The Three Whisky Happy Hour: From Plato to NATO

Another hectic week for your 3WHH bartenders, and John Yoo wasn’t able to join us at all, so this week’s episode includes a special guest Steve has long wanted to bring on, Alex Priou of the University of Austin, the bold, brash start-up that has generated lot of headlines and controversies in its early years of operation. He’s also the co-proprietor of a rival podcast, The New Thinkery, which is on hiatus at the moment as the team is in motion to new assignments, but it can be thought of as an unofficial “Gulf Coast” Straussian podcast. (Check out some past episodes at the link here.)

Needless to say, we spend a lot of time discussing the crisis of the humanities in higher education, about which Alex has finished a book that is not yet in print but hopefully coming soon. But as Alex is a premier Plato scholar, we also spend a good deal of time considering some aspects of Plato on the subject of education and mis-education, ending up with a brief look at Shakespeare.

Interested listeners should also have a look at Alex’s Substack, “The Close Read,” his Twitter/X feed, and, for those interested in his academic writing, his Academia page.

P.S. We have a YouTube channel for this podcast, to which you can subscribe or watch full episodes if you prefer. We also post several short automatically generated excerpts (which can be a little clunky at times), which are surprisingly popular. Here’s one for the time being:

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