Welcome to the Not Old Better Show on radio and podcast.

The show covering all things health, wellness, culture, and more.

The show for all of us who aren't old were better.

Each week we'll interview superstars, experts, and ordinary people, doing extraordinary things,

all related to this wonderful experience of getting better, not older.

Now, here's your host, the award-winning Paul Vogelzag.

Thank you and welcome.

Today's episode is sponsored by Caraway, good-looking and clean cooking.

Thomas Jefferson was a man of brilliant words, but behind the elegant prose of the declaration behind the Monticello image etched into our coins,

was a complicated, anxious, emotionally charged figure who suffered in silence, loved

in secrecy, and lived carefully behind a mask of reason. Today, we meet the man behind the mask.

Welcome to the Not Old Better Show History Alive series. I'm Paul Vogelzeng, and today's guest is

acclaimed historian Andrew Burstein,

whose new book, Being Thomas Jefferson, an intimate history, peels away the polished marble

of public memory to reveal a man far more fragile and far more human than we were ever taught.

Was Jefferson a master of controlled emotion or a prisoner of it, a principled architect of democracy,

or a lifelong rationalizer of privilege and contradiction?

Andrew Burstein takes us through never-before-seen letters,

private moments, and hidden corners of Jefferson's emotional life from chronic illness to his long secret connection with Sally Hemings.

This conversation is part biography, part cultural reckoning, and fully relevant to anyone curious about the difference between the stories we tell and the

truths we live. Stay with us. You've never heard Jefferson quite like this. Please join me in

welcoming, acclaimed historian and author, Andrew Burstey. Professor Andrew Burstey, welcome to the program.

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