#864 - Donald Robertson - The True Story Of History’s Greatest Philosopher AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast Modern Wisdom

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (#864 - Donald Robertson - The True Story Of History’s Greatest Philosopher) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Go to PodExtra AI's podcast page (Modern Wisdom) to view the AI-processed content of all episodes of this podcast.

View full AI transcripts and summaries of all podcast episodes on the blog: Modern Wisdom

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

Author: Chris Williamson
Duration: 02:03:01

Episode Shownotes

Donald Robertson is a cognitive-behavioral psychotherapist, an author and an expert on ancient philosophy. If you were to divide philosophy into two eras, it would be pre-Socratic and post-Socratic. Socrates is history's greatest philosopher, and today we get to discover new lessons about his life and his teachings. Expect to

learn the benefits of thinking like Socrates, why he was so influential, what the Socratic method actually is, the hidden gem lessons from Socrates on how to live a good life, the insane story of how he died and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period from Shopify at https://shopify.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Get a 20% discount on Nomatic’s amazing luggage at https://nomatic.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at https://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Summary

In episode #864 of the Modern Wisdom podcast, Chris Williamson interviews Donald Robertson on Socrates, the iconic philosopher known for his Socratic method and practical ethics. The discussion explores Socrates' life, emphasizing his relentless pursuit of truth and moral transformation through dialogue. Listeners learn about Socrates' critiques of Sophists, his view of justice and the examined life, and the impact of his approach on modern cognitive therapy. The episode also highlights the dramatic circumstances surrounding his trial and execution, illustrating his commitment to philosophy as a means of personal and societal betterment.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (#864 - Donald Robertson - The True Story Of History’s Greatest Philosopher) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_01
Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Donald Robertson. He's a cognitive behavioral psychotherapist, an author, and an expert on ancient philosophy.

00:00:10 Speaker_01
If you were to divide philosophy into two eras, it would be pre-Socratic and post-Socratic. Socrates is history's greatest philosopher, and today we get to discover new lessons about his life and his teachings.

00:00:22 Speaker_01
Expect to learn the benefits of thinking like Socrates, why he was so influential even today, what the Socratic method actually is, the hidden gem lessons from Socrates on how to live a good life, the insane story of how he died. and much more.

00:00:39 Speaker_01
This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Businesses that sell more sell on Shopify, which is why they're the global force behind Gymshark, Skims, Allo, and Nutonic. When it comes to converting browsers into buyers, they are best in class.

00:00:52 Speaker_01
Their checkout is 36% better on average compared to other leading e-commerce platforms, and their shop pay means that you can boost conversions by up to 50%. Best of all, their award-winning support is there to help you every step of the way.

00:01:05 Speaker_01
Look, you're not going into business to learn about how to code or build a website or do back-end inventory management.

00:01:11 Speaker_01
Shopify takes all of that off your hands and allows you to focus on the job that you came here to do, which is designing and selling an awesome product. Upgrade your business and get the same checkout that we use at Newtonic with Shopify.

00:01:23 Speaker_01
Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash modern wisdom or lowercase. That's shopify.com slash modern wisdom to upgrade your selling today. This episode is brought to you by nomadic.

00:01:37 Speaker_01
Traveling should be about the journey, not the chaos of packing, which is why I'm such a huge fan of Nomatic. Nomatic has changed my entire life and their brand new method carry-on is available after selling out pretty much instantly.

00:01:50 Speaker_01
It's engineered to be lighter, stronger, plus it can hold up to 20% more than other carry-ons due to some wizardry that they've done inside, some sort of Harry Potter thing, I'm not too sure.

00:02:00 Speaker_01
But it means that you can fit a week's worth of clothes or more without stressing about space. And their products will last you literally a lifetime with their lifetime guarantee. So this is the final carry-on bag that you will ever need to buy.

00:02:12 Speaker_01
Plus, you can return or exchange any product within 30 days for any reason. Right now, you can get 20% off everything sitewide by going to the link in the description below or heading to nomadic.com This episode is brought to you by Woop.

00:02:32 Speaker_01
Woop is a 24-7 health and fitness coach that tracks your sleep, strain, recovery, stress, and more to provide personalized insights that help you reach your goals.

00:02:41 Speaker_01
Each morning, Woop gives you a recovery score that acts as your daily guide for how much you should exert yourself, At the end of the day, you get a recommendation for your ideal bedtime.

00:02:49 Speaker_01
You can also track over 140 different habits and behaviors to see how they impact your overall health.

00:02:54 Speaker_01
It basically means you can stop guessing about what's happening inside of your body by wearing a small thing on your wrist that tracks absolutely everything. Plus, you can join for free, pay nothing for the brand new Whoop 4.0 strap.

00:03:07 Speaker_01
Plus, you get your first month for free, and there's a 30-day money-back guarantee. So you can buy it for free, try it for free, and if you do not like it, after 29 days, they will give you your money back.

00:03:17 Speaker_01
Right now, you can get that free Whoop 4.0 strap and that 30-day money-back guarantee by going to join.whoop.com slash modernwisdom. That's join.whoop.com slash modernwisdom. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Donald Robertson.

00:03:54 Speaker_01
Dude, I love every time that we get to speak. I adored all of your last books. And you've done a new one about Socrates. Why would anyone want to think like Socrates?

00:04:05 Speaker_00
Why would anyone care about this old dead white guy or whatever? I love Socrates. I love Marcus Aurelius, but Socrates is like the next level. You know, I really am excited to be able to talk and write about him and stuff.

00:04:21 Speaker_00
Socrates was, and I'll tell you why, this is going to seem like an odd answer, right? There's Eric Clapton, right? And guys like that. And then there's Jimi Hendrix, right?

00:04:32 Speaker_00
Eric Clapton's an amazing guitarist, but Jimi Hendrix, to me anyway, sounds like he's from another planet, right? Jimi Hendrix took his guitar to bed with him. He woke up in the morning strapped his guitar on and fried eggs wearing his guitar.

00:04:45 Speaker_00
He went to the lavatory wearing his guitar, right? Psychologists call that time on task. Like he was constantly practicing and stuff like he was obsessed with it.

00:04:53 Speaker_00
Socrates reminds me, in that solitary regard of Jimi Hendrix, because the way he's described to us is that he's a guy who abandoned everything else and just spent all day every day discussing what he considered to be the most important questions in life with anybody, the greatest intellectuals that he could find in the known world, prostitutes,

00:05:18 Speaker_00
politicians, slaves, you name it, everybody from all walks of life. So he had, he was like the Jimi Hendrix of philosophizing. Like he never took his guitar off.

00:05:29 Speaker_00
He was constantly doing, I can't imagine someone in modern society spending that amount of time really analyzing the contradictions in someone else's thinking. So Socrates to me is a kind of a unique individual and it comes through.

00:05:45 Speaker_00
We don't know, there's this thing called the Socratic problem.

00:05:48 Speaker_00
that we don't know, but we should acknowledge at the beginning, that we don't know for sure how close a representation Plato's dialogues or the other sources that we have are of the real Socrates.

00:06:00 Speaker_00
But I think his character comes through to some extent. Those dialogues are probably semi-fictional. They're embellished a bit. But the real guy kind of shines through to some extent, and he must have been an extraordinary individual.

00:06:12 Speaker_00
He's somebody who has a tremendous capacity for thinking outside the box, for spotting logical contradictions. And he said some of the most radical things in the history of Western philosophy. Not only that, I see him as the godfather

00:06:27 Speaker_00
of modern self-help and self-improvement psychology are the great, great granddaddy of cognitive behavioral therapy.

00:06:35 Speaker_00
So as a psychotherapist, a cognitive behavioral therapist, I look to Socrates as somebody who stands at the very origin of our tradition. But also, I think in some ways, we've kind of gone astray in ways that he wonders about.

00:06:49 Speaker_00
So by going back and looking at what he originally said, I think we can figure out maybe and see beyond some of the mistakes that we might have made along the way.

00:06:57 Speaker_01
You mentioned there maybe historical gap with regards to what we know about him, how we would have learned about him. How do we know anything about him? What are the scraps of material that you've been using to write this book?

00:07:10 Speaker_00
Well, the most famous thing is that we have Plato's dialogues. There are like 36 or 37 of Plato's dialogues, most of which feature Socrates prominently. And it's generally assumed by scholars that Plato changed his approach throughout his career.

00:07:25 Speaker_00
Early in his career, he wrote a more literal description of Socrates, probably embellished a bit. As time went on, he starts to use Socrates more and more as a mouthpiece, probably for his own views.

00:07:35 Speaker_00
Like Plato's famous metaphysical theory, the theory of forms, probably wasn't something that Socrates ever actually said. Socrates' way of doing philosophy seems to be more kind of homely,

00:07:46 Speaker_00
down to earth, more focused on applied ethics and daily life, basically. So we have those. Plato's dialogues are just incredible. Plato was also a genius, and so we have the writings of a genius about another genius, basically.

00:08:06 Speaker_00
Some of these texts are the most profound and moving pieces of literature in the Western canon. I seldom recommend books to people, funnily enough, unless I know them very well.

00:08:16 Speaker_00
But my one exception to that is that I think everybody should read Plato's Apology, because I think it's a masterpiece, and it only takes a couple of hours to read, as an aside. So we've got all that stuff.

00:08:27 Speaker_00
And then we have Xenophon, another student of Socrates, and his dialogues are less well known, but we have a bunch of like 30 or 40 dialogues, shorter ones, more down to earth from Xenophon as well.

00:08:41 Speaker_00
Then we have this really weird thing, which is a play by Aristophanes, which is a satire ridiculing Socrates that was written and performed during his lifetime.

00:08:51 Speaker_00
And we learn almost nothing from that, or it's hard to tell anything from it because it's a caricature, but it tells us that he must have been pretty famous. during his lifetime for people to have ridiculed him, caricatured him like that.

00:09:04 Speaker_00
And then we have what's called the anecdotal tradition, which is basically a bunch of little anecdotes and quips about Socrates said this, Socrates did that, that we tend to find in later authors.

00:09:14 Speaker_00
So they are more dubious reliability, but altogether, all this stuff tells us something about what we could frame as the literary character of Socrates.

00:09:24 Speaker_00
So Marcus Aurelius and other subsequent thinkers that followed the subsequent to Socrates would have known of him mainly through these writings.

00:09:32 Speaker_00
So we could say what's influencing them is his character of Socrates that was passed down by other writers. And there's a big question mark about how closely does that correlate to the real guy? We'll never know. Why was he so influential?

00:09:49 Speaker_00
Well, the ancient answer to that question is that he was the first. He wasn't the first philosopher. He wasn't even the first philosopher at Athens.

00:09:58 Speaker_00
But they used to say that he was the first philosopher that brought philosophy really down to earth and applied it to everyday matters, kind of almost making it into a psychotherapy, basically. He would talk to people about the nature of love.

00:10:13 Speaker_00
He would talk to generals in the military about the nature of courage. He would talk to priests about the nature of piety. He talked to his friends about the anger. The most homely dialogue that we have is in Xenophon.

00:10:26 Speaker_00
And in it, Socrates has a conversation with his teenage son, Lamprocles, because Lamprocles is really upset about his mom nagging him. And Socrates helps his son to reframe this, overcome his anger towards his mother.

00:10:43 Speaker_00
So that's probably the most down to earth example of a Socratic dialogue that we have. So that's kind of what he was particularly known for doing.

00:10:52 Speaker_00
But also he took the method of dialectic or philosophical question and answer, turned it into his own trademark method called the Socratic method, and really began to much more radically and thoroughly question the assumptions about morality, mainly, that people around him were making.

00:11:11 Speaker_00
And that made him a controversial figure. You know, he was like dynamite. You know, some people were almost addicted to being questioned by Socrates. They found it an incredibly liberating experience.

00:11:24 Speaker_00
Other people found it embarrassing, humiliating, and they hated him and they went after him. So it wouldn't be overly simplifying things to say that Socrates asked too many questions, rocked the boat, upset some powerful people.

00:11:40 Speaker_00
And we all know how that ended for him. He was made to drink hemlock.

00:11:44 Speaker_01
What was the existing philosophical world that he entered into? You mentioned there that he wasn't the first philosopher, probably by broader categories, but he's the first one to bring it down to earth.

00:11:57 Speaker_01
What was the state philosophically of the existing world?

00:12:01 Speaker_00
Well, the two main philosophical traditions that preceded him, and there were others, so it's a little bit more complex, but the ones that are most relevant to him is the first philosopher at Athens was a guy called Anaxagoras, who came from the Greek colonies, which would be in Ionia, which would be on the coast of Turkey, basically.

00:12:22 Speaker_00
So when we talk about Greek philosophers, we're often a bit confused about where they came from. They didn't all come from Athens. Many of them came from Greek colonies that were much further afield.

00:12:31 Speaker_00
So, Anaxagoras was what we call a natural philosopher. The famous thing about Socrates is we refer to everyone that came before him as pre-Socratic. That's how influential he was. He's the before Christ of philosophy.

00:12:47 Speaker_00
Yeah, so the natural philosophers are in many ways precursors of modern science. They try to explain things, broadly speaking, using physical descriptions. They were very interested in astronomy, very interested in physiology,

00:13:06 Speaker_00
And that was a great thing for Athenian culture and Greek culture. It was also very controversial because they challenged traditional superstitions.

00:13:15 Speaker_00
So people would think that thunder and lightning was caused by Zeus, and the natural philosopher said, we reckon it's caused by clouds rubbing together or something like that. earthquakes, or just a natural phenomenon.

00:13:25 Speaker_00
And that had a surprisingly big impact on society. Just as an aside, there's a famous anecdote about how Pericles, the most influential, most powerful Athenian statesman at this time, was about to set sail with his fleet on a military campaign.

00:13:43 Speaker_00
And there was an eclipse and his crew were cowering in fear and they refused to do it.

00:13:49 Speaker_00
It's very often the Greeks would abandon, particularly the Spartans were known for this, by the way, they would abandon battles because they were concerned about bad omens and so on.

00:13:59 Speaker_00
And Pericles supposedly explained the natural philosophy that he'd been taught by Anaxagoras. And he said, look, this is just something passing in front of the sun, as if I put my cloak in front of your eyes, but it's further away and much bigger.

00:14:12 Speaker_00
And he convinced, by giving this down-to-earth naturalistic explanation, he managed to convince his troops to set sail. And so it changed the outcome of battles, basically. That's how dramatic it was.

00:14:23 Speaker_00
But at the same time, it also upset a lot of people. And so Anaxagoras was also placed on trial for impiety long before Socrates. So there was Anaxagoras, and Socrates thought, this philosophy, though it doesn't teach wisdom,

00:14:39 Speaker_00
He said Anaxagoras didn't really understand anything about the nature of justice and injustice. So when he was placed on trial, supposedly he was a broken man as a result.

00:14:50 Speaker_00
And we can contrast how Anaxagoras dealt badly with being exiled and then subsequently sentenced to death.

00:14:59 Speaker_00
for impiety and how Socrates famously exhibited courage in court and stood by his principles because he'd prepared himself to understand justice and injustice from a much more profound philosophical perspective.

00:15:14 Speaker_00
So there's Anaxagoras and many other natural philosophers that Socrates had studied. And then a bit later, we get these guys called the Sophists. And their name implies that they claim to be wise, they claim to have expertise.

00:15:28 Speaker_00
And the sophists taught young men oratory and rhetoric. They were kind of like self-improvement gurus in a sense, but they also taught people how to become successful politicians and confident public speakers. And they

00:15:45 Speaker_00
where the first one was Protagoras, who Socrates knew personally and questioned. And this seems to have been a key moment in his career.

00:15:54 Speaker_00
But Socrates basically thought the sophists were far too concerned with just winning arguments and they'd sacrifice the truth. So they would teach you how to win a debate in the assembly.

00:16:04 Speaker_00
But Socrates' concern, to put it very simply, was he'd say, how much time have you guys spent trying to figure out what's in the best interest of society, or what's just and what's unjust? Zero time.

00:16:17 Speaker_00
But you spend all of your time trying to figure out how you can convince other people what's just are in their interests before the assembly. Now this is a very simple argument, but weirdly, eerily, it kind of applies today.

00:16:30 Speaker_00
So people get into politics because they want to influence society, but how many politicians seem to have invested that much time and effort in trying to figure out what's genuinely in the interests of individuals or society?

00:16:45 Speaker_00
Socrates says it would be like going to see a doctor. They'd never spent any time studying medicine. I don't bother with that. I'm just really good at writing prescriptions, but I don't know what's actually good for your health.

00:16:57 Speaker_00
So politicians, all they're concerned about is winning debates, influencing legislation. But Socrates said, could you explain what justice is or explain to me what's in the interest of society?

00:17:07 Speaker_00
And when he asked him these questions, I don't know, I haven't really thought about it. So this was his concern with the sophists. It was all about appearances and they sacrificed truth. But he had a kind of love-hate relationship with them.

00:17:18 Speaker_00
He liked to kind of hang around them. He thought they said some interesting things, but they didn't really think deeply enough about what they were saying. I guess another part of it that I think is very relevant today

00:17:29 Speaker_00
is that Socrates found that the sophists would give speeches and they would teach people maxims. A bit like watching a YouTube video or getting kind of rules for life from modern self-improvement experts, right?

00:17:42 Speaker_00
And Socrates thought that was basically too passive. He thought there are no rules that are going to apply across every situation in life, basically.

00:17:52 Speaker_00
What's much more in your interests is learning how to think for yourself and to be able to question things and spot exceptions to general rules and principles. So that's a harder, it's a more kind of, a less tangible concept for people.

00:18:05 Speaker_00
But that's where the Socratic method comes in. Socrates thought we need to learn how to think for ourselves, question things more deeply, not just kind of memorize these phrases that we're getting from the sophists.

00:18:15 Speaker_01
Do you think it's kind of ironic that one of Socrates' fundamental principles is that you must think for yourself, and your book is called How to Think Like Socrates? How to Think Like Socrates, which is how to think for yourself.

00:18:26 Speaker_01
It's nice and circular there, I love it.

00:18:29 Speaker_00
It's a bit circular, but if you learn to think like Socrates, you'll learn to think for yourself.

00:18:35 Speaker_01
So do we know how Socrates got into philosophy? Have we got any idea about his upbringing or history or introduction?

00:18:43 Speaker_01
If he's this sort of game-changing, world-renowned, everything before him was now and after him was just a replicant of what he said before. What was his come-up story?

00:18:56 Speaker_00
We have several bits of evidence there. Sometimes the evidence is a little bit contradictory or it's a little bit vague. In telling his story, we have to make some assumptions.

00:19:05 Speaker_00
We have to iron out some contradictions and stuff because the ancient text is a little bit messy in that regard. So the most famous explanation he gives is in Plato's Apology.

00:19:14 Speaker_00
where he says his friend Chirophon went to Delphi, which is a few days walk outside Athens in the mountains. This incredible place, it's like something out of Lord of the Rings. And there's a great famous temple to the God Apollo there.

00:19:27 Speaker_00
And you could ask questions of the Pythia, the priestess of Apollo. She sat on a bronze tripod, supposedly inhaling these fumes, and she'd go into a trance. And the God Apollo possessed her and spoke through her, right?

00:19:40 Speaker_00
And Chirophon, who was another philosopher, a weird dude who people compared to a bat to respect her. He was, I imagine him almost like a kind of goth or something like he, he was a bit of a misfit, but he was Socrates, his best friend.

00:19:55 Speaker_00
He went to the, he was known for doing kind of eccentric things. So he went to the Delphic Oracle and asked it, is any man wiser than Socrates? And it replied, no man is wiser than Socrates.

00:20:12 Speaker_00
Apollo, the god Apollo, replied, no man is wiser than Socrates. And so the weird story in the apology is that Socrates found this difficult to accept. And so he went around grilling

00:20:26 Speaker_00
the wisest people that he could find to try and find evidence that there was indeed somebody that was wiser than him. Because he didn't believe that no one was wiser than him.

00:20:35 Speaker_00
But he found that when he asked great philosophers and statesmen, often they contradicted themselves. So he thought, they can't be wise. They believe that they are. And the sophists literally called themselves wise men.

00:20:49 Speaker_00
But often when they were questioned, the things they were saying were full of contradictions and fell apart. And so Socrates thought, well, look, I come to the conclusion that paradoxically, I don't know much either, but neither do these guys.

00:21:05 Speaker_00
And I am wiser than them by a hair's breadth, because at least I know that I'm not wise, whereas they falsely believe that they are wise. And so the central thrust of his method becomes puncturing this kind of intellectual arrogance or conceit.

00:21:23 Speaker_00
Sometimes it's called double ignorance. So Socrates thought ignorance isn't a problem. Because I might be ignorant about medicine, but if I know I'm ignorant about medicine, I might be motivated to go and consult an expert, right?

00:21:34 Speaker_00
I might not know how to fix the engine in my car, but if I go and see a mechanic, I can find somebody that maybe knows better than me.

00:21:40 Speaker_00
But if I believe that I'm an expert on engines, or I believe I'm an expert on medicines, and I'm not really, then I'm in trouble, because I'll be guided by my ignorance to make lots of mistakes.

00:21:51 Speaker_00
So Socrates thought, this is one of our biggest problems in life, a bit like the Dunning-Kruger phenomenon. that we believe that we know things that we do not in fact know.

00:22:00 Speaker_00
So he found that his method was almost like a therapy for curing people of this intellectual conceit. So that's a story that Plato tells, but he must, he also says that he did study philosophy prior to that.

00:22:12 Speaker_00
Maybe for decades, he'd been studying natural philosophy and learning about from other philosophers, but his trademark method developed

00:22:21 Speaker_00
at some point in his life as a result of this weird incident where the Oracle proclaims that no man is wiser than him.

00:22:31 Speaker_01
How much do you think he would have spent his time

00:22:36 Speaker_01
playing this game of poking holes in other people's hypocrisy, ignorance, like shallow rhetoric that isn't sort of foundation philosophically if he hadn't stepped into a world where the sophists were kind of the number one band available at the time.

00:22:54 Speaker_00
That's really hard to say. I mean, I always feel like we almost need the sophists to have Socrates. He's very much reacting to them.

00:23:02 Speaker_00
I mean, maybe he would have developed his method in response to the other, the natural philosophers, but it really seems to be the sophists that inspire him in a way because he's so concerned.

00:23:12 Speaker_00
And one reason for that is that the sophists have a lot of influence over Athenian politics. And Socrates was friends with some powerful political figures.

00:23:23 Speaker_00
And so although he wasn't really directly involved in politics himself, I think he was very concerned about Athens.

00:23:30 Speaker_00
And what's missing from the Platonic dialogues and from Xenophon, although they refer to historical events and they refer to important figures, I think people still, when they read Plato, get the feeling that Socrates is just walking around in pleasant groves and sandals, kind of pontificating about things, and they don't visualize him.

00:23:51 Speaker_00
as a heavy infantryman who fought in at least three major battles of the Peloponnesian War. They don't imagine him as someone who survives a terrible plague.

00:24:02 Speaker_00
They don't see him at the heart of Athenian politics, surrounded by these key figures like these senior statesmen. and living through one of the most epic wars in European history.

00:24:13 Speaker_00
The Peloponnesian War lasted 27 years, and under a dictatorship, the 30 tyrants that took over Athens. So his life was incredibly dramatic. basically. And his philosophy is shaped by, I think, all of these things.

00:24:29 Speaker_00
His experience as a soldier, living under different political regimes, including a kind of dictatorship that was really brutal, political purges where people were just rounded up and executed. all of these things.

00:24:44 Speaker_00
But definitely the sophists loom large in Socrates' influences, partly because he's concerned about them having so much sway over the Athenian assembly and the political decisions that are being made.

00:24:58 Speaker_01
How would you describe the main principles of his philosophical worldview?

00:25:05 Speaker_00
Well, as we said, I mean, the Socratic method, the core of what he's doing, in a sense, is more about the process.

00:25:11 Speaker_00
So some people in the ancient world would have seen wisdom or the goal of life as being the acquisition of knowledge, like having a bunch of opinions that are true, basically. And Socrates thought that's not real wisdom, though.

00:25:24 Speaker_00
That's just kind of learning stuff passively. Real wisdom is more like a cognitive skill.

00:25:30 Speaker_00
So the goal of philosophy, I think, for Socrates, is more of a process that we engage in every day of our lives, learning to think and question things more profoundly. He said the unexamined life is not worth living.

00:25:44 Speaker_00
He thought the goal of life was to examine your life continually every day. It was like an ongoing process of personal development that, in a sense, never really ended. So the core of his philosophy, I think, is the actual method of his philosophy.

00:25:58 Speaker_00
And he does have doctrines in a sense. Often he doesn't state them, but he seems to be arriving at them. So for example, a famous one is in Plato's Republic, in the first book, Socrates asks for a definition of justice.

00:26:16 Speaker_00
And his friends say, well, justice is helping your friends and harming your enemies, right? This was a cliche in Athenian culture.

00:26:23 Speaker_00
It comes from the military world where you'd be helping your military allies and punishing or attacking your enemies in warfare. But it was also applied to civilian life as well. And Socrates questions us from a number of different angles.

00:26:38 Speaker_00
But as far as I recall in the Republic, he doesn't specifically state what the alternative conclusion would be. He just kind of implies it.

00:26:46 Speaker_00
Whereas later philosophers, Plutarch, for example, explicitly says Socrates believed that justice consists in helping your friends, but also helping your enemies by turning them into your friends.

00:26:58 Speaker_00
So the goal is basically to convert enemies into friends, not just to kind of punish or harm your enemies. Socrates was concerned that if we try to harm our friends from a particular point of view, first of all, we're missing out.

00:27:11 Speaker_00
If we try to harm our enemies, first of all, we're missing out on the opportunity to convert them into allies or friends. And secondly, we might kind of end up making them worse enemies by punishing them or harming them in a particular way.

00:27:24 Speaker_00
And actually, that's kind of what happened to Athens. you know, there were certain more kind of aggressive, hawkish political leaders that took control of the Athenian assembly and they committed genocide.

00:27:36 Speaker_00
And this really led to Athens' downfall because Athens' potential allies no longer trusted them and turned against them. So their regime collapsed.

00:27:45 Speaker_00
They had a catastrophic military defeat in Sicily that can be seen as the consequence of this kind of more short-sighted, more aggressive attitude towards other states.

00:27:56 Speaker_00
So Socrates does have these doctrines, and there are many, many other ones that people derive from what he's saying, but we should be a little bit careful about making them into rules that are too rigid.

00:28:06 Speaker_00
One of his nicest ones that's a little bit different, for instance, is Socrates, according to Xenophon, Socrates reputedly said that we should eat to live rather than live to eat.

00:28:19 Speaker_00
You know, he thought people in general, he thought people were too much duped by appearances. So they were too much swayed by short term pleasure and pain.

00:28:28 Speaker_00
And he thought we should think more carefully about whether something is actually good for our health or not, rather than just whether it tastes nice or doesn't taste nice. We should be thinking about the reality of stuff beyond the appearances.

00:28:42 Speaker_00
Another one of his little sayings that's quite well known is that we should be as we wish to appear. He thought, again, we're misled into focusing too much on appearances. We want to appear confident.

00:28:54 Speaker_00
Socrates said it would be better to actually become confident if you want to appear confident. If you focus too much on faking it, or the appearances, that can kind of lead to a more superficial approach. You could be misleading it.

00:29:07 Speaker_00
You could get sucked into deception of other people. It would be better for you to actually become confident. People came to him saying, Socrates, how can I make myself seem like a good friend?

00:29:18 Speaker_00
And Socrates said it would be better to become a good friend in reality.

00:29:25 Speaker_01
I'm feeling a lot of this sort of tension between practical and abstract, especially stepping into a world where it's this sort of rhetorical device.

00:29:35 Speaker_01
People are getting Toastmasters or improv or comedy speech coaching in this way, but they're not actually assessing the underlying motivations of why they're doing this particular thing. And, you know, he's got that, we are what we repeatedly do.

00:29:49 Speaker_01
Excellence then is not an act, but a habit. So even in the highlighting of the importance of action, he's even taking it one step further and talking about the repetition of action.

00:30:03 Speaker_00
Yeah, I mean, Socrates felt like we were constantly confusing appearance and reality. That's, I guess, a recurring theme of his philosophy. And he felt the sophists were all about appearances and completely neglected reality.

00:30:17 Speaker_00
So, you know, he's always challenging us to look beyond appearances by using reason. In a sense, Socrates thinks we're kind of lazy.

00:30:25 Speaker_00
You know, and he's always kind of encouraging us to question appearances and use reason to think a little bit more deeply about things. I'll give you a really cool example of that that relates to something I mentioned earlier.

00:30:37 Speaker_00
I mentioned Lampercle is getting annoyed with his mother. Socrates, at the beginning of the conversation, asks his son whether his mother really cares for him and whether she's made many sacrifices to help him.

00:30:52 Speaker_00
And Lamprocles admits quite easily, he says, yeah, my mum's dedicated her life to helping me when I'm sick. my mother nurses me. She spent all of her time raising me. She's done everything for me.

00:31:05 Speaker_00
But Socrates, she just really annoys me when she's nagging me. I don't know how I could possibly put up with it." And Socrates uses this amazing analogy. It's one of my favorite things that he says. He says,

00:31:19 Speaker_00
In the theater, when you're going to see a tragedy being performed, for example, do the actors not really say things that are much more vicious and insulting and hostile than anything your mother ever says?

00:31:32 Speaker_00
And Lamperclay says, well, yeah, of course they do. But you don't understand Socrates. They're just acting. It's not real. That's the difference. And Socrates says, but you just told me a few moments ago

00:31:43 Speaker_00
that you believe that your mother doesn't really mean you harm, but fundamentally she cares for you, right? So sometimes she might seem really annoying, but in general, she actually cares for you a lot.

00:31:55 Speaker_00
And what he's encouraging Lampocles to do is to kind of look beyond the impression that he has of his mother in those moments and think more about her personality as a whole and a more rounded and complete way by using reason to think about who is your mother really?

00:32:10 Speaker_00
What is the nature of your relationship with her, really? It's more than just a nagging. That may be part of it. It may be something you don't like, but by focusing only on that and putting it under a magnifying glass, you exaggerate your anger.

00:32:25 Speaker_00
But if you think about her personality as a whole, then it becomes just one small part, and it becomes less upsetting. Maybe you become more able to tolerate it.

00:32:35 Speaker_01
You mentioned it a couple of times. Assume that somebody hasn't heard about the Socratic method before. What is it? How does it work?

00:32:44 Speaker_00
In some ways it's tricky to define and in some ways it's easy. There's a lot of nuance to it. And Socrates doesn't sit down at any point and say, hey, let me just explain my methods to you briefly.

00:32:56 Speaker_00
Instead, what we see is example after example of him using his method in various different ways. So we have to kind of infer how he's doing it. But basically, what he tends to do is to ask people to define a concept, and it's usually a virtue.

00:33:13 Speaker_00
So he'll say, define piety, define courage, define justice. Typically, it's something that's very relevant to them. So he's not just like we would in academic philosophy now, analyzing concepts for the sake of it.

00:33:28 Speaker_00
He talks to military commanders about the nature of courage, for example, because it's something that they're already taking for granted, in a sense, in the conversations that they're having.

00:33:36 Speaker_00
So you could also say he's digging deeper beneath the conversation and questioning the underlying premise or assumption. So you guys are talking a lot about courage, but what is courage? How do you actually define it?

00:33:47 Speaker_00
The whole conversation is based on that. And then he'll normally think of exceptions to the role that they've given. So the most famous example is when he's talking to Lachies and Nicias to Athenian generals.

00:34:05 Speaker_00
They define courage as standing your ground and remaining in formation in the face of the enemy.

00:34:11 Speaker_00
And that's because the Athenians depended to a large extent on their hoplites, their heavy infantry, which Socrates was one, and they had to fight in the phalanx formation.

00:34:21 Speaker_00
And so each soldier's shield would protect him, but also the guy standing to his left.

00:34:27 Speaker_00
And if you broke formation, not only would you place yourself at risk, but you place the soldiers that are fighting alongside you in greater danger as well by doing that.

00:34:35 Speaker_00
So they had to really drum it into these guys that they had to remain very rigidly in formation for this phalanx strategy to work. And Socrates says, okay, that's a good definition of courage, but it's too narrow, right?

00:34:48 Speaker_00
Because what about during a tactical retreat? Like you break from the phalanx formation, but you could still exhibit courage. You're no longer standing your ground in the same way though.

00:34:58 Speaker_00
What if you fight in the cavalry and then you have to charge into the middle of the enemy rather than standing your ground? But the cavalry exhibit courage. You'd have to define it differently, though. He says, what about the Spartans?

00:35:09 Speaker_00
They fight in phalanx formation, but they also sometimes charge into the enemy like cavalry do. But they're renowned for their courage. So you wouldn't say that they lack courage. You'd have to tweak your definition a little bit.

00:35:20 Speaker_00
So he starts this conversation going usually by creative thinking. and being able to come thinking outside the box and coming up with... Again, he's not following a formula here as much as using a skill.

00:35:34 Speaker_00
He's thinking, and he's coming up, he's brainstorming examples. What about this? What about this? What about this? It's like he's saying, Okay, courage could be standing your ground, but what about this? What about this scenario?

00:35:46 Speaker_00
What about in civilian life? You'd have to define it differently. And so he constantly challenges the interlocutor, the person he's speaking about, to revise their definition and think about it at a deeper and deeper level.

00:35:57 Speaker_00
And he doesn't always arrive at a clear conclusion. Often he doesn't. His dialogues often end in aporia in Greek, which is the term that we use to mean a sort of confusion or bewilderment. So people walk away. And some people hated that.

00:36:12 Speaker_00
But other people would walk away from it thinking, I kind of feel like I know less now than I did at the beginning of the conversation, but in a good way.

00:36:20 Speaker_00
Because maybe I was too rigid in my thinking, and I was assuming that I knew things that I didn't really understand. At least now I realize that there's more to justice than helping your friends and harming your enemies.

00:36:33 Speaker_00
Or there's more to courage than just standing your ground and remaining in the phalanx formation. And maybe I've kind of spiraled closer and closer to the center of the meaning of these concepts.

00:36:44 Speaker_00
So in the process of doing that, he'd often point out contradictions in people's thinking. He said that what you're saying now seems to clash with something that you said a few minutes ago. So he was very sharp at noticing this.

00:36:58 Speaker_00
And I think one of the ways that that can help us today, actually, is there's a particular type of contradiction that Socrates would sometimes point out. A moral contradiction.

00:37:09 Speaker_00
I'll give you another example where he's talking to a teenage boy, an adolescent boy. There's a guy called Kratopoulos that comes to him, who's the son of one of his best friends, Kratos.

00:37:19 Speaker_00
And Kratopoulos says, Socrates, could you introduce me to some people that would be really good friends to have in Athenian society? He's asking him for help networking, weirdly, right? And Socrates says, sure. How would you define a good friend?

00:37:34 Speaker_00
And Kratopoulos says, well, they come and visit you when you're sick. Maybe they'd lend you money if you're broke.

00:37:38 Speaker_00
Maybe if you're being a bit out of order, they take you to one side and gently kind of explain to you that you should change your behavior and stuff like that. So quite easily, he's able to kind of define what a good friend does.

00:37:50 Speaker_00
But then Socrates says, well, how many of these qualities do you exhibit yourself? And Kratopoulos is like, well, not many, like zero, I don't know. So Socrates says, again, haven't you got this back to front?

00:38:02 Speaker_00
You're kind of asking me to present you to these people as if you would be a good match, as if you would be a good friend to them.

00:38:10 Speaker_00
But they're bound to figure out if you don't have any of these qualities, and then they won't trust me as a matchmaker of friends, and they're going to lose faith in you as a friend as well. You should have come to me and asked me,

00:38:22 Speaker_00
how you could become a good friend yourself, how you could improve yourself. So you're exhibiting a double standard. You're applying one standard to other people in terms of friendship, but a different standard or no standard to yourself.

00:38:38 Speaker_00
This is a kind of moral hypocrisy, if you like. So often Socrates is drawing people's attention to the fact that they're exhibiting moral double standards. And we do similar things in modern cognitive therapy as well. Sometimes people think,

00:38:52 Speaker_00
Philosophical ethics can be quite subtle and quite nuanced, and it often is. But in many cases, we can make moral progress, I think, just by not being hypocrites.

00:39:03 Speaker_00
The one thing that the majority of people agree on is that you shouldn't contradict yourself morally. And if you're saying one thing and doing another, like if you're applying a double standard, most people agree there's something wrong there.

00:39:17 Speaker_00
And it's reason that helps us to spot those contradictions and attempt to resolve them.

00:39:23 Speaker_00
So there's a simple way, I think, that many people can make progress in terms of morality and self-improvement just by questioning their own standards in the way that Socrates teaches these young men to.

00:39:35 Speaker_01
It seems like that's the consistent trend or theme or perhaps outcome of this Socratic method, which is discontinuity, inconsistency, hypocrisy, poorly clarified underpinnings and foundations and definitions of what's going on.

00:39:56 Speaker_01
But yeah, I can also imagine that simply by asking questions and continuing to refine, you may avoid untruths. And perhaps by avoiding untruths, move yourself closer to truth. But it's very much a sort of do-it-yourself, paint-by-numbers.

00:40:15 Speaker_01
Socrates isn't coming in and saying, well, this would be a better approach. He's saying, I think there may be a problem with this.

00:40:21 Speaker_01
So I can quite imagine why people could find him annoying, because he's basically just permanently poking holes in everything.

00:40:27 Speaker_00
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I think there are a number of... Let me kind of... explain what he's doing, I think, from a different perspective, from a more psychological perspective, right?

00:40:37 Speaker_00
And in doing that, I'll maybe make its relevance a bit more apparent to modern self-improvement.

00:40:42 Speaker_00
So as a body of research and modern psychotherapy and psychology and in the field of coping and stress, we can analyze different coping strategies that people use to deal with stress, right?

00:40:54 Speaker_00
And these are the strategies that you find in self-help books and self-improvement books, right?

00:40:59 Speaker_00
So maybe breathing exercises, relaxation technique, cognitive therapy, positive affirmations, positive visualization, even things like avoidance, just running away from the situation.

00:41:08 Speaker_00
or accessing other social support, getting someone else to help you in a situation or things like that. There's lots of different ways that you could potentially cope with anxiety, depression, stressful situations, right?

00:41:21 Speaker_00
But no one of those coping strategies works every time.

00:41:24 Speaker_00
And the people that exhibit the most emotional resilience and are most able to recover from anxiety and depression are generally found to be the ones that have something we call coping flexibility.

00:41:38 Speaker_00
So they're able to choose intelligently between whether to confront a situation assertively or whether to back away from it and resign themselves to it with emotional acceptance.

00:41:50 Speaker_00
A lot of it like saying knowing when to pick your battles and things like that, you know, or knowing when it's better to distract yourself from pain or discomfort and when it would be better to address the cause or when it would be better to confront it and adapt to the experience and learn to accept it.

00:42:07 Speaker_00
And by questioning, I mean, what we do in modern cognitive therapy, like often we'll find, almost with every client, you'll find that they have coping strategies they've just made up themselves, or coping strategies they've got from the internet, or from self-help books.

00:42:24 Speaker_00
In many cases, they'll be using these maladaptively in a way that's contributing to the problem and making it worse, usually because they're doing them too rigidly or they're using them as a subtle form of avoidance that's actually contributing to the problem.

00:42:39 Speaker_00
And so one of the first things we might do is what's sometimes called a functional analysis. So we'll get people to very carefully weigh up the pros and cons of the strategies they're using.

00:42:48 Speaker_00
And this kind of thinking things through, it's a cognitive therapy technique, is similar in some ways, I think, to using the Socratic method to question your definition of justice, for instance. Or Socrates would also

00:43:02 Speaker_00
I'll give you an example of a specific technique that kind of blew my mind when I read it.

00:43:07 Speaker_00
In Xenophon – and classicists never mention this because as a psychotherapist looking at the Socratic dialogues, I notice him doing psychological stuff that a philosopher or a classicist might not even register.

00:43:22 Speaker_00
So there's a bit in Xenophon where Socrates speaks to another young guy in a shop in the Agora, and this dude is a self-help junkie, as we would call it today.

00:43:32 Speaker_00
He literally has a collection, he's got the finest collection in Athens of self-improvement books.

00:43:37 Speaker_00
He says he collects the maxims of wise men, and he's trying to improve his character so that one day he can become a great statesman, and he wants to understand the nature of morality or justice.

00:43:47 Speaker_00
And Socrates questions about the definition of justice and quickly shows that he doesn't really understand it. He's contradicting himself.

00:43:54 Speaker_00
And so this guy thinks, well, I've been reading all these books and tried to memorize what they say, but when someone tries to get me to explain the meaning of these concepts, I just kind of fall apart.

00:44:03 Speaker_00
Because he's never really thought things through very deeply. He's just parroting stuff. He's learning passively. Socrates draws a diagram which I immediately recognized because we do it all the time in cognitive therapy.

00:44:15 Speaker_00
He draws two columns, probably on a wax tablet or something. And at the top of one column he writes injustice and at the top of the other column he writes justice. And he says, I want you to kind of brainstorm definitions of what's justice there.

00:44:30 Speaker_00
You want to be a just individual. And brainstorm examples of injustice. So for injustice, he comes up with things like lying or stealing, stuff like that, obvious examples of injustice.

00:44:46 Speaker_00
And then Socrates does exactly the same thing that we mentioned earlier. He brainstorms exceptions. He said, okay, lying. What if you're an elected general and you're lying to the enemy in order to deceive them in a military campaign?

00:44:58 Speaker_00
Is that unjust or would you consider that to be just under the circumstances? And so this young guy, Euthydemus is his name, he says, well, that's different. That's an exception, right?

00:45:07 Speaker_00
Socrates says, what if you're a parent and you're trying to give your kid medicine, but they won't take it unless you hide it in their food? Is that injustice or would that seem like it's just? He says, well, that's different as well.

00:45:18 Speaker_00
And then Socrates uses another example that's really well known in philosophy. He says, what if your friend was suicidal and they come to you and say, where did you hide my dagger? Like, would you lie to them and pretend that you don't know?

00:45:29 Speaker_00
Or would you say, oh, I guess I have this over here, you know, take it? And he says, well, that's different as well. These are kind of unusual circumstances.

00:45:37 Speaker_00
So Socrates says, well, maybe then there's more nuance to this idea that justice consists in always telling the truth and never lying. You seem to think that there's more to it than that. There's other perspectives, right?

00:45:50 Speaker_00
And this technique of drawing two columns, we can literally do it on coping strategies to get people to think, when would you practice mindfulness? And what might be the pros and cons of doing that? When might you try to fake it to make it?

00:46:05 Speaker_00
And when might that be a bad idea, right? When might it be a good idea to always speak your mind to other people and be assertive?

00:46:14 Speaker_00
And when might it be a better idea just to keep your mouth shut in some situations and know when to fight your battles and so on?

00:46:20 Speaker_00
And it's cognitive flexibility and coping flexibility, the ability to view situations from different perspectives, and the ability to choose intelligently between different types of coping strategies that really constitute, in the same way that I said before that wisdom is more like a skill rather than just a bunch of ideas or opinions that you could hold.

00:46:38 Speaker_00
I think that, to some extent, that's missing from a lot of modern self-improvement literature.

00:46:43 Speaker_00
The risk is then that people get techniques that work in some situations, but then they carry on using them rigidly in situations where they're no longer working, they're backfiring. I'll give you an example.

00:46:55 Speaker_00
Any self-help technique is going to backfire in some situations. is some techniques are more robust than others. Mindfulness is a really useful strategy. It works really well, right?

00:47:07 Speaker_00
But for instance, clients who have health anxiety and are constantly scanning their body for symptoms like, oh, I've just noticed, I think I noticed a weird sensation in my chest, right?

00:47:18 Speaker_00
Practicing mindfulness in some cases could actually just exacerbate or heighten their focus. It's threat monitoring for symptoms, basically, and paying too much attention to every slight twinge in their body, right?

00:47:31 Speaker_00
Social anxiety like we know that one of the main correlates of social anxiety is heightened self-focused attention so in fact many self-help techniques that people try to use in social situations actually increase their self-focused attention.

00:47:46 Speaker_00
right? So people with social anxiety will typically do things like trying to stand up tall and straight in their back and look people in the eye, right? Because they feel like that makes sense and it should make them more confident.

00:47:57 Speaker_00
But what they don't realize is often it heightens their self-focused attention unnaturally, and that contributes to social anxiety. And it also increases their cognitive load.

00:48:06 Speaker_00
So they're more likely to feel awkward because they're trying to walk and chew gum at the same time, right? And

00:48:11 Speaker_00
But getting people to think about the pros and cons of these different strategies, when might it be a good idea, when it might potentially backfire, is there a good way of doing mindfulness?

00:48:22 Speaker_00
And maybe there's a bad way of doing mindfulness in some situations. That's the wisdom that allows people.

00:48:30 Speaker_00
The ancient philosophers used to also say if you could give somebody... The problem with teaching moral precepts or coping strategies would be that if you give a piece of advice, a maxim, to someone who's wise, they'll use it wisely.

00:48:46 Speaker_00
But if you give it to someone who's foolish, they're probably going to use it foolishly. If you give coping strategies to somebody who's got severe anxiety, they're more likely just to turn it into a form of avoidance if you're not careful.

00:49:02 Speaker_00
The people who have the most severe problems are the ones that are most likely to misuse the type of strategies that we get in self-help books, basically. So what's often missing, I think, is this

00:49:13 Speaker_00
Meta skill if you like or being able to choose between strategies and figure out their pros and cons Which is actually one of the first things we'd normally do in cognitive therapy Yeah, very prophetic by Socrates to be able to see that out front.

00:49:28 Speaker_01
What was the organ on organ on? That's one of Aristotle's books, isn't it?

00:49:37 Speaker_01
Yes, I saw that and this sort of interesting pivot towards what you see with these two different people that one is focused very much on what seems to be practical but then there's this

00:49:51 Speaker_01
begin of a trajectory toward philosophy being involved in politics, philosophy being involved in sort of statesmanship with logic, syllacism, deduction, ethics, stuff like that. Why did Socrates not get involved in politics during his time? Or did he?

00:50:13 Speaker_01
How much did he?

00:50:15 Speaker_00
Yes and no. Generally speaking, he didn't get directly involved in politics. There was one incident where he was elected to a kind of committee overseeing a trial.

00:50:33 Speaker_00
Socrates took a principled stand, supposedly, in a situation where the mob were baying for the blood of a bunch of Athenian generals that were on trial, and he almost was executed as a result of doing that.

00:50:49 Speaker_00
But after that, I think he said that, look, if I was to get involved in politics, I'd just end up being killed, because the standard I would take would just... In Athens at that time, one of our sources suggested his thinking was he just wouldn't last very long.

00:51:12 Speaker_00
And it would be more constructive of him to kind of critique politics from the sidelines, as it were, rather than trying to get directly involved.

00:51:24 Speaker_01
Do you not say something about Roger Stone? Was there not some similarities between him and Roger Stone?

00:51:32 Speaker_00
I think there's some similarities and differences between him and Roger Stone. What's funny, Roger Stone is one of these people that have published books on rules. It's called Stone's Rules, his book.

00:51:43 Speaker_00
And some of them are the opposite of what Socrates would say. Roger Stone, I think it's fair to say, is a man who would probably characterize himself as being quite fixated on the idea of revenge. That comes through pretty clearly from his book.

00:52:01 Speaker_00
At no point in his book does he ever really discuss what he thinks is in the interest of society. He spends a lot more time discussing how much he hates his political opponents and how he uses politics as a means to get back at them, interestingly.

00:52:19 Speaker_00
I guess he has what you would call, with a small c, a very cynical attitude towards politics. It's very different from the way that someone like Socrates would have seen it.

00:52:30 Speaker_00
And Socrates, I think, would be a critic of this idea that revenge is a rational motive for us to have. I try to have an even-handed approach to understand it.

00:52:47 Speaker_00
Again, weighing up the pros and cons, I looked at Bridgestone's book and I thought, are there bits of this that kind of make sense in relation to ancient philosophy, and are there bits of it that seem like they might be the opposite?

00:52:57 Speaker_00
He says one or two things about resilience, I think his phrase is, turning chicken shit into chicken soup, or something like that, is the way he puts it. Very artsy. Yeah.

00:53:09 Speaker_00
He has this idea that we should adapt to adversity and develop emotional resilience, which kind of sounds a little bit like the Stoics.

00:53:18 Speaker_00
But what's missing from it, I guess he has some ideas about emotional resilience, but he doesn't seem to see any connection between that and social virtue, for example, or justice.

00:53:36 Speaker_00
He sees politics, I think, through a much more Machiavellian lens, as far as I can tell.

00:53:43 Speaker_01
Well, how would you summarize what Socrates believed about what a good life consisted of or how to achieve a good life? Did he talk about that?

00:53:54 Speaker_00
Yeah. I mean, again, the first thing he would do is apply... For example, when he's talking to that guy, Euthydemus, he asks him that very question, but he encourages him to think it through for himself, right?

00:54:04 Speaker_00
So Euthydemus is this young dude that's been reading loads of self-improvement books, and he says, okay, so what is a good life? Actually, Euthydemus says, where is the first place that I should begin applying philosophy, incidentally?

00:54:16 Speaker_00
And Socrates says, here. The first thing you should do is start by asking yourself what the goal of life is and what constitutes flourishing or eudaimonia. So basically what's good for us and what's bad for us in life.

00:54:28 Speaker_00
And Euthydemus says, well, OK, so stuff like noble birth, wealth, status, having a nice house, being healthy, having lots of friends are all good. Generally, people think that constitutes good fortune and flourishing in life.

00:54:45 Speaker_00
And then Socrates basically goes through the list and says, but each one of these things could potentially be bad. There's another dialogue by Plato where he provides a much clearer counter-argument. Let's start with wealth as the easiest example.

00:55:02 Speaker_00
Wealth in the hands of somebody who's wise and virtuous would allow them to do more wise and virtuous things.

00:55:09 Speaker_00
But if you give a big pile of money to somebody who's foolish and vicious, it's just going to allow them to do more foolish and vicious stuff, right? And the same would apply to status.

00:55:20 Speaker_00
And actually, most of these external goods, as they're known, in a sense, are more like practical advantages or opportunities that you have in life.

00:55:28 Speaker_00
And what really matters is how you make use of them, whether you use them wisely or whether you use them foolishly. So then doesn't that suggest that the only thing that's intrinsically good would be practical wisdom or moral wisdom.

00:55:43 Speaker_00
Because how you use other things, even the disadvantages you have, even poverty and sickness, might be used well by somebody who's profoundly wise. They might develop more resilience as a result. They might learn from the experience, for instance.

00:55:58 Speaker_00
But somebody who's foolish and vicious will use even every advantage in life badly.

00:56:04 Speaker_00
So it's by this kind of questioning method Socrates gets his interlocutors, usually young men just embarking on adult life basically, to realize that the things that most people assume to be the goal of life, like reputation and material success and stuff like that,

00:56:23 Speaker_00
aren't really intrinsically the most important thing in life, but what matters more is your ability to use these things well, which is something that they tend to have neglected and not really discussed.

00:56:34 Speaker_00
And so Socrates says, that's what we should be talking about. How do you use these things well?

00:56:39 Speaker_00
And so the goal of life, of flourishing, would consist in a kind of practical wisdom or moral wisdom, and also in the realization that the prevailing values of our society are kind of back to front, and the things that everybody is led to value, like consumerism and celebrity culture and all that kind of stuff, those are misplaced values, basically.

00:57:00 Speaker_01
Isn't it interesting that it's the values of our society talking about this thousands of years ago and them being the same values that everybody is still being swayed by now?

00:57:11 Speaker_00
I wonder about that. I think there's got to be a reason for that, and I don't pretend to know exactly what it is, but the ancient philosophers had some answers.

00:57:18 Speaker_00
I believe that part of it is, if you imagine when you're born as a child, you're kind of a blank slate to some extent, and you start interacting with adults before you can even speak, let alone reason.

00:57:31 Speaker_00
And so you just emulate what you see other people doing as a small child. And I think it partly comes from the fact that we model our values on other people's behavior.

00:57:43 Speaker_00
So as a child growing up, you think, you take a look around you and you think, what's all this meant to be about? You think, well, everyone else seems obsessed with money and property and status.

00:57:52 Speaker_00
So you just kind of naturally fall into that if you're not careful.

00:57:55 Speaker_01
Are you saying that we are the progeny of Socratic society's culture eventually just a few thousand years down the line?

00:58:04 Speaker_00
Well, yeah, I think we're just a product of the fact that we can't really understand each other deeply, I think is the problem, that we're basing our values and just observing other people's superficial behavior.

00:58:16 Speaker_00
So, for example, we might see, as a little kid, you might see your dad working really long hours and earning money to kind of pay off the mortgage and stuff like that.

00:58:24 Speaker_00
And if you're not careful, you might think, I guess working hard and earning money is what life is all about. But your dad might think, well, I'm doing that to care for my family.

00:58:33 Speaker_00
for example, because I consider being a good father to be what I want my life to be about. So we don't necessarily observe the values that are driving other people's behavior internally. I think we fall into this trap.

00:58:51 Speaker_00
This is my belief over and over again. because we are not able to see inside people's hearts. We end up with a superficial understanding of their values.

00:59:02 Speaker_00
And it's only over the course of life, as we develop the ability to reflect on our values and question them more deeply, we start to think, why are we doing all this stuff? Why am I buying a house? Why am I working long hours?

00:59:16 Speaker_00
It's for something deeper. It's in order to be a good person and a good parent and a good husband and stuff like that. And I think one of the things that can help us achieve that realization and question the prevailing values of our society is death.

00:59:33 Speaker_00
Because many people, I think, for whatever reason, on their deathbed, when they look back over the course of their life, think, is it really worth spending your life just trying to earn as much money as possible?

00:59:47 Speaker_00
Was that what, in retrospect, my life should have been about? Was writing a bestselling book or something really the most important thing? Or does that seem trivial in retrospect when you've only got a few days left to live or something like that?

01:00:02 Speaker_00
But I mean, if you're lucky, maybe you have a brush with death early on and survive, and that changes your perspective and that liberates you from these assumptions that we all have.

01:00:12 Speaker_00
Or sometimes when you're bereaved, like, you know, I lost my father when I was quite young. And I thought, to be honest, that really shook me and made me kind of question what's the point of all of that, because I saw him. He died of lung cancer.

01:00:26 Speaker_00
He was bedridden for about a year. And so I had about a year just to observe my father dying slowly and think he seemed to be going through this process of questioning what his life had stood for.

01:00:37 Speaker_00
And so when I was like 13, 14 years old, that kind of made me think, gee, I don't want to end up like that. At the end of my life thinking maybe I've spent my time and energy in the wrong way.

01:00:47 Speaker_00
So these things, and also sometimes I think having children and looking at your kids and thinking what you want for them and what values you want them to have, if we approach it in the right way, can help us to gain some insight and start to question what our values are.

01:01:01 Speaker_00
But if we don't do that, we just look around us, think everybody's obsessed with money and fame. We end up entering into the rat race, chasing around after that.

01:01:10 Speaker_00
Then one day you end up in your deathbed and the doctors tell you you've only got a few weeks left. And you look back on it and you think, what a huge waste of time. A lot of that was.

01:01:21 Speaker_00
Maybe I've got millions of dollars in my bank account, but you can't take it with you. Does it really do anything that worthwhile in retrospect? So that's why ancient philosophy is kind of obsessed with this question of death.

01:01:35 Speaker_00
Now the other thing that could help us would be reading about philosophers who contemplate the problem of our own mortality. That's why Plato's Apology is so influential because it depicts Socrates standing in court knowing he's about to be executed.

01:01:50 Speaker_01
Can you tell us the story of the end of Socrates' life? What happened? What was the build-up? Why did it occur?

01:01:57 Speaker_00
It's a slightly long and convoluted story. For some reason, he was brought to trial, charges were brought against him. So in Athenian law, other citizens could sue you, and he was brought to court under charges of impiety and corrupting the youth.

01:02:17 Speaker_00
What's impiety? like, that he didn't believe in the traditional gods, basically. And these are standard charges that were used against intellectuals, basically. You know, there was nothing new.

01:02:29 Speaker_00
But if you were, like, if you were too clever, other people in Athens would say you're corrupting the youth, right? And if you question things too much... An excuse for politically incorrect blasphemy.

01:02:41 Speaker_00
Yeah, you're engaged in blasphemy as well if you're starting to question some traditional religious ideas and stuff like that. So it was kind of like stock charge in a way.

01:02:50 Speaker_00
There are many reasons why some people think Socrates had certain political views. He also had friends that became controversial in Athenian society. And so his association with certain influential figures might have been part of it.

01:03:06 Speaker_00
And it may also be that he went around humiliating powerful people. He went out to politicians and said, can you define the nature of justice? And they'd be like, I don't know. And that made them embarrassed.

01:03:19 Speaker_00
And it made them look stupid in front of their fans and followers and stuff. And so they wanted for all of these reasons. I mean, Socrates' execution was overdetermined. There were multiple reasons why people wanted him dead.

01:03:34 Speaker_00
And some of it was propaganda. Like I mentioned earlier, there was a play about him that caricatured him. So Soxie's in the trial says, a lot of you guys, there were 500 people in the jury.

01:03:45 Speaker_00
And he says, most of you will know me mainly through this play. It would be like trial by media. Right. So I've never met most of you, but you've probably seen this play that makes me out to be this horrible, corrupt pseudo intellectual, right?

01:03:59 Speaker_00
Like a charlatan and stuff. So that's what you'll be judging me based on. And he stands up. He was meant to beg for mercy in court. He stands up and one of the first things he says is he refers to his military service.

01:04:11 Speaker_00
And to paraphrase, he basically says, I went out and fought in these battles and faced death. on behalf of Athens to defend the walls of the city. And you guys told me that was honorable.

01:04:23 Speaker_00
Now I'm standing in court facing death because I believe in the practice of philosophy as a way of improving the people that live in the city. What's the point in defending the walls of the city if the people that live in it are corrupt, right?

01:04:36 Speaker_00
So some of you think this is ridiculous, that I'm willing to risk my life in court. But you praised me for risking my life in the military. And this is actually much more important to me. It's how he kind of starts off his defense in a way.

01:04:48 Speaker_00
And then he goes on to talk about how he's not afraid of dying and all this kind of stuff. And he kind of reasons that through. But he doesn't beg for mercy. He's very unapologetic in Plato's Apology.

01:05:00 Speaker_00
And so the jury condemned him to death because of what Xenophon called his big talk in court. They thought he would bring his family in. And he would have weeping in front because that was what was normal.

01:05:17 Speaker_00
But right from the very beginning of the trial, his family weren't even present. So he made it clear that he wasn't going to beg for mercy before he even began speaking. And he basically gives them a lecture on philosophy.

01:05:28 Speaker_00
He carries on in court doing the very thing that he's on trial for. Everything about Socrates is paradoxical. But the other argument, again, there's many different aspects. He's like peeling the layers of an onion back.

01:05:44 Speaker_00
The other thing Xenophon says Socrates was like 71, 72. He's pretty old for Athenian society. And the implication in some of the dialogues is He thought, well, I'm starting to lose my faculties.

01:05:57 Speaker_00
Maybe I'm getting older, becoming more of a burden to my family.

01:06:00 Speaker_00
He'd reach a point where he thought, rather than trying to kind of just keep extending my life indefinitely while I'm in decline, I'd rather go out with a bang and make this huge statement. And he became a martyr for philosophy.

01:06:12 Speaker_00
But say what you will about Socrates, it worked. And even today, we're still talking about him. And he became an icon. to generations of young philosophers that followed him because they were inspired.

01:06:28 Speaker_00
Do you think he'd be less impactful if he hadn't died in that way? A hundred percent. He would still have had some impact. But I mean, the most famous thing about Socrates in the ancient world is Plato's Apology and his noble death.

01:06:43 Speaker_00
When Epictetus, the famous Stoic philosopher who was teaching like 400 years later, Right. So, you know, like that's Socrates's ancient history to Epictetus.

01:06:56 Speaker_00
He's the most famous quote from Epictetus, the most famous quote in all of Stoicism is people are not upset by events, but by their opinions about them. But no one ever quotes what he says next in the following sentence.

01:07:08 Speaker_00
He says, for example, death is not intrinsically terrible, because if it were, Socrates would have been afraid of dying and he wasn't. Right?

01:07:19 Speaker_00
So this is an important argument that you find in Socrates, but it's really highlighted in the Stoics, which is, you know, we use a similar kind of strategy in cognitive therapy.

01:07:31 Speaker_00
If somebody is depressed or angry or frightened by something, one of the first questions you'd normally ask is, does everyone else feel the same way about it? I mentioned Lampercle is getting angry with his mom.

01:07:40 Speaker_00
Socrates says, does other people all find your mom unbearable? Or do certain people view her differently? Socrates himself, for example, viewed it very differently. He got nagged by xanthopy, but it didn't really bother him.

01:07:54 Speaker_00
So one of the first questions we ask in cognitive therapy are, are other perspectives available? Is this the only way of looking at things, or might you potentially see it differently? Epictetus's main example of that, he goes straight for the jugular.

01:08:08 Speaker_00
He says, we're not upset by things, but by our opinions about them. Even when it comes to death, some people aren't scared of dying. Actually, loads of people aren't scared of dying.

01:08:20 Speaker_00
There are many people I've found, it's one of the weird things, particularly younger people often find it inconceivable. that someone wouldn't be afraid of dying.

01:08:29 Speaker_00
But a lot of elderly people are resigned to their own death because they've been bereaved many times, and maybe they've had many health scares.

01:08:36 Speaker_00
And so over the space of decades, in some cases, if not all, you speak to elderly people and they say, I've got over it. I've had years and years to get used to the idea of dying, so it doesn't really frighten me anymore.

01:08:50 Speaker_00
Some elderly people are terrified of dying, but others are surprisingly resigned to it. Sarkozy's again, 71, 72, facing his trial. He's an older guy living in a society where there's not a lot of medicine.

01:09:02 Speaker_00
I think he's the sort of dude that was perfectly resigned. He'd lived through many dangerous... It's hard to imagine how many brushes with death Socrates had had, right?

01:09:13 Speaker_00
I mean, they tried to execute him, I think, about three or four times altogether under different political regimes. He was involved in battles where thousands of people were killed around him.

01:09:23 Speaker_00
And he lived through a plague that killed tens of thousands of people in Athens. So he was a guy who was well accustomed to the fragility of his own existence, right? I mean, we live a very, very, very sheltered existence by comparison to that.

01:09:41 Speaker_00
But it's interesting that Epictetus goes straight for that example. He has Plato's Apology in mind. He's like, you want to know what it means to realize that it's your opinions that shape your fear.

01:09:54 Speaker_00
Look at the example of Socrates and how he was unafraid even of being executed in court. that's your primate. And that was the cardinal example to young philosophers in the ancient world.

01:10:09 Speaker_01
It's wild to think of somebody so steadfast in their beliefs, especially given the fact that almost all of their career was spent highlighting hypocrisy.

01:10:18 Speaker_01
So it would have been a odd curtain call had he have, at the final... Imagine how much more tarnished his entire philosophical career would have been had he have done the pliable begging for mercy on the floor doing... You know, it would have changed an awful lot, I think, about how people perceived his work.

01:10:38 Speaker_00
In the Crito, which is one of the dialogues that takes place when he's in prison, he's in prison for about a month awaiting execution, and his friends say, listen, we could just bribe the guards really easy and get you out of here and stuff.

01:10:49 Speaker_00
He talks about this fact that it would make him ridiculous in his own eyes if he now behaved inconsistently with his values.

01:10:59 Speaker_00
Allegedly, in the Phaedo, which is the last dialogue chronologically when Socrates drinks the actual hemlock, they bring the poison to him and his friend Crito, his childhood friend who grew up in the same suburb of Athens as him, Crito says to him,

01:11:20 Speaker_00
Some people don't drink the poison straight away. I mean, I think you're actually allowed to have a final meal. He had lots of friends around him when he was being executed, if you can imagine that. That was the norm in Athenian society.

01:11:31 Speaker_00
Yeah, it was like a party. I suppose there were about 10 or 20 people there. So they come and visit him every day in the prison. Weird kind of scenario. But they all gathered round and his family came. His wife brought his kids. He had a baby.

01:11:48 Speaker_00
All we know is that Xanthippe was carrying one of the children. So scholars think that kind of implies that it was a baby or a toddler. Socrates still got it at 72. So they say you don't have to drink it right away. And he says,

01:12:05 Speaker_00
It would seem ridiculous of me, I feel ridiculous in my eyes, to try and eke out another half an hour. He's like, I've been here for a month waiting to drink it. He goes, what am I going to do with another half hour?

01:12:20 Speaker_00
So that was supposedly his thinking was, I'm ready. I've prepared myself for this. I'd feel like a coward and it would seem inconsistent of me and ridiculous if I was like, yeah, yeah, you're right.

01:12:33 Speaker_00
Maybe I could leak out another hour or so before I have to drink it. So I'm ready to drink it. I've been sitting here for a month getting ready to drink it.

01:12:41 Speaker_01
The thing you've mentioned the Stoics a couple of times I'd like to talk about is sort of enduring influence on them and links between the two.

01:12:49 Speaker_01
But the first person that comes to mind for me is Seneca, somebody for whom proclamations and fantastic contributions to thought and philosophy and stuff were replete.

01:13:01 Speaker_01
But in his private life, when the rubber met the road, so to speak, he was much more malleable. He was playing these sorts of games, political games, and backbiting, and sucking up to people, and so on and so forth.

01:13:17 Speaker_00
Controversially, yeah, Xenak has always been a divisive and controversial figure. In some ways, he can be compared to Socrates. Socrates had a friend and possibly a lover called Alcibiades, who was one of the most influential statesmen.

01:13:32 Speaker_00
He was appointed the commander-in-chief of the Athenian military at one point, the most senior statesman in Athens, almost like an emperor over what had evolved into an Athenian empire. He was one of Socrates' best friends and closest associates.

01:13:49 Speaker_00
So his relationship with Alcibiades, trying to get him to be a better ruler and stuff, is a bit like Seneca and his relationship with Nero. But Seneca, I mean,

01:14:04 Speaker_00
Some people will find this controversial, but although we think of Seneca as a stoic philosopher, he was famous primarily as an author, not as a philosophy teacher. He probably didn't teach that much philosophy to Nero.

01:14:20 Speaker_00
He mainly trained him in rhetoric. So in some regards, Seneca was more like a Latin sophist than a philosopher. The sophists often quoted philosophy,

01:14:30 Speaker_00
like they made speeches out of it and things but they didn't attempt to live in accord with it in the way that the Stoics or Socrates did. So Seneca is somewhere in between.

01:14:39 Speaker_00
It may be that towards the end of his life, he embraced philosophy more fully. I think earlier in his life, philosophy was more something he used to become a famous author.

01:14:49 Speaker_00
He became famous by writing consolation letters, using stoicism to people that had been bereaved, that were wealthy, influential figures. He was like a self-help guru to the rich and famous in Roman society.

01:15:04 Speaker_00
And that's how he ended up becoming an advisor to Nero. So he was a figure that really was compromised by that in a number of ways. He was Nero's right-hand man. Nero was like a despot, a dictator.

01:15:21 Speaker_00
And he also wrote speeches defending Nero in the Senate and trying to, I mean, ridiculous, like saying that he was virtually a philosopher king and

01:15:32 Speaker_00
That he his hands were unstained by blood and all this kind of stuff that couldn't really imagine Socrates saying no these Socrates never sullied himself in that way There's a guy the Marcus Aurelius is rhetoric teacher We have his private letters and Marcus is talking to him about Seneca

01:15:56 Speaker_00
We don't see what Marcus wrote, unfortunately. We only see Fronto's replies. Fronto can't stand Seneca, and he died a few generations earlier. But I think it's partly he doesn't like his writing style.

01:16:10 Speaker_00
But he says looking for pearls of wisdom in Seneca's writings would be like someone grubbing around in the bottom of a sewer, trying to dig a few silver coins out of the filth. which is what the kids today call a sick burn.

01:16:27 Speaker_00
That's only something that another sophist could have come up with as an insult. But I think what he means is that Seneca in Rome would have been known more than today for his political speeches defending Nero.

01:16:41 Speaker_00
And we have a couple of examples of those.

01:16:43 Speaker_00
We have on clemency, for example, which is this letter to Nero that was probably made public that kind of puts Nero on something of a pedestal, also tries to improve his character and teach him more clemency or mercy.

01:16:58 Speaker_00
But at the same time, it praises him as a great ruler, which is ridiculous. He was a tyrant. And at the same time that Seneca was defending Nero,

01:17:08 Speaker_00
and propping up his regime, there were other Stoics that were fighting against Nero and opposing him in the Senate. They're called the Stoic Opposition, and several of them died or were exiled defying Nero. Epictetus

01:17:26 Speaker_00
who was kind of on the periphery of this, because Epictetus kind of came from the next generation, but he was a slave owned by Nero's Greek secretary, a guy called Epiphroditus, who was perhaps also Nero's bodyguard, according to one source.

01:17:42 Speaker_00
He was certainly very, very close to Nero. Epictetus idolizes the Stoic opposition and never mentioned Seneca once, so he clearly felt those were the Stoics from that generation that he looked up to.

01:17:57 Speaker_00
And Seneca was seen, even by other Stoics at the time, as a guy that had maybe compromised himself morally.

01:18:04 Speaker_01
What is the truth that we know about whether Socrates was really ugly or not?

01:18:10 Speaker_00
That's actually a contested point. There's a really cool book that came out recently by Armand Dangour, a classicist who wrote a book called Socrates and Love that I really like that's kind of speculative biography of Socrates.

01:18:26 Speaker_00
And he claims that Socrates was probably not as ugly as he's made out to be, and that particularly younger in life, he may have been quite a virile and attractive

01:18:36 Speaker_00
But, I mean, Socrates' friends describe him as walking like a pelican, having eyes like a crab, having a face like a torpedo fish, and being balding and pot-bellied. And he looks like a satyr as well, we're told.

01:18:56 Speaker_00
Like one of those kind of goat, like pan, or whatever. So those are his friends. Right. And so I guess it's partly the Athenian culture. They were kind of ribbing him a bit and stuff.

01:19:08 Speaker_00
If you go to Athens today, there's a famous statue of Socrates, a modern statue of him outside the university where he's incredibly buff. I mean, he definitely looks like he's been lifting weights, but that's a modern representation of him.

01:19:24 Speaker_00
The ancient sculptures we have of him are this little pot-bellied old man that's presented as more of a comedy character almost. So yeah, he makes fun of it.

01:19:35 Speaker_00
In Xenophon Symposium, Socrates jokes and he says, I think if we had a beauty contest, I would win it. And everyone kind of rolls about laughing at this. It seems ridiculous to them.

01:19:46 Speaker_00
But then it leads into him having a conversation about how they define beauty. And he starts to question whether beauty is actually something that comes from a person's character. And he says he's confident that he would win on those terms.

01:20:02 Speaker_00
But his friends still think it's a bit ridiculous of him. They thought, Xenophon to his credit says, you learn more about wise men by seeing them at their leisure. I believe that's how he begins the symposium.

01:20:14 Speaker_00
It's a drinking party and he presents Socrates as this guy who's quite witty and humorous, right? So he says things where he... Socrates was the type of guy that would say something to you and you think, Is he joking? Is he serious?

01:20:31 Speaker_00
And the answer is yes and no. He's kind of joking and serious. He's kind of both joking and serious at the same time, often I feel.

01:20:43 Speaker_01
I can't remember who it was from that era of philosophers. I seem to remember a story of one of those philosophers complaining that every time they went to dinner or had a party, the people got too drunk.

01:20:57 Speaker_01
And one of the solutions to people getting too drunk would be to reduce the size of the cups. If only we could make the size of the cup smaller. Was that Socrates?

01:21:04 Speaker_00
Yeah, I think that's in Xenophon's symposium, or it might be in Plato's symposium. In one of the symposiums, he says, and they do it, he asks them to bring out smaller cups. And he says, if we use smaller cups, we can moderate our drinking.

01:21:21 Speaker_00
It's ruining the quality of the conversation. He says alcohol, I think this is in Xenophon Symposium, he says alcohol is like watering a plant. He goes, if you don't give it enough, then it kind of shrivels up and dies.

01:21:33 Speaker_00
But if you give it too much, then it wilts. And he goes, this is the effect that I think wine has on conversation at a dinner party. You've got to find just the right level so that people loosen up. So he wasn't completely in favor of abstinence.

01:21:45 Speaker_00
He thought the right amount of wine was conducive to a good philosophical conversation and a dinner party.

01:21:52 Speaker_01
Didn't he stand in one place for a day at one point? Well, don't we all? No.

01:22:01 Speaker_00
No, I know I do but no he stood for 24 hours he's we're told from sunrise one day to sunrise the next day and Put a day in the middle of a battle No, we're not in the but like while they were besieging the city way in the north of Greece he we're told that he just froze and the other some of the other soldiers camped beside him overnight because they were kind of like I

01:22:30 Speaker_00
Is he really going to stand here all night barefoot in the cold like they were having bets on or something? And they watched him in the morning.

01:22:39 Speaker_00
I believe Plato says that he said a prayer to the rising sun, which may have been associated with God Apollo. One of the themes that runs through the dialogues is Socrates' association with the God Apollo.

01:22:54 Speaker_00
a debate about whether Apollo was associated with the sun that early. I think he was. Socrates saw the sun as an embodiment of the god Apollo, who's the patron god of philosophy. It was the priestess of Apollo who said, no man is wiser than Socrates.

01:23:10 Speaker_00
And it was outside the Temple of Apollo that says, Ganothai seouton, or know thyself, which is this statement maxim that became a kind of theme for the Socratic method in a way. It was pursuing self-knowledge. But he was in a habit of it.

01:23:27 Speaker_00
Plato tells us he used to regularly just freeze and meditate, going on a trance. Can you dig into the know thyself I mean, it comes up again and again in different dialogues. I'll tell you something really cool about it.

01:23:41 Speaker_00
There's a dialogue that I think is authentically attributed to Plato, but some scholars have questioned. It doesn't matter in a way. Somebody wrote it thousands of years ago.

01:23:52 Speaker_00
So there's a dialogue called the First Alcibiades that's about Socrates having a dialogue with this great statesman, I mean, someone said recently on Twitter they should make a movie about Al-Sabahideh.

01:24:04 Speaker_00
He has one of the most dramatic and colorful and exciting lives. And he was Socrates' companion. Socrates saved his life in battle. I mean, honestly, his life is so cinematic. It's like this huge epic adventure story.

01:24:18 Speaker_00
Now, in this dialogue, Socrates questions whether Al-Sabahideh is competent to become a political leader, a statesman. he proves to him by questioning that he doesn't really understand anything about the nature of justice, but he should.

01:24:31 Speaker_00
And then this leads into a conversation about, and Socrates says to Alcibiades, you know, what do you think it means?

01:24:39 Speaker_00
And he's like, well, I mean, I would think that I know myself, but you know, he says, well, it's not just like knowing the name of something. It's about really understanding it because this is how I understand it. And then he says,

01:24:51 Speaker_00
Often you get these remarkable metaphors or images in ancient literature, and this is one of my favorites. Socrates says that self-knowledge is like an eye that sees itself, right? It's the eye that sees itself.

01:25:05 Speaker_00
He said, it's like the God said that you're instructed your eye to see itself when he says that the mind should know itself. And he says to Alcibiades, how can the eye see itself? And Alcibiades is like, I guess like in a mirror.

01:25:19 Speaker_00
And Socrates says, well done. So how would the mind know itself by analogy? I guess you'd need some kind of mirror for your mind. I don't know how that would work though. And Socrates basically implies he's often a bit vague about things.

01:25:38 Speaker_00
He's engaged in this question and answer method rather than just giving a lecture. So he basically implies to Al-Sabahidis that engaging in philosophical dialogue or conversation with other people is a mirror for our own soul. And he understands that

01:25:55 Speaker_00
I mean, he was, again, way ahead of his time in this regard. And by the way, this is another problem for modern self-help, right? So there are many problems with self-help. One of the problems with self-help is the self part, right?

01:26:08 Speaker_00
In a sense, the person least qualified to help you. I don't know if you've noticed that there's actually research that shows this, right? I'm going all over the place, sorry.

01:26:18 Speaker_00
But I interviewed recently a guy called Igor Grossman, who you should speak to, right? He's a professor at the University of Waterloo who does research on the nature of wisdom, right? And he has research that shows, that confirms

01:26:33 Speaker_00
the suspicion that we all have that we're much better at giving other people advice than we are at giving ourselves advice, right? This is a sensitive subject for psychotherapists, right? Because all we do is give other people advice and stuff.

01:26:46 Speaker_00
But if you go to a psychotherapy conference and walk in the door, you would notice immediately that it's full of some of the craziest people you'll ever meet in your life.

01:26:56 Speaker_01
You're saying that being able to give advice to other people is not reliable evidence that you can give advice to yourself?

01:27:01 Speaker_00
Yeah. But over time, I think if you approach it in the right way, and I think it has something to do with empathy, right?

01:27:09 Speaker_00
If you identify with your clients in a sense that you put yourself in their shoes and you empathize with them, you might, to put it very simply, start to think, maybe I do some of the things that they do too. right?

01:27:21 Speaker_00
Maybe by helping them to see through their own mistakes and to troubleshoot them, I could kind of indirectly learn something about myself, right? But we're better at giving other people advice.

01:27:32 Speaker_00
It has been proven by Professor Grossman's research than we are at giving ourselves advice. And Socrates seems to realize this.

01:27:39 Speaker_00
This is partly why he thinks engaging in philosophical dialogue about the most important questions in life, as he puts it, is so important.

01:27:48 Speaker_00
This provides the best mirror he can imagine for learning about our own soul, our own mind, and coming to know ourselves, knowing our strengths and weaknesses, our limitations, and so on.

01:28:02 Speaker_00
There's another technique that he kind of uses, I think, that Professor Grossman has done research on. It might be worth mentioning because I know people are interested in this.

01:28:14 Speaker_00
Igor Grossman, based on his observations, based on his research, did a study. There are several studies like this.

01:28:23 Speaker_00
where they ask people to keep a journal where they have two groups, and one group describes their relationship problems and so on, attempting to resolve them in the first person. And the other group do the same thing, but in the third person.

01:28:37 Speaker_00
So rather than saying, oh, I forgot my wife's birthday, and she got really upset with me, and I don't know how to make it up to her, I would say, Donald forgot his wife's birthday. and she became really upset with him. So in the third person, right?

01:28:53 Speaker_00
As if I'm giving advice to another person, right? And they found, so they said, what happens if you make yourself do this? And by, they call it distant self-reflection.

01:29:02 Speaker_00
So by keeping a journal in the third person, they found that people exhibited measurably more wisdom in the advice and the solutions that they came up with for themselves. Now Socrates does something a bit like that.

01:29:15 Speaker_00
doesn't talk to himself that much in the third person, but usually in the second person. He engages in imaginary or hypothetical dialogues quite a lot.

01:29:23 Speaker_00
So for example, he imagines arguing with the laws of Athens at one point in the Critias, and the laws of Athens start criticizing him and questioning him.

01:29:34 Speaker_00
So they say he imagines that the laws are saying to him, Socrates, you're contradicting yourself in this way and that way and so on, and you're mistaken about this, right?

01:29:42 Speaker_00
But that's just an opportunity for him to critique himself in the second person and by name. So with greater objectivity, basically, and actually recycling some of the skills that he's honed

01:29:56 Speaker_00
by critiquing other people and applying the Socratic method to them in real way, in the flesh dialogues.

01:30:05 Speaker_01
It sounds to me like this guy is infallible. He lived the philosophy. Everything that he said was done with virtue. Very, very accurate. Where are Socrates' biggest weaknesses, philosophically, in your opinion?

01:30:21 Speaker_00
Oh, there are many. I mean, I told you he's like Jimi Hendrix, right?

01:30:25 Speaker_00
So some people might look at Jimi Hendrix and they might think, well, he's not, you know, maybe he's not like the technically the best guitarist that's ever lived, but there's no, there's still something kind of really unique about him, right?

01:30:37 Speaker_00
There was only ever one Jimi Hendrix, like there's nobody else really that kind of sounds exactly like him. And so Socrates is, I mean, the odd thing is that many academic philosophers will disagree with most of what Socrates says, right?

01:30:51 Speaker_00
And they'll often think that his arguments are incomplete, that there are gaps in them, that they're not very convincing.

01:31:00 Speaker_00
And I think even Socrates realized this, but those dialogues weren't written necessarily to persuade people that they should agree with him. They're more like teaching aids that are designed like an assault course for the mind.

01:31:14 Speaker_00
They're meant to train us to be able to think through puzzles from different perspectives. That's why I said what we learn from Socrates more is the method. He kind of implies certain really interesting conclusions.

01:31:30 Speaker_00
but they're often very radical conclusions. It might be worth mentioning some of them.

01:31:34 Speaker_00
So people usually, most philosophers disagree with them, but one of the ancient dialogues has Socrates saying, when you talk to a wise person, it's like being bitten by a small insect, like a mosquito or something, right?

01:31:50 Speaker_00
And you might not even notice when it happens. But then hours later, or the next day, you suddenly start to itch in the spot where you were bitten. And so people would say, that's what it's like when you talk to Socrates.

01:32:01 Speaker_00
He'll say stuff, and you think, that's a stupid argument, Socrates. It's not really convincing. It doesn't make any sense. And then 10 years later, you're still thinking about it, and it's kind of bothering you.

01:32:11 Speaker_00
But for instance, one of the other things I wrote about in my book, because again, it's very interesting in relation to modern psychology, Socrates had this radical position that injustice harms the perpetrator more than it does the victim.

01:32:29 Speaker_00
And he repeats this quite a lot. So people who read that think, that's a hard view to accept. But no one ever forgets it.

01:32:40 Speaker_00
Anyone that reads the platonic dialogues decades later will think, remember Socrates kept going on about this idea that acts of injustice harm the perpetrator more than they do the victim.

01:32:52 Speaker_00
In court he said, you guys that are putting me on trial and convincing the jury to sentence me to death unjustly are harming yourselves more than you're harming me. Epictetus quotes him at the last sentence of the Enchiridion.

01:33:08 Speaker_00
He says, Anetis and Meletus, the two guys that brought him to trial, can kill me, but they cannot harm me. Which is crazy, that's hardcore. First of all, the guy that believes that, hats off to him. No wonder he was resilient. Do we agree with him?

01:33:34 Speaker_00
There may be a case for it, but it's a bit like an extreme version of stoicism, basically. In relation to modern psychology, I think there's a lot we can take from it.

01:33:47 Speaker_00
So there's a body of research that shows that people who suffer from clinical depression tend to have high levels of perceived injustice, right?

01:33:57 Speaker_00
And we also know that anger is linked to depression, and anger is also directly linked to the perception of injustice. So how could our philosophy of justice affect emotions like anger and depression? Well,

01:34:17 Speaker_00
If we agreed with Socrates that our own injustice does us more harm than the injustice of others, then maybe we wouldn't become as depressed when we perceive injustice in the world around us. We might still object to that. We might still defy it.

01:34:37 Speaker_00
but we might respond to it differently emotionally.

01:34:41 Speaker_00
Socrates was fearless in court because he believed that the acts of injustice being inflicted on him couldn't really harm him, because they could take away his property, his reputation, and even his life.

01:34:54 Speaker_00
But they couldn't harm his moral character, and that was the most important thing to him. On his deathbed, he'd think, did I maintain my integrity throughout life? You guys can't take that away from me. Only I can do that to myself, right?

01:35:06 Speaker_00
Now, what's true in anyone's eyes, even if they don't go as far as that,

01:35:13 Speaker_00
Time and time again, what you'll find in therapy when you're working with people who are very angry, for instance, is that their anger usually, just at a practical level, does them more harm than the things that they're angry about.

01:35:30 Speaker_00
Maybe not in every single case, but I struggle to think of a case where that's not true. In virtually every client I work with, when we sit down and go, what are the consequences of your anger?

01:35:41 Speaker_00
One reason for that is that anger by its very nature impairs our ability to think about the consequences. That's why angry people act impulsively, right? It's well known.

01:35:52 Speaker_00
There's a large body of psychological research that shows, surprise, surprise, angry people behave impulsively.

01:35:58 Speaker_00
But they do that because they're not thinking straight, and they're not able to really think through and weigh up the consequences of their action. They tend to think very short term. We all do when we get really angry.

01:36:09 Speaker_00
We don't become really good at nuanced social problem solving when we're angry. Generally, it's like we become a kind of blunt instrument.

01:36:18 Speaker_00
And that's highlighted by the fact that very often angry people a day later or weeks later regret what they did when they're angry.

01:36:27 Speaker_00
Because now they're not angry, and they're thinking about the longer term consequences and the wider impact of what they did. So maybe some guy gets really angry, he tells his wife to shut up.

01:36:38 Speaker_00
And he gets what he wants, maybe she does shut up, right, in the moment. So it seems successful, makes her seem powerful, and then she divorces him, right? So it destroys the relationship, right?

01:36:50 Speaker_00
I mean, to caricature it a little bit, but often what we struggle to do is kind of think about the wider impact. I think about the longer term consequences of anger, and particularly in terms of relationships, where it's complex.

01:37:05 Speaker_00
Anger impairs our ability to empathize with other people. And when we get angry, we tend to engage in what's known as hostile attribution bias.

01:37:15 Speaker_00
So we usually think of people as acting just out of hostility towards us, whereas normally, if I say, oh, why did that guy not send me a Christmas card this year? I might go, well, there's probably a bunch of possible explanations for that.

01:37:31 Speaker_00
Maybe there's several reasons, depending on how you look at it. Whereas if I'm angry, I'll think, just because he's a jerk, that's why he did it. Out of just pure hostility.

01:37:42 Speaker_00
So we tend to have a very monolithic and simplistic understanding of other people's motives when we're angry, but that makes us rubbish at social problem solving. Anger is really bad for maintaining any kind of healthy relationship.

01:37:56 Speaker_00
So by its very nature, it means that we tend to underestimate the negative consequences of it. So in therapy, it's easy to go.

01:38:05 Speaker_00
You sit with people and you draw a little list and you go, what are all the ways in which anger is harming your physical health, your mental health? your relationship with other people. The other weird thing about it, anger tends to spread.

01:38:16 Speaker_00
So if I get angry, I could be watching TV and get really angry with some politician that I don't like, and then I turn around and I snap angrily at my cat. Now, my cat has done nothing.

01:38:33 Speaker_00
But it's not even involved in American politics in any shape or form, right?

01:38:39 Speaker_00
But because I'm annoyed with some politician that's on the news or whatever, I'm now also, by associating, I'm just annoyed with my cat as well, because I'm in an angry frame of mind. And maybe I'm going to be a bit short.

01:38:53 Speaker_00
My wife might say, what do you want for dinner? And I'll ask me later, right? Because I'm annoyed with... some so-called politician. So anger harms our relationships, even with the people that we're not initially angry with.

01:39:13 Speaker_00
We get angry with our perceived enemies, but we end up taking it out on our friends as well. if I'm not careful. So people massively underestimate the negative consequences of anger.

01:39:23 Speaker_00
And so usually in therapy, what people find is, yes, anger, your own anger is doing you more harm than the thing the politician said on TV or somebody not sending you a Christmas card.

01:39:35 Speaker_00
Not maybe in every case, but really for practical purposes in the majority of cases that we end up dealing with. So Socrates took it way further, but nevertheless, there's something really interesting about the point that he's making.

01:39:49 Speaker_01
Speaking of anger and frustration, I seem to remember you saying that you thought it would be impossible to write this book.

01:39:56 Speaker_00
I did think it was impossible. Why? I really did. I thought it was impossible to write it, because I thought Socrates was too complex a character. The Peloponnesian War is really annoying. something like 300 Greek states were involved in it.

01:40:20 Speaker_00
It went on for 27 years. So the politics of it and the history of it are so complex. I thought, how can I summarize that and condense it into a book and have the life of Socrates as a philosopher

01:40:34 Speaker_00
have some discussion of philosophy and philosophical dialogues and have some modern psychology and fit it all into 50,000 words. It just seemed like it would take three different books.

01:40:49 Speaker_00
But then I don't know how exactly I changed my mind, but what I realized was that I could maybe… I think what I did was I gave up trying to attempt a more academic history

01:41:01 Speaker_00
And I said from the outset, I'm going to approach this like I'm writing a movie screenplay. And so it'll be a dramatized version.

01:41:09 Speaker_00
I'm going to make it as close to the historical sources as I possibly can, but I'm going to have to take two characters at points and combine them together for simplicity.

01:41:19 Speaker_00
I'm going to have to massively abbreviate some of his arguments and just give key selections out of them. And I'm going to have to figure out ways to simplify the history of the Peloponnesian War. So

01:41:32 Speaker_00
I'm kind of surprised that I managed to compress all of that into one book. I thought very long and hard about how to do it. There was a lot of planning that went into it.

01:41:47 Speaker_00
I think I put four times as much work into this book as I put into the preceding How to Think Like a Roman Emperor.

01:41:58 Speaker_01
You're looking at second-hand sources, very little direct.

01:42:04 Speaker_01
Even with that, I learned this from you as well, that even when we think about Marcus Aurelius and how much information we have about him because we've got his direct writings and he was an emperor and prestigious and stuff like that.

01:42:17 Speaker_01
But even with him, because he didn't really do that much wrong, there wasn't that much writing about him. He didn't just simply attract insufficient drama.

01:42:26 Speaker_01
So then you think, OK, we have this guy of whom there are significantly better recorded people from history, and he is the well-recorded version compared with the new book I'm about to write, which is this bloke who I've got, like, basically wiretaps of, like ancient wiretaps.

01:42:43 Speaker_01
And that's the best that I can go on.

01:42:45 Speaker_00
Yeah, there's really frustrating things about the life of Socrates. So this thing about going to Delphi and the pronouncement is presented as a key moment in his life. We don't know for certain when it happened, right?

01:43:00 Speaker_00
So for instance, we don't know if it happened before or after other key events in his life, and then it would change the whole narrative.

01:43:07 Speaker_00
So with things like that, we could write an academic history where we argue about the possible dates, but in order to write a movie, you'd have to go, we have to pick a date, go and pick one.

01:43:18 Speaker_00
It could be one of maybe three different... You've just got to choose one and go with it in order to be able to tell the story.

01:43:24 Speaker_00
And I guess that's what liberated me, is I just thought, it needs to just be approached like we're writing a graphic novel or a movie. Which you did.

01:43:32 Speaker_01
You did that as well. You're a man of many literary pathways now.

01:43:38 Speaker_00
I take some satisfaction in that. Some authors just write the same book over and over again, and I don't know that I did this deliberately.

01:43:45 Speaker_00
It'd be like an actor that just plays the same kind of characters over and over, and then you've got other people that do lots of different things.

01:43:51 Speaker_00
But I look back at the books that I've written, although I did actually write three books in a row about Marcus Aurelius, they're all different genres. One's more of an academic history, one's a self-help book, one's a graphic novel.

01:44:06 Speaker_00
So, if I look at the books, I've probably written about eight books, they're all quite different from each other. I feel like I kind of stretched myself.

01:44:16 Speaker_00
I mean, the pros and cons of that are sometimes when you stretch yourself and do something you haven't done before, you can kind of fall flat on your face and maybe you figure out it's not your 40 or whatever.

01:44:25 Speaker_00
But the positive side is that that's how you grow. Like, you know, by taking a chance and doing something that's, you know, something you never even imagined that you'd be doing. I think that was part of it as well.

01:44:38 Speaker_00
I kind of thought it's too difficult to write a book like this about Socrates. And I thought, well, you know, as I get older, I'm less afraid of making mistakes, you know? And I thought, what's the worst that can happen?

01:44:50 Speaker_00
Maybe I'll just mess it up and the book will be rubbish or something like, you know, I thought, yeah, I think I'd rather just try. have a go at doing it.

01:44:57 Speaker_00
I think the other thing that swings it for me is I really always approach it with this question in mind.

01:45:06 Speaker_00
I imagine that if I could go back in time and give the book that I'm writing to my 17-year-old self or when I was 15 or something, I think, what would I want to write in a book that I'm giving to my younger self?

01:45:18 Speaker_00
And, you know, would I be kind of ashamed to write a book?" And then maybe we go, okay, we pick one of these dates for when the pronouncement was made at Delphi, and oh damn, we got it wrong.

01:45:31 Speaker_00
So maybe the chronology is a little bit off or something like that, or there's some other debatable historical point. Would my 17-year-old self care about that?

01:45:39 Speaker_00
Or would he just think, I don't really care if there's one or two details that are debatable. The story is really awesome.

01:45:45 Speaker_01
And it kind of gave me a... It's interestingly very Socratic to go about things like that. Okay, how can we apply this practically? How useful is this? And it's also very Aureliacian too, debating about what a good man is versus being one.

01:46:02 Speaker_00
Well, sometimes people ask you, how'd you go about writing a book? And I don't think I've ever said this on a podcast before, but funnily enough, the answer to this is kind of weird. There's a bunch of things I do that are quite specific.

01:46:18 Speaker_00
One is that I write the audio book first. So when I'm writing a book, I'm not writing a print book, I think I'm writing an audio book. And as part of that, I'll read it aloud a lot and I'll pay somebody, like a local barmaid or something,

01:46:34 Speaker_00
or one of my friend's friends or whatever, to come over and I'll give them a case of beer and I'll pay them whatever per hour, and I'll give them a big printout of the manuscript and I'll say, read the entire thing to me.

01:46:49 Speaker_00
I think last time we did it, it took 12 hours. I've got a video of the aftermath. We're sliding out of our chair. We've got some snacks piled up. I think it was 12 hours.

01:47:00 Speaker_00
Maddy, I think it was the name of my friend's friend that came over and read through the whole of how to think like Socrates. I think I did it several times because I wanted to know what it sounded like as well as reading it on the page.

01:47:14 Speaker_00
But the other thing I would do is I normally work in the library. And I would sit with a timer, and I'd practice a meditation technique for 10 minutes called the Benson Method, that's well-known in psychotherapy.

01:47:27 Speaker_00
So I'd just repeat a word over and over, and I'd try and notice that I'm doing this voluntarily, but there's also intrusive automatic thoughts that pop into my mind.

01:47:36 Speaker_00
So I'd try to become clearer about the differentiation between what I'm thinking voluntarily. I'd normally just say the number one, Or I count down from 10 to 0 over and over again on each out-breath, one number like 10, 9, 8, and then start again.

01:47:54 Speaker_00
Because then if you're counting and your attention wanders, you're more likely to notice it because you've broken the sequence, right?

01:48:01 Speaker_00
And I'll observe, I'll think I'm doing this voluntarily, I'm counting voluntarily, but if I suddenly think about paying my taxes or something, I'll go, that's an automatic thought. And I choose to think that I just popped into my mind.

01:48:11 Speaker_00
So I kind of train myself to become more aware of that distinction. Then for 10 minutes, I would imagine that I'm in Academia Platanos in Greece, I wrote about in the beginning of the book, and imagine I'm talking to Socrates.

01:48:24 Speaker_00
And the first thing I would always do, Chris, is shake his hand. And it took a surprisingly long time for him to get used to that.

01:48:31 Speaker_00
I always remember my imaginary Socrates in my mind, I insisted on shaking his hand, but he thought it was a bit weird at first. And I would say to him, I'd ask him lots of questions about anything that I was struggling with in the book.

01:48:47 Speaker_00
And what I generally found, any of the history stuff, His opinion, I'd be trying to think, we need to get an eye on this, get it accurate and stuff. And he would always, my imaginary Socrates anyway, would always be like, who cares?

01:49:02 Speaker_00
It's like, I don't even know why. He seemed to place surprisingly little importance on getting it historically accurate.

01:49:10 Speaker_00
And he said, no, just focus on telling the story of the literary character of Socrates in a way that gets people interested in the philosophy. That's what actually matters.

01:49:21 Speaker_00
There are other books that you can go and read where people try and argue through the evidence and try to get to the truth.

01:49:28 Speaker_01
I've been thinking about something not too dissimilar, a little bit more generalized, but I think what you're getting at as well, which is this odd split on the internet that we have at the moment.

01:49:41 Speaker_01
One is extreme credentialism, which I call experts only. If you don't have the requisite background, a lot of the time you're criticized. What do you know?

01:49:52 Speaker_01
You're not a... psychotherapist, psychedelics expert, sports and physio person, whatever you're pontificating about.

01:50:00 Speaker_01
And the reason I don't like it is that it's gotten rid of, I think, what Oscar Wilde called the Oxford manner, which is the ability to play gracefully with ideas. And it seems that very much the Socratic method is that.

01:50:14 Speaker_01
And then on the other side, you have this sort of over romanticization of the renegade, untrained, sort of orthogonal thinker.

01:50:23 Speaker_01
So we have these two worlds and you can kind of deploy them to whichever you need in order to make the other side seem stupid. So they don't have the credentials or this person is a flame wielding truth warrior.

01:50:36 Speaker_01
Yeah, they did it outside of the establishment. That's how they actually really know what's going on.

01:50:40 Speaker_01
But it's very, there's a large number of ways where unless you have a completely stellar academic career, it's unfettered by any kind of controversy or falling short at any time. It seems to me that

01:50:53 Speaker_01
that bar is unreasonably high for pretty much everybody to get over. And on top of all of that, it makes for a much less interesting world, because nobody's allowed to play with ideas outside of their domain of credentialized competence.

01:51:07 Speaker_00
See, you are thinking about it in a more Socratic way, because the very fact you're going, well, can I see it from more than one perspective? So the rule that you always have to be qualified, well, maybe there's some exceptions to that, right?

01:51:18 Speaker_00
And you can easily think of examples of great thinkers in the past that weren't qualified. They were outsiders or talented amateurs or whatever.

01:51:26 Speaker_00
But on the other hand, having zero qualifications in certain subjects clearly in some cases just leads to the Dunning-Kruger effect and people making schoolboy errors that are just almost cringeworthy if you know about the subject.

01:51:41 Speaker_00
I mean, the most obvious example of that, I think, is the internet is absolutely awash with people who can't tell the difference between causation and correlation in medical research.

01:51:55 Speaker_00
Newspapers and magazines have exploited that confusion for generations, but now it's become a much bigger thing on the internet. So understanding basic medical research methods.

01:52:09 Speaker_00
Getting confused about that does lead a lot of people to make basic mistakes, to misinterpret. If you don't know, during the pandemic, Every five minutes, people were waving around research studies and stuff that didn't have any medical research.

01:52:30 Speaker_00
So they had no idea what the stuff they were reading actually meant. And over and over again, they're just making the kind of mistakes that you would get taught not to make. So there are problems that happen.

01:52:45 Speaker_00
And there are people, when they discuss ancient philosophy, that make errors that an academic philosopher maybe wouldn't make. But yeah, I don't think there's a conclusive answer to this, but I think we just need to be aware.

01:52:57 Speaker_00
I think the best thing is just to kind of be aware of what are the pros and cons.

01:53:01 Speaker_00
In the same way that for any self-help technique, just at least sit down and make a list of what the strengths and weaknesses of this, what's a good way and a bad way of doing it.

01:53:10 Speaker_00
So you've got a slightly more nuanced understanding of it, not just a kind of rigid. But I think in general, this thing about amateurs versus experts is similar. There's pros and cons to it. Just knowing what those are is perhaps the main thing.

01:53:24 Speaker_00
I mean, I can tell you over the years, I'm friends with and know many well-respected academics, historians, classicists, philosophers. And I guess my attitude has changed a little bit from my experience over time.

01:53:43 Speaker_00
Sometimes, there are people that are incredibly highly qualified in the subject and say stuff that's bonkers, that other experts in the field just think they've lost their mind.

01:53:57 Speaker_00
Again, they're making mistakes that a first-year student would fail an assignment for doing. I mean, it's weird when you see that, but it happens a lot.

01:54:06 Speaker_00
You get books by people that are professors of philosophy or psychology or whatever, and you think a first-year undergraduate student would get lambasted for saying this stuff. It's crazy. The most highly credentialed people are often not experts.

01:54:25 Speaker_00
There's also a well-known problem with expertise. There's actually statistical research that shows that narrative reviews of medical research that are done by experts in a particular field tend to be unreliable.

01:54:45 Speaker_00
So normally you'd think this guy's like one of the most experienced heart surgeons in the world. So he's written an article reviewing all the research. It should be authoritative because he really knows what he's talking about.

01:54:55 Speaker_00
But experts are often biased and they're particularly prone to committing the cherry picking fallacy. So they just pick out studies that support their pet theory, whereas professional statisticians that don't have any skin in the game

01:55:07 Speaker_00
We'll just look at what all of the research says and cast a cold eye over it. And they'll say, no, this is what the research actually shows. This guy is just telling you what half of the research says because it supports his pet theory.

01:55:21 Speaker_00
And experts in a field, or if you want to put it another way, people that are really invested in certain theories that have been doing it for a long time, can be biased. And so their version of things can be quite distorted.

01:55:37 Speaker_00
But I think the other difficulty I wanted to mention to you in terms of this idea of getting information from experts and becoming kind of passive rather than depending on our own reason, there's another piece of research that's very influential in state-of-the-art, like modern behavioral psychology, which shows there's a problem with something called rule-governed behavior.

01:56:06 Speaker_00
So if you get two groups of participants in a study and you teach them how to solve some... You give them a puzzle they have to solve, like pressing three buttons in a particular order or whatever. And if they get it right, they get a reward.

01:56:20 Speaker_00
If they get it wrong, maybe they get some punishment, a buzzer goes off or something like that. They lose points or whatever. And in one group, You just give them oral or written instructions that say, this is how you solve the puzzle.

01:56:36 Speaker_00
The other group, they have to figure out through trial and error, right? This is phase one of the experiment. In phase two, so they do it repeatedly. In phase two, the rules that govern success change without telling them, right?

01:56:50 Speaker_00
So they have to adapt, basically. You create a circumstance where they have to adapt. One group had been verbally given the role or solution, the other group had to figure it out through trial and error.

01:57:02 Speaker_00
The group that have learned the rule verbally will keep trying it even though it's not working, whereas the group that had to figure it out themselves will adapt much more quickly. So we call this insensitivity to environmental change, right?

01:57:16 Speaker_00
And the reason it's really important is that's exactly what people who come for psychotherapy are doing. They're usually using some strategy that's not working. And so the puzzle is, why do they keep doing it when it's clearly not?

01:57:30 Speaker_00
Why do they keep yelling at their partners when their relationships keep breaking up as a result? Surely, after a while, they'd figure out, this isn't working out for me, and they'd start to adapt and change.

01:57:42 Speaker_00
So what is causing the rigidity in their behavior?

01:57:47 Speaker_00
And one of the explanations is that when we learn a rule from other people passively, or sometimes even if we get it from a book or something like that, there's a tendency, an established tendency, to overextend it and apply it too rigidly.

01:58:04 Speaker_00
And that can cause problems.

01:58:07 Speaker_01
Donald Robertson, ladies and gentlemen. Dude, I love you. I love all of the work that you do every time that you bring a new book out. I'm super excited. Have you got any idea what you're working on next?

01:58:15 Speaker_01
I know you've got your sub stack and stuff like that going.

01:58:18 Speaker_00
Well, I've written a bit like famous philosophers and stuff, Chris. But I mean, all honesty, the thing that's, I sat down and I kind of thought, what if I could only write one more book?

01:58:27 Speaker_00
You know, what do I really, really, really, really want to write a book about? And I thought, oh, I want to write something that I really feel is going to benefit the maximum number of people.

01:58:35 Speaker_00
So it's one of the biggest problems that I think people have. And it's something we've talked a lot about today, you know, for that reason, because it's kind of on my mind. I want to write a book about the philosophy and psychology of anger.

01:58:48 Speaker_00
It's one of those areas where there's a huge gulf between stuff that we actually know from psychological research. We know loads about anger, but most people aren't told about any of the research. Anger plays a huge role in politics.

01:59:05 Speaker_00
And on the internet, we've got trolling and cyberbullying and so much kind of aggression on social media, and so much kind of hostility and aggression in politics.

01:59:14 Speaker_00
But none of us are looking at it and thinking, oh, when people get angry, their thinking becomes skewed. For example, when people get angry, it's well known that they underestimate risk.

01:59:26 Speaker_00
So when you're really angry, you tend to expose yourself and other people around you to more danger than normal. We know loads of things like that about anger.

01:59:35 Speaker_00
But most, the majority of people aren't aware that the research tells us all this kind of stuff. So to them, anger is just a feeling. It's not something that changes their thinking. And if that's what anger does, how does it affect the electorate?

01:59:52 Speaker_00
How does it affect the behavior of politicians? There are measurable problems that it would cause. So I think there's a lot to be said. We've got some great, like Seneca has an entire book called On Anger.

02:00:03 Speaker_00
And we can easily compare all of that ancient philosophical literature to what some of the psychological research says today. So I think people can benefit a lot from working.

02:00:15 Speaker_00
I call anger management the royal road to self-improvement because most people that seek self-improvement, Anxiety and depression are self-blaming emotions, right?

02:00:29 Speaker_00
So people that are anxious or depressed tend to seek self-help or therapy, but angry people don't seek therapy, typically. Because if I'm really angry, Chris, I think you need therapy, buddy, not me. So angry people avoid self-help.

02:00:44 Speaker_00
So that's why you could go online and you see kind of self-improvement communities like the Manosphere, for example, in some cases. And there seems to be a lot of really angry people, yet they're talking about self-improvement.

02:00:58 Speaker_00
I don't know if you noticed that.

02:01:00 Speaker_01
Yeah, I mean, I certainly know that anybody that's ruminative in the depression or anxiety world, they've considered every six ways to Sunday different solution they come up with. I don't know that many angry people.

02:01:14 Speaker_01
I think I tend to try and avoid them or maybe they hide themselves from me. I'm not sure.

02:01:19 Speaker_00
You know if you read the comments on YouTube videos and things like that. Angry people.

02:01:24 Speaker_01
There's a lot of angry people on social media. Don, where should people go? Do they want to keep up to date with all of the things you're doing?

02:01:29 Speaker_00
Well, they can find me on Substack. That's probably where I mainly put stuff. And my website is just donaldrobertson.name. And then, yeah, if they look me up online, I'm involved with two non-profits.

02:01:43 Speaker_00
One's the Modern Stoicism Organization, which is running Stoic Week at the moment.

02:01:48 Speaker_00
And then the other one is a charity or non-profit that we founded in Greece called the Plato's Academy Center, where we're trying to raise funds to create a conference center adjacent to the original location of Plato's Academy.

02:02:02 Speaker_00
So those are the two things I'm interested in. People want to check those out as well. I need to give them a bit of a plug, Chris. But it's always an absolute pleasure. When I'm writing books, it's guys like you that I imagine reading them.

02:02:16 Speaker_00
I can see how passionate you are about these subjects. It's reassuring to me that you find this stuff interesting.

02:02:30 Speaker_01
You keep coming back on, you write, you, you write something and we'll sit down for two hours and talk about it every time. Awesome. I want to do, um, I want to do an episode with you, a primer on CBT.

02:02:41 Speaker_01
So maybe in the next sort of six months or so, we'll, we'll find a time slot that works. And I really want to try and just do a 30,000 foot view, the biggest principles, the biggest learnings and lessons.

02:02:51 Speaker_00
My specialism was always, I used to train therapists and I would always say that I was a techniques guy. So I was really interested in classifying different psychological techniques and comparing them and training.

02:03:04 Speaker_00
We used to train people and gather data and all of these scripted exercises that we had. So I love teaching people.

02:03:10 Speaker_00
And I feel like when we do, when I do interviews and things like that, the one thing I'd love to do more of is just say to people, this is how you'd actually do this visualization tech. This is technique. That's how you do this meditation technique.

02:03:23 Speaker_00
Like let's go through a bunch of them and show you how to actually do stuff.

02:03:25 Speaker_01
I would absolutely love to do that. And I think, you know, the more I haven't really been exposed properly to that much CBT, which is I feel increasingly embarrassed about. It's like this sort of elephant in the room that I get the impression

02:03:40 Speaker_01
much of the stuff that I consider as being sort of self-discovered wisdom that I'm all proud and sort of follow myself for. I'm like, if I'd just read enough CBT, I would have probably come across this already.

02:03:50 Speaker_01
All of the biggest realizations seem to have been arrived at by CBT in one form or another. So I'm looking forward to maybe having the egotistical veils ripped from my eyes about my own beautiful ideas instead. And yeah, we'll do that one next.

02:04:04 Speaker_01
Don, I appreciate the hell out of you. Thank you very much for today.

02:04:07 Speaker_00
Thanks man, it's been a pleasure, I really enjoyed that. It's good to see you again.

02:04:10 Speaker_01
And you.