Bro-icism vs Stoicism | Donald Robertson PT 2

0:00I'm picking my kids up from school today and then doing our weekly routine, which is I take them over to Whole Foods. and we get all our groceries for the week. Then we have dinner. It's one of their favorite things to do. It's one of my favorite things to do. And then my wife loves it because she doesn't have to take care of it. This holiday season, whether you're a guest or hosting the big dinner Whole Foods Market has what you need to delight everyone at your table. They even have heat and eat sides from the prepared foods department. You can make Whole Foods your one-stop shop. Everything follows Whole Foods Market's strict ingredients standards so you know it'll be delicious and good for you.

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2:18Welcome to The Daily Stoic Podcast, where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives. But first, we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors.

3:07Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I am I'm hammering away at the wisdom book. I think I'm making progress. Being in the middle of a book, it's the toughest place to be. The excitement of the beginning goes away and the momentum of being almost done hasn't really picked you up and carried you. So I'm deep in the shit, I guess is what I'm saying, but I love it. And I think I've gotten better over the years at finding a way to, as they say, embrace the suck, really enjoy that it's hard. Like I feel so lucky to get, to be lost in ideas and to, I mean, I'm now five years into this project.

3:53I sold the Stoic Wisdom series in the fall, I believe, of 2019. So I would have started working on it months before that. And then I started The Courage Book, which came out in 2021. Thank you to everyone that read that. The Discipline Book, which came out in 22. Then I took two years to finish The Justice Book, which is coming out this month. There are a bunch of pre-order bonuses you can grab at dailystoic.com slash justice. I would love for you to read that book. And now I'm in the wisdom book. So I'll finish it in the next year or so. It'll come out in 2025, I guess. So I'm just deep in that.

4:30And I took a break from that to have this two-part conversation with the one and only Donald Robertson, where we were talking about stoicism and what made Marcus Aurelius such a special human being. One of the things that he and I talked about is this thing that I talk about in the end of Justice, this idea of broicism, this people liking all the parts about stoicism, except for the virtue of justice, this idea that we have to care about other people and be good people and try to make the world better. That really saddens me. That really saddens me. And it's one of the things I'm talking about in the book.

5:06And I've been trying to push back on here. I'm trying to make it part of the messaging. So I think this is a really great interview. Donald Robertson is a cognitive behavioral psychotherapist. He's a writer. He's a fellow of the Royal Society for Public Health, and he's an expert on Greek and Roman philosophy. He lives in Greece. He came all the way out for the interview. We had a great conversation. I cannot recommend his book, Marcus Rullius, the Stoic Emperor, enough. I also really enjoyed his book, How to Think Like a Roman Emperor, two of the only non-Ryan Holiday Stoicism books we carry at the Painted Porch, not written by actual Stoics.

5:38So I can't recommend them enough. I recommend them by putting my money where my mouth is, and I think you will highly enjoy them. So enjoy this conversation with Donald Robertson. Thanks to Donald for coming out. And I'm thanking him for the work he does because it's made my work better and it's made my life better. And I think you'll feel the same thing.

6:02politics is serving many masters by definition right you have multiple constituencies and so there is something i think a little bit in epictetus as much as i like him that's closer to the sort of origin of stoicism this sort of cynic tradition the i mean look he doesn't he first chance he gets, he leaves Rome and he lives out far away, right? And we can't fault a person who is enslaved and exiled and experiences the worst of the system for not believing in the system and participating in it. But Seneca, I go back and forth. Sometimes I'm very sympathetic. Sometimes I'm utterly disgusted. And I think in that way, he's actually someone we have to talk about because he so embodies the contradictions, the temptations, the imperfect nature of reality that we all struggle with.

6:59But there's something about Epictetus that's very pure that says, don't get your hands dirty, step away from it. Virtue is the only thing that matters. and that's great as far as it works for the individual but i think many other stoic thinkers and and and philosophers before and since go hey you know when you uh withdraw it doesn't it doesn't change anything all it does is seed that role or place to someone else who's almost certainly less philosophical, less virtuous, less principled. I think Pericles said something like, your disengagement is only possible by the increased engagement from someone else.

7:47Yeah. And that part, I think many of the later Roman Stoics struggle with this idea of like, here's what's philosophical, here's what's virtuous, here's what's pure, and then here's the real world with its imperfect problems and solutions. And the decision to be the pen and ink philosopher on this side and the philosopher politician participant on this side, as Marcus tries to be and Seneca tries to be, it's just fraught with morally vexing decisions. Yeah, we're never going to resolve it because it's always been a tension that runs famously, in a way runs through the history of philosophy. And I always, it reminds me in the Eastern tradition in Buddhism, you have these two major schools of Buddhism called the Hinayana and the Mahayana.

8:35And the earliest form of Buddhism has this monastic ideal that involves retreating completely from the world, a bit like a cynic philosopher. Or an Empercurean. Yeah. And then over time people thought, well, that seems like there's something wrong with this. Surely the ideal should be to benefit the rest of mankind as well. And so reconciling the benefits of withdrawing from society with the kind of meaninglessness of that in a way, unless you're contributing to the greater good or the common welfare of mankind has always been... I think the stories are kind of aware of that though. You get this tension to some extent in Epictetus.

9:15It can be explained in a way... By the way, let me just digress for a moment and say that What we're describing, these different factions, we have a source that says there were three schools of Stoicism by the Roman period, and they were represented by followers of the last three scholarchs of Stoicism. And we don't know what the difference was between them. And what are those names for people? One of them is Diogenes of Babylon, I think. one's Antipater of Tarsus and the other one's Panatius of Rhodes and so I think the followers of Panatius are the middle Stoics who follow Posidonius as well and they incorporate bits of Aristotle and Plato.

10:03Seneca and Cicero look like they're probably more aligned with that and interestingly the other ones are both right in Latin so maybe the language has something to do with it as well. This is the more kind of modernized in a way, like, you know, version, more kind of Latinized version of Stoicism. And then there must be, one of the others must be more old school by comparison. Seneca gives us a list of his favorite philosophers at one point, and he lists Socrates and the founders of Stoicism. And he also lists Plato, but he doesn't list Diogenes the Cynic, interestingly. Whereas definitely if you asked Epictetus, who are your top three favorite philosophers?

10:44He would say Socrates and maybe he'd say Xeno and Chrysippus. He'd definitely say Diogenes the Cynic. So I think there's this more urbane version of Stoicism where they are more into Plato and Aristotle and Roman senators are quite into it. And then there's this more hardcore old school version. It's like fundamentalist Stoicism. Yeah, fundamental Stoicism. And Epictetus is clearly... Now, the weird thing is that Marcus Aurelius ends up being into the more hardcore fundamentalist cynic oriented version of Stoicism. But yeah, definitely that's something that I think they struggled with. So in Epictetus, I think this is something that people ask me a lot about.

11:28So maybe it's worth mentioning. He seems to be aware that we have to, there's a passage where he talks about, he talks about bulls quite a lot, interestingly. like and he says um how does the bull know that it can kill a lion i didn't know that bulls could kill lions actually but apparently they can't like they toss them on their horns yeah i guess a water buffalo or something would be have some some adaptations for fighting off they can fight off lion like if they're strong enough like they they throw them up in the air on their horns and make a you know mess them up pretty badly um so epictetus apparently knows this and he says how is it possible that some bulls know again the calves like the heifers can't defend themselves against lions but the strongest bull in the herd can fight off lions how does it know that and i think he's implying that it comes from trial and error and the only way it can know is through testing itself and experience like and the analogy i think that the stoics and other philosophers always have at the back of their mind is wrestling and Pankration.

12:37So he'd say, how do you know which sparring partner to pick? If it's someone that's much younger and weaker and less experienced than you, you're not going to learn anything. But if it's someone that's much bigger and stronger and more skilled than you, you're just going to get humiliated. And you're probably not going to learn anything. He's going to beat you within a second, and it's going to be kind of demoralizing. So really you want to find somebody who's slightly better than you, you know, and that you kind of stand a chance of potentially being, you can learn something. You've got to kind of pick your battles, as it were.

13:15He says, if there's too much smoke in your house, you should get out. But if there's a little bit of smoke, maybe you could put up with it. And I think this is a similar kind of analogy. So I think what Epictetus might say is you need to pick your career in a similar way. If you think that you have the integrity, the wisdom, the composure to get into politics and keep your cool, then maybe the gods have put you in that position. Maybe you are the right guy for the job. But most of you guys, his students, aren't up to this. like, you know, you're novices when it comes to stoicism. And some of you might be better off retreating from society for a while in order to cultivate your virtue.

14:06So like choosing a career is like choosing a sparring partner. Because it's going to challenge you and tempt you and put you in vexing moral positions. And it has the potential to bring out the best in you, but also the worst in you. And you meet guys like that in different careers. You meet people that seem to be able to maintain their composure and their integrity, even in a business where there's a lot of corruption or a lot of temptation. And then you meet other people who wouldn't last five minutes, who are smart, who are educated and competent, but easily overwhelmed by the stress. They want approval too badly or their moral compass isn't clear enough.

14:48Yeah. So I think Epictetus is saying, look, you know, I can't tell you, other people can't tell you, you know, you need to become a good student of your own psyche. You need to learn to know yourself like the bulls in the herd and figure out, you know, are you just like a little calf that's going to get eaten alive by the lions? You know, are you the big alpha bull in the hair that can toss the lions on its horns and isn't scared of them? Right. Are you meant for the scholar's life or the soldier's life? Right. Are you meant to be in the arena or are you, you know, a spectator or a critic or what have you?

15:27You've got to know. And I think Seneca, you know, he says like, he pities the person who hasn't been in the ring, who hasn't been bloodied and bruised and knocked out because they don't know what they're capable of. Now, we could argue that Seneca gets in the ring with more than he could handle. But also, I think we have to acknowledge and respect the fact that he was so in the mix, in the room where it happened, that I don't know, and I can't imagine many people that were tested the way that he was tested. And whether you or I or they would do better in those situations. I mean, the incredible, like Seneca would probably say, do you know what I prevented Nero from doing?

16:12Do you know how much worse he could have been? He could probably say, if what I was really after was my own power and my own enrichment, like what you think I was compensated for is a fraction of what I could. He's like, do you think if all I cared about was money or power, you think I was writing these plays or reading these books? So I think Seneca would probably see himself as having been quite heroic in all of it. Now, how much of that is what he has to tell himself to sleep at night? You know, when you compare it to a Thrasio or an Agrippinus, some of these other Stoics who really did kind of put it all on the line, I think they stand up better.

16:51But Seneca was put in Shakespearean level dilemmas. And some cases, I think he really did well. And in other cases, you know, we hold him up as an example of what not to do. Well, that's a good segue into a completely different perspective on the whole thing, which is what, you know, when you're writing a biography about someone like Marcus Aurelius, one of the questions that I asked myself is, what can we tell about his character by looking at the content of the meditations? Like, what's he worried about in the meditations? And then also, you know, there's another simple question, which the Romans, I think, ask themselves more than we do.

17:28But it's a useful question to ask, which is what don't they mention? Like he doesn't mention Seneca. The dog that doesn't bark. Yeah. Who doesn't he mention? What's missing from this? Marcus says a lot about his relationships with other people. He says a lot about justice. He says a lot about anger. Yes. He says a lot about not being alienated. So he's really concerned with interpersonal conflict, it seems to me. He has that entire section, 1118, where he lists 10 different strategies for coping with anger, right? So this is clearly something, and it's not surprising, like given his position. Do you think Marcus Aurelius had an anger problem?

18:07Yeah. Like, I mean, we can't know for sure, but it certainly comes across that way. I'll tell you something that might shock you actually. And I really don't say this lightly. Like, so as someone who has a background in therapy, I used to teach therapists. I'd stand and speak at conferences and, you know, for weeks on end, I'd speak to rooms full of psychologists and therapists and life coaches. If I said to them, and I'd do this sort of thing all the time, I'd get like a whiteboard and I'd say, how many cognitive strategies can you guys think of for coping with anger? Distinct strategies, not just different versions of the same thing, right?

18:42I think an individual, I'd be impressed if they come up with like three or four. I think the group collectively might come up with, if they're 20 or 30 people, they'd come up with like five or six or something. I don't think they would come up with 10, right? Marcus not only has a list of 10 distinct cognitive strategies, most of which are pretty viable in modern therapy, but he keeps returning to selections from that list throughout the book. So it's clearly not something he's just kind of copied down. He's memorized this and he's using it repeatedly. So he has, maybe this is overstating in a way, but, you know, to be blunt about it, he has potentially the level of knowledge and understanding of coping with anger that I would expect from a therapist.

19:30You know, why would you know 10? Like even as a client, you'd normally learn like two or three self-help techniques and focus on the things that work. But you normally, you'd only know that many distinct techniques if actually you're teaching them to other people. He must have learned them from someone who is an expert on coping with anger. But his knowledge of this is surprisingly extensive. As a therapist, it seems surprisingly in-depth and extensive to me. We have to credit Marcus too with the fact that he didn't need to give a shit about it at all. I think of the story of Hadrian, his secretary makes a mistake.

20:09He's livid. He grabs a stylist off the table and he stabs it in their eye. What are the consequences for this horrendous, you know, loss of control, giving oneself up to the passions as it's so. There are none. He begs the guy for forgiveness. And the guy says, he says, I'll do whatever you want for me. And Hadrian says this, and the man says, well, I'd like my eye back, please. Right. But, and so this story, you know, perhaps Marcus witnesses it happening. Certainly that story would have followed Hadrian around. As a young, future Caesar, Marcus could take from this, I can do whatever I want.

20:46Or he can say, I never want to be that person. And there is clearly this sense that it is a self-imposed limitation, right? It is a battle he is waging on himself against something he is ashamed of or regrets or wants to reign in, not because he's forced to, but because philosophy and his heart is telling him, hey, you're going to do things you regret. It's going to hurt people. What are the ancient cells? What's the literature? He's struggling on this quite genuinely and earnestly because he feels that it's important. And it's kind of, you could argue, it's kind of the battle of his life. Yeah, I think so.

21:40And he didn't exhibit anger. Like, we're told of several incidents where Herodes Atticus lunges at him during a legal hearing as if he's going to throttle him. Like, and the Praetorian prefect leaps forward and stops him. And Marcus supposedly is just completely composed and said, we'll just adjourn until tomorrow. Like, so he had this reputation for being completely unfazed. So it's an interesting example of somebody who feels that he has a flaw and really struggles to overcome it. And by the accounts of other people seems to have succeeded in doing that and become a peer as more composed than anyone else around him.

22:15Now, actually, we said we'd jump around a bit. I just want to throw in another bit of historical trivia that a lot of people maybe don't notice. It's kind of in the small print, as it were, in history. Hadrian during his political purges goes after at one point Marcus's maternal grandfather who he was very close to Marcus acknowledges him at the beginning of the meditations and also and this is a bit more like spaghetti junction of Roman families Marcus's sister's father-in-law right. So the father of the guy that Marcus's sister married. So I don't know if he exiles them. He accuses them of conspiracy and then he strips them of office, Hadrian.

22:59But he'd recently just executed a senator, a consul for something similar. So towards the end of his reign, Hadrian's going after Marcus's family and potentially threatening to have him beheaded or whatever for conspiring against him. so I definitely think Marcus would have looked at Hadrian and thought this guy's out of control yeah right I mean Hadrian would have been like a frightening guy to be around towards the end because there were no consequences to his actions he's the guy that he didn't care anymore yeah like he was suicidal he was kind of losing his mind he was riddled with disease his limbs were grotesquely swollen apparently had a horrible skin disease that it was itching terribly all of the time almost it kind of reminds me almost like you know how sometimes you're reading about these historical figures and they remind you of characters in movies and stuff he makes me think of the baron harkonnen in some way in in june right he's kind of become this grotesque figure he builds this huge palace outside of rome this massive has this massive estate with many buildings in it marcus has to come and live in it like he does we're told he doesn't want to yeah like it's surrounded by spies hadrian had spies everywhere like so i definitely think marcus looked at hadrian and was terrified and thought i don't want to end up becoming this guy's a monster yeah like and i don't want to end up being like him he was only like 16 or something when he had to go in and live with him for about three or four months just before he died um it's a train wreck and dangerous because he's constantly threatening to execute people around him and going a bit crazy.

24:42He's everywhere that Marcus doesn't want to end up. Yeah, Marcus doesn't want to end up like that. Now, I said the things that people don't mention. So Marcus is very concerned about these interpersonal conflicts, but he doesn't say very much about greed for wealth, which is a major stoic concern. he mentions a little bit about the desire for pleasure and hedonism and stuff, but not that much. He says a lot more about anger and justice and social virtue and stuff like that. You get the sense of Marcus as being a guy who's post-economic. Like money is, he's not a guy who carries a wallet. No, he's going to do that.

25:24He never has to, he is basically, he wears his wealth lightly, but also he's so privileged, I think, that money, the lack thereof or the desire for more, it just, it never computes for him. It doesn't figure barely in the meditations at all. Whereas Seneca does mention like overcoming gold, the desire for it and greed for wealth. So it may be that there's a clue there that Seneca was clearly a social climber. But also Marcus never has everything taken from him, right? So you can imagine in Seneca, you know, First off, his family is not exactly new money, but they are successful climbers in their own way.

26:08But then if you have something like an exile, I can imagine it makes you desire to never be so vulnerable again. Yeah, I'm not gonna let that happen again. So we have these two very different characters that come from very different backgrounds, have very different experiences, and they embrace different versions of stoicism. So you can see Marcus's privilege in a way allows him to embrace a more extreme stoic ideal, perhaps. He's never had to worry about money. He's never been exiled. You know, he just doesn't think about it. The other clue is we're told, look closely at Marcus's biography. We're told he started studying philosophy when he was 12, which is unusually young, even in the ancient world.

26:53Not that many people would have studied philosophy. They would probably have begun when they were about 15. Most of his friends would be studying rhetoric and oratory, maybe little bits of philosophy, but they wouldn't have kind of majored in it, as it were. So even that's unusual. But we're not told much about what he read when he was 12. We're told that he dressed like a philosopher and slept in a camp bed on the floor and stuff like that. So there's two things that I would... This is like a decade before he would have even heard of Epictetus, right? Because I think he's in his 20s when Rusticus gives him Epictetus.

27:26So he has a long study of philosophy before the real light bulb goes off. And I don't imagine when he's 12 that he's studying syllogistic logic, right? So I suspect that he's picking up little bits of philosophy from reading plays and poetry and stuff like that, maybe attending a few speeches. but he's probably embracing more of the lifestyle rather than the kind of abstract the diogenes the cynic stuff probably yeah and modeling him himself a little bit more in the so it may well be as some people have suspected that he starts off more leaning towards the and he maybe views it more as a yoga or a lifestyle thing rather than as a a technical study of logic.

28:17Although there's a really interesting passage that's little known in Fronto, where Fronto describes one of Marcus's philosophy lectures. And he's kind of sneering at it. Like Fronto's always kind of like sneering at things. But he says, when you go and do your philosophy, he's complaining about, weirdly, he's complaining that rhetoric is a much more practical discipline than philosophy. And he's saying, in your philosophy lectures, you just sit yawning and staring out the window, and they don't even give you any homework. Nobody pays attention, and they teach you the syllogistic logic stuff. And so he doesn't say what these lectures are, but Marcus's main philosophy teacher at that time would have been Apollonius of Chalcedon, who's a famous Stoic.

29:07So unless he's talking about something completely different. I mean, Marcus seems to be mainly studying stoicism. It may be that the type of stoicism that he was exposed to early on was more academic, more about logic. Epictetus clearly thinks his students are reading lots of books on stoic logic. And he thinks you guys are becoming too bookish. He's always kind of berating them about that. So I think we can imagine that Marcus might initially have resembled Epictetus's students and being, you know, like philosophy students today. It's a kind of abstract, you know, bookish subject. He is literally sitting in these lecture theatres, you know, doing logic exercises and stuff.

29:54And he maybe doesn't really think of it. He's doing cynicism or something like that early on, but he maybe doesn't really see stoicism that much in terms of being a kind of practical lifestyle until he encounters Epictetus. You know, we think of stoicism in a particular way, but it's mainly because we've got Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius. You know, a lot of ancient stoic writings were maybe more dry than the stuff that survives today. Like we have fragments from hierocles for example that's more like a lecture on you know the the ethics and uh you know uh natural philosophy and stuff like that um it so it may be that epictetus was kind of unusual you know and marcus is following him and having this really kind of practical focus um chrysipus we kind of get the impression was you know quite dry yeah epictetus's line about Chrysippus is so good.

30:55There's a student, he's bragging that he's read all the works of Chrysippus and how long it took and how difficult it was to wade through. And Epictetus says, you know, if Chrysippus had been a better writer, you'd have less to brag about. And I think the point to me, the essence of stoicism philosophy, but also just great writing is like, it shouldn't be hard. It shouldn't be complicated. It should be clear and concise and straight to the point. And that's what's so, of course, amazing about meditations is Marcus is writing to himself. He's not even thinking about an audience at all. And yet he's so concise, so to the point, so gets to the essence.

31:31There's no fact. You know, like one of the cool things is, again, to go back to Fronto's letters, there's a really odd thing in Fronto where he says, so Fronto's got mixed feelings about philosophy. and he's competing with Marcus's philosophy teachers, particularly Rusticus, you know, to become his main teacher. And Rusticus eventually seems to win out. And so Marcus kind of majors in philosophy, as it were, rather than in rhetoric. But Frontal repeatedly says to Marcus, I think because in particular, stoic philosophy is expressed in paradoxes, they're inherently hard to understand or communicate for something in Chrysippus is probably quite baffling for a lot of people to read.

32:13And Fronto says, you need rhetoric if you're going to communicate these ideas clearly and effectively. And he really hammers this point home. And he says to Marcus, what you should do is take these sayings that you like and paraphrase them repeatedly to try and hit on exactly the right word or image to communicate them clearly and powerfully. and anyone that studied philosophy or a subject like that knows it's sometimes you can read a really technical book and you can understand it but can you explain it to someone else yeah and then someone finds like a metaphor and you go that's it that captures exactly what i was trying to say it's a whole different skill and marcus in the meditations is doing the thing yeah that fronto tells him to do in the letters like interestingly he sets him as a rhetoric exercise though.

33:02And sometimes people have said to me, you know, why is the meditation still popular today? And I think it's because the philosophy is concise. It's profound. It's expressed in an artfully vague way so that we can immediately put ourselves in Marcus's shoes. So the most famous passage in meditations, I think is 2.1. Yes. By the way, I had someone in here, he's an actor and he just has uh two lines dot one and it's just a reminder of the opening the opening essentially the opening of meditation because we could say debts and lessons is is sort of the the preface but yeah but marcus gets into it with today the people you meet will be and he doesn't say them he doesn't name any names or anything right yeah so we can read that and think well oh yeah, like that guy that works in my office is a bit like that.

33:55Or my mother-in-law. And we project ourselves into it because he expresses it in a kind of surprisingly vague, abstract way at times that allows us to imagine it applying even to our own lives. But I also think, I believe that Marcus was a great writer. I think he's the greatest writer of all the Stoics. Yeah. Yeah, and you know, people, because he's writing aphorisms, we don't get to really see a good example of his speeches or letters. But the proof is in the pudding, right? He's written aphorisms that people get tattooed on themselves, like nearly 2 ,000 years later. Like people memorize sayings from the meditations because he's taken ideas that Chris Ipas would have expressed in technical jargon.

34:45In a whole book. and articulated them with a really captivating image and really clear language. And that's a skill that Fronto has spent years, decades teaching him and that his Greek rhetoric tutors. Marcus had extensive training in writing and rhetoric. And I think you can see, some people have questioned that and said you can't see evidence of it. I think you can totally see evidence that he's a highly skilled aphorist in the meditations. Of course you can't. People love the meditations. I mean, the fact that he is doing it to himself in Greek, on the front lines or in the palace or at the Colosseum, we hear him pouring over his books.

35:30The fact that he's doing it quietly, internally in some respects. and it's so good that we're talking about it 2 ,000 years later that you can be a genius or you can be a prisoner picking it up from the library, an uneducated, uninformed person just picking it up for the first and you can just get it and you get what he means and you can apply it to your life right now and that he synthesized 2 ,000 years or sorry, hundreds of years of wisdom up until that point and it stood the test of time. I mean, that is a feat that very few people can ever claim. And it has psychological implications. Because if you want a philosophy to impact your life, you need to, you know, and this is something that's, I always thought it's strange that in education and in psychotherapy, there are many different ways of conceptualizing psychotherapy.

36:32But we don't usually conceptualize it in terms of memorization. and we should because clients forget most of the things that therapists tell them right and when clients benefit from things in therapy it's because it sticks yes in their mind and they remember it for the rest of their life and they remember it in the right situation at the right time and it is evocative for them it changes the way they see things or the way they feel about things so memorization what's the point in learning something if you forget it right so in order to remember it helps if you're an expert in classical rhetoric and you can find the perfect word and image to encapsulate an idea people remember what marcus says and that has that's that's one of the reasons that it's therapeutic yeah like because i mean people read so you know look at all the self-help books people read in therapy we see clients all the time that tell us are self-help junkies and they have a library full of self-help books and then you can say to them well you know what ideas did you take from that book?

37:35And they'll say, I don't know, I can't remember. You know, I read it, I read it twice, but I still don't really remember that much from it. I didn't put it into practice. It's a combination of forgetting it and not really, you know, following through and putting it into practice. We're not getting it in the first place because it wasn't clear enough. Well, it wasn't clear enough in the first place. So Marcus is doing something, not just that's beautiful, but, you know, sometimes beautiful things have a practical value. You know, the beauty of the meditations makes it more evocative and more memorable and therefore more therapeutic.

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41:10Stoicism is this thing that feels very masculine, very male-centric, but the primary influence on Marcus's life, you could argue, isn't Antoninus, it's his mother. She's this sort of quiet model of stoicism that historians and subsequent philosophers don't give enough credit to. But what does Marcus Aurelius learn from his mother? Well, you could, at a stretch, you could view her as his first tutor. and you know he she's the only woman he mentions his sister fleetingly but other than that his mother is the only woman that he acknowledges in in book one of the meditations i think the most revealing thing about her is that fronto writes to marcus at one point and says i'm going to write a letter to your mum in greek right fronto's an expert on latin and marcus's mother was not just fluent in Greek, like most Roman, most educated Romans would be bilingual and Latin and Greek, but she seems to be completely fluent in it.

42:22And Fronto, who's the most acclaimed Latin rhetorician in the world, writes this kind of slightly pathetic letter to Marcus saying, could you just check it for mistakes before I send it to your mum? Because I'd be embarrassed, you know, for her to read it and think I've, you know, like got the grammar slightly wrong or something. Right. So in Roman society, to look to a woman like that as your superior intellectually is unusual. Like Fronto and also Fronto mentions that his wife is like a student to Marcus's mother. He actually refers to her as Marcus's mother's client, meaning her kind of subordinate, like her student.

43:10So a bit of a strip, but the picture kind of emerges of a woman who is like a multimillionaire, billionaire, construction industry magnate. We have bricks with her name stamped on them that survive today. She owned clay fields and brick and tile factories that she inherited from her family. She never remarried after Marcus's father died. She would have been in her early 20s or late teens when her husband died. She remained single. Marcus and her went to stay with Marcus's paternal grandfather for a while, but then they leave and they go back into her house, which again shows unusual independence in Roman society.

43:56And she seems to have surrounded herself with a kind of intellectual circle, a kind of salon of which she is the centre. And so Marcus grew up in a sense in a school, among a circle of leading intellectuals. Herodes Atticus is another crazy guy, colorful figure. He's the most famous sophist of the period. He lived for a while in the same household as Marcus's mother. So he's a close family friend. And he later becomes Marcus's Greek rhetoric tutor. So Marcus's mother is mingling, you know, is maybe family friends with or grew up alongside the most famous Greek orator and sophist of the period.

44:45She seems to be familiar with Rusticus. Marcus mentions that Rusticus wrote a letter. Maybe she chose Rusticus to be Marcus's tutor. There's another really obscure clue in the meditations that I didn't notice until I was working on this. Another biography mentions it. Marcus, in passing, mentions a guy called Domitius, who we don't know anything about, who he said heaped praise on his... He was very generous in heaping praise on his philosophy tutor. And the tutor that he mentions is a guy called Athenodotus, who is known to be a Stoic teacher. So there's a guy who really loves Stoic teachers.

45:29And his name is the masculine version of Domitia, which is Marcus's mother's family name. So he may have been an uncle or some other relative of Marcus's mother. So there's a tiny, you know, when you're doing - She's got quite a scene. When you really dig it, you know, there's a hint there that Marcus's mom's family already have links to Stoicism and connections with leading intellectuals. She seems more into literature. Yeah. She's an expert on language and rhetoric. She must be reading plays then and other literature. There's not much indication directly linking her with philosophy. Her family have a long history of being associated with the region of Italy that traditionally was colonized by Greece and speaks Greek.

46:23so Marcus grew up in this household where he would have studied Greek literature and where his mum may have been steering him towards stoic philosophy we're also told she lived quite an astere she's another one of these billionaires you know who supposedly lives very simply yeah well it says it says uh my mother her reverence for the divine her generosity her inability not only to do wrong, but even to conceive of doing it in the simple way she lived, not in the least like the rich. And she's also said to be unlike the Roman elite in another way. Frontal kind of notoriously says there's no word in Latin for philistorgia or natural affection.

47:11And he says, because it's a quality, I think he says this more than once, is a quality completely lacking among the Roman elite. But he clearly thinks that Marcus is the exception and his mum, but they're not typical Romans because they're kind of Gratianized to some extent. And so I think Fronto's kind of implying this is a quality that's more common in the Greek world. And he's not a mama's boy, but isn't one of the stories we have of Marcus Aurelius crying that he doesn't want to have to move out of his mother's house and into the... Like he, she creates such a good home, such a place of love and affection and comfort and security, the things that supposedly a stoic is not interested in, that he doesn't want to leave.

47:55He's definitely closer. So in the letters with Fronto, she gets mentioned quite a lot. And Fronto is like always saying, oh, say hi to your mom and things like that. And, but Marcus, even after he's married, I don't think he ever, or Faustina only gets mentioned very fleetingly. Like, so it's interesting, you think they're they always mention his mom but they don't really mention his wife right and they clear the way that fronto talks about her is with reverence like you know it really it really comes through not just as a powerful and wealthy roman woman but as an his intellectual superior yeah in some ways um so she i wish we knew more about her right and And that's what she says.

48:39It's just one fleeting little remark there, not only to avoid wrongdoing in your actions, but also in your thoughts. In a way that sets up the entire agenda for writing the meditations. The whole concept - That's the ideal that Marcus is aspiring to all his life. Yeah, like the whole concept of writing the meditations is about following through on this thing that he remembers his mother saying at the beginning, which is to work on his character, like to improve his mind and not just his external behavior. And so I think it's really important that we don't just, when we run down the lists of famous Stoics, it's not just the people who wrote about Stoicism.

49:19It's this whole other half of society that embodied the Stoic ideals within the confines of a society that was inherently misogynistic and patriarchal, although there were exceptions to that rule. But ultimately, it's like we focus too much on the Stoic generals and the Stoic philosophers and thinkers, and we don't forget who they were actually aspiring to be like. Like in Marcus's case, it's like his mother is the philosophical model for what he's trying to, she's kind of naturally, effortlessly this thing that he's very deliberately and methodically having to cultivate inside of himself. You know, one of the striking things about Stoics, that leads on to a really interesting point, which is the Epicureans thought that they virtually worshipped Epicurus.

50:11They would have images of him that they carried around. They memorised his words verbatim. They celebrated his birthday. It's almost like a personality cult, right? So Epictetus is the kind of final word in certain regards. He's their role model, the founder of their sect. The Stoics do look to Zeno as a role model, but not in anything like the same way. And they very frequently look for moral exemplars from outside their own tradition. Socrates is their favorite. He's not a Stoic. He's a precursor of Stoicism. Diogenes the Cynic, he's not a Stoic. He's a precursor of Stoicism. They also like Pythagoras.

50:53They like famous figures from history that are not connected with philosophy at all. They're interested in what they can learn from fictional characters and tragedies and in mythology. So the Stoics seem to have baked into them a more generous attitude towards recognizing. And I think in a way there's a confidence there that what their philosophy teaches is true. So if they think, but Stoicism is right, it's arriving at these kind of perennial truths. So, of course, we'd expect people all over the world to have glimpsed at least some of the... We should find in ancient tragedies glimpses of similar ideas.

51:32It'd be weird if no one else had... It'd be weird if this is actually true and no one else had glimpsed any of it at all ever. They assume, no, other people must have seen at least fragments of this. And so they're always looking, and famously, Seneca's first 20 letters or so go on a bit epicurus. And how there are bits, he's clear that he's very opposed to Epicureanism. And he's quite scathing about it in some other places. But he thinks there are bits of Epicureanism that are insightful. And he refers to their insights as the common property. He says wisdom is the common property of mankind.

52:10mind, like he comes close to virtually saying it's perennial wisdom. Like it's kind of archetypal. It's innate in us. And the Stoics just have done a better job of articulating it, but there are bits of it scattered around us everywhere. I think Marcus's mother as a model of a sort of a natural Stoic is important. The other two female ones that I'd be curious for your thoughts on, and I think are worth highlighting just to counterbalance the overwhelmingly male lineage and understanding of Stoicism. We have Cato's daughter, Portia Cato, who seems in some ways more stoic than her husband, right?

52:46He's the one who's racked with anxiety and guilt. And she's like, we got to do this. And she would have been taught philosophy from her father, Cato. Flashing forward to Masonius Rufus, who basically says, of course, women should be taught philosophy. Virtue knows no gender. So I think she's interesting. I'd love to hear your take on her. And then flashing forward to the end, someone that I didn't know that much about until your book and some others, which is Marcus Aurelius, it, commonest is such a huge disappointment, the antithesis of stoicism in many ways. But then one of Marcus Aurelius's daughters is executed by a later emperor and is just the absolute model of stoic badass courage and fearlessness up until the end.

53:34Yeah. She says something like, I will show you that I am a daughter of Marcus Aurelius. yeah yeah i wish we knew more about it well that's about all that we know really so we tend to so those were her final words yeah she's forced to take her own life or she her life's being taken and what does she say she says i'll show you that i'm marcus aurelius's daughter if i remember rightly yeah yeah so i mean so clearly of course i mean yeah we tend not to think about this but some of these other women must have been intellectuals like marcus's mother and steeped in the literature um they weren't public figures like the men so they didn't normally write books or give speeches and they're in that society so then they they're kind of invisible yeah i from history but sure like the you know these women read philosophy they got bits of philosophy also from poetry and from the plays that they were writing um and i wish that we you know i wish that we knew more about them the the other famous philosopher who has a lot of female influences.

54:36There were the Pythagoreans. We hear about quite a lot of female Pythagoreans, incidentally, but I've just written a book about Socrates and I try to really talk about a number of the women. Like with Socrates, we get all of these tantalizing references to women that's starting with his mum, Finarite, whose name actually means bringing virtue to light, weirdly. um and which coincidentally was she we're told that was kind of part of her job um she was a matchmaker and a midwife in greek society um she would be like an older woman who was like a mentor to young women and uh so she helped kind of improve and educate young women um she identified suitable husbands for them you know and so her name finarity maybe it's a nickname but it seems to reflect something about her role and you know we're told about a number of women that uh socrates is influenced by in quite profound way one of them is the pithia like who says no man is wiser than socrates and he blames her basically for setting him in the apology he says that's that was the beginning of my philosophical mission when this idea was kind of put out there and planted in my head then in the symposium he says there's a woman called diatema who is a priestess who taught him about the philosophy of the art of love we see him talking to in the memorabilia of xenophon to a prostitute a courtesan called theodota um so there are these women surrounding socrates that seem to quite profoundly influence him yeah you know and maybe that is some a kind of theme that you find recurring in history, but it's like behind every great man, there's a great woman.

56:30Like sometimes when people say, why aren't there more famous women in ancient philosophy? It's often because they're kind of just on the periphery. You know, if you want to find them, where you should look is at some of the famous men and then kind of look beyond them at the women that are surrounding them. Because it's the men that get recorded in history typically. And where are the women? or they are with them. Weirdly, you could argue that that's what makes them the true Stoics in that they cared less about the credit, less about the attention. There was a fundamentally more of a humility and a lack of egotism that, you know, Cato is great, but there's some part of Cato that needs to be recognized for his greatness constantly.

57:13I'll tell you another bit of trivia. You could see, so in the Delphic, the Temple of Apollo, in some ways is the source of the entire philosophical tradition. All women? Yeah, the Pythias were all women. Their sayings had to be interpreted by male priests, but the women, there are legends surrounding them, for example, were told by a number of sources that Pythagoras learned his ethical philosophy from one of the Pythias, one of the priestesses of Apollo. and the sayings, the maxims that come down to us, Plutarch, who's a priest at the Temple of Apollo in Delphi, as well as being a philosopher, says that books many volumes long have been written trying to explain the sayings of the Pythia, which are in Greek often two words, like gnotheise auton, like know thyself, made an agan, nothing in excess.

58:13Not all, but most of them are just two words, almost like a zen koan. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? And then so they'll take these two words and then it's almost like a seed that's handed from the Temple of Apollo to philosophers. And philosophers go away, you know, and write these lengthy books, try to figure out what know thyself means or what does nothing in excess mean, you know? So, but this was, women are at the center of that, like in the very, the kind of prehistory of philosophy in a way, right, you know, a few steps before Socrates. And I think that that tradition's continuing today in the sense that like, I think people think, you know, the audience for my books or your books is all men.

58:50And the number of women that I hear that are interested in stoicism that are, because at the end of the day, you know, leadership is leadership, life is life. And these ideas, as Mussonius Rufus was saying all those years ago, really have nothing. Society can be gendered and discriminatory and, you know, can make these distinctions. But ultimately philosophy is about helping you be a human being in the world. And so it does, it, it, there's, there's, there is nothing gendered about virtue. It just is what it is. I've got a question for you, a personal question for you then Ryan. Do you think it's difficult to be into something like stoicism if your wife isn't into it?

59:29Like, cause like my wife has many opinions about stoicism. She, my wife's more into stoicism than I am. I think sometimes. My, my wife's joke is that, uh, one of us is a stoic and the other writes about stoicism. Yeah. Because I think she is closer to the model that Marcus Reus is talking about where someone sort of effortlessly those things or naturally those things. And for me, it's something I actually have to work on. And I am thinking about constantly and I'm having to get myself to. Like this idea that, you know, women are emotional and men are not. I know so many men who are emotional, not in the sense like they cry, but just men who get, lose their temper, easily, who are constantly comparing themselves to other people, worried about the, like, like the idea that, that, that, that women can't take to these ideas of mastering your emotions, enduring suffering, like childbirth being the penultimate example of like, talk to me about someone who actually has to draw on stoicism in moments of, in a, in a moment in their life.

1:00:37Like Like, I do think, yeah, it's going to be hard to be stoic if you're with a very un-stoic person. Although the argument for Socrates is that, you know, his difficult marriage was his ultimate philosophical trading ground. He's the exception that proves the rule.

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1:03:27Let me ask you though, because I think you're, I know who my books are popular with and I know who yours are popular with. And I think I have a sense of who you are. There is this, as the philosophy has become more popular and reintroduced, there is this thing that the cliche way to dismiss Stoicism is they call it broicism, right? This sort of modern self-help, toxic masculinity idea of stoicism that you see, whether it's Andrew Tate or on some podcast or people on an internet message board or maybe even the YouTube comments of this. There is that and I feel it and I dislike it. What is your take on that?

1:04:16I think there's – my perspective is a bit different because of my background in therapy, right? so let me answer that in a roundabout way when you do evidence-based psychotherapy like cognitive behavioral therapy or cbt you have to study medical research and it's really it gets really really really technical like i mean i'm not the best at statistics right i have to grip my teeth and kind of like study stats and stuff it's hard to read although apparently not because now everybody's an expert on epidemiology overnight, right? Of course. But it's hard. It's postgraduate level stuff. But then your clients are just random people.

1:04:57It could be an elderly Jewish matriarch. It could be a 15-year-old kid that's in trouble with the cops. It could be the guy that works at the bank down the road. It could be, you know, it's just a sample, a random sample of society that walks in your door. And then your job as a psychotherapist is a little bit like public health or something. You have to take state-of-the-art technical research and translate it into language that is understandable and relevant to the elderly Jewish matriarch, to the 15-year-old kid that's in trouble at school, like to a guy that's been in prison, to the CEO of some huge company, to a successful actor, right?

1:05:52And so the job of a good psychotherapist is constantly to be thinking, how am I going to, a bit like Front Hotels Marcus really used to do, right? How can I take this and put it, find a metaphor or create a little diagram or put it in a way that's really going to impact this client, right? So I assume that all good advice that's based on psychology, whether you want to call it self-improvement, self-help, psychotherapy, whatever, has to take many different forms that target different markets, right? You wouldn't take Bertrand Russell's conquest of happiness and give it to a nine-year-old schoolgirl.

1:06:33Yeah, or a professional athlete or something. Yeah. But there's certain people that that book would be absolutely perfect for. Sure. Right? And so when people say, oh, there's versions of Stoicism that are kind of like broicism and they're dumbed down or they're simplified or they're aimed at people that are all the examples of people that work in the tech industry or something like that. But that's a mark like that might be a client in psychotherapy and you'd have to do psychotherapies have to do exactly the same thing yeah are you saying they don't are you saying they don't deserve philosophy that's effectively what you're saying which is crazy they're not going to sit down maybe and read a really dry i mean my first degrees in philosophy right i love reading really boring books right but there are loads of technical books on stoicism or you know therapeutic aspects of philosophy that are not easily readable.

1:07:25The only therapeutic value they'd have for most people is curing insomnia. They did put them to sleep. So there has to be, as a therapist, you're constantly prescribing self-help books to clients, right? And so often you think, go and read this book by this guy. I'm sure lots of therapists recommend your book to their clients, right? Because if they have someone that comes into therapy and they are into like you know the the kind of videos that you do and stuff and you know they resemble your your kind of uh audience then a cbt therapist might be going to read obstacles away by ryan holiday like because it's the sort of stuff that you're into it's the sort of stuff that you're into is the main sure you have to match up is it broadly consistent with what we're trying to do here are you actually going to enjoy reading it Like, there's no point in me prescribing you a book if you're going to get to page three or four and then think, gee, that was so dull.

1:08:23Like, you know, I'm not going to read the rest of it. But when I think of broicism, when I'm steelmanning the argument against broicism, the idea that here's this philosophy that tells you to stuff down your emotions. Here's this philosophy that's about your personal development. Right. That's turning away from your obligations to other people. But there is this version of stoicism that I think has become popular online that's like, here's the recipe for being a better sociopath, right? And that I am disturbed by. And there's also a version of the stoicism I think has become kind of seized by a kind of a movement you might call kind of a modern day know-nothing-ism, which there's misogyny there, there's racism there, there's sort of political callousness there.

1:09:15And it's this kind of like, I got mine. I don't give a shit about weak people. I don't care what other people are going through. That version of stoicism to me is a profound perversion, especially of what Marcus Aurelius is talking about. Well, there's good and bad versions of popular stoicism, right? And so I think it's a mistake to go to either extreme and say all popular stoicism is fine or all popular stoicism is just awful and toxic. There's a mixture, right? Same with anything, right? CBT, most of the, not all the criticisms, but many of the criticisms of stoicism were made to a far lesser extent previously against CBT.

1:09:58For a long time, people said CBT is just in your head. It doesn't deal with the emotions. you know it's overly rational appeals more to men yada yada yada like Albert Ellis got hammered with those criticisms and then it like a lot of times when the criticisms don't have that much it just died off slowly over time and those voices kind of faded away but now they kind of target stoicism with that criticism because there's good and bad versions I've read books on I mean maybe I'm pretty easy going about books and popular books on stoicism but i have read ones that i really thought were awful there's one in particular where the guy that wrote it sounds like he he says stuff that over and over and over throughout the book sounds like the kind of stuff that a school shooter would put in their manifesto that's what i'm talking about yeah it's extreme you know i i i to put it more kind of objectively if i was still working in the nhs or like an institution like that and a client showed me that i'd have to red flag it yeah like as a potential risk factor for this guy saying stuff that sounds very threatening like and he's clearly unstable he's clearly paranoid and he's talking about practicing with guns and other weapons you know and thinking about killing people you know in a book on a self-improvement book on stoicism.

1:11:28Yeah, stoicism is not supposed to turn your heart to stone. It's supposed to mean you're not overwhelmed by your emotions. You're not this walking open wound. But I mean, when I think of the circles of Hierocles, I think about someone who's actually working quite hard to care about as many people as possible. Yeah, the stoic ideal, I mean, it's a little bit like we mentioned the Bodhisattva ideal in Mahayana Buddhism earlier. like the Stoic goal isn't to be, you know, not care about anyone. It's the opposite. It's kindness as a virtue in Stoicism, like Buddhist compassion in a way. Yeah, at the beginning of meditations, Mark Sirius talks about one of his teachers taught him to be free of passion, but full of love.

1:12:10And I think that's lovely. Yeah, Philistorgia, which is like family love, paternal love. it's actually they're thinking in part of the love of zeus for mankind his children and they want to emulate zeus so they think well how could you become you know one of the themes in stoicism the theological aspect is to emulate god like to zeus is this perfect mind so we should try and become as much like that as we can despite you know the limitations of us being mortal so you know how does Zeus feel about mankind well we're all his children like I mean that sounds Christian but that's how Marcus and the Stoics view Zeus like that he has this kind of affection he Zeus is the god of friendship and Xenia like hospitality in Greek culture so this is a theme that runs through Stoicism that I think is often overlooked like you say and so So in these, there is toxic, bad stoicism out there.

1:13:13Andrew Tate did a video where he talks about Marcus Aurelius. And so they're definitely like, some of these guys are definitely associating with capital S stoicism. But what they're talking about is lower case stoicism, which is like a hot potato or whatever in the field of therapy. Because, I mean, very simply, I've said this a million times, But I guess one of the main things that I'd say from my perspective as a former psychotherapist is that there's a significant body of research that shows that lowercase stoicism, we measure it using several tools. One is the Liverpool Stoicism Scale from different research teams around the world that show that it's unhealthy and it has multiple problems.

1:14:02Let me do a very quick deep dive, right? Because I think people need to understand some of this stuff, right? And it's not complicated. So people who view anxiety or fear or sadness as bad and that they have to repress them or suppress them or conceal them from other people tend to, number one, there's a well-known phenomenon called the rebound effect or the paradox of thought suppression. so if people try to suppress a thought or a feeling that's automatic they usually recurs more frequently and more vividly in the future right so there's a number of experiments that show that happening not consistently but it happens enough times that it's a known phenomenon and a problem in psychotherapy so trying to suppress negative feelings backfires in that way we also know that people who judge the belief that anxiety is bad for example people who rate strong agreement with that statement show poorer outcomes long term in terms of their mental health so viewing anxiety as as bad as shameful as something you have to get rid of seems long term to predict mental health problems we know that when people view a feeling or a thought as bad they'll automatically your brain is designed by evolution to allocate attention automatically to threats so if you're a rabbit and there's a hawk on the horizon or something like that you're naturally going to give it all of your attention it's kind of capturing your attention yeah because it's a threat right if you think that your own um tears are a threat yeah like If you think that your hand's shaking is a threat, if you think that blushing is a threat, if you think that emotions or certain thoughts are a threat, your brain will allocate attention to them automatically.

1:16:02It will narrow its scope of attention down. It'll give attention to them highly selectively. You'll get tunnel vision for them, and that will magnify them and exacerbate the effect that they have on your behavior. In addition to those problems, like if you're focusing too much attention on coping with certain feelings rather than just accepting them and riding them out increases cognitive load so for instance somebody has social anxiety if they think oh my god having social anxiety means i'm weak it means i'm not a real man it means like i have to keep a poker face i have to prevent other people from realizing that i'm scared inside because it's not manly enough or it's not tough enough or whatever I've got to stop people from seeing it that in addition to actually just magnifying it in addition to making it more likely to recur in the future it's confusing because it means you're using a lot of your brain power now you're trying to walk and chew gum at the same time right so you try to have a conversation with somebody or give a wedding speech or something while also simultaneously worrying about and attempting to suppress and conceal your anxiety like rubbing your tummy and patting your head or something like we show that to clients in therapy we do these things called socialization experiments.

1:17:15It's kind of a weird name, but that's what we call it. And, you know, again, like trying to teach things in a natural way. So we take stuff that loads of complicated statistical research shows. How am I going to teach this to this 15-year-old kid that's like bunking off school, playing hooky off school? And you'll say, tell me what you did yesterday. And just have a normal conversation. And they'll say, okay, now do that again. Tell me what you did the day before yesterday. right but this time i want you to imagine what your face looks like while you're doing it right and uh i want you to be constantly paying attention to your breathing yeah and they'll be like well yesterday i um had and they go it's kind of hard to concentrate while i'm doing all these things at the same time and so you say but that is not how you cope with social anxiety right you're imagining what your face is going to look like and you're thinking about your breathing for example maybe you're trying to control it because perhaps someone's told you that's a good idea.

1:18:15The things that you're doing are making your anxiety worse. They're making you feel awkward. They're overloading your brain. And that's going to cause you to forget what you're trying to say and to feel awkward in social situations. The internet's awash with bad self-help advice that clashes with stuff that we know from research and psychopathology and psychotherapy. Jordan Peterson is another guy that gives what I consider to be quite bad psychological advice at times. I think he needs some psychological advice you know over time I think more people it's like this thing of the voices dying off over time I think over time Jordan Peterson's kind of dug himself a hole for a lot of his people who were passionately defending him at first and now like okay yeah his behaviour has maybe changed a bit over time but he says things like I'll try it's hard not to make fun of some of these guys right but this is what he says like blah blah blah lobsters right because alpha lobsters hold their claws up in the air this is what he writes at the beginning of 12 rules the so let's that's his argument which is completely pseudo-scientific and doesn't make any sense at all right and and is if i didn't know better i think he literally i would think he was joking when he said like that's what he says but you have to he recommends that people should stand up tall and look people in the eye when they're talking to them.

1:19:39Now, the reason he's saying that weirdly, he doesn't mention this ever, but he's talking about something called the James Lange theory of emotion, which is a 19th century famous psychological theory that says, that speculates that if people adopt certain physical posture and body language, it can affect how they feel emotionally. And there's some truth in that. Yeah, fake it till you make it. Like there's some truth in that. And the problem is often we find in psychology, there are things that there's some truth in that don't, what the gold standard, this is my buy in CBT, we love randomized control trials.

1:20:16Because psychology is full of things that look like they should work, but don't. So the James Lang theory kind of looks like it should work. It sort of makes sense. There's some validity to it. It's not entirely true. However, it doesn't necessarily pan out like that in clinical trials when you get people to do it practice. Why not? Because there's competing factors at play. And one of them is that if you try and stand up straight all the time and make eye contact with people, you increase self-focused attention. And we know that that's one of the main things that exacerbates social anxiety. So that's exactly the sort of thing that clients in therapy who have social anxiety disorder will tell you that they're already doing.

1:20:58They arrive at the gate of therapy. That's the problem, not the solution. Yeah. Saying I've got, we call them maladaptive coping strategies, but many maladaptive coping strategies, they're also called safety seeking behaviors and therapy. Like many of them are things that people have learned from self-help books. Not all of them, but many of them are. Andrew Tate's another one. You know, he'll tell people to do things to cope with their emotions, but he doesn't know anything about psychology. He's also a rapist and a sex criminal. So, uh you know it's not why are we talking about this no i totally get it but you know why do you know why i'm talking about him is because there are loads of other guys that are giving similar advice and appeal to the same audience right they're the kind of watered down version of their android there are 101 andro tate lights right and it's easier to pick him because he's already to a large extent debunked his own reputation because of the criminal well what i What you see is that audience exists, right?

1:21:57And you want to talk about the temptations of Seneca or any of these people. It's the same fundamental thing, which is those people exist and there's something that they would like to be told, that they will compensate you for telling them. And so what you have to decide as a writer, as a creative, as a personality is you go, am I going to pander to that audience? It's pandering. Or am I going to say what I think is true and what's important? Am I going to do what's right? I'll tell you exactly why it's pandering. The first thing that you learn in psychotherapy is that people will do things that make them feel better in the short term, but may make them become worse in the long term.

1:22:33So Albert Ellis used to say there's a difference between feeling better and getting better. There are many strategies that make you feel better, but actually prevent you from getting better. And sometimes you might have to do something that makes you feel worse temporarily in order to actually get better. Maybe you've got to go to the dentist and get your teeth pulled out, you know, in order to get one, get rid of one that's wrong. Maybe it's in your interest in the long term. Maybe you have to go and have surgery. Like maybe you have to go and do physical exercise, you know, and if you haven't done it for a long time, you're going to feel awful for a few days and your body's going to ache, but it's going to be better for you in the long term, right?

1:23:11But so there's a natural tendency baked into all of us to be vulnerable to short-term coping strategies. Drinking alcohol will get rid of your social anxiety, but it causes social anxiety to get worse in the long term. Like most drugs do, right? People smoke cannabis because they say it calms our nerves, but often people that rely on cannabis too much develop social anxiety. And paranoia. Paranoia, right, and other problems, right? So short-term coping strategies. The most popular coping strategy in the world is avoidance. It's the easiest thing. If you encounter something that provokes anxiety, your easiest solution is just to do a runner.

1:23:51But that doesn't help you to overcome or resolve the problem in the long term. It just makes you relieved temporarily. Many self-improvement gurus or self-improvement influencers trade in short-term avoidant coping strategies. right so and it's hard because if you say well if you're a therapist and you say listen people get kind of addicted to doing them because they'll say but it makes me feel better right right but it's making you worse my favorite example was i asked every client i ever worked with how much coffee they drank right and you know clients with insomnia consistently drink tons of coffee sure right they're tired yeah they're tired right that's what they'd say they say but i'm tired I'd be like how many cups of coffee have you had I've had five coffees so far this morning one guy said I just got the I just get the jug from the the coffee machine and put it on my desk next to my computer and I drink about three of those a day he goes I couldn't tell you how many actual cups that is I don't know like 30 or something like 20 like maybe and then I have a couple of Red Bulls and yada yada like so that sounds crazy right and if you say to those people if I drank 20 cups of coffee a day, I think I might be able to give myself insomnia.

1:25:15Of course. Right? Yeah, you'd be wired. And they'll say, now that you say it like that, it sounds silly, but I still feel that I really need the coffee to do my job because I'm tired. And you say, but you wouldn't feel tired unless if you weren't drinking that much coffee, because then you'd be able to get to sleep at night. So there's a weird circularity to it. But the point is, it's really hard. Even if it seems logical to them and it seems ridiculous to any observer, they won't let go. Because it's like an addiction. And that's true of many forms of coping with anxiety as well. So, you know, people might say, people who have panic attacks will try to control their breathing typically, right?

1:26:02And they go, like, I try and control my breathing because I'm worried that I might faint or have a heart attack or something if I don't. But what they need to do is expose themselves to the feelings until they become confident that nothing bad is going to happen. They need to prove to themselves it's safe and they're not going to faint and they're not going to have a heart attack. And the only way they could do that would be by allowing the feelings to wash over them. And so controlling their breathing, psychotherapists used to recommend that like 20 or 30 years ago, but now they seldom do because they think it prevents people from disconfirming the catastrophic beliefs that maintain the anxiety to put it in technical jargon sure like you have to feel anxiety and realize that nothing bad happens in order to get rid of your panic attacks sure basically so we actually induce anxiety and panicky feelings and now in the treatment and actually a bit of trivia for you sometimes people think there's not much progress in psychotherapy but there actually there is and you know the psychoanalysts and other early psychotherapists thought that panic attacks might be biological they thought they were untreatable like having Freudian psychoanalysis does nothing for panic attacks right and most other psychotherapies really struggled with them but in the mid 1980s two CBT researchers independently figured out one in the states and one in the UK figured out a protocol a modified protocol that has about a 90 % success rate in treating panic attacks.

1:27:38And that's now what we call the treatment of choice, like the main evidence-based treatment. So the point about that is that if you went back in time and asked psychotherapists or self-help books that were based on that type of psychotherapy, you'd get bad advice. And we suddenly figured out they were doing it all wrong. And there was a solution that would solve the problem. And it was the opposite in some ways of what they were previously telling people to do. But one of the risks with self-help or bruisism is that, see, like self-improvement advice is definitely a place for, from people approaching it from different perspectives.

1:28:16But in some cases, you know, the risk is that what you'll get are these maladaptive... Or antiquated or generalizations. Yeah, it's a whole thing. Not based on, you know, what research actually tells us about how emotions work. I'll give you another simple example. Like, so in that video where Andrew Tate is talking, he says something that all the Andrew Tate lights say. He says, like, if you've got anger, what you should do is go to the gym and get it out of your system. So this is what we call the venting theory or cathartic theory. Right, names for it. The research studies that show that doesn't work, right?

1:28:59And in some cases, it can actually make anger worse. So people used to hit pillows in parking lots with baseball bats and things like that, right? To kind of vent anger. Psychotherapists got them to do that, right? Like get it out of your system, kind of, or, you know, channel it into something constructive, you know? But if anger is cognitive, if you're angry because you believe that somebody has gravely injured you by turning you down for a date or something like that going to the gym and pumping things or whatever like is not going to do anything to change the underlying beliefs that made you vulnerable to anger in the first place and i'll make one other comment about this right that maybe is kind of challenging but it happens to be what the stoics say as well right anger is itself resembles in my view a coping strategy.

1:29:58So anger, I view to a large extent as, it's a little bit more complex than this, but to a large extent, anger is something that we do often in response to fear. So when people feel threatened or injured, they often attempt to compensate for that by becoming angry. I get angry with you because I think you hurt me, or I think you might hurt me, or I think you hurt something else that I care about. But that's predicated on the belief that I'm injured. So for instance, the example that these guys - Or that you can harm me, like the Stokes would say, like, you know, if it doesn't harm your character, it can't harm you.

1:30:35Obviously, they're not talking about physical pain, but they're saying that, yeah, it's our understanding, our perception that you have the ability to truly injure me outside my physical form, that you can humiliate me as, oh, I don't have a choice. yeah and like a lot of the stuff that you're talking about i guess it's not just broicism but a certain type of it the manosphere stuff is predicated on the assumption that that these guys are incredibly vulnerable that they're easily profoundly hurt and humiliated and the odd thing about it is like from socrates on through the stoics and incognitive therapy the first thing we normally do is if somebody says i asked a girl on a date and she rejected me and i felt you know really devastated by that.

1:31:21Like Socrates would have said, and he addresses very similar issues with his friends. He would have said, does everyone feel the same way? Right. Do you have a buddy that got turned down for a day and it was like water off a duck's back to him? Like, have you got an uncle or a friend or do you know of anybody who doesn't seem, who's kind of like a little bit like crestfallen, but then just picks himself back up the next day, doesn't really let it get to him. In that case, why do you view it as innately humiliating? Doesn't that tell you that it's something about your attitude, values, or beliefs that's making you vulnerable?

1:31:58Or this present moment. How do you think you're going to think about it in a year or five years or 10 years, right? Is it just the recency of it that's making it loom so large for you? Yeah, and would someone else who interprets it differently or thinks about it differently, you know, be far less injured by it? And I think the problem with some of the self-improvement stuff that's in the mainly tends to be in the manosphere is it makes that problem worse. Yeah. Like it actually encourages people to take rejection more personally and to overlook the role. It makes it this systemic thing, like it's women's problem or it's society's problem, or it's this grave injustice as opposed to this thing that doesn't matter at all.

1:32:39If you want to know how we're breeding a generation of weak minded, vulnerable, snowflake individuals. Yeah, read that stuff. Read Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson. They're the ones doing it. And they tend, ironically, if you follow them on social media, to be constantly offended, always getting into squabbles and fights, having enormous egos. You could tell, yeah, they're the real snowflakes. They're the most thin-skinned people that you'll ever encounter. It's hilarious. I mean, also, the other thing you could do is look at the comments on their YouTube videos and ask yourself the simple question, are the people that are watching these videos and following their advice becoming less angry or more angry as a result of consuming the self-improvement content or when i i can tell when i get an email from one of their fans because it's poorly written it's nonsensical you know it's usually angry usually has a bunch of nonsense about vaccines or you know the trump or whatever like i can tell i can just tell who it is and if i saw that person in real life i wouldn't care about their opinion.

1:33:43And so I don't care about it when it comes in over email. You find that in general with people, you know, it's not even just the individuals that are into that, but there's certain people you can tell from the very way they begin a conversation immediately, like, you know, that they're, they're not being reasonable. And it's like, you know, it's often the case as a teacher or a lecturer, you know, there's certain people that ask a question. And as soon as they've asked a question, you know, that they're not listening to the answer. Yeah. They're performing or they're trying to attack you. Yeah.

1:34:10They had no intention of listening to whatever the answer was going to be. But this is, I mean, so this is a problem. It is actually quite a serious problem. I'll tell you another bit of trivia about this that no one ever mentions. Like the things that Andrew Tate and to some extent Jordan Peterson and more often the kind of Andrew Tate likes or whatever say are weirdly similar to things that the sophists used to say. And I think a lot of people don't realize that the sophists used to bang on, according to Plato, anyway, in the Republic. He has Thrasymachus and also Callicles in The Gorgeous go on about how the people that he's arguing with and trying to kind of persuade aren't manly.

1:35:00They accuse Socrates of not being manly enough. So they're saying, you know, real men, weirdly they compare to political tyrants. right so they say a real man like an alpha male would be somebody who's above the law he doesn't care about what the majority of people say is just or unjust like they create their own laws yeah like Nietzsche also famously sounds very similar like to the sophists and play there's always been demagogues and and assholes and psychopaths and sophists as you said who play to the lowest common denominator, tell people what they want to hear, confirm the worst instincts in people, tell them not to be ashamed of the things they should be ashamed of.

1:35:47And look, that's going to play to a certain audience. And ultimately, you got to decide, one, whether you want to be in that crowd or not, like as you want to be the audience for that or not, or as a creator, you got to decide, is that the game you want to play? And it's a game that, as Marcus says, you know it dyes you purple it caesarifies you it changes you it's pandering exactly it's not good for the soul socrates plato socrates calls it pandering like he said he was very clear about that you know everyone knows you could go out tomorrow like and write a book that appeals to everyone's fears and prejudices right and just confirms them and you know you could be easy to write a bestseller that way right you could definitely you know there are guys out there who'll put social media content out, you know, and they'll go, I'm going to say something contrarian and controversial.

1:36:39It's going to get a lot of attention. So then, you know, if all they want is likes and reach and to monetize it and stuff, it's just a mechanism. They think we'll do more of that, like more red meat or whatever. But that's what this office did. They would say stuff. And if they got a big round of applause, like, and the audience were really psyched by it, like they think I'm going to say more of that. Yeah. And Socrates said, the problem with you guys is you're just saying what gets the biggest round of applause. You're pandering to the audience, right? So you're going to play to their fears and their prejudices every time.

1:37:11You're not even interested in whether this stuff is true or false. He compares them to confectioners of the mind and the gorgeous, famously. He says, look, one of the things he highlights is he says, teaching self-improvement or philosophy, Socrates says, is a bit, I'd compare it to being a doctor or a nutritionist. if you care about someone's health, mental health or physical health, you'd study anatomy and physiology and medicine, and then you'd carefully prescribe food to them that you know is going to benefit them. You guys have never studied anything about mental health or the welfare of society because you don't actually care whether the stuff that you're teaching people benefits them or not.

1:37:56And it's interesting, he highlights the fact that you never even claim to have attempted to study what is healthy for people what you teach them is what evokes the strongest approval from them so like a confectioner doesn't study whether the sweets that they're making are healthy or not they don't study anatomy and physiology they just make stuff and give it to people does it taste nice yes you know how many do you want to buy okay you know it's all based on approval yeah rather than studying whether it's not whether or not it's beneficial and socrates says philosophy is based on a study of what's actually good for us.

1:38:33And true. And true. And whereas rhetoric is just based on feedback and approval. Well, social media clearly is the same mechanism. So you'll get the self-improvement advice on social media that you deserve in a way. What you'll get is this kind of echo chamber of avoidance, subtle avoidance. And the point I'd make about avoidance strategies is that we tend to refer to subtle avoidance behavior. So avoidance takes a myriad of different forms. Going to the gym and venting your anger could be a way of avoiding facing up to and experiencing fear, right? So there's lots of different, drinking alcohol, watching TV, playing computer games are all potentially way, in therapy we assess this with clients, and we interview them in depth and we try and figure out what are the ways that this individual is using to try and avoid processing or experiencing the feelings that they find painful.

1:39:36And then usually the first thing we do is get people to drop their avoidance and drop their coping behaviors. And that often means stopping doing stuff that they've learned online from books and in workshops so that they can process. Funnily enough, it's often so they can process their emotions naturally. like because often if you allow yourself to process emotion naturally it gets resolved yeah the most famous example would be anxiety anxiety abates naturally after repeated prolonged exposure like that has to happen if you were a squirrel and you went to the best place to get nuts a tree fell down and it scared the living bejesus out of you right so you're going to run away, right?

1:40:19Next day you come back to the best place to get nuts, you're going to feel anxious. Right. But the tree's not going to fall on you again. Yeah. And if you keep going back, gradually your anxiety will lessen. Eventually you've got nuts again, right? But if anxiety didn't wear off, you'd never get the nuts again, right? And you die, you'd be a dead squirrel, right? Let's say. So it's obvious that anxiety has to wear off through repeated exposure. Otherwise, animals wouldn't be able to adapt to their environment when there's no real threat there, right? And that happens. It's one of the most reliable findings in the entire field of psychotherapy research.

1:40:59It's the basis of one of the most effective treatments that we call exposure therapy. And it's the main technique used in behavior therapy. And yet, you know, most people don't even realize that. You know, they don't understand. Kids don't get taught in school how anxiety abates. You could draw a diagram of it. I used to show clients a diagram that was from a research book of the heart rate of a woman that had a cat phobia. So if I ask a phobic, if you take someone that's got a cat phobia and you put them in a room with a bunch of cats, what happens to the heart rate? Heart rate's a pretty robust measure of anxiety.

1:41:41Not like 100 % reliable. It's like 95 % reliable. It's a pretty good measure and easy. It's going to go up. How much? It'll probably double, right? Almost as if you're like running full pelt, right? Then what happens? And most phobics look confused when you ask them that question because they don't tend to want to think about what would happen if you remain. First of all, there's going to be a really powerful urge to get out of the room and most people are going to naturally try to for various reasons. You know, you're conditioned to avoid anxiety. You feel relief and that relief acts as a reinforcer of the behavior.

1:42:17So we very powerfully at a very animalistic deep level, avoidance behavior is rewarded and strengthened. But if you don't and you stay in the room and the main reason why someone would ride it out is usually social. normally it's because there's someone else with them like a parent or a teacher or a therapist or a coach encouraging them to remain in the room and not left to their own devices sadly most people individually would need enormous self-discipline right to do that and it usually most of the time 95 percent of time if someone faces a fear it's because there's someone else with them encouraging them to do it um like usually it's your kids like are anxious about something and as a parent you encourage them to face it for you and the therapist it's often said becomes a kind of substitute for a parental figure so what happens to your anxiety right most people look confused obviously your heart rate's going to go down like how long does that take can vary it could take five minutes it might take half an hour like but as a ballpark that's roughly what we're talking about what happens if the next day like you go into the room full of cats the same cat phobic well their anxiety their heart rate will go up but probably won't go quite as high as before and it will reduce more quickly maybe yesterday it took 20 minutes today it goes down to its normal resting level within 15 minutes and then on day three if you do it their anxiety will go up but not as high and it will reduce more quickly until eventually by day four or five it'll be negligible, and they'll have extinguished the anxiety.

1:43:58Now, anxiety, of its own accord, to some extent, it can come back, but it doesn't usually. Usually, when you extinguish anxiety, it stays gone, unless there's a complicating factor, like you're worrying verbally or intellectually about something. And that is one of the simplest phenomenon in psychotherapy and it's the basis of most of the anxiety treatments that we use but you could tell you could explain that to a school child in five minutes and show them some diagrams and stuff like that it's in aesop's fables yeah he talks about a lion and a fox and he says at first the fox is scared of the lion then the next day it goes back and its anxieties lower then finally it's able to walk up to the lion and talk to it and the lion turns out to be friendly or whatever luckily like but they in the ancient world they understood this basic principle we call it emotional habituation is the technical term for it but most people don't realize that and so they don't understand that if they just accept their anxiety and ride it out their brain will kind of digest it to use a different metaphor and then they'll they'll get stronger as a result but if you're constantly getting angry and attacking other people as a way to mask your anxiety if you go to the gym and channel your anxiety if you take drugs or alcohol or you watch computer games or movies to try and avoid contact with your anxiety you prevent that natural habituation from being able to happen right there are many things that can get in the way of it and so you know a lot of that unfortunately a lot of self-improvement advice just prevents that natural process from happening we're our own worst enemy in that regard so you know but these guys seldom mention something Jordan Peterson does mention exposure therapy sometimes but then he says other things that seem to kind of clash with it um often the advice that therapists have given in the past is leading people all around the garden path.

1:46:01You know, sometimes a problem isn't even that people get bad advice. It's just that they get the wrong, they don't get the right advice. So you get a kind of bum steer, you know, you're sent off in the wrong direction. And there are many, many people, most people that read self-help books have got some problem with anxiety. So how come hardly any of them are told the most robust thing that we know about overcoming it? they're confused and sent off in every other direction. It might be that they get tidy your room is not bad advice, but it's not good advice either. It doesn't tell you how to actually fix your emotional problems.

1:46:42It might help some people, but then other people, it's not going to help. It might help you temporarily. Is it going to do anything to change the attitudes that make you angry if somebody turns you down for a date? Is it going to help you to expose yourself to social situations repeatedly and for prolonged periods until your anxiety abates permanently? It's not going to actually fix the problem. So it's a distraction from the things that we know actually works. So we have to be wary of stuff that seems like good advice, but is lacking, you know, the truth, the advice that we know is good. Well, I think your stuff is great.

1:47:20And you want to go check out some books in the bookstore? Yeah, let's do it. Let's do it.

1:47:29Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it. I'll see you next episode.

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