Today I'm talking to Ben Merkel, a former Marine Tank driver who is now a historian and the

president of a college and has written the best book on Alfred the Great, who might be the

best role model for today.

Welcome to another T-Rex talk. My name is Isaac Botkin. And with me today as a guest is Dr. Ben Merkel, who I find fascinating. And I hope that you do as well.

Originally, because Dr. Merkel is the president of a college, we were going to talk about education, higher education,

and educational trends. Then I thought, nah, that's boring. Let's talk about Alfred the Great,

because Dr. Merkel has written a great book on Alfred the Great. And I think, I think, Dr. Merkel,

you bring a lot of both an understanding of combat and military, but also some of the other stuff that Alfred

did.

So I was very excited.

I read a bunch of Alfred the Great books, yours, and did some more research.

But then stuff has been breaking out within the halls of higher education.

So now that's topical again.

Would you rather talk about Alfred the Great or

academia? Or is there a way that we can kind of blend lessons from the two? Yeah, it's an

interesting moment right now. I mean, the whole position of college president, the decision-making

that happens in these kinds of crises is really on the front

page. You know, you see what's going down in Columbia, UCLA, elsewhere. It is really interesting.

And I mean, the way I would connect that to Alford the Great is right now you have the perennial temptation to pay the Dane Gelt,

which is going on in all of our college campuses and an inability to, an inability to read the

moment and understand the consequence of this and the fact that you're choosing

a path that leads to your own destruction.

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