Welcome back to Young Herritics Conversations. I've been promising that we're going to do some interviews here on our Friday

episodes. We've been on a translation kick for a while with the Words Words

Words series. If you've been following along with that, that is going to carry on. I'm going to keep

doing more of those episodes where I will take your questions about how to translate things from

other languages, how to pick a good English translation if you feel like you don't even know where to start

all sorts of stuff like that so do get your questions in on those topics as well but

another thing I like to do on Fridays is talk with friends and colleagues

and people out in the world that I think are doing interesting hopeful work. And the reason for this this besides the fact that it's fun

for me and I like talking to smart and interesting people is that when we do kind of

the regular Tuesday episodes of the show. We're often

thinking about kind of big questions, trans historical questions if you want to think of

it that way, these kind of abstract ideas or first principles

and looking at the long view of history and all of that, but I'm always trying to insist

that these are not just fun academic parlor games or ways to entertain ourselves

when we're a little bit bored.

These are actually urgent matters, the matters of central urgency for how we live our lives and how we make our choices

both at an individual level and at a political level and so there's no better

guest for me to have on to talk about all of this stuff than John A Bertka or Johnny Bertka as he is known to his friends and interlocutors.

He's the president and the CEO of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute or

ISI which you can go and check out ISI.org for all of the great work that they do

over there but Johnny is on today because he's got a new book about

statesmanship and statesmanship is in some ways the art of taking big ideas and

...