Welcome back to New Thinkery. My name is David Barr. With me is always is my good friend Greg McRae. How are you Greg?
I'm doing well David. It's nice to see you tonight. Nice to see you too. We're missing our old buddy Alex.
What's he up to? He said that he... There's an alley. I don't really know.
He's something about who's traveling to Paris. No, no, no. He's in a chalet. He's in a chalet.
Oh, that he's in a chalet. Oh, that he's in a chalet. Hell, right. He's right.
Right. Right. That's right. What is that place called?
I don't know. Something about his father-in-law is giving him six figures a month or something like this. Yeah. Yeah.
So Alex sent us these pictures and said... Oh, that's a large... He told me to work last. Why do you work hard?
Why are you poor? Why are you? Yeah. So it's just those kinds of things really endear us to work out host and we're sad he's gone.
What is that? Seriously speaking, we are sad he's gone and if he's sad to miss this too. Right. Because we have our friend, Damien Youngerman, joining us.
Damien was a fan of the show and he reached out to us by email some months ago. And I started talking to him. We've spoken on the phone a number of times to come friends. And he and Greg and Alex have slowly started to get to know one another.
Damien was a naval explosive ordnance... Quick, naval explosive ordnance disposal technician. He had three deployments to Afghanistan. He was embedded with the Green Berets and the Navy SEALs and the third and seventh Special Forces Group.
I may repeat myself. Are those the Green Berets, Damien? Yes. Yeah.
So as a young man, he was an aspiring chespian. So he was going to university in Florida and he wanted to be an actor. And so he found his way naturally enough to New York City and 9-11 happened. And that had an effect on Damien.
He signed up at the advanced age of 29, right? That's right. Yeah. For the military.
And then he became an EOD and saw some pretty serious things. He returned from war and matriculated through Columbia University. And there, or somewhere along the way, this is what we're going to talk about. He was bitten by the great books, Hannah Arendt in particular.
A number of other authors and he got to nurture this with some excellent teachers at Columbia. And so having graduated from Columbia, he now works there in the political world. And he joins us here today. How are you, Damien?
Great. Thank you so much for having me. It's such an honor to be on this podcast. And I'm lucky that I only had to pay a few thousand dollars.
Yeah. He paid to be on the show? He paid Alex. He's very money hungry.
We never see a diamond. So Damien, thanks for coming. This is great. Yeah.
Thank you. The pleasure is ours. I think what precipitated the invitation, other than just talking about the great books in general, and you've been open about your history with traumatic brain injuries, depression and just a lot of the natural outgrowth of difficult deployments that we read about so often in the news. What we don't read about is, and when we read about recovery, you don't often hear people say, well, I recovered essentially through the great books.
But that's part of your story if I captured it correctly. That's right. Okay. Absolutely.
Yeah. So when I brought back to my last combat deployment in 2013, I started, I didn't really go to war until I was 35. I went in 2010, 11 to Afghanistan and that when I was assigned with 37, so I was supposed to go back and then went back again. That was with an army National Guard Infantry Unit up in Northern Afghanistan.
I worked with Steel Team 3 as well. They were close by. My father took his own life when I was in that deployment. So I had to come home one early.
And I only bring that up because when I reacted to that, I thought, oh, this, he was a coward. I had these kind of ideas. And while I was on, it was like a 30-day family emergency leave when I came home and I went to Arizona, he had fallen on hard times. He had a hard time.
We were very close. And he was living in a trailer park and hanged himself from the carport. I knew he had had problems and we had discussed it and he had prior attempts. And I dealt with that and I went back to San Diego and I heard that there was other platoon that was having trouble or they were having some guys that might not go into the deployment.
So I said, I would go into the deployment and go back to Afghanistan with Steel Team 5 pretty quickly and spend nine more months there. And it really wasn't until I got home from that where things started to deteriorate pretty quickly. So quickly, really that within a little more than a year after my father's suicide, I was within, I decided that things weren't, it wasn't really worth kind of living. And I mean, that's kind of a long story.
We don't have to point to it. But things have gotten so dark. I didn't really understand that all was going on. And just to deteriorate to that point where the darkness didn't seem like it would ever be.
And I was functioning fine at work and things like that. And so one evening that I came very close to doing that and was able, really because I thought of my father's suicide and that took me out of it for a moment long enough to think that this is not something I wanted to do. I didn't want to cause my family pain. And in the past, I had been a big reader and decided that I should probably kind of go to that again.
I was desperate really for anything that could help me get through these times and opened up a box of books, that I'd never read, but to just sort of own it. I played it on air subtle because those were books that I had, but I was just about having a lot of people have additional read them and just happened to, it was Plato's Republic, I'll never forget it. And I sat down and started to read it. It was a short version of this.
But I don't know how long it passed, so that kind of amount of time it passed. But all of a sudden I realized, because I was taken aback by it, almost, it was almost kind of spreading. But I realized that it was the first time that I felt like I was breathing while I was reading this book that didn't feel like someone was standing on my chest. My body was relaxed.
And it was so startling that I stopped reading and I went for a walk. And thought, well, really hard about this. And it was very emotional as a woman. And went back and slowly, over time, made my way through that text.
And I can't say that I understood it, obviously, or that it made sense to me. But there was something in the ideas. And I don't know if it was because of my reader, but I know he's telling a story from the past. But the dialogic maybe kind of format, I don't know what it was.
Maybe if I would have got Aristotle's work through it, he's first at Manhattan. But it just kept me coming back. And I slowly made my way through it. And I was just looking for a reason to wake up in the morning, besides work.
And I would go and work was going well. I was an instructor by this way. And it gave me kind of this thing to look forward to when I came home from work that I hadn't had to work. And I don't.
I think it was a, this is before Columbia, right? Yeah, it was a year, so that the 2013, and I didn't get out to 2017. Now, do you think, first of all, I apologize, I shouldn't interrupt you. No, no.
You're on a roll. I just, I had to ask though, do you think it was because of the nature of this book? You picked up a substantive book. Yeah.
That it moved people across the ages. If instead the book was some bullsh** by Tom Clancy, or Dan Brown, I should use Dan Brown. I hate him more. Do you think that it would have moved you just the same?
No, I mean, that's kind of what happened is I. So there was a time, so there happened, what happened next was, I got through, I think I read that and I read, I read, I read, I read, I said, I'll try to do cities because that's military history. You think of that as military history. And this was probably the most important text I suppose, one of the most important text I read, was what I realized was I didn't care much for the military maneuvering.
None of that really mattered. It didn't interest me. But what did interest me were the speeches, specifically like the Deauticists. I remember that, the middle of the day, to be a debate.
And that clarified that it was really these ideas that may be going towards, for me, and this is just me going towards reading stuff like military memoirs. It wasn't what was going to kind of set me path towards finding my way back into society, which is really kind of, I think, across the issue is this kind of idea of homecoming, of reintegrating back into the world after you come back from combat. And so that's what that text set me up for. It was just to kind of start following that.
And I don't want to touch the religiosity to it. There was someone, one of my friends said, well, why didn't go to church? And that was a valid point in some people when you did that. And I was raised in religious background.
But what I said to him was, well, I'm not interested in being forgiven. I want to understand. And I don't mean that to be reductive about religion. I think religion is really important.
But at the time, it didn't seem like I wanted more than that. I don't know when, why didn't want that? I wanted something else. And I felt it reading the text.
Even if you want to call that kind of humanism or utilizing secular texts to find a way to live a good life, that junker, that it was more important to do that just for me. I think the dialysis text was, I mean, for the folks at home, it's the speech that, by the way, it seems to be a fictional character invented by the city's gives to try and prevent the Athenians from slaughtering an entire city of people. Was it the human, was it the, what was it about the speech? Did you catch on to how cleverly he does that?
How he taps into their psyche? Like, clearly they're out for revenge or something like this. I don't know. Was it the same with Republic, by the way?
Was it, because there's a lot about war, I guess, in the public, but not really. I guess it's about the education of a certain type. What do you think it was? Well, I think the speech, he says that two greatest obstacles to good judgement are hastening or hastening or hastening passions, I think, depending on your story.
And that just hit me, not just about that was everything that was okay, that was war to me. That's when mistakes were made, when I made mistakes. And I already read the Nick McKeon Ethics and what I remember reading that part about the difference between recklessness and courage or wrath and fear. And I often used to wonder if it would have been better to read these prior to going to war, if that would have hindered me.
If those ideas would have hindered. Henders you made you less capable of doing your, or it's always kind of a struggle. When you study these texts, it helps in certain ways. Then I wonder when I see people, I know people who just, my mother's very religious and she was very good at it, and doesn't ask these questions and is very happy.
So, you know, it can be the kind of combination of those different kind of paths. I think actually Alex is, I think I listened to either onto your name, right? And the political theological question, or happens in your real thing, is like as a starting point, you know, where, which one, which one of those, who we start coming from, you find a kind of a way to merge those. I often struggle with this question, but the de-automatist, I think it just kind of brought that into focus.
The idea is that I thought about anyone I think that goes to war when you're sitting on top of the building at night in Afghanistan. You'll think of these kind of questions when you have that kind of time, kind of quiet. But I just remember that specific debate, the questions that they raised was really pointing out and clearer. More than other texts that I read.
Did you read, I mean, just digress too much on Thucydides, but on that question of the theological political question, I've always been struck by the Corsarian Civil War, where the strangely, the religion sort of falls away side the worst things get. My expectation would have been that people would have become more religious, but they sort of began to abandon it. I don't know if Thucydides tell me something I've never seen before, if that's right. Yeah, I don't think it's, you know, when he puts the parrotly as speech, and then the plague, right next to each other.
Right next to each other, I think that's always really striking, is you're talking in this, obviously, I mean, it's such an easy clip. You can try to tell when it happened. These kind of things when you talk about the character of your citizens. Yeah.
And then you see something like that happening all that falls apart so quickly. Yeah, I thought that that text, the speeches and that text were probably at the time, I think, the most transformative, maybe the more than reading, you know, text himself. Wow. I have a question, a practical question to any of some listeners may be curious about.
Did you, so you get charmed by these texts, they start speaking to your soul. At the precise time in your life, you really needed that. Was this then followed up by a methodical, did you, was it your schedule start, did you start building in reading time or study time, say from that day forward? I mean, and did you follow, because you hear a lot of people have traumatic experiences, let's just stick to war.
They go, okay, well, come back and there, it seems like there's all this chaos around you. First thing you should do is get a routine down. So did great books become a root nice to you? Or how did you, how did you, what did you do?
And then I have a second related question. No, it wasn't. It may sound like that. This was kind of sloppy.
The way I was going through this, it wasn't clean in any way. I was a really mess at the time. And I would read, you know, when I, when I could, but I was obsessed with my job, especially as an instructor, I really loved teaching. But I love teaching here.
The younger, or the people coming through that were getting right to the deploy. That kept me kind of centered. Yeah, I would even go in on the weekends because I had not, you know, really positive going on. But I would read the text when I could and I would get on stretches.
It was almost like, it was almost manic, you know, there were these kind of periods of media. And that's not a natural either in that situation. But I tried to, I didn't really get a good routine until I went to Columbia. Or right before I went to Columbia, I started, as I knew I was going to go there, I was like, okay, I'm going to start reading these things.
But as I was reading the books, what I thought was useful when I was teaching IDs or anything, actually, you get to, too. Was that, you know, I would be teaching IDs and you would have people say, well, I want to think outside the box and what I started noticing. Or when I was reading these texts, like, oh, this is what's in the box. It was the same as the great books to me was in the human, understanding, human condition for someone in Western civilization.
That's what's in the box. And until I, it was the same way with IDs. So I wanted to teach someone how to diffuse or make a good threat assessment. So a threat assessment would be, I'm going on a mission.
You know, what's the threat, how I mitigate it, what are the greatest threats, what are the ID threats. And if I didn't have a really sound in my opinion, grasp of our fundamental principles, we have these things called publications, publications, really, and they're really fundamental and they're really basic. They're not really about IDs necessarily. These IDs until I would be our work, weren't we?
I mean, you didn't say the Irish public army, you know, and other things. But it really wasn't part of the canon of our field from what I know these. So that was all kind of how I tied it together. It was just like a fundamental, you did see when I got in trouble, you know, you would use fundamental, you know, when I got in trouble in the war, I went back to these really basic principles and they always worked.
And they were always sound. So when I started reading great books and also as I started researching it and seeing how they were kind of attacked or the idea of the canon was attacked, I was like, well, as a human being, I think, when I'm lost. For me, I started just going back to those foundational texts. And so that was very clear because of the same exact thing that I would use when I was in war.
You know, it's interesting though, this is a part of the great books that we don't talk about enough. The extent that they can be destabilizing. I mean, so you're asking about what's inside the box and just the knowledge that sometimes what's in there is scary. And we've all had friends that have, you know, been reading somewhere along the line of the history plot of philosophy, this happens often with Nietzsche and it freaks them out for a short period of time.
But freaks them out nonetheless. But you found stability. I mean, and then to a lesser extent, so Nietzsche, that's obviously an extreme case, but confronting these questions, these soul-staring questions, I think has an impact on everybody in a pretty radical way. But you, but for you, it had a calming effect.
Well, specifically the ancient, I think, had a calming effect. And I think Charles talked about this in the very beginning of the city in Man, I believe. How do these texts? Like, well, right, like we live in different times, whatever, sure.
But why not? Like, why don't we read these? You know, why not? Like, and I was kind of ignorant and naive and, um, I'm not.
Sure when I approached these, but maybe that helped me kind of read them. But, uh, and it wasn't, I never read philosophy when I was younger. It was not really intentionally, it was more of a punishment. But, uh, and then after the punishment, it was interesting for a while.
But I do think that when you read these kind of, what I felt about the ancient, but it was accessible, and this, that might sound strange for people, but I think you can pick up, play it all and read it. You know, and, and you might not get it, but you might not get it. But you might not get it. I didn't get it.
But I could still read it. And it wasn't, you know, I mean, it wasn't, I'm not reading this obscure, you know, the people that, you know, we know, it wasn't kind of the first professional philosopher's first person only. I didn't know. For most of the history of philosophy, there were just normal people.
Right. But, Dean, you turned to Athens, not Jerusalem. You know, from, at least what, stereotypically, you see people all, let's see different examples in war, but the felons, right, extreme situation there, you know, locked inside these boxes. Yeah, it's a lot of psychological duress, a lot of pain in their lives.
What do they do? They turn to the good book. Some of them turn to philosophy. But it's interesting.
You went Athens instead of Jerusalem when you could have just as easily done the other way. I don't mean to put you on the spot, but was there something that the turn to Athens did it helpful in some way that it turned to Jerusalem just was lacking at that moment in your life? Yeah. I mean, I think I mentioned that I may have mentioned this, but so I was raised as a Jehovah's Witness until my parents divorced.
I've always believed it wasn't a huge thing to me, but it wasn't really a question. But at that point in my life, I had a friend that was like, well, why don't you go to church or go to Mass with me? Okay. That's fine.
But, and I'm not saying this is why people go, I wasn't interested in being forgiven and watching, like kind of dismissing it. I wanted to try to understand what was happening with me. And then once I found that, then it was really through these texts that I was able to kind of ask their questions. And I started going to counseling kind of soon after that, I got basically ordered by one of the officers that was a kind of mind.
It's like you're going to counseling. It's like, yeah, it's like, yeah, it's like, yeah, it's like, yeah, it's like, yeah, it's like, yeah, it's like, yeah, it's like, yeah. And I told him I was interested in these texts and there was a doctor, my name is Jonathan Shea. He wrote a book called Achilles in Vietnam, he also wrote it.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And Odysseus in America. And so I talked to my therapist and he's like, oh, you should read it, go with it, get on.
And at the time, it was so painful for me to read the introduction. It's a first person account from Vietnam, better in it. It was so hard to read. It was so poignant.
It's so the guys in Vietnam are really, I just, I always kind of looked at them. I don't know. That's just, I couldn't imagine what they experienced over there going on a night patrol walking point in Vietnam. It's like anything I did to that.
So reading that text, I was like, oh, this is interesting. We can use these texts directly as a kind of way of their, or utilize it in therapy. And then someone named Brian Doris, he started to talk to me about the fear of war. And I believe they went around and did stage readings of Sophocles Ajax.
I think that's the place that we're going to go, which I always loved. And not in the theater, I did not care for replays. I had to perform in a production of Euripides, for resties. And I actually wrote the director letter saying I don't want to do this.
So I didn't want to do anything. Any group of things. But yeah, I really appreciated what all of these people were doing and it all kind of made sense. And what I got out of that was when you read these texts, you realize that you're not alone.
And you read the Odyssey. You read Sophocles. And Ajax is a very dark way. And that was part of it too, is that this isn't unique to me.
It's not. There's no sense in being narcissistic about this. And that knowing that the experience of war is universal, then there are maybe other universals. There's bigger ideas that aren't so seeped and maybe a subjectivity.
Though that's important, it may not. It's not the only kind of lens to look at these things. And that was soothing. When I needed it, it was soothing to look back and read Homer and say, oh, okay.
Yeah. Oh, this is familiar. Oh, it's the same. So yeah, that was really powerful.
That's why I chose to kind of, I didn't want to go to church at the time. I became like a very difficult person for all of us later on. But yeah, these texts have always been something that when the times are dark and it still happened, I have really hard times still. They're the books that will generally go to other people to.
You got to read them to Charles. But yeah, they're the ones that are always there. I mean, they never kind of fail me for engaging my mind in something. And I think the best part of the thing with TBI and PTSD, you know, the symptoms, it's like a bit diagram that's very hard to delineate, which is what I always just seems like.
Reading thoughtful texts and especially I think discussing them with other people has been just a really lovely path towards them, reintegrating to becoming like a more productive person. I just asked, was there anything else that, so the reading the text, the counseling, was there anything else that you did in particular that you think this really helped reintegrate me? We were talking about dogs beforehand. Was that part of it or?
Thanks. Just going to push the Xenophon stuff on you. I love that Xenophon, by the way, I'm not a dog. It's such a good one.
It is. It's such a cool text. And I was like, yeah, I love a guy with all of her now. I don't have a non-aradon kid, so it's like my whole, and he's his own neurotic kind of in that case, but he's great.
Yeah, I started doing your Jitsu, about 2000. Maybe that was the end of, this was soon after two. I thought about suicide. I think it was in 2013 or 14.
And then that was, I made really great claims there in San Diego. I started training pretty regularly and did that up until really got to New York. I was still training in New York a little bit around, but not as much. And so, but I will say that, yeah, everybody I think that I know that trains you to SOO.
You can't help, but there's not much more humbling than getting tapped by a tiny 17 year old. You know, he's like half your side. He's like half the laugh at it. So, yeah, so when I say the great books and I turn to them, I turn to them, but there's lots of other, I mean, I got into counseling, I went to, I got on medication.
Yeah, there's lots of things, but this is the one I know I have every day. So I didn't start reading, so I got to Columbia. So I do the same, I kept the schedules and so left Columbia. There's what?
Sorry, go on. I get up and walk the dog in the morning and then I read for about 90. He goes to sleep after I feed him usually for about 90 minutes, or two hours, but he ever really did that entire time. And then I read at least four or five hours a day.
Damien hadn't heard of the Machiavelli letter. The famous letter Greg. Is that right? Are you referring to the serious one about how he retreats to the courts of men?
Oh, that one, okay. No, no, no, no, no, no, I mean, like what he does during the day, he checks out. I thought you were just before laundry. And how he swears up and down with the villagers and then plays dice and stuff.
All the robes at night and does it for hours. That's cool. I just know I have that translation too and I don't. I was saying to see the back of the man's field print feast on that food, which was made for him alone.
Yeah, which is so true, by the way. By the way, I just thought it was worth we should do an episode on that letter because I think there's an order to what's going on actually. I think it's carefully composed. It's not just a letter to a friend.
The way it goes through morning, the parts of the day, it's very, everything sort of sequential. But, you know, you said something, there were times where you felt alone by yourself, probably misunderstood. There are times I felt like that too during dark moments. I'm sure Greg's also felt that way.
There's nothing like reading one of the great books and just coming across a line or a passage where you immediately are like, Oh, this weirdo is, he's my kind of weird. You know what I'm saying? You can read something so that it's just so immediately, this kinship, you're on this wavelength, hundreds of years of remove. But it's, you know, you suddenly don't feel so alone anymore.
Because I think the thoughtful people, people that engage with the great books, it can be a bizarre lot and it can feel lonely. I don't mean this in some intellectual elite way either. I just mean that they're kind of calibrated. They're kind of artists.
They're sensitive people. And in small wonder that we're inclined toward depressive states also, by the way. So when you do come across somebody that is speaking your language, but lived a thousand years ago, it's incredible and nice. Yeah, it is.
And I, you know, it was one of the things that I remember when I read, I first started reading Strauss and I think it was recent to, I was reading his essay on High-Diverse existentialism. And it's always like this kind of, well, I'm not a philosopher. This kind of humility on a scholar. And I think it's, I mean, it's every, it's in his essay, what is level education?
I think both of those, I think, specifically the one, what is level education? It's kind of humility. And I think that's what happens. And it was really kind of not to shift to much to Strauss.
But when you read that his, like, when I first read that his project was to understand the thinkers as they understood themselves. And Greg, I know you've superseded this and you now understand it's better than you understand themselves. He beat the game. That's what we call it.
Right. Right. But like, how else would you want to, I never understood why anybody would want to read them any other way. And I recently was, I kind of had a bit of a rouse on a reading group.
You were reading the Criedo. And he, I don't know what he said, but he was like, oh, I heard, you know, the kind of historicism, the argument that I think is reduced to this kind of silliness. But understanding context, if you're trying to understand the author is fine. I think it's this idea that you read biography to destroy the person prior to trying to understand them.
It just doesn't go to anybody. And that's kind of why I looked at that. And I always thought that was such a nice, like, humble way to kind of approach anything that you're doing in reading. Like, why dismiss it prior to even trying?
It was kind of an odd way to kind of think of it. But it seemed like that was what was kind of common. Not a Columbia, but it was just kind of, well, I can understand this. So let's dismiss it.
Right. And that wasn't, it wasn't going to help me kind of move forward. Or anyone, I think, who goes through kind of any kind of darkness. I don't, I don't mean veterans only.
I mean, anyone who has difficult times. And I understand, like, it's easy. Like, I'm single. I don't have all this time.
You know, I have the time to read. You don't need to read four hours a day. I don't want to meet. But, you know, Zina hits from St.
John Street wrote that book recently. She, I think she references often this kind of book on working class. I forget the book. And I forget the book.
Not craft is soul craft or something? Is that not Matthew Crawford's book? I know you like that. I'm not a soul crapper.
I like it because I like the book that he watches him. I love him. He's one of the texts. One of the people I don't understand why you know whenever is not anybody's because of Du Bois.
Yeah, of course. It's because of Du Bois. But, you know, it's on that topic too. I mean, I think that's another thing I started reading.
You know, this is Herb Storing too. I say on liberal education. And I want to get to it. We use people.
But this idea that there are different kinds of ways to approach liberal education. And I remember that so Herb Storing was a student's role as a student's role. And then you guys knew it. But one of my favorite, I think of it before I'm not going to get to my favorite students in triage.
I really felt like he tried to do for Booker Kewalshing to almost a scholarship on. He really wrote a lot of African American political philosophy, you know, a book on it. It's hard to find, but it's a really good. Oh, right.
I forgot. It's a great book. And he wrote this essay in the collection of the essays that we wrote towards the work of Union. Yeah.
Yeah. And he wrote liberal education in the con. And it's interesting, you know, he takes this tab that what we need in liberal education isn't great books for everybody. But not everybody is good for great.
For liberal education, liberal education isn't good for everybody. So he says that we need civic education and vocational training. Like that's what, to him liberal education kind of is that's if a liberal education is to be a free education. And that's why I brought up a Matthew Propper book shop, that's a soul.
Okay. That's just a different take on it. But I thought that these like kind of thoughtful discussions about what liberal education is as I got more into great books and then Zena his book, not that she would say that it should be a good enough itself. It shouldn't have any kind of stuff.
Yeah. So I mean, I have a question in our correspondence in preparation for the episode you mentioned, the thinkers that were most important to you, Socrates, Tocqueville, Rents, who so Augusta Melville, and I'm actually, I mean, those are all, I mean, I don't know Rents as well as I'd like, but otherwise those are all important thinkers for me. But it's a little surprising, if I have to be honest, I mean, you mentioned the Ajax, someone who's gone through some traumatic experiences. I think that I would expect them to be more drawn to tragedy and literature that just, that's just my, you know, I don't know, I mean, I went through the term, the most traumatic point of my life, you know, I went through divorce, right?
I'm not very serious. I mean, I was drawn to music. I was like, no, no, I know. But I mean, like, I was, I was, it was my most musical time in my life, right?
I was supposed to listen to music. I was reading more literature. And so I'm just curious as to, I mean, maybe we've already beaten this path, but yeah, I apologize, but how is it that these thinkers are the ones who's, I don't know, it's like, I guess I'm, I guess I'm interested in, maybe we have already played this out, but like, your interest is really intellectual, trying to understand yourself, but trying to understand yourself rationally versus the world. Yeah, as opposed to trying to read, I don't know, is that a sense like, yeah, I, I, I struggle with this because I often deal, I think you guys have discussed this on the podcast.
I don't read enough literature. Yeah, I'm not enough knowledge. You know, and when I do, it's, it's a struggle to not toss it and grab a renter or carlsh or whatever I'm interested in. Me, man, I'm the opposite.
Yeah, okay. But, and, and I, and I, I don't know if this is unique because I was so into reading literature when I was younger. Okay. So now it is, it's really like these people like, you know, like Melville, but at the same time, I'll have to say, so I read Billy Budd, there was a section of it and I cried and I I, I cried like every day for six weeks, just throw out passage.
Like not sobbing with tears every morning. It's the passage one. It's when he's being hanged. Yeah.
And it's not the action of him. It's not that it's that. And I took the, uh, Andrew Delbancot was a professor of mine. Yeah.
Wow. And that's who I was reading Melville with. So I was, he's almost cheating him. But, but, uh, and he's a lovely man.
And, um, I was just really blessed with the professors I had there. He was really, um, he's been really good to me as well. But it was that another human being could put words together like this. They were, they were, and to make them so beautiful.
And I don't, and I don't ever, and it's, and we're all going to have our authors that we are drawn to in favor of. And to me, I don't think anyone's ever done that. Like Melville and I don't know. And Billy Budd, if you don't, if there was a non, it might be probably my favorite book.
But outside of the neighborhood, maybe they would all live. He's kind of beautiful peaks he reaches. And then there are other times just like, I don't mean this thing is not work. He doesn't even seem that lovely.
Especially to see that. It's just a long. Yeah. Yeah.
I struggle with that. I think that part of it is I have a really, I still struggle with my addictive personality. And I think that when I'm reading a thinker, I'm starting to really kind of feel like I'm starting to understand that person. I don't want to stop.
And it usually happens for some reason in political theory. And that's not like I'm reading con. It's, you know, when you're in your fort, I had to kind of, I didn't even know what to tell you're on top of this. I had to kind of decide like there's some things I'm just too old to kind of start in a way.
You know, but they're, you know, professionally you're not too old to plot. You're theoretically too old to call it. But Aristotle makes exceptions. But, you know, just saying if I could quickly interrupt you and Greg back, in fact, you know, this but some of Strauss's most favorite students, he may even say this somewhere.
That's right. Are his students that fought in World War Two, they've seen the text graphs in a more ground way. It was non-theoretical for them. Yeah.
I will just plug your episode on my own fault. Yeah. Yeah. It was a really beautiful episode again.
Like, but I just want to say that, you know, I think what you guys are going to. Obviously this is but the reverend kind of you page of those people is something I think is a really honorable thing to do and listening to him. And I was listening to him, you know, it's like there are books you read, Greg. I think I get this with over to you Washington.
I remember when I was reading out from slavery the first time, never assigned it. You know, when I read you boys, I think four different classes. And I liked it was a lot of, I think the debate between them. Diana Shaw did an episode with them recently.
I thought it was really good. Yeah, not recently, but whatever. And she thought it was fine, didn't she said this. And I was like, she nailed it.
The debate between Du Bois and Washington is the central debate on like the soul of education in America still holds today. At least, no, I don't know the progress of his own education, but it like the solve the really good argument with an education. I think you see this kind of with the micro, right? Credentialing and cool vocational training is great versus, you know, the great books kind of forming a good citizen or whatever the goals are in the education for people for sure.
But you identify with Booker T. I mean, I feel a strong kinship with Frederick Douglass every time I read his narrative. Like, I don't know why, like I'm not going through anything he's gone through. Yeah, somehow.
That's not true. Because he put it mildly, the underdog, right? There's the underdog. Yeah, that's a good point.
If that thread is running through the whole thing, that's a good point. Yeah, Booker T. Washington, because I really, there's something, you know, when you're enlisted in the military, there's something of a kind of a vocational. Right.
I started off as a machinist, which is in the job description, you would think you were like a mechanic. You're thinking things are really not as white as oil. Education is something that I was new. But you were working with tools, you know, my dad was a construction worker and he grew up running motorcycles since I was my first memory.
I was like, oh, one of the only pictures I have of my dad. He's like working on this trip, like this first triumph on a bill back in the day. And yeah, so I, there's something. And Matthew Crawford's book, I think, is lovely.
Sean Brown is really, really good. And he's a, he was a committee on social marketing. That was Cushion. But yeah, so Booker T.
Washington also was one of those books where I was reading it and you just found myself smiling a lot. You know, you're like shaking your head and smiling and going, you hear this, you know, this kind of silly term lived experiences through the other kinds. But, um, but I was like, who had a heart, like who living right now? Had a harder life than Booker T.
Washington. You know, and it's like his whole outlook was like anti resentment. Yeah, there's no resentment anywhere. And it was just, it was just, you know, it's so beautifully written.
It's so clear and simple and, uh, yeah, I was like, man, why doesn't everybody assign this? Well, yeah, I feel that way with the Douglas book, which I had never really looked at seriously until Greg, you know, championed it. I read it, of course. And then you think, oh, man, you faced a roadblock in your office?
Or something for like, oh, it's hard to mow the lawn on a day. Like I'm going to talk about obstacles. I mean, serious stuff in a way, Damien, that's kind of the way that I look at you, too, uh, people that, uh, because of your nature, you'll underplay the supports as many vets do, but it's really hard from, you know, it's like, how am I going to discuss courage and air-saddle with you? You know, it's not a, it's very theoretical for me.
Greg's more courageous. You know, it's, I don't know, I mean, you know, I think, I've thought about this a lot. You know, when I was at war, I had hard times and, you know, I was a theater major. I mean, who would have known I was producing, you know, I chose to use volunteers because it was, how did you choose?
I mean, that seems like the, the thing that would be lowest on most people's lists. Well, everything I was bad at everything I was not. I mean, Damien, it's so gnarly for me to think, I mean, I'm dead serious. I don't know how to convey my anxiety.
Right. Do the computer. I mean, but it's not. It's, it's really simple.
Uh, the IDs weren't, it's not, you know, like a film. It's not really like, it's kind of, I mean, her luck, I don't really remember it, but I was in Iraq. I never were about to. Um, it wasn't.
You weren't able to really promise missions. And if I had to have had to use the bombs, you know, I thought of a way to make sure I didn't ask you, I didn't want to put it on. Um, but you would have just, most people just react what people would think of as courageous. There's really nothing else to do.
I didn't really see a lot of people freeze. I mean, you would see, I mean, I mean, the first time someone got blown up near me, uh, it was like early on in my first appointment, a motorcycle and the Afghans are the special forces. ODA captain just lost his leg. It's up on my idea earlier that day, your mission and you lost his legs and we got in a gunfight and I was in a truck with an Air Force combat controller.
I don't know if you guys know what they are, but they're part of the Air Force special operations. They call on all your strikes. The most unheralded like heroes as a job feeling in Afghanistan, my and they work with also alone. And Mark Forrester, uh, I think he was an E four when I showed up.
He had already been there. I already been there. And I think he extended on his deployment. And I was in his truck usually on our missions.
He was guilty. And that's why I'm kind of talking about him, but not only like, but I learned a lot from him that day or every day we I was in the truck with him. But I remember we're getting shot at from a cave system and he's calling in some helicopters to fire into the game. Um, the ODA captain, I think that explosion had just happened on the other element.
He was going to the other part of it. And Mark said, if I go down, Damien, call your captain, say this. And I was like, Mark, if you go down, like, I'm not going to remember to say what he does all this, you know, but, uh, and we laughed, you know, about that. And then on the way back, our asking partner for someone that got his own motorcycle, he had an ID and Mark just jumped out and started running.
No hesitation. There's no hesitation. It doesn't need for. Um, that matters.
And I'm trying to get out of the metal texturing. I don't have time that this is what I was taught to do, but it's not how it really happened. And so I just jumped out of the truck and ran and caught up to him. And it was just a really important moment.
Um, seeing someone that wasn't reckless. It wasn't a reckless decision. He knew he was doing. He knew the area and been there for a long time.
But there was no hesitation in that moment of knowing, knowing that there's other threats and it was just such a important moment in teaching me that you just sometimes you just have to go. We've got to take that first step forward and that's your job as an EOD tech to see the first one on an ID. So that's the thing. That's what you're there for.
Make sure no one else is hurt. So learning from him, um, that day, met a lot of you came to my room later that night and he had not like, I mean, we'd have chatted and he knocked on my door and he's just wanted to be such one. Thank you for going to get that guy today. And I said, yeah, I'm in the course, you know, and a month later, I left that location to move back into Harin and I think a couple of weeks later, he and Calvin Harrison, he was an eight, Calvin was a medic, a social forces, a medic 18, Delta with seven, three, but he ate air, both killed on a mission.
But I found that. Yeah, I just like a lot of it is just holding the memories of those guys and, you know, and never kind of forgetting the things. There's so many courageous acts that you see all the time over there. Very rarely did I say something, but I'm saying David is like, I feel like people in those situations, like you're just going to kind of do the right thing.
What you think of is the right thing. It's just kind of the way it goes. But I hear what you're saying. I guess I meant that your initial step to join the military after 9-11.
That initial step was courageous. It was naive. I mean, I was ignorant a little bit. I don't, it was, I don't, I mean, I don't know if I was, if I had not been living in New York City on 11 at Coley's line, it was such a visceral thing.
I remember there was, I'll never forget, there was an old lady, older lady in a cabinet, a guy in a gelly and she was shaking her head and she was crying, she was shaking. She was watching like a TV or the black and white TV and she was shaking her head. Saying like, I can't believe this happened here. And I'll never forget.
I was like, it's never going to happen again. This can't happen here. And it would just, it just seems silly to not, you know, if I was just able to come not go or not try it, you know, hard, but I, yeah, you would, to become a U.D. tech.
I dropped out of die school the first time I didn't make a group. And then I went, I became a mechanic. I'm a shamed man. I tried out again and I made it, but yeah, it was just kind of like, I don't know why.
I mean, it was, it was interesting. It seemed something that you could do kind of by yourself too, you know? And it just became, you know, at that time, it really, it was one of the greater threats in the war. So if you're saying a bomb like a puzzle, I mean, in this way, you have a Machia belly is a little puzzle.
Yeah. It's like how come I mean, very clear. It's not. I mean, not the ones that we were doing.
I mean, complex. No, it's more all the things that kind of lead up to it. If you can get to the IEDs, like the ones that I was dealing with, I mean, you hope, I mean, you hope it's not a new type of ID because then it's just not your timing. That's the job.
It was, you know, like, you know, one of my best friend or a good friend of mine, um, in January 2nd, 2012, you know, he was killed. His name was Chad Regan, the greatest U.D. Second, my opinion, our unit of, you know, my peer group, we were on our first platoon together at the Gaffina Center and then he came on and went right back six weeks later after we came home and then I got there and the end of December, I think, and he was still under the morning and second. And how he was doing, I mean, there was really no, you know, that I kind of ID that told him it was, there was no, that's just, you didn't do anything wrong.
It was an error made. It's just, you know, that's, that's kind of a word. And he would have kept going. Like he's the reason I stayed in, just to be enlisted because I was going to get out and go back to Florida and try to create.
He said, no, I never forget it. He's like, we have to keep going. He was like, just perplexed. I didn't think he's like, we have to go as many times as we can go.
Like that was, it was made no sense to them to not want to keep going because the more you went, the quicker you went, the more relevant you're just, you know, it just made sense the more relevant you're experienced. But I've never met anyone who, I mean, there's a lot of the guys at that, but it was so just kind of intrinsically unselfish. But as far as like joining to be any of the tech, it was part of it was just everything I was afraid of. I mean, I wasn't good at, I wasn't engineering, but I wasn't able to be too engineering scared of heights.
So I hated jumping out of planes, diving in the ocean at night. I wasn't under a shift in the peeling. No way. But yeah, so I got to do all those things and I thought I would cure them and get them all those years, but I definitely didn't.
Just keep doing. But what I wanted to say was when we talked about this earlier, it was like, I don't know if studying these texts prior to going to war would have been, if that would have hurt me or help me. I don't know if it may have been, I wonder often, like when I'm the book by J.A. Link Ray Warriors Reflection Woman in Battle, he got his PhD in Philosophy prior to going.
And I don't know if that's, if it's better on the back end or which one. Yeah. Have you read the analysis? I read parts of it, not in the year.
I read it kind of as a only, I didn't read it as a Philstopic text. You know, I put it back when, you know, we knew of Zad upon as just badass mercenary. Yeah. You know, this amazing horseman.
Well, I just mean, the question that they would pose maybe think of that here's, but I my reading of it is that I don't think he had fully internalized his own education yet. I was like, oh, when I look into you, I'll talk about Zernfon. And I have, I have, I have, I have the corner all over that. Okay.
Yeah. Very good. Just made me think of that because I thought, I think that he reflects on that it did actually make him better. Although, yeah, Sarci doesn't seem to, well, he's not approved of his decision to go to war, but it still thinks that it, I think it helped him deal with some of the realities and ways that others weren't capable of.
That's interesting. Yeah. I think that's probably, I think, Greg goes into that too. I think it helped him to deal with some of the realities and ways that others weren't capable of.
That's interesting. Yeah. And to exaggerate or so much superstitious or relied on justice or expected that doing the right thing would save them or, and these kinds of things. Yeah.
And also, do you mean if you're, you know, what's up with the aperture lens is open much a little bit wider than other folks, just because of what you've gone through, if that makes sense, but you can, do you find that you're, I mean, it's, it may be easier also for you to decide what to spend time on when you're reading the great books. No, I have a hard time with that. I was going to make a jump, but then again, you love Anna, which I understand. So I will, can I just talk.
So it, the other thing was kind of like, you can I explain that. I need to do a lightning round with you. Okay. Great.
So Hannah Rint, so yeah, so I love Rousseau, but I didn't, but all I'd ever heard about Rousseau was he was kind of the bane of he was the father of collectivism and, you know, you hear these things and I was like, okay, well, I'm going to read them. Well, actually I started because when I knew I was taking the total class, I knew about a year in advance, that that's about for whatever. And I read somewhere that to feel so that he read a little Rousseau, a little Pascal, and I'm going to want to see you every day. And also Mark, I think in Will's book, The Stillborn Dog, he said something about Rousseau and about to go and Rousseau.
And then I went to the table and I was like, man, I'm going to take a class on book that I should read a little of these, everything. So that's what I started doing. And I was like, oh, Rousseau, I think probably like Nietzsche, he's just so easy to read, like almost to a fault. And so complicated that I think, and there's so much to get.
I think, and David, you know, I thought about it, just how brilliant it must have been as a person. Yeah. Yeah. And a great father.
I think too. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's, you know, I was very dorang kind of the sounding of America's sounding, critical of the French Revolution.