[SPEAKER_10]: Welcome to the lower hounds.

[SPEAKER_10]: This is our coverage of the American Revolution PBS documentary series by Ken Burns, which concluded a couple of weeks ago.

[SPEAKER_10]: This is our season wrap up podcast not unlike our other podcasts for the previous six episodes.

[SPEAKER_10]: We're going to treat this pretty casual and have a bit more of a wide ranging and less structured conversation.

[SPEAKER_10]: And with me today, or my co-host from the initial series, we did five episodes on that.

[SPEAKER_10]: So if you're just catching this for the first time, there are five roughly 30 to 45 minute episodes, sometimes a little longer, a little less in the in the system, [SPEAKER_10]: recorded usually the day after the the airing of the episode.

[SPEAKER_10]: But also with a say right, how are you doing, by the way?

[SPEAKER_07]: I'm fine.

[SPEAKER_07]: How are you?

[SPEAKER_10]: Good to see you.

[SPEAKER_10]: Thank you.

[SPEAKER_10]: You guys are getting a little snow down there.

[SPEAKER_10]: We are a little bit snow kind of freaking out.

[SPEAKER_10]: the inside recording a podcast.

[SPEAKER_03]: Oh sweet summer children.

[SPEAKER_10]: Yes, exactly.

[SPEAKER_09]: No, we get eight, eight inches here and we're like, okay, I gotta go shovel the blocker.

[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, Southerners sounds.

[SPEAKER_09]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_09]: Right.

[SPEAKER_10]: Well, we can get into that because it's serious.

[SPEAKER_10]: And with us joining us today is our very dear friend, our favorite token expert, and who do historian, American Revolutionary historian, you were a research librarian, and so it certainly falls within your remit, but didn't realize that you were such a history buff as well, Marilyn Arpequilla, good to see you, welcome back.

[SPEAKER_01]: Good to see you too, David.

[SPEAKER_10]: And I think this is the first time, I mean, Brian hasn't been on a lot of podcasts with a lot of people.

[SPEAKER_10]: So this is the first time that Brian and Marilyn are together.

[SPEAKER_09]: So kind of cool.

[SPEAKER_03]: You don't know what's going to hit you.

[SPEAKER_07]: That's right.

[SPEAKER_03]: That's right.

[SPEAKER_10]: So anyway, welcome to you both, Marilyn.

[SPEAKER_10]: I know we were chatting a little bit on the side and then a little bit on the meme channel in the discord.

[SPEAKER_10]: And for today, what I thought we do is just touch a little bit on each of your relevant backgrounds for the topic and the material at hand.

[SPEAKER_10]: And then we could do, you know, just sort of our assessments of [SPEAKER_10]: the series now that it's had time to settle with us each and just sort of where we are at.

[SPEAKER_10]: And then Marilyn in True, Laura Hound's fashion, in True Research Library in fashion.

[SPEAKER_10]: You've put together a, oh, it's pretty mild.

[SPEAKER_10]: It's only a four-page document single space type.

[SPEAKER_10]: I could ask Google for the word count here.

[SPEAKER_10]: These are your notes which we're going to use.

[SPEAKER_10]: Kind of as a rough outline, it's only 16, 15, 52.

[SPEAKER_10]: Come on, it's not bad.

[SPEAKER_03]: That's under 20 minutes in the top.

[SPEAKER_10]: So I think we're good.

[SPEAKER_10]: So we'll sort of use that as our outline and we'll just kind of have a really ranging conversation about the new Ken Burns documentary.

[SPEAKER_10]: obviously Ken Burns was not alone, and yet there's a whole team of people, 10 years in the making, not an inexpensive show to make, but a solid entry into his, what do we call it?

[SPEAKER_10]: What is a bibliography for a documentary film series?

[SPEAKER_10]: Folio portfolio.

[SPEAKER_10]: That's the word.

[SPEAKER_10]: That is filmography.

[SPEAKER_10]: Anyway, why don't we kick in Marilyn with you since you're our guest here?

[SPEAKER_10]: Why don't you give us a quick background that is helps you sort of help us understand where you're coming from from your perspective with American Revolutionary History, History in general, as an academic and as a research librarian?

[SPEAKER_03]: Sure.

[SPEAKER_03]: So my undergraduate degree of history, and English, I was mostly interested in medieval and in particular, [SPEAKER_03]: 15th century, England.

[SPEAKER_03]: So when I wanted to get a master's in history because it enhances a research librarians' value when the marketer I did 50 years ago, I don't know what the trends are these days.

[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, still does.

[SPEAKER_03]: Good, well that's good to know.

[SPEAKER_03]: Some things don't change, I guess.

[SPEAKER_03]: Anyway, I wanted to do a master's level degree that took one year with both top courses in a written thesis.

[SPEAKER_03]: And nothing in the states did that.

[SPEAKER_03]: And so I said, well, OK, you've always wanted to live there for a year.

[SPEAKER_03]: Let's check out the options in those lovely islands.

[SPEAKER_03]: And by process of donation, I wound up at University College of Wales.

[SPEAKER_03]: I would just do it if because they were the only one that did the kind of program that I wanted.

[SPEAKER_03]: And so I had the privilege of studying with some of the best well scholars of the day.

[SPEAKER_03]: because there's not all the many places that are focused specifically on medieval registry.

[SPEAKER_03]: And my thesis was power and lordship in the Welsh marches.

[SPEAKER_03]: Well, 1200 to the 1400s.

[SPEAKER_03]: So you would think that military history would be my bacon, but it really is it.

[SPEAKER_03]: I've always been interested in the cultural side.

[SPEAKER_03]: and only in the battles and so far as they shaped culture and dynasty and so forth.

[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, ask me about the marcher area and the marcher lordships and the development of power and authority from them to the hell over with a Welsh lord, not to the y'all.

[SPEAKER_03]: I might even remember some of it.

[SPEAKER_01]: I open up my thesis now and I think.

[SPEAKER_03]: I really wrote this.

[SPEAKER_01]: I can barely understand it.

[SPEAKER_10]: Well, it's good thing we're here to talk about American Revolution.

[SPEAKER_03]: Right.

[SPEAKER_03]: And I grew up in the revolutionary town in Connecticut.

[SPEAKER_03]: Right, called Wilton, and I was a docent at Lila House.

[SPEAKER_03]: It was as it was called then.

[SPEAKER_03]: It's got a completely new name, which I don't even remember, but I got the period Calico fabric that my mother made into a costume for me.

[SPEAKER_03]: And so it's just kind of always been there for me.

[SPEAKER_03]: I was born in New Jersey, but moved to Connecticut when I was six.

[SPEAKER_03]: So like more or less consider myself having grown up, Connecticut.

[SPEAKER_03]: And, you know, you just get a lot of it.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yep.

[SPEAKER_03]: Maybe not as much as if you live in Massachusetts where, you know, maybe you have to memorize the midnight ride to Paul Revere.

[SPEAKER_10]: Well, I can, I can interject something here really quickly.

[SPEAKER_10]: We, we'll talk about this later.

[SPEAKER_10]: We, my family, my wife and daughter, and I just started the John Adams series with Paul Giamati on HBO.

[SPEAKER_07]: It's really good.

[SPEAKER_10]: And my wife was, and because of the American Revolution and our daughter's interest in the topic [SPEAKER_10]: But we as a family watch the whole documentary, we recently did the Liberty Trail and she got her junior Ranger badge and all that kind of stuff.

[SPEAKER_10]: It's so great that my wife commented she was like, oh, I'm a native Bostoner, but there is just so much that.

[SPEAKER_10]: I walked around.

[SPEAKER_10]: I probably, you know, she's probably walked by Paul Revere's house a thousand times.

[SPEAKER_10]: Yeah, I never really clocked it.

[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, it happens.

[SPEAKER_07]: The locals are the last to learn.

[SPEAKER_07]: Right, exactly.

[SPEAKER_03]: But they are.

[SPEAKER_03]: My parents moved from the Midwest to Connecticut, which an hour outside New York City.

[SPEAKER_03]: And from very early on, we went in for musicals and for shopping and all these kinds of things, statue of liberty, all the, all the really exciting places, [SPEAKER_03]: And our neighbors would say, you're so good.

[SPEAKER_01]: We should really do that one of these days.

[SPEAKER_01]: And they never do because it's right there.

[SPEAKER_01]: So I can do it whenever I want.

[SPEAKER_01]: And you never do.

[SPEAKER_10]: No.

[SPEAKER_10]: So anyway, you grew up in New England a northeast town.

[SPEAKER_10]: You were a docent.

[SPEAKER_10]: You were a research librarian.

[SPEAKER_10]: You're a Tolkien scholar.

[SPEAKER_10]: You're a specialist in myth.

[SPEAKER_10]: And I think one of the things that we thought [SPEAKER_10]: when we thought about inviting you to join us for the wrap-up is this specifically this question of mythology.

[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_10]: And how real world, real factually based history and mythology overlap and interrelate to each other.

[SPEAKER_10]: And I think that was one of the things about this, [SPEAKER_10]: new series is I don't want to see myth busting but unpacking myth and illuminating the dimensionality so that it's not just a flat thing so I'll talk a little bit about your background with mythology and history and where you see those intersections.

[SPEAKER_03]: Well, mythology was a love.

[SPEAKER_03]: And I taught women in the myth and fairy tale, and mythology to some degree is also present.

[SPEAKER_03]: Tolkien.

[SPEAKER_03]: Because you were a research librarian at a college in...

Yeah.

[SPEAKER_03]: And I would do the introduction to research library classes for the history majors.

[SPEAKER_03]: And for the last 10 years I was there, they did genealogy.

[SPEAKER_03]: they were supposed to do genological research in their own family, which is one of the best ways of studying history because you're interested.

[SPEAKER_03]: You have a vested interest from the beginning and you learn that, oh, history is in, you know, documents and gosh, what a fantastic time we're living in now because so many of them aren't online.

[SPEAKER_05]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_03]: And you could see a facsimile of the letter that Princess Elizabeth wrote, [SPEAKER_03]: desperate to get through to her sister Mary before she was sent to the tower.

[SPEAKER_03]: And I've read for years and years that because there was left over paper at the bottom, she's scrolled out all, you know, she's drew all these lines and crosses to make sure that nobody would write anything in afterwards.

[SPEAKER_03]: Interesting.

[SPEAKER_03]: And you hear that story and you think, and you're right, well, that's really interesting.

[SPEAKER_03]: When you see that, even electronically, [SPEAKER_03]: This was a person who was in fear for her life, and she was a princess.

[SPEAKER_03]: She was the daughter of Henry Tutor.

[SPEAKER_03]: And that's the kind of thing that really grabs people's attention, and I think that's the beauty of Ken Burns, is that he's telling us the stories of these individuals, as part of the historical narrative, and the military, this and that, whatever, I mean, military history is a specialization and people will refight battles metaphorically as well as a discussion and reenacting.

[SPEAKER_03]: forever.

[SPEAKER_03]: And then why did they do this and didn't do this?

[SPEAKER_03]: But when you actually read the documents and you know read the stories from that time, you're still not getting a complete picture.

[SPEAKER_03]: But when you're somebody's writing a history, they need to summarize.

[SPEAKER_03]: They need to rethink that.

[SPEAKER_03]: Because otherwise you're just you know, the real history is everything.

[SPEAKER_03]: So that's where the discernment comes in.

[SPEAKER_03]: And of course, we're human beings and our discernment [SPEAKER_03]: is filtered through our experiences, our biases, our prejudices, and our preferences.

[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, and I'm reminded that that's a great summary, Marilyn.

[SPEAKER_07]: I remember the fact that I'll talk about my background in a moment when you're ready, but I'm reminded of, you know, the material that I was looking at with the founding fathers.

[SPEAKER_07]: a number of them knew that they would not be destroyed, sometimes they would say destroy them, but a lot of times they knew this was going to be after I die, so I'm going to be very careful with my words because I want to present a certain argument or a certain way, and I know it's going to it's going to come out even during my lifetime.

[SPEAKER_07]: So you're setting yourself up very carefully to [SPEAKER_03]: I think of John Adams, famous letter about, you know, the fourth of July will be, or the, except it was the third of July, for the second, you know, July 2nd, will be celebrated with prayers and celebrations and fireworks, and they took that directly out of his letter and put it into the Broadway play and then later the film, 1776.

[SPEAKER_03]: And he actually sings a song about, oh, I see fireworks.

[SPEAKER_03]: I see the gadget and all the bridge.

[SPEAKER_03]: So, you know, we know what bits and pieces will stick out.

[SPEAKER_03]: And he clearly knew because he was clever that way.

[SPEAKER_07]: Right.

[SPEAKER_07]: Absolutely.

[SPEAKER_10]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_10]: And there's, there's some great mythology to around the flag and all of these other things.

[SPEAKER_04]: Absolutely.

[SPEAKER_04]: It'll get down to that.

[SPEAKER_04]: It'll get down to that.

[SPEAKER_04]: I'm crushed.

[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_04]: Totally crushed.

[SPEAKER_04]: It was not the truth.

[SPEAKER_10]: We'll get down that road in a second.

[SPEAKER_04]: So anyway, hot takes.

[SPEAKER_04]: Well, let me switch over.

[SPEAKER_04]: I'm really curious about that.

[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, go Brian.

[SPEAKER_10]: Go ahead.

[SPEAKER_10]: We'll do some hot takes on the series.

[SPEAKER_10]: Brian, just give us a glimpse into your background and your current working life because you are a professional historian and not only professional, but you are a, that's your day job.

[SPEAKER_10]: Yeah, what you do, history.

[SPEAKER_10]: So tell us a little bit about that.

[SPEAKER_07]: Yes, so I ended up doing undergrad in philosophy and political science.

[SPEAKER_07]: I ended up minor in history and around that time, I got the museum bug.

[SPEAKER_07]: So I decided to get a master's in history, but also work at a presidential home that was in my backyard.

[SPEAKER_07]: And that was the James Garfield National Historic Site.

[SPEAKER_07]: So I pursued a master's, but that was actually my thesis was British history.

[SPEAKER_07]: I was very interested in empire and military history and political history, but I did always have an anchor for American history as well.

[SPEAKER_07]: And it was the museum side that kind of really pulled out the American history part of it.

[SPEAKER_07]: And then after I'm a master's, [SPEAKER_07]: you know, I worked as a park ranger for the Garfield site and the job prospects for a park ranger are difficult for decades and you know, especially nows.

[SPEAKER_07]: But the route would have been very difficult.

[SPEAKER_07]: So I actually ended up pivoting into library.

[SPEAKER_07]: It's unlike Marilyn.

[SPEAKER_07]: I ended up [SPEAKER_07]: getting a master's in library science and working academic institution, you know, while I was getting my master's doing reference work.

[SPEAKER_07]: And then from there I went over to Monticello and I was the research librarian at the Jefferson Library Monticello.

[SPEAKER_07]: So I worked for about three or four years there and I really got into the weeds with reference and people ask me all sorts of questions.

[SPEAKER_07]: I'm helping scholars find material.

[SPEAKER_07]: And then from there, I worked at another academic institution, like Marilyn, I taught the students history sources for the history classes.

[SPEAKER_07]: So students would come to me and we would have a class and would find material and I would show them the databases and all that good stuff.

[SPEAKER_07]: And that's always a joy to do.

[SPEAKER_07]: And then I ended up working at the University of Virginia where I'm presently working in presidential history, more of the modern era.

[SPEAKER_07]: where I am working in presidential oral history.

[SPEAKER_07]: So I do all the research leading up to an interview for the Miller Center, which has done oral history for every presence in St.

Gerald Ford.

[SPEAKER_07]: So we interview [SPEAKER_07]: campaign people, cabinet officers, White House staff, and so I do all the prep work for the actual interviews.

[SPEAKER_07]: So the materials go to the interview.

[SPEAKER_07]: We either go to my colleagues who are interviewing and we talk about oral history, which I think Marilyn and I on the side have talked about this idea of oral history and imperfect memory, right?

[SPEAKER_07]: And that's certainly a play, it's one tool for historians and students to learn about a president.

[SPEAKER_07]: So, yeah, it's just a bit.

[SPEAKER_10]: Interestingly enough, Brian about that oral history question, they just re-released a Beatles documentary on, I believe, it's Disney.

[SPEAKER_10]: I'm blanking the name of the documentary, but it was one that was around before that they've re-done mad at new footage and cleaned up a lot of the video in the audio and such.

[SPEAKER_10]: But what's interesting about it, there's no narrator or third-party interviewer, it's all the Beatles sort of through their own words.

[SPEAKER_10]: And what's interesting is the variations of a particular story when something happens, somebody remembers this or doesn't remember that.

[SPEAKER_10]: So, [SPEAKER_10]: it's imperfect and we could probably spend a good hour-long podcast talking with Nicole about how memories reconstructive actually they talked about it on one of their never-mind music podcasts how each time your neurons are activated right the signals are strengthened or weakened or misfire and different things build together so yeah it's an interesting [SPEAKER_10]: job to play oral history, loose, I mean, it's kind of a sleuthy thing, isn't it?

[SPEAKER_07]: In a way?

[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, it's an art form, you know, my colleague who's been doing it for gosh, I don't know, 20 or 30 years has, has got the questions kind of in their approach down pat.

[SPEAKER_07]: And, you know, for those who are, you know, there's so many varieties of oral histories, you know, the famous, one of the famous one was the, I think, WPA in the 1930s.

[SPEAKER_07]: Right.

[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_07]: The former slaves and children of slaves, and this one is directed through questions, [SPEAKER_07]: But it's about, you know, creating good stories, making people feel comfortable.

[SPEAKER_07]: Their folks are who we work with are political operatives.

[SPEAKER_07]: And so, you know, they have spin, they have spin, but they're also wondering, okay, how is this all going to work, when's it going to come out?

[SPEAKER_07]: Should I be able to live?

[SPEAKER_01]: My career is jeopardy.

[SPEAKER_01]: You know, yeah, yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: Is this going to prevent me from ever being hired in?

[SPEAKER_01]: Exactly.

[SPEAKER_07]: Oh, absolutely, 100% you got it.

[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, a lot of lots of them.

[SPEAKER_03]: how accurate is the is the recollection, even if you set aside deliberate spinning.

[SPEAKER_07]: Yes, exactly.

[SPEAKER_03]: Extractive.

[SPEAKER_03]: All we can do is tell what we remember now.

[SPEAKER_07]: Exactly.

[SPEAKER_07]: Exactly.

[SPEAKER_07]: And the longer you wait, the more that you tear it.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yes, exactly.

[SPEAKER_03]: Just like electronic tape, right?

[SPEAKER_07]: That's right.

[SPEAKER_03]: only so many neuron connections in there.

[SPEAKER_07]: That's right.

[SPEAKER_07]: That's right.

[SPEAKER_10]: So Marilyn, since we didn't have a chance to talk with you yet about the series overall and Brian and I didn't do a episode six recap.

[SPEAKER_10]: We were a little Arizona out and we figured we sort of wrap it up because the episode six does wrap up a lot of stuff.

[SPEAKER_10]: I think it serves up better to be in the wrap up podcast.

[SPEAKER_10]: But just from a very broad level and as a piece of television and a piece of documentary, you know, a visual recitation of a deeply of a period of history that has been deeply [SPEAKER_10]: And it just happened, because they didn't plan this, that it's, you know, next years are 250 of birthday as a nation and never mind the political conditions, just from a piece of media and a piece of history, a visual form of history, what did you take away from that?

[SPEAKER_10]: How do you feel about it?

[SPEAKER_03]: What are your just broad opinions?

[SPEAKER_03]: very, very thoughtful approach because I'm sure that we're far more things that they had to eliminate.

[SPEAKER_10]: We talked about that a lot on our partner coverage.

[SPEAKER_03]: Right, exactly.

[SPEAKER_03]: Exactly.

[SPEAKER_03]: And mostly it was very sobering to me because gosh, over and over and over, I kept thinking, wow, does that sound familiar?

[SPEAKER_03]: And you know, the biggest [SPEAKER_03]: this was not a new revolutionary or so much as it was a civil war.

[SPEAKER_03]: And I knew that because I had read Colin Woodard's excellent book called American Nations.

[SPEAKER_03]: And for any historian who likes American history, who hasn't read it yet, I really encourage you to do so.

[SPEAKER_03]: Because it explains so much.

[SPEAKER_03]: In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if Ernst had read it and was basing some of his approach to it.

[SPEAKER_03]: That there were these separate cultures up and down the eastern coast.

[SPEAKER_03]: And those cultures were replicated as each of those different colonies and later states people moved west from there and they just brought their cultural assumptions with them because you do, you know, there's always room for more in in your, you know, you're kind of still go wagon or your card or however you're getting their backpack and it's so important to remember that.

[SPEAKER_03]: I just, it was years ago when I first read it when a historical fiction book on America, that was the first time I encountered the notion of colonists and colonists' violence.

[SPEAKER_03]: And I'm like, what, what, but, you know.

[SPEAKER_03]: Great Britain is the enemy, surely.

[SPEAKER_03]: And of course, that's just not human biology.

[SPEAKER_10]: And that's the part of the mythology.

[SPEAKER_03]: Exactly.

[SPEAKER_10]: We were sort of a unified.

[SPEAKER_10]: We threw some tea in the harbor.

[SPEAKER_04]: Harbor and suddenly we're a unified rag tag bunch, but we've got heart.

[SPEAKER_04]: Exactly.

[SPEAKER_04]: We were going to overthrow the oppressors and we're for liberty and freedom and all these wonderful things.

[SPEAKER_04]: That's he Ross made us a new flag.

[SPEAKER_04]: That's the way we write it.

[SPEAKER_04]: Because all good.

[SPEAKER_04]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_04]: George Washington swam across the television.

[SPEAKER_04]: took a look up right so that's everybody around the shoot at him, even if it was Christmasy.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I love that he finally started to bring in the voices of tribal nations and to women.

[SPEAKER_03]: And a way that was more explicit, I think, than I've seen in that kind of production, certainly, but unless it was a book specifically focused on [SPEAKER_03]: You know, the Hanushone and their impact.

[SPEAKER_03]: Right.

[SPEAKER_04]: Right.

[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_03]: So those of you who are interested, wonderful New York Times are article by John McWater, yes.

[SPEAKER_03]: Who has some very interesting things to say about race and culture and woe knists and so many other things.

[SPEAKER_03]: He was the one who pointed out the whole Betsy Rossi.

[SPEAKER_03]: But at the same time, he also said, but look.

[SPEAKER_03]: what they showed us was a mirror to who we were then and you know kind of who we are now.

[SPEAKER_03]: The methods are different but the underlying motivations are pretty much the same and that was the sobering part for me.

[SPEAKER_03]: Um, I got a little tired of one battle after another, but hey, you know, it's a revolution.

[SPEAKER_03]: It's a revolution.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_03]: There was a reason why we did that.

[SPEAKER_03]: And, you know, they have more presumably reliable data on those kinds of things, though not necessarily, of course, as we know.

[SPEAKER_03]: Then on how people were thinking and feeling.

[SPEAKER_03]: But, and again, as always, Kenburn signature move, bring in as many letters and diaries as you can of individual voices.

[SPEAKER_03]: if you want to have famous actors reading them all, you know, so much to better.

[SPEAKER_03]: Something in which I initially chafed at.

[SPEAKER_10]: I know.

[SPEAKER_04]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_10]: And then I got some comments back.

[SPEAKER_10]: And then it's like, okay, let me, let me be reflect self-reflective and evaluate.

[SPEAKER_10]: And I, by the end, I was fine, then I needed a little game.

[SPEAKER_10]: Like, could I recognize the name of the act?

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_03]: If they wanted to make Thanos into George Washington, right?

[SPEAKER_10]: That's right.

[SPEAKER_10]: there's an accessibility question, and then there's this question of the politicist, the potential negative politicization.

[SPEAKER_10]: Can I say that word of the work?

[SPEAKER_10]: And I know from hearing some interviews with Ken Burns is that he's [SPEAKER_10]: working carefully, always, to use an Americanism to put the ball straight down over the plate, right?

[SPEAKER_10]: No curve balls, no fun, fun business with it, that he just wants to lay it right down the middle, and a comment that was shared with me was, is that there are [SPEAKER_10]: are people who if if it were too much too soon or or too obscure or too quote unquote woke or or or to not woke that you would end up alienating the people that you're actually trying to you're going to end up alienating a large swath of your [SPEAKER_10]: make informed decisions after that with the information.

[SPEAKER_10]: And in so much of the American Revolutionary story, for at least as a middle class American kid on the West Coast, I didn't know anything about how enslaved people were used or wanted to fight or offered their freedoms in cynical ways, but then, [SPEAKER_10]: returned to slavery after nothing about native tribes and their involvement one way or the other obviously we had a couple of famous women names thrown around in there but never really any real appreciation right it was revered and atoms and Washington and Hamilton and right the great [SPEAKER_06]: Oh yeah.

[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, and it's reflecting back.

[SPEAKER_07]: He's reflecting on how things have changed now where you have, you know, as the New York Times article that Marilyn shared with us, you know, said so well, it's not woke.

[SPEAKER_07]: It's just bringing in different voices that just weren't really studied or it's been studied, but not very much and it never percolated into the K through 12 teachers.

[SPEAKER_10]: It was never ruled into the mythology of the storytelling of history.

[SPEAKER_10]: Yes, right.

[SPEAKER_10]: Somebody else had to just need it and editorial choice about what to say and not to say.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_10]: It wasn't never not there.

[SPEAKER_10]: Anyway, Marilyn, sorry.

[SPEAKER_10]: We were receiving a little bit of...

No, no, this is fine.

[SPEAKER_03]: This moves right into this whole question of mythology and technology.

[SPEAKER_10]: Right.

[SPEAKER_03]: Because you decide what the story is for yourself.

[SPEAKER_03]: and that becomes the story, and will be tied to anybody who tries to tell you that your notion of history is not true.

[SPEAKER_03]: It's amazing how people will really [SPEAKER_03]: It'll really get up their noses when you try to tell them who actually that didn't happen.

[SPEAKER_10]: Right.

[SPEAKER_03]: And I think that phrase is very strongly associated with academic historians.

[SPEAKER_03]: Well, actually, or academic anybody.

[SPEAKER_03]: But it carries on to this very day in so many forms.

[SPEAKER_03]: What is evoked by the familiar paintings from over 200 years, particularly the portraits of the movers and shakers?

[SPEAKER_03]: for quite some time.

[SPEAKER_03]: And people need people to look up to, absolutely.

[SPEAKER_03]: No question about that.

[SPEAKER_03]: And they need to know that they were human beings with Peter Clay.

[SPEAKER_03]: One of my favorite lines, again, I'll go back to 1776 a lot.

[SPEAKER_03]: I'll apologize to him again, but it is a brilliant, early version of what Ken Burns has done here in a long reform.

[SPEAKER_03]: Then Franklin at one point says, what will future people think we were gods?

[SPEAKER_03]: We're just human beings doing our best against odds that a more generous God would not have allowed.

[SPEAKER_03]: Or not as imposed on us.

[SPEAKER_03]: And that is the kind of thing that I think I get.

[SPEAKER_03]: Anytime anybody wants to try and bust any icons, you better be wearing your best to suit.

[SPEAKER_03]: Because people will get angry.

[SPEAKER_10]: The, there was an interview with Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein, who was his, [SPEAKER_10]: One of the other main producers of this series, along with the rest of their team.

[SPEAKER_10]: And he was saying that he was on a C-span show.

[SPEAKER_10]: And C-span has these different phone lines that you can call in.

[SPEAKER_10]: Like, if you identify with this party or that party or no party, you know, I mean, should we, so we start putting our, [SPEAKER_10]: are political affiliations along with our gender pronouns.

[SPEAKER_10]: Sorry, I think that's really a big dummy cheek.

[SPEAKER_10]: But we get so tribal and identifiable, right?

[SPEAKER_10]: And they to the extent that they make separate phone lines for different party affiliation.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, yeah.

[SPEAKER_10]: And he says, you know, the phone calls would come in and people on post sites just railing out at him.

[SPEAKER_10]: And this is not even the American Revolution's I've just before.

[SPEAKER_10]: But then almost universally, if you need somebody in person or somebody would say of one of these calls, [SPEAKER_10]: But are we so admire your work or are we so love your work?

[SPEAKER_08]: Even though I think you're completely wrong.

[SPEAKER_08]: And you know, you're, you're completely in another solar system here, whatever you would tell my story.

[SPEAKER_10]: Yeah, exactly.

[SPEAKER_10]: But then that's what he's, he knows if he's getting it sort of an equal measure in all directions, then he's, he's getting it down the center.

[SPEAKER_10]: Because like you said, people are going to get a be in their ball in it about.

[SPEAKER_10]: their particular point of view or their particular personal connection to that history.

[SPEAKER_10]: It's not being told like every time I think Hamilton's name dropped twice in the in this series.

[SPEAKER_10]: That's right.

[SPEAKER_10]: And my daughter and I were like, where?

[SPEAKER_10]: Because she's a big Hamilton musical fan.

[SPEAKER_10]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_10]: And we kept waiting for it.

[SPEAKER_10]: it there.

[SPEAKER_10]: I mean, Lafayette only got a couple of mentions as well.

[SPEAKER_10]: So the point is that, yeah, we all have a personal stake in hearing these stories.

[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_07]: And and yeah, the Hamilton part, he gets right because during this time period, he [SPEAKER_07]: He is in the army.

[SPEAKER_07]: He's not part of the continental Congress.

[SPEAKER_07]: He's not helping Jefferson wording the Declaration of Independence.

[SPEAKER_07]: He's in the army.

[SPEAKER_07]: He's a junior officer.

[SPEAKER_07]: He's a junior officer.

[SPEAKER_07]: Exactly.

[SPEAKER_07]: It's not until, you know, right after, you know, another five, ten years before he becomes infamous.

[SPEAKER_07]: So he gets it right.

[SPEAKER_03]: He was one of the nation builders.

[SPEAKER_03]: Right.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_03]: You know, he wasn't Lafayette, and as you said David, we hardly see Lafayette at all.

[SPEAKER_03]: But if you think back to the pictures they were showing us the contemporary and oh, probably more into the 18th century, those battles scenes are highly theatrical.

[SPEAKER_03]: You know, the great one, Poise, and the lowly soldier looking up, I mean, just all the sorts of things.

[SPEAKER_03]: And they're designed to evoke strong feelings.

[SPEAKER_03]: So I really like that next to those, he was placing the pen and ink the pen and watercolor drawings.

[SPEAKER_10]: How good were those?

[SPEAKER_03]: They were stunning.

[SPEAKER_10]: They were really well done.

[SPEAKER_10]: So I was trying to, I didn't search for a hard, I was trying, but I was thinking about looking up a little bit more of those.

[SPEAKER_10]: I tried, I'd love to order those, but then I'm like, I don't want those on my wall because those are, you know, war and enslaved people being dressed.

[SPEAKER_03]: But they're so good and they were so evocative.

[SPEAKER_03]: But what they do is they take us away from those iconic images.

[SPEAKER_07]: That's right.

[SPEAKER_03]: I think about that.

[SPEAKER_03]: Set aside our personal mythologies and look at simple drawings.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yes, done contemporaneously.

[SPEAKER_03]: But without such a good point of view without attempting to do anything but tell the story as we know it now from the facts that we are willing to accept as more less factual.

[SPEAKER_10]: I didn't even think about that.

[SPEAKER_10]: They're there.

[SPEAKER_10]: They're a snapshot.

[SPEAKER_10]: A camera snapshot when we didn't have cameras.

[SPEAKER_03]: And you have to have something that depicts [SPEAKER_03]: the dirty bloody gory aspect of war.

[SPEAKER_03]: And of course with Vietnam, not more famously, you've got all that footage.

[SPEAKER_05]: Correct.

[SPEAKER_05]: It's a kind of geography.

[SPEAKER_03]: You've got the photography.

[SPEAKER_03]: So this is where the imagination really starts to show through.

[SPEAKER_03]: I did look up a little bit too, David, and the only thing I was able to find was the watercolors were commissioned for the show.

[SPEAKER_03]: I would assume so.

[SPEAKER_03]: And it looks very familiar to me to pass images from other canvarrants.

[SPEAKER_03]: So I think there must be, you know, some artists who he likes to work with because they're beautiful.

[SPEAKER_03]: Just as paintings, they're absolutely beautiful.

[SPEAKER_03]: But the the information they convey [SPEAKER_03]: is deeply emotional in many respects, but not trying to tell a particular story or a particular version there.

[SPEAKER_03]: They're like, this is what it is.

[SPEAKER_03]: They're mundane.

[SPEAKER_03]: Very good David, exactly.

[SPEAKER_10]: Exactly.

[SPEAKER_10]: They're not a mytho heroic portrayal.

[SPEAKER_10]: No.

[SPEAKER_10]: They're the mundane, the modernity of life.

[SPEAKER_05]: Mm-hmm.

[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, it's different.

[SPEAKER_10]: And every day scene is just every day scene or something that's going on.

[SPEAKER_03]: But these are not the things we use.

[SPEAKER_03]: There's this is not the things that how we know what I'm called about the American Revolution.

[SPEAKER_04]: Right exactly.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, we started with Long fellow Paul Revere's right in 1860.

[SPEAKER_03]: All the famous artists with their paintings, Yankee Doodle, of course, was actual to the period, but it's been interpreted and reinterpreted and misunderstood ever since.

[SPEAKER_03]: And then you get stories of pioneers crossing the country and, you know, law angles welder series, teaching a particular version of what that history was like.

[SPEAKER_03]: John O'Neill and my brother Sam is dead.

[SPEAKER_03]: These are all the kinds of artifacts in our culture now where I'm stretching back some of the years, sorry.

[SPEAKER_03]: We, comparatively recent culture.

[SPEAKER_03]: immediately after we had no more we have that place of 1776 in Broadway which you know 1972.

[SPEAKER_03]: That's pretty astonishing when you consider that [SPEAKER_03]: readily heart-wrenching song, molasses to rum to slaves.

[SPEAKER_10]: It is on my foreshame list.

[SPEAKER_10]: And as soon as we finish the John Adams HBO series, that's the next thing I'm gonna drop into our list, cue.

[SPEAKER_03]: And then of course we have Hamilton.

[SPEAKER_09]: And look how much Hamilton has changed your daughters sense of history.

[SPEAKER_09]: A generation of children who grow up, [SPEAKER_10]: people from broad swaths of life.

[SPEAKER_05]: Mm-hmm.

[SPEAKER_05]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_10]: Performing and delivering on that kind of performance, [SPEAKER_10]: where you see the actor, if you watched the original cast video, they're having that moment of truth that we seek in the stage performance of somebody.

[SPEAKER_10]: And so when the gentleman's name who plays George Washington, when he sings the final notes of his final song, you go that he's feeling that.

[SPEAKER_09]: Yeah, yeah.

[SPEAKER_10]: And then so to see a whole generation of kids [SPEAKER_10]: who, this isn't a, you know, right here, state leaps, Virginia men who's playing the role, right?

[SPEAKER_10]: That changes your perspective and what's accessible for you in history.

[SPEAKER_10]: History can be for you.

[SPEAKER_07]: because they're delivering it in the vernacular of this time exactly exactly exactly and once you see maybe you know if you're a black person you've your fan of Hamilton and you see this program and see some of the daily life etchings of slaves you connect.

[SPEAKER_07]: It's it.

[SPEAKER_03]: I would think so.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, far more than I as a white person ever could.

[SPEAKER_07]: Yes, yes, and real quick, I [SPEAKER_07]: made a note that during the Delaware Crossing for George Washington, Burns did not use the iconic painting.

[SPEAKER_04]: I noted that too.

[SPEAKER_04]: Yes, God bless him.

[SPEAKER_07]: Exactly.

[SPEAKER_07]: Exactly, Marilyn, it's like, thank you.

[SPEAKER_07]: That was great.

[SPEAKER_03]: But Brian, you know somewhere, there's a whole bunch of people like, why the hell are you doing that?

[SPEAKER_03]: And that's the most important image, right?

[SPEAKER_07]: Exactly.

[SPEAKER_08]: And that is because you're leaning on myth.

[SPEAKER_07]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_07]: Right.

[SPEAKER_07]: Right.

[SPEAKER_07]: And I think you're also leaning into identity.

[SPEAKER_07]: Right.

[SPEAKER_07]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_02]: It will.

[SPEAKER_07]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_07]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_07]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_07]: So you are in these stories, you're creating identities, which leads to the emotion and your response because I identify with these maybe white, you know, patriot and founding fathers and you don't have enough of that.

[SPEAKER_07]: So I get upset.

[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, it plays out a lot in, uh, you see that with the Civil War, of course.

[SPEAKER_03]: Right.

[SPEAKER_03]: I just think it's astonishing that it worked out unintentionally to come out on the eve of her.

[SPEAKER_03]: Right.

[SPEAKER_03]: Right.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_10]: And you know, right now, current political circumstances.

[SPEAKER_03]: That's right.

[SPEAKER_03]: Maryland getting.

[SPEAKER_10]: Did you have some more, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, [SPEAKER_10]: broad, I don't want to call my heart takes this as early, but, you know, broad takes or hot takes.

[SPEAKER_03]: No, I'm ready to move on to revolution and violence.

[SPEAKER_03]: Okay.

[SPEAKER_10]: Great.

[SPEAKER_02]: Alright.

[SPEAKER_10]: Let's get Brian's a...

[SPEAKER_10]: Absolutely.

[SPEAKER_10]: Point of view.

[SPEAKER_10]: Definitely.

[SPEAKER_10]: And then we'll take a little quick break after that, and then we'll get into the next phase of things.

[SPEAKER_10]: So, Brian, what are your broad?

[SPEAKER_10]: I've been weaving my takes into the middle of this, so please feel free to expand upon your thoughts.

[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, it was, I, I thought like, like all of you, it was a amazing piece of balance act, right, of bringing new voices, but also being a military history.

[SPEAKER_07]: He clearly learned a lot from the Civil War.

[SPEAKER_07]: I think if he didn't do the Civil War, he may have [SPEAKER_07]: this might have been less powerful series.

[SPEAKER_07]: I'm not sure, but he learned, you know, so much with the stories, the use of cameras.

[SPEAKER_07]: It's just so well done, so so part of his brand.

[SPEAKER_10]: Could we say that that would have been true if he had reversed the two stories?

[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_07]: I think so.

[SPEAKER_07]: If the revolution, you know, I could see actually the revolution being maybe a little more less diverse.

[SPEAKER_07]: Right.

[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_07]: I've seen the Civil War about three times.

[SPEAKER_07]: There are some some slavery aspects to it [SPEAKER_07]: but I think the balance would have been stronger.

[SPEAKER_07]: I think if the Civil War probably came second, I wonder.

[SPEAKER_07]: Interesting.

[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_07]: It's a good question.

[SPEAKER_07]: Anyway.

[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_07]: And I like how it ends kind of an optimistic and where your the revolutionary spark continues to this day.

[SPEAKER_07]: And you know, you have an optimistic story ending [SPEAKER_07]: is not lost.

[SPEAKER_07]: But I think he also plays it very well about how [SPEAKER_07]: how fragile it all was because it's not determined.

[SPEAKER_07]: And I think, you know, we talked a little bit about this David and one, one of the podcasts, but it wasn't inevitable, you know, the, we weren't going to win.

[SPEAKER_07]: It wasn't a guarantee, right?

[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, it's part of that myth, the part of the story that's natural because we know the ending, but.

[SPEAKER_07]: he did quite well in broadcasting this idea that it could have really fell apart and then could lead to many deaths and many repercussions from that.

[SPEAKER_07]: So it was really well done.

[SPEAKER_03]: I love how many times the weather was on the side of the growing.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_03]: Just that one simple [SPEAKER_03]: Good Lord, pre-determined, who can possibly take that?

[SPEAKER_10]: Right.

[SPEAKER_10]: In this kind of warfare, whether and ego and hubris, put together, like, I mean, you know, the hubris of big, egoed people.

[SPEAKER_10]: There are so many tactical errors that were made on the battlefield, where if a British general had said, well, let me go ahead and continue the pursuit or, you know, something's fun.

[SPEAKER_10]: Some's fishy here.

[SPEAKER_10]: Let me, let me hang back for a half a second, just being able to have that.

[SPEAKER_10]: And it's weird, we, it's easy to armchair quarterback these decisions, but we can certainly see that there are some, [SPEAKER_10]: aspects of individual personalities that had they done something counter to their heuristic response, then that outcome could have easily, easily been completely different.

[SPEAKER_07]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_07]: And a lot of the British officers just lack of imagination and misperceptions that it will all fade away.

[SPEAKER_07]: Oh, it to do is just show up with our army and navy and it'll be done.

[SPEAKER_10]: Well, with our, my, my daughter keeps going, why are they wearing bright red, you know, things, and I'm like, my exes, yes, you're a little bit blind for an ex-mark.

[SPEAKER_10]: Exactly, and she's like, they could, you know, they could, should be wearing camouflage and stuff like that.

[SPEAKER_10]: I'm like, yeah, but when a battle line of red coded British soldiers with their muskets, [SPEAKER_10]: lines up in front of you and you have no training and no equipment to really terrify and you see them marching in formation and the shouting, you know, in the commands and it's discipline would be terrifying to see this discipline.

[SPEAKER_03]: This is another example of the power of myth because Great Britain had created its own myth about being militarily superior and comfortable and they were [SPEAKER_03]: in terms of empire building, you know, establishing colonies after you've built the roads and the fortifications, you've established trade, and you do all of these things in order to have these things feeding back to, you know, the center empire, which is getting smaller and smaller.

[SPEAKER_03]: and other Britonic tribes going all the way back to 40 BCE, which we are now pleased to call a guerrilla warfare.

[SPEAKER_05]: Mm-hmm, yes, yes.

[SPEAKER_03]: It's exactly what happened with the Romans.

[SPEAKER_03]: Because, of course, the British model of all that is good and pure and holy at this point in a long-awaited future were the Romans, not the Greeks, the Romans.

[SPEAKER_10]: I should put in some post thing about, for money Python.

[SPEAKER_00]: or either apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system, and public health.

[SPEAKER_00]: What are the Romans in our done for us?

[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, absolutely, absolutely, unquestionably.

[SPEAKER_03]: And so the other obvious point is that these colonists knew their territory.

[SPEAKER_05]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_03]: The brids were completely ignorant of it all.

[SPEAKER_03]: And so guerrilla warfare suited the territory much better than forming straight lines and marching across, you know, open space open space, what open space have ever been the well.

[SPEAKER_03]: It's a Vermont folks.

[SPEAKER_10]: And when the forest story intact and natural, not like they are.

[SPEAKER_03]: Exactly.

[SPEAKER_03]: Exactly.

[SPEAKER_03]: We're third generation growth in charging a retreating which in the British military would get you shot if you retreated unless you were ordered to do so.

[SPEAKER_03]: making it a war of attrition as much as they possibly could.

[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, and I wonder too that the British military thinking was, you know, clearly was European warfare, even though they got exposed to some of the guerrilla warfare in the seven years war, but they kind of forgot that unfortunately for, for that, yeah, exactly.

[SPEAKER_07]: But a lot of the battles right that goes back to the hundred years war, yeah, [SPEAKER_07]: All this stuff was just trotting places that they've fought over and over ground that they fought over and over again So why would you hide that makes no sense so they are a severe disadvantage?

[SPEAKER_03]: Well, it's going into the colors more the plantagen.

[SPEAKER_03]: It's soon figured out That you know, you can do your nights at least charges and so forth, but much better to the Shavos say you know Completely wreck the countryside.

[SPEAKER_03]: So that's nobody can feed themselves [SPEAKER_03]: and they come in and wait till the castle is starving, storm it, say, okay, let us in, and boom, through next fortress is accomplished.

[SPEAKER_07]: Nice, yeah.

[SPEAKER_07]: Again, forgotten, right?

[SPEAKER_10]: Brian, any other broad takes?

[SPEAKER_10]: No, I don't think so.

[SPEAKER_10]: I think the only thing that I want to add in specifically is that at the end of the series, I personally was left with [SPEAKER_10]: this sense of this conflicted sense of wonderment at that birth of a new nation to use the heroic mytho heroic phrase that you know, and thinking of the song and Hamilton and all of that kind of stuff.

[SPEAKER_10]: But then at the same time, the very things that we're still dealing with is so many of our social issues that we're dealing with today.

[SPEAKER_10]: or were present, then, are the relationship to Native American tribes and the double dealing and the sort of, [SPEAKER_10]: this really, really incompatible.

[SPEAKER_10]: I did a light bit of internet searching about this of the incompatible points of views in terms of land use and ownership and what was, what are the sources of some of these conflicts and is just really took very incompatible points of views about how we exist on land.

[SPEAKER_10]: Anyway, that is still there and still in operation.

[SPEAKER_10]: the relationship to women and women's place in society and these normative things, which I'm not opposed to, and I'm not all for locking them in, I mean, our younger generations are really leading the way in a lot of ways of thinking about what is gender and what our norms and what [SPEAKER_10]: and where does an individual and a society where do we show up in those different things?

[SPEAKER_10]: And then of course, you know, the original sin of our country of enslavement.

[SPEAKER_10]: Yeah, yeah, just with us to this day, the media I often look at at what our modern political circumstances are and I go Wait, is it still this issue?

[SPEAKER_10]: It's like, yeah, there it is deep inside this issue.

[SPEAKER_10]: It may not be at the surface, but there it is if you go back, if you follow the money and you follow the people, I don't want to get specifically political here, but these are root issues.

[SPEAKER_10]: The all three of these are root issues that [SPEAKER_10]: We as a country are still that shape our life every day in the here and now.

[SPEAKER_03]: Well, if in the pioneering spirit, you have crossed mountains and fought off Indigenous keepers of lands that you want to claim as your own, and you've done so entirely on your own.

[SPEAKER_03]: How on earth can you be expected to accept anyone else telling you what to do and not to do?

[SPEAKER_05]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_03]: And that is the heart of a conflict.

[SPEAKER_03]: And that's why we almost didn't have a nation because the states' rights federal rights thing, how they were imposing a single system over what had been 13 systems up to that point.

[SPEAKER_07]: That's right.

[SPEAKER_07]: And I'm reminded to that once this revolution was over, [SPEAKER_07]: The 1790s, just 10 years, 15 years later, became one of the most diverse, sorry, divisive periods in American history.

[SPEAKER_07]: We were fighting, you know, the election of 1800s, a famous one, but we were defied it.

[SPEAKER_07]: We were fighting.

[SPEAKER_07]: We were.

[SPEAKER_07]: uh, brilliant, in separate camps of Federalists and Jefferson Republicans, and calling Jefferson a, the, in a Christ.

[SPEAKER_07]: And that was only 10, 15 years.

[SPEAKER_07]: So some things exactly still, yeah, continue throughout the history of our country.

[SPEAKER_10]: And then as I struggle today, literally today, thinking about where we are as a country, it helps to have this [SPEAKER_10]: documentary in the diet of my media consumption because to borrow a phrase from another media source from the battle star galactica reboot, you know, all this has happened before and all this will happen again.

[SPEAKER_10]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_10]: Where we are, yeah, we're maybe, we've moved forward on a number of things but we're still dealing with some other things and you know, we are constantly evolving in our intention with each other.

[SPEAKER_10]: There's a tension.

[SPEAKER_10]: Right, a dramatic tension, if you will, in our nation's mythology and what we believe and the evils that we've done, but the good things that we've done for the world at the same time.

[SPEAKER_10]: And that is a active tension.

[SPEAKER_10]: It is we do not live in a monomethological world.

[SPEAKER_10]: We never have, and we never will.

[SPEAKER_10]: And so I hear all this talk of, oh, can we ever get things back?

[SPEAKER_10]: You know, or is it irreparable, irreparable?

[SPEAKER_10]: I'm like, go back and look at the history that we've always been in tension, and we've always been yelling and throwing things at each other and hitting each other with kings and printing pamphlets about each other.

[SPEAKER_10]: It's not necessarily new, but the human drama plays out within this context of a country that we try to invent from the start, a country of laws, where people could live under their own tree.

[SPEAKER_03]: And this is the so tragic challenge for so many of the people who were coming out at from an idealist perspective, and people say, oh, it's started with, you know, the enlightenment ideas of this annual page, lock, who was held up as an example.

[SPEAKER_03]: wrote slavery into the Haitian constitution when they were still under British control.

[SPEAKER_03]: So this inability to see, you know, the complete picture is something we always have and do we forget that, that our peril.

[SPEAKER_03]: The main historical society offered space for Wavnaki to do their own exhibition on encounters with, you know, the first [SPEAKER_03]: Like people it was at first it was French for their north with the fur traders, but this was more the British and And for the first time I understood there were two completely different concepts What it means to quote unquote own land To obnaki admit that you had the rights for a territory for a time For your hunting or your fishing or you know, they grew crops as well [SPEAKER_03]: But to the English, this is why so many of them were coming over.

[SPEAKER_03]: It meant I owned this plant.

[SPEAKER_03]: I can build fences.

[SPEAKER_03]: I can parse it off and then whatever happens on it, that's on me and you can't tell me what to do.

[SPEAKER_03]: So when, you know, [SPEAKER_03]: Uh, Penopslet leaders would come back and say, hey, um, you know, you had this lease on your land for 20 years.

[SPEAKER_03]: And our other areas for hunting are, are dying off.

[SPEAKER_03]: And oh, by the way, you're completely trashing our hunting grounds by cutting out trees for your cows to grace.

[SPEAKER_03]: Can we renegotiate this?

[SPEAKER_03]: And the English interpretation of this was, you went back on your word.

[SPEAKER_03]: We had a treaty.

[SPEAKER_03]: And none of them are lying.

[SPEAKER_03]: None of them are wrong.

[SPEAKER_03]: They just don't understand what the other one is saying, and I have to take it on the part of the English settlers, they didn't really want to understand too much.

[SPEAKER_03]: Some of them did.

[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, I shouldn't generalize that way, but it was a totally new concept for me to say, okay, yes, as you were saying, David, there's a different way to understand land.

[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_07]: And we come, go ahead, Brian, I'm sorry.

[SPEAKER_07]: And the stakes are so high in that situation, right?

[SPEAKER_07]: It's, it is your sustenance, right?

[SPEAKER_07]: And so the, the ability to try to compromise, perhaps is eroded because the stakes are so high in the, for using land.

[SPEAKER_03]: And you trusted, and you feel all they went back on the word, and all of a sudden, every single ugliest stereotype you've ever had, [SPEAKER_03]: about.

[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_03]: Tribal nations has just comes roaring back.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_03]: Okay.

[SPEAKER_03]: Well, and ultimately, you find a justification for slaughtering whole villages.

[SPEAKER_10]: When you then also add in an additional perspective that, [SPEAKER_10]: a lot of the colonists who are immigrating to the United States never would have had the opportunity to own their own land for exactly a case, except there was always a legeload or some sort of you know somebody else already owned it and whether you were a second son or for whatever it doesn't matter you just weren't going to own land.

[SPEAKER_10]: And then if you come here and you just see all [SPEAKER_10]: It's put under for a new exactly under production in a way that you're used to seeing it.

[SPEAKER_10]: And then if you're a native and you're like, oh, okay, we got, you know, I don't want to over simplify their points of view.

[SPEAKER_03]: But there was an accommodations like, okay, oh, you know, they was common within with in tribal nations and subsets of tribal nations that each would have a more or less not a designated territory.

[SPEAKER_03]: But there were some flexibility and some accommodation.

[SPEAKER_03]: This group would be here and, oh, by the way, there's too many people up here and I'd like to move in over here and we'll all move to the coast for the summer because then the best.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, exactly.

[SPEAKER_03]: It followed the food sources.

[SPEAKER_10]: Right.

[SPEAKER_10]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_10]: In a non, in a, in a, in a, in a, a very advanced hunting and gathering kind of way I don't want to.

[SPEAKER_03]: Absolutely.

[SPEAKER_10]: We reduce by saying hunter-gatherer, but by very sophisticated knowledge systems, when you're not planting a plant.

[SPEAKER_04]: The land that's your stand.

[SPEAKER_10]: Exactly.

[SPEAKER_10]: That the winter is pretty harsh, and the summers are pretty miserable.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_03]: And you cut down all the trees and suddenly you're so quality goes up the window.

[SPEAKER_03]: Right.

[SPEAKER_03]: But let us not forget, it is the economy patriots.

[SPEAKER_10]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_10]: Well, let's do, let's put a bit in that really quick.

[SPEAKER_10]: And because I kept meaning to get a quick break.

[SPEAKER_10]: So let's take a quick commercial break.

[SPEAKER_10]: Then when we come back, we will pick up the economy.

[SPEAKER_10]: And we're back, Marilyn, you had left off with a point about, it's the economy, Patriot?

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_05]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_03]: Time and again, economy and commerce are the big drivers for all kinds of decisions, including military.

[SPEAKER_03]: So the southern states were looking to join because northern states wanted to fit in slavement, which is the bedrock of their economy.

[SPEAKER_03]: Right.

[SPEAKER_03]: And I think it's important to remember that.

[SPEAKER_03]: They weren't just horrible people who, whatever, I mean, we can put our own lenses on that.

[SPEAKER_03]: But they came there because they came largely from many of them from the Caribbean islands where in slavement was already in full swing, thanks to the English.

[SPEAKER_03]: And the climates were good for certain kinds of crops that required intense and very hard labor.

[SPEAKER_03]: They were the younger sons of lords or whatever, and didn't feel that, you know, tilling a rice, patty was, you know, that was impossible for this day to us.

[SPEAKER_03]: And so this all fitted in so tightly with their own conception and understanding.

[SPEAKER_03]: And that's why putting these, you know, this whole stretch of the coastline was really tough.

[SPEAKER_03]: And his resources windowed the army was financed by lenders who had strong interest in this excess of the revolution.

[SPEAKER_03]: So it wasn't just pay-pute forever.

[SPEAKER_03]: It wasn't just a cause for freedom.

[SPEAKER_03]: It was trade.

[SPEAKER_03]: It came down to trade.

[SPEAKER_03]: And I was astounded by the fact that one of the reasons why written a lot so long and so hard was to call on these representatives [SPEAKER_03]: That's just all of my mind.

[SPEAKER_03]: No, no, no, no, all the colonies.

[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, all the colonies.

[SPEAKER_03]: All the colonies.

[SPEAKER_03]: Two thirds of Britain's level trade was the statistic that I heard.

[SPEAKER_03]: Right.

[SPEAKER_03]: No, no, no, no.

[SPEAKER_07]: that sounds about right.

[SPEAKER_07]: I actually have an interesting quote here from historian.

[SPEAKER_07]: South Carolina's codenix sports sword from 9,840 pounds in 1790.

[SPEAKER_07]: So that's about five, you know, less than 10 years from the revolution, to 6 million, double hundred and twenty-five thousand pounds, just 10 years later, [SPEAKER_07]: Right?

[SPEAKER_07]: So you have that as Merrill was saying that interdependency between Britain and the colonies and [SPEAKER_07]: We also talked a little bit about this with the Southern colonies, right, David, where they seem to have really leaned into the trade with the Southern colonies and Britain, right, and cotton with the cotton gin.

[SPEAKER_07]: I think was you like Whitney, certainly 90, right.

[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_07]: I was talking to some of the other day too.

[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_10]: I'm sorry.

[SPEAKER_10]: I'll talk to you there.

[SPEAKER_10]: Somebody mentioned to me the other day to that rice.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yes, it was a critical, which I had no idea.

[SPEAKER_03]: It will be drew mice, right?

[SPEAKER_03]: Right, but the claimants that were perfect for it.

[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, and most of the need to be Western Africa, right?

[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, from West Africa, of the slaves.

[SPEAKER_07]: And so they brought in the colonists brought in slaves from Western Africa, who grew it.

[SPEAKER_04]: And knew how to grew it.

[SPEAKER_07]: No, how exactly.

[SPEAKER_07]: Exactly.

[SPEAKER_10]: And Marilyn, you made an interesting comment on our discord about [SPEAKER_10]: how in the South you had all of these quote unquote cash crops right to back of the cotton rice these things.

[SPEAKER_10]: But the north, the northern colonies, had timber, cordage, and not only sale making, but ship writing, ship making, and the knowledge to sale them.

[SPEAKER_10]: So you had the logistical supply, the logistical, [SPEAKER_10]: part of the transmission of the car engine with a combustion of the South, so to speak, I'm using a very loose automobile comparison or analogy year, but you could have these crops, but unless you had ships to move, to move that stuff around the world, and that's what the Northeast had, right, and then December resources, tremendous, yeah, England had, by this time, you know, and Europe, there weren't big trees left to make big ships [SPEAKER_09]: Right.

[SPEAKER_09]: At least that's my anecdotal understanding of what's going on here.

[SPEAKER_09]: Not at all dissimilar to Eldarian and the new minority.

[SPEAKER_09]: And so we're all talking in their way.

[SPEAKER_08]: Right.

[SPEAKER_09]: We can't be in the back as we're narrowing with our adults.

[SPEAKER_09]: I'm sorry, folks.

[SPEAKER_03]: No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, at that point, they were more interested in the resources than they were in settlements, which is why they got on better with the French Tribal nations what we now think of them is that the more northern ones the French got on with him better excuse me, but I meant to say [SPEAKER_03]: because they weren't there to settle.

[SPEAKER_03]: They wanted the furs for trade.

[SPEAKER_03]: And so they were trappers and traders, very similar to the lifestyles of many of the tribal nations that were in that region.

[SPEAKER_03]: And so that's why you get the French and Indian war and you get different tribal nations to ask so-called.

[SPEAKER_03]: You get the different tribal nations taking sides based on their perception of, you know, who can we most likely survive with?

[SPEAKER_03]: and they chose the French because the French were more familiar to their way of life.

[SPEAKER_03]: Also, terrifying statistic, 90% of the native population in what we now call the state and may die.

[SPEAKER_03]: during the first contact in the late 1600s.

[SPEAKER_03]: Right.

[SPEAKER_03]: All from diseases.

[SPEAKER_06]: Right.

[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_03]: And in that context, when you think, you know, some of the first people to die were their shamans, because of course, the shamans are going to treat the sick of this illness that was totally beyond their experience.

[SPEAKER_03]: And the French priests were not dying from it.

[SPEAKER_03]: But the shots work and therefore the assumption is this God is more powerful right then Yes, so that's why you have such a strong French Catholic tradition amongst the different well-knocking nations and this whole region and all into the Migma and so forth in the Canada [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_03]: Because again, it comes back to the basis of your economy.

[SPEAKER_03]: What are you looking for?

[SPEAKER_03]: And of course, there were these driving ideals.

[SPEAKER_03]: But at the end of the day, it was the economic engines.

[SPEAKER_03]: And Britain's warp policy strategy, excuse me, focused on crippling the economy.

[SPEAKER_03]: The colonies, and that's why they moved out of New England and down to the south.

[SPEAKER_03]: I love that they pointed that out because it I'd never made that equation.

[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, there's a, you know, the, you hear the common story about them thinking that they're more loyalist down in the South, which is true.

[SPEAKER_07]: But the economic side is something that is never really talked much about in, and it's great to have that conversation.

[SPEAKER_03]: He did a, they did a great job of time and again mentioning, well, for economic decisions, we do this sort of the other thing.

[SPEAKER_03]: views that the lenses to which they're looking, they'd start off by talking what they perceive to be the capitals because in European warfare you take over the capitals that's it you're done and they had 13 capitals to deal with.

[SPEAKER_03]: And we're sort of trying to pull together, but not really.

[SPEAKER_03]: And in some ways, that made it harder.

[SPEAKER_10]: And then when the Congress decamped from Pennsylvania, or from Philadelphia.

[SPEAKER_10]: Right.

[SPEAKER_10]: It's not like they, oh, we don't have a fancy brick building anymore to sit in.

[SPEAKER_10]: We didn't stop them.

[SPEAKER_10]: They could do what they deliberate and do what they want.

[UNKNOWN]: Yep.

[SPEAKER_07]: And I really enjoyed, I think episode six brought out Robert Morris.

[SPEAKER_07]: I did not know that he was an insigator of kind of like a JP Morgan of his time, or he helped really pay for the Patriots.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I hadn't known that either.

[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, it was either guy who, yeah, Washington turned to to get supplies clothing for his army [SPEAKER_03]: It was practically a private militia.

[SPEAKER_07]: Yes, exactly.

[SPEAKER_07]: And you think that Congress couldn't do it?

[SPEAKER_03]: And again, run by economics.

[SPEAKER_03]: I'm just going to do it because there was no there was no polity or economy that Congress had anything to do with.

[SPEAKER_10]: Is Hamilton hadn't come along to make a Central Banking on a real estate thing, though?

[SPEAKER_07]: They don't.

[SPEAKER_07]: He learned it right there from Washington and it's time.

[SPEAKER_10]: And that was interesting and interesting thing in the Adams, we just watched the episode two where we meet Washington, you know, who comes on the scene [SPEAKER_10]: come to the point of independence.

[SPEAKER_10]: But Washington says, Oh, well, yeah, I'm prepared to close feed pay a thousand troops under my command.

[SPEAKER_10]: Wow.

[SPEAKER_10]: That's out of your own pocket.

[SPEAKER_10]: He was rich.

[SPEAKER_10]: He was a rich dude.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yes, the problem was he needed 10 times those sources.

[SPEAKER_10]: That's right.

[SPEAKER_10]: And where did his wealth come from?

[SPEAKER_10]: The selling land speculation.

[SPEAKER_03]: Oh yes.

[SPEAKER_10]: Of land that didn't belong to him.

[SPEAKER_03]: Oh yes, not to mention enslaved.

[SPEAKER_03]: Exactly.

[SPEAKER_10]: Yeah, enslaved labor on farms.

[SPEAKER_03]: But you know one thing we haven't mentioned yet that I think was absolutely [SPEAKER_10]: Hmm, similar, yeah.

[SPEAKER_03]: I don't think I could have been possible to create the cultural connections for calling it colony without that very high percentage of literacy that ran through them.

[SPEAKER_03]: And that's partly thanks to New England, I think.

[SPEAKER_03]: This is me circulating wildly here.

[SPEAKER_03]: But Protestant religions coming over one of their key tenants was everybody needs to read the Bible from themselves.

[SPEAKER_03]: Was that the reformation stuff?

[SPEAKER_03]: Absolutely.

[SPEAKER_03]: And so literacy becomes not merely a handy thing to have, but it becomes a religious obligation practically.

[SPEAKER_03]: And so if you have that as a starting place, then that kind of starts spreading down.

[SPEAKER_03]: I don't know, Brian, how much it was in Virginia, per se.

[SPEAKER_03]: But that was, I think, why?

[SPEAKER_03]: They were able to foment the rebellion so much and the ideas of liberty and so forth.

[SPEAKER_03]: who in the back was a Georgia is going to know in the name John Locke or care, right?

[SPEAKER_03]: But in New England, it was sufficiently established that this was really important.

[SPEAKER_03]: And so this was the golden age, the early, the, the early, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, [SPEAKER_03]: It was important to know.

[SPEAKER_03]: And now I'm thinking back to Dick Turpent, of course, because that was based on pamphlets and hand bills and all the rest of it.

[SPEAKER_10]: I keep looking for news about what's his name.

[SPEAKER_10]: Well, his name just flew out of my brain.

[SPEAKER_10]: The actor, no, no, no, no feeling about his health and what's going on, but it's which really quiet, like there's not a lot of info about what's going on with them.

[SPEAKER_03]: So I'm concerned.

[SPEAKER_10]: Yeah, I do hope he's, I hope he's well.

[SPEAKER_03]: So another fact that absolutely astounded me, which reinforced this, the American Colleagues had the highest rates of literacy and anywhere else in the world, the possible [SPEAKER_04]: So just think about that for a while.

[SPEAKER_03]: And the deus felt the dedication was a foundation to virtue, because if you're not relying on virtue coming down from good deus or whatever, you educate yourselves to what is right and what is wrong and you follow the good and the virtuous.

[SPEAKER_03]: And that became a good substitute for religion.

[SPEAKER_03]: And Jefferson felt that the best response to religious disputes was to take no notice of those, so that they would know [SPEAKER_03]: which is an interesting concept to medievalists, who thinks about all the uncounted numbers of people who were tortured and burned at the stake and so forth because of religion.

[SPEAKER_10]: For heretical reasons.

[SPEAKER_10]: And even there are famous Franklin quote about Muhammad, like how he just eaten care, that you didn't care what religion you were, I'd have to internet search that I know that there's one out there.

[SPEAKER_10]: or his other famous quote, which is something about if it neither picks my pocket and breaks my bones.

[SPEAKER_03]: Then I should like here.

[SPEAKER_10]: Yeah, why should I, you know, and that it would be such a different song.

[SPEAKER_10]: Was that Jefferson?

[SPEAKER_10]: Okay, now Franklin.

[SPEAKER_10]: All right.

[SPEAKER_03]: Well, I know that in the outgrowth of Islam in 800's we're going to way back now.

[SPEAKER_03]: when they expanded and started to take over different regions, they would not eliminate people, anybody, well, by and large.

[SPEAKER_03]: But their trend was, we're not going to kill any Christians or choose because they're also people of the book.

[SPEAKER_03]: and they're people of Abraham.

[SPEAKER_03]: And so you could live in these cities, you could prosper.

[SPEAKER_03]: There was often a religion tax if you were not Islamic.

[SPEAKER_03]: But this is why the southern part of Spain, the Alambrac, was the greatest flowering of culture in the 1400s because you had Christian and Jewish and Muslim.

[SPEAKER_03]: Thought ideas, design, culture, music.

[SPEAKER_03]: And then Isabella and Fernand decided they had to go on a crusade and drove them all out.

[SPEAKER_03]: That was the end of it.

[SPEAKER_07]: Right.

[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_07]: And that richness Maryland that you describe plays well in the American Revolution.

[SPEAKER_07]: Because, you know, the myth of, well, the, uh, abyscable, right.

[SPEAKER_07]: The, the established church actually.

[SPEAKER_07]: it wasn't so strong.

[SPEAKER_07]: There's just, you know, all these immigrants brought their own religion, so you have these evangelical Protestants, shakers, Baptists, disciples of Christ, who, like Marilyn was saying, really focused on the common person.

[SPEAKER_07]: and they have that connection with God.

[SPEAKER_07]: So it's helpful to read.

[SPEAKER_07]: So you have this higher literacy.

[SPEAKER_07]: So it's an important part and I'm glad Burns talks a little bit about the Quakers, but there's a lot more to the story that he didn't probably was on the kind of room floor, but there were a lot of big melting pot, so to speak, of religions in the colonies.

[SPEAKER_03]: I have a whole paragraph on Quakers if you want to hear it.

[SPEAKER_07]: We'll get to it.

[SPEAKER_10]: We'll get there to write comments.

[SPEAKER_10]: I did find the quote from Franklin.

[SPEAKER_10]: Again, the internet search for take a vote.

[SPEAKER_10]: It's worth, but I believe it comes from his autobiography, which is even if the moofy of Constantinople were to send a missionary to preach Muhammadism to us.

[SPEAKER_10]: He would find a pulpit at his service.

[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_10]: Right, if that is a question of like it doesn't you can do this.

[SPEAKER_10]: You can do that.

[SPEAKER_10]: You could be a Quaker and we can I have all kinds of words with each other about whether we're going to be independent or not because that was just the episode we watched from the John Adam series with Dickinson.

[SPEAKER_10]: But that yeah, that that that that literacy allows for deism in a way, but that if you didn't have literacy, then you couldn't have all of these.

[SPEAKER_10]: a little flowerings of different practice and belief.

[SPEAKER_03]: That was why it was so important in the period when a Protestant and first arose was the recognition that one's entire knowledge of one's religion came from one person.

[SPEAKER_03]: Right.

[SPEAKER_03]: That's our whole life because most people born in a village worked in a village, died in a village, and the village priest was your only source.

[SPEAKER_05]: Right.

[SPEAKER_05]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_05]: That's right.

[SPEAKER_10]: And this idea too of, I want to stay on it for just a little bit longer, we talk often about our modern media ecosystem and the diet of things.

[SPEAKER_10]: We have the TikToks and the YouTube's and the blue skies and the Twitter's and the Facebook's and all this stuff.

[SPEAKER_10]: Back in the day, they had pamphlets.

[SPEAKER_10]: And they would use those pamphlets to great effect slandering each other and the proverbial slinging of ink.

[SPEAKER_10]: And it abmezes me to think about the fact that has the tone or the tenor of the public square dialogue changed all that much.

[SPEAKER_10]: We certainly have a [SPEAKER_10]: Sociologically, there has to be changes going on at least in terms of the volume of the speed and When the medium and the message change well when the medium changes at such deep levels How is that going to affect just in the long route?

[SPEAKER_10]: Well, I don't know.

[SPEAKER_10]: We're in the middle of it right now All right, but when you had writing and cutiform and pyrus and then you then you get to a printing press, right?

[SPEAKER_10]: That changes a lot [SPEAKER_10]: the nature of society.

[SPEAKER_10]: So now obviously with electronic communications we're changing a lot, but yet what we're delivering to each other is still not all that different, radically.

[SPEAKER_03]: I was going to say, last time I checked the source of every instance of communication with human.

[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, right.

[SPEAKER_07]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_07]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_07]: And I think the tone of social media versus the pamphlets are quite similar.

[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_07]: Maybe back then we are limited the meeting limits us today to seconds to minutes where you can't have a nuanced argument that maybe pamphlets could give you, but the tone could be quite, quite fierce.

[SPEAKER_10]: I started reading a common sense by Thomas Payne and he gets he thinks into some stuff about Judaism and whatnot and I'm kind of in the middle of the mind of it trying to hang with his his argument and I'm experiencing that very thing Brian where my bro gets to the point.

[SPEAKER_10]: Yeah, come on.

[SPEAKER_10]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_10]: I hear you're great.

[SPEAKER_10]: I hear this is a really, really great seminal piece of things.

[SPEAKER_10]: I really like this idea of having a common sensibility for our nation so that we can at, uh, at the, when we meet in the middle of the town square, we have some things that are relatable to each other, give some values and some ideals that we can agree on.

[SPEAKER_10]: And then you can go sit under your bow, I'll go sit under my tree, or my vine, and I'll do my thing, but when we come together, we have a common sensibility to it.

[SPEAKER_10]: So I'm like, cool, I really, I'm really receptive to this message because it's something that I've always perceived, and yeah, I mean, I'm just stuck in the middle of it.

[SPEAKER_10]: this thing, it's not that long, it's not that long and the prose is not that thick, but this idea of nuanced arguments that you could be in your home in the middle of Massachusetts, a main and Carolina in the Carolinas, be reading the same thing as that somebody in Maine is reading, that is rooted in this enlightenment ideals of natural rights that these are obvious things that [SPEAKER_10]: no one gave them to you except for creation, be that embodiment, you know, as a person or not, you know, that you were created those are obvious that you have those.

[SPEAKER_10]: You don't have this country without that literacy.

[SPEAKER_03]: I don't think so.

[SPEAKER_07]: No, I agree.

[SPEAKER_07]: That's right.

[SPEAKER_10]: That's right.

[SPEAKER_10]: Marilyn, what was your next point?

[SPEAKER_10]: Oh, the Quakers?

[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_10]: You want to talk about Quakers?

[SPEAKER_10]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_10]: Let's take another quick break and then we'll [SPEAKER_10]: And we're back.

[SPEAKER_10]: Okay, so let's talk about the Quakers because seems like they're I I never realized how pivotal The this issue was oh, yeah, absolutely.

[SPEAKER_03]: What mean they were meeting in Philadelphia so could hardly not be pivotal since This was the place that William Penn founded and Penn, Sylvania [SPEAKER_09]: That's right.

[SPEAKER_09]: This time I have so many scales falling from my eyes.

[SPEAKER_09]: That's what old process of watching.

[SPEAKER_03]: It gets even more important because the Quakers were able to establish a community and a culture that was resonant with their values, just as all the other religious groups up and down the line did.

[SPEAKER_03]: And they became very prosperous merchants.

[SPEAKER_05]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_03]: Because they were known for one of their basic press precepts, which was speaking the truth in love.

[SPEAKER_03]: They didn't phrase it that way.

[SPEAKER_03]: I'm not memorying the exact term at this point, but it came from the founder George Fox.

[SPEAKER_03]: And so they the saying was in England, you know, when this was first percolating, you could send a four-year-old child to the market to buy a loaf of bread from the Quaker Bakers because they would not [SPEAKER_03]: Moreover, Penn and his early fellows were the first people to approach, I think it's the Lenin Lafay in that region, as fellow human beings, and to outreach to them and say we would like to settle here.

[SPEAKER_03]: We are people of peace, we bring no weapons, we want to work with you.

[SPEAKER_03]: And that worked for a time, and the wealth grew, and so more people came, and so, and so, and eventually, when, in other places, violence got stirred up, and the whole fear of the other, invaded too many different cultures and so forth, you have the Quakers and their own territory, which they founded, suddenly being objected to, [SPEAKER_03]: their decisions about government, their decisions about policy, their insistence that they not have a standing militia, all of these things ran contrary to the greater and greater numbers of people who came in for whatever reason.

[SPEAKER_03]: And then said, look, you know, we don't want to do it this way.

[SPEAKER_03]: What are you going to do about it?

[SPEAKER_03]: And so the founders became, you know, their descendants became very rich merchants.

[SPEAKER_03]: They were still highly respected and [SPEAKER_03]: But it was the actual merchants who were running, they're not there, but the other merchants that had come along, maybe moving down from New England or whatever.

[SPEAKER_03]: And so, as it came close and closer to violence, the Quakers were more and more pushed to the margins of the decision makers.

[SPEAKER_03]: And there were a couple of people in Congress that very first Congress who were birthright friends, as we like to say, they were born Quaker.

[SPEAKER_03]: that didn't mean they stayed quicker necessarily.

[SPEAKER_03]: But I really glad that they mentioned the Fisher family and the deportation of Quaker 17 Quaker merchants to the wilds of Virginia, you're neck of the woods there, Brian.

[SPEAKER_07]: That's right.

[SPEAKER_03]: Where one of them actually died from, because we think, oh, Virginia, nice, they're climbing within Pennsylvania, right?

[SPEAKER_03]: No, this was the wilds, this was the frontier, this was tough living, and these were some of them elderly people.

[SPEAKER_03]: And this was a complete violation of colonial law, which was based on British law, which included the principle of habeas corpus, there were no trials and accusations they were just gathered up and shipped off.

[SPEAKER_03]: And this is to my mind one of the key examples of violence against each other that a revolution perpetuates.

[SPEAKER_03]: Another thing though, the enemy was not only supported by political choices, [SPEAKER_03]: but even more by the end of the fact that the Quakers from the Old Philadelphia families start off as merchants continue to grow their wealth.

[SPEAKER_03]: So even when they lost their social influence, [SPEAKER_03]: And eventually, the governance altogether of the city that they founded, they were still deeply resented for their accumulated wealth.

[SPEAKER_03]: Does this sound familiar?

[SPEAKER_05]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_03]: OK, we can raise the nature flag again.

[SPEAKER_03]: Much of that accumulated wealth was outright stolen by patriots.

[SPEAKER_03]: As Quakers left now, they were not loyalists per se.

[SPEAKER_03]: What they were was they were against violence.

[SPEAKER_03]: And so they would not fund guns for the Patriots.

[SPEAKER_03]: Neither would they fund gun for the British.

[SPEAKER_03]: They would give blackheads to both the Patriots and the British.

[SPEAKER_03]: As the Waffen happens when you're in the middle, both sides hate you.

[SPEAKER_03]: Right.

[SPEAKER_03]: And there's just no way to go.

[SPEAKER_03]: But a little down fact, they were Quakers throughout the Patriot armies.

[SPEAKER_03]: during this civil war, most of them that served as medics, doctors and so forth, and they were read out of their meetings, which means they were ejected from their communities, religious and otherwise, because they had violated the peace testimony by even helping, suffering people who were their own people, as opposed to the grits, of course they did that, too, but less and less [SPEAKER_07]: Maryland.

[SPEAKER_07]: I remember, I can't remember his name.

[SPEAKER_07]: I remember Burns teasing out.

[SPEAKER_07]: There was, I believe, a American Patriot officer who was Quaker.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_07]: Would you have any idea of what would think about him deciding to, you know, maybe growing up as seeing this, you know, idea of of adherence to violence to side, to become an officer during the, you know, not as a medic, but actually a fighting officer.

[SPEAKER_07]: And he thought, so maybe why he would do that.

[SPEAKER_03]: Because one of the important tenets of Quakers is you follow your leadings.

[SPEAKER_03]: We don't have anybody on the pulpit preaching to us as it were.

[SPEAKER_05]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_03]: We believe in that and define in everyone.

[SPEAKER_03]: And therefore, each of us must learn to listen to our inner guide, and then follow what that guide tells us.

[SPEAKER_09]: We should know that you are a practitioner of quick.

[SPEAKER_03]: I'm a friend, I'm a quicker.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yep.

[SPEAKER_07]: that's helpful.

[SPEAKER_07]: That's great.

[SPEAKER_03]: And so, you know, these were individual decisions that were made and as I said, an awful lot of people got read out of meeting because of it.

[SPEAKER_03]: Because when the violence gets added to the, you know, usual area of discussion, people start taking sides in, you know, if you're not for us to your goodness.

[SPEAKER_03]: No, there's no framework for neutrality.

[SPEAKER_10]: There was a scene at the end of the John Adams HBO historical drama, where it looked like John Dickinson was out in the crowd as they were reading the declaration of independence wearing a martial uniform on horseback with some people did he.

[SPEAKER_10]: did he because he in the show they depict that he didn't show up for the final vote for the declaration of the independence.

[SPEAKER_10]: Maybe we should do it.

[SPEAKER_03]: I don't have any information on that.

[SPEAKER_10]: Okay, interesting.

[SPEAKER_10]: All right.

[SPEAKER_10]: No.

[SPEAKER_10]: I have to feel like I can trust the HBO portrayal because it seemed like there's too many known facts that line up.

[SPEAKER_10]: So it's lens.

[SPEAKER_10]: It's a degree of credibility to me.

[SPEAKER_10]: But again, it's a historical drama.

[SPEAKER_10]: So I don't know what's going on.

[SPEAKER_03]: it wouldn't surprise me.

[SPEAKER_10]: Okay.

[SPEAKER_10]: No.

[SPEAKER_03]: It could well have been.

[SPEAKER_10]: But the the interesting thing was during the Philadelphia conference, it was Dickinson who was the leading who was advocating to try to [SPEAKER_10]: you know, be a appeal to the crown and try to chill things out where atoms and the Massachusetts men were pushing for independence and for war ultimately.

[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_07]: And that's what you know, [SPEAKER_07]: things that sticks out with me for this show, especially in the first condone of Congress, you have so many voices coming together for the first time.

[SPEAKER_07]: You have these cultures, you have backgrounds, and they're not going to agree, right?

[SPEAKER_07]: And the textbook, you say, hooray, condone of Congress, we're all on the same page mythology mythology.

[SPEAKER_10]: Yeah, 13 Clarks striking all at the same second.

[SPEAKER_10]: I think it's the famous line from them.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I was it.

[SPEAKER_03]: I thought it was on the road time.

[SPEAKER_10]: Yeah, in the show, Adam says 13 clocks have to strike together, so you have to have to be there and not there yet.

[SPEAKER_10]: Yeah, if we do not, if we're not unanimous in our support, then if there's [SPEAKER_10]: If there's, and it's interesting too, because when you hear court opinions today, anything that's from an appeal, appeals panel to an on-bong to a state or federal Supreme Court.

[SPEAKER_10]: Well, it was six, three, or it was five, four, or whatever.

[SPEAKER_10]: Whenever they leave, whenever they leave that open, that door open to say that it wasn't unanimous, it means that there was dissent when that dissent can be capitalized upon.

[SPEAKER_10]: If you are one side of the issue or the other, you can go, okay, well, that was a final decision, but, right, you know, so if 13 colonies didn't actually come together, if there was one holdout amongst them.

[SPEAKER_10]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_03]: What does that mean?

[SPEAKER_10]: And they're a fact, and their ability to actually prosecute the war of independence.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_03]: 1776 makes this point very well.

[SPEAKER_10]: Right.

[SPEAKER_03]: Because it's John Hancock himself who cast the deciding vote to say this decision must be units.

[SPEAKER_05]: Right.

[SPEAKER_05]: Right.

[SPEAKER_05]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_05]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_03]: Exactly.

[SPEAKER_03]: And even so, this human tendency of sides.

[SPEAKER_03]: is what least eventually to the colonists on colonists violence, which in and again, and again, and I'm so grateful that he presented clearly faith, presented clearly to us.

[SPEAKER_03]: The amount of terror that people were living with.

[SPEAKER_10]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_03]: And whether you're a patriot or a whether you're a patriot or a loyalist, or neither, or neither, you know, the idea of being able [SPEAKER_03]: gone.

[SPEAKER_03]: Absolutely gone unless you struck out for the wilderness.

[SPEAKER_06]: Right.

[SPEAKER_03]: And even then, eventually, you know, Congress has come to say, hi, yeah, you're part of this state now, and we'd like to talk about taxes and imagine how well that goes.

[SPEAKER_02]: Right.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_04]: The whiskey rebellion.

[SPEAKER_04]: And if you remember though, whiskey rebellion?

[SPEAKER_05]: That's right.

[SPEAKER_10]: That's a perfect segue to your next point here, which is Democracy is a form of government.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, as far as I know, and Brian correct me if I'm wrong, the first notion of democracy is a form of government.

[SPEAKER_03]: Possibly, it's with the exceptional Iceland.

[SPEAKER_03]: Hasn't happened since ancient Greece.

[SPEAKER_07]: That's right.

[SPEAKER_07]: That's right.

[SPEAKER_07]: So when the founders, especially Madison was thinking about work, jumping ahead a little bit to the constitutional convention, but they all understood being literate, right?

[SPEAKER_07]: Being educated, elites that they are, they truly believed in this idea [SPEAKER_07]: and how long and how fragile it is because it was ancient Greece, people.

[SPEAKER_08]: Oh, hello.

[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_07]: It was a hard thing to do.

[SPEAKER_07]: And, you know, there is some...

[SPEAKER_07]: nuance to this idea of, you know, people say, well, the founding fathers hated democracy.

[SPEAKER_07]: They were afraid of the mob.

[SPEAKER_07]: And yes, like anything in history, right, it's nuance.

[SPEAKER_07]: Yes, and no, sure.

[SPEAKER_07]: They did believe that maybe not everyone should have the vote, should have a say, it's scary.

[SPEAKER_07]: We've seen what happens, you know, maybe even, you know, ancient, ancient history, [SPEAKER_07]: but they also believed that a voice of some kind of democracy is important.

[SPEAKER_07]: So it's not either or.

[SPEAKER_03]: One of the key things I watched onto was that the original version said, everybody has rights to life, liberty, and property.

[SPEAKER_03]: And they soon revised that to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

[SPEAKER_03]: Now, if that isn't one of the most formless insubstantial concepts, you've ever heard of.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, you can, you can race crap.

[SPEAKER_03]: And as sure we won't stop you unless, you know, obviously the whole thing of your freedom and where my nose, you know, the freedom of your fist ends where my nose begins.

[SPEAKER_03]: Right.

[SPEAKER_03]: Right.

[SPEAKER_03]: But that's very telling.

[SPEAKER_03]: And it comes back to what we were saying earlier about, you know, it's the economy patriot.

[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_03]: It also comes back to the fact of, well, you know, if the enslaved people in any way get some kind of recognition officially, they're going to be having this that they're, you know, human.

[SPEAKER_03]: and they can own property and well we only want the property owners to be voted because of course these are economic votes and have economic consequences and so.

[SPEAKER_10]: There's a long, ugly history of black wealth being destroyed.

[SPEAKER_03]: Absolutely.

[SPEAKER_03]: Absolutely.

[SPEAKER_10]: I think the Tulsa massacre being the most prominent [SPEAKER_10]: Invisible of those, which is still very invisible ultimately, but that happened more than once, and in more places than once, where Prosperous Black community, they were like, okay, we'll just be over here doing our thing.

[SPEAKER_10]: We won't bother anybody, and then no, you can't do that, and we won't let you.

[SPEAKER_07]: And I want to put a little positive spin on that, where [SPEAKER_07]: I mean, I don't know, but what I mean, because of the American Revolution, right, these ideals, what they were trying to do, that everyone is free and equal, and they open that door.

[SPEAKER_07]: They open it very wide, but other people behind us, right, they pushed it exactly.

[SPEAKER_07]: Right.

[SPEAKER_07]: And I think that's what burns and the group we're saying that, you know, it's just like we're [SPEAKER_07]: But we, the revolution opened the door just enough so people could just lean into it and try to get that liberty that writes.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, and at the end of the day, what is it that draws us together?

[SPEAKER_03]: We've talked about this some already.

[SPEAKER_03]: The whole Civil War not a revolution.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_03]: And if you have an external potentially existential threat that is easily nameable and requires a unified response for success.

[SPEAKER_03]: And largely military and character over the years.

[SPEAKER_09]: I'm like biting my tongue because I just things I want to say about that.

[SPEAKER_09]: What carry on, I don't want to interrupt you.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, we now have a professional military.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_03]: And makes it easier to respond to military crises.

[SPEAKER_03]: But we now have a draft military.

[SPEAKER_03]: And I think the Vietnam was largely responsible.

[SPEAKER_03]: We no longer have a draft.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_03]: And I think the Vietnam war was largely responsible for that.

[SPEAKER_03]: And the creation of an exclusively professional [SPEAKER_05]: That's right.

[SPEAKER_03]: But enough people have to be convinced that the existential crisis truly is enough of the threat to bring people to seriously change their way of life, to get out there and get shot and maybe leave your family destitute.

[SPEAKER_03]: So that's why they're finding each other as much as they're trying to British.

[SPEAKER_03]: And they had to be some way of convincing them, you know, again, attributed to Ben Franklin [SPEAKER_10]: Yeah, right.

[SPEAKER_10]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_10]: It was an interesting thing that struck me while we were watching this series.

[SPEAKER_10]: And I commented this on one of the podcasts.

[SPEAKER_10]: I don't know if you remember Brian.

[SPEAKER_10]: I don't remember the exact context.

[SPEAKER_10]: But it was one of those broader based reflections that I had from being present to this revolutionary history is that as a country, part of our national mythology and our mythos about ourselves is when we do come together, we do accomplish amazing things.

[SPEAKER_10]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_10]: You know, in multiple world wars, you know, space races, [SPEAKER_10]: But when it comes to internal things, then usually two external things, right?

[SPEAKER_10]: But with their internal struggles, it's a little bit more messy.

[SPEAKER_10]: And a little bit less clear on how well we move in objectively, it to create a more prosperous.

[SPEAKER_10]: society for our national citizens.

[SPEAKER_10]: But this idea that America when faced with some external threat challenge project were really good when we got something external to us that we can point to and we can pull together.

[SPEAKER_10]: That we agreed to.

[SPEAKER_10]: We agreed to, yes, right.

[SPEAKER_10]: Well, yeah, we're led to it.

[SPEAKER_10]: Maybe we're like, okay, whatever.

[SPEAKER_10]: What's the space race to me, but that's what they say is good.

[SPEAKER_10]: So let's go.

[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, and I think it's the difficulty there right is when you're doing internal, you're putting the mirror up to your physical distance exactly.

[SPEAKER_07]: Worts and all and it gets really ugly.

[SPEAKER_07]: So you can have communism on the external, you know, external villain.

[SPEAKER_10]: Right.

[SPEAKER_10]: Very fast or accusing them of being a patriot or a lawyer.

[SPEAKER_07]: Exactly.

[SPEAKER_07]: Exactly.

[SPEAKER_07]: And it's a and David we mentioned in a previous podcast, which sticks with me how the fact that they would like one neighbor didn't like the other neighbor or had a business rival.

[SPEAKER_07]: And they say, well, look, I saw Fred over there in the corner.

[SPEAKER_07]: Maybe, yeah, I think he's a, he's a loyalist.

[SPEAKER_07]: And they kill them.

[SPEAKER_09]: Right.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_07]: You take advantage of that in a very dark way.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I'll never forget the horror that I felt the first time I realized that this was a regular thing and it was, you know, decades ago, you know, reading a particular store of us.

[SPEAKER_03]: I sometimes think that the only existential threat nowadays, it's big enough that we'll finally bring us together is some kind of outer space content.

[SPEAKER_03]: That's right, completely other beings and I'm not even saying, you know, a violet outer space.

[SPEAKER_03]: Just just the knowledge that there are, in fact, other sentient beings out there who, Oh, by the way, have technology that far exceeds around at this point.

[SPEAKER_03]: Because it's that far and they're going to be big enough.

[SPEAKER_03]: And a virus didn't do it for us.

[SPEAKER_03]: So, yeah.

[SPEAKER_03]: Well, yeah.

[SPEAKER_03]: And that, of course, again, historically, he looked at the newspaper articles from the name 17.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_03]: Right.

[SPEAKER_10]: The flu pandemic, yeah.

[SPEAKER_03]: Where I was blown out, I lost out on an ant I never knew because she died.

[SPEAKER_03]: And even there, my grandfather was a minor, a coal manor.

[SPEAKER_03]: He was an immigrant fin.

[SPEAKER_03]: And in the paper, it talked about how the medical support [SPEAKER_03]: Right, at the point that out, yeah, yeah, you didn't get to go to, you know, the local white doctor who, you know, was trained and so I was just, it was this right.

[SPEAKER_03]: Incredibly compassionate woman you went to house to house.

[SPEAKER_10]: Well, let's take a quick break and then when we come back, we can talk about some contradictions within the Enlightenment.

[SPEAKER_10]: And we're back, Marilyn the next item on your.

[SPEAKER_10]: Outline here is contradictions in the Enlightenment in lightenless if you Oh, I see what you're talking about.

[SPEAKER_09]: I was stumbling for something.

[SPEAKER_09]: Oh, I think you landed You had it the play for sure good thing.

[SPEAKER_09]: I'm a middle-aged dad.

[SPEAKER_09]: I can get away with that kind of stuff.

[SPEAKER_03]: Of course So I was interested to learn that John Locke wrote the founding documents for the Carolinas.

[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, interesting [SPEAKER_03]: And this is, this is all Wikipedia by and large.

[SPEAKER_03]: And so, Wikipedia says, the level of religious tolerance portrayed in the constitutions was acclaimed by Voltaire himself, who advised, cast your eyes over the other hemisphere, behold, Carolina, of which the wise lock was the legislature.

[SPEAKER_03]: And there was somewhere that I read, maybe it's for the none of my notes, that people were saying that the Enlightenment was doing better.

[SPEAKER_03]: Well, yes, the light was doing better in England than in France, where it originated.

[SPEAKER_03]: And so, presumably, a lot of that got carried over with with all the English people who came over as settlers.

[SPEAKER_03]: And let's just say here, I don't know, I was just made this point yet, but I'm not strong enough, perhaps, that they weren't just English.

[SPEAKER_03]: They were Dutch.

[SPEAKER_03]: They were Germans.

[SPEAKER_05]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_03]: You know, all the European countries were sending [SPEAKER_03]: immigrants over here or it's right immigrants are going themselves.

[SPEAKER_03]: And so to think of as as exclusively a revolution of formerly British citizens against the British government, it really doesn't paint the whole picture.

[SPEAKER_03]: And I mean, New York in specific, you know, Dutch Foundation, very focused on commerce.

[SPEAKER_03]: Therefore, they're carrying so much, whether you were what I'm called the right religion or color, whatever.

[SPEAKER_03]: If you were a reliable trader, [SPEAKER_03]: You were in, you know, it was the economy stupid.

[SPEAKER_03]: How was the primary focus?

[SPEAKER_03]: And so that idea spread out across the West when people from the New York area started pushing West, too.

[SPEAKER_03]: Anyway, back to lock in the constitutions.

[SPEAKER_03]: So the insured certain safeguards for group seeking refuge for religious reasons.

[SPEAKER_03]: They gave the right to worship and the right to constitute a church to religious centers, [SPEAKER_03]: and they also promised religious tolerance between the idolater Indians and the heathens.

[SPEAKER_03]: So we were talking about this before a little bit, but once again, in theory and on paper, just incredible changes.

[SPEAKER_03]: And the fundamental constitutions promoted both aristocracy and slavery in North America.

[SPEAKER_03]: The notorious article, one tan of the Constitution stated that, quote, every freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over his Dingo slaves of what opinion or religion, so ever, close quote, a person to this provision, slaveholders are granted, you know, life and death, and the Constitution's hell that being a Christian does not alter the civil dominion of a master over his slaves.

[SPEAKER_03]: And you just sit there and you say, how can they hold these two things simultaneously in their minds?

[SPEAKER_03]: Exactly.

[SPEAKER_03]: What was the diet in the wool perception?

[SPEAKER_03]: by white people of people over the color.

[SPEAKER_03]: It just, it boggles the mind.

[SPEAKER_03]: It really does.

[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, yeah, you know, one of the things that I, you know, people who work among a cello, you can imagine the number of questions, you know, we are asked about how Jefferson write the concept, write the our decoration meeting pendants, but hold slaves.

[SPEAKER_07]: And what I tend to fall into [SPEAKER_07]: You know, it's the economy, stupid, right?

[SPEAKER_07]: It's Jefferson grew up in the system of wealth that if he were to give up his slaves, his whole social and wealth would be destroyed.

[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_07]: So he would not do it, and he was not alone, because there's such slavery was just so interwoven with the economy and your wealth and your status that it would be very difficult, extremely difficult to actually give up.

[SPEAKER_10]: I don't know, make excuses, but I'm just trying to think about that motivation and about the idea [SPEAKER_10]: that what we would call now a paycheck to get paid to do something that was degrading the humanity of another person.

[SPEAKER_10]: And we know that that's the case in a modern day context.

[SPEAKER_10]: We're not anymore enlightened necessarily than others.

[SPEAKER_10]: But if you think about, I'm just trying to imagine myself a little bit in that place in the time, the hardships of the time, [SPEAKER_10]: The cold winters, the wood smoke, the farming, you know, even a successful lawyer like John Adams still had a farm and then they had to do a lot of work on the farm on a regular basis to keep that up.

[SPEAKER_10]: That, you know, the, I guess to expand that then back forward and we look at our modern [SPEAKER_10]: striving for wealth is still a big deal and Nicole and I were just talking about this on episode six for the pluribus podcast and she brought up the point of, you know, they've kind of figured out about how much money you need to, quote, unquote, be happy.

[SPEAKER_10]: where you can relieve the amount of, he said it's like a hundred and seventy thousand dollars or something.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's pursuit of happiness.

[SPEAKER_10]: Exactly.

[SPEAKER_10]: You know, beyond that, your happiness doesn't change.

[SPEAKER_10]: In fact, it starts to go down because you start to worry.

[SPEAKER_10]: But it just drives at this point of, [SPEAKER_10]: at what level are we hardwired for a scarcity mindset?

[SPEAKER_10]: Mm-hmm.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_03]: That's the underlying pinning isn't it David, the whole fear of scarcity.

[SPEAKER_03]: I'm thinking for my own notion of the contemporary analogy.

[SPEAKER_03]: Okay, we all are grumbling about capitalism.

[SPEAKER_03]: And we think capitalism is a terrible thing.

[SPEAKER_03]: And we really need to make changes.

[SPEAKER_03]: Okay.

[SPEAKER_03]: What are you going to do?

[SPEAKER_03]: How are you going to make those changes?

[SPEAKER_03]: what will have to happen to make those changes take place and how much do you really have to hate capitalism before you're willing to do that.

[SPEAKER_03]: And oh by the way, I responsible for a family or you know, I'm the mayor of a town and I kind of like to get reelected or whatever it happens to be.

[SPEAKER_03]: We don't like change.

[SPEAKER_03]: small meeting more large, even the changes that we choose for ourselves.

[SPEAKER_03]: But the other thing we don't like is tyranny.

[SPEAKER_03]: Right, right.

[SPEAKER_03]: And so it can only happen for the ground up.

[SPEAKER_10]: You know, which I feel like or go ahead, it feels like we're in a cycle of we're seeing a style of rising tyranny around the globe.

[SPEAKER_10]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_10]: I don't just point the finger only at us, but around the globe.

[SPEAKER_00]: No.

[SPEAKER_10]: There is that tension, the literacy of democracy.

[SPEAKER_10]: But you have to, I'm not even talking about being able to read and write, but you have to be literate in the ways of politics to understand what's going on because people of nefarious content will always try to manipulate the systems.

[SPEAKER_10]: And when there's a weakness in your ability to keep that undercheck that rises, [SPEAKER_10]: But then when it rises to a point, then people go, oh, wait a minute, why is this happening?

[SPEAKER_10]: Oh, they're being oppressed.

[SPEAKER_10]: This is tyranny.

[SPEAKER_10]: We don't like this.

[SPEAKER_10]: Piss off.

[SPEAKER_10]: And then you, you, you know, are we in the middle of one of those cycles?

[SPEAKER_10]: And then you get revolutionized.

[SPEAKER_10]: Right.

[SPEAKER_10]: And I feel like to me, you know, I'm not the only person who is doing these things.

[SPEAKER_10]: So I'm not trying to advocate a position.

[SPEAKER_10]: But it's like, is that what's going on right now?

[SPEAKER_10]: It's at the same time.

[SPEAKER_10]: Not just domestically.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, sure.

[SPEAKER_03]: At the same time to try and impose the deconstruction of capitalism is equally a form of tyranny.

[SPEAKER_03]: Sure.

[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, sure.

[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_03]: And I think that explains Jefferson to some degree, at least in my mind.

[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_03]: But I think of the best analogy I can for my own life, the paradoxical feature of it.

[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_07]: Exactly.

[SPEAKER_07]: And, you know, it's one of the things that is interesting for this time period of the miracle evolution that you have to, you know, it wasn't perfect.

[SPEAKER_07]: Right.

[SPEAKER_07]: We had Congress coming together.

[SPEAKER_07]: There were arguments to refights.

[SPEAKER_07]: but also there's deliberation.

[SPEAKER_07]: And I think we are getting less deliberation in not only this country, but all around the world, which makes tyranny authoritarianism easier.

[SPEAKER_07]: We just turned this one person, they have all the answers, let's go with that.

[SPEAKER_07]: the founding fathers knew firsthand that that wasn't going to work, that they were willing to deliberate for a while to figure out how we continue this revolution and make it work, which is impressive when you think about it.

[SPEAKER_03]: And this comes back to our earlier point about the contemporary speed.

[SPEAKER_03]: of literacy.

[SPEAKER_05]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_05]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_05]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_03]: Who has time to deliberate exactly?

[SPEAKER_06]: Right.

[SPEAKER_03]: Um, right.

[SPEAKER_03]: Got to decide right now, Bing Bing Bing Bing Bing.

[SPEAKER_03]: And I remember a lovely older Methodist back in my Methodist days saying one time and some discussion or other that any time anybody was trying to sell him anything.

[SPEAKER_03]: And they said, well, you've got [SPEAKER_03]: All right, the answer is no, because if you won't let me think it through on my own, I'm not interested.

[SPEAKER_04]: Well, it's interesting because we're being flooded.

[SPEAKER_10]: by messages.

[SPEAKER_10]: So I've shifted around my social media intake from various forms from Twitter and Blue Sky and TikTok and Instagram reels.

[SPEAKER_10]: Now I'm in a Reddit thing.

[SPEAKER_10]: I have a kind of my Reddit algorithm is kind of like a Twitter or a Blue Sky but a little bit.

[SPEAKER_10]: where you can click through and go a little bit deeper.

[SPEAKER_10]: It's an interesting thing, and there's a part of me that's a student of the forms and being a interested in technology and communications, but then there's also a part of me that's just being captivated because I'm a middle-amaged American person.

[SPEAKER_10]: Who's attention economy is I am the coin of the realm right my attention is the coin of the realm right now and images will always capture attention more strongly 100% right somebody who's involved in that world is I am very aware of that and this idea that two things that the relative value of any piece of information now is next to zero.

[SPEAKER_10]: because it costs me very little to be able to post a message or to generate an image or to put it out there.

[SPEAKER_10]: And so information is devalued.

[SPEAKER_10]: Simultaneously is, you know, we always joke about the fire hose at the T-cup.

[SPEAKER_10]: But it's literally what's going on is is that our brains are being blasted by a tremendous volumes of information.

[SPEAKER_10]: So as you're scrolling, you can see horrific images from around the world or from down your street next to wonderful, beautiful images.

[SPEAKER_10]: I get some cat stuff in my feed.

[SPEAKER_10]: And so, you know, people who've rescued cats or have rehabilitated their cat or their cat as passed away or something like that, next to people being unlawfully detained or disappeared or other various things that are going on, and the level of cognitive dissonance in my brain, I have no idea.

[SPEAKER_10]: And so, what is it doing to me?

[SPEAKER_10]: I can't read common sense because my brain is cooked.

[SPEAKER_10]: by chasing the opium tail of the algorithm by chasing the dragon's tail.

[SPEAKER_03]: I expect Brian will not be surprised when I say this is where you need your information frameworks.

[SPEAKER_10]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_10]: Say more.

[SPEAKER_10]: I need it frameworks.

[SPEAKER_10]: I don't know what they are, but I like the idea of them.

[SPEAKER_07]: Well, I think Marilyn is talking about, you know.

[SPEAKER_07]: curating.

[SPEAKER_07]: Is that right?

[SPEAKER_07]: You're you're creating your information.

[SPEAKER_07]: So, uh, it, you know, as librarians, we help steer people to great, rubber and essence fleece for our students were in some ways gatekeepers.

[SPEAKER_07]: We weren't saying you have to go here.

[SPEAKER_10]: Autroist and gatekeepers.

[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, exactly.

[SPEAKER_07]: So here is hopefully.

[SPEAKER_08]: Oh, yeah.

[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, exactly.

[SPEAKER_07]: Uh, fortunately.

[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_07]: where, you know, we have that, we've we built that trust and that as librarians and as scholars, you know, we had some trust built up that people were willing to do that.

[SPEAKER_07]: And now today, right, we're losing that trust.

[SPEAKER_07]: people.

[SPEAKER_07]: There are no gatekeepers anymore with the internet and social media.

[SPEAKER_07]: Maybe a little bit where you'll kind of follow someone, but maybe you follow that because they're entertaining and not because of their background and scholarship or what I tell it to you Brian, but the [SPEAKER_07]: day.

[SPEAKER_07]: We are 100%.

[SPEAKER_03]: Exactly.

[SPEAKER_03]: We might call it a break.

[SPEAKER_03]: No, it's not.

[SPEAKER_03]: Sorry, Marilyn.

[SPEAKER_03]: The trick is to know that this is a framework.

[SPEAKER_03]: Everybody is much as TikTok or in cyclic PD botanical.

[SPEAKER_03]: Right.

[SPEAKER_03]: That's right.

[SPEAKER_03]: You have to understand what is this frame?

[SPEAKER_03]: What is it designed?

[SPEAKER_03]: What is intended to do?

[SPEAKER_03]: Where does the source of information come from?

[SPEAKER_07]: Who's the author's exactly?

[SPEAKER_03]: And can I check these pieces of information in other sources?

[SPEAKER_07]: That's right.

[SPEAKER_03]: The one thing that I taught any time I was standing up at the last was the journalistic standard, which most people had never heard of, and which has been badly longer.

[SPEAKER_03]: Thank goodness professionals.

[SPEAKER_03]: Right.

[SPEAKER_03]: It's badly dangerous.

[SPEAKER_03]: Anybody who has an account.

[SPEAKER_03]: So the journalistic standard says you will not accept anything as a fact unless you can verify it from three other independence sources.

[SPEAKER_06]: Right.

[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_03]: Who has time for that?

[SPEAKER_06]: Right.

[SPEAKER_03]: We got three papers do next week.

[SPEAKER_03]: They got to get to their sports team or coaches then to kick them out and they're really interested in this cute person that they met in the dining hall yesterday.

[SPEAKER_03]: Right.

[SPEAKER_03]: So they learn to prioritize, which is a good thing.

[SPEAKER_03]: You have to prioritize.

[SPEAKER_03]: You cannot take every single class and read every single assignment that every single professor gives you.

[SPEAKER_03]: It's impossible.

[SPEAKER_03]: But how do they prioritize?

[SPEAKER_03]: You can find a lot of good beginning information in Wikipedia.

[SPEAKER_03]: Do not ever cite a Wikipedia as your source.

[SPEAKER_03]: And anything you were ever going to hand into a professor.

[SPEAKER_03]: Right.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_03]: Sorry, Mayor.

[SPEAKER_03]: We'll get to slap down.

[SPEAKER_10]: You're welcome to the world.

[SPEAKER_10]: You're lucky you're not in the classroom right now with the- Oh, AI would absolutely make me go around the quest.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_03]: For sure.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_03]: The fundamental principle is still there.

[SPEAKER_03]: I don't care if you're back in the age of medieval, Monkish libraries, or in the world of AI, or whatever is coming in the future.

[SPEAKER_03]: It's knowing where your information comes from and deciding is the person who's giving it to you or the source would ever reliable.

[SPEAKER_03]: Right.

[SPEAKER_03]: And recognizing your own cognitive mind.

[SPEAKER_03]: Right.

[SPEAKER_03]: Exactly.

[SPEAKER_07]: Same thing goes.

[SPEAKER_10]: It's interesting from a lower-down standpoint, [SPEAKER_10]: from a business operations and business development standpoint, we think of it in terms of brand.

[SPEAKER_10]: And we are a brand of values and what are our brand differentiators and you know how are we different from the competition in the marketplace and one of the cool things about podcasts is that we can be, you can listen to four or five podcasts and they are not in competition.

[SPEAKER_10]: They're actually in agreement with each other.

[SPEAKER_10]: which I like, and then we get this whole thing of podcasts on YouTube.

[SPEAKER_10]: They're not podcasts anymore, but whatever, because they're visual, yeah.

[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_10]: I don't call it podcasts, I don't know what to call it, but anyway, but when you are watching the video, you're a tension economy, you know, the economy of your own physiological attention is such that you are locked in.

[SPEAKER_10]: where with audio only podcasts, you can watch the dishes, you can be commuting, you could be outwalking your pets or whatever it is that you're doing and that you can listen to three or four podcasts or whatever your brain can hold and you can get a multiplicity, you can get a diversity of points of views.

[SPEAKER_10]: So as a television podcaster, I will listen to two or three other podcasts about the same show that I'm covering and the number of times.

[SPEAKER_10]: Now the question is, is do I certainly sources?

[SPEAKER_10]: And my generous and do I am I intellectually honest with it, you know, there's no one there to fact check me, you know, in my podcast deliberations.

[SPEAKER_10]: But part of our [SPEAKER_10]: So even if I don't name the the specific podcast or the specific crater at least I say, well, this is not my you know an original idea of mine or something like that.

[SPEAKER_03]: That's the point.

[SPEAKER_10]: This is, you know, I got this from this source right as opposed to this is my idea.

[SPEAKER_10]: have been thinking a lot about this recently, relative to our peers, we have a particular tone in a particular style.

[SPEAKER_10]: we're not like the ringer, which is very pop culture, hype, it big, we're not, and I don't mean this in a, in a, in a pejorative way, but we're not bros, like the bald move guys are, right?

[SPEAKER_10]: They're a couple of rows of a particular age set, or we're not oyster clams and cockles, or we're not the house of podcastica, I mean, there's all different kinds of things, and I like to think we're kind of, uh, [SPEAKER_10]: small liberal arts or community college really good community college you know upper division level sort of conversation right or where we're having like graduate seminar kind of conversations rather than you know sitting on the dorm room you know and taking hallucinogenics and talking about the nature of reality.

[SPEAKER_10]: Dude, whoa, yeah exactly, so it's a good fire, wow.

[SPEAKER_03]: For me, that was the architecture.

[SPEAKER_10]: okay.

[SPEAKER_03]: Wow, icons and what are you doing?

[SPEAKER_10]: Look at you being in a professional podcast or in bringing stuff going shopping.

[SPEAKER_03]: You're giving away my secret.

[SPEAKER_10]: No, I was doing an extra job of subtly driving the bus this whole time Marilyn.

[SPEAKER_10]: Oh, let's you for that.

[SPEAKER_10]: I mean, even doing it as a teacher, you were already doing it.

[SPEAKER_10]: So now is you're just doing it in front of a microphone.

[SPEAKER_03]: So we'll come in for me.

[SPEAKER_03]: That means a lot to me.

[SPEAKER_10]: So thank you.

[SPEAKER_10]: Indeed.

[SPEAKER_03]: I never really thought about it consciously, but when I moved to Maine and they spent time in Portland.

[SPEAKER_10]: Fownness, you mean Falmouth?

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, right exactly.

[SPEAKER_03]: Falmouth, that was a shock for me to be honest.

[SPEAKER_03]: We do still have a Falmouth.

[SPEAKER_03]: It's just North of Portland, so talk about Confucian.

[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_03]: What do you mean?

[SPEAKER_03]: Anyway, the scarcity of any kind of earlier buildings, which isn't all that uncommon in big cities these days.

[SPEAKER_03]: Of course.

[SPEAKER_03]: learning that Portland got burned in the ground made this aha moment of okay this is how war affects our physical spaces this is how war affects our our structures our creations they had a chance to completely rebuild a city such as it was at the time yeah which places did they make how do they decide the study of the other thing and so they if the impact of architecture architecture has its own character [SPEAKER_03]: that reflects the culture that is using it and even creating it, and the only early building that I can think of in Portland today, and there's probably more because I don't know where we corner Portland, is the long fellow house, and appropriately that is where the main historical society is lovely.

[SPEAKER_03]: And it's sandwiched between these skyscrapers and the really big, lovely auditorium and all this kind of thing, but it's there, and it's on the main street.

[SPEAKER_03]: So there is that touchstone, just looking at some of the southern New England colonial architecture, I actually felt pain, because that says home to me in a way that the northern New England archajector knew her will, even though I lived here and made longer than I ever lived in southern New England.

[SPEAKER_03]: So, [SPEAKER_03]: I wish maybe Ken Burns could do something on our protecting time.

[SPEAKER_10]: I'm interested, yes.

[SPEAKER_03]: Because I think there's an awful lot there tying in our themes of eye canogatory and mythology, the importance of place speaking to you.

[SPEAKER_03]: And what do we humans do to our surroundings?

[SPEAKER_03]: And why?

[SPEAKER_03]: So here in Maine, you know, very snowy, very cold, Maine, you have the original house that was a farm house in the sense that everybody was a farm in certain regions and then they built the back building for, you know, the grandmother to move into and then they built another back building for the generation and then they built a tunnel that let's straight to the barn so that you went from your bedroom to your barn without having to go outside.

[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, all over here.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, and you got a lot more of it that hasn't been, you know, touched her in a video to whatever, but I'm really passionate at.

[SPEAKER_03]: I wish they'd taken multiple pictures of that clock tower in Philadelphia because it said 10 of 6.

[SPEAKER_04]: How many times did the course think?

[SPEAKER_03]: All right, it couldn't always have been 10 of 6 guys, but should, and then they did eventually show winner two pictures towards the end there.

[SPEAKER_03]: But, um, [SPEAKER_03]: But equally, I adored that they showed us how Nishonay long houses.

[SPEAKER_10]: Yeah, yeah.

[SPEAKER_03]: To say, look, here's this architecture.

[SPEAKER_03]: Here's this architecture.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_03]: Coexisting in this space and time.

[SPEAKER_03]: And I believe that the Haud Nishonay still have long houses to this day.

[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, you know, and again, that's a perfect example of the new voices that Burns is trying to put on into this program because coming from a Jefferson world, he was an architect.

[SPEAKER_07]: So he designed, you know, right?

[SPEAKER_07]: So he designed the Richmond Capital, the state, say capital Virginia, and of course Monochello, but it's that legacy of that Greek.

[SPEAKER_07]: architecture, those pillars, those freezes, and it bleeds into Washington, D.C., right?

[SPEAKER_07]: All the federal buildings would have this kind of architecture, because as you said, Maryland, so well, it broadcasts a message about the revolution, about our ideals, and about our place.

[SPEAKER_07]: that we are creating a kind of tournament structures and the fact that he can bring in other voices to architecture like that.

[SPEAKER_07]: I love it.

[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_03]: It's very important.

[SPEAKER_03]: And, guess where those columns tie back to ancient Greece.

[SPEAKER_07]: And go.

[SPEAKER_03]: Where do democracy begin?

[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_03]: Right there.

[SPEAKER_07]: Exactly.

[SPEAKER_07]: Exactly.

[SPEAKER_03]: How are in plaster or concrete, of course, but concrete didn't litterate.

[SPEAKER_10]: Well, I think this has been a lovely walk in the woods as our metaphor is for some of these less structured conversations, but thank you both for making the time to talk today.

[SPEAKER_10]: I feel like we strayed pretty far at times, but it's okay.

[SPEAKER_04]: It's more hands.

[SPEAKER_04]: Exactly.

[SPEAKER_04]: Let me do it.

[SPEAKER_04]: It's our frame.

[SPEAKER_04]: This is our informational frame.

[SPEAKER_10]: It's our informational frame.

[SPEAKER_10]: And yeah, I think there's a, it's interesting because we talk about this, this idea that we, we don't hide the fact that we as individuals have values and beliefs, but at the same time we're, [SPEAKER_10]: We try to avoid active political discussions in this frame because the value for so many people in the community is that this is entertainment, this is relief, this is a place where they can step away from some of those things and in pursuit of enjoyment and happiness and see what I did there.

[SPEAKER_10]: But at the same time that the dispassionateness of the Ken Burns style lends itself to this broad-ranging style of conversation.

[SPEAKER_10]: And I don't wonder that if there's not some more conversation to be had within this topic with other voices and I'm thinking of other people within our community to whom [SPEAKER_10]: because the story touches on so many people.

[SPEAKER_10]: I mean, obviously, I think of Joel, who is a patient descent, and who's deeply American because he grew up in Brooklyn and Alicia, who is from the United States and chooses to live in another part of the world, which I can completely understand because as she's not an expert, which has a particular definition, whereas I was an expert, I was just living and working for a time.

[SPEAKER_10]: And in so many other people that, you know, there's, I don't think, I don't know that all of our conversation on this topic is done.

[SPEAKER_03]: How could it possibly be done, David?

[SPEAKER_10]: Right.

[SPEAKER_10]: No.

[SPEAKER_03]: And Alicia, drawing from her pot of water, what do you mean?

[SPEAKER_10]: Right, that, too.

[SPEAKER_04]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_10]: That, too, as well.

[SPEAKER_10]: I wasn't even, it's so important.

[SPEAKER_10]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_03]: And I think that, you know, the whole political issue, trying to change people's minds as a form of violence.

[SPEAKER_03]: Hmm, I've just, I've come to that conclusion, giving information, listening to what they have to say, and seeing where the common ground comes in, not in fact starting from a position of, well, we'll never have any common ground because you're feeling the like, right?

[SPEAKER_10]: It was the thing that drives me crazy in our current dynamic is, is that, oh, I'm this or I am that political party.

[SPEAKER_10]: No, you're not.

[SPEAKER_10]: Those are our set of values or beliefs or ideals that you follow or you might adhere to, but that is not who you are.

[SPEAKER_10]: You are something before that.

[SPEAKER_10]: Yeah, even when we identify nationalistically, you know, I'm an American or I'm a Brit or what have you or I mean Yankees fan or a Dodgers fan or whatever.

[SPEAKER_10]: Yeah, right.

[SPEAKER_03]: Well, I am I could apply to the era if I wanted to because my mother's father's side of the family was here in the 1600s with the Quakers as it happens.

[SPEAKER_03]: My father's mother [SPEAKER_03]: So am I an immigrant or am I a colonist?

[SPEAKER_06]: Right.

[SPEAKER_03]: And the answer is yes, of course.

[SPEAKER_03]: Right.

[SPEAKER_03]: Right.

[SPEAKER_03]: Trying to be able to accept contradictory notions and just sit with them and not try to make one right to another faults.

[SPEAKER_03]: I think that's the most important.

[SPEAKER_10]: Well, we never had our what you're watching to talk about conclaves, but it really does go back to certainty.

[SPEAKER_10]: No, we never did it.

[SPEAKER_10]: We talked about it.

[SPEAKER_01]: I even got the book and read it and we never never got it.

[SPEAKER_01]: Let's keep that in the back of our minds.

[SPEAKER_03]: But this idea of certainty is exactly.

[SPEAKER_03]: Is certainty as the original said?

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, brilliant.

[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, exactly.

[SPEAKER_07]: What certainty becomes, you get absoluteest.

[SPEAKER_07]: And with absoluteism, you don't get any exceptions.

[SPEAKER_07]: And you don't listen.

[SPEAKER_03]: Not to mention you stopped growing.

[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, I might have been certain in my teens that I would never do fill in the blank.

[SPEAKER_03]: And now approaching 70, I look back and I say, we all but I did.

[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, right.

[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_03]: Does that mean I'm not who I was?

[SPEAKER_03]: Yes, and now.

[SPEAKER_03]: Right.

[SPEAKER_07]: And I think the commentai for all of us Laura Hounds is that we come to this podcast, either making it or listening to it as learners.

[SPEAKER_07]: Growing.

[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_03]: Mm-hmm.

[SPEAKER_03]: I definitely recognize myself in that description.

[UNKNOWN]: Thank you.

[SPEAKER_10]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_10]: Well, thanks for helping with my brand marketing strategy.

[SPEAKER_10]: No, I'm kidding, but I think it is part of that question of where as a community, who are we as a community?

[SPEAKER_10]: How is it that we identify within our amongst ourselves?

[SPEAKER_10]: And how is it that we continue to grow without being certain and being able to listen?

[SPEAKER_10]: We do a lot of talking, but we do a lot of listening as well.

[SPEAKER_03]: And please don't hold me to anything.

[SPEAKER_03]: I said was absolutely true 10 years ago, okay?

[SPEAKER_10]: We won't, we won't.

[SPEAKER_03]: No, no, just don't, David, I'm just so thrilled and honored to let it that you wanted me to be a part of this conversation today.

[SPEAKER_03]: I have to thank you enough.

[SPEAKER_07]: It's, yeah, and just having to come to say with both views is just wonderful.

[SPEAKER_10]: Well, when we were thinking when Brian and I were thinking and talking about it, it just occurred to me, you know, the question of mythology, I just, yes.

[SPEAKER_10]: Wait, yeah, Maryland.

[SPEAKER_10]: Miff, Maryland.

[SPEAKER_08]: It's just an illness.

[SPEAKER_08]: And look, where are they?

[SPEAKER_08]: Well, I need it.

[SPEAKER_08]: You thought I was just going to talk about mythology?

[SPEAKER_08]: No, no.

[SPEAKER_08]: Wow.

[SPEAKER_10]: Well, it turns out they guess you're a American history expert as well as a talk of expert.

[SPEAKER_10]: Anyway, we could sit here patting each other on the back for several more hours and we wouldn't get anywhere.

[SPEAKER_10]: So I think it would get kind of, it would kind of get boring for the listeners.

[SPEAKER_10]: So thank you, dear listener for coming on this journey with us.

[SPEAKER_10]: I'm going to leave the door open for further conversation within the frame of the American Revolution topic.

[SPEAKER_10]: And as topics and come up and as individuals express some interest, I think we can keep the store open and keep working through some of these topics and issues.

[SPEAKER_10]: So thanks again for [SPEAKER_10]: joining me today and thanks again to all of our listeners.

[SPEAKER_10]: I'm just going to keep it short and just say to our discord server boosters, thank you very much and to our lower master subscribers Brian, you amongst them.

[SPEAKER_10]: Thank you all so very much.

[SPEAKER_10]: We couldn't do this without your community support.

[SPEAKER_10]: So we are in gratitude with that.

[SPEAKER_10]: I think we'll end it there.

[SPEAKER_10]: Thanks everybody.

[SPEAKER_03]: Thanks folks.

[SPEAKER_07]: Thank you.