Speaker 1: If you want to support the show and get the
episodes early and ad free, head on over to Freeman
Beyond the Wall dot com, forward slash Support. There's a
few ways you can support me there. One there's a
direct link to my website. Two, there's a subscribe star.
Three there's Patreon. Four there's substack. And now I've introduced
gum Road because I know that a lot of our
guys are on gum road and they are again censorship.
So if you head over to gum Road and you
subscribe through there, you'll get the episodes early and ad free,
and you'll get an invite into the Telegram group. So
I really appreciate all of the support everyone's giving me,
and I hope to expand the show even more than
it already has. Thank you so much. I want to
welcome everyone back to the Pecanana Show first time Alex pepkis.
How are you doing, Alex?
Speaker 2: Good, great to be here, Peace, Thanks for having me.
Speaker 3: No problem.
Speaker 1: Tell everybody a little bit about yourself, please.
Speaker 2: So I am an ex academic. I grew up.
Speaker 3: Well.
Speaker 2: My career was in classics. It was a PhD in
classics and I focused on the late antique world, especially
the Greek philosophers of the late Roman world, and got
a tenure track job I used to teach rhetoric and philosophy.
I taught at a couple of institutions California, and I
left in twenty twenty for maybe reasons that we'll get
into later on. But since leaving, I've worked a couple
of interesting jobs.
Speaker 3: But now.
Speaker 2: I have the luxury of pursuing my mission full time,
which is trying to bring back the Classics to the
West and the way that I think that they should
be taught. And I run a podcast called The Cost
of Glory where I've been doing that for about three years,
where I just retell, mainly focus on retelling the biographies
of the great leaders of the Greek and Roman world,
especially those featured in Plutarch's lives. So I do these
kind of long form biographies with that spirit of emulation
that the Plutarch illustrates so nicely. And I also sort
of active on Twitter, but I teach some public speaking
rhetoric classes on the side. But that's what I'm up
to these days.
Speaker 1: You got out of academia in twenty twenty. Even before
twenty twenty, thing academia had to be hell. So you know,
what was it like and what finally drove you up?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I so I got when I was in starting
off in my PhD program and I decided to make
that decision to go into grad school. I knew that
it was going to be so I wasn't really I
wouldn't really consider myself a conservative per se, but I
knew that it was going to be hostile environment because
I was a Christian. So I was prepared for classics
being a kind of bad environment for that, and I
wasn't too worried about it, But I wasn't really prepared
for this thing that I slowly came to realize is
that the discipline of you know, the people who are
dedicated to studying the Greeks and the Romans are kind
of committed to its destruction, or at least the eradication
of anything that a young man such as myself would
have been interested in, you know, anything heroic or manly
or kind of impressive daring. That is all being kind
of filed away. And that was kind of came as
a shock to me, honestly, And I slowly woke up
to the facts as I progressed through it, and I
kind of realized what the Greeks and the Romans were
about really, So for the longest time, I thought I
could try to do my part and perform it from
the inside, which is why I kept applying for jobs,
and I finally landed this tenyer track position, you know,
after working ten or fifteen years to finally get into
a position market, get that kind of a job and
have some job security whatever the thing that you're supposed
to want as an academic, right. But and I liked
my colleagues at the place where I was. They were
exceptions to the rule. They were really cool, and I
felt really bad to leave. But I once I like,
things just kept getting worse, especially around They started getting
worse around twenty sixteen. Like there was a long intellectual
history of you know, left wing cultural Marxist kind of
inching their way through critical theory and other ways into
the leadership of the discipline. But you know, like in
twenty sixteen, it was like all the sleeper cells woke
up and we had the Woke movement, and it just
started to become very conformist very quickly. I think classics
kind of dodged the the culture wars of the eighties
and nineties and early two thousands more than the discipline
like English literature for some reason, probably because we were
already kind of small and irrelevant. But you know, for example,
shortly after I left classics and last year, there was
a kind of a glowing puff piece about a former
colleague of mine at Princeton and the headline is, this
is the New York Times. He wants to save white
classics from whiteness, and this was he joined the faculty.
I won't any names, but you know, you can look
up the article, and this particular individual joined the faculty
right after I left, And that was like, that was
the face that the leadership of my discipline. You know,
the Ivy League classicists tend to be the kind of
gatekeepers of the discipline. This was the kind of face
that not just my colleagues at Princeton, but everybody across
the kind of top programs that they wanted to have
the world see classics too, White classics, two patriarchal classics
must die. As if anybody even cared about classics at
this point in our culture, I mean, it's almost like
so narcissistic that you can't see how irrelevant you've already become.
And I was really getting frustrated. I already left at
that point, but you know, the writing was on the wall,
and that was already the vibe and the late twenty teens.
So I was getting really desponded. You know. At some
point I decided I probably couldn't reform the discipline from
the inside. I probably there was probably nothing I could do.
The ship was sinking. You know. It's like you're on
a ship and you're rowing hard and the captain is
just like getting smashed at the helm and saying, yeah,
it would be better if the ship sank. Anyway, that
was really fun frustrating to me, and I got desponded.
But I finally realized that, you know, in a way,
I was sitting on the greatest medicine for this kind
of situation ever made, which is Homer, Plutarch and like
the heroic tradition of extremely high agency men who don't
tolerate crap. And I thought, well, you know, they're saying
something to me, I don't have to tolerate this crap
if I'm willing to tolerate a little bit of risk.
And so I left for that reason on principle, moved
the family back to my native Texas where I grew up,
and so that's where I am now. And I've never
ever regretted it. And it's been hard, but I'm very
encouraged by well by the collapse of the universities that
they know they're going to be a long time dying.
But you know, the craziness that we see today is
it's not fixable in our generation. And I think that
there's a lot of hope for people who want to
build other things and channel the energy and the wisdom
and the knowledge that you used to be able to
get in the universities. You probably can't even get anymore
in most places, even if you wanted to, you have
to seek them outside of the institutional framework. So I'm
just trying to help. I'm one of many people trying
to offer the best parts of my discipline online and
I draw a lot of energy from that.
Speaker 1: I think they could be fixed. As I said this
morning on Twitter that when we found out University Alabama, Birmingham,
I've gotten like two hundred thousand dollars to study like
the menstrual cycle of trans women. You see a stir endowments.
You take every dollar that they have. I think Harvard.
Harvard is up into the twenty to thirty billion dollars
in endowments. You just take them and then see what happens.
I mean, yeah, should we do a lot less.
Speaker 2: Damage to the economy than you know, unrealized capital gains taxes?
That kind of stuff. I mean, I think a lot
of people would cheer you on.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: When I asked this question, I just thought of this one.
Did how does your did your Greek heritage have anything
to do with you wanting to get into to philosophy
and the class?
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's it's funny. So I was raised in the
Greek Orthodox Church. It's uh, it didn't have a huge
well it was. It was a kind of quiet moral compass.
I wasn't like that into it until I went through
a rough patch in high school and I don't know,
typical kind of divorce parents, you know, big school, doing drugs,
playing video games, screwing around kind of story. It was
really overweight too, and I kind of wanted to turn
my life around my junior year of high school and
I came back to Christianity for that reason. They were
also in our house for whatever reason, we had, not
that my liberal parents were all that into this stuff,
but we had Marcus Aurelius on the shelf. We had
somehow somebody had given me a copy of The Seven
Habits of Highly Effective People when I was younger. I
was like, maybe i'll read this, maybe there's some answers
in books. So I got back into Christianity kind of,
and you know, the Seven Habits has draws on a
lot of classical philosophy, as I discovered, but in sort
of self improvement with the Great Books around that time,
and I actually got into I had taken Latin in
a very half assed way throughout high school, like I
did everything half acidly in high school until my senior
year failed history class, which is really funny, but in
algebra two even though it was good at math. So
I wanted when I was in college to on the
side of whatever I was doing. I realized you could
kind of explore intellectual passions in college and like get
your parents to pay for it if you just did
a little convincing. So I decided to take Ancient Greek
my junior year, and I, you know, having even though
I was grew up in the Greek Orthodox Church. The
liturgies in basically ancient Greek. Little did I know that
anything about the difference between modern and ancient Greek at
the time. I mean, my parents, my Greek part of
my family had been in the US for like a century,
so we weren't that Greek. But I wanted to know.
I was sort of my curiosity was was stoked, and
so yeah, I wanted to learn modern Greek, actually because
I thought I might, I might go into youth ministry
for a while on the on the way to have
more serious career. But they have modern Greek. We just
had Attic Greek. What the hell is attic Greek? I
had no idea. So anyway, I got into it that
way my junior year, and once I had a taste
of it, I had this very charismatic teacher, like probably
the smartest professor the whole campus, and he, you know,
painted all the connections between the Greek language and Western
intellectual history and the logos and philosophy and the news,
I mean just everything, you know, Homeric arata versus modern virtue.
I was hooked, and I was. I turned out I
was pretty good the language part, and so that the
language in particular was part of my wanting to explore
my own cultural heritage. But I think what kept me there,
what made me see, oh, this is not just a
hobby but something that you could pursue as a serious
calling in life, was realizing how the Greek language was
important not just to this little ethnocentric world that I
interacted with on Sundays and maybe Christmas in Easter, but
like the foundation of the entire conceptual edifice that I
that my country stood on, and things like that. And
that's why I ended up chasing it all the way
to grad school, against my better judgment.
Speaker 1: So before we get into what we're going to talk about,
let me ask you this question, because this is one
that comes up a lot. Does does Aristotle necessarily and
logically lead to fascism?
Speaker 2: Well, it's been remarked that Athenian democracy would be called
fascists by today's left, for all that, for all that,
you know, the founding fathers thought that was a kind
of crazy mob rule, you know, uh, inferno of a
of a constitution, you know it was, it would still
be fascist mid by modern democrat standards. So so just
just it just might actually Pete.
Speaker 1: All right, you mentioned Plutarch's Lives, and it's a h
It's a gigantic work talking about different figures from history.
Some we know, some we don't know, that we've never
heard of. What can we learn from them? What do
you when you read them?
Speaker 3: What do you? What are you looking for?
Speaker 2: I started reading Plutarch's Lives and serious in earnest as
I sort of knew I was leaving academia. I had,
I think a lot of classicists today. So it's funny
Plutarch's Lives used to be by far the most popular
classical text of all, more popular than Homer. It's more
popular than Homer, Plato, Cicero, Tucidities, and you go down
the list of even less plausible can that it's but
in the eighteenth century and the American colonies, Plutarch's Lives
are the second most likely ancient text to be on
your shelf besides the Bible, and it's I think it's
a very telling sign that he's not in fashion among
today's classicists. And I think we could probably get other
reasons going on further in the conversation. So most classicists,
will you know, assign Plutarch's Life of Caesar, Alexander. For
some history survey class that they're teaching, they won't really
get into the whole lives as a collection or even
consider it as a morally serious project. But so what
it is. What Plutarch's Lives is, you know, biography collection.
It's about forty eight biographies. They're called the Parallel Lives
because it's forty eight Greeks and forty eight Romans that
he compares. He pairs them all together, you know, Alexander
and Caesar, Cicero and Demos, and he's the great orators.
A lot of men in there that you would have
heard of, Pericles, the Mysticles, babyas Maximus, Romulus, a lot
of men you wouldn't have heard of you many's of
Cardia Sertorious. But they're all amazing in various ways. And
when I was so, I was leaving academia, and I
kind of had this sense that this is the text.
This is a text that like, you know, this is
the text that Harry Truman read. He's like our last
self educated, non college education president. Whatever you think of
the man as a political figure, I mean, he was
a formidable, self educated man. This is the text that
you know, Frederick Douglas and Alexander Hamilton Napoleon just read
in their free time. I had the sense that like
men of action should read Plutarch, and I had read
some of the books. I was like, this stuff is
really good. So I was working my way through, and
I was looking kind of for inspiration, honestly, because I
wanted to go into the world of entrepreneurship and business
risk taking. You know, reading people character, what kind of
traits does it take to lead people to to exert
your will over people? Trickiness, political trickiness, all kinds of
stuff you can learn from Plutarch's lives. So now when
I when I do my long form biographies of the
men in Plutarch, and he's my He's my main source
and inspiration. I'm I'm looking for character. I'm looking for
virtues and vices. I'm looking for well, I'm looking for
drama too, because he's one of the greatest. One of
the reasons he's so popular is he's such a good storyteller.
He's he's got these like Hollywood scenes and these just
like banger quotes every other page, and and that's you know,
Emerson calls him a Bible for heroes, Nietzsche says to
the young men, and his untimely meditations on the Uses
and abuses of history says, satisfy your souls on Plutarch
one hundred such men educated in this way against the
modern fashion, who could grown accustomed to the heroic and
learns to appreciate the heroic within themselves, learned to believe
in themselves that they can silence now and forever the
whole noisy pseudo education of our day. He's writing out
in the eighteen seventies or so. So Plutarch is kind
of like this, kind of I mean, he's the original
heroic author in a lot of ways for Western statesmen,
So I look for a lot in there. But mostly
it's just entertaining as hell.
Speaker 1: If that's being suppressed, it's not being taught. I mean,
it's not being suppressed. You can it's you can get
really good copies for very unexpensively an eBay. I mean,
it's just it's not suppressed, it's just ignored. And if
you're not promoting something, it's not going to be popular.
So why do you think this suppression? This just they
want people to ignore it. And would you say you
mentioned that Truman was like, would be the last last president.
And that just goes right to what we call the
Nuremberg regime, that everything after World War Two, that is,
call it right wing, but just call it what was
normal before the French Revolution. You know that that needs
to be suppressed.
Speaker 3: So what do you think about that?
Speaker 2: Well, I know that you like to go kind of
deep in your show, So if I could, I think
it's it's worth telling the story a little bit of
the western modern Western university and the classics role within it,
just like in a nutshell, very broad brushstrokes. But so
basically preface this by saying, I think Plutarch, and it's
not just Plutarch as an author, it's kind of what
he stands for. But he's the most representative example of this,
I think. I think that's what Nietzsche saw, on Emerson saw,
and many others saw in Plutarch, the most representative example
of essentially classics, as specifically the Greek and Roman classics,
as Western civilizations, the kind of backbone of our process
of inculturating men. This is like the top of the
pyramid or the foundation of the pyramid, however you want to,
you know, Jigger the metaphor. Classics are the kind of
the backbone of Western manliness, and Plutarch really exemplifies that.
But how what was the process? Okay, so if you
look at the way that education worked for let's call
them the elites, the statesmanship class of the West, of
the nobles, the aristocrats. You see this in the Renaissance,
very big, big letters with a guy like Machiavelli. It
is basically a great man focused education. You encounter these
great men studying the classics, the Greek and Roman heroes,
in particular the pre Christian ones, through books almost incidentally,
But and the tenor of the education is not knowledge
production or knowledge acquisition. It's it's character acquisition. It's skill acquisition. Particularly,
it's a rhetorical education. It's an education and how to
become a great orator, a great persuader through studying the
great persuaders and the great stories and like assimilating their character.
It's explicitly and rigorously an education focused on emulation, on imitation,
on becoming like these people, doing everything you can to
become like these people. You know, Machiavelli, you know you
put takes off his dusty boots after a busy day's
work and statesmanship, and he you know, retires into the
halls of.
Speaker 3: The great men.
Speaker 2: You know, he would apparently he would set a table
sometimes when he wanted to read a book of like
Cicero or Caesar, he would set a table for two
and he would dress up in like a toga and
uh and then like read a book and like imagine
that the uh, the book the guy who wrote the
book he was reading, or the guy he wrote the
book about, was like sitting across the room from him,
and he was having a conversation with him. So there's
a very much like imaginative, emulative aspect of this. So
any that's and that's I say, it's the Renaissance model.
Let's call it the Renaissance model. But this is really
what the Romans did too with the Greeks. This is
what the Greeks did with Achilles. This is what like
also Biodes and Pericles are doing with Achilles. More or less,
there's there's a rhetorical emulative tenor to it. It's about
emulating the great people. So it's a canon of great
men more than of great books.
Speaker 3: All right.
Speaker 2: So and that's the model basically of education through the
Renaissance and through well. This is the model that the
you know, the founding fathers of the US had very much.
What Hamilton and Franklin are doing and Napoleon is doing.
It is like the basic model of Western elite education
until until what So a guy comes along in the
late eighteenth century, Wilhelm von Humboldt. Maybe you've heard of him.
Humboldt University in Berlin is named after him. He's he
founds the modern Enlightenment education system, the modern Enlightenment University,
the Research University in Germany, which of course at that
time is not unified. There's all these little principalities republics.
But he founds basically the education system of Prussia, the
strongest of the states and the and it's on this
principle of we're going to have a higher education system
based on the principles of the Enlightenment, producing knowledge, adding
new knowledge for a great future for mankind. And the
point of that university system is two not just to
produce knowledge, but to produce a certain kind of person,
which is an expert. It's designed to produce experts, doctors, lawyers,
maybe engineers. Okay, they have the Prussian military Academy. That's
separate for you know, for generals and stuff, actually a
different track. But you know, for like civil experts, you
have the modern university system. And you know, in other words,
not just like you know, doctors and lawyers, but especially
the bureaucrats that are going to run the great enlightened institutions,
the rational institutions that the modern state needs to progress.
So the university basically exists to produce bureaucrats. And they
have this particular advantage over the old system, which is
the PhD. They invent this idea of the doctorate, and
so now you know, will you just have a master's degree.
In Germany, we have doctorates. What does this have to
do with America. It so like in the nineteenth century,
America is becoming more self confidence, industrial production is increasing,
wealth is increasing, and American educators are starting to look
to you know, we're making more universities or let's let's
say institutions of higher education. And so American educators start
looking to Europe to see what's the best paradigm. And
I mean I grossly oversimplifying this, but they see, well,
you know, Oxford to Cambridge, you can get a master's degree,
but you know the humble universities, you can get a doctorate.
So clearly these people have figured something extra out and
that kind of becomes the model for the American university system,
this enlightenment German university where it's all about producing knowledge
on the kind of intellectual level, but on the practical level,
look at the results. It's about producing bureaucrats, about producing experts.
An interesting side note here, what do you think the
the kind of flagship discipline was the flagship model of
the new science of the universities. What do you think
it was? I mean, just take a guess.
Speaker 3: Psychology.
Speaker 2: You might think it's psychology, you'd be wrong. You might
think it's philosophy, which has.
Speaker 3: A long history. I was going to say philosophy, but.
Speaker 2: It's not philosophy. You might think it's physics. No, it's
classics of all things, it's classical philology. It's actually the
study of Greek and Latin language, in particular scientifically. That
is the kind of like that that is like the
most the highest prestige discipline, which is kind of crazy
to think about it, but if you think about where
Western education came from, it makes sense that you know,
this was the study of the classics was the you know,
the study of the great men of the past. Reading
their actual words was really important in the Renaissance, so
learning the actual language Greeks, freak and Latin. So they
kind of change a lot about the university. They kind
of keep this as the prestige subject. But that shift
from emulation and producing statesmen that you have in the
Renaissance model to the model of knowledge production that you
have in the modern Enlightenment university just you know, as
you can guess, it profoundly changes the priorities in education.
You know, the expert kind of it's kind of depersonalized.
The expert has a PhD in the certified subject, and
it doesn't matter who he is, but as long as
he has a PhD, you can trust that he has
expertise in the knowledge. And it's really the knowledge, the
rational knowledge that's going to ensure the institutions run the
way they're supposed to run, and so on and so on.
And this is kind of what happens in we import
this into America. And maybe I should pause for discussion
and comments before we continue the story on do you
have any thoughts?
Speaker 1: No, I'm pretty familiar with how things were brought in
from Prussia to a certain point, and yeah, well I
could go off on that for hours, but let's uh
please please go on.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And you know, I'm not saying it was all
bad or that it was.
Speaker 3: What I was.
Speaker 1: That's what That's how I'd go off for hours is
you know, when I was a libertarian, they talked about,
oh my good, this oppression schooling system and they did
in this and that and everything, and I'm like, yeah,
that doesn't work in a multicultural society.
Speaker 3: It only works at a monoculture.
Speaker 2: Interesting. Yeah, yeah, I think I think we need to
have a lot of these conversations now as we're reevaluating
what the universe is about, to understand the history of it,
because like so many of so many people like you know,
I think what Chris Rufo has done has been amazing,
and the kind of exposure of the corruption and nepotism
and just incompetence at our highest institutions is wonderful. There's
a lot of room for reform, but a lot of
times it's like, are we just trying to rewind the
clock back to the nineteen eighties. I mean, a lot
of the problems were already built in long before that,
so so yeah, the but I think it's really interesting
that from the universities you get this idea. I think
it really comes out of the universities of socialism, which
is essentially I mean, yes, it's about kind of redistribution,
but in principle, it's like in practice it's the rule
of the intellectuals. It's like a regime based on experts.
Socialism is like, that's the paradigm regime in the nineteenth century,
at least, progressive socialism, regime based on enlightened experts, rational principles,
a kind of fungibility of leaders. So ideally you don't
have to have really excellent character people. You just have
the right system with the right knowledge, and you know,
even if somebody is kind of like a mediocre human being,
as long as they have a PhD, you can trust
them to do their job. And it's very uninspiring to me.
Speaker 1: But well, this is what James Burnham wrote in his
incredible nineteen forty book The Managerial Revolution as what this
is all about. He talked about Stalin, he talked about Hitler,
and he talked about FDR and he said it's all
the same thing. It's all rule by managers, it's all
rule by experts. Yeah, and there was, and he said
that was the way it was going to be. He
made some predictions in there that people like to pull
out and say, oh, well, you know, look he got
this wrong. He get well, you're going to get wrong.
You're going to get things wrong if you make predictions.
And he put skin in the game. But one thing
he did not get wrong is that it was going
to become about rule of experts and managerialism. And we
are suffering that now because at some point those managers
want to keep their place, so they have to put
people into spots who aren't good managers what what the
blogger Spandrel called the bioleninism, where you you'd rather put
somebody in who was loyal to you as somebody in
who could actually do the job, which is what we
were talking about before. You know, we were talking about
the term the competency crisis, and I was saying that
I don't think that there there There wouldn't be a
competency crisis if there were, if everyone, if there weren't people,
you know, certain classes of people who weren't precluded from
joining from being in power.
Speaker 2: So yeah, yeah, and uh yeah, I think so when
I read Plato Plato's Republic, I don't see. I don't
see in a lot of the classical political theorists this
sense of how an institution can grow so powerful that
it becomes an organism that with an appetite, that just
wants to devour and grow and has its own priorities
that are independent of a state. The closest I think
you could get would be a kind of the two
operations of Eunuchs in uh, you know, like what's here's
what's wrong with the Persian Empires the eunuchs run the place?
And I mean that's kind of actually starting to get
at it. But but you know, it's more into Greek
political ideology.
Speaker 3: Pretty that's pretty spot on right there.
Speaker 2: Well, there are people that don't really care about their
own legacy or progeny there They they you know, subsume
their interests to the interest of this institution and they're
just kind of in their their kind of careerists, self aggrandizing,
uh you know, infertile. I mean, it's it's it's an
interesting parallels another discussion some of the time. But you know,
to come back to Plato. You know, in a lot
of ways, this is people blame Plato for this, you know,
the idea of the rule by intellectuals, the philosopher king.
I think that Plato would have been rolling over in
his grave to see, you know, himself interpreted in that way.
But yeah, so's it does have a kind of platonic
ring to it that I think is unfair. I had
some other point to make on that, but maybe we'll
come back to it in a sec So the problem, okay,
this was an issue growing bureaucracy in Europe. We see
the results today, stagnation. It's terrible. Europe has fallen, et cetera.
But I think in the nineteenth century it wasn't obvious
that this was going and going to kind of progressivize
the whole nation. But in America you didn't have the
same kind of checks against progressivism that you did in Europe.
And so like the uptake of the university model really becomes,
especially after the Civil War, the Renaissance model of education
of statesmanship and approach to classics for kind of nobility
that becomes very tied with the ante bellum people that
we don't like anymore. So the reform was kind of
quick after the Civil War, and the Classics was sort
of sidelined and thrown out. And part of it was
you have these new disciplines on the rise, Like psychology
doesn't exist really as a discipline formalized until then. You know,
sometime in the nineteenth century. English literature even is kind
of a new discipline relatively speaking, Like Shakespeare is not
in the curriculum in America until I think the first
time it happens is like in the eighteen seventies. It's
not like people weren't reading Shakespeare or that he wasn't great,
it's just he's not the classics. The classics is the
you know, the people that Shakespeare was reading, like Shakespeare
reading Plutarch to write Julius Caesar and Corey Alanas and
all this stuff. So you get these new disciplines like
which is I think another pattern of like bureaucrats inventing
new jobs for themselves in a lot of ways. Comp
lit you know, it's kind of comes up in the
late nineteenth century and one of the ways that the
Classics gets sidelined. You know, any good mobster likes to
make it look like an accident, right, So Charles Elliott
of Harvard, for example, the Harvard's longest serving president eighteen
seventy to nineteen oh something, he stages this kind of
call it a game where okay, rather than requiring a
certain course of study from our students in at Harvard,
we're just going to have an elective system and kind
of have a Darwinian competition of the disciplines. And so
whichever discipline gets the most students is just you know,
it's gonna it's going to be just you know, rational
that that discipline will get the most resources. And so
in a way, it's a it's a game that's rigged
against the discipline, like classics, which is just a lot harder.
You have to spend a lot more time learning these
hard languages. The texts are harder, the skills are you know, more,
they require more of you. And so versus something like
comp lit in a Darwinian competition to see which discipline
can attract the most students. I mean, I think you
could expect what would happen, and it's in the in
this context, he makes it look like an accident. But
this is what the progressive wanted, you know, the traditional disciplines,
the Bible, the classics. These were like hard blockers that
were in the way on the road that they wanted
to build toward the great progressive future. And people like Dewey,
you know, and we're not talking about like cultural Marxist,
hard left progressive in the nineteenth century, of course, we're
talking about like you know, suffragettes. But they got what
they wanted, and I think they made it look like
an accident. And so by the time you get to
the nineteenth the nineteen well, like nineteen hundred, Harvard and
Yale up to that point required Greek and Latin to
be you know, did you have to take a competence
test in Greek and Latin to be it even admitted everybody,
not just humanities majors, everybody, And they removed that in
around nineteen hundred. Of course, that's that's not a cause,
that's a symptom, right of the success of their of
the progressive project to kind of deracinate Western education. And
I think, you know, I don't think that the progressives
necessarily would have said that they were charging against the
patriarchy and capitalism, but in practice, that's that's what the
cultural Marxist who came later in the thirties would have
said they were doing very successfully. And this really ends
up kind of unsettling and making us uncertain about what
it is to be a man, which I think the
way that men in culturate themselves primarily is through imitation,
through examples, through paradigms, through heroes, and particularly heroes like
the prime paradigm of in cultuating manliness, and they have
this kind of north star function culturally, and so if
you get rid of that, you can do all kinds
of stuff because nobody everybody be confused, and they won't
they won't try to stop you. I think this is
why we start to see in the mid the mid
twentieth century, and is in a large part of why
we're dealing with this gender crisis today because we've forgotten
primarily what it means to be a man, because we've
forgotten the class.
Speaker 1: Well, I think that certainly helps. And then you know,
you do have social engineers out there who are pushing
it because it does help their agenda. If you have
people who don't have who have abandoned any hope of
identifying with their past or their history, it's much easier
to mold them into that, you know what the I
would say, the the ideologues want. They're looking for a
you know, the perfect kind of progressive subject to the regime.
And then there are others who are just looking for,
you know, to say, the pharmaceutical companies are just looking
for lifelong, you know, lifelong customers. It's not one A
lot of people say, is one or the other. It's
not one or the other. There's many interests out there
who have an interest in seeing that men don't live
historically and do not you know, have low testosterone. I'm
sure you remember that podcast a few years ago where
all it was like this left podcast where they all
the hosts were men and they took testosterone tests and
they were like half of what they should be, and
you're just like, I'm not shocked by this. I mean,
this is this is what's been bred into us.
Speaker 2: NPR has like a fourth of the normal testosterone level.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so I mean, how do we how do we
get that back?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 1: I was talking with this going back and forth with
a friend of mine today and we were talking about
how when I started out podcasting, I had a mentor.
He was talking about how he didn't really realize it
that he had a mentor when he was when he
started doing what he was doing. And you know, you
think about you're talking about people who are looking back
and they're like, Okay, we need to emulate these great
men and and do what they did and live lives
like they lived. And that's gone too. So you know,
how can we how can we bring this forward? How
can we look at the look at these great men
and you know, help the next generation that's coming up.
I'm very hopeful for gen Z and any more information,
any any way that I can help them, you know,
I want to.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's it's a crucial problem. As you say, it's
there's definitely like a whole coalition of interests that profit
from the collapse of manliness. But I think that one
of the one of the best ways we can start
fighting back is self educate ourselves. I mean personally, I
didn't really start to connect all the dots until I
was in my early thirties. I had a kid, and like,
I just didn't. I didn't all click for me, you
know that I needed to be a man of that
it needs to be a certain kind of man. I
didn't click for me that I had not had those
role models the way that my grandfather would have had
them in the same way. You know, like you don't
often realize what you're missing and until somebody points it
out to you. And so I think that that's you'll
realize that if you get into the heroic tradition of
historical figures. That's one of the things I love Homer.
I think Achilles really existed, but you know, it is mythology,
and it's it's fiction in a way. In an important way,
Plutarch is real guys for the most part. I mean,
he does talk about theseus who probably didn't exist, but Romulus,
Romulus probably existed. But you know, obviously Julius Caesar really existed,
and most of the characters that you're talking about are
like real men. And Nisa talks about this in the
Uses and Abuse of History that you know, Okay, clearly,
Julius Caesar is going to teach you how to build
a rocket to Mars. But that's not what you're You're
not you're not trying to do what he did. You're
trying to match that strength of soul. That's what Rousseau
would call it, the heroic drive to to excellence, the
strength of soul. You're trying to match that, and and
I think it starts by studying their lives, studying their stories.
Aristotle has this discussion in the Rhetoric book two, which
is where he talks about the emotions that are essential
for the order to master to persuade people. And one
of the my favorite passage in there is this emotion
that he calls zeal zelos. It's often translated emulation. Is
where we get the word zeal, so Zelot is cognate
with this word, and he defines zelos or zelos it's
an ada. He defines it as a type of pain
felt when a man sees present among another man who
is like him by nature, things good and honorable, which
he himself is capable of achieving. And we're we need to.
If we don't feel that zeal on a daily basis
in our lives, I think we're missing out. And it's
good to surround yourself with people that bring that out
in you if you can, and until you find them,
I think you can. You can kind of supplement yourself
with just reading or hearing the heroic stories of start
with the Greeks and Romans. I mean, obviously we've got
our own guys. Every great nation has its own guys.
You know, I think Hamilton is probably on par with
a guy like Caesar, tragically died young. But you know,
that's what I One of the things I try to
do my podcast is just tell these stories without a
ton of fluff, but you know, enough detail that you
can get a sense of their characters. But you can
start by Plutarch is pretty accessible. He's hard to listen to,
I found, and I've talked to several other classics professors
who've had a similar experience, like, ah, you just pick
up an audiobook of Plutarch and prepare for your lecture
that way. He's just a little too dense, even for
a specialist, I think, for the most part. So I'm
trying to tell these stories in a way that's more accessible.
But you know, one way is just retelling the stories.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 2: I've got some other ideas too that are in development.
Speaker 3: Well.
Speaker 1: I think one of the most important things about when
you're looking at classic figures is to realize just how
many of them weren't only great soldiers or weren't only
great philosophers. But something that we really have to think
about now is that many of them were great entrepreneurs.
That they they did things, they made, they made their fortunes.
And I think today we believe that, you know, if
you want to be an academic, you can't be an entrepreneur.
If you want to be a soldier, you can't be
an entrepreneur that, but you can be at all. So
if you can talk a little bit about that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Well, like a guy like Solon, the lawgiver of Athens,
I mean, part of how he came up with all
of his ideas for how to run a state is
he was he spent a lot of time doing imporreea.
He was just doing business, which for the Greeks in
his time sixth century BC, is probably a combination of
deal making, you know, buying some jewels here, selling them
in an up you know, markup over here, maybe a
little bit of piracy. You know, there's all kinds of
entrepreneurship that you can get into in the Greek world,
but there's so many. One of the things that really
attracted me about a lot of these stories is precisely that, like,
so you know, you could write a whole richest man
in Babylon ancient Greeks and Romans version. Crassus is a
figure that I've covered in my show, who is the
richest man in Rome when he lived, he was the
he was the financier of Julius Caesar. Actually, so there's
the triumvirt the first triumvirate that Julius Caesar kind of
uses to launch his own political career is Pompey and
Caesar and Crassus and really Crassus, it's a due m
for it. Really, it's Crasus and Pompey and then Caesar's
like the tag along and he knows it. That's why
he brought them together, so that he could leverage their power.
But Crassus is this fascinating character. He's a villain in
the movie Spartacus with Kirk Douglas. Lawrence Olivier plays him.
But he he is this survivor figure who in the
Great First Roman Civil War, he his dad and his
brother were seized by populist like vengeful populists and executed.
And so Crassus, he's like twenty He escaped to Spain.
He lives in a cave with a couple of buddies
and just in hiding because he knows you know, the
regime guys are looking for him. There's a bounty on
his head. So he's out in hiding and he's got
some money, you know, as a you know, a person
whose father was a consul, like he's he's a serious
player already, kind of from a good family. But he
comes back when Salah returns from from his journeys in
the east, from his conquest in the east. This is
the story of the Roman Civil War. It's a longer story,
but basically Crasis raises his an army of his own
with whatever money he has. He gets like two or
three thousand men to come and fight on behalf of Sola,
who's on the optimate side of the conflict, the aristocrats,
and they end up winning the war, and Crassus is
in this position where he has all these confiscations of
property going on, and Crassus buys a lot of cheap
estates and flips them and it was a little bit dubious,
but you know, he felt probably that he was profiteering
off of the misfortune of bad men. But then he
ends up building a fortune in Rome by real estate speculation.
He's just like the best at it, and he has
this whole brigade of firemen and construction slaves. And he's
like an incredible he's got an incredible eye for talents
and for training people. He treats slaves like really valuable assets,
and he takes care to train them well and make
sure they're happy and things like this, and so he
ends up. You know, ifever there's a fire that sweeps
into Rome, can go in and just buy all kinds
of properties on the cheap, knowing that he can flip
them and he can rebuild them with his own guys,
and he becomes the richest man in Rome. He becomes
a great financier and one of the most powerful men
in Rome through who's just having a whole lot of
liquid wealth. He's a great kind. It kind of ends
in tragedy because God, I won't I won't spoil it.
If you want to go hear the story of Crass
as many of you guys know it probably, but I
think that and you know that you can make similar
tell similar stories about a lot of the financial dealings
of some of the great men, Like in peacetime, a
guy like Gaius Marius, who is solid opponents in the
Civil War, like he's off securing mining concessions in Spain.
He's he's got this network of equestrian businessmen who are
tax farmers. I mean, some of the greatest Romans were
incredibly talented entrepreneurs. But it's not just that, because I
think that when I think about who would Julius Caesar
have been today, Who would Napoleon have been today? Even
would they have gone into politics, would they have would
they have joined the US military? Now? Probably not right,
This is not where high agency people go. They don't
they don't you know, they don't go to law school
now so much. They go into entrepreneurship. They're in a
lot of these guys are in Silicon Valley. They're they're
getting into tech. I mean, they're they're bringing them out
about this American dynamism I hope, you know, reindustrializing our country.
But like I think that today in America, especially the
high agency people are going into entrepreneurship. And it's one
of the reasons why Napoleon is so amazingly popular. At
Caesar two, I think in Silicon Valley and how you know,
I have a lot of tech pros in my audience
because like Plutarch's heroes and I mean, this is why
the heroes of Antiquity are so appealing. They are like
some of the most high agency men that have ever lived.
I had I run these retreats in Rome in the summer.
We're going to do Greece next year because Rome is
going to be crowded for the Jubilee year. But you know,
I ask I asked this guy, he's like working at
as a you know, B to b SaaS sales guy,
late twenties. I asked him, like, how did he get
into how did he come to my podcast? How did
he get into the classics? And he's he said that
he felt that this was a secret that had been
kept from him for much of his life. He's like,
why did nobody ever tell me that the Greeks and
Romans were the greatest men who ever lived?
Speaker 3: You know?
Speaker 2: And so I think that that's one of the biggest
things you can get from the ancients. Is this this
like sense of how high agent, see if a person
you can be. And I think that high agency people
just devour this stuff. They need those stories. I mean,
Nietzsche talked about this. They like you just you just
like want to consume this stuff so much. If you
if you if you're if you're bent on great things,
like you need that energy. It's like fuel for the
fire within. And so I personally, I come from both
on my moms and dad's side, like generations of entrepreneurs.
As an academic, I was always ashamed of like that
legacy of like not doing that myself. And that's a
good thing. That's it's a feel, you know, like to
get out there and take some risk and kind of
live up to the I mean, even if you have
a couple of people in your past that you can
look up to, well, you certainly have great ones in
your in the history of your people. So that's what
the classics have been for the West, I think for
since they were you know, two thousand years.
Speaker 1: Is it at this point, if they're going to be
taught again, is it just going to be.
Speaker 3: People like us who.
Speaker 1: Are gonna I'm gonna have somebody on like you who
is an expert at this or you know, your podcast
or It just seems to me that there unless there's
a radical revamping of education in this you know, in
this society in the West, that it's it's going.
Speaker 3: To have to be.
Speaker 1: It's going to have to be people like us. It's
going to have to be podcasts, it's got to be
live streams, and there's an entrepreneurial opportunity there for people
who know how to do it. I mean, I you know,
I'm I'm friends with Darryl Cooper, who now was the
most infamous podcaster in the whole world. And watching and
seeing the amount of people that have subscribed to his substack,
and not only subscribe to his substack, but like are
paid subscribers is and when you take into consideration what
he does, the long form aspect of what he does,
the amount of people who are giving him money knowing
that it'll be all be free one day and they're
still giving him is mind boggling. It means that people
are thirsty for this, that people desire this, that people
are at the point where they can't live without it,
and I think that that's the best we can do
right now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Darryl is amazing. I don't, not that I necessarily know,
have an opinion on his latest controversy, but you know,
I have a lot of respect for him as a
reader and a thinker, and so yeah, like this is
one of the things that I took great hope from
when I was leading the institutional world of classics, because
and one of the things that really inspired me. We've
talked about Plato, and you know, I think a lot
of what Plato said was kind of silly, your thought experiments,
but he in a lot of ways was the person
who inspired me because he was such a man of action. Actually,
if you look at his biography, I mean he's taking
crazy risks, traveling to the courts of tyrants in Sicily
and getting sold into slavery and getting ransomed, and I
mean trying to build a movement. But one of the
things that you read the lives of the early sophists
and the early educational entrepreneurs in Athens, like all of
the greats of the Western tradition of philosophy and antiquity,
at least, they're all solopreneurs for the most part. You know,
gorgeous Protocus, uh Choracentissius, Plato, Isocrates, Aristotle. Aristotle came to Athens.
He was selling drugs to pay his way through school
and afford you know, education. I mean, I don't think
Plato charged, but you know he had living expenses, the
son of a doctor. I mean, like these guys are
scrappy as hell, and they if there's no there's no
like university that's going to offer them a chair. You know,
you have to you have to convince people that what
you're doing is important and you have to be self sufficient.
And it breeds a certain kind of toughness and a
certain kind of like I don't know, like responsiveness to
the market and what people actually need and what is
actually good for well for men, especially what they're going
to find useful. So I really admire that about Plato.
I think he did that. I think Socrates too, of course,
but that's you know, I'm friends with. You know, through
this journey, I've met a ton of really talented people
building their own audiences on the internet, justin Murphy Bennett's phylactory,
And I mean, I go down the list of cool
people that are building their own like intellectuals, independent intellectuals,
building their own raw nationalists, building their own kind of
businesses and models and sharing knowledge, sharing a kind of
vision of how we should develop our characters and how
we should select the inputs that that we put in.
So on the one hand, there is that independent intellectual
world that's kind of fermenting and taking off substack Twitter podcasts,
which I think is great. There is also a battle
that's worth fighting for K to twelve education, and I
want to give some credit to a lot of great
people that have done a lot of work, you know,
in the classical education movement for all that I think,
you know, it's really even though it's been around for
a while, it's still in its nascence, you know. But
there's a great book. I really thought this book was great,
The Battle for the American Mind. I think it's called
Pete hag Seth and David Goodwin. And I know David Goodwin,
he's a great guy, and like they just they in
that book they kind of catalog the progressive takeover of
and the kind of ejection of the classics from American
education and what they proposed to replace it with. But
one of the things that they point out in that
book is like you can actually document an explicit, you know,
public domain, perfectly acknowledged conspiracy, if you will, an open,
not secret conspiracy that the Marxists had the Frankfurt School
to seize the cultural high ground, to take all the
pill boxes of in the American in the War for
the American Mind, by you know, Columbia Education sorry, sorry,
the Columbia School of Education, Columbia Teachers College. I think
that's what's called the foundation of the teachers' unions, the
politicization of the teachers' unions, the Department of Education, all
this stuff like this was planned. There were a lot
of people working hard at this to capture and you know,
dumb down American education. And if it worked for them,
it could work to undo it in the other directions.
The tactics is going to have to be very different.
Ask Chris Ruffo how to do that. I have friends
who are appointees in Florida, you know, the university says,
it's great, what's happening, but it's going to be a
lot of work. I think a place we can start is, like,
you know, kids used to start way earlier on this stuff, right,
Like kids used to be reading Plutarch at age nine ten,
They used to be reading Caesar when they were fourteen.
We can get back to that, but we have to
educate ourselves first. As dad, I have two kids and
hoping to have more. But I think there's great hope
that we can educate ourselves now at a really high
level with like I mean, the amazing quality of stuff
that's available for free through podcasts, especially YouTube to some extent,
I think there's there's still some interesting stuff on YouTube
for sure, and uh, newsletters and uh and then pass
it on maybe form our own institutions that are going
to withstand whatever's coming.
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, I appreciate that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, everybody who's trying to do this work, even the
people who are trying to do it in a system,
within a system that seems to be beyond hope. You know,
you got to be hopeful for that. I do like
what Rufo, what Chris Rufo has done, and a lot
of the things that he's exposed. They yeah, it's good
work there. Let's cut it here. I'm going to have
you do your plugs and then we'll leave it open
for the future. Maybe come back and you know, we'll
be like you'd be like a Thomas appearance and just
come on and do do a lecture on someone from
plut Sarch's from plut Sarch's lives.
Speaker 2: So yeah, happy get into like the Roman Civil War
and stuff like that. It's just some fascinating parallels, but
it's a longer conversation.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but tell people where they can find your stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so, costoglory dot com is my website. You can
find Cost of Glory on YouTube. It's it's also on
the podcast players, Apple and Spotify, just cost of Glory.
I'm at cost of Glory on Twitter if you so.
One of the things that we talked about a little
bit at the beginning is this connection between the emulation
of great men and the rhetorical education, this idea of
becoming an order and a speaker, and I like business partner,
and I are starting a set of online offerings for
training people in the ancient art of rhetoric, giving you
at least a crash course so you can start practicing
on your own. And if you're interested in this connection,
I've got something to offer just for free. I've got
an authoritative speaker's guide that's like a little mini course
that'll give you kind of the basics I think will
help people get into what makes a podcast like the
Cost of Glory or an author like Plutarch tic and
why it's not just interesting and entertaining, but like how
it can be useful, how you can help you in
your career. So if you want to know more about that,
go to costoglory dot com, slash gift and you can
find the authoritative Speaker's guide there. So tell me what you.
Speaker 3: Think awesome, I will.
Speaker 1: I'll check that out myself and I will include that
in the show notes.
Speaker 3: Alex, I appreciate it.
Speaker 2: Thank you very much, thanks for time, PTE been a
great pleasure. S