You're always interested in the first of anything,

and including the first president, the first victorious general,

the person, quite arguably, Washington is more responsible

for the creation of the American Republic than any other person.

And now the good fight with Yasha Monk.

America, as many of you will know, is about to celebrate its 250th birthday.

And so I thought this was a great opportunity to examine the life in times of perhaps the most important American founder, George Washington.

I invited onto a podcast to do this, H.W. Brands,

the Jack S. Blanton senior chair in history at the University of Texas at Austin

and Pulitzer Prize finalist for many of his biographies,

who has a new bookout called American Patriarch, The Life of George Washington.

I was particularly interested in finding out the early upbringing of Washington,

how he fit into the social structure of the time,

how he went from being a loyal British subject to an American revolutionary leader,

how an originally small rebellion spiraled and spiraled

into a much more ambitious undertaking,

and how Washington's choice to relinquish power twice

shaped the norms of the early American Republic.

In the last part of this week's conversation, we talk not about Washington's presidency,

but how he relinquished his presidency, how that set the norm for future American presidents

by and large, with one notable exception, leaving

office after two terms. How Washington thought about the rise of political partisanship, which

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