Sun Valley Writers' Conference with
Jeffrey Rosen, Bestselling Author of The Pursuit of Happiness
Willy Walker: Jeff, I had a pretty busy week this past week because I had the Walker & Dunlop summer conference here with 650 people. And, before they all arrived in town, I had to do a Walker Webcast with two writers for the Wall Street Journal on their book called The Formula, which is all about Formula One. So that was Monday. And then, on Tuesday, I had a Barry Sternlicht, who went to Brown undergrad and Harvard Business School and is viewed as probably one of the most insightful and intelligent commercial real estate and private equity investors in the world to do homework on. And then the next day I had Mohammed El-Erian who went to Cambridge undergrad. He went to Oxford for his master's, and he went to Oxford for his PhD. Now is the president of Queens College at Cambridge and stepped down from running PIMCA before he went and took that job. That was a lot of work. And so I got through those four, and I said, I'm going to wait for Jeff until I'm done with Mohammed. I wake up the next morning after doing Mohammed, and I see that Jeff is gone to Harvard, to Oxford, and to Yale, and I say, “Oh, I am ******.” And so, I have worked very hard Jeff, to try and get up to speed on this.
To anyone in here who is expecting me to try and ask Jeff the difference between Madison's philosophy and how Cicero influenced Madison versus Hamilton versus Jefferson. There are a lot of really good YouTube videos out there of experts from great universities who spent their entire careers studying Madison and Hamilton and can do that much better than I. But I do want to do a little bit of a survey here Jeff to try and pull out of you and your writing in this book that informs what I would call the disciplined life. You talk in this book about deep reading. You talk in this book about lifelong learning. And I think everyone in this room is exemplary of those two things that came out as you were writing this book, in researching this book. I want to back up for a second to start though. You went to Dalton, to Harvard, to Oxford, and to Yale. At which one of those institutions did you learn the most?
Jeffrey Rosen: It's all my mom and dad. There's a moment...
Willy Walker: You can't do that. You gotta pick one.
Jeffrey Rosen: You ask me questions and I’m gonna tell the truth because that’s what I’m here to do.
Two days ago, I was in my favorite building in Washington, DC, the Library of Congress Jefferson Building. I think it's the most beautiful in all of Washington. It was meaningful because I had gone there with my mom when I was about seven years old, and I distinctly remember being full of wonder at the thought that all of the books in the world were in that building. And last week I looked at the legends on the ceiling. The fountain of Wisdom flows through books. The Great University of Today is a collection of books. It's a fun to read, and I was talking to teachers there and expressed thanks to them for having inspired kids to learn about history. And I'm sharing this because that was the values that I grew up in. And my dad's most valuable possession was a hand-carved legend that I still have, that his father wrote during the Depression. The fountain of wisdom flows through books. His dad was a peddler in Detroit, Michigan, during the Depression, a Jewish refugee from the horrors of Europe. The Detroit Public Library had just opened in 1932 with that phrase the Fountain of Wisdom, the first two books, and Manis Rosen, with his own hands, carved out this sense. That's how much he loved learning. He didn't go to college or have even a high school education. But those were the values he gave to Dad, and Dad and Mom gave them to me.
Willy Walker: So you talked about your father. Your father died in 2022, just before this book was published. In the book, in the book you talk about a number of people who at various times in times of great loss. Cicero, into Jefferson into John Quincy Adams went to read the great philosophers at their time of loss. Cicero read Pythagoras after losing his daughter. Jefferson read Cicero after losing his dad. John Quincy Adams read Cicero after losing his son. Where was it in your journey, or about losing your father that got you to go back and read? Or how did losing your father, as you were studying this play into that?
Jeffrey Rosen: I lost my dad as I was turning in the book, and when I did, I realized that the central lesson that he had imbued was the one that I learned in this incredible journey of moral philosophy. My dad was a medical hypnotist. He was one of the great hypnotists of the 20th century. He studied with the founder of medical hypnotism called Milton Erickson. He would always recite a phrase from Paracelsus, who was a 16th-century mystic, “As we imagine ourselves to be, so shall we be.” And that was the essence of his teaching about hypnosis. What I learned from my reading of Cicero in the classical moral philosophers is that that was also the central wisdom of the East and the West. “We are what we think. Life is shaped by the mind,” says Dhammapada. “Focus on the only thing we can control, which is our own thoughts and emotions, not the thoughts and emotions of others,” says the Stoics. “Renounce and enjoy,” says Gandhi. “Renounce attachment to external influences and enjoy eternal freedom.” That central lesson, which is so pervasive in this classical moral philosophy I hadn't experienced before and since you ask, I'll just say how extraordinary it was to discover it based on this book by Cicero. I'll tell the story because this is why we're here.
During Covid, I noticed that both Jefferson and Franklin had cited this book by Cicero that I'd never heard of as their central definition of the pursuit of happiness. And Jefferson, as you said, when he was old, and people would ask him, what's the secret of happiness? Would offer this passage from Cicero, saying, “He who has achieved tranquility of soul, who's neither unduly exuberant r unduly despondent, he is the wise man of whom we are in quest. He's a happy man.” So I saw that, and I thought, I've got to read this Cicero book. And then I noticed that Franklin had also chosen the same book as a motto for a project that he had in his 20s to achieve moral perfection by making a list of 13 virtues. So I said, “I'm going to read Caesar.” What else to read? And then I found this golden reading list that Jefferson would send to anyone who asked him how to be an educated person, and he'd send this to kids who are going to law school, who are sons of his friends, and he'd send them to his daughters. And it's an incredibly rigorous reading list, both in its scope and in his schedule. The scope includes literature, politics, and science, and it also says that there's a rigorous schedule that you have to follow. You've got to get up before dawn, read two hours of moral philosophy, and watch the sunrise. Then you can read political philosophy and law, then lunch, then science and astronomy, then dinner. Then you can have some Shakespeare and poems, and then go to bed, 12 hours a day, no breaks, seven days a week. So I saw this schedule, and then I saw this list of moral philosophies. And there at the top of the list was Cicero's Tusculan Disputations. And then these other great books of the Stoics and the Epicureans, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and enlightenment philosophers like Locke and Hutchison and Bolingbrook. And basically, I thought during Covid, I've got to read these books because it's a gap in my education. As you said, I've had this extraordinary education, and I am so grateful every day of my life for those remarkable teachers who inspired me to learn about political philosophy, law, and history. And I name them because I'm so grateful to them. And they transformed my life. But I just missed all of these books because moral philosophy fell out of the curriculum by the time I was in college in the 1980s. And I remember yearning for this guidance in the ‘80s. It was the great is good decade. And you do you, and Gordon Gekko. And, I was studying Puritan theology in college, which was not doing it for me. I have to confess, both in its idea that you can only achieve salvation through God's randomly given grace and your unshaken faith. Also because I'm Jewish. I was looking for an alternative to both the hedonism of pop culture and the rigors of Puritan theology. And what I didn't realize because the answer was hiding in plain sight, is this is the answer to the classical moral philosophy set out to answer. So when I found the books and saw Jefferson's reading list, I thought I got to read them.
So it was Covid, and something came over me, and I decided to follow Jefferson's schedule. And I get up before dawn. I read for two hours about this amazing moral philosophy. I watched the sunrise, and I found myself writing sonnets to sum up the wisdom that I just read, which I know just sounds incredibly weird and I still can't believe that I did it. But I was inspired. My wife Lauren is here. She's a poet. And she had inspired me to try writing poetry. And that combined with Jefferson and something else led me to do this for a year. And that was the project. And I spent a year reading this moral philosophy, and it just transformed my life. It changed my understanding of how to be a good person, how to be a good citizen, and how to think about the founders and their relationship between personal self-government and political self-government. And it also changed the way I approach every day. This book is incredibly meaningful. I'm so excited to share it with you and with our friends. All of you are lifelong learners. You're all readers. That's why you're here. And I'm here as an evangelist for the power of lifelong learning and reading. And I'm so eager to share with you what I learned during my Covid summer vacation.
Willy Walker: When I saw that Jeff hadn't read any of those great philosophers, the Greek and Roman philosophers in college, I said, Phew! Neither did I.” And then I said, “I've got two days to read them all. So, Jeff, you talked about Cicero. Go back to Pythagoras, because when you talk about Pythagoras and I've listened to you talk about him, that Pythagoras, first of all, he was a vegetarian before vegetarianism was cool. Talk about Pythagoras and the discipline with which he lived his life, and how Pythagoras then influenced Cicero.
Jeffrey Rosen: He's so inspiring. So I thought if Pythagoras is the guy who invented the triangle and the harmonic system. If that weren't enough, Diane knew, you know. But it turns out that in addition to that, he was a sage who lived on the Isle of Croton. Inspired his disciples to first be good and then live like gods. His motto was reverence thyself. It was Pythagoras who came up with the idea of knightly self-accounting of our virtues, which inspired Franklin to come up with his famous project of daily self-accounting and also came up with the distinction between reason and passion, which is the very core of Greek and Western moral philosophy. Pythagoras imagines that we have certain faculties or powers, reason in the head, passion or emotion in the heart, and also desire in the stomach, and says that it's our job to use our powers of reason to moderate or modulate our unreasonable passions and emotions so that we can achieve the calm tranquility that is embodied in the classical virtues of temperance, prudence, courage, and justice. And what's so core about Pythagoras, as you say, is that he lives his virtues, and he encourages and inspires rigorous moderation in eating and drinking. He's a very enthusiastic vegetarian and book 15 of The Metamorphosis has this passage about Pythagoras' vegetarianism, which includes his peculiar exception for vegetarianism, an injunction against eating beans. You're really not allowed to eat beans. In fact, his disciples were so committed to not eating beans that the enemy was chasing them and was about to kill them. And they come upon a bean field, and they have to stop because they can't touch beans. And then the enemy says, “I'll spare you if you just tell one secret. Why won't you eat beans?” And rather than tell the secret, they spit out their tongue and die and accept death in the bean field. So why on earth didn't they eat beans? There are two odd theses. One is that Lauren just discovered this in reading, Iamblichus' Life of Pythagoras. One is that beans cause flatulence. And by emitting the soul through an unwelcome orifice, then you taint the soul. And the other is that beans resemble fetuses, so it's either fetuses or farts. It's one or the other. But no beans aside from that very rigorous vegetarianism. But he was like Jesus or Socrates who were Franklin's models of how to live a perfect, balanced life. He's also a practical inspiration for all of us because you can never actually achieve perfection, but always through daily mindfulness, being really mindful of how you use your time, what you eat, and what you drink. You can first be good and then be like a God.
Willy Walker: So let's fast forward about 500 years to Cicero. Was Cicero a better writer or orator?
Jeffrey Rosen: Cicero is not a romp, I have to confess. The Tuscan Disputations is incredibly inspiring and central to moral philosophy. But also the translation means so much. Of course, he's most famous as a rhetorician. And kids in America and elsewhere would study his rhetoric for generations. And John Quincy Adams, who's in some ways the most inspiring of all the founders, relied on Cicero makes him the center of his book on rhetoric, which was the first book in America, published on rhetoric. So all this is to say, his orations must be extraordinarily powerful. And when you read them out loud, they're really great.
Willy Walker: His influence on the Founding Fathers. John Quincy Adams, as I read the book and listened to you talk about it subsequently. He was the most virtuous. Talk about why you focus on Franklin, you focus on Jefferson but John Quincy Adams, there's something about the way that he lived his life and his pursuit of virtue that made him rank highest amongst the founding fathers.
Jeffrey Rosen: He's so inspiring because it's such a self-conscious effort to achieve self-mastery, and he comes closer than anyone else. So first of all, I thought having a Jewish mom could sometimes be a challenge. Imagine having a Puritan mom like Abigail Adams because she's always exhorting him. “Use your powers of reason to master your passions.” She loves to quote the proverb, “he who is slow to anger is greater than he has mastered a village”, and is always telling Quincy to work harder, drink less, and achieve more. And he internalizes this and he's a bundle of neurosis, basically. And there's at about the age of 30, he's just turned down a U.S. Supreme Court appointment. He's minister to Saint Petersburg. And he writes in his diary, which is the most vivid and revealing of any American president. I'm 30-something years old. I haven't achieved anything. I'm a total failure. I'm spending too much time at the theater. I'm drinking too much. If I could only achieve self-discipline, I might have ended war and slavery. He sets a very high bar for himself. Okay, so then he goes on. He's elected president. And the close contest with Andrew Jackson was defeated by Jackson the second time around. And then he suffers another incredible tragedy, which is that his oldest son, George Washington Adams, commits suicide. And George Washington couldn't deal with the burden of having that name. Can you imagine? Also, Adams wrote an entire book to him, letters from a father to a Christian son, exhorting him to be as perfect as Jesus and to exemplify self-mastery and virtue. He can't take it. He jumps off a steamship. Adams is crushed. He can't imagine how he'll continue. What does he do? He spends a year rereading Cicero in the original, and particularly the Tusculum Disputations. And in the White House, he reads Cicero gets up, writes sonnets against slavery, and watches the sun rise. It's just remarkable. So after this year of accounting of the soul, he reemerges and becomes the greatest opponent of slavery of any white man of his time, according to Frederick Douglass. And he's reelected to Congress as a representative from Massachusetts. He denounces the gag rule forbidding abolitionist petitions from being introduced. He introduces a constitutional amendment to end slavery, and he dies on the floor of the House. And his last words are “I am composed.” And that's from Cicero. Remember the line that Jefferson would share with anyone saying, “What's the meaning of happiness?” The perfectly composed person who's achieved a tranquility of soul is virtuous and happy. That's how mindful he was in composing this virtuous life and achieving a version of his ideals. And I must share this incredible exhortation that Quincy Adams had in 1839 on the jubilee of the Constitution and the Declaration. And he's afraid it's a time much like today. Polarization is so great it looks like the country's going to break apart. And Quincy Adams says, “The only thing that will save us is learning about the principles of the Declaration and the Constitution.” And he's a great bassist, and he reads Deuteronomy in the original. This is worth getting exactly. But he says a version of this. He says “These principles of the declaration in the Constitution put them as front, let's between your eyes, whisper them to your children before you go to bed. Exhort them to your fellow citizens. Make them the principles of your political salvation.” That's how intense he is about the need for Americans to learn about these principles, for our own self-mastery, and to save the country. And every time I feel like browsing or watching a spare YouTube video that I shouldn't, I think of John Quincy Adams and try to do some more deep reading because he's so inspiring.
Willy Walker: So go from John Quincy Adams's evolution on the abolition of slavery to Thomas Jefferson, and his great contradiction of trying to live a virtuous life yet continuing to own slaves throughout his entire life.
Jeffrey Rosen: Jefferson read Cicero and read the same books and had the same philosophy as Virtuous Adams, although, at the end of his long life, Jefferson concludes, “I am not a stoic, but an Epicurean,” by which he means not heedless or hedonism or pleasure-seeking, but the rational contraction of desire so that we can meet them. But he's so mindful about living a life of virtue. How is it possible that this sage could so flamboyantly and hypocritically betray his own principles? And what's so striking to learn in death is he didn't even try. He and the other enslavers from Virginia are open in their moments of candor, that slavery violates the Declaration of Independence and the Bible and natural law, but that they just don't want to give it up because they like the lifestyle. And there's this really striking and honest moment of candor from Patrick Henry, who's given the give me liberty or given me death speech quoting Cato's letters. And Henry says, “Is it not amazing that I myself, who think that slavery violates the Bible and natural law, my cell phone slaves? I will not justify it. I won't attempt to. It's simple avarice or greed. I can't deal with the inconvenience of giving it up.” You have to gasp at it, but it's a gasp of truth. It's okay. That's what it was. They knew it was horribly wrong, but they didn't want to give it up. They didn't want to have the inconvenience. And Jefferson was the most flamboyant example of that because of his preaching industry and frugality. And yet he lives Caligula's life at Monticello, where he creates this fantasy of a Palladian villa. And he is served by his own children, the people in his house are Beverley and Eustace Hemings, his children by Sally Hemings, who came back from Paris. She agreed to come back as he agreed to free their kids on his death. And he calls them his family and flatters himself that he's being a kindly paterfamilias. Although he's always insisting that slavery should end at some point in the distant future, he doesn't free his own enslaved population except his kids, even on his death. They have to be broken up and the parents are separated from the kids in order to pay his debts. And the other thing that's so shocking about Jefferson is the depth of his racism. And I have a chapter on Phillis Wheatley, the great first black poet in America. She is brought over and enslaved. She's given a classical education by her mistress who lets her sit in on the lessons in Cicero and Seneca that the kids are having in the schoolroom. Based on a year of this education as a teenager, she starts writing these poems of virtue and becomes acclaimed as one of the greatest poets of her age. Washington praises her genius, and Benjamin Franklin receives her with the respect she goes to England, and she meets the Duke and Duchess. And she is what Professor Gates calls the Oprah Winfrey of her day, and who's the only dissenter, Jefferson. And in his notes on the state of Virginia, he has a whole chapter on how the poems of Phillis Wheatley, or he calls her “Watley”, are beneath contempt, basically because she's black and black people can't write good poetry. And it's such a shocking bit of racism from the deep racism from the great champion of freedom of conscience and freedom of the mind. And it goes well beyond anything expressed by Washington or Madison or the other enslavers, or certainly by Franklin who became an abolitionist. So all this is to say that on closer examination, Jefferson becomes more troubling and not less. And yet, like all the others, he didn't attempt to defend slavery but recognized that it was a form of great hypocrisy.
Willy Walker: Wheatley could have stayed in England and stayed free and came back to the United States into slavery.
Jeffrey Rosen: Yes, Somerset's decision by Lord Mansfield had just come down and seemed to suggest that presence in England would free you, and yet Wheatley also seems to have come over on a promise of freedom, which she received. So it was a bargaining chip. And that was one reason that she came back to the US.
Willy Walker: So Jefferson lived by his 12 virtues, and as you talked about had a reasonably disciplined way of living to it of waking up in the morning and living his day. Franklin had 12 and added a 13th. The thirteenth was humility. I want to go to John Adams on humility in a moment. But before we go to Adams on humility, let's stay with Franklin for a moment and his 12 turn to 13 list. You start the book with him, which said to me he was going to be the one that you thought, unlike John Quincy Adams later saw you profiled him. But Franklin was a very virtuous man trying to achieve virtue in everything he did. He had great discipline. Talk for a moment about why he was in such a quest of being a virtuous person, given all of his great success. You talk in the book about here's a man who has got all of these lists of characteristics and what he's done to give to society, and yet he is like the others in this constant quest of being a better person.
Jeffrey Rosen: It's incredible. And it's such a good question. Why? And even when he's just starting in Philadelphia as a printer's apprentice, he starts this club for the United Party of Virtue, and he calls it the junto. It's basically a reading group for guys, and you're supposed to pick a different virtue and try to achieve it. He gets the whole idea from John Locke, who in his Essays on Education recommends self-accounting and the pursuit of virtue as the core of education. And that's why Franklin makes this list of 13 virtues, including temperance, prudence, order, and industry. And he saves humility for last. And turning to Pythagoras because he is so practical is just trying to operationalize it. It's basically applied Pythagorean virtue accounting. He suggests that every night you put an X mark next to the virtue where you fallen short. He tries this for a while. He finds it incredibly depressing because there are so many X marks, and he gives it up for a while, but he thinks he's better for having tried. I know you know.
Willy Walker: You did that as well.
Jeffrey Rosen: I did.
Willy Walker: Talk for a moment about how well you were tracking your virtues during the pandemic.
Jeffrey Rosen: Talk about synchronicities. About ten years ago, a rabbi in DC at Odyssey's Israel synagogue suggested that a friend and I, Frank, try this system of Hebrew character accounting called Musser, which means character. And includes 13 virtues. And we didn't realize that it came from Franklin. And in fact, there was a Hasidic rabbi in 1808 who was an admirer of Franklin, who translated his virtues into Hebrew. And they survive till today as this Musser system forgetting or not understanding that it all went back to Franklin? We tried it for a while, and it's unbelievably depressing. Imagine if tonight you were going to make an X mark if you'd fallen short of temperance. Every time you lose your temper, you have to do an X mark, which reminds me how rigorous this self-accounting is because it's a minute-by-minute thing. It's not generic. I'm going to try to be a good person today. I can't lose my temper or order or cleanliness. Any one of them is so hard to achieve. But it is useful just to be mindful about it. For me, I guess it's for Franklin too, what's even more important than the daily accounting is the spiritual framework about why it's so important. And for Franklin, as for all the others, recognizing that it was necessary to be self-mastered in order to lead a good life and to not only be healthy, wealthy, and wise. Because Franklin was so practical that it'll make you good in business, but also to be a good person, and that being a good person will ultimately make you a good citizen. This is something that he got from his deep reading and moral philosophy and from reading. He is reading in Christian sermons as well. And others got it in different places. But it really, it's worth pausing for a second. How is it possible, as you said, that this great man, the most famous man in the world, next to Voltaire, who at the end of his life is acclaimed for having tamed the Gulf streams and brought lightning from the heavens. What did he attribute his great success to? He said his temperance, his conciliating temperament led him never to be too tendentious in asserting his opinions. He would never say, “This is the way, it is my way or the highway.” But always, “It may be so. Or I think perhaps it's this way.” And that's what he said, led him at the Constitutional Convention to convince both warring sides to make it unanimous. “This isn't perfect,” he said. “It's not what I might have drafted, but it's as good as we're going to get. And I think it's as close to perfection as possible.” And that's what led him to thrive during the revolution. It's what allowed him to continue his extraordinary productivity, curiosity and lifelong learning. So I think the point is that it's important to see these as practical virtues. We're not actually trying to be like Jesus or Socrates in one swoop, but today we'd call it mindfulness, which is why there are such deep connections between the Eastern and Western wisdom traditions. But Franklin thinks that a version of what some people today would consider meditation or other forms of mindfulness and being aware of each moment of the day. And in particular, how you use time, it's so urgently important to be mindful about each moment and to structure the day so that you're not getting distracted by unproductive emotions and are focused on productive work. And there's that phrase, Justice Ginsburg, her mom told me that the best advice her mom gave her was to avoid unproductive emotions like anger, jealousy, and fear. They are not productive, and they'll distract you from productive work. RBG's mom got it from reading the Stoics in things like the McGuffey Readers and the readers that she read on the Lower East Side of New York when she was a young schoolgirl. But it's the ancient wisdom that by being completely focused on basically being your best self every moment of the day, you can use your own talents to the best of your abilities and in doing so best achieve your potential and also serve others.
So, it's taking me a moment to describe it, but this sensibility that Franklin embodied in his virtue project self-mastery, self-reliance, and character improvement is the basic moral lesson of the ages that was so central to his education. Went all the way up through American education for so long, and oddly fell out of the discourse, not so long ago.
Willy Walker: I've got about 15 questions out of what you just said. I'm going to try and work through them as quickly as I can, and I'm going to answer a couple of myself. The first is his last book before this one was on Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Highly recommend it to anyone in the room. The second thing is that Ruth Bader Ginsburg married Lauren and Jeff as a little aside that you might not have known.
The next thing I want to talk about, Geoff, was Franklin's in the book you write that Franklin learned that raising his voice didn't get him any further in an argument, and he actually learned how to tone his voice down to have greater influence over people. In the world we live in today, where it seems like everyone's just turning the volume up as loud as they possibly can. Really interested in that.
Let's go back to Franklin on his 13th, which was humility, and go to John Adams because, in your chapter on humility, you put Adams in there which is somewhat ironic because he was the one who struggled with humility the most.
Jeffrey Rosen: Yes. Franklin said he found it hardest to achieve. A Quaker friend told him he had to work on it, and he put it in there. And of course, it is the hardest to achieve. It has to do with mastering your ego, which is the central task. And it's those ego-based, unproductive emotions of anger, jealousy, and fear. How dare they not know who I am? It's the essence of wisdom to achieve. And Adams is the most famously self-regarding man of his age. And he's always storming that he's not getting enough credit for the Declaration of Independence. And as we all know from the musical 1776, I'm obnoxious and dislike that cannot be denied. He's constantly full of ego. He's mocked as his rotundity because he wants the president to be called his elective majesty and so forth. But the most endearing thing about Adams is he knows it. He's so relatable, as we would say today because he's aware of the fact that this is his vice.
And when he and Abigail are courting, they decide to make a list of each other's faults. Not a great dating strategy. Where do they get it? From Pythagoras. They're both reading the golden virtues and they think, make a list of your faults. So Abigail is very generous to John, and she says, “Some call you arrogant, but in fact, it's just that you're so brilliant that people find you intellectually intimidating.” And Adams's response is, “You should practice the piano more and read more. Plus, you're pigeon-toed,” and she's totally cool about it. She says, “I'll try to read more, but a gentleman should never comment on a lady's posture.” She takes it in stride. And then they have this gorgeous epistolary friendship and intellectual partnership and romance, and they're always exhorting each other to achieve self-improvement. Not least, Abigail helps him master his temper and she helps him make up after his two great battles with Thomas Jefferson and Mercy Otis Warren, the brilliant Anti-Federalist, Adams calls her the poetical genius of the revolution because she wrote these satires revolution. And they fall out of her politics because she writes a history of the US that's Jeffersonian and says that Adams is a monarchist who wants to set up a form of the English Constitution. And Adams loses it and says, “How dare you say I'm a monarchist and I'm arrogant?” And she said, “You endorse the English Constitution. They break up for a while.” Abigail sends a lock of her hair to bring them back together, and they reconcile because Adams knows about his faults. And in this great moment at the end, Mercy says, “I've just got one favor to ask. Some guy took the credit for my play The Agitator, which you said was the best play of the revolution. Can you attest that I wrote it?” He says, “You're the only genius who could have written it.” He rides into Boston, goes to the Boston Athenaeum, goes to the title page where this other guy is taking credit for the play, and crosses out the guy's name and says, “This was written by Mercy Otis Warren and it's there in the Athenaeum today you see it.” But it's a signal that he was arrogant but always gained himself.
The other thing I have to share, it's so inspiring to see John Adams and Jefferson talking about books when they're old. What do they want to do when they reconcile? Talk about the books they've read. Adams is so excited when he learns that Pythagoras may have traveled to the East and read the Bhagavad Gita and the Hindu Vedas. Wow, can you imagine this is what he wants to do at the age of 80 or something. But there's only one problem. He's not sure that Joseph Priestley has lived long enough to write his book, comparing the moral philosophy of the Christians and the Hindus, as they're called. And Jefferson says, “Good news. He lived. Here's the book. I'll send it to you.” And Adam says “This will prove that the central lesson of Pythagoras can be traced back to the East. And that's love God and his creatures, rejoice in all things.” It's a version of renounce and enjoy. Adams also notes the deep connections between the wisdom of the East and the West. It's just so exciting, isn't it? And so humbling to see you. You're all lifelong learners, and I want to be too. When we're 80 years old, be like that and look for those connections and seek out the books and be excited by the similarities rather than the differences. And here's the other thing that's so inspiring. Adams had to worry about whether someone lived long enough to translate the Bhagavad Gita for us. Nowadays, it's all online, it's all on our phones, and it just blows my mind that I was able to do this whole reading project and write this whole book sitting on my couch at home, because all of the books are on this device, and all I need is the self-discipline to read them.
Willy Walker: Self-discipline not to go to that in the morning and check emails and do social media before doing a reading, no, but Jeff talks about that. I mean, you talk about creating that discipline of waking up in the morning and reading first and not going to that have. Have you maintained that discipline?
Jeffrey Rosen: Yes, I have. This is the crucial takeaway. There's got to be a takeaway. And it's all about rules because that's what Pythagoras and Franklin teach. Habits and rules are crucial. So my rule now is I wake up early. I'm not always making the sunrise. Now I must fess up. I don't want to be a virtue monger and pretend that every single morning I'm waking up with the sunrise. But I do have a rule that I have to read at least until breakfast rather than browse, and that requires picking up the phone because I do read online, and just not being allowed to swipe left to email or to the bloggers or whatever. And instead of having to read a book. And it's hard because I really would rather check my email in the morning than read a book. So every morning it's a bit of a struggle. But because it's a rule, I'm keeping to it, and as a result, I'm still reading a lot. And it's so exciting that I remember that feeling I had as a kid. All the books are in this place, and I still get excited as I'm sharing this with you now, they're just all here and there's so much wisdom and learning, but it's you've got to have a habit. And for me, it has to be the same time of day. So the morning is the golden time to try to do the reading. And that's what I'm doing. And I'm writing another book and reading a lot of books for it. And I'm so glad to have developed the habit.
Willy Walker: So on his deathbed, Peter Jefferson looks at Thomas Jefferson and says to him, “Get a classical education and maintain physical fitness.” The real focus of your book is deep reading, continuous learning, and lifelong learning. But when I read that, you're in good shape, as it relates to the discipline of reading and lifelong reading on the other side of it, Jefferson was someone who also, and many of the founding fathers took care of themselves physically as well. This all plays into this virtue in the discipline. Talk for a moment about that piece. Did you think about looking at them on that side as far as their physical health as well as their mental health, as you were doing this research.
Jeffrey Rosen: Completely. They're all about schedules and all about at the same time of day for everything. And they also talk constantly about the times that they set aside for exercise and for meals and what they eat. And they're always doing accounting there. And Jefferson has advice about hikes. You should not bring a book so that you can focus on nature. He does say you can bring a gun. So I think hunting is okay, but it's very important to commune with nature and clear the mind and not be focusing on other things. And he breaks his wrist at the end, but he's really horseback riding until the end. Washington keeps up his schedule. Washington's obsessed with clocks which he gets from Seneca. Seneca has this great essay on time to his friend Lucilius. Time is a gift repaid by industry, by squandering what fools these mortals be. The Shakespeare line comes from Seneca, and Washington has breakfast, lunch, tea, and dinner at the same time every day. He basically eats the same thing every day, corn cakes in the morning, a hearty lunch, and a light dinner. He also is very keen on exercise and the whole sound mind and sound body which comes from the Greeks, is not just some lifestyle choice. It's central to the Pythagorean schedule of self-mastery. They took naps as well and scheduled those in there as well. So attention: eat, sleep, diet, discipline, and time is all part of the package.
Willy Walker: I was on a hike this morning getting ready for this conversation, and I had my ear pods in my ears listening to Jeff in an interview, and I heard the part about Jefferson saying, “When you're on a hike, you should be focusing on nature and nothing else.” And I go, I think he'll excuse me for going away from that right here.
Jeff, when you read the book, there's this wistful sense that our leaders today don't have the qualities that the Founding Fathers had. That the people that we have is wistful, an okay word. But there's a sense when you read it. And by the way, you do point out some of the inconsistencies with Jefferson, for instance. But first of all, this morning I woke up and I was thinking about this, and I wrote three, I won't use their names, but two senators and one governor and said, “What are you reading right now?” And all three came back to me within two hours telling me what they were reading. One of them on a book on Iceland, the other one is a book on history, but they all read, okay, and I won't tell you what parties they were in, but they're all in one party.
So, my question to you Jeff is this, as you did this research, and you think about where we are today? Let me backup for two seconds. You mentioned in the book a memorandum or a note that Jefferson wrote about a president who would lose an election. You take it from here.
Jeffrey Rosen: He's got the Constitution from Madison because he's been in Paris, and he has two objections. First, there's no Bill of Rights. And second, there's no term limits for the president. And he's worried that in the distant future, a president will lose an election by a few votes, cry foul, refuse to leave office, and list the states who voted for him to support him and install himself as a dictator. As this gentleman is covering his face. Hamilton has a similar fear from the other side. He's afraid that a president will be like a Caesar on horseback who will win an election and voluntarily persuade the people to install him as a dictator for life. They're centrally concerned about demagogues, and their fear of demagogues comes from their concerns about democracy. Because neither of them is in favor of unmediated, direct democracy. And they've been reading the ancients, and they have absorbed the wisdom that in all large assemblies, as Madison said, “Of any character composed passion never fails to wrest the scepter from reason. Even if every Athenian had been Socrates, Athens would still have been a mob. And that's why the whole constitution is set up to slow down deliberation, to prevent mobs or factions from forming based on passion rather than reason.” Remember that distinction that comes back from Pythagoras. It defines not only their notion of personal self-government, but political self-government. Individuals have to balance passion and reason in the constitution of their minds. Democracies have to do it in the constitution of the state. And unless they do that, they will form factions which are any group, a majority or a minority, animated by passion rather than reason, devoted to self-interest rather than the public good. That's why the whole system is set up to separate powers vertically and horizontally to slow down deliberation, to prevent mobs or factions from forming, and to assume that by the time they do. Because it's hard to make decisions, people will get tired and go home. So it's central to the political psychology of the Constitution. I came to understand the Federalist Papers in a totally new light as a manual for public happiness, which is a phrase that Madison and Jefferson repeatedly use.
At the end of their lives none of them is sure that the experiment will succeed, and the major founders often express grave concern about whether enough people will find enough virtue to keep the Republic. And by virtue now I understand it's not some generic being good in the abstract. It's the self-discipline and self-mastery not to tweet ourselves to death, not to let our most angry faction add on the libs and own the conservative's impulses that define our need to compromise and to listen and moderate ourselves. And Washington is afraid that we may descend into factions. Jefferson fears a civil war. Madison and Hamilton think the Republic isn't strong enough to stop factions from forming. Only Madison is a little more optimistic. But what's the cause of his optimism?
These new media technologies, like the broadside press, will allow complicated arguments like the Federalist Papers to be distributed in newspapers. So a class of enlightened journalists and statesmen he calls the literati will persuade citizens to read. By reading these arguments listen to different perspectives and deliberate and eventually converge around reason rather than passion. So that's why it's such a challenging time because obviously our world of Instagram and X or whatever it's called, or Facebook is the opposite of the Federalist Papers and the slow birth of reason. And I have to say, in terms of politics, I'm not allowed anymore to have any political opinions because I'm privileged to work at the National Constitution Center, which is set up by Congress to be this nonpartisan center for constitutional education. And our chairs are Justice Breyer, who's here, and Justice Gorsuch. And we bring together liberals and conservatives to debate and educate people about the Constitution. And it's so inspiring to be part of this great mission for constitutional education. So it's not a question of favoring one candidate or another, but it's obviously true that people on both sides, as you said, are not expressing themselves with the thoughtfulness, moderation, and depth of the founders. Why is that? It's not just because they don't read, because as you said many people do and in fact are newly chosen vice-presidential candidates, J.D. Vance is certainly a deep student of American history and reads deeply as do many others in public life. It must be the incentives of politics, and it must have to do with the social media environment that encourages you to play to your base and make the most extreme and radicalized statements in order to mobilize extremists on one side or the other. Because there's no longer an incentive to move to the middle and to compromise. And it also has to do with the polarized state of our politics, which reflects this polarized social media landscape. And in that sense, you could say it's vindicating some of the founder's fears about the excesses of unmediated democracy. They're very much for republicanism, which means that ultimately the people have to decide. But it's a question of cooling the popular will.
Here's the other thing that's so central. It's resisting the immediate impulse and thinking taking the long view, that's basically the definition of virtue when you sum up all of the wisdom literature. It's a version of the marshmallow test. Remember those kids at Stanford? If you want one marshmallow, you're seven years old. Now you get one. If you can wait 15 minutes, you get two. And the kids who could wait did much better later in life. And that's what the Bhagavad Gita, the Dhammapada, John Locke, and Cicero are all saying. Resist the immediate gratification or pleasure and reflect so that you can serve your long-term interests. And that's what immediate democracy by polling or Twitter polls don't do. And that's what a republic or a constitutional democracy does achieve. So it's a very serious challenge. It's not just the leader's fault because they're responding to the incentives of the system, but how we're going to get out of it is a great challenge.
Willy Walker: Jeff clearly went for the two marshmallows.
Jeffrey Rosen: I did not. I will always go for the first marshmallow.
Willy Walker: As you went through that and about the need to pause, it reminded me in the book, you talk about Jefferson, where you said, “If you get angry, count to ten. If you get really angry, count to 100.” And we all probably could learn a little bit from that, particularly in the tweet world that we live in today. I guess one of the things as I listen to you and by the way, like in that response, you’re quoting directly from the Constitution, from the great Greek and Roman philosophers, and also pulling it all together in something perfectly articulated to be that smart and have your brain running that fast.
The National Constitution Center for a second, let's dive into that because you talked about it being bipartisan. It was chartered by the federal government but is now privately funded by very little funding from the federal government. But you have a podcast every week called We the People, where you're extremely good at bringing in both sides of the debate, both sides of the issue. And you have incredible scholars and judges and all sorts of people to take both sides. As you've been at the National Constitution Center. Jeff, defending that document. Have you felt yourself moving more towards, if you will, Ruth Bader Ginsburg if it should be a living document that gets reinterpreted over time or more towards Antonin Scalia, that we need to look at the actual words of the Constitution and hold on to them from a traditionalist standpoint?
Jeffrey Rosen: I say I'm not allowed to have opinions. I've lost interest in my own opinions and it's much like that.
Willy Walker: We're very interested in your opinions. How has this job influenced you?
Jeffrey Rosen: I'm not being coy here. Every week I have to call up these great scholars and thinkers to give the arguments on both sides of all the cases. And we did the Trump immunity case last week and in two episodes. First, it was Harold Koh from Yale Law School and a group of scholars who were more inclined to think it was a five-alarm fire, as Justice Jackson said. And then we had two conservative scholars. All have different perspectives in each of these cases. They disagreed slightly, but they were much more. This is a pleasure. This is within the scope of previous immunity decisions that will not transform the world. And the more you listen to different thoughtful people on both sides, the harder it is to be sure of yourself. That spirit that's not too sure it's right is Learner puts it, comes from taking the time to listen to arguments on both sides. But I will say this, it's so inspiring. It's so elevating. It's so meaningful to learn from all of these wonderful perspectives every week and to convene groups of people to do this, to teach learners of all ages, especially kids. And it's so exciting to have created this new Constitution 101 class, which is now online. And we're going to launch in just a few weeks with Khan Academy. It's Khan Academy's first civics course. They've never done one before, so we'll bring it to high school students at scale with the great liberal and conservative scholars and for teachers and high school kids. And then we're going to do a middle school version. And I'm also committed to inspiring adult learners like you to engage in this great project of lifelong constitutional education. So now I'm going to just plug the incredible interactive constitution, which is now online, and it's free, and it's now gotten 80 million hits since we launched in 2015. It's among the most googled constitutions in the world. And you can click on any clause of the Constitution. And again, find the leading liberal and conservative scholars writing a thousand words about what they agree the provision means, and then separate statements about what they disagree about. So as Amy Coney Barrett and Neal Katyal with a thousand words about what they agree about the habeas corpus clause and then separate statements about what they disagree with, it just blows my mind. 80 clauses, 160 scholars, so much learning and light. And so it's so deep and rigorous. And you can't believe that any of these questions are simple. Once you see how thoughtfully people agree and disagree, plus the podcasts and the classes and primary source documents. I really believe in this marvelous age of learning that we can create the resources that can allow citizens of all ages just to learn and to dig in and to teach themselves.
So, the Constitution is made for people of fundamentally different points of view, as Justice Holmes said. And throughout history, the lines between liberal and strict construction and national and state power have gone up and down. That's part of the American experiment, but it's both elevating and consoling to some degree, to realize that although we've come very close to civil war more than once, violence has pervaded our history. We've betrayed our ideals dramatically throughout our history. The arc has bent upward because people have been committed to the conversation, and because the Constitution itself has provided a framework that has structured our disagreements.
Willy Walker: Jeff talked about our Constitution and what he has online being viewed by people from all over the world. The National Constitution Center actually gave President Zelensky the Liberty Award two years ago and was a real shot in the arm to him at that time as it relates to trying to hold on to their nation under siege. You also gave the award to David Rubenstein and to Judy Woodruff, who has been a great participant and fan of the Sun Valley Writers Conference last year.
Jeffrey Rosen: And we're giving it this year to read Ken Burns, who I think is another friend out here. Please come. It's September 24th in Philly, and we're also working with Ken Burns for his Amazing American Revolution documentary, which is going to launch next year, and is creating a series, a civic toolkit so that kids in schools can learn about the basic principles of the American idea as they watch the documentary. And it's so exciting to be able to work with Ken Burns to teach the American idea. These are very alarming and troubling times for politics. But it's exciting to be able to teach all this history and inspire people to learn about the best of America.
Willy Walker: To any of you who haven't watched Ken Burns commencement speech at Brandeis University this past May. You might want to take a look at that. It's a fantastic speech. Two final things. First of all, a lot of people felt that 2020 was a great testing of our system. You know our system and the laws of our system as well are better than anyone. Was that a true test? And are we prepared to be able to take another test?
Jeffrey Rosen: It was a test. I don't know anyone, including defenders of President Trump, who doesn't say that January 6th, the riots themselves were wrong and they were Madison's nightmare. The fear of armed mobs surrounding federal courthouses was literally what led to the Constitutional Convention and Shays Rebellion, and the fear of subverting the Republican system through violence is exactly what the whole Constitution was set up to avoid. The system did hold, the vice president did not certify the false results, and all 80 judges who considered the question, those appointed by President Trump and other presidents all rejected the false claims. And the winner took office. So the system, the system held. I don't know what the future will bring. It's so extraordinary to see how fate turns as we have been reminded this week of a gesture of bullet or a breath or faith. Small contingencies can transform history and it's fragile. And war came in the 1860s because the Constitution did not hold. The wisest thing that President Trump ever says is “We'll see, that's all we can say.” But
Willy Walker: I will say one thing, which I mean, I opened my conference earlier this week, and I did say thank God that President Trump was not shot and killed. Thank God because I said to everyone who was here, you may not be here. What would be going on in the streets of America right now had that happened? And so I think we have to remember that. The other thing was I had Dawn Staley, who was the women's basketball coach at the University of South Carolina, come speak at our conference. And Dawn Staley, some of you may remember, she was in three Olympics, and won three Olympic gold medals. And she was the flag bearer for the United States walking into her final Olympics. And she talked about what an honor it was to carry that flag in. And I pointed out to people that we are all fighting to defend that same flag, left or right. The two sides view it as a more perfect union, but they are both fighting for that flag. And you must remember. That neither side has the privilege to say we believe in that flag more than the other, and that we all have to focus on that flag. My final question to you.
Your next project, it's Hamilton and Jefferson and the differences between the two of them as it relates to having state power or federal power. Talk for a second about that and how happy one of them would have been on the outcome of the Rowe.
Jeffrey Rosen: Hamilton, Jefferson the battle for the Soul of America, from 1776 to 2026 is the most obvious of all historical subjects and the most exciting to work through because it's so powerful. Hamilton and Jefferson are like golden and silver threads woven throughout American history, and their initial battle between national power and states' rights. And liberal versus strict construction and rule by elites versus rule by democracy, have defined all of our political and constitutional battles ever since. And half the book just tells their story. The incredible clash over the bank and the finance system, the alien's edition acts, and the profound differences in their political philosophies, in particular their approach to national power. And then I trace how each of them is invoked at every major moment in American history by Lincoln, who before the Civil War said all honor to Jefferson and insisted that resisting secession was crucial to preserving the union against Calhoun, who invoked Jefferson to justify secession. And FDR, who has the hootspa as the only word to paint himself as a great Jeffersonian, even as he's expanding federal power, in ways that Jefferson would have recoiled from Ronald Reagan, reinvokes Jefferson to try to strike back against the New Deal. And it pledges to appoint Jeffersonian justices who will abide by original understanding. And that's the whole basis for our current debates about federal power. The clash between the Jeffersonian Clarence Thomas, who believes in the declaration. The more Hamiltonian Justice Scalia, who believed in original understanding but wanted to defer to the federal government like the administrative state and would have upheld that Chevron decision that the Supreme Court just overturned last week because he thought that executive power was more important than constraint in Congress. So it's just a marvelous and dramatic way of studying American intellectual, political, and constitutional history. And it's so exciting for me to trace it through. Rowe is Jeffersonian in the sense that it returned power to the states rather than the federal government. On the other hand, so many of these decisions would have made Jefferson cringe because they're all about judicial supremacy and the extraordinary vision of a U.S. Supreme Court, immunizing the president or striking down environmental protections, would have appalled Jefferson because he thinks that the president is even bound to obey the Supreme Court and views John Marshall as a minor and Saper who's trying to undermine the Constitution. Basically, he believes in democracy above all and doesn't think that judges should strike down any unconstitutional laws.
What this shows is both Jefferson and Hamilton are protean figures, to use a phrase that one scholar has said, and different sides have invoked Jefferson or Hamilton at different times based on whether their stock is high or low. And also to justify their political results. But there is something majestic and inspiring about the fact that our history has been defined by a battle of ideas. And even though all sides have often betrayed their principles, at least they've had these great principles to betray and also to march for. When you think about why we are fighting for democracy. Why must we be committed to preserving it? We've got to preserve it because the ideals are so inspiring: liberty, equality, democracy, freedom of conscience, natural rights. All of these ideals of the Constitution and Declaration, which Hamilton and Jefferson share are the right ideas. They're self-evident truths. It is self-evidently true that we are all created equal and born by our creator with these glorious rights, and we do form a government to secure these rights. And we've created the greatest experience in self-government ever. The only written constitution still survives. It's urgently important to preserve it. And I guess now that I'll finish up this 4th of July speech by saying the way to preserve it is to listen and to deliberate and to remember Franklin and the spirit were not too sure that was right and not my way or the highway. It's virtuous self-mastery, calm, temperance, moderation, prudence, courage, fortitude, and justice. Let's remember those virtues. They'll make us better citizens. And at the very least, in these anxious, challenging, difficult times, they'll make us happier people.
Willy Walker: Thank you.
