Hi everybody this is Scott Sad for the Sad Truth another fantastic guest today the

second I believe classicist the first one tough shoes to follow Victor Davis

Hansen today we have a younger version of Victor Davis Hanson. Today we have a younger version of Victor Davis

Hanson but as charming and as knowledgeable Spencer Clavin, how you doing

sir? Oh I'm doing very well thank you. Thanks for having me. I would be only too honored to follow in.

Dr. Hansen's. Those are big shoes to fit. Okay, let me just very briefly mention a few highlights from your bio.

PhD from Oxford University in ancient Greek literature. That itself, we could spend the whole hour

talking about the ancient world and so on. Editor at the Claremont Institute, author of

Music in ancient Greece, melody, rhythm, and life.

That itself could be a great topic for a conversation.

And your most recent book, just out February 14th via Regnery how to save the West ancient wisdom for five modern crises.

Did I cover the main points?

Do you want to add anything to that bio?

That's plenty to be getting on with to start with yeah

absolutely that's great. Okay so let's start with probably a question that you

have asked many times so there are five crises, crisis of meaning, crisis of reality, religion,

regime, body. Why did you pick these five crises as opposed to other ones?

What are some ones that you might have considered that you left out?

So in psychology we talk about a factor analysis, right?

You take a whole bunch of variables and then you distill them to a fewer set that still captures the phenomenon.

So there are many more crises in these five, why these five in particular.

Yeah, that's a great way of putting it and I think that's actually one major advantage of the texts of the Western canon as they help us to do that very kind of analysis.

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