Continuing the Conversation: a Great Books podcast

In this episode of Continuing the Conversation, the Surface Navy Association podcast, LT Scott Harris sits down with Mouzetta C. Zumwalt-Weathers, daughter of Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr., former Chief of Naval Operations and namesake of the USS Zumwalt (DDG 1000). Mouzetta shares personal reflections on her father's leadership philosophy, his commitment to fairness and service, and the enduring impact of the Admiral Zumwalt Award for Visionary Leadership. The conversation explores Admiral Zumwalt's efforts to improve opportunities across the Navy, his dedication to sailors at every level, and the qualities that define visionary leadership in today's fleet. The discussion also highlights the legacy of USS Zumwalt, Admiral Zumwalt's post-Navy work supporting bone marrow transplantation and veterans affected by Agent Orange, and the importance of organizations like the Surface Navy Association in connecting generations of naval leaders. This episode offers valuable insights for sailors, leaders, and anyone interested in the lasting impact of service-driven leadership.   Host: LT Scott Harris, USN Secretary, SNA Monterey Chapter   Guest: Mouzetta C. Zumwalt-Weathers Daughter of Admiral Elmo Zumwalt

In this episode of Continuing the Conversation, the Surface Navy Association podcast, LT Scott Harris sits down with Mouzetta C. Zumwalt-Weathers, daughter of Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr., former Chief of Naval Operations and namesake of the USS Zumwalt (DDG 1000). Mouzetta shares personal reflections on her father's leadership philosophy, his commitment to fairness and service, and the enduring impact of the Admiral Zumwalt Award for Visionary Leadership. The conversation explores Admiral Zumwalt's efforts to improve opportunities across the Navy, his dedication to sailors at every level, and the qualities that define visionary leadership in today's fleet. The discussion also highlights the legacy of USS Zumwalt, Admiral Zumwalt's post-Navy work supporting bone marrow transplantation and veterans affected by Agent Orange, and the importance of organizations like the Surface Navy Association in connecting generations of naval leaders. This episode offers valuable insights for sailors, leaders, and anyone interested in the lasting impact of service-driven leadership.   Host: LT Scott Harris, USN Secretary, SNA Monterey Chapter   Guest: Mouzetta C. Zumwalt-Weathers Daughter of Admiral Elmo Zumwalt

In this episode of Continuing the Conversation, the Surface Navy Association podcast, host LT Scott Harris, USN, Secretary of the SNA Monterey Chapter, speaks with LCDR Donald Rudnickas, Commanding Officer of CGC SPAR (WLB 206), and EMC Marc Mouton, Command Chief, recipients of the 2025 Hopley Yeaton Superior Cutterman Awards. The conversation explores the leadership philosophy, teamwork, and operational excellence that earned CGC SPAR recognition for superior cuttermanship. Rudnickas and Mouton discuss the unique challenges of Coast Guard operations on the Great Lakes, including aids to navigation, icebreaking, crew development, and maintaining mission readiness amid increasing operational demands. The episode highlights the critical relationship between commanding officers, chiefs, and crews in creating a meaningful sense of purpose. Their insights on leadership, mentorship, and service offer valuable lessons for members of both the Coast Guard and Surface Warfare communities while reinforcing the importance of professional development and maritime excellence at sea.    Host: LT Scott Harris, USN Secretary, SNA Monterey Chapter   Guest: LCDR Donald Rudnickas, USCG CGC SPAR (WLB 206), Commanding Officer 2025 Officer Hopley Yeaton Superior Cutterman Award Winner   EMC Marc Mouton, USCG CGC SPAR (WLB 206), Command Chief 2025 Enlisted Hopley Yeaton Superior Cutterman Award Winner

In this trailer for an upcoming episode of Continuing the Conversation, the Surface Navy Association podcast, we preview a conversation with LCDR Donald Rudnickas, Commanding Officer of CGC SPAR (WLB 206), and EMC Marc Mouton, Command Chief, recipients of the 2025 Hopley Yeaton Superior Cutterman Awards. Together, they discuss the leadership, teamwork, and sense of purpose that helped their crew excel through demanding operations on the Great Lakes. From icebreaking and aids to navigation to developing future leaders, their story highlights the people behind mission success in the United States Coast Guard. Listen to this preview and discover the leadership lessons that earned CGC SPAR recognition for superior cuttermanship.

In this episode of Continuing the Conversation, the Surface Navy Association podcast, host LT Scott Harris, USN, Secretary of the SNA Monterey Chapter, speaks with SCPO Thomas Christie, USN, Intelligence Specialist and recipient of the 2025 SNA Video Award. Christie discusses the inspiration and creative process behind Sea of Valor, a music video highlighting the sailors and mission of USS Howard (DDG 83). The conversation explores Christie’s long-standing interest in video editing, his experience capturing the daily work of forward-deployed sailors, and how emerging technologies—including AI-generated music—helped shape the final production. The episode also reflects on the historical legacy of destroyer sailors, the importance of storytelling in recognizing the work of the Surface Force, and the operational realities of ships forward deployed in the Indo-Pacific. This discussion highlights how creative media can capture the professionalism, teamwork, and dedication of the Surface Warfare community while showcasing the people and missions that define today’s Surface Navy. Host: LT Scott Harris, USN Secretary, SNA Monterey Chapter Guest: SCPO Thomas Christie, USN Intelligence Specialist 2025 SNA Video Award Winner

In this trailer for an upcoming episode of Continuing the Conversation, the Surface Navy Association podcast, we preview a conversation with SCPO Thomas Christie, USN, Intelligence Specialist and recipient of the 2025 SNA Video Award. Christie discusses the inspiration behind Sea of Valor, a music video highlighting the sailors and mission of USS Howard (DDG 83). Drawing on the legacy of destroyer sailors and the realities of forward-deployed naval operations, the video captures the professionalism, teamwork, and dedication of today’s Surface Force. The full episode explores Christie’s passion for storytelling, the creative process behind the video, and how emerging technologies—including AI-generated music—helped bring the project to life. Stay tuned for the full conversation on Continuing the Conversation.

Continuing the Conversation is the official podcast of the Surface Navy Association. Originally recorded in 2020, this episode highlights the experiences of women serving in the United States Navy. The discussion was hosted by Captain Paul Rinn, U.S. Navy (Retired), a longtime leader within the Surface Navy Association and a respected voice in the Surface Warfare community. Captain Rinn passed away in 2022 after decades of service to the Navy and the Surface Navy Association. In this episode, Captain Rinn speaks with three distinguished members of the naval community about their experiences in service, leadership, and the evolving role of women in the Navy. Guests include: BM1 Cheryl Shaw, USN USS Whidbey Island (LSD-41) 2019 E3–E6 Admiral Zumwalt Award Winner CAPT Donna Looney, USN (Ret.) Surface Navy Association Board of Directors VADM Mary Jackson, USN 6th Commander, Navy Installations Command The episode features individual conversations with each guest followed by a roundtable discussion bringing all participants together to reflect on leadership, service, and the experiences of women serving across the fleet. This episode is part of the Continuing the Conversation series, which brings together leaders, Sailors, and members of the naval community to share their experiences and perspectives.

Continuing the Conversation is the official podcast of the Surface Navy Association. The podcast extends the dialogue taking place across SNA symposiums, chapter events, professional forums, and interviews by bringing conversations with leaders, Sailors, innovators, and members of the naval community to a broader audience. The podcast highlights the people, ideas, achievements, and leadership shaping today’s Surface Force. Subscribe and join us as we continue the conversation.

The power and beauty of Homer’s imagery in the Iliad is undeniable, and his scenes of battle often prompt vexing questions about ancient and modern virtues. Can killing and dying in war be beautiful? Is a just cause required for glory to be gained? Is war a courageous way of fulfilling human nature and, ultimately, of embracing the reality that death awaits us all? This episode, in which Annapolis host Louis Petrich and tutor Erica Beall delve into the dramatic contrasts that make Homer’s work powerful and war potentially beautiful, invites us to question our own modern perspectives on this ancient text. Those perspectives may reflect Shakespeare’s Trojan war play, Troilus and Cressida, which shows the reality of war as ugly, its fabled glory a concoction of poets that charms men into fighting. And yet Homer's Iliad remains a perennial favorite of Johnnies, who often return to it multiple times after graduation. In fact, it is the only text in Continuing the Conversation to headline two episodes.  

This episode takes us through a close reading of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 94, which many consider to be his most enigmatic. Annapolis tutor Eva Brann brings a clear argument to the poem, taking us quatrain by quatrain through the poet’s descriptions of the beloved’s power over the poet through cold detachment and contingent self-mastery. For Brann, the sonnet provides exemplary evidence that “love and logic, passion and thinking, are closely intertwined.” The existence of the sonnet also masterfully enacts its revenge on the stone-cold beloved, whose legacy is defined by the sonnet itself, and its lingering concluding couplet: “For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds; lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.” We also explore the idea that the mastery of logic and language—when kindly and thoughtfully wielded—can prevent the passions of human nature from issuing in inarticulate violence and corruption. This episode is hosted by Louis Petrich.

In the ancient world, art and religion provided a sense of meaning and order that was upended by science and technology. Today, our world is defined by consumerism, self-expression and a gnawing lack of meaning. Can the contemplative life of the mind play a central role in addressing this void? What about the role of its supposed counterparts—doing, making, and simply being? This episode seeks to untangle the human desire for meaning and coherence, the reality of disorientation and disorder, and the perhaps false dichotomy between the life of the mind and the simple act of living itself. Featuring Santa Fe host Sarah Davis, also an artist, and tutor David McDonald, also a photographer, the two begin their conversation exploring the order and power of harmonic music, stumble into the disorder of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, and eventually find some inspiration in the humble unity of Kierkegaard’s knight of faith.

Why is it difficult for people to talk to one another? Annapolis tutor Howard Zeiderman proposes a likely culprit: the difficulty that most humans have with listening. In this episode, Zeiderman joins host Louis Petrich to discuss the importance of learning to hear and understand the language of those who are unlike us, of supporting quieter and less represented voices in conversation, and of building true community through the committed practice of listening. The two explore the value of listening through the lens of the college, which cultivates the practice in seminar, and through the lens of America, where polarization has caused a dangerous breakdown in communication. 

What is the relationship between sports and war? And what is seminar's relationship to both? In this episode, Santa Fe host Sarah Davis and tutor Julie Reahard talk about Reahard’s passion for sports, her long-running commitment to the St. John's ice hockey team, and whether her experiences on the court are similar to those that play out on the battlefield of great texts like the Iliad and War and Peace. As the conversation continues, the two stumble across an unexpected connection to sports and war: the competitive instincts that can arise in seminar, in which participants desire to vanquish their ideological opponents; these instincts are common and real, but also stand in tension with the college's dialectical approach to conversation. From conversational cooperation to sportsmanlike competition to brutal war, this episode takes us on a journey through the best and worst of human nature. 

If one could perfectly translate a literary work, would that translation make the original idea of the author universally understood by all readers? Or do the greatest translations bring new layers of creativity and meaning to a work, making its latent textures relevant for another culture or time—such as feminist translations of the Odyssey and Christian translations of Plato—even as they may dampen the original intentions of the author? In this episode, Annapolis tutor Stella Zhu, who is also a translator of Chinese poetry, joins host Louis Petrich to discuss the complexities of translation, including the role of interpretation and emotion, as humans attempt to understand and communicate ideas across linguistic boundaries through literary translation and dialogue with each other. Their conversation, which itself exemplifies the mystery of communication, continues by exploring the idea that perhaps math and music provide universal languages that literary works never approach; that translating oneself to others may hold the same challenges as translating literary works into new languages; and that multiplicities of understanding may be an inescapable, and perhaps beneficial condition of human life. 

Socrates says that the intellectual practice of philosophy is a practice for dying. But what if the body is the vessel that can best prepare us for the end of life? In this episode, martial artists Krishnan Venkatesh and Claudia Hauer, both tutors in Santa Fe, sit down to discuss the problems of a philosophical separation of mind and body. Through the writings of two essayists—the 13th-century Japanese author Dogan and the 16th-century French author Montaigne—Venkatesh and Hauer explore how physical presence and pain can take us out of our minds and into a practice that prepares us for the vicissitudes of life and the certainty of death through an integration of mind, body, and soul. 

Annapolis tutor Chester Burke has spent many years teaching and shaping the laboratory program of St. John’s College, where mathematics and science are studied as liberal arts. This means that all students read the foundational texts of some of history’s greatest mathematical and scientific minds, in their historical order, while performing original observations, demonstrations, and experiments. These activities allow students to witness great scientific thinkers and experimenters provide the building blocks, old and new, for our theoretical knowledge of nature. In this episode, Burke joins host Louis Petrich for a conversation on the college’s unique approach to scientific and mathematical study.  As such, it includes a standard and beloved practice at St. John’s College—a mathematical chalkboard demonstration—to accompany a dive from classical physics into the startling world of quantum mechanics. Authors touched upon include Galileo, Leibniz, Maxwell, Thompson, Schrödinger, Bohr, Einstein, Heisenberg, Faraday, and Descartes. 

Why do writers travel? Why do some authors write their most influential works in foreign countries? Does the unknown bring new insights and transformation, or do new lands provide nothing more than romantic myths for the imagination? In the essay Self-Reliance, Emerson says "Traveling is a fool's paradise . . . My giant goes with me wherever I go." Is he right? Or is getting lost the best way of finding higher truths? In this episode, Santa Fe host Krishnan Venkatesh joins tutor David Carl in a conversation that explores Carl's journey as a writer who travels alongside these larger, universal questions, taking us from his time as a boy in rural Oregon, to Paris, to India, and ultimately back home, to ponder these questions at St. John’s College. 

Is it important to feel when we read literature? Or when we learn math and science? On a related front, what is the role of order and disruption in literature, in life, and in our observation of the universe? In this episode, Santa Fe host Sarah Davis and tutor Grant Franks explore the meaning and value of feeling, then launch into a wide-ranging conversation about the ways in which emotion, order, chaos, and discovery seem central to great literature, to world-changing shifts in math and science, and to one’s own sense of self and belonging. Through dramatic moments and characters in the Iliad, the Aeneid, and The Brothers Karamazov to Newton’s Principia Mathematica and Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, this episode investigates what makes us feel and how to feel about deep feeling. 

In the Gettysburg Address, President Lincoln proclaimed that soldiers gave their life at the Battle of Gettysburg for a “new birth of freedom.” But what did he mean? In this episode, Annapolis tutor George Russell joins host Louis Petrich in a conversation that on the surface explores important Lincoln speeches and ideas within their Civil War context. But on a deeper level, it is a discussion about the often-conflicting ideas of freedom and equality, the complexity of justice, and the value—and difficulty—of freeing one’s mind from the shackles of accepted notions. It is also a conversation between two tutors of different races, practicing the art of questioning authoritative opinions, particularly those concerning race in America: how did the Civil War bring about a new birth of freedom? What about the lynchings, segregation, and deep economic inequalities that followed? Did Lincoln foresee that the nation would need multiple new births to maintain its ideals and opportunities for all citizens? How has—and hasn’t—the nation realized Lincoln's vision at Gettysburg? 

Is a book dead or alive? Can one be friends with a book or with the author behind the book? What are the promises and hazards of such friendships? Should we seek stability, loyalty, and reassurance of our deepest convictions and impulses? Or do real friends provide conflict, mystery, and depth, challenging and surprising us continually with new insights and contradictions? What if a friendship isn’t dyadic in nature but triadic, requiring a third element to complete it—such as fine wine or a shared spiritual yearning? Are some friends more suited to lifelong friendship than others and, if so, why? In this episode, Annapolis tutor Mary Elizabeth Halper and host Zena Hitz explore the very personal relationships that humans have with books, and with the complex questions they bring up in all of us.