Welcome back to Young Heretics Conversations. This is my interview series, where I get to talk with authors and thinkers who are out there doing interesting things in the world that catch my eye.

Usually when I introduce this series, I explain it as a way of

raising our heads up from the musty old books to make contact with the real world. This is a show

about Western culture, Western civilization, and it's the classical education that you didn't

know you were missing, which means mostly what we do is we read.

This stuff has its own inherent value.

We're working through the Aeneid right now, and it's like every page could take up an entire episode because these texts are so rich.

They have so much to say about eternal truths, ongoing and enduring aspects of human nature, dynamics that never change,

things that we always want to know about, always care about.

But we all live in time and we are creatures in the world and we're supposed to be engaging with current affairs.

So I like to take the stuff that we read and discuss it with people who are out there engaged in what the ancients might have called practical philosophy or practical wisdom.

That is, they're thinking about how to act in the world, what to do politically, what we ought to do as a country, that sort of thing.

And today's guest, Major Daron Spielman, is a perfect guy to talk about that with, because he's written this book called When the Stones Speak, the remarkable discovery of the city of David,

that gives a perfect example of how scholarship and texts and literary analysis are not only incredibly cool,

and they reveal all sorts of awesome stuff about history that you would never think was possible, but they also are urgently relevant to the moment. The excavation of the ancient

city of Jerusalem is something that obviously holds a certain degree of academic interest,

but also is part of this incredibly contested political situation in the Middle East.

And the way that those two things have intersected is

kind of just astonishing, remarkable to me, because on the one hand, it goes all the way back

to the politics of ancient Mesopotamia. On the other hand, that same politics is in many

ways still affecting politics today. Obviously, this is a very fraught

region, very fraught moment for the region. We've talked a fair bit about it recently on the show,

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