Welcome back. It's time for the first episode of Young Hertics Conversations for 2024.

If you've only just joined me this year, you Heretics Conversations for 2024.

If you've only just joined me this year,

you probably have seen that on Tuesdays

I post a regular episode of the show

and that's just me sharing with you some of the wisdom that I feel we can

glean from the Western canon from the traditions of Athens and Jerusalem and

their cultural inheritors.

And then on Fridays I like to talk with people

from friends or folks whose work I've enjoyed out there

on the internet whose work gives me hope for the future.

And in particular, this week,

we've been talking a lot about academia,

a lot about the corruption and the moral and scholarly

rot that's been going on in the Ivy Leagues and elsewhere and you know

that I'm somebody who made his way from the halls of academ from the so-called

ivory tower out into the big wide world and it seemed like a really great time to talk to another buddy of mine who also did that he actually spent more time in professional academia far more time than I did and I want to

ask him a little bit about that and why it is that he turned to something much more immediate

and direct which is the use of ancient texts specifically

Plutarch the great biographer and essayist of the ancient world.

Alex decided that he wanted to share with the world the moral lessons that you can draw from these biographies and essays that Plutarch wrote.

And so what I would like to do with him is sort of think through how we can

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