Episode 08: Cycles of Life

Episode 08: Cycles of Life In this podcast I spend some time with my good friend Jacob. We became friends at work but ultimately built a friendship based on a mutual interest in music and technology. This turned out to be one of the most impactful podcasts I’ve done because we really get to the heart of why I spent so much time in structured environments. In a lot of ways I moved from the military to the monastery and then to graduate school—all structured environments as a way to deal with the chaos of my childhood.

Om Podcasten

Alexs Thompson is an internationally recognized scholar of Islam who spent over a decade living and working in the Middle East with self-described fundamentalists in Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, and numerous countries in Central and East Africa. Much of that time was spent in support of U.S. forces and international policy. Alexs received a Ph.D. from the Divinity School at the University of Chicago where he wrote his dissertation on medieval Islamic history. He also received a Master's degree in geochemistry from the University of Illinois (Chicago) where he wrote about the age and sustainability of groundwater in Egypt. Dr. Thompson has been published in Joint Force Quarterly--the leading military journal directed by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Small Wars Journal, and been a guest speaker at the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy as well as the Association of the United States Army. In his travels, he worked with Generals David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal and participated in numerous pivotal combat zones in the War on Terror. https://www.thisherolife.com