patterns that the AI can do?

It can juggle so much data.

Sort of an intuition, too. Einstein once said that every great advance is a leap of intuition, but every leap of intuition comes from years of having absorbed data.

Yeah, that's so true. Okay, so all this to say, why have you not ever done Bill?

First of all, I tend to think childhood is the sweet spot to why. I mean, whether it's- Us, too. Difficult childhood in South Africa.

The wilderness camps, he was sent to define them.

Yeah, and that we, biographers, believe that dad and childhood are two keys to understanding. Well, Source Code, which is Bill Gates' first of, I think, a trilogy of memoirs That is as good as it gets when it comes to memoirs. There'll be a certain point I'll write something about Bill Gates, but I can't top that book.

Okay, that makes sense. Now, you just circled the point I wanted to explore, which is certainly with Elon, the whole thing is just driven by this relationship with his father. That's the fuel in the tank, as was Steve Jobs in some interesting way in that he was adopted and that whole story. Of your subjects, all are male except for Doudna, was her driving force a mother conflict?

No, it was actually a father, too. I don't want to say that's a pattern of everybody, but as Barack Obama, who's been on your show, his first line is, I think every successful person is either trying to live up to the expectations of his father or live down the sins of the father. And the same is true of me is what he said. So Jennifer had a very, very supportive father who just believed she could do science and took her on explorations. I think that was a key to the childhood there. She felt like an outsider. I think I'm handicapped like Michael Lewis. My friend grew up with him in New Orleans. We had magical childhood. We were growing up in New Orleans with wonderful parents and friends. I think sometimes having a rough childhood and feeling like a misfit, feeling like an outsider instills in you a bit of that drive of how do I fit in? You look at Leonardo, who's born out of wedlock and is not legitimated by his father, and he's gay, and he's left-handed, and he's distracted. Line him up. He goes in this small village of Vinci and finally goes to Florence, where the Medici embrace But you could do it.

Einstein being Jewish in Germany. Yeah, you feel like an outsider. You go down the line.

Or just even alienated by their genius as well.

They feel a misfit in who they are. Elon Musk being bullied as a kid, having a father who is psychologically abusive to him, who took the sides of the bullies who beat up Elon. Elon is slightly on the, I'm not very good with social signals scale. So he's sitting there in the corner of the bookstore, growing up all alone, reading Asimov, reading Heinlein. I saw one of the books, Stranger in a Strange Land. It's on your shelf there. Elon would read these things, and he'd feel like a stranger in a strange land. Yeah.

Just to remind folks of one of the stories in that book about Elon, right? Is He had at this wilderness camp got beat up so severely by another boy that he was in the hospital for four days. When he came home and was presented to his father, his father proceeded to shame him for losing the fight.

For hours, just made him stand in front and say, You're a loser. You'll never amount to anything. While Kimball, the younger brother, had to watch. And Kimball says, It's still the most searing experience of the life.

And it's not to excuse things, but minimally, when you're evaluating these crazy things you observe, it is useful to remind yourself of what- That he's a person.

People are people.

He was humans. He was forged. Forged by fire. I think that's the title of my first chapter. But I get some pushback, and so does Michael Lewis sometimes, Oh, you're trying to explain a way, Elon being demon-driven and stuff. I say, No, I'm trying to explain it.

Exactly. People can flate an excuse and an explanation.

They say, You're trying to excuse them. I say, I'm trying to explain them. You can be the judge But I'm going to tell you what it was like, how it was growing up. I think successful people have some demons in them. Of course. They have a question for anybody like that. We probably all do, even those of us who have good childhoods, have a few demons. Do you harness your demons or do your demons harness you? And Elon has spent a lifetime struggling harnessing his demons.

It's not even helpful to have a story that doesn't show all the pieces because it's a cautionary tale, too. You need to hear about the father and the bullying and stuff so that whoever reads it moving forward knows that results in this.

Mae Musk, who's just this wonderful person, the mother of Elon. You've probably watched her. She's a fashion model in their 70s. But But she said to me at the very beginning, and we were talking about her ex-husband, Elon's father, saying, The challenge for Elon is the danger that Elon becomes his father. You see that struggle and you see it in Luke Skywalker learning that the dark side of the forest, well, hey, that's my father. And that's a pretty ancient struggle. You're right. You want to explain all the sides so people understand where the demons But you don't have a lot of drives that are insane drives unless you have a few demons. I know. And maybe that's why I'm a better observer of people than somebody who's going to shoot rockets to Mars because I got some drives, but they're not insane, but they're not going to change the world the way Steve Jobs did, the way Elon Musk did, the way Einstein did.

I guess Bill's comforting in that way that his parents were, by all accounts, spectacular.

His father and mother, that's what source code this book he did about his childhood and the Thierry O'Camp that they used to go to the games that they played. Now, he was very competitive and ambitious, but his father, who just died maybe five or six years ago, has got to have been one of the wisest, sweetest people.

Yeah, a gentle giant, an enormous man with a big heart.

He did one of the great things for Bill Gates was he helped negotiate that original IBM contract that says, and you get to keep the source code. Yes.

He is. Then the mother's incredibly admirable proportionality of pushing him to be social and then surrendering to who he was.

So the big in the United Way understanding that is not just about taking things, it's about giving back. I did do, years ago, a cover story in Time magazine on Bill, and it begins with the mother and the mother taking Bill to a psychologist because Bill is always resisting or always refusing to do things. And the psychologist saying to the mother, I think Mary, her name was, Give it up. Just let him be who he is because if you struggle with him, he's going to win. That's why I think Bill turned out a little bit differently. He has incredible drives. Early years of Microsoft. I mean, he is- Psychopathic.

Yeah.

Admittedly, he says so.

But he has been somebody who has been then it's about something larger, like taking you to India and explaining why. All the people I've written about at a certain point realize it's not just about me and my success. It's about connecting my success to something larger than myself. Interesting.

Okay, so now, having studied all these people, here's, I guess, my fear. My conclusion is they don't come in the shape we'd like. I think our current society has lost a little bit of tolerance for what comes with these once in a generation types. We want them to also be perfect, and I think that's unrealistic. What do you think about the reality of what makes these people and what tolerance we have to have society?

I think you have to have tolerances for geniuses, and that's when I was doing the Elon Musk being interviewed about him. People who just really hated him and say, wait a minute, do you want a society without Elon Musk? Or George Parker wrote a great book on Richard Holbrook, who's not quite up there with Elon Musk, but this diplomat It was just such a pain in the ass. And yet, as Parker ends the book as the way I in the Elon book, could you have had a kinder and gentler subject still being the one getting the date in the cord, shooting the rocket to Mars, whatever it may be? So I I think we have to tolerate, and people push back me, but tolerate sometimes the craziness of genius. That said, I think there was a period up until about four or five years ago where we had become quite intolerant of, say, Picasso. I think that as we got into an age where in 140 characters, you had to declare somebody a hero or a villain. You couldn't say, Wait a minute. With Picasso, It's more complicated than that. But TSLA is more complicated than that.

Michael Jackson.

Exactly. We became a society in which either because of the algorithms of social media or the talk radio or cable news, you had to immediately declare somebody was either totally evil or totally great.

Yeah, everything binary, quickly.

You couldn't explain, Well, it's a little bit more complicated. As you said, these are humans. Yes, exactly. Do you want to have a planet in which the people who are pushing us forward-Also have great bedside manner.

Yeah.

Steve Jobs wrote, When he came back to Apple, having been sent into the wilderness in the '90s, he wrote this ad to declare what Apple was all about. Now, remember, late in his life, he recited to me and started crying. Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the round pegs in the square hole, the ones who think different. It goes on, and then it ends with, Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do. Are you going to be tolerant of the misfits, the rebels, the crazy ones? Well, yes, but you also have to remember that you can cry the bad parts of them. I mean, Shakespeare teaches that. In our current age, everything's so binary. We don't understand that. Look at Shakespeare's great heroes, even Henry V, by Arjen Kaur, speech, whatever. He kills all the prisoners, the French prisoners. He does horrible... Likewise, even the villains in Shakespeare, Othello, Iago, they all have back stories. Yes. Nobody says, Hey, Shakespeare, you shouldn't try to explain away their flaws. I think we need to get back to understanding the complexity of human nature.

Yeah. I agree.

Or just pick that I don't want anything new or I don't want anything incredibly hard done.

I will say I think that cancel culture and everything else, pendulum has swung away from that recently and maybe too far. I can look at whether it be Donald Trump or many other people in public eye. I don't mean to get political here. They are breaking all sorts of guardrails, and maybe we should be now saying, Wait a minute, wait a minute, don't go there.

Yeah. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. We are supported by Allstate. Checking Allstate first could save you hundreds on car insurance. That's smart. Not checking Which platform you watch that new show on? So frustrating. Fifteen minutes later, you've logged into seven apps, reset two passwords, and still haven't found it. Yeah, checking first is smart. So check Allstate first for a quote that could save you hundreds. You're in good hands with Allstate. Potential savings vary, subject to terms, conditions, and availability. Allstate North American Insurance Co and affiliates, Northbrook, Illinois. We are supported by Inuit TurboTax. You know that feeling when you drop your taxes off with somebody and then nothing? You're Just sitting there wondering if they've even started, if there's a problem. If you're getting everything you're owed, it's like sending your car to the shop and never getting an update. That's what I appreciate about TurboTax full service. They've completely flipped that experience. You get matched with a dedicated tax expert who actually does your taxes for you. Here's the part that changes everything. You get real-time updates on your experts' progress right in the app. You can literally see when they're working on your return, no more guessing, no more waiting by the phone.

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My father was the smartest person I've ever met, the nicest person I've ever met, the most loving person I ever met.

Fuck you, I guess, is what I want to say.

My mother, too, one of the smartest people I ever knew and the supportive. I joke with Michael Lewis, who also has a great family, is that, well, maybe that's why we're the observers and they're the one shooting the rockets to Mars. My father was an engineer.

Mechanical?

Electrical was his main thing, but he had an engineering firm that did electrical, mechanical, and structural. One of the things about it was he taught me, you can learn everything, as I said. And this, I think, should be the tagline of our share. You can learn it, which is in our house, which is still our family home in New Orleans on Napoleon Avenue, huge basement. And we had workshops, but it was also electronics. I'm old. We remember tubes, and you could test the tubes and change them in the radio and soldering irons and heat kits. We'd spend so much time doing hardware engineering and stuff. I learned a love of science and engineering from him. I think I went astray because then I studied history and literature in college. If I had had to do it over again, I would have become an engineer like my dad.

You wish you had?

Yes, because engineers can appreciate the beauty of history and poetry. But sometimes the humanists I know, they get, Oh, I love Shakespeare. I love this part of history. But then you say something about a circuit and exactly what a resistor does or why a transistor makes. Oh, no, I can never do science. Well, yeah, you can.

Maybe not at the same pace as your colleagues in class did, which is, I think, what informs people, whether they can or cannot do something is like, Oh, did I pick it up at the same rate as the people around me? Oh, it's not for me.

That's a really good point because when I went to college, I was going to do math and physics and science. It was hard. If you went to a Steven Greenblatt teaching Shakespeare, whoever you were, you'd be welcome. If you went to a physics course, and I took a couple, and I took a biochem course, and you weren't a scientist, you were made to feel you just don't get it, you'll never get it. So they were not as inviting as they have been.

Yeah.

Well, do you think maybe then you felt like, I'm not going to be as good as my dad at this, so I might as well pivot?

No, I don't quite know what it was. But I do think that nowadays, being able to fully understand the beauty of science and engineering is crucial to being part of the political and philosophical conversation. What I've tried to do in my books, like James Watson, another person who's complex and has been canceled, but he writes a double helix, and it's a fun, beautiful tale inspired Jennifer Doudna, but he smuggles in a lot of science. To try to make Einstein's special relativity, here's this patent clerk who can't get a job at a university or anything, but he's trying to learn how to synchronize clocks because people are having patent applications because the Swiss are pretty insistent that you can clock be synchronous. He's saying, Well, what if I wrote alongside the signal that was synchronizing the clocks? Would time be the same to me? So understanding through the life of a person trying to convey that science to me has a certain beauty to it. Yeah.

Okay. I wanted to ask your opinion as a professor at Tulane, whose current enrollment, I looked it up this morning, is 62% female, 38% boys.

I didn't know that, but that's interesting.

Is that something that you've observed in your time there? Are you worried about that? What are your thoughts the changing demographics of college students?

That's a good question. I'd not noticed it in particular. One of the things that I have noticed is that when people came in five, six, seven years ago, their parents would say, I just want them to learn coding. I want my boy or girl to be a great software engineer so that they'll have a job. Ai comes along, and ChatGPT can code better than 99% of most college coding students. But in some ways, connecting human feelings and emotions to the technology, that's the skill. I've started with some of my students, including students who do AI or computer science students, but also my history students, I'm pairing them. We've created a company called Boswell & Company. What it does is it believes that everybody's got a story worth telling. It uses Google Gemini Notebook, but also Anthropic, to gather all the data. My students interview people and their families, and we put it all together, and we produce a biography for them. The reason I say this is because the people who can connect the humanities to the technology will succeed. People say AI will destroy jobs. No, AI is going to open up whole new fields.

Maybe 500 people get a biography or a memoir written each year. It should be 5 million. Everybody should be able to do it. We will have whole new products. Our little company, which is doing it for people we know who ask us, commission us to do it, that will just show how this AI combined with the humanities will find new products and new jobs for people.

Yeah, it's almost a tall order because that's, I guess, what everyone already recognizes about him. What makes jobs so unique was that he seemingly has had the emotionality of the interaction being a priority as much as how good the product itself function. It seemed like he was very smart at recognizing you have to emotionally connect to this device.

And one reason was just who he was, a great genius. But when he went to college to read before dropping out, he didn't sit there studying computer software engineering. He studied calligraphy, dance, music, art. He really got a grounding in the humanities and a sense, just a two-word sense that's so important. Beauty matters. Just what you said. You said esthetics matters, but he made it simple. Yeah, same thing. Beauty matters. We're talking about Bill. I mean, Bill made some great products, but they both made a MP3 music player approximately the same time. Microsoft made the Zoom, which was really good in many ways, but Steve made the iPod, which was an object of desire. Yes.

It was a declaration of your identity.

Even those ads and the earbud and everything. So understanding the emotional connection, the humanities connection, is what made the iPod beat out the Zoom.

Okay, so you're not sitting at Tulane going, Where are the boys and what's happening? And we got a problem on our hands.

Haven't thought about that now. I'm going to have to go back. Yeah, I generally don't desire more boys to be around either. We probably have a problem in our society, which is the K through 12 education and everything else, it used to be a sense that the world was going to be a better place for each new generation. For example, if you're born when I was in the 1950s, you had an 80% chance of having a better life than your parents. If you're born when my students were born, say, hate to say it, but like the year 2000.

Or even in the book, you say the '80s.

In the book, I say in the '80s, right? But also in the year 2000, you have less than a 50% chance of doing better than your parents. This explains a whole alienation of a new generation, but it also explains, I think, the resentments in our politics and other things.

The greatest sentence ever written is your new book, and It is conveniently coming out a month or two before we enter our 250th year anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Happy birthday. That would be a very obvious reason to write this book, but I don't I think that's the primary goal of the book.

It was definitely a goal and a thought, which is you're about to have a birthday party, and I don't know that your family. My family is pretty well, but if I have a big extended birthday party, then people hardly can speak to on some of my cousins and Sure. But you put it aside on your birthday and you say, We're family. We're Common Ground. Here's what we share. We have had this happening in our society, maybe for the past 8-10 years, where it just gets more and more polarized so that anything that happens, like should wear a mask in COVID. Anything becomes so political and partisan that we polarize ourselves on it. Well, we're about to have a birthday party. Wouldn't it be nice if we could say, Well, here's what we all agree on. Here's what the common ground is. I wanted to do something that says, What is our mission statement as a nation? Let's read it, understand it, and for a year at least, get along a little bit better to say, Well, yeah, we do hold these truths to be self-evident. Yeah.

Yeah. So there's a lot. We're going to go through each one. It's so cleverly broken down. But I will say what strikes me immediately is I think we do suffer from not knowing history. Ask yourself, well, how did it come about? How did we learn to live in a group of 330 million people as one unit. There's some stuff that predates our country. There's Hobbes and Locke. There's people that propose this notion of a social contract. And you're going to leave Give the wild where you have unlimited rights. You see something you don't like, kill it. Who cares? Take what you want. We're going to give up some liberty because we believe the net benefit is going to be much larger if we give up some of our liberty so that we can coexist peacefully. So maybe just even that notion is maybe a bit more foreign to people than I think would be helpful.

Yeah, you've read the book, which is great. I love that because that is how we begin, because we're doing a parsing of the sentence, We hold these truths to be self-evident. And you start with the word we. What does that mean? Well, it's not we, the 62 people gathered in Philadelphia. It's the social contract that we've decided to have. Our founders, particularly Jefferson, Franklin, and to some extent, John Adams, they were reading the people of that time. You mentioned John Locke, David Hume, the people who are saying, How did we come out of a state of nature in the prehistoric times where we're all fighting each other? How did we agree on how to have a government? And that's what the social contract is. Rousseau writes a book, Hobbes writes the book on it, Locke writes it. And these founders who are doing this Declaration of Independence, they base it on that enlightenment period, meaning these philosophers like John Locke who said, How is it we come together as a society?

Yeah. I think a lot of people, at least, have this notion that I will live in this society and I will give up nothing to do so. That it needs to be exactly how I think it should be, and anything short of that is unacceptable. It's like the original buy-in is not floating around. It's like, Oh, no, I'll be giving things up to reap the rewards of all the sky.

Yeah, it's like when I'm driving here and there's a red light. Okay, I agree. I generally stop it. It's inconvenient to you. That's part of the social contract. If you're going to have a society, a contract isn't just, I get everything. It's, Here's the deal we all hold hands and make. If you look at the Declaration of Independence and you look at the sentence that I call the greatest sentence, it's, We hold these truths, and that's a contract that we've made. If we all realize that maybe just that understanding it's a social contract, and then we have common ground, that helps reduce the temperature a little bit of some of our partisan, poisonous debates at the moment. Yes.

As a historian, lay out a little bit of the context in which they're going to write this document, because I think people might think of it as being more monolithic than it was. It was anything but a unified group that had inhabited the colonies.

There's even a total consensus in January of 1776 that we're going to break away from the Crown. But at a certain point ingrained in us is this notion of individual liberty. That's what Locke brings us with the social contract is we're all in a state of nature as autonomous individuals, and then we make, let's hold hands and create a society. It's based on individual rights rather than the rights of the king or the divine rights of kings or the conqueror. That notion of individual rights is so important.

First of all, I don't know that everyone would just know Who wrote it?

The wonderful thing, especially those of us who've been editors in our time, is that this greatest sentence, We hold this truth to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, is that one person? They went through four draughts and then a final version. Of course, Jefferson is the first author. He gets to write the first draft. Would you have a committee? The continental Congress says, Okay, we're about to declare independence. A decent respect for the opinions of mankind means we got to say why. And so they appoint a committee. It may be the last time Congress appointed a good committee, but it has Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams on it.

All making notes, scratching things out.

And so, in fact, can I grab the book?

Yes, please.

Right here, we do it as the opening thing. This is the first draft. I don't know where your cameras are. Oh, yeah.

It's a mess.

There is a total mess, but here it is. We hold these truths. Then you see Jefferson, he writes To be sacred. Benjamin Franklin was a printer So he had a dark black pen that did backslashes the way a printer, and he writes in self-evident. And so part of the book is just explaining that sometimes innovation is a team sport. Sometimes creativity It is a collective endeavor, and that's what this sentence is about.

In the forces at play, you already have Burbling. You have the south's entire economy dependent on cotton production and slavery.

Right. And you have Jefferson as a lead author who was slaving 400 people at the time.

The wealthiest part of the country is the south that's dependent on slavery. You have already people in the north calling for an end of slavery in their colony. That's already a very contentious issue. The way we word this is all incredibly important. Compromises are happening in all these sentences.

As Franklin said, compromises may not make great heroes, but they do make great democracies. You got to compromise. One of the problems, though, because it's not all great, sometimes you make a compromise that becomes an original stain on the nation. They have to do that in even the Declaration. They're writing, All men are created equal. Now, I try to explain it. They call it a self-evident truth because we all come from the state of nature. But how can they write that when one of them, Jefferson, is a major slave holder?

He's had children with one of his very underage.

The person who is in Philadelphia in that room when he has his mahogany desk and he has Franklin and Adams there is Thomas Hemmings, the brother of his enslaved mistress, also a slave. They wrestle with this. The original draft in Virginia was that all men are endowed with certain inalienable rights when they enter into a society, and that was supposed to exclude the slaves. Jefferson knew that just doesn't wash. And so you have the great contradiction. If he just says all men are created equal, and yet even at his death, he doesn't free a slave. Or his own children. Well, he doesn't free Sally Hemmings, but part of the agreement with his mistress, Sally Hemmings, who was enslaved, was he would have freed their children, and he does. So it's all, once again, human and complex. But four score and seven years later, meaning when Lincoln is at the battleground of Gettysburg, when they're consecrating the carry there. He harked back and he says, A nation founded on the proposition that all men are created equal. So you see the power of the sentence pushing us to progress.

Yeah. I just want to put one more bullet point on which is important. Prior to this, governments, as everyone knew, were pretty much ordained by either God or a royalty that had been anointed by God. So they were never by the people. So we is very, very powerful.

That same Lord begins the greatest sentence ever written, and it begins our Constitution, we the people. So you got to understand that this isn't the divine right of Kings or the power of conquerors. It's this notion of a society that says, We will create common ground. That's why I wrote this, because I want us to understand the struggle to create the Common Ground.

In the self-evident truths, you explain how Hume, David Hume, who Franklin was friends with and admired, said there's two kinds of truths. There's synthetic, and those are based on facts. The example you give is like, Philadelphia is bigger than Boston. Well, we're going to have to go out and do some census work to find out the answer to that. Versus analytic truth, which is all bachelors are unmarried. We don't need to go survey bachelors to find out if they're unmarried. The premise of the statement is in itself-Self-evident. Self-evident. So that's the distinction. And then all men, obviously, we're not including women. We're not including Native Americans. You point out in the book, at that moment, a fifth of all people in the colonies were slaves.

Right. And so to start with the self-evident. Jefferson had written, We Hold These Shoes to be Sacred. And Franklin has been staying with David Hume in Scotland, the greatest philosopher of the time, as he said, somebody who read about contract theory and had come up with this notion of self-evident truce, all bachelors are unmarried, versus truce you had to go around and look. When you say are created it equal. Franklin says that has to be a self-evident thing because if you actually go around and look, you'll say, wait a minute, I just talked to Magic Johnson. Walt is not equal to him. Somebody is not equal to Einstein. But what is self-evident is that We all had autonomy in the state of nature, and we came together as a society. We all had this notion of coming together as a country, so politically, we're created equal. But as you point out, they leave out a lot of people. The arc of American history is delivering on the aspirations of that sentence. And even Benjamin Franklin, to me, years ago, I read a book about Benjamin Franklin. He's still a hero. He had two slaves when he was a young printer in He just worked in his print shop, and then he realizes that's bad.

They wander off. He doesn't try to keep them. But he just knows it's something he's done wrong. In his whole life, he keeps a ledger of the errata he had made and how he rectified it. He ran away when he was apprenticed, he breaks the indenture to his brother and runs away. He rectifies it years later by educating his brother's son. Anyway, he realizes the great sin was having once owned a couple of slaves. And so he becomes President of the Society for the Abolition of Slavery. He helps create schools for Blacks and freed Slaves in America. And his own personal arc, to me, is analogous to the arc of American history. That eventually we have to say, is all men will know. That's an expansive term. It's all humanity. That's what all men should mean. And likewise, if you're going to say created equal, you got to make sure black or white or female, whatever it may be, we all have equal rights.

I was shocked to read this in the book that Jefferson called slavery, moral depravity, and hideous blot. Yet is one of, in my opinion, as I read about all the forefathers, the most repugnant behavior in regards to his slavery. I mean, traveling Europe with a 14-year-old that you impregnate, is to me about as fucking low as a kid. It's interesting to We've got to acknowledge that he had this contradiction that was very much alive.

It goes back to what we were saying at the very beginning. Even the heroes have great flaws, even the villains have back stories. We shouldn't just say somebody's all or nothing. Wrestling with the complexity of Jefferson is so important. We went through a period where either every monument had to be taken down. Yes, but we probably should understand the contradictions and the dark sides of some of these people. I mean, I tend to write about Franklin because he was very self-reflective.

Who you want him to be. He follows the great arc of humanity.

But you can't totally dismiss Jefferson. You should have Annette Gordon-Reed. I don't know if she's been on this show. No. She wrote The Hemmings of Monticello. She's at Harvard, African-American historian. But she has this wonderfully complex view of Jefferson.

I need that. I've been saying I need to read something Jefferson.

Well, Meachum has a somewhat nuanced thing, and obviously, in that, Gordon Reid's book is extraordinarily good. In this book, I'm trying to say, Man, this is outrageous. Taking his slave mistress, even as he's written this declaration, I try to say, yes, but look at these people who together created this sentence for all of their flaws. They gave us our mission. Now, it's 250 years, our birthday of that mission, because we We can all agree on that sentence. Let's reflect on it.

Another major tension of the time, which is not foreign to us in 2025, is there was quite a bit of tension over how religious this text would be. That's the endowed by their creator, the next line. Right.

And begins with Franklin crossing out sacred and putting in self-evident, and we hold these shoes. And then the sentence goes on, and you'll have it in the book there. You can look at the edits, and it says, They're endowed with certain inalienable rights. And then you have what I think is John Adams' handwriting because he's the most conventionally religious, and he puts endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. So even in the editing of one half of this greatest sentence ever written, you see them balancing the role of rationality and reason with the dictates of religion and basically the divine providence that we had as a nation. They're creating a balance. We've lost that today. Nowadays, you're using the Ten Commandments to divide us. I was at CNN when I was first studying this sentence because I was doing it for my Ben Franklin book. And I go in one morning and somebody says, Oh, we have a great crossfire show. Judge Roy Mohr has put the Ten Commandments in his courthouse in Alabama. A federal judge says, Take it down, and they're going to have to send in the marshals. Everybody says, great.

Who are we going to get in favor of the Ten Commandments? Who are we going to get against? And I'm thinking, oh, good. We have a good crossfire tonight. And then when I went back, I was saying, the founders are using religion and rationality to balance us. And here we were in the press, and there they were, the politicians, using the Ten Commandments to divide us. So that's another lesson we can learn from the founders is this balance of the role of religion, the role of rationality, and the role of tolerance.

I'm embarrassed to say I had never even heard the term deus until I was reading this chapter. Many of them were deus.

What are deus? Deus were very big in both Europe and the United States in the 1700s. Voltaire is, to some extent, Jefferson and Franklin are. And what deus is, which was basically the creed of most of the people who wrote the Declaration, in the north, at least, is you believe in God, you believe in God is a great creator, but he set the universe in motion, their laws.

And he stepped out.

It stepped out. Einstein believes in that, too, which sets a beautiful laws in a wondrous Cosmos for us to live in, but he doesn't go around intervening.

Picking World Series outcomes.

Yeah, that the saints who were here yesterday to play the ram, I could pray as hard as I want that the saints were going to beat the ram, but there's no God who says, All right, I owe Walter one. Let's have the saints beat the ram. He doesn't intervene. That's the deist creed.

That seems to have died out entirely.

I think a lot of people People, Francis Collins, a great scientist who believes in God as a Christian. There are many people, I think, who believe in a benevolent creator, endowed by the creator, as our sentence writers put it, believe that the world and the universe has a miraculous set of laws, but there aren't miracles in which suddenly the laws of the universe are broken because you prayed hard enough. Yeah.

It was a creator, not a It's not managing the apartment.

Exactly. It was also called providence. In other words, the good Lord sets up a creation, and we owe it to divine providence to understand the beauty of that creation. Ation, but it's not individual providence where the good Lord is intervening every day and deciding, I'm going to help you out today.

And they were even specifically saying, I'm not in that Jesus was the son of that thing.

I think they're all very rational. When I say, Oh, let's pick Jefferson and Franklin because those are the two who talk about it. It's in the book a bit. Franklin is the best, really, because he's a very rational person. And he believes in the creator, and he believes that worshiping is good for a society. But Esra Stiles, who was President of Yale, right when Franklin is dying, says, Okay, but do you accept the divinity of Jesus Christ? And Franklin writes back and he says, I've I've looked at that my whole life, and I've never decided to proselytize, to preach on it, because I'm just not sure, and it's not something I know. He said, And I've quit worrying about it because I'm going to learn soon enough the real answer. He was dying soon. So If you look even at John Adams, he's that way, which is they believe in the creator, but the notion of the divinity of Christ is something that some take on faith, but others feel they're not sure about it. Jefferson in particular, takes the Bible and he creates what's called the Jefferson Bible, where he keeps in all of the great wise things of Jesus, all of the principles and the moral principles of Jesus.

But he actually takes a razor and cuts out the miracle parts because Jefferson is such a deist and such a rationalist. He thinks that the Bible would be better if we just listen to the moral preaching, but didn't worry about how do you make loaves and fishes.

He sent that book to his nephew or something?

The Jefferson Bible, you can see it in Monte Cello. It actually exists and it has the razor cutouts. It's, once again, something I don't proselytize on. I think everybody should have their own set of beliefs. But I think the key there is to be tolerant. This is what Franklin was saying, different people are going to understand the divinity of Jesus differently. I think they all felt that we should have a respect for a great creator, a divine power that created us, but otherwise we should be tolerant.

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, If You Dare. Yeah, so it's interesting. You got these three dudes that are really nitpicking over all the wording. Even in this group of three, you've got a really wide range of how religious, like Adams is definitely more. He's definitely more of an abolitionist than is Jefferson. You're sitting down with what would seem to be unbridgeable differences.

They would seem more unbridgeable than our differences today. Yeah, that's my point. Our difference today is, okay, how much health care should be considered into something that's a Medicaid, Medicare.

We want immigrants, but how many?

We're arguing over what should be in the comments, how much health care should be in the commons, how much police protection, whatever it may be. Those are pretty simple enough arguments arguments compared to the ones our founders had to deal with. And they successfully craft the sentence and then craft a declaration and then craft what may be the most astonishingly successful constitution imaginable. And as Franklin says at the end, when they finish that sentence, they're voting on the declaration, and then he does it with the Constitution as well. He said, I never thought this was perfect, but it's as good as humans can do. And so with all of his flaws, let's be humble and hold hands and say, We have endowed this.

That's another thing I think we've lost the appetite for a little bit is some places are just a good place to start. We're not there, but we need to start somewhere so the improvements can come.

Also, I feel like the Benjamin Franklin thing that you said where he was very much writing his wrongs over time. Nowadays, I feel like what's so upsetting is we would look, not we, but a lot of people would look at it and be like, Oh, he was wishy-washy. Or, Oh, he switched. He flip-flopped.

It's so crazy.

He flip-flopped on.

But that's an unforgivable sin to flip-flop.

Exactly. Again, on both sides, we do this on the political spectrum. We're like, Oh, now they changed their mind. You can't trust them. It's like, That's called growth. Exactly. We should be able to let people change their mind.

When I learn more, I change my mind. What do you do? And that's an old line that he used. But we're stuck right now. We don't tolerate compromises or people who grow. That's what this book is about, too, is we started a nation with a certain aspiration, but we had to grow and we had to get there. That's the core of it. Yeah.

Okay. Then we get into what I think is the most moving part of the book and the thing that I appreciate reading most, and that is just about Common Ground in the Pursuit of the American Dream. It's going to define these things. People are very familiar with the term Common Ground, but it had a literal beginning, Common Ground. Right.

Common Ground, back in feudal times, was the landowners and the great duks and the earls and the... They had their land. But there was a certain parts of the land that were put in communs. They were called the communs. Everybody could graze their herds or grow things there. It was for what we then called commoners. That's how we get the name commoners. They were the ones who didn't own land, but they could graze on the common. It comes even from John Locke. John Locke is a strong believer of private property. He believes that if you mix your labor with things you find in nature, you have a right to make that your private property. He is the philosopher who gives us the notion of free markets and private property. He has a caveat that says, as long as there is enough and is good left in the commons. So even in Boston, Philadelphia, and in Cambridge, in colonial times, there was Boston Common, Cambridge Common. We think, okay, Boston Common is beautiful, and it has a place where the swans. No, but that was a commons where people could do it. So for me, that's the metaphor that is at the core of this sentence.

What is this sentence talking about? It's saying a common ground. And so what they did back then was they put not just land in the common for people to graze on, but they said, We're going to put certain things in the common. Ben Franklin did. He said, Okay, we're going to put a library service in the common. This is Ben Franklin and his little group in Philadelphia.

You need to do two seconds on what a paradigm breaker that was having libraries. I don't think people understand the importance of just having access to books, how much that opened up your opportunity.

It is the great symbolic nature of the Commons and American Dream that everybody has access to information. Franklin said when he created the Free Library of Philadelphia, which is the first library where everybody could come and use it. He said, We're going to create a society where anybody, whatever their birth, whatever their background, will be able to learn as much as the wealthiest people. And that allows everybody the opportunity. That's what America is about, having the opportunity.

Yeah, because books were elite. You had to be rich to own books.

And Franklin goes around as a young tradesman in Philadelphia, and he goes to all the wealthy people, and he says, Put Which are books in this library? Which ones can we borrow for it so we can create a community? So that was a symbolic comment. Likewise, he says, Let's do a fire corps, volunteer fire department. Even when he died, he still had his bucket by his bed because you had to keep your bucket if you're a volunteer fireman by your bed. So in his deathbed, he still has it. But when he's 18 years old, his friends are creating a volunteer fire, and they say, Well, should it be for people who pay for it, or should it be in the They said, Wait, it's not a good idea if we let some houses burn and some doesn't help the city. So we put that in the commons. We put the Nightwatchmen Corps and Police in the commons. He even does a hospital that's a public-private partnership done by people who donate, but there's a matching from the legislature, and there's a lottery to pay for it because he wants to put some health care in the commons.

That's still what we're trying to do is argue how much health care should be in the commons? Should there be free charity hospitals? Should there be Medicare or Medicaid? If we realize that our debates are simply about how much gets put in the commons, then we can disagree, but at least we know it's not some existential fight. It's just a question of balance.

I needed to read this part and be reminded of this part because what I hear mostly in our public discourse is just this hatred for billionaires. It's a very common hatred. We're seeing some cities move to maybe more socialist measures. I think I'm living in the defense of the free market a lot in my head. I am someone who thinks to Locke's point, if I make a pottery out of the clay I found in the ground, it's not your bowl. I do believe that.

Absolutely. You've got Locke exactly right.

The principle I was choosing not to look at is the American dream, the core of it is, I can transcend my class. I mean, that's really when we get into, why did we form this country? We were rebelling in many ways against a very hierarchical class structure that was hereditary. I'm born into nobility, I'm born into aristocracy. We would all agree that's not how it should be. The fundamental reason we didn't want anything to do with them is we wanted a merit-based system that would allow you to transcend. When I'm reminded of that, I do think, yes, the common goods are what ensure that, and they're hugely important. Because if we are not a place that you can transcend your social class, then we are in a nobility. We might as well be in a monarchy. We have seen, and I acknowledge, this increased elitism is now functioning virtually the same as inherited class. When we look at the real statistics. I just think this is a very important part of the book, and I was really, really grateful to be reminded what its purpose is.

No matter how much you believe in private property or anything else, there's a moral purpose of saying there'll be Certain things that every kid has the opportunity to have. Every kid has access to every person. That could be K through 12 education. We put that generally in the commons.

It's under attack currently.

Police protection, we put in the commons. To some extent, health care. Why do we do it? Not just because we're being sweet and generous, but because we want to be a land of opportunity, which means whatever class you're born into, we're not like the old aristocracy we were fighting against when we created this country, in which if you were born into the aristocracy with land, you'd always stay there. If you were born a commoner, it was hard to rise. We want to be a land of opportunity, and it got called the American dream. That's the goal and the fundamental moral purpose of saying, what do we put in the commons and what do we not? Well, we can debate that, but without having some things in the commons. It's not socialist to say, hey, police protection and defense should be in the commons. It should protect everybody. And likewise, debating how much health care should be in the commons, how much higher education. Should community colleges, or for that matter, state colleges and universities be free? Is that something we want to put in the commons? Well, we can debate that. No, maybe we shouldn't.

And we can incrementally try things.

And we can balance things. And we can say- And just. Yes, but we're going into a new... When we went from the agricultural age to the industrial age 100 years ago, we put into the commons a lot more. Like high school education should be in the commons. Everybody should get it for free.

That started with the industrial revolution.

Yeah. When we were trying to go into an industrial age, we realized, well, now we're going into a new age of AI and other things. Well, perhaps more is required to put in the commons, but that doesn't make you a socialist to say we should put in order to have a land of opportunity, have more access to education. You don't have to make it all or nothing. We could take some of these hugely poisonous fights we're having and say, well, it's just a question of calibrating how much health care should be in the commons, how much public education should be in the commons. Let's not make these existential fights. Let's look at it through the lens of what makes us a land of opportunity, what makes sure that we all have to share some common ground, because the moral purpose of the commons is not just to make things a land of opportunity, but it was also to give everybody a stake in society. A buy. Yeah, a buy. Look, you may not have been born wealthier, but you all have a stake in keeping this society. And nowadays, some of the resentment comes Because people in closings, they make special VIP entrances.

Well, hold on on that. I have a whole section on the sky boxification. I think this is fascinating. But I just want to say, yes, if we don't have that principle that anyone here can become anything they want, we don't really have a unique take on anything. I think that is the quintessential ingredient. And as it erodes, it's good to remember, no, that's actually the thing we should all feel pride on.

That's why for the past 50 years, we've been the engine of innovation for this world since World War II. And yes, that notion of an American dream where everybody can rise, that was been Franklin's core principle when he's helping write this sentence. If you lose that, you lose something moral, which is every kid, every person deserves an opportunity to do the best again. But you also, from a practical sense, you erode the buy-in people have for our system. They become resentful and they end up voting the extremes.

These populist movements come up.

Populace movements come up or left wing movements. If you erode the sense that we all have a stake in society- Then communism does start looking attractive.

Correct.

Or Socialism, or fascism, or authoritarianism. We're seeing that not just the United States, even in Japan, but all of Europe. Even if you don't believe in the moral reasons for having a commons, which is that everybody should get an education and be able to do well, you say, Okay, but just for practical purposes, if we don't want to undermine democracy, we ought to make sure everybody buys into it.

Absolutely. Okay, so now let's talk about the skyboxification. Yeah, this is a bummer to read, and it's so true and so I am a beneficiary.

I'm going to read this afternoon when I go to LAX. First, let's give Michael Sandell, the greatest public philosopher of our time, credit. He came up with the notion of skyboxification. It's easy enough to understand. When I was young and went to Fenway Park, including with Michael Sandell, we'd all go in the same entrance, we'd eat the same soggy hot dogs, we'd sit in the stands together. Now, even when you go and when I go, we probably get to the VIP entrance entrance, maybe, or you do at least, and maybe we're invited to the sky boxes, and we don't all sit in the same stand. That's a metaphor for so many things in our society.

I got to add, it's a dramatic difference to the degree that now that I've been invited. I mean, I grew up looking at the outside of the red rope, but now on the inside of it, I can tell you it's so dramatically different that there are things that I wouldn't even do otherwise now. It's so spoiling, and the gap is so big in the experience. People are right to be pissed.

I guess right to be pissed is another way of saying resentment, which is the way I put it. But sometimes it happens to me. You go to the airport and you're in the priority lane or the clear lane, and people waiting in line are giving you that look. There's a slight resentment. These build up resentments. Probably when I go this afternoon to LA, I'm not going to not say, Well, let me give up the TSA pre-line or whatever it's called. But it happens in so many different ways. It used to be. My father and grandfather growing up, exactly where I did in New Orleans, all went to the public high school right in the neighborhood. Now, even K through 12 education, there's a velvet rope that certain people get.

Yeah, private is huge.

Health care, you name it. It goes back like many things, and I mention it in the book. This book is not a heavy philosophy book, but there's a paragraph that mentions it from John Locke, which is in that period, they had what was called the Enclosure Laws. What they did was they had the Commons. Everybody got to graze their sheep on the Commons, but they decided that certain people could have the right to enclosed part of the Commons and make it private. That has a really good impact in many ways. You had a lot more productivity if it's private. The yields go up. You have a huge agricultural revolution. However, if you enclosed off, if you fence off, if you velvet rope off too many things, it has a bad impact. Whether it's our understanding of our founder's personalities or of Elon's personality or of these things, we have to realize it's not all or nothing. There's a certain balance that, yes, we want people to be able to enclose things. We want maybe even to have velvet ropes. But if you do it too much, you get a resentful society and a society in which people cannot rise to their own talents.

Maybe interesting or not, but Jefferson weirdly a meritocratic elite.

He doesn't come off perfectly in this book. Both Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson start what become universities, University of Virginia and the Academy for the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania that becomes Penn, University of Pennsylvania. They have different mission statements. What Jefferson says is, The point is we are going to take the best 40, 50 kids, and we are going to groom a new meritocratic elite, and those people are going to become the leaders of society. Franklin, on the other hand, says, No, the university's purpose is to have everybody, whatever their innate talents be, to have a chance to do the best they can with whatever assets they have, and we want everybody to move up. Well, creating a meritocratic elite, I don't blame Jefferson for all of this, but I blame my generation, which is at a certain At a certain point, maybe 50 years ago, we created a meritocracy of credentialed people who went to the right schools.

And whose children, most importantly. In practice, it became hereditary.

How is it meritratic? We call it meritocratic because that was what James Cohn and Bryant did when they invent the SAT, and they say that's merit. People say, Well, I believe in merit. What do you mean merit? Exactly. Is the ability to ace an SAT score pretty useful? But is that true merit? Frankly, in answers by saying, No, true merit is the ability to better serve your community and your country. That's what we call true merit. And so he was fighting Jefferson on that. So we created, and I mean by we, a baby boom generation after World War II, a credentialed elite who went to the best colleges and got their kids in the best colleges.

Sat, tutors.

And they became the ones who thought that they could understand foreign policy be better. And once again, Michael Sandell has a good book, you got to get him on the show, called The Tyranny of the Maritocracy, because the maritocracy got a lot wrong after a while, including forever wars and things they got us into. But anyway, there is That notion that we created a new elite, and that wasn't the best thing to happen. And it really starts happening in the '50s, '60s, '70s. And that elite, it happened in the Clinton years. Whatever you may think of the Clinton years, it was meritocratic. People, including Hillary Clinton, would say things like, Well, you should just go to college, and that way you won't be left behind in society. What made the 65% of the people who don't finish college look down on. And that elite view of the credentialed should run our society was a bad thing.

Yes. I think that's a big issue we've not yet figured out how to tackle. In general, I see that as an enormous problem the left has that they are seemingly unwilling to confront.

Well, it's not necessarily the left. It's the neoliberal liberalism of the '70s, '80s, and '90s, which is you It'll be fine if you just go to college, and if you don't, it's your fault.

Yes. Then some assumption that you have the same odds of attending college as everyone else.

Frankly, that if you went to an Ivy League college, somehow you had more merit. We have to try to understand, and this is what this book is about, too, there has been a backlash of populism on the left and the right and globally. Certain people in the old neoliberal consensus who looked down on the populist backlash. I'm saying, No, no, no. There's really a lot of reasons people, to use your technical term, are pissed. The reason they're pissed is we started losing the Common Ground. We started losing the American dream. We started losing the notion that we should be a land of opportunity. That's why if we're going to heal this great divide, I just hope for a 250th, you don't have to read my book, just read the sentence. We hold this and everybody should understand this sentence and say, Okay, I get it. Now, let's live by it.

Yeah, talk about going forward. That's the last thing I wanted to talk about. Franklin said, Yes, we must indeed all hang together, or most assuredly, we shall all hang separately. How can we all hang together?

I think Franklin is the great guidepost because he is a entrepreneur. He believes, like you do in many, and yes, you can succeed with private property. You can make things. He gets to Philadelphia because he's running away from being an indentured to his brother. He's got three coins in his pocket. It's a most wonderful scene. He tips the boatman, buys the three puffy rolls, gives one away. He says, When you're really poor, you're always more generous because you want people not to think you're poor. So he's with the streetcoins being generous. And he comes into Philadelphia and It becomes a land of opportunity for him, Market Street. And he becomes from that penniless, not penniless, three pennies kid to, in some ways, one of the wealthiest people in America. Hard to count land owning and slave ownership and all that. But for somebody who creates printing shops and franchises them up and down the Coast and it becomes a publisher, he becomes enormously successful. And so that's the point of Franklin. But then he creates a group in his community community and says, Okay, how are we going to serve the common ground? And that's when he forms with his Leather Apriclub, he calls it, because it's people who go to their shops each morning, put on their leather apron.

It's not the elite. It's Shopkeepers. He said, We the middling people, shopkeepers, artisans, those of us who go to work every day, we not only have the opportunity to succeed, we have to figure out what should we put in common so we become a land of opportunity. I say, if we're going forward, try to be like Franklin, and I talk about it at the end of the book, which is he starts a street sweeping corps, a police corps, a volunteer fire department, a hospital, and of course, the library, an insurance fund for widows and orphans where everybody chips in almost like you'd have social security today. He said, That's good for everybody if we put these in the commons. But he also has a revolving loan fund for entrepreneurs who want to start businesses. That's still today. In Philadelphia and Boston, those revolving loan funds that he started are still helping people in East Philadelphia start little businesses. He is a believer in capitalism, believer in enterprise, but also in making sure everybody has an opportunity. Then he does many other things, not just these loan funds. But during his lifetime, he donates to the building fund of each and every church built in Philadelphia.

And then at one point, they're building a new hall, which is still next to the Independence Hall, still called the New Hall. He writes a fundraising document and says, even if the Muftai of Constantinople were to send somebody here to preach Muhammadism to us, we should offer a pulpit and we should listen for we might learn something. And then on his deathbed, he's the largest individual contributor to the congregation Mikva Israel, the first synagogue built in Philadelphia. So when he dies, instead of his minister accompanying his casket to the grave, all 35 ministers, preachers, and priests link arms with the rabbi of the Jews in Philadelphia and march with them to the grave.

Do you say 22,000? Is that the number in the book?

That's the number of people who were at the funeral procession. And then it's led by the clergy of all.

Yeah, they're witnessing this.

And that's the type of nation they were trying to create 250 years ago. That's what they were fighting for 250 years ago. And that's what we're still fighting for today. And the sentence can still guide us.

So many people have hard-ons for the founding fathers, these young dudes who I don't know if they've read any of the stuff. But I want them to know this part. If you want to idolize these guys, please idolize the right stuff about these guys. That's incredible.

And you have to realize When people read my biographies, they might say, I'm just like Elon. When people do something that sucks, say, Wait a minute. Have you ever sent a rocket into orbit? You're not.

You're 5,000 satellites.

My books are not how-to manuals. They are real people. So learn from the good, learn from the bad, learn the cautionary parts. But in this case, the greatest sentence ever written, there were deep flaws when they said, All men are created equal, but they did set us on the right mission. Yeah, absolutely.

You're right. The greatest sentence ever written, I very much encourage you.

It's very short.

I was going to say, if you have a short attention, this is the Isaacson book for you to take on. Walter, it's so great to have you in person. Thank you. Thank you. Such a different I really, really enjoy getting to sit down with you face to face. I love this.

I'm glad you did this.

This is really important. I needed to hear several parts.

I think we all should, you say, how can we do going forward? The two of you have a great platform to do it, but everybody listening has a great platform. Every day, wake up and say, at least for our 250th birthday, I'm going to try to think, What can I do that helps bring us together and unite us versus being part of the things that polarizes us.

We're on the same mission. What a delight. I can't wait to I'll have you back when you write your next book.

Can't wait to be back.

All right. We hope you enjoyed this episode. Unfortunately, they made some mistakes. Oh, should we tell everyone our incredible discovery last night, flying back from Nashville? Yeah. As we were checking into our flight. Yeah. That if Delta grows up and starts a company, it's like Delta Company. But then she abbreviates it to Delta Co. Of course. Delta Co is DelTaco. Yeah. I can't wait for her to start it. I wonder if Deltaco will come after her for infringement, and she'll go, I've had this name. This is my name.

This has been my name my whole life. I counter Sue. They can't come after her because it's Delta Co. It's just pronounced Ounce Del Tango. Del Tango. Yeah. I mean, this is great. She has to start one now. She has no other option.

I actually should look into incorporating her immediately.

You really should.

Sometimes you just get a little blessing lands in your lap, and that's what it felt like last night. I agree.

Do you want to talk about the fact that I'm platinum?

That was embarrassing. That was pretty embarrassing.

So, yes, we flew back last night because we had a really fun interview that we did in Nashville. And then we came back home, you, me, and the kids. Kristin had come home earlier. Yeah. And we're in line, ready to check our bags. Check our bags. And somehow we got on this subject. I think Lincoln asked, Are you platinum? She said, What are you? Or something like, What rank are you?

Yeah, which why on earth would she have brought that up? I don't even know if she knows about the frequent flyer-She knows now somehow. Runs on the ladder. Well, now she does.

Yeah. I think they just overheard something. They asked me, and I said, Well, I'm platinum. But it was a sim because I had written down already that I wanted to talk to you about this because when I was flying out on my way to Nashville, there was a man in front of me, a young man, young, fit man. You left out the fit part. I did. But I'm adding- Even the young. I did.

How young? Eighteen?

No, no, no. Like my age.

Jesus. Okay, so middle-aged? How dare you?

No, because he was young to have when the The lady checked him in and say, Thank you for being a Diamond member, whatever.

Yeah, what are they even saying?

I forget. Diamond Club? Yeah. I overheard it, and I was like, Diamond? Whoa. But I'm platinum. I'm like, That's the highest. Maybe diamond's right below it. But I don't remember them ever saying diamond to me. A lot was going on there in my head. Then I checked in, Thank you for being a platinum flyer member, whatever. Then I went and had to look it up.

Dimonds above platinum. Do you remember how many miles you have to fly to earn that status?

Over 50. 50 million? Yeah. Rob, do you want to look? Yeah.

Rob, do you know how to look?

Lifetime is 3 million actual miles.

Lifetime, okay.

You need to spend $28,000 in medallion qualification dollars each year. Mqd.

I mean, what are we talking about?

Mqd. Mqd. Not just miles flown. It's like 11 per dollar.

Okay. I know nothing. Well, I looked it up and I was like, You know what? This guy... And then it got me so curious. I was like, Who's this guy? He flies so much and he's so young and he's so fit. It's a bit. But also, the youth was interesting because it's like, Oh, he flies a lot. It's not like he's like 80, then Diamond might make sense. It's like a accumulation.

This guy was born in an airplane.

Yeah. So So this was very curious.

Do you know I have a friend who, and maybe I've already told you this story, but he had, it must have been diamond status or something, right? Elusive. And when you have that one, you get the free upgrade every time. You can buy a coach ticket if you're diamond, you will get upgraded to first class almost all the time. He had this crazy status, and he liked to travel, and he wasn't rich.

Yeah.

And his weird thing was, and I remember one time, it was like the The end of the year was approaching, and he needed another 15,000 miles. He went online and he just started searching for the longest trip possible for the cheapest. I want to say on December 30th, he flew to Malaysia and then just fucking flew back. No.

That's where it's getting out of his hands.

So then he could keep his diamond status.

Oh, but see, I get it. I get you want it. It's very elusional.

You don't lose it. It's the loss bias or whatever they call it.

Yeah, Exactly. You have a little bit of glitter, I see.

You know, I put on that birthday hat at Brick Top, and I still have glitter in all these places. That's for that? That's for that? Yeah, that thing got everywhere, I see. Yeah, that thing got everywhere, I see. I have washed my face, rest assured. I don't know if it's embedded or maybe I have consumed some, and they're now getting expressed out of the pores.

I think that's fun. Maybe all year, there's just going to be glitter popping out.

So back to Line, we discover your platinum and we discover I'm gold. Well, I tell you, oh, that's weird. I just got an email, and I'm terrible at putting my number in when I fly. And I got a whole reason why, you know it's so boring, but it's like every time I've ever tried to use those miles, it's a fucking joke. Every time it's a blackout, when I've used it, it ends up being like 120,000 miles to get a coach seat or something. And I'm like, this thing's a fucking wrecking. I haven't had that. No, a lot of people have great luck with it, and I concede to that. All to say, I go up to the counter first with the girls to check in, and the woman behind the counter at some point says, Thank you for your gold status. And then you start laughing immediately behind. And then I look at you. And then obviously, she clocks this whole thing somehow. And so then I step away, I've checked in the bags, and now you step up, and we're like, whatever, eight feet away from you. And when she checks you, she's like, Oh, my.

We are so So delighted to have your platinum status. Did she scream platinum status? It was really funny. She hit platinum status like three times. She did. She was a party.

She was. She was really fun, and it was very funny. And then Then-The flight?

Yeah, about the flight. Me holding in the farts and the pee.

Oh, well, yeah, you had a lot of farts and pee that you kept in.

The girl next to me was asleep. Yeah. And boy, she looked like she was really peacefully sleeping. I could not bring myself to wake her up to get out. Yeah. And a couple of things happened. One, I had to pee really bad. Two, I had to fart so bad.

I'm just really surprised you didn't do it.

I couldn't do it because I was like, if this a woman wakes up because she smells something, I couldn't do it, and I had a bad hunch it was going to be dramatic. I held it, and it was so uncomfortable. Then additionally, mid-flight, Delta comes up to my seat and she goes, Will you get my bag down, Daddy? I go, I can't because She's sleeping. I can't step over. And she looked frustrated to the point where I felt really bad. So she left. She went back to her seat, and I was thinking, I was like, God, if you're a little person and you just can't reach your bag, how powerless that is. But you have a daddy, and so you ask him, and he says, No. I started feeling really quite bad about it to the degree that when we landed, I said to her, Hey, if I were you and I were little and I couldn't reach my bag, and I'd be very frustrated. And I'm really, really sorry, but I just really didn't want to make. And then she hit us with... She had had an enormous calamity in back.

Yeah, she had.

She had poured an orange juice all over her shirt, all over her pants, through her underwear. So this poor girl, when she wanted her luggage, she was soaking what with apples. Juice and sticky. And then the best part is she was explaining to us how she dealt with it, which, again, I'm glad I didn't get her bag because she just had to deal with it.

Yeah, true.

And I think she told us she was pulling her pants down.

Yeah, but no one could see. But no one could see. So they could air out.

I Can you just imagine walking by in one of the rows, and there's just this little kid with her pants down.

Yeah, just watching their iPad with her pants down.

Not watching that. Ten Things I hate about you. Yeah.

But okay, so there was a guy next to me on the flight. Oh, I peeped him. Oh, you did? Yeah.

I saw that you were sitting next to this guy.

Yeah, sitting next to this man. In the middle of the flight-Sorry. Okay.

I did receive a text message at one point before we took off, and I looked, and it was a text message from my friend Monica, who was several rows behind me, and she just said, I heard you cough. I am the worst, man. I'm just... I am the worst.

It's distinct, your cough. But I just know your cough. No one else, everyone just hears people coughing.

I just really can't figure out if it's a tick or I have a condition because I have a lot of stuff. It's not like I'm just dry coughing. God, this is disgusting.

I'm I'm so happy you're saying this out loud because I didn't feel like I could ever say this to you.

I think you've already said this to me. I have? Yeah, about the nose-blowing.

I just think you have some tick. I do. Yeah. I have ticks. We all have things, but I think you have... I notice it in editing. That's when I really notice it where I'm like, he's not... It's a tick. You're coughing and clearing and stuff and nose-blowing and stuff. Because it's anthropologically interesting. It's not annoying. It's fine.

But is it chicken or the egg? I think I have some issues. I had asthma.

Yeah, I don't think it's out of nowhere.

It's entirely psychosomatic.

It's not, but it- But it's 50/50.

It's 80/20. It might be 80/20.

I mean, in here, sometimes I feel like it It happens.

Oh, you're really scared to say this. I can tell the crook of your smile.

Well, either if you're a little... If you get a little agitated or something, I think something happened.

Even you're saying that. I was like...

I know that face.

I just felt like I was like, Oh,.

Yeah, it's really funny. We have so many idiosynchips.

I just want to thank everyone in my life. Clearly, everyone in my life is very tolerant of the amount of noises I'm making.

It's fine. Who cares? Anyway, so there was a guy next to me, and he was young.

What did you say, fit? Yeah.

No, he was like... He seemed a little younger than me, so he did. So he was prime. He was reading his book and stuff. It seemed like he was solo, right?

Yeah.

At some point in the flight, I look over and he's talking to a girl, a young woman, next to him, but I I was next to him, but on the- I noticed that, too. Okay, yeah. He was reading his book and he was just being... He wasn't talking to her until all of a sudden he was, and to me, in the middle of the flight. I look over and he was just talking. I'm looking and I'm trying to listen a little bit, but I have the headphones in. Yeah, you want to listen a little bit. I couldn't really hear, but it seemed to me, they were meeting.

Oh, meet cute. I was.

I was like, Oh, my Me cute is happening. Then, this is funny. Then I was like- You got jealous?

Yeah, I did.

I was like, What the fuck? I'm sitting right here.

Hey, hello.

I'm sitting right here.

Diamond status. What are you? Platinum.

I'm sitting right here. I'm pleather status. I'm pleather status. He hates me so much. I'm so gross. He has to go across the aisle.

He'd rather cross the aisle.

Exactly.

No, but hold on. Now, you can't build this argument because I was already witnessing it before you ever sat down.

I know, but listen.

The trolley had left the station.

So they're following in. They're flirting. So they're chit-chatting chatting, and I was like, Oh, my God, a meet cute. And I was like, Man, I feel conflicted about this because I love meet cute. So I'm like, I'm happy this is happening for them, but also I'm right here. This is so rude. It's so rude.

It could have turned into a challenger situation.

Oh, shit. I know. I looked for the movie on the plane, it wasn't playing.

That's your safest.

Then I would have really got his attention. Yeah.

You nudged him and you pointed during the three-way. Then you nudged him and said, Nudge her. Hey, you see what's happening here? Does this interest you, this concept of three people getting together intimately?

Okay, so Then at one point, and I am an observer, and I am closing my eyes a lot in the flight. This is part of it, I guess. Then at one point, I look over and I'm like, Oh, he has a wine. He hadn't had a wine or a drink or anything.

But his date was going great.

Exactly. I was like, Oh, my God. He has a wine now. They're literally on a date. But then I look over and I was like, Oh, she's not there anymore. Okay. Then I was like, Oh, my God. She went to the bathroom. She asked him to hold her wine. I was like, What a move.

Hold on a second. Well, that's an interesting conclusion. Why isn't it his wine? Because you think you would have saw him order it?

I was like, I would have known that.

I got you. You look over and the wine had just materialized. Exactly. I got you.

That's more- It had materialized. It was a white wine. I was like, I know her. She was like, Do you mind holding my She didn't want to leave it out in the open with this other stranger, the counterpart to me. I know. I felt horrible for him.

What if you two would have caught eyes and rolled your eyes? And then we got to be cute. That would be fun. But what would be more fun is if you guys were both watching them, and then you caught eyes with each other, and you both rolled your eyes. These two losers because you were hurt.

Yeah, exactly. These two assholes. What the fuck?

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, If You Dare.

I was like, I put it together.

I was like, Oh, my God, what a move. Can you wondering wine? But it's also a scary move because she doesn't know him. He could put something in there. He should have asked me if she was being smart. But anyway. Then I do see her come back, and she's smiling at him. Then she sits down, and I'm watching at this point. I'm watching them, my show, my TV show. He gives her the wine. You were right. I was right. Oh, wow. Thank you. Then I really, in my head, was like, they are just being like, the way she said thank you did not feel like if you held my wine. Right. I was like, Oh, my God. It's for sure meet cute.

How do you know they weren't Then. Oh, I forgot. We're in a Seinfeld episode.

I forgot. Stop cutting to the end. Stop fast forwarding. Then, I'm stewing.

Wow, you had a lot going on back there.

I did. I was like, I can't get a stylist. No one wants to meet you with me. That wasn't me cute with me. Then, there was a second of turbulence, not very long.

Yeah, I don't even remember it.

Exactly. I'm like, just close my eyes, and then I look over.

They're holding hands.

Monica, they were already together.

No, they're holding hands across the... I was like, oh, my. They've gone from strangers to in love on this flight.

No, there's no way. They just went on the flight and they were holding hands during the turbulence.

This went from zero to 100 so fast. Then I did have to think, wait, Are they? Did they come together? But how? Because he was just reading his book. He wasn't talking to her pre-flight at all. I don't know. It's still unclear. But I do think they went home together.

Yeah, because they came together.

No, because they fell in love. It was an eventful flight. It was. A lot happened.

We got home very late. We did.

Very, very late. We really did.

But we had so much fun in Nashville.

Yes, we did.

Yes. We had a very fun birthday party.

Yeah, it was your birthday. Dinner. We went to your favorite restaurant. It was so good.

It was so delicious. I want to give a shout out to my neighbor, Nate. Okay. I got so fucking lucky with our neighbors in Nashville. Yeah. One of them is Nate, my neighbor, who who are the same age. Yeah. I like that.

That's fun. Yeah.

It is. I really like it. But he has grandkids. Oh, wow. Because he started real early. Yeah. Yeah. In some ways, we're living different lives because he already has grandkids. But I guess if I I see a guy my age that's crazy active with his grandkids. He's so active with his grandkids.

That's fun.

I just immediately go like, That's a fucking guy right there. That's a stand-up dude. My experience having neighbors in Michigan, way different than my experience is having neighbors in LA. In general, I don't know people that are friends with their neighbor. I don't have a single friend in LA, and I have 35. They do not hang out with their neighbors.

That's true.

I'm friendly to my neighbor. Yeah, But when I go back to Aaron's house in Michigan, there's no fences in the backyards. And when it's summertime, everyone's drilling, everyone's talking, people are walking back and forth in the yards. It's a community. Here, we're just very anonymous. There's just so many of us, and we're Very anonymous. And so whatever. It's just been 30 years since I had that neighborly feeling, and I really love it. It's special. It feels like protective. I got your back. I'm watching out for, Hey, I noticed this thing at your house.

It's just very nice.

That is really nice.

That is really nice. I like it. Actually, yeah, that's funny. I noticed that when I was home in Georgia, I was at my friend's house, Christina. Kids were coming over. I was like, That's so cute. I did have that growing up also in Georgia and in Tennessee. We would just go to each other's houses.

Just in general, I do cherish that whole neighborhood vibe with a bunch of little kids.

It is lovely. It is really nice. I agree.

I think we need to do one last thing. Okay. And it's a New Year's resolution update because it's pretty comical. Okay. Which is if people remember, my resolutions were sprints. Yes. And not being affected by people's emotions. Yeah. And so January second, I'm on my birthday. Yes. And this part I feel a little guilty about, but I didn't ask anyone to do it. But I think people did sprints because it was my birthday. Sure they did. Yeah. So it turns out like six of us-Not me. You knew better. And mind you, we made a ton of jokes about, Don't get hurt. Also, I laid out this whole strategy. Anytime I get back into sprints, I like to do 70 % the first time, then 80, and I build my... Maybe my fifth time doing sprints on full out. There were six of us. And I thought, I my competitiveness took over. And Eric was like, I could hear Eric behind me. So I was like, turning on the turbojets. And the goal was to do 6 30-second sprints, which, again- Too long. Not to bore anyone. When I've done sprints in the past, it It's generally like 40-yard dash.

A 30-second sprint is like 200 meters. I said this on the last. I was like, That's too long. It's too long.

Anyways, on the fourth one, we're walking back and I'm like, Oh, my calf feels dicey, but I can get through two more sprints. And then on that same walk back, Eric was like, I'm out, just tore something in my budget. And I'm like, I'm still in, and I got a A third of the way through my fifth sprint. I was like, Oh, my God, I got to stop. I think I might be tearing something.

Yeah, I'm glad you stopped.

All to say the sprinting resolution is proving to be more challenging. We're hoping that was Friday. I'm hoping by this Friday, my cat feels good enough to resume.

You're going to do it again. Got to.

But it was very comedic to wake up the following morning, and Eric and I can't walk. We're both hobbling around the house. Yeah, I know. I'm like, Welcome to 50s.

50s? No. I said, No one above 35 should be doing this. It is hard on the body. Really too hard. Anyway, so that's over. Also, I want to give an update to I do have a stylist now. I'm really excited about her, and she seems awesome. We're going to give it a whirl. All right. Well, let's do some facts.

Yes, ma'am.

Okay, so, Walter. I got my He had this book for Christmas, and he read it all, read the whole thing. In an hour? It's a small book, but yeah, he blew through it. He loved it. He loved it?

Yeah. When he reads a book like that, will he then want to talk about some of the things he learned in, or he just wants to say he liked it?

He does want to talk about it, but I had to go to my room because I was tired.

So he did want to talk about it?

No, he just said, Oh, I read one of the books.

Okay, I'm going to Wake me up when you don't want to talk about that book.

No, he just was like, Yeah, it was really interesting. I mean, he said a few things about it, but they were watching a movie. I don't know. Anyway, now he's reading Sapiens. I bought him that, too. He had not ever read it. He doesn't read a lot. Not a big reader.

He's busy. But now that he's fake retired.

Exactly. That was it. He was like, I want to- We had a riot talking about his retirement last night. Yeah. Yeah, my sweet dad.

I was saying because your dad is retiring, but he's also coming back as a consultant.

Yeah.

A contractor. A contractor or whatever. Worker, contractor. And I was saying I would be a little mad if I was one of his coworkers, And we threw a big retirement party on Friday. Everyone got hammered, and they had a hangover. And then you got to work on money. You saw Ashoka sitting at his desk drinking coffee. You'd be like, What? That's not how this works. I know.

I know. Luckily, no one threw him a party. Well. Exactly.

Is he sad about that? No.

He doesn't care about anything.

He doesn't care about anything. I love how we both agree your dad's one of the smartest people on the planet, but then you also make room for him being one of the dumbest people on the planet.

Well, not dumb. Not dumb.

Just-unaware.

Just not like what he's not interested in, he's not interested in. Right. At all. He doesn't care about a lot of things. Oh, you know what's fun? You just don't get to see parents in other environments often than them being your parent.

You don't get to see them with their other identities. Exactly.

But one of my dad's coworkers came over to pick something up. She's a friend of my dad's, too, and they worked together for a long time, but now she's in another department or something. But anyway, she was chatting with us, and it was so fun to see him him with her talking about their work and their history. His friend was like, I'm glad I'm not in that department anymore. It would be too sad to know you were retiring. Oh. Yeah. And also- She loved working with your dad.

Yeah. And then even talking about how my dad is...

I shouldn't be surprised by this, but the best one there.

No joke. No doubt. Yeah. Oh, your dad was a loved hearing that. I know. Yeah.

I was so proud of him. Yeah.

You got a very good one. I know. There's a lot of them out there, and you got a very good one.

I got a really good pair. I have to say. I was getting my nails done this morning, and I was talking to the nail aesthetician. We got on the subject of my parents, and we Because I was talking about moving into the house, and she was like, Wow, that's such a big deal. I was like, yeah, it is exciting. She was asking about why I came. I was like, oh, for acting and commercials, whatever. I was talking about my first commercial, my first big commercial, the Herbalessence commercial. I'd forgotten some details, but I was telling the story, and I was remembering that it was three callbacks for that commercial. My agent called me and was like, Can you be here in two hours? Can you come in in two hours? We're doing another callback. It's down to three people, you and two other people. And my parents were in town. I was with them. We were in Santa Barbara.

Oh, were they My favorite place.

Yes, India. I said, I'm in Santa Barbara with my parents. No, I can't. Then my dad was like, What's going on? I was like, Well, there's callback, and I can't. He was like, We're going right now. And I was like, What? I was like, I don't think... And he was like, We're going. You didn't come out here to do this.

To quit on the 99th Yard Line.

Or to hang out in Santa Barbara. So he drove us back immediately, and then I booked it. And that was my first big commercial. And they were there. And they were there for my booking. And my dad said, he said on that trip, because obviously, he had been driving around LA and looking at houses and all these things. And he said, You're going to have one of those houses one day, and I'm about to move into it. And then I was telling her this, and I was like, She was like, She was like, What a good dad. I was like, He is. They are, and I really do not.

You're right as the child.

I don't think about those special I know how good I have it. But those things, it's like, yeah, they're just really good ones, and I'm very, very, very lucky. But, yes. But I hate it.

But you finish by.

But they drive me nuts. Sure.

They're family.

But that's because they're family. But I love them very much.

Anyway- Well, I'm emotional now.

I understand. They're nice people. Well, I have a birthday present for you. You do?

Yeah. Oh, my Oh, my goodness. This is fun. This is an unconventional size box. I know. Generally, when you get me something, it's a clothing item, and it's in a bigger box. Okay. It's a shirt.

It is a clothing item in a tiny box.

Oh, my God. No way. A Kmart shirt.

It's a Kmart shirt. But it's also a Dare shirt.

Oh, my God. Kids Against Drugs. Lame. I know.

I thought it was a double whammy for you.

Yeah, the bumper says, Kmart Kids Who does race against drugs? There's a lot going on here. There is. Why are they Kmart Kids? Exactly. How does one race drugs? Correct.

How do you race it?

You can race on drugs. Yeah.

It was a race where they were against drugs.

Do you know how old you were when the shirt was made? No. You were 11 years old. Oh, wow. You were just about to start racing against drugs.

Oh, I had been racing. I had been racing since I was five against drugs.

And in '98, I was 23. I was on drugs. Oh, yeah.

The kids weren't really doing it for you, though.

They were racing me, but they couldn't keep up. No, they couldn't. Oh, my God. This is great.

It's a Kmart shirt. You had to have it.

Yes. I love it. I hope it fits. I was just telling you that I watched a YouTube video on the history. It wasn't like the history of Kmart. It was just this graph that changed, and it gave you the amount of Kmarts in different states starting in, I think, 63 or eight.

Yeah.

And when it occurred to me, I had no idea. And I'm bummed about it. Yeah. It started in Michigan. I know. That was wild. And there were so many more in Michigan all the way up until the '80s. We were like, blowing the rest of the country away. Eventually, it got passed by maybe California or a couple, but it stayed really high. I was like, Oh, yeah. My opinion of Kmart's skewed by being born in Michigan. It's in your blood. I thought it was as ubiquitous as Walmart.

Right. We had a lot of them in Georgia, but maybe later I think later.

Yeah, I think later. In Michigan, they were more numerous than Walmart's. Wow, yeah.

Yeah. It's in your history and your lineage. But you told me that story, but I had already had your shirt already.

I was so excited. You must have been so excited. Yeah.

Okay, so, Walter. So he mentioned a room where people gather that as a couch on the outside and cushions in the middle, it sounds like a riddle.

It does.

But I looked it up. It says the room design you're describing is commonly known as a conversation pit or a sunken seating area.

I want one of those so bad. You do? Yes. They're making a comeback I saw in some architectural magazine. Oh, wow. But as a kid, those were big in the '70s. And so when I was a kid, they had gone out of vogue, but you could still bump into them. I was like, I want a sunken in the living room so bad.

Oh, yeah. I don't really know about them.

Just imagine the floor levels this, and then it drops down another two and a half feet so that the couch hole area, square, is like, so your shoulders are just above the floor line. Interesting. Oh, I love it.

Okay, well, that's what he's talking about.

It was on the back of TV Guide a lot.

Oh, is Bill Gates, that's tricky, mom named Mary. Yes. Mary Maxwell Gates. Mary Maxwell Gates. I like that. Maxwell.

Did you have Max and Irma's down there in Georgia?

Yes, we did. Yes, we did have Max and Irma's.

We were alive at the bullseye of the franchise restaurant. I know. There was no such thing as a Chili's in my youth and then around my teenage years, all of a sudden, and it was the most exciting thing in the world.

Listen, I was buy a Chili's last week, and I asked my mom, I was like, Have you guys been to Chili's? She was like, We went last week. Oh, great. I was like, Yeah. And I was like, I want to go. It's fucking delicious. I know. I loved it. They used to have chicken tacos, but they took them off the menu. They did? Yeah. Oh, no. I know.

Yeah. Not caloric enough.

Yeah, I guess not. Okay, well, so that is all of the facts.

That concludes the fact portion of the program.

Yeah, he's too smart. What are we going to do?

Thank you for my Kmart shirt, Monica. You're welcome. Thank you so much. It was fun to open up a box.

It was a trick because it was a big shirt in a small box. Yeah.

I like that. That's a metaphor. Yeah. Big things come in very small packages. Yeah.

We got there.

All right. Love you.

Love you.

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