The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1109: What We Can Learn by Studying Great Men of the Past w/ Alex Petkas

Episode Date: September 19, 2024

67 Minutes  PG-13 Alex Petkas is a former academic and host of the Cost of Glory podcast.Alex joins Pete to tell his story of leaving academia to pursue his love of teaching about the great men of history, especially from the classic Plutarch's Lives.  Alex's Website Alex's Authoritative Speaker's Guide Pete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's SubstackPete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

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this Christmas with vouchers from Trump-Dunbeg. Search Trump-Ireland gift vouchers. Trump on Doonbiog, Kush Farage. If you want to support the show and get the episodes early and ad-free, head on over to freemam Beyond the Wall.com forward slash support. There's a few ways you can support me there. One, there's a direct link to my website. Two, there's subscribe star. Three, there's Patreon. Four, there's substack. And now I've introduced. gum road because I know that a lot of our guys are on gum road and they are against censorship. So if you head over to gum road and you subscribe through there, you'll get the episodes early and ad free and you'll get an invite into the telegram group. So I really appreciate all the support

everyone's giving me and I hope to expand the show even more than it already has. Thank you so much. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekignano show. First time, Alex Petka. How are you doing, Alex? Good. Great to be here, peace. Thanks for having me. No problem. Tell everybody a little bit about yourself, please. So I am an ex-academic. I grew up. My career was in Classics. I did a PhD in Classics, and I focused on the late antique world, especially the Greek philosophers of the late Roman world and got a tenure track job. I used to teach rhetoric and philosophy.

I taught at a couple of institutions in California. And I left in 2020 for maybe reasons that we'll get into later on. But I've since leaving. I've worked a couple of interesting jobs. But now I have the luxury of pursuing my mission full time, which is trying to bring. back the classics to the West in the way that I think that they should be taught. And I run a podcast called The Cost of Glory, where I've been doing that for about three years, where I just

retell, mainly focus on retelling the biographies of the great leaders of the Greek and Roman world, especially those featured in Plutarch's lives. So I do these kind of long-form biographies with that spirit of like emulation that the Plutarch illustrates so nicely. And I also sort of active on Twitter, but I teach some public speaking rhetoric classes on the side. But that's what I'm up to these days. You got out of academia in 2020, even before 2020 thing. Academia had to be hell. So, you know, what was it like?

and what finally drove you out? Yeah. So I got, when I was starting off in my PhD program, and I decided to make that decision to go into grad school, I knew that it was going to be, so I wasn't really, I wouldn't have really considered myself a conservative per se, but I knew that it was going to be a hostile environment because I was a Christian. So I was prepared for classics being a kind of bad environment,

environment for that and I wasn't too worried about it but I wasn't really prepared for this this thing that I slowly came to realize is that the discipline of you know the people who are dedicated to studying the Greeks and the Romans are kind of committed to its destruction or at least the eradication of anything that a young man such as myself would have been interested in. You know, anything heroic or manly or kind of impressive, daring, that is all being kind of filed away. And that kind of came as a shock to me, honestly.

And I slowly woke up to the fact as I progressed through it and I kind of realized what the Greeks and the Romans were about, really. So for the longest time, I thought I could try to do my part and reform it from the inside, which is why I kept applying for jobs. And I finally landed this tenure track position after working 10 or 15 years to finally get into a position where I could get that kind of a job and have some job security, whatever. The thing that you're supposed to want is an academic, right?

And I liked my colleagues at the place where I was. They were exceptions to the rule. They were really cool. And I felt really bad to leave, but once I, like, things just kept getting worse, especially around, they started to get worse around 2016. Like, there was a long intellectual history of, you know, left wing cultural Marxist kind of inching their way through critical theory and other ways into the leadership of the discipline. But in 2016, it was like all the sleeper cells woke up and we had the woke movement. And it just started to become very conformist very quickly. I think classics kind of dodged the culture wars of the 80s and 90s and early 2000s,

more than the discipline like English literature for some reason, probably because we were already kind of small and irrelevance. But, you know, for example, shortly after I left classics, and last year, there was a kind of a glowing puff piece about a former colleague of mine at Princeton. And the headline is, this is in New York Times, he wants to save classics from whiteness. And this was, he joined the faculty. I won't name any names, but, you know, you can look up the article. And this particular individual joined the faculty right after I left. And that was like, that was the face that my, the leadership of my discipline.

You know, the Ivy League classicists tend to be the kind of gatekeepers of the discipline. This was the kind of face that not just my colleagues at Princeton, but everybody across the kind of top programs that they wanted to have the world see. Classics too white. Classics too patriarchal. Classics must die. As if anybody even cared about classics at this point in our culture. I mean, it's almost like so narcissistic that you can't see how irrelevant you've already become. And I was really getting frustrated. I already left at that point. But, you know, the writing was on the wall. And that was already the vibe in the late 20 teens. So I was getting really despondent. You know, at some point I decided. I probably couldn't reform the discipline from the inside. I probably, there was probably nothing I could do. The ship was sinking. You know, it's like, it's like you're on a ship and you're rowing hard. And the captain is just like getting smashed at the helm and saying, yeah, it would be

better if the ship sank anyway. That was really frustrating to me. And I got despondent, but I finally realized that, you know, in a way, I was sitting on the greatest medicine for this kind of situation ever made, which is Homer and Plutarch and like the heroic tradition of extremely high agency men who don't tolerate crap. And I thought, well, you know, they're saying something to me. I don't have to tolerate this crap if I'm willing to tolerate a little bit of risk. And so I left for that reason on principle, move the family back to my native Texas where I grew up.

And so that's where I am now. And I've never ever regretted it. And it's been hard. But I'm very encouraged by, well, by the collapse of the universities that they, they're going to be a long time dying. But the craziness that we see today is it's not fixable in our generation. And I think that there's a lot of hope for people who want to build other things. and channel the energy and the wisdom and the knowledge that you used to be able to get in universities.

You probably can't even get any more in those places, even if you wanted to. You have to seek them outside of the institutional framework. So I'm just trying to help. I'm one of many people trying to offer the best parts of my discipline online. And I draw a lot of energy from that. Ready for huge savings? We'll mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th, because the little news, Newbridge Warehouse Sale is back.

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Trump. I think they could be fixed. As I said this morning on Twitter, that when we found out University Alabama, Birmingham had gotten like $200,000 to study like the menstrual cycle of trans women, you seized their endowments. You take every dollar that they have. I think Harvard is up into the $20 to $30 billion in endowments. You just take them and then see what happens. I mean, yeah, sure, people don't want to the economy than, you know, unrealized capital gains taxes, that kind of stuff.

I think a lot of people would cheer you on. Yeah. When asked this question, I just thought of this one, did, how does your, did your Greek heritage have anything to do with you wanting it to get into philosophy? and the classic. Yeah, it's, it's funny. So I was raised in the Greek Orthodox Church. It didn't have a huge, well, it was a kind of quiet moral compass.

I wasn't like that into it until I went through a rough patch in high school. And I don't know, typical kind of divorced parents, you know, big school, doing drugs, playing video games, screwing around kind of story. I was really overweight too. And I kind of wanted to turn my life around my junior year of high school. And I came back to Christianity for that reason. They were also in our house for whatever reason we had. Not that my liberal parents were all that into this stuff, but we had Marcus Aurelius on

the shelf. We had somehow somebody had given me a copy of the seven habits of highly effective people when I was younger. I was like, maybe I'll read this. Maybe there's some answers in books. So I got back into Christianity kind of and you know the seven habits is draws on a lot of classical philosophy as I discovered, but in sort of self-improvement with the great books around that time. And I actually got into I'd taken Latin in a very half-assed way throughout high school. Like I did everything half-assedly in high school until my senior year failed history class, which is really funny.

but in algebra too even though I was good at math. So I wanted when I was in college to, on the side of whatever I was doing, I realized you could kind of explore intellectual passions in college and get your parents to pay for it if you just did a little convincing. So I decided to take ancient Greek my junior year. And I, you know, having, even though I was grew up in the Greek Orthodox Church, the liturgy's in basically ancient Greek. Little did I know that. Anything about the difference between modern and ancient Greek at the time.

I mean, my parents, my Greek part of my family had been in the U.S. for like a century. So we weren't that Greek. But I wanted to know, I was sort of my curiosity was stoked. And so, yeah, I wanted to learn modern Greek actually because I thought at my, my, I might go into youth ministry for a while on the on the way to have more serious career and But they wouldn't have modern Greek. We just had addict Greek what the hell is attic Greek? I had no idea So anyway I got into it that way my junior year and Once I had a taste of it I had this very charismatic teacher like probably the smartest professor the whole campus

And he you know painted all the connections between the Greek language and Western intellectual history and the logos and philosophy and the news. I mean, just everything. You know, Homeric Aratei versus modern virtue, I was hooked. And I turned out I was pretty good at the language part. And so that the language in particular was part of my wanting to explore my own cultural heritage. But I think what kept me there,

what made me see, oh, this is not just a hobby, but something that you could pursue as a serious calling in life, was realizing how the Greek language was important, not just to this little ethnocentric world that I interacted with on Sundays and maybe Christmas and Easter, but like the foundation of the entire conceptual edifice that my country stood on and things like that.

And that's why I ended up chasing it all the way to grad school against my better judgment. So before we get into what we were going to talk about, let me ask you this question, because this is one that comes up a lot. Does Aristotle necessarily and logically lead to fascism? Well, it's been remarked that Athenian democracy would be called fascists by today's left. For all that, for all that, you know, the founding fathers thought that was a crazy mob rule,

you know, inferno of a constitution, you know, it would still be fascist by modern Democrat standards. So, so just, it just might actually,

Pete. All right. You mentioned Plutarch's Lives and it's a, it's a gigantic work talking about different figures from history, some we know, some we don't know,

that we've never heard of. What can we learn from them. When you read them, what are you looking for? I started reading Plutarch's Lives in serious, in earnest, as I sort of knew I was leaving academia. I had, I think, a lot of classicists today. So it's funny, Plutarch's Lives used to be by far the most popular classical texts of all, more popular than Homer. It was more popular than Homer, Plato, Cicero, Ducydides, and you go down the list of even less plausible candidates. But in the 18th century in the American colonies, Plutarch's lives are the second most likely

ancient text to be on your shelf besides the Bible. And it's, I think it's a very telling sign that he's not in fashion among today's classicists. And I think we could probably get into the reasons going on further in the conversation. So most classicists will, you know, assign Plutarch's Life of Caesar or Alexander for some history survey class that they're teaching. They won't really get into the whole lives as a collection or even consider it as a morally serious project. But so what it is, what Plutarch's lives is, you know, biography collection. It's about 48 biographies. They're called the parallel lives because it's 48 Greeks and 48 Romans.

that he compares. He pairs them all together, you know, Alexander and Caesar, Cicero and Demosonies, the great orators. A lot of men in there that you would have heard of, Pericles, Themistocles, Babius Maximus, Romulus, a lot of men you wouldn't have heard of. You men, he's of Cardia, Sertorius, but they're all amazing in various ways. And when I was, so I was leaving academia, and I kind of had this sense that this is the text, this is a text, This is a text that like, you know, this is a text that Harry Truman read. He's like our last self-educated, non-college education president. Whatever you think of the man as a political figure.

I mean, he was a formidable self-educated man. This is the text that, you know, Frederick Douglas and Alexander Hamilton and Napoleon just read in their free time. I had this sense that like, men of action should read Plutarch. And I had read some of the books. And I was like, this stuff is really good. So I was working my way through it. I was looking kind of for inspiration, honestly, because I wanted to go to the world of entrepreneurship and business, risk-taking, you know, reading people's character.

What kind of traits does it take to lead people to exert your will over people, trickiness, political trickiness, all kinds of stuff you can learn from Plutarch's lives. So now when I do my long-form biographies of the man in Plutarch, and he's my main source and inspiration, I'm looking for character. I'm looking for virtues and vices. I'm looking for, well, I'm looking for drama, too, because he's one of the greatest. One of the reasons he's so popular is he's such a good storyteller. He's got these like Hollywood scenes and these just like banger quotes every other page. And that's, you know, Emerson calls him a Bible for heroes.

Nietzsche says to the young men and his untimely meditations on the uses and abuses of history, he says, satisfy your souls on Plutarch, a hundred such men educated in this way against the modern fashion, who could, who've grown accustomed to the heroic and, and learns to appreciate. appreciate the heroic within themselves, learn to believe in themselves, that they could silence now and forever, the whole noisy pseudo-education of our day. He's writing that in the 1870s or so. So Plutarch is kind of like this kind of, I mean, he's the original heroic author in a lot of ways for Western statesmen. So I look for a lot in there, but mostly it's just entertaining as hell.

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Give the gift of a unique experience this Christmas with vouchers from Trump Dunebag. Search Trump, Ireland gift vouchers. Trump on Dunbiog, Kosh Farage. If that's being suppressed, it's not being taught. I mean, it's not being suppressed. You can get really good copies for very inexpensively on eBay. I mean, it's just, it's not suppressed.

It's just ignored. And if you're not promoting something, it's not going to be popular. So why do you think this suppression, this just, they won't. want people to ignore it. And would you say, you mentioned that Truman was like, would be the last president. And that just goes right to what we call the Nuremberg regime, that everything after World War II, that is, call it right wing, but just call it what was normal before the French revolution, you know, that that needs to be suppressed. So what do you think about that? Well, I know that you like to go kind of deep in your show.

So if I could, I think it's worth telling the story a little bit of the Western, the modern Western University and the classics role within it, just like in a nutshell, very broad brush strokes. So basically preface this by saying, I think Plutarch, and it's not just. just Plutarch as an author, it's kind of what he stands for, but he's the most representative example of this, I think. I think that's what Nietzsche saw and Emerson saw and Napoleon, many others saw in Plutarch, the most representative example of essentially classics as, and that's specifically the Greek and Roman classics, as Western civilizations, the kind of backbone of our process of inculturating men. This is like the top of the pyramid or the foundation of the pyramid, however you want to, you know, jigger the metaphor.

Classics are the kind of backbone of Western manliness. And Plutarch really exemplifies that. But how, what was the process? Okay. So if you look at the way that education worked for, let's call them the elites, the statesmanship class of the West, of the nobles, the aristocrats, you see this in the Renaissance, very big, big letters with a guy like Machiavelli. It is basically a great man focused education. You encounter these great men studying the classics, the Greek and Roman heroes,

in particular the pre-Christian ones, through books almost incidentally. But and the tenor of the education is not knowledge production or knowledge acquisition. It's character acquisition. It's skill acquisition. Particularly it's a rhetorical education. It's an education of how to become a great orator, a great persuader through studying the great persuaders and the great stories and like assimilating their character. It's explicitly and rigorously an education focused on emulation, on becoming like these people, doing everything you can to become like these people.

Machiavelli takes off his dusty boots after a busy day's work and statesmanship and he, you know, retires into the halls of the great men. You know, he would apparently, he would set a table sometimes when he wanted to. to read a book of like Cicero or Caesar. He would set a table for two and he would dress up and like a toga and then like read a book and like imagine that the book, the guy who wrote the book he was reading or the guy he wrote the book about was like sitting across the room from him and he was having a conversation with him.

So there's a very much like imaginative, emulative aspect to this. So any of that's, and that's, I say it's the Renaissance model. Let's call it the Renaissance model. But this is really what the Romans did too with the Greeks. This is what the Greeks did with Achilles. This is what Alcibiades and Pericles are doing with Achilles, more or less. There's a rhetorical, emulative tenor to it. It's about emulating the great people.

So it's a canon of great men more than of great books. All right. And that's the model, basically, of education through the Renaissance and through, well, this is the model that the, you know, the founding fathers of the U.S. had very much what Hamilton and Franklin are doing and Napoleon is doing. It's like the basic model of, you know, Western elite education until, until what? So a guy comes along in the late 18th century, Wilhelm von Humboldt. Maybe you've heard of him. Humboldt University in Berlin is named after him. He's, he found the modern enlightenment education system, the modern enlightenment university,

the research university in Germany, which of course at that time is not unified. There's all these little principalities, republics. But he founds basically the education system of Prussia, the strongest of the states. And the, and it's on this principle of we're going to have a higher, education system based on the principles of the Enlightenment, producing knowledge, adding new knowledge for a great future for mankind. And the point of that university system is to, not just to produce knowledge, but to produce a certain kind of person, which is an expert. It's designed to produce experts.

Doctors, lawyers, maybe engineers. They have the Prussian Military Academy. That's separate for, you know, for generals and stuff. It's actually a different track. But, you know, for like civil experts, you have the modern university system. And, you know, in other words, not just like, you know, doctors and lawyers, but especially the bureaucrats that are going to run the great enlightened institutions, the rational institutions that the modern state needs to progress.

So the university basically exists to produce bureaucrats, and they have this particular advantage over the old system, which is the PhD. They invent this idea of the doctorate. And so now, you know, well, you just have a master's degree. Well, in Germany we have doctorates. What does this have to do with America? So like in the 19th century, America is becoming more self-confidence, industrial production is increasing, wealth is increasing. And American educators are starting to look to, you know, we're making more universities, or let's say institutions of higher education.

And so American educators start looking to Europe to see what's the best paradigm. And I mean, I grossly oversimplifying this, but they see, well, you know, at Oxford or Cambridge, you can get a master's degree, but, you know, the humble universities, you can get a doctorate. So clearly, these people have figured something extra out. And that kind of becomes the model for the American university system, this Enlightenment German university where it's all about producing knowledge on the kind of intellectual level, but on the practical level. look at the results. It's about producing bureaucrats, about producing experts. And an interesting side note here, what do you think the kind of flagship discipline was, the flagship model of the new science of the universities? What do you think it was? Just take a guess. Psychology? You might think it's psychology. You'd be wrong. You might think it's philosophy. You might think it's

which has a long history. I was going to say philosophy, but it's not philosophy. You might think it's physics. No. It's classics of all things. It's classical philology. It's actually the study of Greek and Latin. Language in particular, scientifically,

that is the kind of like, that is like the most, the highest prestige discipline. Which is kind of crazy to think about it. But if you think about where Western education came from, It makes sense that this was the study of the classics was the you know the study of the great men of the past reading their actual words was really important in the Renaissance so you're learning the actual language Greek and Greek and Latin so they kind of change a lot about the university they kind of keep this as the the prestige subject but that shift from emulation and producing statesmen that you have in the Renaissance model to the model of knowledge production that you have in the modern Enlightenment University. It's just, you know, as you can guess, it profoundly changes the priorities in education. You know, the expert kind of, it's kind of depersonalized.

The expert has a PhD in the certified subject, and it doesn't matter who he is, but as long as he has a PhD, you can trust that he has expertise in the knowledge. And it's really the knowledge, the rational knowledge, that's going to ensure the institutions run the way they're supposed to run and so on and so on. And this is kind of what happens in, we import this into America. And maybe I should pause for discussion and comments before we continue the story on. Do you have any thoughts? Airgrid, operator of Ireland's electricity grid is powering up the northwest.

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essential TV and Netflix, all for just 44 euro a month for 12 months, our lowest ever price. Availability subject location, new customers only, 12 month minimum terms, standard pricing thereafter, TV and broadband sold separately, terms apply for more infooshee, sky.a slash beads. No, I'm pretty familiar with how things were brought in from Prussia to a certain point. And yeah, I could go off on that for hours, but let's, please go on. Yeah, and I'm not saying it was all bad or that it was what I was that that's what that's how I'd go off for hours is You know, when I was a libertarian they talk about oh my goodness the suppression schooling system and they did in this and that and everything and I'm like yeah, that doesn't work in a multicultural society

It only works at a monoculture interesting. Yeah Yeah, I think we need to have a lot of these conversations now as we're reevaluating what the university is about to understand the history of it because like so many of so many people like, you know, I think what Chris Rufo's done has been amazing and the kind of exposure of the corruption, nepotism, and just incompetence at our highest institutions is wonderful. There's a lot of room for reform. But a lot of times it's like, are we just trying to rewind the clock back to the 1980s? I mean, a lot of the problems were already built in long before that. So, so yeah, the, um, But I think it's really interesting that from the universities you get this idea I think it really comes out of the universities of socialism, which is essentially, I mean, yes, it's about kind of redistribution, but in principle it's like in practice it's the rule of the intellectuals.

It's like a regime based on experts. Socialism is like, that's the paradigm regime in the 19th century at least. progressive socialism regime based on enlightened experts, rational principles, a kind of fungibility of leaders. So ideally, you don't have to have really excellent character people. You just have the right system with the right knowledge. And even if somebody's kind of like a mediocre human being, as long as they have a PhD, you can trust them to do their job. And it's very uninspiring to me. Well, this is this is what James Burnham wrote in his incredible 1940 book The Managerial Revolution.

As what this is all about, he talked about Stalin, he talked about Hitler, and he talked about FDR, and he said, it's all the same thing. It's all rule by managers. It's all ruled by experts. Yeah. And there was, and he said that was the way it was going to be. He made some predictions in there that people like to pull out and say, oh, well, you know, look, he got this wrong.

Well, you're going to get things wrong if you make predictions and you put skin in the game. But one thing he did not get wrong is that it was going to become about rule of experts and managerialism. And we are suffering that now because at some point, those managers want to keep their place. So they have to put people into spots who aren't good managers, what the blogger Spendrel called the biolaninism, where you'd rather put somebody in who was loyal to you than somebody in who could actually do the job, which is what we were talking about before. We were talking about the term, the competency crisis. And I was saying that I don't think that there wouldn't be a competency crisis if there were,

if everyone, if there weren't people, you know, certain classes of people who weren't precluded from joining from being in power. So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and yeah, I think, so when I read Plato, Plato's Republic, I don't see, I don't see in a lot of the classical political theorists this sense of how an institution can grow so powerful that it becomes an organism with an appetite that just wants to devour and grow and has its own priorities that are independent of a state. The closest I think you could get would be a kind of the two parations of eunuchs in, you know, like here's what's wrong with the Persian Empire as the eunuchs run the place. And I mean, that's kind of actually starting to get at it. But, but, you know, it's a foreign degree political ideology. That's pretty spot on right there. Well, there are people that don't

really care about their own legacy or progeny. They're, they subsume their interest to the interest of this institution and they're just kind of in there they're kind of careerist self-aggrandizing uh you know infertile it's it's some interesting parallels another discussion some other time but i you know to come back to plato you know in a lot of ways this is people blame plato for this you know the idea of the rule by intellectuals the philosopher king I think that Plato would have been rolling over in his grave to see himself interpreted in that way. But yeah, so it does have a kind of platonic ring to it that I think is unfair.

I had some other point to make on that, but maybe we'll come back to it in a sec. So the problem, okay, this was an issue growing bureaucracy in Europe we see the results today stagnation it's it's terrible Europe has fallen etc but I think in the 19th century it wasn't obvious that this was going and going to kind of progressivize the whole nation but in America you didn't have the same kind of checks against progressivism that you did in Europe and so Like the uptake of the university model really becomes, especially after the civil war,

the Renaissance model of education of statesmanship and approach to the classics for kind of nobility, that becomes very tied with the antebellum people that we don't like anymore. So the reform was kind of quick after the civil war. And the classics was sort of sidelined and thrown out. Part of it was you have these new disciplines on the rise. Psychology doesn't exist really as a discipline formalized until then, you know, sometime in the 19th century, English literature even is kind of a new discipline, relatively speaking. Like Shakespeare is not in the curriculum in America until I think the first time it happens is like in the 1870s.

It's not like people weren't reading Shakespeare or that he wasn't great. He's just he's not the classics. The classics is the, you know, the people that Shakespeare was reading like Shakespeare reading. Shakespeare reading Plutarch to write Julius Caesar and Coriolanus and all this stuff. So you get these new disciplines, which is, I think, another pattern of like bureaucrats inventing new jobs for themselves in a lot of ways. Complet, you know, it kind of comes up in the late 19th century. And one of the ways that the classics get sidelined, you know, any good mobster likes to make it look like an accident, right? So Charles Ellie,

of Harvard. For example, Harvard's longest serving president, 1870 to 190 something. He stages this kind of call it a game where, okay, rather than requiring a certain course of study from our students at Harvard, we're just going to have an elective system and kind of have a Darwinian competition of the disciplines. And so whichever discipline gets the most students is just, you know, it's going to, it's going to be just, you know, rational that that discipline will get the most resources. And so in a way, it's a, it's a game that's rigged against the discipline like classics, which is just a lot harder.

You have to spend a lot more time learning these hard languages. The texts are harder. The skills are, you know, more, they require more of you. So versus something like comp lit in a Darwinian competition to see which discipline can attract the most students. I mean, I think you could expect what would happen. And it's in this context, he makes it look like an accident, but this is what the progressive wanted.

You know, the traditional disciplines, the Bible, the classics, these were like hard blockers that were in the way on the road that they wanted to build toward the the great progressive future. People like Dewey, you know, and we're not talking about like cultural Marxist, hard left progressives in the 19th century, of course. We're talking about like, you know, suffragettes. But they got what they wanted and I think they made it look like an accident. And so by the time you get to the 19th, the 19, well, like 1900, Harvard and Yale up to that point

required Greek and Latin to be, you know, did you have to take a competence test in Greek and Latin to be even admitted everybody, not just humanities majors, everybody. And they removed that in around 1900. Of course, that's not a cause. That's a symptom, right, of the success of their, of the progressive project to kind of deracinate Western education. And I think, you know, I don't think that the progressives necessarily would have said that they were charging against the patriarchy and capitalism. But in practice, that's what the cultural Marxists who came later in the 30s would have said they were doing very successfully. And this really ends up kind of unsettling and making us uncertain about what it is to be a man,

which I think the way that men inculturate themselves primarily is through imitation, through examples, through paradigms, through heroes, and particularly the hero is like the prime paradigm of inculturating manliness. And they have this kind of North Star function culturally. And so if you get rid of that, you can do all kinds of stuff because nobody, everybody would be confused and they won't try to stop you. I think this is what we start to see in the mid-20th century and is in a large part why we're dealing with this gender crisis today.

Because we've forgotten primarily what it means to be a man because we've forgotten the classics. Operator of Ireland's electricity grid is powering up the Northwest. We're planning to upgrade the electricity grid in your area and your input and local knowledge are vital in shaping these plans. Our consultation closes on the 25th of November. Have your say, online or in person. So together we can create a more reliable, sustainable electricity supply for your community. Find out more at airgrid.i.4 slash northwest.

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or TV and broadband sold separately. Terms apply for more infoosies sky. d-a-e slash beads. Well, I think that certainly helps. And then, you know, you do have social engineers out there who are pushing it because it does help their agenda.

If you have people who don't have, who have abandoned any hope of identifying with their past or their history, it's much easier to mold them into that, you know, what the, I would say, the ideologues want, they're looking for a, you know, the perfect kind of progressive subject to the regime. And then there are others who are just looking for, you know, let's say the pharmaceutical companies are just looking for lifelong, you know, lifelong customers.

It's not one, a lot of people say it's one or the other. It's not one or the other. There's many interests out there who have an interest in seeing that men don't live historically and do not, you know, have low testosterone. I'm sure you remember that podcast a few years ago where all it was like this left podcast where they, all the hosts were men and they took testosterone tests and they were like half of what they should be. And you're just like, I'm not shocked by this. I mean, this is, this is what's been bred into us.

Yeah, big surprise NPR has like a fourth of the normal testosterone level. Yeah. So, I mean, how do we get that back? Yeah, I was talking with, I was going back and forth with a friend of mine today. And we were talking about how when I started out podcasting, I had a mentor. He was talking about how he didn't really realize that he had a mentor when he was, when he started doing what he was doing. And, you know, you think about, you're talking about people.

who are looking back and they're like, okay, we need to emulate these great men and do what they did and live lives like they lived. And that's gone too. So, yeah, how can we bring this forward? How can we look at these great men and, you know, help the next generation that's coming up? I'm very hopeful for Gen Z and any more information, any way that I can help them, you know, I want to. Yeah, it's a crucial problem. As you say, there's definitely like a whole coalition of interests that profit from the collapse of manliness. But I think that one of the best ways we can start fighting back is self-educate ourselves. I mean, personally, I didn't really start to connect all the dots until I was in my early 30s.

I had a kid and like I just didn't I can I didn't all click for me you know that I needed to be a man of that I need to be a certain kind of man I didn't click for me that I had not had those role models the way that my grandfather would have had them in the same way you know like you don't often realize what you're missing until somebody points it out to you and so I think that that's you'll realize that if you get into the heroic tradition of historical figures that's one of the things I love Homer I think Achilles really existed but you know it is mythology and it's it's fiction in a way and an important way plutarch is real guys for the most part I mean he does talk about Theseus who probably didn't exist but Romulus Romulus probably existed but but you know obviously Julius Caesar really existed and most of the characters he's talking about are like real men. And Nietzsche talks about this in uses and abuses

of history that, you know, okay, clearly Julius Caesar isn't going to teach you how to build a rocket to Mars. But that's not what you're, you're not trying to do what he did. You're trying to match that strength of soul. That's what Rousseau would call it. The heroic drive to excellence, strength of soul. You're trying to match that. And I think it starts by studying their lives, studying their stories. Aristotle has this discussion in the rhetoric, book two, which is where he talks about the emotions that are essential for the orator to master,

to persuade people. And one of the, my favorite passage in there is this emotion that he calls zeal, zelos. It's often translated as emulation. This is where we get the word zeal. So zealot is cognate with this word. And he defines zelos or zelos. It's an ada. He defines it as a type of pain felt when a man sees present among another man who is like him by nature, things good and honorable which he himself is capable of achieving. And we're, we need to,

if we don't feel that zeal on a daily basis in our lives, I think we're missing out. And it's good to surround yourself with people that bring that out in you, if you can. And until you find them, I think you can, you can kind of supplement yourself with just reading or hearing the heroic stories of start with the Greeks and Romans.

I mean, obviously we've got our own guys. every great nation has its own guys. I think Hamilton is probably on par with a guy like Caesar, tragically died young. But that's one of the things I try to do with my podcast is just tell these stories without a ton of fluff, but in enough detail that you can get a sense of their characters.

But you can start by. Plutarch is pretty accessible. He's hard to listen to, I found. I've talked to several other classics, professors who've had a similar experience like, oh, you just pick up an audio book of Plutarch and prepare for your lecture that way. He's just a little too dense, even for a specialist, I think, for the most part. So I'm trying to tell these stories in a way that's more accessible. But one way is just retelling the stories. Now I've got some other ideas, too, that are in development.

Well, I think one of the most important things about when you're looking at classic figures is to realize just how many of them weren't only great soldiers or weren't only great philosophers. But something that we really have to think about now is that many of them were great entrepreneurs. That they did things. They made their fortunes. And I think today we believe that if you want to be an academic, you can't be an entrepreneur. If you want to be a soldier, you can't be an entrepreneur, but you can be at all. So if you can talk a little bit about that. Yeah, well, like a guy like Solon, the lawgiver of Athens,

I mean, part of how he came up with all of his ideas for how to run a state is he was, he spent a lot of time doing Emporia. He was just doing business, which for the Greeks in his time, six century BC is probably a combination of deal making, you know, buying some jewels here, selling them at an up, you know, markup over here, maybe a little bit of piracy, you know. There's all kinds of entrepreneurship that you can get into in the Greek world. But there's so many, one of the things that really attracted me about a lot of these stories is precisely that. Like, so, you know, you could write a whole richest man in Babylon, ancient Greeks and Romans version. Krasis is a figure that I've covered in my show, who is the richest man in Rome when he lived.

He was the financier of Julius Caesar, actually. So there's the triumvirate, the first triumvirate that Julius Caesar kind of uses to launch his own political career is Pompey and Caesar and Krasis. And really Krasis, it's a duum for it, really. It's Krasis and Pompey and then Caesar's like the tag along and he knows it. That's why he brought them together so that he could leverage their power. But Crassus is this fascinating character. He's a villain in the movie Spartacus with Kirk Douglas.

Lawrence Olivier plays him. But he is this survivor figure who in the great first Roman Civil War, his dad and his brother were seized by populists, like vengeful populists. executed. And so Crassus, he's like 20. He escaped to Spain. He lives in a cave with a couple of buddies and just in hiding because he knows, you know, the regime guys are looking for him. There's a bounty on his head. So he's out in hiding. And he's got some money, you know, as a, you know, person whose father was a console. Like he's a serious player already kind of from a good family. But he comes back when Sulla returns from

from his journeys in the east, from his conquest in the east. This is the story of the Roman Civil War. It's a longer story. But basically, Krasis raises an army of his own with whatever money he has. He gets like two or three thousand men to come and fight on behalf of Sulla, who's on the, the, the optimist, side of the conflict, the aristocrats. And they end up winning the war. And Krasis is in this position where he has all these confiscated.

of property going on and Crassus buys a lot of cheap estates and flips them. And it was a little bit dubious, but, you know, he felt probably that he was profiteering off of the misfortune of bad men. But then he ends up building a fortune in Rome by real estate speculation. He's just like the best at it. And he has this whole brigade of firemen and construction slaves. He's like an incredible, he's got an incredible eye for talent and for training people. He treats slaves like really valuable assets and he takes care to train them well and make

sure they're happy and things like this. And so he ends up, you know, if ever there's a fire that sweeps in to Rome, he can go in and just buy all kinds of properties on the cheap knowing that he can flip them. He can rebuild them with his own guys. And he becomes the richest man in Rome. he becomes a great financier. And one of the most powerful men in Rome through, who's just having a whole lot of liquid wealth,

he's a great, it kind of ends in tragedy because, I won't spoil it if you want to go hear the story of crassas. Many of you guys know it, probably. But I think that, you know, that you can make similar, tell similar stories about a lot of the financial dealings of some of the great men. Like in peacetime,

a guy like Gaius Marius, who is Saul's opponent in the social, of a war. Like, he's off securing mining concessions in Spain. He's got this network of equestrian businessmen who were tax farmers. I mean, some of the greatest Romans were incredibly talented entrepreneurs. But it's not just that because I think that when I think about who would Julius Caesar have been today? Who would Napoleon have been today, even? Would they have gone into politics? Would they have joined the US military now?

Probably not, right? This is not where high agency people go. They don't, they don't go to law school now so much. They go into entrepreneurship. A lot of these guys are in Silicon Valley. They're getting into tech. They're bringing them out about this American dynamism, I hope, you know, reindustrializing our country.

But like, I think that today, in America especially, the high agency people are going into entrepreneurship. And it's one of the reasons why Napoleon is so amazingly popular at Caesar too, I think, in Silicon Valley and how I have, you know, I have a lot of tech bros in my audience. Because like Plutarch's heroes, and really, I mean, this is why the heroes of antiquity are so appealing is they are like some of the most high agency men that have ever lived. I had I run these retreats in Rome in the summer. We're going to do Greece next year because Rome's going to be crowded for the Jubilee year. But, you know, I asked this guy, he's like working as a B2B SaaS sales guy,

late 20s. I asked him like, how did he get into, how did he come to my podcast? How did he get into the classics? And he said that he felt that this was a secret that had been kept from him for much of his life. He's like, why did nobody ever tell me that the Greeks and Romans were the greatest men who ever lived? And so I think that that's one of the biggest things you can get from the ancients is this sense of how high agency of a person you can be. And I think that high agency people just devour this stuff. They need those stories.

I mean, Nietzsche talked about this. They like, you just, you just like want to consume this stuff so much. If you're if you're bent on great things, like you need that energy. It's like fuel for the fire within. And so I personally, I come from both on my moms and dad's size, like generations of entrepreneurs. As an academic, I was always ashamed of like that legacy of like not doing that myself. And that's a good thing. That's the feel, you know, like to get out there and take some risk and kind of live up to the, I mean, even if you have a couple of people in your past that you can look up to.

Well, you certainly have great ones in the history of your people. So that's what the classics have been for the West, I think, for since they were, you know, 2,000 years. Air Grid, operator of Ireland's electricity grid is powering up the Northwest. We're planning to upgrade the electricity grid in use. your area and your input and local knowledge are vital in shaping these plans. Our consultation closes on the 25th of November. Have your say online or in person. So together we can create a more reliable, sustainable electricity supply for your community.

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Is it at this point if they're going to be taught again? Is it just going to be people like us who are going to, I'm going to have somebody on like you, who is an expert at this or, you know, your podcast, or it just seems to me that they're, unless there's a radical revamping of education in this, you know, in this society in the West, that it's going to have to be, it's going to have to be people like us. It's going to have to be podcasts. It's got to be live streams.

And there's an entrepreneurial opportunity there for people who know how to do it. You know, I mean, I'm friends with Daryl Cooper, who now is the most infamous podcaster in the whole world. And watching and seeing the amount of, people that have subscribed to his substack and not only subscribe to his substack, but like are paid subscribers is, and when you take into consideration what he does, the long form aspect of what he does, the amount of people who are giving him money, knowing that it'll all be free one day,

and they're still giving him, is mind-boggling. It means that people are, thirsty for this or that people desire this, that people are at the point where they can't live without it. And I think that's the best we can do right now. Yeah, Darrell is amazing. I don't, not that I necessarily know, have an opinion on his latest controversy, but I have a lot of respect for him as a reader and a thinker. And so, yeah, like, this is one of the things that I took great hope from when I was leaving the institutional world of classics. And one of the things that really inspired me, we've talked about Plato, and I think a lot of what Plato said was kind of silly or thought experiments, but he in a lot of ways

was the person who inspired me because he was such a man of action, actually. If you look at his biography, I mean, he's taking crazy risks traveling to the core. of tyrants in Sicily and getting sold into slavery and getting ransom. I mean, trying to build a movement. But one of the things that you read the lives of the early sophists and the early educational entrepreneurs in Athens, like all of the greats of the Western tradition of philosophy, in antiquity, at least, they're all solopreneurs for the most part. You know, Gorgias, protica, Proticus, Korax and Tisius, Plato, Isocrates, Aristotle. Aristotle came to Athens. He was selling drugs to pay his way through school and afford education. I mean, I don't think Plato charged,

but he had living expenses, the son of a doctor. I mean, like, these guys are scrappy as hell. And they, if there's no, there's no like university that's going to offer them a chair, you know, you have to convince people that what you're doing is important and you have to be self-sufficient and it breeds a certain kind of toughness and a certain kind of like, I don't know, like responsiveness to the market and what people actually need and what is actually good for, well, for men especially, what they're going to find useful. So I really admire that about Plato. I think he did that. I think Socrates too, of course. But that's, you know, I'm friends. with you know through this journey I've met met a ton of really talented people

building their own audiences on the internet Justin Murphy Bennett's Philactory and I mean I go down the list of cool people that are building their own like intellectuals independent intellectuals building their own raw egg nationalists building their own kind of businesses and models and sharing knowledge sharing a kind of vision of how we should develop our characters, how we should select the inputs that we put in. So on the one hand, there is that independent intellectual world that's kind of fermenting and taking off

substack Twitter podcasts, which I think is great. There is also a battle that's worth fighting for K to 12 education. And I want to give some credit to a lot of great people that have done a lot of work, you know, the classical education movement. For all that I think, you know, it's, really, even though it's been around for a while, it's still in its nascence, you know, but there's a great book. I really thought this book was great, the battle for the American mind.

I think it's called Pete Heggseth and David Goodwin. And I know David Goodwin. He's a great guy. And like, they just they, in that book, they kind of catalog the progressive takeover of and the kind of ejection of the classics from American education and what they proposed to replace it with. But one of the things that they point out in that book is like you can actually document an explicit you know public domain perfectly acknowledged conspiracy if you will an open not secret conspiracy that the Marxists had the Frankfurt School to seize the cultural high ground to take all the pillboxes of in the American in the war for the American mind by Columbia education what sorry sorry the Columbia School of Education, Columbia Teachers College, I think that's what's called, the foundation of the

teachers unions, the politicization of the teachers unions, the Department of Education, all this stuff, like this was planned. There were a lot of people working hard at this to capture and, you know, dumb down American education. And if it worked for them, it could work to undo it in the other direction. The tactics are going to be, have to be very different. Ask Chris Rufo how to do that. I have friends who were appointees in Florida, you know, the university system. It's great what's happening. But it's going to be a lot of work. I think what place we can start is like, you know, kids used to start way earlier on this stuff, right? Like kids used to be reading Plutarch at age 9, 10. They used to be reading Caesar when they

we're 14. We can get back to that, but we have to educate ourselves first as dad. I have two kids and hoping to have more. But I think there's great hope that we can educate ourselves now at a really high level with like the amazing quality of stuff that's available for free through podcasts, especially YouTube to some extent. I think there's still some interesting stuff on YouTube for sure. And newsletters and then pass it on maybe form our own institutions that are going to withstand whatever's coming. Well, yeah, I appreciate that. Yeah, everybody who's trying to do this work, even the people who are trying to do it in a system within a system that seems to be beyond hope. Yeah, you got to be hopeful for that. I do like what Rufo, what Chris Rufo has done. And a lot of the things

that he's exposed. They, yeah, that's good work there. Let's cut it here. I'm going to have you do your plugs, and then we'll leave it open for the future. Maybe come back and,

you know, we'll be like, you'd be like a Thomas appearance and just come on and do a lecture on someone from Plutarch's, from Plutarch's lives and areas. Yeah. Yeah, happy we could get in like the Roman Civil War and stuff like that. There's some fascinating parallels, but it's a longer conversation.

Yeah, but tell people where they can find your stuff. Yeah. So costofglory.com is my website. You can find Cost of Glory on YouTube. It's also on the podcast players, Apple and Spotify, just Cost of Glory. I'm at Cost of Glory on Twitter. So one of the things that we talked about a little bit at the beginning is this connection between the emulation of great men and the rhetorical education, this idea of becoming an orator

and a speaker. And my business partner and I are starting a set of online offerings for training people in the ancient art of rhetoric giving you at least a crash course so you can start practicing on your own. And if you're interested in this connection, I've got something to offer just for free. I've got an authoritative speaker's guide that's like a little mini course that'll give you kind of the basics. I think will help people get into what makes a podcast like the Cost of Glory or an author like Plutarch Tick and why it's not just interesting and entertaining, but like how it can be useful, how you can help you in your career. So if you want to know more about that, go to cost of glory.com slash gift and you can find the authoritative speakers guide there. So tell me what you

think. Awesome. I will, I'll check that out myself and I will include that in the show notes. Alex, I appreciate it. Thank you very much. Thanks for time, Pete. It's been a great pleasure.