Jon Meacham

[0] Welcome, welcome, welcome to armchair expert.

[1] Experts on expert.

[2] I'm Monica Mouse.

[3] What would you feel like if you went to my body?

[4] Would you be excited to be small?

[5] Full of, yes.

[6] There's so many things I would do.

[7] If we body switched?

[8] Yeah.

[9] I'd run to the closest mirror and get naked.

[10] Duh.

[11] Okay.

[12] Now, John doesn't want to be a part of that.

[13] John Meacham is our guest today.

[14] You've probably seen him on Bill Maher.

[15] That's where we've seen him a ton.

[16] A ton.

[17] Great.

[18] He's a writer, a reviewer, a presidential biographer, a former executive editor and executive vice president at Random House.

[19] He is a contributing writer to the New York Times book review, a contributing editor to Time Magazine, and a former editor -in -chief at Newsweek.

[20] He also won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for American Lion Andrew Jackson in the White House.

[21] He also has a new book called The Hope of Glory, Reflections on the Last Words of Jesus from the Cross, and an exciting five -part documentary podcast series, Hope, through history.

[22] So check out hope through history and please enjoy historian John Meacham.

[23] Wondry Plus subscribers can listen to Armchair Expert early and ad free right now.

[24] Join Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts or you can listen for free wherever you get your podcasts.

[25] He's an armchair expert.

[26] John, hi.

[27] How you doing?

[28] Good.

[29] Where are we joined?

[30] you?

[31] Are you in a study in your home?

[32] I am.

[33] I'm in Nashville, Tennessee.

[34] I've been socially distancing for half a century, so this is not that different for me. You're nice and practiced.

[35] Exactly.

[36] Now, are you in the middle of a book tour?

[37] No, I'm composing.

[38] I am writing a little biography of John Lewis, then going back to my magnum opus, which is a biography of Dolly and James Madison.

[39] So I toggle between centuries.

[40] Yeah, and how is your, because you've been at this for a while, And I have to imagine the digital revolution for you has saved your car a lot of miles.

[41] Did you use to drive all around and go to like hidden libraries and small towns and stuff like that?

[42] It's interesting.

[43] It has made basic infrastructural research easier.

[44] It has put a higher premium on those kinds of small libraries, collections that have not reached the digital landscape yet.

[45] And one of the tests I always try to meet.

[46] is, can I bring some evidence to the party that hasn't been there before?

[47] So my favorite historical guys are McCullough, of course.

[48] Always, yeah.

[49] And Caro, increasingly, did you read Titan?

[50] You must have.

[51] Oh, yeah.

[52] Sure now, sure.

[53] Yeah, so probably my favorite historical biography ever written.

[54] My best Chernow story, which isn't really about Ron, is I was interviewing Dan Rather at a public event in Nashville a couple of years ago.

[55] And before we went out, he said, I want to talk to you about Hamilton.

[56] I said, sure.

[57] I'm a Jefferson biographer, but I have thoughts.

[58] Sure.

[59] And we get out there, and we're talking along.

[60] And about, you know, eight, nine minutes in, he says, well, Ron, the key point here is, and I think, huh, you know, all right, slip of the tongue, no problem.

[61] And then he did it again.

[62] And then he did it again.

[63] And I thought, Jesus Christ, he thinks I'm wrong turn out.

[64] And then at that point, you know, it gets so far past where the buses run.

[65] You can't fix it.

[66] 100%.

[67] Yeah.

[68] So, and fortunately, it was a hometown crowd.

[69] And so enough people kind of got it that we were all basically enabling Dan.

[70] Sure.

[71] By the end of the evening.

[72] Oh, that's fantastic.

[73] I'm glad that you just went along with it because, you know what?

[74] Why not?

[75] What are you going to do?

[76] He's been right.

[77] He's served his country.

[78] It's okay.

[79] Now, I really want to read your Jefferson book, The Art of Power, because I have read so many books where Jefferson is positioned as kind of an asshole, particularly, right, the John Adams books.

[80] I came to dislike Jefferson through those books.

[81] Yeah, well, that you were supposed to.

[82] So David did the right thing.

[83] I wrote that book, actually, in part because, I mean, he'd been chased by McCullough for about 800 pages in Adams.

[84] Ron had hit him twice in Hamilton and Washington.

[85] And if you're going to be chased by anybody, you don't want to be chased by McCullough and churnow, right?

[86] Right, sure.

[87] So I thought exactly what you're just saying, you know, the son of a bitch may have been a son of a bitch, but he wrote the Declaration of Independence, for Christ's sake.

[88] So let's give him some credit.

[89] My argument about Jefferson is he's not a hypocrite any more than the country was hypocritical at the time.

[90] And his views were not that far out of the mainstream.

[91] And if you denounce him and send him to the cross for our sins, it's actually letting the rest of the country and the rest of us off the hook.

[92] He was reflecting prevailing opinion.

[93] And you can want him to be a saint, but John Adams closed down the press and deported immigrants.

[94] Hamilton wanted a British monarchical system.

[95] Nobody's perfect in this stuff.

[96] And if you look back and you think, oh, they all have to be these virtuous Rushmoreian figures, you're not doing justice to them.

[97] And you're not really enabling our own time to learn from them.

[98] Because do you learn more from sinners or from saints?

[99] You know, you learn more from centers, which is good, given the relative proportion of the centers and saints in the population.

[100] Yeah.

[101] I think increasingly people want their heroes to be flawless, and it's getting increasingly frustrating from my point of view, which is like, no, no, these people are shitheads on one day, their geniuses on the next day.

[102] They are people just like all of us.

[103] And if your expectations are perfection, then we're not going to have anyone who we study or learn from.

[104] And you can't learn from them.

[105] Again, there's a reason there's a category of saints.

[106] Those are exemplary of saints.

[107] plurie stories that are inspiring, but saints themselves, by definition, are also human.

[108] You know, I first came across this, or I first started seriously thinking about it as a result of a couple of conversations with Taylor Branch, wrote the definitive, really, Martin Luther King biography, trilogy.

[109] If you haven't read it, it's worth it.

[110] It's parting the waters, pillar of fire, and at Canaan's edge.

[111] And he was talking about how, in the second volume, he had included the information from the FBI wiretaps that King had had a very vigorous, extracurricular, extramarital life.

[112] Orgies.

[113] And he was under some pressure.

[114] He was under some criticism for why would you reward the FBI's unconstitutional surveillance and sully this man's name?

[115] And he made an incredibly resonant point with me, which is if you treat people as monuments, you limit their capacity to teach because who can be that?

[116] Yeah.

[117] Right.

[118] So in Jefferson's case, as a young unmarried guy, he had a crush on a married friend's wife.

[119] He had a 40 -year connection with a woman he owned.

[120] I don't say relationship.

[121] He wrote the most important sentence ever originally rendered in English that we were all created equal, but did almost nothing to bring the specific end of slavery about.

[122] But as you say, if you want your figures in the past to be perfect, it's a fool's errand, and I don't think it's particularly useful.

[123] Yeah, I'm with you.

[124] And in fact, being sober, the magic of this group, this 12 -step group is I'm actually learning from everyone's failures.

[125] To your point, I'm not learning from people's accomplishments or successes.

[126] And I always say I'm here, like, if I interview somebody who's won an Academy Award, I don't know how that's applicable to my life.

[127] I'm not en route to win one.

[128] And that's that story over.

[129] But when I read Grant and I go, oh, my God, this is phenomenal.

[130] This guy is a military genius.

[131] And he's as dumb as it gets when it comes to managing money and get rich quick schemes.

[132] He would have been in every multi -level marketing scheme available.

[133] Yeah, that's so refreshing and encouraging.

[134] And I think it helps people go, oh, I could have an area of my life.

[135] I'm genius.

[136] And I could focus on this thing that I'm great at, and I can feel, you know, human about it.

[137] Well, it goes to my basic point about the country, which sounds very grand.

[138] But it's why when people throw up their hands about anything the incumbent president does, as if there were somehow or another five minutes before he became president, we were a perfect country.

[139] Right, right.

[140] And then all of a sudden we're terrible.

[141] At our very best, we get things right 51 % of the time.

[142] At our very best, Abraham Lincoln was basically a segregationist.

[143] You know, go read the first inaugural.

[144] He reassures people in my native land that we have nothing to fear from him because he's not going to touch slavery where it exists.

[145] You know, then circumstances change.

[146] Largely military necessity is what led to the Emancipation Proclamation, and he becomes Moses.

[147] But he didn't start out as Moses.

[148] And I sometimes get dinged for saying, oh, well, everything's going to be all right because everything has been all right in the past.

[149] And I don't mean that.

[150] But I do think that if you set an unreasonable standard of judgment, then you're foreclosing the possibility, A, of persevering in hope, because if you have to get to 100%, you're always going to fall short of that.

[151] But the other side of that coin is that our best moments, the moments we celebrate, the moments we commemorate, the moments you want to be associated with historically, are about liberation, not captivity.

[152] You know, it's about appomatics.

[153] It's about Selma.

[154] It's about Stonewall.

[155] Standing here today, if you had been the Congress of the United States in 1964, do you want to have voted for or against the civil rights?

[156] Act.

[157] What do you want in your obituary, right?

[158] I just looked this up the other day.

[159] At the end of the millennium, so in 99, Gallup did a big survey about what did the public think were the most important moments of the 20th century.

[160] The Civil Rights Act was fourth.

[161] It was ahead of the Kennedy assassination.

[162] It was ahead of the moon landing.

[163] It was ahead of World War I. And one of the things that I try to do when I talk to people who are in public life is ask this question.

[164] I call it the portrait test.

[165] What do you want us to think when we look at your portrait on the wall?

[166] And it actually has some salience and chance to work because none of them can imagine a world where we're not staring at their portrait.

[167] That seems like a perfectly natural thing.

[168] You're asking them a question they asked himself hourly.

[169] Exactly.

[170] Now I'm dead curious.

[171] What was one, two, three?

[172] World War to the atomic bomb and...

[173] The McRib?

[174] I'll think of three in a second.

[175] But it was big, right?

[176] Yeah.

[177] So, but the Civil Rights Act beat the Depression in terms of people.

[178] Now, maybe that's liberal guilt.

[179] Maybe that's white guilt.

[180] But it doesn't really matter because insofar as we can use how history is going to see you as a cudgel to make you do the right thing now.

[181] you know go for it right that's a great thing yeah and in fact i'll bring up like a you know a more recent example of this and i'll say that this is a virtue i most admire which is anyone can have an opinion and then double down on a double down and just refuse to take on new data and to watch a president obama in real time be on the wrong side of marriage equality and then on the right side of it to me marriage equality is almost immaterial to the thing that i'm impressed with there, which is, wow, he could publicly acknowledge, oh, I was wrong on that and I've changed my mind.

[182] I've taken on new info.

[183] And that's, that's a thing that should be modeled.

[184] If I may, there's even a further level of human complexity on that because he didn't really believe that it was wrong in the first place.

[185] Right.

[186] He was correcting a cynical decision, which to some extent is even harder than what you just said.

[187] It wasn't new data.

[188] It was public opinion data.

[189] And remember, it was Biden who pushed him.

[190] Right, right.

[191] Biden got out ahead.

[192] In fact, Obama said in kind of a condescending way, oh, Joe got off a little over his skis there on an issue of human rights.

[193] So, I mean, maybe I'm wrong here.

[194] Maybe the Barack Obama, I don't think I am, but let's, maybe the Barack Obama of 2008 really believed that same -sex marriage, marriage equality was not right.

[195] I don't believe that.

[196] I think he made a cynical decision for some swing states and then had the guts to undo his cynicism.

[197] But as you say, kind of in connection to Jefferson, he was just reflecting the popular opinion at the time.

[198] It felt like a big swing to be like, okay, I'm for this or against this.

[199] But I guess the thing that we want, I don't think people want perfection, but they want the people who hold a legacy to have taken those risks and been a leader.

[200] not just a reflection.

[201] Two thoughts.

[202] Exactly right.

[203] Remember, Obama, we kind of forget now to some extent that a guy named Barack Hussein Obama succeeded a guy named George Walker Bush.

[204] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[205] I used to think we would never see a sharper contrast in presidential type and temperament than George W. to Obama until Obama to Trump.

[206] And now Trump has made Obama, George W. Clinton, everybody looked like Cicero, right?

[207] They all look like Roman senator.

[208] now in comparison.

[209] But he was a black guy who needed to normalize himself a little bit in some swing states.

[210] And that's what he was doing.

[211] Do we really believe he doesn't believe that having a health insurance mandate is the right public policy?

[212] I don't.

[213] But he was against it in the 2008 campaign.

[214] Again, perfection isn't the thing.

[215] It's, and to go exactly to your point, The presidents we remember most warmly tend to be the presidents who challenged their own bases.

[216] So Lyndon Johnson from a segregated state on civil rights.

[217] What's the one thing we remember about Richard Nixon that's positive?

[218] He went to China.

[219] So the guy who chases Alger Hiss.

[220] Didn't he do the EPA too?

[221] Yeah.

[222] Yeah.

[223] But most folks would say, but that's fine.

[224] So, yeah, there was a, there was a domestic.

[225] His health care plan, by the way, was to the left of Obama's to show you how rapidly the country can change.

[226] Ronald Reagan and the Cold War, George H .W. Bush and taxes.

[227] You know, he had given his base what they wanted and then said, you know, no what?

[228] I'm wrong.

[229] We got to do this.

[230] And he's been rewarded for that in history.

[231] So it's, here's a category with no end.

[232] What the president doesn't understand, which is, you know, how much time you got.

[233] But one of the fundamental things is he doesn't see you have to spend some political capital to benefit historically.

[234] Yeah.

[235] And that's just putting it in vanity terms.

[236] Forget that it's the right thing to do.

[237] Right.

[238] And you're right.

[239] To go to your point, it's a leader.

[240] But people do reward those who challenge their basic assumptions.

[241] Yeah.

[242] Okay.

[243] I want to walk through your life a little bit because that's what we do here.

[244] I'm sure you've listened to all the episodes.

[245] Religiously.

[246] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[247] Of course.

[248] You're from Chattanooga.

[249] I am.

[250] And dad was in the Vietnam war.

[251] He was in the Vietnam.

[252] I like that phrase.

[253] Yeah.

[254] Right.

[255] Vietnam.

[256] Mom and dad got divorced.

[257] They did.

[258] And then you went and lived with grandma and grandpa.

[259] Grandpup.

[260] Yeah.

[261] And then he, your grandfather or granddaddy, he had daily chats about local politics with all of his pals.

[262] And you just kind of hung around and were absorbing all that, right?

[263] And you wrote a letter to Ronald Reagan when you were, and got invited to his inauguration.

[264] Okay, so I just want to say, what are you in a handful of seven?

[265] It's hard to do something on a planet with seven billion people that puts you in a group of five.

[266] And I got to imagine you're just one of five 11 -year -olds who wrote a letter to Ronald Reagan.

[267] Yeah, well, I appreciate that.

[268] The letter part is a bit of urban legend.

[269] Oh, it's apocryphal?

[270] That's apocryphal.

[271] But so the truth is even worse.

[272] so the truth is that yeah my grandfather was a judge in chattanooga probably when i was six he started taking me to court with him and i was most excited because they had a machine downstairs one of the old pull the lever vending machines oh sure and you could get peanuts and so you could pull the thing and you go and you get the peanuts and i get a coke during the recesses So I thought the recesses were great.

[273] And I still don't quite understand how they did this in terms of a workday.

[274] But it is absolutely true that the district attorney, sometimes the mayor, a couple of judges, there was a state Supreme Court justice who was around.

[275] The sheriff was around a little bit.

[276] They would at 10 o 'clock in the morning, so why they weren't working to earn their salary, which we were paying them, they would go to, we had this old down.

[277] downtown hotel.

[278] It's still there called the Reed House.

[279] And they would sit around and have a cup of coffee and tell lies, basically.

[280] They sometimes called it the Mendacity Club.

[281] And so to me, politics, to me, they were people.

[282] And I'm convinced there's a line between what I do now and that experience.

[283] The Reagan thing was, I've never looked up the date of it, but sometime in the fall of 79, Reagan gave 60 minutes.

[284] its interview.

[285] And I bet it was with Mike Wallace, because Mike Wallace was an old pal of Nancy's family in Chicago.

[286] One of the many weirdnesses about Nancy Reagan is she used to talk about how her father was a doctor and she had doctor's hands, but he was her stepfather.

[287] Oh, okay.

[288] Yeah, go work on that for a while.

[289] She skipped the Mendel P. section of the genetics.

[290] Bingo.

[291] And I was just fascinated by it.

[292] I can't imagine it was the substance.

[293] I don't think I had a lot to, about the grain embargo of that year.

[294] But Reagan, he communicated this kind of mystique of power and politics.

[295] And I was sort of hooked.

[296] You know, he had, he had studied FDR.

[297] He voted for him four times.

[298] There's a great scene in September 1936.

[299] FDR comes to the Iowa State Fair, which was late in the summer.

[300] And Reagan is working for W .HO.

[301] He's doing the Cubs games.

[302] It was the year before he went to Hollywood and got his contract.

[303] And he actually runs across the studio offices to catch a glimpse of FDR as he goes by in the motorcade.

[304] And he learned from Roosevelt how a president should act literally in every sense of that term.

[305] So he had a way of communicating that he embodied the state somehow.

[306] And so that was appealing to me. And so I volunteered.

[307] I was in the sixth grade.

[308] I volunteered at the Hamilton County Republican headquarters, which was next to a dive bar called Lennards.

[309] They had a lot of—Linards served a hamburger that was basically onions with some meat.

[310] I remember that detail very clearly.

[311] Anyway, so I was just around local politics for about a year or so, and he wins, of course.

[312] And I got an invitation to the inauguration, and I talked to my grandmother.

[313] into taking me up there.

[314] So I was on the lawn of the Capitol on the West Front, Tuesday, January 20th, 1981, when really in many ways modern politics began.

[315] Wow.

[316] And when you were there, did you have fantasies of being a politician?

[317] Oh, yeah.

[318] You did.

[319] You thought you might be a politician.

[320] Oh, yeah.

[321] Look, if you were a white southern episcopalian child, you thought, all right, you go to law school, then you get out, you run for office.

[322] Yeah.

[323] Now, the drama of my early 20s.

[324] was to do everything I could to avoid going to law school.

[325] So I did, like St. Paul, I did put away childish things eventually.

[326] But when I look back on it, I'm pretty convinced that the tributaries that led me into doing what I'm doing would be going to court with my grandfather, being around those local politicians.

[327] Then it got nationalized and even internationalized by both the Reagan experience.

[328] And then I read Churchill's War Memoir.

[329] at a weird age.

[330] I was a really exciting kid, as you can tell.

[331] McCullough's early stuff and all that.

[332] William Manchester, American Caesar and The Last Lion, those books were hugely important to me. You're clearly a unique boy, right?

[333] Are you, and I say that with admiration.

[334] Are you also at the high school prom?

[335] Are you just completely on your own path?

[336] No, I was a friend in college.

[337] He once had a great line.

[338] He sort of captured me as well as I think anybody ever did, which was that I was like Frasier Crane in Cheers.

[339] I would be dismissive and critical of the madness and then go along and do it anyway.

[340] Uh -huh, sure.

[341] And that was a really astute insight.

[342] So, no, I was not a big athlete, obviously.

[343] I wasn't quite as weird as I'm making myself sound.

[344] You could make a good case that I was like, the boy in the bubble meets C -SPAN.

[345] But it's a little more complicated than that.

[346] Because you're roughly the same age as my brother.

[347] and I'm wondering, I grew up in a room with Kiss murals on the wall that my mother painted for him.

[348] Like, his life was Kiss.

[349] Where were they at on your radar?

[350] They were not high on the list.

[351] You didn't go as A's Freely on Halloween?

[352] No. The poster on my wall was, and I have it right over here, was of George Herbert Walker Bush and Ronald Reagan at the 1980 Detroit Convention with the line, the time is now.

[353] Okay.

[354] All right.

[355] Well, that's so.

[356] That's really specific.

[357] Now, it really tells a lot.

[358] So when I was a freshman at school called Sawani, which I loved, I got an internship to work covering a congressional race, partly because I knew the people who were running back home in Chattanooga.

[359] And the way I think of it now is I walked into that newsroom and that was it.

[360] It had everything, right?

[361] You could write, which gave you some measure of control.

[362] you had a ticket to anything.

[363] It was all about all the things I thought about and read about since those days when I was playing with the Peanuts.

[364] Yeah.

[365] You end up working at the Chattanooga Times.

[366] I love how you say Chattanooga, by the way.

[367] I'm going to practice it and do it for Monaco all the time.

[368] Yeah, because you kind of go, Chattanooga.

[369] No, it was Chattanooga.

[370] Chattanooga.

[371] My 12 -year -old makes fun of me for this, too, so you have that in common.

[372] That sounds about right.

[373] The parallels will not stop there, by the way, with your 12, 12 -year -old.

[374] Okay, so you end up working, and we're going to fast forward now, you end up working at Newsweek in D .C. and you become the executive editor and the executive vice president, ultimately at Random House.

[375] And I'm wondering, throughout this time, do you know you're bound to write historical novels?

[376] Or are you, what's your game plan at that point?

[377] Didn't really have one.

[378] I'm a case of sort of the rat boarding, a lot of sinking ships, right?

[379] So daily journalism, weekly journalism, hardback books.

[380] I have a real eye for the future.

[381] Yeah, you sold Abacus's door to door for a minute.

[382] Yeah, yeah.

[383] So pretty soon, I'm going to launch this thing called Gutenberg.

[384] It's going to be a lot.

[385] But I was lucky in that everything sort of fed into telling these stories about the foilables of the powerful, both journalism and just the basic reading, getting to know a lot of these people that I just, you know, known from afar, President Bush being the best example, I guess.

[386] I guess the other sort of Rosebud moment was in the summer of 86, I think Kiss was on tour, probably.

[387] Sure, sure.

[388] But I'd been to so many shows at that point that I kind of, I kind of knew the, knew the the drill.

[389] So I took some time off from that and read two books.

[390] One was Robert Penn Warren's All the Kingsmen.

[391] And the other was written by Evan Thomas and Walter Isaacson called The Wise Men.

[392] And it's about Dean Atchison, Averill Harriman, Robert Loved.

[393] It was about these six friends who were part of the foreign policy establishment under Truman and Eisenhower and Kennedy.

[394] And I loved both those books so much that I finished them.

[395] And then I started reading them again.

[396] So I read each twice that summer.

[397] So I'm a case of I read these things.

[398] I love them so much.

[399] I always had this kind of voice in the back of my head.

[400] Could I possibly play in that stadium?

[401] Right.

[402] And as you start writing these books, you write several before you write Andrew Jackson American Lion, which one knew the Pulitzer.

[403] Do you see that book is markedly better than the others?

[404] Or I'm curious what you think you did write in that book?

[405] That's a very good question.

[406] I have no idea.

[407] I'm a terrible judge of my own work.

[408] And it's not false modesty.

[409] It's just sometimes I think I'll do something and I'll think, man, this is going to make them sit up and, you know, the mailman won't even notice.

[410] and then I'll do something without thinking about it and I'll get 40 letters.

[411] So I just, I'm just not, and that's, I'm thinking journalistically there.

[412] Do you sway between, so my two outcomes are I'm the greatest gift of comedy to ever live and I'm the worst piece of shit how they let me on a show.

[413] There's no middle ground for me. I'm either God or the devil in my assessment.

[414] You know, I don't want to in any way harm your sense of self, but I don't think that's, a unique view.

[415] Right.

[416] Well, that's what I'm hoping.

[417] Yeah, yeah.

[418] Yeah, I do, I do veer.

[419] But have you found this?

[420] How old are you?

[421] 45.

[422] Okay.

[423] Have you found that you are easier on yourself to some extent today than you were, say, 10 years ago?

[424] Yeah, a thousand percent as I've gotten a handle on my ego and I realize that the things that create sustainable kind of self -esteem aren't really related to the results.

[425] And I've definitely, the thing I now mine for self -esteem and pride is just diligence and hard work.

[426] So I say I'm in the show up and work business, not the results business.

[427] And ego is just results business, right?

[428] Two quick things come to mind of that.

[429] I have found I am radically different than I was 10 years ago in terms of the emotional swings.

[430] And I don't just think it's the medication in this game.

[431] Stay tuned for more armchair expert, if you dare.

[432] What's up, guys?

[433] It's your girl Kiki.

[434] And my podcast is back with a new.

[435] new season and let me tell you it's too good and I'm diving into the brains of entertainment's best and brightest okay every episode I bring on a friend and have a real conversation and I don't mean just friends I mean the likes of Amy polar Kell Mitchell Vivica Fox the list goes on so follow watch and listen to baby this is Kiki Palmer on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcast we've all been there turning to the internet to self -diagnose our inexplicable pains debilitating body aches sudden fevers and strange rashes.

[436] Though our minds tend to spiral to worst -case scenarios, it's usually nothing, but for an unlucky few, these unsuspecting symptoms can start the clock ticking on a terrifying medical mystery.

[437] Like the unexplainable death of a retired firefighter, whose body was found at home by his son, except it looked like he had been cremated, or the time when an entire town started jumping from buildings and seeing tigers on their ceilings.

[438] Hey listeners, it's Mr. Ballin here, and I'm here to tell you about my podcast.

[439] It's called Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries.

[440] Each terrifying true story will be sure to keep you up at night.

[441] Follow Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries wherever you get your podcasts.

[442] Prime members can listen early and ad free on Amazon Music.

[443] Are you 51?

[444] Is that old year?

[445] Be 51 next week, yeah.

[446] And I really do think it's just a function of age to some extent.

[447] I am far more capable of doing something and saying, you know what, this is what I set out to do.

[448] I have a great example right now.

[449] So I'm writing this book about John Lewis, hero of Selma, hero of Nashville, arrested 45 times, fractured skull.

[450] He's as close to an American saint as of anyone I've ever met in the classical sense of that and the way that the early church defined it, which was not necessarily your character, but your willingness to shed blood and suffer for the faith itself.

[451] I met him 30 years.

[452] years ago.

[453] Whenever I'm around him, I just think this is the most incredible person who's walking the planet right now.

[454] And I've always thought, you know what, I should write this.

[455] And so I was with him, I took my family down.

[456] We were in Selma Montgomery and Birmingham right before COVID struck.

[457] It was the anniversary of Bloody Sunday.

[458] He does an annual trip down there.

[459] You walk across the Pettus Bridge with John Lewis.

[460] It's like walking at Normandy with Eisenhower.

[461] Sure.

[462] Literally.

[463] Yeah.

[464] Right.

[465] Because that is a domestic war story, the civil rights movement.

[466] And what happened at Selma, what happened at Montgomery, what happened at Birmingham, what happened in Jackson, Mississippi, is as important to the American character and fate as what happened at Normandy or Bunker Hill or Appomatics.

[467] So I just decided, you know what, I'm going to write this book.

[468] I'm just going to do it.

[469] John's sick.

[470] He's got cancer.

[471] He's fighting it.

[472] He's 80 years old.

[473] And this may not be a radical reinterpretation of John Lewis.

[474] This, if you know a lot about him, you may not come away dazzled by new information.

[475] But I have an argument I want to make about this man. And I'm lucky enough that I have world enough in time to do it.

[476] So I'm just going to write this book.

[477] And if you like it, that's great.

[478] And if you don't, well, you know what?

[479] We'll move on.

[480] Yeah, yeah.

[481] I could no more have said those sentences in that order 10 years ago than I could have flown.

[482] And I'd love to say that's maturity.

[483] I think it's just age.

[484] Well, I don't know about for you, but for me, a huge help in that has been two children.

[485] As I had nothing to focus on but myself, and occasionally I'd give my wife some of my thoughts.

[486] I was all important and I was the only measure of how this experience was going.

[487] But then once two other humans entered the picture, I had to break out of my own narcissism.

[488] And everything about me got a little less important in the most healthy way imaginable.

[489] Yep.

[490] No, I totally get.

[491] I wish I could give credit to them.

[492] But I was the old way for a long time while they were, I have an 18 year old, a 15 year old, and a 12 year old.

[493] Uh -huh.

[494] But absolutely.

[495] Bill Buckley once said, every man should write a book, plant a tree, and have a son.

[496] So I'm done.

[497] What kind of tree did you plant?

[498] Sure.

[499] Well, it's half yours.

[500] Transferable credit, my friend.

[501] So how do you pick, and we're going to get to your new book, how do you pick?

[502] So Andrew Jackson, here's what I know about Andrew Jackson.

[503] And a lot of it's probably a lie.

[504] Well, he was in a duel, right?

[505] He's one of our only presidents that actually was a duel.

[506] Yep.

[507] And did he have a humongous wheel of cheese he put in the White House?

[508] He wanted people to be able to grab a piece of cheese when they visited?

[509] Well, somebody, actually, a guy named Meacham from Vermont, I think, sent it down there.

[510] And so what are you going to do if you get?

[511] It's like a re -gifting, right?

[512] Oh, okay, okay, okay.

[513] So it was like the Statue of Liberty.

[514] It just arrived.

[515] Yeah, just, all right, fine.

[516] Put it out there and maybe they'll all eat it.

[517] Oh, okay.

[518] But what was it about him that made you?

[519] on fire to because I mean you got to I have to imagine you're spending I don't know how long it takes you to write these books clearly over a year right maybe a couple years Jackson took five Bush took 17 so that's a different story okay so this is longer than many many relationships people have and so I got to imagine you might get on fire for them for a minute but you have to really be able to suss out is this a sustainable interest it's going to be years that's exactly the way to put it, is it cannot be a single date, because you do live with them through thick and thin.

[520] They also, I have found that, well, to answer your question directly, the reason I did Jackson when I did it was we were coming out of Founders Sheek.

[521] McCullough had done John Adams, Joe Ellis had done several really good books, Walter Isaacson had done Benjamin Franklin.

[522] Everybody was walking around in frock coats with powdered wigs.

[523] And then in sort of the March of Time, popular mind, you really go from the founding era to Lincoln, right?

[524] Yeah, yeah.

[525] And then it's D -Day and then we're done.

[526] So I thought, you know, who's the most important American between the founding and Lincoln?

[527] And that's Jackson.

[528] He's a fantastic character.

[529] I sometimes think I should have saved Jackson from my retirement because he was, again, I mean, the incumbent president makes him look like, you know, Seneca.

[530] but he was temperamental, he was self -made, he came from the lowest rung of white society, never knew his father.

[531] Is he the only red -headed president we've had?

[532] No, Jefferson was kind of red -headed.

[533] Jackson, he had a good head of hair, actually, John Kerry kind of hair.

[534] Okay, yeah.

[535] Oh, my gosh, do you collect locks of presidential hair?

[536] We had someone on here who did that.

[537] I don't.

[538] I don't.

[539] And I don't really have anything to add To my simple denial If that's okay I have a lot of weird stuff Bob Dole once gave me one of his button hooks One of the things You know, because of his arm, his injury So that's about as weird as it gets Bob Dole is a great American And still going We ran into him My son was with me And Dol called up A couple days later to say thank you for something He said, Bob Dole here.

[540] I said, Senator, we'd love to come see you.

[541] Sometimes I said, not hard to get on the calendar when you're 94.

[542] That's my Bob Dole impression.

[543] I know you're pleased.

[544] Has there ever been someone who referred to themselves in the third person as much as Bob Dole?

[545] I really don't think so.

[546] I love it.

[547] He made it so charming.

[548] He's so great.

[549] Because I was a big lefty.

[550] I was young and a big lefty.

[551] And even I was like, I like this guy a lot.

[552] I like this guy.

[553] You know, you would?

[554] You know why you liked him, if I may, project seriously?

[555] In a different life, in an alternative universe, he could have been Letterman.

[556] Yeah, I totally agree.

[557] He's ironic, and it was all shield and sword, right?

[558] Because he needed to distract from the arm.

[559] So I don't know if he was quite as ironic as a kid, but when he came back, the sense of humor was about if you're laughing, you're not staring.

[560] Interesting.

[561] Yeah, that's a comedian's light of a comedian.

[562] Yeah, yeah.

[563] It's interesting.

[564] So Jackson was immensely important.

[565] Native Americans, he defended African -American slavery.

[566] He was an architect of the perpetuation of the two original American sins.

[567] But to circle back to what we were talking about, he was never outside the mainstream.

[568] And so what I dislike about the, not the revisionism, that's great.

[569] Let's debate it all you want.

[570] But when you try to exile him to a corner somewhere, and I don't care who's on the $20 bill, by the way, that talk about a Pyrrhic fight.

[571] But if you think that you can put him in a historical timeout, and that somehow absolves the nation of its enduring.

[572] tradition of injustice, then you're kidding yourself.

[573] And I think there's a lot of elective self -righteousness when it comes to Jackson and the founders.

[574] My theory, which no one pays any attention to, but we'll launch it here again, people ask me a lot about Confederate monuments and stuff.

[575] Yeah, yeah.

[576] My view is, if you were devoted to the American experiment of a journey toward a more perfect union, however imperfect you may have been, then you should be commemorated if you decide on other merits in public places.

[577] But if you were taking up arms against the order that actually produced the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, that produced the Civil Rights Act, that produced the country that we still, for all of our unhappiness we want to defend, then you shouldn't.

[578] So if Robert Lee, it had his way, there would not have been a 13th, 14th, or 15th Amendment.

[579] And so you want to put him on a courthouse lawn?

[580] I don't quite see that.

[581] You know, there was a fairly reasonable constitution in Alabama from 1866 to 1901.

[582] 1901, they got back together.

[583] They re -legislated white supremacy.

[584] And really, 1900 to about 1929, I think is the period that's most like ours in that sense.

[585] a lot of immigration, a lot of reaction to immigration, the refounding of the Klan, the founding of the NAACP to try to fight back against Jim Crow, the narrow victory for suffrage in 1920, Wilson outlawing civil dissent during the First World War.

[586] There's a lot in that period that I think is unfolding and echoing even now.

[587] Now, your fascination with George Herbert Walker Bush, it makes sense because now I know you had a poster of him at a young age.

[588] I'll tell you, one thing here, Ellen posts a picture with George W. Bush.

[589] Yeah.

[590] And people go crazy in there saying he's guilty of war crimes and everything.

[591] Here's my limited experience.

[592] I went to a resort in Africa.

[593] We went during the rainy season.

[594] It was completely closed down, this wonderful place, Singita, my wife and I. and we got to hang with all the people that worked there because there was no other people.

[595] And they were telling us about all these amazing people that had come through.

[596] Like Bill Gates had been there a couple months before and rented out the whole place.

[597] They're just going through lists after list.

[598] And these guys, independently, six or seven guys told me this.

[599] I said, you know who the coolest guests we ever had was, was George Bush?

[600] He sat with us every night and chatted till late at night.

[601] He was just the most friendly, likable guests we've ever had.

[602] And, of course, I was politically opposed to him.

[603] Is this the father or the son?

[604] The son, the son.

[605] And I just thought, oh, yeah, you know what?

[606] The guy's a nice guy.

[607] You want to know how someone really is?

[608] Talk to the staff at a hotel.

[609] If you're their favorite person that's ever come through, that says something about you.

[610] Absolutely right.

[611] You know, I met the senior president Bush in 98.

[612] So I was in college through most of senior president Bush's term.

[613] And like you, I think my roommate was a guy from Lynchburg, Tennessee, named Jack Daniels.

[614] And so I was a little fuzzy on the Gulf War.

[615] I had this very 1992 vision of Bush as Dana Carvey.

[616] Yeah.

[617] And at a touch and I'd been around him for about 20 minutes when I thought, oh, this is why he became president.

[618] Because in a tumultuous, turbulent, and fallen world, he communicated this kind of ineffable sense that, you know what, if there are tough decisions to be made about war and peace, I'm a pretty good bet.

[619] Yeah.

[620] That he communicated that sense.

[621] Now, this is the father.

[622] And one of the things that fascinated me was how in a popular government, in a media -saturated age, there could be such a gulf between the way he was.

[623] and the way even someone like me who spends a lot of time thinking and reading about this stuff could have such a different view.

[624] So one of the reasons I wanted to do the book was to try to explain that.

[625] George W. Bush, I met him when he was running for president, but got to know him really at the end right when he left office.

[626] And I was in the home stretch of the book about his dad.

[627] And he was very generous.

[628] He was, you know, he was skeptical.

[629] I'd been at a magazine that had called his father a wimp famously in 1988 that he saw me as this left lefty media figure but he he answered every question what you saw was what you got and maybe you wanted to see something else and maybe you wanted to get something else but he has this capacity better than almost anyone i've ever known including real people to ask the hard question to address the elephant in the room.

[630] Well, he's got a charm about him, right?

[631] That was kind of made him Teflon -y in that way?

[632] Yeah.

[633] Well, it's tricky to say it's Teflon, though, because he left with a 21 % approval rating, right?

[634] So 79 % of the country.

[635] We forget now, because now everyone looks back at him and is like, oh, he was great, but ever, no one.

[636] Oh, no. He gave rise to the first black president.

[637] He was, yeah, universally.

[638] People were disappointed.

[639] But this is why there's a. difference between journalism and history because I published the book about his father 20 years after he became president because that's about the earliest that you can make a considered judgment.

[640] So here's a great example, ripped from the headlines of this.

[641] If you were writing a book about George W. Bush, and let's say you had published it in the fall of 2019, I bet you a box of cigars that the word pandemic would not have been in the index.

[642] Today, he looks far -seeing.

[643] He pulled together a response manual.

[644] We didn't pay any attention to it.

[645] But it's what makes what I do to me fascinating is things that you might not have even taken note of in one moment loom incredibly large the next.

[646] it's one sign of how complicated the presidency is.

[647] Arguably, the most important thing Bush 41 did domestically was something that passed by with very little debate, which was the Americans with Disabilities Act.

[648] Almost every building in America has George Herbert Walker Bush's thumbprint on it.

[649] Because a Republican president in our lifetimes signed a big government bill that ordered every building in America to be different and it was signed in the fall of 1990, which is right after Saddam had invaded Kuwait, nobody paid much attention to it.

[650] In his mind, it was about fair play.

[651] And part of what the presidency does is it touches on all these aspects of life.

[652] And in some ages, you notice it, in some ages you don't.

[653] And the point of these debates is to go to your point.

[654] I mean, W .A. looks very, very good.

[655] right now.

[656] Harry Truman, the same thing happened to Truman.

[657] They all want what happened to Truman to happen to them.

[658] Truman left Washington in January of 1953 with about a 25 % approval rating.

[659] All because of some scandals, nobody, even I can't remember.

[660] Even the dorks can't remember.

[661] But as the decades went by, a couple of things happened.

[662] It turned out that containment worked.

[663] NATO was important.

[664] The Marshall Plan paid off.

[665] and through Vietnam and into Watergate, it turned out we kind of liked presidents who were really blunt.

[666] Okay, I want to talk about your new book, The Hope of Glory, Reflections on the Last Words of Jesus from the Cross.

[667] Now, before we even launch into that, what I'm trying to, as I try to do, which is a bad habit, but I do it, is I'm trying to draw a conclusion.

[668] It seems to me that you straddle a little bit of left and right, and I don't think it's an accident you live in Nashville, which I always get a good vibe down there.

[669] I also do in Austin.

[670] I always say about Austin, that's my city.

[671] It's a liberal hillbilly.

[672] So it's like, you're still on a truck, but you know, you want gay folks to get married.

[673] That's basically me in a nutshell.

[674] And I get that vibe in Tennessee a bit.

[675] There's like a nice contingent of kind of some straddle.

[676] You wear tattoos to the gay wedding.

[677] Yeah, I got it.

[678] Right, right, right, right.

[679] So are you a straddler at all?

[680] Do you find that you're not fitting neatly into a box or are you one or the other?

[681] No, I don't fit into it.

[682] I don't.

[683] No, I have voted for presidents of both parties.

[684] I plan to continue to, maybe because of the way I spend my days, I just don't believe anyone or any side has a monopoly on insight.

[685] Yeah, I agree.

[686] And that's not to say that somehow another, because I'm not a partisan, I therefore know more than partisan.

[687] I don't mean that.

[688] The system doesn't work if you don't have these forces and counter forces pulling on each other.

[689] I'm very much in the Reinhold Niebuhr, history is tragic, best we can do is 51%.

[690] Theodore Parker, which is a line that King used, and Obama used, the arc of a moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

[691] If you don't have people who are insisting that history swerve, we're not going to make it bend at all.

[692] Right.

[693] So if you don't have Bernie Sanders and John Lewis, and dare I say it, the folks on the right as well, then the dialectic doesn't work.

[694] My own view is I try to be data driven.

[695] I think that there's a totally understandable, but a largely irresponsible shorthand that people fall into, that, you know, one party's virtuous and the other party's not.

[696] and I just don't I don't think the facts support that yeah well I got to say like you watch the McCain document around yeah but but I was like my god here's a guy who I didn't agree with uh on a single thing and I can see and feel viscerally the integrity and I admire it in the times where he stood up against his own group you know you can't deny that yeah Senator McCain is a great example of this I think president Bush senior president Bush is you know he gave up his presidency because of an economic decision he made in the fall of 1990.

[697] When he decided to break the no new taxes pledge, he told his diary.

[698] He said, I'm going to be dead meat.

[699] But it's the right thing to do.

[700] And he had Gingrich and all these people pounding on him.

[701] But he really believed if he did the right thing, people like us and the fullness of time would come to appreciate it.

[702] And I'm delighted, you know, he sort of lived to see that.

[703] Yeah, yeah.

[704] Okay.

[705] So I bring up the straddling point because there is a stereotype where if you've written a book about Jesus and you're living in Tennessee, I'm thinking one thing.

[706] But then I know how interested you are in the civil rights movement.

[707] And then I go, okay, that's interesting.

[708] So what drew you to the hope of glory?

[709] Well, I was educated entirely in religious schools.

[710] So I went to an Episcopal Montessori, which is kind of redundant, I guess, when you think about it.

[711] A nominally Protestant.

[712] secondary school and an Episcopal college.

[713] I think that, and this is speaking both from a faith and a historical perspective, I think if you're making a list, to go back to our list mode, of the most important things that have happened in recorded history, what happened in Jerusalem around the year 33 is as important, if not more so, than almost anything else, including Gutenberg, including the Enlightenment, including World War II, including the splitting of the atom, the weaponizing of science.

[714] It determines how we tell time, right?

[715] And you can believe what you want to believe, but we know more about Jesus historically than we know about Socrates.

[716] The Gospels are not biographies.

[717] It's not like McCullough got the interview.

[718] They were written for evangelistic purposes, but that doesn't mean they're not useful historically.

[719] And I, the very practical reason I did it is years ago, seven, eight years ago, when we lived in New York, went to a wonderful parish, St. Thomas Fifth Avenue, and we were regulars.

[720] And the rector asked me to do, it's a three -hour service on Good Friday where you give seven sermons in one's thing.

[721] So it's like Guantanamo for believers.

[722] Yeah, this is.

[723] You pound them over the head.

[724] I was going to compare it to maybe seal week.

[725] Yeah, exactly.

[726] Exactly.

[727] Paris Island.

[728] So I delivered them.

[729] And it's funny, talk about a straddle.

[730] So my view, and this very much goes to what we were talking about, about if I produce something that I think has integrity, you take it or you leave it.

[731] This is fully within that zone.

[732] I believe that the Christian story continues to shape us in fundamental ways.

[733] It has a greater capacity to do.

[734] good than evil if we do it right.

[735] And if you concede the story, if you see the story to what we think of broadly as the religious right in this country, then you are unilaterally disarming and handing this great tradition over to people who actually are not about the sermon on the Mount, but are really just about the Supreme Court.

[736] And so as someone who would call it, call myself basically a kind of progressive believer, I decline to hand Jesus over to Franklin Graham and the rest of them.

[737] You know, what's funny is we're very critical, myself included, on these quote, moderate Muslims.

[738] We want them to be very vocal against the extremists, right?

[739] We're expecting them to stand up and say, no, no, no, no, they do not represent us.

[740] Yet there doesn't to be a ton of responsibility laid on Christians to stand up, and I'm not a Christian, but I am aware of the messaging and doesn't seem to sync up neatly with any of the messaging that I feel like is what made the book sustainable for 2 ,000 years to begin with.

[741] Amen, brother.

[742] I mean, yes, that's exactly what I'm saying.

[743] There's a fourth century, a Roman writer noted Christians who have just come to power when Constantine converted.

[744] And the writer said, but surely there's not simply one path to so great a truth.

[745] And I totally believe that.

[746] Right.

[747] But this is my path.

[748] It itself evidently is politically, historically, historically, culturally important to our allocation of resources and our dispositions of heart and mind in this country.

[749] Uh -huh.

[750] And so the reason I did this was to say, I think you can accept the truth.

[751] of this story without joining blindly one temporal political faction or another.

[752] All the mysticism and supernatural elements aside, I'll go, okay, I have to acknowledge there was this guy, Jesus Christos or whatever.

[753] He was killed.

[754] Pontius Pilate did order that.

[755] God, this guy's famous.

[756] I mean, for 2 ,000 years, if I just look at the fact, like, could there ever be a figure like that?

[757] I mean, I don't think.

[758] for any number of reasons there couldn't be ever again.

[759] It is astounding that one human being, regardless, is being talked about today in a computer.

[760] What do you think it is about the timing of it, the context that created this kind of indelible story?

[761] This will be a countercultural answer.

[762] Okay, good.

[763] The reason we are talking about him is because that handful of believers were willing to die because they actually believed he got back up.

[764] If he had simply been another rabbi or prophet who had been martyred and left in a tomb, both literally and figuratively, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

[765] The radical nature of the resurrection story, which was so real to them, that they were willing to be persecuted, chased out of Jerusalem, stoned, changed the, the trajectory of that religious narrative and made it both a cultural and a historical one.

[766] The reason I think it's better than even that it really happened is because why on God's earth, so to speak, would you make up something so stupid?

[767] Well, you don't do it.

[768] Well, you don't.

[769] No, no, no. First of all, they tell the story in the weakest possible way.

[770] The women come and tell them.

[771] Women couldn't testify.

[772] The last person, his mouth you would put testimony in that you wanted to be accepted to the broader world would be a woman in the Middle East of the first century.

[773] They dismissed it as an idle tale.

[774] And I just think, why on earth would you, as a believer, would you tell the story in a way that so openly undermined your authority if there weren't some historical basis?

[775] because that's the way it really happened.

[776] Well, I can easily come up with a motive.

[777] So I've got this group of people.

[778] They followed this man. The man said he was God.

[779] If the God is just ordered to be killed by Pontius Pilate, and he just sits there and he's dead.

[780] It didn't prove to be a God.

[781] So it's a very simple conspiracy for me to launch to go like, hey, we know he was God.

[782] Now, it didn't shake out.

[783] He doesn't seem very Godlike.

[784] He was just killed by men.

[785] Now, if he had risen, that would confirm.

[786] I mean, right, you can see the motive for constructing that he did something that only a God could do.

[787] But nobody, I see what you're saying, but if you, there's some terrific scholarship on this.

[788] And mine is not terrific scholarship on it.

[789] But I've read the terrific scholarship.

[790] It's like watching an exercise video, but not exercising.

[791] Yeah, yeah.

[792] It just, nobody was looking for a human atoning resurrected sacrifice.

[793] So they weren't speaking in any vernacular.

[794] that would have been plausible.

[795] Sure.

[796] It was a one -off.

[797] It was a total one -off.

[798] Stay tuned for more armchair expert, if you dare.

[799] There was a big book in the mid -century, mid -20th century, about Jesus the salesman.

[800] The argument was the best salesman ever was, you know, I think it's riveting.

[801] I think it's, you know, we could spend the next three years talking about this.

[802] I think that the durability of the Christian story, A, owes an immense amount to the durability and power of the story of Israel, which is entirely about tragedy and endurance.

[803] But it also requires a kind of assent to tragedy because, so if all this is true, why pick this guy on the edge of an empire?

[804] and then go deep again.

[805] So he goes deep for, in biblical terms, 6 ,000 years.

[806] And now he's been deep again for 2 ,000.

[807] Uh -huh.

[808] So, well, you know, what is it that pulls him up?

[809] Yeah.

[810] It's like, you know, it's Jesus is Bigfoot, you know.

[811] Yeah.

[812] Now, here's my issue with it.

[813] It's like the messaging is so profound.

[814] I do think what he was saying, love your enemy, turn the other cheek, these are incredibly beautiful and profound sentiments that he should be celebrated for.

[815] Do we even need the mystical aspect of it for him to just be an incredible philosopher that once live like Socrates or Plato?

[816] I mean, could his message just be that profound that that was worthy of being passed along generation to generation?

[817] Yes, intellectually, clinically, what you just said, of course.

[818] but the reason we're talking about his articulation of what is not a particularly original message is because of the extraordinary story right and so your book is really it's about the last thing he said it's a it's a spiritual exercise there are seven it started the middle ages there are seven sentences that the church believes he spoke from the cross you know if you want to be absolutely historically rigorous, very hard to talk when you're being crucified.

[819] I would imagine, yeah.

[820] Particularly in good King James English, you know.

[821] I don't know how you say, oh, shit, how can this be over in Elizabethan tones?

[822] But yeah, it's Father, forgive them for they know what they do.

[823] So I immediately, that's the first one, I immediately take issue with it because that doesn't make any sense.

[824] Because they know what they did, right?

[825] They know what they did.

[826] And if it's part of a salvation history that this has to happen, everybody should be happy about what they're doing, right?

[827] So the first chapter of this book is we're starting with a problem.

[828] Everything you and I have said the last seven minutes, that the gospels are problematic, the story is problematic.

[829] This is not a Jesus loves me, yes, I know for the Bible tells me so, but it is at the heart of Western history.

[830] It is the story that has affected, shaped, change.

[831] more lives than any other, I think.

[832] And so my message in this is a lot of people are going to gather at the foot of the cross, no matter what.

[833] So let's take advantage of that.

[834] Yeah.

[835] Try to understand what happened, why we think what happened may or may not have happened, and apply those lessons as well as we can.

[836] I think that the secular tendency to try to move religion out of the public square is, again, a kind of fool's errand.

[837] At the same time, I think the Fox News thing about, oh, Christianity's under assault, is genuinely insane.

[838] Right.

[839] There's no denying the impact of this faith on Western civilization and then, you know, collaterally there out.

[840] So my argument is let's understand it.

[841] Yeah.

[842] understand it.

[843] Now, here's my question, and this is where we go all the way back to you having a 12 -year -old daughter.

[844] So I was in an AA meeting recently.

[845] I just became aware out of nowhere, because I don't spend a lot of time in churches, how little role there is for women in the religion.

[846] And I would see that as a real hurdle going forward where, you know, God's a man and God created a son.

[847] He didn't send a daughter back.

[848] And then all the apostles are male.

[849] I mean, you really have his mom and then you have the hooker, Mary Magdalene, how does a young girl, well, Eve, but she fucked everything up.

[850] Yeah, she ruined.

[851] She was born from his rib and then tempted him.

[852] You know, I'm curious how Christianity incorporates women.

[853] You know, do you see that as an issue?

[854] Like, if I was a young girl and I'm sitting there being explained this whole religion, I'm kind of like, well, what, what the hell did we do?

[855] And what's my role in this?

[856] And why, why would I join something that seems to have ignored my existence.

[857] Right.

[858] One fact check just for you.

[859] Mary Magdalene actually was not the prostitute.

[860] The woman at the well was a prostitute.

[861] Mary Magdalene was basically bankrolling Jesus.

[862] Oh, okay.

[863] I'm here to, I'm here to defend the very few women there are.

[864] I come from a part of the forest that actually is the antidote to what, the very reasonable question you raise.

[865] The Episcopal Church now, I don't know what percentage.

[866] it is, but a huge percentage of the clergy is female.

[867] We were early -ish on that in terms of from the 70s forward.

[868] I don't think my daughters feel gender alienated, but that's probably because of our particular tradition.

[869] Well, I can just, can I own my own side?

[870] So I work in Hollywood.

[871] If you look at all of our movies, all of our movies up until 20 years ago are written by men, and lo and behold, males are the leads.

[872] And even if you look at like the days of wine and roses, I mean, it's ostensibly about a woman dealing with alcoholism.

[873] But no, it's really about Jack Lemon having to deal with his wife with alcoholism.

[874] And so it just, it illustrates the nature of people write what they know.

[875] And if the only people writing are men, these are the stories you get.

[876] Yep.

[877] Yep.

[878] I think that's the energy behind your question is widely shared.

[879] I think it's, you know, I go back to the political realm on this.

[880] My girls go to a girl's school, and I was the post -election day speaker in 2016.

[881] So you can imagine that the draft had to be redone on the fly.

[882] Last minute, I would imagine.

[883] So I was going to show up and declare, I was going to wear a white suit, it was going to be the new era, the land of the – And, of course, and the iconography of power is.

[884] where I land on this.

[885] We do not know, even now 13 years in, the significance of Barack Obama in the White House for the iconography of power.

[886] As soon as we can get a woman there.

[887] Yeah.

[888] And I don't want to say this, I almost don't care who it is.

[889] Yeah, yeah, almost.

[890] Yeah, we have to know.

[891] A caveat, yeah.

[892] A caveat, yeah.

[893] By and large.

[894] Not the gal from Alaska, but yeah, continue.

[895] Exactly, exactly.

[896] John McCain.

[897] Jane's only big mistake.

[898] I've often thought that by late October, he wished he'd been back at Hanoi.

[899] Because they were nicer to him than she was.

[900] So, yeah, you're right.

[901] It requires a deeply conscious thing.

[902] I find myself, so my son has a lot of the same interests I do, and he's the oldest.

[903] And I have to watch, you know, when we're at dinner that he and I don't just, you know, run off talking about, you know, the future of NATO, A, because no one cares, but, but, you know, that you, that you don't somehow or another, I don't know, this is the right word, genderize conversation and topics.

[904] Yeah.

[905] And thus power.

[906] Yeah, yeah.

[907] And so it's a matter of, it's just vigilance.

[908] Yeah.

[909] I agree.

[910] Out of just curiosity and having to see oneself in a story, I think of it.

[911] Not even like I'm judging everyone in the past.

[912] You know, I have no acts to grind.

[913] I just more like in a very selfishly motivated incentivized.

[914] Why, you know, how do you incorporate gales into something that is so historic and is what it is?

[915] Well, I'm dealing with this right now in early American history because I am writing half a biography about Dolly Madison, who was the highest -ranking woman in American public life for.

[916] 16 years.

[917] I know nothing about Dolly Madison.

[918] I will take care of that.

[919] You may not be interested, but it will be available.

[920] Like Cal?

[921] Exactly.

[922] That's right.

[923] I see it my fridge.

[924] That's right.

[925] The literature of early feminist thought, you can master it, right.

[926] It's not huge.

[927] It's the vindication of the rights of women.

[928] It's a woman named Judas Sergeant Murray, who was an American journalist.

[929] So the issues you're raising are very much on my mind because I'm trying to, without making her into Betty Friedan in a hoops skirt, I am trying to try to understand if you were an educated woman in elite circles at the beginning of this continental national experience, what would you have seen as your role and what would you have seen as the possibilities of transcending it and I know the question I don't have the answer yet let's talk in six months I love it I love it well listen we we enjoy you so much on Bill Marr I can't wait for you to talk about that book with Bill oh yeah yeah no he loves he really appreciate the nicest thing in a passive aggressive way anyone's ever said to me I think it was on, I can't remember it was on the air or not.

[930] He was, he made some offhand comment about how idiotic, religious people were.

[931] And I said, well, you know, I'm religious.

[932] He said, yeah, that's what I can't figure out, because otherwise you seem fine.

[933] You know where that show is shot, don't you?

[934] It's in the Price's Right studio.

[935] Is it?

[936] Oh, I didn't know that.

[937] It's got that big wheel and all that.

[938] It's all crammed up against the wall.

[939] Oh.

[940] The gall, it's really hard to spend.

[941] Eric Holder and I tried to spin it once.

[942] It might have been locked.

[943] Shit.

[944] Maybe that was it.

[945] So I host a game show called Spin the Wheel, and the Wheel is five stories, and it weighs 40 tons.

[946] So obviously, no one can actually spin it, which became this whole thing.

[947] Once we started filming, it's like, there's nothing rewarding about someone just touching in it, then it takes off.

[948] So they have to kind of act like they're moving it, which no human could.

[949] And then when it spins, it's directly behind me, a five story.

[950] It's like the fucking Chicago World's Fair.

[951] And I'm waiting for it to just fall on me. It's coming.

[952] And I'm like, will it be Buster Keaton and I look like a comedic genius?

[953] Well, I land perfectly between a spoke or will it be, I will just disappear under it.

[954] Yeah, I think it's probably the latter.

[955] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[956] I've done the math on the wheel.

[957] There's more surface area than not surface area.

[958] Well, John.

[959] Yeah, John, what a pleasure talking to you.

[960] And please keep going on Bill Maher.

[961] and keep riding and keep thriving down there, Nashville.

[962] Next time you're here, let me know.

[963] All right.

[964] Great talking to, John.

[965] You too.

[966] See you.

[967] And now my favorite part of the show, the fact check with my soulmate Monica Padman.

[968] We were just again going over the whole phenomena with the Perrier can.

[969] Just rehashing it for fun.

[970] The longstanding pariet can.

[971] The one in my car that had flam in it.

[972] And then Dax took a sip of it and I started screaming.

[973] And I thought there must be booze in here.

[974] That's why she screamed so I don't get it in my mouth.

[975] Yeah.

[976] What's really funny is all those thoughts that we've now talked about for hours.

[977] Yeah.

[978] They all happened in two seconds because it was all straightened out.

[979] So quickly.

[980] It's true.

[981] But in that microsecond, I had like a whole world fantasy about your life as someone who drinks in the morning.

[982] and hides it in Perrier.

[983] And then I, of course, like, how do I feel about that?

[984] Yeah.

[985] That was evaluated all in, like, a nanosecond.

[986] Which is crazy.

[987] Do you think your nanosecond evaluation is accurate to how you really feel?

[988] Because real feelings take some time to process.

[989] Well, certainly, and they can evolve.

[990] But, yeah, you've never liked my feelings on it, which is so interesting because it's basically the feelings I would desire for you to have.

[991] have for me. Yeah, no. Yeah, it's like opposite.

[992] Opposite days.

[993] You said you wouldn't care.

[994] I said, I thought, well, that's what she's been doing and she's completely normal and seems to have no wreckage or unmanageability.

[995] So who am I to say?

[996] What is the right amount of alcohol and when you should drink it?

[997] Now, if you had like wreckage and problems, then that's a different conversation entirely.

[998] Yeah.

[999] But I know you and you don't have problems.

[1000] Yeah.

[1001] and wreckage and unmanageability.

[1002] So I was just like, oh, my goodness, she drinks in the morning and none of that stuff.

[1003] But obviously I have unmanageability if I'm drinking in the morning.

[1004] Like maybe you aren't seeing it, but that means there's something going.

[1005] I mean, you say addiction is just regulating your emotions.

[1006] Yeah.

[1007] So obviously I'm doing that if I'm drinking in the morning.

[1008] Yeah.

[1009] And out of a parakeet.

[1010] But I got to be honest, I don't know that I am unilibrating.

[1011] against addiction.

[1012] Well.

[1013] I think I'm unilaterally against people being unhappy, being miserable and demoralized and shame -ridden.

[1014] I'm against all those things.

[1015] But if you're some anomaly that, I guess Frank Sinatra, right?

[1016] That guy just woke up and he drank and he was drunk all the time and he loved it and he didn't care.

[1017] And it didn't seem to bother anyone.

[1018] I wasn't married to him, mind you.

[1019] Yeah.

[1020] I'm sure it bothered people.

[1021] Well, and I'm sure I'm sure he was not happy.

[1022] I have no clue.

[1023] I would guess.

[1024] Yeah.

[1025] You don't think Frank Sinatra was happy?

[1026] He seemed very happy.

[1027] He's good at pretending he was happy.

[1028] Most people in the public eye are good at pretending.

[1029] Now, what's interesting about that group is like Dean Martin, you could see, was an alcoholic.

[1030] Like, he had wreckage.

[1031] He was sloppy.

[1032] It really was affecting him.

[1033] And he looked demoralized and shame -ridden.

[1034] Right.

[1035] And it looked like it was hurting his life.

[1036] Right.

[1037] But I'm not ready to give that evaluation to Sinatra's life.

[1038] Okay.

[1039] I'm like, I'm open to those anomalies.

[1040] Yeah.

[1041] I don't have the type of wagging my finger.

[1042] Like, oh, you drink X amount.

[1043] It's this.

[1044] You don't have to, I mean, you don't know them so who cares.

[1045] But I think you should care.

[1046] I mean, this was my whole point.

[1047] It's someone in your life, who you love.

[1048] Yeah.

[1049] You should care about their well -being.

[1050] I do.

[1051] And that's a big red flag to their well -being.

[1052] It definitely deserves some follow -up questions, but I was open to the notion that it's not impacting you negatively in any way.

[1053] And what a weird anomaly I was witnessing.

[1054] Because I've not met anyone who drinks in the morning out of a pariet can.

[1055] No. Who's happy and improductive and not addled with shame.

[1056] There is shame if you're drinking out of a pariet can.

[1057] Well, you would just be drinking it out of a cup.

[1058] Well, that's a good point.

[1059] You're clearly hiding it.

[1060] But are you like hiding it going like, oh, these people are.

[1061] squares.

[1062] They don't understand.

[1063] I drink in the morning and it's fine.

[1064] Or, you know, it's like what version of it?

[1065] Also, just first, I mean, I was driving your children around.

[1066] So, like, you have to.

[1067] That's a big deal breaker for me. Yeah.

[1068] Someone, someone being drunk while driving my children, that's, I don't really care if you have shame or demoralized or any of that.

[1069] Yeah, that's, that's a no -go for me. Luckily, it was just phlegm.

[1070] Good old -fashioned phlegm.

[1071] I want to add one more later to it.

[1072] What's funny is because this scenario is so extreme, right?

[1073] I've discovered alcohol in your pariette at 9 in the morning.

[1074] Yeah.

[1075] I think part of you then fills out all this other stuff because that's so crazy.

[1076] But in my world, everything's the same.

[1077] I know you.

[1078] I know all about you and your routine and your general well -being and your mental health.

[1079] I'm aware of all that.

[1080] Yeah.

[1081] I think when you do the fantasy where that was alcohol, there's a whole different Monica.

[1082] Well, there is.

[1083] But that's my point is I was living real time.

[1084] There wasn't another Monica.

[1085] I was with her.

[1086] So if the places were switched and I found something odd that you were hiding.

[1087] Uh -huh.

[1088] And you're still you.

[1089] Right.

[1090] I don't think like, oh, he just has this extra thing.

[1091] I'm like, oh, there's this whole.

[1092] whole area of his life that he's keeping secret.

[1093] Uh -huh.

[1094] That's a problem.

[1095] Uh -huh.

[1096] People don't keep secrets about things they're fine about.

[1097] Well, I'd say yes and no. People have secrets that like about how much money they make because they're aware of what it does to other people.

[1098] But that's not a secret.

[1099] That's just keeping something like, if someone asked how much money do you have, you'd probably answer.

[1100] Right.

[1101] Like, I don't do this, but if I was someone who took, like, I read Michael Pollan's book.

[1102] and I loved it, and I did a hero dose of mushrooms once a week.

[1103] I might be clever enough not to share that info with people that that would scare, but that doesn't mean that I feel shame about it.

[1104] The people that it would scare the people that care about you the most.

[1105] So the idea that you're keeping that from them so that you can do this thing private by yourself or have this thing is not good.

[1106] Well, secrets that give you shame.

[1107] It's not good.

[1108] I think we could agree on that part.

[1109] We could build from there.

[1110] Well, sure.

[1111] That seems obvious.

[1112] Yeah.

[1113] But I think there's secrets that don't give you shame.

[1114] There's just stuff that's not public knowledge that doesn't give you shame.

[1115] I don't know that I agree.

[1116] Oh, really?

[1117] And also, I'm surprised that you feel that because you wear honesty as like such a cloak.

[1118] But I guess I'm giving you an example and you don't agree with that example.

[1119] But for me, it's a real example, which is I wouldn't want to tell someone how much money I make.

[1120] Yeah.

[1121] Sure.

[1122] There's a bunch of stuff I may choose to not share with people because I'm aware of the other person.

[1123] I know that there are a variable in the equation.

[1124] So I have to consider that other variable because there's a lot of things that, like, I don't have shame about.

[1125] I'm happy to let 10 people know, but I don't want to tell a 10 person that's going to let 1 ,000 people know.

[1126] I might not want 1 ,000 people to know.

[1127] Sure.

[1128] But I might be very comfortable with 10 people knowing.

[1129] Yeah, yeah, that's fine.

[1130] I'm not saying everybody should know everything about everyone.

[1131] Right.

[1132] But, like, I don't think the money thing is the same as the shrooms.

[1133] Because the money thing, there's this whole, like, societal layer on top.

[1134] Like, you shouldn't talk about money that everyone's comparing money.

[1135] Like, you are thinking about the other person.

[1136] And the shrooms one, you're thinking about the other person, but in relation to you.

[1137] Well, I'm going, oh, this person, let's say it was, you know, Kristen's mother.

[1138] Uh -huh.

[1139] Who's traditional in many ways.

[1140] Yeah.

[1141] And I would go, there's no way I'm going to make her understand the value of mushrooms.

[1142] Right.

[1143] So I'm only putting something in front of her that she's only going to be judgmental of.

[1144] So why would I do that?

[1145] I don't need to tell her that.

[1146] I don't need to make her worry.

[1147] And I have a different opinion.

[1148] And I recognize I have different opinions than people in the world.

[1149] Like some activities scare people and some don't.

[1150] Like I ride motorcycles.

[1151] There are many women that text me. Like I can't believe Kristen let you do.

[1152] that like that's very scary to them they would that would be unacceptable that their husbands did it I totally get it that's their prerogative but you know we'll just never see it the same yeah but you wouldn't keep it a secret from them that you you like you feel totally fine and good about yourself that you ride motorcycles you wouldn't be like I'm gonna keep that a secret yes you're right about that but I'm saying have I established that there's these things that like people will never see eye to eye on yeah so then as you just you explore different things along those lines and For me, there can be gates of like, oh, five people know, 20 people know, a thousand people know, the world can know.

[1153] Yeah, I mean, I think you have to, you just have to be careful.

[1154] You have to really be policing yourself if you do that because you have to start thinking like, okay, the five people who I told about shrooms, are they the people who are giving me the shrooms, the people who are doing them with me, people who don't care by, enablers, exactly.

[1155] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[1156] If the people you're specifically leaving out are ones you're leaving out because they might say to you, that's a slippery slope.

[1157] I don't think you should do it.

[1158] And you just don't want to hear that.

[1159] Sure.

[1160] Well, that's a very specific thing.

[1161] And I think that's a big problem.

[1162] What?

[1163] If you were hiding it because you thought people might contradict what your opinion was on it, and you didn't want to be challenged on it.

[1164] Right, right.

[1165] Yeah.

[1166] I think that's like a specific thing.

[1167] Yeah.

[1168] But I can think of so many things.

[1169] Let's say I started acting 15 years earlier.

[1170] Uh -huh.

[1171] And I like to wear women's clothes.

[1172] Uh -huh.

[1173] Now, I might not have any shame about that.

[1174] Yeah.

[1175] And I might have told five people.

[1176] Yeah.

[1177] And I also might not have wanted the whole world to know because it would have affected my career.

[1178] And so there would be a secret that is a secret and yet it doesn't create shame.

[1179] I'm comfortable with it.

[1180] And yet I don't need everyone to lob on.

[1181] Yeah.

[1182] It's all specific to the example.

[1183] Because it's the history of the thing, right?

[1184] Like for shrooms with you, yeah, there's some fear around that.

[1185] Sure, of course.

[1186] And for you wearing women's clothes, there's no fear.

[1187] Right.

[1188] You know?

[1189] And so it depends, I guess, on each circumstance.

[1190] And with that, Perrier, I just think when something's so secretive, it generally means there's a reason why.

[1191] There is a reason for the clothes because it, because society is not there.

[1192] It would ruin your career.

[1193] That's the reason.

[1194] That makes total sense.

[1195] Yeah.

[1196] So what's the reason about me drinking alcohol in a paria can?

[1197] Like, we'd have to find out what that reason is and then decide whether that was healthy or not healthy.

[1198] Yeah, I really think it boils down to Dr. Alex, which is like, does it give you shame?

[1199] Is that, you know, is it secret and you feel shame about it?

[1200] I think that has to be the thing we're evaluating.

[1201] So, like, if I find out you were drinking and then you didn't feel shame and you're like, oh, yeah, yeah, I drink every morning.

[1202] And I was like, you didn't tell me that.

[1203] And I'm like, you didn't ask me that.

[1204] Right.

[1205] And then you were completely fine with it.

[1206] Yeah.

[1207] And you didn't care.

[1208] Yeah.

[1209] And then your life was exactly how you wanted it to be.

[1210] Yeah.

[1211] I just, I'm hesitant to say that one thing's bad.

[1212] Like any one thing is bad.

[1213] Some people can go do cocaine on their birthday weekend.

[1214] Yeah.

[1215] I can't.

[1216] Nope.

[1217] But that person that can do that and does that 15 times in their life, that, you know, I don't find that implicitly bad.

[1218] And I don't think anything's implicitly bad.

[1219] It's all in context, you know.

[1220] And it's all about the.

[1221] I think the consequences of the behavior.

[1222] Do you feel shitty?

[1223] Are you miserable?

[1224] Are you depressed?

[1225] Are you unaccountable?

[1226] You know, all these things we'd have to use to evaluate whether someone's thriving or not.

[1227] Yeah.

[1228] And you were thriving on all those things.

[1229] Yeah.

[1230] I guess it's tricky because, yeah, this just this conversation just gets so loopy because if I was drinking in the morning, there would be consequences.

[1231] There just would be.

[1232] You're right.

[1233] Yeah.

[1234] But what I had observed was there were no consequences.

[1235] And here was this, I just discovered that there's been alcohol this whole time and no consequences.

[1236] So it was just curious to me. Yes.

[1237] Yeah.

[1238] Well, anyway.

[1239] Good debate.

[1240] Okay.

[1241] John Meacham.

[1242] So he talks about the Gallup survey that surveyed the public about what was most important moments in the 20th century.

[1243] He said civil rights was fourth.

[1244] And then he said one was World War II.

[1245] was atomic bomb.

[1246] He couldn't remember three.

[1247] So I looked it up.

[1248] Okay.

[1249] So one is World War II.

[1250] Two is women gaining the right to vote in 1920.

[1251] Women's suffrage.

[1252] Three is the atomic bomb.

[1253] Oppenheimer.

[1254] Four is the Holocaust.

[1255] Nazis.

[1256] And five is the Civil Rights Act.

[1257] So he was wrong.

[1258] KKK.

[1259] Oh, oh boy.

[1260] Well, we were naming the antagonist in these.

[1261] Okay.

[1262] Oh, my God, by the way.

[1263] What?

[1264] The father and son that killed, the black guy jogging.

[1265] Ahmed Arbery.

[1266] So I just heard on social media, jogger gets killed by two white men, father and son.

[1267] I'm like, ugh, Jesus, fuck.

[1268] Then the New York Times posted the videos.

[1269] They edit together all these videos.

[1270] There's some dashboard thing.

[1271] There's some security video.

[1272] And I watched the video, and in the video, he's not jogging.

[1273] he goes into a house that's under construction and he's in there for like a half hour and the house had been broken in too many times before.

[1274] So the neighbors who have observed that the house has been broken into, they call 911 and then the neighbors are all kind of now talking.

[1275] You got one neighbor in a pickup truck and then you got the father and son that are on foot with guns.

[1276] And the truck blocks him off and he takes off running and then the truck circles run.

[1277] So now he's running from everyone.

[1278] And then somehow it gets where the truck is in front, and he's kind of caught.

[1279] So then he comes around and he starts punching the sun.

[1280] Okay.

[1281] And then the sun shoots him.

[1282] Okay.

[1283] So at first I was like, God, it's so much more complicated than a black kid went jogging and got shot.

[1284] It's a whole trespassing in the house.

[1285] They thought there was a robber.

[1286] They're telling him to stop.

[1287] He didn't stop.

[1288] The point is that when I watched the video, I was like, This is so complicated.

[1289] First of all, no one should ever get shot for going into a house that's under construction.

[1290] All that said, the thing just kept escalating.

[1291] You know what I'm saying?

[1292] And then they're yelling to stop.

[1293] They're on 911.

[1294] And then he starts punching the guy and he gets shot.

[1295] So I'm like, this thing is more complicated than it was being sold.

[1296] And then yesterday they posted a picture of the dad was at a KKK rally four years ago.

[1297] He's photographed at a KKK rally.

[1298] So then it goes like, okay, now it, it's just so complicated.

[1299] Now it's...

[1300] It's not, though.

[1301] Like, a white kid who trespassed is not getting shot.

[1302] Doesn't matter what they do.

[1303] Doesn't matter who they punch.

[1304] They're not getting shot.

[1305] Well, hold on.

[1306] Hold on.

[1307] I don't know that I agree.

[1308] At least where I'm from where you have, like, really low -income white people who are stealing ship from houses under construction.

[1309] and you do have people intervening and trying to, like, get the cops there.

[1310] And then if the white trash kid starts swinging at one of the guys and the guy's got a gun.

[1311] Now, what you have to remember about that is it's not that someone would rather kill someone that get punched in the face.

[1312] It's that they're holding a gun.

[1313] They're getting punched.

[1314] So you must assume worst case scenario that that gun's going to now end up in that person's hand.

[1315] So at that point, you have to really think if this gun gets free and I'm punched out on the ground, I'm going to get killed.

[1316] I mean, the thing that sucks and what I'm saying is guns made the whole situation terrible.

[1317] So I'm not, they shouldn't have guns.

[1318] I want to be clear about that.

[1319] Yeah, yeah.

[1320] But if you're holding a gun and someone starts running at you and swings and punches you in the face, you have to assume they're trying to get your gun to kill you.

[1321] Maybe.

[1322] I believe, especially with all the people who fight all of this stuff all day long who want to act like this isn't an issue, they would be posting those videos all day.

[1323] And they don't exist.

[1324] of white kids doing the same thing and getting the same repercussions that they do not exist.

[1325] I don't know what he was doing in the house or whatever, but the fact that he's dead is terrible.

[1326] Is indicative of this whole issue.

[1327] It wouldn't have been the same way if it was a white kid.

[1328] I really, really believe that.

[1329] And I know what you mean, but I don't even think the white father and son would be as like ready to assume that it was something like they there these people who are racist are just ready to assume so they're very threatened yeah they're very threatened by any black folks but at the same time someone has broken into a house they're screaming stop they're on with the cops they're yelling don't run it is all just escalating very quickly it's different than like two white guys were like let's go find a black jogger and kill them it's just different there's there's some Sure.

[1330] I don't think many humans, truly, even the worst ones, unless they're actually psychopaths do what you just said, say, today let's go find someone to kill.

[1331] They don't do that.

[1332] Right.

[1333] Either do the cops who are shooting these.

[1334] No one's, it's, it doesn't matter.

[1335] It's still underlying this hatred and this division and this fear that causes these things to happen.

[1336] And I agree.

[1337] I mean, look, I've seen the videos, certainly of the cops, like, I think they were even on Stone Mountain, ironically enough, where the KKK staged their big comeback.

[1338] But there was some rally up there.

[1339] And a white dude is holding a handgun.

[1340] And he keeps pulling it and pointing it at the cop.

[1341] And the cop's like, put the gun down.

[1342] Stop.

[1343] Like, you're so right.

[1344] There's like, for whatever reason, that white cop's not afraid of that white guy pointing a gun at him.

[1345] Exactly.

[1346] And he's terrified of a black person pointing a gun at him.

[1347] So clearly there's like, yeah.

[1348] Yeah.

[1349] It's bad.

[1350] Civil rights.

[1351] Civil rights was five.

[1352] Five, okay.

[1353] Okay, six was World War I. Seven, landing a man on the moon.

[1354] Sure.

[1355] Eight, assassination of President Kennedy.

[1356] Nine, the fall of the Berlin Wall.

[1357] There's 18, but mine got cut off.

[1358] What a weird number.

[1359] Let's do the 18.

[1360] I know.

[1361] It doesn't make any sense.

[1362] At least if they did 19s, it was the 1900s.

[1363] If they did 20, it was the 20.

[1364] century.

[1365] You're right.

[1366] 18 makes zero sense.

[1367] Actually, maybe, let me make sure there's not more.

[1368] Not worry.

[1369] No, 18.

[1370] Okay, I'll keep going.

[1371] You want me to?

[1372] Yes, of course.

[1373] Okay.

[1374] So, nine was the Berlin Wall.

[1375] Ten is the Depression.

[1376] 11, the breakup of the Soviet Union.

[1377] 12, the Vietnam War.

[1378] 13, Charles Lindbergh's transatlantic flight.

[1379] 14, the launching of the Russian Sputnik satellites.

[1380] 15, the Korean War.

[1381] 16, the Persian Gulf War, 17, the impeachment of Bill Clinton.

[1382] Wow.

[1383] And 18, the Watergate scandal involving Nixon.

[1384] So this was pre -9 -11, clearly.

[1385] There's no way 9 -11 doesn't make that.

[1386] Yeah, this is up until year 2000.

[1387] Oh, okay, okay.

[1388] Yeah, what do you think your number one would be?

[1389] Most memorable events?

[1390] I guess is it most memorable or most important?

[1391] Oh, so that's...

[1392] I don't even like this question.

[1393] There's too much pressure because you got to get it right.

[1394] Because, like, let's say, I say advent of the internal combustion.

[1395] And then someone quickly go, like, really, more important civil rights?

[1396] And then I'll feel like an asshole.

[1397] Like, there's got to be some, I'm sure that I'll miss a bunch of humanitarian ones that I'll just feel like an asshole about.

[1398] All right.

[1399] That's fine.

[1400] But most memorable, memorable events is much easier for me. Not important, just memorable.

[1401] Uh -huh.

[1402] Probably 9 -11 and then Space Shuttle Challenger, which you weren't born yet.

[1403] No, but I know about it.

[1404] You know about it.

[1405] and every kid my age was watching it.

[1406] I know it's, but I think memorable because they were tragedies.

[1407] Oh, yeah.

[1408] Tragedies are very memorable.

[1409] As opposed to, like, the victories.

[1410] Like, I like that these, many, many are bad, but many are positive, like the women's right to vote and civil rights.

[1411] You know, all those.

[1412] The Berlin Wall.

[1413] Yeah.

[1414] Yeah, you're right.

[1415] Landing a man on the moon.

[1416] That's nice.

[1417] That's pretty high.

[1418] That's seven.

[1419] I would have thought I was higher.

[1420] Really?

[1421] Yeah, because when it happens, I mean, someone's a big deal.

[1422] left Earth our home.

[1423] I know.

[1424] And they literally went to this object that mankind's been looking at for 150 ,000 years.

[1425] I'd argue that's even more impressive than the Berlin Wall.

[1426] And more impressive than women's suffrage, I got to say.

[1427] No. I mean, we should just have women's suffrage.

[1428] As an accomplishment, exiting Earth, your host planet.

[1429] I think what's very sad is it's not as impressive.

[1430] It's not as hard to leave Earth.

[1431] than it is to change the minds of a whole country about a group of people.

[1432] That's true.

[1433] That's true.

[1434] I want to leave Earth for a sec. You do.

[1435] Regroup.

[1436] Do I?

[1437] I mean, the idea of going in a shuttle and stuff sounds awful.

[1438] Like, I have no desire to go into space, really.

[1439] But I just wonder what it would be like if I could just teleport up there.

[1440] Now, I wrote this movie, my friend Steve Brill and I wrote, for Paramount called Space Race.

[1441] And I had to learn a lot.

[1442] about space?

[1443] And then I read all these accounts from astronauts, and there's a high suicide rate among guys who have been up for a while.

[1444] Do you think it's chemical?

[1445] It could be?

[1446] I think something nihilistic happens when you exit and look back at that little rock that everyone's so busy on acting like everything's important.

[1447] I know.

[1448] You become literally the alien looking at the monkeys.

[1449] But why couldn't it be the opposite?

[1450] Why couldn't you come back and just be like?

[1451] Well, here's the.

[1452] The positive thing I want to add is that every one of those guys and gals who've been up there, almost all of them will say every time they had free time.

[1453] Like, they have all these chores up there, clearly.

[1454] Yeah.

[1455] But on all the off hours, they all just stare at Earth.

[1456] Like, it's supposed to be the most mesmerizing thing to watch.

[1457] And they never tire of it.

[1458] Because you can watch, right?

[1459] Because the Earth's spinning at a thousand miles an hour and you're traveling at 17 .5.

[1460] thousand miles an hour in orbit you're watching like oh there's egypt oh there's this oh there's and you're just watching you know it's supposed to be see it like that oh yeah and you can see the lights wow you can see urban areas you can they say you can see the wall the great wall of china from up like i can barely see it i can barely see it in an airplane how can we see it from mars or wherever we are the moon or orbit well when you orbit you're only i don't know how much miles you are up, I should remember.

[1461] But, you know, you're not that far away from Earth.

[1462] Yeah.

[1463] But even to get to the tip of Earth, the edge of Earth.

[1464] Of the flat earth.

[1465] Yeah.

[1466] Dive off.

[1467] Jump off.

[1468] Wow.

[1469] Mm -mm -mm -mm.

[1470] Wow.

[1471] Yeah, definitely memorable 9 -11 would be number one for me for memorability.

[1472] You know what's so crazy and cool is just, and he, mentioned this about presidents.

[1473] You can't really even begin to write biographies until like, what do you say?

[1474] Like 15 years after minimally.

[1475] Yeah.

[1476] Because you can't see the full scope yet.

[1477] And you don't see the things that they've planted that then come back around and using the coronavirus as a example.

[1478] Or Nixon and the EPA.

[1479] It is so crazy to think like this time is a very huge historical moment.

[1480] Like, this is going to go down as one of the biggest moments in history.

[1481] Totally unknown what the outcome is.

[1482] Yeah.

[1483] And will not be fully visible for 15 years.

[1484] Minimally.

[1485] It's cool.

[1486] Cool, go, go, go.

[1487] I mean, I bet also one that would make the list, definitely would make the list in my book.

[1488] And I think, in general, would be Michael Jackson's thriller video.

[1489] You weren't boring yet.

[1490] I don't think that's.

[1491] It's going to make the list.

[1492] You weren't born yet.

[1493] No, is Obama becoming president?

[1494] Yeah, I can remember exactly where I was standing in chick.

[1495] But I was the first time I voted.

[1496] Oh, yeah?

[1497] It was Obama 08.

[1498] Yeah.

[1499] Yeah.

[1500] It was exciting.

[1501] It was in Athens.

[1502] I was in, I was in Bora Bora.

[1503] Oh.

[1504] We were out of the country.

[1505] We were going to hear the results.

[1506] Did you do a mail -in?

[1507] Yeah.

[1508] Oh, wow.

[1509] Yeah, mail -in.

[1510] What was amazing is that there was some cast members.

[1511] members who did not want him to be voted.

[1512] And there were many who did.

[1513] So it was a quiet three days after.

[1514] Wow.

[1515] It's kind of like me getting the negative results back from my COVID test.

[1516] Whereas everyone's just kind of quiet.

[1517] Oh my God.

[1518] Yeah.

[1519] I mean, that also specifically that election and then this one coming up is going to be the same.

[1520] And this past one was where like it feels so.

[1521] intense, like your side.

[1522] Although maybe it always weighs.

[1523] I think it always does.

[1524] Really?

[1525] Yeah.

[1526] I don't.

[1527] I don't.

[1528] I think it's newish that there's this really extreme division.

[1529] Oh, well, yeah.

[1530] The division's much more extreme.

[1531] So it feels so much more intense when somebody wins and somebody loses.

[1532] But the first time I got to vote was for Clinton.

[1533] Yeah.

[1534] And I was just like.

[1535] So excited.

[1536] Aaron and I were so excited.

[1537] We called him our king.

[1538] Yeah.

[1539] He was King Clinton.

[1540] We wanted to worship him and make him the king.

[1541] And then we were so into Hillary Rodham Clinton and we'll call each other and we'd say, this is the Hillary, the Rodman, the Clintock.

[1542] We had like all these names for her.

[1543] Oh, wow.

[1544] Yeah.

[1545] Yeah, well, it's just fascinating to look back.

[1546] It is.

[1547] Okay.

[1548] So you said that you imagine he's one in five, 11 -year -olds who have written a letter to Ronald Reagan.

[1549] Okay.

[1550] So I can't check that back.

[1551] There's no way for me to know.

[1552] Okay.

[1553] He said he couldn't remember the day, but Reagan did an interview in the first.

[1554] fall of 79 a 60 minutes interview and I looked I couldn't find a 60 minutes interview in 79 he did one in 75 that was like a big deal okay and then he did another one later he did a few I think but I didn't see a 79 oh okay all right but maybe I'm wrong so he also used the quote the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice that's my favorite quote of all time it's really good.

[1555] I love it.

[1556] And you know, Obama had it on his floor in the oval office.

[1557] He did.

[1558] He had it sewed into the carpet.

[1559] Really?

[1560] Oh, my God.

[1561] That's cool.

[1562] I know.

[1563] Really kill.

[1564] If you're a Republican, you're like throwing up at this last 10 minutes.

[1565] We're just like jerking off talking like Clinton and Obama.

[1566] And then he had this thing on his carpet.

[1567] But I'm going to give credit to Republicans.

[1568] I hope, I hope can appreciate that.

[1569] quote, whether you're a Democrat or Republican.

[1570] You should hope that there's justice regardless.

[1571] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[1572] If you don't, I'm sorry, I don't like you.

[1573] You can be a Republican and have that same ideal.

[1574] Oh, God, yeah.

[1575] I'm sure most of them probably do.

[1576] I'm sure they all do.

[1577] So he said the Episcopal Church, which he's a part of, has more women.

[1578] 12 % of 11 ,000 Episcopal priests are female.

[1579] It's not horrible.

[1580] No, it's not horrible.

[1581] I wonder how many firefighters are women.

[1582] Can you quickly find that out?

[1583] Let's compare the Episcopalian Church to firefighting.

[1584] That's a good question.

[1585] I almost typed in firemen.

[1586] Well, of course.

[1587] That's what they're called.

[1588] No. Even when they're women.

[1589] You call her fire lady?

[1590] That's a great name.

[1591] Well, it sounds like a, like a superhero.

[1592] 8 .8%.

[1593] Okay, so the Episcopalian Church is blowing the.

[1594] Firefighters out of the water.

[1595] Okay, good.

[1596] By the way, though, I don't, I don't think.

[1597] that answers my question so great so there's there's a lot of humans involved but there's no deities there's no supernatural there's no role for women in that religion i'm sorry i i totally agree i got to do a little caveat about this eight percent okay firefighters in 2018 93 700 800 8 percent of the firefighters were female of the career firefighters four percent were female there were 78 500 volunteer firefighters who were female which was 11 percent of the total number of volunteer firefighters.

[1598] Well, that's a different category all together.

[1599] Yeah.

[1600] You know what volunteer firefighters are, right?

[1601] They were in my town.

[1602] You could volunteer.

[1603] They gave you a little light.

[1604] And if all hell broke loose and exceeded the capacity of the fire department, they'd call out the volunteers.

[1605] Oh, really?

[1606] Like my neighbor was a volunteer.

[1607] And then you get to put that light on his dash and speed over there and then help.

[1608] But he's not an employee.

[1609] Did he help?

[1610] Yeah.

[1611] Oh, we did.

[1612] Yeah.

[1613] Well, you have to go through some training.

[1614] They don't just give you the light and say, show up.

[1615] I got a little nervous.

[1616] panicking.

[1617] Yeah, exactly.

[1618] I'm here.

[1619] I don't know what to do.

[1620] There's fire everywhere.

[1621] Call the fire department.

[1622] You are the fire department.

[1623] Oh, boy.

[1624] Well, that was fun.

[1625] I always love when we have historians on.

[1626] Yeah, it's different.

[1627] It's different.

[1628] Yeah, it was fun.

[1629] Yeah.

[1630] I love you.

[1631] Love you.

[1632] Follow armchair expert on the Wondry app, Amazon music, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[1633] You can listen to every episode of Armchair Expert early and add free right now by joining Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts.

[1634] Before you go, tell us about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondry .com slash survey.