Modern Wisdom - #497 - Donald Robertson - The Stoicism Secrets Of Marcus Aurelius

Episode Date: July 9, 2022

Donald Robertson is a stoicism historian, a psychotherapist and an author. Marcus Aurelius has become one of the most quoted and most popular philosophers in history. His meditations have helped millions of people to find solace in hard times and deal with setbacks in life. But which elements of his life and philosophy have been hidden from the public and how many valuable insights are less widely known? Expect to learn why many of Marcus' quotes might be plagiarising lost texts from other philosophers, whether Donald thinks that Marcus took psychedelics during a sacred ceremony, just how crazy Emperor Nero was, what Marcus learned about not being seduced by fame, how the Stoics would advise people to deal with depression and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get 20% discount & free shipping on your Lawnmower 4.0 at https://www.manscaped.com/ (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get over 37% discount on all products site-wide from MyProtein at https://bit.ly/proteinwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Get 15% discount on Craftd London’s jewellery at https://bit.ly/cdwisdom (use code MW15) Extra Stuff: Buy Verissimus - https://amzn.to/3ybXgWs Follow Donald on Twitter - https://twitter.com/DonJRobertson  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What's happening people? Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Donald Robertson. He's a stoicism historian, a psychotherapist, and an author. Marcus Aralius has become one of the most quoted and most popular philosophers in history. His meditations have helped millions of people to find solace in hard times and deal with setbacks in life, but which elements of his life and philosophy have been hidden from the public, and how many valuable insights are less widely known? Expect to learn why many of Marcus' quotes might be plagiarizing lost texts from other philosophers, whether Donald thinks that Marcus took psychedelics during a sacred ceremony, just how crazy Emperor Nero was, what markets learned about not being seduced by

fame, how the Stoics would advise people to deal with depression and much more. Donald is one of the best communicators on the planet when it comes to history, philosophy and especially stosism. The guy is a legitimate force of nature and I'm so glad to have him on the show again. You're going to learn so much today. Just sit back and enjoy this. The guy's phenomenal. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Donald Robertson, welcome to the show.

Hi, it's the pleasure to be here, looking forward to it. Nice shirt. Thank you. I love the fact that you like my shirt. I'm very proud of it. Just in case people can't make it, I would have mentioned earlier it's got Alligators or Crocodiles or something on it.

Hardcore. So, Marcus Arrailius, this is the third book that you've now written on him in one form or another. I'm losing count, buddy. Like, it's too many books. I've written three in a book on him. I've also written chapters on him for other books and I edited and wrote a preface for an edition of the

meditations. So yeah, and I wrote, how do you think of Romain Prar, which was a self-help book? I did that graphic novel about him, which is just coming out. And then I did a prose biography of him for Yale University press. So yeah, I think I need that break from Marcus Aurelia. So I've started writing a bit of it, so I'll cut these notes. So that's I haven't told anyone else yet. I've built a few hundred thousand people on the internet now, yeah, exactly. Are you Marcus Aurelia? This is number one fan? Do you think, or do you think that you're the most educated on him or one of the most educated on him that's alive at the moment? I, yeah, I mean, it doesn't seem like that much of a briac, I've spent so much time having

to read this stuff on ProBot, I must be one of the people in the world that knows the most about Marcus Aurelis, now just because I've spent so much time writing stuff about him. And I kind of thought I learned a lot about him and then obviously when you write other stuff like you write it from a different perspective, the graphic novel, I suddenly had to think what did this look like and what did that look like and so it may make splot his life from a bit of a different perspective, I had to visualize it more. And I thought well now I know everything I need to know about him, but then when I did the more academic biography, that was a more rigorous standard in a way. And I thought, no, I'm now doing research that's even deeper than I did before.

So apparently there's always more to learn. So Mark is a relius. I can't do that much left. Emperor Rome. But followed a Greek-born philosophy. Why? Yeah. Well, let's get into some obscure stuff then.

I can't be 100% sure about some good stuff speculating, Chris, right? I reckon it was to do with his mum partly. That's one reason. So his mum, his father passed away when Marcus was, we think about three or four years old, and so he was brought up to a large extent, although not exclusively by his mother.

Now his mother was a very wealthy and powerful woman. She was a construction magnate, believe it or not. And we know that because we have hundreds of bricks with our name stamped on them. She owned a brick and tile factory and clay fields that were used in construction. So she was very wealthy and powerful. Women, not like we might have kind of assumed,

you know, in Roman times. And she had a kind of, she seems to have had an intellectual circle that's around her to like a salon of intellectuals at their house. And so she was a very well educated woman. Here's a bit of trivia for you. Marcus Cornelius Frontal, who is Marcus's Latin retric tutor, and was considered the greatest Roman Orator since Cicero, which is quite an accolade. We have a letter from him where he says to Marcus,

he's writing to Marcus's mother in Greek and he says Marcus, kind of patheticly, could you check my grammar and vocabulary and stuff to make sure that it's okay before your mum reads it? So fronto, one of the greatest intellectuals of the era, is kind of intimidated by Marcus's mother. That's cool. It is cool. And so Kashi was really into Greek culture and literature. I think she brought up her son to be into Greek philosophy and that kind of led to stoshism. Also the other, this is a real deep dive. Roman matriarchs were, are believed to have been the ones that were mainly responsible for choosing the tutors that were employed.

And Marcus had an unusual number of Stoic philosophy tutors. So he got into Stoicism himself. But we also have to assume that his family were kind of steering him in that direction, and it was probably his mum that picked those stoic tutors for him. What was the culture of Rome like? Were the Roman philosophers as well, obviously, apart from Marcus? What was the difference between them and the Stoics? I mean, the culture was that, Marcus was loving through a cultural movement called the Second Sophistic. So the Sophists, people may have heard of, is these kind of quasi-philosophos or

intellectuals, the Socrates was kind of jousting with intellectually, he was a critic of the Sophists, but there was a resurgence of popularity in the Roman Empire of the sophists. So these were Greek orators and speech writers and generally intellectuals who came over and they were viewed as exotic and they became very trendy for centuries in the Roman Empire. And Marcus kind of grew up in the middle of that. So Hadrian who was a huge figure in Marcus' life, Hadrian became Marcus' adoptive grandfather. And Marcus that. So Hadrian, who was a huge figure in Marcus' life, Hadrian became Marcus' adoptive grandfather. Marcus was brought into Hadrian's villa

and raised in his household for around about six months towards the end of Hadrian's life. Hadrian wanted to be a sophist. He loved, he spent a lot of time in Athens, he left, he did a lot of construction in Athens. He saw himself as an intellectual and surrounded himself with his sophists and Marcus grew up in this kind of, I guess we would say sort of pretentious intellectual culture. And his mum was kind of connected with that, the most influential

Greek orator, the most influential intellectual in a sense of the period was a guy called Herodis Atticus, who's famous now in Greece because the Foufeitos performed a concert at a building called the Odin of Herodis Atticus. It's a famous building on the side of the Appropolis, which still exists. I've been to it. Yeah, you've been there. And like, you know, staying and like, brining, you know, all these kind of musicians perform there now. And I wrote these Atticus was like a billionaire and a celebrity or a tour, like a rock star of the period.

But he was also a really horrible man with a really bad temper. He was raised for a time in the same household as Mark's or release his mother. Like, we know that's a little kind of fragment of a clue. So she knew the leading surface of the era. So how's that? This guy that we think of as a stoic or typically critics of these kind of potential intellectuals, his mum grew up in the same household as the most influential and famous surface of them all. And he became a family friend sort of a kind of friend of me in a way for the rest of Marcus' life.

At one point he lunged at Marcus like he was going to throttle him or something and he was nearly executed by the Pretoria and Prefect, but Marcus stood up and told his guards to stand down. I suppose if you are, if the person that is at the absolute tip of the spear of the cool movement of the time also happens to be a bit of a dick. That's a pretty good excuse to not want your son to grow up like that. That's a good description. I mean, what have we got against the royalties? He did that horrible thing. The Athenians here, they were always trying to suit him in court. He kind of went, he was tried because he was accused of kicking his pregnant wife today, although he was acquitted of

that, but there's a kind of stigma that hung over him, like he cannot manage to dodge a bullet there. So the irony is that we know, here's another cool bit of trivia, like we know that how do these Atticus had read epic titus, and he kind of liked to quote him sometimes. The sophist would often quote philosophers, but they kind of appropriated it because it sounded cool. They didn't really love like philosophers. It was more about, you know, they literally liked social media today. They would give speeches where they tried to win the biggest round of applause, like getting the most likes or something like that, they were celebrities.

So we know Epic, Erruti's Attic has criticized the Stoics because he said they espouse insensibility. He goes, they root out the most kind of vibrant emotions and you don't want to end up like one of these guys like a robot or whatever. And the Stoics said that's not at all what we're about. So this guy that's saying the story is too unemotional. I think Marcus looked to him and said, dude, I don't want it to be like you though. Like you've got an appallingly bad temper. And like, you know, I think that one of the things that really shaped Marcus was seeing these guys side by side and thinking this dude that's saying embrace your passions and all that is actually a terrible violent person. And these other guys that are saying, no, you have to learn

to understand and to master your passions, Marcus loved and really admired those dudes. And just in a personal level much more than, you know, he ever warmed to her with his articles. What was the story of how meditations was actually written? It was given that he was even the different name when it was first written, right? Yeah, it's called, well, the earliest manuscript was headed to himself, so it may be that that's the title that it was originally given, which is kind of interesting, because for ancient philosophers we sometimes say that to learn philosophy is to learn to discourse, to talk with yourself, which is a really from a cognitive therapy point of view. I'm a cognitive behavioral psychotherapist. This idea that

is about learning how to talk to yourself rationally is a really cool concept. In the meditations, Marcus has this recurring phrase where he says every morning say to yourself, so the book consists of lots of things that he's telling himself to say to himself. So it's a very appropriate heading for it. How it was written, we believe that it was written pretty much coinciding with the first Markamanic war. And it happens to be just after Marcus' main philosophy, Chirta, Janieus Rustikus, dies. So I'm very tempted to visualize, again, when you do the graphic novel,

you try to like visualize these things, you think, look, this guy's just died that he's his main Chutta. He's just left Rome pretty much for the first time to go to Austria, and it's kind of that he finds very harsh with the military. It's the first time he's really been stationed himself with the military like this, like a real fish out of water suddenly.

And he does not have, he may have had some philosophers with him, but he did not really have this kind of circular philosophers that he would have had at Rome. And we know Marcus Wright like to write letters. So I imagine that he was probably writing letters to some of the philosophers that he was friends with, I wish we still had those. We have letters to his rhetoric, to really kind of gossip about philosophy of that and stuff. But I imagine that when rustic has died, Marcus was left thinking, whom are going to talk to philosophy now? And if he'd been writing to him, it would have been

very natural for him to think, maybe I need to carry on writing about philosophy, but instead of addressing letters to rusticus, there's no past away, I should write to myself. And I would like to imagine that some of the things that Marcus is saying in the meditations must be things that he heard in lectures or that he'd read in books or that he'd discussed, maybe written about in letters to rusticus and the various other stoic chitlos that he'd discussed, maybe written about in letters to rusticus and the various other stochotos that he had. How much do you think is original thought then and how much do you think is repurposed

from people that or places that we perhaps don't have access to anymore? That's a really good question and the short is, we just will die not knowing Chris, probably, we'll never be able to figure that out. I'll tell you some really cool trivia about it. The person that marks a really as close, most often, is Epictetus. He clearly loves Epictetus. He says at the beginning that one of the biggest moments in his life was when Janieus rustic has gave him a copy from his personal library of the discourses of epictetus. Now the discourses of epictetus are quite long, they're like four volumes, but one ancient

source says they were originally eight volumes, so half of them were gone missing, right? They were misplaced some, you know, some time over the centuries, annoyingly. Now Marcus quotes stuff that's in the discourses, they also quote stuff from Epic Titus that we've never heard before. So what's really cool is to imagine that Marcus really has had read the four missing volumes of Epic Titus. He knows even more about this, did the we do. And so, like because they don't use quotation marks

and they don't cite things, certainly Marcus writing in formal, he doesn't do anything like that. He occasionally will say as Plato said, or as Epictetus said, so there's a clue. But some of the things he said look like the quotes, and they may be some of the stuff that we attribute to Marcus, really, is actually stuff that Epictetus said that he's just copying down into his notes, but it doesn't quotation marks around it for all we know. Are you familiar with Churchill and Drift?

Do you know what that is? No, I've not held that expression before. You need it, you need it in your life. So you'll have heard a lot of people attribute quotes to, I think it was Churchill that said this thing. It's the phenomenon whereby quotes that are kind of difficult to attribute end up moving slowly over time towards being Churchill.

You could also have like an Einsteinian drift as well, I think, like Einstein and Churchill. I don't know who said this quote, so I'd better say Churchill said it because it probably was. And what you have here is like an oraleousian drift in that he, because so much less of his work has been lost than other people around that time, or at least because so much of it has been preserved, that means if he's been condensing down other people's work, maybe he is taking a license for other people's stuff. I mean, it could be the loads of the meditations, it's just quotes from other books, for all

we know. Like, I don't think at all is because some of it's kind of personal to him. And I'll tell you, I'll tell you another really cool piece of trivia. First of all, just an aside about this Trouch Hilly and Drift. You know, I just interject a warning to your viewers, right? The internet is absolutely a wash. Replique. Replique with misattributed quotes. And there are a bunch a bunch that people attribute to Marcus Aurelius over and over again That happens so often that you then eventually they find a way into books and so you buy books

Never said that what are the most like mr. Tributed Marcus Aurelius quotes What the most does does one that says everything you see is just a perspective or something like that, which is doesn't even make sense semantically. You don't you don't see a perspective. You see through a perspective, right? I'm like, geez, Marcus, I really would never write that. That's nonsense. But like he wouldn't say that anyway, because it's kind of extreme relativism and Marcus would say no that might be true of some things but like you know the Marcus believed that there are

certainties in life like he thought there were more certainties in life. Now I was going to say something I've forgotten what I was going to say Chris about epic titus so maybe it doesn't matter the tracheleon drift we were talking about effectitas, so maybe it doesn't matter, the tracheleon drift, we were talking about. And the courts are attributed to Marcus, are really not necessarily from them. That was very common in the ancient world, you know, the ideas end up. We only have about 1% of ancient literature surviving today, so of course, we're probably messaged by the loads of ideas. Is the whole universe's change and life itself is but what you do, is that him?

You know I'm going to say yes and no, because I think he would say himself that what he's doing, I remember what I was going to tell you actually relates to this, you've given me a really good example. In Greek that's just like sex words. It's like really, really concise. Right? And you can tell from the context that what he's saying is the universe has changed, is him referring to Heraclitus, and life's opinion is him referring to Epic Titus. So he's trying to sum up his two favorite philosophers. I said earlier, he made his favorite person to quote as Epic Titus. His second favorite person to quote is Heraclitus. And so these are like his two

favorite philosophers. And he's trying to sum up the philosophy in just like his few words as possible. And so he can memorize it really easily. This is a kind of like, he's make up slogans for himself. This is a thing that the Stoics would do. So is a kind of like, he's make up slogans for himself. This is a thing that the story would do. So by the universe has changed. He means what we call pan-tare, everything flows. Like this kind of doctrine of impermanence that you find in the pre-secretic philosopher, kind of quite a sort of the story's really loved.

Life's opinion is a bit more obscure and it needs to be unpacked about what he does not mean everything is just subjective. He's talking about when Epictetus says it's not things that upset us but rather our opinions about them. What he means is the quality of your life is shaped fundamentally by certain opinions that you hold predominantly your value, your judgments. So what he's saying is the things that you value and the things that you despise are going to shape your character and therefore the quality of your life. So it, unfortunately, you lose some meaning by trying to simplify and abbreviate

things. That's what he's doing. He's trying to make it more memorable, but he's ended up saying something that people are bound to mess with. So I'll prep. Well, you have to sacrifice context for brevity, right? This is what I mean, I'm a big fan of Naval Ravacant. I'm not sure if you've come across him. No, I haven't. Very, very cool guy. So he's a VC, angel investor, but also, I guess he class himself as a sort of garage

philosopher as well. And he's very, very pithy. So he's like an aphorism factory and he's constantly putting out these really, really cool shorts, sort of aphoristic things. And he says basically the same thing. Look, the point is for this to kind of be like a buoy in the water and you know that below that

there's tons and tons of more stuff. It's kind of like just a little mental trigger. Look, this is the thing that you've got to remember. There's a big concept. It's not worth just knowing the thing. You've got to know the concept, but in order to remind you of the concept, here's the thing that sits above the water of it. Epic Titus says almost exactly the same thing in one of his discourses. He says, if you ask us what the goal of life is, we'll say it's living in a quad with nature, or if I say something else actually, and he says, but then if you ask us what does living mean and what does nature mean, it's going to take a lot longer

to unpack those concepts. So he says, you can condense things down into a short slogan, like just a few words, but then you're going to have to explain what those words mean in order to avoid confusion. It's basically the same idea because it's really clearly. And it reminds me of like, the other little bit of trivia I was going to tell you, and this is just like a cool thing for people that are interested in the meditations, right? So first of all, a bit of background. I meet a surprising number of people who think that we don't know anything about Marx Areilius, which is really weird, because he was a big deal back in the day.

And one of the reasons I've written about him is we know more about Marx Areilius than Marx, which is really weird, because he was a big deal back in the day. One of the reasons I've written about him is we know more about Marx, and we do almost any other ancient philosopher, certainly far more than we know about any other stoic, because he was a Roman Emperor. We have three major surviving histories of his reign. We have a bunch of archaeological evidence and inscriptions. We have references to him and loads of other writings. We have a record of his legal rescripts, like his legal agenda from the laws that he passed in Roman legal digests, but we also have a cache of letters that are found in the 19th century between

Marcus and Marcus Cunningless Fronto, his retriture till I mentioned earlier. And some people are disappointed by those letters because they're mainly check-chatting, they talk about their aches and pains and the weather and stuff like that. There's not a lot of philosophy in them. But at one point, in front of us to talk about these retric exercises that he's setting, Marcus, like how to practice writing powerful speeches and how to phrase things effectively and stuff. But at one point, Toronto sets its exercise for Marcus and he basically has this thing where Marcus is trying to decide whether he wants to spend his time studying rhetoric or studying philosophy.

And Toronto is kind of struggling to persuade Marcus in order to retain his status at core is his main tutor. He was in competition, he says, with rusticists like to be Marcus's main tutor as he gradually got older and shifted more towards philosophy. And what frontal says is very interesting, he says, basically, that philosophers come up with these insights that are kind of obscure by their very nature. So, you think very deeply about things, you're going to come up with stuff that's kind of obscure by their very nature. So you think very deeply about things. You're going to come up with stuff that's kind of hard to put into words.

It's going to seem like any original thought. It's going to be a little difficult to articulate at first. And he says, so the philosophers end up saying weird stuff. They make up jargon and things like that. And they say things that are kind of obscure. And he says, if you want to really understand things, and if you want to communicate them effectively,

you have to study a rhetoric as well. Like, you're going to have to figure out how to take these paradoxical ideas and put them into plain English, basically, for your own benefit, as well as the benefit of other people. And he tells Marcus, you should take these insights and practice paraphrasing them repeatedly. So thinking of different metaphors, different words that you produce to try and get the meaning across. You think, oh, that's cool. It's kind of like a retro exercise. It's also showing us how to figure out a way that you can hang on to this position in court. So Markis don't just leave me and go off and do philosophy. You need retrocan philosophy, he wants to say. But also the really cool thing about it is, when

scholars first read that letter and he returns to it a few times in other places, they thought, how weird is this? Because that looks like that's what he's doing in the meditations. Like, in the meditations, he's taking these paradoxical ideas and it looks like he's partly repeating them over and over again, like he's paraphrasing them, it looks like he's doing this thing that Fronto tells him to do, where he's turning an idea over and over and he's mind and trying to articulate it in different ways so he understands it from different perspectives. That's the problem I think a lot of people have with the social media Twitter verse when it comes to deploying wisdom that it's all front and no substance, right?

That people can use fancy rhetoric and fluent talking to cover up the fact that there's actually it's a baseless argument that they're putting across. So there isn't anything deeper than that. Fluency is used as a proxy for truthfulness or insight. Yeah, socks. We need to do something about that. Like social media is awesome. Like, but all good things have pros and

cons, right? One of the disadvantages of it is that it really seems to, I think there are features of social media that have made people more angry and confrontational. It seems to have really damaged people's ability to engage in reasoned arguments somehow. You see way more kind of fallacies, like had home and attack, sweeping generalizations and stuff. And then to that, then you'd normally expect to see just in an everyday conversation with other people. I think somehow it allows people to get away

with saying irrational stuff more than, you know, you'd be challenged perhaps, a little bit more, or in a more effective way in a normal face-to-face conversation. There's another thing that happens, which, you know, Socrates said an odd thing about the Sofists. A lot of people are not a lot of people in the Socrates, right? Socrates just to pretend that he had a bad memory. He was kind of famous for it. He'd be like, oh, I've got this really bad memory. And it was part of the Socratic irony. It was fainting. And the reason he did it was because the Sorphus was one known

for giving really long elaborate speeches, right? And one of the risks of that is that often people disguise the weakest part of their argument by taking it for granted. It's like an unspoken premise. And then they'll build on it and build on it and build on it until everybody's kind of forgotten that the foundation was nonsense to begin with, right? And so Socrates would say, oh, interrupt this office all the time. He wouldn't let them go for more than a sentence or two.

And he'd say, well, hang on a minute, let's just check. Like, you're starting point before we go any further. And that really aggravated them. Like, it was one of the things he was kind of known for. And it didn't sound cool to listen to. People thought, well, this office are more entertaining. You can be passive. You just sit there and let it kind of wash over you.

Like, this colorful, like, emotional speech and stuff. Insolkities kept interrupting them at the beginning and say, and not even letting them get started. Because he said, but the thing that you're assuming right from the very beginning, like, do we know for certain that that's absolutely true? Are you given this big speech about justice? But you haven't explained what justice means. Let's stop and just define the concepts that you're using before we can go any further. I've got a quote from Xeno that maybe have had Chichilian

drift on it, so I'm going to stress test it with you about this exact thing. Long-worthy, sophisticated philosophical discussions were popular in ancient Roman Greece. Xeno, the founder of Stoicism, took a totally different approach and was super concise. When someone complained that his philosophical arguments were very abrupt, Xeno agreed and replied, if I could, I'd abbreviate the syllables as well. Yeah, and we all get that from as the Spartans. So we say that someone is Leconic if they're very canataeus and abrupt and Leconia is the region like the county or whatever where the city of Sparta was located. So it means Leconic

just means Spartan right. The Spartans were known for speaking in this very concise very brief way in the stoics and socrates were kind of known from modeling themselves a bit on certain aspects of Spartan culture. There's a really good anecdote about a sophist and a Spartan king. So there was a sophist and this must have been relatively unusually went to Sparta and he spoke to Spartan king. I guess the Spartan king was like, I'm just going to find out what these guys are like, you know, I've got to check it out. So this guy is invited to the court and he gives a big elaborate speech and it out. So this guy is invited to the court and he gives a bigger elaborate speech.

And then he says at the end of it to the king, would you, you know, would you think of that? And the king says, well, it went on so long by Spartan standards. He goes, I can't even remember the beginning. And therefore, I didn't understand the middle and so I can't agree with your conclusion. Like, which is a very psychotic sounding things to say,

you know, he wants to kind of go right back to the beginning of the speech and say, well, it's just roll it back a bit and look at where you started. I mean, the easiest way to explain that, as I said earlier, people talk about courage or justice or wisdom. They say a lot of things, there's a lot of heartache, but socrates would say, well, hang on a minute,

we need to define what you mean by those words before we start using them. Otherwise, we can't get lost in the weeds. And we get lost in the weeds all the time, on the internet. Yeah, I wonder why you were talking about social media. I wonder why it is that people are able to make more obvious errors online.

Maybe part of it is that the immediate social cost of doing something, like you would see it in someone's face, if you start to stray or make a fallacy, you'll see someone go like that almost immediately, whereas on the internet you're a little bit more detached. It's bizarre because on the internet, certain things are scrutinized more because the bandwidth is lower and it's this sort of staccato, I say a thing, then you prepare and you say a thing, then I prepare and I say a thing.

So some of the stuff is more scrutinized, but some of the stuff is a lot less scrutinized and able to be sort of slipped in a little bit more easily, especially when emotions are running high. What do you think Marcus Aralius would say about the current state of the internet and social media and tribalism and stuff like that? I think he dove a lot to see about it. And it may surprise people, I mean, he'd say,

he talked with many aspects, some of the things that you've just touched on. He'd say, maybe on social media people are less able to interrupt you. Maybe also you can, you're not seeing the facial expression and stuff. You can also just ignore them. There are many people who put stuff out in social media and never read any of the responses. Like, so they're just kind of like spuring stuff out, but they're not really.

I, in psychotherapy, you know, that to me sets alarm bells ringing. Like, because people can, I need the socializing effect of getting feedback from other people. We need critics. We need disagreement in order to knock the rough edges off our thinking, basically. But there are some people who are so narcissistic or like they just want to put stuff out and not get any kind of feedback on it. Which is the opposite in the sense that the peer review method and science is all about, you can put stuff out there and then you let everyone tear it to shreds and that's kind of like how we learn stuff.

But there are definitely intellectuals that avoid doing that, like the plague, like they don't present their ideas of conferences, you know, like they don't engage with our critics and stuff like that. One of the things that stories, the story is named after this public space in the Agora. When the other philosophers had kind of retreated

to some extent to these more private schools outside the city walls, the stories went, no, we are going back to where our Socrates did philosophy out in the marketplace so that anybody can come along and tell us that they think we're talking rubbish like, and they can pick holes in their ideas, because we want to engage with other people we want to to hear the criticisms, rather than being afraid of it.

There's a really cool quote actually from arrival school from the Epicureans, but they still say similar things. Marks are really said similar things to this. Epicureus said something deeply paradoxical. He said in a philosophical debate, everybody wants to be the winner, right? But ironically, the person who benefits the most from a philosophical debate is the person who loses the argument. And that's a beautiful paradox. The guy that wins the argument doesn't really gain anything, but the guy that loses the argument

potentially learns something. So, Epicurus is like, why are you so desperate to win? Like, Socrates actually talks as if he wants to be refuted. He kind of wants to, he wants other people to disprove things, because he that someone's like getting vitamins in your mind or something like that, there's something nourishing and healthy about that. I think the other thing that Marcus would say that's related to this, and this might surprise people, unless they've just heard me saying it lots already, I think Marcus would find the striking thing about the internet is the amount of rage and anger and hatred and spite and stuff that's on it and passive aggressiveness and things. And the Stoics, differ from modern psychotherapists, this has made me realize in a way this is

a shortcoming of my profession of modern psychotherapy. Let me back up and explain a little. The Stoics thought that the main, the Stoics did psychotherapy. The Stoics did psychotherapy. They straight up just did psychotherapy. They wrote books called on therapy. Some people find that hard to believe. Most of those books are lost now, apart from one by Senna Karp, which is called on anger,

which is on Stoic therapy for anger. And they thought the most urgent emotional problem to address was anger. Now, usually we talk roughly of there being three broad categories of negative emotion, anger, fear and sadness, right? So our anger, anxiety and depression, if you like, right? Clinicians, therapists, mainly predominantly see people with anxiety disorders and clinical depression or some combination thereof.

There might be bits of anger, but people who predominantly suffer from anger tend not to seek therapy. So therapy has a kind of self-selecting audience to some extent. Angry people think, you need therapy, buddy. Like not me. So they're less likely to go and seek therapy. Where you see angry people is in institutions like in prisons, in schools, in the military because somebody else says, buddy, you've got an anger problem, you need to go and see a counselor, a therapist about that. But angry people are generally resistant to seeking help because they think they're in the right, there's a righteousness about it, they think they're in the right. I think for that reason, one of the risks of

modern self-help, the internet is also a wash with self-help, self-improvement advice. I think the downside of that is that people potentially focus all of their attention in the wrong areas in neglect, like the place where they're actually wounded the most deeply. So I'm surprised how little discussion there is in self-improvement communities about anger. Like, it kind of comes in, but it's not usually the main focus. And often people that talk about self-improvement do it in quite an angry, you know, surprising how hostile

they can be in their conversations, like in YouTube comments and stuff like that. It's like that's where the biggest blind spot is and for that reason, I like to call it the royal road to self improvement. If people could just get past that blind spot and realize that's the biggest opportunity, like for actually transforming our character, because it's the most neglected part of our personality and the Stoics knew that. Working on anger is the biggest opportunity. Working on anger, I think so. What do you think the Stoics would say about dealing with depression and anxiety? Yeah, they think those are equally also very important areas. Like, the main focus is on anger, but they think depression and anxiety

are important as well. Let's talk about some specific things that I think are actually helpful in practice. I like to chat and talk about trivia and things, but it's also good to just give people some practical take-a-rays right? So in terms of coping with anxiety, there are a bunch of things, there are still many, many techniques actually. One of them is, you know, we call it a view from above, like this idea of broadening your perspective. They were so far ahead of their time and compranding this. So they would visualize the world as I've seen from mental impus, or trying to visualize the cosmos as a whole. Whenever they're talking about cosmology in ancient philosophy and a sense of visualizing the whole of time and

space. Marcus talks about this quite a lot as a psychological technique. In fact, at one point he says he does it every day, if you can imagine the effect of doing something like that every day. Now, what I'd say about that is that we know now that when people become anxious or angry and also depressed, they exhibit cognitive biases and usually we don't realize that we have those biases because we're looking at the world through the biases. So it's like they're done in Kruger effect. Like we're too biased to notice our own biases. And so when people are anxious, they engage in threat monitoring as it's sometimes called. So there are focus of attention becomes quite narrow and quite selective. And they look for

possible, they'll look for reasons to worry. Same as angry people look for things to be pissed off about, like anxious people look for things to be frightened of, right? We, it's easy to see other people doing that, right? I mean, like when you look at other people and they're anxious or angry, you think, that guy's just looking for stuff to get angry about. It's obvious, but we don't realize when we're doing it ourselves because we're kind of, we're biased, we need other people to tell us that we're looking at things in a really biased, very selective way. The story is realized that when we broaden our perspective, spatially, chronologically, it helps to counteract this narrowing of attention that we tend to see in extreme emotions. And one of the dilemmas in modern psychotherapy is that when people have troubling thoughts,

when they get upset, they usually go to one extreme of the other. So either they're ruminate, right? So if somebody has an anxious thought that pops into their mind, either they spend way too much time going over and over it, like we call up the worrying cognitive style. So they'll go, what if this happens? What if that happens? How am I going to cope with it? What will I do? And they'll, they'll, they'll, won't get to sleep for hours. They'll be lying in bed at night for hours. They're thinking about it, right? Gone round and round and round and circles. Or they do the opposite, Chris. And I thought pops in their mind. You know, what if I go bankrupt? What if my wife leaves me or something? And they go, I mustn't think about that. I have to block

it from my mind. So the attempt thought suppression is we call it, and try and avoid thinking about it. So they either overthink it or they avoid thinking about it. And those are both highly toxic ways of coping, with distressing information or ideas. And usually what happens is people can ricochet back and forth, between either overthinking things or being extremely avoidant. You see this all the time, and the sad thing is there's got to be a via media, there has

to be another way, a third option. The third option is to allow yourself to acknowledge the information of the thought, but in a multi-touched way. One way of doing that is by gaining what we call cognitive distancing. So realizing it's just a kind of arbitrary thought, like viewing it almost like from the side, like, and go, oh, Donald's telling himself that he could go bankrupt, but Donald's telling himself is marriage could collapse or something like that. So you get a sense of objectivity about your own thoughts by stepping to one side

and noticing them like that. R&T Beck, the founder of Cognitive Therapy, said, it's like you're looking at the world through rose tinted glasses or, you know, catastrophe tinted glasses in this case. And instead of looking through them and just thinking that's how the world looks, they'll be like you took them off and looked at them. And when all I see now, those are the lenses that I was looking through, right? But another way of doing something similar

is to broaden your perspective. And that allows you, that's not avoiding the thought. You're still acknowledging the thought. And it's not over-analysing it and going around in circles. Like, you're not really engaging with it. You're just shifting your perspective. The key often, what both of those techniques haven't common is that you continue to accept the thought, but you're shifting the perspective that you

have on it. And that allows us to avoid this over thinking in one extreme or avoidant thought suppression way of coping at the other end. That's a takeaway that I'd like to give people, you know, it's very simple, learn to accept upsetting thoughts, but from a different perspective. Is that slightly more for anxiety than depression or for both? I think what we know, I hesitate to say these words because there's no panacea, but the closest thing that we have to a panacea in modern research and psychotherapy is cognitive distancing.

We know that it works for anxiety and depression and really a whole bunch of different things. And these strategies function in a slightly different way for different problems, but this is used in the treatment of clinical depression that can be used for anger as well. These are pretty general purpose strategies. They're tied up with what we call the modern of the past 20 years or so, the third wave in psychotherapy and evidence-based, research-based psychotherapy, and the move toward which was influenced in part by Buddhist mindfulness meditation practices. So let me, in very plain English, everybody would know

when you do mindfulness meditation and a thought pops in your, you're sitting there across leg with your justics, press, and your beads on and all that. And suddenly I thought pops in your mind, you suddenly think, can I not minute? What if nobody likes me, everybody hates me? Or something like that? You know, like, cause random thoughts just pop into our mind like that. Like background noise. When you're meditating, you wouldn't think, geez, what am I going to do about that? Why is that? Is it something to do with my upbringing? What currently? So then you wouldn't be meditating anymore, right? And you also wouldn't think, Geez, what am I going to do about that? Why is that? Is it something to do with my upbringing? What, Kotly? So then you wouldn't be meditating anymore, right?

And you also wouldn't think, ah, I have to stop thinking about that. Get rid of that thought, like, quick, drink some whiskey or take some drugs, I said, like, what's kind of distracting myself? When you're meditating, you'd naturally think, I have to acknowledge that thought, but then just do nothing in response to it. Like, just allow it to pass through my mind like the weather. And so it's natural when you're meditating that you adopt a detached perspective to interests of thoughts. And so for that reason, researchers were very

interested in studying that and looking at all the ways it could be utilized. And tells I'm running the perspective, I'll give you this is my favorite cognitive therapy takeaway, right? Because like there are techniques we use in therapy, I used to train therapists from living, like for a long time in the UK. Some of the techniques we get therapists to do are pinnacle they ask to teach, like they're complicated and it's sometimes that some people find easier to do than others. And then there's other techniques we use in therapy that are so simple. I don't know why we don't teach them to kids.

Like they're like, idiot proof therapy techniques. And one of them is to say what happens next, so especially with chronic warriors. So when people worry, they'll think about field catastrophes in the future, and they'll keep replaying them over and over in their mind. But the weird thing about it is, they'll focus in the worst part of an incident, and you have to ask yourself, why do you choose to begin at that point and end at that point? It's arbitrary, right? If you're thinking

about your future, you could expand the duration of the clip so that it encompasses weeks or months or years or whatever. But your amplify your anxiety if you focus on the setback or the worst part and then you don't think about what would happen after. And you also prevent yourself from planning coping behaviour, right? So it's a really dysfunctional thing to do. It's got to do with the editing of the video if you like in your mind. Why would you choose that time's lease Like that's what's cannot pathological about it. So therapy all we have to do is to say well suppose that you Did go bankrupt What would probably happen next And then they might say well I'd set home and I cry a lot and then you say so suppose you did go bankrupt

You say home you cried a lot what would probably happen next and So suppose you did good bankrupt and you sat along and you cried a lot, what would probably happen next? And then someone might say, well, I'd have to start thinking of ways that I could kind of start another business, I find a job or something like that. And they say, okay, suppose that you did that, then what would probably happen next? And you just keep asking that question over and over to force them to broaden their chronological perspective. And usually that dilutes the feeling of anxiety, because they're now thinking about not just the worst part, but also bits where they're beginning to move on so the anxiety is reduced. But it also forces them to problem solve as we call it and think of potential ways of coping, which is maybe something that they hadn't really taken

time to think through previously. So just keep asking yourself, suppose even if that did happen, what would probably happen next and just nudge yourself past that initial catastrophic movie clip. I like the fact that you're kind of front loading hedonic adaptation into the mind right now. Mutton, the studies say that a year after someone's become disabled or won the lottery baseline happiness tends to go back to a similar sort of level as it was before.

I'm not sure whether that's how well researched and studied that is, but certainly in my life when I think about when really good things have happened or when really bad things have happened. After a long enough time span, life kind of feels the same. I ruptured my Achilles about two years ago and you know, yeah, the rehab period sucked and it was boring or whatever. But there's actually points of the recovery

that I really enjoyed, there's points of the recovery where I got real senses of satisfaction, very, very good feelings from making progress. So, yeah, it's like a double-edged sword. Well, you're doing something, I think, and a sense there are two types of people in the world, right?

There are people that learn from experience and people that don't. Like, so there are people, especially, I think, to kind of being slightly glib, but I think once you kind of reach around about 40, you suddenly, you know, you potentially sit down and kind of look back on how your life is gone so far. And you kind of notice patterns and things in retrospect. And that

is fundamentally a kind of wisdom. And some people don't seem to do that. Like, they don't seem to do that at all. Whereas other people very naturally, like, you're doing, we'll just review. So yeah, I had this accident. And then, you know, how was it after? And I can have adapted to, and that's how things pan pan though. And then you start to realize, well, maybe that's what's gonna happen in the future when I encounter other setbacks. Well, the bottom line is, the bottom line is that no matter what's happened to you,

all of the fears that you had, all of the nightmares, all of the concerns and worry and sleepless nights and all that stuff, anybody that's listening to this right now, it never to be made it through that challenge because they're here to listen to this right now. Like, you have proof for however many years and decades you've been alive on the planet that no matter what the challenge was, you manage to get through it by the fact that you're

still here. Yeah, I mean another thing that we like to do, worry is when I actually my specialist, you mentioned anxiety, I specialize in treating anxiety disorders as a therapist, mainly in social anxiety, but other types of anxiety as well. And one of my favorite pieces of research on worry is that when you get people to keep worry diaries and just write all the stuff that they're freaking out about down, like you put record of it, and then you kind of review it just for research purposes. Sometimes the things that research does to gather information, end up being accidentally therapeutic. So if we say, well, what percentage of those things actually happened, or what percentage of them were as bad as you thought, they were going to be people go, like, not actually most of it never happened?

And like, how much time, how many hours have you spent over your life worrying about stuff that ended up not actually happening or if it did happen you cooked better or it wasn't as awful as you thought it was going to be. And people will go, geez, I like a large fraction of my life. Well, in retrospect, it's probably been spent worrying about stuff unnecessarily. And when you have that realization, Chris, when the scales drop from your eyes, like you actually is one thing someone telling you that It's nothing looking back in your life and going jeez yeah Lots of wasted time wasted years like worrying about something that didn't even happen like it makes you feel differently about

The future and about things that are worrying you in the present right? Speaking about depression and anxiety and stuff, just how crazy was Nero? Oh, I mean, like, first of all, I'm always surprised when people get upset on the internet, where they go to get upset about how we can't be certain about a lot of things in this day. And I thought everyone took this for granted. This is a premise of the conversation as we can't really know 100% for sure. So we're just basing it on what survives and stuff.

But personally, I think Neuro was pretty crazy. Like subsequent generations, a Roman was really vilified. I mean, Marcus really uses him as an example of somebody who's crazy, a tyrant, and just dominated by his own anger and anxiety. So he uses Neuro as like as code for that as like an example of that. I mean I think Neuro was a car crash and one of the reasons was Neuro I kind of instigated the second Sephistic. He loved Greek culture and he wanted to be an actor famously and he would force people to come and applaud him. They created a special cohort

of soldiers who would round people up at these festivals that he held and they'd stand around them with swords and they had to applaud Nero on stage like reciting poetry and things like that. I mean how fascistic like is that? Is that like the Nuremberg rallies or something like that? We're going to execute you unless you applaud this terrible play that Nero's written or whatever, it's crazy. But I think part of the craziness of it is, you know, people talk a lot actually these days about narcissism. I mean, obviously it's always been a thing, but it's easy. One of the things that we've always known is that narcissistic individuals have a magnetism and charisma to them often. And that's true throughout history. Like, so Neuro is a raging narcissist.

Of course, even from just what I've told you, it's clear this guy is a raging narcissist. And I think that's kind of part of the craziness. You become, it's one of the fundamental things that the story's really worn as a game. It's being too preoccupied with winning approval from other people. like too preoccupied with what other people think of us. Nero is the extreme example of that going wrong. So he's a vulnerable narcissist, not the grandiose narcissist, then based on what the literature would say. Yeah, he ended up committing suicide.

Who's it like? There's only 40 or something, wasn't he? Yeah, he was relatively young. He became Emperor of When He Was Very became emperor when he was very young, when he was a teenager. And so the Romans would say one of the things that concerned them is that this, Marcus was concerned about comodus also being a very young emperor.

And he said, like, that's not a good track record. And actually, some of the things happened to comodus. The, I always think those kind of like, several ways that a Roman Emperor can maintain power. Like it's it's difficult. It's a challenge, a daily challenge for all. How do you hang on to power in the Roman Empire? You could be assassinated. There could be a civil war. So you need ideally you want the army to love you and be on your side. That helps. Julie Caesar had the army on his side. He was a precursor of the impulse, but

he had the army on his side. Mark Sirreley didn't have the army on his side initially. He had served in the military, but he seems to have really won them over by the end. They seem to have come to really revere him. You want to have the Senate on your site. Some emperors treated the senators like trash, they executed them, they had the purges of them. Whereas, like Hadrian, for example, had terrible purges, we persecuted the senators. The Antoninus Pius and Marxer really saw themselves as working alongside the senate more. They were viewed as almost like the senators, like, you know, part of that, like, you know, sharing power with them and so on. If you don't have the Senate on your side and you don't have the army on the side, you need

to have the general public on your side. And the way that people did that in part was through almost turning themselves into celebrities in ancient Rome. And throwing expensive gladiatorial contests that, like having TV shows today or so, like reality TV, they would have these expensive public performances, festivals, like games, to try and kind of win over the public and impress them. And I think everybody knew that was the most toxic way to try to hang on to power, because the popularity

like that tends to be fickle. People end up having to do stuff that's not really anything to do with running the state. These guys like Neuro and Comma seem to forget about actually running the state and they become much more preoccupied with appearances. And it usually leads to assassination by other than being overthrown in the end. And I think Marcus would have been horrified to realize the first thing that comments did when Marcus died was here abandoned the army. Like he only needed the Senna and a dressed up as an... he dressed himself up. He put out a...

he had a wee stachees belt of himself with a lion skin, then the Mayan lion, like he was pretending that he was a God Hercules. And, you know, he became a Megalomaniac, like he, he wanted to be able to worship him, and he went and fought in these gladiatorial contests, like you see in the Ridley Scope movie, like he was desperate to, like, being a, he fought in the Colosseum, like you see in the Redley Scott movie, like he was desperate to, like being a, he fought in the course of the, like being a reality TV star or something like that. Like, did you see the Netflix series, I think it's called Roman Empire?

Yeah, with Chroma the Senate. I, I must have watched each season of that five times. I don't know how historically accurate it is, but it is so entertaining. For me, that style of documentary that Netflix does, they've done World War Two in color and the great events of World War Two in HD, where you've got archive footage or actors playing out what's going on, interspersed with experts and historians talking about it. Dude, I could, I could, that, if that was all that was on TV, I'd be happy with that for the rest of time. It's so cool. I remember watching that and thinking, the dramatizations are often

kind of inaccurate in some ways, but that doesn't bother me because, yeah, it's like it's a dramatization. I remember watching that and thinking, I kind of like the dramatization better than I like the talking head experts. Sometimes I know like I cannot, you know, I thought some of the things that they were saying I didn't entirely agree with. But I love watching things like that. When we were a research on the graphic novel, I didn't read that, I never read that many graphic novels. And so I sat down and I thought I'm going to read big parallel graphic novels. Like, sat down and I thought I'm going to read a big parallel graphic novels. I thought, geez, my job sucks, I've got a library and just read comics all day.

But I couldn't do it. I found them kind of tedious. I wasn't doing it. I was kind of struggling to get into it. I've never got into them either. Yeah. And then I thought what I need to do is actually, sometimes you've got your approach things in a slightly roundabout way.

So to research out graphic novel, I watched loads of movies. I rewatched loads of movies. So I watched these kind of TV series that you're talking about. And I looked at them from the perspective of how could we do something similar in our comic book format. So I didn't get inspiration from my local comics. I got inspiration much more from films and to TV series. What does you need to do the same thing, right? You need to set a scene where's the perspective, where's the camera, where are the protagonists, so on and so forth, what's the backdrop gonna look like?

Oh, you can do, I mean, I think it's possible to do a graphic novel. I didn't even realize this at first, but of course, you can have a graphic novel where it's just a bunch of the stickman talking if you really wanted and you just don't pull out a dialogue and a, but at the beginning I thought, we can't do that, right? I really, I don't want to do that.

I want to have a story of it marks a release because a lot of action. And I want to have philosophy in it, but where we can't let try and weave it into the action more. So actually, if you took all the philosophy out of it, it would still be a really cool story. I don't want a bunch of like, stek men or a bunch of men in tour,

guys just like talking to each other loads. I want the philosophy to kind of emerge from the action more. I started reading a guy called Jed McKenna last year and he's got a book called Spiritual Enlightenment Now. So he's a guy that says that he's awakened and is basically speaking stream of consciousness about what is life's like. He's running some sort of conventy type thing in America. And I really,

really fell in love with it. Whether the guy is awakened or not completely fully the separation of self from everything else, like all of that, everything he's reached it. Whether that's true or not doesn't really matter because the writing to me is just so spectacular. And in it, he has this concept that he calls releasing the tiller. And he talks about how when you're in a boat, the tiller is the thing that's attached to the rudder, and it's what you steer with. And he talks about how most people grip the tiller very, very hard and uses this analogy in sailing that if you're sailing through a storm, one of the best ways to actually maneuver the boat is to allow the tiller to maneuver itself because the boat will find the easiest path up and over the waves. And he keeps on talking about that. And then

I had Ryan Holiday on last year and he was, I mentioned it to him and he was like, that's a lot like, I'm off atty, you know, sort of loving your fate about releasing the tiller, allowing yourself to be sort of carried a little bit more. And I never got to speak to Ryan that much about that concept, although I did a little bit of research. So I wondered if you could take me through what I need to know about loving your fate and where it came from and what you, your reflections have been on it. Because I've got two things that pop into my mind immediately, like, and one of them is a bit of trivia for you, but you ask me where others have come from. So that phrase comes from Nietzsche, who was a, we think of them as a philosopher, but he was a professor of classical philology by profession, like, of ancient languages. And as far as I know, no one has ever been

able to trace that phrase, I'm a fatite, to any surviving Latin text. So either it's a kind of phrase that Nietzsche just coined himself, which sounds odd because it sounds very similar. It really does sound very similar to things that Marcus Aurelius says. So it couldn't sound more stoic, although Nietzsche paradoxical as he is often is kind of quite critical of stoics. This seems to really rip off their ideas, like really blatantly, in other ways, right? So, for a long time, I thought it's just this thing that Nietzsche came up with, and then I realized actually,

although there's not a Latin version, there's a Greek version of that phrase, and I think it's Storger, Tichun or something like that in Greek, and it's in Johannes Stubeabeis, if I remember rightly, in the list of Maxims that come from the Delphi Chorico. So people thought the Delphi Chorico was a woman, again another weird paradox we think of Greek philosophy as mainly men. The Pythia, the priestess of Apollo was a woman and the god Apollo supposedly spoke through her like she was possessed by him or something. And we have all these maxims, there's like 160 odd that survive, like no I sell all things in moderation and the famous

ones. And one of them is Love Your Fate and Plutarch who was a famous philosopher but also a priest of Apollo at Delphi, right? He says that the pithy effumes over these things are like coans, that these, most of them are two words in Greek, and they're very, very condensed. And he said, that people have written books about philosophy many volumes long, discussing them. So the lexedes that philosophy grows out of and becomes very verbal. To go back to what we're talking about earlier, I mean, normally it's the other way around. You take markets to take in as complex philosophy and compressing it into short phrases.

But Plutarch says, she would just spit out these two words. And then people would go away and try and figure out where they meant and come up with lots of different versions. For example, Genneth Ice, Outon was written and grieved that the entrance to the temple of Apollo. And people think it means kind of mindfulness, or like investigating your own character and stuff like that. It's a kind of recurring theme in you know, Greek philosophy, particularly in Socrates. But Senna Camp Lutarch both say it's a

memento morai. They say that no thyself means no that you are mortal. Like because it's what you read is you're walking into the temple of Apollo at the entrance. Before you're about to be in the presence of the immortal God Apollo. So remember that you're not an immortal. So it's not to do with introspective work reflections. It could be all of that. It could be both, right? So I guess that's what Plutac is means as well, is that she just says something cryptic that sounds really cool.

And some people take it away to mean you've got to really investigate yourself and explore its character. And other people say not means something completely different, but equally profound about remembering that you're like finite and mortal and stuff like that. So yeah, like that's I think it's really cool this idea that people say our philosophy is dominated by men, but maybe it was that there was a woman that was just kind of like pressing the buttons and initiating it all. Have you read the immortality key by Brian Mororescu? The one about the cookie on, like, uh, here's another, where are our trivia roll now Chris? I'm fine with that.

Did you know, did you know that Marcus Aurelius had hardly been out of Rome, then he went and fought and along the Danube in Austria, Hungary in these countries, and then he eventually took the east of the empire towards the end of his life and he went to Athens. And during the height of the war, we're told he made a vow that he was gonna go to elusis just outside Athens and be initiated into the Alicinian mysteries. And that must have meant that he drank the cookie on,

which is this small quantity of liquid, which some people believe contains something like air got, like it's kind of precursor of LSD, because it's the cult of demeter, the grain mother, or the earth mother, the goddess of wheat and grain, and air got grows naturally on wheat. And so they believe that over the centuries they created this hallucinate, a lot hallucinogenic, kind of liquid, based on our gut that people drank as part of the ceremony. And it's real to think the market, so really it's me of drunk it. That's cool. I mean, I'd spoke to Brian and he, his works fascinate. He's such an impressive

guy. I was in Guatemala about two months ago picking up my American visa and I went out for dinner with this guy that watches the show and he's got a huge YouTube channel in Spanish in Spanish and He was telling me that Brian is completely fluent in Spanish Brian is completely fluent in Spanish. Almost completely fluent in Portuguese. He is a full-time solicitor or some other, like, of some sort of lawyer, law professor.

And also, it's researching the Ellucian mysteries at the same time and flying all over and going to Athens and trying to work out what's going on with Ergot. And I was just really, really impressed with it. What do you all thought? Do you think that this is legit? Do you think that this is legit? Do you think that they would have had a psychedelic brew that would have perhaps been a sacred ritual

that many of the philosophers of the day went to do a tribute at? I don't know, I'm keeping an open mind, but I think it's like uncertain. I definitely think it's possible. And he says something actually that's true, which is generally if you speak to people in Greece, they're more sympathetic.

So they're like, yeah, sure, of course. Like, maybe less of a stigma around it, but I don't know, whether it actually happened or not, we don't really know. If Mark, when Mark has did that, was almost certainly after he finished writing the meditations. Oh, yeah, that's something that we didn't that we didn't quite clarify earlier on. So you mentioned that he's doing it when he's in basically modern day Austria, it's freezing cold, but what's the time period? Is it is this for over a long span of time or is this kind of condensed information that you have? Like you go at the meditations. Yes. Like our best, I can talk all day about the little bits of evidence that contribute

towards us. There are bits of evidence that we can use to date the meditations within a certain boundary. Like for example, here's a cool bit of trivia. Like at one point he says, at Conantum, which is the main legionary fortress in modern day Austria on the Danube. Now when I went to Con to London for a week doing research and I spoke to the director of archaeology there and I said, have you found any stuff here that might be relevant to Marx's release because often archaeological remains don't tell us that much

about philosophers' theories and things like that, right? Or, can I specific stuff that we get from the text? But they found a grave marker for a Praetorian Guard that's dated 171 AD, and the Praetorian Guards were the Empress Personal Body Guards. So that strongly suggests that Marcus must have been in Conantum in 171 AD, which kind of squares with other bits of evidence that we have. So he says I'm in Conantum when he wrote that in the meditations it may have been round about that time.

I mean specifically I think he probably wrote it between roughly 171 and about 174 AD and then the Civil War happened and I think that kind marks, like the end of it roughly. Is that not a bit of a shame, the fact that, you know, Marcus had a bunch more life to live and potentially lessons to accumulate that aren't written down. Yeah, maybe he went and drank the cookie and then thought, I've changed my mind about all this stuff that I wrote. Oh, bullshit, bullshit, burning.

That's bullshit, I bet. Well, I mean, it kind of looks like, especially that people say the view from above, they've thought seems kind of trippy and psychedelic, like some of the passages in the meditations, they can imagine that he might have taken full listen to genetic substances before he wrote it. He took opium, but it seems like it was probably in quite small quantities.

Gaelin says he asked to reduce the dose if I remember rightly because it was making them too drowsy. He took it for insomnia on chronic chest and stomach pain that he was suffering. People thought he had a stomach ulcer, right? That was what I was saying. He may have, like we're kind of guessing, but he talks about these pains and expecting blood and stuff, so he may have had an ulcer. He was pretty frail. There's a later Roman author that describes him

centrally, or in retrospect, he says, he had diaphanus, transparent skin. Like, so they certainly had this image of him as being kind of of very frail. And it's often the case though, isn't it? Sometimes there are guys that are super fit and athletic and then they drop dead, like in authorities or whatever. And then there's other guys that are really sickly and frail and they outlive everybody.

And more artists was one of these. Warren Buffett has a McDonald's every single day. I think that's what it attributes is. It's longevity. Level of relaxation, I'm not really too sure. So going back to the Amoffati thing, a lot of stoicism is built around preparing for death. How do you think Marcus felt as he was dying

and as death approached him? When I was writing the graphic novel, one of the things that changed a bit my perception of Marcus was I just sat up one day from working on it and I thought, I just suddenly don't know, and I thought this guy must have really just woken up every morning and kind of pinched himself and thought, I'm still alive, because everyone was dropping down from the plague. This kind of variant of smallpox, we believe it was, the Antelope plague. He lost many friends and family members.

He had 14 kids and half of them died before him. He frontal and rustic as died. He could have been assassinated at any moment. There was a civil war against him. And then he stationed himself in the Danube, at a place where we're told 20,000 Roman soldiers were killed in one day and what would have been one of the worst defeats in Roman military history, but probably before he went there. So he was putting himself in danger militarily as well. So it's like for a bunch of reasons. So when he's meditating on death and the meditations, I think it's interesting to realize

that he was just to put it bluntly in an incredibly dangerous and precarious situation. This is some abstract idea. He's meditating on something that is at the forefront of his existence every day. I mean, have you ever been in a dangerous situation and you kind of, depending on your throat G, I can't actually survive that.

Like, I feel like Marcus did that every day. Like, he must have thought, wow, I'm still here. You know, I've survived many outbreaks, that's horrible plague and stuff. So it wasn't at all abstract for him. And in the other weird thing is, like, I say, because he was frail, I think,

people, and because he was famous, I think he was surrounded by people waiting for him to die Even taught he actually talks about that about in the meditations So imagine what it would be like to have people gossiping all the time But when do you think he's gonna die like nice coffin all the time? You're literally frail He's gonna kill over or say any minute Like imagine that's all the conversation that going on around you man, like for decades, and suddenly meditations he's like, I don't know, maybe they're right. Maybe I'm going to kill over any minute. I think he had more opportunity than any of us to come to terms with his own mortality.

Okay, so let's say that you're a stoic and you're meditating on death. Let's also say that death is at the forefront of your existence. How do you not descend into a more hedonic style of living? I think that's a really interesting question. I mean, my experience is that there's no for at least two, although I guess for some people it can, first of all, let's preface that by saying the Stoic's thought that meditating on death would lead you to embrace reason more as a guide to life. And I think part of it is to do with this kind of broadening of perspective that we mentioned

earlier. It comes from the fact that I think when we contemplate our own mortality, what goes hand in hand with that is thinking about our life as a whole rather than becoming too preoccupied with moments of moment existence. When you're lying on your deathbed, you naturally tend to look back over your life as a whole. lying on your deathbed, you naturally tend to look back over your life as a whole. But the story it's all doing is this paradoxical balancing act, wherein the one hand they want us to be really grounded in the present, but also at the back of our minds also have this expansive awareness of the whole space and time. They want us to have our cake and eat it crisp.

They want us to be grounded in the present, but also aware of the totality of existence, as the context within which the present moment takes place. I think that changes the way that we perceive transient pleasures. Let me explain why. I'm going to say something that I think is very profound, because Mark's really assays it, right? There are many things over the years that I've learned in philosophy and psychology and some of it sounds well, there? There are many things over the years that I've learned in philosophy and psychology and some of it sounds, well, there's some of the things

that sound really deep and profound are usually BS and not that deep, you know, when you can dig into them, but then you know, often the most profound things are kind of relatively simple. Mark is talks at one point about how when people desire things, in a sense what they're doing is imagining the presence of something that's currently absent. What if I had a really nice car? I don't have a really nice car,

but I'm imagining work that like, that did have one. It's hypothetical. He says everyone does that, can I naturally? But he says, what if you do the opposite and you imagine the absence of things that are currently present, then rather than desire, you experience gratitude, right? There's a cool neat little rhetorical way of putting it, right? But there's also something like deeper going on there, because if we expand our perspective so we acknowledge a broad of context, then in addition to experiencing the presence of the things that we currently have, at the back of our mind or at the periphery of our awareness, we have to acknowledge that there was a time before and there will be a time after this experience.

So we experienced the presence in absence of something simultaneously by broadening our perspective. Sure, I haven't now. But there was a time when I didn't have this and one day it'll be gone. One day I'll be gone. So we experience the presence, the pure presence of the present moment, but enveloped in this kind of nothingness or absence of individual things, also of our entire life. And I think that when we broaden our perspective and we experience presence and absence of ourselves and the things we're enjoying simultaneously, it dilutes the intensity of our emotional experience. Now, mean that in a good way. It kind of brings it within rational bounds, I would say. And it's the same like if you're experiencing pain or discomfort or pleasure, I think that perspective allows you to enjoy pleasure without being consumed by it, without becoming too

much of an indulgence, without losing perspective. I guess that's a good way of phrasing it, I always just keep perspective on the things that are causing us pain or pleasure. Naval Ravikant says that desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want. Yeah, like the story kind of say that as well. They talk about it as being, and in modern psychology, this is the formula really for anxiety, it's future focused. The anxiety, a fear is the belief that something bad is going to happen, like, although we're going to be deprived of something that we desire.

And a lot of fear is predicated on the stuff that we value. Like you say, you know, in terms of society, most people that live in the first world are full of consumer things out about losing stuff that our parents never had to begin with. When I was a kid growing up, I love being able to say this now. We used to walk to school and the snow, when we were no shoes, and all that. When I was a kid,

everything was made of wood and cost two pens, back and all this. But when I was a kid growing up and Scotland, we really didn't have that much. We didn't have the internet. We didn't have the internet, you know, like if I wanted to get books, there were hard-to-tain books on philosophy and the small town that I lived in. And now we can take more and more stuff for granted, but we're also living an object era of being deprived of these things. Whereas, you know, it would just bring us back to the level of people throughout most of human history

who were fairly content, not to have central heating and the internet and the microwave oven and all this kind of stuff. Like, we, we, becoming overly attached to these things, we really set ourselves up for fear and anxiety and depression. It's crazy how you see people who are very wealthy and successful and then they lose it and commit suicide. And you think, but you still have more money than the majority of people. I have more opportunity and more success. I, it's just that you had a relative loss in status.

The story's one that's to try and see through that and transcend, I think. Speaking of rich, powerful people, has cancel culture tried to come for stoicism yet? I mean, it's a rich, white person elitists philosophy. I love all this stuff in our way. I just kind of find that, like most things, I think the key to life is paradox, isn't it?

The key is to kind of, like I said before, about how can we accept a thought, but without getting entangled with it. So there's got to be a third way. I think we have to be able to laugh at some of this stuff, but also kind of take it seriously at the same time. You know, you don't have to get too seriously, you don't have to laugh at it too much. But there's kind of a middle road.

I think some of it's kind of absurd, right? The story, usually what people say is like the opposite of the truth. So the Stoics were famous for an ancient Greece anyway, as a foreign philosophy, like they were the immigrants. Zeno was shipwrecked, he was finnishin, like he's described as having dark skin. Like even the word that you actually use is black, but it probably just means that he was quite dark skinned who's perceived as foreign, like very foreign and his philosophy was perceived as a foreign import to Athens.

He was a medic legally, like a permanent resident or a foreign immigrant, he wasn't an Athenian citizen. And most of the subsequent teachers came from what we would describe as the Middle East, now from Asia, Mayna. So this idea that it's kind of these disdominant tradition of white men is just historically not really accurate.

You know, like if you really visualize what was going on, it's a philosophy of immigrants and people who were looked down on by the Athenians because they were foreigners at Athens. So it's just not factually accurate to begin with. It's how I see it, ironically. Well, pretty much everything is going to be trampled by the Cancel Culture Mob at some point, so I'm sure that you'll probably have to defend some of the boundaries of stoicism. And the other thing they tend to say is it's a philosophy for the Roman elite, which is kind of there's a grain of truth in that. There's more truth, first of all there's both more and less truth in that than they realize.

So first of all Marcus, I really as well as elite, but they don't realise also that Augustus, the founder of the Roman Empire, was into stoicism as well. So Marcus wasn't the only emperor that was into stoicism, and the others kind of like, dabbled in it a bit as well, like, Nero obviously, and Hadrian, although they weren't really stoics themselves as such. But Stoicism was also a philosophy of poor people, certainly at one point, Clienthe is the second head of the Stoics school, what of Gardens at night for a living, like really cheap manual labor that he did, he was notoriously poor. He used to be a professional boxer. So he was this kind of example of a poor working class did, like that became a famous philosopher.

And Epictetus was a former slave, as well, obviously, and the cynics, as well, lived like beggars, basically. So the idea that is just a philosophy for the Roman elite is just contrary to the historical facts, basically. The Roman elite liked it, but it was also embraced by poorer people in the slave class, even. Speaking about the higher class people, what do you think Marcus would say about not getting seduced by fame?

He says a lot about that. I think it has his fear. Gosh, there's a whole, there's a really interesting story there, a press, but I'll just be able to kind of touch on it briefly here. When I read, there are many biographies of Marcus, I really, and I think generally they don't pay enough attention to Hadrian. Like, I talk a lot more about Hadrian when I

and the biography that I've written a bit Marcus. And I think one reason for that is that Hadrian was suggested by fame. Like he was absolutely preoccupied with his kind of wanting to be revealed as an intellectual actually and as a poet. And he kind of went crazy to Earth End, became a tyrant. And I think Marcus really was frightened at first of becoming adopted into the Imperial family and one day becoming emperor because he thought I don't want to end up like Adrian. Like on the one side he's like it's all sick of ants that are like sucking up to him and telling him whatever. Another hand that's all these people plot into assassinating him. And he's kind of like caught in the middle of this, kind of gradually going bonkulls, like cooked up in this massive opulent,

pat like luxury palaces that he's created from self surrounded by slaves and stuff. And Marcus thought this is just gross. Like, it's a car crash, and I don't want anything to do with it. And then luckily for him, he was too young to become emperor. So Hadrian adopted a kind of interim ruler,

Antoninus Pius, actually ruled for 23 years, looked probably longer than most people expected, because he lived a long time, he died in his 70s, I think. And Marcus had this really long apprenticeship, 23-year apprenticeship under Antoninus Pius, and I think he had this big revelation, he was the opposite of Hadrian in every regard, basically. And I'm telling you this guy isn't corrupted by power. The first thing he did was he moved into somewhat more modest powers of building the competitive, this crazy massive thing that Hadrian had constructed. And he got rid of a lot of the furnishings and statues. He went around dressed in a senatorial robes, which would be like, instead of wearing like purple,

like, kind of regalia or like a monarch, and Tainanus pie is basically more than modern and prevalent of a business. So, and he, he, doctors, are kind of more presidential role as the emperor. And Marcus saw this and thought, wow, this couldn't be more different from Hadrian. And I think that inspired him to think maybe there's a way, but I think he I think his challenge, I mean, you've read the meditations.

In book one, he talks about 17 different people. They're all family members or tutors that he's trying to role model, he's listing their roptures. people. They're all family members or tutors, but he's trying to role model. He's listing the roaches. And Antonin is biased. He says far more about than about anyone else. I think Marcus, this is decades after Antonin has died. Marcus was obsessed with modeling his adopted father. Partly because he lost his birth father when he was very young. So he was kind of craving a father figure. And in between, he'd seen these terrible negative role models. So he watched on Tantanius' his savior on a way. He thought this is a guy that I actually respect and he provides the template for how to not turn into Adrian and how to be a ruler.

And I think Marcus thought, how can I become like Antoninus and avoid turning into Hadrian? And the answer to that question is Stoicism. He thought I'm going to train in Stoicism. And that way, that will help me to become more like Antoninus unless like Hadrian. Donald Robertson, ladies and gentlemen, if people want to keep up today with the courses you do and get the new graphic novel and stuff, where should they go? people want to keep up to date with the courses you do and get the new graphic novel and stuff where should they go. My website is just Donald Robertson.name NAME so if they want to check that out, I've got stuff all over social media and things that they can have a look at. Fantastic. Donald, I always love speaking to you. Next book, next year, as soon as it's ready,

let me know. I want to bring you back on. Oh, awesome. Thanks very much, Chris. It's been a pleasure as always.