Donald Robertson on What Ancient Philosophy Teaches Us About Facing Uncertainty

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1:19Welcome to the weekend edition of The Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space when things have slowed down. Be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring.

2:11Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Socrates is a hard philosopher to read because, well, he didn't write anything. Well, actually, as I talked about with today's guest, Donald Robertson, he did write things. A lot of it, though, must have been more like sort of personal writing, Marcus Aurelius style kind of journaling and proofs and working through problems, but he didn't publish anything. He's closer, I guess, in that sense to someone who he was a hero for, which is Epictetus. Epictetus only survives to us in the form of his lecture notes. Socrates survives to us in the form of the dialogues preserved by Plato and Xenophon, two of his students.

2:53But Socrates is a tough read. And why I really wanted to have this conversation is that he's a tough guy to get a read on because he's very likable and very unlikable, very wise, and then also very naive in some ways, very insightful and also kind of annoying. I remember I said a thing one time we were talking to someone and we were kind of all trying to give each other honest feedback. And I remember I said something like, you know, you're very good at asking Socratic questions, but I do think it's worth remembering that they killed Socrates. And I didn't really have a problem with this person, but I was just saying, I think you're going to get yourself in trouble if you're always questioning and questioning and questioning, but you're hard to pin down yourself, which is something I talked a lot about in part one with Donald, because his new book, How to Think Like Socrates is very pro-Socrates.

3:37I recently read Emily Wilson's book, The Case Against Socrates, which is less pro. And so I've just been fascinated with Socrates. He's a big character in the wisdom book I'm writing now. As they say, Socrates is one who brought wisdom down from the heavens. He made philosophy accessible, actionable, urgent. And that legacy continues down to this day. I'm a huge fan of today's guest, as you probably heard in part one or my earlier episodes with Donald Robertson. I'll link to those in today's show notes. I loved his book, How to Think Like a Roman Emperor. I love his new book, How to Think Like Socrates.

4:08I really like his biography of Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius, the Stoic Emperor. We've got some signed copies in the painted porch and just regular copies. We've carried his books forever. You got to listen to this guy. I think you'll really like him. He's a writer, a cognitive behavioral psychotherapist, and a trainer. He's a fellow of the Royal Society for Public Health. He specializes in that overlap, that fascinating overlap between modern psychotherapy or CBT. and classical Greek and Roman philosophy. He's a great fan and student of the Stoics. He's taught me a lot of what I know about them.

4:40And I've heard from so many people that he's impacted. So it's always good to see him in person. He came all the way out to the painted porch, which I appreciated. I think you're going to like this interview. Enjoy.

4:55Socrates is as far from a philosopher today as Jesus is from your pastor of a megachurch. You know what I mean? It's striking and profound and in some ways kind of got to be almost an indictment. And I guess that's the thing about the fact that we have these dialogues. The dialogues, although the setting is sometimes kind of minimal they're quite wordy at times they are they're all set somewhere right and they're often set in gymnasia yeah so like an ancient greek gymnasium was like a big park like and it mainly had running tracks it had paths that you'd walk along it had a palestra wrestling school people would do pancratia and like mixed martial arts type thing and there'd be also libraries and shrines and there'd be people giving talks yeah so like it was a hub or i guess like a recreational ground where there was but there was education religious ceremonies but also a lot of sports going on and that's the setting yeah you know and i guess in some ways it's hard for us to fully understand what's going on with socrates's philosophy because we don't really have a direct equivalent to that environment we certainly don't think of Socrates as an athlete, but Epictetus says he's the world's greatest athlete.

6:13He says that, you know, life demands or philosophy is the art of catching the ball and throwing it back, catching the ball and throwing it back. And he says Socrates is the world's greatest athlete in this regard, that he takes the situations and the obstacles and the balls that life throws at him, and he catches them and throws them back up to the very end when, you know, he's brought in front of this tribunal and faces this great trial. And so the idea of Socrates and philosophers as being both literal and metaphorical athletes is, I think, a very striking way to think about it. I think things like their experience of wrestling as well-shaped Greek and Roman thinkers, like sparring, made them view...

7:01I mean, Marcus Aurelius uses this as a metaphor for life, you know that our sparring partner isn't something that we isn't somebody that we resent even though they're throwing us in the ground and beating us up and stuff like that like you know we're choosing to to use them as a training partner you know and we should see adversity that we face and misfortune in life in a similar way the gods are giving us the stuff to deal with you know and it's a test of our strength and our coping ability i think that brings me back to something else actually like somebody said something weird to me the other day ryan i was doing another podcast with this young guy like he's kind of influencer in the uk and he said to me do you have a problem with self-help and i thought about it for a minute and i thought i think there is a problem there's definitely a problem with self-help literature and the self-help field and i do try and kind of talk about it in this book because i thought socrates would quite would raise questions about the self-help field that we have today and one of them is this that let's start with this in therapy, in the initial assessment where we're talking to clients, the first thing we normally do is look at their coping strategies.

8:08Like, how are you currently dealing with your anxiety? And how's it working out for you? And the strange thing is, people will usually have coping strategies that they have mixed feelings about, right? So they go, well, I try and control my breathing or try and relax my muscles when I get social anxiety or something like that. I repeat a mantra, right? And I kind of feel like it helps a bit, right? But then the therapist might think, But why are you in therapy? Right? You're still here. Yeah. Something's not working. Yeah. We often find clients over and over again in therapy, you find clients that have extensive libraries of self-help books, right?

8:44So they'll joke about it. They'll go on my self-help junkie. I've read every book that's going. I've done every course that's going. But they still kind of end up in therapy or in coaching or whatever, because they still have stuff that they're struggling with. and in some ways i think what's lacking one of the things that's lacking is that when people read some self-help books or go to some websites and things they kind of get stock advice yeah so you know here's a strategy like breathing here's a strategy like mindfulness here's a strategy like assertiveness you know off you go and just use it and what we tend to find is that people will take strategies that might work short term, but then become problematic long term, or that might work in one situation, but not so good in another situation, or that would work sometimes, but they're overextending it and using it all of the time, right?

9:36So it might be useful, for example, to relax all the muscles in your body if you're lying in bed at night and you're kind of stressed and you want to get to sleep perhaps. But if you're doing public speaking and you're relaxing the muscles in your body that can backfire because it can increase self-focused attention and that's highly correlated with social anxiety so it makes you pay too much attention to your own body and not enough attention to the audience so we'll often find people with social anxiety are using what they think at first are helpful anxiety management techniques but are actually backfiring in a way that they they don't expect and the way that we deal with that what's different is in therapy, we'd often sit down with people and say, what do you think are the pros and cons of doing this exercise?

10:22Is there, or another way of doing it would be to say, is there a good way and a bad way of doing this? So people might say, I need to prepare for presentations that I'm giving. And the therapist might say, well, there's a difference between a good form of preparation and a bad form of preparation. Like a bad form of preparation might go on and on and on. You might still be doing it at 1am in the morning when you're lying in your bed in your head it might involve a lot of kind of catastrophic thinking and not really focus on practical things it might be overly abstract and not concrete enough so how would we distinguish worrying from preparation or problem solving most people often kind of confuse these things so they think i'm preparing for my talk and actually they're just worrying about it and making their anxiety yeah it's not constructive at all and so i thought that there's something about socrates that makes me think of this i think socrates saw the sophists in particular is dishing out maxims one size fits all kind of yeah one size fits all kind of advice right one of the things that really jumped out at me when i was reading xenophon is there's there's this odd thing that people say socrates never wrote anything right and yes and no right plato says that Socrates wrote some poetry when he was in prison.

11:40And we even have what are purportedly a couple of lines from it, right? Although it's debatable how authentic they are. But Epictetus, again, says this really crazy thing about Socrates. He says at one point Socrates wrote more than anyone, but he never published any of it. And you're like, what? This is 400 years later, right so are you sure about this like he says socrates wrote copiously right but he left it to his students to write things for publication because he wasn't interested in fame or reputation so epictetus seems to think that socrates wrote and he says he wrote for his own improvement so you know you could say it sounds like he's saying he wrote some kind of journal or at least notes for self-improvement and then you think geez if only we knew what that looked like you know but then you think well there are probably clues right we can't really know for sure but in Plato's dialogues and in Xenophon Socrates kind of talks at times about the sort of questions that he probably would have asked himself and in fact in one place in Xenophon he does something even more explicit he sits down with a young guy called Euthydemus there are two Euthydemuses in the dialogues there's there's one that Plato talks about and a different dude that that Xenophon talks about.

12:57Now, Euthydemus is a self-help junkie. He's eerily similar to clients that we'd see in therapy today. He has an extensive library of books, and Socrates says he's been memorizing and learning the maxims of the wise, and he thinks he's achieved a lot in self-improvement terms. But when Socrates questions him, he ends up being quite confused, and he realizes that he doesn't really understand the goal of life or the nature of justice. So he needs some help in that regard. And Socrates does an exercise with him, like a written exercise. And he draws, he seems to describe drawing two columns, right?

13:34Now that immediately jumps off the page at me because it's exactly what we do in cognitive therapy, right? We get a flip chart and we draw two columns and we do this in a number of ways. So we'll get a belief that's provoking anxiety or depression, like something awful is going to happen and I won't be able to cope with it and we'll say okay one column is the evidence for that the other column is the evidence against it and we'll weigh it up or we'll take like a coping strategy like i use muscle relaxation or practice mindfulness okay what are the pros and cons of that so like what do you what are the advantages of doing that what might be possible disadvantages of doing that or like i said we'll take a strategy and say is there a good way and a bad way of doing this right so what might be a bad way of thinking about problems and what might be a good way a healthy way of thinking about them so socrates does something very similar he gets uh euthydemus to think about the nature of justice because he says that's his goal in life he wants to understand justice and socrates says right he writes justice and injustice at the headings of these columns and he says can you give me some examples of injustice and they come up with formulaic examples like well lying is morally wrong and stealing is morally wrong but then socrates says well the next stage is where it becomes like a basic cognitive skill that i think underlies the whole socratic method the next bit so it's useful to clarify by giving some concrete examples but then he says can you think of any circumstances where lying might be moved across to the other column and might be just and he says what for example if an elected general deceived the enemy in a war would that be unjust and he says well no that's kind of an exception we consider that just what if a parent was given medicine to a small child and in order to get him to take it he had to deceive him by hiding it in his food yeah and he said well he's doing it for the child's benefit so then that wouldn't be unjust.

15:33What if your friend, to use, this is a famous example that a lot of philosophers use, what if your friend was suicidal, right? And he said, where's my dagger? Would you tell him the truth? Or would you tell him a white lie and keep it hidden from him because you want to protect him? Okay, okay. These are like exceptions, right? But then your definition is rubbish, right? Or your definition is an overgeneralization, right? Now, I mentioned that particular example because it struck me on many levels as being similar to things that we do in cognitive therapy it struck me as being a method a teaching aid that helps us to develop the basic skill of the socratic method but also something that psychologists today call cognitive flexibility which is the ability to kind of see beyond rigid formulaic rules yeah right and weirdly it reminded me of something that is maybe one of the best-selling modern self-help books which does the complete because it does the complete opposite right jordan peterson's 12 roles right literally consists of a set of formulaic roles yeah and not only that the forward to it valorizes the whole concept of having rigid formulaic roles to follow in life he the guy that wrote forward even compares them to the Ten Commandments.

16:55And he says, we're not talking about loose guidelines here. People need, young men in particular, need strict rules to follow and clear guidance, right? And Socrates, one of his rules is that you should tell the truth, which happens to be the very example that Socrates gives in this dialogue. And then he questions it and said, but surely there are exceptions to that. wisdom doesn't consist in memorizing a bunch of formulas or rules socrates says that just gives you a bunch of opinions without any understanding without any sensitivity to context right you're never going to get a rule or a principle like that that is valid across every situation it makes your thinking overly rigid and dependent on other people if you do that

17:50We just took our kids to an outdoor performance of the Nutcracker. They had a snow cone and then they went insane in the car ride home. And one of the things I try to remind myself when that's happening is that I don't control my kids' behavior, especially when they're too far gone like that. But I do control how I respond, right? That's stoicism, but it's also what Dr. Becky talks about. Dr. Becky is a clinical psychologist and a best-selling author, and she founded Good Inside, which is there to give parents practical, actionable tools for handling those everyday challenges with confidence. My wife introduced me to Dr.

18:27Becky's books. I love them. I've recommended them a million times. I've had her on the podcast. And as it happens, Dr. Becky is hosting two live Q &A events for Good Inside members. I am one of them. She signed me up for it about a year and a half ago. I've loved it ever since. On December 1st, you can join Dr. Becky for her How Not to Raise Assholes event, which is about avoiding entitlement and raising kind, empathetic kids. And on December 15th, she's hosting her How Not to Lose It over the holidays event, which I'm sure we could all use. As I said, I'm a big fan of Dr. Becky. She's been a great influence for me as a parent and just as a human being.

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20:55You know, the concept of negative capability comes to us from Keats. Basically, the idea is that you have to be able to... Your mind has to be able to handle complexity, even contradiction. This is a higher level of thinking. And I think it's not an accident that Keats is a poet. And there's something about... If you think the world is a math equation, you're going to really struggle. If you think about it more like a poet, which is sometimes this, sometimes that. Right. Complexity, contradiction. Also, I think to me, what Socrates was getting to there is that there's something ineffable about justice.

21:36It defies categorization because it is so it's both simple and complex at the same time. And to me, that is a higher level of thinking to be able to have that to sit with ambiguity and contradiction. Yes. But also not go nothing matters. So what you're saying, I think you call it negative capability, is perhaps similar to what we call cognitive flexibility in psychology. And as an aside, there are constructs that we measure in research on mental health. And one of them that's quite topical over the past decade or so is something called intolerance of uncertainty. because you can once you can measure something like that you can find correlations right and so we know that people who are highly intolerant of uncertainty or ambiguity are more prone to generalized anxiety disorder and i think also to clinical depression like so that there are forms of cbt that consist in training people to become more tolerant of uncertainty and ambiguity and complexity in their thinking and socrates definitely has i mean another way of putting it as for Socrates wisdom isn't just like a body of knowledge wisdom's a skill yes like wisdom is a process like wisdom is being able to ask is dynamic it's being able to ask the right questions you cannot get it just from reading a book or listening to a speech or watching a YouTube video and memorizing what it says like that would be the opposite like that would drain you of wisdom if anything by making you you're thinking overly passive one of my one of my favorite passages in meditations is where Marx really sort of lists a bunch of great conquerors and generals, and then he lists a bunch of philosophers.

23:18And I think he ends with Socrates. And he says, ultimately, Socrates is the greater because his mind was his own. And that contrast, the philosopher having wisdom being the kind of ultimate form of power, ultimate... We see this in the contrast in the ancient world between Diogenes and Alexander. Alexander is more powerful literally, but Diogenes is the greater because he understands how unnecessary most of the power that Alexander seeks is. There's something about, here you have Marcus Reus, a wise and powerful person. And the person he really admires is Socrates. In Plato's Gorgias, he addresses this topic directly and it's a complex dialogue but it has some amazing images and metaphors in it and one of them is the image of a blindfolded swordsman so plato uses this he has puts it in the mouth of socrates to explain the idea so his followers are convinced that a political tyrant perhaps like alexander who has a command of a huge army everybody does what he says is the most powerful person that someone can imagine and socrates says something typically crazy right he says, I think he's the most powerless person in society.

24:36And they said, what on earth are you talking about, Socrates? You're bonkers. Like, no one in their right mind believes that. Like, they really give him a lot of pushback in that dialogue. And he says, well, look, if a tyrant lacks wisdom and he doesn't really understand what the goal of life is, it would be like someone who's got a really sharp sword. So they could kill anyone they like with it. So by your analogy, they're very powerful. But suppose they're blindfolded. So they can't actually see where they're waving it or who they're stabbing or what they're doing. Right. So a political tyrant who isn't a philosopher might command armies, but he has no idea what it is that he should be doing.

25:14So he's like a blindfolded swordsman. Seneca was talking about Marius, maybe. And he says, you know, Marius commanded armies, but ambition commanded Marius. And so to take your analogy of the blindfolded swordsman, the other way is, let's say you have a swordsman. they can see, but there's also a series of ropes tied to them. Yes. And other people and other things can jerk on these ropes anytime they want. Right. Like a puppet. Yeah. And when we think of puppet, we think of a puppet master deliberately making them do something. This is actually far more random and actually even more powerless because random inputs, random distractions, you can see this right now.

25:56Donald Trump may regain the presidency, but he doesn't actually have the presidency because he doesn't possess himself. It's his ego. It's his insecurities. It's whatever he sees on Twitter. It's whatever a random person who wants something from him who's deft enough to plant a seed or pull a trigger that can make him go in a certain direction. So yes, it's literally true that they're very powerful. They control nuclear weapons or they have a sword or whatever it is. But just as this billionaire who has an enormous fortune is quite wealthy, but if they need something they don't have or something else controls or can direct them, they actually don't have the power.

26:39The office has them. Yeah. Yeah. Like it would be like lacking wisdom would just be like being blind. Yeah. Yeah. So Epictetus also, I think, compares somebody who's kind of injured in their capacity for reasoning as somebody who has a kind of disability, like being blind. But he says it's much more serious than just being blind. Because you would know you don't have sight. Yeah. So the famous analogy as well, you reminded me of, there's another amazing image, one of my favorite images in Plato. I love Xenophon because I think his dialogues are more like cognitive therapy in some regards, right?

27:17And they've been a little bit overlooked by classicists and philosophers, but I think they're more obviously relevant to therapists. And I think the Stoics maybe realized that. But Plato has some amazing imagery. In the first Alcibiades, which some people dispute whether it's genuinely Platonic or whether someone else wrote it. But in the first Alcibiades, Socrates is discussing the nature of wisdom. and he links it to the saying at Delphi, Ganoth I seouton or know thyself, which is engraved at the entrance to the temple. It's almost like a concept that Socrates wrestled with his whole life. And in that dialogue, he says, to know thyself or to achieve wisdom would be like being an eye that sees itself.

28:05It seems impossible. And he says to Alcibides, how would that be possible? and also by the says i guess you'd like need a mirror or something and socrates says well how then would the mind know itself and also by the says i guess in some way by using another person as a mirror because we have socrates seem to understand that we have biases that prevent us from being able to properly evaluate our own thinking there's evidence actually that leads me to another aspect of modern psychology i interviewed recently a psychologist at the university of waterloo called igor grossman and uh he does research on the nature of wisdom he has a center for researching wisdom right and what he's found talking the book about this concept of eleism he's done research on what he calls distanced self-reflection distanced self reflection because first they found they developed a method for quantifying wisdom in reasoning so the way that they do that is showing that people exhibit intellectual humility um openness to other perspectives an ability to compromise and like we're saying an ability to embrace ambiguity and complexity in their thinking right ego grossman found that people exhibit more of that when they're analyzing other people's problems than when they're analyzing their own So this is kind of intuitive.

29:30We all know this already, but psychologists can quantify it. They can put a percentage in the difference. It's like 20, 30 % difference or something like that, right? And so he said, well, what happens if you deliberately describe your own problems in a third-person perspective? That's what we call eleism. So he got people to keep a journal of their interpersonal problems, but using their own name and using third-person pronouns. So rather than saying, you know, I'm really upset because, you know, my wife said something and it rubbed me up the wrong way. I would say Donald got really upset because his wife said something that rubbed him up the wrong way.

30:10As if I'm described, it's just all I have to do is phrase it differently. And it seems like, and he found that when people simply did that, changed it grammatically, they exhibited more capacity for wise reasoning. I think Socrates realizes something like that. I think he understood that by engaging all day long in dialogue with other people about what he repeatedly calls the most important things in life, like he was able to benefit from observing their thinking. And the reason that that strikes me is as a therapist, there are things that kind of just resonate. Like, you know, if you're a therapist and you're working with clients, have depression and anxiety and stuff like that, you know, you're very conscious that sometimes you get anxious and sometimes you get down and stuff and sometimes you get angry.

30:54And, you know, it's easier to help the clients than it is to help yourself. But over time, you gradually benefit in an indirect way by helping other people. You spot the mistakes that they keep making and the traps that they fall into and you start to kind of realize that you're probably doing the same thing. they function to some extent as a mirror for your own problems over time i have a chapter about this in the wisdom book that i'm doing because i'm finishing the cardinal virtue series and i was i i think it's so fascinating that you can you can read a book like a biography of someone it could be 500 pages it could be 200 pages and in that series of hours you could emerge with a better understanding of that person than the person who lived in that body for 80 years yeah Yeah, that's interesting.

31:39Just how rare and unique real self-awareness is, particularly amongst powerful, successful, ambitious people. It's almost a feature. You can see in a biography, you can see in the conversations that what's really motivating this person, what their sort of rosebud moment is in their life. and they themselves are completely oblivious to it. And how, when you see that, it shouldn't make you feel superior to that person. You should go, ah, but how am I a stranger to myself? And we all are strangers to ourselves in alarming ways. Perhaps in a way, it's a fundamental aspect to the human. This is the eye that doesn't see itself.

32:27It's a perspective in the world that doesn't understand its own biases, its own perspective. I mean, in psychotherapy, this is integral to modern therapy. We train the clients to be able to shift their perspective so they become better at observing their own biases and viewing them. This is, again, like cognitive distancing, being able to view yourself from that point of view. So yeah, definitely. I think Socrates... The other thing that Socrates does, he doesn't really do eleism much, but he does something that's very similar. He frequently engages in hypothetical dialogue. So even, I think, in the Apology, at one point, he imagines having a little debate with the jury.

33:08And he said, you guys would probably criticize me and say this, and this is how I would respond. And so he often has these little hypothetical dialogues. And the Critias, he imagines, he uses a technique called apostrophe, where he personifies the laws of Athens and imagines that they're criticizing him. But in doing that, by having imaginary hypothetical dialogues, we have to refer to ourselves in the second person. So the laws go, Socrates, you're making an error by doing this but it's socrates that's doing that i think of almost like you've got a sock puppet and that represents the laws and you're going socrates you're making a mistake but it's your hand that's moving the lips right so you're really using your imagination to adopt this role of someone that's observing you and able to criticize more objectively on you there's a bit in the theatetus there's often these really weird little some of the most remarkable things about socrates i'll just said and it's often the case just as a flippant passing remark right and a dialogue that's about something else so in the theotetus in passing socrates says that when he goes home after debating with people there's a guy waiting for him who's like a weird stranger that lives in his house and he leaps out and sort of accosts him and criticizes him for not really understanding the nature of wisdom and justice and then he says this person that accosts him this weird critical stranger is like uh another socrates right so he's describing in a weird way continuing the dialogue at home in his imagination using the second person grammatically like this guy's saying socrates you know like you contradicted yourself earlier when you said this in marketing there's an exercise which is like you have this idea for something like a product, and you write the press release first.

34:56You write the press release announcing it to the public for the first time. So you're describing it in the third person, the thing that you haven't made exist yet. And it forces you to think all the way to the end and think about how you would explain it to another third party. And so you're forced to see, it's again, cognitive distance. Instead of being so lost in your enthusiasm and excitement for the thing, you have to flash forward to the end and describe it as it is. And I think those kind of exercises that get you outside yourself is how you know yourself and what you are trying to do or need to do.

35:30This has become, I mean, I'll tell you a little story about this. Like when Aaron T. Beck introduced cognitive therapy in the 1960s, right? The central technique he called Socratic questioning because he'd read Plato's Republic at college. And it's a bit different from the way Socrates questions, but similar kind of concept. And Beck's main question was, where's the evidence for that? Nobody likes me, everybody hates me. Where's the evidence for that? And then he'd ask other questions to encourage the client to re-evaluate their rigid assumptions or beliefs. But he realized there was a problem because some people were so fused with their beliefs that they didn't even see them as debatable right so they'd lose their job and they think it's a catastrophe and beck might say well where's the evidence for that what are the pros and cons of viewing it that way and they say you don't understand it just is a catastrophe yeah right it objectively is a disaster it's the only way of seeing it they have kind of tunnel vision for it and so beck realized there's something that has to happen as a prerequisite before we can even begin evaluating whether you're right or wrong or whether this is the whole story, are there any errors in your reasoning?

36:44For you, it's not up for debate, right? And this first step is the cognitive distancing. It's kind of related to what you're describing, the ability to step back and say, no, this is just one opinion about the situation. And it might not be the whole story or the only way of looking at it. But before you can even begin doing cognitive disputation, the individual, the client, has to be able to view their own opinions as hypotheses.

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37:55And that thing from Epictetus, it sounds so basic. It's not things that upset us. It's our opinion about things. But it's such a fundamental paradigm. It's foundational. Yeah. And if you can't open that up, a whole bunch of things is closed off to you. If you can, a whole bunch of possibilities are possible for you. What happened in, like most people have heard of CBT, cognitive therapy and stuff like that. But I think people are only gradually becoming more aware that cognitive therapy has gone through sort of three phases in its history. We usually say there's what we call the first wave, which is behavior therapy, like using conditioning and stuff.

38:29And then the second wave was Beck and Ellis and CBT and REBT and stuff like that. but then about 20 years ago a third wave began emerging that we call the mindfulness and acceptance approach and it consists of lots of different therapies developed by different research teams at different universities all over the world all converged in a similar kind of direction and one of the things that they did was test these techniques for gaining cognitive distancing so Beck thought this is the kind of initial step and then you do the disputation and some of the researchers started to say well what happens if you just do the distancing part and put more emphasis on that and what they felt so they called that radical distance or comprehensive distancing is what they initially called it what happens if you just do that bit and get people to view their thoughts objectively but don't even bother disputing them right and they found that was much more therapeutic than Beck had assumed like so actually the disputation part still plays a role in cognitive therapy, but it's not as central in some approaches as it used to be.

39:35This initial shift in perspective has become much more important. And people realized early on, if you can take a step back and observe your thoughts, it's a bit like what happens in meditation. So people, when they're practicing mindfulness meditation, are told, you know, when a thought crosses your mind, don't get entangled with it or swept away with it. Just view it as if it's a cloud passing across. But there's a distance between you and the thing. Yeah. We have to use all these kind of quirky little... So it's like it's viewing it as an event that's happening in your mind rather than kind of getting locked into it and viewing the world through the lens of that thought.

40:10Doesn't it have to say that that's kind of the first thing a philosopher does is have the ability to analyze your own thoughts? Yeah. But first of all, you have to see them as thoughts and not facts. Like Kaczynski used to say, you know, it's just not confusing the map with the terrain, you know, like the thoughts, not facts. He also says this when he says when you have a troubling impression, you should say to it, you're just an impression and not the thing itself. Yes. Right. That is literally he's describing cognitive distancing, like verbatim. It's even clearer in the Greek. Right. And also he's using a technique.

40:48He says, let me put you to the test. He says, so you're just a thought. You're not reality. You're just one way of looking at things. Right there, like he perfectly captures. It's actually really weird that these guys seem to genuinely have understood some of these psychological phenomena because you might think, well, like some of it's maybe kind of common sense. Psychotherapy has been around for actually about over 150 years-ish in the modern world it really started with the hypnotists and then hypnosis evolved into psychoanalysis and stuff like that but Freud and Jung and these guys did not fully appreciate some of these phenomena in cognitive psychology so we kind of take it more for granted now and we have lots of different ways of teaching people these skills but older models of psychotherapy are kind of oblivious to this so it's really weird to go back 2 ,000 years and find people that had a better understanding of human psychology than Freud and Jung.

41:51It's like finding out that they knew the cure for scurvy and then we forgot about it for 2000 years. Yeah. And then rediscovered it. At some level, they were like, these two things are associated with each other. This is a way to prevent this thing from happening. And then we kind of lost that connective tissue and then have only in shockingly recent times begun to be able to make that explicit and clear. And I'll tell you something even weirder about it, right? So Ellis was really into Epictetus and very influenced by him, but he kind of largely left out all the stuff in Stoicism about living in accord with virtues and the stuff about prosochi or being continually mindful of your thoughts and the emphasis on distancing that you find, right?

42:38so he was influencing kind of other ways and so the third wave in cognitive behavioral therapy put a lot more emphasis on mindfulness detached observation of thoughts identifying your core values and living in accord with them in a way that's virtually identical to how virtues are understood in ancient philosophy so even in cognitive behavioral therapy a lot of these things weren't fully understood until about 20 years ago like they were only really reintroduced in the third wave. And when those guys did it, they took inspiration from Buddhist mindfulness and stuff. The third wave in CBT makes virtually no reference to stoicism, even though some of the main things that they're emphasizing are pretty explicit.

43:19And so like the virtues, there's an entire approach that one of the leading evidence-based approaches to treating clinical depression is called behavioral activation. And it completely revolves around this idea of identifying value distinguishing between values that are about character traits and values that are about external outcomes and how depressed people typically put too much importance in the external outcomes and getting them to cherish character traits more and engage in activities more consistent with them so systematically doing exactly what virtue ethics talks about But they never mentioned stoicism, right?

44:02Weirdly. And so they reinvented the wheel. It's because it doesn't get taught and there's not that basic, you know, like if those people had grown up repeating the epigrams of Seneca and Latin class, maybe it would have been familiar, right? Like there's just a gap in people's, and hopefully this is what the resurgence of Stoic wisdom is bringing is people's ability to connect these 2000 year old ideas with what we're also understanding and seeing in the world around us. I was wrong about something, which is when I first got involved with studying stoicism, the first book I wrote, I kind of really thought, I mainly spoke at conferences for psychotherapists and I trained psychotherapists and supervised them.

44:44And so I thought psychotherapists would be the ones getting on board with stoicism and they didn't really like, and there are reasons for that. One reason is that cognitive behavioral therapists tend to turn their nose up at anything old and they're they're kind of trained to look at the latest research and not to kind of look backwards so much so they've got a bit of an aversion to doing anything that isn't cutting edge kind of evidence-based you know that's their orientation sure so i underestimated how that would maybe distract them from looking at something as old as stoicism but what happened over time is stoicism as you probably noticed is is what the young people call a thing yeah today it's an entire genre of self-help partly like due to you it's your fault as you and as you were saying to me last time we spoke in some ways it really has now become so popular its popularity is becoming is raising its own problems right what happens now is i hear a lot of psychotherapists saying their clients are turning up yes and saying this stuff that you're doing with me in the sessions is similar to stuff that i've read about in ryan holliday's books or that i've seen you know people talking about in stoicism and then the therapists are kind of guilt tripped in a good way into having to shuffle off and you know get up to speed on stoicism yeah because they'd be embarrassed to sit there for the clients to be lecturing them on how this is 2000 years old yeah and they didn't know anything about it so in a roundabout way we're getting gradually penetrating into the world of therapy i love it you want to go check out some books yeah yeah sure let's do it cool awesome

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