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

Donald Robertson is a cognitive behavioral psychotherapist, author of over nine books, and one of the founding voices in the modern Stoicism movement. He has spent over 30 years studying how ancient Greek and Roman philosophy intersects with contemporary psychology, and in this conversation we start where it all begins: the maxim carved into the temple of Apollo at Delphi. Know thyself. We explore what it actually meant, who said it, and why it still matters more than most self-help advice written in the last century. What We Dive Into: 1. The Stoics drew a sharp line between what actually happens and the value judgments we add on top of it. To say something "is awful" treats our emotional reaction as a fact about the world. 2. Of all the emotions that derail a life, anger gets the least attention in therapy, self-help, and honest self-reflection. 3. In the ancient world, wisdom was not something you consumed or memorized. It was something you practiced daily. Collecting insights without changing your behavior is closer to what the Sophists sold than to what Socrates taught. Know Thyself, but not by yourself. A guided space to return home to yourself. https://www.knowthyselfcollective.com ✨THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS: https://drinkLMNT.com/KnowThyself Try LMNT & get a free sample pack https://www.timeline.com/KNOWTHYSELF Save 20% off your Mitopure® Gummies ___________ 00:00 Intro 01:53 Know Thyself: The Three Sayings at Delphi 07:44 What Philosophy Actually Means 11:17 Socrates vs. the Sophists: Wisdom vs. Appearance 18:05 The Stoic U-Turn: Reorienting What We Value 23:59 Self-Knowledge as a Mirror for the Soul 26:59 Values Clarification and the Eulogy Exercise 35:02 Ad: LMNT 36:03 Eudaimonia: Flourishing, Not Just Happiness 39:40 Hardship as Opportunity for Character 45:31 A Brief History of Stoicism 53:22 Ad: Timeline Mitopure 54:33 The Stoics Were Way Ahead of Their Time 59:30 Stoicism, India, and Alexander the Great 1:06:31 Early Christianity and Greek Philosophy 1:14:03 Marcus Aurelius: The Man Behind the Meditations 1:19:17 Philosophy Born from Injury: Marcus and Donald 1:32:52 Uppercase vs. Lowercase Stoicism 1:38:28 The Two Phases of Emotion 1:45:47 Prosoché: The Practice of Paying Attention 1:50:40 Appearance vs. Reality: The Stoic Core 1:56:34 Turning the Chinese Proverb into a Practice 2:02:44 The View from Above and the Acropolis 2:11:28 Premeditatio Malorum: Rehearsing Adversity 2:17:27 Anger as Temporary Madness 2:23:26 De-Romanticizing Desire 2:36:58 Sophists, Rhetoric, and Modern Influencers 2:44:47 Why Self-Help Isn't More Helpful 2:56:17 The Socratic Method as Cure for Conceit 3:13:19 The King Who Rules Himself 3:17:50 The Oracle of Delphi and Socrates' Mission 3:33:44 Injustice Harms the Perpetrator More 3:36:51 Donald's Own Life: Philosophy as a Path 3:38:46 The Eleusinian Mysteries and Marcus's Initiation 3:48:21 Learning to Die as Liberation 3:55:29 Marcus's Naked Soul: Transparency as Practice 3:58:07 What the Stoics Taught About Love 4:02:05 Rapid Fire: The Great Philosophers 4:16:00 Closing Message: You Underestimate Your Resilience ___________ ✨MORE FROM DONALD ROBERTSON↳Substack: https://donaldrobertson.substack.com/↳Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1732050. Donald_J_Robertson ↳Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/donaldjrobertson/↳YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@DonaldJRobertsonAuthor/featured↳https://donaldrobertson.name 📜MORE FROM KNOW THYSELF ↳Spotify: https://spoti.fi/4bZMq9l ↳Apple: https://apple.co/4iATICX ↳Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/ ↳TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@andreduqum ↳Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/knowthyselfbyandreduqum/ ↳https://knowthyselfpodcast.com/ 👁️MORE FROM ANDRÉ ↳Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/@andreduqum ↳Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/know-thyself-podcast ↳Book recs: https://www.knowthyselfpodcast.com/book-list

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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

• 0:25André Duqum?

  Let's do it.

• 0:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 0:26André Duqum?

  So what does philosophy mean? There are so many rabbit holes I want to dive into. How do you think about that? What about love, anger, suffering and even virtue? What did the Stoics teach about all of that?

• 0:38André Duqum?

  Philosophers seem to be often born from an early injury.

• 0:42Speaker 00

  I lost my father and I turned to philosophy as a sort of substitute father figure.

• 0:48Speaker 00

  I think that's what Marcus Aurelius did. Marcus lost his father when he was young and he struggled with his own anger. But he conquered his temper using Stoicism as a way of coping with it. If we can really deal with anger, it might be the royal roads, the self-improvement. Stop arguing about what it means to be a good man, just be one.

• 1:13André Duqum?

  Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Know Thyself podcast. Our guest today is one of the founding voices in the modern Stoicism movement. Beautifully weaving ancient philosophy and modern psychology. He's written over nine books, like How to Think Like a Roman Emperor on Marcus Aurelius's life, How to Think Like Socrates. And he's also spent decades as a cognitive behavioral psychotherapist. And today's conversation is going to be exploring at start and then quickly going deeper with the oldest maxim, which is the ethos of this show. Donald Robertson, thank you so much for being here.

• 1:50Speaker 00

  Well, thank you for inviting me. I'm really looking forward to it.

• 1:54André Duqum?

  I thought we could start with the most obvious place too. Over 24 centuries ago, this maxim, know thyself carved at the Temple of Delphi.

• 2:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:04André Duqum?

  Tell me, tell me more.

• 2:06Speaker 00

  It really is a great place to start and we were chatting earlier. I said, you know, if anybody is thinking about going to Greece, Delphi's like, I think it's a two or three hour drive from Athens. Definitely go. It's one of the most amazing archaeological locations in the world. Um, it's like being in Lord of the Rings or something like that. The legend is that the god Apollo slayed a dragon there. And when I go there, I always feel like I kind of imagine that maybe he could have. It looks like someone could slay a dragon in this place. So it's a very magical place and the ruins of the temple of Apollo are there. And famously, people from all over the Greek world used to go there.

• 2:51Speaker 00

  Um, outside the temple, it had several sayings engraved. There were three that were particularly famous. The most famous was, "Gnouf icy outon, or know thyself." And you could say, I think Plutarch is who says, uh, who was actually a priest. He was a philosopher and historian, but Plutarch was also a priest at Delphi. And he says the sayings at Delphi are very concise. Actually, we have a list of 147 sayings that come from Delphi and almost all of them in Greek are two words. Like they're very, they're compressed into two words. And Plutarch says, although these sayings are very concise,

• 3:33Speaker 00

  books many volumes long have been written about their meaning. So they're kind of like seeds, the seeds of philosophy in a sense. Definitely know thyself seems to have inspired the whole Socratic tradition. It's a theme that runs throughout classical philosophy. What does it mean? Philosophers put different interpretations on it. Uh, Socrates in the writings of Xenophon. So we have dialogues about Socrates from Plato, almost famously, but we also have dialogues that were written by one of his other students, a Rome, a Greek general called Xenophon. And Xenophon says that Socrates believed that know thyself

• 4:12Speaker 00

  meant understand your strengths and weaknesses. But he compares it to appraising a horse and checking out like whether it's fat, looking at its teeth and stuff like that. Like we should understand who we are, what we're capable of, if we're going to know ourselves. But Seneca and Plutarch, if I remember rightly, put another interpretation on it, which is kind of intriguing. They say that because you're entering the temple of Apollo, when you see these words, to know yourself is to know how you stand in relation to the gods. You're about to enter the presence of the god Apollo. So it's to understand that you are mortal. And so they

• 4:53Speaker 00

  compare know thyself to a memento mori. It's to understand your own mortality and to come to terms with it.

• 5:03André Duqum?

  So that was over 24 centuries ago. What is your conception of how they would have arrived at that as an important maxim to carve it at the, you know, forefront of the temple?

• 5:16Speaker 00

  Well, we have different stories about that. We're told that the sayings outside the temple, they're attributed to the seven sages of Greece, who are these famous figures, statesmen and poets, who kind of preceded early philosophy in a sense, or very early. And but we're into the kind of legends somewhat now. So the attributions might just be kind of legendary, yeah. Some of the things that Greek philosophy has derived from are lost about in the midst of time. So we're right at the threshold here of philosophy blending

• 5:54Speaker 00

  into legend, basically. The other sayings, some scholars believe they may even originally have gone together and formed a short poem.

• 6:08Speaker 00

  So the first is know thyself. The second most famous is made in agan, which means nothing in excess, nothing too much, or like all things in moderation, basically. The connection may be that to know yourself would mean to know your limitations. And to refrain from excess, to exercise temperance or moderation, would require understanding what's too much for you as an individual. So you'd need self-knowledge in order to exercise temperance, in a sense. And the third saying no one ever talks about, right? It's the one that everyone kind of forgot about, partly because it's a little bit tricky to translate from ancient Greek.

• 6:51Speaker 00

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

• 7:25André Duqum?

  Sounds like we could all use a bit more of that understanding.

• 7:28Speaker 00

  That's like a whole philosophy, right? Just like in a couple of little... So you can see what he meant. When he said books many volumes long have been written elaborating on it. You can build a philosophy from these little seeds.

• 7:39André Duqum?

  I mean, we'll be spending the rest of this podcast exploring them, I'm sure.

• 7:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:43André Duqum?

  What does philosophy mean?

• 7:45Speaker 00

  Well, literally, it means love of wisdom. And actually, I'm glad you asked that question because sometimes I believe that some of the most important mysteries are mysteries in broad daylight. You know, often we don't see the wood for the trees. And it's quite significant. Ancient philosophers thought the word philosophy was quite significant. They took it, in a sense, more literally than we do today. The Stoics in particular. And Socrates certainly seemed to have thought that it's important to love wisdom and cherish it and prize it. Socrates famously said the unexamined life is not worth living. That suggests that he thought our whole life should be dedicated to the pursuit of wisdom.

• 8:30Speaker 00

  So loving wisdom isn't just a kind of abstract or academic concept. It's a way of life in the ancient world.

• 8:40André Duqum?

  Yeah, not a mere means to acquire greater possessions, but become enriched internally in a way that could, that the other can never compare.

• 8:50Speaker 00

  It's a value system, you could say. It defines a value system that was characteristic of ancient philosophers.

• 8:56André Duqum?

  Is it true that it's rumored that Socrates was roaming the markets at Athens, saying, who know, who knew there were so many things in this world in which I did not need?

• 9:05Speaker 00

  We have all these anecdotes about Socrates. So we've kind of got a lot of different sources. It's mainly many dialogues from Plato, quite a lot from Xenophon. And then we have what's sometimes called the anecdotal tradition, which are all these little fragments in various other authors. And one of them says that he walks around the agora. He used to hang out there a lot of the time. We kind of, I think it's Xenophon that tells us Socrates' daily routine. If I remember rightly, it was something like in the morning, he would hang around in the gymnasium. These are big recreational fields where Athenians would exercise. But weirdly, they also had libraries and shrines, and they also used to walk around and do philosophy there as well.

• 9:49Speaker 00

  So they did sports and philosophy in the same places. And then I think in mid, around the midday, he would hang around in the agora, which would be like hanging out in a shopping mall or something. And then in the evening, he would go to his friends' houses and have dinner and stuff like that and carry on discussing philosophy. So I think of him a little bit like, he reminds me weirdly of Jimi Hendrix, right? So Jimi Hendrix used to go to the toilet with his guitar strapped on. He would go to bed at night and put his guitar in his bed. You know, he would fry eggs in the morning with his guitar strapped on. A psychologist caught time on task, like he was just constantly like playing around with the guitar. Socrates were told dead philosophy all day long.

• 10:31Speaker 00

  Like he basically just went around constantly discussing the nature of wisdom. And I think that comes through in Plato. Plato's dialogues are believed to be semi-fictional. Like Plato's describing conversations that Socrates had before Plato was born in some cases. So, you know, we have to assume there there must be semi-fictionalized. But he certainly portrays somebody who comes across as if he's talked about these ideas endlessly. And he's really familiar with the logic of his arguments. There's a kind of richness and quality to his thinking that I think it's hard to fake. It comes across as as well worn and genuine.

• 11:18André Duqum?

  I think it's so easy in the modern day where we have access to so much wisdom and information to have it be aphorisms and maxims that we memorize instead of sit with and integrate and actually infuse and change the way we act and view the world.

• 11:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's a really good point. So wherever you find Socrates, you'll find these other dudes called sophists. They kind of go hand in hand. And Socrates, in a sense, is defined by his reaction to the sophists. Now, sophos means wise man, basically. It comes from the Greek word sophia, that means wisdom. So there was a point in history, like the generation before Socrates, someone for the first time, a guy called Protagoras. People would say, hey, Protagoras, what do you do for a living, buddy? And Protagoras was the first person allegedly to say, I'm a professional wise man. Like, that's what I do. It's my job description, basically.

• 12:17Speaker 00

  And Plato's dialogue of the same name, the Protagoras, he basically talks about this fact. He was the first person to do that. And Socrates thought there was something, well, like certainty brings ruin. There was something conceited about that. He thought it was highly problematic. I think Socrates thought that if you go around claiming to be wise, it forces you to become kind of defensive about your beliefs. You can never really allow yourself to be proven wrong by your students. So it forces you to be kind of closed minded and a bit defensive about your thinking. He didn't think it was a very healthy attitude. It wasn't conducive to learning. So Socrates fundamentally opposed what he was doing to the sophists.

• 13:01Speaker 00

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

• 13:45Speaker 00

  And Socrates thought there was something fundamentally wrong about this. He was also notoriously suspicious about books. He thought it discouraged people from thinking for themselves. And so people sometimes are frustrated by the Socratic dialogues because in many cases they end in what scholars call aporia, which means a sort of bewilderment or confusion. It's the opposite of the sophist. The sophist would tell you what to think. Like Socrates leaves you with more questions often. But in the process of getting there, the journey of questioning the meaning of wisdom, the meaning of courage, at the end you might not have a clear conclusion that you can sum up in a sentence,

• 14:26Speaker 00

  but somehow you've got a deeper understanding of the concept, of the exceptions to your existing definitions. I'll give you a quick example, actually. Socrates is speaking to some Athenian generals in a dialogue called the Lachesis. And he turns the conversation around to the concept of courage and asks them how they would define the nature of courage. And one of the generals, I think it's Nicias, says that courage is standing your ground in the face of the enemy. Now, that's a very cliched Athenian definition of courage, because the ancient Greeks were known for their phalanx formation, and the crucial thing was to remain rigidly in formation,

• 15:11Speaker 00

  because if you broke formation, it would endanger the other guys that were fighting alongside you. So, training people and drumming into them that they were to remain in formation and stand their ground in the face of the enemy was fundamental to military discipline. And that was how Nicias thought courage should be defined. And Socrates said, "Well, that's a good definition, but what if you're in the cavalry and you charge into the enemy rather than standing your ground? Isn't that equally courage?" And he said, "What if you have to fight a tactical retreat?" He said also, "The Spartans charge into the enemy like cavalry do, but nobody would say that they lack courage."

• 15:54Speaker 00

  And the Athenian generals, Lachesis and Nicias, are going, "Okay, those are kind of exceptions, Socrates." And Socrates said, "But this definition also only fits courage in wartime. What about courage in peace? Can't people be courageous in peacetime as well?" So, they don't really arrive at the end of this long dialogue a clear alternative definition of courage. But by pointing out these exceptions to the definition that they started with, which in a way was a form of intellectual conceit, they thought they knew what courage was. Socrates shows them that they've got a partial understanding. The definition is not completely wrong, but it's kind of incomplete. So, by the end of it, I would say that they don't have a clear definition anymore.

• 16:36Speaker 00

  In a sense, they know less than they knew at the beginning of the dialogue, but if you'll forgive me for putting it this way, they know less but understand more. I think that's what we get from those dialogues.

• 16:47André Duqum?

  That seems to be the product of sincere reasoning, right? And I love that you mentioned just the correlation to AI in this day and age, because we can have access to conclusions which we didn't really have any business in reasoning to and don't have the proper process to get there that would have actually supported our understanding of it. And so we can regurgitate things without actually knowing or understanding them. I just want to quickly go back to the Socratic saying, or when Socrates said, "Who knew there were so many things in this world which I do not need?" When we look at detachment,

• 17:24Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 17:25André Duqum?

  it begs into question this, you know, is renunciation truly letting go of things? Or is it a reevaluation of what is actually meaningful and what is actually valuable in one's life? And when we are having this conversation today and exploring some of the greatest wisdom from these Stoic philosophers and applying it through the modern understanding today, I just want to get your perspective on that reorientation towards what is actually valuable? Because there is a societal conditioning that value is to be gotten from the outside. And the Stoic understanding kind of flips its on its head. So I'd love for you to speak to that.

• 18:06Speaker 00

  Yeah. The Stoics literally call it epistrophe, which is a cool word. It's a Greek word that means like a religious conversion. But its literal meaning is doing a U-turn, turning around. So the Stoics thought what their philosophy demanded was a radical U-turn in our values, basically. Because they thought there was something about human nature that leads us, generation after generation, and perhaps every society in the world, to overvalue the outcome of our actions, particularly wealth, property, and reputation and status.

• 18:49Speaker 00

  Or today, like, you know, how much money you've got in the bank and how many followers you've got on Facebook or something like that, perhaps.

• 18:57Speaker 00

  Well, the best way to explain this, I think, is actually to talk a little bit about another Plato's dialogues, funnily enough. We're talking about the Stoics, but in the surviving Stoic texts, we almost get the conclusion of these arguments. Like, the Stoics often are taking arguments for granted that they've inherited from Socrates and from other earlier philosophers. So Socrates does all the kind of legwork. Socrates walks so the Stoics can run, kind of thing, and they're standing on his shoulders. In the Euthydemus, one of Plato's dialogues, Socrates is talking to a couple of young guys, like he does, and he says, could you define good fortune? He likes getting people to define things, right?

• 19:42Speaker 00

  And, you know, Socrates often starts off by asking questions that people think are naive and simple, but then halfway through the conversation, it starts to get much trickier, and he begins asking more paradoxical, more difficult questions. So he says, well, how would you define good fortune? And typically, they respond by saying, well, that's a silly question. Socrates, everybody knows how you would define good fortune. It means having loads of money and a big house and a lot of status and a beautiful wife and all that kind of stuff, you know? It's easy to define what good fortune looks like. That's what life is all about. And, oh yeah, maybe having a good character, like nobility and wisdom and courage and stuff like that are part of it. And Socrates says, well, that's really interesting. I think you're on to something there.

• 20:25Speaker 00

  But hang on a minute, you know, just one more thing. He's a little bit like Columbo. Do you remember? I don't know if you remember Columbo, maybe before your time, but he was a detective and he'd be walking away and he'd turn around and go, just one more thing. And then he'd ask a question that would kind of like be really penetrating. So Socrates is a little bit like that. He says, just one thing. Let's take the example of wealth. Now, philosophers actually thought wealth was often the easiest example to pick on in this regard. He say, suppose we got a big pile of money, a big pile of gold. And we give it to somebody who's wise and virtuous. What would probably happen? And I said, well, I guess they could use that money to do a lot of wise and virtuous stuff. And that'd be pretty cool.

• 21:08Speaker 00

  And Socrates was like, yeah, I can see that's what you're thinking of, right? What if we took that pile of money and gave it to somebody who was foolish and vicious, though? Ah, now, perhaps then they would use that money to do more foolish and vicious stuff. Right, and then it wouldn't be so good. And Socrates says, is it possible, then, that maybe money in itself is neither good nor bad? But what matters is the use that you make of it. And whether you use it wisely, or whether you use it foolishly, whether you use it virtuously, or whether you use it viciously. In itself, it's just a kind of practical advantage. And in a sense, actually, maybe it allows you to have more control over your environment. But that could be good or bad, depending on your character and the amount of wisdom that you have.

• 21:54Speaker 00

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

• 22:36Speaker 00

  So this is where the Stoics get this idea from, ultimately, this argument that wisdom and virtue are what determine the value of other external goods. But society, for some reason, and human nature dupers into thinking that external goods are more important than our own character. So the epistrophe, the U-turn that we have to do is not to abandon completely or negate the value of wealth and reputation, but to see those things as merely advantageous, or, as the Stoics put it, preferable, but of fundamentally secondary importance to our own character.

• 23:22André Duqum?

  That U-turn that you referred to gives me this visual of like examining the place one sees from. You know, it's like looking through the lens in which you look, looking at through the lens.

• 23:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:35André Duqum?

  And I know I've heard you speak to some dialogues of examining that. And when you talk about know thyself and you talk about the love of wisdom. Okay, then if it's not just these external, you know, acquisitions of wealth and power that are the ultimately the good thing that we should be trying to go after, but rather the wisdom that uses and discerns how to use them, then what is the turn there? Could you speak a little bit more about the look inwards then?

• 24:02Speaker 00

  I thought you're getting pretty close to mentioning one of my favorite metaphors.

• 24:06André Duqum?

  I wanted you to say it.

• 24:07Speaker 00

  I want me to say it. It's from the first Alcibiades, it's one of Plato's dialogues. And Socrates is talking to Alcibiades, who's a whole, you know, kind of worms in himself. He's a very interesting character.

• 24:23Speaker 00

  His friend and possibly kind of lover as well. So Socrates says to Alcibiades that know thyself or self-knowledge or wisdom

• 24:35Speaker 00

  consists and he says it would be like if the god said to you, see yourself. How would you do that? He says to Alcibiades and Alcibiades says, well, I guess you'd look in a mirror or something like that. And then you'd be able to see yourself. And Socrates says, when the god Apollo says know thyself. Is it possible that he means the mind should be like an eye that sees itself? Right? And he, again, he only implies this, he doesn't directly state this. But he very much, I think, implies that what would be the best mirror for the human soul would be where Socrates is constantly looking, not in a physical mirror, but

• 25:17Speaker 00

  the mirror that Socrates is looking in all day long, every day is dialogue. Like, he treats dialogue with other human beings as the best mirror for the human soul. And, you know, that's partly, you know, it's through dialogue that he examines his life. The unexamined life is not worth living. What does that look like? What did he do all day long? He went around talking to people, questioning their assumptions and encouraging them to question his assumptions. And he thought through this process, dialectic, he gained, that was how he was, he's gaining a profound sense of self-awareness. So there's a kind of interesting overlap between what Socrates is talking about and

• 26:01Speaker 00

  what the Stoics are talking about and what we call mindfulness today. But there's also a sense in which it's, it also requires self-analysis and self-questioning on top of simple self-observation.

• 26:16Speaker 02

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• 27:17André Duqum?

  Goes back to the unexamined life is not worth living, right? And of course, we examine the many different themes without trying to slip into a sali- a sali-istic sort of way of living life. Examining the self so in the service of what, right? In the service of being somebody who is living in alignment with values that you actually have deemed worthy, that are contributing to a larger whole more effectively, et cetera, et cetera. When you think about value clarification, what are some immediate questions we can ask ourselves? Because I think a lot of us don't really understand or have really even just examined and asked ourselves, what do I fundamentally value?

• 28:00Speaker 00

  Well, the funny thing is the Socratic dialogues are all about that. Like, it's amazing how much self-improve. I think people drink from a fire hose of self-improvement content today. When I was a wee boy in Scotland, I'd go to the bookshop and there'd be like two or three self-help books kicking around. And now people consume self-improvement content all day long. But not that much of it necessarily consists on really deep reflection on our core values, which is what the Stoics and what Socrates thought was really the main thing that we should be doing. Seneca says, "No wind is favorable unless you know to which port you're sailing." So we need that North Star, like we need our fundamental goal or sense of purpose.

• 28:45Speaker 00

  Otherwise, what does self-help or self-improvement even mean? Helping ourselves to do what? I don't know. Like, so we have to figure out where it is that we're trying to get in order to figure out which types of self-help would be helpful for us. So what are the questions that we can ask? The one question that I think is quite useful is what are the qualities that we admire most in other people in terms of their character? So sometimes it's useful to, I, sometimes I'll get clients to draw two columns and put desire and admire at the top of them.

• 29:22Speaker 00

  And then I'll have them list the things that they actually spend their time doing and the things that they dedicate their life to pursuing and practice. Like, what did you do all day yesterday and the day before? Are these the things that you desire and pursue? And then what are the qualities that you admire in other people? You really reflect on that. People you know, but it could also be fictional characters. It can be historical figures, characters in movies that you admire. And then what would happen if you took the qualities that you most admire in other people and spent more time each day dedicating yourself to the cultivation of those qualities? Well, here, now let's talk a little bit more about psychology.

• 30:05Speaker 00

  So this is central to really all ancient virtue ethics. It's almost, the ancient schools of philosophy all kind of argued with each other and disagreed with each other about a lot of things. But the funny thing is, like, they pretty much all agreed about the basic goal of life involving cultivating virtue, far more than we do today. We sort of lost sight of that consensus over the centuries somehow. And yet, we rediscovered it in some ways in clinical practice and psychotherapy. So one of the leading evidence-based forms of treatment for clinical depression is a thing called behavioral activation.

• 30:50Speaker 00

  And behavioral activation is a kind of pared-down version of CBT. It focuses on getting people to clarify their values and then schedule daily activities that are more consistent with them. And we know that works. Like, we know that when people who are depressed do that, it generally helps alleviate the symptoms of depression and it gives them more of a sense of meaning and purpose. That entire, that's pretty much all there is to that therapy. It's deliberately meant to be quite minimalist, like, quite simple. Simpler than most other forms of CBT. And the core of it is really... Like clearly very similar to the whole concept of ancient virtue ethics. So we've now got scientific evidence, if you like, that that shows that this kind of

• 31:35Speaker 00

  approach has tangible benefits for people. And by the way, not just for depression, similar approaches have been found helpful for people who have generalized anxiety disorder and other psychological problems. We know that people who suffer from depression and generalized anxiety tend to put a disproportionate amount of emphasis on external goals. The other thing about that is that if you want wealth and reputation, those goals are future oriented. So the more important you think they are, the more you'll allocate your attention to them, the more you'll become preoccupied with the future. Where is the future? Well, I'll tell you where it isn't. Like, it's not here and now, right?

• 32:20Speaker 00

  It's not in the present. So it hijacks your attention, like, and sucks all of your attention, sucks all of the life, all of the joy, out of the here and now, and it becomes captivated in anticipation of a hypothetical future. It's kind of soul destroying in a way. But where is virtue located? Like, virtue happens the moment you make a commitment to begin acting in accord with your values. Virtue exists in the here and now from moment to moment. So modern psychotherapists tend to think of this, they call it by different names, but values clarification, this kind of virtues ethic type approach, as being very complimentary

• 33:03Speaker 00

  to and reinforcing of mindfulness practice. If you want to pay attention and become more aware of your own thinking and your own behavior, it makes sense to place more value on your own character. Like, because valuing things outside yourself and in the future, you're just going to drag your attention repeatedly away from that.

• 33:30André Duqum?

  Well said. Are there another question or two you like to ask to be able to help kind of pin the tail on the donkey?

• 33:37Speaker 00

  There's a bunch of things you can ask, but the other one would be, you remember Stephen Covey, what is it? The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. I always liked that book, right? I thought it was one of the best self-help. There's a lot of stuff in it, actually, that's very similar to Stoicism. And Covey has this idea of an exercise, I think he calls it the eulogy exercise. You find similar things in existential therapy where he'd say, imagine your own funeral. Right? And what you'd want people to say about you once you're, like, once you passed away in a eulogy. Basically, what would you want your life to stand for? This is similar to the Stoic idea of contemplating your own mortality.

• 34:23Speaker 00

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

• 34:39André Duqum?

  One more TikTok scroll.

• 34:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's like you can't take it with you. So those things kind of seem more trivial in retrospect. When you think about, like, you're looking back from the end of your life. So that can really put things in perspective more. And it tends to encourage us to think, maybe the journey was more important than the outcome. And maybe I should have played, paid more attention to the way that I was living my life, rather than the outcomes that I was trying to achieve. And another thing I like to ask, honestly, people sometimes ask me what they should do with their kids. Should I, how could I teach my kids Stoicism and stuff like that? And I think a good question to ask children is how we do define wisdom. And usually they just look at you like, what are you talking about dad?

• 35:26Speaker 00

  You know, but if you're watching a movie or something, you could say, you know what wisdom is like. Are some of these characters wise other than others? Like, do some of them do quite unwise things? Like, what's the difference? How can you tell like the wise from the unwise characters in the story or in this movie? And so just, no one ever poses that question, right? But in a sense, that's one of the core questions. That is what know thyself means in a sense, like, you know? One of the core questions in ancient philosophy is just keeping coming back to what, what does wisdom look like? To love wisdom, what is it? What's it look like? And just literally asking that question can be quite helpful.

• 36:04André Duqum?

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• 36:47André Duqum?

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• 37:05André Duqum?

  Yeah, what is a life well-lived, you know? And I think upon examining the inherently impermanent transient ephemeral nature of all circumstances that arise and pass away in life and the things that we acquire that at some point are not by their nature going to fall away. It kind of keeps on going to, okay, then what is the most essential valuable thing? Cultivation of oneself, these things that.

• 37:34André Duqum?

  May or may not go with you after you pass whatever happens after that point, but will certainly lead to a fulfilled life. When you think of eudaimonia and the problem or question that Stoicism is essentially aiming to be an answer for, could you set the stage for that and what that really is?

• 37:55Speaker 00

  Eudaimonia is traditionally translated as happiness, but that's not a very good translation, right? And it's partly because the word happiness has changed its meaning, like many words change their meaning over the centuries.

• 38:11Speaker 00

  I don't know, like some of your viewers might be familiar with the word hapless. It's not used that often, but we talk about someone being a hapless individual, meaning that they're kind of unfortunate or their life is kind of wretched. hapless is the antonym, the opposite of happy. So happy used to mean flourishing or fortunate, and someone was hapless if they were doing badly and they were in an unfortunate situation in life. But somehow over the centuries, happy degenerated in its meaning, it lost its meaning, and it came to just mean a kind of warm glow, like a positive feeling or something like that, rather than actually doing well and objectively flourishing in life.

• 38:54Speaker 00

  So eudaimonia means happiness in the original sense, in the sense of not being hapless, in the sense of being fulfilled, basically, of living well, of doing the best that you can, and like being the best version of yourself, the best human being that you could potentially be. And that's the ultimate goal of all ancient Greek philosophy, essentially. They all agree on that. Scholars will sometimes say, pretty much all ancient philosophers in the West agree that the goal of life is this thing called eudaimonia, but they disagree about how it should be defined. So for example, Aristotle thought it was, they all think virtue is part of it. Again, they all agree on that.

• 39:39Speaker 00

  Aristotle thought virtue was central to it, but he He also thought you need a certain amount of wealth and status and stuff like that as well. The Stoics went slightly further and they said, no, we think wealth and reputation are actually irrelevant to your di manea and that the core of it is really only virtue. As Cicero says, the Stoics believe that virtue is the only true good ultimately. It raises some interesting questions. For example, ancient philosophers would sometimes say Socrates was relatively poor. He kind of goes on about that quite a lot, although he wasn't that badly off, right? But he was relatively poor for someone of the hoplite class, a sort of middle class Athenian.

• 40:24Speaker 00

  And he had a lot of enemies, you know, they made him drink hemlock in the end. So he wasn't that popular with the people that voted for his execution. So subsequent generations of philosophers could say, would Socrates' life have been improved? If we gave him more money and he was more popular? And that's a curious question because the Stoic argument would be no. That in a sense, what made Socrates Socrates was that he faced hardship and opposition. And that allowed him to really exhibit his strength of character. Epictetus says that the other Stoic role model is the god Hercules. Funnily enough, he's like a big icon to the cynic philosophers and the Stoics.

• 41:08Speaker 00

  Epictetus said, look, if Hercules hadn't undertaken the 12 labors. So Hercules had like a really hard life according to legend. If Hercules hadn't been forced to complete by the goddess Hera, been forced to complete the 12 labors, these really difficult tasks. The last one is he has to literally go down to Hades, right? And capture Cerberus, I think, and bring him back or something like that. If he hadn't been forced to do all this really difficult stuff, if he'd just chosen to stay at home and snuggle comfortably under a blanket, Epictetus says he wouldn't even have been Hercules.

• 41:47Speaker 00

  Like he wouldn't have been worthy of the name Hercules unless he endured some hardship and he overcame it by an exhibited virtue. It's a paradox in ancient philosophy that if life is too easy, then we potentially don't have the opportunity to develop courage, temperance and strength of character. So a certain amount of hardship, the Stoics think, actually potentially works in our favour. We can gain something. I'll tell you another anecdote that helps to flesh that out. Epictetus was a pretty admirable guy. Most people today who are into Stoicism think, well, Epictetus is the man. So it's kind of humbling in a sense to think Epictetus had heroes.

• 42:32Speaker 00

  There were guys that, he was quite open about saying he looked up to certain individuals and he names them. So one of them is the unfortunately named Peconeus Agrippinus, who was a Roman statesman. And Agrippinus was the guy who was having lunch one day. And I think it was either Nero or the Michian sent soldiers to him to tell him he'd been condemned to exile. And Agrippinus packed up the food he was eating and he said, well, we have to go to Brindisium, to the port, we've got to go through the Italian countryside. He said, there's a lovely spot on the way where we could stop off for a picnic. Right, so he found something positive even in being sent into exile.

• 43:16Speaker 00

  Epictetus says that Agrippinus used to write letters to himself. Like he literally sat down and wrote letters to himself. Like here we have a clear description of an actual self-improvement technique. The guy sat down, wrote letters that he describes as eulogia, like eulogies, in praise of exile, poverty, sickness. He doesn't tell us exactly what they look like, but we can pretty much guess that he was a Stoic, we know. So for him to write in praise of sickness and poverty, he almost certainly wrote letters to himself saying, listen, if I cope well with this, then potentially I gain something by developing emotional resilience,

• 44:00Speaker 00

  temperance, wisdom, it strengthens my character. Like I can turn it into an exercise, potentially.

• 44:10André Duqum?

  It makes me be suspicious of the things I think I want in life, you know? And the things that we think we want in life and the road to get there.

• 44:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:22André Duqum?

  Because it's like, if comfort in that case does corrupt us to some degree, then perhaps we actually need and it would be wise to invite challenge into our life.

• 44:37Speaker 00

  We do that in many ways, you know, for fitness and stuff. We go to the gym and stuff like that. And people sometimes will go camping in the wilderness or whatever and do things that are quite physically demanding.

• 44:50Speaker 00

  So definitely, I think an interesting thing is when you look forward in life and you anticipate hardship, we're much more prone to catastrophize it. You think, well, if my relationship ended or my business went bust or I failed an exam, that would be awful. Like, it seems looking forward. But it's interesting to notice how different it often is. Not always, but in many cases, it seems very different in retrospect. So you look back and you think, well, most people have been in multiple relationships over the course of your life. Get back and think, well, when I broke up with my girlfriend, let's say when I was a teenager, it seemed catastrophic at the time. Now, in retrospect, it really doesn't seem like that catastrophic, like, because I had other relationships since.

• 45:31Speaker 00

  You know, you look back and you think, I had a business and it really ran into problems, maybe even went bust or something. Was it the end of the world? I guess not, I'm still here. Like, so usually when you look back, it's easier for you to see things in context, to see that you moved on eventually and did other things. And also you can look back and think, maybe I gained some things from that. Maybe I learned something. Maybe it motivated me in certain ways. So it's interesting simply to think about that and notice how different catastrophes appear in the rearview mirror and how that's very different from the way that they seem to us when we're looking ahead at them.

• 46:14André Duqum?

  I would love to actually set the stage a little bit by getting a 30,000-foot bird's eye view of the timeline of some of the most prolific Stoic thinkers with the understanding that there's probably many that don't have the fame and notoriety of certain folks for various reasons that were nonetheless very impactful. Take us back as much as you can with the date of the timelines.

• 46:36Speaker 00

  Apocryphal history of Stoicism. Well, Socrates was executed in 399 BCE. They made him drink hemlock. There were other philosophers before Socrates. Do you know what we call them? The pre-Socratics. Right? So I like to tell people that because it just highlights how important, how cool is that? That's like saying the pre-Jimmy Hendrix era, right? Or something, you know? So there's Pythagoras, a handful of pre-Socratic philosophers that are really interesting. Pythagoras was one that influenced the Stoics. Heraclitus was another one that really influenced the Stoics. He's an interesting guy because he's had this doctrine called pantaray, everything flows. He said you can't step into the same river twice.

• 47:20Speaker 00

  Very similar to the Buddhist doctrine of, what's it called, nichavada, the doctrine of impermanence.

• 47:26André Duqum?

  Because it's not the same river, not the same man.

• 47:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, like, so it's, a lot of people, while we're on the subject, Pythagoras taught reincarnation. He had the doctrine, the Greeks called metempsychosis. So just kind of like mention in passing, like, these ideas existed in the West, in Greece, and they were very familiar to the Stoics and to Plato and to Socrates. And we don't know if there was any connection. There are rumors and legends and stories about communication between the East and the West at that point. There's even a real, an obscure ancient anecdote about Socrates that says that he spoke to an Indian merchant, which is pretty unusual at that time, but it's not completely impossible.

• 48:13Speaker 00

  Right? So we have Socrates and he dies. A hundred years later, there's a guy called Zeno who's not Greek. He's a Phoenician from Cyprus. And the Phoenicians were famous for being a seafaring people. They traded this purple dye that was incredibly precious and expensive. It was extracted from sea snails laboriously. And his ship sank and this dye that took ages to extract from something that came out of the sea dissolved back into the sea that it came from. He lost his whole fortune.

• 48:52Speaker 00

  He was shipwrecked to Athens and Zeno supposedly said the most profitable journey that he ever made was the one where he lost his entire fortune and was bankrupted, according to legend. Because that forced him to reconsider his whole life and his values. He became a philosopher at that point. So this is like a hundred years after Socrates died. By this time, Socratic philosophy had become quite entrenched in Athens. And Zeno went around and studied Platonic philosophy. He studied, became a cynic philosopher. He trained in the various other, the Magherian School of Philosophies that aren't even that well-known today.

• 49:35Speaker 00

  So he absorbed all these different perspectives on philosophy that were flourishing in Athens at the time. And then eventually he founded his own school. Now, interestingly, the other schools of philosophy were located in gymnasium, like the lyceum, like a sports ground where Aristotle taught, the academy where Plato taught. But Zeno founded his school in Diagona, in the store poichle, in a public porch, where Socrates used to do philosophy. In the marketplace, he went back to the marketplace you were talking about earlier and he did philosophy in public.

• 50:17Speaker 00

  So some people think the Stoics seem to have been trying to get back to philosophy in the way that Socrates did it. So Zeno started the school of philosophy that flourished for 500 years, which is kind of impressive. Marxism, psychoanalysis in the modern world kind of had a heyday, there was like 100 years or something like that. But Stoicism lasted 500 years in the ancient world. And there was a continuous succession of teachers called scholars. Scholar just means the head of the school. The first three were Zeno, Cleanthes and Chrysippus.

• 50:58Speaker 00

  Chrysippus was one of the greatest intellectuals of the ancient Western world. He was considered to be up there with Aristotle, which is a high accolade. But none of his writings survive today. He wrote 700 books, probably more like essays.

• 51:15André Duqum?

  Is it true that less than 1% of the writings from that time exists?

• 51:18Speaker 00

  It's a rough estimate, yeah, like about less than 1% roughly.

• 51:22André Duqum?

  And why is that?

• 51:24Speaker 00

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

• 52:06Speaker 00

  So some people believe that Sulla possibly looted the libraries and the philosophical schools and scrolls were maybe just destroyed or sold or something like that. So unfortunately, in the ancient world, stuff, stuff gets broken and destroyed and, you know, like it may be that by the time of Marcus Aurelius, he doesn't even have access like to some of the original Stoicism. He said, he almost certainly wouldn't have access to all of Chrysippus's books. He's maybe reading books by later authors who are quoting excerpts from Chrysippus, perhaps. Maybe he had some of the original texts. Just as an aside, as an example. Chrysippus wrote a book called Peripathon, which means on passions.

• 52:49Speaker 00

  The Greek word pathos means passion or emotion, but it also means pathology or illness weirdly. So it really means a book on psychopathology, which is essentially what it was, on the pathology of emotions, like emotional disorders. And it was four volumes long. And the fourth volume of it was called Therapeutikon. And it circulated on its own as a standalone book. It means on therapeutics. So Chrysippus wrote a book on psychotherapy that 400 years later actually still existed. It was being quoted by Galen, Marcus Aurelius's physician. And I think there's another author who quotes from it

• 53:33Speaker 00

  four centuries later. So in the ancient world, there was a book on psychotherapy, probably the first ever book on cognitive behavioral therapy.

• 53:41André Duqum?

  Which is so counterintuitive. Most people think Freud, right?

• 53:46Speaker 00

  That's what people think. Freud himself actually trained in psychotherapy. Modern psychotherapy originated about 50 years before Freud invented psychoanalysis. But it existed in the ancient world. Not everything is new, right? So it does seem weird to people, but psychotherapy existed in the ancient world. Not in the form that it did today, but they definitely had the concept of doing therapy on the emotions. And they absolutely used the medical model to describe it. It was pretty common. Socrates uses the medical model to describe his Socratic method.

• 54:25André Duqum?

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• 55:08André Duqum?

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• 55:23André Duqum?

  It seems like there can be this romanticizing of the ancient world. And sometimes perceiving like they're less sophisticated in some ways. And obviously technologically they were, but in terms of the inner technology, in many ways, they were more.

• 55:36Speaker 00

  Definitely. My, I mean, if you, if people want to think that progress is linear and that people a long time ago were more primitive, they should look at ancient rhetoric. Like ancient Greeks and Romans who were educated would wipe the floor. Like with most contemporary Americans or Brits or Canadians in terms of their grasp of rhetoric and logic, basically. So in some ways they were, they had more time to study these subjects and had a very sophisticated understanding of them. So to continue our ported history.

• 56:10André Duqum?

  Yeah, Chris Ippus.

• 56:12Speaker 00

  I got to Chris Ippus. Then there are a bunch of other Stoics. There was a guy called Diogenes of Babylon, who went to Rome as an ambassador. He was a head of the Stoic school and the Romans got into Stoicism at that point. When was that? Round about, round about 100 B.C. if I remember rightly. And so the Romans were becoming interested in Greek thought. And they learned about different branches of Greek philosophy, but Stoicism was the one that really resonated with them. They identified it with traditional Roman values. So a number of Roman statesmen became kind of hooked on Stoicism and it began to spread through the Roman Republic. Then Cicero.

• 56:59Speaker 00

  Who's a famous orator and statesman was not a Stoic, but studied Stoicism in Athens and wrote about it extensively. So Cicero's writings are one of our main and one of our most sophisticated sources for understanding what the Stoics actually believed. There was one of his contemporaries, a guy called Cato the Younger, became a kind of iconic figure in Roman Stoicism because he was a political opponent of Julius Caesar. So Cato didn't leave any writings behind, but he left this kind of legacy in the Roman world. Then something weird happened. So we'll gloss over the fall of the end of the Republic and the assassination of Julius Caesar.

• 57:42Speaker 00

  His nephew Octavian becomes Augustus, the founder of the Roman Empire. And the interesting thing about that is that Augustus had two Stoic tutors. And he seems to have been quite into Stoicism. He, towards the end of his life, started writing books on philosophy and circulating them among his friends, although they don't survive today. We've got no idea really what was in them. So it looks like the founder of the Roman Empire set this kind of precedent for Romans in the imperial age to believe that Stoicism was kind of the de facto philosophy of rulers, of emperors and statesmen. And then we have Nero, not a good example of Stoicism,

• 58:27Speaker 00

  being taught by Seneca. Seneca was Nero's personal tutor. This was, Seneca's a contemporary of St. Paul. Seneca's brother is in the New Testament. He's mentioned briefly. Incidentally, the Stoics are literally mentioned in the New Testament. St. Paul goes to Athens, to the Areopagus, and we're told that he spoke to a group of Epicurean and Stoic philosophers. So they have a kind of walk-on part, like a bit part in the New Testament, weirdly.

• 58:58Speaker 00

  So then we have Seneca and his life overlaps with that of Epictetus, who was a slave and became the most influential teacher in the history of Rome. He went into exile and died when Marcus Aurelius was a young boy. And that must have been like, Marcus must have felt like he narrowly missed the opportunity to study under his hero, basically. But he got the next best thing. Marcus almost certainly knew older men who probably met Epictetus in person. And one of them, a guy called Junius Rusticus, his closest friend and mentor,

• 59:43Speaker 00

  gave him a collection of writings that were transcriptions of the sayings, the teachings of Epictetus. We call them the discourses of Epictetus today. So this would be like getting bootleg copies. It was, nobody knew this existed originally. And I think it's possible that when Marcus Aurelius got these books, he says he got them from the private collection of Junius Rusticus, which maybe implies that they weren't well known at that time. So he must have thought, I'll never get a chance to learn from Epictetus. And then his tutor went, I've actually got all these transcriptions of his, like bootleg copies of a band that you'd missed a chance to see live, right?

• 1:00:27Speaker 00

  And Marcus Aurelius becomes completely devoted to Stoic philosophy. He is a big deal back in the day because he's a Roman emperor. So he makes Stoicism famous again, even more famous. And then weirdly, and we don't entirely know the reason for this, after Marcus Aurelius dies, Stoicism kind of disappears from the historical record. It's kind of supplanted in popularity by Neoplatonism. And then eventually Christianity leads to the suppression of the pagan schools of philosophy. They're closed down eventually in 529 AD. So Stoicism kind of vanishes. But the Stoics, to borrow a phrase from Nietzsche, pressed their hand upon aeons as though upon wax.

• 1:01:11Speaker 00

  They left their imprint on Christianity to some extent. So we kind of... In modern Western society, Stoicism is weirdly familiar to us because it kind of permeated our culture in lots of subtle ways. It affected Latin poets and their writings affected early modern poets. And so we've kind of absorbed it like indirectly without realizing it in many cases. So often when people read the Stoics, they they say, this seems strangely familiar to me and they're not sure why. But that's the influence throughout the ages. So you you were asking about India.

• 1:01:51Speaker 00

  It's so cool and so frustrating because there there may have been, there are obvious parallels, right? It's quite eerie sometimes.

• 1:02:01André Duqum?

  Yeah, especially with like the Vedantic tradition.

• 1:02:04Speaker 00

  Yes, super nerdy in a way to kind of get into this like, but there's some cool things that are worth thinking about here. There's legends about early legendary Greek pharaohs traveling to the east. So the problem is, in case people are wondering, the problem is that Persia is in the way, right? So the Persians protected the Silk Roads. There are important trade routes, so you couldn't just go very easily from Greece to India and back and forth. I think there are ways that that some merchants were able to travel through, but it was difficult. There wasn't much contact.

• 1:02:48Speaker 00

  It was mediated by the Persian Empire until a guy that you may have heard of called Alexander the Great.

• 1:02:57André Duqum?

  Never heard of him.

• 1:02:58Speaker 00

  Never heard of that guy. Like, so he was a big deal back in the day. So Alexander the Great conquered Persia, like, you know, like remarkable, I mean, he's a, he was a historical phenomenon, like, you know, it's difficult to overstate like how remarkable it was. Not necessarily a good guy, he's not celebrated in every culture, but he did something remarkable in military terms. He got to Afghanistan and Pakistan. He's got pretty far, like, and he took philosophers with him.

• 1:03:37Speaker 00

  Right, so in particular, he took a cynic philosopher and he took a guy called Pyro Velis, who was a skeptic philosopher. So it could be the Greek philosophy influenced Indian philosophy. It would be astounding if Indian philosophers didn't talk to some of these guys, the Greek colonists that went there and like take some influence from them. There's a Buddhist scripture called the Questions of King Melanda, and King Melanda is a Greek, I think in Afghanistan or Bactria, like he's a king in a Greek colony.

• 1:04:18Speaker 00

  So we find in some eastern scriptures references to exchange of ideas. And it could be that some ideas from Indian philosophy penetrated particularly through Pyro Velis, like Greek skepticism, some people believe may have been influenced by Indian philosophy. And there's a number of other kind of obscure references to some sort of contact between these two traditions. But it was Alexander the Great that opened up, like created a window of opportunity for communication between these cultures.

• 1:04:53André Duqum?

  I'm so intrigued and fascinated and I could spend the rest of this podcast just exploring the possibilities of what kind of happened in crossover. And what's inspiring to me actually is when schools of thought perhaps maybe didn't even influence each other because of their geographic separation and yet arrive at similar truths and knowings. To me, that reinforces this Vedantic maximal, so that truth waits for eyes unclouded by longing, you know, when one actually becomes wise, no matter where you come from, you arrive at similar understandings about the nature of reality.

• 1:05:35Speaker 00

  Like it's kind of perennial, archetypal wisdom that people, the Stoics actually talk about that and they believe. That it's no surprise, if when thinkers are very confident that they're on the right track, they're usually unsurprised when other people in other cultures arrive at the same conclusion. They tend to say, of course they would, like, because we believe that this is right. You know, the doctrine of impermanence, there are guys like in India that believe, yeah, because it's true. So like, we'd be surprised if they didn't figure stuff like that out. So they're very open to that idea. I was going to mention that the odd thing about it is, you know, it's the way that

• 1:06:20Speaker 00

  these different cultures perceive each other, I have to say, is different from the way that we tend to perceive them, right? So the Greeks actually have a name for Indian philosophers. They call them the gymnosophy, like, which means naked wise men. So that was how they and there are some references to the things that they taught, but they don't really seem to look that like, that much like Vedanta. It's hard to kind of extract what it is that they're referencing to, and it may be that, you know, maybe the historians are making up some of the references or dialogues, but they definitely know that these guys exist.

• 1:06:58Speaker 00

  Here's a bit of trivia for you. One of Marcus Aurelius's teachers apparently travelled to Africa, to North Africa, to Egypt, and some other parts of North Africa, and supposedly met gymnosophy there. So I think there were some Indian philosophers or merchants that got travelled to Egypt by, and so Marcus knew a guy who knew a guy, you know, he knew a guy who allegedly had met Indian philosophers, but that's maybe about as close as we get to, like, directly having contact with that culture.

• 1:07:35André Duqum?

  Yeah, the speculation is fascinating and endless, even Jesus's life, you know, and those missing years of like, what was happening in his twenties before he started teaching, you know? What were the Stoics' understanding of Jesus, of Nazareth, and who he was? Was he a mystic, the Messiah? Was it a wide spectrum? Do you know?

• 1:07:54Speaker 00

  They didn't think much about Christianity. Really, the Romans at that time, in the first couple of centuries, generally just viewed Christianity. First of all, they thought it was Jewish. They saw it mainly as a kind of Jewish sect. And I think that the thing about understanding how ancient philosophies interacted in a way is to realize there were more of them than we normally think. So, early Christianity was probably more diverse than we would assume, and there were

• 1:08:34Speaker 00

  probably many other similar sects that the Stoics, like the Stoics or educated Romans in general, would probably have seen Christianity as just kind of one among a number of similar sects or religions that were around at the time. And also, sometimes they're a little bit vague about what Christians believe. And the form that popular versions of Christianity took, there were Christian sects that are extinct, long extinct now, that died off a few centuries later, that might have been the most popular forms at the time. For example, Gnosticism.

• 1:09:09André Duqum?

  Yeah, Gnostics and...

• 1:09:10Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, in 1945, there was a little guy who was like a goat herder in Egypt, and he, going to work every day, walked past a boulder, and it used to bug him, because he thought, he just thought, you know, when you see something, you think, that just doesn't look right. And he thought, this boulder looks like it shouldn't be where it is. It's just like in a weird position at the bottom of a cliff. And so one day, I guess he was bored and he thought, I'm gonna move it and see if there's anything underneath it. And he found a stash of books from the third century A.D.

• 1:09:52Speaker 00

  From a Gnostic Christian community that had stashed all of their codices, their, their version of the Bible. Basically, because they'd probably been persecuted by, perhaps by other Christians. They like, what they were doing was unorthodox. So a bit of trivia for you. One of those codices, it contains Gnostic and hermetic and kind of apocryphal Christian writings. But it also has Socrates in it, weirdly. So there's a parallel universe like in which an early version of Christianity has a Bible that includes Socrates.

• 1:10:32André Duqum?

  Interesting.

• 1:10:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's got an excerpt and translated into Coptic. It's an excerpt from Plato's Republic. Right, so early Christian community, I mean, early Christianity, things were different than we tend to assume. Like there were early Christian communities out there that considered Socrates to be part of their scripture.

• 1:10:52André Duqum?

  So if I have a right, this goat herder stumbled upon these vessels, which I believe were preserved from bat dung. Is that, is that right?

• 1:11:00Speaker 00

  Oh, I don't know about that. I don't know how that, this is in a place called Nishkamadi.

• 1:11:04André Duqum?

  Yeah, yeah, Nishkamadi Library, right? And what, from what I understand, there was bat dung that was actually preserving a lot of the scrolls. Um, one of which I believe from the Gnostic texts, the Gospel of Thomas.

• 1:11:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:11:19André Duqum?

  All these other potentially. Extracted, removed gospels from the early various Bibles, one of which saying, which I love from that, who knows if it's rightly or wrongly attributed to Jesus, but if you bring forth that which is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth that which is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you. And to me, it's the fact that we just recently, in the past hundred years, have discovered these texts that give us a window into the cross pollination between these wisdom traditions is so cool.

• 1:12:00André Duqum?

  I would, I would just love, I would die to see the people that were putting those scrolls in that place at that time, you know, over a millennia ago, and us reinterpreting and trying to figure out what actually happened.

• 1:12:15Speaker 00

  It's quite difficult to imagine now because Christianity evolved so much over the ages, but at certain points, like Christians, some scholars believe that early Christians saw themselves at one point as philosophers, like, you know, like more as a sort of philosophy. And they're certainly in the Gnostic gospels, there are very, there's clearly more Neoplatonic influence in them than in the surviving New Testament. So early, like Christianity was in some ways more philosophical or more influenced by Greek philosophy than we might assume.

• 1:12:59Speaker 00

  There's also, we have writings from early Christian figures like Justin Martyr, who wrote a letter to Marcus Aurelius that survives. And in it, he talks about Heraclitus and he talks about Stoicism. So sometimes early Christians were critics of Stoicism, but they were kind of frenemies, for want of a better word. So they would criticize Stoicism, but they would also see themselves as having some common ground with the Stoics. Here's about a trivia for you, Dante, who wrote the Divine Comedy. Maybe a good way of expressing the kind of relationship between the two things. And, you know, many centuries later, describing purgatory, he takes Cato, who we mentioned earlier.

• 1:13:43Speaker 00

  And he, Cato is the guardian of purgatory in Dante's Divine Comedy. So Cato is kind of, the way he portrays him, he says there are four stars behind him that illuminate him with like their light. And Virgil and Dante fall to their knees in front of him, right? He's like a pagan saint and Dante, Dante's super Catholic, right? So it's quite odd that he says this guy technically can't get into heaven because he doesn't believe in Jesus. But he's as close as you could possibly get. He has this idea of the Stoics as being like potentially the best that somebody could be, the most like the most virtuous someone could be

• 1:14:27Speaker 00

  in the eyes of Christianity without actually believing in Jesus. They're in the most elevated position in the afterlife. And so he sees, yeah, Cato is this kind of like pagan saint-like figure. And it shows this, you know, kind of strained in some ways, but relationship, but relationship of admiration that Christians often had with Stoics.

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• 1:15:52Speaker 00

  Stoicism.

• 1:15:54André Duqum?

  I I'm I'm loving this conversation. There are so many various rabbit holes I want to dive deep into, you know, Marcus Aurelius. You're probably one of the living humans that knows the most about his life. Would you would you agree?

• 1:16:06Speaker 00

  Accidentally, you know, I've written three books about Marcus Aurelius. So I kind of spent quite a lot of time. I thought eventually I need to write a book about someone else.

• 1:16:14André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:15Speaker 00

  So then I wrote a book about Socrates. But yeah, I've spent quite a lot of time studying Marcus Aurelius. I wrote a graphic novel about him. I wrote How to Think Like a Roman Emperor. And I wrote a biography of him for Yale University Press, like a more kind of traditional biography of his life. I think he is a very like, he's a very appealing figure to many people today. I guess that's the simplest thing that I could say about it. I don't know if Stoicism would be anywhere near as popular if it wasn't for Marcus Aurelius. He's a figure that people find it easy to relate to. And also, the Meditations is a text that's quite accessible.

• 1:16:54André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:55Speaker 00

  Like, so not as many people today are. There are very, there's no renaissance of of of Aristotelianism that's comparable like to Stoicism, because there isn't an Aristotelian text that's anywhere near as accessible and user friendly as the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. So he's a great ambassador for Stoicism in a sense.

• 1:17:18André Duqum?

  There's something really inspiring about getting a window into the personal thoughts of a emperor like him at that time that a contemporary Western mind can directly relate to, which makes you think, oh, these perennial questions.

• 1:17:42André Duqum?

  That we're all faced with and pervasive without the human existence are not anything new, which in some ways is refreshing because that means that the answers, the solvents, the things that will actually provide solutions for are things that people have wrestled with for millennia. So what are the Meditations and why is that text such a unique and popular text in this day and age?

• 1:18:07Speaker 00

  Well, I think you're right. It is, I wrote a book called How to Think Like a Roman Emperor, and some people would say, well, how would we know how a Roman emperor thought? And the answer is, well, duh, he literally tells us exactly how he thought. Like, he wrote his private thoughts down in detail for us. So it's remarkable. Like you say, that very fact alone is quite remarkable. We have this window into his thought process about how he's coping with the challenges that he faces as an emperor, and not just kind of little asides, like a diary or something. Like, he's really going deep into his core philosophy. So it's in itself a remarkable book. There's another reason why it's so popular, though,

• 1:18:49Speaker 00

  which is, funnily enough, some scholars, I think, don't really appreciate, which is that Marcus Aurelius, I think, is a far greater writer than he's normally given credit for being. Now, the Meditations are private notes. It's not a polished speech that he writes. It's not his best writing in that regard. But Marcus had an amazing education, and we can thank his mother for that, incidentally. You know, people say behind every great man there's a great woman. Like, Marcus Aurelius is a really good example of that because his mother, Domitia La Silla, probably engineered his education. What's unusual about Marcus Aurelius's education is he started studying philosophy when he was 12, which even in

• 1:19:34Speaker 00

  the ancient world is unusually young. And he had a lot of Stoic tutors, like, that which some Romans may have had a Stoic tutor. Marcus had multiple Stoic tutors. So if that's anything to do with his mother, and there's some hints that it may well be, she made him. The Stoics that he became by, you know, giving him a Stoic education. But he also studied rhetoric in Latin and in Greek. So for decades, and he was a big fan of oratory and rhetoric. So Marcus was a highly, highly trained and highly accomplished writer and a great aphorist.

• 1:20:18Speaker 00

  So one of the reasons that people are very influenced by his writings is that they're easy to read. The language he uses captures philosophical ideas in very vivid images. And sometimes the things he says are quite memorable as well. So I think the quality of his writing matters. We have some other Stoic texts that are pretty dry by comparison. So that, I think, I think that's part of it, you know? People don't get quotes from CBT books tattooed on them, right? But I kid you not, like, there are whole websites dedicated to photographs of dudes with Stoic tattoos.

• 1:21:02Speaker 00

  Like, people keep showing me them and stuff, right? I think it's a good illustration in a way of how Stoicism resonates with people in ways that other philosophies don't really. And it's partly down to Marcus Aurelius, his mastery of the language that he's using.

• 1:21:21André Duqum?

  What are your thoughts on how philosophers seem to be often born from an early injury?

• 1:21:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:21:27André Duqum?

  There is this, uh, this search for meaning that seems to be quite embedded in people that have traumatic or difficult experiences early on.

• 1:21:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:21:38André Duqum?

  That lead to great minds and philosophers.

• 1:21:41Speaker 00

  So Marcus Aurelius lost his father when he was young. And, but he had a quite traumatic life in other regards as well. In ways that, I mean, it gets kind of dark at certain points. We think of Hadrian as being one of the good emperors and one of the better emperors because he accomplished a lot of things. But that wasn't the Hadrian that Marcus Aurelius knew. Marcus Aurelius knew Hadrian towards the very end of his life. In the last, I think, about four or five months of Hadrian's life, Hadrian ordered Marcus to come and live in his villa. And I think that was like.

• 1:22:21Speaker 00

  Traumatizing for him because Hadrian went crazy and had political purges, had senators executed, kept trying to kill himself. Like, he was a physical mess. He was very sick. He was kind of depraved, really. And Marcus, I think he was about 15, like, when Hadrian ordered him to come and live in his villa. I think it would have blown his mind. And my belief is that Marcus saw this kind of depravity and this guy's decline and paranoia. And he thought, he was frightened. And he thought, I don't want to end up like this guy.

• 1:23:02Speaker 00

  And I think that threw him, in the same way that, as you know, said, he was cast into the arms of philosophy by becoming bankrupt and losing everything. I think Marcus was thrown into the arms of philosophy by seeing this kind of madhouse that surrounded Hadrian and thinking, how am I going to survive in this horrible, corrupt world? And he thought, I need to find something that I can cling on to. And he attached himself to Stoicism as something that he thought would allow him to cope with the demands of living, of court life in the Roman Empire. Surrounded by people that are lying to him and manipulating him and want to assassinate him,

• 1:23:46Speaker 00

  you know, and temptations that would, you know, be way beyond most people's self-discipline.

• 1:23:53André Duqum?

  What through line do you draw with your own search for meaning? And you as a young boy at 13, when your father passed? And what ensued after as you kind of being labelled as a write-off for the anger that you had in your life? I'm curious, what through lines and what was it just like to be you?

• 1:24:12Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, I didn't really think about this much when I first became interested in Marcus Aurelius, but I suppose it became obvious to me over time, you know, gradually sunk in that there are parallels between my own life and his. So I lost my father a bit later in life, but it still had a big impact on me. And I turned to philosophy as a sort of substitute father figure. I think that's what Marcus Aurelius did. He thought, I don't have a dad telling me. What sort of man to be, you know, to look up to as a role model. So I need to kind of somehow construct my own guide to life. And that was what philosophy did for him. And that's the reason that I became interested in philosophy. And also, when I was a young guy, I had a lot of anger issues.

• 1:24:56Speaker 00

  And I think in some ways, almost like people, when someone has a problem, you know, it reaches a certain point, sometimes they kind of come out the other side of it. So in some ways, I feel like my being really angry as a young guy kind of helped me because I reached a point where I thought, I can't carry on like this. You know, I need to stop being angry. And that caused me to really question my anger at a much deeper level than I would have done normally. Marcus Aurelius tells us in the Meditations that he had a bad temper. Maybe he's implying, the paradox is, he says that he struggled with his own anger,

• 1:25:38Speaker 00

  but the Roman histories tell us that he was known for being devoid of anger in the face of provocation. So that, you could argue that that paints a picture of somebody who naturally had this temper that he was struggling with, but succeeded perhaps in using Stoicism as a way of coping with it. So that other people started to perceive him as somebody that was the opposite. Why, you know, he conquered his temper. So I think, I think perhaps I found him relatable for that reason, that he was struggling with similar problems that, you know, that I had struggled with.

• 1:26:17Speaker 00

  And so he kind of offered me like, it was attractive to me because he was walking a similar path and offering me solutions, you know. I think that one of the things I'd say about the Stoics. What do you call a follower of Pythagoras? A Pythagorean? What do you call a follower of Epicurus? An Epicurean? A follower of Plato is called a Platonist. A follower of Aristotle is sometimes called an Aristotelian. What do we call a follower of Zeno? We don't call them a Zanonian, luckily. Because that would be like a Martian or something like that. It would sound odd. We call them Stoics after the place where they met. And there's a reason for that.

• 1:27:00Speaker 00

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

• 1:27:21Speaker 00

  I think Seneca in one of his letters probably is echoing what earlier Stoics had said about Zeno. So Seneca writes these letters to a friend called Lucilius. And he says to Lucilius, I don't want you to think of me as being like a physician and you're my patient. On the contrary, I think of me more like a fellow patient. Simply one who's been undergoing treatment for longer and maybe has more experience. So Stoics are describing something that's like a peer support approach. A bit like Alcoholics Anonymous for philosophers, like, in a way. And I think that was something that was characteristic of Stoicism in the ancient world.

• 1:28:04Speaker 00

  Is this emphasis on fallibility and recognizing the fallibility in other people. But also trying to find, to extract from other people the qualities that are worth modeling. So not putting anyone on a pedestal, but actually looking at everybody and trying to see what we could possibly learn from them. For example, at the beginning in Book One of the Meditations, Marcus lists the people that he admires. And he lists the qualities. He talks about his adopted father, Antoninus, at great length. He talks about Junius Rusticus at length. But he also lists his brother, Lucius Verus, who is a guy that it would be difficult to find as a role model.

• 1:28:48Speaker 00

  He was probably an alcoholic. He was kind of a failure in many regards as a co-emperor.

• 1:28:57Speaker 00

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

• 1:29:42Speaker 00

  But in therapy, there are, the research shows that although there are some benefits to mastery modeling, it can also backfire because it can make people kind of idealize the goal that they're trying to work towards. And it doesn't necessarily show them the journey that they need to take to get there. It can be counterproductive in some ways. Coping modeling would be like Seneca. When you look at somebody who's not perfect, has maybe had similar problems to you. So you, if you have social anxiety, coping modeling would be somebody who had social anxiety, but has made some progress in dealing with it, right? So they're kind of still on the journey. But they show you the steps that you would need to take

• 1:30:26Speaker 00

  in order to improve. So Stoicism seems to be more based around coping modeling, whereas other schools of ancient philosophy lean more towards mastery modeling. And I, I think that attracted me. Marcus is a flawed individual. He acknowledges his flaws. And we see him working through them, not putting himself on a pedestal and trying to claim that he has mastery. But like, he's showing us what he needs to do in order to deal with his temper and deal with his fears.

• 1:31:03André Duqum?

  I resonate with a lot of your personal journey as well. For me internally, my parents split when I was around six, seven, eight, which is a very formative time for your identity. And I had a lot of, I don't even know if I've talked about this much, but like also a lot of anger at that time. We'd get in fights at schools. I was in the principal's office suspended multiple times. I think I've heard you share similar, similar with you. And around, I think like 12, 13, stepping into high school, I straightened out puberty helps. I remember one time my mom, after, uh, we were, I was like getting in fights. We were doing like these fight tournaments in our, in our bathroom during breaks. Um, and someone like recorded it and it got to the assistant principal,

• 1:31:47André Duqum?

  called me to the office. My mom came in, she slapped me in front of, in front of the principal. You know, that, that'll, that'll influence it for sure. Um, I think about that time, fast forwarding to like 18, 19, when I started, uh, was part of this like men's group kind of thing. We'd get together and we'd talk about what we're learning about ourselves, accountability systems. We all would assign each other a different historical figure who everyone else thinks they most resemble. Um, and qualities like for me was like truth seeker. And actually Marcus Aurelius was the person that they-

• 1:32:20Speaker 00

  Wow, that's awesome. Really?

• 1:32:21André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:22Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 1:32:23André Duqum?

  So I look back and I just, I put a lot of through lines with, with all this. Um, and, and resonate with, with the journey of the meaning making and, uh, trying to make sense of a reality which is confusing as a young boy.

• 1:32:37Speaker 00

  Yeah. I, I mean, we don't know that much about the lives of many ancient philosophers. Like we, we know, you know, like we know more about Marcus Aurelius perhaps than we know about any other ancient Greek or Roman philosopher. Um, because he was a big deal. I mean, a lot of philosophers, we don't even know what they looked like. Cause in many cases there are surviving statues or images of them. Marcus Aurelius, we have a whole bunch of statues of him. We have archaeological evidence from coins and engravings about him. We have- His private letters that were discovered in the 19th century. Like, so we get this window into his private life.

• 1:33:18Speaker 00

  We have Roman historians writing about him and other writers in the period just kind of mentioning him in passing. So we've got this kind of wealth of information that allows us to make him three dimensional. Like, he's, and one of the reasons he's attractive is he seems like a real person. I think that's also because, like, say with a figure like Augustus, he carefully managed his public image. So we don't get to kind of see the real Augustus as clearly.

• 1:33:44André Duqum?

  Tellability.

• 1:33:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, whereas Marcus were like, we can, we can see who this guy was more clearly. You know, much better than we can with a lot of other historical figures. It makes him more relatable, I think. And also it didn't do any harm that there was a spike in popularity of Stoicism in the year 2000. What happened in the year 2000 that made Stoicism suddenly become more popular? The movie Gladiator came out.

• 1:34:12André Duqum?

  Of course.

• 1:34:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, and Richard Harris plays Marcus Aurelius in the first act. He gets killed by Commodus in the movie. But a lot of people who had never picked up a book on philosophy in their lives, well, who's this Marcus Aurelius dude? And they, a lot of young guys in particular would go out and sales of the meditation kind of shot up after that. And that was one of the things that helped push Stoicism into the limelight. So that now Stoicism has become a thing. Like, it's, it's almost like a subgenre of self-improvement in its own right today.

• 1:34:49André Duqum?

  Why does there seem to be this pervasive perception of Stoics being emotionally suppressed?

• 1:34:57Speaker 00

  That was a caricature of Stoicism that existed even in the ancient world.

• 1:35:02Speaker 00

  But it's not what this, it's a simplification of what the Stoics meant. And in some ways, it's kind of the opposite. By the way, Marcus Aurelius, we're told, wept twice. Once was when he was attending a speech in the Senate about an earthquake that had happened in Asia Minor, where a lot of people had died. Why, and he broke into tears listening to the news about this tragedy. And another time was when Junius Rusticus, his tutor, died, like he wept inconsolably. So I think Marcus Aurelius was a naturally sensitive man. He wasn't like a robot. And he used Stoicism as a way of helping him to manage his, his natural sensitivity.

• 1:35:43Speaker 00

  So when we talk about Stoicism, here's a curious observation about language. Everyone has heard the word cynical, epicurean, skeptical, academic, stoic. These are all names of ancient Greek schools of philosophy, but we use those words today to mean things that are tenuously related to what they originally meant. So words often change their meaning over the centuries and the meaning becomes a caricature or a kind of diluted version of what it originally meant.

• 1:36:23André Duqum?

  Like apathy?

• 1:36:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, like apathy is a good example, right? And that's a technical term in Stoic philosophy, but it's come to mean a very simplified version. It just means not feeling anything. Whereas like the, a literal translation of apathia would be more like, well, I said earlier that pathos means emotion, but also means pathology. So it would mean not experiencing pathological emotions. So it would be the, almost by definition, it would be the outcome of psychotherapy would be apathy. It wouldn't be not, it wouldn't be the absence of feeling. It would be the absence of pathological feelings. Stoicism today, scholars usually make a distinction between Stoicism written with a lowercase s

• 1:37:10Speaker 00

  and capital S Stoicism. So lowercase Stoicism has come to mean. Having a stiff upper lip or suppressing or concealing unpleasant or embarrassing emotions is how I would technically define it. Now, the funny thing is, there's actually quite a lot of research on lowercase stoicism. We can measure it as a coping style or kind of personality trait. And the evidence strongly suggests it's pretty unhealthy. Like, it tends to backfire for a bunch of reasons. I think that's very interesting because a lot of people even today do try to be lowercase stoic.

• 1:37:51Speaker 00

  You know, some people would say it's associated with certain preconceptions about masculinity. For example, like, men are supposed to be stoic in that sense, just have a stiff upper lip. There's a bunch of reasons why that doesn't work out that well in the long run. I mean, a really simple, obvious one is that people that score highly on, for example, the Liverpool Stoicism Scale, which is one of the tools that's used to measure this. People that score highly on that will tend not to seek emotional support from their friends. Or they don't, these people don't go and see counselors or therapists, basically, because that's contrary to their coping style. And so, surprise, surprise, people who don't seek emotional support or don't go to see therapists

• 1:38:33Speaker 00

  tend to cope more poorly in the long run than people that seek help. So that's just one of several reasons why it can potentially backfire. There's more subtle reasons as well. The ancient Stoics had a much more nuanced and sophisticated understanding of emotion. Right? They did not advocate suppressing emotions. That, that concept, I kind of wouldn't even make sense to them. It's not on their radar. The, the reason that this confusion exists in a way is that we have this thing that philosophers and psychologists call a folk psychology. So folk psychology is the default set of assumptions that everybody shares about how

• 1:39:15Speaker 00

  the mind works and how emotions work is baked into our culture and the language that we use. Right? So we, everyone has this kind of psychological theory that we, you know, we use in, in daily life. Problem is that, particularly with regard to the emotions, it's wrong.

• 1:39:36Speaker 00

  Like our folk psychology or the folk psychology is very simplistic and it's basically inaccurate. So the folk psychology of emotions, generally speaking, is the idea that an emotion is kind of homogeneous. Like so anger is just like an energy that wells up inside you. And so people think you should try and push it down or channel it into certain things or kind of purge it or vent it from your system. And those ways of coping make sense to people intuitively because they think of anger as a kind of homogeneous energy that wells up inside them, right? But that isn't what anger is and it's not how it works. That's not how emotions in general function.

• 1:40:18Speaker 00

  So as soon as you look closely at something, you'll tend to realise that it has components. And what seems like a thing on close inspection often starts to look more like a process, right? So the Stoics saw the emotions more as processes that consist of distinct phases. And they saw them as being composite and combining certain ingredients together. So one of the basic distinctions that Stoicism makes is between an initial automatic phase of emotion. Somebody walks up to you in the street and spits in your face. You'll react, right?

• 1:41:00Speaker 00

  Before you even have a chance to think about it, it'll trigger your amygdala and the rage circuit in your brain. Your blood pressure will shoot up, your body will release adrenaline, your muscles will tense up. Like your attention will become narrow and focused. It's like a bunch of things happen automatically to you before you get a chance to even think about what's going on. That's the automatic phase of emotion. So you can't suppress that. It's too late. Like it already happens before you get a chance to intervene in it. Maybe with training, over time, you could influence that. But in the moment, it's too fast usually to do much about it. So the most that we can do is kind of, the Stoics said, it's indifferent. We should accept it. It's just a kind of, in a sense, a physical reaction.

• 1:41:47Speaker 00

  But what happens next is increasingly under voluntary control. So you might say you can't do anything about your reaction, but what you can do is change your response to your reaction. As Covey says, there's a gap between stimulus and response. And that's exactly what the Stoics are interested in. And the transition between stage one and stage two of the emotion, which might be like a split second, the Stoics refer to as sun cata thesis, like they have this weird technical term for it, which I think is badly translated as assent to the initial impression. So you have the initial impression like this guy's a jerk and he deserves to be punched in the face, right?

• 1:42:28Speaker 00

  That's your, your brain creates that for you by appraising the threat and your coping options instantly, automatically lets out, seems to you immediately because your brain's done that for you. But then you have the opportunity to go, hang on a minute, hold your horses. Is this the whole story? Is this accurate? Or is it kind of distorted? Is this really the best way to respond or might I regret this afterwards? Am I perhaps making things worse if I responded this way? So Epictetus tells his students that at this crucial gap between stimulus and response, you should say, take a moment, refrain from hasty assent to the impression.

• 1:43:11Speaker 00

  He says, talk to your impression weirdly and say to it, you're just an impression and not entirely the thing that you claim to represent. So it restores the subjectivity of our impression. No angry person thinks right now I'm having the impression that this guy deserves to be punched in the nose. Angry people think.

• 1:43:37Speaker 00

  This guy does deserve to be punched in the nose and he is a jerk. So when we're highly emotional, when we escalate our emotions, we take our impressions and we fuse them with reality. We treat them as if they're facts. Like, this guy is a jerk. It's like Kaczynski called it the is of identity, right? Not just, this guy seems like a jerk to me. This guy is a jerk, as if it's an objective fact, as if I expect everyone else to agree with me about it, right? Once I make that transition, that's synchata thesis. Like, once I fuse my perception with reality, I'm kind of now inhabiting the impression. I'm trapped inside it. That's become my world. Now, I'm living in a world where there's a guy in front of me that's a jerk

• 1:44:21Speaker 00

  and he deserves to be punched. So it's almost now I'm inevitably gonna experience the escalation of the emotion. The Stoics want us to kind of introduce a pause at that point before that happens, to catch it early and say, hang on a minute, hold your horses. Like, this is just an impression. It's not the whole story. It's never the whole story. And maybe it's distorting things or exaggerating things in certain regards. Normally that happens. I'll explain a very simple way of understanding this kind of two-phase model, which is weirdly consistent with modern research on emotions. So hopefully already you can see how this is a more sophisticated

• 1:45:03Speaker 00

  understanding of emotion that changes the coping strategies that you would potentially use. Like, how could you cope in a healthy way with emotions if you don't make these basic distinctions, right? You're gonna be handicapped in that regard if you just think of emotion as a kind of vague ball where everything's mashed together.

• 1:45:27Speaker 00

  So a good example would be, one of my favorite examples, is you're walking through the woods and at night, out of the corner of your eye, you see a snake. And immediately, your heart starts beating. Your body releases adrenaline. It triggers the fight or flight response, activates your amygdala. Two seconds later, you look more closely at it and you think, that's not a snake. It's a old bit of rope or a rubber hose or something like that. What happens now is that your prefrontal cortex has started to reevaluate your initial impression and it's noticed that it's inaccurate.

• 1:46:08Speaker 00

  So unconsciously, at a neurological level, it sends an inhibitory signal to your amygdala and says, turn off the alarm, like it's a false alarm. Now, the interesting thing is you're still going to be anxious for a while. Your body will stop releasing adrenaline, but it's going to take 10, 20 minutes, whatever, for your body to break down the adrenaline that's already circulating. So it's going to take you a while to restore your com- your hands might still be shaking like for five or 10 minutes afterwards, right? There's a recovery period. But that's normal. Like, it's normal for our emotions to be triggered rapidly, automatically, but in a fast and loose way. So what we gain from that is a rapid response, but the price we pay for it is that it's

• 1:46:53Speaker 00

  imprecise, inaccurate, and leads to a number of false alarms. There's a tendency to exaggerate threats and underestimate our coping ability. What's supposed to happen is that we then reappraise. Like, when we've got a little bit more time, like, we begin to reappraise our hot take, like our initial impression. And cognitive therapy, in a sense, is just building on that by doing that in a more sophisticated way. So Stoics understood we need to buy ourselves a little bit more time, ideally at that point. And the easiest way to do that, actually, is just to tell yourself, slow down, take a moment, like, hold your horses, like, stop and think.

• 1:47:36Speaker 00

  Is your initial impression, is your hot take really accurate? Or might it be slightly distorted? This is, I think, in a way, that you could describe that as a sort of mindfulness. The Stoics call it prosokhie. It means paying attention. And in a sense, this is kind of the first step in almost any type of self-help or psychotherapy, perhaps.

• 1:48:02André Duqum?

  I'm curious, because my perception through the lens of modern psychology and also ancient wisdom traditions like Buddhism would ask us, similarly, to examine the gap between the stimulus and the response and how our hardwired need for survival

• 1:48:24André Duqum?

  Makes us vigilant for any perceived threat and stress. And how if I'm going to come to you, Donald, and sling insults your way in English, in a way that matches with your own perceived inadequacies, that is going to be triggering for you because in some way you believe on some level, if you're triggered emotionally, on some level that you're, that these things are actually true about you. And likewise, it, from the Buddhist perspective, they, they ask us and invite us to pay attention to the changes in our biochemistry. There's always an abnormality in the breath and a biochemical sensation

• 1:49:05André Duqum?

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

• 1:49:50Speaker 00

  I think to kind of circle back to where we started with the lowercase Stoicism and so on. So people who have that simplistic idea would think the goal is just to kind of eliminate all of their feelings and that might be an unrealistic goal. So the Stoics would say, no, the goal is to notice, recognize the initial automatic subcortical like threat responses and so on that are just part of human nature, but also just to kind of realize that they're just automatic responses and you don't, the Stoics say you, you don't actually have to buy into them. You know, the odd thing is it changes our perception, but I would compare it to.

• 1:50:32Speaker 00

  If you're high on drugs or you're drunk, you just drank a bottle of whiskey. You know, you might think, I feel like I should phone up one of my relatives that I don't go on with and have, you know, tell them what I really think of them, right? So one person might do that. And another person might think, hang on a minute, I'm drunk. Why, I'm not thinking straight. You know, I can't trust some of these impressions I have right now. They're kind of distorted. And that's kind of what the, that self-awareness of somebody who's drunk or high, realizing that they're drunk or high, is the type of self-awareness that the Stoics are talking about. They have a technical term for this. They call these initial automatic phases.

• 1:51:14Speaker 00

  They call them the first movements of the proto-passions. Propathetae is the term that they use. So those they think are just natural. But the trick is not being swept along by them, but being able to kind of step back from them. Like, not trying to eliminate them or suppress them, but just accepting that they're natural and realizing that we don't necessarily have to allow them to control us. We can choose what we do next in response to them.

• 1:51:42André Duqum?

  It makes me think about how it's been helpful in my life also is just examining the physics of what's happening. You know, you make these sounds, which I'm interpreting in my brain through the language of English and my understanding to create this meaning. But if you were to come to me and speak in pig Latin or Italian, all of a sudden, there's no trigger because I, I'm not making any meaning out of what you're saying. And it seems like many of the great wisdom traditions, and Stoicism certainly included in that, is, is reminding us to examine the delta between what is and everything else. What really happens in reality and the meaning that is asserted on top of it.

• 1:52:27André Duqum?

  And I'm curious your thoughts there because I've heard you refer to the Stoics endeavor to live in accordance with nature in a sense, and to be with what is and to see reality clearly for what it is. So any other thoughts you have there on the difference between what's really happening in the physical world and all the stuff that we put on top of it?

• 1:52:46Speaker 00

  Well, one way of understanding Stoicism, I think is kind of useful.

• 1:52:52Speaker 00

  The slogan of Stoicism was living in agreement with nature. It's a little bit cryptic. And its connotations are slightly different in the original Greek. But that was what they said was the goal of life. They said that that is Stoicism, living in agreement with nature. Marx really uses that phrase many times, by the way, even nearly 500 years after Zeno coined it. So throughout the history of Stoicism, this was kind of central to how people understood it. It doesn't mean just kind of going along with your animal instincts, though. The Stoics viewed nature slightly differently from the way that we would today. They saw reason as being part of human nature. So they said that living in agreement with nature is synonymous with living rationally,

• 1:53:36Speaker 00

  but using reason in an integrated and consistent way, basically. And they thought one way of understanding how we do that is that we should perceive the world accurately. How do we perceive the world accurately? They said that we should only give our assent or accept as reality fused with reality, impressions that we consider to be accurate and objectively true. Right? So they thought one of the main problems is that we impose too, we assign too much value to things that are outside of our direct control. They seem to think that's the main way that we distort our perception of external events.

• 1:54:21Speaker 00

  So I lose my job. Or Epictetus would say, by all means, assent to the impression that you've lost your job. That's like a fact, right? It might not be the whole story. It's probably incomplete, but apart from that, it's objectively true. Perhaps it's a fair description of events.

• 1:54:39André Duqum?

  That's what his quote about the opinions of events is getting at.

• 1:54:42Speaker 00

  Yeah. He says, it's not events that upset us, but rather our opinions about them. And specifically our opinions about how bad they are, basically, our value judgments. He says something kind of cute. He says, if somebody's been sent into exile or sent to prison, say he's been sent into exile, say I've lost my job. But he says, but do not add the word alas. Right, so he says that when you add the value judgment, when you catastrophize it, you're going beyond the objective facts. The catastrophicness, the awfulness of it, isn't a physical property of the event. Our language biases us to think that it is.

• 1:55:27Speaker 00

  We say, this is big, it's small, it's black, it's white, it's awful. As if awfulness is a physical property of the event. We're just, I'm just calling it like it is. Yeah. Right, you know, but actually, it would be more accurate to say it's large, it's small, it's black, it's white, and I evaluate it as awful. And it's more about, when I say something's awful, it's more that I'm expressing my attitude towards it. But the grammar of the language misleads us into thinking that we're just describing an objective fact. And that's synchata thesis, right? This is awful is the is of identity.

• 1:56:08Speaker 00

  Once I think that's, that defines the external world, I lose control at that point. Because I'm now treating it as if it's a fact, rather than it being an attitude that I could possibly change. There's a big difference between saying, this is awful, and saying, right now, in my current physiological state, my current neurological state, from my current perspective, I'm evaluating this as being awful. But that's not the whole story about it. And other people might evaluate it differently. I myself, tomorrow, in a different neurological and physiological state, looking back on

• 1:56:51Speaker 00

  it, might evaluate it slightly differently. So that seems like a more kind of rational, objective way of describing what's going on. It seems kind of pedantic to spell it out like that. But the emotional difference between saying it is awful and saying, from my current perspective, I'm evaluating it as awful, although I know that's not the whole story and it's not the only way of evaluating it, night and day. Right, the Stoics would say that the The second one is more accurate, right? They want to restore our sense that these are just impressions and not facts about the world. You could say a big theme, you know, know thyself is a theme that runs through ancient philosophy.

• 1:57:33Speaker 00

  Another big theme that runs through most Greek philosophy is just this basic distinction between appearance and reality. And the Stoics think that, you know, synchata thesis,

• 1:57:46Speaker 00

  that the root of pathology is when we confuse appearance and reality. Right? This guy seems like a jerk is different from this guy is a jerk. Why? If we take our impression or how things seem to us and we treat it as if it's objectively true. It's at that point, the problem is that at that point we lose control. It controls us.

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• 1:59:09André Duqum?

  It seems like a really simple, but also radically transformative thing to infuse doubt into the things we feel we're so certain about. I remember, I mean, I'd butcher if I tried to share, but I think that Chinese proverb of the son who's the the father whose son fell off the horse and broke his arm and you know what I'm referring to. About who are we to play God in our lives and know the reason, whether it's good or bad, and have these value judgments on the events that are occurring? Because we don't know the full picture.

• 1:59:39Speaker 00

  This idea about, you know, it's hard to evaluate whether something's good or bad or favorable or unfavorable was very familiar in Greek culture as well. For the simple reason that it's a mainstay of Greek tragedy. So Oedipus meets a beautiful woman, is a queen, and he marries her. Like, happy days, like, you know, it's good fortune. But then he discovers that it turns out it's his own mother. He didn't realize that because he'd been abandoned as a child. Now it becomes a tragedy, right? So the Greeks celebrated reversal of fortune in their literature. And so this was a really familiar idea to them, which is what that Chinese proverb is talking about.

• 2:00:24Speaker 00

  Socrates turns that into like a self-help technique, basically a psychological coping strategy. There's a passage, if I can remember it rightly, in Plato's Republic, where Socrates is talking about the Greek tragedies. And he says, I don't think the heroes in Greek tragedies are great role models. And the guy he's talking to is Plato's brother, Glaucon. And he says, what are you talking about, Socrates? Tragedy is like high art, you know, you should like, it's kind of weird to criticize it. And Socrates says, well, the people in Greek tragedies are often the authors of their own misfortune. And Glaucon says, what do you mean? And he says, well, a wise person wouldn't respond to misfortune in that way. They're kind of making things worse for themselves.

• 2:01:09Speaker 00

  And Glaucon says, well, you know, how would a wise person respond to misfortune? And Socrates says, well, he tells himself four things.

• 2:01:21Speaker 00

  And the first thing he says is what you're referring to, that he can never be sure whether something's good fortune or bad fortune until he's seen how it turns out in the long term. You know, you could lose your job and it seems like a disaster, but maybe then you go on to start a business and it's the best thing that you ever did. I couldn't find a supervisor for my PhD when I was a young guy, but because I couldn't find someone who, I couldn't find someone who would supervise stoicism, like it was a niche subject. So I took all my notes from my PhD and I published a book. And then it gave me a career as an author. So it turned out to be a good thing, right? So Socrates says, the wise person suspends judgment about whether something's good fortune or bad fortune, because he doesn't really know for sure how it's going to pan

• 2:02:05Speaker 00

  out in the long term. And the second thing is that he sees grieving excessively about things or freaking out as simply adding another level to suffering. So misfortune's already painful, like to worry about it, ruminate about it doubles the pain unnecessarily. And then the third thing is that the wise person tells himself that nothing is that important in the grand scheme of things. So a single misfortune doesn't entirely define your whole life. It would be blowing it out of proportion in that regard. But like the view from above, if you look at the bigger picture, like one mishap or one misfortune can't like define or tarnish like an entire life. And he says, the fourth thing is that

• 2:02:50Speaker 00

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

• 2:03:14Speaker 00

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

• 2:03:56Speaker 00

  Sometimes, you know, in the ancient world, people knew these things were said, but now we've lost a connection with these ancient texts, and we don't realize they have these relatively simple pieces of self-help psychology in them.

• 2:04:11André Duqum?

  I love the first one being suspend judgment, because it can feel like too much of a stretch to accept the things we perceive to be as horrible transgressions in our life. But suspending our judgment about them just gives us a little bit of space to be able to have a different perspective, zoom out. Could you restate the four just succinctly? What were the four again?

• 2:04:35Speaker 00

  So suspending judgment about whether something's good fortune or bad fortune, because you don't know how it's going to pan out in the long term. Telling yourself that adding additional suffering to your misfortune simply doubles the pain unnecessarily. Telling yourself that nothing is all-important, like, no individual setback is catastrophic enough to tarnish your entire life. And then, fourthly, telling yourself that worrying excessively about it would prevent you from doing the very thing that's most required, which would be to think clearly and problem-solve.

• 2:05:13André Duqum?

  Very practical for us all to apply in the modern day.

• 2:05:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, who would have thought? Plato and Greek philosophy, you know, like, people used to know this, and then it kind of got forgotten.

• 2:05:26André Duqum?

  Especially the zoom out one, I mean, obviously, it's become a cliche in terms of gaining perspective in our life. Is it the overview effect when astronauts look back down on Earth?

• 2:05:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:05:36André Duqum?

  Right? It's like if we could at least in our back pocket, maintain a perspective of our both cosmic significance on one hand, but our absolute insignificance on the other, how much that would help us?

• 2:05:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, that that ability. So a little anecdote about that. The Stoics talk a lot about what modern scholars call the view from above. The Stoics had never been in space. Why? They had no idea what the planet Earth looked like and they didn't know what the solar system was like, but they did cosmology. They drew maps and diagrams. So they actually were able to figuratively contemplate the smallness of human life and the vastness of space and time. They don't need a picture taken from space in order to get the basic idea. Why would this be so important? Well, there's a lot of things we could say about it, but one that I think is quite helpful is that we know from modern research on stress

• 2:06:34Speaker 00

  and emotions that when the amygdala hijacks our thinking and when our fight or flight response is triggered, one of the symptoms of that is that our attention becomes narrowed in scope. So we engage in what's called threat monitoring. It becomes like a laser beam focused on where we think the potential sign of danger is. Now, that could be useful. If you're an animal and there's a predator on the horizon, you want to forget about everything else and just focus like a laser beam on the predator. And if it starts to move towards you, like, you know, to respond immediately in bold. But the price we pay for that is it's selective thinking and we shut out awareness of the context and the environment. So it is useful if you're a small furry animal and there's a predator

• 2:07:17Speaker 00

  on the horizon, but it might not be that useful when you're in a board meeting or you're talking to your bank manager or you're having a discussion with your kids or something like that.

• 2:07:26André Duqum?

  Or even looking for your keys.

• 2:07:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:07:29André Duqum?

  I found that selective awareness of when I'm trying to find something I've lost. Narrowly focusing my attention on trying to find it is almost less helpful than sitting for a second and just like not putting so much importance on it and be like, oh, I remember where I put it, you know?

• 2:07:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, like, there's a bunch of ways in which it it might be more useful to maintain the flexibility and expansiveness of your attention. So I think the Stoics trained themselves, so Marcus Aurelius at one point implies that he does this every day. Like, sometimes he'll literally say, picture to yourself every day. So he's literally saying this is a contemplative practice that he's doing regularly. So he's picturing the view from above. He's imagining his position and the whole of space and the whole of time, and he's expanding his attention. And in doing that, he's training himself to do the opposite of what happens when the amygdala hijacks our thinking. He's restoring the activity or integration of the prefrontal cortex more fully.

• 2:08:26Speaker 00

  And I think there's some reason to believe that when we our attention gets narrowed in that way, we often lose self-awareness. You know, one of the part of the price that we pay is if I'm really angry with you and I see you as a threat and all my attention is focused on you, I'll I'll tend to be less aware of what I'm doing. Whereas when I start expanding my attention, it tends to facilitate mindfulness or self-awareness, which then makes it easier for me to evaluate whether what I'm doing is actually helpful or making things worse. So the Stoics are training themselves to restore self-awareness, but to counteract this kind of tunnel vision that we get when we're very emotional about things. Here's a little bit of trivia for you, by the way.

• 2:09:07André Duqum?

  I love, by the way, we need to start your own trivia show.

• 2:09:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, like ancient philosophy trivia, right? I like I like the trivia as well. So in the Meditations, Marcus, there's a kind of well-known passage where he says, the mind free from violent passions, and the word he uses is apathia there, by the way. The mind free from violent passions is like an impenetrable citadel is a popular translation of it. And for a long time, it kind of bugged me, you know, when something bugs you and you think, I keep meaning to look this up, but I never get around to it. And I thought, what Greek word is being translated the citadel? Like, I was like, I'm kind of curious, like, is this the word for four or something?

• 2:09:50Speaker 00

  It's kind of an odd, like, it's quite a specific word and, you know, and it just kind of bugged me. And then one day I went back and I checked the original Greek and I was like, oh, it's literally Acropolis in Greek. And I thought, that's weird, because there's another passage where he's describing the view from above. And he says, imagine that you're looking down on law courts and agoras, agoras, and merchants and so on. I thought that is literally the view from the Acropolis in Athens.

• 2:10:21André Duqum?

  What's the Acropolis from the light on?

• 2:10:23Speaker 00

  Well, the Acropolis literally means high up place. Like, Polis is city and acro is like acrobat, it's like high up. So in the ancient world, people would often build towns or settlements around hills. Because if someone attacked, they could all retreat up the hill and they build a palisade around it. And it was easier to defend, right?

• 2:10:47André Duqum?

  So it would mean like an impenetrable perspective also?

• 2:10:51Speaker 00

  And Athens, like Athens, there are many Acropoli in ancient Greece, but the most famous by far, even at Marcus really this time, was the Athenian Acropolis. The Athenian Acropolis evolved into a temple complex. So the main temple is the Parthenon, which is the temple to the goddess Athena. And so the view from the Acropolis, the impenetrable citadel that he's referring to, is the Temple of Athena in the middle of Athens that looks down on the Agora, which is where all the kind of busyness of life took place, the market and the law courts. It's also probably where Socrates was put on trial,

• 2:11:34Speaker 00

  where he was imprisoned, put on trial and executed as well. So all the drama happened down there. So Marcus might be picturing this kind of metaphysical, godlike view, but he may also be literally imagining looking down from the Temple of Athena and the Acropolis at the Agora.

• 2:11:52André Duqum?

  It makes me directly think of, and I just love all the through lines between the different schools of thought. But in the Buddhist tradition, they speak about creating distance between you, your awareness, and your thought and your emotions.

• 2:12:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:12:05André Duqum?

  Especially your judgments and your opinions. There's this analogy of being stuck in traffic and the frustration of being in bumper to bumper, and you don't know if you're gonna miss your flight because you're headed to the airport. And there is a certain resistance you hold in that space, and then you finally, you actually make your flight. You get to the airport, you make your flight. You take the plane and you look down from a few thousand feet above, or 10,000 feet above, back on that same traffic you were once in, and suddenly it doesn't bother you as much.

• 2:12:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:12:34André Duqum?

  And the fundamental difference is the distance between you and the perceived problem, you know?

• 2:12:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:12:42André Duqum?

  Seems like there is a correlation there.

• 2:12:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, definitely. And it's kind of like, in some ways, the view from above, I think, is one of the most important practices in Stoicism, because I think it actually sums up potentially a lot, there's a lot in it going on. It creates some distance or separation between the event and your evaluation of it. It places things within a wider context as well. And potentially places things within a wider chronological context, too. It arguably forces you to acknowledge the impermanence or transience of things more. And I guess if you do it the way the Stoics described, and you think of your life within like the broader context of the history of the universe, like the vast river of time,

• 2:13:29Speaker 00

  then it also forces you to contemplate your own mortality.

• 2:13:32André Duqum?

  Yep.

• 2:13:33Speaker 00

  In a sense, you see, you know, you only have three score of years and 10 or whatever on the earth, and this incident is one moment in it. So putting things within a kind of realistic perspective like that, grasping the transience of things, like, you know, it's powerful and transformative, but there's also, I think, something kind of, you know, archetypal and perennial about it again. It wasn't only the Stoics that did this, and ancient Greece philosophers from different schools of philosophy did the same thing as well.

• 2:14:08André Duqum?

  For most of our life, we are spent with this subtle anxiety of life not occurring or happening the way we would ideally like it to.

• 2:14:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:14:20André Duqum?

  And so much of that suffering occurs, obviously, in our imagination.

• 2:14:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:14:25André Duqum?

  One of the tools I've heard you refer to is deliberately imagining the worst-case scenario.

• 2:14:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:14:31André Duqum?

  And rehearsing the worst. So what is that for people that want to maybe give it a go?

• 2:14:35Speaker 00

  Well, the Stoics call it premeditatio malorum, which means kind of premeditating or anticipating bad stuff. Premeditating adversity is how I usually gloss it or translate it. It's very common in Stoicism, but actually, it probably goes back even earlier, yet again, to like earlier schools of philosophy. It's weirdly similar to things that we do in cognitive behavioral therapy today. So one of the most robust techniques in modern psychotherapy since the 1950s, one of the earliest techniques in behavior therapy involves repeatedly imagining things that trigger anxiety until the anxiety wears off, basically.

• 2:15:20Speaker 00

  There's so much research on what we call exposure therapy. Exposure therapy would be facing your fears in reality. Imaginal exposure would be doing it in your imagination, right? The Stoics are kind of talking about both, that this technique is doing it in your imagination. There's a ton of research that shows that this is effective, and we know quite a lot about the mechanisms involved. There are actually multiple ways in which it can benefit you.

• 2:15:47Speaker 00

  So one which the Stoics imply sometimes that they understand is that if you are in the presence of something that triggers, say, anxiety, and to some extent, this is true of other emotions, it triggers your amygdala, like the fear circuit's activated, there's a surge of adrenaline, but that's not permanent. Like, it kind of spikes, and then gradually, the nervous arousal will usually wear off as long as there isn't anything that keeps re-evoking it, and nothing dangerous happens, and you remain in the situation. So psychologists call that emotional habituation. It's the natural wearing off of anxiety over time.

• 2:16:31Speaker 00

  The easiest way to think of it is in terms of heart rate. If you take someone with a cat phobia and you put them in a room with cats, their heart rate will almost double within less than five seconds. But it doesn't stay at that level. Like if they stay in the room, their heart rate will gradually start to come back down again. And if they do that repeatedly, they'll condition themselves to no longer experience. If the next day you do the same thing, the heart rate will go up, but not as high as it did before, and it will reduce more quickly. And then the day after and the day after. So exposure therapy has, for animal phobias, has about a 90% success rate within about three hours or so. Like it's very robust as a technique.

• 2:17:16Speaker 00

  And the Stoics understand this basic idea, like to some extent. They know, they talk about the freshness of the initial impression triggering an emotion. So when it's no longer as fresh, they seem to realise that anxiety and other emotions wear off over time. So premeditatio malorum means imagining bad things that can happen, kind of until you get bored with them, until the anxiety starts to wear off. But I think there's also another process going on. When we do, you could also call this mental rehearsal. When you do imaginal exposure or mental rehearsal, it's also an opportunity to practise responding differently to the trigger.

• 2:17:58Speaker 00

  So we talked earlier about the two phases of emotion. What the Stoics are doing here is replicating the initial phase. They're deliberately evoking the impression and the automatic response that we have to it in order to withhold assent, as they put it.

• 2:18:18André Duqum?

  Withhold assent, meaning the ascent, the movement towards the reaction.

• 2:18:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, not agreeing with their evaluation of it. So I may imagine I give a presentation at a conference and everybody laughs at me and like this is the worst thing I've ever heard. And so.

• 2:18:35André Duqum?

  Or you stumble on your words and you make a mess of yourself, like that imaginal exposure there.

• 2:18:40Speaker 00

  Deliberately imagine the worst that could happen, right? So I'm deliberately evoking the trigger or the impression. And I'm allowing myself to feel the proto passions or the first movements, the kind of initial uncomfortable reaction, like the discomfort that I have in response to it. And then I'm preventing it from escalating, right? Because I'm retaining some self-awareness and detachment, right? So I'm saying, okay, just because I feel as if this is catastrophic, doesn't mean that it actually is. This is just an impression. Like, it's not entirely like the thing that it claims to represent, as Epictetus puts it. So just because it seems catastrophic, it doesn't mean that it really is catastrophic.

• 2:19:24Speaker 00

  Maybe not the whole story. And maybe I'll evaluate it differently tomorrow, like, or if I give myself enough time to get used to it. So this kind of mindfulness, if you like, or psychologists also call this cognitive diffusion, like separating our evaluation or our thoughts from the event. Premeditation is an opportunity to rehearse that kind of detachment. So even though this is uncomfortable, I don't have to buy into it completely. I can see it as a false alarm, basically, and get used to viewing it in that way, rather than allowing myself to be swept along by it.

• 2:20:06André Duqum?

  When I've done my own value, you know, analysis and seeing what what means most to me, clarity of thought, clarity of mind, seeing reality as it is, or as close as one could possibly even do, is, you know, really high up there. And it seems like a lot of these descriptions on the emotional experience.

• 2:20:26André Duqum?

  Momentarily blind us from seeing and perceiving life as it is. I've heard you refer to anger as a temporary madness. Any thoughts there?

• 2:20:36Speaker 00

  Stoics, Seneca calls it that. I think that phrase originally came from Euripides. Euripides is a Greek tragedian who was quite philosophical. There was a rumor that Socrates was friends with him and helped him to write some of his plays. So the Stoics loved to quote him.

• 2:20:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, a lot of the things that the Stoics say cash in in terms of modern research or the psychology of the emotions. I mean, I kind of feel almost slightly, you know, it makes me cringe a little bit to say, you know, they were ahead of their time. They're way ahead of their time. You know, it's like a cliche, but like they were. They were like way ahead of their time. I mean, they wrote a book on cognitive behavioral psychotherapy 2,250 years ago. That's kind of crazy when you think about it. So when they say emotions are temporary madness, like one of the big innovations that the Stoics made, which, well, I say innovation, but they inherited this from Socrates and

• 2:21:39Speaker 00

  maybe from other earlier thinkers. But the Stoics really made this idea their own, that the emotions are cognitive. So like Albert Ellis, the founder of cognitive therapy, used to say, somebody would say,

• 2:21:57Speaker 00

  I feel depressed or I feel angry. And Ellis used to say to them, sure, but it's not just how you feel, is it? It's also how you think. And we tend to underestimate, we naturally underestimate, the role that belief, thinking, cognition plays in shaping our emotions. And that's crucial because once we realize the role that thinking plays in shaping our emotions, it gives us more leverage. It opens up a whole toolbox of cognitive therapy techniques. So when the Stoics say anger is temporary madness, and they could say the same about anxiety or worry. Other dysfunctional emotions.

• 2:22:39Speaker 00

  What they're drawing attention to is the fact that it's accompanied by many cognitive distortions. Like, we're using the subcortical regions in our brain and they distort our thinking. So, I mean, one way of understanding this very simply is if you imagine that when the fight or flight response is triggered, your brain, it goes into a kind of emergency mode. It's like, I could die, you know, this is an emergency, I need to do something fast. So you begin to process information in a more simplified way. Like, so we exhibit more black and white, extreme, all or nothing thinking.

• 2:23:23Speaker 00

  And so, like, fight or flight itself, either a fight this thing or a flee, choose now, right? So if I reduce my options to like two and I pick one, I can make a decision more quickly. But, you know, that often leads to a lot of problems. Like, it's not helpful for problem solving. Particularly, funnily enough, in relationships, or when you're dealing with other human beings. If it's a simple, kind of practical decision, like a saber-toed tiger's attacking me, either a fighter or a runaway, you know, pick one now, like rapid decision-making. But dealing with like a problem in a boardroom or a problem in your marriage, it's going

• 2:24:02Speaker 00

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

• 2:24:43André Duqum?

  I believe Epictetus is quoted as only a madman seeks figs in winter.

• 2:24:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:24:49André Duqum?

  I'm curious your thoughts on the limits of reason

• 2:24:55André Duqum?

  towards emotion and because they are kind of fundamentally two different forces.

• 2:25:01Speaker 00

  Uh huh.

• 2:25:01André Duqum?

  And sometimes

• 2:25:05André Duqum?

  not being analytical in our emotional process serves us more. Um, so I'm curious your thoughts on that.

• 2:25:11Speaker 00

  I think the distinction we made earlier between these two phases of emotion.

• 2:25:16André Duqum?

  Yep.

• 2:25:17Speaker 00

  Helps to address that to a large extent. So funnily enough, I mean, the Stoics definitely place a lot of value. The Stoics love reason. There's no question about that. Socrates loves reason, but the Stoics also clearly carve out a niche for these primitive irrational responses. And they're not in a big battle against them. They think it's not that we're trying to get rid of them or replace them with reason. It's more that reason is what happens next. Right? So there's a place for these initial automatic appraisals that we make of threat.

• 2:26:00Speaker 00

  You know, they're in the sense that Stoics see them as neither good nor bad. They're just natural. Like, it's just what happens.

• 2:26:08Speaker 00

  But reason can be useful in deciding whether we act on them. Like, whether we reevaluate them. What we do next, basically.

• 2:26:19André Duqum?

  One other framework I thought would be useful here, there's just so many that seem very applicable to all of our lives. One of which is de-romanticizing desire.

• 2:26:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:26:28André Duqum?

  And the kind of process they have for that. Why would anyone care to learn what that is and the goal of it?

• 2:26:35Speaker 00

  Well, I think the Stoics probably realize that desire is one of the main things that shapes our quality of life and our emotions. And a lot of the things that we desire, perhaps the problem isn't so much in terms of the things that we desire, but the way that we desire them. The Stoics have a concept that's kind of similar to non-attachment, basically. So they think that being overly attached to external things that aren't directly under our control is basically a recipe for emotional disturbance. Do you, when you say de-romanticizing desire, are you kind of talking about in relationships

• 2:27:20Speaker 00

  specifically, or desire for, more generally?

• 2:27:25André Duqum?

  Yeah, a lot of the frameworks that I think we've been exploring help kind of subvert or undermine the things we think we want.

• 2:27:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, okay.

• 2:27:32André Duqum?

  Which are directly tied to the suffering because we don't have them. And by breaking it down into its parts, again, to the physics of things, we can see things a bit for more of what they are. So I think in that sense.

• 2:27:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, so the Stoics have this idea called the reserve clause. Hupexarisus is in Greek, so it's kind of like, in Greek, a technical term. It's tricky to translate. It's usually translated as the reserve clause. And it means that they say to themselves that I will do this or achieve this goal if nothing permits me. So they attach a kind of caveat to their pursuit of external things. Sometimes they say fate willing or God permitting. It's a bit like early Christians used to say, or medieval Christians would say diovalente at the end of letters. It means they'd write a letter and then they say God willing at the end. It's a bit like saying Inshallah or something like that.

• 2:28:26Speaker 00

  So it's a form of non-attachment to the outcome of our actions in a way. Very similar to a basic principle that underlies cognitive behavioural therapy, especially the earliest form of cognitive behavioural therapy, which is the called rational emotive behavioural therapy. It was founded by Albert Ellis in the 1950s. And Ellis had read the Stoics and Stoic thinking kind of permeates his approach to therapy. So Ellis, Ellis is the kind of guy that had a huge amount of clinical experience. So he didn't do much research, although many of his ideas were subsequently confirmed by researchers in psychotherapy. He had great clinical intuition, I think, and a lot of practical experience.

• 2:29:11Speaker 00

  And Ellis firmly believed that most emotional problems can be traced to having a, to a problem with desire, basically. But more than that, it's desires that become excessive and become transformed into rigid demands, essentially. So Ellis thought it would be natural to say, I strongly desire that other people treat me politely. But it's not entirely under my control, whether they do that or not. Sometimes they're probably going to do the opposite. And if that happens, when it happens, it's not the end of the world. I can cope with it.

• 2:29:54Speaker 00

  So that'd be like a normal, flexible, adaptive way of having preferences or desires. But as our desires become stronger, they easily cross a kind of threshold into becoming rigid, absolutistic, black and white demands. Where we turn that preference into saying something like, people must respect me. They have to, they've got to, they need to. And if they don't, I can't stand it. Like, it's awful. That's a recipe for neurosis, basically, as Ellis saw. And the Stoics say something kind of similar, but in different language, essentially.

• 2:30:33Speaker 00

  The Stoics think that when we have an excessive desire, they define unhealthy desires and emotions as being excessive, irrational and unhealthy. Those are the three characteristics that define them.

• 2:30:50Speaker 00

  They have this idea as well that when we want something too much and we treat it as a rigid demand, sometimes that's we're about not to get what we want. And if we're unprepared for that and we treat it as a shock, I can't believe it. You know, people need to be polite to me. This guy wasn't. I can't believe it. You know, that's bound to result in frustration. And then that frustration often escalates into anger or anxiety or depression or whatever. So the solution to that is what Ellis called high frustration tolerance, which is kind of what stoicism is building in a way. That's the ability to replace rigid demands with what Ellis calls or sometimes calls

• 2:31:35Speaker 00

  a rational preference. And the Stoics also call described as a preference. Like, you know, I strongly prefer it if people are polite to me, but they don't have to be. Like, it's not under my control. Like, shit happens, you know? Sometimes they're gonna be like obnoxious to me. When Marcus Aurelius says every morning, he prepares himself by imagining that he's gonna encounter people that are deceptive and rude and dishonest, like, in a way, he's rehearsing this. It's closely intertwined with the premeditatio malorum. Like, I prefer it if everyone is wise and virtuous, but I also anticipate the fact

• 2:32:17Speaker 00

  that often they're not going to be, and I can handle that.

• 2:32:21André Duqum?

  When it comes to desire for material things, sex, food, power, money, what examples have they given to be able to break things down and to deromanticize it?

• 2:32:36Speaker 00

  Oh, you mean, the Stoics think that-

• 2:32:40André Duqum?

  Like fine wine is fermented grape juice.

• 2:32:44Speaker 00

  Marcus Aurelius talks about, he says, describes sex as just the exchange of bodily fluids, or something like that, the phrase he uses. So this is kind of a technique that probably goes back to the pre-Socratic philosophers. Some of the pre-Socratic philosophers were really, they were kind of divided in the sense that some pre-Socratic philosophers were really mystical, like Pythagoras, and some of them were almost the opposite, they were kind of proto-scientists, and they had a very naturalistic worldview, like Anaxagoras, for example. He was the first philosopher to come to Athens, and so he kind of, in a sense, set the agenda for philosophy at Athens.

• 2:33:27Speaker 00

  And Anaxagoras liked to describe everything just in terms of physical interactions, like in a very unmystical way, down-to-earth way, to kind of try and get away from superstitious religious thinking. And the Stoics inherit this sort of naturalistic way of explaining things from Anaxagoras. They thought, they sometimes call it phantasia catalectica, or, which is hard to translate, but one translation, a rough translation, is objective representation, some people have called it, or you could say a kind of naturalistic description of events. So Marcus says that the finest Falernian wine, the most expensive Roman wine, is just fermented grape juice.

• 2:34:11Speaker 00

  His imperial purple robes as emperor, like the most precious thing, and incidentally, a callback to Zeno, like they're dyed in the purple dye that the Phoenicians traded, is just sheep's wool dyed in shellfish gore, is how he describes it. It's very similar, there's a quote attributed to Napoleon, where he says a throne is just a bench covered in velvet. Like, so like a really kind of, what's the, you said deromanticizing, like a really down-to-earth description, matter-of-fact description of things, that takes away, I think of it as taking away the kind of, some of the emotive rhetoric that fuels our emotional reaction.

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• 2:36:00Speaker 00

  So thanks.

• 2:36:00André Duqum?

  And not that we can't enjoy things, but the insatiable desire to fulfill every urge is going to lead us to a lethargic and suffering existence.

• 2:36:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, the Stoics want us to, they want us to see things for what they really are, right? And not to kind of distort things through the, the language that we use. And Marcus also says that when a meal is set before you, you should just say, "This is just a dead pig." "This is just a dead fish" and stuff like that. Rather than "This is some luxurious extravagant meal a chef has prepared."

• 2:36:36André Duqum?

  It also fuels into the ethical perspective of things too. When you, we take for granted the modern conveniences and comforts we have today.

• 2:36:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:36:45André Duqum?

  And are often, when shopping in a grocery store, completely oblivious to the animal agriculture industry that is causing suffering to millions of, of animals. And I think breaking things and calling things what they are in that sort of objective sense helps us actually examine and...

• 2:37:07André Duqum?

  Yeah, subvert our subjective desires and preferences so strongly.

• 2:37:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, the Romans didn't have this kind of concept of animal rights that we have today. But they kind of, like you're saying, they kind of have the seeds of the attitude in a sense. And that Marcus wants us to see things accurately. And he wants us to understand where things came from as well and how they're going to end up. So seeing the life cycle of objects around us and people around us from a broader perspective. The Stoics are always, in a sense, just striving for a certain type of accuracy in their thinking. That, so some people would say, well, how, what's the relationship between philosophy and psychotherapy? Some people think it's odd that these two things would go together at all.

• 2:37:53Speaker 00

  But the Stoics believe that there's a particular type of objectivity, precision and accuracy in our thinking. And that when understood from a particular point of view is inherently therapeutic. They think that violent emotions or unhealthy emotions tend to be associated with a kind of inaccurate or distorted thinking. And cognitive therapy, you know, lends modern support to that view.

• 2:38:23André Duqum?

  Another interesting avenue that you mentioned earlier was wisdom versus its appearance. And you refer to the sophists, the dialectic and the debate style that would quickly take philosophical inquiry as a means to build one's own egocentricity and moral superiority. And so I'm curious, your, your thoughts on this, this line between being wise and sounding wise? This, this line that I walk on this show and people listening, you know, between.

• 2:39:01André Duqum?

  Vainly receiving bountiful information and doing nothing with it in your life.

• 2:39:06Speaker 00

  Well, it's a problem from like modern day influences in a way, right? And in some ways, all of us, if we're writing books and we're doing podcasts, we're kind of overlapping in a sense with what the sophists did in the ancient world. But all ancient philosophers did that as well. They were sophism and philosophy weren't completely separate, although there was some overlap between them. It's always a hazard if your job is to discuss philosophy or you write books about it, you know, that you could sell out, basically, and kind of sacrifice your values to tell people what they want to hear, basically. Plato's famous dialogue, Plato talks about this a lot, so do other ancient philosophers.

• 2:39:47Speaker 00

  Probably his most famous dialogue about it is the Gorgias, which is about the art of persuasion. And the sophists taught the art of persuasion. So the guys that said they were professional wise men specialized in persuasion skills, rhetoric and appearing wise, winning arguments. Socrates said that paradoxically in another dialogue in the Protagoras, he says that he thinks it's better to lose an argument than to win one, which would be absolutely shocking to the sophists. He says this to Protagoras and he kind of actually tricks him into agreeing with him in front of his students,

• 2:40:32Speaker 00

  which is kind of funny in a way because you can see Protagoras is kind of thinking, okay, like, I kind of see why you're saying that, but I'm a bit reluctant to admit that because, you know, my whole career is about avoiding losing arguments. So Socrates says, in a philosophical debate, the person who loses actually gains more because they learn something. Right? So I really, you know, value somebody proving that I'm wrong. And Protagoras is kind of like, yeah. These guys are paying me to win, teach them how to always win arguments so they look clever, you know? So it shows the clash in values in a sense between the sophists and the philosophers.

• 2:41:16Speaker 00

  So sophists placed a lot more emphasis on.

• 2:41:21Speaker 00

  Using debating skills. So today, the internet is rife with often kind of political influencers that like do debates, right? But I mean, it's odd if you stop to think about it for a minute.

• 2:41:36Speaker 00

  We don't usually think that those type of debates settle questions in science. Like, that would seem odd. You know, just because somebody is a good debater and good at winning arguments. It doesn't mean that they're actually right about the stuff that they're saying. Often, people win arguments by changing the topic, attacking the person that they're speaking to.

• 2:42:03Speaker 00

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

• 2:42:48Speaker 00

  So they trained young politicians and self-improvement. And in a sense, I mean, sometimes people looking back on it think, what did these guys do? They taught oratory, but they were also kind of self-improvement gurus? It seems like a weird combination. At least, it seemed weirder to me in the past. But with the rise of the internet and modern day influencers, a lot of self-improvement authors today get involved with politics. And increasingly, there's a kind of blurring of this distinction between those two domains, basically, those two types of discourse, right? So, I mean...

• 2:43:32Speaker 00

  Maybe I'd like to name examples, like there are dudes, a lot of the dudes in the manosphere, is it really Andrew Tate, like for example, has political views, but engages in a lot of political rhetoric, but is also kind of offering some self-improvement advice in a sense. Jordan Peterson, like writes self-help books, but you know, did a lot of political talking points in his videos and stuff. And that's a strange combination in a way, because usually in order to engage in political rhetoric, you you kind of have to manipulate people's emotions. Like you want to exploit their fear and their anger normally to get them

• 2:44:15Speaker 00

  worked up about things. That's traditionally how political oratory works throughout the ages. It's almost the complete opposite of what we do in psychotherapy. So usually when we're doing cognitive therapy, we're like, you know, undoing a lot of the effects of political rhetoric on people, basically. Political rhetoric often, for example, involves blaming other people for stuff. Like, you know, throughout the ages, that's clearly been a recurring feature of it. Whereas in psychotherapy, one of the main things that we do is get people to take more personal responsibility for their lives and their feelings and so on. And Socrates and the Stoics were aware of this antagonism as well.

• 2:44:59Speaker 00

  There are ways, Socrates acknowledges and the Stoics realize there are ways that you could use persuasion and rhetoric in the service of philosophy and wisdom, but often particularly particularly in the hands of politicians and sophists, the two things are somewhat at odds, basically. So Socrates thought we need to be extremely careful about rhetoric and persuasion skills, because it's very easy for people to exploit us and manipulate us by using fairly simple techniques. I think, you know, maybe I mentioned earlier that in the ancient world, their understanding of rhetoric, if anything, was like way more

• 2:45:42Speaker 00

  sophisticated than ours today. So the the sophists, almost like in the Gorges, for example. They they have this kind of, what's the word? Sort of grandiose idea of their own power. Like, they're they're kind of intoxicated. Like, they come across as quite intoxicated by the power. They say, if I want someone killed, you know, if I want someone exiled, like, persuasion skills allow me to do that. Um, Gorgias says, or one of the characters, or maybe one of the other people in that dialogue,

• 2:46:21Speaker 00

  says to Socrates, they're talking about using persuasion tactics before the political assembly in Athens to sway votes and things like that. You know, so they say, like, if I want a country invaded, I can use persuasion to cause, start a war. Like, if I want, that's how powerful rhetoric is, they're basically saying. Um, so at one point, one of them says, in a debate between a physician who's an expert on health but has no training in rhetoric and an orator who's trained in rhetoric but knows nothing about medicine, the rhetorician or orator will win every time, is what Gorgias

• 2:47:06Speaker 00

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

• 2:47:33André Duqum?

  Hmm. I'm curious what other through lines you drive to the modern time we find ourselves in, with so much infinite access to information online. In a way, in many traditions, you needed to be initiated for. You needed to spend lifetime earning your right to gain access to, in some traditions, uh, can just now show up on your Instagram feed, you know? And.

• 2:48:04André Duqum?

  There's so much good that comes to the access we have. And yet, there's this lack of embodiment and integration because of the medium it's shared in.

• 2:48:14Speaker 00

  Yeah. There's a lot that I could say about this and I, you know, I, I think the, the simplest observation to make, as I mentioned earlier, when I was a young guy, there wasn't as much self-help literature around. And now there's loads, but it seems obvious to say that people, despite consuming far more self-help and self-improvement content than they did a few decades ago, are people helped that much more. It's rates of depression and anxiety disorders like plummeting as a result of all the self-improvement stuff that people are consuming. Why hasn't it had a bigger impact on our emotional wellbeing? Like,

• 2:48:55Speaker 00

  there's something kind of odd about this. Now, there's lots of really good self-improvement and self-help advice. And I, but I think there are problems with the whole field. And there are reasons why people maybe don't get as much benefit from it as they potentially could. And they're not all things that authors and influencers are to blame for. Like, to some extent, there are just aspects of the, the medium through which we're consuming it. So what are they? One of them, a very, one very simple observation, explanation for why self-help isn't more helpful, is that in order to improve yourself, you need

• 2:49:38Speaker 00

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

• 2:50:04Speaker 00

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

• 2:50:48Speaker 00

  the wrong problem with it, perhaps.

• 2:50:53Speaker 00

  Normally, the way around that would be that somebody else would tell you what your problems are, right? And we have blind spots for our own weaknesses.

• 2:51:06Speaker 00

  There's a, in one of Aesop's fables, he says everybody's born with two sacks hanging around their neck. He said, there's a big sack that hangs in front of us, around our neck, that's right under our nose all of the time, and it contains everybody else's flaws, and we can see it wherever we go. And then there's a little sack that hangs behind our neck that we can never see, because it's like in the blind spot of a camera, right? And everyone else can see it, but we can't ever get a perspective on it, we can't ever see it, and it contains our own flaws. And Galen mentions this, quotes this in an essay that he wrote, a book he wrote, talking about the need to find a mentor.

• 2:51:48Speaker 00

  So he says, it's very important, in ancient culture, they thought, to find somebody who's more experienced, who's wiser, who can be completely honest with you, and is going to be able to tell you where your weaknesses are. I think it's interesting, by the way, that Marcus Aurelius says when he struggled with his anger, the person that he became angry with most often was Junius Rusticus, like his mentor, because we can guess he was probably provoking him by pinpointing his weaknesses. The Stoics thought it was incredibly important that you need to be able to tolerate people speaking frankly and openly with you and kind of challenging you, basically.

• 2:52:32Speaker 00

  They saw that as a sort of prerequisite of self-improvement. So one difficulty with self-help, if it's completely self-directed, if we're not careful, we just avoid addressing our blind spots and we don't have the kind of external perspective that a mentor or a therapist or a counselor or a parent or a friend might potentially be able to bring. There's another problem, which is that, kind of relates to what we said earlier about the sophists and them teaching slogans or sayings that people would memorize parrot fashion. And Socrates thinking that real wisdom comes from being able to question things.

• 2:53:13Speaker 00

  Socrates, I think, would be an example of somebody who demonstrates exceptional cognitive flexibility, as we call it today, the ability to kind of see things from different perspectives and look beyond our rigid assumptions, basically. His method is like a masterclass in developing cognitive flexibility, which we know is associated with better coping and mental health. Consuming self-help advice from books potentially does the opposite. So people love lists, bullet points, like they want things to be compressed and simplified for them.

• 2:53:53Speaker 00

  But what research tends to show is that when people learn a coping strategy in the form of a verbal rule, they often apply it rigidly. And so you could say you could take any saying or any coping strategy and make it maladaptive by using it too rigidly and inflexibly, right? Whether it's my, some techniques are generally better than others, but all techniques can be used too rigidly in a way that backfires. Maybe they work in some situations, but if you use them in other situations, it could be counterproductive. For example, mindfulness.

• 2:54:31Speaker 00

  Is generally pretty beneficial, but it could be that some people who have health anxiety and are constantly scanning their body for physical symptoms of illness might turn mindfulness just into another form of threat monitoring. Social anxiety potentially involves heightened self-focused attention. Some people who learn mindfulness techniques might turn it into maladaptive self-focused attention. It potentially makes their social anxiety worse, right? So you could say there's a good way and a bad way of doing any coping strategy or any self-improvement technique. When we learn things in a simplified way from self-help books,

• 2:55:14Speaker 00

  you know, without somebody kind of mentoring us, without trial and error learning, you know, the risk is that we use these strategies rigidly and they become maladaptive. What research on stress and coping shows is that the people who have the best resilience exhibit something that researchers call coping flexibility. So they're able to choose selectively from a variety of different coping strategies. And they're also able to take strategies and combine them or adapt them depending on the needs of different circumstances. So I think that's another reason that self-help sometimes isn't as helpful as it could be, because people consume it in a slightly passive way,

• 2:55:56Speaker 00

  which can lead to them applying it in an overly simplistic or rigid manner.

• 2:56:03André Duqum?

  It reminds me of Zeno's compromise of theory being only good insofar as it makes you more virtuous. And this yogic perspective of vidya versus kyan, meaning, what does it actually mean to learn or to know something, right? Because we have an education system that puts information in, asks you to memorize and regurgitate it, and that is what learning is, memorization in a sense. And that's more in line with vidya of like book knowledge or, you know. Sort of top down, but the Giann or the internal knowing, which could be comparable to religious versus the Gnostic thinking, right?

• 2:56:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:56:46André Duqum?

  What is the, at the origin of the mystical thinkers and the knowing that they, that becomes self-evident, once you tap into that understanding of wisdom, right? It doesn't need to be taught to you, it becomes self-evident, it is what it is. And we don't need to beat a dead horse, but it is something to be continually mindful of as, you know, and I tried to, as much as I can, remind myself and on this podcast for being somebody who has a podcast in the self-help space, one might say, where we're exploring a lot of different philosophical avenues. I mean, exploring philosophy for its own sake is fun. It's a hobby of yours that you've turned into a career. It's something that I have an innate calling towards and I would do with or without getting

• 2:57:31André Duqum?

  paid, and I love it. But again, to what end, right? And are we actually applying what we're hearing or is it becoming just entertainment?

• 2:57:40Speaker 00

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

• 2:58:22Speaker 00

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

• 2:59:08Speaker 00

  unless we're constantly asking ourselves how it helps us to improve our character.

• 2:59:13André Duqum?

  And to meditate upon what you read. What I love about certain more poetic translations of the Tao Te Ching or even meditations is you can take a maxim and you can sit with it, contemplate it, make it your own. Like, make that understanding visceral in your body as opposed to a theoretical thing that distors and is a cool party trick.

• 2:59:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that process of kind of really digesting things and making them your own and adapting them is the key, basically.

• 2:59:44André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:45Speaker 00

  You know, we have to push ourselves beyond that. I mean, one way is, actually, like Socrates said, a very simple solution to it is discussing things with other people and allowing them to question you and allow, you know, and being allowed to question them as well. So philosophical dialogue is a good way of encouraging that kind of flexibility. So we're not just going around repeating things parrot-like in a rigid way, but we're understanding the limits of certain ideas and maybe the exceptions to them as well.

• 3:00:16André Duqum?

  Without bastardizing it, how would you distill down most succinctly the Socratic method and what it is?

• 3:00:27Speaker 00

  Well, the Socratic method, interestingly, to come back to something we mentioned earlier. Socrates at one point describes it, perhaps at more than one point, describes it as a therapy. He says it's like a medicine. He describes it as similar to a pharmaceutical, a remedy, which raises the question, what does it cure? And Socrates actually tells us what it cures pretty clearly. He says it cures a kind of arrogance or conceit that he calls double ignorance. It's like the Dunning Kruger effect in a way, like the Socratic method is like a cure for the Dunning Kruger phenomenon. He says there's nothing wrong with being ignorant.

• 3:01:06Speaker 00

  You know, if I don't know anything about engineering or physics or medicine, as long as I know that I don't know it, then that's okay. And Socrates implies that if you know that you don't know something, that might motivate you to go and learn more about it, or to consult an expert, or to avoid making important decisions about it without seeking more information. So, understanding the limits of your knowledge, like know thyself, knowing your strengths and weaknesses and limitations, is fine. Ignorance itself is no problem. But ignorance of your ignorance would be problematic. Like believing, he describes it as believing that you know stuff that you do not in fact know.

• 3:01:51Speaker 00

  And so the Socratic method, he thinks, is the best cure for that.

• 3:01:58Speaker 00

  And it comes in part from perhaps relying too much on formulaic definitions and answers. The Socratic method normally involves asking people to define really important concepts. Like Socrates usually picks on the virtues, similar kind of important things. He'll ask people to define justice. He'll ask them to define temperance, wisdom, things like that. Basically, courage we mentioned earlier. And then he'll usually question them and try and identify exceptions to their definition, and then encourage them to revise their definition.

• 3:02:42Speaker 00

  Now, you'd think that would end up with an improved definition. And usually, there's a, it's like a, the Socratic method is that you're spiraling closer and closer to a centre, but you don't necessarily ever actually arrive at the centre. But you feel that you've learned something from the process. So often, it ends in aporia, this kind of sense of somewhat bewilderment.

• 3:03:06André Duqum?

  Puzzlement.

• 3:03:07Speaker 00

  Some people hated that and got really angry about it because Socrates would question experts, and they would often feel that it had. To harm their status, to be shown not to understand. If you're a politician and you think you know what justice is, but Socrates demonstrates that you're contradicting yourself, or that your definition doesn't really fit some examples, you come away from it looking like you don't really understand justice, that could be damaging to your ego, right, and to your status. But other people found it quite addictive, because they really felt that they were gaining some insight from it. There's a simpler way of explaining the Socratic method, actually, and funnily enough, Socrates

• 3:03:50Speaker 00

  tells us, like, they're in plain sight, not in Plato, it's in the dialogues of Xenophon. So he says that Socrates was talking to a young guy called Euthydemus, there's two Euthydemuses, there's one in Plato and a different one in Xenophon. So he's talking to another dude called Euthydemus. And it's a really good example, because this guy is like a lot of young dudes today, who's obsessed with self-improvement. And Socrates goes to him because his friends have told him that this guy has the biggest collection of books of anyone that they know, and he's been reading the sayings of the wise, and memorizing them, and learning from them.

• 3:04:33Speaker 00

  So he's a great example of a guy that's immersed himself in wisdom literature, and self-improvement literature at the time. And Socrates says, well, why are you studying all this? First of all, he says, I think it's the most valuable thing you can do. Great that you're doing that, you take self-improvement so seriously. He says, why are you doing it? And this young guy says, well, I want to be a great statesman, and in order to do that, I need wisdom, and I need to understand the nature of justice, right, so that I can make decisions and advise people in the assembly and stuff. And Socrates says, well, that's highly admirable. He says, could you define justice for me? And Euthydemus says, well, I think it'd be easier to define injustice.

• 3:05:14Speaker 00

  It's very interesting, people do often find it easier to define the contrary of their values. It's easy, he says, we're surrounded by examples of injustice, so it's much easier to point to them. And Socrates says, okay, well, fine, let's start off with this kind of negative definition, then what's injustice like? And he draws two columns.

• 3:05:37Speaker 00

  And at the top of one, he writes justice and at the other, he writes injustice. And Socrates says, okay, so like, let's look at some examples of injustice. So they agree that lying and stealing would be good examples of something that's unjust. And so Euthydemus thinks this is easy, you know, again, like Socrates often seems like he's asking dumb questions, like naive questions at the beginning. Euthydemus is like, yeah, like lying and stealing are unjust, it's pretty straightforward. And so then the Socratic method proper begins. Socrates says, what if an elected general, the Athenians elected their generals,

• 3:06:20Speaker 00

  deceived the enemy in warfare? Would that be unjust? And Euthydemus says, well, come on, Socrates, that's like an exception, right? And Socrates says, okay, yeah, fair enough. What about if they attacked the enemy camp and stole their weapons? It's the thing that often happened in ancient warfare. Euthydemus is like, well, yeah, that's technically stealing and it's not unjust. So yeah, that's like another exception. Socrates says, what if a parent has a child who's sick? And the only way that they could get them to take the medicine would be to conceal it in their food because they don't like the taste of it. Euthydemus is like, yeah, that's deception, but it's not unjust. So again, I guess you're right. And then Socrates gives another example that's actually kind of famous in the history of philosophy.

• 3:07:05Speaker 00

  It comes up repeatedly, which is he says, what if someone's friend was depressed and suicidal? And they said, you know, where have you hidden my sword or my knife? Why, would it be unjust to lie to them in order to save their life? And Euthydemus is like, okay, Socrates, I get the point. Like, there's a lot of exceptions to this definition. Now, at the end of this, they don't necessarily have a better definition of justice or injustice. But it seems like Euthydemus has learned something. He's deepened his understanding very simply by drawing these two columns. And Socrates kind of says, under what circumstances would...

• 3:07:46Speaker 00

  Say lying or stealing be moved from the injustice column into the justice column. Like, and this simple way of kind of conceptualizing things forces Euthedimus to identify exceptions to the definition that he's taken for granted, his assumption about the nature of justice. So now he has a more flexible, more, he's got more questions, in a sense, about something that he's been taking for granted. Hmm.

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• 3:09:10André Duqum?

  I'm reminded to apply that level of thinking in my own life as much as possible and what feels like a continual return to sincerity and to not live life through the conclusions of, of just conclusions in general, that we think we know what something is, because in some fashion, those are like deaths unto themselves. And when you think you know something, the humility of you being wrong, the possibility of you discovering what something, you know, might be more accurate and more true, is like drastically thwarted, you know?

• 3:09:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, they actually, you sound like Plato. Like, he describes the Socratic method in a very similar way. He says that once we are, if we're arrogant and conceited and we have double ignorance and we assume that we know something, then it prevents us from being able to learn anything more. Like, it's the end of learning. Once we assume that I already know what justice is, like, then we've reached a point of conclusion where we're not ready to learn anything else. So the Socratic method is this, almost being like an eternal student. Yep. Like, you know, Socrates was like, I'm not a sophist, I'm not an expert, I'm not a teacher. He's more, he's casting himself in the role of a student.

• 3:10:36Speaker 00

  But a student who has more interesting questions than the lecture being given by the teacher, basically, if you can put up with him, right? So, I mean, there are inherent benefits to that type of cognitive flexibility. But also in therapy, you could say, when people are depressed or anxious or they're very angry about things in a pathological way, their beliefs about the problems that they face are often quite rigid. And, you know, we use Socratic questioning as one of the main techniques in cognitive therapy.

• 3:11:16Speaker 00

  So encouraging people to question whether, if they think something's catastrophic, for example, like, but if I lose my job, that would be awful. Like, well, are there other ways of viewing it? Like, is it as awful as you're assuming? Like, how, from zero to a hundred percent, where a hundred percent is the worst form of medieval torture or global thermonuclear war? Like, where on that scale would losing your job be? So are you possibly exaggerating how awful it is? And the question I like to ask people, I think maybe a more interesting way of framing it. So people will go, but it is awful. Like, it would be a catastrophe if this happened. So you can say to them,

• 3:12:02Speaker 00

  For instance, but suppose there are good ways and bad ways of coping with losing your job, right? Do you think some people might cope with things like that worse than others do? And most people will say, well, yeah, like, obviously, that's a truism, like, self-evidently. So in that case, what would it look like for somebody to cope with it well or cope with it wisely? So then they'll kind of like describe what that would look like. So if somebody coped with it wisely, what would happen next? And then what would happen? And then what would happen? And then, looking back on it, from that perspective, in retrospect, how catastrophic would it seem to them?

• 3:12:41Speaker 00

  Well, you know, however they phrase it, not as catastrophic as it originally did, right? So you're

• 3:12:49André Duqum?

  This is modeling, right? What you refer to as

• 3:12:51Speaker 00

  Yeah. You're finding ways of using questioning just to kind of tease out some more flexibility to help people to find an alternative way of looking at things. A more direct way of using modeling would be, who do you admire for their resilience? How would people that you admire for their resilience evaluate losing their job? So somebody that you admire for wisdom, temperance, patience, if they lost their job, would they say, this can't happen, it's awful, I can't handle it? Or would they frame it differently than that? And people usually, almost like slightly begrudgingly, well, I guess they would like phrase it differently.

• 3:13:34Speaker 00

  And if you were to emulate the way that they are framing it, what would be the consequences of that? Well, I'd probably deal with it much better and it wouldn't be as distressing and stuff like that, right? So people are kind of quite attached to their rigid beliefs and their catastrophic thinking. So usually, you know, there's kind of an art to asking the right type of questions that nudge them into a slightly less extreme, slightly less rigid way of looking at things usually.

• 3:14:04André Duqum?

  To me, it feels like a return to sanity.

• 3:14:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:14:08André Duqum?

  Whatever that approximates to.

• 3:14:09Speaker 00

  I agree, you know, in many cases, like, what emerges at the end of cognitive therapy is, you know, just, I, sometimes I say to people,

• 3:14:21Speaker 00

  If we got together all of the clients who have genuinely benefited from cognitive behavioral therapy and we interviewed them and asked them what the big insights were that they achieved that helped them to overcome their problems and we wrote them all down in a book, I say it would be the most boring book in the world, right? Cause I can tell you right now, it would say a lot of stuff like, I just realized it wasn't worth getting angry about stuff anymore. Or I realized that I was kind of exaggerating how catastrophic things were. And you'd read it and think, really? Is that it? Like, so that's, you said it's a return to common sense,

• 3:15:01Speaker 00

  right? It sounds kind of banal in a way. It can take a lot of effort to get somebody to realize something which in a sense is kind of banal, just viewing things realistically, basically. But that's what the Stoics say. You know, the goal is to get back to a rational, realistic appraisal of things, to get things in, getting things in perspective isn't sexy. Like, you know, getting things in perspective when you explain it. That's partly why people need therapy, you know? It's partly why you can't just tell them the answers. Because the answers in some ways sound too obvious. We don't see the wood for the trees a lot of the time.

• 3:15:46André Duqum?

  In Zen, they have the saying that water heats gradually and boils suddenly. Think about that moment of comprehension, you know, when it lands and you get it. It's a process to get there. And we all have our own individual processes of what we're moving through. And it's kind of fun to be on a journey, you know, of self-discovery and that there's, there's more to learn, more to grow. And that perpetual student mindset is, is an exciting adventure. If you know. What everything is, then where does the possibility for learning more arise?

• 3:16:24Speaker 00

  It would be like a kind of death in a way. You know, to be human is to be fallible and ignorant, you know, and imperfect. To be human is to have anxiety and to have cravings and to have problems.

• 3:16:40Speaker 00

  I think people too readily have this desire to kind of eliminate all their weaknesses and eliminate all of the problems. And I don't think there's anything wrong with dealing with those things and moderating them. But the truth is that if we completely got rid of all of our problems and all of our weaknesses, we'd all die of boredom. You know, it's part of human nature to get anxious about things sometimes and, you know, to have habits and cravings to deal with. There's nothing, you know, inherently terrible about that. As long as we kind of manage to keep things within perspective. It's part of what it means to grow and live, as you're saying, you know, it's the journey of life.

• 3:17:22Speaker 00

  Is identifying our weaknesses, accepting them and learning from them and dealing with them. It's what makes us who we are. And I imagine, you know, if we were, if there were such a thing as, you know, the gods. Like they probably look at human beings where an envy is in a sense because they, they think there's something.

• 3:17:45Speaker 00

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

• 3:18:13André Duqum?

  The drama we're here to play. I read in your recent Substack article of how to think like a Roman emperor. You talked about the double meanings of that title and this idea of kingship. Who rules themselves in our world? Who would you point to? Seneca's line, "The greatest empire is to be emperor of oneself." And what are your thoughts on that? Kingship being a state of mind, not a station?

• 3:18:44Speaker 00

  That's how the Stoics and Socratic philosophers in general, I think, had this idea. You know, the famous, it's like a kind of famous trope or like theme in ancient philosophy. The best example would be our buddy Alexander the Great, right? So he's the most powerful man in the world and hugely accomplished military figure. But the legend is that he encountered Diogenes the Cynic. And Diogenes the Cynic was like the dregs of society in a sense. He was a criminal who had been exiled from his home city and he lived like a beggar, basically. So in Athenian terms, he was like the lowest of the low in a way.

• 3:19:26Speaker 00

  And yet he was admired for his strength of character and his wisdom. And the story goes, the famous anecdote is that Alexander the Great wanted to see him and he went to visit him and he said, "Is there anything that I can do for you?" And Alexander said, "Yes, can you step aside? You're blocking the sun." Which is deeply metaphorical, like, because Alexander claimed to be the incarnation of the sun god. Like, so he was the kind of fake sun and Diogenes wanted to, you know, see the real sun that he was obscuring. And there's another story that as he was walking away, like Alexander's retinue thought this was kind of ridiculous and Diogenes was an idiot.

• 3:20:11Speaker 00

  But Alexander said, "You know, if I wasn't Alexander, I would wish to be Diogenes." I think, I don't know if this is unlikely to be historically true, but it was an appealing anecdote to people in the ancient world. This contrast between somebody who was very powerful, but perhaps like had been captured by their own ambition and desires, and somebody for whom that was meaningless and had nothing, but completely transcended it. I mean, obviously Diogenes is a very similar figure in many ways to the gymnosophy. You know, the way he lived and so on is a kind of aesthetic renunciate,

• 3:20:54Speaker 00

  kind of similar to Hindu sanyasan, holy man.

• 3:21:01Speaker 00

  There's also a story that when, there's lots of anecdotes about Alexander the Great. There's an anecdote that when he was dying, he said, "I want you to cut two holes in either side of my casket, so that when you carry my coffin through the streets", which is what they did in the ancient world, they paraded the body. And he said, "I want you to have my arms hanging out either side of the casket, so that people can see that I'm leaving the world empty-handed." You know, like we say today, you can't take it with you, basically.

• 3:21:35Speaker 00

  So this idea would be someone like Nero or Alexander, Epictetus would say is a slave, because they're ironically, paradoxically, they're enslaved by their own ambition. They're enslaved by their own desire. Whereas Diogenes and Socrates, although they have nothing, are completely free and they rule over themselves. So they have, someone has the external appearance or the status of a king, but they're internally a slave. Diogenes externally looks like a slave or a beggar, but internally he's a king.

• 3:22:14André Duqum?

  It's a powerful inquiry for our own lives, you know? Like, we're often chasing this mountain top where we will feel like a king or queen. And I think that we can hear it many times of the emptiness people feel when they arrive at what they thought they desperately wanted and was the aim of their life, to then find out that they're still them and there they are. And what does it mean to be the king or queen, so to speak, of your internal landscape? And that's a powerful inquiry. I want to go back to Delphi. We started this podcast there. Who was the oracle of Delphi? Who's the literal woman? And what does she say about Socrates?

• 3:23:00Speaker 00

  So the oracle at Delphi was many different women, occupied that role over centuries.

• 3:23:10Speaker 00

  Supposedly, they were uneducated peasant girls who lived in the local area. According to, I think Plutarch tells us that. He says, "There's nothing special about the priestess at Delphi." Although, it probably changed over time. And there's also a tradition that Pythagoras, one of the earliest pre-Socratic, one of the most mystical philosophers, learned his ethical philosophy from a priestess at Delphi. So I think one of the cool ideas that I come across sometimes is that

• 3:23:43Speaker 00

  women are kind of underrepresented in the ancient world. But if you dig deeply, they're kind of on the periphery in these key roles. Definitely, weirdly, in the story of Socrates, there's quite a few really interesting, really influential women at the periphery of the story, as it were.

• 3:24:03André Duqum?

  I wonder how much they were in the periphery in the, in the actual moment as opposed to the men who wrote the history.

• 3:24:09Speaker 00

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

• 3:24:26André Duqum?

  Yeah, I risk sounding too woke, but what, what was her story instead of his story, right?

• 3:24:31Speaker 00

  Yeah. So she sat on a tripod. Like, tripods had this kind of... Spiritual significance in Greek religion.

• 3:24:45Speaker 00

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

• 3:25:28Speaker 00

  And she would say weird and cryptic things. So the story about Socrates is that she, one of Socrates' friends, who was a weird dude, like he was known as, his name was Chirophon.

• 3:25:44André Duqum?

  So many good names.

• 3:25:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, he was like a really cool guy.

• 3:25:46André Duqum?

  Syrophone, Agrippinus.

• 3:25:48Speaker 00

  Yeah. He had a brother called Chirocrates and the two of them used to fight a lot. And Socrates, in some of the dialogues, Socrates is just straight up doing relationships counts, like using the Socratic method. I mean, you know, sometimes if people think it's like a reading between the lines or a bit of a stretch, because sometimes you read Plato and Socrates is doing very abstract philosophy. But in Xenophon's dialogues in particular, sometimes he's literally just helping people resolve their relationship problems. So he, he, he helps these two brothers overcome an argument and be reconciled, basically. It's a really clear example of him using his method as a therapy, like straightforward example of a type of cognitive therapy in the ancient world.

• 3:26:33Speaker 00

  And so Chirophon is like a guy who almost sounds like a.

• 3:26:42Speaker 00

  I'm tempted almost to say he sounds like a bit emo or a goth or something. They describe him as being like a bat and that he was kind of pale and gaunt looking. And he was just generally perceived as a bit of an unusual dude. But he was Socrates' best friend. Like, so we often don't think of him like that, but he had this kind of sidekick or best friend who was also a philosopher. Who was kind of like this weird eccentric figure. And the reason his eccentricity is important is he went, they went on this, almost like a pilgrimage, you know, he'd walked for several days to go to Delphi. It's a big deal to consult the oracle. And Chirona consulted the oracle and asked it whether anyone was wiser than Socrates.

• 3:27:26Speaker 00

  And which is a like bizarre like question to ask, basically. And the oracle replied that no man is wiser than Socrates. And Socrates claims that he found this kind of disturbing and problematic. And that in a sense instigated his career in philosophy, or at least moved it into, I think he'd already been studying philosophy. But he thinks his, in Plato's apology, he suggested that his philosophy career kind of really took off or entered a new phase. When he, he got this proclamation from the oracle at Delphi.

• 3:28:09Speaker 00

  It's hard to know really what to make of this historically. And Plato's apology, where he's claiming to describe what happened in court when Socrates was on trial. When Socrates mentions it, the audience freak out and get, start to get really agitated. You know, so it seems to have been a very controversial thing. And Socrates claims that he thought, well, the only, I don't believe that I'm wise. And I think if I start to think that I'm wise, it's going to make me close minded and conceited. So the only way that the oracle could be true is if nobody else is wise either. So he claims that that inspired him to go around testing whether anybody else was genuinely wise.

• 3:28:54Speaker 00

  I'll tell you an interesting bit of trivia anyway. He started off questioning, he says he started off questioning very important people. He doesn't really name them, but we can see he's questioning people like Protagoras, who claims that he's the wisest man alive. His, Protagoras' followers literally called him the wisest man alive. So it seems like he was probably one of the first people, we don't know the chronology exactly, but he was probably one of the first people that Socrates made a beeline for and said, okay, let's test out whether this guy is actually wise or not. And basically by asking him Socratic questions and proving that he contradicted himself or tripped himself up, so Socrates thought,

• 3:29:32Speaker 00

  okay, so, you know, if the oracle says that this dude isn't wiser than me, then that's not, you know, that's not really such a dramatic thing. Because, you know, his wisdom is an illusion, like it's just an appearance. And he charged certain statesmen probably as well. I think some has, this is kind of reading between the lines a bit, but scholars of Plato have noted that it looks like over time, Socrates increasingly begins to do philosophy with young men. And initially, he went to great statesmen, great philosophers.

• 3:30:14Speaker 00

  And I think he went to the people who claimed to be wise and found that they weren't wise. And probably discovered that actually the more someone claims to be wise, the more closed minded they are and the less useful they are as a partner in dialogue. And so he began, and then I'd like to say, then he went to the youth of Athens, who nobody considered to be wise. Right? Because he thought, these guys at least are gonna engage a proper dialogue with me because they've got nothing to lose. They're not pretending to be wise. Nobody thinks of them as wise. So they're flexible and open minded and more willing to admit when they make mistakes. And so they make much better, more dynamic partners in dialogue.

• 3:30:58Speaker 00

  I'll tell you another bit of trivia about Socrates. Socrates, we can see, and he was known for this, went around doing philosophy. So he did philosophy in the marketplace. He went to his friends' houses. Sometimes, we're told, he just bumped into people in the street and into philosophical dialogues with them. He did philosophy with the rich, the poor, Athenians, foreigners, slaves. And perhaps most controversially of all, he did philosophy with women. So in one of Xenophon's dialogues, he's speaking to a famous courtesan, a prostitute, doing philosophy with her.

• 3:31:41Speaker 00

  Which might not seem like a big deal, but to Athenians, that would have been kind of shocking. Now, one of his favorite arguments is whether or not virtue can be taught. And this was perhaps the most subversive thing that he discussed. The fact that he's doing philosophy with women and slaves and poor people suggests that he thinks virtue is learnable. Otherwise, what would be the point of speaking to people that Athenian society didn't consider to be wise or virtuous? Right?

• 3:32:18Speaker 00

  Now, this was controversial because, I mean, very simply, Greek culture assumed that aristocrats were virtuous. At birth. Yeah, like, they described, they literally just described it as noble birth. Yeah. Like, so the best people in society are wealthy aristocrats. Like, and of course, there's a social hierarchy and everybody else is inferior. Slaves are inferior, foreigners and barbarians are inferior to Athenians, and women are inferior to men. And they have this kind of rigid hierarchical view of society. And they think it's genetic.

• 3:33:00Speaker 00

  They think you're literally just born with courage and wisdom and virtue and stuff. And maybe training can help to bring that out. But the idea that poor people, women and foreigners, could learn virtue would upset the social hierarchy. Like, so the very fact that Socrates was talking about that and questioning it.

• 3:33:25Speaker 00

  Helps to explain why they executed him. Because what he was doing was much more radical than it seems at first. It was more egalitarian. And it rocked the the social order. Sometimes people think it's they're kind of struggle with the idea that Socrates was executed. I think the one of the biggest puzzles about Socrates is why they didn't kill him sooner.

• 3:33:47André Duqum?

  He was seventy.

• 3:33:48Speaker 00

  He was seventy one.

• 3:33:49André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 3:33:50Speaker 00

  Like, they waited until he was nearly dying of old age anyway.

• 3:33:54André Duqum?

  And then accused of, uh, what?

• 3:33:58Speaker 00

  Oh, uh, impiety and corrupting the youth, like, basically. These are kind of like standard charges in Athenian society. So, yeah, they accused accused him of corrupting the youth is like a key part of it. And turning them against their parents, like, subverting the social order.

• 3:34:19André Duqum?

  And not to divert you too much, but then how did he respond as opposed to denying the accusations? How did he in his trial show up?

• 3:34:28Speaker 00

  Well, in Plato's Apology, he responds very unapologetically. Like, so there's many things, I mean, I think Plato's Apology is a masterpiece. So, you know, it's difficult to know where to begin and and so I think everyone should read it. Right? It's one of the few texts that I would just categorically recommend that everyone should just go out and read. But a lot of things happen in it. So one of them is that Socrates basically just does philosophy in the courtroom. Like, he just uses, so he's on trial for doing the Socratic method. They're basically putting him on trial for doing the Socratic method. And he does it in the courtroom. He does the thing that he's on trial for in the courtroom, basically.

• 3:35:08Speaker 00

  And the the jury vote and finds him guilty by a narrow margin. And then the way that the Athenian court worked was they would vote on your guilt and then they vote on the penalty. So the more people voted for the death penalty than found him guilty, which is like, so some of the, some of the dudes that found him innocent changed their mind at the last minute and voted that he should be executed, like in the space of like, you know, a few minutes at the end. So his response to the guilty verdict just upset the, uh, the jury even more.

• 3:35:49Speaker 00

  There were three hundred people in the jury, but it was like a big group of people voting, and a kind of like a mob. They were quite unruly and I think three times in the apology, they have to be told to calm down.

• 3:36:01André Duqum?

  Are there any modern cinema representations of that moment?

• 3:36:05Speaker 00

  Um, not that I'm, I'm sure there might be some, maybe in other languages. There's a play starring Christopher Walken as Socrates's son, Lamperkles, uh, called Barefoot in Athens from the sixties. Um, it's like a TV show. It doesn't show his trial though, I don't think, but it kind of depicts his life pretty well.

• 3:36:37Speaker 00

  So yeah, like essentially that's what goes on in the trial, but lots of other things happen. He, he, he says, he talks about his attitude toward death. He talks about his military service. He doesn't forward really complete arguments in the apology, but he drops in these little kind of seeds or fragments of philosophical arguments. It like, it's very intriguing, but it's again, uh, sort of tantalizing and inconclusive. You know, you take away like bits of ideas and fragments of arguments from it.

• 3:37:12André Duqum?

  And you would say that the way that he handled his death and showed up in the courtroom probably largely impacted his influence and recognizability as a historical figure?

• 3:37:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, beyond question. Socrates's death mainly through, like Xenophon also wrote an apology that survives today. And there may have been other accounts of his trial and death as well in the ancient world. There were lots of other Socratic dialogues that by other authors that don't survive today.

• 3:37:45Speaker 00

  But yeah, I mean, it was like, uh,

• 3:37:49Speaker 00

  In a sense, the most famous moment in the history of Western intellectual life. It was a seismic event in Greek culture. And all philosophers pretty much knew the apology by heart. You know, the Stoics are very familiar with it. They often refer to it. And to them, it's just like a bit of cortex that they absolutely take for granted. You know, for many centuries, it's like, it's almost like, um, you know, it's not like really a philosophical dialogue so much as, um, what would you say, like a sort of a call to action or something like that.

• 3:38:34Speaker 00

  It's an inspirational, you know, motivational text that's meant to kind of really inspire people to admire philosophers and want to embrace it as a way of life. Some people read it and they just think Socrates comes across like a jerk and like really annoying. But in the ancient world, people thought he came across as heroic and inspirational.

• 3:38:56André Duqum?

  So Socrates made a claim that sounds insane on the surface, which is that injustice harms the perpetrator more than the victim. I want you to defend it.

• 3:39:07Speaker 00

  To defend that claim. This is a notorious claim that he make, that the Stoics agree with. So he thinks Socrates believes that the most important thing to us in life is our own character. And that determines the benefit that we gain from wealth, reputation, um, uh, life, you know, everything. Like if we have a bad character, then our life will be bad. If we have a good character, then our life will go well. And. So he thinks that injustice harms the character of the person that's inflicting it on someone else. They degrade themselves.

• 3:39:52Speaker 00

  It's a form of ignorance. It's the opposite of wisdom. And so really, they're harming their own soul by doing that. And the most that it can do to another person would be to deprive them of property, or to deprive them of status, or to deprive them of their life. But even taking away their life can't damage the other person's character. So if they endure injustice nobly, then they potentially die a hero, or die with dignity or nobility.

• 3:40:32André Duqum?

  Jesus on the cross?

• 3:40:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, so, you know, they win. There's a famous saying attributed to Socrates that he doesn't actually say in the apology, so it may come from another text, or it may be kind of paraphrasing Plato. It's at the, it's the final closing sentence of the Handbook of Epictetus. And also, it's a saying that one of the Roman stoics was known for going around and repeating, but Epictetus quotes it as his, the final remark in the, in the handbook. And it, it has Socrates saying, Annetus and Melitus, the two guys who brought the charges

• 3:41:19Speaker 00

  against him, he says, "They can kill me, but they cannot harm me." Which is a crazy radical thing to say. Weirdly, it sounds like Obi-Wan Kenobi. And I don't know if you remember in Star Wars, he says to Darth Vader, "You can kill me, but you'll just make me more powerful," or something like that, right? So it's weirdly reminiscent of this thing in Star Wars. He says, "You can kill me, but you cannot harm me." And he means like, "Even if you do the most extreme thing to me, deprive me of my reputation, my wealth, and actually end my life, you can't actually harm my character, which is the thing that defines my worth as a human being, ultimately."

• 3:42:03André Duqum?

  Yeah, there's so many through lines through Star Wars and the Force and the cultivation of virtue versus sin and I, this podcast is so fun for me because there are like, for me, like, five different avenues at any point to walk down and this has already probably been the longest podcast I've ever done.

• 3:42:24Speaker 00

  Right.

• 3:42:25André Duqum?

  But, so joyfully, you know, there's, there's still some, a few last questions that I want to ask, but I am, I'm just so, I'm so grateful for your life's work and what you've been able to study, so.

• 3:42:38Speaker 00

  I feel very lucky to have, you know, been able to spend my life doing my hobby, basically, and kind of writing books about it.

• 3:42:47André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 3:42:48Speaker 00

  You know, I look back and like a lot of people, I think, it was a few lucky breaks along the way allowed me, you know, to end up spending my life, I dropped out of school when I was a kid and I kind of, when I was a teenager, I felt my life was going absolutely nowhere. But I fell in love with philosophy and I was committed to it and I, I kind of stuck it out, even though I wasn't sure where it was going to lead me. And now, looking back on it, I think, you know, I, it's allowed me to, it's benefited me enormously personally to be able to read the Apology of Plato and read the Stoics. And it's also given me an opportunity to do something that really seems to benefit

• 3:43:31Speaker 00

  other people through therapy and coaching, like, personally, and through doing podcasts and things like that, and also through writing books that reach hundreds of thousands of people. So I, I have Marcus Aurelius and Socrates and these ancient philosophers to, to thank for that. It's like an enormous gift and I said to you earlier, it's like I am doing my hobby for a living, so I, I love nothing more than these kind of conversations.

• 3:43:59André Duqum?

  Likewise, I live for it. I would be remiss to not ask about the Eleusinian mysteries. And it is rumored, to what degree we have historical data to back it up, that Marcus Aurelius potentially made a trip to Greece towards the end of his life to explore.

• 3:44:16Speaker 00

  I think we're pretty safe in saying that he did that.

• 3:44:18André Duqum?

  Great.

• 3:44:19Speaker 00

  Because when you're reading Roman history, one of the distinctions that you probably want to make is stuff that happens in private. That, you know, so there's like a rumor that such and such happened. And you think, you know, if you're reviewing history critically, you think, well, who saw this? You know, I, nobody, this is clearly hearsay, right? But things that happened very publicly are usually more likely to be accurate. We have several references to the fact that he went to Athens towards the end of his life. So actually, the weird thing about that is Marcus Aurelius absolutely loved Greek culture and philosophy. But as far as we know, he didn't get a chance to go to Greece, like, and go to Athens

• 3:45:03Speaker 00

  until quite late on in his life. Because he was too busy fighting various wars and things like that.

• 3:45:10Speaker 00

  And so he eventually went, he was initiated into the Eleusinian mysteries. The temple at Eleusis, or modern day Eleusina, is like half an hour drive outside of Athens.

• 3:45:21Speaker 00

  The temple complex, the ruins of it are still there today. The, a tribe had looted it and sacked the temple during Marcus's lifetime. And he made a vow that he was going to go there and be initiated and restore the temple. There's a bust which we believe is Marcus Aurelius, which is still there today. So it looks like he had the gate to the temple restored and his bust was placed above the entrance with what looked like poppy flowers around it, which are symbols of the Eleusinian mysteries.

• 3:46:03Speaker 00

  So it was, some people call it the religion with no name. It was a cult, a mystery religion. Clues in the name. It was mysterious. It was a secret.

• 3:46:15André Duqum?

  Is that what Eleusinian means?

• 3:46:17Speaker 00

  Oh, the mystery. It means it was kept secret.

• 3:46:21André Duqum?

  Yeah. What does Eleusinian refer to the people?

• 3:46:24Speaker 00

  It's just the name of the town. And it was based around the myth of Demeter

• 3:46:35Speaker 00

  and Persephone. And it's an agricultural myth.

• 3:46:42Speaker 00

  It was an initiation that people went through. People from all over the Greek world would travel there. I mean, it's hard to imagine today, but these ceremonies at Delphi and Eleusis were like, kind of like the Woodstock Festival. Like, they were crazy. Like, I mean, I think some of our ancient sources kind of describe it as very chaotic and people running around like crazy and music and incense and like lots of foreigners, which like would have been kind of a very unusual atmosphere. So there's a lot of stuff going on, music, dance, religious ceremonies.

• 3:47:24Speaker 00

  You know, a crazy experience for people that lived in the ancient world. You know, it's not often they'd get the opportunity to kind of experience something like that. And so people would be initiated. We don't know exactly what happened. You could be severely punished for disclosing what happened. I think you could get the death sentence in Athens for disclosing what happened in the Eleusinian mysteries, which sounds kind of weirdly extreme. But I think one reason for it is that perhaps there was so much economic interest and political interest in it, that the Eleusinian mysteries gave the Athenians some power and an influx

• 3:48:09Speaker 00

  of wealth. So disclosing those secrets would potentially allow people to replicate the ceremony in other places and that would materially affect the state. So it was a state secret.

• 3:48:25Speaker 00

  And so we don't know exactly what went on, but people probably saw dramatic reenactments of the myths. They went through initiation rituals.

• 3:48:36André Duqum?

  Psychedelic?

• 3:48:37Speaker 00

  They probably took, I think it's safe to say, you know, there's reasonable evidence that they took some ergot, like a fungus that has hallucinogenic properties. Yeah, I don't know about musha. I think it's probably more likely to be ergot.

• 3:48:53André Duqum?

  So ergot is what?

• 3:48:54Speaker 00

  It's a, it's a. It's a fungus that grows on barley, for example, and I think some other plants.

• 3:49:00André Duqum?

  So a type of fungi?

• 3:49:01Speaker 00

  Yeah. And but it, I think it's partly, so LSD is a synthetic chemical. But I think the chemical formula for LSD, if I remember rightly, is partially derived from ergot.

• 3:49:16André Duqum?

  Any other ones that we can speculate on, like acacia or?

• 3:49:19Speaker 00

  Other drugs that they said. I think it's mainly ergot that we believe that they took. They, they took this potion called the kikion, which means like cocktail or mixture in Greek.

• 3:49:30André Duqum?

  It's a peculiar name.

• 3:49:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:49:32André Duqum?

  The cookies. Hippies taking a cookie on.

• 3:49:34Speaker 00

  Like the hash cookies or something like that. And I think we're told in some sources that it was barley water, which is, they use barley to brew beer. So it's probably fermented barley that has this fungus on it. But it would probably have to be carefully prepared. We have all these little ceramic,

• 3:49:57Speaker 00

  small, like a little jug, and the, the Greeks used to put medicine in or like, like a little thing for putting a potion in, basically. So that kind of strongly implies that they were drinking some small quantity of a substance. And there's some chemical evidence from, I think, a temple in Sicily that replicated the Eleusinian mysteries, that, that found traces of ergot in some of the ceramics. And also, I think, in a skull that was found in the temple, in the teeth, there were traces of ergot. So anyway, it's all, it's long been speculated. There were drugs involved in the Eleusinian mysteries. Whatever happened, it was a big deal.

• 3:50:39Speaker 00

  Cicero says that the Eleusinian mysteries were the greatest contribution that the Greeks made to culture, which is a big claim. You know, that's like saying the Eleusinian mysteries were more important than Plato, like more important than philosophy, more important than Greek tragedy. It's a remarkable thing to say. But certainly, people thought it was really, really important. So what did it consist in? I mean, I think it looks like it involved some kind of ritual where people believed that they glimpsed the afterlife, right?

• 3:51:17André Duqum?

  More of a mystical tradition.

• 3:51:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was like, it seems like it was about an initiation that allowed you to catch a glimpse of the afterlife and that transformed your attitude towards life.

• 3:51:28André Duqum?

  Which maybe would make sense why Marcus would be interested in exploring towards the end of his life.

• 3:51:33Speaker 00

  Well, it's a pity he didn't do it before he wrote the Meditations. So funnily enough, you know, maybe he even changed his mind about the stuff he wrote in the Meditations after going to Eleusis and taking ergot. For all we know, we, we don't have anything that he wrote after that. But maybe it confirmed, I mean, there's a sort of, there's some, I mean, again, we know very little about the Eleusinian mysteries, so it's very secretive. But there's obviously some kind of parallels or, what's the expression? Like some kind of harmony between Stoicism and the Eleusinian mysteries. So Marcus talks, for example, he often uses language that sounds Eleusinian.

• 3:52:16Speaker 00

  He'll talk quite a lot about ears of corn and figs ripening and stuff. And these are, because it's a kind of agricultural cult, that we know that these were symbols in the Eleusinian mystery. So part of it, almost certainly, was the idea that crops are seasonal and they go through cycles of birth and decay. And probably part of the Eleusinian mysteries was encouraging people to see life and death as natural phenomena.

• 3:52:48Speaker 00

  And to view them as part of the natural, the part of the cycle of nature, basically. So probably coming to terms with our own mortality by seeing it as part of a natural process, like plants and the seasons, and also this initiation into a glimpse of the afterlife. And definitely in Stoicism, we don't have the belief in the afterlife in Stoicism, but we have the other part, which is viewing life and death as natural. Like the Stoics repeat this a lot because they think that emphasizing how natural and inevitable death is takes away some of the sting from it.

• 3:53:32André Duqum?

  Hmm. To learn how to die according to the Stoics is to unlearn how to be a slave.

• 3:53:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:53:39André Duqum?

  What does that mean?

• 3:53:40Speaker 00

  That's one of the more dramatic sayings, Seneca, who says that. He means that coming to terms with your own mortality can liberate you from excessive attachment to things that are outside your direct control. So for example, when people have a brush with death, or when they're bereaved, it might make them question their priorities in life. Go through this epistrophe, a U-turn, where they begin to question whether wealth and reputation are really as important as they thought they were. And that's freedom for the Stoics.

• 3:54:18Speaker 00

  When we realise that the things that appear to be important might not actually be important in reality, it's liberating and we snap out of the trance. We are awakened, basically.

• 3:54:34André Duqum?

  Hmm. Quote from your book.

• 3:54:36Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 3:54:37André Duqum?

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

• 3:54:59André Duqum?

  Beautifully written. Shares that perspective on the view from above that we talked about earlier. How do you think about your finitude of life and death?

• 3:55:10Speaker 00

  Well, I think about it more as I get older, that's for sure. I mean, I think when I was a young guy, I thought about my own mortality. I had a couple of brushes with death when I was a young guy. I think on two or three occasions, I thought I was gonna drown as a kid growing up by the coast. And when I lost my father, it made me think about my own mortality. So I think in my teens, I began to think about the bigger picture, the view from above, my own finitude. And as time goes on, it's something that I increasingly think about as I get a bit older. And some of my friends pass away over time, family members pass away.

• 3:55:55Speaker 00

  I think increasingly, as time goes on, you have more opportunity to reflect on your own mortality. So I've always found it liberating. It doesn't, death doesn't really scare me as much as it. I mean, when I was a young guy, I was, I would lie awake at night, like worrying about, I had death anxiety. You know, it was something that really troubled me. And partly perhaps through stoicism, partly just through getting used to thinking about it over time. That changed dramatically, like, I mean, really quite a long time ago. But increasingly, as time goes on, I view death as natural, inevitable.

• 3:56:36Speaker 00

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

• 3:57:17André Duqum?

  If you do, what hope do you have that your life and your teachings and writings impart on people long after your past?

• 3:57:25Speaker 00

  What hope do I have? It's not something that I feel strongly about, to be honest. I think it's great if people benefit from Stoicism. I don't particularly feel that it needs to be through my writings. If the, if someone just burned all of my books and that people like continued to read The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius and benefit from Stoicism, I'd be perfectly happy with that. So I think, you know, when you're writing a book, you really put everything into it. But I don't feel that all that attached to it strangely. I mean, it's an odd thing. You know, I, you quoted something from one of my book and I kind of recognize it, but

• 3:58:09Speaker 00

  I think I haven't read that for seven years. You know, so I'm like sort of forgotten some of the things that I wrote in that book. I mean, I get the general idea of it, but in a sense, it's something that I've already forgotten about some of the books that I've written. So I, I don't feel like it's a legacy that I'm kind of attached to, but I do think it's good that people benefit from Stoicism like I, you know, but at the same time, I also accept that that's not something that's really directly under my control. It's quite a puzzling thing in a way, you know, it could easily have gone the other way. I was into Stoicism before it was cool. Again, it makes me cringe when I say that, but when I first got into Stoicism, it wasn't trendy at all.

• 3:58:51Speaker 00

  It was like a niche subject that hardly anybody was interested in, except a handful of academics. And it really surprised me when it became popular. But, you know, in a parallel universe, maybe Gladiator didn't come out and maybe Brian Holiday didn't write books about it and perhaps Stoicism would never have gone through a resurgence. It's a fluke in a sense that it did. I mean, it's good that it did and there were reasons why it happened, but I view it as just a weird thing that's outside of my control that happened in the culture and I appreciate it, but.

• 3:59:26Speaker 00

  I it could as easily just stop tomorrow. I I've often wondered like, are people gonna lose interest in Stoicism like a year from now or two years from now? So far, it's continued to kind of grow in popularity, which is good. But I keep an open mind about how long that's gonna continue for. And actually, like we were kind of saying earlier, the Stoics believed that they were teaching a kind of a sort of universal wisdom. So it makes no difference to me whether people get those ideas from Buddhism or Taoism or from reading poetry, or if they get it from the Stoics. You know, I think it's great if they benefit from the idea. It doesn't really matter to me where they get it from, though.

• 4:00:12André Duqum?

  To me, it's refreshing that if you truly find a tradition or lineage or school of thought and logic that resonates to you most and you really go to it at its depth and apply reason, that you'll come to similar truths across the board. And that sends the pressure sort of off.

• 4:00:30Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 4:00:31André Duqum?

  Yeah. What Marcus said that he wanted his soul to be naked and simple. What do you think that would mean to live that transparently in your life?

• 4:00:42Speaker 00

  It's an interesting, um, actually, here's a bit of trivia about that. Uh, there's a passage where Marcus says that you should live as if you're you weren't concealed by curtains, I think, is the expression that he uses at one point. And there's a kind of slightly dark aspect to that, because I think I mentioned earlier that when he was about fifteen, when he was a young guy, he was taken into the villa of Hadrian. And Hadrian was kind of quite sinister at that point. Hadrian had spies everywhere, like, and Roman aristocrats were under constant kind

• 4:01:26Speaker 00

  of suspicion. Hadrian had vendettas, I think, against at least two of Marcus's family members. And so when he was a kid and he was fifteen years old, everywhere he went in that villa, the servants, slaves, the people around him would have been constantly watching him and reporting back everything he said and did to Adrian. So he had to, at that point, live as if he didn't have any secrets and he couldn't hide behind any curtains or walls. Because in a sense, he literally couldn't. He was constantly being spied on. So I think he thought, in a sense, the only way I can deal with this is by being really mindful

• 4:02:09Speaker 00

  and self-aware, like, and never doing anything or saying anything that I'm ashamed of. In a way, it was perhaps at that point in his life, a way of coping with being under constant surveillance. But later in life, it becomes part of his philosophy and it becomes a spiritual practice. What does that mean? I think it's, you know, Stoicism sets a very high standard. It's good because Stoicism has this very high bar, but as we talked about earlier, it combines that with accepting our own fallibility. And so it's kind of a forgiving

• 4:02:47Speaker 00

  philosophy, simultaneously being quite aspirational or idealistic. Marcus is constantly going on about his own flaws and weaknesses in the meditations, but he aspires to this high goal of being able to live as if he's getting nothing to conceal from other people. It's a remarkable thing for someone in his possession to say, because Roman emperors normally have lots of secrets.

• 4:03:15André Duqum?

  Yeah, yeah. We talked a lot about death in this conversation, not just literal, physical death, but also death of the ideas we cling to and of our identity. What did the Stoics teach about love?

• 4:03:34Speaker 00

  It's an interesting question. Now, love is important to Stoicism. We don't have a very clear account of the position on it, but we've got various fragments, bits and pieces where we can kind of reconstruct the position from it.

• 4:03:50Speaker 00

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

• 4:04:31Speaker 00

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

• 4:05:15Speaker 00

  We want eudaimonia for other people. We want them to experience wisdom. We want them to experience virtue. Like, so we want them to flourish. But they have to reconcile that with the basic principle that other people's behaviour isn't directly under their control. So they pursue it, they have to pursue it with what we called earlier the reserve clause.

• 4:05:42Speaker 00

  Which would be, you know, I strongly prefer it that you flourish and gain wisdom, but I accept that it's not directly under my control. So the Stoics would say they do the best that they can to benefit other people. Well, being prepared to accept that the other people might not learn. So Marcus, for example, would have to accept that he got the best tutors and tried to set the best example that he could for Commodus, his son, but be prepared for the fact that Commodus might nevertheless turn into a corrupt and vicious individual as he did. There are many examples that this was a kind of cliche in the ancient world.

• 4:06:23Speaker 00

  Like, the Greeks loved to draw attention to the fact that great men often had idiotic kids, basically, very crudely. Like, it was, Socrates goes on about this, and then people say it about Socrates as well. They say Socrates' kids were like really unimpressive and unaccomplished individuals, even though we idolize him as a great philosopher. So they thought this was like a, I think they got to the point where most philosophers in the ancient world thought this is kind of a cliche, it's a sort of trope, that great philosophers and great parents and wise and just individuals aren't necessarily always able to pass that on to their children. They can help. It's like the saying you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.

• 4:07:08Speaker 00

  You know, you can set a good example and you can provide an education for other people, but you can't guarantee like that they're necessarily going to benefit from it.

• 4:07:18André Duqum?

  To close out, I have some rapid fire questions that I would. I will personally resist the urge to ask deeper context around and would try to limit you to one sentence, to one paragraph for each question.

• 4:07:32Speaker 00

  I like doing that, I'll have a go.

• 4:07:34André Duqum?

  Let's do it.

• 4:07:34Speaker 00

  I accept the challenge.

• 4:07:36André Duqum?

  The challenge begins.

• 4:07:37Speaker 00

  Alright.

• 4:07:38André Duqum?

  If you could transport back to one moment in history, which would it be?

• 4:07:43Speaker 00

  Oh, the oracle at Delphi, because we know so little about that. It's quite intriguing. I'd love to go back and see what actually happened at that point when the oracle said, no man is wiser than Socrates.

• 4:07:58André Duqum?

  Why did the philosophers insist on plain, unextravagant clothing?

• 4:08:07Speaker 00

  It became a symbol of being a philosopher, but it was also a form of renunciation

• 4:08:18Speaker 00

  and a way of embracing a lifestyle where they rejected ostentation and material status and flamboyance and things like that. A way of, as from a non-attachment, I guess.

• 4:08:39André Duqum?

  Similarly, and I try to increasingly disabuse the extravagant articulation, which is fun for me sometimes. But there seems to be this return to simple language and speaking plainly. What is the importance of that from the Stoic perspective when communicating effectively?

• 4:09:05Speaker 00

  They thought that by communicating simply and clearly,

• 4:09:11Speaker 00

  we could help avoid

• 4:09:16Speaker 00

  using language in a way that amplifies and distorts our emotions. They thought it was therapeutic, basically, to be more concise and more objective in their speech.

• 4:09:28André Duqum?

  You say studying the traits we admire in others is a starting point for cultivating them. What traits are you working on right now personally?

• 4:09:40Speaker 00

  I think the things that I'm most interested in learning from other people are qualities like patience and empathy, probably, are things that I'm particularly interested in at the moment.

• 4:09:57André Duqum?

  If you could have dinner with any Stoic and it wasn't Socrates or Marcus, who would it be?

• 4:10:04Speaker 00

  That's a tricky one.

• 4:10:11Speaker 00

  I mean, I guess the obvious answer would be Epictetus, because he's like somebody that I find. Even like Marcus looked up to him and he's he's like an iconic stoic figure. So yeah, definitely Epictetus.

• 4:10:28André Duqum?

  One thing you would wish people would stop quoting Epictetus on?

• 4:10:32Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 4:10:37Speaker 00

  I nothing. Like, I don't. I mean, the one where he says it's not things that upset us, but that's quoted to death in books. And so I I would say I wish they would quote other stuff from Epictetus and not just that one quote. Definitely. But I don't want them to stop quoting that. I just want them to quote other things as well.

• 4:10:56André Duqum?

  Alfred Korzipski.

• 4:10:58Speaker 00

  Oh, wow.

• 4:10:58André Duqum?

  Two sentences. Why should anyone care?

• 4:11:00Speaker 00

  Oh, that's an impossible question. Like, Korzipski's general semantics is notoriously tricky to explain. So it's kind of.

• 4:11:13André Duqum?

  You get two paragraphs.

• 4:11:14Speaker 00

  All right, I've got again. No, I'll do it. I can do it. I have a go at doing this in like two sentences. It's a major precursor of cognitive behavioral therapy. Um, that's as philosophically important to CBT as Stoicism is arguably. And it's about changing the way that we use language in general. So the potential benefits of it are kind of more pervasive and generic than CBT. So it lends itself towards general self, very general self-improvement and resilience building.

• 4:11:52Speaker 00

  And so that the breadth of it is particularly useful. And also, there aren't really other approaches to self-improvement that can cover the same ground. It's so unique in some regards.

• 4:12:06André Duqum?

  What virtue do you think the modern man and woman could use most in cultivating?

• 4:12:23Speaker 00

  Well, in a way, the answer would just be wisdom, because the Stoics think wisdom is kind of integral to all the other virtues. However,

• 4:12:33Speaker 00

  I think that

• 4:12:39Speaker 00

  another virtue that's very important that people don't talk a lot about is magnanimity. And Seneca thinks magnanimity is the main virtue, one of the main virtues that counteracts anger. I think anger is particularly problematic for modern society. And this kind of forgotten virtue of magnanimity, like of going beyond anger and being able to see things more objectively. And having a, it means literally having a big soul, like rather than kind of focusing narrowly on small things. It's something that's lacking from society and many people would benefit from.

• 4:13:23Speaker 00

  We don't have magnanimity in our politicians, for example, they could definitely benefit from it.

• 4:13:30André Duqum?

  Okay, I'm gonna put you through the torturous endeavor of trying to summarize your favorite quote or ethos of a philosopher that I'm gonna name. And you say your favorite, or maybe most personally impactful lesson that comes to mind from them. Okay, Pythagoras.

• 4:13:52Speaker 00

  The first thing that comes to my mind about Pythagoras is the idea that we should postpone responding to things that provoke our anger until our feelings have naturally abated. So I think that was an integral technique in Pythagoreanism, and I think it's still very relevant today.

• 4:14:13André Duqum?

  Heraclitus.

• 4:14:15Speaker 00

  Heraclitus.

• 4:14:20Speaker 00

  Heraclitus says that the way up and the way down are the same. His teachings are hard to explain because they're very paradoxical and obscure. But I think this is a really cool idea. If we understand how we can make ourselves more anxious or how we make ourselves more angry, then we potentially understand how to do the opposite and deconstruct my unhealthy feelings. So the way up and the way down are the same is a very profound saying, I believe.

• 4:14:50André Duqum?

  Zeno.

• 4:14:51Speaker 00

  Zeno is the whole of Stoicism. So I think arguably one of his big innovations was the distinction between two different types of value. So the value that we place on external things, like he calls it selective value. So the idea that you could say that something has utility or that you'd prefer to have it. But that's different from the value that you invest in something when you become very emotional about it. So separating kind of practical value and the sort of evaluations that cause strong emotions is a major insight, I think, that Zeno had.

• 4:15:33André Duqum?

  Socrates?

• 4:15:35Speaker 00

  Socrates is, again, so much stuff.

• 4:15:41Speaker 00

  I think the Socratic method really is the main thing. And the idea that it's a remedy for kind of intellectual conceit and that it's a process that helps us to develop understanding without necessarily arriving at a clear conclusion.

• 4:16:01André Duqum?

  Diogenes?

• 4:16:03Speaker 00

  Diogenes.

• 4:16:08Speaker 00

  I think one of the main things that I take from Diogenes is the idea of voluntary hardship. And building up, the cynics had this idea that by accepting pain or discomfort, we can kind of remove some of the sting from it, like grasping a nettle.

• 4:16:34Speaker 00

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

• 4:16:58André Duqum?

  Epicurus.

• 4:16:59Speaker 00

  Oh, Epicurus is a tricky one because he's kind of a big rival of the Stoics. So the philosophies are usually seen as being kind of odds in some ways. But Epicurus did say a lot of really cool things.

• 4:17:17Speaker 00

  Seneca borrows quite a lot from him. So one of the things that I like about Epicurus is that he says,

• 4:17:29Speaker 00

  and that Marcus Aurelius quotes several times, is that pain is either,

• 4:17:39Speaker 00

  what is it he says, it's either acute,

• 4:17:46Speaker 00

  it's either intense and short-lived or it's long-lived and bearable. So like the most intense pain that we experience is usually the briefest pain.

• 4:17:59Speaker 00

  And that kind of, that's a curious way of kind of reframing the experience. You can either tell yourself, this is really bad, but it won't last long. Or you can tell yourself, okay, this lasts a long time, but it's not as severe as acute pain. So there's always an angle that you can adopt that allows you to reframe it one way or the other.

• 4:18:20André Duqum?

  Chrysippus.

• 4:18:26Speaker 00

  I mean.

• 4:18:29Speaker 00

  Inventing cognitive behavioral therapy, basically. The Chrysippus says that there are two types of belief that cause emotions. And one of them is an evaluation of how bad something is. And the other one is an extreme belief about how we should respond to it. And this is really similar to a very influential modern theory of stress and emotion. So I think that was incredibly insightful and way ahead of its time. So this idea that when we're angry or when we're anxious, we kind of have a threat appraisal and then also a strong belief about how we should cope.

• 4:19:13André Duqum?

  Okay, a couple more. Seneca.

• 4:19:15Speaker 00

  Seneca.

• 4:19:19Speaker 00

  Let me think.

• 4:19:22Speaker 00

  I mean, one of the main things that I would take away, this like loads and loads of things from all of these philosophers, but Seneca has this idea that he is one of our main sources for premediterranean malorum. So the idea that we should practice all of the misfortunes that commonly befall people and prepare ourselves to cope in advance with them. It's like a really profound idea, like it's a resilience building strategy. Now, I say all that much about that philosophically, but I think it's a major theme in his writings and very important.

• 4:20:01André Duqum?

  Epictetus.

• 4:20:05Speaker 00

  I think one of the most interesting things that Epictetus says is that passage where he tells his students that when they have a troubling impression, they should speak to it and say, you're just an impression and not entirely the thing that you claim to represent. That's weirdly similar to one of the central principles of Kuzmic's general semantics. And it's really interesting for several reasons from the point of view of modern psychotherapy. So it's like a passing remark that he makes, but it's very powerful and very interesting.

• 4:20:42André Duqum?

  Marcus Aurelius.

• 4:20:44Speaker 00

  The main things that I would take from Marcus Aurelius, again, there's like so many things, and probably one of the most famous sayings that he has is stop arguing about what it means to be a good man and just be one. So that's not a profound philosophical argument, but I think it's a very powerful piece of philosophical rhetoric.

• 4:21:04André Duqum?

  You've spent 30 years studying ancient philosophy and modern psychology. You've spent decades applying that through practice and coaching, behavioral therapy, raising a daughter, losing a father, and friends. If you had one last message to deliver it in 60 seconds, it's no small question, what would you leave people with?

• 4:21:33Speaker 00

  Again, there's so many ways that I could potentially answer that. But the first thing that comes to my mind, funnily enough, I've changed my mind a lot better as I get older. But as time goes on, it sounds odd to say this, and I'm drawing on Stoicism, modern psychotherapy research and saying this. The main thing I would say to people is I think most people massively underestimate their own ability to cope with stress and misfortune, very simply. I think people underestimate their coping ability. And just realizing that and thinking about it, it's one of the most important things that they can do to help themselves.

• 4:22:14André Duqum?

  We recently launched an online community, the Know Thyself Collective. The goal is to facilitate individual awakening towards the collective transformation of a more beautiful world. And we have people from our community send in questions. And so one question that came in from Luis from Los Angeles, does Stoicism separate ambition from uncontrolled desire?

• 4:22:44Speaker 00

  Does that question mean could there be a healthy form or a moderate form of ambition?

• 4:22:52Speaker 00

  So the terminology the Stoics use is probably slightly different.

• 4:22:59Speaker 00

  But the Stoics would certainly acknowledge that you could have ambition without being rigidly pathologically attached to it. That would be what they call preferred indifference. So they think it's possible to, they, they think, um, they don't think that material success or social success or reputation are bad things. They think they're potentially advantageous. They just don't think that they're all important or that we should invest our self-esteem in them. So if we can pursue those things with a certain degree of non-attachment and a kind

• 4:23:40Speaker 00

  of somewhat egoless way, then that's potentially natural and healthy. But in the process of doing, the trick to doing that paradoxically would be to pursue ambition while accepting the possibility of failure with relative indifference, like to prefer success but be able to endure failure.

• 4:24:07André Duqum?

  Wonderful. Is there any?

• 4:24:12André Duqum?

  We had quite a thorough conversation. Is there anything else on your mind or heart that you want to share before we close out?

• 4:24:19Speaker 00

  Gosh, let me think. Well, the book I'm writing at the moment is about anger, so that's my big hobby. I used to be really into anxiety and now I'm more into anger for some reason.

• 4:24:28André Duqum?

  You're too, emotions de jour.

• 4:24:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, I got more into anger as time went on.

• 4:24:35Speaker 00

  I think in some ways that anger might be the royal road or our royal road to self-improvement or overcoming anger is. Because if we can really deal with anger, it potentially transforms our relationship with other people. It forces us to think more deeply about. Well, we've talked about love earlier. You know, what's the opposite of anger? And what does it mean to wish people well and want them to flourish? So I, and anger is one of the most overlooked of the emotions. There's relatively little research on it compared to depression and anxiety. People with anger are therapy dodgers.

• 4:25:17Speaker 00

  They usually don't seek out therapy unless a spouse or somebody else refers them, tells them that they should go. So one thing I'd leave people with, we talked earlier about kind of blind spots. Anger is like the biggest blind spot for self-help and self-improvement. It's the thing that people tend to ignore. It's a problem that nobody's watching. So if you're looking for your blind spots, resentment, anger, those kind of feelings are the ones that are kind of trickiest. What I'd leave with people is there's maybe more to be gained therefore by looking deep within and targeting that particular problem.

• 4:25:53André Duqum?

  Can't wait to read it when it comes out. And this has been one of the most thorough and fun conversations that I've had in a while. I just want to say thank you so much. And we'll leave links down in the description where people can stay connected with you and your work and your Substack and your writings, all of that.

• 4:26:08Speaker 00

  Awesome. It's been a pleasure. Again, you know, I've really enjoyed the way that you, the direction in which you took the conversation. Like we've had a, I feel like we've kind of been on a bit of a journey.

• 4:26:18André Duqum?

  Yeah, absolutely. It's my favorite journey to be on. Thank you for going on it with me and thank you all for coming on this journey as well.

• 4:26:31André Duqum?

  Massive gratitude to you.

• 4:26:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, likewise.

• 4:26:33André Duqum?

  Yeah. Thank you, everyone. Until next time, be well.