The more you learn about the founding fathers, the more nuanced your view becomes — and that's a good thing; the American experiment requires honest self-criticism, not blind adoration.
Conan argues that genuine patriotism means embracing nuanced understanding of the founders' flaws and mistakes, not mindless celebration — the American project is an experiment that demands honesty. ✦ AI generated
Conan O'Brien · The Rest Is History · 2026-07-25 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 10:20
The more you learn about anything, whether you're trying to learn the guitar or you're trying to study history, the more you realize you don't know and the more humbling it is. And that's part of educating yourself. The more you learn about the founding fathers and about the start of our country, the more nuanced things can seem and the more you can question a lot of our mistakes. But I say go ahead and question them. It doesn't mean you can't love this experiment. It is an experiment. We can never forget that it's an experiment and we have to be honest with ourselves about our past. It doesn't mean we have to renounce the whole thing, but we just need to be honest about it.
verbatim transcript · starts at 10:20
10:13toppled, it solidifies attitudes on the right that you can't say anything negative about them at all. Yeah, I do think that's probably the case that you know uh and it's probably just natural uh law of physics or chemistry, whatever you want to attribute it to, but when if someone moves farther to the left, someone will else will move farther to the right. It's almost like a a a
10:39scientific, you know, response. And I think that's unfortunate because the more you, as you know, the more you learn about anything, whether you're trying to learn the guitar or you're trying to study history, the more you realize you don't know and the more humbling it is. And that's part of educating yourself. The more you learn about the founding fathers and about the start of our country, the more nuanced
11:07things can seem and the more um you can question uh you know a lot of our mistakes. But I say go ahead and question them. It doesn't mean you can't love this experiment. It is an experiment. We can never forget that it's an experiment and we have to be honest with ourselves about our past. It doesn't mean we have to renounce the whole thing, but we just
11:35need to be honest about it. I think the reason Dominic and I enjoyed doing it was a vague consciousness that [laughter] that that our perspective was bound to be different because we haven't grown up viewing these men as kind of titanic figures. And to be honest, they were kind of hazy. uh certainly in my mind and one of the reasons I wanted to do this series was a chance to to get to
11:59grips with these very very famous figures and kind of put them all together and try and work out exactly what they were doing. And I have to say that I think America was incredibly lucky in the caliber of the people who raised the banner of revolution. So it is great that your first president, the guy who who um led the military defeat of Britain was so boring, was so dull,