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- [00:00]
A
Hello friends. Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Donald Robertson. He's a cognitive behavioral psychotherapist, an author and an expert on ancient philosophy. If you were to divide philosophy into two eras, it would be pre Socratic and post Socratic. Socrates is history's greatest philosopher and today we get to discover new lessons about his life and his teachings. Expect to learn the benefits of thinking like Socrates, why he was so influential even today. What the Socratic method actually is. The hidden gem, lessons from Socrates on how to live a good life, the insane story of how he died, and much more. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Shopify powers 10% of all E commerce companies in the United States. They're the driving force behind Newtonic and a few other brands you've probably heard of like Gymshark and Allbirds. You can think of Shopify as your business sidekick. From setting up shop to scaling your business, they've got you covered. You're not going into business to learn about how to code or build a website or do backend inventory management. Shopify takes all of that off your hands and allows you to focus on the job that you came here to do, which is designing and selling a cool product. So if you've got a killer idea and a dream to sell, Shopify is your go to no coding, no design skills, no problem. Just pure entrepreneurial magic. Right now you can sign up for a $1 per month trial period at the link in the description below or by heading to shopify.commodern wisdom all lowercase, that's shopify.commodern wisdom now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in. This episode is brought to you by Nomatic. Traveling should be about the journey, not the chaos of packing, which is why I'm such a huge fan of Nomatic. Nomatic has changed my entire life and their brand new method Carry on is available after selling out pretty much instantly. It's engineered to be lighter, stronger, plus it can hold up to 20% more than other carry ons due to some wizardry that they've done inside some sort of Harry Potter thing. I'm not too sure, but it means that you can fit a week's worth of clothes or more without stress. Stressing about space. And their products will last you literally a lifetime with their lifetime guarantee. So this is the final carry on bag that you will ever need to buy. Plus you can return or exchange any product within 30 days for any reason. Right now you can get 20% off everything site wide by going to the link in the description below or heading to nomatic.com modernwisdom that's n o m a t I c.com Modern Wisdom I've won Whoop for over four years now, since way before they were a partner on the show. And it is the only wearable I have ever stuck with because it's the best. It's so innocuous you don't remember that you've got it on and yet it tracks absolutely everything 247 via your wrist. It tracks your heart rate, your sleep, your recovery, all of your workouts, your resting heart rate, heart rate variability, how much you're even breathing throughout the night. Puts all of this into an app and spits out very simple, easy to understand and fantastically usable data. It's phenomenal. I am a massive, massive fan of whoop. And that is why it's the only wearable that I've ever stuck with. And best of all, you can join for free. Pay nothing for the brand new Whoop 4.0 strap, plus you get your first month for free and there's a 30 day money back guarantee so you can buy it for free, try it for free, and if you don't like it after 29 days, they'll give you your money back. Right now you can get all of that by heading to join.whoop.com modern wisdom. That's join.whoop.com modern Wisdom. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Donald Robertson. Dude, I love every time that we get to speak. I adored all of your last books and you've done a new one about Socrates. Why would anyone want to think like Socrates?
- [04:08]
B
Why would anyone care about this old dead white guy or whatever? He. I love Socrates. I love Marcus Aurelius. But Socrates is like the next level, you know, I really am excited to be able to talk and, and write about him and stuff. Socrates was an. I'll tell you why this is going to seem like an odd answer, right? Does Eric Clapton, right? And guys like that. And then there's Jimi Hendrix, right? Eric Clapton is an amazing guitarist, but Jimi Hendrix, to me anyway, sounds like he's from another planet, right? Jimi Hendrix took his guitar to bed with him. He woke up in the morning, strapped his guitar on and fried eggs wearing his guitar. He went to the lavatory wearing his guitar, right? Psychologists call that time on task. Like he was constantly practicing and stuff, like he was obsessed with it. Socrates reminds me in that solitary regard of Jimi Hendrix because the way he's described to us is that he's a guy who abandoned everything else and just spent all day, every day discussing what he considered to be the most important questions in life with anybody, the greatest intellectuals that he could find in the known world. Prostitutes, politicians, slaves, you name it, everybody from all walks of life. So he had. He was like the Jimi Hendrix of philosophizing. Like, he never took his guitar off. He was constantly doing. I can't imagine someone in modern society spending that amount of time really analyzing the contradictions in someone else's thinking. So Socrates to me is a kind of a unique individual and it comes through. We don't know. There's this thing called the Socratic problem that we don't know. But we should acknowledge at the beginning that we don't know for sure how close a representation Plato's dialogues or the other sources that we have are of the real Socrates. But I think his character comes through to some extent. Those dialogues are probably semi fictional, like they're embellished a bit. But the real guy kind of shines through to some extent. And he must have been an extraordinary individual. He's somebody who has a tremendous capacity for thinking outside the box, for spotting logical contradictions. And he said some of the most radical things in the history of Western philosophy. Not only that, I see him as the godfather of modern self help and self improvement psychology or the great, great granddaddy of cognitive behavioral therapy. So as a psychotherapist, of cognitive behavioral therapist, you know, I look to Socrates as somebody who stands at the very origin of our tradition. But also I think in some ways we've kind of gone astray in ways that he wanders about. So by going back and looking at what he originally said, I think we can figure out maybe and see beyond some of the mistakes that we might have made along the way.
- [07:00]
A
You mentioned there maybe historical gap with regards to what we know about him, how we would have learned about him, how do we know anything about him? Sort of. What are the scraps of material that you've been using to write this book?
- [07:13]
B
Well, the most famous thing is that we have Plato's Dialogues. There are like 36 or 37 of Plato's dialogues, most of which feature Socrates prominently. And it's generally assumed by scholars that Plato changed his approach throughout his career. Early in his career he wrote a more literal description of Socrates, probably embellished a bit as time went on. He starts to use Socrates more and more as a mouthpiece probably for his own views, like Plato's famous metaphor, physical theory, the theory of forms probably wasn't something that Socrates ever actually said. Socrates's way of doing philosophy seems to be more kind of homely, down to earth, more focused on applied ethics in daily life, basically. So we have those. And, you know, dude, Plato's dialogues are just incredible. You know, Plato was also a genius. And so we have the writings of a genius about another genius, basically. You know, some of these texts are the most profound and moving pieces of literature in the Western canon. And, you know, I seldom recommend books to people, funnily enough, unless I know them very well. But my one exception to that is that I think everybody should read Plato's Apology, because I think it's a masterpiece and it only takes a couple of hours to read as an assay. So we've got all that stuff. And then we have Xenophon, another student of Socrates, and his dialogues are less well known, but we have a bunch of like 30 or 40 dialogues, shorter ones, more down to earth from Xenophon as well. Then we have this really weird thing, which is a play by Aristophanes, which is a satire ridiculing Socrates that was written and performed during his lifetime. And we learn almost nothing from that. Or it's hard to tell anything from it because it's a caricature, but it tells us that he must have been pretty famous during his lifetime for people to have ridiculed him, caricatured him like that. And then we have what's called the anecdotal tradition, which is like basically a bunch of little anecdotes and quips about Socrates said this, Socrates did that. That we tend to find in later authors, so they are more dubious reliability. But altogether, all this stuff tells us something about what we could frame as the literary character of Socrates. So Marcus Aurelius and other subsequent thinkers that followed the subsequent to Socrates would have known of him mainly through these writings. So we could say what's influencing them is the character of Socrates that was passed down by other writers. And there's a big question mark about how closely does that correlate to the real guy? We'll never know.
- [09:48]
A
Why was he so influential?
- [09:52]
B
Well, the ancient answer to that question is that he was the first. He wasn't the first philosopher. He wasn't even the first philosopher at Athens. But they used to say that he was the first philosopher that brought philosophy really down to earth and applied it to everyday matters, kind of almost making it into a psychotherapy. Basically, he would talk to people about the nature of love. He would talk to generals in the military about the nature of courage. You know, he would talk to priests about the nature of piety, he talked to his friends about the anger. The most kind of homely dialogue that we have is in Xenophon. And in it, Socrates has a conversation with his teenage son Lamprocles, because Lamprocles is really upset about his mum nagging him. And Socrates helps his son to kind of reframe this, overcome his anger towards his mother. Right. So that's probably the most kind of down to earth example of a Socratic dialogue that we have. So that's kind of what he was particularly known for doing. But also he took the method of dialectic or philosophical question and answer, turned it into his own trademark method called the Socratic method, and really began to much more radically and thoroughly question the assumptions about morality mainly that people around him were making. And that made him a controversial figure. You know, he was like dynamite. You know, some people were almost addicted to being questioned by Socrates. They found it an incredibly liberating experience. Other people found it embarrassing, humiliating, and they hated him and they went after him. So it wouldn't be overly simplifying things to say that Socrates asked too many questions, rocked the boat, upset some powerful people, and we all know how that ended for him. He was made to drink hemlock.
- [11:47]
A
What was the existing philosophical world that he entered into? You mentioned there that he wasn't the first philosopher, probably by broader categories, but he's the first one to bring it down to earth. What was the state philosophically of the existing world?
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B
Well, the two main philosophical traditions that preceded him, and there were others, so it's a little bit more complex. But the ones that are most relevant to him is the first philosopher at Athens was a guy called Anaxagoras who came from the Greek colonies, which would be in Ionia, which would be on the coast of Turkey, basically. So when we talk about Greek philosophers, we're often a bit confused about where they came from. They didn't all come from Athens, many of them came from Greek colonies that were much further afield. So Anaxagoras was what we call a natural philosopher. The famous thing about Socrates is we refer to everyone that came before him as pre Socratic. That's how influential he was. You know, like pre George.
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A
He's the before Christ. He's the before Christ of philosophy.
- [12:50]
B
Yeah. So the natural philosophers are kind of, in many ways precursors of modern science. They try to explain things, broadly speaking, using physical descriptions. You know, they were interested in, very interested in astronomy, very interested in physiology, and that was a great thing for Athenian culture and Greek culture. It was also very controversial because they challenged traditional superstitions. So people would think that thunder and lightning was caused by Zeus. And the natural philosopher said, we reckon it's caused by clouds rubbing together or something like that. You know, earthquakes are just a natural phenomenon and things. And that had a surprisingly big impact on society. Just as an aside, there's a famous anecdote about how Pericles, the most influential, most powerful Athenian statesman at this time, was about to set sail with his fleet on a military campaign and there was an eclipse and his crew were cowering in fear and they refused to do it. Very often the Greeks would abandon, particularly the Spartans were known for this by the way. They would abandon battles because they were concerned about bad omens and so on. And Pericles supposedly explained the natural philosophy that he'd been taught by Anaxagoras. And he said, look, this is just something passing in front of the sun, as if I put my cloak in front of your eyes, but it's further away and much bigger. And he convinced, by giving this down to earth naturalistic explanation, he managed to convince his troops to set sail. And so it changed the outcome of battles, basically, that's how kind of dramatic it was. But at the same time it also upset a lot of people. And so Anaxagoras was also placed on trial for impiety long before Socrates. So there was Anaxagoras. And Socrates thought, this philosophy though, doesn't teach wisdom. He said Anaxagoras didn't really understand anything about the nature of justice and injustice. So when he was placed on trial, supposedly he was a broken man as a result. And we can contrast how Anaxagoras dealt badly with being exiled and then subsequently sentenced to death for impiety, and how Socrates famously exhibited courage in court and stood by his principles because he prepared himself to understand justice and injustice from a much more profound philosophical perspective. So Xanaxagris and many other natural philosophers that Socrates had studied, and then a bit later we get these guys called the Sophists. And their name implies that they claim to be wise, they claim to be, to have expertise. And the Sophists taught young men oratory and rhetoric. They were kind of like self improvement gurus in a sense, but they also taught people how to become successful politicians and confident public speakers. And they were. The first one was Protagoras, who Socrates knew personally and questioned. And this seems to have been a key moment in his career. But Socrates basically thought the Sophists were Far too concerned with just winning arguments and they'd sacrifice the truth. So they would teach you how to win a debate in the assembly. Right? But Socrates, concerned, to put it very simply, was he'd say, how much time have you guys spent trying to figure out what's in the best interest of society or what's just and what's unjust, like zero time. But you spend all of your time trying to figure out how you can convince other people what's just are in their interests before the assembly. Now this is a very simple argument, but weirdly, eerily, it kind of applies today. Like, you know, so people get into politics because they want to influence society, you know, but how many politicians seem to have invested that much time and effort and trying to figure out what's genuinely in the interests of individuals or society? Socrates says it would be like going to see a doctor that never spent any time studying medicine. I don't bother with that. Like, you know, I'm just really good at writing prescriptions, but I don't know, like, you know, what's actually good for your health, you know, so politicians, all they're concerned about is winning debates, like, you know, influencing legislation. But somebody said, could you explain what justice is or explain to me what's in the interest of society? And when he asked them these questions, they'd be like, I don't know, I haven't really thought about it. So this was his concern with the Sophists, it was all about appearances and they sacrificed truth. But he had a kind of love hate relationship with them. He liked to kind of hang around them. You know, he thought they said some interesting things, but they didn't really think deeply enough about what they were saying. I guess another part of it that I think is very relevant today is that Socrates found that the Sophists would give speeches and they would teach people maxims, a bit like watching a YouTube video or getting kind of rules for life from modern self improvement experts. Right? And Socrates thought that was basically too passive. He thought there are no rules that are going to apply across every situation in life. Basically what's much more in your interests is learning how to think for yourself and to be able to question things and spot exceptions to general rules and principles. So that's a harder, it's a more kind of a less tangible concept for people. But that's where the Socratic method comes in. Socrates thought we need to learn how to think for ourselves, question things more deeply, not just kind of memorize these phrases that we're getting from the Sophists.
- [18:18]
A
Do you think it's kind of ironic that one of Socrates fundamental principles is that you must think for yourself? And your book is called how to Think like Socrates, how to Think Like Socrates, which is how to Think for yourself. Seems nice and circular there, I love it.
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B
It's a bit circular but if you learn to think like Socrates, you'll learn to think for yourself.
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A
So do we know how Socrates got into philosophy? Have we got any idea about his upbringing or history or introduction? If he's this sort of, you know, game changing, world renowned, everything before him was nowt and after him was just a replicant of what he said before, like what was his, what was his come up story?
- [18:59]
B
We kind of have several bits of evidence there. So like sometimes the evidence is a little bit contradictory or it's a little bit vague. So you know, in telling his story we have to make some assumptions, we have to iron out some contradictions and stuff because the ancient texts a little bit messy in that regard. So the most famous explanation he gives is in Plato's Apology where he says his friend Chaerephon went to Delphi, which is a few days walk outside Athens in the mountains. This incredible place, it's like something out of Lord of the Rings. And there's a great famous temple to the God Apollo there and you could ask questions of the Pythia, the priestess of Apollo. She sat on a bronze tripod supposedly inhaling these fumes and she'd go into a trance and the God Apollo possessed her and spoke through her, right? And Chaerephon who was another philosopher, a weird dude who people compared to a bat or a specter. He was, I imagine him almost like a kind of Goth or something. Like he, he was a bit of a misfit, but he was Socrates's best friend and he went to the, he was known for doing kind of eccentric things. So he went to the Delphic oracle and said, Asta, is any man wiser than Socrates? And it replied no man is wiser than Socrates. Apollo the God Apollo replied, no man is wiser than Socrates. And so the weird story in the Apology is that Socrates found this difficult to accept. And see, he went around grilling the wisest people that he could find to try and find evidence that there was indeed somebody that was wiser than him because he didn't believe that no one was wiser than him. But he found that when he asked great philosophers and statesmen, often they contradicted themselves. So he thought they can't be wise, they believe that they are. And the sophists literally called themselves wise men. But often on when they were questioned, the things they were saying were full of contradictions and fell apart. And Socrates thought, well, look, I come to the conclusion that paradoxically I don't know much either, but neither do these guys, and I am wiser than them by a hair's breadth, because at least I know that I'm not wise, whereas they falsely believe that they are wise, right? And so the central thrust of his method becomes puncturing this kind of intellectual arrogance or conceit. Sometimes it's called double ignorance. So Socrates thought, ignorance isn't a problem because I might be ignorant about medicine, but if I know I'm ignorant about medicine, I might be motivated to go and consult an expert, right? I might not know how to fix the engine in my car, but if I go and see a mechanic, I can find somebody that maybe knows better than me. But if I believe that I'm an expert on engines, or I believe I'm an expert on medicines and I'm not really, then I'm in trouble because I'll be guided by my ignorance to make lots of mistakes. So Socrates thought, this is one of our biggest problems in life, a bit like the Dunning Kruger phenomenon, that we believe that we know things that we do not in fact know. So he found that his method was almost like a therapy for curing people of this intellectual conceit. So that's a story that Plato tells, but he must. He also says that he did study philosophy prior to that, maybe for decades he'd been studying natural philosophy and learning about from other philosophers. But his trademark method developed at some point in his life as a result of this weird incident where the oracle proclaims that no man is wiser than him.
- [22:33]
A
I How much do you think he would have spent his time playing this game of poking holes in other people's hypocrisy? Ignorance, like shallow rhetoric, that isn't sort of foundation philosophically. If he hadn't stepped into a world where the sophists were kind of the number one band available at the time.
- [22:56]
B
That'S really hard to say. I mean, I always feel like we almost need the sophist to have Socrates. You know, he's very much reacting to them. I mean, maybe he would have developed his method in response to the other, the natural philosophers. But it really seems to be the sophists that inspire him in a way because he's so concerned. And one reason for that is that the Sophists have a Lot of influence over Athenian politics. And Socrates was friends with some powerful political figures. And so, although he wasn't really directly involved in politics himself, I think he was very concerned about Athens and what's missing from the Platonic dialogues and from Xenophon. Although they refer to historical events and they refer to important figures, I think people still, when they read Plato, get the feeling that Socrates is just walking around in pleasant groves and sandals, kind of pontificating about things. And they don't visualize him as a heavy infantryman who fought in at least three major battles of the Peloponnesian War. They don't imagine him as someone who survives a terrible plague. They don't see him at the heart of Athenian politics, surrounded by these key figures, these senior statesmen, and living through one of the most epic wars in European history. The peloponnesian war lasted 27 years, and under a dictatorship, the 30 tyrants that took over Athens. So his life was incredibly dramatic, basically. And his philosophy is shaped by, I think, all of these things, his experience as a soldier living under different political regimes, including a kind of dictatorship that was really brutal. Political purges where people were just rounded up and executed, all of these things. But definitely the sophists loom large in Socrates influences, and partly because he's concerned about them having so much sway over the Athenian assembly and the political decisions that are being made.
- [25:01]
A
How would you describe the main principles of his philosophical worldview?
- [25:07]
B
Well, as we've said, I mean, the Socratic method, the core of what he's doing, in a sense, is more about process. So some people in the ancient world would have seen wisdom or the goal of life as being the acquisition of knowledge, like, you know, having a bunch of opinions that are true, basically. And Socrates thought, that's not real wisdom, though. That's just kind of learning stuff passively. Real wisdom is more like a cognitive skill. Right. So the goal of philosophy, I think, for Socrates is more of a process that we engage in every day of our lives, learning to think and question things more profoundly. You know, he said, the unexamined life is not worth living. You know, he thought the goal of life was to examine your life continually, every day. It was like an ongoing process of personal development that, in a sense, never really ended. So the core of his philosophy, I think, is the actual method of his philosophy. And he does have doctrines, in a sense. Often he doesn't state them, but he seems to be kind of arriving at them. So, for example, a famous one is in Plato's Republic, in the first book Socies asks for a definition of justice and his friends say, well, justice is helping your friends and harming your enemies. Right? This was a cliche in Athenian culture. It comes from the military world where you'd be helping your military allies and punishing or attacking your enemies in warfare. But it was also applied to civilian life as well. And Socrates questions us from a number of different angles. But as far as I recall in the Republic, he doesn't specifically state what the alternative conclusion would be, he just kind of implies it. Whereas later philosophers, Plutarch, for example, explicitly says Socrates believed that justice consists in helping your friends, but also helping your enemies by turning them into your friends. So the goal is basically to convert enemies into friends, not just to kind of punish or harm your enemies. Socrates was concerned that if we try to harm our friends from a particular point of view, first of all, we're missing out. If we try to harm our enemies, first of all, we're missing out on the opportunity to convert them into allies or friends. And secondly, we might kind of end up making them worse enemies by punishing them or harming them in a particular way. And actually that's kind of what happened to Athens. You know, there were certain more kind of aggressive, hawkish political leaders that took control of the Athenian assembly and they committed genocide. And this really led to Athens downfall because Athens, potential allies, no longer trusted them and turned against them. So their regime collapsed. They had a catastrophic military defeat in Sicily that can be seen as the consequence of this kind of more short sighted, more aggressive attitude towards other states. So, you know, Socrates does have these doctrines and there are many, many other ones that people derive from what he's saying, but we should be a little bit careful about making them into roles that are too rigid. One of his nicest ones, you know, that's a little bit different, for instance, is Socrates. According to Xenophon, Socrates repeatedly said that we should eat to live rather than live to eat. You know, he thought people in general, he thought people were too much duped by appearances, so they were too much swayed by short term pleasure and pain. And he thought we should think more carefully about whether something is actually good for our health or not, rather than just whether it tastes nice or, you know, doesn't taste nice. We should be thinking about the reality of stuff beyond the appearances. Another one of his little sayings that's quite well known is that we should be as we wish to appear. He thought, again, we're misled into focusing too much on appearances. We want to appear Confident. Socrates said it would be better to actually become confident if you want to appear confident. If you focus too much on faking it or the appearances, that can kind of lead to a more superficial approach. It could be misleading. It you could get sucked into deception of other people. It would be better for you to actually become confident. People came to him saying, soccer, how can I make myself seem like a good friend? And Socks said it would be better to become a good friend. In reality.
- [29:28]
A
I'm feeling a lot of this sort of tension between practical and abstract, especially stepping into a world where it's this sort of rhetorical device. People are getting toastmasters or improv or comedy speech coaching in this way, but they're not actually assessing the underlying motivations of why they're doing this particular thing. And, you know, he's got that we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. So even in the highlighting of the importance of action, he's even taking it one step further and talking about the repetition of action.
- [30:06]
B
Yeah, I mean, Socrates felt like we were constantly confusing appearance and reality. That's, I guess, a recurring theme of his philosophy. And he felt the sophists were all about appearances and completely neglected reality. So, you know, he's always challenging us to look beyond appearances by using reason. In a sense, Socrates thinks we're kind of lazy, you know, and he's always kind of encouraging us to question appearances and use reason to think a little bit more deeply about things. I'll give you a really cool example of that. That relates to something I mentioned earlier. I mentioned Lamprocles getting annoyed with his mother. Socrates, at the beginning of the conversation, asks his son whether his mother really cares for him and whether she's made many sacrifices to help him. And Lamprocles actually admits quite easily. He says, yeah, my mom's, like, dedicated her life to helping me. When I'm sick. My mother nurses me like she spent all of her time raising me and she's done everything for me. But Socrates, she just really annoys me when she's nagging me, like, I don't know how I could possibly put up with it. And Socrates uses this amazing analogy that just out. It's one of my favorite things that he says. He says, in the theater, when you're going to see a tragedy being performed, for example, do the actors not really say things that are much more vicious and insulting and hostile than anything your mother ever says? And Lamprecli says, well, yeah, of course they do, but you don't understand Socrates, they're just acting. It's not real. Right? That's the difference. And Socrates says, but you just told me a few moments ago that you believe that your mother doesn't really mean you harm, but fundamentally she cares for you, right? So sometimes she might seem really annoying, but in general, she actually cares for you a lot. And what he's encouraging Lampocles to do is to kind of look beyond the impression that he has of his mother in those moments and think more about her personality as a whole and a more rounded and complete way, by using reason to think about who. Who is your mother really, you know, what is. What is the nature of your relationship with her, really? It's more than just the nagging. Like, that may be part of it, it may be something you don't like, but by focusing only on that and putting it under a magnifying glass, you exaggerate your anger. But if you think about her personality as a whole, then it becomes just one small part, and it becomes less upsetting. Maybe you become more able to tolerate it.
- [32:38]
A
You mentioned it a couple of times. Assume that somebody hasn't heard about the Socratic method before. What is it? How's it work?
- [32:46]
B
So in some ways it's tricky to define, and in some ways it's easy. There's a lot of nuance to it. And Socrates doesn't sit down at any point and say, hey, let me just explain my method to you briefly. Instead, what we see is example after example of him using method in various different ways. So we have to kind of infer how he's doing it. But basically what he tends to do is to ask people to define a concept, and it's usually a virtue. So he'll say, define piety, define courage, define justice. And typically it's something that's very relevant to them. So he's not just like we would in academic philosophy now, analyzing concepts for the sake of it. He talks to military commanders about the nature of courage, for example, because it's something that, that they're already taking for granted, in a sense, in the conversations that they're having. So you could also say he's digging deeper beneath the conversation and questioning the underlying premise or assumption. So you guys are talking a lot about courage, but what is courage? How do you actually define it? The whole conversation is based on that. And then he'll normally think of exceptions to the role that they've given. It's the most famous example is when he's talking to lackeys and Nicaeus to Athenian generals, they define courage as standing your ground and remaining in formation in the face of the enemy. And that's because the Athenians depended to a large extent on their hoplites, their heavy infantry, which Socrates was one. And they had to fight in the phalanx formation. And so each soldier's shield would protect him, but also the guy standing to his left. And if you broke formation, not only would you place yourself at risk, but you place the soldiers that are fighting alongside you in greater danger as well by doing that. So they had to really drum it into these guys that they had to remain very rigidly in formation for this phalanx strategy to work. And Socrates says, okay, that's a good definition of courage, but it's too narrow, right? Because what about during a tactical retreat? You break from the phalanx formation, but you could still exhibit courage. You're no longer standing your ground in the same way, though. What if you fight in the cavalry and then you have to charge into the middle of the enemy rather than standing your ground? But the cavalry exhibit courage. You just have to define it differently, though. He says, what about the Spartans? They fight in phalanx formation, but they also sometimes charge into the enemy like cavalry do. But they're renowned for their courage, so you wouldn't say that they lack courage. You'd have to tweak your definition a little bit. So he starts this conversation going usually by creative thinking and being able to come thinking outside the box and coming up with. So he, you know, again, like, he's not following a formula here as much as using a skill. Like, he's thinking, right? And he's coming up. He's brainstorming examples. What about this? What about this? What about this? Right? It's like he's saying, yeah, but okay, courage could be standing your ground. But what about this? What about this scenario? What about in civilian life? You'd have to define it differently. And so he constantly challenges the interlocutor, the person he's speaking about, to revise the definition and think about it at a deeper and deeper level. And he doesn't always arrive at a clear conclusion. Often he doesn't. His dialogues often end in aparia in Greek, which is the term that we use to mean a sort of confusion or bewilderment. So people walk away, and some people hated that, but other people would walk away from it thinking, I kind of feel like I know less now than I did at the beginning of the conversation, but in a good way, because maybe I was too rigid in my thinking, and I was assuming that I knew things that I didn't really understand. At least now I realize that there's more to justice than helping your friends and harming your enemies, or there's more to courage than just standing your ground and remaining in the phalanx formation. And maybe I've kind of spiraled closer and closer to the center of the meaning of these concepts. So in the process of doing that, he'd often point out contradictions in people's thinking. He said that what you're saying now seems to clash with something that you said a few minutes ago. So he was very sharp at noticing this. And I think one of the ways that that can help us today actually is there's a particular type of contradiction that Socrates would sometimes point out, a moral contradiction. I'll give you another example where he's talking to a teenage boy, an adolescent boy. There's a guy called Kratobulus that comes to him who's the son of one of his best friends, Crito and Critopolis. Says, socrates, could you introduce me to some people that would be really good friends to have in Athenian society? He's asking him for help networking weirdly, right? And Succeed says, sure. How would you define a good friend? And Chretoblas says, well, they come and visit you when you're sick. Maybe they'd lend you money if you're broke. Maybe if you're being a bit out of order, they'd take you to one side and gently kind of explain to you that you should change your behavior and stuff like that. So quite easily he's able to kind of define what a good friend does. But then Socrates says, well, how many of these qualities do you exhibit yourself? And Chretoblis is like, well, not many. Like, you know, zero. I don't know. So Socrates says again, haven't you got this back to front? You're kind of asking me to present you to these people as if you would be a good match, as if you would be a good friend to them. But they're bound to figure out if you don't have any of these qualities, and then they won't trust me as a matchmaker of friends, you know, and they're going to lose faith in you as a friend as well. You should have come to me and asked me how you could become a good friend yourself, like how you could improve yourself. So you're exhibiting a double standard. You're applying one standard to other people in terms of friendship, but a different standard or no standard. To yourself. This is a kind of moral hypocrisy, if you like. So often Socrates is drawing people's attention to the fact that they're exhibiting moral double standards. And we do similar things in modern cognitive therapy as well. Sometimes people think philosophical ethics can be quite subtle and quite nuanced, and it often is. But you know, in many cases we can make moral progress, I think, just by not being hypocrites. You know, the one thing that the majority of people agree on is that you shouldn't contradict yourself morally. You know, and if you're saying one thing and doing another, like if you're applying a double standard, most people agree there's something wrong there, and it's reason that helps us to spot those contradictions and attempt to resolve them. So there's a simple way, I think, that many people can make in progress in terms of morality and self improvement just by questioning their own standards in the way that Socrates teaches these young men to.
- [39:38]
A
It seems like that's the consistent trend or theme or perhaps outcome of this Socratic method, which is discontinuity, inconsistency, hypocrisy, poorly clarified underpinnings and foundations and definitions of what's going on. But yeah, I can also imagine that simply by asking questions and continuing to refine, you may avoid untruths and perhaps by avoiding untruths move yourself closer to truth. But it's very much a sort of do it yourself paint by numbers. Socrates isn't coming in and saying, well, this would be a better approach. He's saying, I think there may be a problem with this. So I can couldn't quite imagine why people could find him annoying because he's basically just permanently poking holes in everything.
- [40:30]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I think there are a number. Let me kind of explain what he's doing, I think from a different perspective, from a more psychological perspective. Right. And in doing that, I'll maybe make its relevance a bit more apparent to modern self improvement. So there's a body of research in modern psychotherapy and psychology and in the field of coping and stress that we can analyze different coping strategies that people use to deal with stress. Right. And these are the strategies that you find in self help books and self improvement books. Right. So maybe breathing exercises, relaxation technique, cognitive therapy, positive affirmations, positive visualization, even things like avoidance, just running away from the situation, you know, or accessing other social support, getting someone else to help you in a situation or things like that. There's like lots of different ways that you could potentially cope with anxiety, depression, stressful situations. Right. But no one of those coping strategies works every time. And the people that exhibit the most emotional resilience and are most able to recover from anxiety and depression are generally found to be the ones that have something we call coping flexibility. So they're able to choose intelligently between whether to confront a situation assertively or whether to back away from it and resign themselves to it with emotional acceptance. Well, by like saying, knowing when to pick your battles and things like that, you know, or knowing when it's better to distract yourself from pain or discomfort and when it would be better to address the cause or when it would be better to confront it and adapt to the experience and learn to accept it, you know, and by questioning, I mean what we do in modern cognitive therapy. Like often we'll find almost with every client, you'll find that they have coping strategies they've just made up themselves, or coping strategies they've got from the Internet or from self help books. Right. And many, in many cases, they'll be using these maladaptively in a way that's contributing to the problem and making it worse, usually because they're doing them too rigidly or they're using them as a kind of subtle form of avoidance that's actually contributing to the problem. And so one of the first things we might do is what's sometimes called a functional analysis. So we'll get people to very carefully weigh up the pros and cons of the strategies they're using. And this kind of thinking things through as a cognitive therapy technique is similar in some ways, I think, to using the Socratic method to question your definition of justice, for instance, or Socrates would also. I'll give you an example of a specific technique that kind of blew my mind when I read it in Xenophon. And scholars, like classicists never mention this because as a psychotherapist looking at the Socratic dialogues, I notice him doing psychological stuff that a philosopher or classicist might not even register. So there's a bit in Xenophon where Socrates speaks to another young guy in a shop in the agora, and this dude is a self help junkie, as we call it today. He literally has a collection, he's got the finest collection in Athens of self improvement books. He says he collects the maxims of wise men and he's trying to improve his character so that one day he can become a great statesman and he wants to understand the nature of morality or justice. And Socrates questions about the definition of justice. And quickly shows that he doesn't really understand it. He's contradicting himself. And this guy thinks, wow, I've been reading all these books and tried to memorize what they say, but when someone tries to get me to explain the meaning of these concepts, I just kind of fall apart. Because he's never really thought things through very deeply. He's just parroting stuff he's learning passively. Socrates draws a diagram, which I immediately recognized because we do it all the time in cognitive therapy. He draws two columns, right? Probably on a wax tablet or something, right? And at the heading at the top of one column, he writes injustice. And at the top of the other column, he writes justice. And he says, I want you to kind of brainstorm definitions of what's justice. Then you want to be a just individual and brainstorm examples of injustice. So for injustice, he comes up with things like lying or stealing, stuff like that, right? Obvious examples of injustice. And then Socrates does exactly the same thing that we mentioned earlier. He brainstorms exceptions. He says, okay, lying. What if you're an elected general and you're lying to the enemy in order to deceive them in a military campaign? Is that unjust? Or would you consider that to be just under the circumstances? And so this young guy, Euthydemus is his name, he says, well, that's different. That's an exception, right? Socrates says, what if you're a parent and you're trying to give your kid medicine, but they won't take it unless you hide it in their food? Is that injustice? Or would that seem like it's just. He says, well, that's different as well. And then Socrates uses another example that's really well known in philosophy. He says, what if your friend was suicidal and they come to you and say, where did you hide my dagger? Like, would you lie to them and pretend that you don't know? Or would you say, oh, I guess I have this over there, you know, take it? And he says, well, that's different as well. These are kind of unusual circumstances. So Socrates says, well, maybe then there's more nuance to this idea that justice consists in always telling the truth and never lying. Like, you seem to think that there's more to it than that. There's other perspectives, right? And this technique of drawing two columns, we can literally do it on coping strategies to get people to think. When would you practice mindfulness? And what might be the pros and cons of doing that? When might you try to fake it to make it? And when might that be a bad idea, right. When might it be a good idea to always speak your mind to other people and be assertive? And when might it be a better idea just to keep your mouth shut in some situations and know when to fight your battles and so on. And it's cognitive flexibility and coping flexibility, the ability to view situations from different perspectives and the ability to choose intelligently between different types of coping strategies that really constitute, in the same way that I said before that wisdom is more like a skill rather than just a bunch of ideas or opinions that you could hold. I think that to some extent that's missing from a lot of self modern self improvement literature. And the risk is then that people get techniques that work in some situations, but then they carry on using them rigidly in situations where they're no longer working, they're backfiring. I'll give you an example, right? Any self help technique is going to backfire in some situations. Mindfulness is. Some techniques are more robust than others. Mindfulness is a really useful strategy. It works really well, right? But for instance, clients who have health anxiety and are constantly scanning their body for symptoms like oh, I've just noticed, I think I noticed a weird sensation in my chest, right? Practicing mindfulness in some cases could actually just exacerbate or heighten their focus. Threat monitoring for symptoms basically and paying too much attention to every slight twinge in their body. Right? Social anxiety, like we know that one of the main correlates of social anxiety is heightened self focused attention. So in fact, many self help techniques that people try to use in social situations actually increase their self focused attention. Right? So people with social anxiety will typically do things like trying to stand up like tall and straighten their back and look people in the eye, right? Because they feel like that makes sense and it should make them more confident. But what they don't realize is often it heightens their self focused attention unnaturally and that contributes to social anxiety and it also increases their cognitive loads. So they're more likely to kind of feel awkward because they're trying to walk in true government at the same time. Right? But getting people to think about the pros and cons of these different strategies, when might it be a good idea when it might potentially backfire? Is there a good way of doing mindfulness? And maybe there's a bad way of doing mindfulness in some situations. That's the wisdom that allows people. The ancient philosophers used to also say, if you could give somebody the problem with teaching moral precepts or like coping strategies, you know would be that if you give a piece of advice, a maxim to someone who's wise, they'll use it wisely. But if you give it to someone who's foolish, they're probably going to use it foolishly. Right. If you give coping strategies to somebody who's got severe anxiety, they're, they're more likely just to turn it into a form of avoidance if you're not careful. The people who have the most severe problems are the ones that are most likely to misuse the type of strategies that we get in self help books, basically. So what's often missing, I think is this meta skill, if you like, of being able to choose between strategies and figure out their pros and cons, which is actually one of the first things we'd normally do in cognitive therapy.
- [49:25]
A
Yeah, very prophetic by Socrates to be able to see that out front. What was the Organon. Organon.
- [49:35]
B
That's one of Aristotle's books, isn't it?
- [49:38]
A
Yes, yeah, yeah, So I saw that. And this sort of interesting pivot towards. Well, you see with these two different people that one is focused very much on what seems to be practical. But then there's this begin of a trajectory toward philosophy being involved in politics, philosophy being involved in sort of statesmanship with logic, cynicism, deduction, ethics, stuff like that. Why did Socrates not get involved in politics during his time? Or did he? How much did he.
- [50:18]
B
Yes and no. Like generally speaking, he didn't get directly involved in politics. There was one incident where he was elected to a kind of a committee overseeing a trial. And Socrates took a principled stand, supposedly in a situation where the mob were kind of baying for the blood of a bunch of Athenian generals that were on trial. And he almost was executed as a result of doing that. But after that I think he said that, look, if I was to get involved in politics, I'd just end up being killed, you know, because you know, the, the stand that I would take would just, you know, in Athens at that time, like he's. I. One of our sources suggests he, his thinking was he just wouldn't last very long and it would be more constructive of him to kind of critique politics from the sidelines, as it were, rather than trying to get directly involved.
- [51:26]
A
Did you not say something about Roger Stone? Was there not some similarities between him and Roger Stone?
- [51:34]
B
I think there's some similarities and differences between him and Roger Stone. Well, it's funny, I know Roger Stone is one of these people that have published books on roles. It's called Stone's rules like his book. And some of them are the opposite of what Socrates would say. Like Roger Stone, I think it's fair to say is a man who would probably characterize himself as being quite fixated on the idea of revenge. That comes through pretty clearly from his book. He at no point in his book again does he ever really discuss what he thinks is in the interests of society. He spends a lot more time discussing how much he hates his political opponents and how he uses politics as a means to get back at them. Interestingly, I guess he has what you would call with a small C, like a very cynical attitude towards politics. It's very different from the way that someone like Socrates would have seen it. And Socrates I think would be a critic of this idea that revenge is a rational motive for us to have. So there are some things I try to have an even handed approach to understanding again, like weighing up the pros and cons. I looked at Rich Tristan's book and I thought other bits of this that kind of make sense in relation to ancient philosophy and other bits of it that seem like they might be the opposite. He says one or two things about resilience. I think his phrase is turning chicken shit into chicken soup or something like that is the way he puts it very artsy. Yeah. He has this idea that we should adapt to adversity and develop emotional resilience, which kind of sounds a little bit like the Stoics, but what's missing from. I guess he has some ideas about emotional resilience, but he doesn't have, he doesn't seem to see any connection between that and social virtue, for example, or justice. He sees politics, I think through a much more Machiavellian lens, as far as I can tell.
- [53:46]
A
How would you summarize what Socrates believed about what a good life consisted of or how to achieve a good life? Did he talk about that?
- [53:57]
B
Yeah, I mean again, the first thing he would do is apply. Like for example, when he's talking to that guy Euthydemus, he asks him that very question, but he encourages him to think it through for himself. Right. So Euthydemus is this young dude that's been reading loads of self improvement books and he says, okay, so what is a good life? Actually Euthydemus says where is the first place that I should begin applying philosophy, incidentally? And Socrates says here the first thing you should do is start by asking yourself what the goal of life is and what constitutes flourishing or eudaimonia. So basically what's good for us and what's bad for us in life. And Euthydema says, well, okay, so stuff like noble birth, wealth, status, having a nice house, being healthy, having lots of friends are all good. Generally, people think that constitutes good fortune and flourishing in life. And then Socrates basically goes through the list and says, but each one of these things could potentially be bad. There's another dialogue by Plato where he provides a much clearer counter argument where he says, okay, like, so let's start with wealth is the easiest example. Wealth in the hands of somebody who's wise and virtuous would allow them to do more wise and virtuous things. But if you give a big pile of money to somebody who's foolish and vicious, it's just going to allow them to do more foolish and vicious stuff. Right? And the same would apply to status. And actually, most of these external goods, as they're known in a sense, are more like practical advantages or opportunities that you have in life. And what really matters is how you make use of them, whether you use them wisely or whether you use them foolishly. So then doesn't that suggest that the only thing that's intrinsically good would be practical wisdom or moral wisdom? Yeah, because how you use other things, even the disadvantages you have, even poverty and sickness, might be used well by somebody who's profoundly wise. Right. They might develop more resilience as a result. They might learn from the experience, for instance. But somebody who's foolish and vicious will use even every advantage in life badly. Yeah. So it's by this kind of questioning method, Socrates gets his interlocutors, the usually young adult, young men just embarking on adult life, basically to realize that the things that most people assume to be the goal of life, like reputation and material success and stuff like that, aren't really intrinsically the most important thing in life. But what matters more is your ability to use these things well, which is something that they tend to have neglected and not really discussed. And so Socrates says, that's what we should be talking about. How do you use these things well, and so the goal of life, of flourishing would consist in a kind of practical wisdom or moral wisdom, and also in the realization that the prevailing values of our society are kind of back to front. And the things that everybody is led to value, like consumerism and celebrity culture and all that kind of stuff is those are misplaced values, basically.
- [57:03]
A
Isn't it interesting that it's the values of our society talking about this thousands of years ago and them being the same values that everybody is still being swayed by now, I wonder about that.
- [57:14]
B
You know, I think there's got to be a reason for that. And I don't pretend to know exactly what it is, but the ancient philosophers had some answers. I believe that part of it is if you imagine when you're born as a child, you're kind of a blank slate to some extent. And, you know, you start interacting with adults before you can even speak, let alone reason. And so you just emulate what you see other people doing as a small child. And I think it partly comes from the fact that we model our values on other people's behavior. So as a child growing up, you think, you take a look around you and you think, what's all this meant to be about? You think, well, everyone else seems obsessed with money and property and status, so you just kind of naturally fall into that if you're not careful.
- [57:57]
A
You think we are the progeny of Socratic societies, culture, eventually, just a few thousand years down the line.
- [58:07]
B
Yeah, I think we're just a product of the fact that we can't really understand each other deeply, I think, is the problem that we're basing our values and just observing other people's superficial behavior. So, for example, we might see, as a little kid, you might see your dad working really long hours and earning money to kind of pay off the mortgage and stuff like that. And if you're not careful, you might think, I guess. I guess working hard and earning money is like, is what life is all about. But your dad might think, well, I'm doing that to care for my family, for example, like, because I consider being a good father, like, to be what I want my life to be about. So we don't necessarily observe the values that are driving other people's behavior internally, I think. So we fall into this trap. This is my belief over and over again. Because we are not able to see inside people's hearts. Like, we end up with a superficial understanding of their values. Right? And it's only over the course of life, as we develop the ability to reflect on our values and question them more deeply, we start to think, why are we doing all this stuff? Why am I buying a house? Why, you know, why am I working long hours? It's for something deeper. It's in order to be a good person and a good parent and a good husband and stuff like that. And I think one of the things that can help us achieve that realization and question the prevailing values of our society is death. Because many people, I think, for whatever reason, on their Deathbed, when they look back over the course of their life, think, is it really worth spending your life just trying to earn as much money as possible? Was that what, you know, in retrospect, my life should have been about, you know, was like writing a bestselling book or something, like, really the most important thing? Or does it that seem trivial in retrospect, when, you know, like, you've only got a few days left to live or something like that. But, I mean, if you're lucky, maybe you have a brush with death early on and survive, and that changes your perspective and it liberates you from these assumptions that we all have. Or sometimes when you're bereaved, like, you know, I lost my father when I was quite young, and I felt, to be honest, that really shook me and made me kind of question, what's the point of all of that? Because I saw him, he died of lung cancer. Like, he was bedridden for about a year. And so I had about a year just to observe my father dying slowly and think he seemed to be going through this process of questioning what his life had stood for. And so when I was like 13, 14 years old, that kind of made me think, gee, I don't want to end up like that at the end of my life, thinking, maybe I've spent my time and energy in the wrong way. So these things. And also sometimes I think having children and looking at your kids and thinking what you want for them and what values you want them to have, if we approach it in the right way, can help us to gain some insight and start to question what our values are. But if we don't do that, we just look around, just think everybody's obsessed with money and fame. We end up entering into the rat race, chasing around after that. Then one day you end up in your deathbed and the doctors tell you you've only got a few weeks left, and you look back on, you think, what a huge waste of time a lot of that was. Maybe I've got millions of dollars in my bank account, but you can't take it with you. Did I really do anything that worthwhile in retrospect? So that's why ancient philosophy is obsessed with this question of death. The other thing that could help us would be reading about philosophers who contemplate the problem of our own mortality. That's why Plato's apology is so influential, because it depicts Socrates standing in court, knowing he's about to be executed.
- [61:53]
A
Can you tell us the story of the end of Socrates life? What happened what was the buildup? Why did it occur?
- [62:00]
B
It's a slightly long and convoluted story for some reason. Like, he was brought to trial, charges were brought against him. So any Athenian law, other citizens could sue you. And he was brought to court under charges of impiety and corrupting the youth. What's piety like that. He didn't believe in the traditional gods, basically. And these are standard charges that were used against intellectuals, basically. You know, there was nothing new about if you were like, if you were too clever, other people in Athens would say, you're corrupting the youth. Right. And if you question things too much.
- [62:40]
A
It'S an excuse for politically incorrect blasphemy.
- [62:43]
B
Yeah, you're engaged in blasphemy as well if you're starting to question, you know, some traditional religious ideas and stuff like that. So it was kind of like stock charge in a way. There are many reasons why some people think Socrates had certain political views. He also had friends that became controversial in Athenian society. And so his association with certain influential figures might have been part of it. And it may also be that he went around humiliating powerful people. Like he went up to politicians and said, can you define the nature of justice? And they'd be like, I don't know. And that made them embarrassed and it made them look stupid in front of their fans and followers and stuff. And so they wanted, for all of these reasons. I mean, Socrates execution was overdetermined. Like, there were multiple reasons why people wanted him dead. And some of it was propaganda. Like there were. There was, like I mentioned earlier, there was a play about him that caricatured him. So Soc in the trial says a lot of you guys, there were 500 people in the jury. And he says, most of you will know me mainly through this play. Like, it would be like you trial by media, right? So I've never met most of you, but you've probably seen this play that makes me out to be this horrible, corrupt, pseudo intellectual, Right? Like a charlatan and stuff. So that's what you'll be judging me based on. And he stands up. He was meant to beg for mercy in court. He stands up in one of the first things he says is he refers to his military service. And to paraphrase, he basically says, I went out and fought in these battles and faced death on behalf of Athens to defend the walls of the city. And you guys told me that was honorable. Now I'm standing in court facing death because I believe in the practice of philosophy as a way of improving the people that live in the city. What's the point in defending the walls of the city if the people that live in it are corrupt? Right. So some of you think this is ridiculous, that I'm willing to risk my life in court, but you praised me for risking my life in the military, and this is actually much more important to me. Right. It's how he kind of starts off his defense, in a way, and then he goes on to talk about how he's not afraid of dying and all this kind of stuff, and he kind of reasons that through, but he doesn't beg for mercy. He's very unapologetic in Plato's apology. And so the jury condemn him to death because of what Xenophon called his big talk in court. Like, they thought he would bring his family in and he would have them weeping in front because that was what was normal. But right from the very beginning of the trial, his family weren't even present. So he made it clear that he wasn't going to beg for mercy before he even began speaking. And he basically gives him a lecture on philosophy. He carries on in court doing the very thing that he's on trial for in the court. Right. Like, everything about Socrates was paradoxical. But the other argument, again, there's many different aspects. He's such. He's like peeling the layers of an onion back. The other thing Xenophon says Socrates was like 71, 72. He's pretty old for Athenian society. And, you know, the kind of implication in some of the dialogues is he. He thought, well, I'm starting to lose my faculties. Maybe I'm getting older, becoming more of a burden to my family, he'd reach a point where he thought, rather than trying to kind of just keep extending my life indefinitely while I'm in decline, I'd rather go out with a bang and make this huge statement. And he became a martyr for philosophy. But say what you will about Socrates, it worked in the. Even today, we're still talking about him, and he became an icon to generations of young philosophers that followed him because they were.
- [66:31]
A
Do you think he'd be less impactful if he hadn't died in that way?
- [66:34]
B
100%, he would still have had some impact. But, I mean, the most famous thing about Socrates in the ancient world is Plato's apology and the way that his noble death when Epictetus, the famous Stoic philosopher, who was teaching like, 400 years later. Right. So, you know, like, that's. Socrates is ancient history to Epictetus. He's the Most famous quote from Epictetus. The most famous quote in all of Stoicism is, people are not upset by events, but by their opinions about them. But no one ever quotes what he says. Next in the following sentence, he says, for example, death is not intrinsically terrible because if it were, Socrates would have been afraid of dying and he wasn't, right? So this is an important argument that you find in Socrates, but it's really highlighted in the Stoics, which is, you know, we use a similar kind of strategy in cognitive therapy. If somebody's depressed or angry or frightened by something, one of the first questions you'd normally ask is, does everyone else feel the same way about it? I mentioned Lamprocles getting angry with his mum. Socrates says, do other people all find your mum unbearable, or do certain people view her differently? Socrates himself, for example, viewed it very differently. He got nagged by Xanthippe, but it didn't really bother him. So one of the first questions we ask in cognitive therapy are, are other perspectives available? Right? Is this the only way of looking at things? Or, you know, might you potentially see it differently? Epictetus is main example of that. He goes straight for the jugular, right? He says, we're not upset by things, but by our opinions about them. Like, even when it comes to death, some people aren't scared of dying. Actually, you know, loads of people aren't scared of dying, right? There are many people, I've found it's one of the weird things. Particularly younger people often find it inconceivable that someone wouldn't be afraid of dying. But a lot of elderly people are resigned to their own death because they've been bereaved many times and maybe they've had many health scares. And so over the space of decades, in some cases, if not all, you speak to elderly people and they say, I've got over it. I've had years and years to get used to the idea of dying, so it doesn't really frighten me anymore. Some elderly people are terrified of dying, but others are surprisingly resigned to it. Socrates again, 71, 72, facing his trial. He's an older guy living in a society where there's not a lot of medicine. You know, I think he's. He's the sort of dude that was perfectly resigning. He'd lived through many dangerous. It's hard to imagine how many brushes with death Socrates had had, right? I mean, they tried to execute him, I think, about three or four times altogether, under different political regimes. You know, he was involved in battles where thousands of people were killed around him, and he lived through a plague, you know, that killed tens of thousands of people in Athens. So he was a guy who was well accustomed to the fragility of his own existence. Right. I mean, we live a very, very, very sheltered existence by comparison to that. But it's interesting that Epictetus goes straight for that example. Look at. He has Plato's apology in mind. He's like, you want to know what it means to realize that it's your opinions that shape your fear? Look at the example of Socrates and how he was unafraid even of being executed in court. That's your primate. And that was the cardinal example to young philosophers in the ancient world.
- [70:12]
A
It's wild to think of somebody so steadfast in their beliefs, especially given the fact that almost all of their career was spent highlighting hypocrisy. So it would have been a odd curtain call had he. Of. At the final. Imagine how much more tarnished his entire philosophical career would have been had he have done the pliable, begging for mercy on the floor, doing. You know, it would have changed an awful lot. I think, about how people perceived his.
- [70:40]
B
Work in the Crito, which is one of the dialogues that takes place when he's in prison. He's in prison for about a month, awaiting execution, and his friends say, listen, we could just bribe the guards really easy and get you out of here and stuff. He talks about this fact that it would be. And it would make him ridiculous in his own eyes, like, if he now behaved inconsistently with his values, you know. And that seems more. I mean, allegedly, in the Fido, which is the last dialogue chronologically, when Socrates drinks the actual hemlock, they bring the poison to him and his friend Crito, like his childhood friend who grew up in the same suburb of Athens as him, Crito says to him, some people don't drink the poison straight away. I mean, I think you're actually allowed to have a final meal. He had lots of friends around him when he was being executed, if you can imagine that that was the norm in Athenian society. Yeah, it was like a party. There were, like, I. Supposedly There were about 10 or 20 people there, like, so they come and visit him every day in the prison. Like, weird kind of scenario. But they all gathered around and his family came. His wife brought his kids. He had a baby like his. What we're told, all we know is that Xantheti. Xanthippe was carrying one of the children. So scholars think that kind of implies that it was A baby or a toddler.
- [71:58]
A
Socrates still got it at 72. 72 years old, yeah.
- [72:03]
B
So they say you don't have to drink it right away. And he says, it would seem ridiculous of me. I feel ridiculous in my eyes to kind of try and eke out another half an hour. He's like, I've been here for a month waiting to drink it. He goes, what am I going to do with another half hour? So that was his supposedly. His thinking was, I'm ready. I've prepared myself for this. I'd feel like a coward. And it would seem inconsistent of me and ridiculous if I was like, yeah, yeah, you're right. Maybe I could leak out another hour or so before I have to drink it. So I'm ready to drink it. Like, I've been sitting here for a month getting ready to drink it.
- [72:44]
A
The thing you've mentioned the Stoics a couple of times. I'd like to talk about his sort of enduring influence on them and links between the two. But the first person that comes to mind for me is Seneca, somebody for whom proclamations and fantastic contributions to thought and philosophy and stuff were replete. But in his private life, when the rubber met the road, so to speak, he was much more malleable. He was playing these sorts of games, political games, and backbiting and sucking up to people and so on and so forth.
- [73:20]
B
Controversially, yeah. Seneca has always been a divisive and controversial figure. In some ways, he became paired to Socrates. Socrates had a friend and possibly a lover called Alcibiades, who was one of the most influential statesmen. He was appointed the commander in chief of the Athenian military, at one point the most senior statesman in Athens, like, almost like an emperor over what was evolving and what had evolved into an Athenian empire. And he was like one of Socrates best friends and closest associates. So his relationship with Alcibiades, like trying to get him to be a better ruler and stuff, is a bit like Seneca and his relationship with Nero. But Seneca, I mean, it wouldn't be. Some people will find this controversial, but although we think of Seneca as a Stoic philosopher, he was famous primarily as an author, not as a philosophy teacher. He probably didn't teach that much philosophy to Nero. He mainly trained him in rhetoric. So in some regards, Seneca was more like a Latin sophist than a philosopher. The Sophists often quoted philosophy like they made speeches out of it and things, but they didn't attempt to live in accord with it in the way that the Stoics or Socrates did. So Seneca, somewhere in between. It may be that towards the end of his life he embraced philosophy more fully. I think earlier in his life philosophy was more something he used to become a famous author. He became famous by writing consolation letters using Stoicism to people that had been bereaved, that were wealthy, influential figures. He was like a self help guru to the rich and famous in Roman society. And that's how he ended up becoming an advisor to Nero. So he was a figure that really was compromised by that in a number of ways. He was Nero's right hand man. Nero was like a despot, a dictator. And he also wrote speeches defending Nero in the Senate and trying to, I mean ridiculous, like saying that he was virtually a philosopher king and that he, his hands were unstained by blood and all this kind of.
- [75:39]
A
You couldn't really imagine Socrates saying, no.
- [75:42]
B
Socrates never sullied himself in that way. There's a guy, the Marcus Aurelius is rhetoric teacher. We have his private letters and Marcus is talking to him about Seneca. We don't see what Marcus wrote, unfortunately. We only see Fronto's replies. Fronto can't stand Seneca and he died, you know, a few generations earlier. But I think it's partly he doesn't like his writing style. But he says looking for perils of wisdom in Seneca's writings would be like someone grubbing around in the bottom of a sewer trying to dig a few silver coins out of the filth. Right. Which is kind of what the kids, they call a sick burn. Right. That's only something that another sophist could have come up with. Right, as an insult. But I think what he means is that Seneca in, in Rome would have been known more than today for his political speeches defending Nero. And we have a couple of examples of those like we have on clemency, for example, which is this letter to Nero that was probably made public that kind of puts Nero on something of a pedestal. Also tries to improve his character and teach him more clemency or mercy. But at the same time he praises him as a great ruler, like, which is ridiculous. He was a tyrant. And at the same time that Seneca was defending Nero and propping up his regime, there were other Stoics that were fighting against Nero and opposing him in the Senate. They're called the Stoic opposition. And several of them died or were exiled defying Nero. Epictetus, who was kind of on the periphery of this because Epictetus kind of came from the next generation, but he was a slave owned by Nero's Greek secretary, a guy called Epaphroditus, who was perhaps also Nero's bodyguard. According to one source. He was certainly very, very close to Nero. Epictetus idolizes the Stoic opposition and never mentioned Seneca once. So he clearly felt those were the, the Stoics from that generation that he looked up to. And Seneca was seen even by other Stoics at the time as a guy that had maybe compromised himself morally.
- [78:07]
A
What is the truth that we know about whether Socrates was really ugly or not?
- [78:13]
B
That's actually a contested point. There's a really cool book that came out recently by Armand Dangur, a classicist who wrote a book called Socrates in Love that I really like. That's kind of speculative biography of Socrates. And he claims that Socrates was probably not as ugly as he's made out to be and that particularly younger in life, he may have been quite a virile and attractive guy. But I mean, Socrates friends describe him as walking like a pelican, having eyes like a crab, having a face like a torpedo fish and being balding and pot bellied. So. And he looks like a satyr as well, we're told, like one of those kind of goat Felipe or whatever. So those are his friends. Right. And so I guess it's partly the Athenian culture. They were kind of ribbing him a bit and stuff. If you go to Athens today, there's a famous statue of Socrates, a modern statue of a. Outside the university where he's incredibly buff. Like, yeah, I mean he definitely looks like he's been lifting weights, but that's a modern representation of him. The ancient sculptors we have of him are this little pot bellied old man, you know, that's more of a kind of was seen as a bit of a. Presented as more of a comedy character almost. So yeah, he makes fun of it. In Xenophon Symposium, Socrates jokes and he says, I think if we had a beauty contest, I would win it. And everyone kind of rolls about laughing at this. It seems ridiculous to them. But he then it leads into him having a conversation about how they define beauty. And you know, he starts to question whether, you know, beauty is actually something that comes from a person's character, you know, and he thinks, he says he's confident that he would win on those terms. But his friends still think it's a bit ridiculous of him. They thought Xenophon, Xenophon, to his credit, says, you know, you learn more about wise men by seeing them at their leisure. I believe that's how he begins the symposium. It's a Drinking party. And he presents Socrates as this guy who's quite witty and humorous, right. So he says things where he. Socrates was the type of guy that would say something to you and you think, is he joking? Is he serious? And the answer is yes and no. He's kind of joking and serious. He's kind of both joking and serious at the same time. Often I feel.
- [80:44]
A
Was there, I can't remember who it was. From that era of philosophers, I seem to remember a story of one of those philosophers complaining that every time they went to dinner or had a party that people got too drunk. And one of the solutions to people getting too drunk would be to reduce the size of the cups. If only we could make the size of the cup smaller. Was that Socrates?
- [81:07]
B
Yeah, I think that's in Xenophon's Symposium. Or it might be in Plato's Symposium. In one of the Symposiums, like, he says, he reckon and they do it. He says, he asks them to bring out smaller cups. And he says if we use smaller cups, we could moderate our drinking.
- [81:23]
A
Getting too drunk, it's ruining the quality of the conversation.
- [81:26]
B
He says, alcohol, I think this is in Xenophon Symposium. He says alcohol is like watering a plan. He goes, if you don't give it enough, then it kind of shovels up and dies, like. But if you give it too much, then it wilts. And he goes, this is the effect that I think wine has on conversation. At a dinner party, you've got to find just the right level so that people loosen up and you have a. So he wasn't completely in favor of abstinence. He thought if you the right amount of wine was conducive to a good philosophical conversation and a dinner party.
- [81:55]
A
Didn't he stand in one place for a day at one point?
- [82:00]
B
Well, don't we all? No, not normally, no. No, I know I do. But no, he stood for 24 hours, we're told, from sunrise one day to sunrise the next day. And put a dea in the middle of a battle? No, well, we're not in the battle. While they were besieging the city way in the north of Greece, we're told that he just froze and some of the other soldiers camped beside him overnight because they were kind of like, is he really going to stand here all night, barefoot, in the cold? They were having bets on it or something. And they watched him. And in the morning, I believe Plato says that he said a prayer to the rising sun, which may have been associated with the God Apollo. But one of the themes that Runs through the dialogues is soccer's association with. With the God Apollo. There's a debate about whether Apollo was associated with the sun that early. I think he was right. So it might be Socrates saw the sun as an embodiment of the God Apollo, who's kind of the patron God of philosophy. And it was the priestess of Apollo who said, no man is wiser than Socrates. And it was outside the temple of Apollo that says, gnoth I seawton or know thyself, which is, you know, this statement maxim that became a kind of theme for the Socratic method. In a way, it was pursuing self knowledge. But they. He was in a habit of the. Plato tells us he used to regularly just freeze and meditate going out of trance.
- [83:35]
A
What's the. Can you dig into the know thyself?
- [83:39]
B
Yeah, I mean, it comes up again and again in different dialogues. I'll tell you something really cool about it. There's a dialogue that I think is authentically attributed to Plato, but some scholars have questioned it doesn't matter. In a way, somebody wrote it like thousands of years ago. So there's a dialogue called the First Alcibiades that's about Socrates having a dialogue with this great statesman. I mean, Alcibiades. Someone said recently on Twitter they should make a movie about Alcibiades. He has one of the most dramatic and colorful and exciting, you know, lives. And he was Socrates, you know, companion. Socrates saved his life in battle. You know, I mean, honestly, you could. His life is so cinematic. It's like this huge epic adventure story. Now in this dialogue, Socrates questions whether Alcibiades is competent to become a political leader, a statesman. He proves to him, by questioning that he doesn't really understand anything about the nature of justice, but he should. And then this leads into a conversation about Gnophase out I'll know thyself. And Socrates said, cis Alcibiades, you know, what do you think it means? And he's like, well, I mean, I would think that I know myself, but, you know, Socrates says, well, it's not just like knowing the name of something, it's about really understanding it. He goes, this is how I understand that. And then he says, often you get these remarkable metaphors or images in ancient literature, and this is one of my favorites. Socrates says that self knowledge is like an eye that sees itself. Right? It's the eye that sees itself. He said, it's like the God said that you instructed your eye to see itself. When he says that the mind should know itself and he says, alcibiades, how can the eye see itself? And also by his Lara, I guess, like in a mirror. And Socrates says, well done. So how would the mind know itself? By analogy. And they'll tell somebody, I guess you'd need some kind of mirror for your mind. I don't know how that would work, though. And Socrates basically implies, because he's often a bit vague about things, he's engaged in this question and answer method rather than just giving a lecture. So he basically implies to Alcibiades that engaging in philosophical dialogue or conversation with other people is a mirror for our own soul. And he understands that we are biased. I mean, he was, again, way ahead of his time in this regard. And by the way, this is another problem for modern self help, right? So there are many problems with self help. One of the problems with self help is the self part, right? The person, in a sense, the person least qualified to help you. Because I don't know if you've noticed that there's actually research that shows us. Right. I'm going all over the place, sorry. But I interviewed recently a guy called Igor Grossman who you should speak to. Right. He's a professor at the University of Waterloo who does research on the nature of wisdom. Right. And he has research that shows, that confirms the suspicion that we all have, that we're much better at giving other people advice than we are at giving ourselves advice. Right. This is a sensitive subject for psychotherapists, Right. Because all we do is give other people advice and stuff. But if you go to a psychotherapy conference and walk in the door, you would notice immediately that it's full of some of the craziest people you ever meet in your life.
- [86:58]
A
Like being able to give advice to other people is not reliable evidence that you can give advice to yourself.
- [87:04]
B
Yeah. But over time, I think if you approach it in the right way, and I think it has something to do with empathy. Right. If you identify with your clients in a sense that you put yourself in their shoes and you empathize with them, you might, to put it very simply, start to think, maybe I do some of the things that they do too. Right. Maybe by helping them to see through their own mistakes and to troubleshoot them, I could kind of indirectly learn something about myself. Right? But we're better at giving other people advice, it's been proven by Professor Grossman's research, than we are at giving ourselves advice. And Socrates seems to realize this. This is partly why he thinks engaging in philosophical dialogue about the most important questions in Life, as he puts it, is so important. This provides the best mirror, like he can imagine for learning about our own soul, our own mind, and coming to know ourselves, knowing our strengths and weaknesses, our limitations and so on. There's another technique that he kind of uses, I think that Professor Grossman has done research on. It may be worth mentioning because I know people are interested in this. Igor Grossman, based on his observations, based on his research, did a study, and there are several studies like this where they asked people to keep a journal where they describe. They have two groups and one group describes their relationship problems and so on, and, you know, attempting to resolve them in the first person and the other group do the same thing, but in the third person. So rather than saying, you know, oh, I forgot my wife's birthday and she got really upset with me and I don't know how to make it up to her. Like I would say, Donald forgot his wife's birthday and she became really upset with him. So I'm the third person, right? As if I'm giving advice to another person, right? And they found, so they said, what happens if you make yourself do this? And by they call it distant self reflection. So by keeping a journal in the third person, they found that people exhibited measurably more wisdom in the advice and the solutions that they came up with for themselves. Now, Socrates does something a bit like that. He doesn't talk to himself that much in the third person, but usually in the second person he engages in imaginary or hypothetical dialogues quite a lot. So for example, he imagines arguing with the laws of Athens at one point in the Critias, and the laws of Athens say, you know, start criticizing him and questioning him. So they say he imagines that the laws are saying to him, socrates, you're contradicting yourself and in this way and that way and so on. And you're mistaken about this, right? But that's just an opportunity for him to critique himself in the second person and by name. So with greater objectivity, basically, and actually recycling some of the skills that he's honed by critiquing other people and applying the Socratic method to them in real life, in the flesh dialogues, it sounds.
- [90:08]
A
To me like this guy is infallible. He lived the philosophy. Everything that he said was done with virtue. Very, very accurate. Where are Socrates biggest weaknesses philosophically, in your opinion?
- [90:23]
B
Oh, there are many. I mean, I told you, he's like Jimi Hendrix, right? So some people might look at Jimi Hendrix and they might think, well, he's not, you know, maybe he's not like the technically, the best guitarist that's ever lived, but there's no. There's still something kind of really unique about him, right? There's only ever one Jimi Hendrix. Like, there's nobody else really, that kind of sounds exactly like him. And so Socrates is. I mean, the odd thing is that many academic philosophers will disagree with most of what Socrates says, right? And they'll often think that his arguments are incomplete, that there are gaps in them, that they're not very convincing. And I think even Socrates realized this. But those dialogues weren't written necessarily to persuade people that they should agree with him. They're more like teaching aids that are designed like an assault course for the mind. So they're meant to train us to be able to think through puzzles from different perspectives, right? That's why I said, you know, what we learn from Socrates more is the method. And he kind of implies certain really interesting conclusions, but they're often very radical conclusions. It might be worth mentioning some of them. So people, usually, most philosophers disagree with them. But one of the ancient dialogues has Socrates saying, when you talk to a wise person, it's like being bitten by a small insect, like a mosquito or something, right? And you might not even notice when it happens. But then hours later or the next day, you suddenly start to itch in the spot where you were bitten. And so people would say, that's what it's like when you talk to Socrates. Like, he'll say stuff, and you think, that's a stupid argument. Socrates doesn't. It's not really convincing. It doesn't make any sense. And then 10 years later, you're still thinking about it and it's kind of bothering you, right? But, for instance, one of the other things I wrote about my book, because, again, it's very interesting in relation to modern psychology. Socrates had this radical position that injustice harms the perpetrator more than it does the victim. And he repeats this quite a lot. So people, you might. People who read that think that's. That's a hard view to accept, but no one ever forgets it. Anyone that reads the Platonic dialogues, decades later, we'll think, remember, Socrates kept going on about this idea that acts of injustice harm the perpetrator more than they do the victim. In court, he said, you guys that are putting me on trial and convincing the jury to sentencing me to death unjustly are harming yourselves more than you're harming me. Epictetus quotes him at the last sentence of the Enchiridion he says, Anytus and Meletus, the two guys that brought him to trial, can kill me, but they cannot harm me. Which is like, crazy, you know, Crazy. That's hardcore. No, first of all, the guy that believes that, like, hats off to him. Like, you know, no wonder he was resilient. Do we agree with him? I. There may be a case for it, but it's an extreme, like, you're a bit like, you know, an extreme version of stoicism, basically. Nevertheless, in relation to modern psychology, I think there's a lot we can take from it. So there's a body of research that shows that people who suffer from clinical depression tend to have high levels of perceived injustice, right? And we also know that anger is linked to depression, and anger is also very directly linked to the perception of injustice, right? So how could our philosophy of justice affect emotions like anger and depression? Well, if we agreed with Socrates, right, that our own injustice does us more harm than the injustice of others, then maybe we wouldn't become as depressed. When we perceive injustice in the world around us, we might still object to it, we might still defy it, but we might respond to it differently emotionally. Socrates was fearless in court because he believed that the acts of injustice being inflicted on him couldn't really harm him because they could take away his property by his reputation and even his life, but they couldn't harm his moral character. And that was the most important thing to him. On his deathbed, he'd think, did I maintain my integrity throughout life? You guys can't take that away from me. Only I can do that to myself right now. What's true in anyone's eyes, whether, even if they don't go as far as that time and time again. What you'll find in therapy when you're working with people who are very angry, for instance, is that their anger, usually just at a practical level, does them more harm than the things that they're angry about, right? Maybe not in every single case, but, gee, I struggle to think of a case where that's not true. In virtually every client I work with, when we sit down and go, what are the consequences of your anger? And one reason for that is that anger, by its very nature, impairs our ability to think about the consequences. That's why angry people act impulsively, right? It's well known there's a large body of psychological research, so that shows, surprise, surprise, angry people behave impulsively, but they do that because they're not thinking straight and they're not able to really think through and weigh up the consequences of their action. They tend to think very short term. We all do. When we get really angry, we don't become really good at nuanced social problem solving. When we're angry, generally, it's like, you know, we become a kind of blunt instrument. And that's highlighted by the fact that very often angry people a day later or weeks later regret what they did when they're angry. Because now they're not angry and they're thinking about the longer term consequences and the wider impact of what they did. So maybe some guy gets really angry, he tells his wife to shut up and he gets what he wants. Maybe she does shut up right in the moment, so it seems successful, makes him seem powerful, and then she divorces him, right? So destroys the relationship, right? I mean, to caricature a little bit. But often what we struggle to do is kind of think about the wider impact, right? And think about the longer term consequences of anger. And particularly in terms of relationships where it's complex, anger impairs our ability to empathize with other people. And if, when we get angry, we tend to engage in what's known as hostile attribution bias. So we usually think of people as acting just out of hostility towards us, rather. Whereas normally if I say, oh, why did that guy not send me a Christmas card this year? Right? I might go, well, it's probably a bunch of possible explanations for that, right? Maybe there's several reasons depending on how you look at it, you know, whereas if I'm angry, I think just because he's a jerk, that's why he did it, right? Out of just pure hostility, right? So we tend to have a very monolithic and simplistic understanding of other people's motives when we're angry. But that makes us rubbish at social problem solving. You know, anger is really bad for, you know, maintaining any kind of healthy relationship. So by its very nature, it means that we tend to underestimate the negative consequences of it. So in therapy, it's easy to go, you sit with people and you draw a little list and you go, you know, what are all the ways in which anger is harming your physical health, your mental health, your relationship with other people? The other weird thing about it, anger tends to spread. So if I get angry, I could be watching TV and get really angry with some politician that I don't like, you know, and then I turn around, you know, and I snap angrily at my cat, right? Now my cat has done nothing, right? But it's not even involved in American politics in any shape or form, right. But because I'm annoyed with some politician that's on the news or whatever, I'm now also, you know, by associating, I'm just annoyed with my cat as well, because I'm in an angry frame of mind, you know, and maybe I'm going to be short, you know, my wife might say, what you want for dinner? You know, and I'll ask me later, right? Because I'm annoyed with, you know, some so called politician, right? So anger harms our relationships even with the people that we're not initially angry with. You know, we get angry with our perceived enemies, but we end up taking out our friends as well if we're not careful. So people massively underestimate the negative consequences of anger. And so usually in therapy what people find is, yes, anger, your own anger is doing you more harm than the thing the politician said on TV or somebody not sending you a Christmas card or the thing. Not maybe in every case, but really for practical purposes in the majority of cases that we end up dealing with. So he was. Socrates took up way further. But nevertheless, there's something really interesting about the point that he's making.
- [99:52]
A
I. Speaking of anger and frustration, I seem to remember you saying that you thought it would be impossible to write this book.
- [99:59]
B
I did think it was impossible. Why? I really did. I thought it was impossible to write it because I thought Socrates was too complex a character. The Peloponnesian War is really annoying. There's like something like 300 Greek states were involved in it. It went on for 27 years. So the politics of it and the history of it are so complex. Right. I thought, how can I summarize that and condense it into a book and have the life of Socrates as a philosopher, have some discussion of philosophy and philosophical dialogues and have some modern psychology and fit it all into 50,000 words. It just seemed like it would take, you know, three different books. Right. But then I don't know how exactly I changed my mind, but what I realized was that I could maybe. I think what I did was I gave up trying to attempt a more academic history. And I said from the outset, I'm going to approach this like I'm writing a movie screenplay. And so it'll be a kind of dramatized version. I'm going to make it as close to historical sources as I possibly can, but I'm going to have to take two characters and points and combine them together for simplicity. I'm going to have to massively abbreviate some of his arguments and just give like key selections out of them. And I'm going to have to figure out ways to, you know, to kind of simplify the history of the Peloponnesian War. So, you know, I, I'm kind of surprised that I managed to compress all of that into one book. But I, you know, I thought very long and hard about how to do it like. And, you know, there was a lot of planning that went into it. I, I think I put four times as much work into this book as I put into the proceeding. Like how to think like a Roman emperor.
- [101:59]
A
Is it? Well, I mean, you're looking at secondhand sources, very little direct. I mean, even with that, I learned this from you as well, that even when we think about Marcus Aurelius and how much information we have about him, because we've got his direct writings and he was an emperor and prestigious and stuff like that, but even with him, because he didn't really do that much wrong, there wasn't that much writing about him. He didn't just simply attract insufficient drama. So then you think, okay, we have this guy of whom there are significantly better recorded people from history and he is the well recorded version compared with the new book I'm about to write, which is this bloke who I've got like basically wiretaps of like ancient wiretaps and that's the best that I can go on.
- [102:48]
B
Yeah, there's really frustrating things about the life of Soki. So this thing about going to Delphi and the pronouncement is, is presented as a key moment in his life. We've really got. No, I. We don't know for certain when it happened. Right. So for instance, we don't know if it happened before or after other key events in his life. And then it would change the whole narrative. So with things like that, you just have to go. We could write an academic history where we argue about the possible dates, but in order to write a movie, you'd have to go, we have to pick a date. Go pick one. It could be like one of like maybe three different. You've got. Just got to choose one and go with it in order to be able to tell the story. And that's, I guess that's what liberated me is I just thought it needs to just be approached like we're writing a graphic novel or.
- [103:34]
A
Which you did, you did that as well. You're a man of many literary pathways now.
- [103:40]
B
I take some satisfaction in that. There's some authors just Write the same book over and over again. And I didn't really, I don't know that I did this deliberately. It'd be like an actor that just plays the same kind of characters over and over and then you've got other people that did lots of different things. But I look back at the books that I've written that, you know, although I did actually write three books in a row about Marcus Aurelius, they're all different genres. Like one's a more of an academic history, one's a self help book, one's a graphic novel. So if I look at the books, I've probably written about eight books. They're all quite different from each other. Like, I feel like I kind of stretched myself. I mean, the pros and cons of that are sometimes when you stretch yourself and do something you haven't done before, you can kind of fall flat in your face. And maybe you figure out it's not your forte or whatever, you know. But the positive side is that that's how you grow. Like, you know, by taking a chance and doing something that's, you know, something you never even imagined that you'd be doing. I think that was part of it as well. I kind of thought it's too difficult to write a book like this about Socrates. And I thought, well, you know, as I get older, I'm less afraid of making mistakes, you know. And I thought, what's the worst that can happen? Maybe I'll just mess it up and the book will be rubbish or something. Like, you know, I thought, yeah, I think I'd rather just try, have a go at doing it. I think the other thing that swings it for me is I really always approach it with this question in mind. I imagine that if I could go back in time and kind of give the book that I'm writing to my 17 year old self or when I was 15 or something, like, I think what would I want to write in a book that I'm giving to my younger self? And you know, would I be kind of ashamed to write a book? And then maybe we go, okay, we pick one of these dates for when the pronouncement is made at Delphine. Oh damn, we got it wrong. You know, like, so maybe the chronology is a little bit off or something like that, or there's some other debatable historical point. Would my 17 year old self care about that? Or would he just think I don't really care? Like if there's one or two details that are debatable, the story is really awesome. And it kind of gave me a.
- [105:50]
A
It's interestingly very Socratic to go about things like that. Okay, how can we apply this practically? How useful is this?
- [105:58]
B
What?
- [105:58]
A
And it's also very Aureliusian, too, Debating about what a good man is versus being one.
- [106:04]
B
Well, sometimes people ask you, how do you go about writing a book? Right? And I don't think I've ever said this on a podcast before, but funnily enough, the answer to this is kind of weird, right? There's a bunch of things I do that are quite specific. One is that I write the audiobook first. So when I'm writing a book, I'm not writing a print book. I think I'm writing an audiobook. And as part of that, I'll read it aloud a lot. And I'll pay somebody like a local bar maid or something like, to come or one of my friends. Friends or whatever, like to come over and I'll give them a case of beer, like, you know, and I'll pay them whatever per hour and I'll give them a big print out of the manuscript and say, read the entire thing to me, right? It takes. Last time we did, it took 12 hours. Like, I've got a video of the aftermath. We're like sliding out of our chair, you know, like, we've got, like, some snacks piled up. I think it was 12 hours. Maddie, I think, was the name of the. My friend's friend that came over and read through the whole of how to Think Like a soc. Like Socrates. I think I did it several times because I wanted to know what it sounded like as well as reading it on the page. But the other thing I would do is I normally work in the library and I would sit with a timer and I practice a meditation technique for 10 minutes called the Benson method, where that's well known in psychotherapy. So I just repeat a word over and over. And I try and notice that I'm doing this voluntarily. But there's also intrusive, automatic thoughts that pop into mind. So I try to become clearer about the differentiation between what I'm thinking voluntarily. I might just say. I'd normally just say the number one. Or I count down from 10 to 0 over and over again on each out breath. Like 1, 1 number, like 10, 9, 8, and then start again. Because then if you're counting in your mind, attention wanders, you're more likely to notice it because you've broken the sequence, right? And I'll observe. I think I'm doing this Voluntarily, I'm counting voluntarily. But if I suddenly think about paying my taxes or something, I'll go. That's an automatic thought. And I choose to think that I just popped into my mind. So I kind of trained myself to become more aware that distinction. Then for 10 minutes, I would imagine that I'm in academia, Platinus in Greece, like I wrote about at the beginning of the book, and imagine I'm talking to Socrates, right? And the first thing I would always do, Chris, is shake his hand, right? And it took a surprisingly long time for him to get used to that. Like, I think it seems kind of. I always remember, like, you know, my imaginary Socrates. Like in my mind, I insisted on shaking his hand, but he thought it was a bit weird at first, right? And I would say to him, like, I'd ask him lots of questions, right, about anything that was kind of struggling with in the book and what I generally found. Any of the history stuff, his opinion. Well, you know, I'd be like, trying to think we need to kind of iron this out and get it accurate and stuff. And he would always, my imaginary Socrates anyway, would always be like, who cares? You know, it's like, I don't even know why, you know, he seemed to place surprisingly little importance on getting it historically accurate. And he said, no, there's just focus on telling the story of the literary character of Socrates in a way that gets people interested in the philosophy. That's what actually matters, Right. You know, there are other books that you can go and read where people try and argue through the evidence and, you know. Yeah. Try to get to truth.
- [109:31]
A
I've been thinking about something not too dissimilar, a little bit more generalized. But I think what you're getting at as well, which is this odd split on the Internet that we have at the moment, one is extreme credentialism, which I call experts only. If you don't have the requisite background. A lot of the time you're criticized. Well, you know, what do you know? You're not a psychotherapist, psychedelics, expert, sports and physio person, whatever you're pontificating about. And the reason I don't like it is that it's gotten rid of, I think, what Oscar Wilde called the Oxford Manor, which is the ability to play gracefully with ideas. And it seems that very much the Socratic method is that. And then on the other side, you have this sort of over romanticization of the renegade, untrained, sort of orthogonal thinker. So we have these two worlds and you can kind of deploy them to whichever you need in order to make the other side seem stupid. So they don't have the credentials or this person is a flame wielding truth warrior. Yeah, they did it outside of the establishment. That's how they actually really know what's going on. But it's very. There's a large number of ways where unless you have a completely stellar academic career, it's unfettered by any kind of controversy or falling short at any time. It seems to me that that bar is unreasonably high for most pretty much everybody to get over. And on top of all of that, it makes for a much less interesting world because nobody's allowed to play with ideas outside of their domain of credentialized competence.
- [111:10]
B
So you are thinking about it in a more Socratic way because the very fact you're going, well can I see it from more than one perspective? And those pros. So the rule that you always have to be qualified. Well maybe there's some exceptions to that, right? And you can easily think of examples of great thinkers in the past that weren't qualified. They were outsiders, talented amateurs or whatever. But on the other hand having zero qualifications in certain subjects clearly in some cases just leads to dunning Kruger effect. And people making schoolboy errors are just almost cringe worthy if you know about the subject. I mean like the most obvious example of that I think is the Internet is absolutely awash with people that can't tell the difference between causation and correlation and medical research. Like, but like newspapers and magazines have like exploited that confusion for generations. But now it's become like a much bigger thing on the Internet. So like understanding kind of like basic medical research methods, like you know, not getting confused about that like does lead a lot of people to make basic mistakes, right? Basically to misinterpret if you don't know. Like during the pandemic, every five minutes people were waving around research studies and stuff that had never, they didn't have any medical research, right. So they had no idea what the stuff they were reading actually meant. And over and over again they're kind of like just making the kind of mistakes that you would get taught not to make. Right? So there are problems that happen and there are people when they discuss ancient philosophy that make errors that an academic philosopher maybe wouldn't make. But yeah, I don't think there's a conclusive answer to this, but I think we just need to be aware. I think the best thing is just to kind of be aware of what are the pros and cons in the same way that you know, for any self help technique, just at least sit down and make a list of what the strengths and weaknesses of this, what's a good way and a bad way of doing it. So you've got a slightly more nuanced understanding of it. Not like just a kind of rigid understanding. But I think in general, you know, this thing about amateurs versus experts is similar. Like there's pros and cons to it. Just knowing what those are is perhaps the main thing. I mean, I can tell you over the years I'm friends with and know many well respected academics, historians, classicists, philosophers, you know, and I guess my attitude has changed a little bit from my experience over time. Sometimes there are people that are incredibly highly qualified in the subject and say stuff that's bonkers like that. You know, the other experts in the field just think they've lost their mind. Like, you know, that again they're making mistakes that a first year student would fail an assignment for doing. Right. I mean, it's weird when you see that, but it happens a lot. Like you get books by people that are professors of philosophy or psychology or whatever and you think a first year undergraduate student would get lambasted for saying this stuff is crazy. Why? But so you know, they're not the most highly credentialed people are often not experts. And there's, there's also a well known problem with expertise. Like there's actually statistical research that shows that like review narrative reviews of medical research that are done by experts in a particular field tend to be unreliable. So normally you'd think this guy's like one of the most experienced heart surgeons in the world. So he's written an article reviewing all the research. It should be authoritative because he really knows what he's talking about. But experts are often biased and they're particularly prone to committing the cherry picking fallacy. So they just pick out studies that support their pet theory. Whereas professional statisticians that don't have any skin in the game will just look at what all of the research says and be really kind of cast a cold eye over it and they'll say no, this is what the research actually shows. This guy is just telling you what half of the research says because it supports his pet theory. And experts in a field, or if you want to put it another way, people that are really invested in certain theories that have been doing it for a long time can be biased. Right? And so their, their version of things can be quite distorted. But I think the, the other difficulty I wanted to mention to you in terms of this idea of getting information from experts and, you know, becoming kind of passive rather than depending on our own reason. There's another piece of research there's very influential in state of the art, like modern behavioral psychology, which shows there's a problem with something called role governed behavior. So if you get two groups of participants in a study and you teach them how to solve some, you give them a puzzle they have to solve, like pressing three buttons in a particular order or whatever, and if they get it right, they get reward. If they get it wrong, like maybe, you know, they get some punishment, a buzzer goes off or something like that, they lose points or whatever, right? And in one group, you just give them oral or written instructions. Let's say this is how you solve the puzzle. The other group, they have to figure out through trial and error, right? This is phase one of the experiment in phase two, so they do it repeatedly. In phase two, the roles that govern success change without telling them, right? So they have to adapt. Basically, you create a circumstance where they have to adapt. One group have been verbally given the role or solution. The other group had to figure it out through trial and error. The group that have learned the role verbally will keep trying it even though it's not working, whereas the group that had to figure it out themselves will adapt much more quickly. So we call this insensitivity to environmental change. Right? And the reason it's really important is that's exactly what people who come for psychotherapy are doing. They're usually using some strategy that's not working. And so the puzzle is, why do they keep doing it when it's clearly not? Like, why do they keep yelling at their partners when their relationships keep breaking up as a result? Surely after a while they'd kind of figure out, this isn't working out for me, and they'd start to adapt and change. So what is causing the rigidity in their behavior? And one of the explanations is that when we learn a role from other people passively, or sometimes even if we get it from a book or something like that, there's a tendency, an established tendency to overextend it and apply it too rigidly, and that can cause problems.
- [118:10]
A
Donald Robertson, ladies and gentlemen. Dude, I love you. I love all of the work that you do. Every time that you bring a new book out, I'm super excited. Have you got any idea what you're working on next? I know you've got your substack and stuff like that going, well, I've written.
- [118:22]
B
About like famous philosophers and stuff, Chris, but I mean all honesty, the thing that's. I sat down and I kind of thought, what if I could only write one more book, you know, what do I really, really, really, really want to write a book about? And I thought, oh, why write something that I really feel is going to benefit the maximum number of people? So what's one of the biggest problems that I think people have? And it's something we've talked a lot about today, you know, for that reason, because it's kind of on my mind, I want to write a book about the philosophy and psychology of anger, right? Because it's one of those areas where there's a huge gulf between stuff that we actually know from psychological research. We know loads about anger, but most people aren't told about any of the research. So, you know, and anger plays a huge role in politics and on the Internet we've got like trolling and cyber bullying and so much kind of aggression on social media and so much kind of hostility and aggression in politics. But none of us are looking at it and thinking, oh, when people get angry, like their thinking becomes skewed. Like for example, when people get angry, it's well known that they underestimate risk. So when you're really angry, you tend to expose yourself and other people around you to more danger than normal. Right? We know loads of things like that about anger, right? But no one, most, the majority of people aren't aware that the research tells us all this kind of stuff. So to them anger is just a feeling, like it's not something that changes their thinking. And you know, if that's what anger does, like how does it affect the electorate, how does it affect the behavior of politicians? Like there are measurable problems that it would cause. So I think there's a lot to be said. We've got some great angel like Seneca has an entire book called on anger, you know, and it's, we can easily compare all of that ancient philosophical literature to what some of the psychological research says today. So I think people can benefit a lot from working. I call anger management the royal road to self improvement. Because most people that seek self improvement, like anxiety and depression or self blaming emotions, right? So people that are anxious or depressed tend to seek self help or therapy. But angry people don't seek therapy typically. Because if I'm really angry, Chris, I think you need therapy buddy, not me, right? So angry people avoid self help. So you know, that's why you could go online and you see kind of self improvement communities like the manosphere for example, in some cases. And there seem to be a lot of really angry people, yet they're talking about self improvement. I don't know if you noticed that.
- [121:03]
A
Yeah, I mean I certainly know that anybody that's ruminative in the depression or anxiety world, they've considered every six ways to Sunday different solution they come up with. I don't know that many angry people. I think I'm. I tend to try and avoid them or maybe they hide themselves from me, I'm not sure.
- [121:22]
B
You know, if you read the comments and YouTube videos and things like that.
- [121:25]
A
Angry, angry people.
- [121:27]
B
There's a lot of angry people on social media, Don.
- [121:29]
A
Where should people go? Do you want to keep up to date with all of the things you're doing?
- [121:32]
B
Well, they can find me on substack. That's probably where I mainly put stuff. And my website is just DonaldRobertson name. And then yeah, like if they look me up online, I'm involved with a non profit, two non profits. One's a modern stoicism organization which is running Stoic Week at the moment. And then the other one is a charity or non profit that we founded in Greece called the Plato's Academy center where we're trying to raise funds to create a conference center adjacent to the original location of Plato's Academy. So those are the two things I'm interested in. People want to check those out as well. I need to give them a bit of a plug, Chris. But as always, absolute pleasure because you're exactly. You know, when I write in books, it's kind of guys like you that I kind of imagine reading them, you know, like I can see how passionate you are about these subjects and you know, like I hope that it's, it's reassuring to me that you find this stuff interesting.
- [122:33]
A
You keep coming back on, you write, you write something and we'll sit down for two hours and talk about it every time.
- [122:38]
B
Awesome.
- [122:39]
A
I want to do, I want to do an episode with you, a primer on cbt. So maybe in the next sort of six months or so we'll, we'll find a, a time slot that works and I really want to try and just do a 30,000 foot view. The biggest principles, the biggest learnings and lessons.
- [122:54]
B
My specialism was always, I was what I, I used to train therapists and I would always say that I was a techniques guy, right. So I was really interested in classifying different psychological techniques and comparing them and training we used to train people and gather data and all of these scripted exercises that we had. So I love teaching people and I feel like when we do, when I do interviews and things like that, the one thing I'd love to do more of is just say to people, this is how you actually do this visualization take this is technique. This is how you do this meditation technique. Like let's go through a bunch of them and show you how to actually do stuff.
- [123:28]
A
I would absolutely love to do that. And I think, you know, the more I haven't really been exposed properly to that much cbt, which is I feel increasingly embarrassed about. It's like this sort of elephant in the room that I get the impression much of the stuff that I consider as being sort of self discovered wisdom that I'm all proud and sort of full of myself for. I'm like, if I'd just read enough cbt, I'd have probably come across this already. All of the biggest realizations seem to have been arrived at by CBT in one form or another. So I'm looking forward to maybe having the egotistical veils ripped from my eyes about my own beautiful ideas instead. And yeah, we'll do that one next. Don, I appreciate the hell out of you. Thank you very much for today.
- [124:10]
B
Thanks man. It's been a pleasure. I really enjoyed that. It's good to see you again and.