(upbeat music) - Good afternoon, good evening, good morning, depending upon when you're tuning in. You know, we rarely have a spotlight and we're very, very selective about who we bring on in our spotlight. And today we've got a really esteemed guest that we're very excited to talk to by the name of Alex Petkis. And he is the host of "The Cost of Glory." I said that right, right? - Yeah, that's right, I'm sweating. - "The Cost of Glory" podcast, which is a really great name. I'm a little envious. Alex has a mission to translate profound insights from the Greco-Roman leaders and philosophers into actionable wisdom for contemporary times for today and to find a deep appreciation for historical greatness that is so adamantly attempted to being wiped away, tearing down statues and all kinds of things that are happening in our world today, which is incredibly unfortunate if you're paying attention. And so he has a PhD in classics from Princeton University. That's one of those Ivy League schools, I believe. And if I'm not mistaken, Alex, you actually, didn't you teach at Princeton for a time? - Yeah, I did, as a grad student, you end up having taken on some teaching assignments. So I have a lot of classroom experience with the Princeton students. And we had a good time and I learned some of the gaps in their education while I was there as well. So yeah, it was a lot of fun. - Well, it's fun in quotation marks or is it? - There were highs and there were lows, good times of that time. - Yeah, such is life. - So I guess where I'd like to start is with a PhD in classics from Princeton and the opportunity to teach there, what made you decide to leave academia? - Well, something, I've got the sense that something was wrong. I was teaching in a seminar one night and this student came in a little late to class. And so my classroom is right next to the president's office and Princeton at the East Pine Hall is the classics department. And right next to it's the president's office. It's kind of beautiful part of campus. And this kid comes in, "Guys, don't you know what's going on? It's happening." And I'm like, "What's happening? We're occupying the president's office." Over what? Injustice. - What kind of injustice? And the conversation just didn't really go anywhere. There was just a sense among a lot of the students that things needed to be protested. And that was more important than the matter at hand. And I feel like there were various grievances being aired that seemed really silly to me. And it kind of culminated in a series of events at Princeton that was very sad a couple of years ago where a dear friend and a professor of mine was canceled for basically opposing the Marxist-ification of the faculty that was kind of coming down from on high. And we don't need to go into that, but-- - No, I'd love to go into that. I certainly know the name Marx. What is the Marxist-ification of the faculty? What does that mean specifically for our viewers? - Yeah, it's worth explaining a little bit. So we've seen, I think, if you've been paying attention to the news and higher ed in the past year, maybe since about the fall of last year, 2013, 2023, that a lot of the faculty is just overwhelmingly left-wing and campuses, even hard left, like something like 95%, depending on the institution, of course. And Princeton has, of the IVs, tended to be a little bit more moderate compared with, say, Yale or Harvard or Brown. But there were faculty calls, there was like a United Faculty petition, for example, to have a committee, establish a standing committee that would check to see if scholars cited enough of the right groups in their scholarship. Did they cite enough of the people with the right color skin and the right gender? And various things like that, making scholars, making faculty submit reports on what they were doing to push for racial justice, all this sort of things that are really kind of foreign to the mission of the institution, they get right behind the face of intellectual freedom and all kinds of things. So I think it's cultural Marxism more than sort of communism. It's just kind of left-wing race politics that has a suffocating atmosphere on discourse, especially if people feel like their jobs are going to be at stake, very high stakes jobs. So that's kind of what I'm referring to. - Yeah, well, I'm sure you're familiar, well, I'm not sure, but you're probably familiar with Jordan Peterson, and how he lost his job because he refused to buy into the pronouns issue. - Yes. - Was that an issue at Princeton as well? - People were definitely facing pressure. I didn't personally face that kind of pressure at Princeton, but I knew people who did. And so, yeah, it's sort of like you're being forced to conform to a very strange worldview that you might think is not just silly, but unhealthy for the people that are voting it. It's like against, it has nothing to do with religion, but it's against sort of moral principles to let people be dishonest with themselves and force you to be complicit in their dishonesty. And it was, it just got more and more insane. I think 2016, there was some kind of light bulb, or, you know, Manchurian candidate kind of code went off in people's head, like, ah, we must resist whatever needs to be resisted. It had a lot to do with presidential politics. It reminds me of, and I don't remember which, but it was one of the Ivy League schools, maybe you'll recall Bursa Bo, where they were protesting for Palestine, and, you know, it was Harvard. So you say is more, more left than Princeton. But they were protesting and there were people interviewing these students, and it's kind of like your story, saying, you know, what are you really protesting for? And they couldn't answer. They didn't know, you know, they were just protesting to be part of the collective mob, and it seemed like the right thing to do. - Yeah, and there's a general kind of feeling among the faculty that it's good for students to protest, that this is what the university's there for, and especially if it's a left-wing cause that involves making signs or duct-taping your mouth for Instagram shot, or as the case may be, that it doesn't really matter what you're protesting. It's probably good to protest, and there's just not a lot of inquiry put into the actual issues, to be honest. It's very disappointing to see that at a place that's supposed to have really high intellectual standards, right, very, very disillusioning experience for me. That wasn't what did it for me as far as leaving academia as such, but it was certainly a strike against it for me. I ended up leaving a tenure-track job. I got a tenure-track job in California at a good institution. I liked my colleagues there. It was near beautiful nature. I was in Fresno, which a lot of Californians sort of dog, but it's very close to Yosemite and all this stuff. But I felt that the rot that I was seeing in Princeton in maybe a smaller way than you would see at a Yale or Harvard, but still there. And as I found out later was growing, that that was the attitude of the entire discipline of classics that I was a part of, all the leadership that we're supposed to be, helping spread the message that studying Greece and Rome is important, and what can it do for your life? These are the people that end up saying so-and-so's book is good, so-and-so's book is bad, so-and-so deserves a scholarship, et cetera, so-and-so gets a job, so-and-so doesn't get a job. The whole leadership of the discipline was just infected with this, what's been affectionately called the mind virus, the woke mind virus. And I think it was almost like I'm a Christian and I've always had this sense of mission and what I do that I feel that everybody should have a sense of purpose in their work. And you have to support a family probably, you have to pay your way, but you also want to have fine meaning in your work. And I felt increasingly like my work was being undermined and that the whole purpose of what I was there for as a classist was, what flew in the face of what the discipline thought was what classics was for, which I think I thought was really confused and frankly really boring. And so I felt like I was on a sinking-- - Not to mention illogical. - Yeah, no, not to mention just-- - Really, really irrational. - Irrational, I just have to ask you, what was Constantine's pronoun, you know? (laughing) - Yeah, his highness. (laughing) - There you go. - That's a pro-men. (laughing) I love getting it. - Yeah. - So was that really the straw that broke the camel's back was in California and that's when you left? - Yeah, it was what I was observing happening kind of on the national level in California. My personal institution in California was good. My colleagues, I gotta say they were great and I felt bad for leaving, but I said, I see, well, two things, I have a family, some family duties to get back to in Texas. Parents are tiring, only child, this kind of stuff. But I also felt like I had a duty to try to exploit an opportunity that I saw in alternative media. In entrepreneurship, in building a business, because I had learned that the greatest ancient intellectuals, the greatest kind of paradigms for a discipline, Plato especially, he's not a professor at an institution drawing a salary, he's a solopreneur, he's building his own thing and he's taking risks, he's taking risk with his life, he's meeting with serious people, he's doing all the work of recruiting students. And I think I felt like a lot of academia, even though there are some great people, some great entrepreneurial people in it, a lot of the pressure of the institution is to kind of turn you into a brain in a jar that doesn't have to think about marketing or how much we should charge students. Oh, don't worry about that professor, we've got all that under control, you just need to keep publishing your works and don't question the system and your retirement plan is safe, just trust us. I just, I lost all trust. - You just need to keep professing. - Yeah, just keep professing. - Just professing, not doing anything else, just professing, so if I have you straight and jump in, but if I have you straight here, you literally left out of principle. And given that's true, that's very, very commendable. I find that we find that so infrequent in today's world. And you mentioned Plato, who is one of my favorites, you can look at Socrates as well, you can look at so many of the ancient philosophers and correct me if I'm wrong, but not one of them, not one of them ever taught us how to make money. - Yeah. - He taught us how to be moral, principled people and how to live to a standard. And that's true of the prophets as well. We follow the teachings of Christ also. And he said, you can't serve two masters, you can't serve both God and money. You, it doesn't mean that you can't use money, but you can't serve it. And one of the problems that we find, and I talk about this in my latest book, God, Money and Sex, which I believe are the three human dilemmas that we need to understand and master. But money has become our God in our current world. And I believe, and I'd love to hear your opinion on that, that's by design. Rockefeller said, way back, I don't know the exact date, and he's big over the school systems, obviously, or he was. And he said, I don't want independent thinkers, I want good workers. - Right. - And it sounds like that's what they were turning professors into as well. Just do your job and keep your head down and keep going and let us take care of the rest. Care to expand on that? - Yeah, there's tremendous pressure to, well, in any institution, you know, the person who is, well, the way that Aristotle will look at this, for example, is the person who is doing the paying is the free person who's in charge. Person who's getting paid is not free. You tell the professors, ah, we're gonna give you a salary, you're gonna get pay raises based on performance, you don't have to worry about, we're gonna give you a lot of job security. Ten year in a way is a kind of golden chains from one perspective because they're the ones paying you and you're dependent on them. And so all this talk about intellectual freedom is very problematic because like the more committed you are in the system, the more subservient you are in a way, I think that with other jobs, it's not so pronounced, but in academics, whole mind is based on this idea that we have intellectual freedom and that we're the ones who have the most intellectual freedom, whereas maybe it's the other way around, maybe if your mind is the place that's most colonized by, you have to not break orthodoxy, especially in a climate that we have that's so polarized. Yeah, it's a bad recipe. There is a great story that you reminded me of from Aristotle and his politics. He talks about philosophers making money and there's a famous story of Thales of MyLitus, who's one of the early, early Ionian philosophers, quasi-mythical figure, but the story goes that Aristotle's saying philosophers could make money if they wanted to take Thales, for example, he predicted based on his mathematical calculations that there was gonna be a big harvest, the coming year, maybe I can't remember if something about, there was gonna be a very full moon or there was a lot of rain. And so he went down to all the land he bought up, sort of time shares on all the olive presses. So he basically leased right to the olive presses. And then when the huge harvest came, there was incredible demand for all the olive presses and he made a killing, but Aristotle says, and he actually, that's the first instance of the word monopoly. So Thales discovered the principle of the monopoly. If you control all the olive presses, then you can set the price at whatever you want. So Aristotle says to say, wow, what we're really after is something else, but if we wanted to, we could make money. I don't think that's true of all philosophers, but that's a great story. - Well, it is a great story, but it's also a great principle to understand that you have to look at the law of cause and effect, which is the cause and which is the effect. And unfortunately, in today's world, too many of us in our experience are looking at the effects as causes and they've really disconnected from the cause, which we would say is God, God and morality and principles and virtue, and all those things that have been totally lost, not completely, but very much lost in today's world. And you mentioned Marx, I had to go back to Marx. You had to know something about him. I don't know if you've read his communist manifesto, but if you read Marx at all, then there's a step-by-step methodology that demoralizes a nation, that demoralizes a people. And so consequently, the very first one is a destruction of religion. And to make it seem illogical or maybe even stupid to believe and they come up with all these pejorative, an invisible guy in the sky or whatever, to believe in a different power. And that kind of came to fruition, I believe during the Enlightenment period, which I really think was a D Enlightenment period, but nonetheless, we got rarely attached to our logical minds versus following our hearts and our intuition. And the second one is the second one or close to the second, there's a destruction of the family unit. There's a takeover of the educational system. And so if you look at it step-by-step, it sure seems glaringly apparent to me that this is on purpose, that it has methodically been put into place. And I'd love to hear your opinion on that. - Yeah, I like to point out to people that Marx himself was really bad with money. He's always borrowing it and he's always asking his mom for more of the inheritance and he's always having financial troubles, which I think tells you a lot about the quality of his work and how there's a kind of resentfulness toward wealth in there and sort of misunderstanding of how it's acquired, for like what it even is and certainly how to use it. But so there's an interesting story that's worth telling here about so like how our education system got in a really in a nutshell to where it is. So in the pre-enlightenment times, the classics featured very prominently in the education of leaders in Europe and the Americas too is really the paradigm of the 17th, 18th centuries in America. The founding fathers were raised up in this heavily Greek and Roman inflected education system where you read the great books of that past in particular with the explicit goal of emulating them, of becoming great like those men were great, learning from their flaws too. It's not like they were perfect. They weren't saints, certainly a guy like Caesar had a lot of issues and they were quick to observe those. But the overwhelming message of education is become great like these guys were great and they specifically focused on the skill of public speaking of oratory, which was seen as the quintessential sort of, we think of it as soft skill, but they would have thought of it as a pretty hard skill, a real power that you can cultivate through training even though natural ability certainly influences it. Then there was a shift in the enlightenment with the rise of the German research institution late 18th centuries, 1780s, 90s, picking up speed after that. Humbled is a very important figure. They basically they come up with this idea that the PhD is the real prize, the real mark of a learned man who's been properly educated. And the modern research university is designed with the capital of the state to train, well, first this very lofty enlightenment ideal. We're going to make new knowledge. We're gonna, in your PhD studies as you're becoming a scholar, a proper enlightenment, intellectual degree holder expert, you're going to contribute to new knowledge because it really takes specialization, et cetera, et cetera. And there's some truth to that, right? Like focusing on some specific problem in optics is more likely to increase the chance of a scientific breakthrough. But they apply this method also to history, to the classics in particular, which were a very high prestige discipline. And so it became not, we're gonna train the leadership of the next generation to emulate greatness and become great themselves. But we're going to produce knowledge about the weaponry used in this particular battle or even less interestingly, all the etymology of words beginning in PR. And some of it's interesting as a scholar, I find it interesting and illuminating, but the whole focus of what the life of the mind is supposed to be becomes increasingly atomized and small and intellectual is dealing with tiny problems and kind of teaching that tiny, tinieness to their students. And but importantly, there's a shift to a model where the university, even though it's designed to produce knowledge, what it actually produces is experts, is certified intellectuals, is professionals, professors and professionals that are, you don't need to worry about if this guy's good or bad, you don't need to worry about if he's competent or not, as long as he's got that PhD, as long as he's got that masters degree, there is a fungibility, we need a history major now, that's the idea, there's a kind of rationalization of the education system that seems to make a lot of sense on the surface, but it ends up, you produce a class of bureaucrats of high conformity, high intelligence, but high conformity, people who don't like to think outside the box, they have a certain perspective on the whole idea of a great leader rising up to lead his nation is sort of like, that's not what we do around here, let's point to all the problems in that doctrine, there's a kind of critical aspect. And so, fast forward to the problem that we're facing in American education. The short story is that the progressive movement in America, I'm talking about the late 1800s progressive movement, people like John Dewey, there was a move to basically bring this model of education that was originally German into the Americas and do away with this idea of the classics, which was just not fit for our modern enlightened era where science, technology, it's this idea that I think is very wrong, that in order to look toward the future, we need to ignore the past. Whereas I think that the reality is completely the opposite, like if you look at the founding fathers, talk about men of vision. Those guys were obsessed with Greece and Rome. If you look at the Renaissance, talk about a time period of tremendous intellectual artistic creativity, they were training themselves on the greatest models. And so, anyway, the progressives kind of take over education and what you end up having, what ends up happening is that the cultural Marxists, people like Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt School who have this idea of like, you know, sewing, this very explicit idea of like, let's infiltrate the education system because if we can infiltrate the education system, we can do all the things that Marx was calling for. Like you said, break down the family, make religion seem ridiculous. You can't do that by writing books. You have to control the teacher hiring. You have to control the professed professoriate. And you, if you can start the kids when they're in kindergarten. Oh man, you have just free range. You can completely mold the soul in your own Marxist image to fit your own presuppositions. And you know what, it worked. They pulled it off. And this has been documented in some great books out there, but that's where we're dealing with the fruit of that today, unfortunately. - Yes, man, that's profound, that's spot on. Let's shift gears for a minute. And let's talk a little bit about democracy. We hear a lot from the left today that quote, "Donald Trump is a threat to democracy." Love to hear your thoughts on that. But first, you know, tell us what is a democracy because our understanding is we're a constitutional republic. And are there differences? And if so, what are the differences? - Yeah, well, that's a great question. So the founding fathers, as you know, as you pointed out right there, they didn't think of themselves as founding a democracy. They thought of themselves as founding a republic. And the difference in their minds, they're getting from the Greeks and the Romans, who looked at democracy as basically, well, Athenian democracy is a great example in their minds that they thought was really bad, even though it had a good run for a while. So for example, any citizen can propose any law and all the citizens can vote on the majority will pass the law. That doesn't seem so terrible. But another thing that they have is many of the most important offices in the state are not elected. They're actually done by lottery, which is fascinating. You just put your name in the hat and somebody takes a turn as a year. And so-- - You're talking about Athens? Or you're talking about-- - Athens. - Yeah, Athens. - I'm like, you're kind of talking about America, too. - Yeah, right. It starts to resemble that. And I think that what really brought down Athens in the eyes of the founders was the way that demagogic people can exploit the will of the masses. This happened at Rome as well, which was their example of a good government, a constitutional republic, where votes were weighted differently, not everybody could vote. Voting wasn't even the most important thing necessarily. And so Rome's constitution is kind of complicated. There's lots of checks and balances, though, which they liked. But I think that this whole idea of who's the threat to democracy is really interesting because what the demagogue is par excellence is the person able to manipulate the mass opinion. And we've had an entire century of basically demagoguery through television and radio, right? Like, is that a threat to democracy? Is kind of mass opinion shaping to send us to fight this or that war? Or to not, there's an issue dear to my heart, to not admire certain heroes of the past, but to spend most of our time admiring pop stars, is that on accidents? Does that empower a people, a generation of young men to become statesmen and leaders? I think there's a reason that the media now is being challenged more than it ever has, partly because of economic forces, new media coming along, and they can't control the narrative anymore. So they're trying to find, they're desperately reaching for a scapegoat. And I don't find it persuasive myself. I think Trump has incredible power to shape opinion, but I think a lot of it is just people are fed up. Like, there's a lot of people who are in his camp that aren't, they don't think that he's the greatest order or that he can't make any mistakes, but they're fed up at the actual tyranny, the actual demagoguery that we've been subject to for decades, so there you go. - I happen to see a post on X, formerly Twitter. It's either yesterday or early this morning and I, I disciplined myself not to really be a consumer, but to just be a contributor as needed. But nonetheless, someone made a post and they started off said, I hate Donald Trump. And then they continued and said, but I'm voting for Donald Trump. - Yeah. - You know, it's, I think to your point, it's not about the personality or the perfection of the individual that's in leadership. It's about the policies and what they stand for and the principles that they're standing for. And so, you know, I would have to take something you said and run with it and say, is mass media, mainstream media, is it a threat to democracy? I would say no, because in my layman's terms, I don't have the background you have, but, you know, if I was to simply define democracy, it's the mass rules and in a constitutional republic, the constitution rules. And so it doesn't matter what the mainstream media does in a constitutional republic. So they're not a threat to democracy. They're actually a boon to democracy, to try to get the masses to think a certain way. Is that agreeable to you? - That makes a lot of sense, yeah. So the idea of democracy that I think the founders really didn't like, and this is certainly true at Athens, is you can kind of rewrite the rules at will. And this is one of the things that brought down Rome is the idea that if you get enough votes in a popular assembly, you can just completely rewrite the constitution. And when you change the rules like that, you cease to have peaceful means to resolve disputes. And, you know, let's talk about packing courts and, you know, changing the, you know, electoral college. Those are kind of relative to these small things, but in the grand scheme. But I think these things are really dangerous to do. And we have really spent, certainly my childhood on up, like democracy is a sacred word, is a holy word that thou shalt not question whether America is a democracy or whether democracy is fundamentally good. And, you know, there are democratic elements of our political system that have gotten, potentially gotten out of control. That idea is just unsayable in mainstream media, but the founders would have agreed. So I think that there's a lot of scope for democratic aspects in local politics. The higher up you get, the more, the bigger the masses, the bigger the ability of the mass media to manipulate opinion, the more dangerous and kind of tyrannical and oligarchic it gets. So yeah, that's a great distinction. - Yes, and unfortunately, excuse me, when those in governance get corrupted by this mass wave, if you will, of immorality, then you have people in the Congress, in the Senate and the House, who are also that way, you have people in the presidency, quite frankly, or running for presidency, who have been caught up in that. And so consequently, it really is a force to be reckoned with. And it doesn't make it right. And in my opinion, and it sounds like yours, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, in our opinion, it doesn't make it right. Right is right. And there's not your truth and my truth. There's truth. And truth is inarguable. And where do we get that from? Well, if we've torn down our religion, then and we've torn down our belief in God, then the only place we have to go for principles, virtues, and values, is to the secular world and to look around us and say, "What are other people doing?" And that's, and that must be okay. Well, in many cases, it's not okay. And so, do you, I think you probably already answered this question, but you can expand upon it, with your background in the classics, which is extensive. Do you see direct corollaries between the Roman Empire, specifically, and what's happening in America today? And if so, what are they? Yeah, in a lot of ways, yes, in that the demagoguery, or the constitution rewriting, the mass opinion formation was a big issue in the Roman world. And there's other really interesting things, like law fair becomes really out of control. And it gives people who are in power very good reasons to never let go of power. If you're just certain that you're gonna get prosecuted to death after you leave office, this is a big issue in the Julius Caesar. Basically, they had this constitutional republic, and people blame Caesar, but it was a systemic problem. Rome transitioned to a monarchy, the Roman Empire that we think of as decadent, is the monarchy form of the Roman Republic, that was a republic. And I think most of us don't want it to go that way in America. But there are other things that are very different that I think the whole kind of Marxist movement of the 19th century and its kind of children in the 20th century, they didn't really face this issue of people who are determined and have a lot of power and influence. Intentionally destroying the fabric of civilization as such, like bent on destroying the idea of the family. One of the ways that they do it is to remove role models, historical role models. I think denaturing history is something that was really successful in the kind of takeover of education history became about critiquing the narrative only, even though that can kind of be important, history became about exposing colonialism, slavery, and just general badness with America. And that's the only story that is important to tell now for a lot of teachers of history, for a lot of professors of history. And when you do that, it ignores the fact that the, well, or maybe it doesn't ignore the fact and it's maybe is on purpose, but the moral fabric of a healthy culture is so dependent on our heroes. The stories that we tell are, that's how we pass on ethics. That's why there's the kind of heroes of the Old Testament. This is why Plutarch's Lives, which is the basis of my podcast, was such an important text in European history. It's why God had to become a man to have a human life story told about him in the gospels, because that's how we learn what is good and what is bad and what is admirable and what is not. And so if history, a culture sort of is based on this shared idea of values, the way that expresses itself is like, these are the men that you youths should be like. These are who we are. And these have been completely deconstructed in our modern era. And most visibly, like you pointed out at the beginning, with statues being toppled. Jefferson was a slave owner, Lincoln was a racist, Churchill was a colonialist, on and on and on. We can't, we're not allowed to have real kind of manly heroes anymore. And it's totally corrosive. And this is what I think we can recover that through independent means by educating ourselves, alternate media, raising our kids in a different way. It's, and the process is long and slow, but it works, it really does work. And so I have, I have a lot of hope amidst the chaos that, you know, with the narrative controllers kind of losing a grip and the kind of the emperor's clothes being seen now is off with the whole campus controversies around Palestine that, you know, we have a shot now of putting those values back into place. And I'm trying to do it through storytelling. - And is that the main answer, is storytelling? Are there other aspects of that? - No, there's so much to it. So I think that storytelling is a big part of it. Plutarch is this ancient philosopher that I mentioned that was the biographer of the great noble weeks in Romans. And he was the most popular texts besides, the most popular ancient texts besides the Bible in the 18th century in America. He's one of the five most popular books to be on your shelf in the Americas overall of any book. He's just a super bestseller. And it's because he wrote these really concise, compelling biographies of guys like Caesar, Alexander, Pericles, Solon of Athens, Romulus. But Plutarch wasn't just a storyteller. He's also a moral philosopher, like half of his work, more than half of his works are kind of practical life advice, like how to say no to people who are making unreasonable requests, how to tell a friend from a flatter, how to praise oneself without giving offense, as some of these are very just practical. But his whole mission is the moral instruction and fortification of the next generation. But a lot of these moral treatises he does through anecdotes. He actually tells you story, it gives you examples of people who did it, what they said and what they did. But so stories can kind of become a means to the end. I think it's also really important to find your tribe, to get together with people who share your values. We've gotten so atomized as one of the reasons I started running retreats, I do men's retreats currently, but a podcast can really attract certain kind of people that kind of get what you're talking about. There's so much you don't have to explain if they've listened to hours and hours of you telling them what you're about. And that's really powerful for people. People are really thirsty for community and so much of modern life just sends us to atom, like little cells in the suburbs where we don't have a lot of shared vision and shared values. And religion's really important to me. And I think that should be important to everybody. This was clearly important to the Greeks and Romans. And they're looked on as pagans by a lot of Christians today, Christian authors of the past even. But there's a whole lot of healthy piety, like recognition of the divine and the pagans that, Plutarch himself, even though he's not a Christian, he's a monotheist, he believes in one God and a lot of Plato as well, Aristotle too. And I like to think of them kind of paving the way through kind of teaching a society to be pious, even if not toward the right object or the best objects, they're kind of laying the groundwork for the gospel in the Roman world. So it's a whole ecosystem, but I do think stories are one of the things that has been, it was easiest to take away from us as a culture and what people are starving for now is the good story, the good examples from the past. - And do you find that there's a greater hunger for that more currently than there has been in past years? - I feel like that's the case. And it could just be anecdotal. The response to my podcast has been really positive. A lot of people, really, a lot of young guys. I had a guy on my retreat who's like a salesman, a SaaS company and was just a, you know, frat boy in college, but very smart and capable and not really into learning, but he's very smart and he's got obsessed with antiquity, loves my show. And I said, how did you get into this? And he told me, you know, somebody kind of shared some story with me at some point or maybe recommended a book and I gradually realized these are the greatest men who ever lived. Why did nobody tell me about this? I think that people are, have been, this used to be just kind of common knowledge for eras like the 18th, early 19th century, that there's a kind of database of great examples. You know, Krasis Pompey, Lukalis used to be household names in the American founding and Cicero, but they're not now. And so I see that people are hungry and ready and it's my number one job and I think Plutarch's number one job is to entertain you, to keep your attention, to kind of inspire you through telling good stories and then the rest hopefully will fall into place, but there, we do seem to be kind of starved for this stuff today, maybe. - Well, here's our opinion on that. You know, Berespo and I have been exposed to a vast array of teachings. Certainly Berespo was raised behind in Iran, which was the mark of death or the Muslims in the Iranian culture at the time. And you know, she can talk to that infinitum and yet I was raised Christian. My father was a Protestant minister and that's a firm foundation, but we've also been exposed to a lot of the ancient sacred teachings like the Toltec, which I don't know if you're familiar with them, or, you know, the Kabbalistic or the Hermetics, which is ancient, ancient teachings. And all of them are very much in line with Christianity with not traditional Christianity, because unfortunately, and I'd love to hear your opinion on this as a Christian yourself, you know, in our opinion, in our observation, as you read the Bible, the way that Christianity is taught today is almost the antithesis of what Christ taught. You know, we've had people come to our events and say, well, I've accepted Jesus as my personal savior and now I don't have to do anything 'cause I'm saved. Well, that's not what he said. You know, he said, deny yourself, pick up your cross and follow me. He said, you shall know them by their fruits. And so you have to make a fundamental change in your character and your habits and your behaviors. And that seems to have been lost and almost intentionally that if I can keep people with this real surface level that they're not gonna dive deep and they're not gonna realize the power that they have within them. And I'd love to hear your take on that if you agree with that or disagree with that or what your opinion is. - Yeah, this is one of the reasons I got into classics as a young man is I was curious about Christian origins and I grew up in the Orthodox tradition. My family is part Greek. And so I grew up all around a lot of tradition and I had a lot of Protestant friends growing up in Texas in the Bible Belt and like, why do you do all this weird stuff? And I said, I don't know. And so I kind of started this curiosity for me, but you know, one of the things that I noticed really profoundly from studying the early Christians or the acceptance of Christianity in the Roman world is people recognized, oh, this is a philosophy. This is, we understand, it's not just a religion. It's like a whole way of life. And I think a lot of people in, and I don't wanna blame Protestantism as such 'cause I think understood correctly, it doesn't go this way. But there is a tendency to see, well, this is really in Catholicism and Orthodoxy as well, so some extent, there's a tendency to see the squeeze or the juice you get from the squeeze in Christianity as like you go to heaven when you die, that it's all about escaping the wrath of God at some point in the future. But for the early Christians, you know, it was obvious. This is all about, this is the best way to transform your life. And they had practices, you know, there's liturgy, that there's a mystical kind of belief aspect of this. There's a community aspect of this as asceticism, you know, there's prayer and fasting, there's a real, I think some of the best Christian writers from antiquity are these guys that take up stoicism. And just some extent, St. Paul does, you know, like rejoice in my suffering and things like that. Like it's really the biggest promise of Christianity is personal transformation in this life, you know, it's conforming to the character of Christ and it's empowering. It should be like really exciting. And I think that so much academic theology, you know, I tend to, as a former academic, you know, I'm like seeing every problem as God have my hammer and every problem as looks like a nail to me. So, but I think that academic theology does tend to kind of give you this very theoretical view sometimes of what it's like to be a Christian because you're, you know, so many pastors spend so much time just reading books and reading books and reading books and maybe preaching, but there's a real like spiritual warfare that, you know, a lot of the early Christian practitioners talk about wrestling with yourself. And to me, that's the most interesting and exciting part of Christendom. I think it was for, especially for the kind of like leadership classes of the Roman Empire. They're not just, they're interested in Christ's teachings about the poor and this kind of better model, but it's also about like, you know, what's the version of myself that I couldn't access except through Christianity? - Well, you're singing our tune. You know, it was Christ who said, "Think not that I have come to bring peace to the world. "I've come to bring a sword." Now that doesn't get quoted in a lot of churches, you know, but Christ, Jesus was a warrior. - Yeah, so the Pharisees, you are the children of the devil and, you know, the father of lies. Let's not forget Paul was thrown in prison three times. And so none of these ancient leaders lived easy lives. They didn't. They were willing to sacrifice, which you mentioned, etymology means to make sacred. You know, sacrifice something of a lower value for something of a higher value. And unfortunately, that's something that's been lost in so many of the teachings because it's not popular. You know, pick up your cross, deny yourself and pick up your cross. Well, that's not very much fun, you know. How am I going to make money with that? And so it's been lost in this quick fix, instant gratification kind of world that we've been conditioned into. And so, you know, in your opinion, what can we learn from history, on culture, on morality and what worked for them and what fails? - Yeah, great question. I have been spending a lot of time on the later Republic, the Roman Republic 'cause I'm doing this arc on Julius Caesar right now. And the kind of, so Plutarch is the guy that Shakespeare read when he was composing his play Julius Caesar. He's reading the biography of Julius Caesar, also the life of Cato and Pompey and Brutus and Cicero. But, you know, one of the standout characters for me is kind of getting to this issue of like, what will money do for you? Is this guy Crassus, the richest man in Rome? As I like to call him, and he was. He was Caesar's patron and his mentor and his financier. Crassus rose to power through being an incredibly astute businessman. He invested in real estate throughout Rome. He had his own fire brigade and he would wait until a fire swept through the city and then he would offer to take a building off of your hands as like the fire, and you know, approaching a block or two away, you know. I might be willing to take that property, you know, like Penny's on the dollar. So he was a crafty guy, but also very likable and, you know, he knew how to make peace once he had made war. But, so he rose to prominence. And I think you could, he was always blamed for his greed and, you know, he was kind of Penny Pincher. But he could be generous when it counted. But I think the, so there's this tragic end to Crassus, which I see as such a pattern in a lot of great leaders is there's a tragedy to their lives that even when they win, it's only through great suffering. But Crassus had a son. He was actually a good father. And I tell the story at length in my biography, he has a very promising ambitious young son. I don't think he spoiled his sons. I think he really raised them well. He had a philosopher in the house to tell them what's right and what's wrong and what's long term and what's short term. His son goes, public as goes. And he's a junior officer under Julius Caesar. Julius Caesar's fighting the war against the Gauls at the time. He's the most important Roman general. Crassus is his mentor. He's like, I've got a job, I've got a job for you son. Go do it. And Publius is just performing brilliantly. He's talented as a military commander. He's making his father proud. He's making Caesar proud. And this is not a story that's told in Lutarch or a lot of biographies of Crassus. But I became convinced of this as I was looking over the sources. Crassus is famous for going on this terrible disaster and what promised ended up being a terrible disaster against the Parthians. It was a Persian people that live in Iraq now. Their homeland was Iran, but they came down to the Mesopotamia and they controlled that area. And Crassus had reasons to what wage a war on them, but he wanted to personally lead this army when he's like 60 years old. And I don't think people realize the reason he did it wasn't just because he was greedy and he wanted to add treasure and glory to his name. It was because his son pushed him on it. And he wanted to do something nice for his son and against his better judgment. He's so good at controlling risks and not taking unnecessary risks throughout his career. You know, he's fought in wars before, but they were long in the past and he was getting old and he wasn't, you know, he underestimated his enemy. And because it was because he couldn't say no to his son that he had raised well, that was his undoing 'cause they end up, you know, basically having this military disaster in Parthia, they walk into a trap. And so I think that there's a lot of lessons there about like the subtle ways that, you know, even a good person can fail and even a person that I think that was widely reviled in his lifetime and in later history has something admirable to him, but still, you know, you have to appreciate the tragic flaw. And Plutarch has a whole treatise on just this problem of saying yes to people when you should say no. I did an episode on this called "On Cringe" 'cause it's kind of like that feeling of, you kind of cringe when somebody asks you something and I shouldn't say yes, kind of feel it in your face. There's a Greek word for it's sort of, your face feels bad, dissopia. And Plutarch says you have to have something like mentors on your shoulder, like a good angel on your shoulder who's a hard-ass like Cato the Younger to just say no, no, no, somebody who's famous for saying no, you kind of imagine them sitting on your shoulder and just saying no because I think so often the mistakes we make, we rationalize to ourselves. We say that this is the right thing when something in us knows that we should listen to that voice that says no. So that's one example I've been thinking about a whole lot lately. You know, we can learn so much from so many stories of triumph and suffering, whether in the story of Christendom or not. So I'm focused on the pagans these days. - And what about morality? - Which seems to be far-fetched for a lot of people if you observe things that are going on the world today. What can we learn about morality from history? And what works and was there anything that didn't work regarding morality? - Yeah. Well, Plato would want us to desire and pursue virtue because it's its own best reward. You know, this is the whole premise of the republic is to try to make that case to you that morality, even if you strip away all the benefits from being moral, that it's good to pursue of its own sake. And I agree with him, but that's a tough pill for a lot of people to swallow. And I do think that being a good person, being honest is just time and time again, some of the craftiest, great, great men are fundamentally honest, you know? The Caesar is a great example of this. He tells the story of his conquest of Gaul with this just bracing cold clarity and honesty. He'll talk about his own failures. He'll talk about the failures and the talents of his enemy, the people that he doesn't like, who he's fighting against. That like, and Jordan Peterson talks a lot about this, right? Like, don't lie, this is such an important principle that I really see played out in spades on this historical stage. It's not that you can't kind of tell the story you need to tell at the right time, but I think Caesar in particular, I just did a whole series on the Gallic Wars, on my podcast is, you know, which he wrote the story of for history. Caesar was never dishonest with himself. That really comes out in that treatise. Would you define that as self-awareness, being truly self-aware? I think so, yeah. I think it's a kind of self-awareness and, you know, being kind of tough on yourself. That doesn't mean being insecure. It doesn't mean saying the worst things about yourself, right? You have to also believe the good things that people say about you or would say about you, but you gotta acknowledge that your nature is a mixture, you know? And you can't become better if you don't realize where you actually are first. So that's just one lesson of morality that I've been thinking about a whole lot lately with Caesar. Yes. I think it was Nietzsche, who's not one of the classics, but certainly one of my favorites. I already quoted him once in his podcast, but he said nothing is more hated than the truth. And that's pretty true, you know? Most people don't want to hear the truth because it destroys their illusions. And it's very painful sometimes. It totally destroys your world model of who you convinced yourself you are or who you've convinced yourself our country is, or, you know, anything that's contrary to the truth. And yet, you know, the truth is very empowering if you'll be open to it and accept it. Go ahead, no, go. - If I could just go on that. Caesar says this really interesting thing on that note that you're kind of helping me realize. So there's this battle where he's got, he's basically sieging the Gauls in a city. And he's also being besieged by another group of Gauls from outsides. He's got a double wall. His camp is basically a ring with two walls, an inner wall, an outer wall. And he talks about how the men defending one wall are aware that there's Gauls on the other wall that they can do nothing about. They have to rely on the other men defending the other side of the wall. And this brought out a tremendous amount of anxiety in them and he had to be constantly encouraging them and with his personal presence. Because he says men feel the most fear and anxiety about problems that they are not directly facing. And this is a way that I think dishonesty with ourselves and in general really undermines, it gives us a lot of anxiety because we don't wanna face a problem. We don't wanna be honest with ourselves about a problem. We can't deal with it now. So we tell ourselves some story that it's not as bad as it is. We end up avoiding it and it gives us tremendous, it makes it difficult to sleep at night. But, and Jeff Bezos said something similar. You feel the most anxiety about problems that you're not solving directly. But that all begins with being honest with yourself, right? Like about what the real issue is and that does take some self-awareness. But the great's all kind of agree I think there. - Really, yeah, absolutely. George Haggle, Haggle, stated one of the things we learn from history is that we don't learn from history. Do you believe that's true? - Yeah, I like also, history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. And I think the only way that it can is because people always expect to be different. - Is it ever really different in your opinion? - Yeah, I think every situation's different. What doesn't change is human nature and people are always gonna be deceived and politics is really hard. It's the hardest thing. It's harder than leading a nation. It's harder than leading a company, I believe. But even though maybe we see people at scale just consistently making the same mistakes because it's really hard, we can definitely learn. I think this is something that Nietzsche talks about too. The thing that you most need from history, especially from ancient history, he actually was a big fan of Plutarch. He's a big admirer of the Greeks. He exhorts young men to go replew to work. But what he thinks you're gonna get out of it is more than anything, the belief that humans are capable of more, that you are capable of more by observing people doing great things and feeling that you're part of the same story somehow. The human nature is grander than you imagined. And it's always, you always have more in you than you thought you did. And I think that that's something that we can get from history is the sense of people have suffered, people have done great things. And we're kind of called to it. Really, this is what I think history does for me, the biographies of really amazing accomplished people. It's called something out within yourself. And that's, I think, what Nietzsche really wanted for the young men of his day. - Well, we could talk forever and we've gone over time. - I had a feeling in my mind. You're fascinating, we'll have to do this again because it's been a really good time with you. But how do our viewers find you and how can you help them or where would you encourage them to go? - Yeah, it's been great talking James Perciba. And so if you want to find me, I'm on Twitter at costofglory. The place to start with the podcast is find one of the biography episodes on costofglory. I'm on all platforms. I'm on Spotify, Apple podcast, YouTube. Working on getting on Rumble. But I do, if you're interested in this idea of applied history, I have put together a little course and free email course. There's, I don't have anything to tell you at this point, but I did want to kind of get this idea out to help people dig into the podcast deeper. And what can you learn, especially about becoming a better speaker from history, which is to me, the essence of the art of statesmanship in the classical sense. And so I put together, go to costofglory.com/gift. You can sign up for that and get my take on how history can make you, how it can be a practical skill that can help you succeed in business and life. And so check that one out too. - Well, we'll definitely put the links down below. And we want to thank you for all that you're doing. Thank you for your courage to leave academia and pursue which your heart told you to do. And-- - It's very insightful. - Very insightful. And I think you've had, there's been a stupor because she's normally a lot more verbose than she was today. - I was trying to process everything. I thought, well, it's this whole school system and everything that you said was profound. It was very insightful. And what you're doing is, I think it's great, which is especially for young men or men in general right now is much needed. - Yeah, we could maybe zero in on that topic on the next time we get to that. - Yeah, I wanted to ask him, but I thought you guys went way over time 'cause I wanted to ask what you do for a man in your retreats that you've mentioned. - Yeah, well, and I'm glad you pointed on that because in a way I'm doing this for my younger self that I felt like it didn't have role models and I stumbled and I did stupid things for a long time so in our retreats what we do is we've gone to Rome before we take people around, see the sites of Rome. We're also starting a state side program soon. That'll be more compact, but basically half the day has spent kind of contemplating the great works of the Romans telling the story, the basic give you a basic orientation to the city and its monuments, but then we spend most of our time practicing speech forms that we get from ancient oratory such as there's exercises like praise and blame, building up a thesis, taking down a thesis, speech and character, narration, storytelling is a big part of it, but we basically focus on training and taking, essentially I think the lesson that I got from oratory, the way that people get good is through practices. You see speaking as something you need to do like going to the gym on a regular basis and we're, but you can probably do a lot of this on your own but nobody's ever taught you how to bench press. Nobody's ever taught you how to squat. Like we're giving you those like foundational exercises. This is the deadlift for oratory that you can go do on your own or with your friends. We try to give you those tools that you can start practicing and understand why you're doing it and what the goal is. And we have a hell of a lot of fun. People rave about it, transform it, you meet great guys. So we're trying to do something like that state side as well, but that's what it is so far. - So now we know you're the modern version of Plutarch. So, you know, the only knowledge is applied knowledge. - Really? - You've got to experience it and put it into action. So anyway, we won't keep you any longer, Alex. Hang on just a second as we sign off here, but thank you again. God bless you and your work. And we'll look forward to staying in touch. - Been a great pleasure, guys. Thanks again for your conversation. - Thank you. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)
