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We'll get to more on this in a moment. First, there are certain purchases that should be simple. Somehow they still feel stuck in another era. Window treatments are one of those things. You decide you want new blinds or shades, and suddenly you have to schedule an appointment and wait around for somebody to show up. And you sit through a sales pitch and then you brace yourself for a gigantic quote. Well, you know, there are a lot of home projects that are like this, where you think you're fixing a light bulb and it turns out that you have to repair all of the electrical sockets in your house or something. Well, you don't need that. At least not for your window coverings. This is why I trust blinds.com blinds.com lets you shop for custom window treatments online, but still gives you access to professional measuring and installation services if you want them. And honestly, that right there, that's the sweet spot. If you're the kind of person who knows exactly what you want, you can build a quote online in minutes. If you'd rather get some guidance, they will offer virtual design consultations on your schedule instead of making you wait around all day for an appointment. They'll also send samples directly to your door so you can compare colors, textures, materials in your actual home before you make a decision. Blinds.com carries everything from traditional blinds and shades to shutters, bamboo shades, outdoor shades for patios, and more. They've been around for 29 years. They've covered more than 25 million windows, making them the number one online retailer of custom window treatments. Plus, every single order is backed by their 100% satisfaction guarantee. If you're not happy, they'll make it right. Right now, blinds.com is giving our listeners an exclusive $50 off when you spend $500 or more. Just use code Shapiro at checkout limited time offer rules and restrictions apply. See blinds.com for details.
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So good, so good, so good.
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If you could bring back one founding father to diagnose the core reason for America's dysfunction today, who would it be? Which founder would appraise our institution, families, finances, national landscape and say, told you so? Most people might answer George Washington for his leadership, or maybe Thomas Jefferson for his poetry, or maybe Alexander Hamilton for his intellectual prodigy, or perhaps James Madison for his institutional mind. But I'd offer a different founder. My my favorite founder. A founder who, unique among America's architects, understood the keystone of the American experiment. What is the secret ingredient to America's success? What is the core cause of America's worst qualities today? Virtue. Or rather, the lack of it. And none other than John Adams understood this best. This is episode two of the Founders. We need now the pessimist John Adams. John Adams was a lawyer, revolutionary, a diplomat, George Washington's VP and later the second president of the United States. Perhaps more importantly, John Adams was a husband and a father. But in comparison to the other founding fathers, Adams understood something America seems to have forgotten today, that the greatest threat to any republic is not an enemy at the gates, but the decay of the character of the people. Adams understood that great civilizations die by suicide, not by homicide. Like the other founders, John Adams distrusted concentrated power, the tyranny of the masses and the ambition of kings. But most of all, Adams distrusted himself. In Adams view, no one could be trusted fully with power. His entire political worldview begins from the assumption that human beings are driven by vanity, ambition, greed, a hunger for admiration. He said it about himself constantly in his own diaries. Adams was the great pessimist of the founding generation. And for this reason, Adams staked the entire American experiment on one thing no constitution can supply. Virtue. This was Adams great paradox and one of the most important lessons any founder has left us. Adams, of course, revered the force of the Constitution. He wrote the Massachusetts state constitution in 1779, which a decade later would become the model for the American Constitution. Later on, Adams would write about the insufficiency of constitutions. We have no government armed with power, capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge or gallantry would break the strongest chords of our Constitution. As a whale goes through a Net. Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. I would carve those words on the door of every school and state house in this country if I could. As a whale goes through a net, captures the importance of virtue in seven words. You can build an ingenious net of laws, checks, balances. But a people ruled by passions will break the net as if it were never there in the first place. Ultimately, a free government does not run on paper. But in our modern politics, telling Americans they ought to govern themselves might be the biggest losing campaign pitch of all time. If you want to understand who John Adams was, there's one scene that tells you almost everything. We need to go back to Boston. It's March 1770. British soldiers stand surrounded by an angry mob of American colonists. The crowd is screaming, shoving, throwing snowballs, ice, rocks at them. Then someone yells, fire. In the confusion, the soldiers do fire, and five colonists end up dead. History remembers this moment as the Boston massacre, but at the time, it became a powder keg. A mob wanted a de facto show trial and a hanging for those British soldiers. Newspapers exploded. Colonists demanded justice. No nuance, no questions, just punishment. Sound kind of familiar. It's depressing to recall how many times we've seen the public act as judge, jury, and executioner in the past couple of years alone. Back in 1770, no lawyer in Boston would touch the soldier's case. To defend British soldiers would be traitorous to the American cause. So who stepped forward? John Adams. Now, Adams despised British colonial policy, to say the least. He was a revolutionary. He believed the crown was trampling on liberty. His cousin was Samuel Adams, the leader of the Sons of Liberty. He would help lead the revolution himself in a few years time. But Adams believed that justice either applies to everybody or it isn't justice at all. The night before accepting the case, Adams went home and told his wife, Abigail, everything he feared he could lose. His law practice, his reputation, his family could be put in danger. Abigail cried, not because she was scared, but because she understood what doing the right thing might cost. She told her husband to go ahead and do it anyway. We'll come back to Abigail in just a second. In the courtroom, Adam stood before a jury that desperately wanted vengeance and basically told them, facts don't care about your feelings. I'm not kidding. He actually said, facts are stubborn things. And whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence. Consider how totally foreign that is. To the way our politics tends to operate right now. Now it's all appeals to emotion, appeals to empathy, appeals to sympathy, appeals to righteous indignation and anger, not appeals to facts. But for Adams, facts came first, because no true justice could be rooted in untruth. Back to Boston in 1770, Adams wins the case. Six of the eight soldiers were acquitted. Just months later, Adams was elected to the Massachusetts legislature. The same people Adams feared would destroy him for defending the British ended up looking at what Adams had done and concluding he was exactly the kind of man they wanted to represent them. While this may be a testament to the Bostonian's character at the time, can you imagine America electing someone like Derek Chauvin's lawyer to political office today? Yeah, that would not be a thing that would ever happen. Not in 1 million years. Virtue is not revealed when you're defending your friends. Virtue is revealed when telling the truth costs you something. By this standard, John Adams would be a wrecking ball in today's political climate, reminding people that they can and sometimes should risk disappointing their own side in service of the truth. People spend a lot of time waiting for permission. I'm talking not about kids. I'm talking about adults. You're waiting for permission to start to build to turn an idea into a business. But the permission is never going to come. You just have to actually go do it. Which is one of the reasons I love Shopify. At the daily wire shop, we sell everything from fax merch to books, drinkware. What matters isn't just getting people to your store. What matters is making it easy for them to buy when they get there. Shopify checkout helps more customers complete their purchase. When they return, their information is already saved. And that makes the process even easier. Because Shopify handles the store setup, checkout and infrastructure, you can spend more time growing your business and less time managing software. Whether you're building a side hustle or your next full time venture, Shopify gives you the tools to get started. With Shopify, nothing stands between your idea and a real business. So go make it into one. Start your free trial@shopify.com Shapiro that's shopify.com Shapiro to start your free trial. Shopify.com Shapiro we use it at daily Wear. You should use it yourself. Go check them out right now. Shopify.com Shapiro was John Adams born virtuous? Was he just one of these people with unusually good character? Actually, no. That's one of the most encouraging things about John Adams. Adams was born a farm kid in Massachusetts to A Puritan deacon father who also made shoes, farmed and served as a town selectman. As he grew up, Adams never stopped thinking. Kind of like a Puritan. Adams believed that how you behave when no one is watching is the only thing about you that actually matters. The thing you have to understand about young John Adams is he was relentless. His diary tells the story of a man putting himself on trial every single night for the crime of not being good enough, disciplined enough, learned enough. In other words, Adams's diaries are evidence that the virtue he heralded was not easy, automatic, or particularly natural. That's exactly why Adams knew that a republic full of people who disengage from virtue is a republic destined to fall. Now, modern Americans tend to hear the word virtue and imagine someone else's private morality. Mainstream American culture today even teaches people we should constantly affirm ourselves. But to Adams and the rest of the founding fathers, virtue meant a litany of qualities. Honesty, self command, duty, courage, a willingness to delay gratification. Virtue is made up of the habits you need in order to govern yourself in Aristotelian fashion. Famously, Adams also shows us we don't have to cultivate virtue on our own. John Adams's correspondence with his wife Abigail, is evidence of one of the great partnerships in American history. Through years of separation, oceans between them, over a thousand letters that are smarter, funnier, or morally serious than most of what passes for political thought today. John sought Abigail's counsel on everything from legal cases to political tussles to family issues. She told him the truth when nobody else would. He leaned on her as a result. But their correspondence is not just a love story. It demonstrates the entire point of a household, the entire point of the institution of marriage. Which brings us to the question of where virtue actually comes from. Spoiler alert. It's not Washington, D.C. it's not Congress, and it's not the Supreme Court. Virtue springs from the civic institutions Government cannot replace. Families, churches, neighborhoods, schools. Communities that reward responsibility and connection instead of celebrating perpetual adolescence. In colonial America, this was the soil Adams grew out of. That the entire founding generation grew out of. Civil society was not an accessory to America's drive for liberty. It was the engine for it. At the end of the day, government can punish crime. It can't produce honesty. It can enforce contracts. It can't manufacture integrity. Government can imprison thieves, but it can't teach a child why stealing is wrong. Only families, churches, and communities can do those things. And when virtue grows weak, government inevitably grows larger. In the wake Adams fixation on Virtue was not a matter of religious faith. It was political realism. Constitutional articles cannot create the citizen. It presupposes. It can only protect the liberty of citizens who already exist. So we've established that virtue is the keystone. But that raises the obvious question, what kind of virtue are we actually talking about? Because in 2026, virtue, well, it's gotten kind of slippery for a lot of people. It just means being nice or tolerant or inclusive or posting the right thing on Instagram. That is not what Adams was talking about. Not even close. Adams meant the ancient kind of virtue, the kind in the Hebrew scriptures, the kind the Greeks and the Romans debated about for a millennium. A political scientist named Donald Lutz did the definitive study. He went through roughly 15,000 sources of political writing from the founding era and cataloged every source the founders quoted. You want to guess? The single most cited source in the political literature of the American founding, not Locke, wasn't Montesquieu. It was the Bible. About a third of all the citations, the single most cited book was Deuteronomy, the book of law. In fact, Deuteronomy was cited nearly twice as often as John Locke. Why? Well, because Deuteronomy is not primarily about liberation. It's about what comes after you're free. Israelites escaped slavery in Egypt, and then they were told that their freedom would not be the end of the story, but the beginning of obligation. The Israelites are given laws, boundaries, warnings about what happens when a nation forgets them. The Founders recognized themselves in that story. In fighting for American independence, Adams knew better than most that freedom would not be the finish line. The business of a self governing nation would be a lot harder. So when Adams talked about America requiring a moral and religious people, he wasn't demanding that everybody share his exact theology. His point was that a free society would depend on virtue to flourish. Today, declining religious affiliation and church attendance in the last century is the best heuristic we have. Religious identification as a Christian has dropped from about 95% in the mid 20th century to 62% today. Formal church membership has dropped from 73% in 1937 to below 50% in 2020. This is all describing the same cultural erosion Habits that were carried, taught, reinforced for thousands of years primarily by religion cannot be stripped out at the source without consequence. As an institutionalist, John Adams saw that even the most ingenious government design would be as good as the people who, who staffed it and the people it governed. The religiosity of the people wasn't a nice to have it was load bearing. It was the thing that made self government theoretically possible because it produced citizens who could be trusted with the freedom the Constitution handed them. Now I want to show you the deepest thing Adams understood. The thing that makes him, in my view, the most clear eyed political realist of the entire founding generation. Most Americans think the revolution was about one threat, the tyranny of kings. One guy with too much power. And Adams obviously feared that. But Adams also feared the mob exactly as much as he feared the monarch. That often surprises people today because we've been taught to think that democracy is the cure all for everything. But while referencing Plato in his defense of the constitutions of government of the United States, Adams points out that every form of pure government untethered from virtue could become a form of tyranny. The whole argument is every simple form of government carries the seeds of its own corruption and all the power to one guy monarchy it degenerates into tyranny and hand all the power to a few aristocracy it rots into oligarchy. Hand all the power directly to the many democracy. And Adams says it would rot into what he called rage, violence and licentiousness. In other words, the common problem is human nature. While Adams built the cage the American Constitution, Adams also told us the cage isn't enough. Our constitutional structure is operated by human beings at every single point. The judge can be corrupt, the legislature can be bought, the executive can be a demagogue, the voter can be too checked out to care or too dumb to know. Every guardrail Adams designed has a human being standing at it. And if that human being has no virtue, the guardrail is just decoration. So if I could drag John Adams across two and a half centuries, sit him down in front of a tv, hand him a smartphone and let him watch America for an afternoon, I think that he would be in large part horrified. He'd be horrified by the collapse of trust, by institutions that increasingly expect trust they no longer earn, by families under enormous strain or not even forming. By a nation borrowing against the future as though tomorrow's Americans don't exist. By a culture obsessed with rights, but increasingly uncomfortable talking about responsibilities. I don't think he'd spend very long Talking about Washington D.C. he might ask a much more uncomfortable question. What kind of people have we become? In Adams America, virtue meant insisting that some things are wrong even if they're legal, even if they're popular, even when everyone around you has caged. In today's America, all too often virtue is confused with politeness or performative morality. John Adams, more than any other founder, understood that when, not if, institution, institutions begin to fail, virtue would be the only thing left standing between liberty and tyranny. I don't think Adams would give up on America. He knew that virtue was cultivated over the course of a lifetime. John Adams kept his end of the bargain. The only question, the only one that's ever mattered anyway, is whether we will keep ours.