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I really appreciate all of the support everyone's giving me,

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and I hope to expand the show even more than

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it already has. Thank you so much. I want to

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welcome everyone back to the Pecanana Show first time Alex pepkis.

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How are you doing, Alex?

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Speaker 2: Good, great to be here, Peace, Thanks for having me.

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Speaker 3: No problem.

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Speaker 1: Tell everybody a little bit about yourself, please.

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Speaker 2: So I am an ex academic. I grew up.

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Speaker 3: Well.

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Speaker 2: My career was in classics. It was a PhD in

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classics and I focused on the late antique world, especially

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the Greek philosophers of the late Roman world, and got

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a tenure track job I used to teach rhetoric and philosophy.

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I taught at a couple of institutions California, and I

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left in twenty twenty for maybe reasons that we'll get

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into later on. But since leaving, I've worked a couple

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of interesting jobs.

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Speaker 3: But now.

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Speaker 2: I have the luxury of pursuing my mission full time,

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which is trying to bring back the Classics to the

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West and the way that I think that they should

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be taught. And I run a podcast called The Cost

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of Glory where I've been doing that for about three years,

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where I just retell, mainly focus on retelling the biographies

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of the great leaders of the Greek and Roman world,

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especially those featured in Plutarch's lives. So I do these

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kind of long form biographies with that spirit of emulation

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that the Plutarch illustrates so nicely. And I also sort

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of active on Twitter, but I teach some public speaking

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rhetoric classes on the side. But that's what I'm up

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to these days.

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Speaker 1: You got out of academia in twenty twenty. Even before

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twenty twenty, thing academia had to be hell. So you know,

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what was it like and what finally drove you up?

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Speaker 2: Yeah, I so I got when I was in starting

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off in my PhD program and I decided to make

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that decision to go into grad school. I knew that

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it was going to be so I wasn't really I

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wouldn't really consider myself a conservative per se, but I

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knew that it was going to be hostile environment because

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I was a Christian. So I was prepared for classics

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being a kind of bad environment for that, and I

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wasn't too worried about it, But I wasn't really prepared

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for this thing that I slowly came to realize is

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that the discipline of you know, the people who are

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dedicated to studying the Greeks and the Romans are kind

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of committed to its destruction, or at least the eradication

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of anything that a young man such as myself would

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have been interested in, you know, anything heroic or manly

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or kind of impressive daring. That is all being kind

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of filed away. And that was kind of came as

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a shock to me, honestly, And I slowly woke up

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to the facts as I progressed through it, and I

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kind of realized what the Greeks and the Romans were

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about really, So for the longest time, I thought I

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could try to do my part and perform it from

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the inside, which is why I kept applying for jobs,

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and I finally landed this tenyer track position, you know,

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after working ten or fifteen years to finally get into

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a position market, get that kind of a job and

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have some job security whatever the thing that you're supposed

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to want as an academic, right. But and I liked

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my colleagues at the place where I was. They were

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exceptions to the rule. They were really cool, and I

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felt really bad to leave. But I once I like,

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things just kept getting worse, especially around They started getting

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worse around twenty sixteen. Like there was a long intellectual

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history of you know, left wing cultural Marxist kind of

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inching their way through critical theory and other ways into

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the leadership of the discipline. But you know, like in

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twenty sixteen, it was like all the sleeper cells woke

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up and we had the Woke movement, and it just

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started to become very conformist very quickly. I think classics

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kind of dodged the the culture wars of the eighties

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and nineties and early two thousands more than the discipline

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like English literature for some reason, probably because we were

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already kind of small and irrelevant. But you know, for example,

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shortly after I left classics and last year, there was

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a kind of a glowing puff piece about a former

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colleague of mine at Princeton and the headline is, this

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is the New York Times. He wants to save white

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classics from whiteness, and this was he joined the faculty.

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I won't any names, but you know, you can look

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up the article, and this particular individual joined the faculty

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right after I left, And that was like, that was

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the face that the leadership of my discipline. You know,

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the Ivy League classicists tend to be the kind of

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gatekeepers of the discipline. This was the kind of face

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that not just my colleagues at Princeton, but everybody across

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the kind of top programs that they wanted to have

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the world see classics too, White classics, two patriarchal classics

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must die. As if anybody even cared about classics at

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this point in our culture, I mean, it's almost like

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so narcissistic that you can't see how irrelevant you've already become.

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And I was really getting frustrated. I already left at

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that point, but you know, the writing was on the wall,

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and that was already the vibe and the late twenty teens.

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So I was getting really desponded. You know. At some

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point I decided I probably couldn't reform the discipline from

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the inside. I probably there was probably nothing I could do.

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The ship was sinking. You know. It's like you're on

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a ship and you're rowing hard and the captain is

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just like getting smashed at the helm and saying, yeah,

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it would be better if the ship sank. Anyway, that

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was really fun frustrating to me, and I got desponded.

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But I finally realized that, you know, in a way,

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I was sitting on the greatest medicine for this kind

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of situation ever made, which is Homer, Plutarch and like

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the heroic tradition of extremely high agency men who don't

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tolerate crap. And I thought, well, you know, they're saying

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something to me, I don't have to tolerate this crap

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if I'm willing to tolerate a little bit of risk.

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And so I left for that reason on principle, moved

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the family back to my native Texas where I grew up,

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and so that's where I am now. And I've never

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ever regretted it. And it's been hard, but I'm very

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encouraged by well by the collapse of the universities that

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they know they're going to be a long time dying.

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But you know, the craziness that we see today is

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it's not fixable in our generation. And I think that

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there's a lot of hope for people who want to

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build other things and channel the energy and the wisdom

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and the knowledge that you used to be able to

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get in the universities. You probably can't even get anymore

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in most places, even if you wanted to, you have

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to seek them outside of the institutional framework. So I'm

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just trying to help. I'm one of many people trying

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to offer the best parts of my discipline online and

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I draw a lot of energy from that.

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Speaker 1: I think they could be fixed. As I said this

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morning on Twitter that when we found out University Alabama, Birmingham,

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I've gotten like two hundred thousand dollars to study like

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the menstrual cycle of trans women. You see a stir endowments.

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You take every dollar that they have. I think Harvard.

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Harvard is up into the twenty to thirty billion dollars

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in endowments. You just take them and then see what happens.

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I mean, yeah, should we do a lot less.

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Speaker 2: Damage to the economy than you know, unrealized capital gains taxes?

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That kind of stuff. I mean, I think a lot

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of people would cheer you on.

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Speaker 3: Yeah.

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Speaker 1: When I asked this question, I just thought of this one.

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Did how does your did your Greek heritage have anything

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to do with you wanting to get into to philosophy

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and the class?

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Speaker 2: Yeah, it's it's funny. So I was raised in the

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Greek Orthodox Church. It's uh, it didn't have a huge

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well it was. It was a kind of quiet moral compass.

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I wasn't like that into it until I went through

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a rough patch in high school and I don't know,

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typical kind of divorce parents, you know, big school, doing drugs,

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playing video games, screwing around kind of story. It was

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really overweight too, and I kind of wanted to turn

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my life around my junior year of high school and

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I came back to Christianity for that reason. They were

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also in our house for whatever reason, we had, not

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that my liberal parents were all that into this stuff,

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but we had Marcus Aurelius on the shelf. We had

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somehow somebody had given me a copy of The Seven

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Habits of Highly Effective People when I was younger. I

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was like, maybe i'll read this, maybe there's some answers

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in books. So I got back into Christianity kind of,

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and you know, the Seven Habits has draws on a

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lot of classical philosophy, as I discovered, but in sort

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of self improvement with the Great Books around that time,

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and I actually got into I had taken Latin in

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a very half assed way throughout high school, like I

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did everything half acidly in high school until my senior

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year failed history class, which is really funny, but in

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algebra two even though it was good at math. So

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I wanted when I was in college to on the

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side of whatever I was doing. I realized you could

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kind of explore intellectual passions in college and like get

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your parents to pay for it if you just did

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a little convincing. So I decided to take Ancient Greek

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my junior year, and I, you know, having even though

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I was grew up in the Greek Orthodox Church. The

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liturgies in basically ancient Greek. Little did I know that

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anything about the difference between modern and ancient Greek at

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the time. I mean, my parents, my Greek part of

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my family had been in the US for like a century,

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so we weren't that Greek. But I wanted to know.

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I was sort of my curiosity was was stoked, and

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so yeah, I wanted to learn modern Greek, actually because

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I thought I might, I might go into youth ministry

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for a while on the on the way to have

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more serious career. But they have modern Greek. We just

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had Attic Greek. What the hell is attic Greek? I

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had no idea. So anyway, I got into it that

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way my junior year, and once I had a taste

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of it, I had this very charismatic teacher, like probably

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the smartest professor the whole campus, and he, you know,

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painted all the connections between the Greek language and Western

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intellectual history and the logos and philosophy and the news,

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I mean just everything, you know, Homeric arata versus modern virtue.

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I was hooked, and I was. I turned out I

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was pretty good the language part, and so that the

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language in particular was part of my wanting to explore

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my own cultural heritage. But I think what kept me there,

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what made me see, oh, this is not just a

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hobby but something that you could pursue as a serious

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calling in life, was realizing how the Greek language was

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important not just to this little ethnocentric world that I

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interacted with on Sundays and maybe Christmas in Easter, but

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like the foundation of the entire conceptual edifice that I

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that my country stood on, and things like that. And

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that's why I ended up chasing it all the way

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to grad school, against my better judgment.

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Speaker 1: So before we get into what we're going to talk about,

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let me ask you this question, because this is one

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that comes up a lot. Does does Aristotle necessarily and

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logically lead to fascism?

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Speaker 2: Well, it's been remarked that Athenian democracy would be called

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fascists by today's left, for all that, for all that,

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you know, the founding fathers thought that was a kind

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of crazy mob rule, you know, uh, inferno of a

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of a constitution, you know it was, it would still

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be fascist mid by modern democrat standards. So so just

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just it just might actually Pete.

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Speaker 1: All right, you mentioned Plutarch's Lives, and it's a h

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It's a gigantic work talking about different figures from history.

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Some we know, some we don't know, that we've never

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heard of. What can we learn from them? What do

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you when you read them?

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Speaker 3: What do you? What are you looking for?

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Speaker 2: I started reading Plutarch's Lives and serious in earnest as

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I sort of knew I was leaving academia. I had,

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I think a lot of classicists today. So it's funny

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Plutarch's Lives used to be by far the most popular

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classical text of all, more popular than Homer. It's more

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popular than Homer, Plato, Cicero, Tucidities, and you go down

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the list of even less plausible can that it's but

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in the eighteenth century and the American colonies, Plutarch's Lives

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are the second most likely ancient text to be on

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your shelf besides the Bible, and it's I think it's

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a very telling sign that he's not in fashion among

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today's classicists. And I think we could probably get other

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reasons going on further in the conversation. So most classicists,

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will you know, assign Plutarch's Life of Caesar, Alexander. For

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some history survey class that they're teaching, they won't really

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get into the whole lives as a collection or even

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consider it as a morally serious project. But so what

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it is. What Plutarch's Lives is, you know, biography collection.

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It's about forty eight biographies. They're called the Parallel Lives

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because it's forty eight Greeks and forty eight Romans that

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he compares. He pairs them all together, you know, Alexander

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and Caesar, Cicero and Demos, and he's the great orators.

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A lot of men in there that you would have

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heard of, Pericles, the Mysticles, babyas Maximus, Romulus, a lot

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of men you wouldn't have heard of you many's of

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Cardia Sertorious. But they're all amazing in various ways. And

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when I was so, I was leaving academia, and I

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kind of had this sense that this is the text.

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This is a text that like, you know, this is

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the text that Harry Truman read. He's like our last

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self educated, non college education president. Whatever you think of

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the man as a political figure, I mean, he was

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a formidable, self educated man. This is the text that

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you know, Frederick Douglas and Alexander Hamilton Napoleon just read

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in their free time. I had the sense that like

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men of action should read Plutarch, and I had read

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some of the books. I was like, this stuff is

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really good. So I was working my way through, and

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I was looking kind of for inspiration, honestly, because I

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wanted to go into the world of entrepreneurship and business

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risk taking. You know, reading people character, what kind of

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traits does it take to lead people to to exert

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your will over people? Trickiness, political trickiness, all kinds of

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stuff you can learn from Plutarch's lives. So now when

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I when I do my long form biographies of the

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men in Plutarch, and he's my He's my main source

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and inspiration. I'm I'm looking for character. I'm looking for

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virtues and vices. I'm looking for well, I'm looking for

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drama too, because he's one of the greatest. One of

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the reasons he's so popular is he's such a good storyteller.

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He's he's got these like Hollywood scenes and these just

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like banger quotes every other page, and and that's you know,

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Emerson calls him a Bible for heroes, Nietzsche says to

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the young men, and his untimely meditations on the Uses

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and abuses of history says, satisfy your souls on Plutarch

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one hundred such men educated in this way against the

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modern fashion, who could grown accustomed to the heroic and

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learns to appreciate the heroic within themselves, learned to believe

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in themselves that they can silence now and forever the

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whole noisy pseudo education of our day. He's writing out

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in the eighteen seventies or so. So Plutarch is kind

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of like this, kind of I mean, he's the original

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heroic author in a lot of ways for Western statesmen,

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So I look for a lot in there. But mostly

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it's just entertaining as hell.

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Speaker 1: If that's being suppressed, it's not being taught. I mean,

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it's not being suppressed. You can it's you can get

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really good copies for very unexpensively an eBay. I mean,

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it's just it's not suppressed, it's just ignored. And if

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you're not promoting something, it's not going to be popular.

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So why do you think this suppression? This just they

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want people to ignore it. And would you say you

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mentioned that Truman was like, would be the last last president.

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And that just goes right to what we call the

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Nuremberg regime, that everything after World War Two, that is,

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call it right wing, but just call it what was

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normal before the French Revolution. You know that that needs

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to be suppressed.

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Speaker 3: So what do you think about that?

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Speaker 2: Well, I know that you like to go kind of

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deep in your show, So if I could, I think

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it's it's worth telling the story a little bit of

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the western modern Western university and the classics role within it,

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just like in a nutshell, very broad brushstrokes. But so

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basically preface this by saying, I think Plutarch, and it's

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not just Plutarch as an author, it's kind of what

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he stands for. But he's the most representative example of this,

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I think. I think that's what Nietzsche saw, on Emerson saw,

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and many others saw in Plutarch, the most representative example

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of essentially classics, as specifically the Greek and Roman classics,

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as Western civilizations, the kind of backbone of our process

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of inculturating men. This is like the top of the

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pyramid or the foundation of the pyramid, however you want to,

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you know, Jigger the metaphor. Classics are the kind of

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the backbone of Western manliness, and Plutarch really exemplifies that.

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But how what was the process? Okay, so if you

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look at the way that education worked for let's call

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them the elites, the statesmanship class of the West, of

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the nobles, the aristocrats. You see this in the Renaissance,

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very big, big letters with a guy like Machiavelli. It

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is basically a great man focused education. You encounter these

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great men studying the classics, the Greek and Roman heroes,

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in particular the pre Christian ones, through books almost incidentally,

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But and the tenor of the education is not knowledge

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production or knowledge acquisition. It's it's character acquisition. It's skill acquisition. Particularly,

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it's a rhetorical education. It's an education and how to

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become a great orator, a great persuader through studying the

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great persuaders and the great stories and like assimilating their character.

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It's explicitly and rigorously an education focused on emulation, on imitation,

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on becoming like these people, doing everything you can to

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become like these people. You know, Machiavelli, you know you

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put takes off his dusty boots after a busy day's

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work and statesmanship, and he you know, retires into the

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halls of.

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Speaker 3: The great men.

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Speaker 2: You know, he would apparently he would set a table

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sometimes when he wanted to read a book of like

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Cicero or Caesar, he would set a table for two

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and he would dress up in like a toga and

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uh and then like read a book and like imagine

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that the uh, the book the guy who wrote the

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book he was reading, or the guy he wrote the

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book about, was like sitting across the room from him,

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and he was having a conversation with him. So there's

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a very much like imaginative, emulative aspect of this. So

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any that's and that's I say, it's the Renaissance model.

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Let's call it the Renaissance model. But this is really

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what the Romans did too with the Greeks. This is

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what the Greeks did with Achilles. This is what like

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also Biodes and Pericles are doing with Achilles. More or less,

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there's there's a rhetorical emulative tenor to it. It's about

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emulating the great people. So it's a canon of great

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men more than of great books.

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Speaker 3: All right.

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Speaker 2: So and that's the model basically of education through the

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Renaissance and through well. This is the model that the

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you know, the founding fathers of the US had very much.

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What Hamilton and Franklin are doing and Napoleon is doing.

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It is like the basic model of Western elite education

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until until what So a guy comes along in the

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late eighteenth century, Wilhelm von Humboldt. Maybe you've heard of him.

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Humboldt University in Berlin is named after him. He's he

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founds the modern Enlightenment education system, the modern Enlightenment University,

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the Research University in Germany, which of course at that

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time is not unified. There's all these little principalities republics.

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But he founds basically the education system of Prussia, the

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strongest of the states and the and it's on this

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principle of we're going to have a higher education system

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based on the principles of the Enlightenment, producing knowledge, adding

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new knowledge for a great future for mankind. And the

388
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point of that university system is two not just to

389
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produce knowledge, but to produce a certain kind of person,

390
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which is an expert. It's designed to produce experts, doctors, lawyers,

391
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maybe engineers. Okay, they have the Prussian military Academy. That's

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separate for you know, for generals and stuff, actually a

393
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different track. But you know, for like civil experts, you

394
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have the modern university system. And you know, in other words,

395
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not just like you know, doctors and lawyers, but especially

396
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the bureaucrats that are going to run the great enlightened institutions,

397
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the rational institutions that the modern state needs to progress.

398
00:26:25,000 --> 00:26:28,400
So the university basically exists to produce bureaucrats. And they

399
00:26:28,440 --> 00:26:32,160
have this particular advantage over the old system, which is

400
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the PhD. They invent this idea of the doctorate, and

401
00:26:36,680 --> 00:26:40,319
so now you know, will you just have a master's degree.

402
00:26:40,480 --> 00:26:43,400
In Germany, we have doctorates. What does this have to

403
00:26:43,400 --> 00:26:49,440
do with America. It so like in the nineteenth century,

404
00:26:49,480 --> 00:26:56,480
America is becoming more self confidence, industrial production is increasing,

405
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wealth is increasing, and American educators are starting to look

406
00:27:00,319 --> 00:27:04,680
to you know, we're making more universities or let's let's

407
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say institutions of higher education. And so American educators start

408
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looking to Europe to see what's the best paradigm. And

409
00:27:13,039 --> 00:27:15,920
I mean I grossly oversimplifying this, but they see, well,

410
00:27:15,960 --> 00:27:18,839
you know, Oxford to Cambridge, you can get a master's degree,

411
00:27:18,839 --> 00:27:22,079
but you know the humble universities, you can get a doctorate.

412
00:27:22,359 --> 00:27:26,839
So clearly these people have figured something extra out and

413
00:27:26,920 --> 00:27:29,960
that kind of becomes the model for the American university system,

414
00:27:30,240 --> 00:27:38,079
this enlightenment German university where it's all about producing knowledge

415
00:27:38,359 --> 00:27:41,920
on the kind of intellectual level, but on the practical level,

416
00:27:42,720 --> 00:27:45,880
look at the results. It's about producing bureaucrats, about producing experts.

417
00:27:47,680 --> 00:27:53,960
An interesting side note here, what do you think the

418
00:27:53,960 --> 00:27:58,200
the kind of flagship discipline was the flagship model of

419
00:27:59,640 --> 00:28:03,519
the new science of the universities. What do you think

420
00:28:03,559 --> 00:28:05,680
it was? I mean, just take a guess.

421
00:28:08,039 --> 00:28:08,720
Speaker 3: Psychology.

422
00:28:09,240 --> 00:28:12,240
Speaker 2: You might think it's psychology, you'd be wrong. You might

423
00:28:12,279 --> 00:28:14,680
think it's philosophy, which has.

424
00:28:14,559 --> 00:28:17,279
Speaker 3: A long history. I was going to say philosophy, but.

425
00:28:18,160 --> 00:28:23,359
Speaker 2: It's not philosophy. You might think it's physics. No, it's

426
00:28:23,400 --> 00:28:26,960
classics of all things, it's classical philology. It's actually the

427
00:28:27,000 --> 00:28:32,599
study of Greek and Latin language, in particular scientifically. That

428
00:28:32,759 --> 00:28:35,799
is the kind of like that that is like the

429
00:28:35,839 --> 00:28:40,000
most the highest prestige discipline, which is kind of crazy

430
00:28:40,039 --> 00:28:42,000
to think about it, but if you think about where

431
00:28:42,039 --> 00:28:47,599
Western education came from, it makes sense that you know,

432
00:28:48,440 --> 00:28:51,920
this was the study of the classics was the you know,

433
00:28:51,960 --> 00:28:53,599
the study of the great men of the past. Reading

434
00:28:53,640 --> 00:28:56,359
their actual words was really important in the Renaissance, so

435
00:28:56,559 --> 00:28:59,839
learning the actual language Greeks, freak and Latin. So they

436
00:29:00,079 --> 00:29:03,200
kind of change a lot about the university. They kind

437
00:29:03,240 --> 00:29:06,480
of keep this as the prestige subject. But that shift

438
00:29:06,640 --> 00:29:11,880
from emulation and producing statesmen that you have in the

439
00:29:11,880 --> 00:29:16,000
Renaissance model to the model of knowledge production that you

440
00:29:16,079 --> 00:29:18,839
have in the modern Enlightenment university just you know, as

441
00:29:18,880 --> 00:29:22,240
you can guess, it profoundly changes the priorities in education.

442
00:29:24,720 --> 00:29:28,519
You know, the expert kind of it's kind of depersonalized.

443
00:29:28,559 --> 00:29:31,240
The expert has a PhD in the certified subject, and

444
00:29:31,240 --> 00:29:32,799
it doesn't matter who he is, but as long as

445
00:29:32,799 --> 00:29:34,720
he has a PhD, you can trust that he has

446
00:29:35,000 --> 00:29:38,799
expertise in the knowledge. And it's really the knowledge, the

447
00:29:38,880 --> 00:29:41,720
rational knowledge that's going to ensure the institutions run the

448
00:29:41,759 --> 00:29:44,519
way they're supposed to run, and so on and so on.

449
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And this is kind of what happens in we import

450
00:29:48,039 --> 00:29:50,920
this into America. And maybe I should pause for discussion

451
00:29:50,960 --> 00:29:53,279
and comments before we continue the story on do you

452
00:29:53,279 --> 00:29:53,960
have any thoughts?

453
00:29:55,119 --> 00:29:58,759
Speaker 1: No, I'm pretty familiar with how things were brought in

454
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from Prussia to a certain point, and yeah, well I

455
00:30:04,599 --> 00:30:06,880
could go off on that for hours, but let's uh

456
00:30:07,039 --> 00:30:07,960
please please go on.

457
00:30:08,599 --> 00:30:10,519
Speaker 2: Yeah, And you know, I'm not saying it was all

458
00:30:10,559 --> 00:30:12,839
bad or that it was.

459
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Speaker 3: What I was.

460
00:30:13,319 --> 00:30:15,960
Speaker 1: That's what That's how I'd go off for hours is

461
00:30:16,359 --> 00:30:18,200
you know, when I was a libertarian, they talked about,

462
00:30:18,200 --> 00:30:20,839
oh my good, this oppression schooling system and they did

463
00:30:20,920 --> 00:30:23,200
in this and that and everything, and I'm like, yeah,

464
00:30:23,279 --> 00:30:25,359
that doesn't work in a multicultural society.

465
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Speaker 3: It only works at a monoculture.

466
00:30:27,559 --> 00:30:30,359
Speaker 2: Interesting. Yeah, yeah, I think I think we need to

467
00:30:30,359 --> 00:30:33,119
have a lot of these conversations now as we're reevaluating

468
00:30:33,119 --> 00:30:35,519
what the universe is about, to understand the history of it,

469
00:30:35,519 --> 00:30:39,680
because like so many of so many people like you know,

470
00:30:40,279 --> 00:30:42,319
I think what Chris Rufo has done has been amazing,

471
00:30:42,440 --> 00:30:46,240
and the kind of exposure of the corruption and nepotism

472
00:30:46,440 --> 00:30:52,440
and just incompetence at our highest institutions is wonderful. There's

473
00:30:52,440 --> 00:30:54,519
a lot of room for reform, but a lot of

474
00:30:54,599 --> 00:30:56,599
times it's like, are we just trying to rewind the

475
00:30:56,599 --> 00:31:00,440
clock back to the nineteen eighties. I mean, a lot

476
00:31:00,480 --> 00:31:03,119
of the problems were already built in long before that,

477
00:31:03,960 --> 00:31:10,720
so so yeah, the but I think it's really interesting

478
00:31:10,759 --> 00:31:16,640
that from the universities you get this idea. I think

479
00:31:16,799 --> 00:31:20,160
it really comes out of the universities of socialism, which

480
00:31:20,200 --> 00:31:25,079
is essentially I mean, yes, it's about kind of redistribution,

481
00:31:25,240 --> 00:31:28,640
but in principle, it's like in practice it's the rule

482
00:31:29,079 --> 00:31:33,799
of the intellectuals. It's like a regime based on experts.

483
00:31:33,920 --> 00:31:37,519
Socialism is like, that's the paradigm regime in the nineteenth century,

484
00:31:37,519 --> 00:31:43,720
at least, progressive socialism, regime based on enlightened experts, rational principles,

485
00:31:44,119 --> 00:31:48,000
a kind of fungibility of leaders. So ideally you don't

486
00:31:48,039 --> 00:31:50,160
have to have really excellent character people. You just have

487
00:31:50,200 --> 00:31:52,720
the right system with the right knowledge, and you know,

488
00:31:52,759 --> 00:31:55,640
even if somebody is kind of like a mediocre human being,

489
00:31:55,680 --> 00:31:57,240
as long as they have a PhD, you can trust

490
00:31:57,240 --> 00:32:01,599
them to do their job. And it's very uninspiring to me.

491
00:32:01,759 --> 00:32:05,480
Speaker 1: But well, this is what James Burnham wrote in his

492
00:32:07,480 --> 00:32:12,119
incredible nineteen forty book The Managerial Revolution as what this

493
00:32:12,200 --> 00:32:15,519
is all about. He talked about Stalin, he talked about Hitler,

494
00:32:15,519 --> 00:32:18,559
and he talked about FDR and he said it's all

495
00:32:18,559 --> 00:32:22,319
the same thing. It's all rule by managers, it's all

496
00:32:22,400 --> 00:32:26,200
rule by experts. Yeah, and there was, and he said

497
00:32:26,240 --> 00:32:27,920
that was the way it was going to be. He

498
00:32:27,960 --> 00:32:30,160
made some predictions in there that people like to pull

499
00:32:30,160 --> 00:32:32,200
out and say, oh, well, you know, look he got

500
00:32:32,240 --> 00:32:33,920
this wrong. He get well, you're going to get wrong.

501
00:32:33,960 --> 00:32:35,640
You're going to get things wrong if you make predictions.

502
00:32:35,680 --> 00:32:37,759
And he put skin in the game. But one thing

503
00:32:37,799 --> 00:32:39,839
he did not get wrong is that it was going

504
00:32:39,920 --> 00:32:45,079
to become about rule of experts and managerialism. And we

505
00:32:45,200 --> 00:32:51,839
are suffering that now because at some point those managers

506
00:32:52,079 --> 00:32:56,480
want to keep their place, so they have to put

507
00:32:56,519 --> 00:33:02,039
people into spots who aren't good managers what what the

508
00:33:02,240 --> 00:33:07,440
blogger Spandrel called the bioleninism, where you you'd rather put

509
00:33:07,480 --> 00:33:10,400
somebody in who was loyal to you as somebody in

510
00:33:10,440 --> 00:33:12,720
who could actually do the job, which is what we

511
00:33:12,720 --> 00:33:15,799
were talking about before. You know, we were talking about

512
00:33:15,839 --> 00:33:18,720
the term the competency crisis, and I was saying that

513
00:33:18,799 --> 00:33:21,240
I don't think that there there There wouldn't be a

514
00:33:21,240 --> 00:33:26,160
competency crisis if there were, if everyone, if there weren't people,

515
00:33:26,400 --> 00:33:29,000
you know, certain classes of people who weren't precluded from

516
00:33:29,119 --> 00:33:31,960
joining from being in power.

517
00:33:32,279 --> 00:33:39,920
Speaker 2: So yeah, yeah, and uh yeah, I think so when

518
00:33:39,920 --> 00:33:46,000
I read Plato Plato's Republic, I don't see. I don't

519
00:33:46,000 --> 00:33:49,559
see in a lot of the classical political theorists this

520
00:33:50,839 --> 00:33:56,839
sense of how an institution can grow so powerful that

521
00:33:56,960 --> 00:34:00,680
it becomes an organism that with an appetite, that just

522
00:34:00,759 --> 00:34:03,599
wants to devour and grow and has its own priorities

523
00:34:03,640 --> 00:34:06,000
that are independent of a state. The closest I think

524
00:34:06,000 --> 00:34:10,880
you could get would be a kind of the two

525
00:34:10,840 --> 00:34:15,320
operations of Eunuchs in uh, you know, like what's here's

526
00:34:15,360 --> 00:34:17,960
what's wrong with the Persian Empires the eunuchs run the place?

527
00:34:18,039 --> 00:34:21,239
And I mean that's kind of actually starting to get

528
00:34:21,280 --> 00:34:24,639
at it. But but you know, it's more into Greek

529
00:34:24,679 --> 00:34:25,679
political ideology.

530
00:34:25,800 --> 00:34:28,119
Speaker 3: Pretty that's pretty spot on right there.

531
00:34:29,039 --> 00:34:31,679
Speaker 2: Well, there are people that don't really care about their

532
00:34:31,719 --> 00:34:36,079
own legacy or progeny there They they you know, subsume

533
00:34:36,119 --> 00:34:39,280
their interests to the interest of this institution and they're

534
00:34:39,320 --> 00:34:42,400
just kind of in their their kind of careerists, self aggrandizing,

535
00:34:43,320 --> 00:34:48,239
uh you know, infertile. I mean, it's it's it's an

536
00:34:48,239 --> 00:34:52,079
interesting parallels another discussion some of the time. But you know,

537
00:34:52,320 --> 00:34:55,400
to come back to Plato. You know, in a lot

538
00:34:55,440 --> 00:34:59,679
of ways, this is people blame Plato for this, you know,

539
00:35:00,039 --> 00:35:04,519
the idea of the rule by intellectuals, the philosopher king.

540
00:35:07,599 --> 00:35:10,519
I think that Plato would have been rolling over in

541
00:35:10,519 --> 00:35:16,199
his grave to see, you know, himself interpreted in that way.

542
00:35:17,960 --> 00:35:24,000
But yeah, so's it does have a kind of platonic

543
00:35:24,039 --> 00:35:27,800
ring to it that I think is unfair. I had

544
00:35:27,840 --> 00:35:29,840
some other point to make on that, but maybe we'll

545
00:35:29,840 --> 00:35:38,199
come back to it in a sec So the problem, okay,

546
00:35:38,239 --> 00:35:41,320
this was an issue growing bureaucracy in Europe. We see

547
00:35:41,320 --> 00:35:46,559
the results today, stagnation. It's terrible. Europe has fallen, et cetera.

548
00:35:47,880 --> 00:35:50,920
But I think in the nineteenth century it wasn't obvious

549
00:35:51,519 --> 00:35:55,880
that this was going and going to kind of progressivize

550
00:35:55,880 --> 00:36:00,800
the whole nation. But in America you didn't have the

551
00:36:00,840 --> 00:36:06,920
same kind of checks against progressivism that you did in Europe.

552
00:36:06,920 --> 00:36:11,719
And so like the uptake of the university model really becomes,

553
00:36:12,679 --> 00:36:17,280
especially after the Civil War, the Renaissance model of education

554
00:36:17,360 --> 00:36:20,480
of statesmanship and approach to classics for kind of nobility

555
00:36:20,880 --> 00:36:27,119
that becomes very tied with the ante bellum people that

556
00:36:27,159 --> 00:36:30,800
we don't like anymore. So the reform was kind of

557
00:36:30,840 --> 00:36:34,679
quick after the Civil War, and the Classics was sort

558
00:36:34,679 --> 00:36:36,800
of sidelined and thrown out. And part of it was

559
00:36:36,800 --> 00:36:39,599
you have these new disciplines on the rise, Like psychology

560
00:36:39,639 --> 00:36:44,639
doesn't exist really as a discipline formalized until then. You know,

561
00:36:44,960 --> 00:36:48,400
sometime in the nineteenth century. English literature even is kind

562
00:36:48,440 --> 00:36:52,079
of a new discipline relatively speaking, Like Shakespeare is not

563
00:36:53,360 --> 00:36:56,400
in the curriculum in America until I think the first

564
00:36:56,400 --> 00:36:58,599
time it happens is like in the eighteen seventies. It's

565
00:36:58,599 --> 00:37:00,840
not like people weren't reading Shakespeare or that he wasn't great,

566
00:37:00,880 --> 00:37:03,239
it's just he's not the classics. The classics is the

567
00:37:03,320 --> 00:37:05,880
you know, the people that Shakespeare was reading, like Shakespeare

568
00:37:05,880 --> 00:37:08,880
reading Plutarch to write Julius Caesar and Corey Alanas and

569
00:37:08,880 --> 00:37:12,320
all this stuff. So you get these new disciplines like

570
00:37:12,960 --> 00:37:16,519
which is I think another pattern of like bureaucrats inventing

571
00:37:16,559 --> 00:37:20,119
new jobs for themselves in a lot of ways. Comp

572
00:37:20,199 --> 00:37:22,199
lit you know, it's kind of comes up in the

573
00:37:22,280 --> 00:37:25,320
late nineteenth century and one of the ways that the

574
00:37:25,320 --> 00:37:30,639
Classics gets sidelined. You know, any good mobster likes to

575
00:37:30,639 --> 00:37:35,840
make it look like an accident, right, So Charles Elliott

576
00:37:35,880 --> 00:37:42,039
of Harvard, for example, the Harvard's longest serving president eighteen

577
00:37:42,119 --> 00:37:48,119
seventy to nineteen oh something, he stages this kind of

578
00:37:48,239 --> 00:37:56,119
call it a game where okay, rather than requiring a

579
00:37:56,159 --> 00:38:01,039
certain course of study from our students in at Harvard,

580
00:38:01,199 --> 00:38:04,239
we're just going to have an elective system and kind

581
00:38:04,239 --> 00:38:07,920
of have a Darwinian competition of the disciplines. And so

582
00:38:08,199 --> 00:38:10,960
whichever discipline gets the most students is just you know,

583
00:38:11,039 --> 00:38:14,599
it's gonna it's going to be just you know, rational

584
00:38:14,679 --> 00:38:17,239
that that discipline will get the most resources. And so

585
00:38:17,880 --> 00:38:19,679
in a way, it's a it's a game that's rigged

586
00:38:19,719 --> 00:38:23,960
against the discipline, like classics, which is just a lot harder.

587
00:38:23,960 --> 00:38:25,559
You have to spend a lot more time learning these

588
00:38:25,599 --> 00:38:31,559
hard languages. The texts are harder, the skills are you know, more,

589
00:38:32,079 --> 00:38:35,480
they require more of you. And so versus something like

590
00:38:35,559 --> 00:38:39,679
comp lit in a Darwinian competition to see which discipline

591
00:38:39,679 --> 00:38:41,880
can attract the most students. I mean, I think you

592
00:38:41,920 --> 00:38:46,000
could expect what would happen, and it's in the in

593
00:38:46,039 --> 00:38:48,800
this context, he makes it look like an accident. But

594
00:38:48,920 --> 00:38:53,119
this is what the progressive wanted, you know, the traditional disciplines,

595
00:38:53,920 --> 00:38:59,599
the Bible, the classics. These were like hard blockers that

596
00:38:59,639 --> 00:39:03,360
were in the way on the road that they wanted

597
00:39:03,360 --> 00:39:08,760
to build toward the great progressive future. And people like Dewey,

598
00:39:09,119 --> 00:39:13,920
you know, and we're not talking about like cultural Marxist,

599
00:39:14,280 --> 00:39:16,599
hard left progressive in the nineteenth century, of course, we're

600
00:39:16,599 --> 00:39:20,840
talking about like you know, suffragettes. But they got what

601
00:39:20,880 --> 00:39:23,280
they wanted, and I think they made it look like

602
00:39:23,320 --> 00:39:27,800
an accident. And so by the time you get to

603
00:39:27,840 --> 00:39:31,719
the nineteenth the nineteen well, like nineteen hundred, Harvard and

604
00:39:31,800 --> 00:39:34,880
Yale up to that point required Greek and Latin to

605
00:39:35,079 --> 00:39:40,400
be you know, did you have to take a competence

606
00:39:40,440 --> 00:39:43,599
test in Greek and Latin to be it even admitted everybody,

607
00:39:43,639 --> 00:39:47,480
not just humanities majors, everybody, And they removed that in

608
00:39:47,559 --> 00:39:50,280
around nineteen hundred. Of course, that's that's not a cause,

609
00:39:50,320 --> 00:39:54,239
that's a symptom, right of the success of their of

610
00:39:54,280 --> 00:39:59,679
the progressive project to kind of deracinate Western education. And

611
00:39:59,719 --> 00:40:02,360
I think, you know, I don't think that the progressives

612
00:40:02,400 --> 00:40:05,760
necessarily would have said that they were charging against the

613
00:40:05,800 --> 00:40:09,599
patriarchy and capitalism, but in practice, that's that's what the

614
00:40:09,639 --> 00:40:12,119
cultural Marxist who came later in the thirties would have

615
00:40:12,280 --> 00:40:17,599
said they were doing very successfully. And this really ends

616
00:40:17,679 --> 00:40:22,400
up kind of unsettling and making us uncertain about what

617
00:40:22,440 --> 00:40:25,239
it is to be a man, which I think the

618
00:40:25,280 --> 00:40:29,800
way that men in culturate themselves primarily is through imitation,

619
00:40:29,920 --> 00:40:33,239
through examples, through paradigms, through heroes, and particularly heroes like

620
00:40:34,000 --> 00:40:37,320
the prime paradigm of in cultuating manliness, and they have

621
00:40:37,360 --> 00:40:41,400
this kind of north star function culturally, and so if

622
00:40:41,440 --> 00:40:43,679
you get rid of that, you can do all kinds

623
00:40:43,679 --> 00:40:47,159
of stuff because nobody everybody be confused, and they won't

624
00:40:47,280 --> 00:40:49,360
they won't try to stop you. I think this is

625
00:40:49,360 --> 00:40:51,159
why we start to see in the mid the mid

626
00:40:51,199 --> 00:40:54,400
twentieth century, and is in a large part of why

627
00:40:54,440 --> 00:40:57,159
we're dealing with this gender crisis today because we've forgotten

628
00:40:57,199 --> 00:40:59,320
primarily what it means to be a man, because we've

629
00:40:59,320 --> 00:41:01,559
forgotten the class.

630
00:41:02,679 --> 00:41:05,880
Speaker 1: Well, I think that certainly helps. And then you know,

631
00:41:05,960 --> 00:41:08,440
you do have social engineers out there who are pushing

632
00:41:08,480 --> 00:41:12,840
it because it does help their agenda. If you have

633
00:41:13,400 --> 00:41:19,239
people who don't have who have abandoned any hope of

634
00:41:19,320 --> 00:41:23,280
identifying with their past or their history, it's much easier

635
00:41:23,320 --> 00:41:27,639
to mold them into that, you know what the I

636
00:41:27,679 --> 00:41:31,519
would say, the the ideologues want. They're looking for a

637
00:41:33,000 --> 00:41:40,079
you know, the perfect kind of progressive subject to the regime.

638
00:41:41,239 --> 00:41:44,119
And then there are others who are just looking for,

639
00:41:45,599 --> 00:41:48,760
you know, to say, the pharmaceutical companies are just looking

640
00:41:48,800 --> 00:41:53,199
for lifelong, you know, lifelong customers. It's not one A

641
00:41:53,239 --> 00:41:54,840
lot of people say, is one or the other. It's

642
00:41:54,840 --> 00:41:57,719
not one or the other. There's many interests out there

643
00:41:57,719 --> 00:42:03,000
who have an interest in seeing that men don't live

644
00:42:03,159 --> 00:42:06,920
historically and do not you know, have low testosterone. I'm

645
00:42:06,920 --> 00:42:09,440
sure you remember that podcast a few years ago where

646
00:42:09,480 --> 00:42:12,239
all it was like this left podcast where they all

647
00:42:12,320 --> 00:42:16,840
the hosts were men and they took testosterone tests and

648
00:42:16,880 --> 00:42:19,239
they were like half of what they should be, and

649
00:42:19,280 --> 00:42:22,239
you're just like, I'm not shocked by this. I mean,

650
00:42:23,519 --> 00:42:26,119
this is this is what's been bred into us.

651
00:42:27,159 --> 00:42:30,880
Speaker 2: NPR has like a fourth of the normal testosterone level.

652
00:42:31,920 --> 00:42:35,119
Speaker 1: Yeah, so I mean, how do we how do we

653
00:42:35,159 --> 00:42:35,760
get that back?

654
00:42:35,840 --> 00:42:36,039
Speaker 3: Yeah?

655
00:42:36,039 --> 00:42:37,960
Speaker 1: I was talking with this going back and forth with

656
00:42:38,000 --> 00:42:40,760
a friend of mine today and we were talking about

657
00:42:40,760 --> 00:42:43,599
how when I started out podcasting, I had a mentor.

658
00:42:44,599 --> 00:42:47,599
He was talking about how he didn't really realize it

659
00:42:47,719 --> 00:42:50,119
that he had a mentor when he was when he

660
00:42:50,159 --> 00:42:53,320
started doing what he was doing. And you know, you

661
00:42:53,440 --> 00:42:57,280
think about you're talking about people who are looking back

662
00:42:57,280 --> 00:42:59,679
and they're like, Okay, we need to emulate these great

663
00:42:59,760 --> 00:43:03,519
men and and do what they did and live lives

664
00:43:03,559 --> 00:43:07,599
like they lived. And that's gone too. So you know,

665
00:43:07,639 --> 00:43:10,440
how can we how can we bring this forward? How

666
00:43:10,440 --> 00:43:13,440
can we look at the look at these great men

667
00:43:13,639 --> 00:43:17,800
and you know, help the next generation that's coming up.

668
00:43:17,840 --> 00:43:22,320
I'm very hopeful for gen Z and any more information,

669
00:43:22,639 --> 00:43:25,239
any any way that I can help them, you know,

670
00:43:25,519 --> 00:43:26,079
I want to.

671
00:43:27,760 --> 00:43:30,480
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's it's a crucial problem. As you say, it's

672
00:43:30,679 --> 00:43:34,199
there's definitely like a whole coalition of interests that profit

673
00:43:34,280 --> 00:43:40,239
from the collapse of manliness. But I think that one

674
00:43:40,239 --> 00:43:42,760
of the one of the best ways we can start

675
00:43:42,880 --> 00:43:50,119
fighting back is self educate ourselves. I mean personally, I

676
00:43:50,159 --> 00:43:53,360
didn't really start to connect all the dots until I

677
00:43:53,400 --> 00:43:56,719
was in my early thirties. I had a kid, and like,

678
00:43:57,519 --> 00:44:01,280
I just didn't. I didn't all click for me, you

679
00:44:01,320 --> 00:44:05,920
know that I needed to be a man of that

680
00:44:05,920 --> 00:44:08,119
it needs to be a certain kind of man. I

681
00:44:08,199 --> 00:44:12,679
didn't click for me that I had not had those

682
00:44:12,760 --> 00:44:16,199
role models the way that my grandfather would have had

683
00:44:16,239 --> 00:44:18,920
them in the same way. You know, like you don't

684
00:44:18,960 --> 00:44:22,480
often realize what you're missing and until somebody points it

685
00:44:22,519 --> 00:44:26,840
out to you. And so I think that that's you'll

686
00:44:26,880 --> 00:44:30,719
realize that if you get into the heroic tradition of

687
00:44:31,760 --> 00:44:34,239
historical figures. That's one of the things I love Homer.

688
00:44:34,920 --> 00:44:38,480
I think Achilles really existed, but you know, it is mythology,

689
00:44:39,079 --> 00:44:42,159
and it's it's fiction in a way. In an important way,

690
00:44:42,760 --> 00:44:45,199
Plutarch is real guys for the most part. I mean,

691
00:44:45,199 --> 00:44:48,599
he does talk about theseus who probably didn't exist, but Romulus,

692
00:44:49,199 --> 00:44:53,119
Romulus probably existed. But you know, obviously Julius Caesar really existed,

693
00:44:53,199 --> 00:44:55,360
and most of the characters that you're talking about are

694
00:44:55,400 --> 00:44:59,280
like real men. And Nisa talks about this in the

695
00:44:59,360 --> 00:45:03,719
Uses and Abuse of History that you know, Okay, clearly,

696
00:45:04,400 --> 00:45:06,239
Julius Caesar is going to teach you how to build

697
00:45:06,239 --> 00:45:09,480
a rocket to Mars. But that's not what you're You're

698
00:45:09,519 --> 00:45:12,440
not you're not trying to do what he did. You're

699
00:45:12,480 --> 00:45:16,000
trying to match that strength of soul. That's what Rousseau

700
00:45:16,000 --> 00:45:21,400
would call it, the heroic drive to to excellence, the

701
00:45:21,519 --> 00:45:27,039
strength of soul. You're trying to match that, and and

702
00:45:27,079 --> 00:45:31,519
I think it starts by studying their lives, studying their stories.

703
00:45:34,079 --> 00:45:39,679
Aristotle has this discussion in the Rhetoric book two, which

704
00:45:39,719 --> 00:45:43,119
is where he talks about the emotions that are essential

705
00:45:43,159 --> 00:45:47,400
for the order to master to persuade people. And one

706
00:45:47,440 --> 00:45:49,920
of the my favorite passage in there is this emotion

707
00:45:50,000 --> 00:45:55,800
that he calls zeal zelos. It's often translated emulation. Is

708
00:45:55,800 --> 00:46:00,599
where we get the word zeal, so Zelot is cognate

709
00:46:00,719 --> 00:46:05,880
with this word, and he defines zelos or zelos it's

710
00:46:05,880 --> 00:46:10,280
an ada. He defines it as a type of pain

711
00:46:11,000 --> 00:46:13,880
felt when a man sees present among another man who

712
00:46:13,920 --> 00:46:16,800
is like him by nature, things good and honorable, which

713
00:46:16,840 --> 00:46:22,639
he himself is capable of achieving. And we're we need to.

714
00:46:22,760 --> 00:46:25,400
If we don't feel that zeal on a daily basis

715
00:46:25,400 --> 00:46:27,800
in our lives, I think we're missing out. And it's

716
00:46:27,800 --> 00:46:30,079
good to surround yourself with people that bring that out

717
00:46:30,119 --> 00:46:33,840
in you if you can, and until you find them,

718
00:46:33,840 --> 00:46:36,440
I think you can. You can kind of supplement yourself

719
00:46:36,480 --> 00:46:41,920
with just reading or hearing the heroic stories of start

720
00:46:41,960 --> 00:46:44,000
with the Greeks and Romans. I mean, obviously we've got

721
00:46:44,000 --> 00:46:48,159
our own guys. Every great nation has its own guys.

722
00:46:48,400 --> 00:46:52,679
You know, I think Hamilton is probably on par with

723
00:46:52,719 --> 00:46:57,440
a guy like Caesar, tragically died young. But you know,

724
00:46:58,239 --> 00:46:59,760
that's what I One of the things I try to

725
00:46:59,800 --> 00:47:03,280
do my podcast is just tell these stories without a

726
00:47:03,320 --> 00:47:05,280
ton of fluff, but you know, enough detail that you

727
00:47:05,320 --> 00:47:08,519
can get a sense of their characters. But you can

728
00:47:08,559 --> 00:47:11,880
start by Plutarch is pretty accessible. He's hard to listen to,

729
00:47:12,280 --> 00:47:15,360
I found, and I've talked to several other classics professors

730
00:47:15,800 --> 00:47:19,760
who've had a similar experience, like, ah, you just pick

731
00:47:19,800 --> 00:47:22,280
up an audiobook of Plutarch and prepare for your lecture

732
00:47:22,280 --> 00:47:25,480
that way. He's just a little too dense, even for

733
00:47:25,519 --> 00:47:28,679
a specialist, I think, for the most part. So I'm

734
00:47:28,679 --> 00:47:30,960
trying to tell these stories in a way that's more accessible.

735
00:47:31,440 --> 00:47:34,360
But you know, one way is just retelling the stories.

736
00:47:34,400 --> 00:47:34,519
Speaker 3: Now.

737
00:47:34,519 --> 00:47:37,440
Speaker 2: I've got some other ideas too that are in development.

738
00:47:39,800 --> 00:47:39,920
Speaker 3: Well.

739
00:47:39,960 --> 00:47:42,320
Speaker 1: I think one of the most important things about when

740
00:47:42,360 --> 00:47:46,960
you're looking at classic figures is to realize just how

741
00:47:47,039 --> 00:47:52,119
many of them weren't only great soldiers or weren't only

742
00:47:52,239 --> 00:47:57,000
great philosophers. But something that we really have to think

743
00:47:57,039 --> 00:48:00,000
about now is that many of them were great entrepreneurs.

744
00:48:01,719 --> 00:48:07,239
That they they did things, they made, they made their fortunes.

745
00:48:08,159 --> 00:48:12,960
And I think today we believe that, you know, if

746
00:48:13,000 --> 00:48:15,599
you want to be an academic, you can't be an entrepreneur.

747
00:48:15,639 --> 00:48:17,800
If you want to be a soldier, you can't be

748
00:48:17,840 --> 00:48:20,880
an entrepreneur that, but you can be at all. So

749
00:48:21,360 --> 00:48:22,760
if you can talk a little bit about that.

750
00:48:23,400 --> 00:48:28,360
Speaker 2: Yeah, Well, like a guy like Solon, the lawgiver of Athens,

751
00:48:29,159 --> 00:48:31,440
I mean, part of how he came up with all

752
00:48:31,480 --> 00:48:34,280
of his ideas for how to run a state is

753
00:48:34,320 --> 00:48:37,559
he was he spent a lot of time doing imporreea.

754
00:48:37,679 --> 00:48:41,159
He was just doing business, which for the Greeks in

755
00:48:41,480 --> 00:48:44,599
his time sixth century BC, is probably a combination of

756
00:48:45,280 --> 00:48:48,880
deal making, you know, buying some jewels here, selling them

757
00:48:48,920 --> 00:48:52,440
in an up you know, markup over here, maybe a

758
00:48:52,480 --> 00:48:55,960
little bit of piracy. You know, there's all kinds of

759
00:48:56,239 --> 00:48:58,840
entrepreneurship that you can get into in the Greek world,

760
00:48:59,599 --> 00:49:01,440
but there's so many. One of the things that really

761
00:49:01,440 --> 00:49:05,320
attracted me about a lot of these stories is precisely that, like,

762
00:49:06,519 --> 00:49:08,880
so you know, you could write a whole richest man

763
00:49:08,920 --> 00:49:14,400
in Babylon ancient Greeks and Romans version. Crassus is a

764
00:49:14,519 --> 00:49:17,360
figure that I've covered in my show, who is the

765
00:49:17,440 --> 00:49:22,039
richest man in Rome when he lived, he was the

766
00:49:22,559 --> 00:49:25,079
he was the financier of Julius Caesar. Actually, so there's

767
00:49:25,239 --> 00:49:27,920
the triumvirt the first triumvirate that Julius Caesar kind of

768
00:49:28,000 --> 00:49:32,079
uses to launch his own political career is Pompey and

769
00:49:32,119 --> 00:49:36,320
Caesar and Crassus and really Crassus, it's a due m

770
00:49:36,440 --> 00:49:38,800
for it. Really, it's Crasus and Pompey and then Caesar's

771
00:49:38,920 --> 00:49:41,719
like the tag along and he knows it. That's why

772
00:49:41,719 --> 00:49:44,199
he brought them together, so that he could leverage their power.

773
00:49:44,199 --> 00:49:47,480
But Crassus is this fascinating character. He's a villain in

774
00:49:47,519 --> 00:49:53,480
the movie Spartacus with Kirk Douglas. Lawrence Olivier plays him.

775
00:49:53,480 --> 00:49:58,360
But he he is this survivor figure who in the

776
00:49:58,400 --> 00:50:03,679
Great First Roman Civil War, he his dad and his

777
00:50:03,719 --> 00:50:12,119
brother were seized by populist like vengeful populists and executed.

778
00:50:12,519 --> 00:50:15,119
And so Crassus, he's like twenty He escaped to Spain.

779
00:50:16,119 --> 00:50:18,760
He lives in a cave with a couple of buddies

780
00:50:19,000 --> 00:50:22,039
and just in hiding because he knows you know, the

781
00:50:22,119 --> 00:50:24,800
regime guys are looking for him. There's a bounty on

782
00:50:24,840 --> 00:50:27,519
his head. So he's out in hiding and he's got

783
00:50:27,519 --> 00:50:30,679
some money, you know, as a you know, a person

784
00:50:30,719 --> 00:50:34,119
whose father was a consul, like he's he's a serious

785
00:50:34,199 --> 00:50:37,000
player already, kind of from a good family. But he

786
00:50:37,079 --> 00:50:43,440
comes back when Salah returns from from his journeys in

787
00:50:43,480 --> 00:50:45,519
the east, from his conquest in the east. This is

788
00:50:45,559 --> 00:50:47,920
the story of the Roman Civil War. It's a longer story,

789
00:50:47,920 --> 00:50:53,000
but basically Crasis raises his an army of his own

790
00:50:53,320 --> 00:50:55,679
with whatever money he has. He gets like two or

791
00:50:55,679 --> 00:50:59,280
three thousand men to come and fight on behalf of Sola,

792
00:50:59,559 --> 00:51:05,239
who's on the optimate side of the conflict, the aristocrats,

793
00:51:05,519 --> 00:51:07,679
and they end up winning the war, and Crassus is

794
00:51:07,679 --> 00:51:11,800
in this position where he has all these confiscations of

795
00:51:11,840 --> 00:51:14,679
property going on, and Crassus buys a lot of cheap

796
00:51:14,800 --> 00:51:17,880
estates and flips them and it was a little bit dubious,

797
00:51:17,960 --> 00:51:21,159
but you know, he felt probably that he was profiteering

798
00:51:21,199 --> 00:51:24,920
off of the misfortune of bad men. But then he

799
00:51:25,000 --> 00:51:31,239
ends up building a fortune in Rome by real estate speculation.

800
00:51:31,440 --> 00:51:33,239
He's just like the best at it, and he has

801
00:51:33,239 --> 00:51:42,199
this whole brigade of firemen and construction slaves. And he's

802
00:51:42,280 --> 00:51:46,599
like an incredible he's got an incredible eye for talents

803
00:51:46,639 --> 00:51:51,159
and for training people. He treats slaves like really valuable assets,

804
00:51:51,159 --> 00:51:54,159
and he takes care to train them well and make

805
00:51:54,199 --> 00:51:56,760
sure they're happy and things like this, and so he

806
00:51:56,840 --> 00:51:59,039
ends up. You know, ifever there's a fire that sweeps

807
00:51:59,039 --> 00:52:02,519
into Rome, can go in and just buy all kinds

808
00:52:02,519 --> 00:52:04,800
of properties on the cheap, knowing that he can flip

809
00:52:04,840 --> 00:52:07,840
them and he can rebuild them with his own guys,

810
00:52:07,920 --> 00:52:10,599
and he becomes the richest man in Rome. He becomes

811
00:52:10,599 --> 00:52:13,639
a great financier and one of the most powerful men

812
00:52:13,639 --> 00:52:16,159
in Rome through who's just having a whole lot of

813
00:52:16,199 --> 00:52:20,400
liquid wealth. He's a great kind. It kind of ends

814
00:52:20,440 --> 00:52:23,960
in tragedy because God, I won't I won't spoil it.

815
00:52:23,960 --> 00:52:25,360
If you want to go hear the story of Crass

816
00:52:25,360 --> 00:52:29,280
as many of you guys know it probably, but I

817
00:52:29,320 --> 00:52:31,519
think that and you know that you can make similar

818
00:52:31,800 --> 00:52:34,159
tell similar stories about a lot of the financial dealings

819
00:52:34,199 --> 00:52:36,920
of some of the great men, Like in peacetime, a

820
00:52:36,960 --> 00:52:40,079
guy like Gaius Marius, who is solid opponents in the

821
00:52:40,119 --> 00:52:45,400
Civil War, like he's off securing mining concessions in Spain.

822
00:52:46,199 --> 00:52:50,599
He's he's got this network of equestrian businessmen who are

823
00:52:50,679 --> 00:52:53,840
tax farmers. I mean, some of the greatest Romans were

824
00:52:54,199 --> 00:53:00,360
incredibly talented entrepreneurs. But it's not just that, because I

825
00:53:00,360 --> 00:53:05,159
think that when I think about who would Julius Caesar

826
00:53:05,239 --> 00:53:09,159
have been today, Who would Napoleon have been today? Even

827
00:53:10,159 --> 00:53:14,039
would they have gone into politics, would they have would

828
00:53:14,079 --> 00:53:19,960
they have joined the US military? Now? Probably not right,

829
00:53:20,639 --> 00:53:22,920
This is not where high agency people go. They don't

830
00:53:23,039 --> 00:53:25,840
they don't you know, they don't go to law school

831
00:53:25,920 --> 00:53:29,239
now so much. They go into entrepreneurship. They're in a

832
00:53:29,239 --> 00:53:31,800
lot of these guys are in Silicon Valley. They're they're

833
00:53:31,800 --> 00:53:33,880
getting into tech. I mean, they're they're bringing them out

834
00:53:34,000 --> 00:53:39,079
about this American dynamism I hope, you know, reindustrializing our country.

835
00:53:39,079 --> 00:53:42,880
But like I think that today in America, especially the

836
00:53:42,960 --> 00:53:47,239
high agency people are going into entrepreneurship. And it's one

837
00:53:47,239 --> 00:53:50,519
of the reasons why Napoleon is so amazingly popular. At

838
00:53:50,519 --> 00:53:53,519
Caesar two, I think in Silicon Valley and how you know,

839
00:53:53,559 --> 00:53:56,360
I have a lot of tech pros in my audience

840
00:53:57,159 --> 00:54:01,480
because like Plutarch's heroes and I mean, this is why

841
00:54:01,800 --> 00:54:04,719
the heroes of Antiquity are so appealing. They are like

842
00:54:04,800 --> 00:54:07,280
some of the most high agency men that have ever lived.

843
00:54:08,320 --> 00:54:14,519
I had I run these retreats in Rome in the summer.

844
00:54:14,760 --> 00:54:16,960
We're going to do Greece next year because Rome is

845
00:54:16,960 --> 00:54:21,000
going to be crowded for the Jubilee year. But you know,

846
00:54:21,039 --> 00:54:24,800
I ask I asked this guy, he's like working at

847
00:54:24,840 --> 00:54:28,239
as a you know, B to b SaaS sales guy,

848
00:54:30,480 --> 00:54:32,760
late twenties. I asked him, like, how did he get

849
00:54:32,760 --> 00:54:35,159
into how did he come to my podcast? How did

850
00:54:35,159 --> 00:54:37,840
he get into the classics? And he's he said that

851
00:54:38,440 --> 00:54:41,480
he felt that this was a secret that had been

852
00:54:41,559 --> 00:54:44,440
kept from him for much of his life. He's like,

853
00:54:44,519 --> 00:54:47,239
why did nobody ever tell me that the Greeks and

854
00:54:47,320 --> 00:54:49,280
Romans were the greatest men who ever lived?

855
00:54:50,239 --> 00:54:50,480
Speaker 3: You know?

856
00:54:51,119 --> 00:54:54,800
Speaker 2: And so I think that that's one of the biggest

857
00:54:54,800 --> 00:54:57,800
things you can get from the ancients. Is this this

858
00:54:57,960 --> 00:55:00,679
like sense of how high agent, see if a person

859
00:55:00,679 --> 00:55:03,280
you can be. And I think that high agency people

860
00:55:04,079 --> 00:55:06,280
just devour this stuff. They need those stories. I mean,

861
00:55:06,320 --> 00:55:09,840
Nietzsche talked about this. They like you just you just

862
00:55:10,000 --> 00:55:12,760
like want to consume this stuff so much. If you

863
00:55:12,840 --> 00:55:14,920
if you if you're if you're bent on great things,

864
00:55:14,920 --> 00:55:17,480
like you need that energy. It's like fuel for the

865
00:55:17,519 --> 00:55:24,159
fire within. And so I personally, I come from both

866
00:55:24,199 --> 00:55:28,079
on my moms and dad's side, like generations of entrepreneurs.

867
00:55:28,679 --> 00:55:32,280
As an academic, I was always ashamed of like that

868
00:55:32,400 --> 00:55:35,679
legacy of like not doing that myself. And that's a

869
00:55:35,719 --> 00:55:37,679
good thing. That's it's a feel, you know, like to

870
00:55:37,960 --> 00:55:41,000
get out there and take some risk and kind of

871
00:55:41,039 --> 00:55:42,760
live up to the I mean, even if you have

872
00:55:42,800 --> 00:55:44,559
a couple of people in your past that you can

873
00:55:44,559 --> 00:55:47,320
look up to, well, you certainly have great ones in

874
00:55:47,360 --> 00:55:50,239
your in the history of your people. So that's what

875
00:55:50,280 --> 00:55:52,079
the classics have been for the West, I think for

876
00:55:53,039 --> 00:55:56,239
since they were you know, two thousand years.

877
00:55:59,000 --> 00:56:02,039
Speaker 1: Is it at this point, if they're going to be

878
00:56:02,199 --> 00:56:04,440
taught again, is it just going to be.

879
00:56:06,440 --> 00:56:08,119
Speaker 3: People like us who.

880
00:56:07,960 --> 00:56:12,800
Speaker 1: Are gonna I'm gonna have somebody on like you who

881
00:56:13,400 --> 00:56:17,159
is an expert at this or you know, your podcast

882
00:56:17,480 --> 00:56:22,519
or It just seems to me that there unless there's

883
00:56:22,559 --> 00:56:27,480
a radical revamping of education in this you know, in

884
00:56:27,559 --> 00:56:31,599
this society in the West, that it's it's going.

885
00:56:31,440 --> 00:56:32,039
Speaker 3: To have to be.

886
00:56:33,960 --> 00:56:35,719
Speaker 1: It's going to have to be people like us. It's

887
00:56:35,760 --> 00:56:37,480
going to have to be podcasts, it's got to be

888
00:56:37,559 --> 00:56:44,159
live streams, and there's an entrepreneurial opportunity there for people

889
00:56:44,199 --> 00:56:47,360
who know how to do it. I mean, I you know,

890
00:56:47,559 --> 00:56:51,199
I'm I'm friends with Darryl Cooper, who now was the

891
00:56:51,239 --> 00:56:56,559
most infamous podcaster in the whole world. And watching and

892
00:56:56,639 --> 00:57:02,840
seeing the amount of people that have subscribed to his substack,

893
00:57:02,920 --> 00:57:05,400
and not only subscribe to his substack, but like are

894
00:57:05,480 --> 00:57:11,440
paid subscribers is and when you take into consideration what

895
00:57:11,559 --> 00:57:16,119
he does, the long form aspect of what he does,

896
00:57:16,800 --> 00:57:21,000
the amount of people who are giving him money knowing

897
00:57:21,039 --> 00:57:23,599
that it'll be all be free one day and they're

898
00:57:23,639 --> 00:57:28,960
still giving him is mind boggling. It means that people

899
00:57:29,119 --> 00:57:33,480
are thirsty for this, that people desire this, that people

900
00:57:34,119 --> 00:57:36,559
are at the point where they can't live without it,

901
00:57:36,920 --> 00:57:39,199
and I think that that's the best we can do

902
00:57:39,320 --> 00:57:39,679
right now.

903
00:57:40,760 --> 00:57:45,960
Speaker 2: Yeah, Darryl is amazing. I don't, not that I necessarily know,

904
00:57:46,679 --> 00:57:51,639
have an opinion on his latest controversy, but you know,

905
00:57:51,679 --> 00:57:53,079
I have a lot of respect for him as a

906
00:57:53,119 --> 00:58:01,480
reader and a thinker, and so yeah, like this is

907
00:58:01,519 --> 00:58:04,239
one of the things that I took great hope from

908
00:58:04,320 --> 00:58:09,280
when I was leading the institutional world of classics, because

909
00:58:09,320 --> 00:58:12,199
and one of the things that really inspired me. We've

910
00:58:12,199 --> 00:58:14,159
talked about Plato, and you know, I think a lot

911
00:58:14,159 --> 00:58:16,960
of what Plato said was kind of silly, your thought experiments,

912
00:58:17,000 --> 00:58:19,039
but he in a lot of ways was the person

913
00:58:19,039 --> 00:58:23,079
who inspired me because he was such a man of action. Actually,

914
00:58:23,119 --> 00:58:26,079
if you look at his biography, I mean he's taking

915
00:58:26,159 --> 00:58:30,840
crazy risks, traveling to the courts of tyrants in Sicily

916
00:58:31,159 --> 00:58:35,159
and getting sold into slavery and getting ransomed, and I

917
00:58:35,199 --> 00:58:39,000
mean trying to build a movement. But one of the

918
00:58:39,000 --> 00:58:43,800
things that you read the lives of the early sophists

919
00:58:43,800 --> 00:58:47,440
and the early educational entrepreneurs in Athens, like all of

920
00:58:47,480 --> 00:58:52,880
the greats of the Western tradition of philosophy and antiquity,

921
00:58:52,880 --> 00:58:57,440
at least, they're all solopreneurs for the most part. You know,

922
00:58:57,880 --> 00:59:05,760
gorgeous Protocus, uh Choracentissius, Plato, Isocrates, Aristotle. Aristotle came to Athens.

923
00:59:05,760 --> 00:59:08,559
He was selling drugs to pay his way through school

924
00:59:08,639 --> 00:59:12,159
and afford you know, education. I mean, I don't think

925
00:59:12,199 --> 00:59:15,079
Plato charged, but you know he had living expenses, the

926
00:59:15,119 --> 00:59:17,119
son of a doctor. I mean, like these guys are

927
00:59:17,159 --> 00:59:21,719
scrappy as hell, and they if there's no there's no

928
00:59:21,840 --> 00:59:25,320
like university that's going to offer them a chair. You know,

929
00:59:25,440 --> 00:59:27,360
you have to you have to convince people that what

930
00:59:27,440 --> 00:59:31,559
you're doing is important and you have to be self sufficient.

931
00:59:31,559 --> 00:59:34,639
And it breeds a certain kind of toughness and a

932
00:59:34,679 --> 00:59:38,320
certain kind of like I don't know, like responsiveness to

933
00:59:38,360 --> 00:59:40,960
the market and what people actually need and what is

934
00:59:40,960 --> 00:59:44,480
actually good for well for men, especially what they're going

935
00:59:44,519 --> 00:59:47,639
to find useful. So I really admire that about Plato.

936
00:59:47,760 --> 00:59:49,840
I think he did that. I think Socrates too, of course,

937
00:59:51,159 --> 00:59:55,159
but that's you know, I'm friends with. You know, through

938
00:59:55,159 --> 00:59:57,960
this journey, I've met a ton of really talented people

939
00:59:57,960 --> 01:00:03,639
building their own audiences on the internet, justin Murphy Bennett's phylactory,

940
01:00:04,360 --> 01:00:07,519
And I mean, I go down the list of cool

941
01:00:07,559 --> 01:00:10,960
people that are building their own like intellectuals, independent intellectuals,

942
01:00:10,960 --> 01:00:17,440
building their own raw nationalists, building their own kind of

943
01:00:18,760 --> 01:00:23,159
businesses and models and sharing knowledge, sharing a kind of

944
01:00:23,239 --> 01:00:25,800
vision of how we should develop our characters and how

945
01:00:25,840 --> 01:00:29,079
we should select the inputs that that we put in.

946
01:00:30,639 --> 01:00:33,519
So on the one hand, there is that independent intellectual

947
01:00:33,559 --> 01:00:38,840
world that's kind of fermenting and taking off substack Twitter podcasts,

948
01:00:39,119 --> 01:00:42,800
which I think is great. There is also a battle

949
01:00:42,800 --> 01:00:46,079
that's worth fighting for K to twelve education, and I

950
01:00:46,119 --> 01:00:47,679
want to give some credit to a lot of great

951
01:00:47,679 --> 01:00:49,119
people that have done a lot of work, you know,

952
01:00:49,239 --> 01:00:52,760
in the classical education movement for all that I think,

953
01:00:53,119 --> 01:00:56,079
you know, it's really even though it's been around for

954
01:00:56,119 --> 01:00:59,719
a while, it's still in its nascence, you know. But

955
01:01:00,079 --> 01:01:02,639
there's a great book. I really thought this book was great,

956
01:01:02,679 --> 01:01:05,280
The Battle for the American Mind. I think it's called

957
01:01:05,280 --> 01:01:08,320
Pete hag Seth and David Goodwin. And I know David Goodwin,

958
01:01:08,639 --> 01:01:12,119
he's a great guy, and like they just they in

959
01:01:12,159 --> 01:01:16,440
that book they kind of catalog the progressive takeover of

960
01:01:17,159 --> 01:01:19,800
and the kind of ejection of the classics from American

961
01:01:20,000 --> 01:01:24,239
education and what they proposed to replace it with. But

962
01:01:24,360 --> 01:01:25,679
one of the things that they point out in that

963
01:01:25,679 --> 01:01:29,639
book is like you can actually document an explicit, you know,

964
01:01:30,360 --> 01:01:36,599
public domain, perfectly acknowledged conspiracy, if you will, an open,

965
01:01:36,840 --> 01:01:40,599
not secret conspiracy that the Marxists had the Frankfurt School

966
01:01:40,599 --> 01:01:44,119
to seize the cultural high ground, to take all the

967
01:01:44,159 --> 01:01:48,119
pill boxes of in the American in the War for

968
01:01:48,159 --> 01:01:53,079
the American Mind, by you know, Columbia Education sorry, sorry,

969
01:01:53,119 --> 01:01:56,159
the Columbia School of Education, Columbia Teachers College. I think

970
01:01:56,199 --> 01:02:03,039
that's what's called the foundation of the teachers' unions, the

971
01:02:03,199 --> 01:02:06,239
politicization of the teachers' unions, the Department of Education, all

972
01:02:06,280 --> 01:02:08,840
this stuff like this was planned. There were a lot

973
01:02:08,880 --> 01:02:13,920
of people working hard at this to capture and you know,

974
01:02:14,079 --> 01:02:19,159
dumb down American education. And if it worked for them,

975
01:02:19,440 --> 01:02:22,440
it could work to undo it in the other directions.

976
01:02:22,599 --> 01:02:24,320
The tactics is going to have to be very different.

977
01:02:25,079 --> 01:02:28,400
Ask Chris Ruffo how to do that. I have friends

978
01:02:28,400 --> 01:02:32,440
who are appointees in Florida, you know, the university says,

979
01:02:32,440 --> 01:02:36,280
it's great, what's happening, but it's going to be a

980
01:02:36,280 --> 01:02:39,559
lot of work. I think a place we can start is, like,

981
01:02:39,880 --> 01:02:46,360
you know, kids used to start way earlier on this stuff, right,

982
01:02:46,639 --> 01:02:49,440
Like kids used to be reading Plutarch at age nine ten,

983
01:02:51,079 --> 01:02:53,480
They used to be reading Caesar when they were fourteen.

984
01:02:55,519 --> 01:02:57,280
We can get back to that, but we have to

985
01:02:57,400 --> 01:03:01,840
educate ourselves first. As dad, I have two kids and

986
01:03:01,960 --> 01:03:05,760
hoping to have more. But I think there's great hope

987
01:03:06,199 --> 01:03:09,719
that we can educate ourselves now at a really high

988
01:03:09,760 --> 01:03:12,480
level with like I mean, the amazing quality of stuff

989
01:03:12,480 --> 01:03:18,079
that's available for free through podcasts, especially YouTube to some extent,

990
01:03:19,920 --> 01:03:22,039
I think there's there's still some interesting stuff on YouTube

991
01:03:22,039 --> 01:03:27,360
for sure, and uh, newsletters and uh and then pass

992
01:03:27,400 --> 01:03:30,639
it on maybe form our own institutions that are going

993
01:03:30,719 --> 01:03:32,280
to withstand whatever's coming.

994
01:03:34,960 --> 01:03:36,320
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, I appreciate that.

995
01:03:36,719 --> 01:03:39,840
Speaker 1: Yeah, everybody who's trying to do this work, even the

996
01:03:39,840 --> 01:03:41,840
people who are trying to do it in a system,

997
01:03:42,800 --> 01:03:47,599
within a system that seems to be beyond hope. You know,

998
01:03:47,679 --> 01:03:49,719
you got to be hopeful for that. I do like

999
01:03:49,760 --> 01:03:53,480
what Rufo, what Chris Rufo has done, and a lot

1000
01:03:53,519 --> 01:03:58,320
of the things that he's exposed. They yeah, it's good

1001
01:03:58,360 --> 01:04:02,519
work there. Let's cut it here. I'm going to have

1002
01:04:02,559 --> 01:04:05,519
you do your plugs and then we'll leave it open

1003
01:04:05,559 --> 01:04:09,000
for the future. Maybe come back and you know, we'll

1004
01:04:10,519 --> 01:04:13,320
be like you'd be like a Thomas appearance and just

1005
01:04:13,360 --> 01:04:16,159
come on and do do a lecture on someone from

1006
01:04:16,199 --> 01:04:18,320
plut Sarch's from plut Sarch's lives.

1007
01:04:19,239 --> 01:04:22,519
Speaker 2: So yeah, happy get into like the Roman Civil War

1008
01:04:22,599 --> 01:04:25,760
and stuff like that. It's just some fascinating parallels, but

1009
01:04:26,280 --> 01:04:27,480
it's a longer conversation.

1010
01:04:28,599 --> 01:04:30,639
Speaker 1: Yeah, but tell people where they can find your stuff.

1011
01:04:31,280 --> 01:04:36,880
Speaker 2: Yeah, so, costoglory dot com is my website. You can

1012
01:04:36,880 --> 01:04:40,880
find Cost of Glory on YouTube. It's it's also on

1013
01:04:40,880 --> 01:04:44,559
the podcast players, Apple and Spotify, just cost of Glory.

1014
01:04:45,360 --> 01:04:48,639
I'm at cost of Glory on Twitter if you so.

1015
01:04:48,760 --> 01:04:50,559
One of the things that we talked about a little

1016
01:04:50,559 --> 01:04:55,119
bit at the beginning is this connection between the emulation

1017
01:04:55,519 --> 01:04:58,320
of great men and the rhetorical education, this idea of

1018
01:04:58,360 --> 01:05:05,440
becoming an order and a speaker, and I like business partner,

1019
01:05:05,480 --> 01:05:11,119
and I are starting a set of online offerings for

1020
01:05:11,320 --> 01:05:13,599
training people in the ancient art of rhetoric, giving you

1021
01:05:13,639 --> 01:05:15,639
at least a crash course so you can start practicing

1022
01:05:15,639 --> 01:05:18,360
on your own. And if you're interested in this connection,

1023
01:05:18,440 --> 01:05:20,760
I've got something to offer just for free. I've got

1024
01:05:20,760 --> 01:05:25,000
an authoritative speaker's guide that's like a little mini course

1025
01:05:25,039 --> 01:05:27,280
that'll give you kind of the basics I think will

1026
01:05:27,320 --> 01:05:31,199
help people get into what makes a podcast like the

1027
01:05:31,239 --> 01:05:34,199
Cost of Glory or an author like Plutarch tic and

1028
01:05:34,239 --> 01:05:36,440
why it's not just interesting and entertaining, but like how

1029
01:05:36,480 --> 01:05:38,000
it can be useful, how you can help you in

1030
01:05:38,039 --> 01:05:40,239
your career. So if you want to know more about that,

1031
01:05:40,320 --> 01:05:43,679
go to costoglory dot com, slash gift and you can

1032
01:05:43,679 --> 01:05:47,840
find the authoritative Speaker's guide there. So tell me what you.

1033
01:05:47,760 --> 01:05:50,679
Speaker 3: Think awesome, I will.

1034
01:05:50,960 --> 01:05:54,079
Speaker 1: I'll check that out myself and I will include that

1035
01:05:54,159 --> 01:05:55,039
in the show notes.

1036
01:05:55,400 --> 01:05:56,519
Speaker 3: Alex, I appreciate it.

1037
01:05:56,559 --> 01:05:58,719
Speaker 2: Thank you very much, thanks for time, PTE been a

1038
01:05:58,719 --> 01:06:14,679
great pleasure. S