Ancient Greek Wisdom Every Man Needs To Hear - Donald Robertson

Donald Robertson is a cognitive-behavioral psychotherapist, an author and an expert on ancient philosophy. If you were to divide philosophy into two eras, it would be pre-Socratic and post-Socratic. Socrates is history's greatest philosopher, and today we get to discover new lessons about his life and his teachings. Expect to learn the benefits of thinking like Socrates, why he was so influential, what the Socratic method actually is, the hidden gem lessons from Socrates on how to live a good life, the insane story of how he died and much more… - 00:00 Why Should We Care About Socrates? 07:50 Philosophy Before Socrates 14:42 Why Socrates Became a Philosopher 21:04 Main Principles of Socrates’ Philosophy 35:42 Why Some Find Socrates Annoying 45:35 Did Socrates Get Involved in Politics? 49:50 Socrates’ View of a Good Life 57:57 Why Socrates Was Executed 1:08:48 Links Between Socrates & Seneca 1:19:40 The Meaning Behind ‘Know Thyself’ 1:26:11 Biggest Weaknesses of Socrates’ Philosophy 1:35:55 Why This Book Was Almost Impossible to Write 1:45:35 The Obstacle to Playing With Ideas in Today’s Society 1:54:14 What’s Next for Donald? - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

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

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  Dude, I love every time that we get to speak. I adored all of your last books and you've done a new one about Socrates. Why would anyone want to think like Socrates?

• 0:12Donald Robertson?

  Why would anyone care about this old dead white guy or whatever? He, I love Socrates. I love Marcus Aurelius, but Socrates is like the next level. You know, I really am excited to be able to talk and write about him and stuff. Socrates was, and I'll tell you why. This is going to seem like I know a dancer, right? There's Eric Clapton, right? And guys like that. And then there's Jimi Hendrix, right? Eric Clapton's an amazing guitarist, but Jimi Hendrix, to me anyway, he sounds like he's from another planet, right? Jimi Hendrix took his guitar to bed with him. He woke up in the morning, strapped his guitar on and fried eggs wearing his guitar. He went to the lavatory wearing his guitar, right? Psychologists call that time on task, like he was constantly

• 0:57Donald Robertson?

  practicing and stuff like he was obsessed with it. Socrates reminds me in that solitary regard of Jimi Hendrix, because the way he's described to us is that he's a guy who abandoned everything else and just spent all day, every day, discussing what he considered to be the most important questions in life with anybody, the greatest intellectuals that he could find in the known world, prostitutes, politicians, slaves, you name it, everybody from all walks of life. So he had, he was like the Jimi Hendrix of philosophizing, like he never took his guitar off. He was constantly doing, I can't imagine someone in modern

• 1:39Donald Robertson?

  society spending that amount of time really analyzing the contradictions in someone else's thinking. So Socrates to me is a kind of a unique individual and it comes through, we don't know, there's this thing called the Socratic problem, that we don't know, but we should acknowledge at the beginning, that we don't know for sure how Closer representation Plato's dialogues or the other sources that we have are of the real Socrates, but I think his character comes through to some extent. Those dialogues are probably semi fictional, like they're embellished a bit, but the real guy kind of shines through to some extent, and he must have been an extraordinary individual. He's somebody who

• 2:20Donald Robertson?

  has a tremendous capacity for thinking outside the box, for spotting logical contradictions, and he said some of the most radical things in the history of Western philosophy. Not only that, I see him as the godfather of modern self-help and self-improvement psychology, or the great, great granddaddy of cognitive behavioural therapy. So as a psychotherapist, a cognitive behavioural therapist, you know, I look to Socrates as somebody who stands at the very origin of our tradition. But also, I think in some ways, we've kind of gone astray in ways that he wonders about. So by going back and looking at what he originally said, I think we can figure out maybe and see beyond some of the mistakes that we might have made along the way.

• 3:03Chris Williamson?

  You mentioned there, maybe historical gap with regards to what we know about him, how we would have learned about him. How do we know anything about him? Sort of what are the scraps of material that you've been using to write this book?

• 3:17Donald Robertson?

  Well, the most famous thing is that we have Plato's dialogues. There are like thirty-six or thirty-seven of Plato's dialogues, most of which feature Socrates prominently. And it's generally assumed by scholars that Plato changed his approach throughout his career. Early in his career, he wrote a more literal description of Socrates, probably embellished a bit. As time went on, he starts to use Socrates more and more as a mouthpiece, probably for his own views. Like Plato's famous metaphysical theory, the theory of forms, probably wasn't something that Socrates ever actually said. Socrates' way of doing philosophy seems to be more kind of homely, down-to-earth, more focused on applied ethics and daily life, basically. So we have those. And, and, you know, did-

• 4:00Donald Robertson?

  Plato's dialogues are just incredible. Plato was also a genius. And so we have the writings of a genius about another genius, basically. You know, some of these texts are the most profound and moving pieces of literature in the Western canon. And, you know, I seldom recommend books to people, funnily enough, unless I know them very well. But my one exception to that is that I think everybody should read Plato's Apology, because I think it's a masterpiece. And it only takes a couple of hours to read, as I say. So we've got all that stuff. And then we have Xenophon, another student of Socrates. And his dialogues are less well known, but we have a bunch of like 30 or 40 dialogues,

• 4:42Donald Robertson?

  shorter ones, more down to earth from Xenophon as well. And then we have this really weird thing, which is a play by Aristophanes, which is a satire ridiculing Socrates that was written and performed during his lifetime. And we learn almost nothing from that, or it's hard to tell anything from it because it's a caricature. But it tells us that he must have been pretty famous during his lifetime for people to have, you know, ridiculed him, caricatured him like that. And then we have what's called the anecdotal tradition, which is like basically a bunch of little anecdotes and quips about Socrates said this, Socrates did that, that we tend to find in later authors. So there are more dubious reliability.

• 5:22Donald Robertson?

  But altogether, all this stuff tells us something about what we could frame as the literary character of Socrates. So Marcus Aurelius and other subsequent thinkers that followed the subsequent to Socrates would have known of him mainly through these writings. So we could say what's influencing them is the character of Socrates that was passed down by other writers. And there's a big question mark about how closely does that correlate to the real guy? We'll never know.

• 5:52Donald Robertson?

  Why was he so influential?

• 5:55Donald Robertson?

  Well, the ancient answer to that question is that he was the first, he wasn't the first philosopher. He wasn't even the first philosopher at Athens, but they used to say that he was the first philosopher that brought philosophy really down to earth and applied it to everyday matters, kind of almost making it into a psychotherapy, basically. He would talk to people about the nature of love. He would talk to generals in the military about the nature of courage. You know, he would talk to priests about the nature of piety. He talked to his friends about the anger. The most kind of homely dialogue that we have is in Xenophon. And in it, Socrates has a conversation

• 6:36Donald Robertson?

  with his teenage son, Lamprocles, because Lamprocles is really upset about his mum nagging him. And Socrates helps his son to kind of reframe this, overcome his anger towards his mother. Right. So that's probably the most kind of down to earth example of a Socratic dialogue that we have. So that's kind of what he was particularly known for doing. But also, he took the method of dialectic or philosophical question and answer, turned it into his own trademark method called the Socratic method, and really began to much more radically and thoroughly question the assumptions about morality, mainly, that people around him

• 7:17Donald Robertson?

  were making. And that made him a controversial figure. You know, he was like dynamite. You know, some people were almost addicted to being questioned by Socrates. They found it incredibly liberating experience. Other people found it embarrassing, humiliating, and they hated him and they went after him. So it wouldn't be overly simplifying things to say that Socrates asked too many questions, rocked the boat, upset some powerful people. And we all know how that ended for him. He was made to drink hemlock.

• 7:51Chris Williamson?

  What was the existing philosophical world that he entered into? You've mentioned there that he wasn't the first philosopher, probably by broader categories, but he's the first one to bring it down to earth. What was the state philosophically of the existing world?

• 8:07Donald Robertson?

  Well, the two main philosophical traditions that preceded him, and there were others, so it's a little bit more complex. But the ones that are most relevant to him is the first philosopher at Athens was a guy called Anaxagoras, who came from the Greek colonies, which would be in Ionia, which would be on the coast of Turkey, basically. So when we talk about Greek philosophers, we're often a bit confused about where they came from. They didn't all come from Athens. Many of them came from Greek colonies that were much further afield. So Anaxagoras was what we call a natural philosopher. All these, the famous thing about Socrates is we refer to everyone that came before him as pre-Socratic. That's how influential he was. You know, like pre-Jimmy Hendrix.

• 8:50Chris Williamson?

  He's the before Christ. He's the before Christ of philosophy.

• 8:53Donald Robertson?

  Yeah. So the natural philosophers are kind of in many ways precursors of modern science. They try to explain things broadly speaking, using physical descriptions. You know, they were very interested in astronomy, very interested in physiology. And that was a great thing for Athenian culture and Greek culture. It was also very controversial because they challenged traditional superstitions. So people would think that thunder and lightning was caused by Zeus and the natural philosopher said, we reckon it's caused by clouds rubbing together or something like that. You know, earthquakes are just a natural phenomenon and things. And that had a surprisingly big impact on society.

• 9:35Donald Robertson?

  Just as an aside, there's a famous anecdote about how Pericles, the most influential, most powerful Athenian statesman.

• 9:43Donald Robertson?

  At this time, was about to set sail with his fleet on a military campaign. And there was an eclipse and his crew were cowering in fear and they refused to do it. Very often, the Greeks would abandon, particularly the Spartans were known for this, by the way. They would abandon battles because they were concerned about bad omens and so on. And Pericles supposedly explained the natural philosophy that he'd been taught by Anaxagris. And he said, look, this is just something passing in front of the sun, as if I put my cloak in front of your eyes. But it's further away and much bigger. And he convinced, by giving this down to earth naturalistic explanation, he managed to convince his troops to set sail. Why? And so it changed the outcome of battles.

• 10:28Donald Robertson?

  Basically, that's how kind of dramatic it was. But at the same time, it also upset a lot of people. And so Anaxagris was also placed on trial for impiety, you know, long before Socrates. So there was Anaxagris and Socrates thought this philosophy, though, doesn't teach wisdom. He said, Anaxagris didn't really understand anything about the nature of justice and injustice. So when he was placed on trial, supposedly he was a broken man as a result. And we can contrast how Anaxagris dealt badly with being exiled. And then subsequently sentenced to death for impiety. And how Socrates famously exhibited courage in court and stood by his principles.

• 11:12Donald Robertson?

  Because he'd prepared himself to understand justice and injustice from a much more profound philosophical perspective. So there's Anaxagris and many other natural philosophers that Socrates had studied. And then a bit later, we get these guys called the sophists. And their name implies that they claim to be wise, they claim to be, to have expertise. And the sophists taught young men oratory and rhetoric. They were kind of like self improvement gurus in a sense, but they also taught people how to become successful politicians and confident public speakers. And they

• 11:51Donald Robertson?

  Where the first one was Protagoras, who Socrates knew personally and questioned. And this seems to have been a key moment in his career. But Socrates basically thought the sophists were far too concerned with just winning arguments. And they'd sacrificed the truth. So they would teach you how to win a debate in the assembly. Right. But Socrates's concern, to put it very simply, was he'd say, how much time have you guys spent trying to figure out what's in the best interests of society? Or what's just and what's unjust? Like zero time. But you spend all of your time trying to figure out how you can convince other people what's just or in their interests before the assembly. Now, this is a very simple argument, but weirdly, eerily, it kind of applies today.

• 12:36Donald Robertson?

  Like, you know, so people get into politics because they want to influence society, you know. But how many politicians seem to have invested that much time and effort in trying to figure out what's genuinely in the interests of individuals? Or society? Socrates says it would be like going to see a doctor that had never spent any time studying medicine. I don't bother with that. Like, you know, I'm just really good at writing prescriptions, but I don't know, like, you know, what's actually good for your health. You know, so politicians, all they're concerned about is winning debates, like, you know, influencing legislation. But Socrates said, could you explain what justice is? Or explain to me what's in the interest of society? And when he asked them these questions, they'd be like, I don't know, I haven't really thought about it. So the, this was his concern with the sophists.

• 13:19Donald Robertson?

  It was all about appearances and they sacrificed truth. But he had a kind of love hate relationship with them. He'd take, he liked to kind of hang around them. You know, he thought they said some interesting things, but they didn't really think deeply enough about what they were saying. I guess another part of it that I think is very relevant today is that Socrates found that the sophists would give speeches and they would teach people maxims. A bit like watching a YouTube video or getting kind of roles for life from, from modern self improvement experts. Right? And Socrates thought that was basically too passive. Like, he thought there are no rules that are going to apply across every situation in life, basically. What's much more in your interests is learning how to think for yourself

• 14:02Donald Robertson?

  and to be able to question things and spot exceptions to general rules and principles. So that's a harder, it's a more kind of, a less tangible concept for people. But so that's where the Socratic method comes in. Socrates thought we need to learn how to think for ourselves, question things more deeply, not just kind of memorize these phrases that we're getting from the sophists.

• 14:22Chris Williamson?

  Do you think it's kind of ironic that one of Socrates' fundamental principles is that you must think for yourself and your book is called How to Think Like Socrates? How to Think Like Socrates, which is how to think for yourself. It's nice and circular there, I love it.

• 14:35Donald Robertson?

  It's a bit of a circular, but if you learn to think like Socrates, you'll learn to think for yourself.

• 14:41Chris Williamson?

  So do we know how Socrates got into philosophy? If we got any idea about his upbringing or history or introduction? If he's this sort of, you know, game-changing, world-renowned, everything before him was nought and after him was just a replicant of what he said before? Like, what was his come-up story?

• 15:03Donald Robertson?

  We kind of have several bits of evidence there. So like, sometimes the evidence is a little bit contradictory or it's a little bit vague. So, you know, in telling his story, we have to make some assumptions. We have to iron out some contradictions and stuff because the ancient text is a little bit messy in that regard. So the most famous explanation he gives is in Plato's Apology, where he says his friend Chyrophon went to Delphi, which is a few days' walk outside Athens in the mountains, this incredible place. It's like something out of Lord of the Rings. And there's a great famous temple to the god Apollo there. And you could ask questions of the Pythia, the priestess of Apollo. She sat on a bronze tripod, supposedly inhaling these fumes and she'd go into a trance. And the god Apollo possessed her and spoke through her, right? And Chyrophon, who was another

• 15:48Donald Robertson?

  philosopher, a weird dude, who people compared to a bat, to a spectre. I imagine him almost like a kind of goth or something. Like, he was a bit of a misfit, but he was Socrates' best friend. And he went to the, he was known for doing kind of...

• 16:07Donald Robertson?

  Eccentric things. So he went to the the Delphic oracle and said, uh, asked it, is any man wiser than Socrates? And it replied, no man is wiser than Socrates. Apollo, the god, Apollo replied, no man is wiser than Socrates. And so the weird story in the apology is that Socrates found this difficult to accept. And so he went around grilling the wisest people that he could find to try and find evidence that there was indeed somebody that was wiser than him, because he didn't believe that no one was wiser than him. But he found that when he asked great philosophers and statesmen, often they contradicted themselves.

• 16:49Donald Robertson?

  So he thought they can't be wise. They believe that they are. And the sophists literally called themselves wise men. But often on when they were questioned, they they're the things they were saying were full of contradictions and fell apart. And so Socrates thought, well, look, I come to the conclusion that paradoxically, I don't know much either, but I'm neither do these guys. And I am wiser than them by a hair's breadth, because at least I know that I'm not wise, whereas they falsely believe that they are wise. Right? And so the central thrust of his method becomes puncturing this kind of intellectual arrogance or conceit. Sometimes it's called double ignorance. So Socrates thought ignorance isn't a problem,

• 17:33Donald Robertson?

  because I might be ignorant about medicine, but if I know I'm ignorant about medicine, I might be motivated to go and consult an expert. Right? I might not know how to fix the engine in my car, but if I go and see a mechanic, I can find somebody that maybe knows better than me. But if I believe that I'm an expert on engines, or I believe I'm an expert on medicines, and I'm not really, then I'm in trouble, because I'll be guided by my ignorance to make lots of mistakes. So Socrates thought, this is one of our biggest problems in life, a bit like the Dunning Kruger phenomenon, like that we believe that we know things that we do not in fact know. So he found that his method was almost like a therapy for curing people of this intellectual conceit. So that's the story that Plato tells,

• 18:14Donald Robertson?

  but he must, he also says that he did study philosophy prior to that. Maybe for decades, he'd been studying natural philosophy and learning a bit from other philosophers. But his trademark method developed at some point in his life as a result of this weird incident where the oracle proclaims that no man is wiser than him.

• 18:37Chris Williamson?

  How much do you think he would have spent his time

• 18:43Chris Williamson?

  playing this game of poking holes in other people's hypocrisy, ignorance, like shallow rhetoric that isn't sort of foundation philosophically if he hadn't stepped into a world where the sophists were kind of the number one band available at the time?

• 19:00Donald Robertson?

  That's really hard to say. I mean, I always feel like we almost need the sophists to have Socrates. You know, he's very much reacting to them. I mean, maybe he would have developed his method in response to the other, the natural philosophers. But it really seems to be the sophists that inspire him in a way because he's so concerned. And one reason for that is that the sophists have a lot of influence over Athenian politics. And Socrates was friends with some powerful political figures. And so although he wasn't really directly involved in politics himself, I think he was very concerned about Athens. And what's missing from the Platonic dialogues and from Xenophon, although they refer to historical events

• 19:43Donald Robertson?

  and they refer to important figures, I think people still, when they read Plato, get the feeling that Socrates is just walking around in pleasant groves and sandals, kind of pontificating about things. And they don't visualize him as a heavy infantryman who fought in at least three major battles of the Peloponnesian War. They don't imagine him as someone who survives a terrible plague. They don't see him at the heart of Athenian politics, surrounded by these key figures, like these senior statesmen. And living through one of the most epic wars in European history, the Peloponnesian War lasted 27 years. You know, and under a dictatorship, the Thirty Tyrants that took over Athens.

• 20:26Donald Robertson?

  So his life was incredibly, you know, dramatic, basically. And his philosophy is shaped by, I think, all of these things, his experience as a soldier, living under different political regimes, including a kind of dictatorship that, you know, that was really brutal and political purges where people were just rounded up and executed. All of these things, but definitely the sophists loom large in Socrates's influences. And partly because he's concerned about them having so much sway over the Athenian assembly and the political decisions that are being made.

• 21:04Chris Williamson?

  How would you describe the main principles of his philosophical worldview?

• 21:11Donald Robertson?

  Well, as we've said, I mean, the Socratic method, the core of what he's doing in a sense is more about the process. So some people in the ancient world would have seen wisdom or the goal of life as being the acquisition of knowledge. Like, you know, having a bunch of opinions that are true, basically. And Socrates thought that's not real wisdom, though. That's just kind of learning stuff passively. Real wisdom is more like a cognitive skill, right? So the goal of philosophy, I think for Socrates, is more of a process that we engage in every day of our lives. Learning to think and question things more profoundly. You know, he said the unexamined life is not worth living. You know, he thought the goal of life was to examine your life continually every day.

• 21:54Donald Robertson?

  It was like an ongoing process of personal development that in a sense never really ended. So the core of his philosophy, I think, is the actual method of his philosophy. And he does have doctrines in a sense. Often he doesn't state them, but he seems to be kind of arriving at them.

• 22:14Donald Robertson?

  So for example, a famous one is in Plato's Republic, in the first book. Socrates asks for a definition of justice. And his friends say, well, justice is helping your friends and harming your enemies, right? This was a cliche in Athenian culture. It comes from the military world where you'd be helping your military allies and punishing or attacking your enemies in warfare. But it was also applied to civilian life as well. And Socrates questions this from a number of different angles. But as far as I recall, in the Republic, he doesn't specifically state what the alternative conclusion would be. He just kind of implies it. Whereas later philosophers, Plutarch, for example, explicitly says,

• 22:57Donald Robertson?

  Socrates believed that justice consists in helping your friends, but also helping your enemies by turning them into your friends. So the goal is basically to convert enemies into friends, not just to kind of punish or harm your enemies. Socrates was concerned that if we try to harm our friends... Friends from a particular point of view. First of all, we're missing out, if we try to harm our enemies. First of all, we're missing out on the opportunity to convert them into allies or friends. And secondly, we might kind of end up making them worse enemies by punishing them or harming them in a particular way. And actually, that's kind of what happened to Athens. You know, there were certain more kind of aggressive hawkish political leaders that took control of the Athenian assembly and they committed genocide.

• 23:42Donald Robertson?

  And this really led to Athens downfall because Athens' potential allies no longer trusted them and turned against them. Like, so their regime collapsed. They had a catastrophic military defeat in Sicily that can be seen as the consequence of this kind of more short sighted, more aggressive attitude towards other states. So, you know, Socrates does have these doctrines and there are many, many other ones that people derive from what he's saying. But we should be a little bit careful about making them into roles that are too rigid. One of his nicest ones, you know, that's a little bit different, for instance, is Socrates, according to Xenophon, Socrates reputedly said that we should eat to live rather than live to eat.

• 24:26Donald Robertson?

  You know, he thought people, in general, he thought people were too much duped by appearances. So they were too much swayed by short term pleasure and pain. And he thought we should think more carefully about whether something is actually good for our health or not, rather than just whether it tastes nice or, you know, it doesn't taste nice. We should be thinking about the reality of stuff beyond the appearances. Another one of his little sayings that's quite well known is that we should be as we wish to appear. Like, he thought, again, we're misled into focusing too much on appearances. We want to appear confident. Socrates said it would be better to actually become confident, if you want to appear confident.

• 25:06Donald Robertson?

  If you focus too much on faking it, like, or the appearances, that can kind of lead to a more superficial approach. It could be misleading. You could get sucked into deception of other people. It would be better for you to actually become confident. People came to him saying, Socrates, how can I make myself seem like a good friend? And Socrates said it would be better to become a good friend in reality.

• 25:32Chris Williamson?

  I'm feeling a lot of this sort of tension between practical and abstract, especially stepping into a world where it's this sort of rhetorical device. People are getting Toastmasters or improv or comedy speech coaching in this way, but they're not actually assessing the underlying motivations of why they're doing this particular thing.

• 25:51Donald Robertson?

  Yeah.

• 25:51Chris Williamson?

  And, you know, he's got that, we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act, but a habit. So even in the highlighting of the importance of action, he's even taking it one step further and talking about the repetition of action.

• 26:09Donald Robertson?

  Yeah, I mean, Socrates felt like we were constantly confusing appearance and reality. That's, I guess, a recurring theme of his philosophy. And he felt the sophists were all about appearances and completely neglected reality. Right. So, you know, he's always challenging us to look beyond appearances by using reason. In a sense, Socrates thinks we're kind of lazy, you know? And he's always kind of encouraging us to question appearances and use reason to think a little bit more deeply about things. I'll give you a really cool example of that that relates to something I mentioned earlier. I mentioned Lamprocleis getting annoyed with his mother. Socrates, at the beginning of the conversation, asks his son whether his mother

• 26:53Donald Robertson?

  really cares for him and whether she's made many sacrifices to help him. And Lamprocleis actually admits quite easily, he says, yeah, my mom's like dedicated her life to helping me. When I'm sick, my mother nurses me. Like she spent all of her time raising me and she's done everything for me. But Socrates, she just really annoys me when she's nagging me. Like, I don't know how I could possibly put up with it. And Socrates uses this amazing analogy that just, it's one of my favorite things that he says. He says, In the theatre, when you're going to see a tragedy being performed, for example, do the actors not really say things that are much more vicious and insulting and hostile than

• 27:36Donald Robertson?

  anything your mother ever says? And Lampsocles says, well, yeah, of course they do. But you don't understand Socrates, they're just acting, it's not real, right? That's the difference. And Socrates says, but you just told me a few moments ago that you believe that your mother doesn't really mean you harm, but fundamentally she cares for you, right? So sometimes she might seem really annoying, but in general, she actually cares for you a lot. And what he's encouraging Lampsocles to do is to kind of look beyond the impression that he has of his mother in those moments and think more about her personality as a whole in a more rounded and complete way by using reason to think about who, who is your mother really? You know, what is, what is the nature of your relationship with her really?

• 28:20Donald Robertson?

  It's more than just a nagging. Like, that might be part of it. It may be something you don't like. But by focusing only on that and putting it under a magnifying glass, you exaggerate your anger. But if you think about her personality as a whole, then it becomes just one small part, right? And it becomes less upsetting. Maybe you become more able to tolerate it.

• 28:42Chris Williamson?

  You mentioned it a couple of times, assume that somebody hasn't heard about the Socratic method before. What is it? How's it work?

• 28:49Donald Robertson?

  So it's, in some ways, it's tricky to define, and in some ways, it's easy. Like, there's a lot of nuance to it. And Socrates doesn't sit down at any point and say, hey, let me just explain my methods to you briefly. Instead, what we see is an example after example of him using his method in various different ways. So we have to kind of infer how he's doing it. But basically, what he tends to do is to ask people to define a concept, and it's usually a virtue. So he'll say, define piety, define courage, define justice. And typically, it's something that's very relevant to them. So he's not just like we would in academic philosophy now.

• 29:31Donald Robertson?

  Analyzing concepts, you know, for the sake of it. He talks to military commanders about the nature of courage, for example, because it's something that they're already taking for granted, in a sense, in the conversations that they're having. So you could also say he's digging deeper beneath the conversation and questioning the underlying premise or assumption. So you guys are talking a lot about courage, but what is courage? How do you actually define it? The whole conversation is based on that. And then he'll normally think of exceptions to the role that they've given. So the most famous example example is when he's talking to lackeys and Nikeias, to Athenian generals, they define courage

• 30:13Donald Robertson?

  as standing your ground and remaining in formation in the face of the enemy. And that's because the Athenians depended to a large extent on their hoplites, their heavy infantry, which Socrates was one, and they had to fight in the phalanx formation. Right? And so your their shield, each soldier's shield would protect him, but also the guy standing to his left. And if you broke formation, not only would you place yourself at risk, but you place the soldiers that are fighting alongside you in greater danger as well by doing that. So they had to really drum it into these guys that they had to remain very rigidly in formation for this phalanx strategy to work. And Socrates says, okay, that's a good definition of courage, but it's too narrow, right? Because what about

• 30:56Donald Robertson?

  during a tactical retreat? Like you break from the phalanx formation, but you could still exhibit courage. You're no longer standing your ground in the same way, though. What if you fight in the cavalry and then you have to charge into the middle of the enemy rather than standing your ground? But the cavalry exhibit courage, you'd have to define it differently, though. He says, what about the Spartans? They fight in phalanx formation, but they also sometimes charge into the enemy like cavalry do. But they're renowned for their courage. So you wouldn't say that they lack courage. You'd have to tweak your definition a little bit. So he starts this conversation going usually by creative thinking and being able to come thinking outside the box and coming up with so he, you know, again, like he's not following a formula here as much as using a skill.

• 31:41Donald Robertson?

  He's thinking, right? And he's coming up, he's brainstorming examples. What about this? What about this? What about this? Right? It's like he's saying, yeah, but okay, courage could be standing your ground, but what about this? What about this scenario? What about in civilian life? You'd have to define it differently. And so he constantly challenges the interlocutor, the person he's speaking about, to revise their definition and think about it at a deeper and deeper level. And he doesn't always arrive at a clear conclusion. Often he doesn't. His dialogues often end in aporia in Greek, which is the term that we use to to mean a sort of confusion or bewilderment. Alright, so people walk away and some people hated that, but other people would walk away from it thinking,

• 32:21Donald Robertson?

  I kind of feel like I know less now than I did at the beginning of the conversation, but in a good way, because maybe I was too rigid in my thinking and I was assuming that I knew things that I didn't really understand. At least now I realise that there's more to justice than helping your friends and harming your enemies. Or there's more to courage than just standing your ground and remaining in the phalanx formation. And maybe I've kind of spiralled closer and closer to the centre of the meaning of these concepts. So in the process of doing that, he'd often point out contradictions in people's thinking.

• 32:57Donald Robertson?

  He said, what you're saying now seems to clash with something that you said a few minutes ago. So he was very sharp at noticing this. And, you know, I think one of the ways that that can help us today, actually, is there's a particular type of contradiction that Socrates would sometimes point out, a moral contradiction. I'll give you another example where he where he's talking to a teenage boy, an adolescent boy. There's a guy called Critobulus that comes to him, who's the son of one of his best friends, Crito. And Critobulus says, Socrates, could you introduce me to some people that would be really good friends to have in Athenian society? He's asking him for help networking, weirdly, right? And Socrates says, sure, like, how would you define a good friend?

• 33:40Donald Robertson?

  And Critobulus says, well, they'd come and visit you when you're sick. Maybe they'd lend you money if you're broke. Maybe if you were being a bit out of order, they'd take you to one side and gently kind of explain to you that you should change your behaviour and stuff like that. So quite easily, he's able to kind of define what a good friend is. But then Socrates says, well, how many of these qualities do you exhibit yourself? And Cretobulus is like, well, not many, like, you know, zero, I don't know. Like, so Socrates says, haven't, again, haven't you got this back to front? You're kind of asking me to present you to these people as if you would be a good match, as if you would be a good friend to them. But they're bound to figure out if you don't have any of these qualities. And then they won't trust me as a matchmaker of friends, you know? And they're going to lose faith in you as a friend as well.

• 34:25Donald Robertson?

  You should have come to me and asked me how you could become a good friend yourself. Like, how you could improve yourself. So you're exhibiting a double standard. You're applying one standard to other people in terms of friendship, but a different standard or no standard to yourself. And this is a kind of moral hypocrisy, if you like. So often Socrates is drawing people's attention to the fact that they're exhibiting moral double standards. And we do similar things in modern cognitive therapy as well. Sometimes people think philosophical ethics can be quite subtle and quite nuanced. And it often is. But, you know, in many cases, we can make moral progress, I think, just by not being hypocrites.

• 35:09Donald Robertson?

  You know, the one thing that the majority of people agree on is that you shouldn't contradict yourself morally. You know, and if you're saying one thing and doing another, like, if you're applying a double standard, most people agree there's something wrong there. Like, and it's reason that helps us to spot those contradictions and attempt to resolve them. So there's a simple way, I think, that many people can make this in progress in terms of morality and self-improvement, just by questioning their own standards in the way that Socrates teaches these young men to.

• 35:42Chris Williamson?

  It seems like that's the consistent trend or theme or perhaps outcome of this Socratic method, which is.

• 35:51Chris Williamson?

  Discontinuity, inconsistency, hypocrisy,

• 35:56Chris Williamson?

  poorly clarified underpinnings and foundations and definitions of what's going on. But yeah, I can also imagine that simply by asking questions and continuing to refine, you may avoid untruths and perhaps by avoiding untruths, move yourself closer to truth. But it's very much a sort of do it yourself, paint by numbers. Socrates isn't coming in and saying, well, this would be a better approach. He's saying, I think there may be a problem with this. So I can quite imagine why people could find him annoying because he's basically just permanently poking holes in everything.

• 36:33Donald Robertson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I think there are a number, let me kind of explain what he's doing, I think, from a different perspective, from a more psychological perspective, right? And in doing that, I'll maybe make its relevance a bit more apparent to modern self improvement. So there's a body of research in modern psychotherapy and psychology and in the field of coping and stress. That there, we can analyze different coping strategies that people use to deal with stress. Right? And these are the strategies that you find in self help books and self improvement books. Right? So maybe breathing exercises, relaxation technique, cognitive therapy, positive affirmations, positive visualization, even things like avoidance, just running away from the situation, you know, or accessing other results,

• 37:16Donald Robertson?

  social support, getting someone else to help you in a situation or things like that. There's like lots of different ways that you could potentially cope with anxiety, depression, stressful situations. Right? But no one of those coping strategies works every time. And the people that exhibit the most emotional resilience and are most able to recover from anxiety and depression are generally found to be the ones that have something we call coping flexibility. So they're able to choose intelligently between whether to confront a situation assertively or whether to back away from it and resign themselves to it with emotional acceptance. A lot about like saying, knowing when to pick your battles and things like that, you know,

• 38:00Donald Robertson?

  or knowing when it's better to distract yourself from pain or discomfort and when it would be better to, to address the cause or when it would be better to confront it and adapt to the experience and learn to accept it. You know, and by questioning, I mean, what we do in modern cognitive therapy, like often we'll find almost with every client, you'll find that they have coping strategies they've just made up themselves, or coping strategies they've got from the internet, or from self-help books, right? In many, in many cases, they'll be using these maladaptively in a way that's contributing to the problem and making it worse, usually because they're doing them too rigidly, or they're using them as a kind of subtle form of avoidance that's actually

• 38:43Donald Robertson?

  contributing to the problem. And so one of the first things we might do is what's sometimes called a functional analysis. So we'll get people to very carefully weigh up the pros and cons of the strategies they're using. And this kind of thinking things through is a cognitive therapy technique, is similar in some ways, I think, to using the Socratic method to question your definition of justice, for instance. Or Socrates would also, I'll give you an example of a specific technique that kind of blew my mind when I read it. In Xenophon, and scholars, like classicists, never mention this, because like, you know, as a psychotherapist, looking at the Socratic dialogues, I notice him doing psychological stuff that a philosopher or a classicist might not even, you know, like, register.

• 39:29Donald Robertson?

  So there's a bit in Xenophon where Socrates speaks to another young guy in a shop in the Agora, and this dude is a self-help junkie, as we call it today. He literally has a collection, he's got the finest collection in Athens of self-improvement books. He says he collects the maxims of wise men, and he's trying to improve his character so that one day he can become a great statesman, and he wants to understand the nature of morality or justice. And Socrates questions about the definition of justice and quickly shows that he, he doesn't really understand it, it's contradicting himself. And this guy thinks, well, I've been reading all these books and trying to memorize what they say, but when someone tries to get me to explain the meaning of these concepts, I just kind of fall apart. Because he's never really thought things through very deeply, he's just parroting stuff, he's learning passively.

• 40:15Donald Robertson?

  Socrates draws a diagram. Which I immediately recognised, because we do it all the time in cognitive therapy. He draws two columns, right, probably on a wax tablet or something, right? And at the heading, at the top of one column, he writes injustice. And at the top of the other column, he writes justice. And he says, I want you to kind of brainstorm definitions of what's justice there. You want to be a just individual, right? And brainstorm examples of injustice. So for injustice, he comes up with things like lying or stealing, stuff like that, right? Obvious examples of injustice. And then Socrates does exactly the same thing that we mentioned earlier. He brainstorms exceptions.

• 40:57Donald Robertson?

  He says, okay, lying, what if you're an elected general and you're lying to the enemy in order to deceive them in a military campaign? Is that unjust? Or would you consider that to be just under the circumstances? And so this young guy, Euthedimus is his name, he says, well, that's different. That's an exception, right? So he says, what if you're a parent and you're trying to give your kid medicine, but they won't take it unless you hide it in their food? Is that injustice? Or would that seem like it's just? He says, well, that's different as well. And then Socrates uses another example that's really well known in philosophy. He says, what if your friend was suicidal? And they come to you and say, where did you hide my dagger? Like, would you lie to them and pretend that you don't know? Or would you say, oh, I guess I have this over here, you know, take it? And he says, well, that's different as well.

• 41:42Donald Robertson?

  These are kind of unusual circumstances. So Socrates says, well, maybe then there's more nuance to this idea that justice consists in always telling the truth and never lying. Like, you seem to think that there's more to it than that. There's other perspectives, right?

• 41:57Donald Robertson?

  And this technique of drawing two columns, we can literally do it on coping strategies to get people to think, when would you practise mindfulness? And what might be the pros and cons of doing that? When might you try to fake it to make it? And when might that be a bad idea, right? When might it be a good idea to always speak your mind to other people and be assertive? And when might it be a better idea just to keep your mouth shut, like in some situations and know when to fight your battles and so on? And it's Cognitive flexibility and coping flexibility, the ability to view situations from different perspectives. And the ability to choose intelligently between different types of coping strategies that really constitute.

• 42:38Donald Robertson?

  In the same way that I said before, that wisdom is more like a skill rather than just a bunch of ideas or opinions that you could hold. I think that to some extent that's missing from a lot of self, modern self improvement literature. And the risk is then that people get techniques that work in some situations, but then they carry on using them rigidly. In situations where they're no longer working, they're backfiring. I'll give you an example, right, my, any tech, any self help technique is going to backfire in some situations. Mindfulness is, some techniques are more robust than others. Mindfulness is a really useful strategy, it works really well, right? But for instance, clients who have health anxiety and are constantly scanning their body for symptoms like, oh, I've just noticed a.

• 43:21Donald Robertson?

  I think I noticed a weird sensation in my chest, right? Practicing mindfulness in some cases could actually just exacerbate or heighten their, their focus. It's threat monitoring for symptoms, basically, and paying too much attention to every slight twinge in their body, right? Social anxiety, like, we know that one of the main correlates of social anxiety is heightened self focused attention. So in fact, many self help techniques that people try to use in social situations actually increase their self focused attention. Right? So people with social anxiety will typically do things like trying to stand up like tall and straighten their back and look people in the eye. Right? Cause they feel like that makes sense and it should make them more confident.

• 44:03Donald Robertson?

  But what they don't realise is often it heightens their self focused attention unnaturally and that contributes to social anxiety. And it also increases their cognitive load. So they're more likely to kind of feel awkward because they're trying to walk and chew gum at the same time. Right? But getting people to think about the pros and cons of these different strategies. When might it be a good idea? When it might have potentially backfire? Is there a good way of doing mindfulness? And maybe there's a bad way of doing mindfulness in some situations. That's the wisdom that allows people. The ancient philosophers used to also say, if you could give somebody, the problem with teaching moral precepts or like coping strategies. You know, would be.

• 44:46Donald Robertson?

  That if you give a piece of advice, a maxim to someone who's wise, they'll use it wisely. But if you give it to someone who's foolish, they're probably going to use it foolishly. Right. If you give coping strategies to somebody who's severe anxiety, they're, they're more likely just to turn it into a form of avoidance if you're not careful. The, the people who have the most severe problems are the ones that are most likely to misuse the type of strategies that we get in self-help books, basically. So I, what's often missing, I think, is this meta-skill, if you like, of being able to choose between strategies and figure out their pros and cons, which is actually one of the first things we'd normally do in cognitive therapy.

• 45:29Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, very prophetic by Socrates to be able to see that out front. What was the organon, organon?

• 45:39Donald Robertson?

  That's one of Aristotle's books, isn't it?

• 45:41Chris Williamson?

  Yes, yeah, yeah. So, yes, I saw, I saw that and this sort of interesting pivot towards, well, you see with these two different people that one is focused very much on what seems to be practical, but then there's this begin of a trajectory toward philosophy being involved in politics, philosophy being involved in sort of statesmanship with logic, solicism, deduction, ethics, stuff like that.

• 46:12Chris Williamson?

  Why did Socrates not get involved in politics during his time? Or did he? How much did he?

• 46:22Donald Robertson?

  Yes and no. Like generally speaking, he didn't get directly involved in politics. There was one incident where he was elected to a kind of a committee overseeing a trial. And Socrates took a principled stand supposedly in a situation where the mob were kind of baying for the blood of a bunch of Athenian generals that were on trial. And he almost was executed as a result of doing that. But after that, I think he said that, look, if I was to get involved in politics, I'd just end up being killed.

• 47:03Donald Robertson?

  You know, because, you know, the the stand that I would take would just, you know, in Athens at that time, one of our sources suggests his thinking was he just wouldn't last very long. And it would be more constructive of him to kind of critique politics from the sidelines, as it were, rather than trying to get directly involved.

• 47:29Chris Williamson?

  Did you not say, do you not say something about Roger Stone? Was there not some similarities between him and Roger Stone?

• 47:38Donald Robertson?

  I think there's some similarities and differences between him and Roger Stone. Well, it's funny, Roger Stone is one of these people that have published books on roles. It's called Stone's Rules, like his book. And some of them are the opposite of what Socrates would say. Like Roger Stone, I think it's fair to say is a man who would probably characterize himself as being quite fixated on the idea of revenge. That comes through pretty clearly from his book. He, at no point in in his book, again, does he ever really discuss what he thinks is in the interest of society. Well, he spends a lot more time discussing how much he hates his

• 48:18Donald Robertson?

  political opponents and how he uses politics as a means to get back at them, interestingly. I guess he has what you would call with a small c, like a very cynical attitude towards politics. It's very different from the way that someone like Socrates would have seen it.

• 48:36Donald Robertson?

  And Socrates, I think, would be a critic of this idea that revenge is a rational motive for us to have. But there are something, you know, I try to have an even handed approach to understand, again, like weighing up the pros and cons. I looked at Roger Stone's book, and I thought, are there bits of this that kind of make sense in relation to ancient philosophy? And are there bits of it that seem like they might be the opposite? He says one or two things about resilience. I think his phrase is turning chicken shit into chicken soup or something like that is the way he puts it.

• 49:13Chris Williamson?

  Very artsy.

• 49:14Donald Robertson?

  Yeah, he has this idea that we should adapt to adversity and develop emotional resilience, which kind of sounds a little bit like the Stoics. But what's missing from it, I guess he has some ideas about.

• 49:29Donald Robertson?

  Emotional resilience, but he doesn't have, he doesn't seem to see any connection between that and social virtue, for example, or justice. Like, he sees politics, I think, through a much more Machiavellian lens, as far as I can tell.

• 49:48Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Well, how would you summarize what Socrates believed about what a good life consisted of, or how to achieve a good life? Did he talk about that?

• 50:00Donald Robertson?

  Yeah. I mean, again, the first thing he would do is apply, like, for example, when he's talking to that guy, Euthydemus, he asks him that very question, but he encourages him to think it through for himself, right? So Euthydemus is this young dude that's been reading loads of self-improvement books, and he says, okay, like, so what is a good life? Actually, Euthydemus says, where is the first place that I should begin applying philosophy, incidentally? And Socrates says, here. Like, the first thing you should do is start by asking yourself what the goal of life is and what constitutes flourishing, or eudaimonia, right? So basically, what's good for us and what's bad for us in life? And Euthydemus says, well, okay, so stuff like your noble birth, wealth, status, you

• 50:41Donald Robertson?

  know, having a nice house, like, being healthy, having lots of friends are all good. Like, generally, people think that constitutes good fortune and flourishing in life. And then Socrates basically goes through the list and says, but each one of these things could potentially be bad. There's another dialogue by Plato where he provides a much clearer counterargument, where he says, okay, like, so let's start with wealth is the easiest example. Well, in the hands of somebody who's wise and virtuous would allow them to do more wise and virtuous things. But if you give the big pile of money to somebody who's foolish and vicious, it's just going to allow them to do more foolish and vicious stuff,

• 51:23Donald Robertson?

  right? And the same would apply to status. And actually, most of these external goods, as they're known, in a sense, are more like practical advantages or opportunities that you have in life. What really matters is how you make use of them, whether you use them wisely or whether you use them foolishly. So then, doesn't that suggest that the only thing that's intrinsically good would be practical wisdom or moral wisdom?

• 51:48Donald Robertson?

  Yeah, because how you use other things, even the disadvantages you have, even poverty and sickness, might be used well by somebody who's profoundly wise, right? They might develop more resilience as a result, they might learn from the experience, for instance. But somebody who's foolish and vicious will use even every advantage in life badly. Yeah. So it's by this kind of questioning method, Socrates gets his interlocutors, the usually young adult, young men, just embarking on adult life, basically, to realise that the things that most people assume to be the goal of life, like reputation and material success and stuff like that, aren't really intrinsically the most important thing in

• 52:32Donald Robertson?

  life, but what matters more is your ability to use these things well, which is something that they tend to have neglected and not really discussed. And so Socrates says, that's what we should be talking about, how do you use these things well? And so the goal of life of flourishing would consist in a kind of practical wisdom or moral wisdom, and also in the realisation that the prevailing values of our society are kind of back to front, and the things that everybody is led to value, like consumerism and celebrity culture and all that kind of stuff, is, those are misplaced values, basically.

• 53:06Chris Williamson?

  Isn't it interesting that it's the values of our society talking about this thousands of years ago, and them being the same values that everybody is still being swayed by now?

• 53:17Donald Robertson?

  I wonder about that, you know, I think there's got to be a reason for that, and I don't pretend to know exactly what it is, but the ancient philosophers had some answers. I believe that part of it is, if you imagine when you're born as a child, you're kind of a blank slate to some extent, and, you know, you, you start interacting with adults before you can even speak, let alone reason, and so you, you just emulate what you see other people doing as a small child. And I think it partly comes from the fact that we model our values on other people's behaviour. So as a child growing up, you think, you take a look around you and you think, what's all this meant to be about? You think, well, everyone else seems obsessed with money and property and status, like, so you just kind of naturally fall into that if you're not careful.

• 54:01Chris Williamson?

  Are you saying that we are the progeny of Socratic society's culture, eventually, just a few thousand years down the line?

• 54:10Donald Robertson?

  We're, we're, yeah, like we're, I think we're just a product of the, the fact that we can't really understand each other deeply, I think is the problem, that we're basing our values and just observing other people's superficial behaviour. So for example, we might see, you, as a little kid, you might see your dad working really long hours and earning money, you know, to, to kind of pay off the mortgage and stuff like that. And if you're not careful, you might think, I guess, I guess working hard and earning money is like, is what life is all about. But your dad might think, well, I'm doing that to care for my family, for example, like, because I consider being a good father, like, to be what I want my life to be about. So we don't necessarily observe the

• 54:49Donald Robertson?

  values that are driving other people's behaviour internally. We, we, I think so, we, we fall into this trap. I, this is my belief, over and over again, because we are not able to see inside people's hearts. Like, we end up with a superficial understanding of their values, right? And it's only over the course of life, as we develop the ability to reflect on our values and question them more deeply, we start to think, why are we doing all this stuff? Why, why am I buying a house? Why, you know, why am I working long hours? Why, it's for something deeper. Why, it's in order to be a good person and a good parent and a good husband and stuff like that. And I, I think one of the things that can help us achieve that realisation and question the prevailing

• 55:34Donald Robertson?

  values of our society is death. Like, you know, because many people, I think, for whatever reason, on their deathbed, when they look back over the course of their life, think, was it real, is it really worth spending your life just trying to earn as much money as possible? Was that what, you know, in retrospect, my life should have been about? You know, was like writing a bestselling book or something like really the most important thing? Or does it, that seemed trivial in retrospect, when, you know, like you've only got a few days left to live or something like that. But, I mean, if you're lucky, maybe you have a brush with death early on and survive, and it changes your perspective and it liberates you from these assumptions that we all have. Or sometimes when

• 56:19Donald Robertson?

  you're bereaved. Like, you know, I lost my father when I was quite young and I thought, to be honest, that really shook me. It made me kind of question what's the point of all of it because I saw him. And he died of lung cancer, like he was bedridden for about a year. And so I had about a year just to observe my father dying slowly and think he seemed to be going through this process of questioning what his life had stood for. And so when I was like thirteen, fourteen years old, that kind of made me think, gee, I don't want to end up like that. Like at the end of my life, thinking maybe I've spent my time and energy in the, in the wrong way. So these things, and also sometimes I think having children and looking at your kids and thinking what you want for them and what values you want them to have.

• 57:01Donald Robertson?

  If we approach it in the right way, can help us to gain some insight and start to question what our values are. But if we don't do that, we just look around us, think everybody's obsessed with money and fame. You know, we end up entering into the rat race, chasing around after that. Then one day you end up in your deathbed and the doctors tell you, you've only got, you know, a few weeks left. And you think, you look back on, you think, what a huge waste of time a lot of that was like, you know, maybe I've got like, you know, millions of dollars in my bank account, but it's not, you know, you can't take it with you. Like, you know, did I really do anything that worthwhile in retrospect? So that's why ancient philosophy is kind of obsessed with this question of death. Now, the other thing that could help us would be reading about philosophers

• 57:47Donald Robertson?

  who contemplate the problem of our own mortality. Like, that's why Plato's Apology is so influential because it depicts Socrates standing in court, knowing he's about to be executed.

• 57:56Chris Williamson?

  Can you tell us the, the story of the end of Socrates' life? What happened? What was the build up? Why did it occur?

• 58:03Donald Robertson?

  That it's slightly long and convoluted story. For some reason, like he was brought to trial, charges were brought against him. So in Athenian law, other citizens could sue you. And he was brought to court under charges of impiety and corrupting the youth.

• 58:23Chris Williamson?

  What's impiety?

• 58:25Donald Robertson?

  Like that he didn't believe in the traditional gods, basically. And these are standard charges that were used against intellectuals, basically. You know, there was nothing new, but if you were like, if you were too clever, other people in Athens would say you're corrupting the youth, right? And if you question things too much-

• 58:44Chris Williamson?

  An excuse for politically uncorrect blasphemy.

• 58:47Donald Robertson?

  Yeah, you're, you're, you're, you're engaged in blasphemy as well. If you're starting to question, you know, some traditional religious ideas and stuff like that. So it was kind of like stock charge in a way. There are many reasons why, uh, some people think Socrates has had certain political views. He also had friends that became controversial in Athenian society. Um, and so his association with certain influential figures might have been part of it. And it might also be that he went around humiliating powerful people. Like he went up to politicians and said, can you define the nature of justice? And they'd be like, I don't know, like, and that made them embarrassed. And it made them look stupid in front of their fans and followers and stuff.

• 59:30Donald Robertson?

  And so they wanted, for all of these reasons, I mean, Socrates's execution was over determined. Like there were multiple reasons why people wanted him dead. And some of it was propaganda, like there were, there was, like I mentioned earlier, there was a play about him that caricatured him. So Socrates in the trial says, a lot of you guys, there were 500 people in the jury. And he says, most of you will know me mainly through this play. Like, it would be like you, you trial by media, right? So I've never met most of you, but you've probably seen this play that makes me out to be this horrible corrupt pseudo-intellectual, right? Like a charlatan and stuff. So that's what you'll be judging me based on. And he stands up, he was meant to beg for mercy in court.

• 1:00:13Donald Robertson?

  He stands up in, one of the first things he says is he refers to his military service. And to paraphrase, he basically says, I went out and fought in these battles and faced death. On behalf of Athens to defend the walls of the city, and you guys told me that was honourable. Now I'm standing in court facing death because I believe in the practice of philosophy is a way of improving the people that live in the city. What's the point in defending the walls of the city if the people that live in it are corrupt, right? So some of you think this is ridiculous, that I'm willing to risk my life in court. But you praised me for risking my life in the military, and this is actually much more important to me, right? It's how he kind of starts off his defence in a way. And then he goes on to talk about how he's not afraid of dying and all this kind of stuff,

• 1:00:58Donald Robertson?

  and he kind of reasons that through. But he doesn't beg for mercy. He's very unapologetic in Plato's Apology. And so the jury condemn him to death because of what Xenophon called his big talk in court. Like, he was, they thought he would bring his family and he would have them weeping in front of them, because that was what was normal. But right from the very beginning of the trial, his family weren't even present. So he made it clear that he wasn't going to beg for mercy before he even began speaking. And he basically gives them a lecture on philosophy. He carries on in court doing the very thing that he's on trial for. Right?

• 1:01:42Donald Robertson?

  Like, everything about Socrates was paradoxical. But the other argument, again, there's many different aspects. He's like peeling the layers of an onion back. The other thing Xenophon says, Socrates was like seventy-one, seventy-two, he's pretty old for Athenian society. And, you know, the kind of implication in some of the dialogues is he thought, well, I'm starting to lose my faculties, maybe, I'm getting older, becoming more of a burden to my family. He'd reached a point where he thought, rather than trying to kind of just keep extending my life indefinitely while I'm in decline, I'd rather go out with a bang and make this huge statement. And he became a martyr for philosophy. But say what you will about Socrates, it worked. And even today, we're still talking about him.

• 1:02:26Donald Robertson?

  And he became an icon to generations of young philosophers that followed him, because they were inspired. Do you think he'd be less impactful if he hadn't died in that way? A hundred percent. Like, he would still have had some impact, but I, I mean, the most famous thing about Socrates in the ancient world is Plato's apology and the way that his noble death. When Epictetus, the famous Stoic philosopher, who was teaching like 400 years later, right? So, you know, like, that's, Socrates is ancient history to Epictetus. He's, the most famous quote from Epictetus, the most famous quote in all of Stoicism, is people are not upset by events,

• 1:03:09Donald Robertson?

  but by their opinions about them. But no one ever quotes what he says next in the following sentence. He says, for example, death is not intrinsically terrible, because if it were, Socrates would have been afraid of dying, and he wasn't. Right? So, this is an important argument that you find in Socrates, but it's really highlighted in the Stoics, which is, you know, we use a similar kind of strategy in cognitive therapy. If somebody's depressed or angry or frightened by something, one of the first questions you'd normally ask is, does everyone else feel the same way about it? I mentioned Lamprocleis getting angry with his mum. Socrates says, does other, do other people all find your mum unbearable? Or do

• 1:03:51Donald Robertson?

  other, you know, do certain people view her differently? Socrates himself, for example, viewed it very differently. He got nagged by Xanthoppe, but it didn't really bother him, right? So, one of the first questions we ask in cognitive therapy are, are other perspectives available? Right? Is this the only way of looking at things? Or, you know, might you potentially see it differently? Epictetus's main example of that, he goes straight for the jugular, right? He says, we're not upset by things, but by our opinions about them. Like, even when it comes to death, some people aren't scared of dying. Actually, you know, loads of people aren't scared of dying, right? Um, so there are many people I've found, it's one of the weird things, particularly younger people, often find it inconceivable that someone wouldn't be afraid of dying.

• 1:04:35Donald Robertson?

  But a lot of elderly people are resigned to their own death because they've been bereaved many times and maybe they've had many health scares. And so over the space of decades, in some cases, if not all, you speak to elderly people and they say, I've got, I've got over it. Like, you know, I've had years and years to get used to the idea of dying. So, you know, it doesn't really frighten me anymore. Some elderly people are terrified of dying, but others are surprisingly resigned to it. Socrates, again, seventy one, seventy two, facing his trial. He's an older guy living in a society where there's not a lot of medicine. You know, I think he's, he's the sort of dude that was perfectly resigned. He'd lived through many dangerous, it's, it's hard to imagine how many brushes with death Socrates

• 1:05:17Donald Robertson?

  had had, right? I mean, they tried to execute him, I think, about three or four times altogether under different political regimes. You know, he was involved in battles where thousands of people were killed around him. And he lived through a plague, you know, that killed tens of thousands of people in Athens. So he was a guy who was well accustomed to the fragility of his own existence, right? I mean, we live a very, very, very sheltered existence by comparison to that. But it's interesting that Epictetus goes straight for that example. Look at, he has Plato's apology in mind. He's like, you want to know what it means to realise that it's your opinions that shape your fear. Look at the example of Socrates

• 1:06:02Donald Robertson?

  and how he was unafraid even of being executed in court. That's your prime, that, and that was, that was the cardinal example to young philosophers in the ancient world.

• 1:06:16Chris Williamson?

  It's wild to think of somebody so steadfast in their beliefs, especially given the fact that almost all of their career was spent highlighting hypocrisy. So it would have been an odd curtain call had he have at the final, imagine how much more tarnished his entire philosophical career would have been had he have done the pliable begging for mercy on the floor, doing, you know, it would have, it would have changed an awful lot, I think, about how people perceived his work.

• 1:06:44Donald Robertson?

  In the cryto, which is one of the dialogues that takes place when he's in prison, he's in prison for about a month awaiting execution. And his friends say, listen, we could just bribe the guards really easy and get you out of here and stuff. He talks about this fact that it would be, and it would make him ridiculous in his own eyes. Like if he now behaved inconsistently with his values, you know, and that seems more, I mean, allegedly in the phido, which is the, the last dialogue chronologically, when Socrates is, drinks the actual hemlock. His, they bring the poison to him and his friend, Crato, like his childhood friend who grew up in the same suburb of Athens as him, Crato says to him, um, some people don't drink the poison straight away.

• 1:07:29Donald Robertson?

  I mean, I think you're actually allowed to have a final meal. He had lots of friends around him when he was being executed, if you can imagine that. That was the norm in Athenian society. Yeah, it was like a party. They were like, I suppose there were about 10 or 20 people that like. So they come and visit him every day in, in the prison, like weird kind of scenario. But they all gathered round and his family came, his wife brought his kids. He had a baby, like his, we're told, all we know is that Xanthi, Xanthi was carrying one of the children. So scholars think that kind of implies that it was a baby or a toddler. Socrates still got it at 72, 71, 72 years old. Yeah. So they say, you don't have to drink it right away. And he says, it would seem ridiculous of me.

• 1:08:13Donald Robertson?

  And I, I feel ridiculous in my eyes to kind of try and eke out another, you know, half an hour. He's like, I, I've been here for a month waiting to drink it. He goes, what am I going to do with another half, you know, like, so that was his, supposedly his thinking was, I'm ready. Like I've prepared myself for this. I'd, I'd just, I'd feel like a coward and it would seem inconsistent of me and ridiculous. If I was like, yeah, yeah, you're right. Maybe I could eke out another hour or so before I have to drink it. So I'm ready to drink it. Like I've been sitting here for a month getting ready to drink it. Why so?

• 1:08:47Chris Williamson?

  The thing you've mentioned the Stoics a couple of times I'd like to talk about is sort of enduring influence on them and links between the two. But the first person that comes to mind for me is Seneca, somebody for whom proclamations and fantastic contributions to thought and philosophy and stuff were replete. But in his private life, when the rubber met the road, so to speak, he was much more malleable. He was playing these sorts of games, political games and backbiting and sucking up to people and so on and so forth.

• 1:09:22Donald Robertson?

  This controversially, yeah. Seneca has always been a divisive and controversial figure. In some ways, he could be compared to Socrates. Socrates had a friend and possibly a lover called Alcibiades, who was, you know, one of the most influential statesmen. He was appointed the commander in chief of the Athenian military at one point, the most senior statesman in Athens, like almost like an emperor over what was evolving and what had evolved into an Athenian empire. And he was like one of Socrates' best friends and closest associates. So his relationship with Alcibiades, like trying to get him to be a better ruler and stuff is a bit like Seneca and his relationship with Nero.

• 1:10:03Donald Robertson?

  But Seneca, I mean, it's, it wouldn't be, some people will find this controversial. But although we think of Seneca as a Stoic philosopher, he was famous primarily as an author, not as a philosophy teacher. He probably didn't teach that much philosophy to Nero. He mainly trained him in rhetoric. So in some regards, Seneca was more like a Latin sophist than a philosopher. The sophist often quoted philosophy. Like they made speeches out of it and things, but they didn't attempt to live in accord with it in the way that the Stoics or Socrates did. So Seneca's somewhere in between. It may be

• 1:10:46Donald Robertson?

  that towards the end of his life, he embraced philosophy more fully. I think earlier in his life, philosophy was more something he used to become a famous author. He became famous by writing consolation letters, using Stoicism to people that had been bereaved, that were wealthy, influential figures. He was like a self-help guru to the rich and famous in Roman society. And that's how he ended up becoming an advisor to Nero. So he was a figure that really was compromised by that in a number of ways. He was Nero's right-hand man. Nero was like a despot,

• 1:11:24Donald Robertson?

  a dictator. And he also wrote speeches defending Nero in the Senate and trying to, I mean, ridiculous, like saying that he was virtually a philosopher-king and that his hands were unstained by blood and all this kind of-

• 1:11:42Chris Williamson?

  Stuff he couldn't really imagine Socrates saying.

• 1:11:45Donald Robertson?

  No, Socrates never sullied himself in that way. There's a guy, Marcus Aurelius's rhetoric teacher, we have his private letters, and Marcus is talking to him about Seneca. We don't see what Marcus wrote, unfortunately, we only see Fronto's replies. Fronto can't stand Seneca, and he died, you know, a few generations earlier, but I think it's partly he doesn't like his writing style. But he says, looking for perils of wisdom in Seneca's writings would be like someone grubbing around in the bottom of a sewer, trying to dig a few silver coins out of the filth.

• 1:12:30Donald Robertson?

  Right, which is a kind of what the kids today call a sick burn, right? That's only something that an ulusophist could have come up with, right? As a, as an insult. But I think what he means is that Seneca in, in Rome would have been known more than today for his political speeches defending Nero. And we have a couple of examples of those. Like we have on clemency, for example, which is this letter to Nero that was probably made public that kind of puts Nero on something of a pedestal, also tries to improve his character and teach him more clemency or mercy. But at the same time, it praises him as a great ruler, like, which is ridiculous. He was a tyrant.

• 1:13:11Donald Robertson?

  And at the same time that Seneca was defending Nero and propping up his regime, there were other Stoics that were fighting against Nero and opposing him in the Senate. They're called the Stoic Opposition and several of them died or were exiled, defying, uh, defying Nero. Epictetus, who was kind of on the periphery of this, because Epictetus kind of came from the next generation, but he was a slave owned by Nero's Greek secretary, a guy called Epaphroditus, who was perhaps also Nero's bodyguard, uh, according to one source. He was certainly very, very close to Nero.

• 1:13:53Donald Robertson?

  Epictetus idolizes the Stoic Opposition and never mentions Seneca once. So he clearly felt those were the, the Stoics from that generation that he looks up to. And, and Seneca was seen even by other Stoics at the time as a guy that had maybe compromised himself morally.

• 1:14:10Chris Williamson?

  What is the truth that we know about whether Socrates was really ugly or not?

• 1:14:17Donald Robertson?

  That's actually a contested point. There's a really cool book that came out recently by Armand Dangour, a classicist,

• 1:14:26Donald Robertson?

  who wrote a book called Socrates in Love that I really like. That's kind of speculative biography of Socrates. And he claims that Socrates was probably not as ugly as he's made out to be and that particularly younger in life, he may have been quite a virile and attractive guy. But I mean, Socrates' friends describe him as walking like a pelican, having eyes like a crab, having a face like a torpedo fish.

• 1:14:54Donald Robertson?

  And being balding and pot bellied. So, and he looks like a satyr as well, we're told, like one of those kind of goat, uh, feliphan or whatever. So those are his friends, right? That they, and so I guess it's partly the Athenian culture. They were kind of ribbing him a bit and stuff. If you go to Athens today, there's a famous statue of Socrates, a modern statue of him outside the university, where he's incredibly buff. Like, I mean, he definitely looks like he's been lifting weights. But that's a modern representation of him. The ancient sculptures we have of him are this little pot bellied old man. You know, that's more of a kind of, was seen as a bit of a, presented as more of a comedy character almost.

• 1:15:40Donald Robertson?

  So, yeah, he makes fun of it. In Xenophon Symposium, Socrates jokes and he says, I think if we had a beauty contest, I would win it. And everyone kind of rolls about laughing at this. It seems ridiculous to them. But he then it leads into him having a conversation about how they define beauty. And, uh, you know, he starts to question whether, you know, beauty is actually something that comes from a person's character. You know, and he thinks he's, he says he's confident that he would win on those terms. But his friends still think it's a bit ridiculous of him. They thought Xenophon, Xenophon to his credit says, you know, you learn more about wise men by seeing them at their leisure. I believe that's how he begins the symposium.

• 1:16:21Donald Robertson?

  It's a drinking party and he presents Socrates as this guy who's quite witty and humorous, right? So he says things where he, he, Socrates was the type of guy that would say something to you and you think, is he joking? Is he serious? And the answer is yes and no. Like he's kind of joking and serious. He's kind of both joking and serious at the same time, often I feel.

• 1:16:47Chris Williamson?

  Was the, I can't remember who it was from that era of philosophers. I seem to remember a story of one of those philosophers complaining that every time they went to dinner or had a party, the people got too drunk. And one of the solutions to people getting too drunk would be to reduce the size of the cups. If only you could make the size of the cup smaller. Was that Socrates?

• 1:17:10Donald Robertson?

  Yeah, I think that's in Xenophon Symposium. Or it might be in Plato's Symposium. In one of the symposiums, like, he says, and they do it. He says, he asked them to bring out smaller cups. And he says, if we use smaller cups, we could moderate our drinking.

• 1:17:26Chris Williamson?

  Getting too drunk, ruining the quality of the conversation.

• 1:17:29Donald Robertson?

  He says alcohol, I think this is in Xenophon Symposium. He says alcohol is like watering a plant. He goes, if you don't give it enough, then it kind of shrivels up and dies. But if you give it too much, then it wilts. And he goes, this is the effect that I think wine has on conversation at a dinner party. You've got to find just the right level so that people loosen up and you have a... So he wasn't completely in favor of abstinence. He thought if the right amount of wine was conducive to a good philosophical conversation in a dinner party.

• 1:17:58Chris Williamson?

  Didn't he stand in one place for a day at one point?

• 1:18:03Donald Robertson?

  Well, don't we all? No. Not normally, no.

• 1:18:09Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 1:18:10Donald Robertson?

  I know I do. But no, he stood for 24 hours. We're told from sunrise one day to sunrise the next day. And Potidaea, in the middle of a battle, no, well, we're not in the battle, like, while they were besieging the city way in the north of Greece, we're told that he just froze. And the other, some of the other soldiers camped beside him overnight because they were kind of like, is he really going to stand here all night, barefoot, like, in the cold? Like, they were having bets on it or something. And they watched him and in the morning... I believe Plato says that he said a prayer to the rising sun,

• 1:18:52Donald Robertson?

  which may have been associated with the god Apollo. But one of the themes that runs through the dialogues is Socrates's association with the god Apollo. There's a debate about whether Apollo was associated with the sun that early. I think he was. So it may be Socrates saw the sun as an embodiment of the god Apollo, who's the kind of the patron god of philosophy. And it was the priestess of Apollo who said, no man is wiser than Socrates. And it was outside the temple of Apollo that says, ganof, I say out on or know thyself, which is, you know, this statement maxim that became a kind of theme for the Socratic method in a way. It was pursuing self-knowledge. But he was in a habit of, Plato tells us, he used to regularly just freeze and meditate, go into a trance.

• 1:19:39Donald Robertson?

  What's the, can you dig into the know thyself? Yeah. I mean, it comes up again and again in different dialogues. I'll tell you something really cool about it. There's a dialogue that I think is authentically attributed to Plato, but some scholars have questioned. It doesn't matter in a way. Somebody wrote it like thousands of years ago. So there's a dialogue called the first Alcibiades that's about Socrates having a dialogue with this great statesman. I mean, Alcibiades, someone said recently on Twitter, they should make up a movie about Alcibiades. He has one of the most dramatic and colorful and exciting, you know, lives. And he was Socrates's, you know, companion. Socrates saved his life in battle. You know, I mean, honestly, you could, his life is so cinematic. It's like this huge epic

• 1:20:23Donald Robertson?

  adventure story. Now, in this dialogue, Socrates questions whether Alcibiades is competent to become a political leader, a statesman. He proves to him by questioning that he doesn't really understand anything about the nature of justice, but he should. And then this leads into a conversation about ganof, I say out on or know thyself. And Socrates said, says to Alcibiades, you know, what do you think it means? And he's like, well, I mean, I think that I know myself, but you know, Socrates says, well, it's not like just like knowing the name of something. It's about really understanding it because this is how I understand it. And then he says, often you get these remarkable metaphors or images in ancient literature. And this is one of my favorites.

• 1:21:02Donald Robertson?

  Socrates says that self-knowledge is like an eye that sees itself, right? It's the eye that sees itself. He said, it's like the God said that you're instructed your eye to see itself. When he says that the mind should know itself. And he says to Alcibiades, how can the eye see itself? And Alcibiades is like, I guess like in a mirror. Like, and Socrates says, well done. So how would the mind know itself by analogy? And Alcibiades is like, I guess you'd need some kind of mirror for your mind. Like, I don't know how that would work though. And Socrates basically implies, because he's often a bit vague about things.

• 1:21:44Donald Robertson?

  He's engaged in this question and answer methodical and just giving a lecture. So he basically implies to Alcibiades that engaging in philosophical dialogue or conversation with other people is a mirror for our own soul. And he understands that we are biased. I mean, he was again way ahead of his time in this regard. So, and by the way, this is another problem for modern self-help, right? So there are many problems with self-help. One of the problems with self-help is the self part, right? The person, in a sense, the person least qualified to help you. Like, because I don't know if you've noticed that there's actually research that shows this, right? I'm going all over the place, sorry.

• 1:22:25Donald Robertson?

  But I interviewed recently a guy called Igor Grossman, who you should speak to, right? He's a professor at the University of Waterloo who does research on the nature of wisdom, right? And he has research that shows that confirms the suspicion that we all have that we're much better at giving other people advice than we are at giving ourselves advice, right? This is a sensitive subject for psychotherapists, right? Because all we do is give other people advice and stuff. But if you go to a psychotherapy conference and walk in the door, you would notice immediately that it's full of some of the craziest people you ever meet in your life.

• 1:23:02Chris Williamson?

  You're saying that being able to give advice to other people is not reliable evidence that you can give advice to yourself?

• 1:23:07Donald Robertson?

  Yeah. But over time, I think if you approach it in the right way, and I think it has something to do with empathy, right? If you identify with your clients in a sense that you you put yourself in their shoes and you empathise with them, you might, to put it very simply, start to think, maybe I do some of the things that they do too, right? Maybe by helping them to see through their own mistakes and to troubleshoot them, I could kind of indirectly learn something about myself, right? But we're better at giving other people advice, it's been proven by Professor Grossman's research, than we are at giving ourselves advice. And Socrates seems to realise this, this is partly why he thinks engaging in philosophical

• 1:23:48Donald Robertson?

  dialogue about the most important questions in life, as he puts it, is so important. This provides the best mirror, like, he can imagine for learning about our own soul, our own mind, and coming to to know ourselves, knowing our strengths and weaknesses, our limitations and so on. There's another technique that he kind of uses, I think, that Professor Grossman has done research on, like, it might be worth mentioning, because I know people are interested in this. Igor Grossman, based on his observations, based on his research, did a study, and there are several studies like this, where they asked people to keep a journal, where they

• 1:24:32Donald Robertson?

  described, they have two groups, and one group describes their relationship problems and so on, and, you know, attempting to to resolve them in the first person. And the other group do the same thing, but in the third person. So rather than saying, you know, oh, I forgot my wife's birthday and she got really upset with me and I don't know how to make it up to her, like, I would say, Donald forgot his wife's birthday and she became really upset with him, so in the third person, right? As if I'm giving advice to another person, right? And they found, so they said, what happens if you make yourself do this? And by, they call it distant self-reflection. So by keeping a journal in the third person, they found that people exhibited measurably

• 1:25:14Donald Robertson?

  more wisdom in the advice and the the solutions that they came up with for themselves. Now, Socrates does something a bit like that. He doesn't talk to himself that much in the third person, but usually in the second person. He engages in imaginary or hypothetical dialogues quite a lot. So. For example, he imagines arguing with the laws of Athens at one point in the Critias. And the laws of Athens say, you know, start criticizing him and questioning him. So they say, he imagines that the laws are saying to him, Socrates, you're contradicting yourself in this way and that way and so on. And you're mistaken about this, right? But that's just an opportunity for him to critique himself in the second person and by name.

• 1:25:56Donald Robertson?

  So with greater objectivity, basically, and actually recycling some of the skills that he's honed by critiquing other people and applying the Socratic method to them in, in real way, in the flesh dialogues.

• 1:26:11Chris Williamson?

  It sounds to me like this guy is infallible. He lived the philosophy. Everything that he said was done with virtue, very, very accurate. Where are Socrates' biggest weaknesses philosophically, in your opinion?

• 1:26:26Donald Robertson?

  Oh, there, there are many. I mean, I told you, he's like Jimi Hendrix, right? So, eh, some people might look at Jimi Hendrix and they might think, well, he's not, you know, maybe he's not like the technically the best guitarist that's ever lived. But there's no, there's still something kind of really unique about him, right? There was only ever one Jimi Hendrix, like, there's nobody else really that kind of sounds exactly like him. And so Socrates is, I mean, the odd thing is that many academic philosophers will disagree with most of what Socrates says. Right? And they'll often think that his arguments are incomplete, that there are gaps in them, that they're not very convincing.

• 1:27:06Donald Robertson?

  And I think even Socrates realized this, but those dialogues weren't written necessarily to persuade people that they should agree with him. They're more like teaching aids that are designed like an assault course for the mind. So they're meant to train us to be able to think through puzzles from different perspectives. Right? That's why I said, you know, what we learn from Socrates more is the method. And he kind of implies certain really interesting conclusions. But they're often very radical conclusions. It may be worth mentioning some of them. So people usually, most philosophers disagree with them, but they, there's, one of the ancient dialogues

• 1:27:47Donald Robertson?

  has Socrates saying, when you talk to a wise person, it's like being bitten by a small insect, like a mosquito or something, right? And you might not even notice when it happens. But then hours later, or the next day, you suddenly start to itch in the spot where you were bitten. And so people would say, that's what it's like when you talk to Socrates. Like, he'll say stuff and you think, that's a stupid argument, Socrates. It's not really convincing. It doesn't make any sense. And then 10 years later, you're still thinking about it and it's kind of bothering you, right? But for instance, one of the other things I, I wrote about in my book, because again, it's very interesting in relation to modern psychology.

• 1:28:26Donald Robertson?

  Socrates had this radical position that injustice harms the perpetrator more than it does the victim. And he repeats this quite a lot. So people, you might, people who read that think, that's, that's a hard view to accept. But no one ever forgets it. Anyone that reads the Platonic dialogues decades later will think, remember Socrates kept going on about this idea that acts of injustice harm the perpetrator more than they do the victim. In court, he said, you guys that are putting me on trial and convincing the jury to sentence me to death unjustly,

• 1:29:05Donald Robertson?

  are harming yourselves more than you're harming me. Epictetus quotes him, the last sentence of the Enchiridion. He says, Anatus and Miletus, the two guys that brought him to trial, can kill me, but they cannot harm me. Which is like crazy, you know, crazy. That's hardcore. No, first of all, the guy that believes that, like hats off to him. Like, you know, no wonder he was resilient. Do we agree with him? I, there may be a case for it, but it's an extreme, like a bit like, you know, an extreme version of Stoicism, basically. Nevertheless.

• 1:29:50Donald Robertson?

  In relation to modern psychology, I think there's a lot we can take from it. So there's a body of research that shows that people who suffer from clinical depression tend to have high levels of perceived injustice, right? And we also know that anger is linked to depression and anger is also very directly linked to the perception of injustice, right? So how could our philosophy of justice affect emotions like anger and depression? Well, if we agreed with Socrates, right? That our own injustice does us more harm than the injustice of others.

• 1:30:34Donald Robertson?

  Then maybe we wouldn't become as depressed when we perceive injustice in the world around us. We might still object to it. We might still defy it, but we might respond to it differently emotionally. Like Socrates was fearless in court because he believed that the acts of injustice being inflicted on him couldn't really harm him because they they could take away his property, like his reputation and even his life, but they couldn't harm his moral character. And that was the most important thing to him on his deathbed. He'd think, did I maintain my integrity throughout life? You guys can't take that away from me. Only I can do that to myself, right? Now, what's true in anyone's eyes, whether even if they don't go as far as that.

• 1:31:19Donald Robertson?

  Time and time again, what you'll find in therapy when you're working with people who are very angry, for instance, is that their anger usually, just at a practical level, does them more harm than the things that they're angry about, right? Maybe not in every single case, but gee, I I struggle to think of a case where that's not true. Like in virtually every client I work with, when we sit down and go, what are the consequences of your anger? How did, because and the one reason for that is that anger by its very nature impairs our ability to think about the consequences. That's why angry people act impulsively, right? It's well known. There's a large body of psychological research. So it shows, surprise,

• 1:32:02Donald Robertson?

  surprise, angry people behave impulsively, but they do that because they're not thinking straight and they're not able to really think through and weigh up the consequences of their action. They tend to think very short term. We all do when we get really angry. Um, we don't, we're not, we don't become really good at nuanced social problem solving when we're angry. Generally, it's like, you know, we become a kind of blunt instrument. And that's highlighted by the fact that very often angry people a day later or weeks later regret what they did when they're angry. Cause now they're not angry and they're thinking about the longer term consequences and the wider impact of what they did. So maybe some guy gets really angry. He tells his wife to shut up and he gets what he wants. Maybe she does shut up,

• 1:32:47Donald Robertson?

  right? In the moment. So it seems successful. It makes him seem powerful. And then she divorces him. Right? So destroys the relationship, right? I mean, to caricature it a little bit, but often what we struggle to do is kind of think about the wider impact, right? And think about the longer term consequences of anger and particularly in terms of relationships where it's complex. Anger impairs our ability to empathize with other people. And it, when we get angry, we tend to engage in what's known as hostile attribution bias. So we usually think of people as acting just out of hostility towards us rather, whereas normally,

• 1:33:28Donald Robertson?

  if I say, oh, why did that guy not send me a Christmas card this year? Right? I might, I might go, well, it's probably a bunch of possible explanations for that, right? Maybe there's several reasons depending on how you look at it. You know, whereas if I'm angry, I'll think just because he's a jerk. That's why he did it. Right? Just pure hostility, right? So we tend to have a very monolithic and simplistic understanding of other people's motives when we're angry, but that makes us rubbish at social problem solving. You know, anger is really bad for, you know, maintaining any kind of healthy relationship. So by its very nature, it means that we tend to underestimate the negative consequences of it. So in therapy, it's easy to go. You just sit with people and you draw a little

• 1:34:12Donald Robertson?

  list and you go, you know, what are all the ways in which anger is harming your physical health, your mental health, your relationship with other people. The other weird thing about it, anger tends to spread. So if I get angry, I could be watching TV and get really angry with some politician that I don't like, you know, and then I turn around, you know, and I snap angrily at my cat. Right. Now, my cat has done nothing, right? But it's not even involved in American politics in any shape or form, right? But because I'm annoyed with some politician that's on the news or whatever, I'm now also, you know, by associated, I'm just annoyed with my cat as

• 1:34:55Donald Robertson?

  well, because I'm in an angry frame of mind, you know, and maybe I'm going to be a bit short, you know, my wife might say, what did you want for dinner? You know, and I'll ask me later, right? Because I'm annoyed with, you know, some so-called politician, right? So anger harms our relationships, even with the people that we're not initially angry with. You know, we get angry with our perceived enemies, but we end up taking it out on our friends as well, if we're not careful. So people massively underestimate the negative consequences of anger. And so usually in therapy, what people find is yes, anger, your own anger is doing you more harm than

• 1:35:36Donald Robertson?

  the thing the politician said on TV, or somebody not sending you a Christmas card, or the thing, not maybe in every case, but in really for practical purposes in the majority of cases that we end up dealing with. So he was, Socrates took it way further, but nevertheless, there's something really interesting about the point that he's making.

• 1:35:55Chris Williamson?

  I, speaking of anger and frustration, I seem to remember you saying that you thought it would be impossible to write this book.

• 1:36:02Donald Robertson?

  I did think it was impossible.

• 1:36:05Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 1:36:06Donald Robertson?

  Um, I really did. I thought it was impossible to write it. Uh, because I thought Socrates was too complex a character. The Peloponnesian War is really annoying. Um, there's like, something like 300 Greek states were involved in it. It went on for 27 years. So the politics of it and the history of it are so complex, right? I thought, how can I summarize that and condense it into a book? And have the life of Socrates as a philosopher, have some discussion of philosophy and philosophical dialogues, and have some modern psychology and fit it all into 50,000 words.

• 1:36:50Donald Robertson?

  I, it just seemed like it would take, you know, three different books, right? But then, I don't know how exactly I changed my mind, but what I realized was that I could maybe, I think what I did was I gave up trying to attempt a more academic history. And I, I said from the outset, I'm going to approach this like I'm writing a movie screenplay. And so it'll be a kind of dramatized, I'm going to make it as close to historical sources as I possibly can, but I'm going to have to take two characters and points and combine them together for simplicity. I'm going to have to massively abbreviate some of his arguments and just give like key selections out of them. And I'm going to have to figure out ways to, you know, to kind of simplify the, the history

• 1:37:35Donald Robertson?

  of the Peloponnesian War. So, you know, I, I'm kind of surprised that I managed to compress all of that into one book. But I, you know, I thought very long and hard about how to do it. Why? And, you know, there was a lot of planning that went into it. I, I think I put four times as much work into this book as I put into the preceding, like how to think like a Roman emperor.

• 1:38:03Chris Williamson?

  Is it, I mean, you're looking at secondhand sources, very little direct. I mean, even with that, I learned this from you as well, that even when we think about Marcus Aurelius and how much information we have about him, because, you know, we've got his direct writings and he was an emperor and, you know, prestigious and stuff like that. But even with him, because he didn't really do that much wrong, there wasn't that much writing about him. He didn't just, he simply attract insufficient drama. So then you think, okay, we have this guy of whom there are significantly better recorded people from history, and he is the well-recorded version compared with the new book I'm about to write,

• 1:38:42Chris Williamson?

  which is this bloke who I've got, like, basically wiretaps of, like ancient wiretaps, and that's the best that I can go on.

• 1:38:51Donald Robertson?

  Yeah, there's really frustrating things about life of Socrates. So this thing about going to Delphi and the pronouncement is presented as a key moment in his life. We've really got no, we don't know for certain when it happened, right? So for instance, we don't know if it happened before or after other key events in his life, and then it would change the whole narrative. So with things like that, you just have to go, we could write an academic history where we argue about the possible dates, but in order to write a movie, you'd have to go, we have to pick a date, got to pick one. It could be like one of like maybe three different, we've just got to choose one and go with it in order to be able to tell the story. And that's, I guess that's what liberated me is I just thought, it needs to just be approached

• 1:39:35Donald Robertson?

  like we're writing a graphic novel or a...

• 1:39:38Chris Williamson?

  Which you did, you did that as well. You're a man of many literary pathways now.

• 1:39:44Donald Robertson?

  I take some satisfaction in that, like, you know, there's some authors just write the same book over and over again, and I didn't really, I don't know that I did this deliberately. It'd be like an actor that just plays the same kind of characters over and over, and then you've got other people that do lots of different things. But I look back at the books that I've written, that, you know, although I did actually write three books in a row about Marcus Aurelius, they're all different genres. Like, one's a more of an academic history, one's a self-help book, one's a graphic novel. So if I look at the books, I've probably written about eight books, they're all... They're all quite different from each other. Like, I feel like I kind of stretched myself. I mean, the pros and cons of that are sometimes when you stretch yourself and do something you haven't done before, you can kind of fall flat on your face and maybe

• 1:40:28Donald Robertson?

  you figure out it's not your forte or whatever, you know. But the positive side is that that's how you grow, like, you know, by taking a chance and doing something that's, you know, something you never even imagined that you'd be doing. I think that was part of it as well. I kind of thought, it's too difficult to write a book like this about Socrates. And I thought, well, you know, as I get older, I'm less afraid of making mistakes, you know. And I thought, what's the worst that can happen? Maybe I'll just mess it up and the book will be rubbish or something like, you know. I thought, yeah, I think I'd rather just try, have a go at doing it. I think the other thing that swings it for me is I really always approach it with this question in mind. I imagine that if I could go back

• 1:41:13Donald Robertson?

  in time and kind of give the book that I'm writing to my seventeen year old self or when I was fifteen or something, like, I think, what would I want to write in a book that I'm giving to my younger self? And, you know, would I be kind of ashamed to write a book? And then maybe we go, okay, we pick one of these dates for when the pronouncement is made at Delphi. Oh, damn, we got it wrong, you know, like, so maybe the chronology is a little bit off or something like that. There's some other debatable historical point. Would my seventeen year old self care about that? Or would he just think, I don't really care. Like, if there's one or two details that are debatable, the story is really awesome and it kind of gave me a-

• 1:41:52Chris Williamson?

  It's interestingly very Socratic to go about things like that. Okay, how can we apply this practically? How useful is this? What? And it's also very Aureliusian to debating about what a good man is versus being one.

• 1:42:08Donald Robertson?

  Well, sometimes people ask you, you know, how do you go about writing a book? Right? And I don't think I've ever said this in my podcast before, but funnily enough, the answer to this is kind of weird, right? There's a bunch of things I do that are- Quite specific, like one is that I write the audiobook first, right? And so when I'm writing a book, I'm not writing a print book. I think I'm writing an audiobook. And as part of that, I'll read it aloud a lot and I'll pay somebody like a local barmaid or something like to come or one of my friends' friends or whatever, like to come over and I'll, I'll give them a case of beer, like, you know, and I'll pay them whatever per hour and I'll give them a big printout of the manuscript and I say, read the entire thing

• 1:42:53Donald Robertson?

  to me, right? It takes, I think last time we did it, it took 12 hours. Like I've got a video of the aftermath, we're like sliding out of our chair, you know, like we've got like some snacks piled up. We, I think it was 12 hours. Maddie, um, I think it was the name of the, my friend's friend that came over and read through the whole of how to think like a Socrates, like Socrates. I think I did it several times because I wanted to know what it sounded like as well as reading it on the page. But the other thing I would do is I normally work in the library and I would sit with a timer and I'd practise a meditation technique for 10 minutes called the Benson method, where it's well known in psychotherapy.

• 1:43:33Donald Robertson?

  So I just repeat a word over and over and I try and notice that I'm doing this voluntarily, but there's also intrusive automatic thoughts that pop into my mind. So I've tried to become clearer about the differentiation between what I'm thinking voluntarily. I may just, I'd normally just say the number one, um, or I count down from 10 to zero over and over again on each out breath, like one number, like 10, nine, eight, and then start again, like, cause then if you're counting in your mind, what attention wonders, you're more likely to notice it because you've broken the sequence, right? And I'll observe, I'll think I'm doing this voluntarily, I'm counting voluntarily. But if I suddenly think about paying my taxes or something, I go, that's an automatic thought and I choose to think that I just popped into my mind.

• 1:44:18Donald Robertson?

  So I kind of trained myself to become more aware of that distinction. Then. For 10 minutes, I would imagine that I'm in academia, Platonos in Greece, like I wrote about at the beginning of the book, and imagine I'm talking to Socrates, right? And the first thing I would always do, Chris, is shake his hand, right? And it took a surprisingly long time for him to get used to that. Like, I think it seems kind of, I always remember, like, you know, my imaginary Socrates, like, in my mind, here, I insisted on shaking his hand, but he thought it was a bit weird at first, right? And I would say to him, like, I'd ask him lots of questions, right? About anything that I was kind of struggling with in the book. And what I generally found, any of the history stuff, his opinion, well, you know, I'd be like trying to think, we need to get an eye on this, I can get it accurate and stuff.

• 1:45:03Donald Robertson?

  And he would always, my imaginary Socrates, anyway, would always be like, who cares? You know, it's like, I don't even know why, you know, he seemed to place surprisingly little importance on getting it historically accurate. And he said, no, there's, just focus on telling the story of the literary character of Socrates in a way that gets people interested in the philosophy. That's what actually matters, right? You know, there are other books that you can go and read where people try and argue through the evidence and, you know, try to get to truth.

• 1:45:34Chris Williamson?

  I've been thinking about something not too dissimilar, a little bit more generalized, but I think what you're getting at as well, which is this odd split on the internet that we have at the moment. One is extreme credentialism, which I call experts only. If you don't have the requisite background, a lot of the time you're criticized. Well, you know, what do you know, you're not a dot, dot, dot psychotherapist, psychedelics expert, sports and physio person, whatever, whatever you're pontificating about. And the reason that I don't like it is that it's gotten rid of, I think, what Oscar Wilde called the Oxford manner, which is the ability to play gracefully with ideas.

• 1:46:17Chris Williamson?

  And it seems that very much the Socratic method is that. And then on the other side, you have this sort of over-romanticization of the renegade, untrained, sort of orthogonal thinker. So we have these two worlds and you can kind of deploy them to whichever you need in order to make the other side seem stupid. So they don't have the credentials, or this person is a flame-wielding truth warrior. Yeah, they did it outside of the establishment. That's how they actually really know what's going on. But it's very, there's a large number of ways where Unless you have a completely stellar academic career, it's unfettered by any kind of controversy or falling short at any time.

• 1:46:57Chris Williamson?

  It seems to me that that bar is unreasonably high for most, pretty much everybody to get over. And on top of all of that, it makes for a much less interesting world because nobody's allowed to play with ideas outside of their domain of credentialised competence.

• 1:47:13Donald Robertson?

  See, you are thinking about it in a more Socratic way because you're the very facts. You're going, well, can I see it from more than one perspective and those pros? So the rule that you always have to be qualified, well, maybe there's some exceptions to that, right? And you can easily think of examples of great thinkers in the past that weren't qualified. They were outsiders or talented amateurs or whatever. But on the other hand, having zero qualifications in certain subjects clearly in some cases just leads to the Dunning Kruger effect and people making schoolboy errors are just almost cringe-worthy if you know about the subject.

• 1:47:48Donald Robertson?

  I mean, like, the most obvious example of that, I think, is the internet is absolutely awash with people that can't tell the difference between causation and correlation in medical research. Like, newspapers and magazines have exploited that confusion for generations, but now it's become like a much bigger figure on the internet. So like, understanding kind of like basic medical research methods, like, you know, not getting confused about that, like, does lead a lot of people to make basic mistakes, right? Basically, to misinterpret. If you don't know, like, during the pandemic, every five minutes, people were waving around

• 1:48:32Donald Robertson?

  research studies and stuff that had never, that didn't have any medical research, right? So they had no idea what the stuff they were reading actually meant. And over and over again, they're kind of like just making the kind of mistakes that you would get taught not to make, right? So there are problems that happen.

• 1:48:51Donald Robertson?

  And there are people, when they discuss ancient philosophy, that make errors that an academic philosopher maybe wouldn't make. But yeah, I don't think there's a conclusive answer to this, but yeah, I think we just need to be aware. I think the best thing is just to kind of be aware of what are the pros and cons. In the same way that, you know, for any self-help technique, just at least sit down and make a list of what are the strengths and weaknesses of this? What's a good way and a bad way of doing it? So you've got a slightly more nuanced understanding of it, not like just a kind of rigid understanding. But I think in generally, you know, this thing about amateurs versus experts is similar. Like there's pros and cons to it, just knowing what those are is perhaps the main thing.

• 1:49:31Donald Robertson?

  I mean, I can tell you over the years, I've, I'm friends with and know many well-respected academics, historians, classicists, philosophers. You know, and I guess my attitude has changed a little bit from my experience over time. Sometimes there are people that are incredibly highly qualified in the subject and say stuff that's bonkers. Like that's, you know, the other experts in the field just think they've lost their mind. Like, you know, that again, they're making mistakes that a first year student would fail a assignment for, for doing, right? I mean, it's weird when you see that, but it happens a lot. Like you get books by people that are professors of philosophy or psychology or whatever.

• 1:50:16Donald Robertson?

  And you think a first year undergraduate student would get lambasted for saying this stuff. It's crazy. Like, but so, you know, they're not, the most highly credentialed people are often not experts. And there's, there's also a well-known problem with expertise.

• 1:50:38Donald Robertson?

  Like there's actually statistical research that shows that like review, narrative reviews of medical research that are done by experts in a particular field tend to be unreliable. So normally you'd think this guy's like a, a, one of the most experienced heart surgeons in the world. Like, so he's written an article reviewing all the research. It should be authoritative because he really knows what he's talking about. But experts are often biased and they're particularly prone to committing the cherry picking fallacy. So they just pick out studies that support their pet theory. Whereas professional statisticians that don't have any skin in the game. We'll just look at what all of the research says and be really kind of cast a cold eye over it. You know, I and they'll say, no, this is what the research actually shows.

• 1:51:22Donald Robertson?

  This guy is just telling you what half of the research says, you know, because it supports his pet theory. And experts in a field, or if you want to put it another way, people that are really invested in certain theories that have been doing it for a long time can be biased. Right. And so their, their version of things can be quite distorted. But um, I think the, the other difficulty I wanted to mention to you in terms of this idea of getting information from experts and, you know, becoming kind of passive rather than depending on our own reason. There's another piece of research that's very influential in, in state of the art, like modern behavioural psychology.

• 1:52:07Donald Robertson?

  Which shows there's a problem with something called role governed behaviour. So if you get two groups of participants in a study and you teach them how to solve some, you give them, you give them a puzzle they have to solve, like pressing three buttons in a particular order or whatever. And if they get it right, they get rewarded. If they get it wrong, like maybe, you know, they get some punishment, a buzzer goes off or something like that. They lose points or whatever, right? And in one group, you just give them oral or written instructions that say, this is how you solve the puzzle. The other group, they have to figure it out through trial and error, right? This is phase one of the experiment.

• 1:52:47Donald Robertson?

  And phase two, so they do it repeatedly. In phase two, the rules that govern the success change without telling them, right? So they have to adapt, basically. You create a circumstance where they have to adapt. One group had been verbally given the role or solution. The other group had to figure it out through trial and error.

• 1:53:08Donald Robertson?

  The group that have learned the role verbally will keep trying it even though it's not working. Whereas the group that had to figure it out themselves will adapt much more quickly. So we call this insensitivity to environmental change, right? And the reason it's really important is that's exactly what people who come for psychotherapy are doing. They're usually using some strategy that's not working. And so the puzzle is why do they keep doing it when it's clearly not like, why do they keep yelling at their partners? When and when they keep, and they keep, their relationships keep breaking up as a result. Surely like after a while, they'd kind of figure out this isn't working out for me and they'd start to adapt and change. So what is causing the rigidity in their behaviour?

• 1:53:53Donald Robertson?

  And one of the explanations is that when we learn a role from other people passively. Why, or sometimes even if we get it from a book or something like that. It, we tend, there's a tendency, an established tendency to overextend it and apply it too rigidly. And that, that can cause problems.

• 1:54:13Chris Williamson?

  Donald Robertson, ladies and gentlemen, dude, I love you. I love all of the work that you do every time that you bring a new book out. I'm super excited. Have you got any idea what you're working on next? I know you've got your Substack and stuff like that going.

• 1:54:24Donald Robertson?

  Well, I've written about like famous philosophers and stuff, Chris. But I mean, all honesty, the, the thing that's, I sat down and I kind of thought, what if I could only write one more book? You know, what do I really, really, really, really want to write a book about? And I thought, oh, I write something that I really feel is going to benefit the maximum number of people. So it's one of the biggest problems that I think people have. And it's something we've talked a lot about today, you know, for that reason, because it's kind of on my mind. I want to write a book about the philosophy and psychology of anger. Right? Cause there's, it's one of those areas where there's a huge gulf between stuff that we actually know from psychological research, we know loads about anger, but most people aren't told about any of the research.

• 1:55:07Donald Robertson?

  So, you know, and anger plays a huge role in politics. And on the internet, we've got like sat trolling and cyberbullying and so much kind of aggression on social media. And so much kind of hostility and aggression in politics. But none of us are looking at it and thinking, oh, when people get angry, like their thinking becomes skewed. Like, for example, when people get angry, it's well known that they underestimate risk. So when you're really angry, you tend to expose yourself and other people around you to more danger than normal, right? We know loads of things like that about anger, right? But no one, most, the majority of people aren't aware that the research tells us all this kind of stuff. So to them, anger is just a feeling, right? It's not something that changes

• 1:55:52Donald Robertson?

  their thinking. And, you know, if that's what anger does, like, how does it affect the electorate? How does it affect the behaviour of politicians? Like, there are measurable problems that it would cause. So I think there's a lot to be said. We've got some great, you know, like Seneca has an entire book called On Anger, you know, and it's, we can easily compare all of that ancient philosophical literature to what some of the psychological research says today. So I think people can benefit a lot from working. I call anger management the royal road to self-improvement, because most people that seek self-improvement, like anxiety and depression or self-blaming emotions, right?

• 1:56:36Donald Robertson?

  So people that are anxious or depressed tend to seek self-help or therapy, but angry people don't seek therapy typically, because if I'm really angry, Chris, I think you need therapy, buddy, not me, right? So angry people avoid self-help. So, you know, that's why you could go online and you see kind of self-improvement communities, like the Manosphere, for example, in some cases. And there seem to be a lot of really angry people, yet they're talking about self-improvement. Have you, I don't know if you've noticed that?

• 1:57:05Chris Williamson?

  A little bit, yeah. Oh, I mean, I certainly know that anybody that's ruminative in the depression or anxiety world, they've considered every six ways to Sunday, different solution they come up with. I don't know that many angry people. I think I'm, I tend to try and avoid them, or maybe they hide themselves from me, I'm not sure.

• 1:57:25Donald Robertson?

  You, well, you know, if you read the comments and YouTube videos and things like that.

• 1:57:29Chris Williamson?

  Angry, angry people.

• 1:57:30Donald Robertson?

  There's a lot of angry people on social media.

• 1:57:32Chris Williamson?

  Don, where should people go? They want to keep up to date with all of the things you're doing.

• 1:57:36Donald Robertson?

  Well, they can find me on Substack. That's probably where I mainly put stuff. And my website is just donaldrobertson dot name. And then, yeah, like if they look me up online, I'm involved with a nonprofit, two nonprofits. One's the Modern Stoicism Organisation, which is running Stoic Week at the moment. And then the other one is a charity or nonprofit that we founded in Greece called the Plato's Academy Centre, where we're trying to raise funds to create a conference centre adjacent to the original location of Plato's Academy. So those are the two things I'm interested in. People want to check those out as well. I need to give them a bit of a plug, Chris. But it's always, you know, absolute pleasure because you're exactly, you know, when I'm writing books,

• 1:58:19Donald Robertson?

  it's kind of guys like you that I kind of imagine reading them, you know, like I can see how passionate you are about these subjects. And, you know, like, I, I hope that I use, it's, it's reassuring to me that you find the stuff interesting.

• 1:58:36Chris Williamson?

  You keep coming back on. You write, you, you write something and we'll sit down for two hours and talk about it every time it happens. I want to do, um, I want to do an episode with you, a primer on CBT. So maybe in the next sort of six months or so, we'll, we'll find a, a time slot that works. And I really want to try and just do a 30,000 foot view, the biggest principles, the biggest learnings and lessons.

• 1:58:57Donald Robertson?

  My specialism was always, I was, I used to train therapists and I would always say that I was a techniques guy. Right. So I was really interested in classifying different psychological techniques and comparing them and training. We used to train people and gather data and all of these scripted exercises that we had. So I love teaching people and I feel like when we do, when I do interviews and things like that, the one thing I'd love to do more of is just say to people, this is how you actually do this visualization tech. This is technique. This is how you do this meditation technique. Like, let's just go through a bunch of them and show you how to actually do stuff.

• 1:59:32Chris Williamson?

  I would absolutely love to do that. And I think, uh, you know, the more, I haven't really been exposed properly to that much CBT, which is, I, I feel increasingly embarrassed about. It's like this sort of elephant in the room, uh, that I get the impression. Much of the stuff that I consider as being sort of self-discovered wisdom that I'm all proud and sort of follow myself for. I'm like, if I'd just read enough CBT, I'd have probably come across this already. All of the biggest realizations seem to have been arrived at by CBT in one form or another. So I'm looking forward to maybe having the egotistical veils ripped from my eyes about my own beautiful ideas instead. And yeah, we'll do that one next. Don, I appreciate the hell out of you. Thank you very much for today.

• 2:00:13Donald Robertson?

  Thanks, man. It's been a pleasure. I really enjoyed it. It's good to see you again. And you.

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