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Donald Robertson Writes The World’s First Stoic Graphic Novel · The Stoic Handbook with Jon Brooks

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_02: Today I sit down to have my third interview with one of my favorite speakers and authors, Donald Robertson.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_02: Uh in the first interview, I spoke to Donald about Stoicism as a preventative medicine.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_02: In our second discussion, we talked about his book How to Think Like a Roman Emperor, which is an amazing self-help book which interweaves the biography of Marcus Aurelius with the great wisdom and principles of Stoic philosophy.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_02: And today we sit down to talk about Veritimus, which is a graphic novel about the life and philosophy of Marcus Aurelius.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_02: Verythimus is an amazing project because it synthesizes drama, imagery, history, self-improvement, wisdom into a beautiful book that is almost three hundred pages in length.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_02: The book comes out July the twelfth, and I'm very excited on a personal level to get my hands on a copy.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_02: I own all of Donald's previous books and find great value in reading them and rereading them.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_02: And with this said, I hope you enjoyed the following episode where I sit down and talk with Donald about Veritimus and the process that led to its creation, as well as the life of Marcus Aurelius.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_02: But now I'm excited to talk to you about your latest project.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the book that I've got coming out is called Verissimus, and it's a graphic novel about the life and philosophy of Marcus Aurelius.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: I've written another book since then.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um and started a third book.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: Like so everything's usually seems a little bit out of sync when books come out.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: But Verissimus is coming out very soon, and the 12th of July, and we were working on it for longer than a normal book.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: Usually a book takes about a year roughly.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: That's kind of what's assumed in the publishing industry.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: But this took maybe two or three years altogether.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: Graphic novels can sometimes take longer, especially mainly because the artwork, the script for it, took about six months to write.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: So there's a lot of artwork.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of artwork.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: And we wanted we could have done a graphic novel that was just a bunch of matchstick men talking about like which now seems quite kind of like an appealing idea in retrospect.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: But we decided we were going to make it more cinematic, and we put um a lot of time and effort into designing the panels, like you know, like you would design a shot in uh uh in cinema, and uh you know we spent a lot of time verifying uh historical details, so verifying details about the philosophy, which is kind of my area and to some extent in history.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: But we had consultants that we worked with to verify like Roman legionaries' belt buckles and the length of their swords.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: It was a bone of contention, right?
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: Actually, because um our consultant, the first thing he told us was all the short the swords were of the wrong length in all the initial uh draft.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: They were they had a Gladius, and he said, Oh, round about this period in history, Roman legionaries started to use the spatha, which is a slightly longer sword, it's better for fighting cavalry.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: And we're like, well, we have to go through all of the pictures and make the swords like an inch longer.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: So we um we did a lot of that kind of stuff in verifying the furniture, uh the landscapes.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: We do uh Zen Nanofragas, uh my illustrator, he's Portuguese, and he drew a carnuntum with hills and stuff.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: And actually, it was the I went to Carnuntum in Austria for a week to shoot video and interview the uh head of archaeological research there and the the uh head of the museums, and one of the first things they told us was that they said you know, like the landscape here's flat, right?
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: There aren't any mountains, like so.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: We kind of had to do a lot of things, like changing the landscape and stuff, and then verifying the language used as well is kind of an interesting one.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: So, like when people the way like sort of colloquial language, we wanted to get accurate.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: So when people um like if someone swears uh an oath um or if they're addressing another person, how would they phrase it?
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: We talk a little bit about that at the back of the book.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: So actually the sources that we have for that are Marcus's private letters, and that gives us a kind of indication of how he actually spoke in private, which is very different from how he wrote the meditations, and so a lot of it might surprise people.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: So, for instance, he he tends to refer uh with with um a lot of affection towards his teachers.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: He calls Fronto his rhetoric teacher, best of masters, is how he often addresses him.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and his mother is addressed by Fronto just as the mother of Caesar in private, like that's what he calls her.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: Like to the mother of Caesar is how he addresses his letters.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: So we we kind of studied all these little details and we tried to get the language accurate.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: Took two or three years uh to finish the whole thing, and I I mean it cured my perfectionism because uh I realized it's completely impossible to do unless you've got a time machine, uh, to have a completely historically accurate uh second century Roman graphic novel.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: But we tried our best um to get as close as we could.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: And uh yeah, like I said, I right in the outset when we first proposed it, I said I don't want like a bunch of guys in togas doing what I would call a dialogue dump.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: So it would be easy.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: I think some graphic novels are written where the the script is just like like he said this and he said that, and then the artist just kind of draws guys talking or whatever, and like there's not a lot of description of action.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: Our script goes into a lot of detail um describing the the visual landscape and the action that's taking place, and whenever there's philosophy, we always tried to tie it into the action, and we used tricks of the trade even to kind of push that further.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: So, for example, in situations where we've got people talking about stuff that doesn't relate to action, what we do is have parallel scenes unfolding visually.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: I'll give you an example.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: So, like Marcus is uh talking um uh like about something that isn't directly related to action.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: So rather than just having him kind of walking along the street or in his palace, we set it uh at the circus maximus, and there's a chariot race going on in the background.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: So we imagine he's having this conversation while he's simultaneously watching a chariot race, and then that allows us to have kind of exciting like a chariot crashing and action unfolding that kind of symbolically parallels the stuff that's happening in the conversation.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: Otherwise, we just have like two talking heads like in a boring background, right?
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: So we we use these tricks of the trade to try and keep the visual keep the action going um and like uh and make full use of the visual medium.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, wow.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_02: I I didn't for some reason I didn't even think about the fact that it had to be accurate historically, you know, and that's like a whole other dimension to the project, right?
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: I guess it didn't have to be.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: But we won't we just decided that we were gonna try, and you know, so I went to there's stuff in it that nobody there's like I guess Easter eggs in it, or so there's stuff in it in that book that probably nobody except me would notice.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um but like for example, we'll depict he Marcus has a dream about the Temple of Apollo at Delphi.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: Like, and you know, like even the I sent Z photographs of the rocks that are actually there, like so there's the shape of the rocks matches like the actual landscape uh at Delphi.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: So I we went I went to these locations and researched them and the museums as well.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um you know, like I say, we particularly were interested in what Carnuntum really looked like and you know, little details about what Marcus would have been doing there and what he would have seen.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: We spent a lot of research to do it.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: One of the hardest things actually was researching the so-called barbarian races, because um like the we don't have as much evidence about them, and and the Romans, when they describe what they call barbarians, kind of almost caricature they caricature them to some extent, and they'll be like, Yeah, those guys all just dress in furs and grunt a lot, and they they're all they all drink a lot of wine and they just throw axes at people and they're like you know, like cavemen or something like that.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: But that's so that's kind of come down to it.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: Like that's how we see Germanic tribesmen um when they're kind of depicted in movies and stuff like that, because that's how the Romans describe them, but the the Romans are also just caricaturing them because they want to make them out to be primitive, right?
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: Well, so we kind of strike a balance between to some extent taking what the Romans say seriously because they were actually there and they saw them, but at the same time trying to kind of see through some of the propaganda and imagining a little bit more what what these guys would actually look like, and then trying to kind of make them a little bit more visually interesting.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: That movie Um The Northmen, these things fascinate me.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: I spent so much time watching movies.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um I started reading graphic novels to research this and then I abandoned that pretty early on because I found that I was getting a lot more inspiration from movies and like TV series about like Southern Sandal stuff.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: So I watched and re-watched so many things shot by shot, like looking for things that we could incorporate into the graphic novel.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: And uh I think I it fascinates me now because like with the Northmen, I think if you're going to portray Vikings or like the Germanic tribes, your problem is it gets quite visually monotonous.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: It's like a bunch of guys with beards and axes and mud huts and or wooden huts and kind of like muddy forests and stuff like that.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_00: Like, and so after like about an hour, like it's kind of like we need to spice us up a little bit because it's not as interesting visually as you know Thor Ragnarok or something like that, where it's like a colourful more going on.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: So in the graphic novel, we we thought about that and we tried to make sure we changed location, that we made an effort to kind of vary the appearance more of like the things that were were going on in in certain scenes, so that we're not just kind of like depicting the same cliched stuff over and over.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: So I think we you know we crammed quite a lot into it.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: That's why it it took three times as long as a normal book.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_02: So, yeah, I mean one of the things I really love about the books he've written.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_02: So if we if we just take How to Think Like a Roman Emperor, the the the the experience of reading that is felt very like easy, like enjoyable, like you could just go from chapter to chapter and you felt like you were learning.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_02: But there was also this like you could tell there was a lot of detail, but the detail wasn't kind of confusing or boring, you know, like you're reading like a history textbook, but it was there.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_02: Um so that's one thing.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_02: So I can see why you would have been like really interested to get the the details right for the graphic novel.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_02: It starts off.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: It starts off confusing and boring, and then there's a lot of everything involved to make it not less confusing and boring.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_02: Um I'm wondering what the sort of the the mission or the intention was behind this project, because you're doing multiple things with it.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_02: You're educating people, you're entertaining people, um, you're also you know giving people prompts towards living a more meaningful, wise life, right?
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_02: There's a lot that's packed into this project.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_02: So what was the thing that kind of motivated you to do this?
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_02: Because I don't see people doing this often.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: To do a graphic novel specifically.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um there's really a kind of like a bunch of things that led towards that happening.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: I know it's like people have asked me this question before, and I think I've given different answers to the question.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: Because there were kind of like there are different reasons why we wound up doing this, and some of it was chance, and some of it was design.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um so, in part, it's like um one answer is that I've been writing about stoicism for like since before it was cool.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: Like people say I was into this band before they were cool.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: Like, when I first started researching stoicism, literally everyone told me it was this obscure thing that no one was interested in, and like why are you wasting your time on it and stuff like that?
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: Because there it wasn't that long, it was like about 25 years ago, but there were very few books on it, and it was considered a real niche subject, and then suddenly it exploded and became really popular, and Ryan Holiday's books came out, and uh Massimo Pellucci's books came out, and and suddenly everyone was talking about stoicism.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: But it wasn't like that uh a while back, and uh and so I'd already written and books about stoicism and talked about stoicism, and publishers were like, Could you like write an introduction to stoicism?
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, I've already written one, that's the problem.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: Like I feel like I've written several, like you know, so I can't just keep writing the same book, much as I'd love to.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: Like, you know, it gets a bit repetitive after a while.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: So I thought, how can I do an introduction to Stoicism that's different?
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_00: And that was how I came to write How to Think Roman Emperor.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: Like, I thought I'll make it more about the the character of one of the main historical figures.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: And then like I thought, well, we could write uh a book about stoicism that's kind of designed as an introduction for people, that's what everybody always wants.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_00: Like, how do we get into the subject?
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: But why not make it a graphic novel?
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: And then it's a completely different medium, like it's not just like yet another kind of uh basic idiot's guide to stoicism or whatever, but like a whole different way of introducing people to the subject.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_00: And also, like there, I know there are people who want to get into the subject who maybe don't really read philosophy or self-help books.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I realized that weirdly in part through working with the military.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: Like I've done a lot of stuff with the military over the past few years.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: I went to Quantico and spoke to the US Marine Corps University.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: I I gave a a workshop for Fort Leonard Wood, the officers there, and we ran a conference for the military.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um and it was probably through conversations with those guys.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: They were saying, like, like some of the guys in the Marines weren't really into reading self-help books in history, but they kind of like Gladiator and 300, and they kind of like the idea of stoicism.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um and movies and graphic novels and stuff are like more valuable in terms of reaching like people like when you read books about self-help, you kind of assume that everyone else reads this stuff, but a lot of people aren't really, you know, aren't really into wading through classics, but they they might benefit a lot from the ideas.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_00: So we wanted to do something that was gonna reach a different audience, and it's funny because people keep saying to me, you know, they they want to buy a copy for their kids, and I'm like, well, I would it's kind of PG, like there's nudity, torture, like there's a lot of death, and guys talking about coming to terms with their own mortality in a graveyard and things like that, and supernatural horror, even like so.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, I don't know if I'd give it to little kids, like it's not like you know, um Harry Potter or sort of whatever.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_00: I bought it's getting kind of dark, I guess.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_00: But they uh I think it will reach a young, maybe teenagers or you know, like a slightly different age group, like although it is uh does surprise me how many people assume that because it's a comic it must be for little kids or something.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: No, it's uh it's meant for adults, but probably it would reach a slightly different group of adults.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I think about it now, I mean, I know there's a lot of talk about like how do you teach young children stoicism and things like that, but I mean the people who probably need stoicism the most are teenagers, you know, because they go through this intense shift like physiologically, right?
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_02: And like even if they've had like a really stable childhood, now things are different and there's a lot of choices being made.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_02: So yeah, damn, if I could have read something like this when I was 13, 14, 15, you know, could have made a big difference.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: I would have read this when I was a teenager, I would have thought it was awesome.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_00: So maybe I I think often when you're an author, you can't just write stuff that's entirely for yourself, like you know, you do you've got editors and things like that, but like uh there's a balancing act to be done.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_00: But to some extent, you know, you're you're writing things that you think are cool and that you would have read, like if you were in that position.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_00: I remember like one of the things at the back of my mind was um when the movie Gladiator came out, which is a long time ago now, it's like 20 odd years ago now.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um a lot of people got into stoicism because Richard Harris plays Marcus Aurelius in the first act, and I knew guys that said they didn't read philosophy, but after they watched that movie, they went and looked up Marc Aurelius on Wikipedia or whatever, and they stumbled across the meditations and then they kind of got into it.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um and I always thought I kind of wish there was more stoicism in Gladiator.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_00: Like there's kind of one or two fleeting references to it, more than most people probably realise, actually, because apparently Russell Crowe's really into uh meditations, and he kind of wanted there to be more references to it, but there ended there ended up just being like one or two kind of fleeting ones.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_00: So at the back of my mind, I was always thinking, wouldn't it be cool if there was just like a bit more stoicism mentioned in Gladiator?
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_00: I and this was, I guess, my chance unconsciously.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't realise until we were towards the end of doing this.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_00: I thought, oh, I guess I'm gonna think this is like a prequel to Gladiator.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_00: Like kind of ends round about where the movie Gladiator begins.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um but this is this graphic novel has way more um stoic philosophy in it, I think, than than people would expect.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's got both, like I guess people would expect it to maybe just be like an action thing, or they'd expect a lot of philosophy but not more much action, but really it's got both a lot of both crammed into it, which was took a lot more work than you would perhaps assume at first.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_00: We spent ages like trying to figure out ways to weave the philosophy into the action.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_00: That was one of the biggest challenges that we set for ourselves.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_02: How did you manage to uh kind of find the balance between sort of drama, you know, and kind of like giving people like a a story that kind of you you know you might need to kind of be a bit flexible with the historical stuff versus like giving people just like a completely accurate step-by-step kind of like this is how events unfolded, or did you kind of do both at the same time?
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_02: Like how did you manage that?
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_00: I I know that this is gonna surprise people, um, but the the version of Marx's life that we tell in that graphic novel is basically pretty faithful to what comes down to us in the Roman histories.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_00: Now, that said, obviously, I would take it for granted that the Roman histories aren't completely reliable, right?
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_00: And so what our main source, the Historia Augusta, is kind of notoriously unreliable, and it it's to some extent a sort of literary work anyway.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's no coincidence, and in fact, it does us a favour.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_00: I guess this is also something that's going on in the background here, that we have several, we have three main sources for Marcus Aurelius' life in terms of Roman histories, Cassius Dio, the Historia Augusta and Herodian.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_00: The Historia Augusta is the main one.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_00: The Historia Augusta portrays the other people surrounding Marcus as kind of grotesque caricature figures, right?
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um maybe broadly historically accurate, it's generally believed that they kind of turned the dial up to a living a bit.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_00: So, for example, the way it portrays Commodus is kind of monstrous, and maybe he probably was pretty bad, but it comes across like there's a bit of sensationalism going on in our sources for literary effect.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_00: But that also kind of works in our favour um in terms of dramatizing the story and making it into something like a graphic novel, so it's surprisingly easy.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_00: One thing that that's really striking is that when we read the meditations, and there are reasons for this, but when we read the meditations, Mark, we kind of imagine Marcus in a room on his own by lamplight, you know, kind of writing down these musings.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_00: We don't kind of envisage that he's surrounded by this complete kind of clown show of uh crazy um people that he was you know, it's like the you know, he's got this ensemble cast of uh you know strange people that uh his that are very colourful, kind of very different from one another.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um and that doesn't come across in the meditation, but that defines who he is.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_00: Like, you know, you understand someone when you see their family and friends and the people that they spend time with.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_00: We don't get that from the meditations.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_00: Although in book one he talks about them, it doesn't really kind of allow us to visualize what they were like.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_00: The Roman history is painting this picture of them as being a really varied, really colourful bunch of people, um, and that casts Marcus in a completely different light.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_00: As soon as we he's like a j it's like a jigsaw piece, and when we slot him into the middle of the jigsaw puzzle, suddenly all the stuff he's saying in the meditations starts to kind of take on a a Slightly different meaning.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_00: So, first of all, on the one hand, we're pretty faithful to the historical sources and not just like what it says there, but also archaeological evidence, you know, stuff that we know of from broader research about the period in history, about Roman culture in general, like a whole wealth of sources like we have to draw on really, you know, like inscriptions, uh numismatic evidence, like uh like coins and stuff, like everything like it's intense, like a lot of stuff.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, um, but you know, even really obscure sources that we we you know we have to look at to try and piece together uh Marx Aurelius's uh life.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_00: But we you know, with all this evidence, there's gaps in it, there's contradictions in it, there's stuff in it that looks like it's probably not reliable, you know.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_00: So this is the mess that historians have to sift through, right?
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_00: And you have to make a decision about if the histories say something, do you in an academic history you would say, okay, the Historia Augusta says this, but we're not really sure we believe it.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_00: Like, or the Historia Augusta says this, but Cassius Dio says something slightly different.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_00: Like, and then you in a uh a boring academic history, you can kind of qualify everything in a graphic novel or a movie, you have to pick an interpretation like uh you and stick with it.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_00: Now there is one way around that, um, which is that where there's gossip reported, so one of the weird things is that women histories often report gossip and they'll tell us it's gossip or propaganda or whatever.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and then in the graphic novel or a movie, you you think, well, what can we do with this?
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_00: Because it seems like it's probably not true, but it's kind of interesting and it's a colourful story.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_00: But what we figured out is that we can include stuff like that as long as we actually portray it as gossip, you know.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_00: So there's scenes where we just have people gossiping about Marcus and Faustina, for example, and actually it's good, it's quite liberating because then you can go, okay, we get it now.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_00: Like that tells us something about Marcus, that people would be saying these things about him.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_00: Like, that's part of who part of who he is, is the fact that like the Roman people are uh think that you know he his wife is sleeping with gladiators and this is the talk of the town, and people are mocking him for that and and stuff.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_00: And we can leave it up to the reader to say, like, who knows whether this is actually true or not?
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_00: But what we do is what we do know is that people were saying this.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_00: Like, so this is the environment in which he's living, and actually that's more interesting in a way, because what if you ask it becomes pretty obvious.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_00: Like, why would people say this stuff?
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_00: A really obvious explanation is almost all the gossip about Marcus Aurelius um casts doubt on the legitimacy of Commodus.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um Festina's sleeping with gladiators, right?
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_00: That means Commodus isn't Marcus's real son, is what they're insinuating.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_00: Why would they do that?
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_00: Like, um, because they want to cast doubt on the succession.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_00: Who would do that?
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_00: Like, well, usurpers, like rivals to the throne, like Avidius Cassius.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_00: There was a civil war.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_00: So it's no surprise that during the civil war people would say that guy Commodus isn't even his real son.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_00: You know, um it's political propaganda make perfect sense in terms of the conflict that's going on at the time.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_00: So we do we remained faithful to the sources, but you'd have to qualify that by saying the sources contain stuff like that we know is is maybe uh fictionalized or it's not completely reliable.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_00: But nevertheless, you probably far more than readers would assume, if they go and read the Historia Augusta and they kind of read modern biographies and they dick into the the kind of more obscure bits of it, they'll see that a lot of research has gone into this book.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_00: The book I wrote after it is a prose, conventional prose biography of Mark Aurelius for Yale University Press.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_00: So that has to be written to more of an academic standard.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um like in that book, um I guess it would be a good companion piece for some people, because they'll see in the the biography that most of the stuff that we're saying in the graphic novel is based on the historical research.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um it's not it made up there.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_00: There's one or two things that we had to kind of bite our lip and go, we're gonna have to change this because it doesn't work.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_00: Otherwise, as a story, there's gaps in the story where we're gonna have to kind of either just seldom did we ever just make stuff up, like usually where we bit our lip and kind of uh had to kind of force something a little bit, it was where there was like uh a kind of ambiguity or a kind of tenuous evidence, and we had to kind of so I'll give you an example.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um we don't really um we don't really know why Mark how Marcus won the Civil War.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_00: The guy the one of his senior his most senior general in the East instigated a civil war and had himself declared a rival emperor, and then after a few months he was assassinated by his own officers.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_00: So at one level that's the story, it's kind of interesting.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_00: But for a graphic novel, you're gonna be like, well, hang on a minute, why was he assassinated by his own officers?
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_00: Like why did they suddenly change their mind and and back out of this?
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_00: So it's kind of like holes in the story, um and then there's a kind of slightly more complicated explanation I give about the military strategy and why I think they they ended up in this situation.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_00: But part of it is I believe that Marcus sent a huge contingent of tens of thousands of cavalry, um, like shock troops, ahead.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_00: Like because his problem was that it would have taken Marcus a really long time to move his army from the northern frontier to the east where this rival Emperor was based.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_00: And um we don't know that he did that.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_00: The only evidence that we have that he sent a huge cavalry force there is in basically one inscription and and a bit of tech in a reference in the Historia Augusta that says something similar but slightly different.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_00: So we've got these two kind of little bits of evidence.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_00: So there we have to go, okay, this story doesn't really make sense unless we say we're based on these two fragments of evidence.
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_00: We think probably what happened here to join the dots is he it sounds like he took a huge barbarian auxiliary force and sent them like racing ahead to intervene.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_00: And then the the enemy were caught off guard by that and thought that's it, we've lost, like, because we you know we we've lost our advantage now, uh, and so the officers executed their general.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_00: Spoiler alert by the way.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_00: Spoiler alerts about ancient Roman stuff that happened like 2,000 years ago.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um so anyway, that there's places where we had to kind of you know maybe make I say things that if I was writing a prose history, I'd qualify a bit more and I'd I'd present more tentatively.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_00: But hon I guess once you explain that, I've most people some people will read this and assume it's all made up.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_00: People read How to Think Like a Roman Emperor and review some of the reviewers were like, this is just a load of stories you've made up about Mars Aurelius.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_00: And I was I that surprised me.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_00: And I at first I thought I don't understand why they think this is all made up.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_00: And then I realized why.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_00: It's because the people that that wrote that in reviews or thought that were all listening to the audiobook.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_00: And when you listen to the audiobook, one thing that's missing from it um is the are the footnotes.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_00: So they didn't know that all of the references is the historical event.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_00: There's like over a hundred references, and even in how to think the Roman Emperor, and that's a self-help book to the uh the historical sources, like so no, we're just like retelling the stuff that Cassius Dio says happened, like, and that other historians have have reported.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_00: But a lot of people don't know anything about Marcus Aurelius, so they think I mean this is really weird, but people people believe strange things on the internet, right?
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_00: So there are a lot of people, I meet people still who are like, oh, we don't know anything about Marcus Aurelius.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_00: We know more about Marcus Aurelius than we do about possibly any other ancient philosopher.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_00: We definitely know way more about him than we do about any other stoic philosopher, because he was a big deal.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_00: Like he was a Roman Emperor, so we have loads of stuff we don't even know for sure, um like we've no idea what Epictetus looks like, right?
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um the other famous Stoics, there aren't any statues of him, there are loads of statues of Marcus Aurelius as a child, as an old man, you know, because he was a big deal.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_00: Like and historians record his we have a record of his legal rescripts, we know the legislation that he passed, um, we have his private letters, like we've got references to him in loads of other sources, little fragments here and there.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_00: And also we because the other interesting thing about Marcus is because he's a big deal, like he he's um associated with other famous figures, right?
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_00: So one of our best sources for understanding Marcus Aurelius is information about his predecessors, like so, particularly Hadrian, like which people often don't mention.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_00: We know a lot, of course we know a lot about Hadrian, because Hadrian was also a big deal.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_00: Like, and so there's sculptures, inscriptions, like records, like we know quite a lot about Hadrian.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_00: But Marcus knew Hadrian, Marcus lived in Hadrian's house like for the last six months or so of Hadrian's life.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_00: Hadrian chose Marcus to be his successor after uh Antoninus Pius.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_00: So by studying more about Hadrian and thinking about how their lives overlap and intersect, like that allows us to also add more context to our understanding of Marcus Aurelius.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um Hadrian was his adoptive grandfather, so like you know, this is the house that you know we can go to the ruins of Hadrian's villa, Marcus lived there.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_00: Like, so sometimes we have to look at these other famous figures, and they provide more pieces of the jigsaw, as it were, that allow us to know more about Marcus.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_00: But um, if people are in any doubt, they could just read the prose biography that I've written as well, and they'll see where all of this information comes from, essentially.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_00: Um we there's a lot a lot out there.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_00: The pr the book won't be out until it won't be out until next year.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_00: So these things are kind of a bit yeah, publishing is always feels a little bit out of sync.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_00: So I've finished that book and I'm now writing another book.
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_00: Uh but that won't be pub, it probably won't be published until spring twenty twenty-three.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um but there are many bio the other weird thing is when people say they they don't think we know anything about Marcus Aurelius, there are like more biographies already of Marcus Aurelius than of I don't know like any other ancient philosopher, I guess.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_00: There's loads of biographies of Marcus Aurelius.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um Frank McLean's is the most famous one, Anthony Burley's is the best one, um we even have like you know we've got a 17th century biography of Marcus Aurelius, like there's loads of them, weirdly, but it's strange that people don't know all this stuff exists.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_02: I was gonna say that like uh yeah, I have you ever read a biography of Marcus Aurelius and you on one hand feel like it's it's like historical and the person has done their research but they don't really get stoicism.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, you know, because there's a lot that that's a whole other universe as well, right?
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_00: Like so pretty much all of them.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_00: Like um I don't know whether it's just something about being a historian, like they all seem to have contempt for philosophy or something.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_00: Frank McLean's is the worst in that regard.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_00: He pr he just says that he th he thinks stoicism is a stupid philosophy, and you know, like it's he doesn't get it at all.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um I wrote in my biography the first thing I say is writing a biography, I mark I quote Frank McLean at the beginning, uh, and as he says this is ridiculous philosophy, but and I say this is a caricature of stoicism, right?
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_00: And right in the in the introduction, I say writing a biography of Marcus Aurelius and dismissing Stoicism would be like writing a biography of Saint Augustine and ignoring the role of Christianity in his life.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't make any sense.
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_00: Like everything that Marcus Aurelius did was influenced by his belief in Stoicism.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_00: It was like a religion to him, it was his philosophy of life, and yuck you absolutely have to understand Stoicism in order to understand who he was and why he did the things he did.
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_00: And also the people he was interacting with like were his most senior advisors were stoics as well, some of them.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_00: So it's absurd um, you know, you to to caricature the philosophy in a biography.
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_00: But I I can't really I think all of them um dismiss the philosophy or that what's one of the things I was trying to do differently in my bat in my biographer for Yale was to not do that and to you know I had to you have to make a case for why do we need the like the seventh biography of Marcus Aurelius or whatever.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_00: What's different?
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, well the thing is we need to write one where it properly engages with stoic philosophy and explains the role that that played in his uh his career as emperor.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_00: So I tried to do that to some extent, uh, and at least in a kind of abbreviated form.
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_00: I I realize it would have to be a huge book because I'd have to explain the history and explain the philosophy, so it'd be like a thousand pages long.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_00: So we try to kind of give a condensed version of how these two things interact.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_00: There are over a hundred references to the meditations in my biography of Marx Rules, for instance.
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_02: It's gonna be such a good trilogy to give people like uh as a as an introduction to stoicism, all three books.
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and they're they're gonna disagree as well.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_00: Like some of the things I've said are maybe kind of controversial.
• 37:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um but you know, these other this is my interpretation of who he was.
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_00: And is I've studied Marc Aurelius more.
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_00: I've written three and a half books about him now, I would say.
• 37:29
  SPEAKER_00: I also because I wrote three books and I also edited um an edition of the Meditations and wrote a uh a preface, an introduction to it.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_00: And uh I've written some chapters for academic anthologies about Marcus Aurelius as well.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um the more I study him, the more sympathetic I become to him, really.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um you know it seems to me most of the things that people say that are critical of Marx Aurelius on the internet, like you'll see people that say he persecuted Christians, he committed genocide against the Germanic tribes, he like he's to blame for appointing Commodus as his successor, um, where other other previous emperors um uh adopted the best man for the job or whatever.
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_00: And all of these things I think are kind of really not entirely accurate historically.
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um they're you the truth is usually a lot more complex.
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and some of these things are completely that people say about them are just completely unfounded, they're just kind of based on uh like misunderstandings.
• 38:36
  SPEAKER_00: I mean for one, I think Marcus Aurelius one of the reasons we have to ask why did he face a civil war?
• 38:45
  SPEAKER_00: So one thing we know about Marcus for sure is that a lot of Romans hated him.
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_00: Like, not in majority, he seems to have been very popular, but there were definitely a faction in the military and in the Senate, not just one guy, but like a bunch of guys, like who I don't know, maybe didn't necessarily hate him, but really opposed him and wanted him to be removed from power, right?
• 39:08
  SPEAKER_00: So we have to ask why.
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_00: Like, and I the only answer I can really think of, and the answer that that's I think most supported by our historical sources, is that they thought Marcus Aurelius wasn't hawkish enough as a military commander, they wanted a more aggressive military policy, um, basically, and so this idea that Marcus was a kind of warmonger or whatever, I think is uh apart from the fact that that clashes with what he writes in private in the meditations, I think it clashes with the history as well, because it it looks like people really thought that he was placing too much emphasis on diplomacy and negotiation, and he should have been adopting a more aggressive, violent attitude towards the Germanic uh tribes in particular and the summations.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_02: I can't imagine someone who's practicing stoicism to have a an outlook that is very violent and aggressive, or is is is that accurate to say that?
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_02: Or you know, because it's yeah.
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_00: And he says in the meditations, you know, he'd have to be crazy, or he'd have to, you know, really kind of hypocritical in a way.
• 40:25
  SPEAKER_00: I mean the the true interpretation of this is a little bit more nuanced, but obviously in meditations, he says over and over and over again that um what matters to him is a feeling of brotherhood, brotherly love, really.
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um the Stoics call it Philistorgia, by the way, you know, like the this is one of the central principles of Stoicism is this idea of brotherly love and the the brotherhood of mankind, cosmopolitanism, the idea that we all are citizens of the same cosmos.
• 40:56
  SPEAKER_00: So Marcus mentions Roman citizens, I think, like twice in the meditations, um, but on every page virtually he mentions not being alienated from others, cultivating natural affection towards them, overcoming anger, um, exhibiting justice in his relationship with others, like all these interpersonal virtues, but they're all in reference to humanity as a whole, like not just to Roman citizens, which is remarkable if you think about it, because he's Roman Emperor.
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_00: And he's writing this while he's meeting Germanic and Sarmatian envoys every day.
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_00: So he's talking about the guys that he's at war with, right?
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_00: When he says, you know, that he should cultivate uh natural affection towards the rest of mankind uh and view them as his kin.
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_00: Uh he he means it.
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_00: Like, but he's still at war with them because they invaded his country.
• 41:53
  SPEAKER_00: Like, but he's not by any means if if there's any shred of truth in the meditations, you know, he's the opposite of a warmonger.
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_00: Like, you know, he really he doesn't see these guys as the enemy or as other, like he views them as his brothers and sisters.
• 42:13
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, that's um like I think that um one of the most inspiring things for me, at least reading the meditations, is this perfect balance that I see between strength of character and compassion, you know, because that's a really difficult thing to kind of balance a lot of people who are just too agreeable, too compassionate and pushovers, but uh you see this incredibly powerful, strong human being who's also like going out of his way to practice tolerance and forgiveness and you know kind of seeing how he relates to people.
• 42:49
  SPEAKER_00: He says something weird about that.
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_00: Like he says that true manliness consists in the strength of character to exhibit kindness rather than aggression.
• 42:59
  SPEAKER_00: And uh long story short, people ridiculed Marcus Aurelius.
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um the supposedly the the general that instigated the civil war against him called him a philosophical old woman.
• 43:11
  SPEAKER_00: Like so they thought he was too soft.
• 43:14
  SPEAKER_00: And but Marcus responds to that and he says, No, you're the angry people are weak people.
• 43:19
  SPEAKER_00: Like it's people angry people think they're strong, but actually they're weak.
• 43:25
  SPEAKER_00: And he says it's it's people that have mastered their anger and are able to exhibit compassion that are potentially the strongest characters, and that's what he aspires to be like.
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_00: But this kind of understanding of stoicism is rare in the modern world because the terms that we use in Greek for Greek philosophy generally became degraded over the past 2000 years, and so when people say cynical today, they don't mean that someone followed the philosophy of Diogenes, like they just mean that someone's sneering and negative about uh things.
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_00: When someone says I'm an Epicurean, they just mean that they enjoy fine wine and food.
• 44:09
  SPEAKER_00: Like they they don't mean that they drink barley water and eat potted cheese like the ancient Epicureans did.
• 44:15
  SPEAKER_00: Academic, uh sophist, sceptic, like all these terms mean something slightly different now.
• 44:22
  SPEAKER_00: Something much cruder and more simplistic than what they originally meant.
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_00: And so stoic now means unemotional when we write it with a lowercase S.
• 44:30
  SPEAKER_00: And in psychological research, it's commonly used as a term to denote um toxic, maladaptive ways of emotional coping.
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_00: Though there are large volumes of research showing that lowercase stoicism, which involves suppressing emotions, um, is like definitely not a good thing.
• 44:50
  SPEAKER_00: Like it and again, like the weird thing is people Who suppress their emotions believe that they're being strong, but they're more prone to mental illness, so they're actually very vulnerable, weak people as a result of this maladaptive coping strategy.
• 45:05
  SPEAKER_00: Like, of course, they believe that they're strong, they're actually shown to be weak.
• 45:09
  SPEAKER_00: Like it's a it's a a fragility, a weakness like that it causes in us when we can't handle our emotions and we disguise them and we conceal them and we try to suppress them.
• 45:20
  SPEAKER_00: But that's not what ancient stoicism means, it's completely the opposite.
• 45:24
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, ancient stoicism is the inspiration for cognitive therapy, which there are huge volumes of research showing is good for us.
• 45:31
  SPEAKER_00: Like, so on the one hand, we've got this thing that's bad for mental health, on the other hand, we've got this thing that we know is good for mental health, and like they're both kind of associated with stoicism, like, but they're opposites.
• 45:43
  SPEAKER_00: It reminds me of this quote from William Blake, the poet, who said, We both read the Bible day and night, but you read black, where I read white.
• 45:50
  SPEAKER_00: So a lot of people misconstrue Stoicism and turn it into something that's almost the complete opposite.
• 45:57
  SPEAKER_00: And part of that is that they completely ignore the reference to social virtue in ancient stoicism.
• 46:04
  SPEAKER_00: Stoicism was the inspiration to a large extent for early Christian ethics.
• 46:10
  SPEAKER_00: So no one says that early Christianity was self-centered and non-emotional.
• 46:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's a little bit brotherly love and forgiveness, obviously, right?
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_00: Like supposedly.
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, but that that's all inherent.
• 46:23
  SPEAKER_00: That part of it is all in Stoicism.
• 46:25
  SPEAKER_00: Like it very much seems to be inherited.
• 46:27
  SPEAKER_00: The Stoics use very similar language.
• 46:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um the Stoics are in the New Testament, like, by the way, it's a bit trivial for you.
• 46:35
  SPEAKER_00: Like, not a lot of people know that.
• 46:37
  SPEAKER_00: In the Acts of the Apostles, they're actually mentioned that St.
• 46:41
  SPEAKER_00: Paul goes to Athens and he gives a speech at the a sermon at the Areopagus at the foot of the Acropolis, and it says that he was talking to Stoic and Epicurean philosophers there, and he actually quotes a Stoic author called Aretus to them, who is an ancient poet, who's a student of Zeno, the founder of Stoicism.
• 47:01
  SPEAKER_00: So the early Christianity is steeped in Stoicism.
• 47:04
  SPEAKER_00: The early church fathers, many of them had studied Stoicism, they refer to it.
• 47:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um even St.
• 47:11
  SPEAKER_00: Paul, when we're told in the New Testament, was talking to the Stoics and reading Stoic literature.
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but somehow people ended up thinking of Stoicism as this kind of unemotional, Mr.
• 47:23
  SPEAKER_00: Spock, cold-hearted, kind of atomistic, individualistic thing, and Christianity as being the complete opposite, weirdly.
• 47:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um but these are caricatures, like ancient Stoicism, as you know, particularly in Marcus Aurelius, in every single page of the meditations he talks about as uh cultivating a sense of uh brotherhood and uh affection and kindness and compassion uh towards other people.
• 47:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean like the I I feel like I'm I'm using uh stoicism a lot raising my three-year-old, and I know firsthand experience that it it it makes me more compassionate, you know, like it's it's a it's a tool that really helps me connect and show more love and be a better dad, right?
• 48:14
  SPEAKER_02: It's not like I'm cold and distant from my child.
• 48:18
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm seeing that every day.
• 48:19
  SPEAKER_00: 100%.
• 48:20
  SPEAKER_00: Like even Epictetus is a pretty tough guy, says that you know it it's human nature.
• 48:25
  SPEAKER_00: If you see a small child, you want to get down on all fours and play and interact with them.
• 48:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's natural to have affection for children and like you know to have the Stoics really celebrated what they call uh the the phrase in English is we use as natural affection, but actually in ancient Greek it kind of means paternal or uh familial affection, philistorgia.
• 48:48
  SPEAKER_00: Like this is central to Stoic ethics.
• 48:50
  SPEAKER_00: The Stoics think human nature is that we you know we're designed to care about children, and they think we you know we should cultivate that and extend it and you know uh learn to care about humanity in in general.
• 49:04
  SPEAKER_00: They also thought the I mean the part of their theology is they think we should emulate Zeus.
• 49:09
  SPEAKER_00: Like, you know, we don't worship Zeus, but they did.
• 49:11
  SPEAKER_00: And they thought the the goal for them was to become more Zeus-like, and they said, well, Zeus is the god of hospitality and friendship, uh, among other things in ancient Greece, and the Stoics took that aspect of them very seriously because they thought of Zeus as being the father of mankind, and uh they thought, well, Zeus has paternal affection for the whole of mankind, and so if you were to be godlike and zous-like, you you'd also have to um you'd have this broad, encompassing perspective, like omniscience, but you'd also have this unconditional affection for the the whole of creation, the whole of mankind.
• 49:45
  SPEAKER_00: And so that that kind of helps to define in their eyes what they they they think the ideal is for humanity.
• 49:52
  SPEAKER_02: Wow, that's beautiful.
• 49:53
  SPEAKER_02: I was wondering if you could clear up an objection that I sometimes get when I'm speaking to people about like why I found Stoicism to be so useful.
• 50:01
  SPEAKER_02: And it's usually an objection given to me by people that haven't, you know, done that much research themselves, but maybe they are interested in like intuitive practices like breath work and meditation and yoga and things like that.
• 50:15
  SPEAKER_02: And then I present, you know, like the wisdom of the Stoics, and they will say, Well, you know, I I don't believe that we should live a hyper-rational life and we should be ruled by you know the rational mind at all times, and you know, we need to leave some space for intuition.
• 50:31
  SPEAKER_02: Um I'm I'm wondering uh you know what what is your thought about that objection?
• 50:37
  SPEAKER_00: I think the Stoics would say, yeah, but you have to right first of well, a couple of things.
• 50:42
  SPEAKER_00: Like, first of all, this the I think the Stoics would basically say, yeah, but you need to make a decision about whether you trust your intuition or not.
• 50:48
  SPEAKER_00: Like, and and how do you decide whether you trust it, you have to use reason, right, to figure out is your intuition.
• 50:54
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know whether intuition is reliable or not.
• 50:57
  SPEAKER_00: Some people's intuition is awful.
• 50:59
  SPEAKER_00: Like, you know, it's way off the mark.
• 51:01
  SPEAKER_00: Like, so the Stoics would say, sure, you could incorporate and find a role for intuition, but ultimately you're gonna have to use the Stoics use divination, by the way, right?
• 51:11
  SPEAKER_00: But they would say, but you have to you have to also use reason.
• 51:13
  SPEAKER_00: They're not two mutually exclusive things.
• 51:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's reason that ultimately that becomes the arbiter of whether or not our intuitions are reliable, and all it means is we observe the consequences of following our intuition, and we critically appraise it and decide you know whether it's a good guide or not.
• 51:32
  SPEAKER_00: Socrates followed his intuition.
• 51:33
  SPEAKER_00: He had the demonion, like his inner voice that he said would guide him.
• 51:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um but he made a decision about whether it was usually reliable or not.
• 51:42
  SPEAKER_00: Like he said over the course of his life he found it to be reliable, like it was a good guide to life.
• 51:47
  SPEAKER_00: You know, if it always led him into problems and it told him to do contradictory things, then reason would tell him that it's not a good idea to follow it.
• 51:57
  SPEAKER_00: So I think the Stoics would find this a strange objection because they'd go, but you use reason and intuition, right?
• 52:02
  SPEAKER_00: Like there's reason that tells us whether intuition is any good or not.
• 52:05
  SPEAKER_00: As an aside to that, I guess as a therapist, what I would say is that you know you you can't just say that intuition is a good guide.
• 52:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you'd need to say some forms of intuition are good, other forms of intuition are bad.
• 52:21
  SPEAKER_00: Like, sometimes intuition is reliable, sometimes it's unreliable.
• 52:25
  SPEAKER_00: The intuition of someone who's clinically depressed, in my experience, is often a pretty bad guide to life.
• 52:34
  SPEAKER_00: You know, maybe at some level it could be, but a lot of the intuitions that clinically depressed people have are depressed intuitions.
• 52:42
  SPEAKER_00: Like the intuitions of someone who suffers from generalized anxiety disorder are are usually that something catastrophic's about to happen, or we're all gonna die.
• 52:52
  SPEAKER_00: Like those intuitions are usually wrong as well, right?
• 52:55
  SPEAKER_00: Because they've got psychopathology, right?
• 52:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um maybe somewhere underneath that there's other intuitions, I don't know, but certainly a lot of their intuitions are anxious intuitions or depressive intuitions.
• 53:06
  SPEAKER_00: Why would that be?
• 53:07
  SPEAKER_00: Because when we have anxiety or depression, we exhibit cognitive biases.
• 53:12
  SPEAKER_00: So our brain goes into a different mode of functioning, um, and we become more susceptible to biased thinking.
• 53:20
  SPEAKER_00: We engage in what we call threat monitoring uh in psychology.
• 53:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I I I can't there are not there aren't many situations where I'd be working with a seriously depressed or anxious client, and I think you know what you need to do, buddy, just trust your intuition more.
• 53:36
  SPEAKER_00: Like I feel that that generally speaking, that's probably not gonna be the best advice because most depressed clients would say, Well, my intuition tells me I should stay in bed all day and never go outside, like and stuff like that.
• 53:51
  SPEAKER_00: No, well yeah, that's probably just gonna make you worse, right?
• 53:54
  SPEAKER_00: So uh I as a therapist I'd say of course, and we need to take a step back and decide is this good or bad intuition?
• 54:05
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, well, love that response.
• 54:07
  SPEAKER_02: I'm gonna be stealing that stealing that myself.
• 54:10
  SPEAKER_02: So um let's let's come back full circle.
• 54:13
  SPEAKER_02: Um so when is the graphic novel coming out?
• 54:20
  SPEAKER_02: 12th of July.
• 54:21
  SPEAKER_02: And where can people find out more about your work?
• 54:25
  SPEAKER_02: I know that you have some courses online that I I I know some some friends have done and and they've loved.
• 54:31
  SPEAKER_02: So yeah, where can people find out more about your work and what you're doing?
• 54:34
  SPEAKER_00: I have a lot of stuff online, I have a lot of courses and a lot of articles.
• 54:38
  SPEAKER_00: I write I've written like I think a hundred articles or something, a medium.
• 54:42
  SPEAKER_00: So if people go to my website, which is just donaldrobertson.name, there's like loads of resources and things that they can find on there.
• 54:51
  SPEAKER_00: If they're really cheap skates and they don't want to buy a book, like you know, which they could get from by the way, I'm perfectly happy if they want to get my book from the library.
• 54:59
  SPEAKER_00: But they there's also tons of free stuff that I've put on, like huge mic, it would take a lifetime to wade through all of the courses and audio recordings and videos and things.
• 55:08
  SPEAKER_00: So feel free to, you know, if your listeners are and viewers are into stoicism and they want a lot of um free resources.
• 55:16
  SPEAKER_00: And also the uh my website's donaldrobertson.name and the modern stoicism organization, uh it's the non-profit that we founded, it's called modernstoicism.com.
• 55:26
  SPEAKER_00: There's also it has something like 500 free articles on stoicism by dozens and dozens of different articles.
• 55:34
  SPEAKER_00: Uh different authors.
• 55:36
  SPEAKER_00: Some of them are well-known academics and and authors that have written them.
• 55:39
  SPEAKER_00: So there's like so much free stuff online.
• 55:42
  SPEAKER_02: Wow, yeah.
• 55:43
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, your medium articles have been a really good source for me kind of getting deeper into certain concepts and I guess that on, or just one clarification on things.
• 55:51
  SPEAKER_02: And I just want to say this kind of goes out both to you but to listeners as well.
• 55:55
  SPEAKER_02: But you have a chapter in How to Think Like a Roman Emperor.
• 55:57
  SPEAKER_02: I think it's called A Story of Stoicism, something like that.
• 56:01
  SPEAKER_02: And that that chapter, I'd read a bunch of st uh stoicism books prior to reading this, but that chapter is my favourite chapter that explains Stoicism and the history of it in the shortest amount of time, but like in the clearest way.
• 56:16
  SPEAKER_02: So I just tell people to read that chapter to get like this like kind of you like we can read it quickly, right?
• 56:22
  SPEAKER_02: And you get this the kind of download of of what it's about.
• 56:24
  SPEAKER_00: That's because I had to explain it to my six-year-old.
• 56:32
  SPEAKER_00: So I'd be telling her about Greek mythology and stuff, and she kind of got interested in Diogenes the Cynic and in Socrates, and I would tell her stories about them, and so I had to kind of think, how do I explain this stuff so that you know anyone could understand it, like a like a six-year-old or seven-year-old kid could like get the basic idea.
• 56:51
  SPEAKER_00: I think Socrates would definitely have said that he could explain philosophy to a small child.
• 57:00
  SPEAKER_00: Like, you know, I I feel like that's pretty much part of his character, that he thinks philosophy for everybody, right?
• 57:06
  SPEAKER_00: You know, some of these ideas are relatively simple.
• 57:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um so I think it was because I'd been trying to simplify things as much as I could, you know, without betraying them or distorting them in any way.
• 57:20
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes it helps to tell stories and anecdotes, right?
• 57:24
  SPEAKER_00: That can be an easier way to get the get the ideas across and give some examples and things.
• 57:29
  SPEAKER_00: Um but I think the graphic novel hopefully will will also put a human face on stoicism a bit, and uh allow people you maybe that that were confused by some of the academic text to to to be able to visualize more what stoicism would look like in practice.
• 57:47
  SPEAKER_02: Amazing.
• 57:48
  SPEAKER_02: Uh well thank you for the conversation.