I'm going to show you how great I am.

This is a good fellow.

I just want to say from the bottom of me heart,

I'd like to take this chance to apologize to absolutely nobody.

One gentleman, whose name I never heard, was an earnest friend of the people, and

discanted with much enthusiasm upon the glorious future then opening upon this newborn nation,

and predicted the perpetuity of our institutions, from the purity and intelligence of the

people, their freedom from interest

or prejudice, their enlightened love of liberty, etc. Alexander Hamilton was among the guests,

and his patience being somewhat exhausted, he replied with much emphasis striking his hand upon the table.

Your people, sir, your people is a great beast.

Hello, and welcome to How to take over the world. This is Ben

Wilson and the preceding passage was a quote from Theophilus Parsons. Every nation needs a founder.

An obvious example is Lee Kwan Yu of Singapore or David Ben-Gurion of Israel or Ibn Saud of Saudi

Arabia. But you also have less obvious examples. Charles de Gaul is kind of

the founder of modern France, for example. Anyway, the founder of a nation needs to do two things.

They need to have a vision and a brand, a cult of personality that people buy into. And America is

unique in that it has two founders. Washington provided the cult of personality

and Alexander Hamilton is really the one who provided the vision. Okay, most of the time those two

things are tied up in a single person like Lee Kuan Yew. Again, great example. But in this case,

it was split. And I think the fact that Washington provided that cult of personality obscures

the fact that Hamilton is the one who provided the other half of that equation.

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