0:01 [Music] who are you and where are you going what do you want for the next 24 minutes we're going to design and attain your ideal life [Music] on the way to wow show together we'll find the ideal path to get you back on the track to success and happiness
0:36 on the way to wow show with your host kevin bemel part of finding our way to wow means understanding our identity and central to that is knowing what we value what are our ethics dr travis smith the author of superhero ethics is going to help us figure that out but before that we're going to have a little
1:11 bit of fun arena puerto morenko is going to give us a lesson in brandy what's brandy what's cognac why should we drink them how stay tuned we're going right there now so we're changing things up a little bit on this episode of the way to wow show normally we have a bartender but today we have with us arena ponomarenko originally from russia came to the united states to do graduate work
1:47 and was seduced by wine and spirits um i don't know wouldn't have been it wouldn't have been a very difficult seduction i know for me arena has since become a silver pin sommelier and a certified uh cognac and sherry educator and so she's here today to um spend some time with my colleague sierra and i and and with all of you talking to us about brandy what it is how to taste it and and and all the nice things that go with that so arena thanks for coming on the way to wow show um thank you kevin and sierra so brandy
2:24 is my favorite category i shouldn't say my favorite it's one of my favorite categories of drinks but i love brandy and in particular cognac so what is brandy brandy um in the narrowest sense it is a distillate of wine so people make wine and then they distill wine into brandy brandy the word comes from the word for brandywine or burnt wine so initially people actually started distilling it as a way of basically making a concentrate of wine to reduce the volume for shipping oh and then they of course transported
3:02 that in barrels and after some time they discovered that it actually improved and had a taste that was quite distinct from wine and very interesting on its own so many uh regions that grow grapes and make wine also distill brandy there's spanish brandy there are multiple brandies from france armenia has a strong tradition of distilling brandy georgia america there's plenty of american brandies so lots and lots of places but to be called cognac which is probably
3:38 the most prestigious brandy you can think of it can only come from the region of cognac in the um southwestern part of france okay so kind of like champagne and sparkling yes exactly okay gotcha nice um armagnac you might know um is another very famous brandy uh it is also it also comes from the southwestern part of france but that region is um south of cognac um in a slightly wider sense of the word brandy can be a distillate of other types of fruit
4:14 but typically the word brandy is preceded by the name of the fruit for example pear brandy or apple brandy apple brandy the most famous apple brand is calvados which also comes from france but again lots and lots of places around the world distill all kinds of fruit brandies so we have four here i guess that we're going to taste right we have four brandies we have a fruit brandy that is distilled from pear there is a brandy from moldova and there are two cognacs okay so what do we start with we will start
4:50 with the pear brandy uh because as i mentioned fruit fruit brandies typically focus on the fruit notes sometimes they are also called odavi if they are unaged fruit brandies so it is all about the purity of one fruit so you're looking for the best expression of pear if we're gonna try four maybe we wanna
5:25 yeah that's good thank you now is there a way to drink this properly or i mean obviously well um if you're used to tasting wine typically you you're directed to swirl the wine in your glass rather vigorously to release the aromas you probably shouldn't do that with the spirits because they are higher in alcohol and uh i prefer to gently swirl the glass oh okay in my hands to release the aromas
6:00 as i swirl it around yeah you swirl you live and you learn just um just be a little gentler with it because if you swirl too vigorously it's going to release release a lot of alcohol in your nose so this has a nice nose of uh of pear yeah that's what fruit brand is odavis are all about they're about the purity the one note of the fruit that they're made from okay so there isn't going to be a lot of complexity it is about the fruit okay let's get this track
6:36 oh i like that yeah that's really smooth actually yep um and um it was also it would be good uh chilled i think uh-huh okay it will tone down the alcohol a little more and it will focus on the fruit um so the next one we'll be trying is a two-year-old brandy from moldova okay it says it's aged in oak barrels for 24 months during the soviet times they used to call their brandies cognac just because anywhere east of the iron curtain everybody is just used to the word cognac
7:11 as a generic word for brandy but it is not correct and if they want to be part of the european union they cannot do that anymore oh okay thank you this one i've actually had before i like this so it was more of a way to have a familiar name associated with it so people will be more likely to purchase it exactly okay light light light yeah like that don't do what we did last time you can kind of it looks like there's residual sugar is that what we're seeing no i think it's alcohol there wouldn't
7:46 be any residual sugar in a distillate there you can have sugar added after distillation for certain types of alcoholic drinks but there wouldn't be sugar it's just the alcohol it's quite grapey so uh this is distilled from grapes it is distilled from wine so i would imagine that it is um you should be looking for more notes other than just the grape it's also aged in oak so when a spirit is aged in oak it also extracts certain flavors from the oak like vanilla and spices i would say this one tastes
8:22 older than the other one the other one felt a little more summery if that is a thing it is it is it is purely fruit it's unaged when a spirit spends some time in oak two years in this case it acquires other flavors all right well let's do our last one here this is so interesting i wish there were more classes on how things came to be and the traits of different yeah right you know the brewing process thank you so much oh that's plenty thanks
9:02 so this is an actual cognac but it comes via israel which is one of the places you have to go to get cognac perfect next travel plan okay so you can see that the nose of this cognac is much bigger richer uh there's more complexity there's more integration on the younger cognac or brandy uh you're gonna have the here are the oak aromas here are the fruity aromas they're kind of separate because it didn't really integrate as much didn't have that time so it's more appropriate for let's say a cocktail but with an older cognac you have a lot
9:39 more of that richness complexity and integration and it's more pleasurable to drink on its own and exo is minimum of how old uh right now the minimum is 10 10. yes but many houses do age cognac longer longer yes and uh it doesn't mean that it is all of it is ten years right it means the youngest spirit in the blend so cognac is typically blended right from different from a range of spirits of different ages and the youngest spirit in the blend has to be 10 years old excellent thank you for all of this
10:15 information irina really wonderful and um and now gosh i mean i i've got more cognacs here but unfortunately we're out of time so uh well we'll have to come back and do a cognac party don't you think i think so yeah i think this is wonderful thank you great information and and and uh really appreciate you coming on the show and teaching us all these insights about about brandy and cognac a lot of things i never knew before well thank you for having me it's been great cheers
10:50 [Music] my next guest is dr travis smith and i have my colleague sierra here because she put me on to dr smith's book super hero ethics now to show you what a giving man he is the email i wrote to him after having read his books basically said don't really know anything about superheroes don't like comic books but i found your book fascinating and i have to have you on my
11:27 show and lo and behold he said yes so i mean the idea first of all we don't think that much i think about ethics education and it's really a crucial aspect of finding our way to wow but then through the offices of superheroes travis is on to something here so travis thank you so much for joining us on the way to wow i'm going to give people just a little bit of your background i realize they didn't do that um travis has a phd from harvard
12:04 he's a professor at concordia university and he's really interested in the intersection between ethics and religion and science oftentimes people say don't things that don't go together at all he's also interested in the idea of storytelling as a teaching advice and maybe that's how you got onto comic books so so sierra i i i know you were super excited to to uh to meet uh travis so go ahead and throw out the first question here let's let's uh let's engage the conversation
12:40 yes so travis um for people who don't know the book pairs up many superheroes um and what we can take away from each of them as far as maybe inspiration or a life lesson one of my questions is which one of the characters do you find you draw from the most as a image of a hero or someone you notice you need to tap into their qualities well thank you for the question sierra and thank you kevin for having me on the way to wow this is a uh exciting experience for me to be on your program um right so when i when i was you know
13:17 deciding which superhero characters to conduct a analysis of in my book um i i went uh to the most popular and well-known ones the ones that had had the first so many feature films that they were the focus of those stories uh characters that people might have already known from children's cartoons on saturday mornings and so uh i am someone who's read let's say too many comic books and could have easily you know written a book dealing with a hundred plus characters instead of the ten i focused on
13:52 uh my actual personal favorite superhero is captain marvel the marvel version of captain marvel who had a movie very recently when i was growing up as a teenager you know as as any teenage boy might i thought wolverine was the coolest and i also really liked the green lantern and i was not a big fan of the hulk or batman for example and uh when i when i wrote my book it was important to me to not just focus on my favorites not just focus on the ones that i already felt like i had something you know in common with
14:29 or the ones that spoke to me personally i really wanted to approach the subject in the way that i i try to teach my students to approach works of philosophy which is um you know in a generous open-minded spirit don't just go to the ones that you already feel uh you know intuitive attraction toward uh but instead uh you know if there's if there's characters out there that other people love uh you should try to understand why other people love them try to figure out what it is about other you know models of human excellence people's you know people admire
15:06 people respect look up to you know if they don't speak to you why not you know find out what makes them so appealing to other people and on the flip side i made a point of being critical of the ones that i knew i liked too much to start off with and so as a result of example my analysis of green lantern i don't think i like the character so much anymore and all the things that used to appeal to me about the character i realize are probably flaws in me that i need to work on overcoming uh and so the uh the book came out of an article in which i had compared spider-man and
15:42 batman and um i i do have i will confess a kind of um uh feeling that there's a there's a fair amount of peter parker in my own personality i sometimes wonder which of the various sort of pop culture characters i most like you know i've got a bit of peter parker a bit of kermit the frog a bit of rabbit from winnie the pooh a bit of anakin skywalker you know you can pick and choose from these kinds of you know you know yeah yeah i'm a charlie brown aren't i
16:19 uh and so i i feel like uh ultimately the character of spider-man is the one that i associate most with as someone who offers me a standard of what i think is a a good way to live in the world so how does someone begin to plumb the depths of these characters right i mean it is the case that uh they're often uh not only read as but written as you know juvenile amusements for kids on saturday mornings right with nothing more to them than than four
16:54 colors and two dimensions uh but uh there's something about these characters especially these classic superheroes that were created in the 50s and 60s that it's stuck so there must be something to them they must and not only are they stuck as part of you know american popular culture imagination but worldwide right they speak to people uh from different cultures totally different political regimes around the world and uh i do think it is the case that the that the people who created these characters um
17:30 uh we're doing more than that they let on that they were more educated to the literary uh political historical religious traditions of western society you know people who ended up working in comic books decades ago were people who often had other aspirations as writers and artists but they found work in comic books right and so they were already coming to that business educated to uh educated higher than comic books and infused that education into the popular culture products that they were
18:06 manufacturing and plus they're tapping into the stories that you get from the biblical tradition the classical greek and roman traditions and also from mythologies around the world i mentioned thor so you know there's a popular culture version of norse mythology there they'll go to ancient egypt sometimes in these stories or they'll meet the gods of uh southeast asia and so part of the superhero uh storytelling is drawing upon uh aspects of the depths of a variety of human cultures so for for someone who
18:44 wants to deepen um have a deeper understanding of of you know his ethical nature where does that person start i i'm because i mean when if someone asked me that question one of the things i would say was well go read superhero ethics right um because in at its heart and we talked about this before um at its heart that's what the book is asking us to do it's asking us to examine ourselves reflected against
19:21 these icons of virtue in some way and and measure how do we stack up good or bad and and and then how and and really are these you know is is any particular one supposed to be the model right for me right so that that that's that's one way to approach that give us if you would another way we can approach deepening our our our ethical understanding our our engagement with that that whole body of knowledge
19:56 i'll tell you what what worked for me when i was in my 20s um first off i'll start off you know i teach political philosophy now but i was actually a math science kid growing up and started chemical engineering to start off before i switched into my current field and when you're a math science kid the whole education system is arrayed to help you focus on the maths and the sciences uh and so i did not get much of an education in the humanistic side of things because i was really good with the numbers um but i you know got essentially when i
20:32 was a teenager that i was missing something and so i started reading for myself so i'd finish my calculus homework and i'd grab a copy of the iliad way over my head at the time but then through college i would continue with this and to tell people start reading you know uh great works of philosophy get out the emanuel cons and start with the critique of your reason that's just not good advice right i mean it's important book you should read it but that's not where you start right uh and then um uh it's the same with you know
21:07 read the bible it's a or the religious tradition great text of the great religious traditions in general also for a lot of people off-putting an advice that isn't going to take unless they've already been educated to take it seriously um i tend to find you know students that are raised any religious tradition where they take texts seriously have a real advantage over students today that don't have that education in their childhood doesn't matter from where in the world or what text you're raised to take texts seriously you've got an advantage over students that only know how to tweet and how to instagram uh
21:42 and and so reading is important and so what i say is instead of starting with the great works of philosophy instead of starting with uh the the the books of revelation just find classic works of literature right um and you know to do better than just all the tv streaming that we all do these days and and and whether it's you know as it was for me trying out the tolstoy and the dostoev dostoevsky uh whether the kind of person who's going to fight it instead in the austin bronte you're going to find it instead in you know the dickens
22:18 [Music] or the zola who knows where right try different things but read the great works of literature take time to do that because there's nothing more humanizing than reading the great works of literature and to expose you to how complex the human condition is and the various ways in which some of the best minds have thought about how we have to handle our relationships with each other as best we can under the circumstances that's that's the advice i give okay great advice i feel like a kindred spirit because i i talk to people about great books as often as they'll listen i
22:55 just worry that you know in in your you know uh huxley brave new world all the great works of literature were locked away in a cabinet that only moved off of man the world controller was allowed to read right right and i worry instead we're we're in a situation now where you know they're all there out there for free you can download pdfs of everything or kindle additions for one penny or whatever and and people just choosing not to right and so nobody needs to be forbidden the great books does not have to be made aware of their significance importance and appeal absolutely travis unfortunately
23:33 our time is up but thank you so much for having this conversation with sierra and me a real treat and i i i hope that we can uh talk again uh maybe next season and and and go even more into depth on what is i think a crucial subject when people are really trying to answer those those those two questions that we're helping them with you know who um who are you and and what do you want to do the the the the ethical foundations of that is crucial so yeah thank you so much i really
24:08 appreciate it and as i told you i thoroughly enjoyed your book and what it's about and gave me a fun talking point with many people and i've managed to get kevin and others to read it so thank you for writing that and i hope that you have a good semester with your students nice to meet you sierra thanks for your questions glad you enjoyed the book that's our show for this week i want to thank my guests irena porno marchenko and dr travis smith remembering what travis said how can we get on that path to better understanding our ethics what we really want to be at
24:44 our core read great books so many out there whether it's wonderful fiction like dickens or austin or great tales like the iliad in the odyssey or even the deep deep things like kierkegaard pick something up and just give it a try [Music] stay tuned next week when my guests will be colleen hammond and rabbi mendel schwartz courage at all times my friends marie you are still my bell darling
25:33 [Music] you