In this episode Dr. Franklin Annis, a military philosopher, historian, and educational theorist explores historical military practices, the importance of self-development, and the role of physical training. Dr. Annis shares insights about his upcoming book on Alden Partridge, a significant figure in American educational history, and the legacy of military training and self-reliance. The conversation also touches on the flaws in current academic systems, the necessity of practical education, and the relevance of historical stoicism and philosophy in modern times.
Episode Highlights:
05:08 The Legacy of Captain Alden Partridge
12:29 The Importance of Practical Education
36:01 The Role and Power of the Militia
40:32 Emerson’s Critique of Academia
41:17 The Sin of Slavery and Its Compromises
42:35 The Decline of Academic Integrity
Franklin C. Annis is a researcher in the field of military education. He holds a Doctorate in Education (EdD) from Northcentral University. He created the “Evolving Warfighter” YouTube channel to share his research on Military Self-Development. Dr. Annis is a veteran of Operational Iraqi Freedom.
Learn more about Dr. Annis here: www.YouTube.com/TheEvolvingWarfighter
Read the book: Here
Episode Transcript:
00:45
Acta Non Verba is a Latin phrase that means actions, not words. If you want to know what somebody truly believed, don’t listen to their words. Instead, observe their actions. I’m Marcus Aurelius Anderson, and my guest today truly embodies that phrase. Dr. Franklin C. Annis is a military philosopher, historian, and educational theorist. He’s internationally published in military journals, advancing the concepts of self-development and military philosophy. He has.
01:13
an incredible book that will be coming out next year, which we may allude to a little bit about the life and works of Alden Partridge. And thank you for being on today, Doctor. I appreciate your time and your expertise. Marching with the Spartans is kind of mentality. I remember my squad leader telling me, he says, everything that we do today in the military in a combat capacity is based on what the Spartans were doing. And very close. You probably could say what the hoplites were doing. Right, right.
01:42
include Athens in there. But yeah, there’s not a lot difference between it’s like, well, maybe our range weapons got a little bam, far more range now, but you still got to close with and destroy the enemy, you still got to carry your equipment into the field. That’s it. You have to be able to carry and that’s what they were saying. He was saying that the amount of weight that we can normally bear as a infantryman or as a hoplite is based on what they were figuring out then the amount of distance that we could cover and be combat effective to a target was based on then
02:11
Even this idea of let’s make a big box in the middle of this territory and just defend it. Like that’s, there’s not a whole lot of complexity, right? There’s some fascinating aspects of that. So actually that will be in the second book project that I have about 90% done about a book on rock marching. So Livy, which is a very famous Roman scholar, he records the distance, the test for Roman soldiers, which is like 12 Roman hours, which is like eight.
02:40
8.7 hours. But it’s interesting that if you take a look at the weight they carried, the distance they traveled, it works out that a Roman soldier will march to about 430 calories expenditure per hour. And we did, the US Army did massive amounts of tests in the 1970s trying to figure out like weight loads and how fast you can push soldiers like nutrition calories. And then the irony is, you know, they come out with this recommendation, oh, you can push soldiers so they’re
03:09
capable, they still have a mental reserve, right? So it’s not like, it’s not like running a marathon, like we only can march soldiers fast enough to move, but they have to be have the intellectual capability to respond. So they can’t burn all their energy reserves. So it’s, it’s not as fast as you can march, but they come back out and say, Oh, it’s 430 calories per hour. It’s like, Oh, really? So we knew this, like thousands of years. There’s some really interesting aspects of that too, because
03:40
In World War I, or sorry, going back slightly further, so the, I guess it was the Napoleonic Wars, the militaries of the world set that the weight carried of an individual soldier, the maximum should be about 80 pounds. And it also comes from Roman literature of Scipio Africanus, which was a great famous leader, basically found one legion that was misbehaving.
04:10
a tremendous load to carry around and then, which was a punishment load, it was never supposed to be 80 pounds. But whatever, future military historians looked at it and said, well, Scipio said it, then that’s the weight they should be carrying. And then later on, whatever, post-401, they’re like, hey, we went back and like the normal fighting loads was like 45 pounds, this whole 80 thing is like not what you’re supposed to be doing. So yeah. Yeah, but Scipio Afrikanis, he beat Hannibal. We had to listen to what you said.
04:39
So that gives him a lot of gravity in that. And to your point, you know, the average soldier in the U S army is probably around 170 pounds if he’s in a combat arms capacity. So around, so around a 50% rock march capacity is right around that amount. So, um, I guess we’re, we’re seeing all these semantics to come to full circle to say, yeah, the Romans and the Spartans and the Athenians may have had a thing or two correct when it was all said and done since they’ve been doing it.
05:08
You know, that makes for a perfect segue into my book. So Captain Alden Partridge, which was arguably the most influential, uh, educational theorist in American history, has kind of been lost and abandoned in time. He’s kind of a man that you could, you could legitimately claim that he was kind of America’s Da Vinci, um, kind of the 1820s time period. Uh, he, whatever advanced mathematics, he was a
05:37
Well, he was a military engineer. He was a surveyor. He would climb the, to mountain tops, the measure of the elevation of mountain ranges in the newly reformed Republic. He was the first ballistic scientist. Uh, he was the first scholar that identified that you need physical fitness training and education. Uh, he’s the first, uh, individual in the United States that has recorded, um, incidences of him.
06:04
doing what we now would term special education. He established the first private military school in the United States. He was the first to advocate for land-grant colleges, which later, not quite 20 years later, Morell, Justin Morell was able to pass during the American Civil War, to establish the land-grant colleges. He was an incredible advocate of educating young women. That would have been like 20 years in advance.
06:34
the first wave feminism and with all this said and done, everyone should be saying at this point, like why, why don’t remember this guy? And there’s a couple of reasons why. And the first one was he was the third superintendent of West Point and he was actually the first one to hold the position when the position was removed from the chief of the Corps of Engineers. So he was the first purer.
07:02
superintendent of West Point. But when he was there, he was realizing that the ideals that the American founding fathers left to have our country essentially defended primarily through militia and not through a standing army weren’t being achieved. So he started advocating for the expansion of the United States Military Academy at West Point. So he proposed that two other academies to be established.
07:31
And at that time, the amount of scholarship or professional soldiers would have been reduced to about 40% of the cadets and about 60% of the students there would come in as cadets. They paid their own way and then they returned back the civilian life to be members of the militia and then be civil engineers and build bridges and roads across the country.
07:58
kind of during that time period, we had the war of 1812, kind of our most powerful political leaders. So it would have been James Monroe, our president at the time, kind of looked towards Europe as the model of kind of the future of military professionalism. So at the time, even Napoleon had been defeated, there was a perception that the Napoleon army was the best thing out there. So instead of…
08:25
embracing Partridge’s idea of this kind of militia-based American model of professionalism. There was a desire to import the French model. And essentially, out of that conflict, he was removed. And Partridge went and established what was at the time the American Literary Scientific and Military Academy to essentially do what he planned to do with West Point all on his own as a civilian institution.
08:54
And when he managed to do that, he proved that basically West Point wasn’t needed. And he began arguing that West Point wasn’t constitutional, which even Thomas Jefferson was when he was a vice president specifically, noted that there’s no enumerated power for the U S government to have a military academy because we only raise armies in a time of war and we should call them out of the militia. Now.
09:22
You could argue and say we could have established a naval academy because the constitution says that you are to build and maintain a navy. It makes sense if you look at our country, our biggest threat is someone showing up with warships on our borders. It’s not someone marching an army from Canada or Mexico, which you could argue now there may be a threat. Because of that, the military historians kind of, well, they weren’t kind of.
09:51
They were very biased. So the first historians that went back, or first graduates of West Point that went back and wrote the history of West Point basically attempted to write Partridge out of the history books. So none of his advancements in professionalizing West Point was a credit to him. So they were kind of pushed off on his replacement. So credit was shifted away from him. And then those individuals and hoping to maintain their own universities were really harsh on the memory of Partridge.
10:21
And then we also have the academic community that the Morrell Land Grant Act, as the interpretation of it originally envisioned by Partridge was people would study across a much, much broader scope of academic fields and it would include military training. Partridge wasn’t trying to establish military academies to
10:48
who makes soldiers, he was trying to make military academies to make militia men. So it’s a critical part of any member of a republic to be able to defend the republic. Or just even more importantly, if you’re a member of the republic and you have a chance to vote, you should understand kind of the hell that is war, because when you cast your vote, that should be one of the things that you’re thinking of.
11:15
If I vote for the wrong individual, I’m going to be called the war or I may die or maybe my sons or a member of the larger community. So like having that knowledge and that experience really makes people think like, you know, hey, when I cast a vote, it matters. And it’s not just romantic, right? So like we were attacked 9-11, right? Everyone rushed to join the military. And I think that.
11:44
In times of kind of military conflict, if you don’t have knowledge in your society of what warfare really is, you can get this fever among young men that they over romanticize it where Partridge would pull young boys into this kind of training academy. He would physically harden them to the point where they could walk or march 40 miles in a day.
12:08
which you’re a soldier. Yeah. That’s just an insane amount. So most soldiers today are tested on the ability to walk like 12 miles. If you’re infantry, you might walk 20 miles in training. But the idea that these young men could march consistently 40 miles a day is. Is extreme. And that’s one of the reasons why the book is named what it is. So Partridge intended that college, when you went to college, you would learn about agriculture, you would learn some practical skills, you’d
12:37
about the constitution. You would learn about foreign relationships or foreign relations. You would understand how trade agreements work. You would study mathematics. He was a big engineer, so he thought everyone needed to be engineers. But in whatever that period of time, it made sense that everyone should know how to build their own house or build bridges as America was expanding. But the list went on. Everyone needed to know history. Everyone needed to know philosophy.
13:06
Everyone needed to know science and it was much, much broad. And if you look at the Morrell Land Grant Act and how it lists out kind of subjects, it lists out a number of subjects, kind of mechanical arts, agriculture, and then it says and military tactics. Now how Partridge originally assembled that construct, he meant that every student would go across. And now we live in the day where…
13:35
land-grant colleges says, oh, that needs to teach agriculture. So we have a agricultural major and only agricultural majors learn about agriculture. We have, you know, a mechanical arts or engineering, only engineers learn here and this and military tactics really isn’t needed. So we might have an ROTC or well, they have to have an ROTC program, but it’s totally optional. Like you never have to participate. So it’s a, it was a huge shift.
14:05
away from the original intent. And I think just because of the temperamental bias, there’s kind of some beautiful passages that Norwood Rich University came out with. But there seems to be this thought among academics that if you just stop teaching people how to fight war, they would just forget about it and they would never fight again. So like the worst thing you could do is ever teach a young man how to fight.
14:32
So they don’t see it as like defensive. It’s like, oh, you are perpetuating this evil mankind. And it’s like, well, someone else is perpetuating it. So if I don’t teach my son how to fight, then he’s going to get punched in the face by the guy who did teach his son how to fight. And there’s some really beautiful passage from Norwich University when there was kind of some anti-war flyers passed around and they related it to saying, if you believe that the study of military.
15:00
or ROTC is like your desire for war, then you misunderstand the profession because when we ever look at a doctor and say, hey, you’re studying medicine because you enjoy pain and suffering and sickness. It’s like no one would ever say that a doctor goes into medicine to spread these things. So like the real intent of military academy is that their graduates hate war by the time they get out. But they…
15:24
they know the brutality of sleeping on the ground and walking 40 miles a day and being exhausted and knowing that they would be cannon fodder and the brutal injuries that would come out of it. So if there was an attack or a spark or some incidents or why we should be called the war, you would have a whole bunch of people saying, you know, this is really not a good idea or really to the point of war. Can we try a little more diplomacy? Or you get vice versa. Like, okay, if it’s really time to go to war, then…
15:53
We pull all the nation out and anyone 18 to 45, they can carry a weapon. We go do our business and then we get them home. I think that’s a great testament to that. And I think that, like you said, Partridge was trying to create essentially what? Well-rounded leaders and civilians. The Spartan said every citizen is a soldier. And to your point also, there’s a quote by Thomas Sowell. He says,
16:18
It’s hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay zero price for being wrong. And, um, you’re smiling because you understand the, the truth of that. And again, I’ve never seen, I’ve never met a pacifist. I’ve met people that claim that they’re pacifist, but what they actually are cowards. And they never ever took the time to even fathom the capacity of fear.
16:48
or the necessity of having a martial skill set because they’ve never been in this situation. They’ve never seen what violence looks like. They never experienced it. They never, again, they’ve never heard gunfire. They’ve never been in violent situations. And because of that, you mentioned the romanticized notion of young men when it comes to war. They have a romanticized notion of what peace is. And the reality is peace is something that has to happen after war, after you fought, after you survived. Because the people that are dead,
17:15
They find peace, but that’s not exactly what we’re looking for. Right. That’s a different sort of piece. So I I’m being a little bit, you know, antagonistic about this, but if I have to say in an adversarial way to get people’s attention, then that’s the truth. Throughout history, we have seen so many tyrants that say, listen, this is a useful fallacy to say, you know, once we do this or once we take your rights, you’ll get it back, or once we’ve done this thing and once you’ve capitulated to this point, we’ll let you do whatever you need to do, but the reality is.
17:46
violence or the capacity to be a deterrent of violence by having the capacity to be violent has stopped and protected more nations than anything else has throughout human history. And those that have thought differently have been attacked by those that understand because there’s always going to be one out of 100 people that see, hey, I could get advantage here. Hey, these people aren’t watching this side. Hey, these people are very susceptible here. And then when you scale that into hundreds of thousands of people.
18:14
And now they organize around this ideal of what can we get away with? Where are the advantages? How can we blindside or ambush these people? That becomes something that once it starts to scale and once you start putting, again, all these other things into it to not do so is you do it at your, it’s folly. So there’s an interesting thing to note that there is two kind of great, great models of antiquity in Greece. So you had it.
18:39
Sparta and you’re at Athens and the African American founding fathers deeply love Sparta and there is something called the Spartan Mirage, which was hilarious because it’s a mirage itself. So people claim that oh people only think that Sparta is greater because Sparta was like this warrior culture But if you look at the facts and then count the number of battles Sparta didn’t actually win any more wars than than Athens, so why would you love Sparta but the
19:08
So that was like the re-berg from some modern scholars came out kind of 1970s. But the whole area is like the founding fathers knew more about Sparta than in Athens, than most typical Americans today. So the thing that they didn’t know that they didn’t win ultimately in history is kind of laughable. But the difference is, and I don’t know if you’ve ever read it, but I would encourage everybody to go read the Polti of the last of the Bonians. And it’s…
19:37
recorded by Xenophon, but it’s the Constitution of the Spartans. The Spartans did things and structured their government in an attempt to drive moral virtue in a way that no other country has ever done it. And you probably could laugh about that because whatever, Sparta was really funded based on slavery and our whole notions of modern goodness kind of get in there and mix up things. But in Sparta, it was a requirement that you self-develop.
20:05
So if you didn’t work on improving yourself, you could be found guilty of a crime. Like, like, isn’t that insane? Like if you didn’t make yourself a better thinker or a better fighter, you could be thrown, you know, punished for it. Sparta changed its currency to basically like pig iron or wrought iron. And the currency was made so unwieldy that it took like a wagon to move, essentially quantities of it, the purchase things.
20:34
By doing so, they’ve lost the ability to essentially show off their wealth because you couldn’t move around enough of this iron to buy wealthier trinkets. Because they did that, all the kind of brick or brach or jewelry sellers or all this kind of traveling merchants that would go through the Peloponnesian area knew that don’t go to Spartacus, they don’t have gold coins. They’re going to try to give you whatever, 300 pounds.
21:02
of iron and payment for your necklace and like no merchant wants to carry that away. So the Spartans had kind of strict requirements on attire. It really like level set their, at least their elite, like their citizenry basically all wore the same thing. They all ate the same food. They all kind of had the same purpose. Wealth couldn’t corrupt those individuals in the way that we have in our society now.
21:32
Now I can say that kind of soldiers throughout history have looked back and, and towards Sparta because it really goes ties into actually a step back. So Xenophon, the guy who records Spartan history, cause Sparta doesn’t, we don’t have any surviving records written by actual Spartans. So we don’t know if they didn’t write or if it’s just the fact that other people recorded for them. But Xenophon who wrote.
22:01
down these Spartan passages and captured a lot of Sparta. He was a very famous Athenian general himself. They exiled him into Sparta. We believe that Xenophon’s apology of Socrates, which is very different from Plato’s, was the actual book that Zeno found and read that got him inspired to read into philosophy. So, Xenophon more than likely sparked what
22:29
we now think of the ideas of the founder of Stoic philosophy. So that’s why Xenophon is sometimes called a proto-Stoic, because he carries a lot of the ideas of the Stoic forward. It’s beautiful that the Stoics realized that we use a ton of stuff in our lives because we have it and we’ve been given it. And especially now in the 21st century, we’ve collected so much stuff in terms of ease and mechanical whatever, just advancements in modernity.
22:59
that we have this whole collection of garbage really around us, electric can openers or whatever. We have refrigerators. We have whatever. I have a mini van and then you have computers and whatever, smartphones, this and that. And we very rarely stop to think like, hey, I don’t need a smart watch or I really don’t need a watch at all. In most cases, do I need a cell phone or do I just meet people at certain times?
23:28
We’ve been using things and those things have cost us to bear those things one way or another, whether it’s time or for comfort or not allowing ourselves to have the ability to go to other things. Kind of the Americans philosopher Thoreau famously said the stuff that we own, own us. But the stoic is really good at like trying to figure out what was necessary in life and what wasn’t necessary.
23:55
And that’s why, one of the reasons why Stoics is so popular with the military, because it gets back to the fact, like, if you’re willing to be a little bit colder at night, it’s not going to kill you, right? We’re not talking about like not having cold weather equipment, but if you’re willing to be slightly colder and you can leave that extra three pound sleeping bag back at the barracks, and you save yourself so many calories per hour, and that will allow you to think faster than your enemy, so like maybe it’s
24:22
Okay to be slightly hungry or slightly tired or slightly cold because I’m what I’m buying with the discomfort is like capacity or ability to live in greatness. But unless I have someone to challenge me, I would never think as a young soldier, like, oh, if the army issues me the sleeping bags, then I should use the whole entire system. The entire sleep system. I have to use all of it. I have to bring the baby sack just in case. There’s some interesting studies in the Marshall.
24:51
slam. So SLA Marshall wrote a book called The Soldier’s Load. He talked in World War II that kind of what we think of as Special Forces units, the airborne units, when they hit the ground, they had a culture that allowed them to dump everything they didn’t need. So they dropped whatever gas masks and this and that. Yeah. Yeah. So they left behind a tremendous amount of equipment and moved super light and super fast and were highly successful. But the regular infantry, they had this culture of if it was issued to me, then
25:21
financial responsible for it. So whether or not I used it or not, I had to carry it. And then you can look at the stupidity of… We actually sent men to land on Omaha Beach with 80-pound rucksacks. And some of that was stationary. They each had three cartons of cigarettes. They each had three days of food, even though it was tested later and found that less than… I think the average soldier ate less than that.
25:47
I think it’s less than a pound of food the first day because they were so terrified, right? Yeah, of course. So like we’ve weighed down soldiers so much because we haven’t stepped back and said, do we, you know, just because it exists, do we really need it? Partridge, when he was building his education model, I think he was a brilliant man because he went back and he designed like, essentially he wanted, number one, his college students to live like soldiers. So have the experience of stripping down your life.
26:16
to the absolute bare minimum and realize that, hey, I’m pretty comfortable with the absolute bare minimum. And even like the design of his uniforms were very, very simple compared to kind of the uniforms of everyone else in the day. He very much modeled his university as kind of the American agoghi. And this is insane. He could offer some people degrees.
26:42
And he allowed people to move as fast as through their education as they’re actually able to basically demonstrate their competency But he could get students through college on as little as a little under nine grand or at most $49,000 for basically a full full education And then you look at the modern kind of Education system, especially with the advent of the federal student loan program
27:13
every college knows the exact amount that the federal government backs the student for. So they’re going to set their tuition rate to harvest as much of that as possible. And then it develops this vicious cycle because then Congress recognizes it’s not enough money, so they’ll raise the limit on a loan and the colleges can raise the tuition. But it’s even worse in the fact that since
27:38
that system’s going on, the only way to ensure that you get the money as a college is you keep buying more luxury. So I remember in like, it was 1998 when I walked on the University of Nebraska for my first year of college. I remember walking into the gym and it was like iron, you know, iron bench press weights, you know, black bench press and the headrest was duct taped up.
28:03
And that was, you know, that was like the completely normal experience. Like the walls were just cinder block walls painted white. Like it wasn’t decorated. It was just a gym. Now, if you walk back on college university, you’re going to see like their equipment is branded with their school logo. If they’re going to be colorful, it’s going to have the state of the art cardio machines, all this extra stuff. And you’re like, well, if you’re whatever 19 years old, you really need a logo on your weight set, you know.
28:33
It’s like, how much are we just indebting people in our society for useless luxury? And we’re absolutely tearing them down. So the beauty of Partridge’s model is he made far more practical men that knew that they didn’t need much in life, which really sprang them. As soon as they walked out of their colleges, they were living simply. They understood the bare minimum that they needed. They could invest in the businesses. They could build.
29:02
They weren’t shackled by debt. They were doing great and wonderful things. And now you look at the other side as we’re graduating students today with no practical knowledge, really barely enough capability to get jobs. And in some cases we’re making graduates that are actually harmful for industries. They are absolutely shackled with debt to the point where they’re gonna not have the ability in their life to whatever pay off their.
29:29
their debt and then buy a house. They have no capability of really building wealth and building the American dream because that’s all being siphoned off by this college model, this industrial machine. And it’s one of the several reasons that we absolutely need to go back and take a look at Partridge’s ideas and be mindful. And yeah, there’s so many things.
29:56
It’s, and it’s so sad as you say, because this is the next bubble. This is the next financial bubble is what’s going on with all these things. And as you say, if you’re telling them exactly how much, again, if the government continues to do this, then they’re going to match that and they’re going to ride this gravy train as long as they can. Oh, and now, and now you and I as, as young men, what were you always told? More education, get more education, go to school, do these things. Only this generation I believe understands finally.
30:26
that because some of them are just saying, I don’t even know if I want to go to college. And back in the day, if you said that, it was like, well, what are you a slacker? I mean, no, that’s what we thought. We thought that this is this unwashed, this concrete bound barbarian, but actually it’s more of this idea that today, if they have an inkling of what they are creatively drawn to or what lights a fire in them, or even going to a tech school, which is sometimes covered by
30:54
a local tuition or you can get a scholarship where you literally get to live that American dream now where you can walk out without being shackled by $100,000 of debt of stuff that’s just superfluous path that’s not going to serve you. There’s so many problems there. It reminds me, now I can’t, I wish I had the quote in front of me. It’s a Booker T. Washington, a man that was born a slave and he would go on the found the Ski Institute.
31:20
But he essentially asserted that no society will ever thrive until we realize that there’s as much dignity as plowing a field as in writing a poem. And his biggest concern, especially watching kind of the liberation of the slaves and the restoration of the rights to African Americans, was that he saw too many kind of freed African Americans kind of racing to the city and trying to live on their wits alone.
31:46
So only intellectual professions were endorsed, only intellectual professions were seen as desirable or high-profiting, where in reality, it’s great to have those higher order academic fields. And I believe that everyone should have, right? Everyone should have true philosophy and been introduced with logic and reason, and everyone should study the history and everyone should study the humanities and writing and great literature, but everyone also should know how to have a big garden.
32:16
like grow your own food. Like everyone should have a basic understanding of mechanics that go fix the basic problems with your car. Everyone needs to understand like there’s no shame and whatever, digging a ditch if it’s what’s needed for your community and there’s no moral advantage to being the guy, whatever, a CEO versus a ditch digger. There’s like, you know, we’re all of equal worth and we need.
32:44
various different things that happen in our society and when we start demonizing the physical aspects of work, I think we do such disservice to just this citizen because every citizen to the extent possible should be self-helping. They should be self-reliant. That’s not to say you know, that’s not to say that you should grow all your food and you know.
33:12
you shouldn’t make everything for yourself, but you should have the knowledge that if you know push came to shove you could go out there and do that. And people don’t understand and kind of a really interesting aspect of kind of the American Transcendental movement kind of pushing self-reliance so hard is the more self-reliant you become the more you can become moral with your actions. So the less I’m dependent on my community,
33:39
for survival, the more I have the ability to tell my community that they’re doing something wrong or the more I have the ability to say, hey, I don’t morally agree with this activity, so I’m not going to participate in it. And if we all had more kind of self-reliance, right, self-ability, we could truly shape society in ways to say, hey, I don’t agree with this or I don’t agree with this practice. I’m not stuck that I have to buy this product or engage in the service.
34:09
And I’m quite sure even in the stoic community today, you see a number of whatever vegan stoics that are totally against kind of factory farming. And, you know, if we were all more self reliant, well, maybe we could, you know, wanted to eat meat, we can grow the chickens in the backyard, or we can truly find the small farmer that ethically treats animals and buy from the small farmer. We don’t have to go to the grocery store and it’s just little modification that can really breed.
34:39
true liberty and independence. And that might be one of the reasons why culturally we’ve shifted away from those skills because it’s a lot easier for the control people when they don’t have the ability to be self-sufficient and they become more dependent on politicians and lawyers and the government. Yeah, the government. So, which is a shame because we were never set up to be that way. No, the constitution was developed to limit the power of government, not to go the other direction. And
35:07
As you and I are speaking, hurricanes have been hitting the East Coast, right? And so what do we see? We don’t see people with PhDs out there. We don’t have people that are asking this person if they have a qualification. The people that are coming together are the community. The people that are coming together are people that are willing to say, listen, I’m a blue collar worker and I have a generator. How can I help? I have equipment. How can I help? This is what it takes. And this is why that self-reliance is key. If you’re hoping that the government will come and save you.
35:38
that’s not going to work. And I know that that may be something that aggravates people. But the reality is, if you have that independence, or if you build that community around you, you never have to worry about those things happening, even if there is a disaster. Well, it’s really fascinating. Like if we could go back into the American kind of revolutionary world and talk to the founding fathers and understand the construct of the militia. But really, we required men, we carried on kind of this England English yeomanry tradition. So
36:07
Sunday afternoons, you would go off and drill with the militia. So the English would practice longbows, but we would whatever practice of muskets or do whatever. And then six days a year, the militia would assemble. So it would be any man between 18 and 45 that had good moral reputation. If for some reason you weren’t allowed in the militia or refused, then your charge or your tax would be paying the equivalent of what you would get paid as a militia man. But.
36:36
The power of that militia is whatever a hurricane comes through. And it would be all the men of that community could gather. They all knew each other. They all understood kind of how to work together as a team. They could go out and solve problems and that could be anything from whatever putting down insurrections, repelling invasions, taking care of whatever the natural disasters that hit their community. And I, what I think that people don’t understand is the militia actually gets a veto too. Like
37:05
We have a standing army now that, you know, the government could order the soldiers to go do this and that. And we can say there’s obviously legal orders and illegal orders. But the militia, like if there was a riot in the town and the militia guy called out, but if that riot was justified, the militia would just not show up. So it was a way of actually having political change and true democracy at the lower levels.
37:31
then now we would bring in kind of this foreign community and drop it down and suppress it. And maybe we’re suppressing something that should have occurred because it was just, but we don’t perceive it that way. So I think there’s a lot of utility in shifting back towards a militia model and getting rid of our huge massive standing army that we can’t afford and it’s killing us with national debt. And if nothing else, we actually need to know who our neighbors are, because I think…
37:58
a huge problem that we’re facing in societies. We’re just not interacting in the way, and especially we’re not interacting in a way that we truly help ourselves or understand our community or have an investment in our fellow man. Yeah, it’s important for us to build those communities because those communities are a direct representation of who we are as a species and who we can become. And back to this notion of academia, you know, there’s,
38:25
So many people talk about theoreticals and so many things, so many people talk about the way that they write or they have rhetoric or they speak in a way that is emotive with this certain sorts of languages. But there was a quote that you said that I’ve loved. Can you say what that is and then continue to expand on that because when you said it to me, it really resonated. So the quote comes from, I guess it’s a term.
38:52
It comes from Ralph Waldo Emerson. It’s the treachery of scholars. So it’s kind of interesting because Alden Partridge and Emerson probably knew of each other. They were on very similar speaking circuits in New England. And Emerson himself was kind of a pacifist, or maybe we could say he was an academic. And most people in college may have been introduced to Emerson’s work, the American scholar.
39:21
But about nine years after Partridge’s death, and so 1863, in the heart of the American Civil War, Emerson gives a speech called the American Man of Letters, or Man of Letters, depending on how it was published. So he gave it at Dartmouth and then Waterbury College. And in this speech, he, he captures most of Partridge’s education theory in it. And I love this passage, and I’ll read it to you.
39:51
And this is what Emerson truly thought that every educated or college educated Americans should be. So it’s let the American scholars have it be formed and all his economies heroic, no spoiled child, no drone, no epicure, but a stoic, formidable, athletic, knowing how to be poor, loving labor, and not flogging his wit with tobacco or wine, treasuring his youth.
40:19
I wish the young man to be armed and a complete man, no helpless angel to be slapped in the face, but a man dipped in the sticks of human experience and made invulnerable so. Self-helping. So that was at one time Emerson’s idea of what an American college graduate should be. In that speech, Emerson basically says, we were led astray in America. So we had kind of the American founding fathers, obviously.
40:49
were facing huge threats at the establishment when they had to write the American Constitution. Even before that, the Articles of Confederacy, brand new fledgling nation, somehow defeated the most powerful military in the world.
41:04
And kind of, as you spoke earlier, kind of peace is just kind of the in between between wars. So the American founders are like, oh shit, you know, England is coming back. So we got to, we got to get our act together. They’re coming back. It’s just quite a way. So a series of, series of compromises were made in the articles of Confederacy and the American constitution, namely slavery. Um, really interesting conversations in there about many of the founding fathers wanted slavery abandoned. And then there’s a lot of history in there too.
41:34
So you had the Haitian genocide where the Haitian slaves revolted and killed every white person on the island of Haiti. So there was huge fears like, hey, we have the sin of slavery. We’re not quite sure how to end it because we think we’re all going to be killed. It’s a terrible situation. We really don’t know how to get out of it. There were some attempts to possibly ship all the slaves back to Africa. There were several attempts to do that.
41:58
economically, it just didn’t work out. Slaves were being born faster. The South wasn’t going to let go of their slaves because economics, unlike England, America didn’t offer to buy the slaves. That might have been the saving grace of America if the American government bought all the slaves. That could have been the solution to the problem. But anyway, we had a number of compromises. And then as time drifted between the American
42:28
We saw kind of the military we saw academia. We saw politicians abandon some core principles. So we stopped Especially academics stopped supporting the idea of liberty. So they started speaking against kind of the notion of natural rights We see academics speak against capitalism and freedom. We see them stop or not being kind of
42:53
Constant thorn on our side saying hey, we still have this sin of slavery. We still need to figure it out So yeah, some academics endorsing slavery So in this kind of mess Emerson basically says hey, it’s It’s not the army’s fault that we’re not going to win the army and the army’s having all these difficulties fighting in your Confederacy Especially first few years the American Civil War did not go well for Union forces did not go well
43:22
But he basically laid the blame at the foot of academia saying, hey, you have been false. You are not. You are not being the virtue driven men of letters. You’re not teaching the skills required. You know, you develop this notion that whatever educated men didn’t need the ability to fight or weren’t trained. You thought that whatever your college students didn’t need to be physically prepared, that they didn’t need to, you know, know how to work.
43:52
in the fields and have that capability. You decided that your students never needed to learn how to live poor or live within the budget. You didn’t enforce temperance on your students. So now your students drink and smoke tobacco and you say nothing about it. Your students aren’t time sensitive. They’re kind of wasting their day. They’re being lazy and slothful because they have the money to do so. You’re not.
44:22
and pressing upon them on the stoic virtues that, hey, you only have today, you’re not guaranteed tomorrow. So Emerson basically lays it on the feet of academia, like, hey, of all people, you should have been kind of that driving force. You know, both the academia and the clergy, like our church leaders, you should have always been driving us to kind of be a more moral nation and better.
44:50
and you stopped doing that because it was just simply more profitable not to. And there’s that conversation right now today. We have seen an acceleration in our colleges of a kind of narrowing of temperamental proclivities among our college professors. So we have shifted from colleges kind of being a place where you protect kind of the grumpiest.
45:18
most genius men that really argue with each other in society, because that’s kind of in the Middle Ages, that’s where you save the genius that would have been stoned if he was at some job site because he was too controversial. Instead of working together to do some great wonderful things, now we’re kind of prioritizing agreement or uniformity in our colleges so that the previous men that would have been kind of the rebels that would have demanded different things in society have been.
45:45
Well, kind of pushed out of academia. They might be in think tanks or they’re somewhere else in society, but we’re, we’re seeing a narrowing of ideas or what is allowed to be discussed in academia in a very, very scary way. And, uh, I think you bring up Thomas so well when he says like, Hey, the next time your college college talks about diversity or importance of diversity, ask him how many Republicans are in their humanities. I mean, he.
46:12
That’s a great example, right? Because how many people are, because what you’re talking about, you know, around that, that time of the civil war was back then you had both sides of academia. It was this yin and yang. It was very much this iron sharpening iron. And we saw how even a small compromise back then can affect society for 20 years, let alone when there is just an echo chamber, let alone when all it is, is political correctness, let alone when it’s everybody that’s saying, listen, if I don’t agree with you, what you say is hate speech.
46:41
And if you don’t agree with what I say, then you’re a bigot. There are so many of these things that come into it where it’s like, listen, the whole idea of academia allegedly was to question the status quo, to at least look on the other side, to at least have the capacity to straw man an argument and talk logically, but yet that’s the furthest thing from the truth today. Well, and I think you bring it up. Like the one thing I actually expect from an academic is honesty. So.
47:09
And I run into kind of this conversation every once in a while. Like, I don’t mind if people like look at ancient stoicism and then try to push stoicism through a Mark six lens. If you’re saying this is what I’m doing. Or some other, like Gail Yann or whatever, you pick the name of philosophy. How do you ever really want to twist kind of ancient stoicism to the modern reality? It’s like, that’s fine. You have to be.
47:34
transparent that you’re doing with it. So if you’re talking about ancient stoicism and then using an example from whatever, you could use any size of spectrum. If you’re using the right wing kind of modern notion or the left wing modern notion, like you have to be transparent that this is not exactly ancient stoicism and they would not have understood these things and that we’re only trying to kind of manipulate ancient stoic techniques through these new features. So
48:04
I could name it Black Lives Matter or what would be the other side of the house. I don’t know. Name a right-wing militia group, whatever, peacekeepers or whatever else. If you’re using those examples, we have to be honest that like, hey, the ancient Stoics don’t know these movements and they more than likely have some type of conflict with them so that we can’t perfectly template and say, oh, this is what the ancient Stoics would say on our modern problems. But.
48:31
I see this growing trend inside academia, either take kind of what we, I think we all agree like Marcus Aurelius was beautiful. So you take Marcus Aurelius and then you spin them for a political purpose. Then you hide or you don’t discuss anything that would contradict your opinion of your modern belief or whatever message you’re trying to send it and you package it as like, this is the truth about Stoicism.
49:01
that’s just harmful for everyone that’s evolved because number one, like, you know, I’m, you know, I’ll actually sit down. I can spar back and forth with a Marxist about stoicism, you know, let’s lay out our philosophies and actually have that conversation. Maybe, you know, we’ll drive things forward. And, you know, Marx, I would say he was a terrible human being and he had terrible philosophy and he had made a whole bunch of assertions and never came to light. But like, there are slivers of truth in Marx, right?
49:30
It’s like a broken watch is correct. No, it’s like, yeah, as long as it’s not a smart watch, I should say. So, you know, there are some valid points that Mark’s brought up. So, you know, we could have that discussion if we lay out the cards on the table. We could actually have that, that great academic discussion and really argue to the point where, you know, maybe there’s two different opinions and we can’t resolve it or, Hey, maybe, you know, people cross over their lines and say, okay, I’m going to change my philosophy. And.
50:00
will move forward, but if you’re hiding truth and you’re being deceptive, then people buy into ideas and then they don’t understand how they relate to other ideas and they really get in vacuum chambers. And then the only way that you keep that, that echo chamber alive is then you have to teach them to be hostile to new ideas because you can’t allow anyone to question what you’re teaching because it won’t stand up and then we are developing.
50:28
Basically college students that like Emerson said, we are developing more violence into our culture until we make a civil war or some type of huge conflict inevitable because we are not being honest with our words and not being truthful and supporting the cause of liberty. And it’s tragic to see that, yeah, that even the big names that you see, especially in the field of stillness, now you can pick out and say like, oh,
50:56
It’s like, why did they say that? Or why didn’t they use this example where just like sometimes it’s like, this is just blatantly wrong. This is a lie. And, you know, it’s like how many people will recognize that as a lie. Or even if someone attempts to correct that, do they even have a big enough platform that if the, you know, the individual with the multimillion dollar or multimillion follower keeps pushing out this corrupted message, if the guy who
51:25
gets read by 200 people, is that enough to trigger a cause or reset? Or is it just the perpetuation of this false idea moving forward? Yeah, that’s, it’s something that I don’t think people, like you said, first of all, they can’t tell that they’re being duped. They don’t know that this is subterfuge. They don’t know that they’re being disingenuous or at best maybe a sophist, if you want to even give them credit with that component. Having said that, there is so much that we see.
51:53
Again, Marcus Aurelius, I love his work, but here’s the thing. We’ve all read meditations. We’ve all seen what he wrote yet in the dynamic environment of Rome, being the Caesar of that time, we saw how this is what I was talking to Jeremy Ryan Slade about, about I love Marcus Aurelius and what he wrote and those were his internal thoughts, yet that there was a lot of incongruency even then his actions and words is octanon verb, but there was a lot of conflict.
52:23
So for all these people that are taking what somebody said on a piece of paper from thousands of years ago and saying this is what they would have done. It’s like, I would challenge you to say, well, look at what they really did based on what they knew back then, let alone today when everybody’s trying to take this moral high ground or they’re trying to be virtuous and then they’re disguising it because of a popularity or like you said, the capacity to quote, misquotes enough times to where that now becomes the truth as opposed to a falsehood. Yeah. And I think there’s
52:53
There’s a level of intent too. So I, whatever, there’s no way of being a good scholar without making mistakes. So whether in the book, I’m about ready to publish, I’m sure there’s hundreds of mistakes. If people go find them, which I truly encourage people to find them so we can actually get down to the truth of things. But it, at a lot of the level, it goes, goes beyond just full like errors of logic or errors and structures of arguments, but it’s being like purposely deceptive.
53:23
What I find is terrible is like, I truly believe that every man can be a philosopher, every man and woman. And the best thing a philosopher could do is teach someone else how to be a philosopher. So the purpose of the philosophy is to kind of simplify this really, really complex world that we’re living in into kind of ideas that we can actually move forward with. But what I see a lot, especially very recently, is the people that we would…
53:53
respect as philosophers, they’re really anti philosophers. They’re coming to people and saying this is too complex for you to decide. You need to hire me or you need to pay this or you need to listen to these people or do this. You must conform. So you actually have people that are actively disassembling philosophy and not empowering people to say,
54:20
Hey, maybe your logic and reasoning is false, and maybe you’re wrong, but make, you have the capacity to make a good attempt. And if you fall short, your fellow peers will show you where you fall short, and you could work with other people to come to some reasonable conclusion, and we can make value judgments shape our society move on. And uh.
54:44
It’s just really disheartening when you see like major philosophers say like, oh, it’s too complex or I don’t know, or it’s too, it’s too hard for an individual to make a decision. Because at that point they’re basically telling people not to engage in philosophy or make any attempt to improve themselves and the worlds around them, which is quite tragic. And then they just, that simply encourages them to regurgitate whatever quote they like that felt good or whatever the context was, even though that quote in and of itself was completely taken out of context to
55:15
you know, grind a political ax or whatever their vantage point is. Well, and you always find where things are too complex because it’s always in the area where they don’t agree. So like if they agree with some, some form of logic, they’ll walk you completely through it. But if it’s something that they want to support that they can’t completely justify, they’ll be like, Oh, this is too complex. Yeah. And oftentimes they’ll come at you with this condescension to, to justify that sort of behavior. It’s like, well,
55:41
I have to explain, you’ll never understand this. Like, well, actually I do understand this is the point I’m trying to make. And you were saying also how that even now, like, you know, my, my great uncle had never read Socrates or he never read, you know, anything by Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius yet being in special forces, being in Vietnam, being in long range reconnaissance patrols, everything that he taught me was directly stoicism. Even though he could not quote it, it was very much this idea of what we’re talking about with, with Emerson.
56:10
Yeah, I do believe that there are cultural memories. And I think that if you get into certain industries, like obviously we could probably, um, name a series of what could be best described as natural stoics. So, um, Victor Frankl is probably the example that’s used most often. And then we’d be like, look at him. He’s a stoic. He’s absolutely a stoic. He doesn’t quote any of the stoics. He, he may or may not have been educated on stoicism prior to making
56:40
But we absolutely recognize him as stoics. There’s a man who survived the Baton Memorial, or Baton Death March, named the last year, 10-eat great book, My Hitch in Hell. If you read that, that’s all about controlling your attitude and dealing with whatever being tortured or forced to work in the mine for the Japanese and Korean military. But we can say, hey, he’s just naturally stoic. And I think that we used to, and there’s…
57:10
There’s definitely evidence of before kind of the 1960s, there was a, we used to run on what was called classical humanism and that shifted in the sixties in curriculum in America. So before the 1960s, almost every American was introduced to stoic material inside their curriculum. So sometimes it was just reading kind of the archetypal stories. Almost everyone read Virgil. Virgil is…
57:37
how to be a good Roman citizen, Rome or Virgil’s the author, the Aeneid. Um, so Aeneas, the main character in that is a demigod that’s a stoic. And these kind of, it’s really interesting. The flawed stoic, well, all stoics are flawed. I was Robinson Crusoe. Yeah. Well, and we’ve lost that in our society too. So like Robinson Crusoe, Aeneid, um, are great examples. Both of them have occurrences in their story where they
58:06
Our stoics fail the bestoics and then remember and then recover to go back to stoicism. So especially Robin St. Crusoe, you see like three or four repetitions of this event. So I think that a lot of people in our modern world, we don’t understand like you’re successful till you fail. And then again, like there are certain things that will move you forward. If you’re acting virtuously, you’ll forget to act virtuously. You’ll fall down. That’s not the end of you. Like get back out, act virtuously. Like.
58:34
there is a forgiveness and whether you tie that with kind of religious ideology. So the Neo-Stoics, you know, Christian idea that, you know, we’re all sinners. So humans are fundamentally flawed. So it will be good until we just make a mistake out of human nature. We need to refocus our lives, not focus on the mistake or past, but move forward knowing that we had erred and trying to be more careful. Um, but you can also do that intellectually too. You don’t necessarily need a God, but you know, Hey,
59:04
If I do these things, they’re rewarding unto themselves. If I get distracted by other luxuries or other focuses, I’m going to lose track of things, I’m going to become depressed because now all of a sudden I’m hoping for things that are outside my control. I’m basing my life value on things that really don’t matter. Something’s going to happen to those material goods because it always does. And then my world is going to be shit at her and that’s going to force me to realize like, Oh, you know, whatever getting divorced or losing my house doesn’t matter because like.
59:34
It doesn’t affect my ability to be a good and moral and just man in the world. So I didn’t just go back to focusing on what matters. Um, so it’s a, it’s regretful that we’ve lost that. So there’s an interesting question that like, if your uncle taught you kind of this purified natural form of social, we used to have more of a cultural memory. And we used to probably tell it more in story form than we ever did straight philosophy because few people want to read straight philosophy. Right.
01:00:03
And the story like the ancient Stokes. Yeah. Yeah, of course. But, but like you said, that story, people want that parable. They want that human narrative. And then we see today’s culture where it needs to be in 15 seconds. It needs to be in 30 seconds. And for those of you listening, this is a long-term format. So obviously that doesn’t affect you, but for the most part, I mean, anything worth learning, unless it’s just a singular statement that you need to just live, it’s going to take more than 15 seconds to give you something of substance.
01:00:32
So what do we see now? We see a lot of quantity, but not quality. We see more knowledge out today, but less actual wisdom. We see more social media, but less human connection. And people confuse all of this opportunity as choice, but it’s actually distraction from what is truly important as a human being. Well, I think we do have some powerful stories if we recognize them as more than just entertainment in our society. So…
01:01:02
Obviously, now you can exclude the modern Amazon series, but Tolkien’s books, the whatever, the Paramount movies were just amazing. And even that you see the whatever the error. So like Frodo carries the ring all the way to the Mount Doom. And then at the last moment, he screws up. He can’t do it. Yes. So like theoretically the strongest of the characters can’t manage that. You bring the right thing. Yes. Um, you know, you see Aragorn and Gandalf in there.
01:01:30
displaying a lot of the stoic virtues. And the very first few books of Harry Potter series are very neo stoic in their nature. Unfortunately, I think the last books were kind of rushed. So some of the philosophy aspects fell out of them. But then you see the opposite in our culture too, which is kind of tragic. We are developing a lot of archetypal stories that don’t actually lead to moral ends. So a lot of our comic book kind of characters
01:02:00
moral virtuous things. And then you see the shifting of messaging that came out with whatever. Now we have superhero movies, that seems to be our current theology. But you know, the quality of the storylines have shifted and now it might be more profit driven on what happens inside the stories than versus, you know, actually teaching some type of lesson. And it’s kind of tragic, but Hollywood forgot the fact that if you teach a good moral lesson, then people want to get them to your film versus.
01:02:29
It’s not about whatever special effects or kind of whatever thing you’re trying to force people down throats, just like tell a good story that actually has some type of message and then people come watch your story. And there’s a reason why the hero’s journey has always been so compelling to us as human beings because in our society, we will go through hardship, we will face that call and then we’ll dot ourselves and then we’ll have to face this adversity or this adversary and then we’ll…
01:02:58
face this friction and then we’ll be in a place of a point of no return. And then we will have to overcome and then we will dig deep into what we have. But if we try to substitute that with just some sort of narrative or some sort of ideology that is completely removed from that, like you said, now it’s vapid, now it’s empty, now it’s hollow at best. And so what do they do? They try to compensate with, like you said, special effects or with the fact that there is this kind of shocking component, but at the end of the day, as you say,
01:03:25
what sort of validity or what sort of like true substance are they getting? It’s non existent. And that becomes the expectation they’re on after. And also in Hollywood, we see that they don’t know what to do sometimes. So what are they doing? They’re going back and remaking these things. But they’re, they’re relaunching them in a way that is, again, disingenuous to the actual message. And then they have the audacity to be surprised when people don’t like it. Yeah, they’re like, why aren’t you going to see it? And then they try to shame them or
01:03:53
some sort of ideology to make them go. It’s like, that’s not going to work. Well, sometimes, yeah, there’s a lot of things about neo-Hegelianism, neo-Marxism, that absolutely I don’t understand, like the concept of representation, like, oh, we need to see people that look like us doing things for us to do it. And it’s like, well, what did the, what did the first astronaut look like before there was astronauts or what did the first pilot look like before there was pilots or…
01:04:20
Did anyone ever watch Lord of the Rings and think to themselves like, Oh, my culture isn’t represented here, therefore I’m not going to watch it. Like, I know it’s like, is that really a thing? Like, like there’s a, there’s a tremendous amount of power to say, like, I’m going to be the first to do this. And then to assert you basically can’t be the first one or will she horn false stories of the first one? Yeah. It’s just, just incredibly odd to me. Yeah. And it.
01:04:50
Again, it comes back to that idea of people not having some sort of ethos, some sort of ethical boundaries, some sort of foundation upon which they can build. And as you mentioned, it’s like if for you that’s religious and it’s God, that’s fantastic. If it’s just this, these, these tenants that you want to live by simply because you understand that that’s true. And oftentimes the true thing is going to be difficult. The true thing is going to be inconvenient. The right thing is not going to be easy. But if we…
01:05:19
continue to go down and just lament that fact and then we don’t expand on how important that is again, or if we take quotes or these other things out of context as a way to justify an ideology or to sell a product, then we’re just as dangerous as a person who doesn’t know philosophy. We have to be able to absorb truth irrespective of source. And that’s why, like you said, as philosophers, so to speak, I’ll listen to anybody. But once I see that there is something that doesn’t make any sense.
01:05:48
or I see the incongruency as a philosopher, it is my job to push back and say, well, that doesn’t make sense here, or that’s incongruent with this. And if that person immediately has no way to back that up other than to become emotional or raise their voice and not raise their actual logic, then it makes it hard for me to have a conversation with them, which comes back to what you were saying before.
01:06:14
If we’re not able to have a conversation and disagree as human beings, to still respect one another, then that creates divide and that lack of communication encourages violence in some capacity. There’s so much there. Well, I’ve been talking to you for a little while here and I know we could continue speaking, but is there, can you give us an idea of it’ll be next year sometime really next year when we’re helping to see this new book? Yes. So it’s got to go through a review process, which
01:06:44
could be somewhere as short as 30 days, or it could be as long as several years, unfortunately. But I’m hoping, I’m deeply hoping that I can get it into print by February 12th next year, which would be the 240th birthday of Captain Alden Partridge. So we can remember that man’s great legacy, but I will definitely put it out there. It will be available on Amazon, which would be the…
01:07:11
primary place it will be printed, but it will also be available through Ingham and Moose Sparks, which means it will be orderable through most bookstores. So I think it will be out there and we’ll definitely sure I’ll be hoping to get back on the show and talk more when we get some of the print. And for this wonderful conversation we have, we barely touched on any of the wonderful things and we probably could do whatever five years worth of conversations about individual aspects. So
01:07:40
I will make sure that I get you an advance copy and you can find whatever interesting dynamic of partridge that you’d like to have me back on the speak about. Absolutely. And then you even mentioned the potential of maybe a surprise for our audience in that capacity. So I guess we’ll figure that out. But stay tuned. Where would where can we go support you? Where can we go learn more about you? Where would you direct us? I mean, Amazon, we can get your works and then social media components. What do you would show?
01:08:08
Probably right now I’m most active on LinkedIn. I’m basically, I’m a really bad, maybe really good writer. I’m always kind of sharing my most recent find on partridge or whatever. I’m usually trying to hunt through archives and if I find interesting notes or quotes, I’ll throw them online. But that’s probably where I’m gonna keep everyone updated in terms of the exact progress of the book and love to have great conversations there.
01:08:37
I also run a YouTube channel, which I haven’t put out much on this year mainly because I’ve been trying to finish up my book, but the evolving warfighter people are more than likely to check me out there. I’m also on Twitter, even though I’m slightly less active on it than I’ve been previously in the years, but those are kind of the three best places to find me if people are interested. Yeah, I think that’s fantastic. And I have a tremendous amount of respect for you doctors. So I wouldn’t have you on unless I thought that you…
01:09:06
we’re going to bring something of quality to people. And thank you for the work you’re doing and for helping to counterbalance the treachery of so much of these other academics that we see out there. Thank you for your time. I’ll talk to you soon. Thank you for listening to this episode of Acta Non Verba.
