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Thank you so much.

Hello, friends.

It is an honor to be here with you in this magnificent gathering

to talk about the pursuit of happiness.

I want to tell you about the unusual COVID-era reading

project that led me to explore what Thomas Jefferson meant when he put that famous

phrase into the Declaration of Independence about the pursuit of happiness. And what I learned

changed my life. It changed what I think about

how to be a good person and how to be a good citizen. What I learned was that for the founders,

the pursuit of happiness meant not feeling good, but being good. Not the pursuit of immediate

pleasure, but the pursuit of long-term

virtue. And then I want to tell you about how this new understanding has made me a missionary

for studying the ideals of the Constitution and the Declaration. So here's how this COVID reading project developed. Just around when COVID started,

I noticed that both Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson had taken as their understanding of the

pursuit of happiness from a book by Cicero I'd never heard of called the Tusculan Disputations. And first, I was

reading Benjamin Franklin, and there's that part of his autobiography that some of you may have seen.

In his 20s, Ben Franklin resolved to achieve moral perfection. And he made a list of 12 virtues that he later expanded to 13. And they included

temperance, order, resolution, frugality, cleanliness. He saved the one he found hardest for last,

...