The Daily Stoic - Donald Robertson on What Ancient Philosophy Teaches Us About Facing Uncertainty

Episode Date: November 23, 2024

Stoicism is no different than working out or journaling—it is a daily practice that we lean on to overcome the obstacles we face every day. As a cognitive-behavioral psychotherapist and trainer, Donald Robertson has given readers a unique perspective on the benefits of applying ancient philosophy  to our everyday lives in his work, including his recent book How To Think Like Socrates. Today, Donald and Ryan continue their conversation about cognitive flexibility, what Socrates and the Stoics teach us about handling uncertainty, and how Stoicism is making waves in modern day psychotherapy practices.  Donald is a writer, cognitive-behavioral psychotherapist and trainer. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society for Public Health (RSPH). Donald specializes in teaching evidence-based psychological skills, and is known as an expert on the relationship between modern psychotherapy (CBT) and classical Greek and Roman philosophy.📚 Donald’s book, How to Think Like Socrates: Ancient Philosophy as a Way of Life in the Modern World, is out now! Pick up a signed copy at The Painted Porch.Get a signed copy of Marcus Aurelius: The Stoic Emperor and How To Think Like A Roman Emperor: The Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius from The Painted Porch. 🎙️Listen to Part 1 on Apple Podcasts and Spotify🎥 Watch Donald Robertson’s first interview with Ryan on YouTubeSubstackX: @donjrobertsonIG: @donaldjrobertson✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow us:  Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to the daily Stoic early and ad free right now. Just join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcast. I've been traveling a bunch for the tour that I'm on and I brought my kids and my wife with me when I went to Australia. When I'm going to Europe in November, I'm bringing my in-laws also. So, we're not staying in a hotel. We're staying in an Airbnb. The first Airbnb I stayed in would have been in 2010, I think. I've always loved Airbnb, that flexibility, size, location. You can find something awesome. You want to stay somewhere that other guests have had a positive experience. I love the guest favorites feature that helps you narrow down your search to the most popular, coolest houses. I've been using Airbnb forever. I like it better than hotels. So I'm excited that they're a sponsor of the show.

And if you haven't used Airbnb yet, I don't know what you're doing, but you should definitely check it out for your next family trip. We've got a bit of a commute now with the kids and their new school. And so one of the things we've been doing as a family is listening to audio books in the car.

Instead of having that be dead time, we wanna use it to have a live time. We really wanna help their imagination soar and And listening to Audible helps you do precisely that. Whether you listen to short stories, self-development, fantasy, expert advice, really any genre that you love, maybe you're into stoicism. And there's some books there that I might recommend by this one guy named Ryan. Audible has the best selection of audiobooks without exception and exclusive Audible originals all in one easy app. And as an Audible member, you choose one title a month to keep from their entire catalog. By the way, you can grab Right Thing Right Now on Audible.

You can sign up right now for a free 30-day Audible trial and try your first audiobook for free. You can get Right Thing Right Now totally for free. Visit audible.ca to sign up. Welcome to the weekend edition of The Daily Stoic. Each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down,

be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoke podcast. Chuck Cheese is a hard philosopher to read because, well, he didn't write anything. Well, actually, as I talked about with today's guest, Donald Robertson, he did write things.

A lot of it though must have been more like sort of personal writing, Marcus Aurelius style kind of journaling and proofs and working through problems, but he didn't publish anything. He's closer, I guess, in that sense to someone who he was a hero for, which is Epictetus. Epictetus only survives to us in the form of his lecture notes. Socrates survives to us in the form of the dialogues preserved by Plato and Xenophon, two of his students. But Socrates is a tough read. And why I really wanted to have this conversation is that he's a tough guy to get a read on,

because he's very lik guy to get a read on because he's very likable and very unlikable, very wise and then also very naive in some ways, very insightful and also kind of annoying. I remember I was at a thing one time we were talking to someone and we were kind of all trying to give each other honest feedback and I remember I said something like,

you're very good at asking Socratic questions but I do think it's worth remembering that they killed Socrates. And I didn't really have a problem with this person, but I was just saying I think you're going to get yourself in trouble if you're always questioning and questioning and questioning, but you're hard to pin down yourself, which is something I talked a lot about in part one with Donald because his new book, How to Think Like Socrates, is very pro-Socrates. I recently read Emily Wilson's book, The Case Against Socrates, which is less pro. And so I've just been fascinated with Socrates. very pro-Socrates. I recently read Emily Wilson's book, The Case Against Socrates, which is less pro. And so I've just been fascinated with Socrates. He's a big character in the wisdom

book I'm writing now. As they say, Socrates is one who brought wisdom down from the heavens. He made philosophy accessible, actionable, urgent. And that legacy continues down to this day. I'm a huge fan of today's guest, as you probably heard in part one, or my earlier episodes with Don Robertson. I'll link to those in today's show notes. I loved his book, How to Think Like a Roman Emperor. I love his new book, How to Think Like Socrates. I really like his biography of Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius, the stoic emperor.

We've got some signed copies in the painted porch and just regular copies. We've carried his books forever. You gotta listen to this guy. I think you'll really like him. He's a writer, a cognitive behavioral psychotherapist and a trainer. He's a fellow of the Royal Society for Public Health.

And he specializes in that overlap, that fascinating overlap between modern psychotherapy or CBT and classical Greek and Roman philosophy. He's a great fan and student of the Stokes. He's taught me a lot of what I know about them. And I've heard from so many people that he's impacted. So it's always good to see him in person. He came all the way out to the painted porch, which I appreciated.

I think you're gonna like this interview. Enjoy. Sankarji is as far from a philosopher today as Jesus is from your pastor of a megachurch. You know what I mean? Like it just, it's striking and profound and in some ways kind of in, it got to be almost an indictment. And I guess that's the thing about the fact that we have these dialogues, the dialogues,

although the setting is sometimes kind of minimal, they're quite wordy at times, they're all set somewhere, right? And they're often set in gymnasium. So like an ancient Greek gymnasium was like a big park, like, and it mainly had running tracks, it had paths that you'd walk along, it had the palestra wrestling school, people would do pancratiaa and mixed martial arts type thing. And there'd be also libraries and shrines and there'd be people giving talks. So it was a hub, I guess like a recreational ground where there was education, religious ceremonies, but also a lot of sports going on. And that's the setting.

And I guess in some ways it's hard for us to fully understand what's going on with And that's the setting. And I guess in some ways, it's hard for us to fully understand what's going on with Socrates' philosophy because we don't really have a direct equivalent to that environment. We certainly don't think of Socrates as an athlete, but Epictetus says he's the world's greatest athlete. He says that life demands or philosophy is the art of catching the ball and throwing it back, catching the ball and throwing it back. And he says Socrates is the world's greatest athlete in this regard, that he takes the situations

and the obstacles and the balls that life throws at him and he catches them and throws them back up to the very end when he's brought in front of this tribunal and faces this great trial. And so the idea of Socrates as both a Socrates and philosophers as being both literal and metaphorical athletes is I think a very striking way to think about it. I think things like their experience of wrestling is well shaped Greek and Roman thinkers, you know, like sparring made them view, you know, I mean, Marcus Aurelius uses this as a metaphor

for life. That our sparring partner isn't somebody that we resent, even though they're throwing us in the ground and beating us up and stuff like that. We're choosing to use them as a training partner. We should see adversity that we face and misfortune in life in a similar way the gods are giving us the stuff to deal with. It's a test of our strength and our coping ability. I think that brings me back to something else actually. Somebody said something weird to me the other day, Ryan. I was doing another podcast with this young guy, he's kind of an influencer in the UK,

and he said to me, do you have a problem with self-help? I thought about it for a minute and I thought, I think there is a problem. There's definitely a problem with self-help literature and the self-help field. And I do try and talk about it in this book, because I thought Socrates would raise questions about the self-help field that we have today. And one of them is this.

Let's start with this, in therapy, in the initial assessment where we're talking to clients, the first thing we normally do is look at their coping strategies. How are you currently dealing with your anxiety? And how's it working out for you? And the strange thing is people will usually have coping strategies that they have mixed feelings about. So they go, well, I try and control my breathing or try and relax my muscles when I get social anxiety or something like that. I repeat a mantra. Right.

And I kind of feel like it helps a bit. Right. But then the therapist might think, but why are you in therapy? Right. You're still here. Yeah. Something's not working.

Yeah. We often find clients over and over again in therapy, you find clients that have extensive libraries of self-help books, right? So they'll joke about it, they'll go, I'm a self-help junkie, I've read every book that's going, I've done every course that's going, but they still kind of end up in therapy or in coaching or whatever because they still have stuff that they're struggling with. In some ways, I think what's lacking, one of the things that's lacking is that when

people read some self-help books or go to some websites and things, they kind of get stock advice. So here's a strategy like breathing, here's a strategy like mindfulness, here's a strategy like assertiveness, off you go and just use it. And what we tend to find is that people will take strategies that might work short term, but then become problematic long term, or they might work in one situation, but not so good in another situation, or that would work sometimes, but they're overextending it and using it all of the time. Right? So it might be useful,

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

in therapy, we'd often sit down with people and say, what do you think are the pros and cons of doing this exercise? Or another way of doing it would be to say, is there a good way and a bad way of doing this? So people might say, I need to prepare for presentations that I'm giving. And the therapist might say, well, there's a difference between a good form of preparation and a bad form of preparation. A bad form of preparation might go on and on and on. You might still be doing it at 1 a.m. in the morning when you're lying in your bed, in your head. It might involve a lot of catastrophic thinking and not really focus on practical things.

It might be overly abstract and not concrete enough. So how would we distinguish worrying from preparation or problem solving? People often confuse these things. So they think I'm preparing for my talk. And actually, they're just worrying about it and making their anxiety worse. Yeah, it's not constructive at all. And so I thought that there's something about Socrates

that makes me think of this. I think Socrates saw the sophists in particular as dishing out maxims, slogans. One size fits all kind of thing. Yeah, one size fits all kind of advice. One of the things that really jumped out at me when I was reading Xenophon is there's this odd thing that people say Socrates never wrote anything. Yes and no. Plato says that Socrates wrote some poetry when he was in prison. And we even have what are purportedly a couple of lines from it, right? Although that's debatable how authentic they are.

But Epictetus again says this really crazy thing about Socrates. He says at one point, Socrates wrote more than anyone, but he never published any of it. And you're like, what? Like, this is 400 years later. later. So are you sure about this? He says Socrates wrote copiously, but he left it to his students to write things for publication because he wasn't interested in fame or reputation. So Epictetus seems to think that Socrates wrote, and he says he wrote for his own improvement. So you could say it sounds like he's saying he wrote some kind of journal or at least notes for self-improvement. And then you think, geez, if only we knew what that looked like. But then you think, well, there are probably

clues, right? We can't really know for sure. But in Plato's dialogues and in Xenophon, Socrates kind of talks at times about the sort of questions that he probably would have asked himself. And in fact, in one place in Xenophon, he does something even more explicit. He sits down with a young guy called Euthydemus. There are two Euthydemuses in the dialogues. There's one that Plato talks about and a different dude that Xenophon talks about. Now, Euthydemus is a self-help junkie. He's eerily similar to clients that we'd see in therapy today. He has an extensive library of books and Socrates says he's been memorizing and learning the maxims of the wise. He thinks he's achieved

a lot in self-improvement terms. But when Socrates questions him, he ends up being quite confused and he realizes that he doesn't really understand the goal of life or the nature of justice. So he needs some help in that regard. And Socrates does an exercise with him, like a written exercise. And he draws. He seems to describe drawing two columns.

Now, that immediately jumps off the page at me, because it's exactly what we do in cognitive therapy. We get a flip chart, and we draw two columns columns and we do this in a number of ways. So we'll get a belief that's provoking anxiety or depression, like something awful is going to happen and I won't be able to cope with it. And we'll say, okay, one column is the evidence for that. The other column is the evidence against it. We'll weigh it up.

Or we'll take like a coping strategy. Like I use muscle relaxation, or practice mindfulness. OK, what are the pros and cons of that? So what are the advantages of doing that? What might be possible disadvantages of doing that? Or like I said, we'll take a strategy and say, is there a good way and a bad way of doing this?

So what might be a bad way of thinking about problems? And what might be a good way, a healthy way of thinking about problems and what might be a good way, a healthy way of thinking about them. Socrates does something very similar. He gets Euthydemus to think about the nature of justice because he says that's his goal in life. He wants to understand justice. And Socrates he writes justice and injustice at the headings of these columns. He says, can you give me some examples of injustice? They come up with formulaic examples like, well, lying is morally wrong and stealing is morally wrong. But then Socrates says, well, the next stage is where it becomes like a basic cognitive skill that I think underlies the whole Socratic

method, the next bit. So it's useful to clarify by giving some concrete examples. But then he says, can you think of any circumstances where lying might be moved across to the other column and might be just? And he says, for example, if an elected general deceived the enemy in a war, would that be unjust? And he says, well, no, that's kind of an exception. We can sort of adjust.

What if a parent was given medicine to a small child, and in order to get him to take it, he had to deceive him by hiding it in his food? And he said, well, he's doing it for the child's benefit, so then that wouldn't be unjust. What if your friend, to use this as a famous example that a lot of philosophers use, what if your friend was suicidal, right?

And he said, where's my dagger? Would you tell him the truth or would you tell him a white lie and keep it hidden from him because you want to protect him? Okay, okay. These are like exceptions, right? But then your definition is rubbish, right? Or your definition is an overgeneralization, right? Now I mentioned that particular example because it struck me on many levels as being similar to things that we do in cognitive therapy. It struck me as being a method, a teaching aid that helps us to develop the basic skill of the Socratic method, but also something that psychologists today call cognitive flexibility, which is the ability to kind of see beyond rigid formulaic rules. And weirdly, it reminded me of something that is maybe one of the best selling modern self-help

books, because it does the complete opposite. Jordan Peterson's 12 rules literally consists of a set of formulaic roles. And not only that, the forward to it valorizes the whole concept of having rigid formulaic roles to follow in life. The guy that wrote forward even compares them to the 10 commandments. And he says, we're not talking about loose guidelines here. Why people need, young men in particular, need strict rules to follow and clear guidance. And Socrates is, one of his rules is that you should tell the truth, right? Which is, happens to be the very example that Socrates gives in this dialogue.

And then he questions it and said, but surely there are exceptions to that. Wisdom doesn't consist in memorizing a bunch of formulas or roles. Socrates says that just gives you a bunch of opinions without any understanding, without any sensitivity to context. Right? You're never going to get a role or a principle like that that is valid across every situation. It makes your thinking overly rigid and dependent on other people if you do that. I'm political editor John Lee and I'm exploring the history of Sinn Féin and the Troubles. Whatever you think of them, Sinn Féin continue to be shaped by their past, by the conflicts that raged in Northern Ireland, and by their transition from the political wing of the IRA

to a mainstream party on the cusp of power in Ireland. I've spoken to key players on both sides of the Irish border, and I've asked them all, who are Sinn Féin really? Follow From Bomb to Ballot wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, it's your beauty and wellness BFFs. And we're here to answer all your burning questions. Skincare, makeup, parenting, and more. We have got you covered. Oh, yes, we do. We'll speak with industry

insiders, celebrities, and our close friends. And give all our honest and unfiltered thoughts always. Listen to Lipstick on the Rim now on Apple or wherever you get your podcasts. You know, the concept of negative capability comes to us from Keats. Basically, the idea is that you have to be able to, your mind has to be able to handle complexity,

even contradiction. This is a higher level of thinking. And I think it's not an accident that Keats is a poet. And there's something about, if you think the world is a math equation, you're gonna really struggle. If you think about it more like a poet, which is sometimes this, sometimes that,

the complexity, contradiction. Also, I think to me what Socrates was getting to there is that there's something ineffable about justice. It defies categorization because it is so, it's both simple and complex at the same time. And to me, that is a higher level of thinking to be able to have that, to sit with ambiguity and contradiction, but also not go, nothing matters.

So what you're saying, I think you call it negative capability is perhaps similar to what we call cognitive flexibility in psychology. And as an aside, there are constructs that we measure and research on mental health. And one of them that's quite topical over the past decade or so is something called intolerance of uncertainty. Once you can measure something like that, you can find correlations. And so we know that people who are highly intolerant of uncertainty or ambiguity are more prone to generalized anxiety

disorder and I think also to clinical depression. There are forms of CBT that consist in training people to become more tolerant of uncertainty and ambiguity and complexity in their thinking. Another way of putting it is for Socrates, wisdom isn't just like a body of knowledge. Wisdom is a skill. Like wisdom is a process. Like wisdom is being able to ask is dynamic. It's being able to ask the right questions. You cannot get it just from reading a book or listening to a speech or watching a YouTube video and memorizing what it says. That would be the opposite. That would drain you of wisdom, if anything, by making you're thinking overly passive. One of my favorite passages in Meditations is where Marx really lists a bunch of great

conquerors and generals, and then he lists a bunch of philosophers and I think he ends with Socrates and he says Ultimately Socrates is the greater because his mind was his own and I that contrast but like the the philosopher having wisdom being the kind of ultimate form of power ultimate like we see this in the contrast in the ancient world between Diogenes and Alexander Alexander is more powerful literally, but Diogenes is the greater because he understands how unnecessary most of the power that Alexander seeks is. There's something about, here you have Mark Sturlus, a wise and powerful person. And the person he really admires is Socrates.

In Plato's Gorgias, or Gorgias, he addresses this topic directly and it's a complex dialogue but it has some amazing images and metaphors in it. And one of them is the image of a blindfolded swordsman. So Plato uses this, he puts it in the mouth of Socrates to explain the idea. So his followers are convinced that a political tyrant, perhaps like Alexander, who has a command of a huge army, everybody does what he says, is the most powerful person that someone can imagine. And Socrates says something typically crazy, right? He says, I think he's the most powerless person in society. And they said, what on earth are you talking about, Socrates? You're bonkers. Like no one in their right mind believes that. Like they really give him a lot of pushback in that dialogue. And he says, what on earth are you talking about, Sarkaties? You're bonkers. No one in their right mind believes that.

They really give him a lot of pushback in that dialogue. And he says, well, look, if a tyrant lacks wisdom and he doesn't really understand what the goal of life is, it would be like someone who's got a really sharp sword. So they could kill anyone they like with it. So by your analogy, they're very powerful. But suppose they're blindfolded. So they can't actually see where they're waving it or who they're stabbing or what they're

doing, right? So a political tyrant who isn't a philosopher might command armies, but he has no idea what it is that he should be doing. So he's like a blindfolded swordsman. Seneca was talking about Marius maybe, and he says, you know, Marius commanded armies, but ambition commanded Marius. Yeah. And so to take your analogy of the blindfolded swordsman, the other way is, let's say you have a swordsman they can see, but there's also a series of ropes tied to them. Yes. And other people and other things can jerk on these ropes anytime they want. Right. And pull them in with a puppet. Yeah. And when we think of puppet, we think of a puppet master deliberately making them do

something. This is actually far more random and actually even more powerless because random inputs, random distractions. You can see this right now. Donald Trump may regain the presidency, but he doesn't actually have the presidency because he doesn't possess himself. It's his ego, it's his insecurities, it's whatever he sees on Twitter,

it's whatever a random person who wants something from him who's deft enough to plant a seed or pull a trigger that can make him go in a certain direction. So yes, it's literally true that they're very powerful. They control nuclear weapons or they have a sword or whatever it is. But just as this billionaire who has an enormous fortune is quite wealthy, but if they need something they don't have or something else controls or can direct them, they actually don't have the power. The office has them.

Yeah. Yeah. It would be like lacking wisdom would just be like being blind. Slavery. Yeah. So, Aepatitis also, I think, compares somebody who's kind of injured in their capacity for reasoning as somebody who has a kind of disability, like being blind, but he says it's much more serious than just being blind.

Because you would know you don't have sight. Yeah. So the famous analogy as well you reminded me of, there's another amazing image, one of my favorite images in Plato. I love Xenophon because I think his dialogues are more like cognitive therapy in some regards, right? And they've been a little bit overlooked by classicists and philosophers, but I think they're more obviously relevant to therapists. I think the Stoics maybe realized that. Plato has some amazing imagery. In the first Alcibiades, which some people dispute whether it's genuinely Platonic or whether someone else wrote it, but in the first Alcibiades, Socrates is discussing the nature of wisdom. He links it to the saying at Delphi, gonoth thysi outon, or know thyself, which is engraved at the entrance to the temple.

It's almost like a concept that Socrates wrestled with his whole life. In that dialogue, he says, to know thyself or to achieve wisdom would be like being an eye that sees itself. It seems impossible. And he says to Alcibiades, how would that be possible? And Alcibiades says, I guess you'd need a mirror or something. And Socrates says, well, how then would the mind know itself? And Alcibiades says, I guess in some way by using another person as a mirror, because we have, Socrates seemed to understand that we have biases that prevent us from being able to properly evaluate our own thinking. There's evidence actually that leads me to another aspect of modern psychology. I interviewed recently a psychologist at the University

of Waterloo called Igor Grossman. He does research on the nature of wisdom. He has a center for researching wisdom. What he's found, talking in the book about this concept of elism, he's done research on what he calls distanced self-reflection. First they found they developed a method for quantifying wisdom in reasoning. So the way that they do that is showing that people exhibit intellectual humility, openness to other perspectives, an ability to compromise. And like we are saying, an ability to embrace ambiguity and complexity in their thinking. Igor Grossman found that people exhibit more of that when they're analyzing other people's problems than when they're analyzing

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

I would say Donald got really upset because his wife said something, it rubbed him up the wrong way, as if I'm described. It's just all I have to do is phrase it differently. And it seems like, and he found that when people simply did that, changed it grammatically, they exhibited more capacity for wise reasoning. I think Socrates realizes something like that. I think he understood that by engaging all day long in dialogue with other people about what he repeatedly calls the most important things in life, he was able to benefit from observing their thinking. The reason that that strikes me is as a therapist, there are things that

kind of just resonate. Like, you know, if you're a therapist and you're working with clients, have depression and anxiety and stuff like that, you know, you're very conscious that sometimes you get anxious and sometimes you get down and stuff. And sometimes you get angry and you know, it's easier to help clients than it is to help yourself. But over time you gradually benefit in an indirect way by helping other people. You spot the mistakes that they keep making and the traps that they fall into and you start to kind of realize that you're probably doing the same thing. They function to some extent as a mirror for your own problems over time.

CW I have a chapter about this in the wisdom book that I'm doing because I'm finishing the Cardinal Virtue series. and I think it's so fascinating that you can read a book like a biography of someone. It could be 500 pages, it could be 200 pages. And in that series of hours, you could emerge with a better understanding of that person than the person who lived in that body for 80 years. Yeah, that's interesting.

Just how rare and unique real self-awareness is, particularly amongst powerful, successful, ambitious people. It's almost a feature, not a, but like the not knowing, like you can see in a biography, you can see in the conversations that what's really motivating this person, what their sort of rosebud moment is in their life. And they themselves are completely oblivious to it.

And how, when you see that, it shouldn't make you feel superior to that person. You should go, ah, but how am I a stranger to myself? And we all are strangers to ourselves in alarming ways. Perhaps in a way, it's a fundamental aspect to the human. This is the eye that doesn't see itself. It's a perspective in the world that doesn't understand its own biases, its own perspective. In psychotherapy, this is integral to modern therapy.

We train the clients to be able to shift their perspective so they become better at observing their own biases and viewing them. This is again like cognitive distancing, being able to view yourself from that point of view. So yeah, definitely. I think Socrates, the other thing that Socrates does, he doesn't really do elitism much, but he does something that's very similar. He frequently engages in hypothetical dialogues. So he'll even, I think in the apology at one point, he imagines having a little debate with the jury. And he said, you guys would probably criticize me and say this, and this is how I would respond. And so he often has these little hypothetical dialogues. And the Critias, he imagines,

he uses a technique called apostrophe, where he personifies the laws of Athens and imagines that they're criticizing him. But in doing that, by having imaginary or hypothetical dialogues, we have to refer to ourselves in the second person. So the laws go, Socrates, you're making an error by doing this, but it's Socrates that's doing that. I think of it almost like you've got a sock puppet and that represents the laws. And you're going, Socrates, you're making a mistake by doing that, but it's Socrates that's doing that. I think of it almost like you've got a sock puppet and that represents the laws and you're going, Socrates, you're making a mistake, but it's your hand that's moving the lips, right? So you're really using your

imagination to adopt this role of someone that's observing you and able to criticize more objectively on you. There's a bit in the theotetus, there's often these really weird little, some of the most remarkable things about Socrates are just said and it's often the case just as a flippant passing remark and a dialogue that's about something else. So in the Theotetus in passing, Socrates says that when he goes home after debating with people, there's a guy waiting for him who's like a weird stranger that lives in his house. He leaps out and sort of accosts him and criticizes him for not really understanding the nature of wisdom and justice.

And then he says this person that accosts him, this weird critical stranger is like another Socrates, right? So he's describing in a weird way, continuing the dialogue at home in his imagination, using the second person grammatically, like this guy's saying Socrates, you know, like you contradicted yourself earlier when you said this. In marketing, there's an exercise which is like you have this idea for something like a product and you write the press release first. You write the press release announcing it to the public for the first time. So you're describing it in the third person,

the thing that you haven't made exist yet. And it forces you to think all the way to the end and think about how you would explain it to another third party. And so you're forced to see, it's again, cognitive dissonance, instead of being so lost in your enthusiasm and excitement for the thing, you have to flash forward to the end

and describe it as it is. And I think those kinds of exercises that get you outside yourself is how you know yourself and what you are trying to do or need to do. I'll tell you a little story about this. When Aaron T. Beck introduced cognitive therapy in the 1960s, the central technique he called Socratic questioning because he'd read Plato's Republic at college. It's a bit different from the way Socrates questions, but similar kind of concept. Beck's main question was, where's the evidence for that? Nobody likes me, everybody hates me. Where's the evidence for that? Then he'd ask other questions to encourage the client to reevaluate their rigid assumptions or beliefs. But he realized there was a problem because some people were

so fused with their beliefs that they didn't even see them as debatable. So they lose their job and they think it's a catastrophe. And Beck might say, well, where's the evidence for that? What are the pros and cons of viewing it that way? And they'd say, you don't understand. It just is a catastrophe. Right? It objectively is a disaster. It's the only way of seeing it. They have kind of tunnel vision for it. And so Beck realized there's something that has to happen as a prerequisite before we can even begin evaluating whether you're right or wrong or whether this is the whole story, are there any errors in your reasoning? For you, it's not up for debate. This first step is the cognitive distancing. It's kind of related to what you're describing,

the ability to step back and see, no, this is just one opinion about the situation. It might not be the whole story or the only way of looking at it. But before you can even begin doing cognitive disputation, the individual, the client, has to be able to view their own opinions as hypotheses. I'm Lindsay Graham, host of Wondry Show American Scandal. We bring to life some of the biggest controversies in US history. Presidential lies, environmental disasters, corporate fraud. In our latest series, entrepreneur Lou Pearlman becomes the mastermind behind two of the biggest pop groups in the world, the Backstreet Boys and NSYNC.

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Yeah, that thing from Epictetus, it sounds so basic. It's not things that upset us, it's our opinion about things, but it's such a fundamental paradigm shift. Yeah, it's foundational. Yeah, and if you can't open that up, a whole bunch of things is closed off to you. If you can, a whole bunch of possibilities are possible for you. What happened in, like most people have heard of CBT, cognitive therapy and stuff like that, but I think people are

only gradually becoming more aware that cognitive therapy has gone through three phases in its history we usually see. There's what we call the first wave, which is behavior therapy, using conditioning and stuff. Then the second wave was Beck and Ellis and CBT and REBT and stuff like that. Then about 20 years ago, a third wave began emerging that we call the mindfulness and acceptance approach. And it consists of lots of different therapies developed by different research teams at different universities all over the

world that all converged in a similar kind of direction. And one of the things that they did was test these techniques for gaining cognitive distancing. So Beck thought this is the initial step and then you do the disputation. Some of the researchers started to say, well, what happens if you just do the distancing part and put more emphasis on that? So they called that radical distance or comprehensive distancing is what they initially called it. What happens if you just do that bit and get people to view their thoughts objectively, but don't even bother disputing them? And they found that was much more therapeutic than Beck had assumed.

So actually the disputation part still plays a role in cognitive therapy, but it's not as central in some approaches as it used to be. This initial shift in perspective has become much more important. People realized early on, if you can take a step back and observe your thoughts, it's a bit like what happens in meditation. People when they're practicing mindfulness meditation are told, you know, when a thought crosses your mind, don't get entangled with it or swept away with it. Just view it as if it's a cloud passing across the sky. That there's a distance between you and the thing.

Yeah. We have to use all these kind of quirky little... So it's like it's viewing it as an event that's happening in your mind rather than kind of getting locked into it and viewing the world through the lens of that thought. Doesn't it affect you to say that that's kind of the first thing a philosopher does is have the ability to analyze your own thoughts? Yeah. But first of all, you have to see them as thoughts and not facts.

Like Kaczynski used to say, it's just not confusing the map with the terrain. The thoughts, not facts. He also says this when he says, when you have a troubling impression, you should say to it, you're just an impression and not the thing itself. That is literally, he's describing cognitive distinct, like verbatim, it's even clearer in the Greek. And also he's using a technique.

He says, let me put you to the test. He says, so you're just a thought, you're not reality, you're just one way of looking at things. Right there, he perfectly captures. It's actually really weird that these guys seem to genuinely have understood some of these psychological phenomena because you might think, well, some of it's maybe kind of common sense. Psychotherapy has been around for actually over 150 years in the modern world. It really started with the hypnotists and then hypnosis evolved into psychoanalysis and stuff like that.

But Freud and Jung and these guys did not fully appreciate some of these phenomena in cognitive psychology. So we kind of take it more for granted now, and we have lots of different ways of teaching people these skills, but older models of psychotherapy are kind of oblivious to this. So it's really weird to go back 2000 years and find people that had a better understanding of human psychology than Freud and Jung. It's like finding out that they knew the cure for scurvy and then we forgot about it for 2000 years and then rediscovered it. They some level, they were like, these two things are associated with each other. This is a way to prevent this thing from happening. And then we kind of lost that connective tissue

and then have only in shockingly recent times begun to be able to make that explicit and clear. And I'll tell you something even weirder about it, right? So Ellis was really into Epictetus and very influenced by him, but he kind of largely left out all the stuff in Stoicism about living in accord with virtues and the stuff about prosoche or being continually mindful of your thoughts and the emphasis on distancing that you find. Right? So he was influencing kind of other ways. And so the third wave in cognitive behavioral therapy put a lot more emphasis on mindfulness, detached observation of thoughts, identifying your core values and living in accord with them in a way that is virtually identical to how virtues are

understood in ancient philosophy. So even in cognitive behavioral therapy, a lot of these things weren't fully understood until about 20 years ago. They were only really reintroduced in the third wave. And when those guys did it, they took inspiration from Buddhist mindfulness and stuff. The third wave in CBT makes virtually no reference to Stoicism, even though some of the main things that they're emphasizing are pretty explicit. Like the virtues, there's an entire approach. One of the leading evidence-based approaches to treating clinical depression is called behavioral activation. It completely revolves around this idea of distinguishing between values that are about character traits and values that are about external outcomes and how depressed people typically put too much importance in

the external outcomes and getting them to cherish character traits more and engage in activities more consistent with them. So systematically doing exactly what virtual ethics talks about. It's amazing. But they never mentioned Stoicism, right? Weirdly. And so they reinvented the wheel. It's because it doesn't get taught and there's not that basic, you know, like if those people

had grown up repeating the epigrams of Seneca and Latin class, maybe it would have been familiar, right? Like there's just a gap in people's, and hopefully this is what the resurgence of Stoic wisdom is bringing is people's ability to connect these 2000 year old ideas with what we're also understanding and seeing in the world around us. I was wrong about something, which is when I first got involved with studying Stoicism in the first book I wrote, I kind of I wrote, I mainly spoke at conferences for psychotherapists. I trained psychotherapists and supervised them. I thought psychotherapists would be

the ones getting on board with Stoicism. They didn't really. There are reasons for that. One reason is that cognitive behavioral therapists tend to turn their nose up at anything old and they're trained to look at the latest research and not to look backwards so much. So they've got a bit of an aversion to doing anything that isn't cutting edge, evidence-based. That's their orientation. So I underestimated how that would maybe distract them from looking at something as old as stoicism. But what happened over time is stoicism, as you've probably noticed, is what the young people call a thing today. It's an entire genre of self-help, partly due to you, it's your fault. And as you were saying to me last

time we spoke, in some ways it really has now become so popular, its popularity is raising its own problems. What happens now is I hear a lot of psychotherapists saying their clients are turning up and saying, this stuff that you're doing with me in the sessions is similar to stuff that I've read about in Ryan Holiday's books or that I've seen people talking about in stoicism. And then the therapists are kind of guilt tripped in a good way into having to shuffle off and get up to speed on stoicism because they'd be embarrassed to sit there for the clients to be lecturing them on how this is 2,000 years old and they didn't know anything about it. So in a roundabout way, we're getting gradually penetrating into the world of therapy. I love it. You want to go check out some books? Yeah, sure. Let's do it. Cool. Awesome.

I love it. You want to go check out some books? Yeah, yeah, sure. Let's do it. Cool. Awesome. Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show.

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