The Hero Report

I’m excited to announce a new venture on which I’m about to embark: A weekly video podcast on heroism with my friend Matt Langdon, an educator and blogger from Michigan (via Australia) with whom I’ve been in conversation for a few years now. Our first episode — which features a discussion on the Costa Concordia shipwreck, the captain’s dereliction of duty, and whether or not it’s appropriate to call someone a hero for doing his or her duty — will be available here tomorrow.

Matt and I have both spent a great deal of time thinking, writing, and lecturing on various aspects of heroism; now we’re ready to discuss what we’ve learned and to learn from others. To do this, we’ll take a look at stories about heroism (or the lack thereof) from the week’s news and we’ll debate what happened, why it happened, and what should have happened. From me, you can expect references to philosophy and pop culture as we go. But, I should note, it won’t just be us droning on about our own opinions: We’ll also have guests each week and we’ll pepper them with questions.

What’s more, we’re hoping to really embrace the social networking environment in which we spend so much of our time by taking suggestions for topics and guests for each week’s show, interacting on Twitter, and even broadcasting the show live via Google+ a few days before it’s polished up and available to download.

For those who don’t have any particular desire to see us, there will be an audio-only version, and both audio and video versions should be available before long via iTunes. New episodes will always broadcast at 4pm Eastern on Google+ and will be available to download on Mondays or Tuesday, depending on how much editing we need to do to make ourselves presentable. We might also sneak in a new episode here and there if something particularly interesting happens; we’ll likely just announce these a bit in advance via Twitter for people who’d like to catch the live broadcast.

I’m excited about this project, and hope you’ll consider checking it out and telling your friends!