Good Day Thomas Jefferson, Our Podcast Listeners.

And as always, thank you so much for listening.

This week, a very special show,

primarily a discussion between you Clay and Professor Joseph Ellis about his book American Sphinx.

And this sort of represents the beginning of a series of conversations that you enjoy planned.

I'm so, you know, full of respect for Joseph Ellis and his work. I've read all of his books as they appeared. We became friends a long time ago and he's been such a blessing to the Thomas Jefferson hour during this pandemic and I hope this is a

conversation a series of conversations that just continues indefinitely but I

asked him a short time ago if we could go through his books more or less systematically and sort of debrief

him about his career and of course he's the first to say it's not over yet he still has more books in him

but he agreed and so this is the first of those conversations.

It's about one of his sort of the middle of the PAC books, American Sphinx the character of Thomas Jefferson, and it's through that book that I met him in the studios of the great documentary filmmaker Ken Burns.

And so, you know, it's's just it's a delight he know he's rereading his books

some of which he hasn't read for many many years and I'm reading the books which I've read

before but I've I re-read American Sphinx and I wish we'd had more time

but in this in this podcast we talk about the elusiveness of Jefferson's personality

his capacity to wall off different parts the elusiveness of Jefferson's personality,

his capacity to wall off different parts of his being

so that they didn't have to talk to each other,

which is, I think, the major insight of American Sphinx.

And we talked about his radicalization during his time in France.

So with that let's go to the show before we do anything that you want to update our

listeners on sir.

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