Modern Wisdom - #274 - Donald Robertson - Stoicism: How To Think Like A Roman Emperor

Episode Date: January 25, 2021

Donald Robertson is a Psychotherapist and an author. People are getting tattoos of Marcus Aurelius, copies of his Meditations sold out at the beginning of the pandemic and yet he was just some bloke two thousand years ago. What made him so special and what is there to learn from his life? Expect to learn how stoicism and cognitive behavioural therapy are intrinsically linked, why an existential crisis can be useful, how Marcus Aurelius dealt with his anger, why Donald thinks we lost the wisdom of ancient Greece and much more... Sponsors: Get 83% discount & 3 months free from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Buy How To Think Like A Roman Emperor - https://amzn.to/39JzkgS  Follow Donald on Twitter - https://twitter.com/DonJRobertson  Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi friends, welcome back. On to today's guest, Donald Robertson is a psychotherapist and an author and his new book How to Think Like Roman Emperor is one of my favourites I've ever found on Stoicism. People are getting tattoos of Marcus Aralius, copies of his meditations sold out at the beginning of the pandemic, and yet he was just some bloke, two thousand years ago. What made him so special? So today, expect to learn how stoicism and cognitive behavioral therapy are intrinsically linked. Why an existential

crisis can be useful, how Marcus Aurelius dealt with his anger, why Donald thinks we lost the wisdom of the ancient Greeks, and much more. Awesome, just straight up awesome this episode, Donald is Scottish, which just means that everything he says is like hilarious and kind of like old, timey, great. You're going to really enjoy this one. If you do make sure that you press subscribe and share it to a friend. This is a wonderful overview of House Stoses and Works and gives us some great context about how we can be more robust mentally. I know that you're going to love this. Please welcome the wise and very wonderful Donald Robertson. You're a cognitive behavioral therapy trained psychologist. Why are you writing about Marcus Aurelius? That's a really good question, because actually my first love was philosophy.

And I think I came to philosophy looking for a philosophy of life really, you know, something that would help me feel better about life, cope with adversity. And I didn't find it at university when I was doing my philosophy degree. So then I started training in psychotherapy and stuff like that. Then after that, I realized I'd missed something, which is the one school, one major school of ancient philosophy that you don't normally study, and an undergraduate philosophy curriculum. So it's like the stone that the builder's rejected became the corner, stone kind of thing. So I discovered Stoßism and I thought this is the thing that I was looking for the whole time I was at university, nobody ever told me about. And so I got into Stoßism and I

realized it was also the philosophical inspiration for cognitive therapy, not a lot of people know that. So the two things wedded together and I thought, oh, cognitive therapists must all be really into stuaces and then, and tend to their weren't. So I ended up writing a book about that. And I thought, oh, this is a nerdy obscure subject that no one's ever going to be interested then I'm never going to be talking about this on podcasts or anything like that in the future. And then it's weirdly it became trendy like a few years after I started writing about it. And I got dragged into this thing that suddenly people were getting tattooed on them and stuff like that. It kind of became a bit hip just as I was getting a little bit old. Actually, I feel like, you know, I'm getting

old on out. You miss the boat. Young kids are into it and stuff. It's reliably told by the publishing industry that it's millennials that work in the tech industry, the demographic that are in the store. Why do you think that is? Well, see, the thing is, you know, I always think I'm in a very lucky position because I talk to so many people. So sometimes when I'm answering questions about stores, there's my thing that's easy because I've asked them and they keep telling me why it is. So I'll tell you what they've told me basically. So they tell me that they feel overwhelmed by social media and the news media bombarding them with alarmist stuff about things that aren't

under the direct control. Like they think the media are trying to fear monger and install hatred, like which is accurate probably, and they don't know how to deal with that, and they feel that there's some kind of philosophy of life to cope with it. But like Nietzsche said, you know, God is dead, but we're still kind of living in a shadow. So they want something that's kind of like what Christianity used to do for our grandparents and so on. But a lot of people today, especially I think in the tech industry, are quite rationalist and they want a secular philosophy that's based on reason rather than faith, revelation or tradition. And so they find in storeicism, and there are historical reasons for this, why they would, are a secular alternative to Christianity and a kind of secular, they want something like CBT that is beggar, that's a

hope of a Western yoga, they also say, I'll just tell you all the stuff they tell me man, it's weird, I don't know if you, so like, yeah, they tell me, we want a Western, you know, that's like Buddhism, but Western. And so they want more than CBT, they want a whole way of life. And so that's what's to us, is them, Gibson. Yeah, I've been fascinated thinking about what we're missing with no consistent religion anymore now.

And the most recent riots at the Capitol, I think a part of that, this anomy, this normalness that we've got at the moment, tradition is out of the window where science is the new God materialist reductionist standpoints on everything of the Victor. Yeah, I just wrote an article about that yesterday. You're right on the bottom there, buddy,

with the topical aspect of this, for sure, because that's exactly what people are asking about. And it seems odd that people would say, well, does this ancient Greek philosophy that might be really relevant to the riots and capital hell? So, you know, I mean, I feel people hearing that might think that sounds really implausible, but, you know, already loads of people are saying

yes, anami like you're saying is disillusionment, you know, people have no sense of direction, they've lost touch with their values. And the more people are confused, a bit the more old values often the more kind of rigid and dogmatic like, you know, in draconian, they become in trying to force their non-existent values on other people. Absolutely. Paradoxically. And the more reflective people are about their values, you know, and in touch with them, the more flexible they tend to be about them, strangely.

So I think really, I paradoxically, there's a connection between the lack of deep, sincere, moral self-examination in modern society, and this kind of rigid dogmatic prejudice. And also, there's a really obvious psychological angle to this, and it's kind of, I don't know, it's so strange, because it's blaringly obvious, and nobody ever does anything really to address it on a societal level. And that is we know that anger bias is judgment and anger is related to political prejudice and racial prejudice and religious. That's been known for decades. And yet we allow the media to go crazy like provoking anger and fear and social media,

like partly because it's very structured, kind of fueling that, escalating things like crazy. And so it's no surprise that crejidacies begin to proliferate in society. We need to help people manage their anger and we need to help them reflect on their values. And weirdly, those are two things that stores us as them interested in. Marcus really said big problems with anger, didn't he? I think based on what I know about him, that was probably the biggest vice emotion that he had. He says that. I mean, we've got slender evidence, really. But he says, in the meditations that he was worried he was going to lose his temper a few times and do something that he'd regret. And he's very preoccupied with anger. But it's all our other story.

I think he had problems managing his own anger though. On the other hand, the histories, so we have these two sides of Marx a reliance. We have what he writes himself in his private journal, so the inner psychological story. And by the way, there's internal evidence that's fairly convincing to most scholars that this was never intended for publication. I agree with that. I think it seems unlikely that this was meant for publication where as scenic as letters are, were definitely literary devices and that they were clearly meant for publication. But in private markets talks about his anger, in public, the histories of his reign seemed to say the opposite that he was very calm, he wasn't

easily provoked. There was one time when he lost his temper and ordered the beheading of our Germanic chief then, but then he walked it back and sent the game to exile. What, actually had his head chopped off? No, I'm not after he has. Sorry mate, we'll just stitch that back on. We can stitch it back, oh, I don't worry. Don't worry, we'll fix that. I better glue or something. You'll be right, it's rain.

No, no, no, I think you give the order and then what was it back, he sent the game to exile instead. Who was it? So I was reading this morning doing my research. Was it Augustus that stabbed a slave in the eye with a spear and then apologized afterwards and was like, what do you want? And the guy said, I just want my eye back. I love that story.

You're very close. It was Hadrian and it was actually a stylist. It's a thing that, like a fountain pen basically, you know, like they use a small childish thing to do. And no, like it's like a kid having a, like a lot of people that lose their temper and history, they do seem like toddlers, like having a mat. Hadrian, people love Hadrian. I'm writing about Hadrian at the moment and I really see him as a giant toddler. Like, he's incredibly vain and bad tempo and paranoid and you know, like, but yeah, he stabbed this guy in the eye and he said, what, okay, is anyone I can do to make it up for

you? And the guy said, oh, what is my eye back? That's a great story because it shows in the capital. How right are funnily enough an example of that. Sometimes when people do things in anger they cause harm that can easily be repaired or maybe completely irreparable. That's one of the things that we should try and do a lot, surely, to take that third party perspective and make the action that we would have wanted us to do in the freshness of mind that we'll have tomorrow morning, not in the heat of the moment right now. That would be a great idea. You should spread the word about that. I think everyone did that. The world would be a much rosier place, wouldn't that? But people are active and impulse. Actually, it's very interesting that most of those people

who write and do stuff, if you got them in a camera moment, they would probably say, oh, we would never do that. But, you know, when people do crazy things, they often surprise themselves because your brain goes into a different mode of functioning, actually, and all these biases, kick in, and you're no longer reasoning clearly. Like you start undermate, oh, we know that people underestimate risk when they're angry. They jump to premature conclusions, they make sweeping generalizations and stuff like that. Like, so your brains and a different mode of function in you and you're thinking is foggy. So yeah, you're right. The Stoics have the strategy that's like a time out strategy. We'd call it therapy, which is knowing

that you're in this crazy state in the fog of war, wouldn't it make sense once you've spotted that to go, yeah, hang on a minute, and maybe should maybe wait until I've calmed down a bit, and then I'll decide whether I want to kick in the door to the capital building or, you know, pick up speaker Pelosi's lectin and carry it down there. It really, I go to the idea.

Did you see, did you see this? So I saw this unbelievable photo where they'd storm the Capitol building and they were going through the entrance way, but they'd stayed inside of the ropes, the walkway. Wow, I didn't see that. Like I saw a video with the cops. I don't know what was going on actually. I said, you know what, I'm not see that. Like, I saw a video with the cops. I don't know what was going on, actually.

I said, you know what, I'm not even going to say it. But some of this, whatever went on there, it was really quite shocking. And at the same time, you know, I should say, the Stoics advisors to say not to be shocked by things, but to say, you know, to remind ourselves, in a sense, we should have seen this coming.

You know, well, it happened. It happened. It can't be unbelievable because it happened. Yeah. I know actually people were predicting it. You know, one of my friends wrote an article last November, like the, you know, talked about exactly this sort of thing happening. And so it's like people have been telling us for ages. It's like in the Cassandra and Greek mythology, she was given the power of prophecy, but cursed so that nobody would believe her. And so I feel there's a lot of Cassandra's talking about at the moment, people are told you this was going to happen, and nobody listens.

So there's still to it, say, it's all too common that people go, this is unbelievable, but what we should say is there are always signs, and we should be asking ourselves why we didn't pay more attention to the signs earlier. That would be a more rational philosophical way of processing this. Do we have anything left to learn from Marcus Aralius? Because there's only a limited amount of information that we've got to go on him. Is there a day where all of the insights will be exhausted? Haven't we already reached that? Man, this is a question, first of my heart, because I'm in the middle of writing, not one, but two books about him at the moment, which is a thing I'm told doesn't normally happen in

publishing, but I'm doing a graphic novel at the moment about his life, and then I'm also writing a biography. And I thought there are like at least half a dozen biographies of Marcus Aurelius, and my last book has a lot of biographical stuff. So I thought, do I want to write another biography of it, Marcus Aurelius? And the strange thing is, yeah, well, I immediately thought, there's loads of things that I still think are worth saying about him. Like there are people, there are things that people ask me all the time that aren't in how to think like a Roman Emperor. And I wish I'd had space to address them. And so, and in terms of his life story, you know, I keep coming across new angles and thinking, you know, why is nobody ever written about this before. I'll give you a sneak

peek, right. Hadrian had the guy that advises us, by the way, there's a Polish guy that advises us on the historical authenticity of the stuff that we're writing about for the graphic novel. And he's a big fan of the Frumentari who were the secret police in the Roman Empire, strangely. Right, that says kind of like, Nishner the area. And Hadrian was really into the secret police and the deli Torres who are informals. He had spies everywhere because he was super paranoid. And I think no one's ever really written about the fact that Marcus really is probably new that he was growing up in villas that were full of potential informals. And that everybody kind of knew. Epictetus writes about this. Epictetus's markets are really as was acquainted with, says, and everybody knows that if you slag off Caesar,

it will get back to him. And you know, you could be full of chop. Like, so you have to watch what you say. Because they had so many servants and slaves in those houses that any of them would potentially go and grass you up and then they'd get, you know, paid a lot of gold for doing it. So they really felt they were being watched all the time and the historian Augustus said something quite creepy about that. It says Marcus A really was reared under the gaze of Adrian. So then if you read

the meditations, Marcus says and it things like never do anything that requires walls or curtains. Now that suddenly takes on a different meaning when you realize it, he grew up in this environment surrounded by informals and spies in the service of this crazy paranoid emperor who kept executing potential rivals to the throne. So nowhere's written about that though as far as I'm aware. Now I think it sheds a light, a connection between the historical events and the significance of some of the things that Marcus is talking about. Yeah, because you can only see it in that broader context, right? I spent my birthday last year on the Stoa Poeclay in Athens,

which was like... Meaning the bar. Were you in the Bar beside mean in the bar beside it? Or... No, on the steps of the painted porch, yeah. No, you mean the store at all, the one that's like a museum and the Agora, like it's all shiny and new. Yeah, well, is that not on the spot of where the other... Oh, is it not? Are you gonna ruin this for me? Don, that was my birthday. Actually, I've wamed that back.

You were really close though, you were just across the street from it. That's actually kind of a museum, it's the store of Atlas. It's a replica, right? But it's beautiful. And across the road there's this dirty hole on the ground full of garbage and graffiti and stuff with some like rubble in it and a lot of caps. And that's the store poikily, which I wrote it for you used to be the original store book, you know it means painted pooch, like because it was like an art gallery, it had these four huge paintings by the leading artists of the day, so that the store is lectured in front of these works of art. It would have been as beautiful maybe as the store that you were on, the store, the store art, you were on the wrong porch, but it was a bit poor.

I've got a bit of a thought. Google Maps needs, it's had two and a half thousand years to get the directions right, and obviously Google Maps has taken me to the wrong place. Now I loved it. I spent last the birthday before at the Vatican and around the Roman forum and then the Egorah and the Parthenon and everything else this year. I thought just a wonderful, wonderful way to... That's amazing. I love doing things like that. I feel like I'm very lucky. I like to meet other people that have had a chance to travel. More people should do it because it's not really prebitively expensive when the pandemic's over. Obviously it's

going to be easier. Bamin Athens at the moment. So I'm just, you know, down the road from where you were. If it's any consolation right the the the place you were basically in the Agora right so you were standing on those steps looking across the place where socrates just to teach and also the prison my good friend where he was executed. That is cool. I'll tell you something even cooler about that, right? So one of the things that I think is narrowly cool is most of what we know, well a lot of what we know about Roman history comes from books and some of them are unreliable,

like they're politically biased or they're just, even we have evidence in satire as we're not sure if they're joking or not, right? But what's really weird is sometimes archaeologists will dig something up and think, oh my, like no way, this kind of confirms something that previously we only knew in writing and they were digging in the agora and where the prison is and they found something actually really kind of weird

they found a little statuette of Socrates in the prison building now they may have used this for other things but typically that would be like in a little shrine or something, like you're honouring a deceased ancestor or something. So they say it kind of looks like the Athenians felt, and the Athenians are kind of known for that, right? Like they felt bad about having executed him, and then they thought, we'll put a little shrine up like, because you know, like, we actually quite liked him. Like, try and walk it like, because we actually quite liked him. Like, try and walk it back, try and walk the execution back.

Yeah, walk it back again. So like you said earlier with the beheading, they were like, well, we'll try and fix this by putting a lot of statue of them in there. Yeah. We love you really, Socrates. Sorry, Socrates. I really was the Emperor of Rome,

but it was following a Greek-born philosophy. What else, how come? Yeah, it's good, isn't it? Because the Romans weren't that good at philosophy. Yes, because the Romans weren't that good at philosophy. They had this thing about loving Greek. They really admired Greek culture. When they conquered Greece, they decided that they felt bad about that. I get a lot of ancient histories about the Greek. Rigoret. Yeah, they totally trashed Athens and Greece and destroyed the libraries and things and gutted it, it was sacked by a Roman dictator called Solar and then the subsequent generation,

exactly like we're saying, felt had a big guilt trip about it and they thought we actually quite like Greek culture and some people say also they stole all the books and kind of distributed them and sold them and so people kind of found out a lot about Greece because they pillaged it basically. And then they started to embrace Greek culture and get more and more into it. And the weird thing was they really took to storcism because Stoics, they thought were a bit more tough-minded and that kind of resonated with Roman values, they thought of themselves. They liked Greeks, but they thought of Greeks as kind of lightweights and like a bit a feet, a bit fancy, and they thought we want to like you guys, but if you were a bit tougher like us, and so they were like, ah, the Stoics. There you go. The Stoics are the tougher side

of Greek culture. So the Romans completely embraced to us as um, and actually the guy you mentioned earlier, Augustus, was the founder of the Roman Empire and the first Emperor, and we don't know much about this bit, cryptically. We know that he had two stoic tutors, and he wrote a book on philosophy which is lost now. It's actually an exotation to philosophy which is normally like a speech, like a motivational speech, trying to encourage usually aimed at young men, trying to inspire them to get into philosophy. And so it seems that he can be dabbled in stoicism and maybe set a precedent then for later emperors to kind of associate with it. But the time you get to markets are really issue, the first example of somebody who seems like what's the expression,

you know, like they've just a full-on card carrying stoch as emperor. But it also greed being into Greek culture was trendy at that time. Upon reflecting and all of the different stories about how Xeno of Sityam was crushed in his ship and then he found himself in a bookstore and all of the different stories that I seem to hear to do with the the way that people began their philosophical journey in and around that period. It's so romanticized, yes, there will probably have been a little bit of artistic license used, but hearing the way that Marcus Arraileus spoke about

himself, the leader of what was essentially the free world, wasn't that free, but the leader of the world at the time, hearing the way that he spoke, hearing even stories about Augustus, you know, he was into philosophy, trying to write these speeches and treaties to bring young men into philosophy, what's happened between then and any point after then in history, including now, where you have these philosopher kings. Yeah, I just wonder why it was obviously seen as a competitive advantage to be able to understand that inner working to the human mind and what does meaning mean and what is

purpose in life, etc. Why did that stop? Are you asking me? Will the dog go wrong? Yes. Basically. Well, this is going to be a controversial one. And actually, historians are a bit unsure about the answer to that. But the traditional lines so that people tend to give is the Christianity, the Christianity, supplanted Greek philosophy, and this is debated by some people, but conventionally people say, well, the Christians closed the Greek philosophical schools and banned teaching of philosophy, and Christianity became dominant, and it was in some ways antagonistic to a lot of the learning that had accumulated

up until that point. Now, on the other hand, Christianity, to me, in any way, looks really super stoic. Like Christianity, there are many kind of passing allusions to stoicism in the New Testament. And several of the Church Fathers, we know studied Stoicism before they became Christians, St Augustine, Tutullian, some of the Nostics were in Stoicism. And you know, early Christians in general,

they saw the Stoics as being like the closest thing in pagan philosophy to Christianity. I'll give you an example of that. You know, Dante's Divine Comedy in the second book of it in the parquetry. The person who's guarding the gates of parquetry is a famous stoic called Kato the Younger or Kato of Utica. And so Dante's basically saying like if it wasn't for the fact that you don't believe in Jesus, like, buddy, you would be like, basically a saint. Like, you're like, you're basically a pagan saint.

Like, you're the closest, you're as close to the gates of heaven as you can, you can basically get. And that was how he sort of portrayed Kato. This kind of like, you know, as a stoic who is kind of as close as pagan culture got to Christianity. And people have said many Christians have said that, but Marcus, are really us. They read the meditations and thought, this sounds kind of as close as pagan culture got to Christianity. And people have said many Christians have said that but markets are really yes, they read the meditations and thought this sounds kind of Christian in places. There's a bit in it where it even says you should love your enemies and things like that. Well, I mean, that sounds like the New Testament. Also,

better trivia for you. The Stoics are actually mentioned in the New Testament. Not a lot of people know that. In the acts of the apostles, St Paul goes to the Ariel Pagus, which is just near where you were at, you went to the Acropolis, right? Like there's a big rock covered in broken beer bottles and graffiti, anarchy symbols, at the bottom of the Acropolis,

called the Ariel Pagus, the rock of Mars, where they used to give speeches and things. And St Paul goes there and gave a famous sermon to a bunch of Epicurian and Stoic philosophers and he quotes a Stoic poet to them called Aratus. So that the stories were kind of connected to Christianity and the Info's Christianity. That especially the this idea of Bravillay love that you get in Christianity. The main precedent for that in Hellenistic culture is in Scuwick philosophy. People hearing Christians say that would be like,

that sounds like Stoicism. And I think if you read Marx a really, as you can see, he talks a lot about, you know, brotherly love and natural affection and cosmopolitanism and yeah, that's why people read it and think there's something Christian about this. I'm currently halfway through the immortality key, Brian Murerescu, do you have you read this? I haven't read that.

So I don't know of it, I actually put it so like. He has, it's part of the psychoactive pagan conversion theory. I can't remember the full theory of it. I need to get it before. But it's all about, is it Ellie uses? Yeah, Ellie uses. Yeah, and the cookreon, which was this the pre-stesses at the time used to give these particular drinks and having rituals. And his argument is that it was a psychoactive substance. Yeah, yeah, the Irgott that was in the grain. And it's an entire book, it's huge, it's like 400.

Yeah, yeah, the immortality key, Brian. I know, but the idea. Yeah, I should check that out. Very, very well done. And right, enough learning about the actual history. What did the Stoics say about finding purpose in life? People need that, that anomy at the moment. What do they say about finding purpose?

It's a good thing, and we should all do that. But the Stoics are like the great grandchildren of Socrates. I see them as all being part of the same Socratic stoic tradition, essentially. There's one author that says the stoics are a Socratic sect. So this aspect really lines up the Socrates. So Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living. It's a pretty hard core. He said, you know, life is not worth living, it's a pretty hard core. He said life is all about finding your values.

He calls it the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, So Socrates spent his whole life interrogating people about what's the meaning of justice, what's the meaning of courage, you know, what's the nature of the good, what's the nature of virtue. And he said, you know, he wanted to do that in the afterlife, his trial. And he said, if they told him they would release him and send him into exile, but he would maybe be executed or tried in another city, if he didn't keep his gobshot and he kept on asking questions about these things, he said, I wouldn't be able to stop. There's no point doing sending me into Excel because I'm just going to carry on doing it.

That's what he says in court and it's actually the meaning of life is To question your values and explore them really deeply and you know, that's why Socrates thought that wisdom was virtually unattainable and so he insisted on calling himself not a Sophistie's not a wise man like the other gurus around it But he called himself philosopher, like a lover of wisdom or a friend of wisdom. And the connotation of that play to make it really clear, as it's so that he said, I don't have wisdom, but I have the next best thing, which is a love respect and admiration of wisdom. Like, so somebody

who genuinely, from the bottom of their heart aspires to wisdom is almost as good as somebody who actually is wise. Like, you know, they're almost as admirable. They're a seeker after truth and they're on the right path. Like the hearts and the right place kind of thing. And so he's wants to say like that, that's the meaning of life, right? Nobody's perfect, nobody's wise. But to fuel the kind of pain in a way of lacking wisdom, like, into crave it, like, and to realize it's the most important thing in life,

and to dedicate your life to this kind of endless journey, like, is really what life is actually all about. You know, it's more about the journey and the destination in a sense for socrates. It's about the method of socratic questioning. And so we, like, we were saying earlier, we live in a very unquestioning society. Now, I won't emphasize that because if you go on the internet, you'll find it's full of self-help books and articles. But I think there's something deeply ironic about this

because although everywhere we go was surrounded by self-help advice, I still feel there's a massive lack of reflection in modern society. And sometimes I think people are using self-help actually as an avoidance strategy, like a way of, that I'm very attuned to this from being a cognitive therapist, because any decent modern cognitive therapist, probably any modern psych therapist should tell you, the first thing a psych therapist normally ends up doing, especially these days, I think, more over time. And that their initial assessment session is asking clients what existing self-help or therapy strategies they use and often getting them to stop doing a lot of them. Like, because many of the strategies people use are actually

counterproductive, we now realize, and you know, there's a lot of bad self-help and psychological advice that circulates on the internet. So, although people of bad self-help and psychological advice that circulates on the internet. So although people talk about self-help and they're kind of fascinated by it in our society, it's a huge thing. I'll give you a really clear example of that. It's my favourite subject right now. It's super topical, anger. Hardly, anybody is really bothered to talk about and do anything about anger in themselves and in society. The people that talk about self-help are more likely to be talking about personal suffering, like anxiety and depression, but they're self-dom really addressing

feelings of anger. There are psychological reasons for that. We know that to be the case. I think anger is the royal road to self-improvement though. I think people are really missing a trick there. I think it's much easier in some ways to address anger first, like, and there's a huge potential there for self-improvement, if we could just kind of as a society encourage people to question their anger more. And the stoics thought anger was the main thing we should be working on precisely because they said, you know, it's the emotion that's most obviously a threat to society. It's the most interpersonal emotion in a sense. So, I really, that's kind of

one of my passions at the moment and I use that word advisedly, is that we need to get people to kind of really do self-help more on anger, why it's a massive gap. That's interesting. I, for better or for worse, anger is an emotion that for me is very, very, very rare. I think I'm fairly cognizant at knowing what's going on. The texture of my own mind is something I'm not totally ignorant to. And yet over the last month or so, there was a period where I got angry and oh my god,

it is such a hell of an emotion, especially when you're not necessarily attuned to it. There's other things that occur more frequently in my life. And it's like the devil that you know, you understand, okay, we're at this stage, we're at that stage and you almost get into the rhythm of understanding how you deal with it, but anger is so all-encompassing. And when you then scale that up into crowds, these crowds can be virtual online in a group, in a Reddit thread, on a QAnon sub forum, or whatever it might be, or they can be in person at a football riot or at the Capitol Hill.

It can cause that. I want to loop back to something you mentioned as well about how people are using personal development to almost stave off the different fears that they have. And I'm 100% in agreement. I've had this theory for a long time that the current longevity, biohacking, productivity movements, time management, all of these things are working on an earnest spec as denial of death. They're people terrified about the fact that lives don't have any greater meaning.

We've removed our connection to the wider world to nature, to the awe of the night sky, and what they're doing. Oh, if I live longer, if I get more done in less time, then I won't have this fear anymore. I can give you a long list of reasons why sale of help is an avoidance strategy. By many, many reasons.

Here's number one, client's come into, they'll usually go, I've got this huge library, I self-help books that have been reading for years. A lot of self-help reading just encourages what we call room-inative thinking. People are thinking about the problems and showing them over and not actually doing anything to change them. A lot of self-help strategies involve emotional control or suppression, like so using breathing techniques, visualization techniques, mantras and things, a ways that people use to actually avoid engaging with their emotions and processing them naturally.

People use self-help as a way of get direction from authority figures, like psychologists, rather than becoming more self-reliant, identify their own values. But there are many ways that people use self-help advice in a way that's obviously counterproductive. And the client's something in therapy, I'll tell you that themselves. Like it's very common, quite common to therapy. And they say, you know, I read all these articles and I've got this massive library of self-help books, but I'm not getting any better. You know, there are reasons for that.

I was having a look at objective representation and cognitive distancing when reading your book and how does that relate to the stoic work and what is it and how can people utilize it? Fantasia cataleptic is the Greek and it's hard to translate, but it actually means an impression or a representation that grasps reality, or is grounded in reality. But the story's appear to mean by this. So objective representation is PR, had those paraphrase of that. And it means describing events in a way that suspends value judgments or emotive

rhetoric. I was going to say a minute ago actually if you wanted to be re-insighting girl that you were saying just go on the comments on YouTube or something like that for five minutes it's like a laboratory experiment in anger exposure, it's hard. And even if you don't have anger you've got to deal with other people's right but the internet is full of people using strongly a motive language. Like you know rather than saying people say things like you know you shot me down in flames and tore a strip off me when they could say oh you just expressed disagreement with part of what I said. So the story is one is, this is why Cesar O'Fourth's stories were rubbish at legal rhetoric. He was like, you guys... There was no drama, there was no showmanship with it.

He goes, you make everything too concise and too banal, and then like, well, that's to get rid of the effect of rhetoric, right? Like, you know, like, sure in a law court, you're trying to manipulate the audience, we're trying to under that. I call it Stoicism, kind of, anti-retry, or counter-retry. And, you know, in ancient world there were these lawyers, stroke, self-help gurus called the sophists. And I used to, for a long time, think, we don't really have sophists in the modern world, maybe we have self-help gurus and stuff, but it's not quite the same.

And then one day it dawned on me. Like we do, we have digital softest, like Facebook is basically a massive softest, and so is Twitter, so that the softest would just say whatever would get a reaction out of people. Like, and Socrates was like, this is a problem, man. You guys are just saying whatever, you know, evokes anger or what gets a clout, the crowd to applaud you or whatever, and you don't really give two hoots about the truth. Like, you're just

saying whatever gets a response from people and that just leads to distortion and amplified people's emotions. And it wouldn't get done, I thought, yeah, we don't have softists like that anymore because now they've been taken over by algorithms. That's basically what social media, the social media is a massive softest. And so we need Socrates and we need the Stoics to teach us this, how to protect ourselves against Sofistry and rhetoric in the manipulation of our emotions through the use of emotive language. So Stoics say we should learn to readescribe things

in a more down to the earth an objective way so that we can stick to the facts and not distort things in a way that files our emotions up. How can people apply that cognitive distancing? Obviously it sounds great. How did they do it? The story is just one as to practice. Like when we feel that we're getting upset or angry about something, first of all, like they want us to pause and maybe

to say to ourselves it's not things that upset us, but rather our opinions about them. So realizing that it's our way of thinking that's causing us to feel so upset, rather than the event itself. Say responsibility, basically, for our value judgments. And then to re-describe it, to say, well, what's actually happening here and most specific down to our from objective language. And when we do that, the story extent that helps us to moderate the effect of our emotions. And then the other thing is to broaden our perspective. Because I mean, the were way ahead of their

time right and if you think the stories were ahead of their time my friend like you want to go and read some segment Freud like because that wasn't that long ago and people were still used Freud today right even though that would go like alchemy or something like you know that like Freud was pre-scientific psychology, right? So I remember when I started as a psychotherapist, psychoanalytic approaches were still kind of not that rare, and you know, people still took them quite seriously. Largely Freudianism and its traditional farmers kind of died off now, but if you compare what he was doing to what the Stoics were doing, they were way ahead of that time. Like the story seemed futuristic compared to Freud.

Like, Freud had no idea really what he was talking about. And most of regard contrary to people are going to be shocked if I say this. But I think there's very little of value in Freud's writings. And I have a master's degree in psychoanalytic theory. Incidentally, a trained as a psychoanalytic counselor. And I had psychoanalysis myself. Was it not just projection? Was it not just an entire lifetime of internal projection? Freud, I'm very interested in Freud's biography, actually. Freud's father died and then he had a lot of dreams about it, that were traumatic for him. And he decided to interpret his own dreams.

And he believed that he unconsciously was attracted sexually to his own mother and frightened of his father. And there was this kind of love triangle. And then he just assumed that that applied to everybody else, which is obviously crazy, right? Because he'd hardly seen any clients. He'd seen about five or six clients,

I think, but the time he'd already decided that this was true of everyone. And Freud hated therapy. Like, he really didn't like doing it. If you look at his collected writings, you know, there's whatever, 12 volumes or something. I think there's only one volume actually about therapy. And the rest of it's all this crazy theory and him doing psychoanalysis and Leonardo da Vinci and Moses and weird speculative anthropology and stuff. He just wanted to be a kind of armchair, like, you know, theorist or whatever, really. Is that not the biggest distinction between what he did and what the Stoics did, that it was a philosophy of action born in the crucible of real life? Yeah, and still as a master, a lot longer. I mean, Freudian psychoanalysis was trendy for

a late hour, like 60 years or 70 years or whatever. And so there's pretty much dead in the water. I know, it's like a few of the bit like alchemy now or something. But Sturtheson flourished in the ancient world for five centuries. And that meant to Marcus Aurelius, Socrates was ancient history. Socrates died five hundred years before Marcus Aurelius was even born. That means, as I was talking about somebody in the late medieval period. So we've been doing this for a long time. And so a lot of people in Greece and Rome and all over the known world have been practicing Stoicism. We know of 80 Stoic philosophers from antiquity, the names of authors or teachers, where they were loads of them. So like it was something that they developed over a very long

period of time. And I am still puzzled by it and impressed by it, like, how much of it is relevant and is confirmed by modern research and psychology. So the one I was going to mention is we know now that when people get angry or depressed, there's a narrowing in the scope of attention. So people can normally pay attention to, like, maybe five or six things at once. So you could be driving your car and listening to the radio and maybe thinking about what you're So people can normally pay attention to like maybe five or six things at once. So you could be driving your car and listening to the radio and maybe thinking about what you're going to have for dinner and also kind of like telling your kids in the back seat to keep the noise down or whatever, right?

So you can walk into a gum, like you can do more than one thing at a time, you can move, you can task whatever, except when you're under stress. Like so when people like become very emotionally distressed, the scope of attention narrows and the less capable to think about multiple things at once, right? And we do this thing called threat monitoring, where we tend to really zero and put under

a magnifying glass that the things that we see is threatening or upsetting. And the story actually realized that we did that. Like Freud has no concept really that's equivalent to this. He thinks what you should really be doing is trying to figure out whether it symbolizes castration in your dreams or something like that. Like which nobody, nobody thinks it's helpful.

Sigmund, for the love of God, leave it alone. Freud literally thought, like Freud literally thought all, he says all forms of anxiety are disguised castration anxiety. Like all forms of anxiety are disguised, castration anxiety, like all forms of anxiety, like that's how it's crazy for these theory was. Anyway, the, the story is we're like, no, like, I mean, anxiety is caused by your value judgments, like you'd think like most people may assume, right? So if you think something's really, really bad,

and it's about to happen, then you're probably gonna feel anxious, right? So let's go to do with the value that you invest in external events, especially if they're not directly under your control, it's going to feel more anxiety provoking. That's common sense in a way. And so the specifics think also we narrow our attention down onto things and they realize if you broaden the scope of your attention or tend to dilute the emotional response. So you might say something that annoys me on Twitter,

right? And maybe I don't know anything about you and I haven't seen what your day's been like. All I know is that you just said something that could be taken in a slightly offensive way. Like, so now taking that one remark in isolation, I'm going to focus my attention narrowly on it and have this kind of intense emotional

reaction to it. Whereas if I broaden my attention, like, I might, you know, if I did know more about you, I might think, or maybe you do a lot of good things, you know, maybe you've had a bad day, like, you know, maybe you gave money to charity yesterday, like, so there would be a more rounded picture of you. That's really one of the things that's lacking in modern society. We react to these little slices of people's character, behaviour rather than viewing their personality in a rounded way. Socrates talks about this problem explicitly, actually in relation to his own wife, Zanthropy. So people say, oh my God, how can you stand to live with that woman? Because she had a notoriously bad temper, right? And Socrates was like, but she's a really good wife

and a good, she just shouts at me occasionally. Yes, she threw a bucket of water over me once. But I try and interpret her behavior on her round that she's also like a really awesome person. So Socrates has this whole dialogue about it, where he says, you've got to view people, you've got to go past the appearance and get to the reality, and that means like focusing in a more broad way on somebody's character as a whole. And we don't do that today, we narrow our attention down social media, but it's very

nature potentially encourages us to do that, because it speeds up communication by abstracting little pieces of information out, but that prevents us really from getting to know people properly and, you know, to understand all this, to forgive all the say and go as well, you know, I don't know if we could take that literally, but certainly the more we know about people, the less likely we are to have knee-jerk emotional responses to the things that we do, especially if we make an effort why to maintain that rounded perspective on things. Because in the one hand I can see the nasty thing that you said, and I may still have an emotional reaction to that,

but with my attention is broad, and I'm also seeing in remembering other nice things that you did, and so that compensates our balances out. So I can still disapprove of the thing that you did, but not be completely emotionally overwhelmed by it, because I'm adopting a more balanced perspective. What would Marcus Aralius and the Stoics have to say about facing adversity? They think it's a good thing. Which seems like a truism. There were other people that thought it was a bad thing. There were other philosophers in the ancient world that thought you'd be better off

going and living in a commune and avoiding, like, alleged epicureans will get upset if I say this because there's some disagreement about it. But in the ancient world people thought the Stoics and the epicureans were almost polar opposites. And Epicurus lived in this little private garden on the outside Athens, surrounded by a circle of these friends and relative obscurity. Allegedly he said it's better not to marry or have children or get involved in public life. Basically, like a monk or a happy commune or whatever, like all peace and love and keep it tranquil. Whereas the Stoics wanted to get right in the middle

of the fray, they were where you were right in the Agora, like the Stopically-Face the Agora, same as Socrates would go into philosophy in the street and at his friends' houses. And so the downside of that is that people would be really abusive to them. People used to beat Socrates up in the street, like they'd threaten him, they'd shout abuse at him, because he was asking too many questions and rocking the boat. But Socrates was famous for apaphaya, which is a term that we use in stoic philosophy. We're told that it was really Socrates that made this concept famous. He was unruffled. He was as cool as a cucumber and as unruffled

as a tortoise. That's pretty unruffled. He wouldn't let anything, but have you ever seen a tortoise that looked ruffled? Exactly, right? So that's Socrates. He wasn't easily phased, but the thing, when we talk about temperance and self-control and ancient philosophy, like one of the most obvious ways that's manifested is in being able to have conversations with it within your temper. And Socrates was famous for that epic Titus, the stoic teacher, who loves Socrates, who's on and on and on about him. He tells his students that they should emulate Socrates.

But then he says something really weird that I think should freak out modern readers of Plato He says you know the most important thing that you could learn from Socrates is That he never got in quarrels It wasn't even the things he said it was a way that he said them It was the fact that he was always good humored and artfully polite and Even when people got angry with him like he was able to defuse it, like he never ever lost his temper with other people. So talking to people, but really sensitive subjects like religion and politics and stuff like that, you know, often it just degenerates

out, you see it all the time on the internet, but such he's didn't avoid these discussions and he also didn't let them spiral out of control. So his adversity was facing argumentative people, bad tempered people. Now, in the end, he did get executed partly for that, and for other things that he did along the way. But throughout his life, he was known for this magical ability, this paranormal ability, to be able to talk to people about really sensitive subjects and interrogate them about it, and for the most part, not to punch them in the face. What if the adversity isn't so easily, cerebral, sort of, explained away, it's not just the sort of thing that you can have a discourse about?

For example, a pandemic. Oh, the pandemic. I mean, family and off-socrates lived through a plague and Max, really, you know, lived through the, the Antonine plague. I mean, you know, like books and stuicism have shot through the roof in terms of sales since the beginning and the pandemic. So I think instinctively, a lot of people have felt that stuicism could help them deal with the adversity of the pandemic. Not just because of the historical connection, but they kind of have this visceral feeling that stores as them is relevant to dealing with this situation.

The ancient stories write a lot about how to cope with being sent into exile. And I used to think, that doesn't seem that relevant to me in my life. Then the pandemic happened. I had quarantining and all that. And I thought, all that stuff I read in Senna cab, Excel suddenly seems really relevant now. It's basically the same thing. I mean, I wasn't sent into Excel by the Emperor Neuro or whatever, but I might as well have been, you know, I've come not long to leave my house except to go up for groceries and I think it suddenly seems relevant to people, but I don't, I feel like I almost don't need to persuade people

of that, because it seems like everyone's figured out for themselves. They're all reading the stories since the beginning of the pandemic. I think a big, there are many aspects that are relevant. And one of them is, I think, I mean, maybe I'm wrong about this, but well, there's a couple of things. First of all, a lot of people have had to simplify their lifestyle during lockdown and so on. I feel like when, you know, there are several ways in which we're not going back

to normal after this. You never go back. Like, so after this pandemic ends, I wonder how many people are going to think, maybe I don't need to go back to eating out an expensive restaurant all the time. Like, you know, the amount of money that people blew on entertainment in the city where I lived in Toronto, you know, it's full of expensive bars and restaurants.

You may not know this, but my industry of 14 years, I've been a club promoter, one of the biggest in the UK, and this is something that I am concerned about for our industry. People used to go out to the same venue on the same night of the week, and then a different venue on a different night of the week, every single week, and that's where we made our money. It's not so good for you. Maybe it's, but it's, can I also break in that? It's a habit, right, for a lot of people. Correct. It's just what they do.

100% correct. Get a bit agitated if it gets to a frayed in the night or and the like the stuck at home, we'll start pacing up and down. Why but once the habits broken, after a few months, they might think, but I don't like, I don't need to go out as often. I mean, it may not take some people that long to get back into it, but I think some people, why will reure their expenditure and re-evaluate their lifestyle. I mean, I've spoken, you must have met a lot of people who, everyone's changed the daily routine. So a lot of people are suddenly doing yoga and going for walks in the park and all that. And I think a lot of people might think, maybe I'll carry on doing yoga

and going for walks in the park even after the pandemic's finished, you know, because maybe they realized that it's healthier than what they were doing before and maybe they're actually a lot of people are happier, not everyone, some people are really struggling psychologically, but a lot of people actually feel that they're better off, like it's, you know, it's improved their mental health, having to deal with a lot of time. And again, one of the paradoxical aspects of that is coming to terms with your own mortality, you know, the thing that, again, it of the paradoxical aspects of that is coming to terms with your own mortality. You know, the thing that, again, it's not really talked about that much in self-help,

art, life hack, articles, and I've not an article about this recently where I thought I'm going to do the opposite and just really get into the guts of this whole, everyone's going to die thing. Well, because I really believe it's liberating. When I was a young guy, it was quite reckless. And a couple of times I got into situations where I thought, oh geez, maybe my time's up, this is it. But, you know, just because I did stupid things when I was a teenager. And then, you know, maybe people have health scales and stuff. I give a talk once when I asked how many people in the audience

put your hand up, have I ever had a brush with death, either through health scale or a dangerous situation. I know it was about two thirds of the audience. I was kind of surprised me and I said, was it what you thought it was going to be like? Like were you scared? And a lot of people they had a bit of a chat about and what emerged was a lot of people said, well, in a, in a emergency often you don't really have time to feel scared. You're more just kind of like focused on getting out of there or or dealing with a situation or whatever.

And sometimes you feel incredibly calm. When you you think like maybe this is it, it's not what people imagine it to be necessarily. I think it's different for everyone, but for me, also being bereaved and losing someone close to you can have a similar effect, I think, of making you re-appraise your values. And think, look back on you, because it makes you look at your life if you have time. And think, oh geez, was it worth it? If I dodge this bullet and I get another chance, should I go right back on Facebook or watch another season of friends or whatever. And so it makes you really think those things

I was doing, well they just like ways of killing time or will they actually kind of meaningful and fulfilling things. One of the things we learned from modern psychotherapy, evidence-based psychotherapy, cutting edge of evidence-based psychotherapy for clinical depression. We used to think people with clinical depression were doing enough enjoyable things. So Aaron Beck, who found their occultivative therapy, has big innovation, part of it was to do activity scheduling and get people to do more pleasurable activities during the day. Actually, he didn't invent that technique. It was a guy called Peter Lundson that doesn't get credit for it, that invented that technique. But Ben was wrong anyway. So we now know that that's slightly off. It's not pleasurable activities that help people with depression. It's meaningful activities. Like, there's a subtle

difference between something that makes you feel happy, like it gives you a kind of warm glow, and something that actually makes you feel fulfilled in a deeper sense, right? So maybe eating a chocolate, you know, or having sex or watching a comedy kind of makes you feel good, but like it's not necessarily gonna make you a more filled person in the long term, like if the rest of

your life is kind of pointless, like, and you don't feel that you've got any direction. And so, what really seems to emerge pretty quickly, just when she start asking people the right questions, is that again, where we started, buddy, is people don't know what their values are. And so, if you don't know what your real values are in life, then how do you know what it is that you should be doing all day long every day? And you know a sudden brush with a grim reaper might be what it takes like for people to suddenly think maybe I need to figure out what I actually

Value in life what you know no one has ever had on the tombstone engraved. I wish I'd spent more time on Facebook or I wish I'd watched more Netflix, right? So I think the pandemic has forced a lot of people to have that existential crisis and re-apraise their values. I think we need to push people further in that direction to question those values and then start actually putting them into practice more. And then maybe we wouldn't have as many riots and stuff.

One of my favourite passages, in fact probably my favourite passage from the entire book, I'm just going to read it out here. Looking back, it seems more obvious to me now than ever before that the lives of most men are tragedies of their own making. Men let themselves either get puffed up with pride or tumented by grievances. Everything they concern themselves with is fragile, trivial and fleeting. Well, left with nowhere to stand firm amidst the torrent of things rushing past, there's nothing secure in which we can invest our hopes. What's that

mean? Exactly what we've been talking about. Like when you do behavioral analysis, we're clinically depressed clients. What emerges from it is a lot of the things, the more depressed someone is, the more time they're going to spend doing avoidant behaviors. So if you say what did you do all day yesterday, often it's mainly things that just help them to avoid feelings of boredom, feelings of anxiety, like a drink, I took drugs, I masturbated, like slept, you know, like why did you, you know, like did those things kind of like really make you feel like a more fulfilled individual

or no, I just felt like I needed to do something, I was start to feel bored, feel agitated. So I mean a life that's driven by avoidance and doing things in order to avoid feelings is never going to really be a healthy or satisfying life. There's sort of a way from goals. I'm doing this in order to get away from unpleasant feelings, but it's what you really want, towards goals. I'm doing it because I really love this thing. I love learning, I love wisdom, I love creativity, you know, I want to do more of that stuff. I'll tell you one of the scary things,

whenever we do values clarification with people, which is something that the therapist has been doing since the 70s, and it's quite one of the parts of therapy that's most influenced by socrates. So we get someone to identify their values, let's say, with a bit of work, a bit of effort. And then we might say, well, okay, let's say yesterday, roughly how much time did you spend doing stuff that's consistent with your values.

And the most common answer, we're saying, how many minutes are hours? The most common answer I hear from people is zero, right? And at first that really shocked me. I thought we're going to say maybe half the time or a few hours. No, it's usually zero zero. Like I spent zero minutes or week doing anything that I thought was of any intrinsic value. Like over and over again, it's crazy, isn't it? Embarrassingly, well, not embarrassingly, but it took me 31 years until the beginning of last year for me to ever work out my core values. And upon reading that quote about

how amidst the torrent of things rushing past, there's nothing secure in which we can invest our hopes, that passage to me is talking about someone who is living an unintentional life. They haven't consciously reflected on what it is that they want to want in life. And they're just blown along by societal norms and genetic predisposition and pathosive least resistance and the way they dealt with past traumas, all that stuff. And it is only upon the time that we sit back, we give ourselves that mindfulness gap and we think, okay, what do I want to want? What are the things that I hold so dear that I'm prepared to sacrifice the things

that are easy in order to get them? The cynic and stoic philosophy is a her name for it. They call it T-force, or too fast, depending on how you pronounce it. It means like smoke or mist, like may have like the veil of illusion, except they think it comes from people's opinions. So it's like the prevailing values of society.

They say it's all smoke in mirrors. Right, so we live in this world where we come up, we're thrown into the world as babies, like we grow up, we look around, we copy the adults around as we don't know what we're supposed to be doing, we're like a blank slate in a sense. And we see everyone else running around like crazy, trying to maintain their reputation and accumulate wealth and property. So we're growing up inevitably,

we think, I guess that's what you're supposed to do. Like, I guess we're meant to try and get a bit of a car than other people, and like, you know, get the best job, and it's really awful if you don't get a promotion and pass all your exams and stuff like that. And so we get indoctrinated generation after generation after generation since the dawn of history into pursuing external extrinsic goals because maybe because the very very ways of society and our brains are built and the where our language works. And then maybe we get a shock, a brush with death

or a bereavement or something makes us think more deeply and we start to think, is this really making me happy? Maybe it's all BS. Like, maybe it doesn't really make me happy. Like, in the pandemic, maybe for some people it's got like maybe my job wasn't making me happy. Do you know it's a therapist, one of the main adversities that I deal with, two of the main ones are relationship breakups and redundancy, right? And you know, of course,

it seems like a trauma to many people that their marriage ends or their relationship ends or they get sat or made redundant or whatever, but very often, like, six months they are make time out to be for the best. Well, maybe they've gone on to a better relationship or about, there are many people that leave their jobs like in middle age, let's say, and then go on to do something that they actually want to do. Like, you know, maybe the worst thing that can happen to somebody in life is that they never lose their job. Because then maybe they're stuck doing whatever it was that they just started to stumble into doing. And like, I think there are many people that are just doing a job

that they ended up doing because it was convenient. But maybe it's not fulfilling to them. One of the things I've been thinking about a lot recently is the term it was meant to be when used retrospectively. So a lot of the time, a situation will occur, perhaps an adversity or perhaps even a good thing or whatever it might be, and then out the back of that, however many weeks or months later, someone says, well, it was meant to be because look at where I am now, and to me, with my particular

metaphysical view of the world, that seems to rob all of the beauty and agency from how that person's dealt with the situation. How about the causation runs in the opposite direction that a thing happened and you made it work that you lost your job, had a bereavement, broke up with your partner. And the outcome of that, you were so capable, you had so much upward mobility that you made, you wrangled the world into the outcome that you wanted. It wasn't meant to be, you made it to be. Yeah, the, I mean, the Stoics, you mentioned facing adversity earlier, which is really what this is all about. The Stoics think by nature, we kind of avoid adversity, but they think the paradox is we should undertake voluntary hardship, like we should go out of our comfort zone and seek

out challenges, because we're probably better at coping NSA than we assume. We're survivors, generally speaking. The Stoics think we have to be careful. This is something that people miss about Stoic about us as when we face adversity, we've got to judge whether we're going to be overwhelmed by it or whether and the analogy we'd be choosing like aspiring partner and should wrestling on a martial art, so you don't pick someone who's really easy and not a challenge, but you don't pick some guy that's twice the size of you who's just going to flatten you into a pulp, right? So

obviously you can engage it and you pick something that's going to be challenging, but not overwhelming. And so that's what the story has to say about adversity. Epictetus pretty much says exactly that to his students. He says you'll only know from your own experience what you can actually handle, like, but you should always be kind of pushing yourself to take on challenges so that you can trust in your coping ability and strengthen your coping ability. But obviously don't bite off more than you can chew. I think people are too timid in a sense.

Epititus also said to students, they love Hercules. Hercules is the favourite demigod or a god of the Stoics and Greek mythology and they love the myth of the 12 labours of Hercules and I picked it up to his students but you guys are always telling me how you're trying to avoid problems in life and stuff. He said, let me ask you a question, if Hercules had lain in bed under the covers and been attended on by other men, and he'd never wondered the earth in poverty persecuted by other people facing one one star for another, do you honestly think that you would still admire him? He wouldn't even be worthy of the name Hercules, he says. so the only reason you admire him is because he got Hamad with adversity, and he stood up to it through self-discipline, encouraged, he persevered,

like the idea of the 12 labors was that Hercules had the toughest life ever, like he was constantly in a battle and struggling, It was being persecuted by the goddess here. So it made enemies in high places as it were. And so that's what he kind of represents. So I picked it to say, sure, but you guys think the opposite. You just want to avoid trouble and have an easy life. But then you'll die. You'll be on your deathbed and you'll look back at it and you'll think, Jesus spent a lot of time in bed, just paying out like watching TV and stuff. Trust me, when your time's up and you look back, it's all the kind of challenges that you faced and that you overcame, other things that you're most likely to have some sense of satisfaction from. It's the times when you push yourself and when out of your comfort zone, like that makes your life meaningful. You know, you

want to even remember, I challenge you to remember what happens in most of the episodes of friends or whatever, you know, like, there might be a TV that people watch in our society. You think about how much of it can they actually remember? Like, so then what was the point of it? It was just a way of killing time. As Marcus really says quote, Heraclitus, we were like men asleep, like a dream or something like that, you know, walking about in a trance. And the story is one that's to snap out of that, you know, to wake up. Contemplation of death is one way of doing that, but really it's kind of existential crisis there. They want to evoke and as like to, you know,

really rethink everything dramatically to turn our life upside down. The cynics used to symbolize that by walking backwards. It always reminds me of, you know that video with the VR of Richard Ashcroft or whatever his name is. It's putting the jacket on and yeah, yeah. Compadent to all these people and all that.

That's, he's a cynic philosopher buddy. yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, He'd say, I'm just practicing for something that I do my whole life long. Well, I am training myself. It goes, because I'm swimming against the current, fundamentally, existential, throughout my whole life. I'm going against the prevailing values of Athenian society. And you've got to toughen yourself up to do that.

People are going to laugh at me. Well, tell me I'm doing everything back to front. But when you're surrounded by smoking mirrors, like in all the BSS society, and hedonism, narcissism, celebrity culture, consumerism, Santa Claus, you know, all that Coca-Cola, all that kind of stuff, people are going to think you're crazy if you reject it,

try and rise above it. And the sunics were like, you're going to think you're crazy if you reject it, like try and rise above it. And the sunics where like you're going to have to practice what they called shamelessness or we call it, we do this similar thing in therapy today, we call it shame attacking to toughen up like so you don't really care if everybody laughs at you. Because you're going to have to be laughed at if you're going to you know strike out on your own and you know have the courage to do things differently. Is that an inevitability now, even in the modern world?

Because I think it's easy to hear about these ancient times and think, yeah, yeah, but that were, you know, they were, they were totally uncivilized and they were these sort of ridiculous individuals. And maybe there's a little bit of drama and artistic license being used and we presume that because it's such a civilized civilization now that we shouldn't be being ostracized for the things that we say we shouldn't be being out on a limb we shouldn't be going into exile and walking backwards outside of the theater it sounds like it sounds ridiculous now is that still the case for someone who wants the consciously designed life? Is that an inevitable price to pay? Yeah, I thought I'm hoping when I got back to Toronto next actually that I see people

doing that. Like, there's a lot of people that are into stores, so I want to see that on the streets of Toronto or anyone that's listening. Like, out there on Canada. Or anywhere really, all the major cities I'd like to see people doing that now if they're into stores. No, like in modern society it's just the same. You know, a family or can you think, you know, we all do,

like, you know, your girlfriend's going to think you've got crazy, you know, people at work are going to think you're not. Like, if you, you know, like, like I said earlier, like when I was a kid, I don't know, I was kind of lucky in some ways that the first job I had, when I was kicked out of school, when I was a kid, because I was a bit of a tear away, and I've gotten a lot of trouble with local cops and stuff. So I had to kind of bad start,

and it was like the best thing that ever happened to me, because it made me kind of rethink things. And what was gonna say, it made me realize that I had to find a sense of direction and purpose in life. And I was lucky because I found a stumbling to a pretty well-paid job in the tech industry. And I walked out on it to go into a degree in philosophy. And Peter, I remember that I,

people saying are you crazy? If you do a philosophy degree, like how are you gonna get a job at the end of it? You've got really sweet, you've landed on your feet here buddy, they said. Why, and are you not? Like people would give that right arm. Like to be where you, I was only 19 or something like that. And I thought,

I remember thinking at times, I think this is meaningless. I don't want to just like sit in this office, even if I'm getting paid well for it. I thought, do I wait till that's for the rest of my life? Why sit in an office and kind of shuffle paper and draw diagrams? So I walked out on it. But I remember as a young guy that feeling of everybody around me looking at me like I'd lost my mind and thinking that you know I was abandoning something that they thought was really valuable but they were all wrong. Like it was all the BS, it's Mocking Meadows of Society. It was a great job, it was like a prison sentence like Plato's Cave or something like that. You know I got paid a kind of comfortable amount of money for doing something that to me was like, we'd be like sitting in a prison

cell all day. You know, when we go to do that for the rest of my life, you know, I'd rather be broke, like, and have the freedom to sit around and talk and nonsense to strangers about ancient Greeks, like we're doing now, like you and I are doing here. You know, I wouldn't be here today if it wasn't for that. You wouldn't be able to enjoy the pleasure of my company. How can people overcome that inertia? Society norms are strong. You know, the desire to be wanted and liked and accepted is important. And someone thinks, hey, that sounds like me.

Donald, you're talking to me. I don't feel fulfilled in my life. I don't know my values, my meaning. But I'm also shit-skated of leaving this cushy job and what will my friends say? How do they get over the inertia? I think you have to practice in a number of ways. I mean, the story covers a whole barrage of techniques

to toughen ourselves up. I'm gonna go straight for the jugular and say that I think contemplating mortality is the nuclear option in stores it's the most powerful technique. Now, I don't think that psychologically is for everyone. If someone suffers from clinical depression and the suicidal, then I'm going to say contemplate around my type, probably not, right? But if someone's fairly resilient and they think they can cope with it, Sennake used to say to himself every night when he went to bed,

I'm not going to wake up in the morning. Well, and he tried to imagine that that was it, his time was up, well, he was gonna go to sleep and not wake up the next morning. And he would ask himself, am I good with that? Like, can I look back on my life and think, yeah, I can rest easy with this, I'm satisfied with how it's been so far or if not, like what am I going to do differently?

Marcus, really says imagine that you're already dead, but you've got an extension. You're on like, you've got your own penalty time or whatever. Well, you've got, you've got some extra time, right? Well, he goes further than saying, imagine that you've only got a day left. I was like, imagine you're already toast, toast, but they've decided to be generous and give you an extension. So that, I think, is a powerful technique. It is.

Do you think that the Stoics had much of a sense of humor? Because it's easy to hear this is very serious talk. I'm going to bed contemplating death. I'm waking up contemplating death. Everything's about death and being serious and avoiding emotion. You know? They had a sense that like I think there's a couple of ways of refuting this idea. Number one is Socrates is the Godfather of Stoicism. Like you know, epictetus saying, you know, we love Socrates, you should emulate him. No one in the right mind would say that Socrates

was like Mr. Spock or Star Trek. They're not two people that you would ever confuse. If you met Mr. Spock in your night club or whatever, would you look at him and think, is that Socrates? Ha ha ha ha. I'd think, what's it with his ears? They feel like how many things have you had? Yeah, exactly.

Well, they're not two people that you would ever think Socrates is, is got Socrates is very humorous. He's very charming, he's witty. And that makes him come across as a more rounded and emotional person. And the story is wrote books. And the story is wrote satires. We have a bunch of story titles from Perseus. He was a friend of Seneca.

And Seneca has, we've got a stupid satire that Seneca wrote called the pump kinification of Claudius that still survives today. And Chris Ipas, the third head of the store wrote about jokes and he actually died laughing at one of his own jokes about a donkey. What, you call it? It's like a hard attack or something.

Yeah. Like, it's like, have you seen that Monty Python sketch about the joke in the first world war? Like, that's so funny that everybody that hears it dies. Have you never seen that? No. Everyone else we've done. I'm getting a piece in the comments for that one.

Yeah. The government, the British government in the first world, world Well, they say well, it's so dangerous We had to translate it into German, but we we don't like give each person one word so that nobody knew the whole joke Why because if they heard that they would die laughing at it and then they sort of they train these guys like they're you know Like they're putting their plugs in and they're shouting it out like along the trenches of the Germans So they like it's a deadly weapon, like the funniest joke in the world. You can see how people might think that though, right?

With about the Stoics, it sounds like a serious sort of thing. How do you marry this incredibly, sort of existential view of life with being jovial and free? Who's more hardcore than the Stoics, but their predecessors, the cynics? And the cynics were known for satires and human knowledge, and he's a cynic, is one of the funniest. Can we, to a large extent, we only know, we don't have any books by him. We only know about him from anecdotes, and a lot of those anecdotes come from comedies, come from satires.

There's a weird relationship. Marcus really is loved old comedy like you know the the early style of a Greek comedy. There's like a weird relationship between Greek comedy and particular and philosophy. Like Greek comedy had these stock characters where there would be like a really pretentious guy and then like a yoko that would kind of act dumb like fein ignorance but but somehow always kind of get the upper hand over the the pretentious aristocrat. This is they thought this was hilarious right? So they had a lot of comedies that revolved around us and a lot of people have said that's weirdly like Socrates though. Like because he says I know nothing and he just acts lots of questions.

You know, he doesn't as good-humoured way, but he always seems to get the upper hand over these aristocrats and experts that, you know, and he said his Socratic method was a therapy, a therapy, for a talking cure. It uses words rather than pharmaceuticals or drugs or herbs. He says it's very clearly several times in the apology. People often don't notice it. What was that a cure for? It says it was a cure for arrogance or conceit, which to Greeks they'd be like,

that's the whole point of the old comedies. It's puncture-busting the bubble of people's arrogance and conceit. So it's a really weird thing that everybody must have looked at Socrates and thought he resembles this buffoon in comedies. And yet, like the Delphi Choracol, like the pagan Pope in a sense, like it says that no man is wiser than this buffoon. You know, it's a weird deeply, I saw he's fascinating to me. I mean, I think he's like this like vortex of one paradox or a negma within another. He's such a multi layered character. But yeah, that's a big part of it. So comedy, I think, is a big part of, I think you can only really laugh at yourself and laugh at life if you can again, this freedom that comes from questioning,

you know, some of the values that prevail in our society. I think of it as actually a liberating thing and quite the opposite of, you know, the stultifying gravity that really I think is more of a sign of everything the Stoics were trying to uproot and challenge. Is there a quote that you come back to the most from Stoicism? Was there a shot through the heart when you read it, something that particularly had a heavy impact on you or anything that comes to mind. It's hard actually because I studied this story so closely and for so many years, like 25 years or something now, and so I'm like, all of it really, but actually my favourite

quote, so things like, Seneca says to learn how to die is to unlearn how to be a slave. And I think that's like, that's pretty heavy. Like, there are many things that I read in the store. It's like, wow, that's heavy. So that's one of my, one of my favorite ones. And everyone likes that quote from Mark's really. It's really says, stop arguing about what it means to be a good man and just be one. Like, I picked up for the first time, for the first time, ever I picked up in the happiness hypothesis by Jonathan Hight the whole universe is change and life itself is but what you deem it and it's those last eight words life itself is but what you deem it like is a such a mic drop.

He like that quote and Marcus are really is is and by the way, like, I think the other thing I want you to see when I get back to Toronto, like my current home sort of, is I want you to see all these hapstores that are into stores, all the millennials that work in the tech industry, walking backwards, and I want them all to have that tattoo that says life has changed, like the whole universe has changed, life has been has been in the way it's often translated, right? What Marcus really does there is his two favorite philosophers are Heraclitus and Epitetus. So Heraclitus is this presocratic philosopher that said, Pantare, everything flows like a river.

You can't step into the same river twice because it's new water that's constantly flowing through. And he said the whole universe is impermanent. Everything is in flux, which reminds me of a joke. This is one of my few philosophy jokes. How many Heraclotyons does it take to change a light bulb? I don't know. Only one, but he can't change the same light bulb twice. Right. I'm not even sure that makes sense. I don't think it does. No. It's all kind of fine. You can't step into the same river twice. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, it's the same, right? And so Mark's really loves him and he quotes him a lot. Oh, his philosophy was always associated with stoicism. And then his other favorite philosophy,

his main philosophy was actually is Epic Titus. And so that quote, it's sex, words and grief, right? So it's really concise. And he's referring to Heraclitus, the universe has changed, that's Heraclitus is philosophy. And the other bit that says life is opinion is referring to Epic Titus. What's the alternative translation that you're using there? Because I've said life itself is but what you deem it. And what's your one? Life is opinion.

Life is opinion is how it's often. The word he uses is Hupo leapsese, which kind of means actually means like a value judgment. So he said, what he's really sick as he explains it, actually, in the preceding paragraph, right? He's saying, this is as we are summing up the whole philosophy of epictetus. So it's a shorthand we're saying it's not things that upset us, but our opinions are values just the same word like the police is so it's our value judgments that upset us. So what he means is not that everything is opinion but the quality of our life is shaped by our value judgments. Like so what we deem things to be is fundamental to our

quality of life because it shapes whether we're angry or sad or what our value judgments are. It doesn't just mean that everything is subjective. The Stoics weren't skeptics like that. But he thinks that our opinions and value judgments, like we say in cognitive therapy, are the way we think about life is what shapes our emotional experience. That's a good tattoo. I'll tell you, let's talk about stochot tattoos. That's one of my favorite things to talk about on podcast. Is that common? Yeah, like there's a whole,

like someone showed me a web page, there's a whole, like, or is it like a bust of Marcus? They're mainly Marcus, I really use his face. Like, and then some of them have like a global core or a symbol or whatever. So there's one, I like that says, nothing terrible has happened to you. And there's one now what you get, the tattoo I want to get is from Epic Titus, where he says to his students, what does he say? I think it's something like Dirt, it says, it's me, me, a part, a boy, a thinking Greek'm a Greek is a bit rusty. But I mean, it's very short. It just means, I do not say, it's hard to translate. It's usually translated as a last. So like, I would translate it as saying,

do not say what the fuck. Like, I do not say, I do not say, oh no. Like, don't freak out. Why is it kind of what you're saying? Do not say a last is the Victorian English. What's up me to you? Don't impose strong catastrophic value judgments on external events.

That's such a more, well, elucidating version. I'm trying to get me out. Exactly. Donald, man, I feel like I've not even got through half of this stuff that I wanted to do. So I'm going to have to get you back on. But this has been. I've told you about secret project. Tell us about your secret project. That's what I want to know about. I'm not going to tell you about one of them. I'm not going to tell you about all of

them. Secret within a secret. Well, I keep telling people about this, because I said this in a podcast. So I was talking to some guy in a podcast and just off the top of my head, we're talking about being half an Athens. And I said, do you know the thing that I find a bit sad in Athens is Plato's Academy Park is not far from here. And the ruins we believe of Plato's Academy School are there. But you know, but the local Greek School there, but there's nothing much there. And I said, what I really think if you do

is rebuild Plato's Academy, and make it like an international center for practical philosophy. So I said that in a podcast, why are we all back? And people started, phone started ringing, people started getting in touch with me.

So my secret project now is, we've got a plan for doing something vis-a-vis Plato's Academy park to maybe get people coming there to learn a bit philosophy and the location of the original Academy. Like the first ever educational institution in the location of the original academy, like the first ever, like educational institution and the history of Western civilization. So we're all started.

And now it's come full circle. Well, I mean, when I was in Athens, I was so disappointed with this because I love tours. I'm a massive fan of a tour. I get a, a, a fella on a wireless mic and I'll stick a pair of headphones in and just listen to him and walk and talk for three hours. One of the things I saw on TripAdvisor as I obsess over it before I go somewhere was a explanation of Socrates' philosophy explained through a live, socratic dialogue done on an evening time over dinner. So you'd go for dinner in this courtyard and there would be an explanation, but it was done in the

style of a socratic dialogue in, and I was like, this is fucking sick. And it was out of season. And they were like, oh, we only do it. We only do it in the summer months. And I thought, he busted. But surprise me. Why, but there's not many things like that. But occasionally they crop up. That would be awesome though. But the I'm always a bit disappointed like I take people out. I kind of I I'm one of these people that insists on telling everybody what everything is.

You know, but if people are interested in philosophy, I'd make a great tour guide. Why? Because I love taking people and showing them around and and I'm like, no one ever tells you, like this is where sororities was actually executed. The theater of Dionysus, I call it the place the Athenians used to go to laugh at sororities. So the theater on the side of the crook was no one ever tells you that.

Like, you know, I've got the big one. The big one, the big one with the... No, that's your thinking of the Odin of Arodi's Atticus. Okay. They have concerts still, like stinging or whatever, or play that, that's like a big theater. Now, there's a smaller one, a little bit, just a little bit along from that.

That's, like, was used in the ancient festival, a Dionysus. I think I know the one that you mean. Wasn't it the one that was closest to what they used as a hospital? And they sometimes wheeled the patients out because they saw that theatre was part of that. It's just a little bit further down the path, lower down and a bit more toward the main entrance. That's true.

Yeah, it's a lot better way. Yeah, it's towards one of the entrances. People laughed at Socrates then. Yeah, like the Aristophanes performed the clouds there, which is like a parody of Socrates. There's a story that Socrates went to it and he sat in the audience and there was two guys from McGayra, like another city, tourists. And they were like, because it absolutely mercilessly like, you know, humiliates and ridicules him, makes him out to be a pretentious idiot. One of these guys turned to the other guy and he went, who's this dude that they're

just roasting here? And Socrates was setting the side to him and the story goes that he stood up and he turned around to the audience and he went, me, like, like, and then he kind of just sat down and he smiled and he sat. So like, the, the symbolism of it is that he didn't, he was, uh, he had a dapper fee. I was like, I don't care. Like, what if I thought it was back to me? I'm quite enjoying it. Well, man. So good. Look, Donald, uh, I've really, really adored today. Uh, people want to check out more of your work and your accessible writings, where should they go? Well, like if they just got my website, it's just Donald Robertson.name. So instead of .com, it's N-A-M-E, like Donald Robertson.name,

and I have a lot of videos and books and I'm working on a graphic novel at the moment, so they'll see some of the artwork for that. And yeah, they'll be hearing shortly about some of the not-so-secret projects that I'm working on, I guess, if they're interested in that. So, yeah, that's where they can fit. And also the modern stores, as a non-profit, it's like a philanthropic organization,

I'm one of the founding members of it, it's run by a multi-disciplinary team of philosophers and class assistants and psychologists. So the website for that is just modonstoresism.com and it runs conferences and online courses like basically it's like a non-profit. So that's where I generally do your people towards, actually, like they can support their work

and their organization and just educating people about the benefits of stuassism. How do you be a Roman Emperor is the most accessible work? Do you think a good place to start? I've written, yeah, I mean, so when the people seem to like, and you know, I wrote, I teach myself a self-help book called Stuassism and the Art of Happiness. I've written a bunch of books, but like, the one that people seem to like is how to, when I suggested that title 10 years ago and the first publisher told me they thought it was a stupid idea for a title and I thought I never give up. I thought I like it. It is a stupid title. I think it's a stupid title, but that's why I like it. And eventually I managed to find a publisher that would let me use it.

And now suddenly they think it's a great idea, they're like, that's a great title. Like, they're... Oh, the Enret respect. Enret respect. But first everybody thought it was kind of funny. So yeah, by all means, the Romanian translation just came out. I saw.

Congratulations. All the people in Romania getting red-pilled about stoicism. Great, excited about that. The Greek translation is doing okay. I like it when I see the Greeks reading it. Like, you know, because they're not really that interstuicism, so I quite like to see that. Crazy. Look, thank you so much for today.

It's been amazing. Oh, it's been a pleasure. Thank you very much. And, you know, like, you know, maybe hopefully some point in point in the future we can chat again and I'm sure there will be plenty to talk about. you