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We'll get to more on this in just one moment. First, AI is rapidly becoming the dividing line between companies that move fast and companies that get left behind. The question isn't whether you're using AI. The question is whether AI is actually connected to your business. That's why NetSuite Next is interesting. You probably already know NetSuite. It's the AI powered business management suite that securely connects all of your data, bringing every department together into a single source of truth. More than 43,000 customers trust it to run their businesses. Now they're taking that next step with NetSuite. Next, AI agents work alongside you to solve problems and handle routine work. And when you need information, you can simply ask a question about anything, just like you're talking to a colleague. Only the answers are based on your business data. What I like about this approach is that it's AI attached to actual business operations. The goal isn't to generate more noise, it's to help leaders make better decisions faster. NetSuite is customized across a wide range of industries, so it works the way businesses actually operate, not the way a generic software platform thinks they should operate. That's exactly the sort of system businesses should be looking at for the first time ever. You can try netsuite next for free. If your revenues are at least in seven figures, go to NetSuite AI Shapiro. Built for every industry, ready for every boardroom. NetSuite AI Shapiro. 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. And 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. It's the winter of 1798, and there's a man sitting in a prison cell in Philadelphia. It's a debtor's jail located on Prune street, just a couple of blocks from Independence Hall. The man is 64 years old. He was once the richest man in America, and now he is locked behind bars because he can't pay what he owes. This is the man who financed the American Revolution. This man's signature on a piece of paper was, for a few critical years in the founding era, worth more than the entire credit of the United States government because the US Government didn't have any credit at all yet. And now he's sitting in a Philadelphia prison in debt. Thus far, I've made the case to resurrect Thomas Jefferson and John Adams to gain their political appraisals of america on our 250th birthday. But this time, the founder I bring back from the dead is a founder almost nobody remembers. And his relative absence from our history books is in and itself a scandal. You know Washington. You know Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, Hamilton. You probably don't know the man in the prison cell. His name is Robert Morris. Robert Morris was the greatest entrepreneur of the founding generation. Why? Well, because he made the single largest bet in American history. Rather than invest in land or in ships, Morris bet his entire fortune, the largest in the country, on the riskiest startup the world has ever seen, the United States of America itself. Morris lived out the saying freedom isn't free firsthand and and understood intimately that liberty has a price. Somebody has to pay in actual money. In due time, you can write a Declaration of Independence, proclaim yourself evident truths, inspire millions of colonial Americans to have faith in the revolutionary cause. But if you can't pay your army, the British win the Declaration would have been submitted as evidence at America's trial. Every man who signed it would have been hanged for treason. And Robert Morris, knowing full well the stakes, was the man who turned the founding fathers words into an army that could actually fight. But Morris didn't just finance the American experiment, he in many ways, he embodied it. He was one of the first great American entrepreneurs. A man who believed that fortune favored those willing to build, invent, trade, and most of all, take a risk. He understood intimately that prosperity does not come from the avoidance of risk, but from taking intelligent ones, creating value where none existed before, and then staking it all on the country that would grant him the freedom to build even more in the future. The same entrepreneurial spirit that built Morris fortune would go on to build the railroads, the steel mills, the automobile, the airplane, the cell phone, the computer, and countless revolutions ever since. Robert Morris could have just bet on a private company. He chose instead to bet everything on America. And America hit him back in prison cell. But Morris's life, the risk, the success, even the heartbreak is the whole American story in one man. Welcome back to the finale of the Founders. We need now the entrepreneur Robert Morris. To understand the bet, you have to understand the man who made it. Robert Morris was one of the very first examples of American entrepreneurship. Born In England in 1734, Morris came across the Atlantic as a boy and arrived without any title or fortune. For virtually all of human history, your future was largely determined well before you were born. If your dad was poor, odds were you'd be poor too. But Morris didn't land in the old world. He landed in Philadelphia, where he apprenticed at a mercantile house called the Willing Firm and discovered he had a knack for business. Morris understood ships and cargo and bills of exchange. Above all, he was able to grasp the invisible force that makes commerce possible. Trust. Credit. The willingness of one human being to trust another with money. Over time and because this was colonial America, Morris's talent had somewhere to go. He became a partner in the firm. He built one of the most powerful commercial houses in the colonies. By the eve of the Revolution, the penniless immigrant boy from Liverpool had become the wealthiest man in the new World. Morris owned a country estate on the Schuylkill called the Hills with a greenhouse where he grew oranges and pineapples. In Pennsylvania in the 18th century, that's the equivalent of having an 18th century private rocket program. Well, as we know well today, Robert Morris rags to riches story is just one among millions of Americans who would benefit from America's Unique economic freedoms. The destiny of America was written. This country would become the greatest engine of entrepreneurship the world has ever seen. And the sole common denominator in all of it is a willingness for risk, for ideas that could either fail spectacularly or transform the world. One of the most famous theories to explain America's capability for risk goes back to America's earliest origins. The sociologist Max Faber called it the Protestant work ethic. In short, the Puritan culture that settled early America treated disciplined work, thrift, delayed gratification, and honest enterprise into moral virtues. Wealth honestly earned was not shameful, but evidence that you've created value for other people and been a faithful steward of the rewards. Faber actually cited another founding father, Benjamin Franklin, as the embodiment of the Protestant ethic. You might be familiar with Franklin's maxims, like time is money or a penny saved is a penny earned. Robert Morris brought those maxims to life. Disciplined, relentless, prudent, building and reinvesting until he compounded a fortune out of nothing. Morris understood that commerce was the bloodstream of a free republic. A republic that rewarded its builders would always be stronger than a nation that punished them. And in colonial America, the people trying to confiscate and punish wealth weren't fellow citizens arguing over tax policy. They were a king and a parliament 3,000 miles away. To Morris, wealth generation wasn't something to be plundered. Wealth generation was the backbone of a free nation. And Morris was about to stake his entire fortune proving it when independence came up for the actual vote, July 1, 1776. Morris voted against it. Think about why for a second. He was a businessman. He ran the numbers. War against the most powerful empire on earth. No army, no navy, no treasury, no collateral. As a business proposition, the American Revolution looked pretty insane. The odds were terrible. The downside was death. The upside depended on winning a war. Almost Nobody thought the 13 colonies could even afford to fight. All prudence said not to do it. Then Congress voted anyway. And what Morris did next is why he belongs in this series. Morris walked over and signed the Declaration of Independence. Anyway, he wrote this. I am not one of those politicians that run testy when my own plans are not adopted. I think it is the duty of a good citizen to follow when he cannot lead. The man who had argued the bet was too risky turned around and put his name, his neck, and his entire fortune behind it because, well, he was a patriot. Understand what that meant for a man like Morris? To him, his freedom as an American didn't mean doing whatever he wanted to do whenever he wanted to do it. Freedom would mean risking the gallows at worst and bankruptcy at best on what looked like the worst investment formula in the world. Venture capitalists today like to talk about moonshots. Imagine wagering against the British Empire with everything you own, against all logic, just so that America could be the freest nation on earth. There's no question the American Revolution was a financial catastrophe. From literally the first day. There was no lack of courage, but the revolution was nearly lost for lack of money. Congress did what governments always do when they want you to spend money they don't have. They printed it a lot. So much that the phrase not worth a continental became the punchline of the era. The continental was the form of currency. The revolutionary army was starving barefoot, unpaid for months, at times for years. George Washington famously wrote at Valley Forge, his troops would inevitably starve, dissolve, or disperse unless supplies arrived. The whole mobile experiment was about to collapse, not because of British bullets, but because the balance sheet didn't work. But again and again, man who stepped into the gap was Robert Morris. First, in late 1776, Morris reached into his own pocket and lent the government $10,000 of his own money to provision the troops. His money, not the government's, because the government didn't have money. That became the pattern of the war when the states wouldn't pay. And that happened all the time. Morris would issue notes over his own personal signature. They called them Morris notes. Keep in mind, credit is not paper. Credit is trust, the belief that a promise will be kept. One man had to put his personal honor on the line over and over to manufacture out of thin air the trust that an entire government could not produce. During the darkest days of the revolution, soldiers and suppliers took the Morris notes and kept fighting. When Morris was made superintendent of finance in 1781, effectively the first treasury chief the country ever had, he took a financial system that was a total dumpster fire, and he ran it like his own firm. He cut spending, demanded real accounting, treated the nation's debts as if they were his own. What did Morris get for it? Well, Congress investigated him for war profiteering. The man lending his country his own money was accused of getting rich off the country. Now, Congress eventually concluded that Robert Morris had acted with fidelity, but it goes to show, sometimes no good deed goes unpunished. And despite his exoneration, the mud stuck. The mud stuck the way it always does because there is also a pattern as old as the republic. The people who actually produce and build and put their own skin in the game, they get smeared as profiteers by the people who generally spend other people's money. The builder gets the federal investigation. The taker gets the parade. Zormadani gets the parade. Elon Musk gets the sharp end of the stick. Sound familiar? Silicon Valley. Elon Envy. Data centers. Punishing success. It's a permanent part of our politics and it always was. You need great cell phone service that doesn't fall apart on you. You know, cell phone service that actually has a great tower network and that has great customer service and all the rest. And only one wireless company in America earned five out of five stars in every single category. That company is pure talk coverage. 5 stars. Customer support 5 stars. Value 5 stars. Data 5 stars. That's why I use Pure Talk for getting outstanding service without paying those inflated prices charged by the major carriers. And something else. Pure Talk. They love America. Not only do they love America, they're sponsoring donations dollar for dollar until they reach a quarter million dollars from America's Warrior Partnership, helping veterans across the country get the support and services they deserve. Go to PureTalk.com Shapiro Switch to the only wireless company in America awarded 5 stars in every category by Consumer Reports. No contracts, no cancellation fees. Just awesome US based customer service on that 5G network that powers America. Again, that's PureTalk.com appearance. The best coverage is the best. Customer service is the best everything. And by the way, they love America and you help us out here at the show when you go and switch on over to Pure Talk. So go do it right now. PureTalk.com Shapiro push really came to shove in the summer of 1781 when Washington saw an opportunity to nail it to the British. After six years of grinding war, British General Cornwallis marched his army into a peninsula at Yorktown, Virginia. And for a narrow window of time, the Continental army, with the help of the French navy, had the chance to effectively trap the British between land and sea. The end of the war. American independence was within reach. There's only one problem. The US was totally broke again. The army needed food, wagons, horses, gunpowder. Thousands of men had to march from New York to Virginia in order to make the maneuver happen. Washington turned to Robert Morris. Morris went to work solving the problem right away. He raised $1.4 million to finance the Yorktown campaign, again, much of it on his own personal credit. He signed his own name again and again, not because Congress had appointed him with the job, but because there weren't any alternatives. The money came and Washington marched. The French fleet sealed the Chesapeake Bay. Cornwalls and the British army were Trapped. Exactly as planned. And in October 1781, the British surrendered. The Battle of Yorktown decisively won the Revolutionary War. But underneath the glory, the muskets, and Washington's own brilliance, Yorktown had a balance sheet. Take Robert Morris out of the story, and it's possible the war would have trudged on until the exhausted, bankrupt Continental army surrendered. As the Founders knew well, victory was easy. Governing would be a lot harder. Yorktown taught Robert Morris something that would shape the rest of his life. Countries don't run fundamentally on armies, constitutions, or land alone. Countries are held together by trust. A soldier has to trust he'll be paid. A merchant has to trust he will be paid. A farmer has to trust that his land will be worth something tomorrow. Take that trust away. Not only is there no economy, there's really no country. The problem was that throughout the entire war, that trust hadn't lived in any institution. It had basically lived in Robert Morris. His personal signature. That's not a foundation for a nation. What would happen when Morris is gone? So in 1781, Morris built the institution he believed the republic needed. He created the bank of North America. The national bank was controversial from its inception. Morris was only interested in making our fledgling republic fiscally trustworthy. Opponents claimed the bank would concentrate too much power. They called it a scheme to enrich the wealthy and questioned whether the government had the rights to charter such a bank. Proponents of the bank, including Alexander Hamilton, most famously argued for a national mint for sound public credit. Morris was right, of course. His blueprint became the basis of Hamilton's entire financial program one decade later. Because Morris understood the problem of America's finances before the rest of the country even knew the question on the table. In fact, Washington first offered Morris the job of first treasury Secretary when he became president. Morris turned it down. And he told Washington Alexander Hamilton would be better. Think about how unusual that is. The man who built the foundation willingly handed someone else the credit for finishing the house. Because Morris actually cared more about the institution succeeding than he cared about history. Remembering his name. So when people ask who Robert Morris was, here's the answer. He is one of the only two men in the entire founding, the other being Roger Sherman, to sign all three documents that created the the Declaration, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution. He nominated George Washington to preside over the Constitutional convention. When Washington needed a home as president, he lived in Morris mansion while Morris moved next door. The Declaration, the war, the money, the bank, the Constitution, the presidency itself, all of it ran through this one man's Front door. Before we get to how Robert Morris lost everything, I want to stop for a moment and appreciate everything he did. Morris was not a struggling idealist with nothing to lose. Again, he was the richest man in America. He had everything. The state, the greenhouse, the ships, the security, the reputation. Had every reason in the world to sit out the revolution, hedge his bets, keep his head down, stay rich. That's what prudent money would do. Instead, he pushed all of his chips to the center of the table at a bet that by his own calculation, was likely to fail. Something harder than optimism drove Robert Morris. Something rarer, perhaps sheer conviction. A deep belief in the liberty America could promise. Genuine patriotism. He understood the American experiment was worth more than his own fortune or even his own life. That's not a businessman's calculation. That's closer to love than anything else. Eventually, the market came to collect. The same market that had rewarded him for 30 years did not love him back. After the war, Morris did what confident men of capital always do. He looked for the next big thing. He found it in the western frontier. He reasoned that as America grew, the land would be worth a fortune. So he bought millions of acres, leveraged himself up to the eyeballs, borrowed against the borrowing, and bet everything one more time. Here's the part that kind of hurts. He wasn't even wrong. The boom did come. The land was worth a fortune. But years after his notes came due, a credit panic hit. In the late 1790s, his partners proved a mix of unlucky and dishonest. The whole thing came down on his head. It wasn't all bad luck, because Morris wouldn't want me to lie. He overreached. But the market doesn't grade on a curve for good intentions. Not even for the man who financed the revolution. The deeper truth hiding in Morris's fault is that a free market can create vast wealth. But it will also punish when the calculation fails. And as every entrepreneur will tell you, while everyone sees and envies your success, they never see the thousand failures that led you to this moment. This is one thing about the free market people do not understand. For every successful company, for every. For every Elon Musk, there are thousands of people who risked it and lost. But that's why you have to stand by the people who win the rewards. Otherwise, no one will ever take the risk. So back to Morris. There he sat, 64 years old in a 10x12 cell in the Prune street debtors prison for three and a half years. It was rumored that George Washington himself, in the last years of his life came and dined with Morris inside the prison. After all, this was the guy who financed the revolution. So here's how it ends. Morris's ruin was so spectacular, so scandalous, it became one of the catalysts for the first federal bankruptcy law in American history. The Bankruptcy act of 1800. In an orderly legal way for a hopelessly indebted man to discharge his debts and start again. Under that law, in 1801, Robert Morris walked out of Prune Street a free man. His fortune was gone, his health was wrecked. His reputation was permanently scarred. He lived his last years quietly on a small annuity his old friends arranged in a modest house. He died in 1806 having given more to this country than pretty much any man who ever lived yet and asking less in return. The most remarkable thing about Morris is that he never demanded somebody else pay his bills. He accepted the consequences of his own decisions and he bore the losses himself. He didn't blame the free markets or capitalism or campaign on taxing the rich. Why? Because to the very end, Robert Morris believed that a debt was a promise. And he paid his in full with three and a half years of his life. So let me sit him down in front of the America of 2026 and let him be the scalpel. Because no founder is better equipped to diagnose what what's ailing us. Show him a government carrying a national debt north of $39 trillion in climate with no plan to relieve it. Morris would ask a simple question. Who exactly intends to honor this promise? Because the dollar, you know, the Morris note is itself nothing more than promise. The full faith and credit of the United states is an 18th century way of saying people believe we'll pay. Trust, as Morris learned, in that cell, is the one asset you can burn all the way down while the paperwork still looks fine right up until the morning it doesn't. Slowly then, all at once. Morris once bet everything he had on America's future. We're betting our future on our present. That's the exact inversion of Robert Morris. You'd be ashamed of us for it. But I didn't bring him back to leave you in despair. So here's the other half. The engine that made Robert Morris is still running. We have the freest, most powerful wealth creating economy the human race has ever seen. We still have the entrepreneurial fire he embodied. The builders and inventors and risk takers are what still make America exceptional today. The entrepreneurial spirit that built this country is the not gone. What we've misplaced is the conviction that we owe it to the next generation. The way Morris knew he owed it to us. Jefferson taught us a free people has to be willing to defend itself. Adams taught us a free people has to have the virtue to govern itself. And Robert Morris taught us a free people has to be willing to reap what we sow. Defense, virtue, solvency. Three founders, three legs of the same stool. Morris bet everything on America. The only question is whether you're willing to bet on it too. Happy birthday, America. I'm Ben Shapiro and this is is the founders we need now. Sam.