Know Thyself - E202 - Donald Robertson: 2,400-Year-Old Stoic Wisdom To Conquer Your Ego & Live a Virtuous Life

Episode Date: July 7, 2026

Donald Robertson is a cognitive behavioral psychotherapist, author of over nine books, and one of the founding voices in the modern Stoicism movement. He has spent over 30 years studying how ancient Greek and Roman philosophy intersects with contemporary psychology, and in this conversation we start where it all begins: the maxim carved into the temple of Apollo at Delphi. Know thyself. We explore what it actually meant, who said it, and why it still matters more than most self-help advice written in the last century.What We Dive Into:1. The Stoics drew a sharp line between what actually happens and the value judgments we add on top of it. To say something "is awful" treats our emotional reaction as a fact about the world.2. Of all the emotions that derail a life, anger gets the least attention in therapy, self-help, and honest self-reflection.3. In the ancient world, wisdom was not something you consumed or memorized. It was something you practiced daily. Collecting insights without changing your behavior is closer to what the Sophists sold than to what Socrates taught.Know Thyself, but not by yourself. A guided space to return home to yourself.https://www.knowthyselfcollective.com✨THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS:https://drinkLMNT.com/KnowThyselfTry LMNT & get a free sample pack https://www.timeline.com/KNOWTHYSELF Save 20% off your Mitopure® Gummies___________00:00 Intro01:53 Know Thyself: The Three Sayings at Delphi07:44 What Philosophy Actually Means11:17 Socrates vs. the Sophists: Wisdom vs. Appearance18:05 The Stoic U-Turn: Reorienting What We Value23:59 Self-Knowledge as a Mirror for the Soul26:59 Values Clarification and the Eulogy Exercise35:02 Ad: LMNT36:03 Eudaimonia: Flourishing, Not Just Happiness39:40 Hardship as Opportunity for Character45:31 A Brief History of Stoicism53:22 Ad: Timeline Mitopure54:33 The Stoics Were Way Ahead of Their Time59:30 Stoicism, India, and Alexander the Great1:06:31 Early Christianity and Greek Philosophy1:14:03 Marcus Aurelius: The Man Behind the Meditations1:19:17 Philosophy Born from Injury: Marcus and Donald1:32:52 Uppercase vs. Lowercase Stoicism1:38:28 The Two Phases of Emotion1:45:47 Prosoché: The Practice of Paying Attention1:50:40 Appearance vs. Reality: The Stoic Core1:56:34 Turning the Chinese Proverb into a Practice2:02:44 The View from Above and the Acropolis2:11:28 Premeditatio Malorum: Rehearsing Adversity2:17:27 Anger as Temporary Madness2:23:26 De-Romanticizing Desire2:36:58 Sophists, Rhetoric, and Modern Influencers2:44:47 Why Self-Help Isn't More Helpful2:56:17 The Socratic Method as Cure for Conceit3:13:19 The King Who Rules Himself3:17:50 The Oracle of Delphi and Socrates' Mission3:33:44 Injustice Harms the Perpetrator More3:36:51 Donald's Own Life: Philosophy as a Path3:38:46 The Eleusinian Mysteries and Marcus's Initiation3:48:21 Learning to Die as Liberation3:55:29 Marcus's Naked Soul: Transparency as Practice3:58:07 What the Stoics Taught About Love4:02:05 Rapid Fire: The Great Philosophers4:16:00 Closing Message: You Underestimate Your Resilience___________✨MORE FROM DONALD ROBERTSON↳Substack: https://donaldrobertson.substack.com/↳Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1732050.Donald_J_Robertson↳Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/donaldjrobertson/↳YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@DonaldJRobertsonAuthor/featured↳https://donaldrobertson.name📜MORE FROM KNOW THYSELF↳Spotify: https://spoti.fi/4bZMq9l↳Apple: https://apple.co/4iATICX↳Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/↳TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@andreduqum↳Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/knowthyselfbyandreduqum/↳https://knowthyselfpodcast.com/👁️MORE FROM ANDRÉ↳Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/@andreduqum↳Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/know-thyself-podcast↳Book recs: https://www.knowthyselfpodcast.com/book-list

To know yourself is to understand that you are mortal and to come to terms with it. What would you want your life to stand for? That's the ultimate goal of all ancient Greek philosophy. Ancient Greeks and Romans would wipe the floor with most contemporary thinkers. They were way ahead of their time. We have Seneca, Diogenes, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius and Socrates and Zeno. Let's do it. Yeah.

So what does philosophy mean? There are so many rabbit holes I want to dive into. How do you think about death? What about love, anger, suffering, and even virtue? What did the Stoics teach about all of that? Philosophers seem to be often born from an early injury. I lost my father. I turned to philosophy as a sort of substitute father figure.

I think that's what Marcus Aurelius did. Marcus lost his father when he was young and he struggled with his own anger, but he conquered his temper, temper. Using stoicism as a way of coping with it. If we can really deal with anger, it might be the royal roads, the self-improvement, stop arguing about what it means to be a good man, just be one. Hey everyone, welcome back to the know-the-self podcast. Our guest today is one of the founding voices in the modern stoicism movement, beautifully weaving ancient philosophy and modern psychology.

He's written over nine books, like How to Think Like a Roman Epperer on Marcus. Sarales' life, how to think like Socrates, and he's also spent decades as a cognitive behavioral psychotherapist. And today's conversation is going to be exploring at start and then quickly going deeper with the oldest maxim, which is the ethos of this show. Donald Robertson, thank you so much for being here. Well, thank you for inviting me. I'm really looking forward to it. I thought we could start with the most obvious place to over 24 centuries ago. This maxim, know thyself carved at the Temple of Delphi. Yeah.

Tell me, tell me more. It really is a great place to start. And we were chatting earlier. I said, you know, if anybody is thinking about going to Greece, Delphi's like, I think it's a two or three-hour drive from Athens. Definitely go. It's one of the most amazing archaeological locations in the world. It's like being in Lord of the Rings or something like that.

The legend is that the god Apollo, slayed a dragon there. And when I go there, I always feel like, I kind of imagine that maybe he could have. It looks like someone could slay a dragon in this place. So it's a very magical place. And the ruins of the temple of Apollo are there. And famously, people from all over the Greek world used to go there.

Outside the temple, it had several sayings engraved. There were three that were particularly famous. the most famous was Ghanofi Se Outon or Know Thyself. And you could say, I think Plutarch it is who says, who was actually a priest, he was a philosopher and a historian, but Plutarch was also a priest at Delphi. And he says the sayings at Delphi are very concise. Actually, we have a list of 147 sayings that come from Delphi,

and almost all of them in Greek are two words. like they're compressed into two words and Plutarch says although these sayings are very concise books many volumes long have been written about their meaning so they're kind of like seeds that the seeds of philosophy in a sense definitely know that itself seems to have inspired the whole Socratic tradition it's a theme that runs throughout

classical philosophy what does it mean philosophy put different interpretations on it Socrates in the writings of Xenophon So we have dialogues about Socrates from Plato most famously But we also have dialogues that were written by one of his other students A Greek general called Xenophon

And Xenophon says that Socrates believed that know thyself meant Understand your strengths and weaknesses But he compares it to appraising a horse And checking out Like whether it's fat looking at his teeth and stuff like that like we should understand who we are, what we're capable of, if we're going to know our selves. But Seneca and Plutarch, if I remember rightly, put another interpretation on it,

which is kind of intriguing. They say that because you're entering the temple of Apollo, when you see these words, to know yourself is to know how you stand in relation to the gods. You're about to enter the presence of the god Apollo. So it's to understand that you are mortal. And so they compare Know Thyself to Memento Mori, it's to understand your own mortality and to come to terms with it. So that was over 24 centuries ago. What is your conception of how they would have arrived at that

as an important maxim to carve it at the forefront of the temple? Well, we have different stories about that. We're told that the sayings outside the temple, they're attributed to the seven sages of Greece who are these famous figures, statesmen and poets, who kind of preceded early philosophy in a sense, so very early.

But we're into the kind of legends somewhat now. So the attributions might just be kind of legendary, yeah. Some of the things that Greek philosophy is derived from are lost a bit in the midst of times So we're right at the threshold here of philosophy blending into legend, basically. The other sayings, some scholars believe they may even originally have gone together and formed a short poem.

So the first is know thyself. The second most famous is Made in Agan, which means nothing in excess, nothing too much, all things in moderation, basically. The connection may be that to know yourself would mean to know your limitations. And to refrain from excess to exercise temperance or moderation would require understanding what's too much for you as an individual. So you'd need self-knowledge in order to exercise temperance in a sense. And the third saying, no one ever talks about.

It's the one that everyone kind of forgot about, partly because it's a little bit tricky to translate, from ancient Greek. It means something like certainty or over certainty brings ruin. And that can be linked with this idea of moderation and self-knowledge as well. Ancient philosophers linked it to the Greek philosophy known as skepticism. So Greek skepticism is about suspending judgment. The idea was that a lot of problems come from being overly confident in our beliefs, being rigid in our thinking, basically. So know thyself. avoid excess and refrain from overconfident thinking.

Sounds like we could all use a bit more of that understanding. That's like a whole philosophy, right? Just like in a couple of little, so you can see what he meant when he said books many volumes long have been written elaborating on that. You can build a philosophy from these little seeds. I mean, we'll be spending the rest of this podcast, exploring them, I'm sure.

Yeah. What does philosophy mean? Well, literally it means love of wisdom. And actually, I'm glad you asked that question, because sometimes I believe that some of the most important mysteries are mysteries in broad daylight. You know, often we don't see the wood for the trees. And it's quite significant. Ancient philosophers thought the word philosophy was quite significant.

They took it, in a sense, more literally than we do today. The Stoics in particular, and Socrates certainly seemed to have thought that it's important to love wisdom and cherish it and prize it. Socrates famously said the unexamined life is not worth living. And that suggests that he thought our whole life should be dedicated to the pursuit of wisdom. So loving wisdom isn't just a kind of abstract or academic. It's a way of life in the ancient world. Yeah, not a mere means to acquire greater possessions, but become enriched internally in a way that could, that the other can never compare. It's a value system, you could say. It defines a value system that was characteristic of ancient philosophers. Is it true that it's rumored that Socrates was roaming the markets at Athens

saying, who knew, who knew there were so many things in this world in which I did not need? We have all these anecdotes about Socrates, so we've kind of got a lot of different sources. It's mainly many dialogues from Plato, quite a lot from Xenophon. And then we have what's sometimes called the anecdotal tradition, which are all these little little. fragments in various other authors, and one of them says that he walks around the Agora. He used to hang out there a lot of the time. I think it's Xenophon that tells us Socrates's daily routine. If I remember rightly, it was something like in the morning he would hang around in the gymnasia.

These are big recreational fields where Athenians would exercise. But weirdly, they also had libraries and shrines, and they also used to walk around and do philosophy there as well. So they did sports and philosophy in the same places. And then I think around the midday he would hang around in the Agora, which would be like hanging out in a shopping mall or something. And then in the evening, he would go to his friend's houses and have dinner and stuff like that and carry on discussing philosophy. So I think of him a little bit like he reminds me weirdly of Jimi Hendrix, right? So Jimmy Hendricks used to go to the toilet with his guitar strapped on. He would go to bed at night and put his guitar in his bed.

You know, he would fry eggs in the morning with his guitar strapped on. The psychologist caught time on task. Like, he was just constantly, like, playing around with his guitar. Socrates were told, did philosophy all day long. He basically just went around,

constantly discussing the nature of wisdom. And I think that comes through in Plato. Plato's dialogues are believed to be semi-fictional. Like, Plato's describing conversations that Socrates had before Plato was born in some cases. So, you know, we have to assume

there must be semi-fictionalized. But he certainly portrays somebody who comes across as if he's talked about these ideas endlessly, and he's really familiar with the logic of his arguments. There's a kind of richness and quality to his thinking that I think it's hard to fake.

It comes across as well-worn and genuine. I think it's so easy in the modern day where we have access to so much wisdom and information to have it be aphorisms and maxims that we memorize instead of sit with and integrate and actually infuse and change the way we act and view the world. Yeah, that's a really good point.

So wherever you find Socrates, you'll find these other dudes called sophists. They kind of go hand in hand. And Socrates, in a sense, is defined. by his reaction to the Sophists. Now, Sophos means wise man, basically. It comes from the Greek word Sophia that means wisdom. So there was a point in history,

like the generation before Socrates, someone for the first time, a guy called Protagoras, people would say, hey, Protagoras, what do you do for a living buddy? And Protagoras was the first person, allegedly, to say, I'm a professional, wise man. like that's what I do it's my job description basically

and Plato's dialogue of the same name the Protagoras he basically talks about this fact he was the first person to do that and Socrates thought there was something well like certainty brings ruin there was something conceited about that

he thought it was highly problematic I think Socrates thought that if you go around claiming to be wise it forces you to become kind of defensive about your beliefs. You can never really allow yourself to be proven wrong by your students. So it forces you to be kind of closed-minded and a bit defensive about your thinking. He didn't think it was a very healthy attitude. It wasn't conducive to learning. Socrates fundamentally opposed what he was doing

to the sophists. The sophists earn huge amounts of money and they became like rock stars, celebrities by traveling the world, teaching their wisdom. They gave long elaborate speeches and they taught sayings or maxims that people would memorize and repeat verbatim. People would memorize their speeches and repeat them verbatim. It's a little bit in some ways like having someone else do your thinking for you. Like if I pay a lot of money and I listen to this dude and I just repeat what he says, then maybe I could be as wise as he is. It reminds me in some ways of some of the concerns that people have about AI,

doing delegating their thinking to someone else. So Sophos had these students that just parroted what they were saying. And Socrates thought there was something fundamentally wrong about this. He was also notoriously suspicious about books. He thought it discouraged people from thinking for themselves. And so people sometimes are frustrated by the Socratic dialogues because in many cases they end in what scholars call apparea, which means a sort of bewilderment or confusion.

It's the opposite of the Sophos. this office would tell you what to think. Like Socrates leaves you with more questions often. But in the process of getting there, the journey of questioning, the meaning of wisdom, the meaning of courage, at the end you might not have a clear conclusion that you can sum up in a sentence, but somehow you've got a deeper understanding of the concept,

of the exceptions to your existing definitions. I'll give you a quick example, actually. Socrates is speaking to some Athenian generals in a dialogue called the Lackeys and he turns the conversation around to the concept of courage and asks them how they would define the nature of courage and one of the generals, I think it's Nekias,

says that courage is standing your ground in the face of the enemy. Now that's a very cliched Athenian definition of courage but the ancient Greeks were known for their phalanx formation and the crucial thing was to remain rigidly in formation because if you broke formation it would endanger the other guys that were fighting alongside you. So training people and drumming into them that they were to remain in formation and stand their ground

in the face of the enemy was fundamental to military discipline and that was how Nicaeus thought courage should be defined. As Socrates said, well that's a good definition. But what if you're in the cavalry and you charge into the enemy? rather than standing your ground. Isn't that equally courage? And he said,

what if you have to fight a tactical retreat? He said also the Spartans charge into the enemy, like cavalry do, but nobody would say that they lack courage. And the Athenian generals Lachias and Achaeus are gone, okay, those are kind of exceptions, Socrates. And Socrates said,

but this definition also only fits courage in wartime. What about courage and peace? can't people be courageous in peace time as well. So they don't really arrive at the end of this long dialogue a clear alternative definition of courage. But by pointing out these exceptions to the definition that they started with, which in a way was a form of intellectual conceit,

they thought they knew what courage was. Socrates shows them that they've got a partial understanding. The definition is not completely wrong, but it's kind of incomplete. So by the end of it, I would say, that they don't have a clear definition anymore. In a sense, they know less than they knew at the beginning of the dialogue. But if you'll forgive me for putting it this way,

they know less but understand more. I think that's what we get from those dialogues. That seems to be the product of sincere reasoning, right? And I love that you mentioned just the correlation to AI in this day and age because we can have access to conclusions, which we didn't really have, any business and reasoning to and don't have the proper process to get there that would have actually supported our understanding of it.

And so we can regurgitate things without actually knowing or understanding them. I just want to quickly go back to the Socratic saying, or when Socrates said, who knew there were so many things in this world in which I do not need? When we look at detachment, it begs into question this, you know, is renunciation truly letting go of things or is it a re-evaluation of what is actually meaningful and what is actually valuable in one's life? And when we are having this conversation today and exploring some of the greatest wisdom from these Stoic philosophers and applying it through the modern understanding today, I just want to get your perspective on that reorientation towards what is actually valuable

because there is a societal conditioning that value is to be gotten from the outside. And the Stoic understanding kind of flips it on its head, so I'd love for you to speak to that. Yeah. The Stoics literally call that epistrophe, which is a cool word. It's a Greek word that means like a religious conversion, but its literal meaning is doing a U-turn, turning around. So the Stoics thought what their philosophy demanded

was a radical U-turn in our values, basically, because they thought there was something about human nature that leads us generation after generation in perhaps every society in the world to overvalue the outcome of our actions, particularly wealth, property and reputation and status or today like how much money you've got in the bank and how many followers you've got on Facebook

or something like that perhaps. Well, the best way to explain us, I think, is actually to talk a little bit about another Plato's dialogue, funnily enough. We're talking about the Stoics, but in the surviving Stoic texts, we almost get the conclusion of these arguments. The Stoics often are taken arguments for granted

that they've inherited from Socrates and from other earlier philosophers. Socrates does all the kind of legwork. Socrates walks so the Stoics can run kind of thing. They're standing on his shoulders. In the Euthy Demas, one of Plato's dialogue Socrates is talking to a couple of young guys like he does and he says could you define good fortune? He likes getting people to define things right and you know Socrates often starts off by asking questions that people think are naive and simple but then halfway through the conversation it starts to get much trickier and he begins asking more paradoxical more difficult questions so he says well how would you define good fortune and like typically they respond by saying well that's a lot of you define good fortune and like typically they respond by saying well that's

It's a silly question. Socrates, everybody knows how you would define good fortune. It means having loads of money in a big house and a lot of status and a beautiful wife and all that kind of stuff. It's easy to define what good fortune looks like. That's what life is all about. And oh yeah, maybe having a good character, like nobility and wisdom and courage and stuff like that are part of it. And Socrates says, well, that's really interesting. I think you're on to something there. But hang on a minute, you know, just one more thing. He's a little bit like Colombo. I don't know if you remember Colombo, maybe before your time, but he was a detective and he'd be

walking away and he'd turn around and go, just one more thing, and then he'd ask a question that would kind of like be really penetrating. So Socrates is a little bit like that. He says, just one thing. Let's take the example of wealth. Now philosophers actually thought wealth was often the easiest

example to pick on in this regard. He say, suppose we got a big pile of money, a pile of gold, and we give it to somebody who's wise and virtuous, what would probably happen? And they said, well, I guess they could use that money to do a lot of wise and virtuous stuff.

And that'd be pretty cool. And Socrates was like, yeah, I can see that's what you're thinking of, right? What if we took that pile of money and gave it to somebody who was foolish and vicious, though? Ah, now, perhaps then they would use that money to do more foolish and vicious stuff, right? And then it wouldn't be so good. And Socrates says, is it possible then

that maybe money in itself is neither good nor bad? But what matters is the use that you make of it, and whether you use it wisely or whether you use it foolishly, whether you use it virtuously, or whether you use it viciously. In itself, it's just a kind of practical advantage. And in a sense, actually, maybe it allows you to have more control over your environment. But that could be good or bad, depending on your character and the amount of wisdom that you have.

And then he says, spoiler alert, or he doesn't really say that, but he kind of implicitly says that, He says this applies to all of the other things that you listed as well, all these external goods like status and reputation and stuff like that. You know, whether they're good or bad would ultimately depend on the use that you make of them. And so he says, doesn't this ultimately mean that all of these things are merely advantageous? And the deciding factor, perhaps the only truly fundamentally or ultimately good thing would be a particular type of wisdom. That's why philosophy is called the love of wisdom, right? It's clues in the name, kids, right?

It's right there in front of us. It's a mystery and broad daylight. So this is where the Stoics get this idea from, ultimately, this argument, that wisdom and virtue are what determine the value of other external goods. But society, for some reason, in human nature, dupe isn't to thinking that external goods are more important than our own character. So the epistrophe, the U-turn that we have to do, is not to abandon completely or negate the value of wealth and reputation,

but to see those things as merely advantageous, or, as the Stoics put it, preferable, but of fundamentally secondary importance to our own character. That U-turn that you referred to, gives me this visual of like examining the place one sees from you know it's like looking through the lens in which you look looking at through the lens yeah and i know i've heard you speak to some dialogues of of examining that and when you talk about know they self and you talk about the love of wisdom okay then if it's not just these external you know acquisitions of wealth and power that are

the ultimately the good thing that we should be trying to go after but rather the wisdom that uses and discerns how to use them, then what is the turn there? Could you speak a little bit more about the look inwards then? I thought you're getting pretty close to mentioning one of my favorite metaphors. I wanted you to say it. It's from the first Alcibiades. It's one of Plato's dialogues.

And Socrates is talking to Alcibiades, who's a whole, you know, kind of worms in himself. He's a very interesting character. his friend and possibly kind of lover as well. So Socrates says to Alcibiades that know thyself or self-knowledge or wisdom consists in, he says it would be like if the God said to you see yourself, how would you do that? He says to Al-Sabides and Al-Sabides says, well, I guess you'd look in a mirror or something like that and then you'd be able to see yourself. And Socrates says when the God Apollo says, thyself, is it possible that he means the mind should be like an eye that sees itself?

And he, again, he only implies this. He doesn't directly state this, but he very much, I think, implies that what would be the best mirror for the human soul would be where Socrates is constantly looking, not in a physical mirror, but the mirror that Socrates is looking in all day long every day is dialogue. Like he treats dialogue with other human beings as the best mirror for the human soul. And you know, that's partly,

you know, it's through dialogue that he examines his life. The unexamined life is not worth living. What does that look like? What did he do all day long? He went around talking to people, questioning their assumptions and encouraging them to question his assumptions. And he thought

through this process dialectic, he gained that was how he was, he's gaining a profound sense of self-awareness. So there's a kind of interesting overlap between what Socrates is talking about and what the Stoics are talking about and what we call mindfulness today. But there's also a sense in which it's, it also requires self-analysis and self-questioning on top of simple self-observation. Your summer travels deserve an upgrade.

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When you think about value clarification, what are some immediate questions we can ask ourselves because I think a lot of us don't really understand or have really, even just examine and ask yourselves, what do I fundamentally value? Well, the funny thing is the Socratic dialogues are all about that. It's amazing how much self-improve. I think people drink from a fire hose of self-improvement content today. When I was a wee boy in Scotland, I'd go to the bookshop, and there'd be like two or three self-help books kicking around.

And now people consume self-improvement content all day long. But not that much of it necessarily consists on really deep, reflection on our core values, which is what the Stoics and what Socrates thought was really the main thing that we should be doing. Seneca says no wind is favourable unless you know to which port you're sailing. So we need that north star. Like we need our fundamental goal, our sense of purpose. Otherwise, what does self-help or self-improvement even mean? Helping ourselves to do what? I don't know. So we have to figure out where it is that we're trying to get in order to figure out which types of self-help would be helpful for us.

So what are the questions that we can ask? The one question that I think is quite useful is what are the qualities that we admire most in other people in terms of their character. So sometimes it's useful to, sometimes I'll get clients to draw two columns and desire and admire at the top of them. And then I'll have them list the things

that they actually spend their time doing. and the things that they dedicate their life to pursuing in practice. Like, what did you do all day yesterday and the day before? Are these the things that you desire and pursue? And then what are the qualities that you admire in other people? You really reflect on that. People you know, but it could also be fictional characters. It could be historical figures, characters and movies that you admire.

And then what would happen if you took the qualities that you most admire in other people and spent more time each day, dedicating yourself to the cultivation of those qualities. Well, here, now let's talk a little bit more about psychology. So this is central to really all ancient virtue ethics. It's almost the ancient schools of philosophy all kind of argued with each other and disagreed with each other about a lot of things. But the funny thing is, they pretty much all agreed about the basic goal of life

involving cultivating virtue. far more than we do today. We've sort of lost sight of that consensus over the centuries somehow. And yet, we've rediscovered it in some ways in clinical practice and psychotherapy. So one of the leading evidence-based forms of treatment

for clinical depression is a thing called behavioural activation. And behavioural activation is a kind of pared-down version of CBT. it focuses on getting people to clarify their values and then schedule daily activities that are more consistent with them. And we know that works. We know that when people who are depressed do that generally helps alleviate the symptoms of depression

and it gives them more of a sense of meaning and purpose. That's pretty much all there is to that therapy. It's deliberately meant to be quite minimalist, like quite simple, simpler than most other forms of CBT. And the core of it is really, like, clearly very similar to the whole concept of ancient virtue ethics. So we've now got scientific evidence, if you like, that shows that this kind of approach has tangible benefits for people.

And by the way, not just for depression, similar approaches have been found helpful for people who have generalized anxiety disorder and other psychological problems. We know that people who suffer from depression and generalized anxiety tend to put a disproportionate amount of emphasis on external goals. The other thing about that is that if you want wealth and reputation,

those goals are future-oriented. So the more important you think they are, the more you'll allocate your attention to them, the more you'll become preoccupied with the future. Where is the future? Well, I'll tell you where it isn't. It's not here and now, right? It's not in the present.

So it hijacks your attention, like, and sucks all of your attention, sucks all of the life, all of the joy, out of the here and now, and it becomes captivated in anticipation of a hypothetical future. It's kind of soul-destroy in a way. But where is virtue located? Virtue happens the moment you make a commitment to begin acting in accord with your values. Virtue exists in the here and now from moment to moment.

So modern psychotherapists tend to think of this, they call it by different names, but values clarification, this kind of virtues ethic type approach, is being very complementary to and reinforcing of mindfulness practice. If you want to pay attention and become more aware of your own thinking and your own behavior, it makes sense to place more value on your own character. because valuing things outside yourself and in the future, you're just going to drag your attention repeatedly away from that. Well said, are there another question or two you like to ask to be able to help kind of pin the tail of donkey? There's a bunch of things you can ask,

but the other one would be you remember Stephen Covey, what is it, the seven habits of highly effective people? I always liked that book, right? I thought it was one of the best self-help. There's a lot of stuff in it actually that's very similar to stoicism. And

Stovey has this idea of an exercise, I think he calls it the eulogy exercise. You find similar things in existential therapy where he'd say, imagine your own funeral. And what you'd want people to say about you once you passed away in a eulogy. Basically, what would you want your life to stand for? This is similar

to the stoic idea of contours. completing your own mortality. So the idea is that when you're lying on your deathbed, like, you know, your final gasp, like nobody sits there and thinks, I wish I had more followers on Facebook at that point. Or, you know, I wish I'd spent more time earning more money over the years. One more TikTok scroll.

Yeah, it's like you can't take it with you. So those things kind of seem more trivial in retrospect when you think about like you're looking back from the end of your life. So that can really put things in perspective more and it tends to encourage us to think maybe the journey was more important than the outcome and maybe I should have paid more attention

to the way that I was living my life rather than the outcomes that I was trying to achieve. And another thing I like to ask, honestly, people sometimes ask me what they should do with their kids how can I teach my kids' stoicism and stuff like that? I think a good question to ask children is how we do define wisdom. And usually they just look at you, like, what are you talking about, dad?

You know, but if you're watching a movie or something, you could say, you know what wisdom is? Like, are some of these characters wiser than others? Like, do some of them do quite unwise things? Like, what's the difference? How can you tell, like, the wise from the unwise characters in this story or in this movie? And so just no one ever poses that question, right? But in a sense, that's one of the core questions.

That is what know thyself means in a sense. Like, you know, one of the core questions in ancient philosophy is just keeping coming back to what does wisdom look like? To love wisdom. What is it? What does it look like? And just literally asking that question can be quite helpful. A quick share. If you've been feeling sluggish, you might not need more sleep or caffeine. You could just be dehydrated. And hydration is not just about drinking enough water. It's about having the right electrolyte ratio to help your body properly absorb that fluid. Element happens to contain a science-backed ratio of sodium, potassium, and magnesium, which helps regulate your appetite, curb your cravings, and improve your brain function. There's no sugar or artificial colors. I also love their 12-ounce cans, which are sparkling.

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Links down in the description, as always. I hope you enjoy. Stay hydrated. Yeah, what is a life well lived, you know? And I think upon examining the inherently impermanent, transient ephemeral nature of all circumstances that arise and pass away in life and the things that we acquire that at some point are not by their nature going to fall away it kind of keeps on going to okay then what is the most essential valuable thing cultivation of oneself these things that may or may not go with you after you pass whatever happens after that point but will certainly

lead to a fulfilled life, when you think of eudamonia and the problem or question that stoicism is essentially aiming to be an answer for, could you set the stage for that and know what that really is? Eudemonia is traditionally translated as happiness, but that's not a very good translation, right? And it's partly because the words happiness has changed its meaning. Like many words change their meaning over the centuries. I don't know, like some of your views might be familiar with the word hapless. It's not used that often, but we talk about someone being a hapless individual, meaning that they're kind of unfortunate or their life is kind of wretched.

Hapless is the antonym, the opposite of happy. So happy used to mean flourishing or fortunate, and someone was hapless if they were doing badly. and they were an unfortunate situation in life. But somehow over the centuries, happy degenerated in its meaning, it lost its meaning, and it came to just mean a kind of warm glow, like a positive feeling or something like that, rather than actually doing well and objectively flourishing in life. So eudaimenea means happiness in the original sense,

in the sense of not being hapless, in the sense of being fulfilled, basically, of living well, of doing the best that you can, and life being the best version of yourself, the best human being that you could potentially be. And that's the ultimate goal of all ancient Greek philosophy, essentially. They all agree on that. Scholars will sometimes say pretty much all ancient philosophers in the West

agree that the goal of life is this thing called Eudaminia, but they disagree about how it should be defined. So, for example, Aristotle thought it was, they all think virtue is part of it. Again, they all agree on that. Aristotle thought virtue was central to it, but he also thought you need a certain amount of wealth and status and stuff like that as well. The Stoics went slightly further, and they said, no, we think wealth and reputation are actually irrelevant to Eudaimenea, and that the core of it is really only virtue.

or as Cicero says the Stoics believe that virtue is the only true good ultimately. It raises some interesting questions. For example, ancient philosophers would sometimes say Socrates was relatively poor. He kind of goes on about that quite a lot, although he wasn't that badly off. But he was relatively poor for someone of the Hoplite class, that's a middle class Athenian. And he had a lot of enemies. They made him drink hemlock in the end. So he wasn't that popular with the people that voted for his.

execution. So subsequent generations of philosophers could say, would Socrates's life have been improved if we gave him more money and he was more popular? And that's a curious question, because the stoic argument would be no, that in a sense what made Socrates Socrates was that he faced hardship and opposition and that allowed him to really exhibit his strength of character. Epictetus says The other Stoic role model is the god Hercules Funnily enough, he's like a big icon to the cynic philosophers and the stoics

Epic Tetus said, look if Hercules hadn't undertaken the 12 labour, so Hercules had like a really hard life according to legend. If Hercules hadn't been forced to complete, by the goddess Heera, been forced to complete the 12 labours, these really difficult tasks, the last one is he has to literally go down to Hades, like, and capture Cerberus, I think, and bring him back or something like that,

if he hadn't been forced to do all this really difficult stuff, if he'd just chosen to stay at home and snuggle comfortably under a blanket, Epictetus says he wouldn't even have been Hercules, like he wouldn't have been worthy of the name Hercules, unless he endured some hardship and he overcame it, like, an exhibited, virtue. It's a paradox in ancient philosophy that if life is too easy, then we potentially don't have the opportunity to develop courage, temperance, and strength of character. So a certain amount of hardship the Stoics think actually potentially works in our favour. We can gain something.

I'll tell you another anecdote that helps to flesh that out. Epic Titus was a pretty admirable guy. Most people today who are into Stoicism think, well, Epictetus is the man. So it's kind of humbling in a sense to think. Epicetus had heroes. There were guys that he was quite open about saying he looks up to certain individuals and he names them. So one of them is the unfortunately named Peconius Agrippinus, who was a Roman statesman. And Agrippinus was the guy who was having lunch one day and I think it was either Nero or the mission sent soldiers to him to tell him he'd been condemned to exile and Agrippinus packed up the food he was eating and he said well we have to go to Brindicum to the port we got to go through the Italian countryside he said there's a lovely

spot on the way where we could stop off for a picnic why so he found something positive even in being sent into exile. Epic Tito says that Agrippinus used to to write letters to himself. He literally sat down and wrote letters to himself. Here we have a clear description of an actual self-improvement technique. The guy sat down, wrote letters that he describes as eulogia,

like eulogies, in praise of exile, poverty, sickness. He doesn't tell us exactly what they look like, but we can pretty much guess that he was a stoic, we know. So for him to write in praise of sickness, in poverty, he almost certainly wrote letters to himself saying,

listen, if I cope well with this, then potentially I gain something by developing emotional resilience, temperance, wisdom. It strengthens my character. Like I can turn it into an exercise, potentially. It makes me be suspicious of the things I think I want in life, you know, and the things that we think we want in life. the road to get there. Yeah.

Because it's like, if comfort in that case does corrupt us to some degree, then perhaps we actually need and it would be wise to invite challenge into our life. We do that in many ways, you know, for fitness and stuff, we go to the gym and stuff like that. And people sometimes will go camping in the wilderness or whatever and do things that are quite physically demanding. So definitely, I think an interesting thing is when you look forward in life and you anticipate hardship, we're much more prone to catastrophize it. You think, well, if my relationship ended or my business went bust or I failed an exam, that would be awful.

Like, it seems looking forward. But it's interesting to notice how different it often is. Not always, but in many cases it seems very different in retrospect. So you look back and you think, well, most people have been in multiple relationships. over the course of your life. You go back and think, well, when I broke up with my girlfriend, let's say when I was a teenager, it seemed catastrophic at the time. Now in retrospect, it really doesn't seem like that catastrophic, like,

because I had other relationships since. You know, you look back and you think, I had a business and it really ran into problems, maybe even went bust or something. Was it at the end of the ball? I guess not. I'm still here. Like, so usually when you look back, it's easier for you to see things in context, to see that you moved on eventually and did other things.

And also you can look back and think maybe I gained some things from that. Maybe I learned something. Maybe it motivated me in certain ways. So it's interesting simply to think about that and notice how different catastrophes appear in the rearview mirror and how that's very different from the way that they seem to us when we're looking ahead at them. I would love to actually set the stage a little bit by getting a 30,000 foot bird's eye of of the timeline of some of the most prolific stoic thinkers,

with the understanding that there's probably many that don't have the fame and notoriety of certain folks for various reasons that were nonetheless very impactful. Take us back as much as you can with the date of the timelines. A plotted history of stoicism. Well, Socrates was executed in 399 BCE. They made him drink Hemlock. There were other philosophers before Socrates.

do you know what we call them? The pre-Socratics. So I like to tell people that because it just highlights how important, how cool is that? That's like saying the pre-Jimmy Hendrix Iraq or something, you know? So there's Pythagoras,

there are a handful of pre-Socratic philosophers that are really interesting. Pythagoras was one that influenced the Stoics. Heraclitus was another one that really influenced the Stoics. He's an interesting guy because he's had this doctrine called Panta Ray. Everything flows.

He said you can't step into the same river or twice, very similar to the Buddhist doctrine of what's it called, Nietzschevada, the doctrine of impermanence. Because it's not the same, where we're not the same man. Yeah, like, so it's a lot of people might, while we're on the subject,

Pythagoras taught reincarnation. He had the doctrine that Greeks called metam psychosis. So just kind of, like, mention in passing, like these ideas existed in the West, in Greece. And they were very familiar to the Stoics and to Plato and

at Socrates. And we don't know if there was any connection. There are rumours and legends and stories about communication between the East and the West at that point. There's even an obscure ancient anecdote about Socrates that says that he spoke to an Indian merchant, which is pretty unusual at that time, but it's not completely impossible. all right so we have Socrates and he dies

a hundred years later there's a guy called Xeno who's not Greek he's a Phoenician from Cyprus and the Phoenicians were famous for being a seafaring people they traded this purple dye

that was incredibly precious and expensive it was extracted from sea snails laboriously and his ship sank and this dye that took ages to extract from something that came out of the sea dissolved back into the sea that he came from. He lost his whole fortune. He was shipwrecked at Athens,

and Zeno supposedly said the most profitable journey that he ever made was the one where he lost his entire fortune and was bankrupted, according to legend, because that forced him to reconsider his whole life and his values. and he became a philosopher at that point. So this is like 100 years after Socrates died. But this time, Socratic philosophy had become quite entrenched in Athens. And Zeno went around and studied Platonic philosophy.

He studied became a cynic philosopher. He trained in the various other, the Magarian School of Philosophy, philosophies that aren't even that well known today. So he absorbed all these different perspectives on philosophy that were flourishing in Athens. at the time. And then eventually he founded his own school. Now, interestingly, the other schools of philosophy were located in gymnasia, like the Lyceum, like a sports ground where Aristotle taught,

the academy, where Plato taught. But Zeno founded his school in the Agora and the Stoerpoichel and a public porch. Where Socrates used to do philosophy in the marketplace. He went back to the marketplace you were talking about earlier, and he did philosophy in public. So some people think the Stoics seem to have been trying to get back to philosophy in the way that Socrates did it. So Zeno started the School of Philosophy that flourished for 500 years, which is kind of

impressive. Marxism, psychoanalysis in the modern world. kind of had a heyday that was like 100 years or something like that. But Stoicism lasted 500 years in the ancient world. And there was a continuous succession of teachers called Scholarx. Scholar just means the head of the school. The first three were Xenocleanthes and Chrysippus. Chrysippus was one of the greatest intellectuals of the ancient Western world.

He was considered to be up there with Arisipus. Aristotle, which is a high accolade. But none of his writing survived today. He wrote 700 books, probably more like essays. Is it true that less than 1% of the writings from that time exists? It's a rough estimate, yeah. About less than 1% roughly. And why is that?

Just for many reasons, because they, before the printing press, like text had to be manually copied by slaves usually, by hand. And so there weren't that many copies of certain books. books. They were stored in ancient libraries and often they were over time they deteriorated or there were fires like at the Library of Alexandria or they were looted. We think, we don't know if there's a kind of gap in our knowledge here but there was a Roman dictator called Sula who besieged Athens and things go kind of quiet after that in terms of philosophy. So some of the people believe that Sulla possibly looted the libraries and the philosophical schools and scrolls

were maybe just destroyed or sold or something like that. So unfortunately in the ancient world, stuff gets broken and destroyed. And, you know, like, it may be that by the time of Marcus it really is, he doesn't even have access, like, to some of the original story. He said he almost certainly wouldn't have access to all of Chris Hypers' books. He's maybe reading books by later authors who are quoting excerpts from Chrysippus, perhaps. Maybe he had some of the original texts. Just as an aside is an example, Crosypish wrote a book called Peripathon,

which means on the passions. The Greek word pathos means passion or emotion, but it also means pathology or illness weirdly. So it really means a book on psychopathology, which is essentially what it was, on the pathology of emotions. emotional disorders. And it was four volumes long.

And the fourth volume of it was called Totherapeuticon. And it was circulated on its own. It was a standalone book. It means on therapeutics. So Cresipus wrote a book on psychotherapy that 400 years later actually still existed.

It was being quoted by Galen, Marcus Aurelase's physician. And I think there's another author who quotes from it four, centuries later. So in ancient world, there was a book on psychotherapy. Probably the first ever book on cognitive behavioral therapy. Which is so counterintuitive, most people think Freud, right? That's what people think. Freud himself actually trained in psychotherapy. Modern psychotherapy originated about 50 years before Freud invented psychoanalysis. But it existed in ancient. Well,

like, not everything is new, right? So it does seem weird to people. But psychotherapy existed in the ancient world, not in the form that it did today, but they definitely had the concept of doing therapy on the emotions. And they used the medical model to describe it. It was pretty common. Socrates uses the medical model to describe his Socratic method. Hey, fam, quick share. What you know about mitochondria? Maybe you recall from biology class that they're the power plants of ourselves.

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with mitopure gummies from Timeline. Visit Timeline.com slash know-thelf and save 20% off your mitopure gummies. That's it. Timeline.com slash know thyself. Hope you enjoy. It seems like there can be this romanticizing of the ancient world

and sometimes perceiving like they're less sophisticated in some ways and obviously technologically they were, but in terms of the inner technology in many ways they were more superior. I mean, if people want to think that progress is linear and that people a long time ago were more primitive,

they should look at ancient rhetoric. Ancient Greeks and Romans who were educated would wipe the floor with most contemporary Americans or Brits or Canadians in terms of their grasp of rhetoric and logic, basically. So in some ways they had more time to study these subjects, and had a very sophisticated understanding of them. So to continue our ported history. Yeah, Chrysippus.

Then there were a bunch of other Stoics. There was a guy called Diogenes of Babylon who went to Rome as an ambassador. He was ahead of the Stoic school. And the Romans got into Stoicism at that point. When was that round about 100 BC, if I remember rightly? and so the Romans were becoming interested in Greek thought and they learned about different branches of Greek philosophy

but Stoicism was the one that really resonated with them they identified it with traditional Roman values so a number of Roman statesmen became kind of hooked on Stoicism and it began to spread through the Roman Republic then Cicero whose famous orator and statesman was not a Stoic, but studied Stoicism in Athens and wrote about it extensively.

So Cicero's writings are one of our main and one of our most sophisticated sources for understanding what the Stoics actually believed. There was one of his contemporaries, a guy called Cato the Younger, became a kind of iconic figure in Roman Stoicism because he was a political opponent of Julius Caesar. So Cato didn't leave any writings behind, but he left this kind of legacy in the world. Roman world. Then something weird happened. So we'll gloss over the fall at the end of the Republic and the assassination of Julius Caesar. His nephew, Octavian, becomes Augustus, the founder of the Roman Empire. And the interesting thing about that is that Augustus had two stoic tutors.

And he seems to have been quite into stoicism. He, towards the end of his life, started writing books on philosophy and circulating them among his friends, although they don't survive today. We've got no idea really what was in them. So it looks like the founder of the Roman Empire set this kind of precedent for Romans in the imperial age to believe that Stoicism was kind of the de facto philosophy of rulers, of emperors and statesmen. And then we have Nero, not a good example of Stoicism, being taught by Seneca. Seneca was Nero's personal tutor.

This was, Seneca's a contemporary of St. Paul. Seneca's brother is in the New Testament. He's mentioned briefly. Incidentally, the Stoics are literally mentioned in the New Testament. St. Paul goes to Athens, to the Ariopagus, and we were told that he spoke to a group of epicurean and stoic philosophers. So they have a kind of walk-on part, like a bit part, in the New Testament, weirdly. So then we have

Seneca and his life overlaps with that of Epictetus who was a slave and became the most influential teacher in the history of Rome. He went into exile and died when Marcus Aurelius was a young boy and that must have been like he, Marcus must have felt like he narrowly missed the opportunity to study under his hero, basically. But he got the next best thing.

Marcus almost certainly knew older men who probably met Epictetus in person. And one of them, a guy called Junius Rusticus, his closest friend and mentor, gave him a collection of writings that were transcriptions of the teachings, the teachings of Epictetus. We call them the discourses.

of Epic Titus today. So this would be like getting bookleg copies. It was nobody knew this existed originally. And I think it's possible that when Marcus really has got these books, he says he got them from the private collection of Junius Rusticus, which maybe implies that they weren't well known at that time. So he must have thought, I'll never get a chance to learn from Epictetus. And then his tutor went,

I've actually got all these transcriptions of his, like bookleg copies of a backer. that you'd missed a chance to see live, right? And Marcus Aurelius becomes completely devoted to Stoic philosophy. He is a big deal back in the day because he's a Roman emperor, so he makes Stoicism famous again, even more famous. And then weirdly, and we don't entirely know the reason for this, after Marcus Aurelius dies,

Stoicism kind of disappears from the historical record. It's kind of supplanted in popularity by Neoplatonism, and then eventually Christianity leads to the suppression of the pagan schools of philosophy. They're closed down eventually in 529 AD. So Stoicism kind of vanishes. But the Stoics, to borrow a phrase from Nietzsche, pressed their hand upon aeons as though upon wax.

They left their imprint on Christianity to some extent. So we kind of, in modern Western society, stoicism is weirdly familiar to us, because it permeated our culture in lots of subtle ways. It affected Latin poets, and their writings affected early modern poets. And so we've kind of absorbed it indirectly without realizing it in many cases. So often when people read the Stoics, they say,

this seems strangely familiar to me, and they're not sure why. But that's the influence throughout the ages. So you were asking about India. it's so cool and so frustrating because there may have been there are obvious parallels right

it's quite eerie sometimes especially with like the Vedantic tradition yeah it's super nerdy in a way to kind of get into this like but there's some cool things that are worth thinking about here there's legends about early legendary Greek figures

traveling to the east So the problem is, in case people are wondering, the problem is that Persia is in the way, right? So the Persians protected the Silk Roads. There are important trade routes. So you couldn't just go very easily from Greece to India and back and forth. I think there are ways that some merchants were able to travel through, but it was difficult.

There wasn't much contact. It was mediated by the Perseys. Persian Empire, until a guy that you may have heard of called Alexander the Great. Never heard of him. Never heard of that guy. So he was a big deal back in the day. So Alexander the Great conquered Persia. Like, you know, like remark.

I mean, he's a, he was a historical phenomenon. Like, you know, it's difficult to overstay. Like how remarkable it was. not necessarily a good guy and it's not celebrated in every culture but he did something remarkable in military terms he got to

Afghanistan and Pakistan he got pretty far and he took philosophers with him right so in particular he took a cynic philosopher and he took a guy

called Pyro of Ellis who was a skeptic philosopher So it could be the Greek philosophy influenced, Indian philosophy. I would be astounding if Indian philosophers didn't talk to some of these guys the Greek colonists that went there and like take some influence from them. There's a bit of scripture called the questions of King Melanda. And King Melanda is a Greek, I think in Afghanistan or Bactria. Like he's a king in a Greek colony.

So we find in some Eastern scriptures references to exchange of ideas. And it could be that some ideas from Indian philosophy penetrated, particularly through pyrovelis, like Greek skepticism. Some people believe may have been influenced by Indian philosophy. And there's a number of other kind of obscure references to some sort of contact between these two traditions. But it was Alexander the Great that opened up, like created a window of opportunity for communication between these cultures. I'm so intrigued and fascinated and it could spend the rest of this podcast just exploring the possibilities of what could have happened and crossover. And what's inspiring to me actually is when schools of thought perhaps maybe didn't even influence each other because of their geographic separation. and yet arrive at similar truths and knowings.

To me, that reinforces this pedantic maxim so that truth waits for eyes unclouded by longing. You know, when one actually becomes wise, no matter where you come from, you arrive at similar understandings about the nature of reality. Like it's kind of perennial or archetypal wisdom that people... The Stoics actually talk about that and they believe that it's no surprise. when thinkers are very confident

that they're on the right track, they're usually unsurprised when other people and other cultures arrive at the same conclusion. They tend to say, of course they would. Because we believe that this is right. You know, the doctrine of impermanence, there are guys like in India that believe,

yeah, because it's true. So, like, we'd be surprised if they didn't figure stuff like that out. So they're very open to that idea. I was going to mention that the odd thing about it is you know the way that these different cultures perceive each other

I have to say is different from the way that we tend to perceive them right so the Greeks actually have a name for Indian philosophers they call them the gimnosophoy which means naked wise men so that was how they

and there are some references to the things that they taught but they don't really seem to look that much like Vedanta. It's hard to kind of extract what it is that they're referencing to, and it may be that, you know, maybe the historians are making up some of the references or dialogues, but they definitely know that these guys exist. Here's a bit of trivia for you. One of Marcus Aurelius's teachers apparently traveled to Africa, to North Africa, to Egypt,

in some other parts of North Africa and supposedly met Jimnosophoy there. So I think there was some Indian philosophers or merchants that got traveled to Egypt. And so Marcus knew a guy who knew a guy, you know,

he knew a guy who allegedly had met Indian philosophers. But that's maybe about as close as we get, like, directly having contact with that culture. Yeah, the speculation is fascinating and endless, even Jesus' life, you know, those missing years of like what was happening in his 20s before he started teaching, you know,

what were the Stoaks understanding of Jesus of Nazareth and who he was? Was he a mystic, the Messiah? Was it a wide spectrum? Do you know? They didn't think much about Christianity. Really, like the Romans at that time, the first couple of centuries generally just viewed Christianity. First of all, they thought it was Jewish. They saw it mainly as a kind of Jewish sect. And I think the thing about understanding how ancient philosophy is interacted in a way is to realize there were more of them than we normally think. So early Christianity was probably more diverse than we would assume. And there were probably many other similar sects.

that the stoics or educated Romans in general would probably have seen Christianity as just kind of one among a number of similar sects or religions that were around at the time. And also sometimes they're a little bit vague about what Christians believe. And the form that popular versions of Christianity took, there were Christian sects that are extinct, long extinct.

They died off a few centuries later that might have been the most popular forms at the time. For example, Gnosticism. Yeah, Neosthenes. Yeah. So in 1945, there was a little guy who was like a

goat herd in Egypt and he going to work every day, he walked past a boulder. And it used to bug him because he thought, he just thought, you know when you see something, you think, that just doesn't look right. And he thought, this boulder

looks like it shouldn't be where it is. It's just like in a weird position at the bottom of a cliff. And so one day, I guess he was bored and he thought, I'm going to move it and see if there's anything underneath it. And he found a stash of books from the third century, AD, from a G. from a Gnostic Christian community that had stashed all of their codices, their version of the Bible, basically, because they'd probably been persecuted by, perhaps by other Christians, like what they were doing with them. unorthodox. So a bit of trivia for you. One of those codices that contains Gnostic and hermetic and kind of apocryphal Christian writings, but it also has Socrates in it weirdly. So there's a parallel universe in which an early version of Christianity has a Bible that includes Socrates.

Interesting. Yeah, it's got an excerpt, and translated into Coptic, it's an excerpt from Plato's Republic. Right. So early Christian community, early Christianity, things were different than we tend to assume. There were early Christian communities out there that considered Socrates to be part of their scripture. So if I haven't right, this goat herder

stumbled upon these vessels, which I believe were preserved from Batong. Is that right? Oh, I don't know about that. This isn't a place called Nash Hammadi. Yeah, yeah. The Nakhladi Library, right? And from what I understand, there was bat dung that was actually preserving a lot of the scrolls.

One of which, I believe, from the Gnostic text is the Gospel of Thomas, all these other potentially extracted, removed gospels from the early various Bibles, one of which saying, which I love from that to who knows if it's rightly or wrongly. attributed to Jesus, but if you bring forth that which is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth, that which is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you. And to me, it's the fact that we just recently, in the past 100 years, have discovered these texts that give us a window into the cross-pollination between these wisdom traditions is so cool. I would just love, I would die to see the people that were putting those scrolls.

that place at that time, you know, over a millennia ago, and us reinterpreting and trying to figure out what actually happened. So it's quite difficult to imagine now because Christianity evolved so much over the ages, but at certain points, like Christians, some scholars believe that early Christians saw themselves at one point as philosophers, like, you know, like more as, is a sort of philosophy. and certainly in the Gnostic Gospels, there's clearly more neoplatonic influence in them than in the surviving New Testament.

So early, like Christianity was in some ways more philosophical or more influenced by Greek philosophy than we might assume. There's also, we have writings from early Christian figures like Justin Martyr, who wrote a letter to, Marcus Aurelius that survives. And in it, he talks about Heraclitus, and he talks about stoicism. So sometimes early Christians were critics of stoicism, but they were kind of frenemies, for one of a better word.

So they would criticize stoicism, but they would also see themselves as having some common ground with the Stoics. Here's a bit of trivia for you. Dante, who wrote The Divine Comedy, made a good way of expressing the kind of relationship between the two things. you know, many centuries later. Describing purgatory, he takes Cato, who we mentioned earlier,

and Cato is the guardian of purgatory in Dante's Divine Comedy. So Cato is kind of, the way he portrays him, he says there are four stars behind him that illuminate him with their light. And Virgil and Dante fall to the way. their knees in front of him, right? He's like a pagan saint. Dante, Dante's super Catholic, right? So it's quite odd that he says, this guy technically can't get into heaven because he doesn't

believe in Jesus, but he's as close as you could possibly get. He has this idea of the Stoics as being like potentially the best that somebody could be, like the most virtuous someone could be in the eyes of Christianity without actually believing in Jesus. They're in the most elevated position in the afterlife. And so he sees, yeah, Kato is this kind of like pagan saint-like figure. And it shows this, you know, kind of strained in some ways, relationship. But relationship of admiration that Christians often had with Stoicism. I'm loving this conversation. There are so many various rabbit holes I want to dive deep into, you know, Marcus Aurelius. You're probably one of the living humans that knows

the most about his life, would you agree? Accidentally, you know, I've written three books about Marcus Aurelius, so I kind of spent quite a lot of time. I thought eventually I need to write a book about someone else. So then I wrote a book about Socrates. But yeah, I've spent quite a lot of time studying Marcus Aurelius. I wrote a graphic novel about him.

I wrote, How to Think Like a Roman Emperor. And I wrote a biography of him for Yale University Press, like a more kind of traditional biography of his life. I think he is a very like he's a very appealing figure to many people today I guess that's the simplest thing

that I could say about it I don't know if stoicism would be anywhere near as popular if it wasn't for Marcus Aurelius like he's a figure that people find it easy to relate to and also the meditations is a text that's quite accessible

yeah like so not as many people today are there are very there's no renaissance of of aristotelianism that's comparable to stoicism because there isn't an aristotelian text that's anywhere near as accessible and user-friendly as the meditations of Marcus Aurelius. So he's a great ambassador for stoicism in a sense.

There's something really inspiring about getting a window into the personal thoughts of a emperor like him at that time that a contemporary Western mind can directly relate to, which makes you think, oh, these perennial questions that were all faced with and pervasive without the human existence are not anything new,

which in some ways is refreshing, because that means that the answers, the solvents, the things that will actually provide solutions for, things that people have wrestled with for millennia. So what are the meditations and why is that text such a unique and popular text in this day and age? Well, I think you're right.

It is, I wrote a bit called How to Think Like a Roman Emperor and some people would say, well, how would we know how a Roman Emperor thought? And the answer is, well, duh, he literally tells us exactly how he thought. Like, he wrote his private thoughts down in detail for us. So it's remarkable, like you say. That very fact alone is quite remarkable.

we have this window into his thought process about how he's coping with the challenges that he faces as an emperor and not just kind of little asides like a diary or something. Like he's really going deep into his core philosophy. So it's in itself a remarkable book. There's another reason why it's so popular though, which is, funnily enough, some scholars, I think, don't really appreciate it, which is that Marcus Aurelius, I think is a far greater writer than he's normally given credit for being.

Now, the meditation is a private note. It's not a polished speech that he was right. It's not his best writing in that regard. But Marcus had an amazing education. And we can thank his mother for that, incidentally. You know, there's people stay behind every great man, there's a great woman. Like, Marcus really is a really good example of that

because his mother, Dimisha Lassila, probably engineered his education. was unusual about Marcus Aurelius' his education is he started studying philosophy when he was 12, which even in the ancient world is unusually young. And he had a lot of stoic tutors, like, some Romans may have had a stoic tutor.

Marcus had multiple stoic tutors. So if that's anything to do with his mother, and there's some hints that it may well be, she made him the stoic that he became, by giving him a stoic education. But he also studied rhetoric in Latin and in Greek. So for decades, and he was a big fan of oratory and rhetoric. So Marcus was a highly, highly trained and highly accomplished writer

and a great aphorist. So one of the reasons that people are very influenced by his writings is that they're easy to read, the language he uses captures philosophical ideas and very vivid images and sometimes the things he says are quite memorable as well so I think the quality of his writing matters we have some other stoic texts

that are pretty dry by comparison so that I think that's part of it you know people don't get quotes from CBT books tattooed on them right but I'm I kid you not like there are a whole websites dedicated to photographs of dudes with stoic tattoos like people keep showing me them and stuff right I think it's a good illustration in a way of how stoicism resonates with people in ways that other philosophies don't really and it's partly down to marcus a really is his mastery of the language that he's using what are your thoughts on

how philosophers seem to be often born from an early injury. Yeah. There is this search for meaning that seems to be quite embedded in people that have traumatic or difficult experiences early on. Yeah. That lead to great minds and philosophers. So Marcus really lost his father when he was young, but he had quite a traumatic life in other regards as well

in ways that, I mean, it gets kind of dark at certain points. we think of Hadrian as being one of the good emperors and one of the better emperors because he accomplished a lot of things but that wasn't the Hadrian that Marcus Aurelius knew Marcus Aurelius knew Hadrian towards the very end of his life in the last I think about four or five months of Hadrian's life Hadrian ordered Marcus to come and live in his villa

and I think that was like traumatising for him because Hadrian went crazy and had political purgeous, had senators executed, kept trying to kill himself, like he was a physical mess, he was very sick,

he was kind of depraved, really, and Marcus, I think it was about 15 like when Hadrian ordered him to come and live in his villa, I think it would have blown his mind, And my belief is that Marcus saw this kind of depravity and this guy's decline and paranoia and he thought he was frightened.

And he thought, I don't want to end up like this guy. And I think that threw him in the same way that Zeno said he was cast into the arms of philosophy by becoming bankrupt and losing everything. I think Marcus was thrown into the arms of philosophy by seeing this kind of madhouse that surrounded Adrian and thinking, how am I going to survive in this horrible, like, corrupt world? And he thought, I need to find something that I can cling on to.

And he attached himself to stoicism as something that he thought would allow him to cope with the demands of living, of court life in the Roman Empire. He's surrounded by people that are lying to him and manipulating him and want to assassinate him, you know, and temptations that would, you know, be way beyond most people's self-discipline. What through line do you draw with your own search for meaning and you as a young boy at 13 when your father passed and what ensued after is you kind of being labeled as a write-off or the anger that you had in your life? I'm curious, what through lines and what was it just like to be you? Well, I mean, I didn't really think about this much

when I first became interested in Marcus Aurelius, but I suppose it became obvious to me over time, you know, gradually sunk in that there are parallels between my own life and his. So I lost my father a bit later in life, but it still had a big impact on me, and I turned to philosophy as a sort of substitute father figure. I think that's what Marcus Aurelius did.

He thought, I don't have a dad telling me what sort of man to be, you know, to look at a little bit. to look up to as a role model, so I need to kind of somehow construct my own guide to life, and that was what philosophy did for him. That's the reason that I became interested in philosophy. And also, when I was a young guy, I had a lot of anger issues.

And I think in some ways almost like people, when someone has a problem, you know, it reaches a certain point. Sometimes they kind of come out the other side of it. So in some ways, I feel like my being really angry, as a young guy kind of helped me because I reached a point where I thought, I can't carry on like this. You know, I need to stop being angry. And that caused me to really question my anger at a much deeper

level than I would have done normally. Marcus Aurelius tells us in the meditations that he had a bad temper. Maybe he's implying, the paradoxes, he says that he struggled with his own anger. But the Roman histories tell us that he was known for being devoid of anger in the face of provocation. So you could argue that that paints a picture of somebody who naturally had this temper that he was struggling with, but succeeded perhaps in using stoicism as a way of coping with it so that other people started to perceive him as somebody that was the opposite. why, you know, he conquered his temper. So I think perhaps I found him relatable for that reason

that he was struggling with similar problems that I had struggled with. And so he kind of offered me, like, it was attractive to me because he was walking a similar path and offering me solutions, you know. I think that one of the things I'd say about the Stoics, what do you call a follower of Python? Pythagoras, a Pythagorean.

What do you call a follower of Epicurus, an Epicurean? Foller of Plato is called a Platonist, a follower of Aristotle, sometimes called an Aristotelian. What do we call a follower of Zeno? We don't call them a Zunonian, luckily, because that would be like a Martian or something like that. It would sound odd. We call them Stoics after the place where they met.

And there's a reason for that. The Stoics were famous for refusing to claim that their founder was perfectly wise, like a wise man or a guru or a sophist. They said, no, Zeno is fallible. Like, he's like Socrates. Like he refused, he portrayed himself more like a student

rather than a teacher. I think Seneca in one of his letters probably is echoing what earlier Stoics had said about Zeno. So Seneca writes these letters to a friend called Lusilius. And he says to Lusilius, I don't want you to think

of me as being like a physician and you're my patient. On the contrary, I think of me more like a fellow patient, simply one has been undergoing treatment for longer and maybe has more experience. So Stoics are describing something that's like a peer support approach, a bit like Alcoholics Anonymous for philosophers, like in a way. And I think that was something that was characteristic of Stoicism in the ancient world, is this emphasis on. one fallibility and recognizing the fallibility in other people, but also trying to find to extract from other people the qualities that are worth modelling. So not putting anyone on a pedestal, but actually looking at everybody and trying to see

what we could possibly learn from them. For example, at the beginning in book one of the meditations, Marcus lists the people that he admires, and he lists the quality. He talks about his adoptive father, Antoninus, at great length. He talks about Junius Rusticus at length, but he also lists his brother, Lucius Veris, who is a guy that it would be difficult to find as a role model. He was probably an alcoholic. He was kind of a failure in many regards as a co-emperor,

and he was sort of a notorious playboy, right? But Marcus says he's affectionate and loyal, and those qualities, can learn something from. So even in somebody who's deeply flawed and fallible, Marcus is able to find something admirable. Now again, in modern psychology, there's a body of literature on what's called modeling. And the literature on modeling makes a basic distinction between what we call mastery modeling and coping modeling. So mastery modeling is where you look at somebody who's nailed it. Like, say you want to model public speaking, you would look at somebody who's like the world's greatest public speaker

and model their mastery of the subject. But in therapy, the research shows that although there are some benefits to mastery modeling, it can also backfire because it can make people kind of idealize the goal that they're trying to work towards. And it doesn't necessarily show them the journey that they need to take to get there. It can be counterproductive in some ways.

coping modeling would be like Seneca, when you look at somebody who's not perfect, has maybe had similar problems to you. So if you have social anxiety, coping modeling would be somebody who had social anxiety, but has made some progress in dealing with it. So they're kind of still on the journey. But they show you the steps that you would need to take in order to improve. So stoicism seems to be more based around coping modeling. whereas other schools of ancient philosophy lean more towards mastery modeling. And I think that attracted me. Marcus is a flawed individual.

He acknowledges his flaws, and we see him working through them, not putting himself on a pedestal and trying to claim that he has mastery, but he's showing us what he needs to do in order to deal with his temper and deal with his fears. I resonate with a lot of your personal journey as well. For me internally, my parents split when I was around 6, 7, 8, which is a very formative time for your identity. And I had a lot of, I don't even know if I've talked about this much, but also a lot of anger at that time would get in fight at schools.

I was in the principal's office suspended multiple times. I think I've heard you share similar with you. And around, I think, like 12, 13, stepping into high school. school. I straightened out. Puberty helps. I remember one time my mom after, uh, I was like getting in fights, we were doing like these fight tournaments in our, in our bathroom during breaks. Um, and someone like recorded it and I got to the assistant principal, called me to the office. My mom came in. She slapped me in front of, in front of the principal. You know, that, that'll, that'll influence it for sure. Um, I think about that time, fast forwarding to like 18, 19, when I was started was part of this like men's group kind of thing we'd get together and we'd talk about

what we're learning about ourselves, accountability systems. We all would assign each other a different historical figure who everyone else thinks they most resemble and qualities like for me was like truth seeker and actually Marcus Aurelius was the person that they- Wow, that's awesome. Really? Yeah. Wow. So I look back and I just I put a lot of through lines with all this and resonate with the journey of the meaning-making and trying to make sense of a reality, which is confusing as an young boy. Yeah, I mean, we don't know that much

about the lives of many ancient philosophers. Like, we know, yeah, like, we know more about Marcus Aurelius, perhaps than we know about any other ancient Greek or Roman philosopher because he was a big deal. I mean, a lot of philosophers we don't even know what they look like because in many cases there are surviving statues

or images of them. Marcus Aurelius, we have a whole bunch of statues of him. We have archaeological evidence from coins and engravings about him. We have his private letters that were discovered in the 19th century. So we get this window into

his private life. We have Roman historians writing about him and other writers in the period just kind of mentioning him in passing. So we've got this kind of wealth of information that allows us to make him three-dimensional. Like, he's, one of the reasons he's attractive is he seems like a real person. I think that's also because, like, say with a figure like Augustus, he carefully managed his

public image, so we don't get to kind of see the real Augustus as clearly. Pallibility. Yeah. Whereas Marcus, we can, we can see who this guy was more clearly, you know, much better than we can with a lot of other historical figures. It makes him more relatable, I think. And also it didn't do any harm that there was a spike in popularity of Stoicism in the year 2000.

What happened in the year 2000 that made Stoicism suddenly become more popular? The movie Gladiator came out. Of course. And Richard Harris plays Marcus Aurelius in the first act. It gets killed but comedies in the movie. But a lot of people who had never picked up a book on full. philosophy in their lives. Who's this Marcus Aurelius do?

And a lot of young guys in particular would go out and sales of the meditation kind of shot up after that. And that was one of the things that helped push Stoicism into the limelight. So that now Stoicism has become a thing. It's almost like a subgenre of self-improvement in its own right today. Why does there seem to be this pervasive perception of Stoeroy being emotionally suppressed. That was a caricature of Stoicism that existed even in the ancient world.

But it's not what this is, it's a simplification of what the Stoics meant. And in some ways, it's kind of the opposite. By the way, Marcus Aurelius, were told, wept twice. Once was when he was attending a speech in the Senate about an earthquake that had happened in Asia Minor, where a lot of people had died. And he broke into tears, listening to the news about its tragedy. and another time was when Junius Rusticus, his tutor, died like he wept inconsolably. So I think Marcus Aurelius was a naturally sensitive man.

He wasn't like a robot. And he used stoicism as a way of helping him to manage his natural sensitivity. So when we talk about stoicism, here's a curious observation about language. everyone has heard the word cynical, epicurean, skeptical, academic, stoic, these are all names of ancient Greek schools of philosophy, but we use those words today to mean things that are tenuously related to what they originally meant.

So words often change their meaning over the centuries and the meaning becomes a caricature or a kind of diluted version. of what it originally meant. Like apathy? Yeah, like apathy is a good example, right? That's a technical term in stoic philosophy, but it's come to mean a very simplified version. It just means not feeling anything.

Whereas like a literal translation of apothea would be more like, well, I said earlier that pathos means emotion but also means pathology. So it would mean not experiencing pathological emotions. So it would be almost by definition it would be the outcome of psychotherapy, would be apathy. It wouldn't be the absence of feeling.

It would be the absence of pathological feelings. Stoicism today, scholars usually make a distinction between stoicism written with a lowercase S and capital S stoicism. So lowercase stoicism has come to mean having a stiff upper lip

or suppressing or concealing or concealing unpleasant or embarrassing emotions is how I would technically define it. Now the funny thing is there's actually quite a lot of research on lowercase stoicism. We can measure it as a coping style or kind of personality trait. And the evidence strongly suggests it's pretty unhealthy. It tends to backfire for a bunch of reasons. I think that's very interesting because a lot of people even today do try to be lowercase stoic. You know, some people would say it's associated with certain preconceptions about masculinity,

for example, men are supposed to be stoic in that sense, just have a stiff upper lip. There's a bunch of reasons why that doesn't work out that well in the long run. I mean, a really simple, obvious one is that people that score highly on, for example, the Liverpool Stoicism scale, which is one of the tools that's used to measure this, people that score highly on that will tend not to seek emotional support from their friends or these people don't go and see counselors or therapists basically because that's contrary to their coping style

and so surprise surprise people who don't seek emotional support or don't go to see therapists tend to cope more poorly in the long run than people that seek help so that's just one of several reasons why it can potentially backfire as more subtle reasons as well

the ancient Stoics had a much more nuanced and sophisticated understanding of emotion, right? They did not advocate suppressing emotions. That concept, I kind of wouldn't even make sense to them. It's not on their radar. The reason that this confusion exists in a way is that we have this thing that philosophers and psychologists call a folk psychology.

So folk psychology is the default set of assumptions that everybody shares about how the mind works and how emotions work, is baked into our culture and the language that we use, right? So we, everyone has this kind of psychological theory that we, you know, we use in daily life. Problem is that particularly with regard to the emotions, it's wrong. Like, our folk psychology, our default psychology, is very simplistic, and it's basically inaccurate. So the folk psychology of emotions, generally speaking, is the idea that an emotion is kind of homogenous. So anger is just like an energy that wells up inside you. And so people

think you should try and push it down or channel it into certain things or kind of purge it or vent it from your system. And those ways of coping make sense to people intuitively because they think of anger is a kind of homogenous energy that wells up inside them, right? But that is what anger is and it's not how it works. That's not how emotions in general function. So as soon as you look closely at something, you'll tend to realize that it has components. And what seems like a thing on close inspection often starts to look more like a process, right? So the Stoics saw the emotions more as processes that consist of disqualification. different phases and they saw them as being composite and combining certain ingredients together.

So one of the basic distinctions that Stoicism makes is between an initial automatic phase of emotion. Somebody walks up to you in the street and spits in your face, you'll react, right? Before you even have a chance to think about it, it'll trigger your amygdala and the rage circuit in your brain. Your blood pressure will shoot up. your body will release adrenaline, your muscles will tense up. Your attention will become narrow and focused. It's like a bunch of things happen automatically to you before you get a chance to even think about what's going on.

That's the automatic phase of emotion. So you can't suppress that. It's too late. It already happens before you get a chance to intervene in it. Maybe with training over time you could influence that. But in the moment, it's too fast, usually to do much about it. So the most that we can do is, the stoics said, it's indifferent. We should accept it.

It's just kind of, in a sense, a physical reaction. But what happens next is increasingly under voluntary control. So you might say you can't do anything about your reaction, but what you can do is change your response to your reaction. As Covey says, there's a gap between stimulus and response. That's exactly what the Stoics are interested in. And the transition between stage one and stage two of the, motion, which might be like a split second.

The Stoics refer to as Sun Katathesis, like they have this weird technical term for it, which I think is badly translated as assent to the initial impression. So you have the initial impression like, this guy's a jerk, and he deserves to be punched in the face,

right? That's, your brain creates that for you by appraising the threat and your coping options instantly, automatic. That's how it seems to you immediately. because your brain's done that for you. But then you have the opportunity to go, hang on a minute, hold your horses.

Is this the whole story? Is this accurate? Or is it kind of distorted? Is this really the best way to respond? Or might I regret this afterwards? I'm perhaps making things worse if I respond in this way. So Epictetus tells his students

that at this crucial gap between stimulus and response, you should say, take a moment. refrain from hasty assent to the impression. He says talk to your impression weirdly and say to it, you're just an impression and not entirely the thing that you claim to represent. So it's restores the subjectivity of our impression.

No angry person thinks, right now, I'm having the impression that this guy deserves to be punched on the nose. angry people think this guy does deserve to be punched in the nose and he is a jerk so when we're highly emotional when we escalate our emotions we take our impressions and we fuse them with reality

we treat them as if they're facts like this guy is a jerk it's like Kuzibski called it the is of identity not just this guy seems like a jerk to me this guy is a jerk as if it's an objective fact as if I expect everyone else to agree with me about it, right?

Once I make that transition, that's synchata thesis. Like, once I fuse my perception with reality, I'm kind of now inhabiting the impression. I'm trapped inside it. That's become my world. Now, I'm living in a world where there's a guy in front of me that's jerk and he deserves to be punched. So it's almost now I'm inevitably going to experience

the escalation of the emotion. The Stoics want us to kind of introduce a pause at that point before that happens to catch it early and say hang on a minute, hold your horses like this is just an impression. It's not the whole story, it's never the whole story. And maybe it's distorting things

or exaggerating things in certain regards. Normally that happens. I'll explain a very simple way of understanding this kind of two-phase model, which is weirdly consistent with modern research and emotions. So hopefully already you can see how this is a more sophisticated understanding of emotion

that changes the coping strategies that you would potentially use. How could you cope in a healthy way with emotions if you don't make these basic distinctions, right? You're going to be handicapped in that regard if you just think of emotion as a kind of vague ball where everything's matched together. So a good example would be,

one of my favorite examples is you're walking through the woods and midnight, out of the corner of your eye, you see a snake. And immediately, your heart starts beating, your body releases adrenaline. It triggers the fight-of-flight response, activates your amygdala. Two seconds later, you look more closely at it,

and you think that's not a snake. It's an old bit of rope or a rubber hose or something like that. What happens now is that your prefrontal cortex, has started to re-evaluate your initial impression and it's noticed that it's inaccurate. So unconsciously, at a neurological level, it sends an inhibitory signal to your amygdala and says turn off the alarm, like it's a false alarm.

Now, the interesting thing is you're still going to be anxious for a while. Your body will stop releasing adrenaline, but it's going to take 10, 20 minutes, whatever, for your body to break down the adrenaline that's already circulating. So it's going to take you a while to. restore your, your hands might still be shaking for five or ten minutes afterwards, right? There's a recovery period. But that's normal. Like, it's normal for our emotions to be triggered

rapidly, automatically, but in a fast and loose way. So what we gain from that is a rapid response, but the price we pay for it is that it's imprecise, inaccurate and leads to a number of false alarms. and there's a tendency to exaggerate threats and underestimate our coping ability. What's supposed to happen is that we then reappraise like when we've got a little bit more time like we begin to reappraise our hot take

like our initial impression. And cognitive therapy in a sense is just building on that by doing that in a more sophisticated way. So Stoics understood we need to buy ourselves a little bit more time ideally at that point. And the easiest way to do that actually is just to tell yourself, slow down, take a moment, like hold your horses,

like stop and think. Is your initial impression, is your hot take really accurate? Or might it be slightly distorted? This is, I think in a way that you could describe that as a sort of mindfulness. The stoics call it proso-hoi. It means paying attention. In a sense, this is kind of the first step in almost any type. of self-help or psychotherapy perhaps. I'm curious because my perception through the lens of modern psychology and also ancient wisdom traditions like Buddhism

would ask us similarly to examine the gap between the stimulus and the response and how our hardwired need for survival makes us vigilant for any perceived threat and stress and how if I'm going to come to you, Donald, and sling insults your way in English

in a way that matches with your own perceived inadequacies, that is going to be triggering for you because in some way you believe on some level, if you're triggered emotionally, on some level that these things are actually true about you. And likewise, from the Buddhist perspective, they ask us and invite us to pay attention to the changes in our biochemistry. There's always an abnormality in the breath and a biochemical sensation that's always coupled

with these sanscars, these old triggers and wounds embedded deep in our mind. And to become a free individual, to wake up to the truth of who we are, we need to begin examining these automatic algorithmic patterns that are almost enacting in and of themselves. And that is an inherently unconscious way to live life. Of course, it brings compassion into the equation for largely their unconscious processes in which we have no control over. I love that the invitation that you're bringing is to start to give some gap, give some space and breath into the gap between our opinions about the events and the events in it of themselves.

I think to kind of circle back to where we started with the lowercase stoicism and so on. So people who have that simplistic idea would think the goal is just to kind of eliminate all of their feelings. And that might be an unrealistic goal. So the Stoics would say, no, the goal is to notice, recognize the initial automatic subcortical like threat responses and so on that are just part of human nature but also just to kind of realize that they're just automatic responses

and you don't, the stories say you don't actually have to buy into them. You know, the odd thing is it changes our perception but I would compare it to if you're high on drugs or you're drunk, you just drank a bottle of whiskey, you know, you might think,

I feel like I should phone up one of my relatives that I don't go on with and have, you know, tell them I really think of them, right? So one person might do that, and another person might think, hang on a minute, I'm drunk. Like, I'm not thinking straight.

You know, I can't trust some of these impressions that I have right now. They're kind of distorted. And that's kind of what the, that self-awareness of somebody who's drunk or high, realizing that they're drunk or high, is the type of self-awareness that the Stoics are talking about.

They have a technical term for this. They call these initial automatic faces. They call them the first movements of the proto-passions, propathiae is the term that they use. So those they think are just natural. But the trick is not being swept along by them, but being able to kind of step back from them. Like not trying to eliminate them or suppress them, but just accepting that they're natural and realizing that we don't necessarily have to allow them to control us, we can choose what we do next in response to them. it makes me think about how it's been helpful in my life also is just examining the physics of what's happening

you know you make these sounds which i'm interpreting in my brain through the language of english and my understanding to create this meaning but if you were to come to me and speak in pig latin or italian um all the sudden there's no trigger because i i'm not making any meaning out of what you're saying And it seems like many of the great wisdom traditions and stoicism certainly included in that is reminding us to examine the delta between what is and everything else, what really happens in reality and the meaning that is asserted on top of it. And I'm curious your thoughts there because I've heard you refer to the Stoics endeavor to live in accordance with nature in a sense and to be with what.

is and to see reality clearly for what it is. So any other thoughts you have there on the difference between what's really happening in the physical world and all the stuff that we put on top of it? Well, one way of understanding Stoicism, I think it's kind of useful. The slogan of Stoicism was living in agreement with nature. It's a little bit cryptic. And its connotations are slightly different in the original Greek. But that was what they said was the goal of life. They said that is Stoicism, living in agreement with nature.

Marksorilius uses that phrase many times, by the way, even nearly 500 years after Zeno coined it. Throughout the history of Stoicism, this was kind of central to how people understood it. It doesn't mean just kind of going along with your animal instincts, though. The Stoics viewed nature

slightly differently from the way that we would today. They saw reason as being part of human nature. So they said that living in agreement with nature is synonymous with living rationally, but using reason in an integrated and consistent way, basically. And they thought, one way of understanding how we do that is that we should perceive the world accurately. How do we perceive the world accurately? They said that we should only give our assent or acceptors reality, fuse with reality, impressions that we consider to be accurate and objectively true, right? So they thought one of the main problems is that we assign too much value to things that are outside of our direct control.

They seem to think that's the main way that we distort our perception of external events. So I lose my job. Or Epictetus would say, by all means, I sent to the impression that you've lost your job. that's like a fact, right? It might not be the whole story. It's probably incomplete. But, you know, apart from that, it's subjectively true, perhaps.

It's a failed description of events. That's what his quote about the opinions of events is getting at. Yeah. He says it's not events that upset us, but rather are opinions about them. And specifically our opinions about how bad they are, basically, are value judgments. He says something kind of cute.

he says if somebody's been sent into exile or sent to prison say he's been sent into exile say I've lost my job but he says but do not add the word alas right so he says that when you add the value judgment when you catastrophize it

you're going beyond the objective facts the catastrophicness the awfulness of it isn't a physical property of the event our language biases us to think that it is. We say this is big, it's small, it's black, it's white,

it's awful. As if awfulness is a physical property of the event. I'm just calling it like it is. Yeah. Like, you know, but actually it would be more accurate to say it's large, it's small, it's black, it's white, and I

evaluate it as awful. It's more about, when I say something's awful, it's more that I'm expressing my attitude towards it. But the grammar of the language misleads us into thinking that we're just describing an objective fact. And that's some catathesis,

right? This is awful. It's the is of identity. Once I think that defines the external world, I lose control at that point, because I'm now treating it as if it's a fact rather than it being an attitude that I could possibly change. There's a big difference between saying

this is awful and saying right now in my current physiological state, my current neurological state, from my current perspective, I'm evaluating this as being awful. But that's not the whole story about it. And other people might evaluate it differently.

I myself, tomorrow, in a different neurological and physiological state, looking back on it, might evaluate it slightly differently. So that seems like a more kind of rational objective way of describing what's going on. It seems kind of pedantic to spell it out like that. But the emotional difference between saying it is awful and saying, from my current perspective, I'm evaluating it as awful, although I know that's not the whole story and it's not the only way of evaluating it.

Night and day. The stories would say, but the second one is more accurate, right? They want to restore our sense that these are just impressions and not facts about the world. You could say a big theme, you know, know thyself is a theme that runs through ancient philosophy. Another big theme that runs through most Greek philosophy is just this basic distinction between appearance and reality.

And the Stoics think that, you know, Suncatathesis, the root of pathology is when we confuse appearance and reality, right? This guy seems like a jerk. It's different from this guy is a jerk. Why? We take our impression or how things seem to us and we treat it as if it's subjectively true. It's at that point, the problem is at that point we lose control. It controls us. It seems like a really simple but also radically transformative thing to infuse doubt into the things we feel we're so certain about. I remember, I mean, I'd butcher if I try to share, but I think that Chinese proverb of the son

who's the father whose son fell off the horse and broke his arm and what I'm referring to, about who are we to play God in our lives and know the reason whether it's good or bad and have these value judgments on the events that are occurring because we don't know the full picture. This idea about, you know, it's hard to evaluate whether something's good or bad or favorable or unfavorable

was very familiar in Greek culture as well. for the simple reason that it's a mainstay of Greek tragedy. So Oedipus meets a beautiful woman as a queen and he marries her. Like happy days. Like, you know, it's good fortune. But then he discovers it turns out it's his own mother. He didn't realize that because he'd been abandoned as a child. Now it becomes a tragedy, right?

So the Greeks celebrated reversal of fortune in their literature. And so this was a really familiar idea to them, which is what that Chinese proverb was talking about. Socrates turns that into a self-help technique, basically, a psychological coping strategy. There's a passage, if I can remember it rightly, in Plato's Republic, where Socrates is talking about the Greek tragedies. And he says, I don't think the heroes in Greek tragedies are great role models. And the guy he's talking to is Plato's brother, GlauCon, And he says, what are you talking about? Socrates's tragedy is like high art.

You know, it's kind of weird to criticize it. And Socrates says, well, the people in Greek tragedies are often the authors of their own misfortune. And Glaucon says, what do you mean? And he says, well, a wise person wouldn't respond to misfortune in that way. They're kind of making things worse for themselves. And Glaucon says, well, you know, how would a wise person respond to misfortune? And Socrates says, well, he tells himself four things. And the first thing he says is what you're referring to,

that he can never be sure whether something's good fortune or bad fortune until he's seen how it turns out in the long term. You know, you could lose your job and it seems like a disaster, but maybe then you go on to start a business and it's the best thing that you ever did. I couldn't find a supervisor from my PhD when I was a young guy, but because I couldn't find someone who would supervise stoicism, like it was a niche subject.

So I took all my notes for my PhD and I published a book and then it gave me a career as an author, so it turned out to be a good thing, right? So Socrates says the wise person suspends judgment about whether something's good fortune or bad fortune because he doesn't really know for sure how it's going to pan out in the long term.

And the second thing is that he sees grieving excessively about things or freaking out as simply adding another level to suffering. So misfortune is already painful. Like to worry about it, ruminate about it, doubles the pain unnecessarily. And then the third thing is that the wise person tells himself that nothing is that important

in the grand scheme of things. So a single misfortune doesn't entirely define your whole life. It would be blowing it out a proportion in that regard. But like the view from above, if you look at the bigger picture, like one mish, or one misfortune can't define or tarnish an entire life. and he says the fourth thing is that a wise person tells himself that grieving excessively or just freaking out

prevents him from doing the very thing that's most required in the face of a crisis and GlauCund says what's that, Socrates and he says well grieving excessively or freaking out prevents you from being able to think clearly and rationally in solving the problem so a wise person

tells himself, like if I freak out about this, it's counterproductive, basically. The more serious this problem is, the more it would be important to keep a clear head. And actually, in a crisis, we naturally, that's how you know when you look to somebody as a leader. Like, when you think everyone else is running around waving their arms in the air and going, woo, woo, woo, and this one guy seems to be really focused. like those people are natural leaders, I think in a sense. So Socrates says a wise person understands these four things. This is a type of cognitive therapy that he's describing.

It's buried in Plato's Republic though. Sometimes in the ancient world, people knew these things were said, but now we've lost a connection with these ancient texts, and we don't realize they have these relatively simple pieces of self-help psychology in them. I love the first one being suspend judgment because it can feel like too much of a stretch to accept the things we perceive to be as horrible transgressions in our life suspending our judgment about them just gives us a little bit of space

to be able to have a different perspective, zoom out. Could you restate the four just succinctly? What were the four again? So suspending judgment about whether something's good fortune or bad fortune because you don't know how it's going to pan out in the long term. Telling yourself that adding additional suffering to your misfortune simply doubles the pain unnecessarily. Telling yourself that nothing is all important,

like no individual setback is catastrophic enough to tarnish your entire life. And then fourthly, telling yourself that worrying excessively about it would prevent you from doing the very thing that's most required, which would be to think clearly and problem-solve. Very practical for us all to apply in the modern day. Yeah, who would have thought in Plato, in Greek philosophy? You know, like people used to know this, and then it kind of got forgotten.

Especially the zoom-out one, I mean, obviously it's become a cliche in terms of gaining perspective in our life. Is it the overview effect when astronauts look back down on Earth, right? Yeah. It's like if we could at least in our back-down, pocket maintain a perspective of our both cosmic significance on one hand but our absolute insignificance on the other how much that would help us yeah that that ability so a little anecdote about the stoics talk a lot about what modern scholars call the view from above the stoics had never

been in space why they had no idea what the planet earth looked like and they didn't know what the solar system was like but they did cosmology they drew map and diagrams. So they actually were able to figuratively contemplate the smallness of human life and the vastness of space and time, right? They don't need a picture taken from space in order to get the basic idea, right?

Why would this be so important? Well, there's a lot of things we could say about it, but one that I think is quite helpful is that we know from modern research on stress and emotions that when the amygdala hijacks are thinking, and when our fight-of-flight response is triggered. One of the symptoms of that is that our attention becomes narrowed in scope. So we engage in what's called threat monitoring.

It becomes like a laser beam, like, focused on where we think the potential sign of danger is. Now, that could be useful. If you're an animal and there's a predator on the horizon, you want to forget about everything else and just focus like a laser beam on the predator. And if it starts to move towards you, like, you know, to respond immediately in a boat. but the price we pay for that is it's selective thinking and we shut out awareness of the context and the environment. So it is useful if you're a small furry animal

and there's a predator on the horizon, but it might not be that useful when you're in a board meeting or you're talking to your bank manager or you're having a discussion with your kids or something like that. Or even looking for your keys. I found that selective awareness of when I'm trying to find something I've lost, narrowly focusing my attention on trying to find

It was almost less helpful than sitting for a second and just like not putting so much importance on it and be like, oh, I remember where I put it, you know? Yeah. Like, there's a bunch of ways in which it might be more useful to maintain the flexibility and expansiveness of your attention. So I think the Stoics trained themselves. Marcus Aurelius at one point implies that he does this every day. Like sometimes he'll literally say, picture to yourself every day. So, like, he's literally saying this is a contemplative practice that he's doing. regularly. So he's picturing the view from above. He's imagining his position and the whole

of space and the whole of time and he's expanding his attention. And in doing that, he's training himself to do the opposite of what happens when the amygdala hijacks our thinking. He's restoring the activity or integration of the prefrontal cortex more fully. I think there's some reason to believe that when our attention gets narrowed in that way, we often lose self-awareness. You know, one of the part of the price that we pay is if I'm really angry with you and I see you as a threat and all my attention is focused on you, I'll tend to be

less aware of what I'm doing. Whereas when I start expanding my attention, it tends to facilitate mindfulness or self-awareness, which then makes it easier for me to evaluate whether what I'm doing is actually helpful or making things worse. So the Stoics are training themselves to

restore self-awareness, but to counteract this kind of tunnel vision that we get when we're very emotional about things. Here's a little bit of trivia for you, by the way. I love, by the way, we need to start your own trivia show. Yeah, I have a little ancient philosophy trivia, right? I like the trivia as well. So in the meditations, Marcus, there's a kind of well-known passage where he says, the mind free from violent passions, and the word he uses is apothea there, by the way, the mind free from violent passions is like an impenetrable citadel, is a popular translation

of it. And for the word he uses, he says, is the word he uses. a long time it kind of bugged me. You know, when something bugs you and you think, I keep meaning to look this up, but I never get around to it. And I thought, what Greek word is being translated as Citadel? Like, I was like, I'm kind of curious. Like,

is this the word for four or something? It's kind of an odd, like, it's quite a specific word, and I, you know, and I just kind of bugged me. And then one day I went back and I checked the original Greek. And I was like, oh, it's literally Acropolis in Greek. And I thought,

But that's weird because there's another passage where he's describing the view from above. And he says, imagine that you're looking down on law courts and agoras, agoras, and merchants and so on. I thought that is literally the view from the Acropolis in Athens. What's the Acropolis from Ruleton? Well, the Acropolis literally means high up place. Like, Pallas is city and Acro is like acrobat. It's like high up.

So in the ancient world, people would often build towns or settlements around hills because if someone attacked, they could all retreat up the hill and they'd build a palisade around it and it was easier to defend, right? So it would mean like an impenetrable perspective? Yeah. In Athens, there are many acropolis in ancient Greece, but the most famous, by far, even at Marxian, this time, was the Athenian Acropolis.

The Athenian Acropolis evolved into a temple complex. So the main temple is the Parthenan, which is the temple to the goddess Athena. And so the view from the Acropolis, the impenestrable citadel that he's referring to, is the temple of Athena in the middle of Athens, that looks down on the Agora, which is where all the kind of business of life took place,

the market and the law courts. It's also probably where, Socrates was put on trial, where he was imprisoned, put on trial and executed as well. So all the drama happened down there. So Marcus might be picturing this kind of metaphysical godlike view, but he may also be literally imagining looking down from the temple of Athena on the Acropolis at the Agora. It makes me directly think of, and I just love all the through lines between the different

schools of thought. But in the Buddhist tradition, they speak. about creating distance between you, your awareness, and your thought and your emotions, especially your judgments and your opinions, there's this analogy of being stuck in traffic and the frustration of being in bumper to bumper, and you don't know if you're going to miss your flight because you're headed to the airport. And there is a certain resistance you hold in that space, and then you finally, you actually make your flight, you get to the airport, you make your flight, you take the plane and you look down from a few thousand feet above or 10,000 feet above, back on that same traffic you were

ones in and suddenly it doesn't bother you as much. And the fundamental difference is the distance between you and the perceived problem. It seems like there is a correlation there. Yeah, definitely. It's kind of like, in some ways the view from above, I think, is one of the most important practices in Stoicism because I think it actually sums up potentially a lot. There's a lot in it going on. it creates some distance or separation

between the event and your evaluation of it it places things within a wider context as well and potentially places things within a wider chronological context too it arguably forces you to acknowledge the impermanence or transience of things more and I guess if you do the way the soics described and you think of your life within the broader context of the history of the universe like the vast river of time then it also forces you to contemplate

your own mortality in a sense you see you know you only have three score years and ten or whatever on the earth and this incident is one moment in it so putting things within a kind of realistic perspective like that grasping the transience of things

like you know it's powerful and transformative but there's also I think something kind of you know archetypal and perennial about it again It wasn't only the Stoics that did this. In ancient Greece, philosophers from different schools of philosophy did the same thing as well. For most of our life, we are spent with this subtle anxiety of life not occurring or happening the way we would ideally like it to. And so much of that suffering occurs obviously in our imagination.

One of the tools I've heard you refer to is deliver. I'm deliberately imagining the worst-case scenario in rehearsing the worst. So what is that for people that want to maybe give it a go? Well, the Stoics call it premeditatio malorum, which means kind of premeditating or anticipating bad stuff. Premeditating adversity is how I usually gloss it or translate it. It's very common in Stoicism,

but actually it probably goes back even earlier, yet again to earlier schools of philosophy. is weirdly similar to things that we do in cognitive behavioral therapy today. So one of the most robust techniques in modern psychotherapy since the 1950s, one of the earliest techniques in behaviour therapy involves repeatedly imagining things that trigger anxiety

until the anxiety wears off, basically. There's so much research on what we call exposure therapy. Exposure therapy would be facing your fears in reality. Imaginal exposure would be doing it in your imagination. The Stoics are kind of talking about both, but this technique is doing it in your imagination. There's a ton of research that shows that this is effective. And we know quite a lot about the mechanisms involved.

There are actually multiple ways in which it can benefit you. So one which the Stoics imply sometimes that they understand is that if you are in the presence of something that triggers, say, anxiety, and to some extent this is true of other emotions, it triggers your amygdala, like the fear circuits activated, there's a surge of adrenaline, but that's not permanent. Like it kind of spikes, and then gradually the nervous arousal will usually wear off as long as there isn't anything that keeps re-evoking it,

and nothing dangerous happens and you remain in the situation. So psychologists call that emotional habituation. It's the natural wearing off of anxiety over time. The easiest way to think of it is in terms of heart rate. If you take someone with a cat phobia and you put them in a room with cats, their heart rate will almost double within less than five seconds. But it doesn't stay at that level. If they stay in the room, their heart rate will gradually start to come back down.

again. And if they do that repeatedly, they'll condition themselves to no longer experience. The next day you do the same thing, the heart rate will go up, but not as high as it did before, and it will reduce more quickly. And then the day after and the day after. So exposure therapy has, for animal phobias, has about a 90% success rate within about three hours or so. Like, it's very robust as a technique. And the Stoics understand this basic idea. to some extent. They talk about the freshness of the initial impression triggering an emotion.

So when it's no longer as fresh, they seem to realize that anxiety and other emotions wear off over time. So premeditational malorum means imagining bad things that can happen kind of until you get bored with them, until the anxiety starts to wear off. But I think there's also another process going on. When we do, you could also call this mental rehearsal.

when you do imaginal exposure or mental rehearsal, it's also an opportunity to practice responding differently to the trigger. So we talked earlier about the two phases of emotion. What the Stoics are doing here is replicating the initial phase. They're deliberately evoking the impression and the automatic response that we have to, in order to withhold assent, as they put it. So to hold assent, meaning the assent the movement towards the reaction.

Yeah, not agreeing with their evaluation of it. So I may imagine, I give a presentation at a conference and everybody laughs at me and like, this is the worst thing I've ever heard. And so. Or they stumble on your words and you make a mess of yourself, like that imaginal exposure there. Deliberately, imagine the worst that could happen, right? So I'm deliberately evoking the trigger or the impression. and I'm allowing myself to feel the proto-passions or the first movements,

the kind of initial uncomfortable reaction, like the discomfort that I have in response to it. And then I'm preventing it from escalating, right, because I'm retaining some self-awareness and detachment, right? So I'm saying, okay, just because I feel as if this is catastrophic, it doesn't mean that it actually is. This is just an impression. like it's not entirely like the thing that it claims to represent

as Epictetus puts it. So just because it seems catastrophic, it doesn't mean that it really is catastrophic. Maybe not the whole story. And maybe I'll evaluate it differently tomorrow. Like, or if I give myself enough time to get used to it. So this kind of mindfulness, if you like, or psychologists also call this cognitive diffusion,

like separating our evaluation or a thoughts from the event, premeditation is an opportunity to rehearse that kind of detachment. So even though this is uncomfortable, I don't have to buy into it completely. I can see it as a false alarm, basically, and get used to viewing it in that way, rather than allowing myself to be swept along by it. When I've done my own value analysis and seeing what means most to me, clarity of thought, clarity of mind, seeing reality as it is, or as close as one could possibly even do, is really high up there. And it seems like a lot of these descriptions on the emotional experience

momentarily blind us from seeing and perceiving life as it is. I've heard you refer to anger as a temporary madness. Any thoughts there? Stoics at Seneca calls it that. I think that phrase originally came from Euripides. Erepedes is a Greek tragedian who was quite philosophical. There was a rumor that Socrates was friends with him and helped him to write some of his play. So the Stoics loved to quote him. Yeah, I mean, a lot of the things that the Stoics say

cash in in terms of modern research or the psychology of the emotions. I mean, I kind of feel almost slightly, you know, it makes me cringe a little bit to say, you know, they were ahead of their time. They're way ahead of their type. It's like a cliche. But like they were.

They were way ahead of their time. I mean, they wrote a book on Cognitive Behavioral Psychotherapy 2,250 years ago. That's kind of crazy when you think about it. So when they say emotions or temporary madness, like one of the big innovations that the Stoics made, which, well, I say innovation, but they inherited this from Socrates

and maybe from other earlier. thinkers. But the Stoics really made this idea their own that the emotions are cognitive. So like Albert Ellis, the founder of cognitive therapy, used to say, somebody would say, I feel depressed or I feel angry. And Ellis used to say to them, sure, but it's not just how you feel, is it? It's also how you think. And we tend to underestimate. We naturally underestimate. We naturally underestimate the role that belief, thinking, cognition plays in shaping our emotions. And that's crucial because once we realize the role that thinking plays in shaping our emotions, it gives us more leverage. It opens up a whole toolbox of cognitive therapy techniques. So when the Stoics say anger

is temporary madness, and they could say the same about anxiety or worry, other dysfunctional emotions, what they're drawing attention to is the fact that it's accompanied by many cognitive distortions. Like, we're using the subcautical regions in our brain and they distort our thinking. So, I mean, one way of understanding this very simply is if you imagine that when the fight of flight response is triggered, your brain, it goes into a kind of emergency mode. It's like, I could die. You know, this is an emergency.

I need to do something fast. So you begin to process information in a more simplified way. So we exhibit more black and white, extreme all or nothing thinking. And so, like, fight or flight itself, either a fight this thing or a flea. Choose now, right?

So if I reduce my options to, like, two and I pick one, I can make a decision much more quickly. But, you know, that often leads to a lot of problems. Like, it's not helpful for problem solving. Particularly, funnily enough, in relationships or when you're dealing with other human beings, if it's a simple kind of practical decision, like a saber to tigers attacking me, either a fighter or a runaway, you know, pick one now, like rapid decision-making.

But dealing with like a problem in a boardroom or a problem in your marriage, it's going to require much more sophisticated and nuanced problem-solving. basically. And so the Stoics say, well, when we evoke strong emotions, like, you know, there are reasons perhaps why we want to make decisions sometimes really quickly, but the price we pay for that is precision, accuracy, at close or judgment. You know, it's a type of madness that might be helpful in some emergencies, but it's often highly counterproductive to think in black and white or very simplistic terms. when we're dealing with most of the problems that we face in daily life.

I believe Epictetus is quoted as only a madman seeks figs in winter. I'm curious your thoughts on the limits of reason towards emotion because they are kind of fundamentally two different forces. And sometimes not being analytical in our emotional process serves us more. So I'm curious your thoughts on that. I think the distinction we made earlier between these two phases of emotion

helps to address that to a large extent. So funnily enough, I mean, the Stoics definitely place a lot of value. The Stoics love reason. There's no question about that. Socrates loves reason. But the Stoics also clearly carve out a niche for these primitive, irrational responses. and they're not in a big battle against them.

They think it's not that we're trying to get rid of them or replace them with reason. It's more that reason is what happens next, right? So there's a place for these initial automatic appraisals that we make of threat. You know, they're in the sense to exceed them as neither good nor bad. They're just natural. It's just what happens.

But reason can be useful in deciding whether we act on them, like whether we reevaluate them, what we do next, basically. One other framework I thought would be useful here. There's just so many that seem very applicable to all of our lives, one of which is de-romanticizing desire and the kind of process they have for that. Why would anyone care to learn what that is and the goal of it? well I think the Stoics probably realize that desire is one of the main things that shapes our quality of life and our emotions and a lot of the things that we desire perhaps the problem isn't so much in terms of the things that we desire but the way that we desire them the Stoics have a concept that's kind of similar to non-attachment basically um so they think that

being overly attached to external things that aren't directly under our control is basically a recipe for emotional disturbance. When you say de-romanticizing desire, are you kind of talking about in relationships, specifically, or desire for, more generally? A lot of the frameworks that I think we've been exploring help kind of subvert or undermine the things we think we want, which are directly tied to the suffering, because we don't have them. And by breaking it down into its parts, again, to the physics of things,

we can see things a bit for more of what they are. So I think in that sense. Yeah. So the Stoics have this idea called the reserve clause. Whopex Areas as in Greek? So it's kind of like in Greek a technical term. It's tricky to translate. It's usually translated as the reserve clause.

And it means that they say to themselves that I will do this or achieve this goal if nothing permits me. So they attach a kind of caveat to their pursuit of external things. Sometimes they say fate willing or God permitting. It's a bit like early Christians used to say, or medieval Christians would say deo valente at the end of letters. It means they'd write a letter and then they say God willing at the end. It's a bit like saying inshallah or something like that.

So it's a form of non-attachment to the outcome of our actions in a way. It's very similar to a basic principle that underlies cognitive behavioral therapy, especially the earliest form of cognitive behavioral therapy, which is called Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy. It's founded by Albert Ellis in the 1950s. And Ellis had read the Stoics, and stoic thinking kind of permeates his approach to therapy. So Ellis, Ellis is the kind of guy that had a huge amount of clinical experience.

So he didn't do much research. although many of his ideas were subsequently confirmed by researchers in psychotherapy. He had great clinical intuition, I think, and a lot of practical experience. And Ellis firmly believed that most emotional problems can be traced to having a problem with desire, basically. But more than that, it's desires that become excessive and become transformed into rigid demands, essentially. So Ellis thought it would be natural to say, I strongly desire that other people treat me politely. But it's not entirely under my control, whether they do that or not. Sometimes they're probably going to do the opposite.

And if that happens, when it happens, it's not the end of the world. I can cope with it. So that'd be like a normal, flexible, adaptive way of having preferences or desires. But as our desires become stronger, they easily cross a kind of threshold into becoming rigid, absolutistic, black and white demands, where we turn that preference into saying something like, people must respect me. They have to. They've got to.

They need to. And if they don't, I can't stand it. Like, it's awful. That's a recipe for neurosis, basically, as Ellis saw. And the Stoics say something kind of similar, but in different language, essentially. The Stoics think that when we have an excessive desire, they define unhealthy desires and emotions as being excessive, irrational, and unhealthy. Those are the three characteristics that define them. So they have this idea as well that when we want something too much and we treat it as a rigid demand,

and sometimes that's we're about not to get what we want. And if we're unprepared for that and we treat it as a shock, I can't believe it. You know, people need to be polite to me. This guy wasn't. I can't believe it. You know, that's bound to result in frustration. And then that frustration often escalates into anger or anxiety or depression or whatever. So the solution to that is what Ellis called high frustration tolerance, which is kind of

what Stalicism is. in a way. That's the ability to replace rigid demands with what Ellis calls or sometimes calls a rational preference. And the Stoics also call, I describe as a preference. Like, you know, I strongly prefer it. People are polite to me, but they don't have to be. Like, it's not under my control. Like, shit happens, you know. Sometimes they're going to be, like, obnoxious to me. When Marcus Aurelius says every morning he prepares himself by imagining that he's going to encounter people that are deceptive and rude and dishonest. In a way, he's rehearsing this. It's closely intertwined with the premeditatio malorum.

Like, I prefer it if everyone is wise and virtuous. But I also anticipate the fact that often they're not going to be, and I can handle that. when it comes to desire for material things sex food power money what examples have they given to be able to break things down and to de-romanticize it

you mean the Stoics think that fine wine as fermented grape juice Marcus Aurelius talks about he says describe sex is just the exchange of bodily fluids or something like that the phrase he uses. So this is

kind of a technique that probably goes back to the pre-Socratic philosophers. Some of the pre-Socratic philosophers were really they were kind of divided in the sense that some pre-Socratic philosophers were really mystical, like Pythagoras, and some of them were almost the opposite.

They were kind of proto-scientists and they had a very naturalistic worldview, like Anaxagoras, for example. He was the first philosopher to come to Athens. And so you kind of, in a sense, set the agenda for philosophy at Athens. And Annexagris liked to describe everything just in terms of physical interactions,

like in a very unmystical, like down-to-earth way, to try and get away from superstitious, religious thinking. And the Stoics inherit this sort of naturalistic way of explaining things from Annexagris. They sometimes call it Fantasia catalectica, or. or it's hard to translate, but one translation, a rough translation, is objective representation. Some people have called it, or you could say a kind of naturalistic description of events. So Marcus says that the finest Felernian wine, the most expensive Roman wine, is just fermented grape juice. His imperial purple robes as emperor, like the most precious thing.

And incidentally, a callback to Zeno, like they died in the purple. die that Phoenicians traded. It's just sheep's wool, dyed in shellfish gore is how he describes it. It's very similar. There's a quote attributed to Napoleon where he says a throne is just a bench covered in velvet.

So like I really kind of, let's take place. You said de-romanticizing like a really down-to-earth description, matter-of-fact, description of things that takes away, I think of it is taking away the kind of some of the emotive rhetoric

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The Stoics want us to, they want us to see things for what they really are, right? And not to kind of distort things through the language that we use. And Marcus also says that when a meal is set before you, you should just say this is just a dead pig. This is just a dead fish and stuff like that. Rather than this is some luxurious, extravagant meal that a chef has prepared. It also fuels into the ethical perspective of things too when we take for granted the moderate conveniences and comforts we have today. And are often when shopping and grocery store are completely oblivious to the animal agriculture industry, that is causing suffering to millions of animals.

And I think breaking things and calling things what they are in that sort of objective sense helps us actually examine and, yeah, subvert our subjective desires and preferences so strongly. Yeah, the Romans don't have this kind of concept of animal rights that we have today. But you're saying they kind of have the seeds of the attitude. in a sense, and that Marcus wants us to see things accurately, and he wants us to understand where things came from as well and how they're going to end up.

So seeing the life cycle of objects around us and people around us from a broader perspective, the Stoics are always, in a sense, just striving for a certain type of accuracy in their thinking. So some people would say, well, how, what's the relationship between philosophy and psychotherapy? some people think it's odd that these two things would go together at all. But the Stoics believe that there's a particular type of objectivity,

precision and accuracy in our thinking that when understood from a particular point of view is inherently therapeutic, they think that violent emotions or unhealthy emotions tend to be associated with a kind of inaccurate or distorted thinking. And cognitive therapy, you know, lends modern support that view. Another interesting avenue that you mentioned earlier was wisdom versus its appearance. And you refer to the sophists, the dialectic and the debate style that would quickly take

philosophical inquiry as a means to build one's own egocentricity and moral superiority. And so I'm curious your thoughts on this line between being wise and sound. sounding wise, this line that I walk on this show and people listening, you know, between vainly receiving bountiful information and doing nothing with it in your life. Well, it's a problem from like modern-day influencers in a way, right? And in some ways, all of us, if we're writing books and we're doing podcasts, we're kind of overlapping in a sense with what the sophists did in the ancient world. But all ancient philosophers did that as well.

they were sophism and philosophy weren't completely separate although some overlap between them. It's always a hazard if your job is to discuss philosophy or you write books about it, you know, that you could sell out basically and kind of sacrifice your values to tell people what they want to hear, basically. Plato's famous dialogue, Plato talks about this a lot, so do other ancient philosophers, probably his most famous dialogue about it is the Gorgias,

which is about the art of persuasion, and the sophists taught the art of persuasion. So the guys that said they were professional wise men specialized in persuasion skills, rhetoric, and appearing wise, winning arguments. Socrates said paradoxically, in another dialogue in the Protagoras, he says that he thinks it's better to lose an argument

than to win one, which would be absolutely shocking to this office. He says this to Protagoras and he kind of actually tricks him into agreeing with him in front of his students, which is kind of funny in a way because you can see Protagoras is kind of thinking, okay, I kind of see why you're saying that, but I'm a bit reluctant to admit that because my whole career is about avoiding losing arguments.

So Socrates says in a philosophical debate the person who loses actually gains more because they learn something so I really value somebody proving that I'm wrong and Protagoras is kind of like yeah

these guys are paying me to win to teach them how to always win arguments so they look clever so it shows the clash in values in a sense between the sophists and the philosophers so sophists placed a lot more emphasis on

using debating skills. So today the internet is rife with often kind of political influencers that like do debates right. But I mean it's odd if you stop to think about it for a minute we don't usually think that those type of debates settle questions

in science you know like that would seem odd just because somebody is a good debater and good at winning arguments, it doesn't mean that they're actually right about the stuff that they're saying. Often people win arguments by changing the topic, attacking the person that they're speaking to, you know, misdirecting things like stoking emotions, you know, selective presentation of facts.

Like there's all these tactics that people use in debates that really just, you know, do the opposite of arriving at truth or knowledge or wisdom. They're designed to distort and manipulate a perception of the truth. That was always the case. And, you know, funnily enough, it was to a large extent associated with politics in the ancient world. So in that sense, nothing much has changed. In the modern world today, you know, we have this strange thing. The sophists, I always thought, were this weird,

intersection of political oratory. So they trained young politicians and self-improvement. And in a sense, I mean, sometimes people looking back on it, think, what did these guys do? They taught oratory, but they were also kind of self-improvement gurus. It seems like a weird combination. At least it seemed weirder to me in the past, but with the rise of the internet and modern-day influencers, a lot of... self-improvement authors today get involved with politics.

And increasingly, there's a kind of blurring of this distinction between those two domains, basically, those two types of discourse, right? So, I mean, maybe I'd like to name examples, like there are dudes that, a lot of the dudes in the Manosphere, is it were, like Andrew Tate, like, for example, has political views, but engages in a lot of political rhetoric, but is also kind of offering some self-improvement advice in a sense. Jordan Peterson, like write self-help books, but, you know, did a lot of political talking points in his videos and stuff.

And that's a strange combination in a way, because usually in order to engage in political rhetoric, you kind of have to manipulate people's emotions. Like, you want to exploit their fear and their own. anger normally to get them worked up about things. That's traditionally how political oratory works throughout the ages. It's almost the complete opposite of what we do in psychotherapy. So usually when we're doing cognitive therapy, we're like, you know, undoing a lot of the effects of political rhetoric on people, basically. Political rhetoric often, for example, involves blaming other

people for stuff. Like, you know, throughout the ages, that's clearly been a recurring feature of it. Whereas in psychotherapy, one of the main things that we do is get people to take more personal responsibility for their lives and their feelings and so on. And Socrates and the Stoics were aware of this antagonism as well. There are ways. Socrates acknowledges and the Stoics realize there are ways that you could use persuasion and rhetoric in the service of philosophy. for in wisdom, but often particularly in the hands of politicians and sophists, the two things are somewhat at odds, basically. So Socrates thought we need to be extremely careful about rhetoric and persuasion skills, because

it's very easy for people to exploit us and manipulate us by using fairly simple techniques. I think maybe I mentioned earlier that in the ancient world they're understanding a rhetoric if anything was way more sophisticated than I was today so the sophists almost like in the gorges

for example they have this kind of what's the word sort of grandiose idea of their own power like they're kind of intoxicated like they come across as quite intoxicated by the power they say if I want someone killed

you know, if I want someone exiled, like persuasion skills, allow me to do that. Gorgias says, or one of the characters, maybe one of the other people in that dialogue, says to Socrates, they're talking about using persuasion tactics before the political assembly in Athens to sway votes and things like that.

You know, so they say, like, if I wanted to, a country invade it, I can use it. use persuasion to start a war. Like if I want, that's how powerful rhetoric is they're basically saying. So at one point, one of them says, in a debate between a physician who's an expert on health but has no training in rhetoric and an orator who's trained in rhetoric but knows nothing about medicine, the rhetorician or orator will win every time. is what God just says, which I think in Plato's dialogue,

and even today when we read it, it's kind of scary, like an unnerving concept. So Stoics and Socrates were slightly alarmed by the power of rhetoric, and they saw philosophy as a sort of remedy for that. There's a sense in which philosophy is a kind of counter rhetoric or a remedy for the effects of rhetoric on our emotions.

I'm curious what other things. through lines you drive to the modern time we find ourselves in with so much infinite access to information online in a way in many traditions you needed to be initiated for you needed to spend lifetime earning your right to gain access to in some traditions can just now show up on your Instagram feed, you know, and there's so much good that comes to the axis we have, and yet there's this lack of embodiment and integration because of the medium it's shared in. Yeah. There's a lot that I could see about this, and I, you know, I think the simplest observation to make, as I mentioned earlier when I was a young guy, there wasn't as much self-help literature around, and now there's loads,

but it seems obvious to say that people, despite consuming far more self-help and self-improvement content than they did a few decades ago, are people helped that much more? It's a rates of depression and anxiety disorders like plummeting as a result of all the self-improvement stuff that people are consuming. Why hasn't it had a bigger impact on our emotional well-being? like there's something kind of odd about this now there's lots of really good self-improvement and self-help advice but I think there are problems with the whole field

and there are reasons why people maybe don't get as much benefit from it as they potentially could and they're not all things that authors and influencers are to blame for like to some extent there are just aspects of the medium through which we're consuming it so what are they one of them a very one very simple observation explanation for why self-help isn't more helpful is that in order to improve yourself you need to kind of understand what your weaknesses are

you need to know thyself right you need to know your strengths and weaknesses but often people invest a lot of time in energy trying to improve aspects of their personality that maybe aren't where their main problem lies. I'll give you an example. It strikes me that a lot of the young guys in the manosphere are quite fixated on self-discipline. I think it's fair to say.

But in many cases, they also seem to have issues with anger. And it seems to me that they invest far more effort in developing self-discipline than they do in overcoming their anger. So it may be, and in many cases those young dudes are frustrated because they have difficulties establishing relationships. And it seems a more obvious explanation for that would be that their anger in some cases is preventing them from developing healthy long-term relationships. You know, and they're doing a lot of self-improvement, but it's maybe targeting the wrong problems. So you can go, well, these techniques work. This is good self-help.

but I'm maybe addressing the wrong problem with it, perhaps. Normally, the way around that would be that somebody else would tell you what your problems are, right? And we have blind spots for our own weaknesses. There's a, in one of Isop's fables, he says, everybody's born with two sacks hanging around their neck. He said, there's a big sack that hangs in front of us around. our neck that's right under our nose all of the time and it contains everybody else's flaws and we can see it wherever we go and then there's a little sack that hangs behind our neck that we can never see because it's like in the blind spot of a camera right and everyone else can

see it but we can't ever get a perspective on it we can't ever see it and it contains our own flaws and Galen mentions us quotes this in an essay that he wrote a book he wrote talking about the need to find a mentor. So he says it's very important in an ancient culture they thought to find somebody who's more experienced, who's wiser, who can be completely honest with you and is going to be able to tell you where your weaknesses are. I think it's interesting, by the way, that Marcus Aurelius says when he struggled with his anger, the person that he became angry with most often was Junius Rusticus, like his mentor, because we can guess he was probably provoking him by pinpointing his weaknesses.

The Stoics thought it was incredibly important that you need to be able to tolerate people speaking frankly and openly with you and kind of challenging you, basically. They saw that as a sort of prerequisite of self-improvement. So one difficulty with self-help, if it's completely self-directed, if we're not careful, we just avoid addressing our blind spots and we don't have the kind of external perspective that a mentor or a therapist or a counselor or a parent or a friend might potentially be able to bring. There's another problem which is that it kind of relates to what we said earlier about the sophists and them teaching slogans or sayings that people would

memorize parrot fashion. And Socrates's thinking that real wisdom comes from being able to question things. Socrates, I think, would be an example of somebody who demonstrates exceptional cognitive flexibility, as we call it today, the ability to kind of see things from different perspectives and look beyond our rigid assumptions, basically. His method is like a master class in developing cognitive flexibility, which we know is associated with better coping in mental health. Consuming self-health. Consuming self-health, help advice from books potentially does the opposite. So people love lists, bullet points, like they want things to be compressed and simplified for them. But what research tends to show is

that when people learn a coping strategy in the form of a verbal rule, they often apply it rigidly. And so you could say you could take any saying or any coping strategy and make it maladaptive by using it too rigidly and inflexibly, right? Some techniques are generally better than others, but all techniques can be used too rigidly in a way that backfires. Maybe they work in some situations, but if you use them in other situations,

it could be counterproductive. For example, mindfulness is generally pretty beneficial, but it could be that some people who have health anxiety and are constantly scanning their body for physical symptoms of illness might turn mindfulness just into another form of threat monitoring. Social anxiety potentially involves heightened self-focused attention.

Some people who learn mindfulness techniques might turn it into maladaptive self-focused attention and it potentially makes their social anxiety worse, right? So you could say there's a good way and a bad way of doing any coping strategy or any self-improvement technique. When we learn things in a simplified way from self-help books, without somebody kind of mentoring us, without trial and error learning, the risk is that we use these strategies rigidly and they become maladaptive.

What research on stress and coping shows is that the people who have the best resilience exhibit something that researchers call coping flexibility. So they're able to choose selectively from a variety of different coping strategies. and they're also able to take strategies and combine them or adapt them, depending on the needs of different circumstances. So I think that's another reason that self-help sometimes isn't as helpful as it could be, because people consume it in a slightly passive way, which can lead to them applying it in an overly simplistic or rigid manner. It reminds me of Zeno's compromise of theory being only good insofar as it makes you more virtuous, and this yogic perspective of Vidya Varsgyan meaning

what does it actually mean to learn or to know something, right? Because we have an education system that puts information and asks you to memorize and regurgitate it and that is what learning is memorization in a sense. And that's more in a line with Vidya of like book knowledge or sort of top down. but the guian or the internal knowing, which could be comparable to religious versus the Gnostic thinking, right?

Yeah. What is the, at the origin of the mystical thinkers and the knowing that they, that becomes self-evident once you tap into that understanding of wisdom, right? It doesn't need to be taught to you. It becomes self-evident. It is what it is. And we don't need to beat a dead horse,

but it is something to be continually mindful of as, you know, and I tried to as much as I can remind myself and on this podcast for being somebody who has a podcast in the self-help space, one might say, where we're exploring a lot of different philosophical avenues. I mean, exploring philosophy for its own sake is fun. It's a hobby of yours that you turn into a career. It's something that I have an innate calling towards and I would do with or without getting paid and I love it. But again, to what end, right? And are we actually applying what we're hearing, or is it becoming just entertainment? Yeah, the Stoics, and again, there's kind of a debate in ancient philosophy

about some philosophers and maybe Anaxagoras and some of the other pre-Socratics seem to have had this idea that the goal of life was knowledge, understood in a kind of broad sense. So like encyclopedic knowledge of the world, you can see how that would be an attractive idea. The goal of life is just to know everything about how the universe works and stuff like that. And Socrates kind of ridicules this because he says, look, some knowledge is kind of useless and a bit of a distraction. Like, you know, you should be asking yourself which knowledge is actually useful? You know, some knowledge is far more important than others. Like, Anne Axagoras

thought that had a theory that there were people that lived on the moon. And Socrates thought things like that were kind of, you know, why would you go and listen to lectures about that? It doesn't actually help you to become a more virtuous or a wiser or a better person in daily life. You see Marcus Aurelius saying, you know, put aside your books. Don't be such a nerd. He's basically telling himself, you know, you're too bookish, you're too much of a bookworm. Like, you should be thinking more about how to actually put this in practice. Seneca says it's more important to read a few books well than to read lots of different books. So like to deepen your understanding of how to actually apply things. I think the Stoics believe that knowledge in itself

can become a vice unless we're constantly asking ourselves how it helps us to improve our character. And to meditate upon what you read, what I love about certain more poetic translations of the Dao-e-Ching or even meditations, you can take a maxim and you can sit with it, contemplate it, make it your own, like make that understanding visceral in your body as opposed to a theoretical thing that distores in as a cool party trick. Yeah, I think that process of kind of really digesting things and making them your own and adapting them is the key, basically. You know, we have to push ourselves beyond that. I mean, one way is actually like Socrates said, a very simple solution to it is discussing things with other people and allowing them to question you.

and being allowed to question them as well. So philosophical dialogue is a good way of encouraging that kind of flexibility. So we're not just going around repeating things pirate-like in a rigid way, but we're understanding the limits of certain ideas and maybe the exceptions to them as well. Without bastardizing it, how would you distill down most succinctly the Socratic method and what it is? well the Socratic method interestingly to come back to something we mentioned earlier Socrates at one point describes it and perhaps more than one point describes it as a therapy

he says it's like a medicine he describes it as similar to a pharmaceutical a remedy which raises the question what does it cure and Socrates actually tells us what it cures pretty clearly he says it can it cures a kind of arrogance or conceit that he calls double ignorance. It's like the Dunning Kruger effect in a way. The Socratic method is like a cure for the Dunning Kruger phenomenon. He says there's nothing wrong with being ignorant. You know, if I don't know anything about engineering or physics or medicine, as long as I know that I don't know it, then that's okay. And Socrates implies that if you know that you don't know something, that might motivate you to go and learn more about it or to consult an expert or to, or to, you know, or to

avoid making important decisions about it without seeking more information. So understanding the limits of your knowledge, like know thyself, knowing your strengths and weaknesses and limitations, is fine. Ignorance itself is no problem. But ignorance of your ignorance would be problematic. He describes it as believing that you know stuff that you do not in fact know. And so the Socratic method, he thinks, is the best cure. for that. And it comes in part from perhaps relying too much on formulaic definitions and answers. The Socratic method normally involves asking people to define really important concepts. Like Socrates usually picks on the virtues, similar kind of important things.

He'll ask people to define justice. He'll ask them to define temperance, wisdom, things like that, basically, the courage we mentioned earlier. And then he'll usually question them and try and identify exceptions to their definition and then encourage them to revise their definition. Now, you'd think that would end up with an improved definition. And usually there's a, it's like a, the Socratic method is like you're spiraling closer and closer to a centre, but you don't necessarily, ever actually arrive at the center.

But you feel that you've learned something from the process. So often it ends in a parria, this kind of sense of somewhat bewilderment. Some people hated that and got really angry about it because Socrates would question experts and they would often feel that it had harmed their status to be shown not to understand. If you're a politician and you think you know what justice is,

but Socrates demonstrates that you're contradicting yourself or that your definition doesn't really fit some examples. You come away from it looking like you don't really understand justice. That could be damaging to your ego and to your status. But other people found it quite addictive because they really felt that they were gaining some insight from it. There's a simpler way of explaining the Socratic method actually, and funnily enough, Socrates tells us they're in plain sight.

not in Plato. It's in the dialogues of Xenophon. So he says that Socrates was talking to a young guy called Yuthademus. There's two Yuthademuses. There's one in Plato and a different one in Xenophon. So he's talking to another dude called Yothidemus. And he's a really good example because this guy is like a lot of young dudes today who's obsessed with self-improvement. And Socrates goes to him because his friends have told him. He's, he's him that this guy has the biggest collection of books of anyone that they know, and he's been reading the sayings of the wise and memorizing them and learning from them. So he's a great example of a guy that's immersed himself in wisdom literature and self-improvement literature at the time. And Socrates says, well, why are you studying all this? First of all, he says, I think it's the most valuable thing you can do. Great that you're doing that. You take self-improvement so seriously. He says, why are you doing it? And this young guy says, well, I want to be a great statesman. And in order to do that, I need wisdom and I need to understand the nature of

justice, like, so that I can make decisions and advise people in the assembly and stuff. And Socrates says, well, that's highly admirable. He says, could you define justice for me? And Euthidema says, well, I think it would be easier to define injustice. It's very interesting. People do often find it easier to define the contrary of their values. It's easy. He says, it's, it's, you know, He says we're surrounded by examples of injustice, so it's much easier to point to them. And Socrates says, okay, well, fine, let's start off with this kind of negative definition, then what's injustice like? And he draws two columns.

And at the top of one, he writes justice, and at the other right, he writes injustice. And Socrates says, okay, so like, let's look at some examples of injustice. So they agree that lying and stealing. would be good examples of something that's unjust. So Uthedemus thinks this is easy. You know, again, like Socrates often seems like he's asking dumb questions, like naive questions at the beginning. Uthidi Mists is like, yeah, like lying and stealing or unjust.

It's pretty straightforward. So then the Socratic method proper begins. Socrates says, what if an elected general, the Athenians elected their generals, deceived the enemy in warfare? would that be unjust? And Euthadema says, well, come on, Socrates, that's like an exception, right? And Socrates says, okay, yeah, fair enough.

What about if they attacked the enemy camp and stole their weapons? It's the thing that often happened in ancient warfare. Euthidema says like, well, yeah, that's technically stealing and it's not unjust. So yeah, that's like another exception. Socrates says, what if a parent has a child to sick? And the only way that they could get them to take the medicine would be to conceal it in food because they don't like the taste of it. Euthidimus is like, yeah, that's deception, but it's not unjust.

So again, I guess you're right. And then Socrates gives another example that's actually kind of famous in the history of philosophy. It comes up repeatedly, which is he says, what if someone's friend was depressed and suicidal? And they said, you know, where have you hidden my sword or my knife? Like, would it be unjust to lie to them in order to save their life? and Euthademus is like, okay, Socrates, I get the point, like there's a lot of exceptions to this definition.

Now, at the end of this, they don't necessarily have a better definition of justice or injustice, but it seems like Euthademus has learned something. He's deepened his understanding, very simply by drawing these two columns, and Socrates kind of says, under what circumstances would, say, lying or stealing, be moved from the injustice column into the justice column. in this simple way of kind of conceptualizing things

forces Euthademus to identify exceptions to the definition that he's taken for granted his assumption about the nature of justice. So now he has a more flexible, he's got more questions in a sense about something that he's been taking for granted. I'm reminded to apply that level of thinking in my own life as much as possible

and what feels like a continual return turn to sincerity and to not live life through the conclusions of just conclusions in general that we think we know what something is because in some fashion those are like deaths unto themselves and when you think you know something the humility of you being wrong the possibility of you discovering what something you know might be more accurate and more true is like drastically toward it, you know? Yeah, actually, you sound like Plato.

Like, he describes the Socratic method in a very similar way. He says that once we are, if we're arrogant and conceited and we have double ignorance and we assume that we know something, then it prevents us from being able to learn anything more.

Like, it's the end of learning. Once we assume that I already know what justice is. Like, then we've reached a point of conclusion where we're not ready to learn anything else. So the Socratic method is this almost being like an eternal student. My, you know, Soxas was like, I'm not a sophist. I'm not an expert. I'm not a teacher. He's more, he's casting himself in the role of a student. But a student who has more interesting questions than the lecture being given by the teacher, basically, if you can put up with him,

right? So it, I mean, there are inherent benefits to that type of cognitive flexibility. But also in therapy, you could say when people are depressed or anxious or they're very angry about things in a pathological way, their beliefs about the problems that they face are often quite rigid. And we use Socratic questioning is one of the main techniques in cognitive therapy. so encouraging people to question whether if they think something's catastrophic for example

but if I lose my job that would be awful well are there other ways of viewing it is it as awful as you're assuming like from zero to 100% where 100% is the worst form of medieval torture or global thermonuclear war like where on that scale with losing your job

be. So are you possibly exaggerating how awful it is? The question I like to ask people, I think maybe a more interesting way of framing it. So people will go, but it is awful. Like it would be a catastrophe if this happened. So you can say to them, for instance, but suppose there are good ways and bad ways of coping with losing your job, right? Do you think some people might cope with things like that worse than others do? And most people will say, well, yeah, like obviously, that's a true as a self-evidently. So in that case, what would it look like

for somebody to cope with it well or cope with it wisely? So then they'll kind of like describe what that would look like. So if somebody coped with it wisely, what would happen next? And then what would happen? And then what would happen?

And then looking back on it from that perspective, in retrospect, how catastrophic would it seem to them? Well, you know, however they phrase it, not as catastrophic as it originally did right so you're this is modeling right

what you refer to is really yeah you're finding ways of using questioning just to kind of tease out some more flexibility to help people to find an alternative way of looking at things a more direct way are using modeling

would be who do you admire for their resilience how would people that you admire for their resilience evaluate losing their job so somebody that you admire for wisdom, temperance, patience. If they lost their job, would they say, this can't happen? It's awful. I can't handle it. Or would they frame it differently than that? And people usually almost like slightly

begrudgingly, well, I guess they would like phrase it differently. And if you were to emulate the way that they're framing it, what would be the consequences of that? Well, I'd probably deal with it much better and it wouldn't be as distressing and stuff like that, right? So people are kind of quite attached to their rigid beliefs and their catastrophic thinking. So usually, you know, there's kind of an art to asking the right type of questions

that nudge them into slightly less extreme, slightly less rigid way of looking at things usually. To me it feels like a return to sanity. Yeah. Whatever that approximates to. I agree. You know, in many cases, like what emerges at the end

of cognitive therapy is, You know, just, I sometimes I say to people, if we got together all of the clients who have genuinely benefited from cognitive behavioral therapy, and we interviewed them and asked them what the big insights were that they achieved that helped them to overcome their problems, and we wrote them all down in a book, I say, it would be the most boring book in the world, right? Because I can tell you right now, it would say a lot of stuff like, I just realized it wasn't worth getting angry about stuff anymore. Or I realized that I was kind of exaggerating

how catastrophic things were. And you'd read it and think, really, is that it? Like, so you said it's a return to common sense, right? It sounds kind of banal in a way. It can take a lot of effort to get somebody to realize something which in a sense is kind of banal, just viewing things,

realistically, but that's what the Stoics say. The goal is to get back to a rational, realistic appraisal of things. Getting things in perspective isn't sexy. Like, you know, getting things in perspective when you explain it. That's partly why people need therapy, you know. It's partly why you can't just tell them the answers. Because the answers in some way sound too obvious.

We don't see the wood for the trees a lot of the time. In Zen, they have the saying that water heats gradually and boils suddenly. Think about that moment of comprehension. You know, when it lands and you get it, it's a process to get there. And we all have our own individual processes of what we're moving through. And it's kind of fun to be on a journey, you know, of self-discovery and that there's more to learn, more to grow. and that perpetual student mindset

is an exciting adventure. If you know what everything is, then where does the possibility for learning more to rise? It would be like a kind of death in a way. You know, to be human is to be fallible and ignorant, you know, and imperfect. To be human is to have anxiety

and to have cravings and to have problems. I think people, too readily have this desire to kind of eliminate all their weaknesses and eliminate all of the problems. And I don't think there's anything wrong with dealing with those things and moderating them. But the truth is that if we completely get rid of all of our problems and all of our weaknesses, we'd all die abhordom. You know, it's part of human nature to get anxious about things

sometimes and, you know, to have habits and cravings to deal with. There's nothing inherently terrible about that. As long as we kind of manage to keep things within perspective, it's part of what it means to grow and live, as you're saying. It's the journey of life, is identifying our weaknesses, accepting them and learning from them and dealing with them. It's what makes us who we are.

I imagine, you know, if there were such a thing as, you know, the gods, like they probably look at human beings we're envious in a sense because they think there's something there's something noble about being human and being fallible, you know, being perfect,

potentially, I imagine the gods would all be quite bored. Like, you know, and they think occasionally we have to come to earth and incarnate ourselves as humans so that we can kind of go through this adventure, like, of being ignorant and temporary madness, like infallibility. dealing with that. It's part of the drama of human life.

The drama we're here to play. I read in your recent substack article of how to think like a Roman emperor. You talked about the double meanings of that title and this idea of kingship. Who rules themselves in our world? Who would you point to? Seneca's line, the greatest empire is to be emperor of oneself. and what are your thoughts on that kingship being a state of mind, not a station? That's how the Stoics and Socratic philosophers in general, I think, had this idea. You know, the famous, it's like a kind of famous trope or like theme in ancient philosophy.

The best example would be our buddy Alexander the Great, right? So he's the most powerful man in the world and this hugely accomplished military figure. But the legend. is that he encountered Diogenes Asynic and Diogenes of Seneca was like the dregs of society in a sense he was a criminal

who had been exiled from his home city and he lived like a beggar basically so in Athenian terms he was like the lowest of the low in a way and yet he was admired for his strength of character and his wisdom and the story goes

the famous anecdote is that Alexander the Great wanted to see him and he went to visit him and he said, is there anything that I can do for you? And Alexander said, yes, can you step aside

you're blocking the sun? Which is deeply metaphorical, like, because Alexander claimed to be the incarnation of the sun god. So he was the kind of fake son and Dowaginis wanted to, you know,

see the real son that he was obscuring. And there's another story that as he was walking away, Diorgio, like Alexander's retinue, thought this was kind of ridiculous and diogenes was an idiot. But Alexander said, you know, if I wasn't Alexander, I would wish to be diogenes. I think, I don't know if this is unlikely to be historically true, but it was an appealing anecdote to people in the ancient world.

This contrast between somebody who was very powerful, but perhaps like had been captured by their own ambition and desires and somebody for whom that was meaningless and had nothing but completely transcended it. I mean obviously Diogenes is very similar figure in many ways to the gymnosophoy you know, the way he lived and so on is a kind of aesthetic or renunciate

kind of similar to Hindu synchusyn or holy man. There's also a story that when There's lots of cool anecdotes about Alexander the Great. There's an anecdote that when he was dying, he said, I want you to cut two holes in either side of my casket so that when you carry my coffin through the streets, which is what they did in the ancient world, they parade the body.

And he said, I want you to have my arms hanging out either side of the casket so that people can see that I'm leaving the world empty-handed. Like we say today, you can't take it with you, basically. So this idea would be someone like Nero or Alexander, Epictetus would say is a slave because they're ironically, paradoxically, they're enslaved by their own ambition, they're enslaved by their own desire,

whereas Diogenes and Socrates, although they have nothing, are completely free and they roll over themselves. So someone has the external appearance or the status of a king, but they're internally a slave. Diogenes externally looks like a slave or a beggar, but internally he's a king.

It's a powerful inquiry for our own lives, you know? Like we're often chasing this mountain top where we'll feel like a king or queen. And I think that we can hear it many times of the emptiness people feel when they arrive at what they thought they desperately wanted and was the aim of their life to then find out that they're still them

and there they are. And what does it mean to be the king or queen, so to speak, of your internal landscape? And that's a powerful inquiry. I want to go back to Delphi. We started this podcast there. Who is the Oracle of Delphi? Who's the literal woman?

And what does she say about Socrates? So the Oracle at Delphi. Delphi was many different women occupied that role over centuries. Supposedly they were uneducated peasant girls who lived in the local area, according to, I think, Plutarch tells us that. He says there's nothing special about the priestess at Delphi, although it probably changed over time. And there's also a tradition that Pythagoras, one of the earliest pre-Socratic,

one of the most mystical philosophers learned his ethical philosophy from a priestess at Delphi. So one of the cool ideas that I come across sometimes is that women are kind of underrepresented in the ancient world, but if you dig deeply,

they're kind of on the periphery in these key roles. Definitely, weirdly, in the story of Socrates, there's quite a few really interesting, really influential women at the periphery of the story, as it were. I wonder how much they were in the periphery in the actual moment as opposed to the men who wrote the history.

Yeah, I mean, you could say maybe Plutarch is giving a really distorted version of events, or it could be that by his time, the Oracle at Delphi had become unimportant in terms of who she was, but perhaps in earlier time, she was a very important priestess and highly educated. Yeah, it risk sounding to,

woke but what was her story instead of his story, right? Yeah. So she sat on a tripod. Tripods had this kind of spiritual significance and Greek religion. In the temple

at Delphi and there were supposedly fumes that rose up from cracks in the ground that some people believe were intoxicating and she would go into a kind of trance where she was possessed by the god Apollo. So you know they'll say when they go to the oracle they're consulting Apollo and the reason that they phrase it like that is because they believe that the god literally possesses her and speaks through her. So they're not really attributing the things she says to the priestess

that you think she's channeling the god Apollo and Apollo is the god of prophecy and in some ways the god of philosophy by implication the god of the arts and philosophy is one of the arts and she would say weird and cryptic things. So the story about Socrates is that she, one of Socrates's friends, who was a weird dude. Like, he was known as, his name was Chirophon. There's not many good names.

Yeah, he's like a really cool guy. Syrophon, agropinus. Yeah, he had a brother called Chirocratis, and the two of them used to fight a lot. and Socrates, in some of the dialogues, Socrates is just straight up doing relationships counselling using the Socratic method. I mean, you know, sometimes if people think it's like

a reading between the lines or a bit of a stretch, sometimes you read Plato and Socrates is doing very abstract philosophy, but in Xenophon's dialogues in particular, sometimes he's literally just helping people resolve their relationship problems. So he helps these two brothers overcome an argument and be reconciled, basically. It's a really clear example of him using his method as a therapy, like straightforward example,

or a type of cognitive therapy in the ancient world. And so Cairofon is like a guy who almost sounds like, I'm tempted almost to say he sounds like a bit emo or a goth or something. They describe him as being like a bat and that he was kind of pale and gaunt looking and he was just generally perceived as a bit of an unusual dude but he was Socrates's his best friend like so we often don't think of him like that

but he had this kind of sidekick or best friend who was also a philosopher who was kind of like this weird eccentric figure and the reason his eccentricity is important is they went on this almost like a pilgrimage you know he'd walked for several days to go to Delphi it's a big deal to consult the Oracle and Chirophon consulted the Oracle

and asked it with whether anyone was wiser than Socrates, which is a, like, bizarre, like, question to ask, basically. And the Oracle replied that no man is wiser than Socrates. And Socrates claims that he found this kind of disturbing and problematic, and that in a sense instigated his career in philosophy, or at least moved it into, I think he'd already, been studying philosophy, but he thinks his, in Plato's apology, he suggested that his philosophy

career kind of really took off or entered a new phase when he got this proclamation from the Oracle at Delphi. It's hard to know really what to make of this historically. In Plato's apology, where he's claiming to describe what happened in court when Socrates was on trial, when Socrates mentions it, the audience freak out. and start to get really agitated. So it seems to be in a very controversial thing. And Socrates claims that he thought, well, the only, I don't believe that I'm wise. And I think if I start to think that I'm wise, it's going to make me close-minded and conceited.

So the only way that the Oracle could be true is if nobody else is wise either. So he claims that that inspired him to go around testing whether anybody else was just, genuinely wise. I'll tell you an interesting bit of trivia in a way. He started off questioning, he says he started off questioning very important people. He doesn't really name them, but we can see he's questioning people like Protagoras, who claims that he's the wisest man alive. He's Protagoras's followers literally called him the wisest man alive. So it seems like he was probably one of the first people. We don't know the chronology exactly, but he was probably one of the first people that Socrates made a B-line for and said, okay, let's test.

out whether this guy is actually wise or not. And basically by asking him Socratic questions and proving that he contradicted himself or tripped himself up at Socrates's thought, okay, so you know, if the Oracle says that this dude isn't wiser than me, then that's not, you know, that's not

really such a dramatic thing because his wisdom is an illusion, like it's just an appearance. And he challenged certain statesmen, probably, as well. I think some his, this is kind of reading between the lines a bit. But

scholars of Plato have noted that it looks like over time, Socrates increasingly begins to do philosophy with young men. And initially, he

went to great statesmen, great philosophers, and I think he went to the people who claimed to be wise and found that they weren't wise. And probably discovered that actually the more someone claims to be wise, the more close-minded they are,

and the less useful they are as a partner in dialogue. And so he began, and then I'd like to say, then he went to the youth of Athens who nobody considered to be wise, like, because he thought, these guys at least are going to engage

in a proper dialogue with me because they've got nothing to lose. They're not pretending to be wise. Nobody thinks of them as wise, so they're flexible and open-minded and more willing to, admit when they make mistakes. And so they make much better, more dynamic partners and dialogue. I'll tell you, another bit of trivia about Socrates. Socrates, we can see, and he was known for this,

went around doing philosophy, so he did philosophy in the marketplace. He went to his friend's houses. Sometimes we're told he just bumped into people in the street and got into philosophical dialogues with them. he did philosophy with the rich, the poor, Athenians, foreigners, slaves, and perhaps most controversially of all, he did philosophy with women. So in one of Xenophon's dialogues, he's speaking to a famous courtesan, a prostitute,

doing philosophy with her, which might not seem like a big deal, but to Athenians, that would have been kind of shocking. Now, one of his favorite arguments is whether or not virtue can be taught. And this was perhaps the most subversive thing that he discussed. The fact that he's doing philosophy with women and slaves and poor people suggests that he thinks virtue is learnable.

Otherwise, what would be the point? Speaking to people that Athenian society didn't consider to be wise or virtuous, right? Now, this was controversial because, I mean, very simply, Greek culture assumed that aristocrats were virtuous. At birth. Yeah. Like, they literally just describe it as noble birth. Yeah. Like, so the best people in society are wealthy aristocrats.

Like, and of course, there's a social hierarchy and everybody else is inferior. slaves are inferior foreigners and barbarians are inferior to Athenians and women are inferior to men and they have this kind of rigid hierarchical view of society and they think it's genetic they think you're literally

just born with courage and wisdom and virtue and stuff and maybe training can help to bring that out but the idea that poor people, women and foreigners could learn virtue would up

upset the social hierarchy. So the very fact that Socrates was talking about that and questioning it helps to explain why they executed him. Because what he was doing was much more radical than it seems at first. It was more egalitarian and it rocked the social order. Sometimes people think it's that kind of struggle with the idea that Socrates was executed. I think one of the biggest puzzles about Socrates is why they didn't kill him sooner. He was 71. He was 71.

Yeah. Like they waited until he was nearly dying of old age anyway. And then accused of what? Oh, impiety and corrupting the youth, like, basically. These are kind of like standard charges in Athenian society. So, yeah, they accused them of corrupting the youth is like a key part of it. and turning them against their parents, subverting the social order.

And not to divert you too much, but then how did he respond as opposed to denying the accusations, how did he in his trial show up? Well, in Plato's apology, he responds very unapologetically. So there's many things. I think Plato's apology is a masterpiece,

so it's difficult to know where to begin and so I think everyone should read it. It's one of the few texts that I would just categorically recommend that everyone should just go out and read. But a lot of things happen in it. So one of them is that Socrates basically just does philosophy in the courtroom. Like he just uses it. So he's on trial for doing the Socratic method.

They're basically putting him on trial for doing the Socratic method. And he does it in the courtroom. He does the thing that he's on trial for in the courtroom, basically. And the jury vote and find him guilty. by a narrow margin and then the way that the Athenian court worked was they would vote on your guilt and then they vote on the penalty

so the more people voted for the death penalty than found him guilty which is like so some of the some of the dudes that found him innocent changed their mind at the last minute and voted that he should be executed

like in the space of like a few minutes at the end so his response. to the guilty verdict, just upset the jury even more. There were 300 people in the jury by the. It was like a big group of people facing. And it kind of like a mob, they were quite unruly. I think three times in the apology, they have to be told to calm down.

Are there any modern cinema representations of that moment? That you know. Not that I'm sure there might be some maybe in other languages. there's a play starring Christopher Walken as Socrates's son Lamprocles

called Barefoot in Athens from the 60s It's like a TV show It doesn't show his trial though I don't think But it kind of depicts his life pretty well So yeah Like essentially that's what goes on in the trial

But lots of other things happen He says he talks about his attitude toward death, he talks about his military service. He doesn't forward really complete arguments in the apology, but he drops in these little kind of seeds or fragments of philosophical arguments. It's very intriguing, but it's, again, sort of tantalizing and inconclusive. You know, you take away bits of ideas and fragments of arguments from it. And you would say that the way that he handled his death and showed up in the courtroom probably largely impacted his influence and recognizability as a historical figure? Yeah, I mean, beyond question, Socrates's death mainly through,

like Xenophon also wrote an apology that survives today, and there may have been other accounts of his trial and death as well in the ancient world. there were lots of other Socratic dialogues by other authors that don't survive today. But yeah, I mean, it was like, in a sense, the most famous moment in the history of Western intellectual life. It was a seismic event in Greek culture. And all philosophers pretty much knew the apology by heart. you know, the Stoics are very familiar with it. They often refer to it.

To them it's just like a bit of context that they absolutely take for granted. You know, for many centuries, it's like, it's almost like, you know, it's not really a philosophical dialogue so much as, what would you say, like a call to action or something like that. It's an inspirational, you know, motivational text that's meant to kind of really inspire people to admire philosophers and want to embrace it as a way of life. Some people read it and they just think Socrates comes across like a jerk and like really annoying.

But in the ancient world, people thought he came across as heroic and inspirational. So Socrates made a claim that sounds insane on the surface, which is that injustice harms the perpetrator more than the victim. I want you to defend it. to defend that claim. This is a notorious claim that he make that the Stoics agree with. So he thinks Socrates believes that the most important thing to us in life is our own character and that determines the benefit that we gain from wealth, reputation, life, you know, everything. Like if we have a bad character, then our life will be bad. If we have a good character,

then our life will go well. And so he thinks that injustice harms the character of the person that's inflicting it on someone else. They degrade themselves. It's a form of ignorance. It's the opposite of wisdom. And so really they're harming their own soul by doing that. And the most that it can do to another person would be to deprive them of property or to deprive them of status or to deprive them of their life but even taking away their life

can't damage the other person's character so if they endure injustice nobly then they potentially die a hero or die with dignity or nobility Jesus on the cross Yeah, so they win There's a famous saying attributed to Socrates

that he doesn't actually say in the apology So it may come from another text Or it may be kind of paraphrasing Plato It's the final closing sentence Of the handbook of Epictetus And also it's a saying That one of the Roman stories was known for going around and repeating,

but Epictetus quotes it. It's the final remark in the handbook. And it has Socrates saying, Anatus and Melitus, the two guys who brought the charges against him, he says, they can kill me, but they cannot harm me, which is a crazy, radical thing to say. Weirdly, it sounds like

Obi-Wan Kenobi. And I don't know if you remember in Star Wars. He says to Darth Vader, you can kill me, but you'll just make me more powerful or something like that, right? So it's weirdly reminiscent of this thing in Star Wars. He says, you can kill me, but you

cannot harm me. And he means like even if you do the most extreme thing to me deprive me in my reputation, my wealth, and actually end my life, you can't actually harm my character, which is the thing that defines my worth as a human being, ultimately. Yeah, there's so many through lines through Star Wars and the Force and the cultivation of virtue versus sin. And this podcast is so fun for me because there are like, for me, like five different avenues at any point to walk down.

And this has already probably been the longest podcast I've ever done. But so joyfully, you know, there's still some, a few last questions that I want to. ask but um i am uh i'm just so i'm so grateful for uh your life's work and what you've been able to study so i feel very lucky to have you know been able to spend my life doing my hobby basically and then kind of breaking books about it and yeah you know i look back and like a lot of people i think it was a few lucky breaks along the way allowed me you know to end up spending my life to i dropped out of school when i was a kid and i kind of when i was a teenager i felt my life was going absolutely nowhere.

But I fell in love with philosophy and I was committed to it. And I kind of stuck it out even though I wasn't sure where it was going to lead me. And now looking back on it, I think, you know, it's allowed me to, it's benefited me enormously personally to be able to read the apology of Plato and read the Stoics. And it's also given me an opportunity to do something that really seems to benefit. for other people through therapy and coaching, like personally, and through doing podcasts and things like that. And also through writing books that reach hundreds of thousands of people. So I have Marcus Aurelius and Socrates and these ancient philosophers to thank for that.

It's like an enormous gift. And I said to you earlier, it's like I'm doing my hobby for a living. So I love nothing more than these kind of conversations. Likewise. I live for it. I would be remiss to not ask about the Ilocidian mysteries, and it is rumored to what degree we have historical data to back it up, that Marcus Aurelius potentially made a trip to Greece towards the end of his life to explore. I think we were pretty safe in saying that he did that.

Because when you're reading Roman history, one of the distinctions that you probably might make is stuff that happens in private. So there's like a rumor that such and such happens. And you think, you know, if you're, reviewing history critically, you think, well, who saw this? You know, this is clearly hearsay, right? But things that happened very publicly are usually more likely to be accurate. We have several references to the fact that he went to Athens towards the end of his life.

So actually, the weird thing about that is Marcus Aurelius absolutely loved Greek culture and philosophy. But as far as we know, he didn't get a chance to go to Greece. and go to Athens until quite late on in his life because he was too busy fighting various wars and things like that and so he eventually went he was initiated into the Alicinian Mysteries

the temple at Elusis or modern day Elifina is like half an hour drive outside of Athens the temple complex the ruins of it are still there today the

a tribe had looted it and sacked the temple during Marcus's lifetime and he made a vow that he was going to go there and be initiated and restore the temple. There's a bust which we believe is Marcus Aurelius which is still there today. So it looks like he had the gate to the temple restored

and his bust was placed above the entrance with what looked like poppy flowers around it which are symbols of the Olsonian mysteries. So it was, sometimes people call it the religion with no name. It was a cult, a mystery religion, clues in the name. It was mysterious. It was a secret. Is that what?

Yeah. Lucian means. Oh, no, mystery. It means it was kept secret. Yeah. What is it? Lucian refers to the people. It's just the name of the town.

And it was basically. around the myth of Demeter and Persephone and it was an agricultural myth it was an initiation that people went through

people from all over the Greek world would travel there I mean it's hard to imagine today but these ceremonies at Delphi and Eleusis were like kind of like the Woodstock Festival, like they were crazy. Like, I mean, I think some of our ancient sources

kind of describe it as very chaotic and people running around like crazy. Music and incense and lots of foreigners, which like would have been kind of a very unusual atmosphere. So there's a lot of stuff going on. Music, dance, religious ceremonies, you know, a crazy experience for people that lived in the ancient world,

you know, it's not often they'd get the opportunity to kind of experience something like that. And so people would be initiated. We don't know exactly what happened. You could be severely punished for disclosing what happened. I think you could get the death sentence in Athens for disclosing

what happened in the Lassanian Mysteries. It sounds kind of weirdly extreme, but I think one reason for it is that perhaps, there was so much economic interest and political interest in it that the Elisian Mysteries gave the Athenians some power and an influx of wealth. So disclosing those secrets would potentially allow people to replicate

the ceremony in other places. And so that would material affect the state. So it was a state secret. And so we don't know exactly what went on. But people probably saw dramatic reenactments of the myths. They went through initiation rituals. Psychedelic? They probably took, I think it's safe to say, you know,

there's reasonable evidence that they took some ergot, like a fungus that has hallucinogenic properties. I don't know about musha. I think it's probably more likely to be ergot. So ergot is what? It's a... It's a fungus that grows on barley, for example, and I think some other plants.

So a type of fungi. Yeah. But I think it's partly, so LSD is a synthetic chemical. But I think the chemical formula for LSD, if I remember rightly, is partially derived from Ergot. Any other ones that we can speculate on, like Acacia or other drugs that they say? I think it's mainly Ergot that we believe that they took. They took this potion called the Cookion, which. which means like cocktail or mixture in Greek.

It's a peculiar name. Yeah. The cookies. The hippies taking a cookie on. Like the hash cookies or something like that. And I think we're told in some sources that it was barley water, which is they use barley to brew beer. So it's probably fermented barley that has this fungus on it.

But it would probably have to be carefully prepared. We have all these little ceramic small. like a little jug that the Greeks used to put medicine in or like a little thing for putting a potion in basically. So that kind of strongly implies that they were drinking some small quantity of a substance. And there's some chemical evidence from, I think, a temple in Sicily that replicated the Ellicinian mysteries, that found traces of Ergot in some of the ceramics. and also, I think, in a skull that was found in the temple, and the teeth, there were traces of ergot.

So, anyway, it's long being speculated that there were drugs involved in the Ellicinian mysteries. Whatever happened, it was a big deal. Cicero says that the Alicinian mysteries were the greatest contribution that the Greeks made to culture, which is a big claim. You know, that's like saying

the Alcenaian mysteries were more important than Plato, like more important than philosophy, fate more important than Greek tragedy. It's a remarkable thing to say. But certainly people thought it was really, really important. So what did it consist in? I mean, I think it looks like it involved some kind of ritual where people believed that they glimpse the afterlife.

Right? More of a mystical tradition. Yeah, it seems like it was about an initiation that allowed you to catch a glimpse of the afterlife and that transformed your attitude towards life. Which maybe would make sense why Marcus would be interested in exploring towards the end of his life. Well, it's a pity he didn't do it before he wrote the meditations. So funnily enough, you know, maybe he even changed his mind about the stuff he wrote in the meditations

after going to elusive and taking Ergot for all we know. We don't have anything that he wrote after that. But maybe it can, I mean, there's a sort of, there's some, I mean, again, we know very, little about the Ellicinian Mysteries. It's very secretive. But there's obviously some kind of parallels or, what's the expression, like some kind of harmony between stoicism and the Elicinian mysteries. So Marcus talks, for example, he often uses language that sounds Elicinian. He'll talk quite a lot about ears of corn and figs ripening and stuff. And these are, because it's a kind of agricultural cult,

that we know that these were symbols in the Ellicinian mystery. So part of it almost certainly was the idea that crops are seasonal and they go through cycles of birth and decay. And probably part of the Alicinian Mysteries was encouraging people to see life and death as natural phenomena and to view them as part of the natural, the part of the cycle of nature basically. So probably coming to terms with our own mortality

by seeing it as part of a natural process like plants in the seasons and also this initiation into a glimpse of the afterlife. And definitely in stoicism, we don't have the belief in the afterlife in stoicism, but we have the other part, which is viewing life and death is natural.

The Stoics repeat this a lot because they think that emphasizing how natural and inevitable death is takes away some of the sting from it. To learn how to die, according to the Stoics, is to unlearn how to be a slave. What does that mean?

That's one of the more dramatic saying. It's Seneca who says that. He means that coming to terms with your own mortality can liberate you from excessive attachment to things that are outside your direct control. So, for example, when people have a brush with death or when they're bereaved, it might make them question their priorities in life.

Go through this epistrophe, a U-turn, where they begin to question whether wealth and reputation are really as important as they thought they were. And that's freedom for the Stoics. when we realize that the things that appear to be important might not actually be important in reality, it's liberating. And we snap out of the trance. We awaken, basically.

Quote from your book. Okay. I find myself marveling once more at the soul's capacity to rid itself of myriad unnecessary troubles in this way, enlarging itself, embracing the whole universe, and reflecting on the finitude and transience of all individual things, the brevity of our entire life and the lives of others when compared to the eternity of time.

Beautifully written, shares that perspective on the view from above that we talked about earlier. How do you think about your finitude of life and death? Well, I think about it more as I get older, that's for sure. I mean, I think when I was a young guy, I thought about my own mortality. of brushes with death when I was a young guy. I think on two or three occasions I thought I was going to drown as a kid growing up by the coast. And when I lost my father, it made me think about

my own mortality. So I think in my teens, I began to think about the bigger picture, than view from above, my own finitude. And as time goes on, it's something that I increasingly think about is a bit older. And some of my friends pass away over time, family members pass away. I think increasingly as time goes on, you have more opportunity to reflect on your own mortality. So I've always found

it liberating. It doesn't, death doesn't really scare me as much as it. I mean, when I was a young guy, I would lie awake at night, like worrying about, I had death anxiety. You know, it was something that really troubled me and partly perhaps through stoicism, partly just through getting used to thinking about it over time. That changed dramatically. I mean, really quite a long time ago, but increasingly

as time goes on, I view death as natural inevitable. I don't really worry about it as much. and I think that allows me to see life from a different perspective. There's some evidence that death anxiety is correlated with clinical depression and generalized anxiety disorder and that when people work on their death anxiety and become more reconciled to their own mortality, it seems to reduce general distress. And it also can contribute to a greater sense of purpose in life. And that's definitely what I experience personally.

If you do, what hope do you have that your life and your teachings and writings in part on people long after your past? What hope do I have? It's not something that I feel strongly about, to be honest. I think it's great if people benefit from stoicism. I don't particularly feel that it needs to be through my writings. if someone just burned all of my books and but people like

continued to read the meditations of Marcus Aurelius and benefit from stilicism that would like I'd be perfectly happy with that so I think you know when you're writing a book you really put everything into it but I don't feel that

all that attached to it strangely I mean it's an odd thing you know I you quoted something from one of my book and I kind of recognize it, but I haven't read that for seven years. You know, so I'm like, sort of forgotten some of the things that I wrote in that book. I mean, I get the general idea, but in a sense it's something that I've

already forgotten about some of the books that I've written. So I don't feel like it's a legacy that I'm kind of attached to, but I do think it's good that people benefit from stoicism. But at the same time, I also accept that that's not something that's really directly under my control. It's quite a puzzling thing in a way.

You know, it could easily have gone the other way. I was into Stoicism before it was cool. Again, it makes me cringe when I say that. But when I first got into Stoicism, it wasn't trendy at all. It was like a niche subject that hardly anybody was interested in except a handful of academics.

And it really surprised me when it became popular. But, you know, in a parallel universe, maybe gladiator didn't come out and maybe Brian Holiday didn't write books about it. and perhaps stoicism would never have gone through a resurgence. It's a fluke in a sense that it did. I mean, it's good that it did,

and there were reasons why it happened. But I view it as just a weird thing that's outside of my control that happened in the culture. And I appreciate it. But I could as easily just stop tomorrow. I've often wondered, like, are people going to lose interested in stoicism? Like, a year from now or two years.

years from now. So far it's continued to kind of grow in popularity, which is good. But I keep an open mind about how long that's going to continue for. And actually, like we were kind of saying earlier, the Stoics believed that they were teaching a kind of universal wisdom. So it makes no difference to me whether people get those ideas from Buddhism or Daoism or from reading poetry or if they get it from the Stoics. You know, I think it's great if they benefit from the idea. It doesn't really matter to me where they get it from, though. To me, it's refreshing that if you truly find a tradition or lineage or school of thought

and logic that resonates to you most and you really go to it at its depth and apply reason that you'll come to similar truths across the board. And that sends the pressure sort of off. Yes. Yeah. What Marcus said that he wanted to do. his soul to be naked and simple. What do you think that would mean

to live that transparently in your life? It's an interesting... Actually, here's a bit of trivia about that. There's a passage where Marcus says that you should live as if you weren't concealed by curtains, I think, is the expression that he uses at one point.

And there's a kind of slightly dark aspect to that because I think I mentioned earlier that when he was about 15 when he was a young guy he was taken into the villa of Hadrian and Hadrian was kind of quite sinister at that point Hadrian had spies everywhere

like and Roman aristocrats were under constant kind of suspicion Hadrian had vendettas I think against at least two of Marcosi's family members and so when he was a kid and he was 15 years old But everywhere he went in that villa, the servants, slaves, the people around him

would have been constantly watching him and reporting back everything he said and did to Adrian. So he had to at that point live as if he didn't have any secrets and he couldn't hide behind any curtains or walls. Because in a sense he literally couldn't. He was constantly being spied on. So I think he thought, in a sense, the only way I can deal with this is, is by being really mindful and self-aware, and never doing anything or saying anything that I'm ashamed of.

In a way, it was perhaps at that point in his life a way of coping with being under constant surveillance. But later in life, it becomes part of his philosophy, and it becomes a spiritual practice. What does it mean? I think it's, you know, stoicism sets a very high standard. it's good because Stoicism has this very high bar but as we talked about earlier

it combines that with accepting our own fallibility and so it's kind of a forgiving philosophy but simultaneously being quite aspirational or idealistic Marcus is constantly going on about his own flaws and weaknesses in the meditations but he aspires to this high goal of being able to live as if he's got nothing to conceal from other people.

It's a remarkable thing for someone in his position to say because Roman emperts normally have lots of secrets. Right. Yeah. Yeah. We talked a lot about death in this conversation, not just literal physical death, but also death of the ideas we cling to and of our identity.

What did the Stoics teach about love? It's an interesting question. Now love is important to Stoicism. We don't have a very clear account of the position on it, but we've got various fragments and bits and pieces we can kind of reconstruct the position from it. They have this idea doctrine of Philistorgia in Greek, which is tricky to translate into English.

It's translated usually as natural affection. So the Stoics thought it's natural for human beings to have affection for people that are close to them, to want to protect their children, to want to protect their loved ones. They thought this kind of bakes into human nature. I guess it's almost a little bit like a quasi-evolutionary theory. You thought, well, if humans didn't naturally want to protect their spouse and their children, then we wouldn't survive as a species. So it's something that's innate to us.

But they thought that as we evolve, they had this idea that we are born with certain instincts, but as our intellect develops as we get older, we develop from children into adults. It changes our values. And we begin to appreciate other people at a different level. So we have a kind of instinctive affection for other people. people or certain other people initially. But over time, the Stoics seem to think that that should evolve in a way that's filtered through reason and wisdom. So we begin to want other people to flourish. We want eudamonia for other people. We want them to experience wisdom.

We want them to experience virtue. So we want them to flourish. But they have to reconcile that with the basic principle that other people's behavior isn't directly under their control. So they have to pursue it with what we called earlier the reserve clause, which would be, you know, I strongly prefer it that you flourish and gain wisdom, but I accept that it's not directly under my control. So the Stoics would say they do the best that they can to benefit other people while being prepared to accept that the other people might not learn.

So Marcus, for example, would have to accept that he got the best tutors and tried to set the best example that he could for Commodus, his son, but be prepared for the fact that Commodus might nevertheless turn into a corrupt and vicious individual as he did. There are many examples that this was a kind of cliche

in the ancient world. The Greeks love to draw attention to the fact that great men often had idiotic kids basically Spirit Cridly. Like it was a if Socrates goes on about this and then people say it about Socrates as well. They say Socrates kids were like really unimpressive

and unaccomplished individuals even though we idolize him as a great philosopher. So they thought this was like a I think they got to the point where most philosophers in the ancient world thought this is kind of a cliche it's a sort of trope that great philosophers and great parents and wise and just individuals

aren't necessarily always able to pass that on to their children. They can help. It's like the saying you can lead a host of water but you can't make it drink. You know, you can set a good example and you can provide an education for other people but you can't guarantee that they're necessarily going to benefit from it.

To close out, I have some rapid fire questions that I would... Cool. I will personally resist the urge to ask deeper context around and would try to limit you to one sentence to one paragraph for each question. I like doing that. I have a go. Let's do it. I accept the challenge.

The challenge begins. If you could transport back to one moment in history, which would it be? Oh, the Oracle at Delphi, because we'd know so little about that. It's quite intriguing. I'd love to go back and see what actually happened, at that point when the oracle said no man is wiser than Socrates Why did the philosophers

insist on plain, unextravagant clothing? It became a symbol of being a philosopher but it was also a form of renunciation and a way of embracing a lifestyle where they rejected ostentation

and material status and flamboyance and things like that. It's a form of non-attachment, I guess. Similarly, and I try to increasingly disabuse the extravagant articulation, which is fun for me sometimes, but there seems to be this return to a simple language and speaking plainly, what is the importance of that from the Stoic perspective

when communicating effectively? They thought that by communicating simply and clearly, we could help avoid using language in a way that amplifies and distorts our emotions. They thought it was therapeutic, basically, to be more concise and more objective in their speech. you say studying the traits we admire and others is a starting point for cultivating them. What traits are you working on right now personally?

Hmm. I think the things that I'm most interested in learning from other people are qualities like patience and empathy, probably are things that I'm particularly interested in at the moment. If you could have dinner with any Stoic and it wasn't, Or Marcus, who would it be? That's a tricky one. I mean, I guess the obvious answer would be Epictetus, because he's like somebody that I find.

Even like Marcus looked up to him and he's like an iconic stoic figure. So, yeah, definitely Epicetus. One thing you would wish people would stop quoting Epicetus on. Oh, nothing. Like, I don't, I mean, the one where he says it's not things that upset us, but that's quoted to death in books and say. I would say I wish they would quote other stuff from Epicetus and not just that one quote, definitely.

But I don't want them to stop quoting that. I just wanted to quote other things as well. Alfred Korsipski. Oh, wow. Two sentences. Why should anyone care? Oh, that's an impossible question. Like Kazibski's general semantics is notoriously tricky to explain. So it's kind of

You get two paragraphs I've got to get no I'll do it I'll have a go of doing this in like two sentences it's a major precursor of cognitive behavioral therapy that's as philosophically important to CBT as stoicism is arguably and it's about

changing the way that we use language in general so the potential benefits of it are kind of more pervasive and generic than CBT. So it lends itself towards very general self-improvement and resilience building. And so the breadth of it is particularly useful. And also there aren't really other approaches to self-improvement that kind of cover the same ground.

It's sort of unique in some regards. What virtue do you think the modern man and woman could use most? cultivating? In a way the answer would just be wisdom because the Stoics think wisdom is kind of integral to all the other virtues. However, I think

that another virtue that's very important that people don't talk a lot about is magnanimity. And Seneca thinks magnanimity is the main virtue, one of the main virtues that counteracts anger.

I think anger is particularly problematic. for modern society and this kind of forgotten virtue of magnanimity of going beyond anger and being able to see things more objectively having a, it means literally having a big soul like rather than kind of focusing

narrowly on small things is something that's lacking from society and many people would benefit for. We don't have magnanimity in our politics for example, they could definitely benefit from it. Okay. I'm going to put you through the torturous endeavor of trying to summarize your favorite quote or ethos of a philosopher that I'm going to name, and you say your favorite,

or maybe most personally impactful lesson that comes to mind from them. Okay. Pythagoras. The first thing that comes to my mind, but Pythagoras is the idea that we should postpone responding to things that provoke our anger until our feelings have naturally abated. So I think that was an integral technique in Pythagoreanism, and I think it's still very relevant today. Heraclitus. Heraclitus says that the way up and the way down are the same. His teachings are hard to explain because it's very paradoxical and obscure.

But I think this is a really cool idea. If we understand how we can make ourselves more anxious or how we make ourselves more angry, then we potentially understand how to do the opposite and deconstruct my unhealthy feelings. So the way up and the way down are the same is a very profound saying, I believe. Zeno.

Zeno is like the whole of stoicism. So I think arguably one of his big innovations was the distinction between two different types of value. So the value that we place on external things, like he calls it selective value. So the idea that you could say that something has utility or that you'd prefer to have it, but that's different from the value

that you invest in something when you become very emotional about it. So separating kind of practical value and the sort of evaluations that cause strong emotions, is a major insight, I think, that Zeno had. Socrates. Socrates is, again, so much stuff. I think the Socratic method really is the main thing. And the idea that it's a remedy for kind of intellectual conceit

and that it's a process that helps us to develop understanding without necessarily arriving at a clear conclusion. Diogenes. Diogenes, I think one of the main things that I take from diogenes is the idea of voluntary hardship and building up. The cynics had this idea that by accepting pain or discomfort, we can kind of remove some of the same. sting from it, like grasping a nettle.

They have various metaphors to describe this, but it's very relevant to modern therapy that if we face our fears and we voluntarily endure stress and discomfort, we can potentially kind of adapt or climatize to it rather than always trying to run away from it and suppress it. Epicurus.

Oh, Epicurus is a tricky one because he's kind of a big rival of the Stoics that the philosophies are usually seen as being kind of an odds in some ways. But Epicurus did say a lot of really cool things. Seneca borrows quite a lot from him. So one of the things that I like about Epicurius is that he says, and that Marcus, I really as quote several times, is that pain is either, what is it? He says it's either acute, it's either intense and short-lived

or it's long-lived and bearable. So, like, the most intense pain that we experience is usually the briefest pain. pain. And that's a curious way of kind of reframing the experience. You can either tell yourself this is really bad but it won't last long or you can tell yourself, okay, this lasts a long time but it's not as severe as acute pain.

So there's always an angle that you can adopt that allows you to reframe it one way or the other. Chrysippus. I mean inventing cognitive behavioral therapy basically the Chrysippus says that there are two types of belief

that cause emotions and one of them is an evaluation of how bad something is and the other one is a extreme belief about how we should respond to it and this is really similar to a very influential modern theory of stress and emotion

so I think that was incredibly insightful and way ahead of its time. So this idea that when we're angry or when we're anxious, we kind of have a threat appraisal and then also a strong belief about how we should cope. Okay, a couple more. Seneca.

Seneca, let me think. I mean, one of the main things that I would take away, there's loads and loads of things from all of these philosophers, but Seneca has this idea that he is one of our main sources for premeditercial malorum. So

the idea that we should practice all of the misfortunes that commonly befall people and prepare ourselves to cope and advance with them. It's like a really profound idea. It's a resilience building strategy.

I don't know I'd say all that much about that philosophically, but I think it's a major theme in his writings and very important. Epictetus. I think one of the most interesting things that Epictetus says is that passage where he tells his students that when they have a troubling impression,

they should speak to it and say you're just an impression and not entirely the thing that you claim to represent. That's weirdly similar to one of the central principles of Kuzibsky's general semantics. And it's really interesting

for several reasons from the point of view of modern psychotherapy. So it's like a passing remark that he makes, but it's very powerful and very interesting. Marcus Aurelius. The main things that I would take from Marcus Aurelius, again, there's like so many things. Probably one of the most famous sayings that he has

is stop arguing about what it means to be a good man and just be one. So that's not a profound philosophical argument, but I think it's a very powerful piece of philosophical rhetoric. You've spent 30 years studying ancient philosophy and modern psychology. You've spent decades applying that through practice and coaching and behavioral therapy, raising a daughter, losing a father, and friends. If you had one last message to deliver it in 60 seconds, it's no small question.

What would you leave people with? again there's so many ways that I can potentially answer that but the first thing that comes to my mind funnily enough I change my mind a little bit as I get older but as time goes on it sounds odd to say this and I'm drawing on stoicism modern psychotherapy research and saying this

the main thing I would say to people is I think most people massively underestimate their own ability to cope with stress and misfortune very simply I think people underestimate their coping ability and just realizing that and thinking about it is one of the most important things that they can do to help themselves. We recently launched an online community

that know-thyself collective. The goal is to facilitate individual awakening towards the collective transformation of a more beautiful world and we have people from our community send in questions. And so one question that came in from Luis from Los Angeles. Does Stoicism separate ambition from uncontrolled desire? Hmm.

Does that question mean could there be a healthy form or a moderate form of ambition? So the terminology the Stoics use is probably slightly different. But the Stoics would certainly acknowledge that you could have ambition without being originally pathologically attached to it. That would be what they call preferred indifference. So they think it's possible to, they think, they don't think that material success

or social success, our reputation or bad things, they think they're potentially advantageous. They just don't think that they're all important or that we should invest our self-esteem in them. So if we can, pursue those things with a certain degree of non-attachment and a kind of somewhat egoless way,

then that's potentially natural and healthy. But in the process of doing, the trick to doing that paradoxically, would be to pursue ambition while accepting the possibility of failure with relative indifference, to prefer success but be able to endure failure. Wonderful. Is there any, we had quite a thorough conversation. Is there anything else on your mind or heart that you want to share before we close out?

Gosh, let me think. Well, the book I'm writing at the moment is about anger. So that's my big hobby. I used to be really into anxiety and now I'm more into anger for some reason. There too. Emotions tojor. Yeah. I got more into anger as time went on. I think in some ways the anger might be the royal road or our Royal Road to Self-improvement or overcoming anger is. Because if we can really deal with anger, it potentially transforms our relationship with other people. It forces us to think more deeply about, we've talked about love earlier. You know, what's the opposite of anger?

What does it mean to wish people well and want them to flourish? So, and anger is one of the most overlooked of the emotions. There's relatively little research on it compared to depression and anxiety. People with anger are therapy dodgers. They usually don't seek out therapy unless a spouse or somebody else refers them, tells them that they should go. So one thing is I'd leave people with. We talked earlier about kind of blind spots. Anger is like the biggest blind spot for self-help and self-improvement.

It's the thing that people tend to ignore. It's the problem that nobody's watching. So if you're looking for your blind spots, resentment, anger, those kind of feelings are the ones that are kind of trickiest. What I'd leave with people is there's maybe more to be gained therefore by looking deep within and targeting that particular problem. Can't wait to read it when it comes out. And this has been one of the most thorough and fun conversations that I've had in a while.

I just want to say thank you so much. And we'll leave links down in the description where people can stay connected with you and your work and your substack and your writings, all of that. Awesome. It's been a pleasure. Again, I've really enjoyed the way that you, the direction of which you took the conversation. I feel like we've kind of been on a bit of a journey. Yeah. Absolutely. It's my favorite journey to be on. Thank you for going on it with me. And thank you all for coming on this journey as well.

Massive gratitude to you. Yeah, likewise. Thank you, everyone. Until next time, be well.