Yeah.

So in order to judge them, it's not just that you're having more information and everything.

You have to believe that you are doing the right thing right now.

You have to believe that what you're doing, the things you're not even thinking of, won't be judged very harshly in thirty or forty years by your grandkids.

And the fact is we don't-- You try your best, but you don't really know how you're gonna be judged, and it takes an incredible lack of humility and a sense of certainty to judge people, eh, about their actions, a lot of people about their actions in the past, who were born into a particular time, lived in that particular time.

And if they're lucky, and they lived a long time, you know, live long enough to see that some of the things they thought were good were not gonna look good in the long run.

Yeah.

And I couldn't...

I mean, he was a brutal [laughs] character.

He's interesting because he grew up on a farm in Connecticut, and I live in Connecticut, and he committed a petty crime when he was 15 or 16 years old, and they put him in an adult prison where he was brutalized, and he kept escaping from prison.

And finally, they locked him in solitary confinement for a full year.

This is like a Dickensian prison in Connecticut, and he said later, 'cause there was this wild confession he gave.

He was the last person publicly executed in, in New York City, and he gave this confession, and he said that he decided when he was in solitary confinement that things had been so unfair to him that he was gonna take his revenge on the world.

And when he got out, that's what he did, and he went on kind of a 20-year killing spree, starting off by joining a whaling ship out of Rhode Island, and he would incite mutiny among the crew, kill the officers, take the money, and take off.

And in his confession, which is one of the strangest documents in American history, it's like Gabriel Garcia Marquez or something, he talks about his travels, and he went all over the world.

I really wanna come back to that, but just to keep things in order and give listeners a bit of perspective, what was the crime that he was ultimately executed for?

Yeah, right, whatever it is.

And then he played mites, and then he played-- There was, like, a travel team for mites, which was ridiculous, so...

And then they started dividing him up, you know, and, and all these different things.

And the divisions when he-- were, were arbitrary.

I thought the divisions were based on the parents' friend groups.

You know, like, I would see kids not make a team because they didn't like the mother and didn't wanna hang out with her.

And I got it.

... to see, like, what are the things that I remember versus what he remembers, you know?

Hmm.

So they can show up and help you pack, and if the husband or the wife or whatever stumbles upon the scene, it doesn't look like a moving company.

So he waited to a day, a day that she knew he'd be gone all day, at the water ski pond, I believe.

I think it was Father's Day with his kids.

She had this company with the unmarked cars come, packed up everything.

She had told him she was going to go stay with her mother in Pound Ridge, New York, and then visit her father's grave the next day.

Father had died not that long before.

Yeah.