#864 - Donald Robertson - The True Story Of History’s Greatest Philosopher

28:16You know what is what is the relate nature of your relationship with a really it's more than just a 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 magnifying glass you exaggerate your anger and 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. You mentioned it a couple of times. Assume that somebody hasn't heard about the secratic method before. What is it? How's it work? So in some ways it's tricky to define it in some ways it's easy.

28:54There's a lot of nuance to it. And Socrates doesn't sit down at any point and say, hey, let me just explain my methods to you briefly. Instead what we see is an example, after example of him using his method in various different ways. 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 an 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 they're already taking for granted in a sense in the conversations that they're having.

29:43So 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 will normally think of exceptions to the rule that they've given. It's the most famous example, examples, when he's talking to lackeys and nekias to Athenian generals, they define courage as standing your ground and remaining information in the face of the enemy. And that's because the Athenians depended to logic sent on their hotplights, the heavy infantry, which Socrates was one and they had to fight in the phallax formation.

30:28So each soldier's shield would protect him, also the guy standing to his left. If you broke formation, not only would you place yourself at risk, but you placed 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 phallax strategy to work. And so, he says, OK, that's a good definition of courage, but it's too narrow, right? Because what about during a tactical retreat? Like, you break from the phalanx formation, but you could still exhibit courage. You're no longer standing your ground in the same way though.

31:04What 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, you know, again, like he's not following a formula here as much as using a skill.

31:41Like he's thinking, right? and he's coming up his 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 in your ground, but what about this, what about this scenario, what about 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 level. And he doesn't always arrive at a clear conclusion, often he doesn't. His dialogues often end in apariya and Greek, which is the term that we use to mean a sort of confusion or bewilderment.

32:16Right? 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 the valence formation. And maybe I've kind of spiraled closer and closer to the center of the meaning of these concepts.

32:50So in the process of doing that, he'd often point out contradictions in people's thinking. He said to what you're saying now, it seems to clash with something that you said a few minutes ago. So he was very sharp at noticing this. And you know, 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 and adolescent boy. There's a guy called Critobulus that comes to him who is the son of one of his best friends, Crito.

33:25And Critobulus says, Socrates, could you introduce me to some people that would be really good friends to have in a Thinian society? He's asking him for help when it's working, weirdly, right? And Socrates says, sure, how do you define a good friend? In Cretopolis, 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 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?

34:00And Cretoblis is like, well, not many, like, you know, zero, I don't know. So, Socrates says, having, 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 and you as a friend as well. You should have come to me and asked me how you could become a good friend yourself. Well, how you could improve yourself.

34:34So 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.

35:16You know, and if you're saying one thing and doing another, like if you're applying a double standard, most people agree that something wrongly are. 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 this improgrous in terms of morality and self -improvement just by questioning their own standards in the way that Socrates teaches these young men to. It seems like that's the consistent trend or theme or perhaps outcome of this psychotic method, which is discontinuity, inconsistency, hypocrisy, poorly clarified underpinnings and foundations and definitions of what's going on.

36:02But 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 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 quite imagine why people could find him annoying because he's basically just permanently poking holes in everything. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I think there are a number of... Let me kind of explain what he's doing, I think, from a different perspective, from a more psychological perspective, right?

36:42And in doing that, I'll maybe make it relevant, so a bit more apparent to modern self -approvedment. So there's a body of research and modern psychotherapy and psychology and in the field of coping and stress. We can analyze different coping strategies that people use to deal with stress. And these are the strategies that you find in self -help books, in self -improvement books. So maybe a breathing exercise, whose 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, there's like lots of different ways that you could potentially cope with anxiety, depression, stressful situations, right?

37:27But 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 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. A lot of people are about like saying knowing when to pick your battles and things like that, you know, I are knowing when it's better to distract yourself from pain or discomfort and when it will be better to address the cause, or when it will be better to confront it and adapt to the experience and learn to accept it.

38:14And 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 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 it 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.

38:49So 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, so cognitive therapy therapy technique is similar in some ways, I think, to using the Socratic method to question your definition of justice, for instance, or circuities would also, I'll give you an example of a specific technique that kind of blew my mind when I read it. In Xenophon, in scholars, like, classists never mentioned this because it like, you know, as a psychotherapist looking at the Socratic dialogues, I noticed him doing psychological stuff that a philosopher or a classist might not even, you know, of like register.

39:29So there's a bit in Xenophon, where Socrates speaks to another young guy in a shop in the Agara. 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 a bit, but the definition of justice, and quickly shows that he doesn't really understand it, he's contradicting himself. And since I think, well, 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.

40:12He's just parroting stuff. He's learning passively. Socrates draws a diagram, which I immediately recognized, because we do all the time in cognitive therapy. He draws two columns, probably in a wax tablet or something. And 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 brainstorm definitions of what's justice that you want to be a just individual. And brainstorm examples of injustice. So for injustice he comes up with things like lying,

40:47or stealing stuff like that, obvious examples of injustice. And then Socrates does exactly the same thing that we mentioned earlier. He brainstorms exceptions. He said, 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? So this young guy, Yifidaeumus, his name 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?

41:19Is 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 for loss. 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? I am pretend that you don't know or would you say, I guess I have this over there, you know, take it. And he says, well, that's different as well. Like 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.

41:51Like, 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 it might be a better idea just to keep your mouth shut, like in some situations in nowhere to fight your battles and so on. And it's cognitive flexibility and coping flexibility.

42:30The ability to view situations from different perspectives and the ability to choose intelligently between different types of coping strategies that really constitute. And 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 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?

43:01Any tech, any self -help technique is going to backfire in some situations. Mainfulness is, some techniques are more robust than others. Mainfulness 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 a, I think I noticed a wheel sensation at my chest, right? Practicing mindfulness in some cases could actually just exacerbate or heighten their, their focus, their threat monitoring for symptoms basically and paint too much attention to every slight twinge in their body, right?

43:37Social 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. So people with social anxiety will typically do things like trying to stand up tall and straighten their back and look people in the eye because they feel like that makes sense and it should make them more confident. But what they don't realize is often that in heightens their self -focused attention and naturally in that contributes to social anxiety.

44:10And it also increases the cognitive load. So they're more likely to kind of feel awkward because they're trying to walk into government at the same time. Right. But getting people to think about the pros and cons of these different strategies, when might a big, good idea, when it might have 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 of teaching moral precepts or like coping strategies, would be that if you give a piece of advice, a maxim to someone who's wise, they'll use it wisely.

44:53But if you give it to someone who's foolish, they're probably going to use it foolishly. If you give coping strategies to somebody who's severe anxiety, 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, or being able to choose between strategies and figure out their pros and cons, which is actually one of the first things we normally do in cognitive therapy.

45:29Yeah, very prophetic by Socrates to be able to see that out front. What was the organon? Organon? That's one of the Aristotle's books, isn't it? Yes, yeah. I remember it. So, yes, I saw that and this sort of interesting pivot toward, well, you see with these two different people that one is focused very much on what seems to be practical, but then And as 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?

46:19Or did he? How much did he? Yes and no. So generally speaking, he didn't get directly involved in politics. There was one incident where he was elected to a kind of committee overseeing trial. And Socrates took a principled stand supposedly in a situation where the mob were kind of being 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 the look if I was to get involved in politics, I'd just end up being killed, because the standard I would take would just, and Athens at that time, where one of our sources suggests his thinking was he just wouldn't last very long.

47:17and 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. Do you not say something about Rodgistone? Was there not some similarities between him and Rodgistone? I think there's some similarities and differences between him and Rodgistone. Well, Rodgistone is one of these people that have published books on rules. but he'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.

48:03That comes through pretty clearly from his book. He, at no point in his book, is again, does he ever really discuss us what he thinks is in the interest 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 a very cynical attitude towards politics. It's very different from the way that someone like Socrates would have seen that. In Socrates I think we'd be a critic of this idea that revenge is a rational motive for us to have. But there are something, you know, I try to have an even -handed approach to understand it.

48:54Again, like weighing up the pros and cons, I looked at Rick Juston's book and I thought, are the bits of this that kind of makes 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 he's phrases 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 can sound a little bit like the Stoics, But what's missing from it? I guess he has some ideas about emotional resilience, but he doesn't seem to see any connection between that and social virtue, for example, like our justice.

49:42He sees politics, I think, then I'm throwing much more Machiavellian lines as far as I can tell. Well, 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? Yeah. I mean, again, the first thing he would do is apply, for example, when he's talking to that guy, Yithidimus, he asks him that very question, but he encourages him to think it through for himself, right? So Yithidimus is this young dude that's been reading loads of self -improvement books and he says, okay, so what is a good life? Actually, Yuthi Dima says, where is the first place that actually began applying philosophy incidentally and Sakti says, he are.

50:24The first thing you should do is start by asking yourself what the goal of life is and what constitutes flourishing or udai menea. So basically what's good for us and what's bad for us in life. Yuthi Dima says, well, okay, stuff like noble bar, wealth, status, having a nice house, like being healthy, having lots of friends are all good. Generally, people think that 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, let's start with wealth is the easiest example.

51:09Well, in the hands of somebody who's wise and virtuous, would allow them to do more wise and virtuous things. But if you give the 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. 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?

51:49Because how you use other thing, even as as advantages 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 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.

52:41And 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 realisation that the prevailing values of our society are kind of back to front and the things that everybody is led to value, like consumerism, celebrity culture and all that kind of stuff is those are misplaced values basically. 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?

53:17I wonder about that. 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 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 and 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?

53:54You think, well, everyone else seems obsessed with money and property and status. Like so you just kind of naturally fall into that if you're not careful before you. You think that we are the progeny of Socratic societies, culture, eventually just a few thousand years down the line. We're, well, yeah, like we're, 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, you're a little kid, you might see your dad working really long hours and earning money, you know, to kind of pay off the mortgage and stuff like that.

54:31And if you're not careful, you might think, 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, because I can say that being a good father light to be what I want my life to be about. So we don't necessarily observe the values that are driving other people's behaviour internally. 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 is we develop the ability to reflect on our values and question them more deeply.

55:15We 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? Why is for something deeper? Why 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, on retrospect, respect my life should have been about, you know, was like writing a best -selling book or something, like really the most important thing, that seemed trivial in retrospect when you know, like you've only got a few days left to live or something like that.

56:08But I mean, if you're lucky, maybe you have a brush with Therley on and survive and it 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 thought or to be honest, that really shook me and made me kind of question what's the point of all of it, because I saw him. He died of lung cancer, like he was bedridden for about a year. So I had about a year just observed my father dying slowly and think he seemed to be going through this process of questioning what his life had stood for.

56:43And 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. Like at the end of my life thinking maybe I've spent my time in 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 and just think everybody's obsessed with money and fame. You know, we end up entering into the rat race chasing around after that.

57:16Then one day you end up in your deathbed and the doctors tell you you've only got, you know, a few weeks left and you think you look back on you think what a huge waste of time a lot of that was like you know maybe I've got like you know millions of dollars in my bank account but it's not you know you can't take it with you like you know does it really do anything that worthwhile in retrospect. So that's why ancient philosophy is kind of 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.

57:50That's why Plato's apology is so influential, because it depicts Socrates standing in court knowing he's about to be executed. Can you tell us the story of the end of Socrates' life, what happened, what was the buildup, why did it occur? It's a slightly long and convoluted story. For some reason, he was brought to trial charges, were brought against him. So, Athenian law, other citizens could sue you and he was brought to court under charges of impiety and corrupting the youth. And these are... ...like that he didn't believe in the traditional gods basically. And these are standard charges that were used against intellectuals, basically.

58:34You know, there was nothing new. But if you were to clever other people and Athens would say you're corrupting the youth, right? And if you question, excuse for politically incorrect blasphemy. Yeah, your your your your your engagement blasphemy is well if you're starting to question, you know some traditional religious ideas and stuff like that. So it was kind of like stock charging away. There are many reasons why some people think Socrates has had certain political views. He also had friends that became controversial in a Thinian society. And so his association with certain influential figures might have been part of it.

59:13And it might 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. Like, 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 over -determined. Like, there were multiple reasons why people wanted him dead. And some of it was propaganda. Like, there was, like I mentioned earlier, there was a play about him that caricatureed him. So Socrates in the trial says, a lot of you guys, there were 500 people in the jury.

59:51And he says, most of you will know me mainly through this play. Like, it would be like, you're 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 and core. 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.

1:00:29Now 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. Was a point in defending the walls of the city if the people that live in it are corrupt. 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 defence 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's going to reasons that through.

1:01:00But he doesn't beg for me, I say 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 he was, he was just, they thought he would bring his family in and he would have them weeping in fact because that was what was normal but right from the very beginning 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 Encore doing the very thing that he's on trial for. Right. Look, everything about Socrates was paradoxical.

1:01:44But the other argument, again, there's many different aspects. He's such, he's like peeling the layers of a minion back. The other thing Zenith one says Socrates was like 71, 72, who's pretty old for Athenian society. And you know, the kind of implication in some of the dialogues is he thought, well, I'm starting to lose my faculties maybe. I'm getting older, becoming more of a burden my family, he'd reach a point where he thought rather than trying to kind of just keep extending my life indefinitely, well, 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, and that even to the...

1:02:24we're still talking about him. And he became an icon to generations of young philosophers that followed him. Do you think he'd be less impactful if he hadn't died in that way? 100%. He would still have had some impact. But I mean, the most famous thing about Socrates, an ancient world, is Plato's apology in the way that he's noble death. When Epic Titus, the famous Stuart philosopher, who was teaching like 400 years later, right? So, you know, like that's Socrates' ancient history, to epic Titus. He's the most famous quote from epic Titus. The most famous quote in all of Stoicism is people are not upset by events but by their opinions about them.

1:03:11But no one of a 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 and 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 Lampr, Cleese getting angry with his mum. Socrates says, does other people all find your mum unbearable or to certain people view her differently.

1:03:54Socrates himself, for example, viewed it very differently. He got nagged by his aunt, but it didn't really bother him. So one of the first questions we ask in cognitive therapy are our other perspectives available. Is this the only way of looking at things or might you potentially see it differently? Epitetists' main example of that, he goes straight for the jugular. He says, were not set 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. 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.

1:04:35But 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 scales and so over the space of decades, in some cases, if not all, you speak to elderly people in the same, 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 resilient to it. So again, 70 -172 facing his trial, he's an older guy living in a society where there's not a lot of medicine. I think he's He was a sort of dude who was perfectly residing.

1:05:12He'd lived through many dangerous, it's hard to imagine how many brushes with death socrates had. They try to execute him, I think about three or four times altogether under different political regimes. He was involved in battles where thousands of people were killed around him and he lived through a plague 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 Epic Titus goes straight for that example. Look at he used to, he has Plato's apology in mind.

1:05:54He'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 on a freed even of being executed in court. That's your prime. And that was that was the cardinal example to young philosophers in the ancient world. 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 have at the final. Imagine how much more tarnished his 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 work.

1:06:44In the crytow, 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.

1:07:23Crito 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, well, that was the norm in a family society. Yeah, it was like a party. They were like, I suppose they were about 10 or 20 people. So they come and visit him every day in the prison. Weird kind of scenario. But they all gathered around and his family came, his wife brought his kids. he had a baby. We were told, oh, we know, is it Zanthapy? Zanthapy was carrying one of the children.

1:07:58So, scholars think that can of implies that it was a baby or a toddler. Socrates still got it at 72, 717, two years old. Yeah. 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 e -cout and other half an hour. I've been here for a month waiting to drink it. He goes, what am I going to do with another half an 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 all of me in ridiculous if I was like, yeah, yeah, you're right.

1:08:39Maybe I could leak out another hour or so before I have to drink it. So I'm ready to drink it. I've been sitting here for a month once again ready to shrink it. Wait, so. The thing you've mentioned the stokes a couple of times, I'd like to talk about is sort of enduring influence on them and links between 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 game, political games, and backbiting, and sucking up to people, and so on and so forth.

1:09:23That's controversial. Yeah, it certainly has always been a divisive and controversial figure. And some ways he could be compared to Socrates. Socrates had a friend, and possibly a lover, called Also Bideys, who was one of the most influential statesmen. And 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 the top of these best friends and closest associates. So his relationship with our subidies, like trying to get him to be a better ruler and stuff is a bit like Sennaka and his relationship with Nero.

1:10:02But, Senaika, I mean, it wouldn't be, some people will find this controversial, but although we think of Senaika 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, Sennaka was more like a Latin's office than a philosopher. The sophist often quoted philosophy, like they made speeches out of it and things, but they didn't attempt to live in a chord with it and the way that the Stoics or Socrates did. So Sennaka is 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.

1:10:55He became famous by writing consolation letters using storcism 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 Despo, a dictator. And he also wrote speeches defending Neuro and the Sainate and trying to, I mean, ridiculous, like saying that he was virtually a philosopher king and that his hands were unsteined by blood and all that kind of stuff.

1:11:43That couldn't really imagine Socrates thing. No, these Socrates never solute himself in that way. There's a guy that Marcus Aurelius' rhetoric teacher. We have his private letters and Marcus is talking to him about Sennaka. We don't see what Marcus wrote, unfortunately we only see Frontal's replies. Frontal can't stand Sennaka and he died 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?

1:12:30Which is, I kind of want the kids to take off a sick burn. Well, that's only something that another sophist could have come up with, right? Is an insult. But I think what he means is that Seneca in Rome would have been known more than today for his political speeches defending Neuro. And we have a couple of examples of those. Like we have Unclemency for example, which is this letter to Neuro that was probably made public that kind of puts Neuro on something of a pedestal. Also tries to improve his character and teach him more Clemency or Mercy, but at the same time it praises him as a great ruler by which is ridiculous, he was a tyrant.

1:13:11And at the same time that Seneca was defending Neuro and propping up his regime, there were other stoics that were fighting against Neuro and opposing him in the Senate, they called the stoic opposition and several of them died or were exiled, defying Neuro. 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 Epifrodotus who was perhaps also Nero's bodyguard according to one source who's 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 looks up to and Ensenica was seen even by other Stoics at the time as a guy that had maybe compromised himself morally.

1:14:10What is the truth that we know about where the Socrates was really ugly or not? That's actually a contested point. There's a really cool book that came out recently by Arman Dangoor, a classist who wrote a book called Socrates and Love that I really like, that's kind of speculative biography, a 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, his friends describe him as walking like a pelican, having eyes like a crab, having a face like a torpedo fish, and being bold and pot -bellied.

1:14:58So, and he looks like a satire as well. We're told, like one of those kind of goat, fat, 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 him 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 sculptures we have of him are this little pop -bellied old man, you know, that's more of a kind of like was seen as a bit of a presented as more of a comedy character almost.

1:15:40So, yeah, he makes fun of it. And Xenophon's symposium, Socrates Jolkes, 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 then it leads into having a conversation about how they define beauty. And he starts to question whether beauty is actually something that comes from a person's character. 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, Zenophon, Zenophon to his credit says, you learn more about wise men by seeing them at their leisure.

1:16:19I believe that's how he begins to some plosio. It's a drinking party and he presents Socrates is this guy who's quite witty and humorous, right? So he says things where he, he Socrates was 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 in serious as he's kind of both joking and serious at the same time. Often I feel. Was the, 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, the people got too drunk and one of the solutions to people getting too drunk would be to reduce the size of the cups.

1:17:07But who could make the size of the cup smaller was that Socrates? Yeah, I think that's in Xenophon symposium if I or it might be in Plato's symposium My in one of the symposiums like he says he reckon and they do it He says that he asked him to bring out smaller cups and he says if we use Smaller consequences lottery are drinking or getting too drunk. He said ruining the quality of the conversation He says alcohol. I think this is Xenophon symposium. He says alcohol is like watering up land because if you don't give it enough then it kind of shrivels up and dies, but if you give it too much then it wills.

1:17:42And it goes, this is the effect that I think Wayne has on conversation at a dinner party. You've got to find just the right level so that people will listen up and you have a... So he wasn't completely in favour of abstinence. He thought if the right amount of wine was conducive to a good philosophical conversation in a dinner party... Didn't he stand in one place for a day at one point? Well, don't we all? No, not normally. 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 day out in the middle of a battle. No, well, we're not in the battle like well, they were besieging the city way in the north of Greece, he were told that he just froze.

1:18:30And some of the other soldiers camped beside him overnight because they were like, is he really going to stand here all night, be our foot, light in the cold, like they were having bets on it or something. And they watched him in the morning. I believe Plato says that he said a prayer to the rising son, which may have been associated with God Apollo. One of the themes that runs through the dialogues is Socrates' association with the God Apollo. There's a debate about whether Apollo was associated with the son that early. I think he was. Socrates saw the son as an embodiment of the God Apollo, who's the patron God of philosophy.

1:19:12It was the priestess of Apollo who said, no man is wise of the Insolcrates. It was outside the temple of Apollo that says, got off I say out on on Node I self, which is, you know, this statement maximum that became a kind of theme for the psychratic method in a way, it was pursuing self -knowledge. But he was in a habit of it, he played a tells us he used to regularly just freeze and meditate going out trance. What's the, can you dig into the Node I self? 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 other some scholars have questioned it doesn't matter in a way.

1:19:56Somebody 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, Alcibi, 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, life's, and he was Socrates is, you know, companion. Socrates saved his life in battle. You know, I mean, honestly, you could, his life is so cinematic. It's like it's huge epic adventure story. Now in this dialogue, Socrates questions whether or somebody is competent to become a political leader or a statesman.

1:20:31He 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 a bit, good enough, I say out on, I know that I say off. And Socrates said, says to us about these, 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, so he says, well, it's not like just knowing the name of something. It's about really understanding it. Because this is how I understand it. And then he says, often you get these remarkable metaphors, our images and ancient literature.

1:21:01And this is one of my favorites. Socrates says that self -knowledge is like an eye that sees itself. right, is the eye that sees itself. He said it's like the God said that you're instructed your eye to see itself when he says that the mind should know itself. And he says, tell somebody, how can the eye see itself? And also by just a liar, I guess like in a mirror, like in such he says, well done. So how would the mind know itself by analogy? And they'll tell somebody just like, I guess you'd need some kind of mirror for your mind, like, 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 I'm so methodologist giving a lecture.

1:21:49So he basically implies to also buy these that engaging in philosophical dialogue or conversation with other people is a mirror for our own soul. And he understands that we're biased. I mean he was again way ahead of be timing this regard. So, 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? In a sense, the person least qualified to help you. Like, is you, because, I don't know if you've noticed that there's actually research that shows this, right? I'm going all over the place, sorry, but the interview recently, a guy called Igor Grossman, who you should speak to, right?

1:22:30He's a professor at the University of Waterloo who does research on the nature was dumb. 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 us also advice. Right? This is a sensitive subject for psychotherapists. Right? Because well, 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. And being able to give advice to other people is not reliable evidence that you can give advice to yourself.

1:23:07Yeah, 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? 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 has been proven by Professor Grossman's research than we are at giving ourselves advice.

1:23:44And Socrates seems to realize this is partly why he thinks engaging in philosophical dialogue about the most important questions in life as he puts it. It is so important. This provides the best mirror 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 might be worth mentioning because I know people are interested in this. ego Grossman based on his observations, based on his research, did a study, and there are several studies like this where they ask people to keep a journal where they describe they have two groups and one group describes their relationship problems and so on and attempting to resolve them in the first person and the other group do the same thing but in the third person.

1:24:44So 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. Well, I would say Donald forgot his wife's birthday and she became really upset with him. So in the third person, right? As if I'm giving advice to another person, right? And they found, so they said, well, I'm just if you make yourself do this. And by, they call it distance self reflection. So by keeping a journal on the third person, they found that people exhibit measured, measurably more wisdom in the advice and the solutions that they came up with for themselves.

1:25:19Now, Socrates does something a bit like that. He doesn't tell 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 critis. 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 Mistaking about that's 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 by critiquing other people and applying the stochastic method to them in real way in the flesh dialogues.

1:26:11It sounds 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? Oh, there are many. I mean, I told you he's like Jimmy Hendrix, right? So some people might look at Jimmy Hendrix and they might think well he's not, you know, maybe he's not like the technically the best guitarist that's ever loved. But there's no, there's still something kind of really unique about him, right? There was only ever one Jimmy Hendrix. Like, there's nobody else really that kind of sounds exactly like him.

1:26:49And 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, looking assault course for the mind. So they're meant to train us to be able to think through puzzles from different perspectives. That's why I said, you know, what we learn from Socrates more is the method.

1:27:33And he can apply certain really interesting conclusions, but they're often very radical conclusions. And maybe we're mentioning some of them. So people usually, most philosophers disagree with them, but there's one of the ancient dialogues has Socrates saying, when you talk to our 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 etch in the spot where you were a bitten. And so people would say, that's where 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?

1:28:11It's not really convincing, it doesn't make any sense. And then 10 years later, you're still thinking about it, it's kind of bothering you, right? But for instance, one of the other things I wrote about my book because, that 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 a hard view to accept, but no one ever forgets it. Anyone that reads the Platonic Dialogues decades K is 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?

1:28:59And core, he said, you guys that are putting me on trial and convincing the jury to sentence me to death unjustly or harming yourselves more than you're harming me. Epic Titus had quotes him that the last sentence of the Enqueridian, he says, Anatus and Maletus, the two guys that brought him to trial, can kill me, but they cannot harm me. Which is like creating, you know, crazy. That's hard to call. 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? There may be a case for it, but it's an extreme Like if 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.

1:29:53So 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 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 that, we might still defy it, but we might respond to it differently emotionally.

1:30:47Like, Socrates was fearless in core because he believed that the acts of injustice being inflicted on him couldn't really harm him because they could take away his property, my, 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.

1:31:36Right? Maybe not in every single case, but do you, I struggle to think of a case where that's not true. Well, and virtually every client I work with, when we sit down and go, what are the consequences of your anger? How do, because, and the 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.

1:32:11They tend to think very short term. We all do when we get really angry. We don't become 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 them seem powerful, and then she divorces him.

1:32:53Right? So it destroys the relationship, right? I mean, to caricature it a little bit, but often, what we struggle to do is kind of think about the wider impact, right? I'd think a little bit 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 it's, when we're 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?

1:33:33Right? I make a waltz, probably a bunch of possible explanations for that. Right? Maybe there's several reasons depending on how you look at it. You know, where's our farm angry? I think just because he's a jerk, That's why he did it. Right? It was 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 it's very nature. It means that we tend to underestimate the negative consequences of it.

1:34:10So in therapy, it's easy to go. You just set up with people and you draw a lot of lists and you go, you know, what 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 a turnaround, you know, and a snap angrily at Macat. Right. Macat has done nothing. Right. It's not even involved in the American politics. Many 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 a bit short, you know, my wife might say what you want for dinner, you know, and I'll ask me later, right?

1:35:05Because 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 it out in 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 as yes, anger, your own anger, or it's doing you more harm than the thing the politician said on TV or somebody not sending your Chris record or the thing, not maybe in every case, but in really for practical purposes and the majority of cases that we end up dealing with.

1:35:47So he was, socrates took it way further, but nevertheless, there's something really interesting about the point that he's making. I speak in Langa and frustration. I seem to remember you saying that you thought it would be impossible to write this book. I did thank you is impossible. Why? I really did. I thought it was impossible to write it because I thought Socrates was two complex 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, the history of it, 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 fed it all into 50 ,000 words.

1:36:50It 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 there, it said, I'm going to approach this like I'm writing a movie screenplay. And so it'll be a 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 it's at 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.

1:37:32And I'm going to have to figure out ways to simplify the history of the Peloponnesian War. So, you know, I'm kind of surprised that I managed to compress all of that into one book. But I thought very long and horror about how to do it. And there was a lot of planning that went into it. I think I put four times as much work into this book, is I put into the proceeding, how to think like a Roman Emperor? Is it, I mean, you're looking at second hand sources, very little direct. I mean, even with that, I learned this from you as well, that even when we think about Marcus Raelius and how much information we have about him, because you know, we've got his direct writings and he was an emperor and, you know, prestigious and stuff like that.

1:38:23But even with him, because he didn't really do that much wrong, there wasn't that much writing about him. He didn't just, he just simply attracted 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 right, which is this bloke who I've got like basically why a taps of like ancient why taps and that's the best that I can go on. Yeah, there's really frustrating things a bit life of so that this thing about going to Delphi and the pronouncement is presented as a key moment in his life.

1:39:01We'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 or 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 days. 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 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 a book.

1:39:38which you did. You did that as well. You're a man of many literary pathways now. I take some satisfaction in that. There's some authors just write the same book over and over again. And I don't know that I did this deliberately. I'd be like, can I actually just play the same 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, but Marcus are really is. They're all different genres. One's a more of an academic history, one's a self -help, but one's a graphic novel.

1:40:12So if I look at the books I've probably read about eight books, they're all quite different from each other. I feel like I kind of stretched myself. 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. But the positive side is that that's how you grow by taking a chance and doing something that's 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.

1:40:50And I thought, well, I was, again, older and less afraid of making mistakes. And I thought, what's the worst that can happen? Maybe I'll just mess it up in the book, I'll be rubbish or something like that. I thought, yeah, I think a try I'll 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, well, I think what would I want to write in a book that I'm giving to my younger self?

1:41:25And 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 pronounciament is made at Delphi and I'm down, we've got it wrong. You know, like, so maybe the chronology is a little bit, or for something like that, or there's some other debateable historical point. With my 17 year old self -care about that, our weightages 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... What? It's interestingly very secratic to go about things like that. Okay, how can we apply this practically?

1:41:59How useful is this? Well, it's also very erraliocene to debating about what a good man is versus being one. Well, sometimes people ask you, you know, how'd you go about writing a book, right? And I don't think I've ever said this in my podcast before, but for like the funnily enough, the answer to this is kind of weird, right? There's a bunch of things I do that are quite specific. Like, one is that I write the audio book first, right? So when I'm writing a book, I'm not writing a print book. I think I'm writing an audio book. And as part of that, I'll read it aloud a lot. And I'll pay somebody, like a local bar made 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 B .R.

1:42:46Like, you know, and I'll pay them whatever per hour. And I'll give them a big print out of the manuscript. and I said, I read the entire thing to me. Right, it takes, I think last time we did it, it took 12 hours. Like, I've got a video of the aftermath where like sliding out of our chair, you know, like we've got like some snacks piled up. We saw, I think it was 12 hours. Maddie, I think it was the name of the, my friend's friend that came over and read through the whole of how to think like a soccer team. I think I did it several times because I wanted to know what it sounded like as well as reading it on the page.

1:43:20But the other thing I would do is I normally work in the library and I would sit with a timer and I'd practice a meditation technique for 10 minutes called the Benson method Where there'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 the pop into mind So I'd try to become clearer about the differentiation between what I'm thinking voluntarily I normally just say the number one or account down from 10 to zero over and over again on each out breath, like one number like 10, 9, 8, and then start again.

1:44:00Because then if you're counting in your main attention one does, you're more likely to notice it because you're broken into the sequins, 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 for and it chose to think that I just put it into my mind. So I kind of trained myself to become more aware of that distinction. Then for 10 minutes, I would imagine that I'm in academia, Platonos in Greece, like I wrote about at the beginning of the book, and imagine I'm talking to Socrates, right?

1:44:31And the first thing I would always do, Chris, is shake his hand, right? And it took quite surprisingly a long time from 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, here I insisted on shaking his time, but he thought it was about weird at first. Right? And I would say to him, my, I'd ask him lots of questions, right? About anything that was struggling with in the book. And what I generally found, any of the history stuff, his opinion, what, you know, I'd be like trying to think we need to get eye on this, I didn't get it accurate and stuff.

1:45:03And he would always, my imagine resorca tea is anyway, would always be like, who cares? You know, it's like, I don't even know why, you know, he, he seemed to please surprisingly little importance on getting it historically accurate. And he said, no, there's just focus on telling the story of the literary character, or his own, he's 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, try to get your truth. I've been thinking about something not too dissimilar, a little bit more generalized, but I think split on the internet that we have at the moment.

1:45:47One 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, what do you know? You're not a dot, dot, dot. Psychotherapist, psychedelics, experts, sports, and physio person, whatever you're pontificating about. And the reason that 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 very much this ecstatic method is that. And then on the other side, you have this sort of over romanticization of the renegade untrained, sort of orthogonal thinker.

1:46:30So 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, they did it outside of the establishment. That's how they actually really know what's going on. But 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 unresurably 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.

1:47:13So you are thinking about it in a more socratic way, because you're very fat, you're going, can I see it from more than one perspective and there's prosa? 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 they weren't qualified. They were outside, those are talented amateurs, but on the other hand, having zero qualifications and certain subjects, clearly in some cases just leads to a done and Kruger effect and people making schoolboy errors that are just almost cringeworthy if you know that the subject.

1:47:47I mean like the most obvious example of that I think is the internet is absolutely a wash with people that can't tell a definition between causation and correlation and medical research. But like newspapers in magazines have exploited that confusion for generations, but now it's become much bigger than the internet. So understanding basic medical research methods, getting confused about that does lead a lot of people to make basic mistakes, to misinterpret. If you don't Like during the pandemic, every five minutes, people were waving around research studies and stuff. They didn't have any medical research, right?

1:48:36So 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. 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. 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.

1:49:16So you've got slightly more nuanced understanding of it, not just a kind of rigid understanding. But I think in And generally, you know, this thing about I am a chose versus experts is similarly, 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, classists, 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's, you know, the other experts in the field just think they've lost them lightly, you know, that again, they're making mistakes that a first year student would fail a assignment for doing, right?

1:50:09I mean, it's weird when you see that, but it happens a lot. You get books by people that are professors of philosophy or psychology or whatever, and And you think a first year undergraduate student would get lambasted for saying this stuff is crazy. Well, but so, you know, they're not the most highly credentialed people are often not experts. And there's also a well -known problem with expertise. Like there's actually statistical research that shows that sit 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.

1:50:56Like 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 a pet theory, where there's professional statisticians that don't have any skin in the game. We'll just look at what all of the research says and be really kind of cast a cold eye over it. You know, I, and they'll say, no, this is what the research actually shows. This guy's just telling you what half of the research says, you know, because it supports his pet theory.

1:51:27And 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. And so their version of things can be quite distorted. But I think the other difficulty I wanted to mention to you in terms of this idea of getting information from experts and becoming kind of passive rather than depending on our own reason, there's another piece of research that's very influential in state of the are like modern behavioral psychology, which shows there's a problem with something called rule -governed behavior.

1:52:12So 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 a word, if they get it wrong, like maybe they get some punishment or buzzer goes off or something like that, they lose point. So, right. And in one group, you just give them a role or written instructions. Let's say this is how you solve the puzzle. The other group, they have to figure it out through trial and error, right. This is phase one of the experiment. And phase two, so they do it repeatedly and phase two, the roles that govern the success change without telling them, right.

1:52:56So they have to adapt. Basically, create a circumstance where they have to adapt. One group had been verbally given the role or solution that other group had to figure out through Charan Ehrer. 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 out themselves will adapt much more quickly. So we call this insensitivity to environmental change, right? And the reason that's really important is that's exactly what people who come for psych therapy 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?

1:53:36Like, why do they keep yelling at their partners when they keep their relationships, keep breaking up as a result? Surely, like, 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, it tends, there's a tendency, an established tendency to overextend it and apply it to rigidly. And that can cause problems. Donald Robertson, ladies and gentlemen, dude, I love you.

1:54:16I 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 sub -stack and stuff like that going. Well, I've written a bit of like famous philosophers and stuff, Chris. But I mean, all honesty, the thing that's a sat down and a 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 it? And I thought, oh, I'll 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?

1:54:45And 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. 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, an anger place a huge role in politics. And on the internet, we've got like, satrolling and cyberbullying and so much kind of aggression on social media. and so much kind of hostility and aggression and politics.

1:55:21But none of us are looking at it and thinking, oh, when people get angry, like they're thinking become skewed, or 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 of the majority of people are not aware that the research tells us all this kind of stuff. So today, Mange is just a feeling. It's not something that changes their thinking. And, you know, if that's what anger does, like, how does it affect the electorate?

1:55:58How 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 angelic senica as an entire book called on anger. You know, and And 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 are self -blaming emotions, right? So people that are anxious to depressed tend to seek self -help or therapy, but angry people don't seek therapy, typically, because if I'm really angry at this, I think you need therapy buddy, not me, right?

1:56:48So angry people avoid self -help. So that's why you could go online and you see kind of self -improvement communities like the Manus fear, for example, in some cases. And there seems to be a lot of really angry people, yet they're talking about self -improvement. I don't know if you noticed that. 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.

1:57:25You know, if you read the comments and YouTube videos and things like that. Angry people. There's a lot of angry people, so I should give you. Don't, where should people go? They want to keep up to date with all of the things you're doing. Well, they can find me on Substack. That's probably where I mainly put stuff. And my website is just donaldrobotsand .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 organisation, 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 Centre.

1:58:00where we're trying to raise funds to create a conference center adjacent to the original location of Play Tours 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 progress. But it's always, you know, absolute pleasure. 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 reassuring to me that you've found the stuff interesting. You keep coming back on. You write something and we'll sit down for two hours and talk about it every time it has.

1:58:42I want to do an episode with you a primer on CBT. So maybe in the next sort of six months or so, we'll find a time slot that works and I really want to try and just do a 30 ,000 foot view, with the biggest principles, the biggest learnings and lessons. My specialism was always, I was what I was, I used to train therapists and I would always say that I was a technique sky. 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 technique.

1:59:26This is technique, so you do this meditation technique. Let's go through a bunch of them and show you how to act. I would absolutely love to do that. And I think 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 follow myself for. I'm like if I just read enough CBT, I would have probably come across this already. All of the biggest realizations seem to have been arrived at by CBT in one form or another.

2:00:01So 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. Done. I appreciate the hell out of you. Thank you very much for today. Thanks, man. It's been a pleasure. I really enjoyed it. It's good to see you again. And you.