Latest / The Stoic Handbook with Jon Brooks / Donald Robertson on Socrates, Philosophy, and Modern Self-Help

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Donald Robertson on Socrates, Philosophy, and Modern Self-Help · The Stoic Handbook with Jon Brooks

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_02: Welcome back to the Stoic Handbook Podcast, Arnold.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_02: This is I think I think it's gotta be maybe the fourth interview that I've done with you.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_02: So you're one of my favorite people to interview, and you are definitively my favorite stoic and philosophy writer.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_02: You're the person I recommend always.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it's a pleasure.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: I like doing this podcast as well.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: I like speaking to your audience, so now it it's uh it's good to speak to you again.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: It's nice to be here.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_02: Last time we spoke, we talked about Verissimus, the graphic novel, and you mentioned that you were working on a Marcus Aurelius biography, which has also come out.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_02: And this conversation we're gonna be having is gonna focus primarily on Socrates, and you've got a book coming out on the 19th of November, correct?
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I wrote three books in a row about Marcus Aurelius, and then I thought I should write a book about someone else for a change, you know.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: So I wanted to write about Socrates.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: Socrates is my favourite philosopher.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I actually took your course on Socrates, so you you have a lot of information in that course, it's very, very dense.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_02: Uh if we keep going back over it and over it, it's a lot to learn.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I was excited to see that you were gonna do a book dedicated to this.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the challenge was I I was saying earlier that I think people asked me about this before actually, and I said I didn't think it was possible to write a book like this about Socrates.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: I was kind of toying with the idea though, and I think somewhere along the line I must have convinced myself it was possible somehow, and now I've now done it and it's coming out.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but I wasn't sure because Socrates is a more complex, multifaceted, ambiguous character than Marcus Aurelius, both in terms of his personality and the historical sources and the type of philosophy that he's doing.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um it's not as cut the Stoics like slogans and maxims.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: And Socrates has his share of those, but he prefers questions, and he's often implying ideas or scutting around them, you know, so he's a little bit harder to pin down.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: I really I can't say enough, and I'll try and only use this word once or twice, but everything about Socrates is paradoxical, which is pretty typically Greek as well, and it's like peeling the layers off an onion when you study Socrates.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: So I love Marcus Aurelius, no offense to Marcus Aurelius, but Socrates is a much more nuanced, multifaceted type of character to write about, and I really enjoyed writing about him.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: And the other thing, just to make life even worse, like for an author trying to write about him, is that he lived we have this image, I think, of Socrates as a guy in sandals, hanging around in a pleasant grove, talking to his buddies, in a somewhat abstract way.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: Plato does mention famous historical figures, he may he alludes to historical events, but nevertheless I still I think still people come away from reading Plato's and Xenophon's dialogues, with this kind of feeling that Socrates is a little bit detached from the historical events around him.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: We often get that feeling with philosophers.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: But in fact, Socrates lived through the plague of Athens, the Peloponnesian War, which is one of the most epic conflicts in European history, but for 27 years.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: He fought in it in at least three major battles.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: He knew and rubbed shoulders with some of the leading politicians and greatest minds of his era.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: He lived through a dictatorship in the fall of the Athenian democracy.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: I think they tried to kill him or execute him maybe three or four times altogether.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: So he actually had a really dramatic, colourful life.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: And we I think also, you know, the very nature of the dialogues is they they mention these people that he's talking to.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: But often when people are reading them at university and so on, they don't know that much about the people he's talking to.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: But Socrates was surrounded by this kind of ensemble of characters that are incredibly colourful, vibrant people.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: I guess it's a writer's dream come true in a way.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um it's very cinematic.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's how I approached the book.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: I approached it like kind of like I was writing a screenplay for a movie or something like that.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_02: Love that, yeah, because it was uh there's periods where you you set the scene of a like I'm I'm picturing myself there and the little details of the scene, and then you some of the dialogues just go on, so you can really get like a sense of the dialogues in context, instead of it being this kind of hard to read, I can't quite picture what's going on there.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_02: I did appreciate that.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_02: It was really a nice way to read the dialogues, a way that I could picture what was happening.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: I think something that helps a little bit as well for me anyway, is the often the interlocutors, which is what we call the people that he's someone is talking to in a dialogue, his buddies, they're not always his buddies, but the people he's talking to, sometimes they're pretty argumentative and actually at times quite rude to Socrates.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: And so I tried to add beyond what you tend to get in Plato and Xenophon, and I like added a little bit, a few references to body language and the tone of voice and things to kind of make it come alive.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's more interesting when people are talking in a very quite a heated way about philosophical debates, about politics and rhetoric and the meaning of life and the nature of justice, you know, and sometimes it's it's getting you know, it's it's getting quite confrontational.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_02: Certainly, those are the the videos that go viral, you know, the debates that get heated, and yeah.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_02: One of the things I I would like you to do for the listeners is if you don't mind, is to try and bring Socrates to life and to try and explain some of his day because a lot of people who don't know him that well is a detached, wise statue figure in their mind.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_02: But I'm curious, you know, how did he live his day-to-day life and what did he wear and what did he eat and you know, all of those things about him as a human?
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, he his day-to-day life actually funnily enough, Xenophon tells us his so Xenophon is one of his students, who happens also to be a famous Athenian general.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so Socrates was a weird-looking guy.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um he the Greeks called him a topos, describe him as being a topos, which literally means out of place, like he was a misfit.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: So, on the one hand, he's a misfit, on the other hand, he's the quintessential Athenian philosopher.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: He kind of almost in a way kind of embodies the city of Athens in a sense, while at the same time seeming like a real misfit in that city.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: And he his friends say he had eyes like a crab, he had a face like a torpedo fish, uh, he walked like a pelican, and you know, they describe him like a satyr, like uh one of these like goat-like uh creatures like Pan.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: And uh those are his friends, right?
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: He was balding and pot-bellied, and the reason all that stuff's interesting is he grew up in a period where the human form, and particularly the male form, um was uh idealized.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so you know the the the the Greek art is obsessed with male physical perfection, like the athletic physique and stuff like that.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: So Socrates was this kind of seen by some people as a kind of misshaping, almost they would have seen him as and I'm deadly serious about this, I think it's quite an important point about him.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: In Greek theatre, there's a kind of stock formula in the satirical plays where there's a kind of pretentious character, usually someone who's more uh upper middle class or noble, and then there's a kind of buffoon, like a country bumpkin or whatever, that uh is a sort of everyman and punctures their conceit by you know asking them stupid questions and so on.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: And these are stock characters in Greek theatre.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: People would have definitely seen Socrates in both in his physical appearance and in his behaviour as resembling a buffoon in Greek satirical uh theatre, I believe.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: And so he was an odd, kind of strange guy.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: He was both really attractive to people and kind of repellent to them at the same time.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: In the morning, he, if I remember rightly, in the morning he went to the gymnasia, according to Xenophon.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: So Athens had three major gymnasia, and a gymnasium in ancient Athens is kind of I guess the best way to describe it would be it's a bit like what we would call recreational, uh like a sports ground, um, where there's running tracks, a big park where people are doing pancratian or like mix it would be like mixed martial arts and boxing and wrestling, running, maybe throwing javelin.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: But there's also libraries and shrines and people doing public speaking there, kind of like on a soapbox, or giving lectures.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: So there would be young men training for their military career and also doing dance, like they had this military uh athletic dance that they would do.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: So performing kind of doing ritualistic dance and exercise and so on, and then there'd be older men talking about philosophy and politics and giving speeches, basically.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: While they wander through the walkways and the parks, that's where that's where Socrates would send spend his mornings.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: So often surrounded by intellectuals, but also a lot of adolescent boys doing boxing and stuff, and very outdoors, like walking around doing philosophy.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um the gymnasia of Athens were the Lyceum, um, the Academy, which became famous later as the schools of Aristotle, the location of the famous school of Aristotle and the school of Plato, and also uh Kunusarges, which is associated with the Cynic School of Philosophy to some extent, where poorer citizens would go and train.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: So that's what he did in the morning.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: And then, if I remember rightly, in the afternoon, he would go to the agora.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: So Socrates was also very well known for hanging around in the city centre of Athens, which would be a little bit like hanging around in a shopping mall today.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_00: So that's where all the market stalls were, there were shops, and lots of public buildings as well.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: The Stoapoikle, the home of Stoicism, it's like a colonnade was there.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um it's beneath the Acropolis and the shadow of the Acropolis and the Parthenon Temple.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: And uh ironically, the we as far as we we know, the court where he was placed on trial and the prison where he was kept pending his execution were both in located in the agora where he would typically hang out every afternoon of his life.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: So you he would have been hanging around just outside um the walls of the prison, um, and then later he would be on the other side of them, hearing probably hearing the same voices that he heard every day, but this time on the other side of the wall, on the outside of the wall.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: And he hung around in shopkeepers, so I'll tell you a little bit of trivia about Socrates.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's kind of gold dust to historians when we have these textual sources that often are surprisingly questionable from the ancient world.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: So we we get little anecdotes, we get people's enemies criticizing them, uh, we get jokes about people and satirical plays about them, and so sometimes it's difficult to know how much of this stuff we can take literally by the by the very nature of it.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: So there's an anecdote that Socrates was friends with a shoemaker called Simon, and he would hang out in Simon's shoe shop and talk about philosophy, and Simon wrote down everything he said, and he was the first person, allegedly, to publish Socratic dialogues after Socrates died.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: So there were many different followers of Socrates that published Socratic dialogues, but today it's mainly the dialogues of Plato and Xenophon that survive like almost all, apart from some fragments, the rest of them are all lost.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: But supposedly Simon the Shoemaker was the first person to write these dialogues.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_00: And historians thought this is ironic, it's got to be satirical because Socrates is famous for going barefoot everywhere.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_00: So the idea that he sat in a shoemaker's shop all afternoon doing philosophy, and this guy's like, Socrates, when are you ever going to buy a pair of shoes?
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: Like, none of your friends wear shoes either.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: Like, is he ever going to put me out of business?
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_00: Seems like it's like a joke or something, right?
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um, however, when the Greek uh the the Greek government were um digging up uh the archaeological remains of the agora, they found lots of shops and the ruins of them, and they they found the ruins of a shop where there were nails that they believe are used for making shoes.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_00: And they also found something that's pretty common in archaeology in Greece.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um a Greek terracotta wine cup is called a keyx, and at the base of it, people would scratch their name, so because it belonged to you, right?
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's got you scratch your name at what maybe it gets mixed up with someone else's cup at once you've had a few too many drinks or something like that.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: And they found that in this shoemaker shop the base of a keyx and it has the name Simon scratched on it, right?
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: How weird is that?
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_00: So you would go from thinking this doesn't sound this doesn't have the ring of truth about it, like it sounds like a satire, to thinking, imagine pulling that out of the ground and thinking you'd immediately know, you'd be like, This is the guy that we're told Socrates was friends with that was a shoemaker, right?
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: So Socrates hung about in shops and he um you know the the famous anecdote is somebody said to him once, Socrates, you're kind of aloof from material possessions, you're always questioning materialism and stuff, and yet you spend all day hanging out, or you spend all afternoon hanging around in the agora, which is this tempo to consumerism, like it's where all the markets are and the kind of bustle of the the city centre, you know, like hanging out in a shopping mall.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: Like, how do you explain that?
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: And Socrates said, I like to remind myself every day, I like to remind myself how many things there are of which I have no need.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_00: Like, which is typically kind of ironic of him, like everything he said, and the famous thing about Socrates as well is his Plato has him saying that his friends are sometimes not sure whether he's joking or not.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but he's the sort of guy that I think in many cases is simultaneously joking and serious and deadly serious.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_00: Like somehow it's often often he got that's why he's so kind of complex.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_00: He often comes across as if he's being ironic and joking, and yet he's never joking.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_00: Like he's in some sense, he's always at the same time, seems to be deadly serious about what he's saying.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_00: But he just somehow ends up being humorous.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: So that's what he'd do in the afternoon, and then in the evenings, supposedly he'd go and hang out in his friends' houses, and we see that in Plato's dialogues and stuff, like he'll go around and and have dinner at a friend's house, sometimes in the houses of very wealthy, influential, like Athena.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it would be odd today, because this this is a guy that walks around with no shoes, and some people ridiculed him like he was a look he was like a sp dirty vagrant or something, you know.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um but at the same time, it would be like him having dinner with a cabinet minister, you know, or like uh or more, like you know, like with the prime minister or the president, you know.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_00: Uh he was besties with Alcibiades, who at one point became almost like uh he was the commander-in-chief of the Athenian military and and kind of being almost regarded as as if he was about to become like an emperor of of Athens.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um and that that was one of Socrates' best friends.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_00: So he he had a very complex social life.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: He was also known for talking to a wide variety of people, Athenians, uh men, but he spoke to we're also told he spoke to several prostitutes, um slaves, foreigners, people that were rich, poor, a dwarf, and perhaps most controversial of all, several women in an ancient Athenian society that was considered you know odd and controversial.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_00: Like to do philosophy with women was um would have been seen by many Athenians of the time to be perhaps more controversial than doing philosophy with slaves.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um and he uh you know he's uh he's unusual in that regard.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_00: Like the fact that he wanders about the street, kind of doing philosophy with random people as well.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_00: He's a kind of opportunistic philosopher, Socrates.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_00: That's part of his character.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: You know, he just bumps in.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_00: We sometimes he's described as kind of bumping into people in the street, he's he's going somewhere, he's on his way somewhere, and he gets interrupted because he bumps into someone and they say, Hey Socrates, come and speak to this guy.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: Like, and he'll end up in a what becomes a famous, celebrated philosophical debate.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_00: And that's not the norm for most philosophers, even in antiquity, they usually would hang out where the with their students in their little school or whatever, and and do philosophy um with their friends and other intellectuals, not just random people that they bump into in the street.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, well what comes up when you share that is my kind of image of someone who's deep in in the philosophical way of life.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_02: Obviously, there's exceptions, but generally likes things and ideas and to kind of stick to their own crowd and read, whereas Socrates seems to love other human beings.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_02: He seems to always want to be around and to socialize.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_00: He's a hard person to categorize, but I get that feeling from him.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_00: The sense that I get from Socrates to me is that he comes across as someone who has a very profound love of human nature and and human and beings.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_00: Man, he l he wants to spend all of his time around people.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_00: He just wants to talk to people all day long.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_00: I keep telling people he reminds me of Jimi Hendrix, and I mean that quite seriously, although again it sounds like I'm joking, right?
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_00: Because Jimi Hendrick woke up in the well, Jimi Hendrix went to bed with his guitar and his bed.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_00: He woke up in the morning, strapped his guitar on and started fra cooking his breakfast wearing his guitar.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_00: He went to Lavetry wearing his guitar, allegedly.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_00: So the psychologists called that time on task, he just had his guitar on all the time, right?
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_00: And that's how Socrates is portrayed.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_00: He just did philosoph he didn't have a job, right?
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_00: He used to possibly used to be a stonemason, and then we're told that he quit doing that and so that he could just dedicate his life to doing philosophy.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_00: And he just he just got up every morning and just did philosophy all day long, even with you know random people that he would encounter.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_00: So that means because he's using this questioning method, he's constantly honing his critical thinking skills all day long, every day.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_00: You know, and can you it's inconceivable.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_00: Like no one would do that.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_00: Our culture doesn't really admit of that today.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_00: So to imagine what a guy would be like who literally just spent all day every day.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes we read these things in the ancient sources, and uh classicists will always tell us we can't take this too literally, you know.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_00: Plato and Xenophon seem to be portraying Socrates in a somewhat semi-fictional way.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um but no one ever really disputes that you know, no one ever says Socrates didn't spend all day doing philosophy, that's ridiculous.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it seems to be generally accepted that that's a plausible portrayal of him.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um so he was a he might he was definitely the Greeks refer to him as uh being a uh having a great soul.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_00: There's a term that they use, Megalosuchia, um, which means having literally means having a big psyche or big soul.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_00: Like he's a uh towering character, like a unique individual, like in his era.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_00: So normally that ter that's a term is used for great military commanders and famous politicians, you know.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_00: But Socrates was one of these standout individuals, you know, he must have had incredible charisma in a in a peculiar kind of way.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um and people say that when they met him, like it was you know uh a pr very kind of profound experience.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_00: But some people hated him as well.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, he was executed.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_00: Placed on trial for corrupting the youth and impiety and forced to drink uh hemlock when he was about 71, 72 years old.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, you go into that uh the sort of second chapter of the book is entitled The Trial and love the because the one of the books you recommend people read is The Apology, right?
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_02: As like one of the best philosoph philosophy book books ever.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_00: No, I correct I'll correct I'm gonna correct you, they are right.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_00: It's the only book that I recommend that people read.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_00: Like I know sometimes I'll recommend books to individuals, right?
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_00: But actually I seldom do that.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's presumptuous to recommend books to people.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_00: People, you know, it takes time to read the book, you know.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_00: And so if by sometimes in coaching or therapy, I know a client quite well, or a person I think you as an individual should maybe read this book, but in general, I don't recommend that people read books normally, with one exception, like Plato's Apology, because I think it's one of the most profound and moving and important texts in in the history of the Western canon.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_00: And it only takes a few hours to read.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_00: Why do you put that book in like a league of its own?
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_02: What's special to you about that book?
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_00: Because first of all, actually, this might sound a bit glib because but like I said a moment ago, it's relatively short.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_00: That means a lot to me, because someone could just sit down and read it in an afternoon.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_00: Like anyone could have a go at it.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_00: What have you got to lose?
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_00: It's one it would be like reading a a work of Shakespeare, like, and it only taking a few shorter than Shakespeare.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_00: Like it would only take uh a few hours to get through it.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's pretty easy to read.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_00: Some of Plato's dialogues, like The Republic, is really long and it gets quite dry in the middle, right?
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_00: And kind of abstract at times.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's fascinating if you're a bit of a nerd for these things, but it's a bit much for somebody who's coming to it for the first time.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_00: But the Apology is pretty dramatic because it's a courtroom drama, essentially, in a way.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_00: And Socrates condenses quite a lot of stuff in it.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_00: He says, and it's beautifully written.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_00: So I think it drops lots of kind of little seeds of philosophy.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't have many complete arguments in it, but it has lots of little seeds of ideas that you know you might read it and be thinking about it decades later, like you know, because it creates images in your mind, and it it was hugely influential in the ancient world.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_00: If one do you understand any ancient philosophy, all ancient philosophers were familiar with Plato's apology, it was like that famous, it was um you know, uh it influenced everybody pretty much, and you know, it sort of someone like Marcus Aurelius, for example, would be like really familiar with it.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_00: It's a fundamental cultural reference point um for basically all ancient thinkers.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_00: That's why uh one of the reasons why I think it's it's really important, but it was, for example, taken to be the most iconic example of what's sometimes called a uh a good death or a noble death, right?
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_00: So that was meant to be profoundly inspiring.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_00: I'll give you one illustration of that uh four hundred and five hundred years later, um Epictetus is teaching stoicism.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_00: So to Epictetus Socrates, by the way, is ancient history, it's like late medieval periods or something, right?
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_00: Like this is five centuries earlier.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_00: Epictetus turns to his students and he says that people aren't upset by events but by their opinions about them.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_00: The most famous quote in the stoic literature, right?
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_00: It used to be a cliche in cognitive behavioral therapy, it was in like every book on CBT um but no one ever quotes the next sentence, right?
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_00: In the next sentence Epictetus says, for example, so he gives an example of what he means, and he said, uh death, so you go straight for the jugular, right?
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_00: You know, death itself is nothing terrible because if it were Socrates would have been frightened of dying, and he wasn't, right?
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_00: So he said this is a fundamental strategy that Socrates himself uses in the dialogues of both Plato and Xenophon.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_00: He won't he'll often say to people, when someone's scared of something or they're angry about something, he'll say, Do other people all feel the same way about it that you do?
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_00: And if the answer to that is no, people feel differently about this thing, then that would suggest that your fear, your fear of it, or your anger towards it is shaped by your beliefs, uh, your opinions, and your assumptions.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_00: Death seems like the most extreme example of something that we should fear, and yet not everybody feels the same way about death, right?
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_00: Some people actually are completely resigned to their own death.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_00: You know, that's it's a really interesting one because some people I know find that almost inconceivable, particularly, I think, younger people, right?
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_00: And I think there's a reason for that.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_00: As you get older, I hate to break it to you kids, but as you get older after 50, and just get into your 60s, 70s, or whatever, like other people start dying that you know, and so you're probably going to be be bereaved multiple times.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_00: By the time Socrates was 71, 72, let's say, he'd probably seen loads of people dying.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_00: He'd served in the military and thousands of people had died around him.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_00: He'd seen tens of thousands of people die in the Athenian plague, right?
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_00: But a lot of a lot of his friends had died as well, right?
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_00: So he'd had plenty of opportunity to face up to and come to terms with his own mortality.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_00: And also, as you get older, you have brushes with death, either because you're in dangerous situations, like you're in a car crash or something, or you have a health problem, like you have a health scare and you rush into the hospital, but you know, you're it turns out you're fine.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_00: But for a minute you think maybe this is it, or maybe like maybe my number's up or whatever.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_00: As time goes on, you have more and more opportunities to think, yeah, like maybe maybe this is it.
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_00: Like, you know, maybe, maybe there isn't anymore, maybe, maybe uh, you know, any minute now, like, or or maybe in the next few days, like uh, you know, it could be over.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I think as that happens to a lot of people when they're older and they have these multiple experiences of bereavement, multiple brushes with death themselves, a lot of people become more resigned to their own mortality, you know.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_00: So Epictetus wants to point to Socrates and say, he's the cardinal example of this.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_00: Like, he was completely indifferent, like, to his own death.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_00: Partly, Xenophon says part partly it was to do with his age.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_00: That's not the only reason, but part of it was that Socrates felt he'd had a good innings, you know, he was about to become a burden to his family or begin losing his his faculties.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_00: He talks a lot about this.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_00: He says, Um, death is is like someone who's lent you money and he makes you repay it a little bit of time.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_00: He goes, 'I'll have your eyesight, I'm gonna have your hearing, gonna have your the strength in your legs now.' He says, Old age kind of robs you, it makes you pay your life back in one installment at a time.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_00: You know, he wasn't keen to go out like that.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_00: He wants to go out Socrates wants to go out in a blaze of glory, you know, in a sense.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_00: Or he wanted to make a statement on behalf of philosophy.
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_00: He thought he could do benefit Athenian society more by making this kind of principled stand in public than he could by continuing the same discussions that he'd been having for decades when he was he was starting to get on a little bit.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um, that's part of you know what we see going on there.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_00: But Epictetus is like, this guy's not afraid of dying, he's he shows complete indifference to it.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_00: You know, he's ready to go.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_00: Like, you know, and because of that, you know, people are amazed.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_00: They're like, you're about to be executed, you're standing trial in court, right?
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_00: If the jury don't like you, you're gonna be executed.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_00: Do you understand that?
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_00: And Socrates is like, yeah, I understand it.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's not gonna stop me from saying what I want to say.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_00: Like, I'm not scared of dying.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_00: He says something remarkable as well about his military service at the beginning.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_00: I'll paraphrase.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_00: Like, one of the first things he mentions in his defense is that he talks about his military service.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_00: Socrates was a hoplite, a heavy infantryman.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_00: By the way, I my personal view is that he wasn't an ordinary hoplite.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_00: He is depicted by both Xenophon and Plato discussing military training, by Xenophon discussing strategy and tactics in considerable detail.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_00: Like he talks, he's comfortable being consulted by uh Athenian generals and like senior officers.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_00: Like he's more like a sergeant major, or in the Roman legions, he would have been like a centurion, I think, like than just like a regular soldier.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_00: Like he's he's kind of he knows a lot, he's studied warfare, he's experienced, and he's kind of like a mediator with this with senior officers, um, a go-between.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_00: Like, so he says, Look, I fought in three major battles in the Peloponnesian War.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_00: Lots of people died around him.
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_00: He says, You guys praised me for my courage when I risked my life in order to protect the city walls of Athens.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_00: Now I'm standing here in court, you're talking as if I'm ridiculous for risking my life in order to defend philosophy.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_00: But this is much infinitely more important to me, right?
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_00: Because of what value are the walls of the city if the men that live within them are no good?
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_00: Like if they're corrupt.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_00: So he said, Doing philosophy and trying to improve my fellow citizens is more important to me than serving in the military.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you praised me for risking my life doing that.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I feel exactly the same way about risking my life right now in court, it's more important to me, right?
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_00: That was part of how he put his reasons for making the unapologetic.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_00: The the Greek word for defence speech is apologia, um, and so that we get the English word apology.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but Socrates is obviously completely unapologetic.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_00: He couldn't be less apologetic.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_00: He not only he carries on doing philosophy in the trial.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_00: Like, and was when he takes the stand, he starts doing philosophy while you know interrogating the the guys that are are prosecuting him and bringing the charges against him, you know, weirdly.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_00: He's doing the very thing that they're putting him on trial for in the trial.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_00: Like they're going on, but you should stop doing philosophy, and he's like, Well, you know, like tell me and define what you mean by you know corrupting the youth and stuff like that.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_00: You're like, you're doing the thing right now that you're on trial for.
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_00: Like, that's how unapologetic he actually was.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_00: So he he to borrow a phrase from Nietzsche, uh Socrates pressed his hand upon Aeons as though upon wax during his trial.
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_00: Like he sent shockwaves uh through the the Greek world and changed history by you know, this is a guy that never wrote a book.
• 35:05
  unknown: Yeah.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_00: You know, and he's the most iconic philosopher in the the Western tradition.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_00: And part of it was also he said some radical he helped to define the philosophical method as we know it today, and he said he tended to say things and come to conclusions that are so radical that whether we agree with them or not, they kind of, you know, they stick in our minds and you know, like force us to to ask very deep questions.
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_00: You know, often people would walk away from discussions with Socrates and think, I don't find these arguments convincing.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm not really sure what he's driving at.
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I ca I just can't buy his conclusions, they seem too extreme.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_00: But weeks, months, years, decades later you're still thinking about the stuff that he said because he pushed it further than most other thinkers would dare.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_02: One of the things that Socrates said that you quoted him saying in the in the trial chapter of your book is that the evil of wrongly taking a life or inflicting other forms of unjust punishment is far greater than the evil of suffering it.
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_02: In other words, the people that were gonna execute him were really the ones suffering compared to him.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_02: A lot of people would be like, hang on a second.
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_02: Hang on a second.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_02: Is that really the case?
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_02: You know, like and also I'm I'm curious how you interpret that.
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it that's a good example of something that Socrates says that sticks in your mind and should make you think, but it's kind of extreme, and a lot of people would struggle to agree with it.
• 36:49
  SPEAKER_00: Epictetus's so often Socrates also will insinuate things or imply conclusions.
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_00: No, some to some extent in the apology, but in the the apology is the least dialogical of the dialogues.
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's uh the the apology is almost a monologue.
• 37:09
  SPEAKER_00: There are little bits of dialogue in it, but it's more like a monologue.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_00: But the in the other dialogues there's there's a bit more uh back and forth.
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_00: But uh Socrates will say these things, but sometimes in the discussion he'll be asking questions and he'll kind of like say like he's spiral spiralling around something.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_00: He's getting closer and closer to a conclusion, but he doesn't necessarily state it explicitly.
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_00: You know, sometimes it's left and that's partly because those dialogues are come across as if um and I think we don't know for sure, but I think many scholars believe they're they're not like uh what we would think of as a philosophical book or a lecture.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_00: They're intended somewhat more as teaching aids that were created to inspire thinking.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, the their function is to make us think, not just to say, here's the conclusions that you you know.
• 38:07
  SPEAKER_00: Socrates was kind of against this idea of just like handing down opinions that we would absorb passively, you know.
• 38:13
  SPEAKER_00: He he says radical things on purpose to make us question uh you know our thinking and he poses tricky questions.
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_00: So epic but then what happens is that over time the people that are responding to those dialogues often naturally say, Well, this is what he seems to be implying, and they'll state it more explicitly than he ever would, right?
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_00: So in Epictetus, they again like five centuries later, at the end of the Encharidian, the handbook of Epictetus, he has this kind of quote that he attributes to Socrates that isn't in the apology.
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so it's not clear whether he's kind of paraphrasing or maybe he's taking it from some other lost text, but it concludes with the words Anitas and Miletus, who are the two of the guys, the two main guys that were prosecuting him, like the or suing him in court.
• 39:06
  SPEAKER_00: In Greek, um ancient Greek law, the there wasn't a kind of what do you call it, uh, crown prosecution service or whatever.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_00: Like they, you know, the the the government or the police didn't press charges against people.
• 39:22
  SPEAKER_00: You you had to bring bring civil suits against people.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_00: So you you know it had to be two other fellow citizens that would like bring these charges to the court, and they weren't judges either.
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_00: The the jury the jurymen kind of served as uh as jurymen and and judges, uh and there were more of them, there were 500 typically in a jury.
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_00: So again, if you imagine he's in the court, it's like a huge mob of people, and and fights would break out and and things like that, right?
• 39:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's some somewhat, you know, it's almost more like a sporting event or something than uh uh what we would think of as a trial.
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_00: But Epictetus says uh portrays Socrates as saying, Anitas and Miletus can kill me, but they cannot harm me which is pretty hardcore thing to say, right?
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_00: Like again, he goes straight for the jugular, like it's the most extreme version that he uh he can come out with.
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_00: They can kill me, but it won't harm me.
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_00: They could take away my property, they could destroy my reputation, but they can't harm me.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_00: Because the only what he's implying is that the only truly important thing in life is moral wisdom or something like that.
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_00: That seems to be the position that Socrates circles around constantly, continually seems to be implying, although he you know he he he often implies it or insinuates it, or is working towards it rather than just kind of explicitly stating it.
• 40:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um but he he clearly seems to be implying that moral wisdom of some sort is the most important, perhaps the only important thing in life, and taking someone's property, destroying their reputation or killing them doesn't damage their moral wisdom or integrity, so it's of trivial or secondary uh importance.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um and in fact, being threatened with death simply gives him, in a sense, more opportunity to exercise moral wisdom and integrity in the in the face of extreme adversity, arguably, you know.
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_00: He has uh Seneca says, you know, one of the ironies is that you need uh to experience in a sense you need something resembling fear in order to exhibit the virtue of courage.
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_00: Like if you just had no fear at all, like then you wouldn't be able to exercise courage.
• 41:53
  SPEAKER_00: Like feel just like a can a robot be courageous?
• 41:56
  SPEAKER_00: You know, can somebody who's kind of been lobotomized about it like does it just isn't capable of feeling anxiety, be courageous?
• 42:03
  SPEAKER_00: Like can the same you need you need to experience some kind of desire or temptation in order to exhibit self-control and self-discipline.
• 42:11
  SPEAKER_00: Like if you just don't desire, you know, if you're not hungry, then how can you exhibit self-control in relation to your appetite, right?
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um and Socrates in the trial, he says something like he says, you know, they're talking, he's talking about how he's not pleading for mercy, and he says, I I'm um I'm a man of of flesh and blood, and you know, not like I'm made of of wood or stone.
• 42:35
  SPEAKER_00: So he says, Um, I have feelings, you know, but nevertheless, he stands up in front of the jury um and tells them he's not afraid of dying.
• 42:47
  SPEAKER_00: And the mo main important most important thing to him is he he wants to honour philosophy and defend he's really def he's not defending himself, he's defending philosophy in that trial, basically, you know, s in a way that he made himself a martyr for philosophy.
• 43:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, 400 years before Christ.
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_00: Like he's a Christ-like figure in a sense, like somewhat, you know, couldn't be less like Christ in some ways, in other ways, really similar.
• 43:20
  SPEAKER_00: Like it's obvious it's an obvious comparison that many authors throughout history have made, is like Socrates kind of dies for his belief in in moral virtue and philosophy, and a bit like the crucifixion of Christ.
• 43:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and I'll tell you another weird uh thing about it.
• 43:37
  SPEAKER_00: He he a strange coincidence in the trial there are kind of two phases to the jury vote.
• 43:46
  SPEAKER_00: So they vote on whether someone's guilty or not, right?
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_00: They narrowly find Socrates guilty, and then what happens is that the the prosecution um suggests a penalty, and the defendant suggests a penalty, and the jury vote to choose which one.
• 44:08
  SPEAKER_00: So normally, like in a case like this, the the people that are prosecuting would s suggest the death penalty, um, and then the defendant would suggest exile or something like that, or a huge fine.
• 44:22
  SPEAKER_00: Um and Socrates suggested that they should give him free mules for life as his punishment, right?
• 44:30
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, which is part of his big talk.
• 44:32
  SPEAKER_00: Like, and and but then he kind of backpedaled because I think because of his friends, and he offered to pay a fine of thirty uh pieces of silver, weirdly, like uh a bit like the the biblical story um of the betrayal of of Christ.
• 44:54
  SPEAKER_00: By Judas Iscariot.
• 44:57
  SPEAKER_00: And then they they vote again, and but he's condemned by a larger majority, which means, as it's often put, that some of the guys that thought Socrates were was innocent actually then voted in favour of the death penalty somehow because they were so provoked by the second speech that he gave regarding his alternative penalty.
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_00: They were so kind of offended by that somehow that quite a few of them switched and said, A minute ago I voted to say you were innocent, now I think that we should execute you.
• 45:36
  SPEAKER_00: Like so remarkably, um that was what happened during his trial.
• 45:45
  SPEAKER_02: I wanna go back to some of the comments you made about Socrates not being afraid of dying and how Epictetus uses him as a reference in the Anchorydian.
• 45:59
  SPEAKER_02: So this is just something that I've been thinking about and I'm curious if you have any thoughts.
• 46:03
  SPEAKER_02: So if someone says that personally I've overcome the fear of death, we tend to think, you know, this is a wise person.
• 46:10
  SPEAKER_02: You know, they're seeing death objectively as a natural process in life.
• 46:15
  SPEAKER_02: There's nothing intrinsically bad about death.
• 46:18
  SPEAKER_02: But then if you had the same attitude towards other people, like other people's deaths are neither good nor bad.
• 46:26
  SPEAKER_02: It's nothing then you may be seen as being a bit cold, you know, and like oh there's something like you know, like socially.
• 46:33
  SPEAKER_02: So how do you kind of think about those?
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I more in terms of a distinction that the Stoics maintained that was central to their ethics between uh preference, um so they the Stoics thought there is this kind of paradox about our moral judgments, right?
• 46:54
  SPEAKER_00: Let me think of a good on-ramp here.
• 46:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um so the ideal, say, to pick a different situation would be that we care about injustices that happen in the world enough to do something about them if we if we're able to, like to vote for a different government or whatever.
• 47:15
  SPEAKER_00: But not so much that we become depressed or neurotic or really outraged in a uh uh you know in a way that's obviously harmful.
• 47:25
  SPEAKER_00: So most people would agree that I should care about injustice, but not make myself neurotic not get neurotic about it, right?
• 47:37
  SPEAKER_00: So that in a way the pro the stoics are trying to tackle this problem and think how is it possible to care enough about stuff that we would do something about it without driving ourselves nuts about it.
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I I think the solution is the only way that we can really do this is by making a distinction between two different types of value judgment.
• 47:58
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 47:58
  SPEAKER_00: Because we don't have the conceptual apparatus to do this very successfully with our with the language that we we we have uh in our society, in an ancient Greek society.
• 48:11
  SPEAKER_00: We need we need to make a more fine-grained distinction between one type of value judgment that says, I would prefer that politicians aren't corrupt, for example.
• 48:23
  SPEAKER_00: Like I would prefer it if politicians are honest, um, and I'll take action to change that insofar as it's within my power to do it, i.e., maybe by voting or something, or reporting corruption and bear or being a whistleblower or something.
• 48:40
  SPEAKER_00: If I not, if I have an opportunity to do something, then you know I do it.
• 48:44
  SPEAKER_00: But not to invest so much value in it that I see it as something that intrinsically contributes to my quality of life, like that I don't think that I have to have honest politicians in order to have a good life, right?
• 49:05
  SPEAKER_00: My fulfillment, my fundamental goal, the goal in life.
• 49:09
  SPEAKER_00: The most important thing to me in in life doesn't depend on the world being perfect or politicians being honest or something like that.
• 49:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um so when it comes to the suffering of other people, I think we have to make a similar kind of distinction that I prefer it if other people like don't die in natural disasters and things like that.
• 49:35
  SPEAKER_00: But I can't make my fulfilment depend on that.
• 49:41
  SPEAKER_00: I mean it would be crazy to because it's an in a necessary part of human life that we're like all mortals are born and die, you know, and it's a intrinsic part of nature that some people die younger and some people die older, and some people die peacefully in their bed, and some people are like mulled to death by tigers or whatever, like you know, um, or die of a horrible disease, like you know, that that's the way of the world, and it's it's how the world functions, and it'd be like kind of irrational, be kind of like crazy for me to to wish that it just wasn't like that.
• 50:21
  SPEAKER_00: What kind of world wouldn't be like that?
• 50:23
  SPEAKER_00: Like if we all were immortal and walked around and never got any diseases or anything like that, then we would all die of boredom.
• 50:30
  SPEAKER_00: I really think you know, strangely, like I it's funny because people talk like that sometimes, but I find it quite hard to imagine this perfect world where there's no suffering and you know challenges and you know everything goes so I honestly I think it would be incredibly dull.
• 50:45
  SPEAKER_00: Like, so you know the there's uh a sense in in which the unpredictability of life and the fragility of it are part of what makes it interesting, you know, and part of what gives it its value.
• 50:59
  SPEAKER_00: So we we don't generally speaking, we have no control over whether other people ultimately die or not.
• 51:07
  SPEAKER_00: Like everybody is the Greeks used to say, um, you know, supposedly Socrates said this, but it's attributed to Anaxagoras as well.
• 51:15
  SPEAKER_00: The you know, someone said you you've been condemned to die by the Athenians.
• 51:20
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, They've been condemned to die by nature.
• 51:23
  SPEAKER_00: Like, you know, we're we're all condemned to die, you know, some people sooner, some people later, later, you know, nature like itself, like the gods have condemned them to die.
• 51:35
  SPEAKER_00: Like so the you know, I'm the men who condemned me are themselves condemned, like they're just kind of like in denial of it.
• 51:43
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, we have to recognise that that's a natural phenomenon, that it's kind of inescapable in a way, and that typically it's beyond our direct control, maybe with some exceptions, you know.
• 51:56
  SPEAKER_00: I might be able to dive in somebody to save someone from drowning or whatever, but for the most part, I you know I don't have that much control over uh saving other people's lives.
• 52:06
  SPEAKER_00: There's people dying, you know, someone just died that very second somewhere in the world, probably.
• 52:12
  SPEAKER_00: And throughout history, like you know, countless millions upon millions of people have have lived and died, and and will continue to do so in in the future.
• 52:23
  SPEAKER_00: So I think it's possible to have a kind of preference for one thing or a dislike or a disapproval of another while accepting our that we may not have control over it, um, and allowing our decisions and choices to be informed by that kind of preference or value judgment, but not viewing it as something that intrinsically contributes to our uh uh fulfilment or the goal of life as the the Greeks tend to phrase it, and therefore not something that we you know should get distressed stu highly distressed about, right?
• 53:02
  SPEAKER_00: Like Socrates said, he's a man of flesh and blood, so he does have feelings, he's saddened to see the death of of other people, you know.
• 53:10
  SPEAKER_00: But it's there's a difference between being sad about something and becoming clinically depressed about it, like you know, that our you know, we shouldn't see it as the end of the world, like and the kind of something that can ruins all of life for us.
• 53:23
  SPEAKER_00: And another thing that that changes the value that we attribute to external events is um seeing the bigger picture, right?
• 53:32
  SPEAKER_00: So while it's true that some that people die and you know it there there's a tragedy to that, um, but also an inevitability about it, you know, everywhere in the world the split seconds to babies being born, right?
• 53:46
  SPEAKER_00: And someone's coming into existence, right?
• 53:49
  SPEAKER_00: So like when you look at existence in the right, I mean if you just sit and contemplate all the people dying, that'd be kind of depressing.
• 53:57
  SPEAKER_00: But if you think about the fact that lots of people are being born and they have their whole life to look forward to, that's kind of more maybe more inspiring.
• 54:07
  SPEAKER_00: But the wise person would think of all of these things side by side, and so they'd have this kind of more nuanced, balanced, blended emotional reaction to events, and it would it would the Socrates, I think, and certainly the Stoics would consider it irrational and a form of self-deception to place only the bad under a magnifying glass and get kind of tunnel vision for it, so that we're ignoring all of the the positive or all the other uh aspects of life.
• 54:44
  SPEAKER_00: You know, life would seem very dark if you only look at the kind of negative parts of it in isolation, but that's a lie.
• 54:52
  SPEAKER_00: Like it's a lie of a mission, you know, like and what is the emotional reaction, the appropriate feeling that we have when we think about the whole of existence in a rounded and balanced way, you know.
• 55:06
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know, but it's probably not a kind of extreme anger or extreme depression or extreme anxiety, you know.
• 55:13
  SPEAKER_00: At the very least, my perception is that and from working with clients and altering the perspective, generally the most extreme emotional reaction occurs when you have this kind of narrow tunnel vision, and any broadening of perspective tends to moderate or dilute your emotional response.
• 55:30
  SPEAKER_00: So again, you might think, well, this is a tragic thing that's happening, but because I'm aware there are lots of other positive things happening at the same time, you know, I don't see it as depressing.
• 55:41
  SPEAKER_00: Like, because there are things, you know, uh to feel happy about and things to feel sad about at simultaneously when I take a step back and look at the world.
• 55:52
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, even Zapic Tis advises just imagining the same thing happening to a friend and what your reaction would be to that, it's the same kind of it's a bit closer to home than the view from above, but it's changes things when you identify closely with yourself, always hurts more.
• 56:10
  SPEAKER_02: Always make it more magnified.
• 56:12
  SPEAKER_00: Definitely if you die.
• 56:14
  SPEAKER_00: Like if you when we think about other people, when we think about strangers dying, we kind of, you know, especially if we take a step back from it and think about it objectively, we think, but like everyone dies eventually.
• 56:25
  SPEAKER_00: But when we think about our own death, it seems like a cosmic injustice or something, you know.
• 56:31
  SPEAKER_00: Like it's uh maybe we're more in denial or of or whatever.
• 56:35
  SPEAKER_00: It seems odd that other people would be in denial of their mortality.
• 56:39
  SPEAKER_00: You think when you look at other people, you know, you think surely you should accept the fact that you're gonna die eventually, and as you get older, the chances are more likely, you know.
• 56:49
  SPEAKER_00: That just seems like common sense when we we're observing other people from the inside, but we're from the outside, but we're looking at things from the inside from a first-person perspective, we're we're we have all these biases and blind spots that prevent us from being able so.
• 57:03
  SPEAKER_00: I think really fundamentally, one of the things that we get from Socrates is the idea that we can learn by observing other people's thinking, and it's difficult for us to critique our own thinking because we have these biases and blind spots, but if we critique other people and we can do it in such a way that we see them as kind of analogous to us, we we in a sense have a kind of empathy for people that we're debating with or engaging in philosophical dialogue with.
• 57:36
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we think this guy keeps making these same errors, but maybe I do that as well sometimes, right?
• 57:43
  SPEAKER_00: He one of my favourite dialogues is the first Alcibiades, where Socrates tries to explain what the maxim out that's engraved in the pillar outside the the temple at Delphi means the most famous philosophical maxim or Delphic maxim.
• 58:02
  SPEAKER_00: There were many of them, but the most famous is Gonothai Sauton, which means know thyself and has a profound effect on Greek philosophy.
• 58:13
  SPEAKER_00: Socrates seems to keep coming back to it, um, and he says to know thyself he clearly thinks of as a kind of definition of of wisdom.
• 58:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um he compares it to an eye that can see itself, which is a really powerful and kind of evocative image, right?
• 58:33
  SPEAKER_00: He says, Imagine the god the god Apollo is commanding your mind to know itself, says, Know thyself.
• 58:40
  SPEAKER_00: Imagine he commanded your eye to see itself.
• 58:43
  SPEAKER_00: He says this to Alcibiades, and Alcibiades says, I guess you'd need like a mirror or something.
• 58:48
  SPEAKER_00: And Socrates says, Well, what would be the mirror for the mind?
• 58:52
  SPEAKER_00: And what he's he implying or insinuating is that another person with whom you're engaging in a collaborative philosophical discussion would be like a mirror for your mind, and that that would be like the eye being able to can see itself, like you learn something about yourself by engaging very sincerely and very deeply in a debate with other people about what Socrates likes to describe as.
• 59:26
  SPEAKER_00: I think some of the most profound things that Socrates says are just like him often saying quite simple things, right?
• 59:33
  SPEAKER_00: So the very fact that he keeps he tends to refer to some of the things he's talking about is the the most important things in life, like the highest things he says.
• 59:45
  SPEAKER_00: He's he's what he's implying is that one of the distinctive things about the dialogues that he's engaging in is that he keeps bringing the subject back to the most fundamental questions, such as what is wisdom?
• 59:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um, what is good for us, what is bad for us, you know, what is the goal of human life, what does human fulfillment consist in?
• 1:00:05
  SPEAKER_00: What is the nature of justice?
• 1:00:08
  SPEAKER_00: You know, these absolutely like fundamental questions about how we should live our lives and the things upon which we should place most value.
• 1:00:16
  SPEAKER_00: So when we ask those really deep questions in a really sincere dialogue with other people, we we learn more about ourselves.
• 1:00:23
  SPEAKER_00: But I think to me, my interpretation of what's going on in uh in the course of Socrates' life is that he says in the Apology that initially the when the oracle said no man is wiser than Socrates, and he thought, I need to go and check this out, I find it hard to believe.
• 1:00:44
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm gonna see if I can find someone that's wiser than me.
• 1:00:48
  SPEAKER_00: What he f says that he initially did was to seek out people that were known for wisdom.
• 1:00:54
  SPEAKER_00: And when he questioned them, he found it mainly that makes us think of the Sophists because um like the the Greek word sophistes means an expert or someone who claims to be wise.
• 1:01:11
  SPEAKER_00: The Sophists were basically people who literally went around claiming to be wise or and claiming to be enlightened, and their followers claimed that they were.
• 1:01:19
  SPEAKER_00: So Socrates went, okay, I guess I should speak to these guys, right?
• 1:01:23
  SPEAKER_00: Protagoras, the the the first famous sophist, was literally referred to as the wisest man alive, right?
• 1:01:29
  SPEAKER_00: So Socrates went to him and was like, Okay, like can you explain what virtue is and how it can be taught and stuff like that, right?
• 1:01:38
  SPEAKER_00: And when he questioned him very thoroughly, he found that Protagoras struggled to answer some basic questions, um, and he contradicted himself and he tied himself in knots.
• 1:01:47
  SPEAKER_00: So Socrates thought, maybe these guys aren't really that wise then, right?
• 1:01:51
  SPEAKER_00: And and I'm only wiser than them because I at least realize that I am ignorant of the answers to these questions, right?
• 1:01:59
  SPEAKER_00: But there's something else going on here, which is Protagoras and some of these other guys became annoyed with Socrates and kind of evasive.
• 1:02:08
  SPEAKER_00: So Plato often portrays them wanting to change the subject and kind of trying to, you know, uh misdirect uh Socrates, launching into prepared speeches and kind of getting other people to step in for them in the in the conversation and things like that.
• 1:02:24
  SPEAKER_00: So being kind of evasive, right?
• 1:02:27
  SPEAKER_00: And Socrates says that he was surprised to find that sometimes he spoke with people who had no reputation for wisdom and found that they exhibited more wisdom than people who were famous wise men, right?
• 1:02:40
  SPEAKER_00: So just like humble tradesmen and things like that.
• 1:02:43
  SPEAKER_00: Socrates spoke to prostitutes and slaves and you know all sorts of people.
• 1:02:48
  SPEAKER_00: But I think part of it, what that uh he's implying, and maybe this is even stated explicitly in one of Plato's dialogues, that people who claim to be wise are unsuited to philosophical discussion because they have a too much of a reputation to defend.
• 1:03:06
  SPEAKER_00: So that prevents them from ever admitting that they're wrong.
• 1:03:10
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 1:03:10
  SPEAKER_00: So you could point out the contradictions in their thinking and the gaps in their reasoning.
• 1:03:16
  SPEAKER_00: They're just going to get defensive when you do that and change the subject, right?
• 1:03:20
  SPEAKER_00: Or try and gloss over it.
• 1:03:22
  SPEAKER_00: Because they've they've basically poisoned the dialogue by investing their reputation in maintaining the appearance of wisdom, right?
• 1:03:33
  SPEAKER_00: The appearance of wisdom is more important to them than real wisdom, and that's going to make them highly evasive, like it's going to make them resist ever having their errors being pointed out to them.
• 1:03:48
  SPEAKER_00: So Socrates increasingly turned to a group of individuals that nobody considered to be wise.
• 1:03:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um and those were the youth of Athens, like who seemed much more open to being interrogated by Socrates and having their errors.
• 1:04:07
  SPEAKER_00: That's why I think that it's sometimes said he looks like over time he he some spends somewhat more time talking to younger people, you know, and I think it's because he initially he went, right, I'm gonna go straight to the people that are called wise, the wisest men alive.
• 1:04:22
  SPEAKER_00: And then he thought these guys are like useless to talk to because they're so defensive, because they have to protect their reputation.
• 1:04:30
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas slaves, prostitutes, and young people have got nothing to lose.
• 1:04:36
  SPEAKER_00: Like, so if I ask them how they define justice, and then I kind of point out that that you know there's maybe a a flaw in their definition or there's a contradiction, they're more they're more willing to accept that and to have another go and revise you know what they're saying and to keep the conversation going.
• 1:04:52
  SPEAKER_00: You know, they they they don't have a reputation to protect.
• 1:04:57
  SPEAKER_00: So they're they provide a better mirror like for my soul than you know, the someone who claims to be wise is like a clouded mirror, or they're not, it's not much good, you know.
• 1:05:07
  SPEAKER_00: Like someone who has more intellectual humility is gonna provide a better mirror.
• 1:05:13
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I I can actually see that a lot in the uh when I train jujitsu.
• 1:05:18
  SPEAKER_02: Sometimes when people get a black belt, it's like they they just they're no longer open to learning from the lower belts, and it's like they've got to always maintain this authority when you talk to them.
• 1:05:29
  SPEAKER_02: Whereas someone who's a white belt, they just like, I don't know anything.
• 1:05:32
  SPEAKER_02: Like we we both don't know anything.
• 1:05:35
  SPEAKER_02: And I really respect the black belts that still act like they don't know much, you know, and they've got lots to learn.
• 1:05:43
  SPEAKER_00: Socrates avoided this.
• 1:05:44
  SPEAKER_00: I sometimes the way I explain it is that he always avoided setting himself up as a teacher.
• 1:05:51
  SPEAKER_00: Like he didn't charge fees, uh, whereas the sophists charged huge fees, right?
• 1:05:56
  SPEAKER_00: So they're financially invested in maintaining a reputation.
• 1:05:59
  SPEAKER_00: He didn't make any money from teaching, he never claimed to be a teacher, he avoided saying that he was a teacher, avoided he denied being wise, and ironically, what he does is cast himself more in the role not of a teacher, but of a student, but of an exceptional student.
• 1:06:17
  SPEAKER_00: Like I guess you could say he's kind of got a beginner's mind or whatever would be another way of maybe putting it, but he casts himself much more in the role of a kind of eternal student, and he would be a bit like you know, at the same time, it's almost humorous, like how annoying Socrates can be, but at the same time, kind of you know, that that's part of his character, and he this is what makes him inspiring.
• 1:06:38
  SPEAKER_00: But it's like you went to a lecture by a famous public intellectual, and it's really expensive, and there's like hundreds and hundreds of people, maybe thousands of people that went to see them, and there's one guy in the audience.
• 1:06:53
  SPEAKER_00: That keeps is asking them really difficult, really penetrating questions, right?
• 1:06:59
  SPEAKER_00: And some people might start to turn around and think some people in the audience might think this guy's kind of annoying, just let it let him go on.
• 1:07:06
  SPEAKER_00: We're well paid to come in here this dude.
• 1:07:08
  SPEAKER_00: But other people, the audience might be divided.
• 1:07:10
  SPEAKER_00: There might be other people in the audience that think this guy's questions are more interesting than this dude's answers.
• 1:07:17
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 1:07:18
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's almost like Socrates is like this guy at the back that everyone's starting to turn around and watch and think this dude's questions are more better and more interesting than the expert at the front giving the answers.
• 1:07:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:07:32
  SPEAKER_00: But there would be people who hated him for that.
• 1:07:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:07:36
  SPEAKER_02: I can see that.
• 1:07:37
  SPEAKER_02: In in the book, you talk about cognitive flexibility, and whenever I hear you talk about Socrates and I read about him, I feel like he's a master at trying on almost like different lenses or perspectives and flipping between them.
• 1:07:54
  SPEAKER_00: I think so.
• 1:07:55
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, let me explain a little bit about something that was a little bit of an epiphany for me.
• 1:08:00
  SPEAKER_00: Like, so one of the reasons that Socrates sometimes people say, Well, what did Socrates say?
• 1:08:05
  SPEAKER_00: And it's hard to summarize what Socrates says, because we have these dialogues mainly, and he does imply things, or sometimes he says things explicitly, but for the most part, what he bequeaths to us is a method.
• 1:08:18
  SPEAKER_00: Like, and I think that's part of his thinking.
• 1:08:21
  SPEAKER_00: Some people like the sophists believed that wisdom consisted in knowing a bunch of stuff and or holding correct opinions, and that you could sum it up in a speech, you could sum it up in maxims or slogans that people could buy from you, like buying onions from a greengrocer.
• 1:08:39
  SPEAKER_00: They come along and pay you money, and you give them the speech, and now they're wise, they just memorize it.
• 1:08:45
  SPEAKER_00: Like you could write it down for them, and they could memorize the slogans and they repeat it, and now they're gonna be as wise as you are, they just repeat what you said.
• 1:08:51
  SPEAKER_00: And so Socrates doesn't think of wisdom in terms of content, he thinks of it more in terms of process, it's a cognitive skill.
• 1:08:59
  SPEAKER_00: Like, you know, he thinks there is no rule or maxim that's gonna be true in every situation, there's always gonna be exceptions to it, and wisdom for Socrates appears to consist more in being able to figure out the exceptions to a general maxim or a rule, to be able to think more flexibly and more creatively.
• 1:09:20
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I explain it to kids by saying Socrates is like this guy that whenever you say something, he'll kind of it's almost like he wants to say yes but.
• 1:09:30
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 1:09:30
  SPEAKER_00: So how would you define justice?
• 1:09:32
  SPEAKER_00: And you go, I think justice is like helping your friends and harming your enemies.
• 1:09:35
  SPEAKER_00: It's a classic group definition.
• 1:09:37
  SPEAKER_00: Socrates kind of response is just to go, yes, but and then he'll come up with some kind of flaw in it or objection to it, right?
• 1:09:45
  SPEAKER_00: So he's like kind of acknowledges there's some truth in what you're saying, but there's also a shortcoming to it.
• 1:09:49
  SPEAKER_00: There's always more, you know.
• 1:09:51
  SPEAKER_00: He's always he's always very creatively thinking of situations where your idea, your definition, your role kind of breaks down, and so what we get from him more is this method of questioning.
• 1:10:06
  SPEAKER_00: So the epiphany I had, I was reading Xenophon, and you know, I was hesitant to write about Socrates.
• 1:10:14
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's a um presumptuous thing because people have been writing about Plato and Socrates for is since they you know they they they lived, you know, and you know, many you know great scholars have written uh over the centuries uh about Socrates and Plato, to a lesser extent about Xenophon.
• 1:10:38
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought, I don't, you know, I'm not uh uh an expert.
• 1:10:43
  SPEAKER_00: I have a degree in philosophy, but you know, I I'm not a Plato scholar, like I'm not an expert, it's just kind of hobby for me.
• 1:10:51
  SPEAKER_00: And then I one of the reasons I decided to write about it was because I was teaching my daughter about this stuff, and I I thought, look, I just want to be able to communicate with people, you know, about the benefit that I derive from it and the way the same way that I would talk to my daughter about it, right?
• 1:11:07
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm not you know, I'm not I'm not claiming to have the final word on Plato or to be able to compete with professional scholars, but I think maybe I can express some of the ideas in a way that would be engaging, uh give people an on-ramp, you know, to go and read the dialogues and so on.
• 1:11:23
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the reasons for that I think is that I um have an unusual background.
• 1:11:30
  SPEAKER_00: My background is interdisciplinary.
• 1:11:32
  SPEAKER_00: So my master's degrees was in an interdisciplinary centre in Sheffield, where we studied sociology, anthropology, philosophy, psychiatry, like psychotherapy.
• 1:11:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um and I've always been my I came from a background of philosophy and then I trained in lots of different types of psychotherapy, and then I got into kind of studying classics and history, so I combine these different disciplines to some extent.
• 1:11:59
  SPEAKER_00: And reading Plato and particularly Xenophon, actually, as a psychotherapist, I think I noticed stuff.
• 1:12:10
  SPEAKER_00: It seemed to me I was noticing stuff that classicists and philosophers just never mentioned.
• 1:12:15
  SPEAKER_00: And when I I, you know, I'm lucky enough to, over the years, having written books and speak at conferences, I I'm friends with and know lots of classicists and philosophers.
• 1:12:25
  SPEAKER_00: And I'd say to them, like, have you noticed this thing that Plato says or this thing that Xenophon says?
• 1:12:31
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, they'd often noticed it, but hadn't thought it was significant, or they just hadn't noticed it at all.
• 1:12:37
  SPEAKER_00: The stuff that leaps out at me is because sometimes it's just weirdly similar to stuff that we would do in cognitive therapy.
• 1:12:45
  SPEAKER_00: But one of them is in one of Xenophon's dialogues, Socrates is talking to yet another adolescent boy, and he's in the agora in a saddlery, like uh sell saddles for horses.
• 1:13:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so just like we described before, and he gets talking to this young guy called Euthydemus.
• 1:13:07
  SPEAKER_00: There are two euthodemuses, one in Xenophon and one in Plato.
• 1:13:10
  SPEAKER_00: There's a Xenophon's Euthydemus.
• 1:13:13
  SPEAKER_00: And Socrates says to this guy, listen, I've heard all about you.
• 1:13:16
  SPEAKER_00: You've got a reputation for having this amazing library private collection of books on self-improvement.
• 1:13:24
  SPEAKER_00: He's a self-help junkie, like really familiar in modern psychotherapy.
• 1:13:28
  SPEAKER_00: Half the clients that we see in therapy have got libraries of self-help books, you know, they're self-help junkies, right?
• 1:13:35
  SPEAKER_00: And this is exactly what this young guy is like.
• 1:13:37
  SPEAKER_00: And he says, Yeah, I collect the maxims of the wise for my own improvement, right?
• 1:13:42
  SPEAKER_00: He's a self-help junkie.
• 1:13:43
  SPEAKER_00: Like he's got the all the books, he's got all the best-selling books of the time and stuff.
• 1:13:47
  SPEAKER_00: And Socrates gets in a conversation with him about that, and he basically questions him.
• 1:13:52
  SPEAKER_00: He says, Well, he wants more than anything else is to be a great statesman and to demonstrate that he really understands the nature of justice.
• 1:14:01
  SPEAKER_00: And so Socrates questions him about the nature of justice and within a few minutes shows that he's contradicting himself and he doesn't really he's confused and he doesn't really understand it.
• 1:14:09
  SPEAKER_00: So again, he's been passively just kind of parroting stuff from books, but he hasn't got the cognitive skill of being able to do critical thinking.
• 1:14:19
  SPEAKER_00: Like, you know, he's he can't employ these concepts, like he's just repeating stuff that he's read um without really understanding it.
• 1:14:29
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so Socrates is trying to show him like to really understand the nature of justice, we you need to you know be willing to debate it and to kind of explore it from different perspectives and turn it over in your mind and so on.
• 1:14:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's gonna take work, like you know, like practicing playing the guitar or something like that.
• 1:14:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um it's a skill, it's a practical skill, like that we're we're learning.
• 1:14:50
  SPEAKER_00: But then this is the bit that jumps out at me.
• 1:14:54
  SPEAKER_00: Socrates says, let me let me show you, and he draws a diagram.
• 1:14:59
  SPEAKER_00: So it's like no one told me Socrates drew a diagram.
• 1:15:02
  SPEAKER_00: Like, I mean he draws he does draw other diagrams but no one told me he drew this diagram, and he he draws two columns, probably in a wax tablet, I'm guessing.
• 1:15:10
  SPEAKER_00: Like, um and we do two column diagrams all the time in cognitive behavioral therapy, every there's probably someone doing it right now as we speak, somewhere in the world, right, with a a flipboard with a CBT client.
• 1:15:22
  SPEAKER_00: We use it for different things, but what Socrates uses it for?
• 1:15:27
  SPEAKER_00: So we all do typically we'll get a negative belief that a client has, like nobody likes me, everybody hates me, or something, right?
• 1:15:34
  SPEAKER_00: And the the cognitive therapist will say, Where's the evidence for that?
• 1:15:37
  SPEAKER_00: Let's draw two columns and we'll have the evidence for that belief on one side and the evidence against it on the other side, right?
• 1:15:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and then we'll go through and the evidence that you think is for it, then maybe we'll do a second round and we'll go, is this evidence real?
• 1:15:52
  SPEAKER_00: Or could it be possibly interpreted differently or challenged, right?
• 1:15:57
  SPEAKER_00: So we'll kind of like start to question the placement of things in the column.
• 1:16:01
  SPEAKER_00: We'll also do two columns and weigh up the pros and cons of holding a belief or using a particular strategy, right?
• 1:16:09
  SPEAKER_00: And then again, someone might say these are some of the pros of avoidance.
• 1:16:15
  SPEAKER_00: Like, oh, when at least when I avoid situations that make me feel anxious, it makes me like feel temporarily better.
• 1:16:22
  SPEAKER_00: And so the therapist might say, might then go back and question that and say, but is that an illusion, right?
• 1:16:27
  SPEAKER_00: Is that really a pro or is it is there really a disadvantage there?
• 1:16:31
  SPEAKER_00: Because maybe it alleviates your anxiety temporarily, but makes you more sensitive in the long term, like more vulnerable over the long term.
• 1:16:38
  SPEAKER_00: So but maybe that's that's not really an advantage, maybe it just seems like one, right?
• 1:16:43
  SPEAKER_00: And so we we start to question the evaluation of the pros and cons in that way.
• 1:16:48
  SPEAKER_00: There's you know, there's a couple other variations, but those are the ways that we typically use the two color, two-column diagram.
• 1:16:54
  SPEAKER_00: So Socrates draws two columns, and he says, Okay, so you're you want to be a statesman and understand the nature of justice.
• 1:17:01
  SPEAKER_00: Let's put justice at the top of one column and injustice at the top of the other.
• 1:17:04
  SPEAKER_00: He says, you know, give me some examples of injustice.
• 1:17:08
  SPEAKER_00: And Euthemus says that's easy, lying and stealing and stuff like that, right?
• 1:17:13
  SPEAKER_00: And Socrates says, Okay, and this is where the Socratic method proper begins, the next step.
• 1:17:19
  SPEAKER_00: So he says, uh, lying.
• 1:17:22
  SPEAKER_00: So now Socrates isn't just following a formula, he's actually thinking creatively, he's coming up with creative examples, right?
• 1:17:30
  SPEAKER_00: Not not just f not following some standard formula, he has to think on the fly.
• 1:17:35
  SPEAKER_00: So he says, um, okay, it's lying and stealing.
• 1:17:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um what if an elected general in a war lies to the enemy?
• 1:17:44
  SPEAKER_00: Is that injustice or is that potentially just?
• 1:17:47
  SPEAKER_00: And Euthydemus is like, well that's different, right?
• 1:17:50
  SPEAKER_00: Like that's an exception to the rule of the different age that would be just.
• 1:17:54
  SPEAKER_00: Socrates says, you said stealing was unjust, but what if he captures an enemy camp and steals their weapons?
• 1:18:01
  SPEAKER_00: Is that unjust?
• 1:18:02
  SPEAKER_00: Or would we consider that to be just in the in the rules of war?
• 1:18:05
  SPEAKER_00: And Euthydemus says, Okay, like you know, that that's just, that's an exception.
• 1:18:09
  SPEAKER_00: Socrates says, okay, what about in civilian life if a parent is trying to give medicine to this a small child and they they won't take it, but they know it's they they need to uh like to help them, so that the parent hides it inside the food and deceives the child.
• 1:18:25
  SPEAKER_00: Like, is that unjust or is that a justified form of deception?
• 1:18:29
  SPEAKER_00: Euphydemus is like, okay, well that's different as well, right?
• 1:18:31
  SPEAKER_00: Like it's kind of an exception.
• 1:18:33
  SPEAKER_00: So then Socrates uses an example that's like a famous one throughout the centuries that philosophers love.
• 1:18:38
  SPEAKER_00: So what if your friend, he says, What if your friend is suicidal?
• 1:18:41
  SPEAKER_00: Like, and they and then and they ask you, you know, where like where did you put my dagger?
• 1:18:45
  SPEAKER_00: Like, so would it would you consider it uh unjust to tell them a white lie and say, I don't know, I can't remember where your dagger is, like, in order to save their life, you know, or you know, and he's you see Mrs.
• 1:19:02
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, well yeah, that's that's different, man.
• 1:19:03
  SPEAKER_00: It's a white lie, you're doing it to save somebody's life, to to help them.
• 1:19:08
  SPEAKER_00: So what Socrates is basically teaching is a cognitive skill here, it's a form of cognitive flexibility where you're able to you know think outside the box to use horrible modern cliche, you know, like you've got this kind of rigid definition like of justice, it consists, you know, in telling the truth and not stealing and stuff like that, you know.
• 1:19:29
  SPEAKER_00: But is there more nuance to it?
• 1:19:31
  SPEAKER_00: Like, you know, actually, if you really understand justice and injustice, then you know, are there possible possibly exceptions to it?
• 1:19:37
  SPEAKER_00: And in different situations might you interpret the meaning of of the word somewhat differently.
• 1:19:42
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, you can't teach that by just getting someone to memorize a formula.
• 1:19:47
  SPEAKER_00: You have to get them to think through lots of examples, right?
• 1:19:50
  SPEAKER_00: And at the end of it, they might be, they might even say, I'm not sure that I could necessarily, you know, they they revise their definition of what justice means, but they might never get to a perfect definition, but they still it still seems like they've got a better understanding by the end of it, because they've gone on this journey of thinking through all the exceptions.
• 1:20:10
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it takes time to do it, it's a skill, you can't just get that from someone giving you a lecture and you going away and memorizing what they've said.
• 1:20:17
  SPEAKER_00: So Socrates says, we draw these two columns.
• 1:20:20
  SPEAKER_00: Are there any circumstances under which we would move something from one column into the other column?
• 1:20:26
  SPEAKER_00: So that you know, you said that lying is unjust.
• 1:20:30
  SPEAKER_00: Would you ever move it across into the column marked justice?
• 1:20:33
  SPEAKER_00: You know, in some situations, you know, and he says the same thing.
• 1:20:37
  SPEAKER_00: Then Euthydemus uh eventually says to him, Listen, I want to study philosophy and learn this skill.
• 1:20:42
  SPEAKER_00: Where should I begin?
• 1:20:44
  SPEAKER_00: And Socrates then says to him, This is how you should begin, right?
• 1:20:48
  SPEAKER_00: And he says, Where you should begin is by asking yourself what eudaimonia consists in, a fulfillment.
• 1:20:54
  SPEAKER_00: This would seem logical from an ancient Greek point of view.
• 1:20:57
  SPEAKER_00: He says, It's your definition of what is good and bad, basically, because that's what how you know an ancient Greek would define eudaimonia, right?
• 1:21:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's having everything that's good and avoiding everything that's bad, basically.
• 1:21:10
  SPEAKER_00: So he says, list all the things that you think are good for us in life, you know, like wealth and reputation and having a big house and all this kind of superficial stuff he would come up with initially.
• 1:21:20
  SPEAKER_00: And Socrates says, Can you think of any situations in which the things that you listed as good might potentially be bad?
• 1:21:27
  SPEAKER_00: So he says health is the most obvious example of something that's intrinsically good.
• 1:21:32
  SPEAKER_00: And Socrates says, Well, you know, what if you live in a dictatorship and the tyrant that rules it is recruiting people to engage in an unjust war where everybody's going to get killed?
• 1:21:42
  SPEAKER_00: Like then h being healthy might be a disadvantage, right?
• 1:21:46
  SPEAKER_00: Socrates' favourite example as well was the of reversal of fortune, is that under the dictatorship of the 30 tyrants in Athens, the oligarchy, um, towards the end of his life, they went round and executed of like lots of people that had money and status.
• 1:22:05
  SPEAKER_00: Because if you had status, you were a threat to them, and you have and if you had a lot of money, they wanted to seize it for themselves.
• 1:22:12
  SPEAKER_00: So people before had complained that they were poor, like and they had no status in Athenian society.
• 1:22:20
  SPEAKER_00: And Socrates after the the oligarchy, probably annoyingly, would go up to them and say, Don't you think you're better off now?
• 1:22:28
  SPEAKER_00: Because the the 30 tyrants rounded up anybody that had status and money and garotted them and threw them in a pit, like in order to steal their will.
• 1:22:37
  SPEAKER_00: You're lucky, you're poor.
• 1:22:39
  SPEAKER_00: Like, you know, it didn't work out so well for the the rich and famous of Athenian society.
• 1:22:44
  SPEAKER_00: Like, so sometimes it could be surprising how things work out, right?
• 1:22:49
  SPEAKER_00: Losing your job might be the best thing that ever happens to you, right?
• 1:22:53
  SPEAKER_00: I mean getting sick might be one of the best things that ever happens to you.
• 1:22:57
  SPEAKER_00: You might really learn something from it, it might cause you to view things from a different perspective.
• 1:23:02
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's difficult to predict like how things are gonna often when you look it's easier in retrospect as you go older, you look back over your life.
• 1:23:11
  SPEAKER_00: It sounds crazy at first to say this, but when you're older and you look back on your own life and you think, what are the things that benefited you the most over the course of your life?
• 1:23:19
  SPEAKER_00: And you might look back and think, some of the things that actually benefited me the most were like a relationship that that went like didn't work out, or uh getting failing an exam, or you know, like some of the the things that that made me who I am today were like setbacks, like and misfortune, like so it seems you know, like we again we have to have a more nuanced perspective, you know, uh we have to have more cognitive flexibility and being able to look at things from multiple alternative points of view to see the possibilities that are intrinsic in them.
• 1:23:57
  SPEAKER_00: But also in modern psychology, we know that this kind of cognitive flexibility that that is Socrates is training people to develop through using this two-column technique, you know, thinking of exceptions to the rules, always generating alternative ways of looking at things, is associated with um emotional resilience, uh better relationships with other people, better psychological well-being, yeah, whereas rigidity in our thinking tends to be associated with depression and anxiety and other mental health problems.
• 1:24:30
  SPEAKER_00: So it's it's the skill of the Socratic method, like uh that we obtained from Socrates that maybe is the mo one of the most valuable things.
• 1:24:41
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe flourishing actually consists in this ability to ask questions and think about things in a more flexible and and creative way.
• 1:24:52
  SPEAKER_00: But one of the reasons I'm emphasizing that is I don't think this is acknowledged in modern self-help literature, generally speaking.
• 1:24:59
  SPEAKER_00: I think when you read modern self-help books and you watch videos, they self-help books give self-help advice.
• 1:25:09
  SPEAKER_00: They give answers, they recommend maxims and strategies and techniques.
• 1:25:16
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but like with the ancient sophists, that risks encouraging a kind of passivity and rigidity in our thinking.
• 1:25:23
  SPEAKER_00: Modern research, there's cognitive flexibility, which is our ability to kind of view things creatively from different perspectives, that's linked to empathy, like uh it's linked to our ability to kind of snap out of unhealthy patterns of thinking as well.
• 1:25:41
  SPEAKER_00: But there's also something closely related to it called coping flexibility, which is our ability to be able to choose wisely and adaptively between different ways of coping with problems.
• 1:25:55
  SPEAKER_00: I mean the simplest example of that is sometimes when you're dealing with other people, it's important to be able to speak up and assert yourself, but other times I hate to break it to you kids, sometimes you'd be better off zipping it like and saying nothing in some situations.
• 1:26:16
  SPEAKER_00: But you a a really smart person will be able to pick their battles, like and choose.
• 1:26:24
  SPEAKER_00: But if you think I have to confront, confront, like attack, attack, attack, assert myself every time.
• 1:26:30
  SPEAKER_00: That generally doesn't work out that well, to be honest, like even though many people believe that that's healthy, and likewise always kind of avoiding things and kind of being resigned and accepting something doesn't work you sometimes.
• 1:26:42
  SPEAKER_00: You need to be able to speak up, but you have to pick your your situations.
• 1:26:47
  SPEAKER_00: I think Epictetus talks about something very similar to this, but he he recognises that for stoics there's this problem he he's famously he says, How does the bull know that it can kill a lion?
• 1:27:07
  SPEAKER_00: Seems like an odd remark to make, right?
• 1:27:10
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't know bulls could kill lions, but I did a bit of research on it.
• 1:27:13
  SPEAKER_00: Oh boy, they can.
• 1:27:15
  SPEAKER_00: Like, so like a bull that's like the in charge of a herd can toss a lion in the air on its horns, make mincemeat of it, like but uh the uh calves aren't strong enough to uh to fight off a lion, like only some of the bulls are powerful enough, strong enough to do that.
• 1:27:37
  SPEAKER_00: So Epictes is how would you know that you could fight a lion?
• 1:27:44
  SPEAKER_00: Like, well, the only way that you would really know is through trial and error, like you know, so I think what he has in mind is most ancient philosophers had some experience of martial arts, like they did Pancratian or wrestling or boxing, or it's surprising to us now, but even Mark Aurelius, who was a bit of a weedy nerd, was like definitely trained in in wrestling and boxing and alludes to it in the meditations.
• 1:28:11
  SPEAKER_00: So did most people like in Greek and Roman society.
• 1:28:16
  SPEAKER_00: Um so they're very familiar with the idea of choosing a sparring partner, right?
• 1:28:21
  SPEAKER_00: And they this becomes a metaphor for for life on many levels.
• 1:28:25
  SPEAKER_00: But part of it is if you choose somebody that's too easy to fight, and you're like really experienced, you're a big strong guy, and you're really fast and you're really skilled, it's gonna be too easy you're gonna have a sparring partner that's too easy, and you're not gonna learn, they're not gonna be that much of a challenge for you, right?
• 1:28:42
  SPEAKER_00: Perhaps.
• 1:28:43
  SPEAKER_00: But if you pick somebody who's twice your size and way more experienced, like much stronger and much faster than you, then you're you know, you're just gonna get your you know, like your your butt kicked.
• 1:28:53
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 1:28:54
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe you learn something from that, but it's not gonna you'd be better to pick someone who's more generally speaking, who's more evenly matched.
• 1:29:02
  SPEAKER_00: You we said earlier you can learn from novices and stuff as well, but for the most part, you want to pick somebody like that's if you're spar you you're sparring with, you might want to pick somebody where you think there's kind of a a chance that they might beat you, a chance that you might win.
• 1:29:15
  SPEAKER_00: Or they're reasonably evenly matched, you know, they're not just gonna beat you within the first two seconds every time or something like and it's not gonna be you know, there's not gonna be much opportunity to learn stuff perhaps, right?
• 1:29:25
  SPEAKER_00: So Epictetus says you you can only judge this from experience.
• 1:29:31
  SPEAKER_00: Like, you know, you through trial and error you kind of figure out what's too much and what's not enough is a challenge.
• 1:29:37
  SPEAKER_00: And in terms of stoicism, like how can you if you can uh use stoicism, for example, psychologically to endure pain, to resist temptation, how do you know?
• 1:29:53
  SPEAKER_00: For some people being promoted to a position of power they lose their mind.
• 1:30:02
  SPEAKER_00: Like some famously in politics, if you power corrupts, right?
• 1:30:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um and whereas other people are kind of unfazed by that, right?
• 1:30:13
  SPEAKER_00: How would you know?
• 1:30:14
  SPEAKER_00: Like, but you have to observe yourself very closely in similar situations and think I know that you know this is a weakness for me or it's a strength for me, right?
• 1:30:26
  SPEAKER_00: You know, um and so deciding whether it's a good idea to face certain challenges, or you'd be better off avoiding them because it's too much, it's gonna overwhelm you.
• 1:30:41
  SPEAKER_00: You know, everyone has to decide that for themselves.
• 1:30:43
  SPEAKER_00: That's not a standard formula, right?
• 1:30:46
  SPEAKER_00: If you no one is like it, unless you're the stoic sage, you can't put your throw yourself into every challenging situation because some of them are gonna be too much for you.
• 1:30:57
  SPEAKER_00: Like the the it's gonna be depressing, or or you're gonna lose your temper, you're gonna succumb to temptation, like unless you're saint-like, you know, and you've completely mastered all fear and and anger and desire in yourself.
• 1:31:11
  SPEAKER_00: And some challenges are gonna be a piece of cake for you, but we have to know ourselves, we have to study our strengths and weaknesses, and figure out the on the basis of self-knowledge, what would be an appropriate coping strategy for us in different situations, right?
• 1:31:28
  SPEAKER_00: And that that takes thinking, it takes coping flexibility, you know.
• 1:31:35
  SPEAKER_00: It takes you know, also an a part of it is evaluating what aspects of a situation you have control over and which ones you don't which aspects you don't have control over.
• 1:31:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um in some situations the way you cope might depend on uh how much time you have.
• 1:31:52
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 1:31:53
  SPEAKER_00: So generally I think wisdom, would you say?
• 1:31:55
  SPEAKER_02: Is that it sounds like it's part of the wisdom where you're describing it.
• 1:31:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it definitely it's a form of practical wisdom.
• 1:32:01
  SPEAKER_00: I think often people think again, you you can just get like a bunch of formulas from a book.
• 1:32:05
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, alright, I'm not I don't mean to pick on any one individual because there are lots of self-help books of this kind, but I will pick on one because it just st jumps out at me, right?
• 1:32:17
  SPEAKER_00: So there's this guy you may have heard of called Jordan Peterson, right?
• 1:32:22
  SPEAKER_00: Who has a book called Twelve Rules for what's it called?
• 1:32:27
  SPEAKER_00: Twelve Rules for Life or something like that, right?
• 1:32:29
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason that one always sticks in my mind, it's not so much the content of the rules or like the other stuff that he says, but the foreword, which he didn't write of that book, amazed me when I read it because um I've read it several times because I kind of couldn't believe it, right?
• 1:32:49
  SPEAKER_00: The guy who's a psychoanalyst who and a neuroscientist I believe who wrote the foreword actually spends quite a lot of it valorizing rigid rule following behavior, right?
• 1:33:05
  SPEAKER_00: So it's a book about twelve rules.
• 1:33:07
  SPEAKER_00: He compare he begins by comparing them to the twelve command uh the ten commandments, right?
• 1:33:12
  SPEAKER_00: Doesn't go quite as far as to compare Jordan Peterson to Moses, but he kind of like he kind of gets pretty close.
• 1:33:19
  SPEAKER_00: Like so he says we've got these 12 rules, they're a bit like the Ten Commandments.
• 1:33:23
  SPEAKER_00: It's not the twenty it's he says at one point, he he says it's it's not the ten suggestions like or the ten guidelines, the ten commandments, like something because sometimes people need strict, clearly defined rules to follow, right?
• 1:33:36
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason I thought that was weird is that he doesn't mention, and I guess it kind of sounds like he's not aware of, I can't believe that John Pearson isn't though.
• 1:33:48
  SPEAKER_00: Like, there's a body of research literature that is quite influential in modern behavioural behaviour therapy, um, that deals with what we call rule-governed the problem of role-governed behavior.
• 1:34:01
  SPEAKER_00: And the problem with role-governed behavior is to cut a long story short, a number of research studies, fame influential research studies, have shown that when people try to follow rules like this that are that seem kind of quite absolute, like commandments, it tends to lead to rigidity and a lack of coping flexibility, right?
• 1:34:24
  SPEAKER_00: So it's kind of the opposite of what we want.
• 1:34:26
  SPEAKER_00: So it's a hazard, well-known hazard in modern psychotherapy, that if you're too prescriptive and you just tell people he just follow this strategy or something.
• 1:34:36
  SPEAKER_00: Now, ironically, one of the 12 rules that Jordan Peterson gives is that you should tell the truth or at least never lie, which happens to be almost identical to one of the definitions of justice that Socrates disputes in this dialogue by Xenophon.
• 1:34:53
  SPEAKER_00: So he Socrates uses this as almost the same thing as an example of a maxim or a rule that's overly simplistic, right?
• 1:35:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:35:02
  SPEAKER_00: That was 2400 years ago, right?
• 1:35:06
  SPEAKER_00: But also in modern psychology, like in in cognitive behavioral therapy, we we have the same understanding that um often because when we assess clients in the first session, we ask them, What do you currently do to cope with your depression?
• 1:35:23
  SPEAKER_00: What do you currently do to cope with your anxiety?
• 1:35:25
  SPEAKER_00: And people have coping strategies that they've either come up with themselves or they've got off the internet or from self-help books that they've read.
• 1:35:33
  SPEAKER_00: And often they're using them maladaptively.
• 1:35:36
  SPEAKER_00: Otherwise, why would they be in the consulting room?
• 1:35:39
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 1:35:39
  SPEAKER_00: And to be fair, the more this is more of a problem with people in psychotherapy than with the non-subclinical, non-clinical population, um, so-called normal population.
• 1:35:52
  SPEAKER_00: Although, in my experience, they're not that normal sometimes.
• 1:35:55
  SPEAKER_00: Like, but people that don't have clinical depression or anxiety um might not experience this as such an issue.
• 1:36:03
  SPEAKER_00: We we tend to become more I unfortunately, we become more rigid in our role following the more we experience stress or the more we experience strong emotions like anxiety, depression, or anger.
• 1:36:14
  SPEAKER_00: Then what are cop the coping strategies that we have we apply more in a black and white, rigid, absolutistic kind of of way, and then that just tends to lead to more and more problems.
• 1:36:25
  SPEAKER_00: So people, we usually the first thing we do is identify the coping strategies that people are using, and often we have to ask them to quit using them, like, because the reason in therapy is because these strategies are backfiring, and it might be because people are applying them too rigidly and overextending them, or that they've somehow turned them into forms, subtle forms of avoidance, or that they have disadvantages that they haven't really thought through.
• 1:36:52
  SPEAKER_00: Like, I'll give you an example.
• 1:36:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um this is another one of John Pearson's 12 rules, actually.
• 1:36:59
  SPEAKER_00: That sometimes people have been told that if they stand up straight and they kind of put their shoulders back and they have con fake it to make it and they have confident body language and look people in the eye, that's gonna make them more confident, right?
• 1:37:14
  SPEAKER_00: And give them social confidence, right?
• 1:37:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um, for instance, like that that's quite common among certain clients, right?
• 1:37:24
  SPEAKER_00: But what they might not realize is that many different self-help techniques, if you s if someone is prone to social anxiety, or social phobia, as it's called, and the extreme form, social anxiety disorder, then one of the main maintaining factors for social anxiety is heightened self-focused attention.
• 1:37:45
  SPEAKER_00: We know that beyond a shadow of a doubt, right?
• 1:37:48
  SPEAKER_00: So the problem with self-help techniques in that context is that a great many self-help techniques actually increase self-focused attention.
• 1:37:58
  SPEAKER_00: So if I try to control my breathing or relax my muscles or change my posture, it forces me to focus more attention on myself than normal.
• 1:38:06
  SPEAKER_00: And that increases social anxiety in social situations.
• 1:38:10
  SPEAKER_00: So doing changing your posture and stuff might actually work in situations where you're not that anxious, or it might work in situations where you're not like the center of attention or whatever.
• 1:38:21
  SPEAKER_00: But if you have social anxiety and you feel that people are looking at you, and then you try and change your posture, you're probably going to like double or treble your self-focused attention and make your anxiety much worse, right?
• 1:38:33
  SPEAKER_00: And many self-help techniques indirectly have that same backfire and in a similar way.
• 1:38:39
  SPEAKER_00: So in therapy, usually, again, it's it's just a question of sitting down with people and going, what do you think are the pros and cons of using this technique?
• 1:38:47
  SPEAKER_00: Because in some ways, it all self-help techniques have some advantages, you know, but they also all have disadvantages as well.
• 1:38:54
  SPEAKER_00: So what's usually missing is that in books you get overly kind of prescriptive one size fits all advice, and then people under duress will apply it even more rigidly, insensitive to changes in the environment, not really weighing up the consequences.
• 1:39:10
  SPEAKER_00: And the more anxious they get, the more they'll hang on to this clutching at straws of you know this technique.
• 1:39:16
  SPEAKER_00: Um but what needs to happen is to think through the consequences of it, and also another way of doing the two-column technique is to say, let's say there's uh a good way and a bad way of changing your posture, like for instance, or faking it to make it, or there's a good form of mindfulness and a bad form of mindfulness, what would the difference be?
• 1:39:40
  SPEAKER_00: Like, how would you identify healthy mindfulness and and what might cross over into unhealthy mindfulness?
• 1:39:46
  SPEAKER_00: How do you distinguish between the good and bad versions of this concept?
• 1:39:50
  SPEAKER_00: And again, just teaching people to reflect on things and question them.
• 1:39:53
  SPEAKER_00: Like it might sound simple.
• 1:39:54
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you do that that happens in almost all cognitive therapy.
• 1:39:58
  SPEAKER_00: It it's something that's a little bit more intangible because it's an experience, it's a skill that comes from thinking things through.
• 1:40:06
  SPEAKER_00: That doesn't that often is completely missing from especially if you get a self-help book and it says treat this like the Ten Commandments, you know, kind of thing.
• 1:40:15
  SPEAKER_00: That that's really doing the opposite and and and risks discouraging.
• 1:40:19
  SPEAKER_00: Although, to be honest, I think John Peterson himself, later in his book, does acknowledge that there are exceptions to some of these rules.
• 1:40:29
  SPEAKER_00: But even the language of prescribing rules and things, you know, and certainly comparing them to Ten Commandments.
• 1:40:36
  SPEAKER_00: And when I first read that, it struck me as being obviously at odds with what we normally do in in psychotherapy and what the research literature shows about rule-governed behaviour and the problems associated with that.
• 1:40:49
  SPEAKER_00: So I I wanted to emphasize that because when I talk to people about self-help, this comes up over and over and over again.
• 1:40:56
  SPEAKER_00: Like the world is full of self-help junkies who wind up in psychotherapy.
• 1:41:00
  SPEAKER_00: Like, and they say, I don't understand that.
• 1:41:02
  SPEAKER_00: I've read all these self-help books, and I'm really, really trying hard to fake it to make it.
• 1:41:05
  SPEAKER_00: I'm really trying hard on my mindfulness and stuff like that.
• 1:41:07
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm just getting I'm just getting worse.
• 1:41:09
  SPEAKER_00: It kind of feels like it's helping, but I'm not really getting better, right?
• 1:41:13
  SPEAKER_00: You hear that a lot, and you think, well, you have to analyze what you're doing and evaluate it more critically, you know, and figure out the pros and cons and how you would tweak it or adjust it to suit different situations.
• 1:41:25
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe mindfulness, and maybe speaking your mind, or maybe changing your posture isn't the best strategy in every situation, right?
• 1:41:32
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe in some situations you want to do something different.
• 1:41:35
  SPEAKER_00: That's coping flexibility, right?
• 1:41:37
  SPEAKER_00: It's cause this coping flexibility, actually, and the the ability to think on your feet a little bit more.
• 1:41:43
  SPEAKER_00: I hate to break it to you, kids.
• 1:41:45
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you're gonna have to think for yourselves, right?
• 1:41:48
  SPEAKER_00: But the ability to think for yourselves is the main thing, actually, beyond any rules that anyone can give you.
• 1:41:56
  SPEAKER_00: Like, there's one of the main things that's gonna contribute to emotional, genuine emotional resilience across situations.
• 1:42:04
  SPEAKER_00: Well research on coping shows is that nobody uh t uh typically develops emotional resilience by just depending on one strategy all the time.
• 1:42:13
  SPEAKER_00: Like, genuinely resilient people use different techniques and different strategies in different situations, you know, and they're they're they're more adaptive.
• 1:42:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, but that's that's a skill.
• 1:42:27
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it maybe the very fact that we become overly dependent on lists of rules is one of one of the sources of of our psychological problems.
• 1:42:40
  SPEAKER_00: You know, uh we're we're too passive in that regard.
• 1:42:45
  SPEAKER_00: That's the soccer in a way, the Socratic method is is addressing that same problem.
• 1:42:50
  SPEAKER_02: I consider myself to have over the years been a bit of a self-help junkie, but I think just listening to you now, one of the things I've always really enjoyed doing is challenging what I'm reading and almost like getting really into something and then asking a bit later, hmm, are there problems with this?
• 1:43:06
  SPEAKER_02: Are there flaws with this?
• 1:43:07
  SPEAKER_02: And so I've read 12 Rules for Life, I enjoyed it, but I also love hearing your kind of critique of it and realizing that yeah, there's going to be problems and flaws within it.
• 1:43:17
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that stops me being overly reliant on one way of perceiving a rule and can kind of flip between different ideas.
• 1:43:26
  SPEAKER_00: The other one I I'll just throw another one in the mix.
• 1:43:30
  SPEAKER_00: You're right.
• 1:43:31
  SPEAKER_00: He has a chapter in it about corporal punishment for small children.
• 1:43:36
  SPEAKER_00: He says two-year-olds, actually, right?
• 1:43:38
  SPEAKER_00: And so he's I think sometimes John Pearson is just being a bit contrarian.
• 1:43:41
  SPEAKER_00: But there's nothing wrong with that, right?
• 1:43:43
  SPEAKER_00: He just wants to say something a bit unique, a bit different.
• 1:43:45
  SPEAKER_00: So he wants to say he says that you should he talks about flicking a small child in the back of their hand with your index finger, quite which kind of stings when you do it, right?
• 1:43:55
  SPEAKER_00: Like now, I'm an expert on corporal punishment because when I was a kid, I was in trouble every day.
• 1:44:02
  SPEAKER_00: Like, and we had this thing in Scotland called the toss, um, which was uh a leather strap that the teachers kept in their desk, and I got the strap, as we called it, across the palms of my hands, like once a week or something, uh, you know, constant, but to but the then this highlights problems with it, right?
• 1:44:23
  SPEAKER_00: So I find it strange that Jordan Peterson references B.
• 1:44:26
  SPEAKER_00: F.
• 1:44:26
  SPEAKER_00: Skinner, because I read Skinner like when I was like 17, and it was a revelation to me, because Skinner, who's like one of the pioneers of operant conditioning and an expert on reward and punishment, generally thought that punishment, like corporal punishment, wasn't very effective as a way of shaping behaviour.
• 1:44:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's strangely, Peterson seems to think that Skinner supports what he's saying, but I would have thought Skinner said the complete opposite.
• 1:44:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I agreed with Skinner.
• 1:44:53
  SPEAKER_00: Skinner said, you know, there are many problems with using punishment as a form of shaping behaviour, it's complicated.
• 1:45:02
  SPEAKER_00: Again, there are pros and cons to doing it.
• 1:45:03
  SPEAKER_00: It's not like you can just punish a kid and it's always going to extinguish their behavior.
• 1:45:07
  SPEAKER_00: Number one, and I was like, I'm an expert in this because I I've I've had so much punishment as a as a kid.
• 1:45:14
  SPEAKER_00: He said, like, number one, beyond a certain point, uh it becomes ineffective, right?
• 1:45:19
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, Yeah, like it doesn't hurt anymore.
• 1:45:21
  SPEAKER_00: Like, you know, so kids that had never had the strap were terrified of it.
• 1:45:25
  SPEAKER_00: I had it so often it didn't bother me anymore.
• 1:45:27
  SPEAKER_00: Like, but and actually it gave me a buzz because it made me feel like a tough guy.
• 1:45:31
  SPEAKER_00: I just went, teacher, give me a strap, then but like, you know, so it made you kind of like it had the opposite of the desired effect, right?
• 1:45:38
  SPEAKER_00: And then the other thing would be if you do something, commit a crime, and you evade punishment, you get um what's called negative reinforcement.
• 1:45:46
  SPEAKER_00: So you get a buzz from avoiding punishment, right?
• 1:45:49
  SPEAKER_00: I think the famous example of that is that you have a dog that jumps up on your couch, and so you whack it in the newspaper, like rolled up newspaper, you know, is the old example that people would give to teach your dog it's not to jump up on the couch, and it kind of works because the dog's like, oh, I don't want to get whacked in the newspaper and jump on the couch.
• 1:46:07
  SPEAKER_00: But every day when you go out to work, your dog's like, he's not around anymore, and now it's like I'm definitely gonna get on the couch.
• 1:46:13
  SPEAKER_00: Like, because not only do I quite like getting on the couch, I'm also getting a buzz out of the fact that I'm able to do it without getting whacked, because I'll beat the system, right?
• 1:46:23
  SPEAKER_00: Like he's not around like at the moment, so like you know, like it's a a thrill.
• 1:46:28
  SPEAKER_00: And criminals like uh often like after a certain point get a buzz out of committing crimes and dodging the police, right?
• 1:46:38
  SPEAKER_00: Like there's a certain satisfaction that comes with it.
• 1:46:40
  SPEAKER_00: We call negative reinforcement's a technical term for it.
• 1:46:42
  SPEAKER_00: This kind of says that these are all the other thing is like you if you you have to increase the level of punishment for it to continue to be effective, but beyond a certain level, you break individuals and they just become completely demoralized and kind of depressed.
• 1:46:57
  SPEAKER_00: So you you know, either the kids get used to the punishment in some cases, or you have to punish them so severely you just destroy them and traumatize them.
• 1:47:07
  SPEAKER_00: Like basically, you know, it's much better to shape behaviour through strategic use of positive reinforcement and good role modelling and stuff like that.
• 1:47:17
  SPEAKER_00: Basically.
• 1:47:18
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm not saying this stuff just for the sake of disagreeing with Jordan Pearson, but it's a good example of how, okay, sure, like punishing giving kids the strap or flicking them in the back of the hand maybe works sometimes, but there's pros and cons to doing it.
• 1:47:33
  SPEAKER_00: And in some situations, it might actually achieve the complete opposite.
• 1:47:36
  SPEAKER_00: I got punished like crazy when I was a kid.
• 1:47:38
  SPEAKER_00: The main thing it did to me was just make me incredibly rebellious, right?
• 1:47:43
  SPEAKER_00: And actually, one of the things it did to me was make me really angry, like as a teenager.
• 1:47:48
  SPEAKER_00: Like I was always kind of plotting how I was gonna get my own back against school teachers and stuff like that.
• 1:47:53
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the ironies about that, again, as a kind of reversal of fortune, is because I was so consumed with anger as a teen, quite early on in life, I kind of began to question it, right?
• 1:48:08
  SPEAKER_00: And uh I thought, this I can't go on like this.
• 1:48:11
  SPEAKER_00: Like I I'm just consumed with rage, like about you know, like the people like you know, giving me the strap and things like that, and other things.
• 1:48:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um so I thought I have to I have to do something about my anger.
• 1:48:27
  SPEAKER_00: Like, and so by the time I was in my I think my mid-twenties or something like that, I'd I got to the point where I didn't really have that much anger anymore, because ironically, I had so much anger I f I was forced into a position where I had to do something about it and change it.
• 1:48:43
  SPEAKER_00: And that was partly why I became interested in stoicism.
• 1:48:46
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it was through doing Buddhist meditation and reading loads of self-help books and reading Seneca's on anger and getting into stoics that helped me to kind of cure myself of this anger that I'd inherited from, you know, I think, like as a response to like excessive corporal uh punishment.
• 1:49:04
  SPEAKER_00: Because that happened in the schools, it also happened at home.
• 1:49:06
  SPEAKER_00: And that happened to all my friends as well.
• 1:49:08
  SPEAKER_00: Like when I was a kid, my mother had a drawer and it was full of leather straps.
• 1:49:13
  SPEAKER_00: Like, and so sometimes all she had to do was she was she would go and just put her hand on the the handle of the drawer and look at me, like, and that was my signal, you know.
• 1:49:23
  SPEAKER_00: She was like, if you don't if you don't watch out, if you don't behave, then I'm gonna open the drawer, I'll get the strap out, give you the strap.
• 1:49:31
  SPEAKER_00: So I got strapped at school, I got strapped at home.
• 1:49:33
  SPEAKER_00: But again, the thing was, after a while, it was more the kind of indignity of it, or something like it didn't actually hurt that much, right?
• 1:49:40
  SPEAKER_00: So this is another example of something it seems like, and in the 12 rules, Jordan Peterson presents corporal punishment as an effective way of shaping the behaviour of small children, but in some situations, not only will it fail to work, it will potentially have the complete opposite of the desired result.
• 1:50:00
  SPEAKER_00: So, yeah, I think the real self-improvement strategy is the one that is described by Socrates, you know, which is to see beyond these rules and maxims and coping strategies and learn to question them.
• 1:50:18
  SPEAKER_00: Like to think of situations where the definition of justice or courage or wisdom doesn't apply anymore, or where something that seems good for us or healthy might be bad for us or unhealthy.
• 1:50:33
  SPEAKER_00: That's familiar to me because it's normally what we have to do in in cognitive therapy.
• 1:50:39
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, you know, you'd say to very often you say to clients, what do you think the pros and cons are?
• 1:50:45
  SPEAKER_00: But the most having said that Socrates thinks we gain insight from working with other people, and and that's you know why we have mo his philosophy in dialogue form in part.
• 1:50:57
  SPEAKER_00: The the best way to weigh up the pros and cons.
• 1:50:59
  SPEAKER_00: And it's again it's a shame because I don't think people have part of the problem here is um modern society.
• 1:51:06
  SPEAKER_00: Like we, you know, we we get this, we get self-help information from videos and off the internet.
• 1:51:11
  SPEAKER_00: But one way that you would normally see beyond these kind of rigid strategies and rigid roles is in a group of other people.
• 1:51:24
  SPEAKER_00: If you say, hey, you know, I think it's really useful to practice mindfulness as a way of coping with different forms of anxiety.
• 1:51:35
  SPEAKER_00: And someone in the group might say well I tried that but I found that I've got health anxiety and that makes me scan my body obsessively for the slightest little twinge and interpret as a symptom.
• 1:51:45
  SPEAKER_00: So when I was doing mindfulness that that actually just seemed to magnify that.
• 1:51:49
  SPEAKER_00: It made me pay even more attention to the symptoms of my body.
• 1:51:52
  SPEAKER_00: And someone else might have social anxiety like we mentioned earlier and they might say well I practice mindfulness and that just heightened my self-consciousness in in social situations.
• 1:52:01
  SPEAKER_00: I had to train myself to do the opposite and focus more attention outwardly on the audience in order to cope with it.
• 1:52:07
  SPEAKER_00: And then someone else might say well I had that problem but I figured out a solution to it right so in a group you'll often get a discussion going about the pros and cons of different strategies.
• 1:52:18
  SPEAKER_00: My experience has been one of the most useful I used to teach therapists for many years.
• 1:52:22
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the most useful things that I I would do is I'd teach a technique and then I'd say what do you guys think of the pros and cons of this technique?
• 1:52:30
  SPEAKER_00: And then I'd say how could you maximize the pros and make even better use of them and how could you minimize or prevent the cons or disadvantages like in the group brainstorming together and sharing different perspectives is a really you know by the end of it then you you potentially you have a much more nuanced understanding pretty quickly of the genuine pros and cons of of using different techniques.
• 1:52:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's hard a little bit harder to get that on your own.
• 1:52:59
  SPEAKER_00: It's a I think in my experience is easier to get that when you talk to other people.
• 1:53:04
  SPEAKER_02: One question I wanted to ask you is have you played around with artificial intelligence, large language models because I've been playing around with using ChatGPT as a way to like impersonate Socrates and to kind of whiz me and it's almost like an interactive exercise where I can just might not be perfect but at least it gets me thinking and refining my thoughts.
• 1:53:27
  SPEAKER_02: What do you think about that?
• 1:53:29
  SPEAKER_00: I like I mean it's an intra really interesting question.
• 1:53:33
  SPEAKER_00: First of all I'll say there are many things about the ancient Socratic dialogues that seem weirdly contemporary to me.
• 1:53:40
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 1:53:43
  SPEAKER_00: One completely tangent that I just mentioned in passing is the sophists mainly talk to adolescent boys that's their audience and so Plato portrays them to some extent is playing on their insecurities about their masculinity so talking to them about if you want to be a real man like then you'd emulate political tyrants more.
• 1:54:10
  SPEAKER_00: They don't care about other people's ideas of social virtue or justice.
• 1:54:14
  SPEAKER_00: And I when I read that I think these guys sound an awful lot like influencers in the manosphere today weirdly who have a kind of similar audience actually like it dawned on me one day that that they're saying this stuff partly because there are no audiences mainly 15 year old boys right so it's kind of no coincidence that a lot of it seems to emphasize strength and virility and masculine defining that as true masculinity like because that's their their anxiety.
• 1:54:45
  SPEAKER_00: But another thing is I talk a lot about Socrates notoriously particularly in a platonic dialogue called the Phyderus kind of expresses concerns about books and he thinks that books provide limited understanding that you can't ask a book questions although you can ask AI questions to s to sit in a sense like although you know um not in the way that you can a human though perhaps but he says like you know the problem with reading books is you kind of delegate your understanding you get opinions from books potentially and the risk is you'll just repeat what you you just read stuff in a book and then you'll parrot it and repeat it without really understanding it or having figured it out through trial and error yourself.
• 1:55:32
  SPEAKER_00: So some of the concerns that he expresses about books or writing um are we eerily similar to concerns that people have today about becoming overly dependent on AI.
• 1:55:46
  SPEAKER_00: Like basically he his concern is that we're delegating our thinking to another source and just kind of passively you know getting opinions I'm just read a book and now the stuff I believe is just what I read in this book rather than stuff that I've actually figured out.
• 1:56:02
  SPEAKER_00: Socrates says that's opinion not knowledge like you know because you can't really explain how you arrived at that it's just someone else's conclusions.
• 1:56:13
  SPEAKER_00: That said I think there's a lot of value in AI it's like it's a little bit like talking to an alien right it's it says things it has strengths and weaknesses like it has weird weaknesses that you know at the moment that humans uh don't have but it also has in some ways it can be more rounded and balanced and more impartial than humans be it's it has some language skills that are better than than most humans.
• 1:56:44
  SPEAKER_00: One other advantage is you can relentlessly question it in a way that humans would get fed up with so in terms of Socratic diet you can argue till the cows come home with AI you know about picking holes in its reasoning and stuff like that and kind of quizzing it in fine detail.
• 1:57:00
  SPEAKER_00: And actually the truth is it's it's often difficult to do that with other humans because a lot of people don't have the patience for it.
• 1:57:06
  SPEAKER_00: So I I found it as a kind of sparring partner or a tool quite useful.
• 1:57:10
  SPEAKER_00: But I think it's more I find it useful more as a a way of helping me to articulate questions and refine them rather than I I kind of almost assume that I'm dis I I don't take anything it says for granted.
• 1:57:24
  SPEAKER_00: I don't trust it I think in particular area areas I found ChatGPT to be in some instances I was asking a lot of very difficult questions about ancient history and it got almost all of them wrong weirdly like made quite stupid mistakes but it was still what it's it's useful I think sometimes for to ask it if it can identify any errors in your reasoning.
• 1:57:52
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 1:57:53
  SPEAKER_00: And uh and also like say if you you read a book and we are much more prone to accept opinions based on authority I think than ChatGPT or or other AI bots necessarily are so there may be a famous author um you know who whose reasoning perhaps is kind of vacuous like you know like the Emperor's new clothes type thing.
• 1:58:20
  SPEAKER_00: You know and it's like a fad and everybody's into this thing let's say but you punch it into AI and it'll tell you yeah there's all sorts of flaws and you know like the there's errors, things that are left out of this argument like the evidence contradicts this.
• 1:58:35
  SPEAKER_00: It's more likely to be able to just impartially lay out flaws and idiosyncratic views that are established on the basis of appeal to authority these days.
• 1:58:47
  SPEAKER_00: But I the other thing that I think there's a couple of things that I think it's quite useful for what like in ther I use it sometimes in therapy.
• 1:58:55
  SPEAKER_00: I'll give you a very specific example around about the mid-1990s mindfulness became much more popular as a form of self-help and eclipsed something that had been a prone since the 70s ish which was assertiveness training.
• 1:59:20
  SPEAKER_00: And you can combine these but in some ways they're kind of antagonistic one is more about one's more what we would call problem focused coping.
• 1:59:28
  SPEAKER_00: You you could do we divide coping in the research literature there's dozens and dozens of different coping strategies.
• 1:59:35
  SPEAKER_00: But usually one of the simplest distinctions between problem focused and emotion focused coping.
• 1:59:40
  SPEAKER_00: So when you're faced with a stressful situation either either you try and change the or eliminate the source of the stress or you you you try to tolerate the stress and cope with the emotions better.
• 1:59:54
  SPEAKER_00: And to some extent that's going to turn on how much time you have, how much control you have over the source right but fundamentally one of the main decisions you need to make if you're going to exhibit coping flexibility is you you've got to be able to distinguish between attack you know addressing the the the problem at a practical level or emotional.
• 2:00:17
  SPEAKER_00: Mindfulness generally is more of an emotion focused coping strategy and assertiveness is more of a problem focused strategy.
• 2:00:29
  SPEAKER_00: Now one of the reasons that I think assertiveness declined in popularity is that sometimes we have really good formulas for you know guide like guidelines that help people to articulate themselves in a more assertive way.
• 2:00:52
  SPEAKER_00: There's a thing called the four step assertiveness strategy um which is useful again not as like a rigid rope but as a kind of rough template right so you can frame stuff in terms of this four-step strategy and think how does that sound like does it sound better than what I normally say to other people but it takes time to do it.
• 2:01:12
  SPEAKER_00: So typically the four steps are you kind of acknowledge common grounds that you both agree on and then you validate their perspective you acknowledge what they're gonna say that kind of takes the wind out of their sails because otherwise if you don't acknowledge the other person's position all they're gonna do as soon as you finish talking is then go yeah but I disagree and I feel this and that but if you go I know you disagree and I know you feel this then that you've taken the words out their mouth and so that they're kind of left a little bit you know nonplussed at the at the end of what you're saying usually um and then you kind of clearly assert how you feel like and what you maybe what you think your your rights are in the situation what you want to happen and then you propose a conclusion what like for example you know what's lacking in many cases is that people express disagreement maybe argue with other people and that but then never propose a a solution and then you know often if you can get people to the point where they they say what they actually think should happen it you often have this weird experience where everybody just looks at each other and and they go fine I don't have a problem with that like geez is that all like you know you just wanted to finish work early and fro go ahead knock yourself out buddy like you know what was all the fuss about like so it's weird like how often just kind of articulating a proposed solution maybe there's a compromise solution you know can kind of resolve things but if you go if you check these four boxes then in many cases that that could be a an effective strategy.
• 2:02:49
  SPEAKER_00: But it takes people time to figure out how they would put things in those words but if you if you can just get people to do a brain dump of what they were going to say and then take a description of the four step strategy like copy pasted from a website and dump them both in chat GPT and actually what someone was going to say people often people are expressing themselves by email or text message now anyway so you can literally say okay like maybe you had a disagreement with an employee last week you know and you sent them an email and everyone got really upset about it at work it just didn't work out show me the email that you sent.
• 2:03:32
  SPEAKER_00: Let's put it in ChatGPT put in the four step of stuff a surface uh strategy and just ask ChatGPT to patch paraphrase what you actually said but putting it into this formula and it does that pretty well like and it does it within like one or two seconds or whatever right so normally people kind of scratch their head for a little and go, I don't know about this.
• 2:03:59
  SPEAKER_00: You know and again you might be making them too passive by doing that but there's as again there's pros and cons to everything.
• 2:04:05
  SPEAKER_00: So I think it what it can do is give some really good examples right and then ideally what you'd want to do is to say okay let's take away your training wheels and like get you to start doing this on your own without using AI.
• 2:04:20
  SPEAKER_00: But like this is how easy it would be to take what you said and just translate it into this more carefully worded format right and then like how do you think that would have come across like and usually what I find is most of the time people look at it immediately go, yeah obviously that would have that sounds completely it makes the same point but in a much more tactful way and it's much more solution focused right so it's really good at providing an example of how you would paraphrase of course because it's a language model.
• 2:04:50
  SPEAKER_00: So it's really good at paraphrasing stuff.
• 2:04:52
  SPEAKER_00: But being able to paraphrase something in a particular format is actually one of the main stumbling blocks that a lot of people have had in previous decades when learning assertiveness because to a large extent it's about learning a communication skill right so I I believe that it has some potential there is a way of giving through giving examples like training people.
• 2:05:17
  SPEAKER_00: But again like we we've already been saying there's a problem with being overly passive so in order to really develop that skill you're gonna have to fade that out like and start saying okay I get the idea now I've seen a few examples of how things I actually said could have been worded differently now next time you know like let's anticipate a meeting I've got tomorrow and this is what I want to say how could I potentially phrase that differently so there are many ways that I think AI has potential but things like that already seem to me to be really useful you know clearly so 100% yeah I've I've been playing around with that in that context.
• 2:05:59
  SPEAKER_02: With the Socrates example I gave I also meant that instead of playing the role of Socrates you could ask Chatibt to play the role of Socrates and question you so you are the one coming up with definitions so it's much more active than just kind of you know talking endlessly I can see a role for that I mean actually even having said that Socrates kind of expresses these concerns about books I suppose an interesting I don't know the answer to this for sure but I I think not see the dialogue the the philosophical dialogue is is a genre that is pretty almost extinct now right Plato wrote these dialogues nobody really very few I'm sure there are some people there very few people write philosophical dialogues anymore I mean it's almost un it's virtually unheard of right and one reason for that is it does take a little bit of patience to read them right but actually then maybe this is a good point to touch on like one possible advantage of reading philosophical dialogues is I believe it can help people to observe the process of reasoning and observe the consequences of holding certain opinions or beliefs from a more detached perspective.
• 2:07:24
  SPEAKER_00: And so what I think often happens is rather than just kind of reading it in an abstract way in a lecture or something or a typical prose textbook if someone is expressing a belief in a dialogue I think we're more able to imagine what would be the consequences though of that belief like emotionally on their relationship how would it kind of come across so in a more holistic way or more rounded way I think it it it enables us to take a sort of more objective psychological perspective on evaluating certain beliefs and and attitudes that could be therapeutic there's a technique that uh I think is quite helpful that I know that people find useful to learn about uh called Ilyism it comes from Ily which is a a a Latin third person pronoun and Iliism is when you speak about yourself in the third person.
• 2:08:31
  SPEAKER_00: So rather than saying uh Donald had a problem earlier on posting a parcel and it made him kind of frustrated but he figured out a solution.
• 2:08:45
  SPEAKER_00: Rather than saying I had a problem earlier on and I got frustrated I would say Donald had a problem and he got frustrated right as if you were talking about another person having it there's research that shows from the University of Waterloo they have a centre for research and wise reasoning there's research that shows that when people phrase things in the third person like that, that they exhibit more intellectual humility, more cognitive flexibility, more ability to arrive at compromise solutions or combine possible solutions.
• 2:09:21
  SPEAKER_00: So they're they show better thinking skills in reasoning in the third person about a problem than they would reasoning about it in the first person.
• 2:09:30
  SPEAKER_00: This idea is definitely exists in ancient philosophy like Galen um Marx Aurelius physician is pretty explicit about discussing this problem.
• 2:09:39
  SPEAKER_00: Like we have biases and blind spots that make us quite difficult at being our own therapist unfortunately you know and that's Socrates doesn't use Iliaism but he does often do something that's kind of like it is that he often engages in hypothetical dialogues or imaginary dialogues in which he imagines someone talking to him in the second person.
• 2:10:09
  SPEAKER_00: So in a dialogue called the Critias he imagines the laws of Athens as a kind of hypothetical abstract concept critiquing his behaviour and say and they say Socrates you're mistaken and you're contradicting yourself on this matter blah blah blah like so he that's just a way of forcing himself to refer to himself in the second person and by name so achieving the same kind of external point of view or objectivity that we would have if we used Eliism I think it's basically the same thing or a very similar kind of technique right so that but the whole how you become better at that if you engage in dialogues with real people then you're gonna be you're gonna develop the same skills that you would when you engage in an imaginary dialogue with yourself right and you know we find there's several references to this in the ancient literature that Socrates would practice engaging in internal dialogue with himself as a form of self-improvement.
• 2:11:13
  SPEAKER_00: So I I think Iliism is a strategy that we kind of use a little bit in cognitive behavioral therapy.
• 2:11:18
  SPEAKER_00: Although there's some evidence that when people do this it can also reduce their anxiety for example like when people ref refer to their anxious thoughts in the third person they get in the habit of doing that they it can dilute the the intensity of the feeling so again modern research on decision making problem solving and on psychotherapy kind of reinforces ideas techniques that we find being used in ancient philosophy as if just through intuition alone these guys were kind of onto something that was two and a half thousand years ahead of its time so we've been going two hours and eleven minutes which is amazing I'm I'm just loving this.
• 2:12:03
  SPEAKER_02: I have two questions left for you.
• 2:12:06
  SPEAKER_02: Alright cool the first this is something I've been thinking about for a long time since doing your course it's Socrates's wife Xanthope I think I'm pronouncing her name right so when she's described she's framed as almost just like this very hot tempered crude is that what you'd call it and kind of Socrates is and Socrates is kind of a bit distant from her and kind of more focused on philosophy.
• 2:12:38
  SPEAKER_02: But when I was thinking about the relationship I was thinking that it sounds almost like a abusive relationship.
• 2:12:45
  SPEAKER_02: It sounds almost like there's like the way she's acting it sounds like she is verbally and physically abusing Socrates and he may have some
• 2:12:53
  SPEAKER_00: kind of personality disorder right she's she's not quite stable just from the description it's possible I think yeah I can I can see that right and um but I think there's alternative ways of interpreting it right so it it's it's possible right with with something like that I guess you know writing biography and writing telling a story ancient history I think there's multiple possible interpretations there's one that's maybe more sort of favorable to heart or to Socrates and then there's ones that you know are are maybe a little bit more cynical or or maybe like more concerned about like what we're reading.
• 2:13:33
  SPEAKER_00: And then we also need to make cut some uh slack or make some allowances for cultural differences right so in the ancient Mediterranean world I think it's fair to say that people expressed emotion differently and you know we people it it typically expressed emotion in a much more physical form.
• 2:13:54
  SPEAKER_00: So some of the behavior in general seems a little bit shocking to us.
• 2:13:58
  SPEAKER_00: So we will often hear um even about adult Mediterranean men tearing their hair out, beating their chests beating their face with their fists in grief over something or or rage um so you know we don't in modern day America Britain or Canada kind of express our emotions in that way but people in other cultures do right so there's more of kind of physical expressiveness.
• 2:14:32
  SPEAKER_00: So it's not with that in mind we're told things like she tore the shirt off his back she threw a bucket of water over him she trampled a cake that he'd been given as a gift um which like sounds kind of extreme from our point of view.
• 2:14:48
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think it would actually have seemed as extreme in classical Athenian culture.
• 2:14:55
  SPEAKER_00: I could be wrong about that but the impression I get is that that kind of really expressive physical emotional behavior was not as unusual in in those times as as it would be today.
• 2:15:14
  SPEAKER_00: So could we view it as a personality disorder or some kind of mental health problem it's very difficult to make a judgment about that in my view.
• 2:15:24
  SPEAKER_00: When we're dealing with diff cultural differences in emotion like if that's within the normal bounds of emotional expression it might seem really weird to us or kind of extreme to us.
• 2:15:35
  SPEAKER_00: I mean I suppose the question would be if someone's emotional reactions are much more extreme than other members of their culture then we more like to think in terms of a mental health diagnosis.
• 2:15:46
  SPEAKER_00: But what if that's within the normal bounds of what how how people in general express their emotion in that culture then I think it's harder to label it as a a mental health problem um it's tricky it's a it's a notoriously difficult question um cross-cultural psychopathology basically and especially when we're talking about different eras in history but I so I keep an open mind about it.
• 2:16:12
  SPEAKER_00: I can kind of see it either way maybe Socrates's wife was crazy like she maybe she was like you know maybe or maybe she had mental health problems or you know maybe she was just maybe she was a really horrible person or you know maybe it can I can imagine also it just coming across differently in that culture.
• 2:16:33
  SPEAKER_00: It might be that people looking at her um just thought this is how this is how a lot of people react like in a in classical Athens in these situations.
• 2:16:44
  SPEAKER_00: But it would seem weird to to us.
• 2:16:47
  SPEAKER_00: Now in terms of his relationship with us we don't have a lot of evidence but we by the way she was we she's believed to have been about 30 years younger than him so she's sounds like she was quite a lot younger than him which actually wouldn't have been that also wouldn't have been that unusual in ancient Greece and and also like in in Roman society as well.
• 2:17:15
  SPEAKER_00: Today we might think that's quite a big age gap but no it wouldn't seem so out of place then.
• 2:17:20
  SPEAKER_00: Especially also by the way after the many adult men had been killed in the Peloponnesian war so there would there wouldn't be as many there would be a lot of unmarried women and and not as many men around and there's also a story that Socrates had two wives and again that some scholars believe that could that's plausible and it could be a consequence of the Peloponnesian war like that maybe it became the norm for men to take a second wife so the somebody you know would would have to in their culture take responsibility perhaps for you know for women that had been widowed or that the husbands weren't available for or so there's there's some cultural differences and complexities there.
• 2:18:10
  SPEAKER_00: Socrates in one of Xenophon's dialogues Socrates says that he emphasizes that Xanthope is uh a good wife and a good mother and that he really values her despite the fact that she has this hot temper.
• 2:18:25
  SPEAKER_00: So it's hard because we don't know her right but he cut in at least in that little snippet he comes across as seeming quite confident that she's somebody that he values as a a a wife and a mother to his children maybe even in I hesitate I was about to say that it's somebody that he he loves but you know actually in classical Athens in that time it's not that common for men to express love towards their wives.
• 2:18:59
  SPEAKER_00: You know most of the love poetry that we have brace yourselves gentle readers like from from from from classical Athens most of the lot most but not all of the love poetry is written by between men rather than uh written by by men to to women um and so it was bisexuality of a sort was fairly normal like sexual mores were very different from our society.
• 2:19:30
  SPEAKER_00: So Socrates quite possibly had a male lover of sorts like in addition and maybe two wives like so it was a bit of a different family setup.
• 2:19:43
  SPEAKER_00: So much for the nuclear family and all that right like it wasn't necessarily as simple as simple as that in in ancient Athens.
• 2:19:52
  SPEAKER_00: But uh yeah she can come across as a bad uh mother but actually in that dialogue with uh Lamprocles there Socrates really seems to be making the case that despite her bad temper she's still she's actually a fundamentally good and and caring person.
• 2:20:10
  SPEAKER_00: So we maybe he's kind of making out that we shouldn't be too quick to judge somebody by just the the superficial behaviour.
• 2:20:17
  SPEAKER_00: So somebody might have quite a sharp tongue but still you can imagine somebody who's who could be you know could raise a voice you know and be quite sharp but but when you view the behavior in general they still come across as a very loving and caring person right people are complex.
• 2:20:36
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's the picture that I would I feel so we have such little information to go on it's a little bit tricky but that's one way of interpreting what he says about her it was interesting because doesn't he kind of make the claim that he uses her to almost practice his tolerance and he chose a wife that was particularly difficult to kind of rein in he compares it to training horses um and but the the funny thing he does I don't think it mentions this in the dialogue but that's what her name means um Zantipi means a yellow horse and he says uh someone who's learning to train horses again a bit like this thing about choosing a sparring partner which is a strange analogy for a wife but like he he said someone who's learning to train horses would would pick like not easily domesticated horses but ones that are you know that are harder so that they can train and improve their skills.
• 2:21:35
  SPEAKER_00: Right there's if you imagine there's different you know you could grade horses on how difficult uh they are to train and if you want to really improve your skills as a horse trainer then you you start pro working with progressively more difficult ones and until you're the go-to guy for dealing with even the most difficult and he says xanthopy is challenging but he I guess it's like this thing as well of being able to choose you know uh is this something that you're confident that you can deal with or is it something that you would just feel overwhelmed by and Socrates seems completely I mean Socrates we probably is an exceptionally resilient individual so he's completely he seems completely unfazed and actually funnily enough you could say if we say this is abuse like tearing his shirt and throwing water over him she doesn't actually do him any physical harm right so and I sometimes he seems to joke about that like he said there's a joke where she threw water over him and he said I I I told you that Xanthope's thunder would be followed by uh by rain right so he's he's like it's nothing to him like you know it's not this is a guy that survived the plague and three major battles in the Peloponnesian War also we we should remember like you know he he's seen people being slaughtered around him his wife throwing a bucket of water over his head is you know is is like super trivial yeah like it's in Socrates terms.
• 2:23:07
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah I'm I'm fascinated by that relationship because there's so many questions and you it's open to interpretation so the the last question is kind of like a personal question in terms of how you approach reading because um if you take like the works of Plato I'm wondering what's going on in your mind when you're reading a book maybe for the first time are you trying to remember key details are you are you challenging the author are you because I remember you said that you when you first read Plato, not The Republic, but after that you would close your eyes and think about the ideas.
• 2:23:46
  SPEAKER_02: So do you have any advice on how we can approach reading these texts?
• 2:23:50
  SPEAKER_00: There are many things over the years that people have taught me to do and I've learned to do in terms of reading and I've changed my habits quite a lot over time.
• 2:24:01
  SPEAKER_00: But for instance you know I I if I'm reading a book I read less and less as I I get older and you know often I'm just going back and reading the same books.
• 2:24:14
  SPEAKER_00: Actually I think if you're an author particular if you write books that involve a lot of research the paradox is people send me free books all the time like I get inundated with books right um but I have very little time to read modern books because usually I'm kind of up to my neck in in reading and rereading classical texts and you know you to write a book you usually have to do a lot of research and spend all day reading books for your s your research so then you don't have that much time to kind of read new books for pleasure.
• 2:24:47
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm I've become much more selective in my reading um I used to be when I was a young guy I insisted on reading books cover to cover and I I realize now that that's unnecessary especially when you're kind of inundated and so often I I'll the first thing I'll read in a book is the index which is kind of like odd but I I over time I I read the table of contents and I read the index and I'll look at the index and and think are there first of all it is I'm stuff that I'm hoping to get out of this book maybe it's never mentioned anywhere in the index.
• 2:25:22
  SPEAKER_00: Like so hang on a minute am I wasting my time reading this book like like it perhaps it doesn't even mention the thing that I I was assuming that it was going to mention.
• 2:25:30
  SPEAKER_00: Or maybe it does mention it but it's all in one chapter.
• 2:25:33
  SPEAKER_00: I think I should probably just read that chapter first and cut to the chase like because you know why wade through all of the other stuff is the bit that I was actually interested in is all in chapter five.
• 2:25:44
  SPEAKER_00: So I think okay go straight to chart if I want I could go back and read the rest of it.
• 2:25:48
  SPEAKER_00: I don't read and also don't necessarily read stuff in sequence anymore.
• 2:25:51
  SPEAKER_00: I used to again be a stickler for that in the past and now I'll often go straight to the bit that I think is most relevant and then I might go back and read the rest of the book if I think it would be useful to do that.
• 2:26:06
  SPEAKER_00: I make a lot of notes often it depends I also I'll I I'll read in maybe two different ways like I'll speed read some books.
• 2:26:16
  SPEAKER_00: So I'll run my finger along the line and I train myself to go through something really quickly.
• 2:26:21
  SPEAKER_00: But to me that's skim reading and I'm not going to digest it as much but if the goal is that I just have to kind of get through something for some reason like I'll I'll I'll use a pen or uh I'll run my finger along line by line so that my gaze doesn't wander and I get through it more quickly.
• 2:26:38
  SPEAKER_00: Or you know with some other books I'll go through them really slowly and I'll make a lot of notes as I'm going if I think I really want to kind of squeeze um you know everything that I can out of it.
• 2:26:49
  SPEAKER_00: Do you un like qu like questions to the author or are they just things you want to like think about later on or I think it tends to summarize information in my notes and I think I'm trying to usually to summarize stuff so that it's easier for me to remember it afterwards.
• 2:27:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 2:27:11
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe sometimes there'll be questions.
• 2:27:14
  SPEAKER_00: I do I'm a big believer in writing down questions.
• 2:27:17
  SPEAKER_00: Like I in meetings where people maybe have action points and things like I'll I'll often like to have a list that I'll label unanswered questions.
• 2:27:27
  SPEAKER_00: And then I also I'll say okay what are all the and sometimes in when I'm having meeting with other people I might say you know what what what are all of the unanswered questions that everyone has you know and how would we answer them?
• 2:27:40
  SPEAKER_00: How do we answer these unanswered questions?
• 2:27:43
  SPEAKER_00: Like you know is a I think a useful way of putting it um because usually it's pretty simple because the unanswered question is how long would it take to do XY and Z and you think well why don't we just ask somebody we could look at let's just Google it or whatever.
• 2:28:00
  SPEAKER_00: Like you know the the information that's missing for people often you find this in therapy as well.
• 2:28:05
  SPEAKER_00: When you're working with clients you often ask them what prevents you from being able to do such and such and clients will say well I don't I don't know you know who I'd contact and you're like how would you find that out and well I guess I could ask around or whatever.
• 2:28:18
  SPEAKER_00: So the solution to this is pretty simple.
• 2:28:21
  SPEAKER_00: Like you know often people avoid taking steps or they make things seem more complicated than they are.
• 2:28:27
  SPEAKER_00: They people stall because they they have information missing that would be easy for them to obtain especially now with AI actually AI another thing it does is potentially make it much easier to find obscure information like and answer the sort of questions that people typically get stuck with.
• 2:29:01
  SPEAKER_00: I think useful questions to to ask um yeah like those are when I mean when I'm reading a book those are some of the things that I would typically do.
• 2:29:17
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes I try and visualize having a conversation with the author like when I was writing about Socrates I like every single time I was working on the book in the library I'd sit down and spend I'd set a timer for 10 minutes and I'd visualize that I was talking to Socrates and I'd literally I'd just be like Socrates I don't understand this thing that you said you know I get kind of I'd even get quite kind of annoyed about a confrontation I'd be like you know there's a go and often I wouldn't get an answer but at least I I spent some time kind of like you know really focusing on uh something that I was stuck with you know articulating my questions more clearly by imagining that I'm addressing them to sort of like what were you th why did you say this?
• 2:30:00
  SPEAKER_00: You know why why is it don't you think these two I things that you said are kind of contradictory like what did you really mean when you you said such and such um sometimes I got answers by doing that you know often I think it's the slower slow burn process um I don't I was saying this to someone earlier like one of the weird things was I would often at the beginning when I was working on that book I was more concerned about kind of getting historical accuracy there's it's pretty I probably downplay this too much like that it's pretty the that book the account that I give of Socrates's life to many people if they bother to go and kind of check the ancient sources they'll go this is pretty accurate like in many cases but there are some places where we'd have to make assumptions or fill in gaps and things like that.
• 2:30:50
  SPEAKER_00: And so I'd imagine talking to Socrates and saying when did this event happen?
• 2:30:54
  SPEAKER_00: We don't know the date like you know like give me a clue here like you know when did this happen and why did this happen and how did you know this guy and da da da da da da and for some reason every single time I'd kind of get the same sort of response which is my imaginary Socrates seemed surprisingly indifferent to questions of historical accuracy.
• 2:31:18
  SPEAKER_00: He more than me like he he'd over and over again he'd be like what difference does it make like you know he'd say you know what matters is are the philosophical ideas right what matters are the questions.
• 2:31:31
  SPEAKER_00: What matters is like helping people to figure out the point of the dialogue like it doesn't matter whether I'd be one of my main questions would be things like when you met Protagoras and you had this famous dialogue with him did that happen before or after the oracle at Delphi said there was no man wiser than Socrates for instance right and I'd be like I could kind of see reasons to date these events at different times and stuff and I'd be like so like just tell me like when exactly did this event happen and was it before or after this event?
• 2:32:09
  SPEAKER_00: And he'd be like why would you what difference does it make?
• 2:32:12
  SPEAKER_00: Like does it really does it really matter like he says surely he he would always be like the main he was always saying to me the main thing is are your readers going to benefit from this?
• 2:32:23
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 2:32:24
  SPEAKER_00: Like are people going to read this and be inspired?
• 2:32:27
  SPEAKER_00: Are they going to get the point?
• 2:32:28
  SPEAKER_00: Are they going to ask themselves these questions right and does answering these historical questions really make any difference in that regard right and that was when I eventually I kind of decided to be more emphatic in the introduction to the book and say this is a self-consciously semi-fictional approach to writing the biography of Socrates right and there'll be bits of it that people disagree with or that they think could potentially be chronologically different or interpreted differently but it's grounded very carefully.
• 2:33:07
  SPEAKER_00: That's why there are extensive footnotes in it referencing a wide range of of ancient sources so sometimes I think I kind of overplay that hand um in saying that it's like semi-fictional it's like a screenplay it's a dramatized version but I had to I felt that I had to do this because I think it was an obstacle like I thought there's an amazing story here and I I I thought what how come people don't know this story already?
• 2:33:40
  SPEAKER_00: Why hasn't this already been done?
• 2:33:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I think the answer is because there are too many questions about the his like the historical events and that frightens people or creates an obstacle that prevents them from attempting to tell the story of Socrates and I I thought that's a shame because if I went back in time and said to my 17 year old self there's this amazing story about the life of Socrates it's really inspiring and it it's a great way to really make people feel much more interested and engage with the philosophy but I can't tell you that story because some of the dates don't line up like and there's a couple of bits of details that we're not really sure about so we'd have to kind of make assumptions.
• 2:34:29
  SPEAKER_00: I think my 17 year old self would say like Socrates who cares like just qualit say it's semi fictional and just get on with it and tell us the actual story you know and then maybe later we'll figure out okay yeah you got these two dates the wrong way round perhaps like you know maybe there's some evidence that you overlooked or or whatever.
• 2:34:50
  SPEAKER_00: But it doesn't really matter you know and and sometimes even If the events were events were changed, the fact that you've attempted to tell the whole story kind of reveals more about the character anyway.
• 2:35:04
  SPEAKER_00: You know, like we maybe, you know, we get more by putting everything together into a coherent whole, I think we feel that we get to know Socrates better, even if we've made mistakes about.
• 2:35:16
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, some of the sources are considered more reliable than others.
• 2:35:20
  SPEAKER_00: So some of the details of his life, one is, for example, um, I I think it's only in the anecdotal tradition, like the centuries later, that we're told that his father was a stonemason, right?
• 2:35:35
  SPEAKER_00: So some people think, well, that's questionable because it's not explicitly stated in Plato or Xenophon.
• 2:35:43
  SPEAKER_00: Like the sources that come later tell us.
• 2:35:46
  SPEAKER_00: Although that well, to complicate things further, those later sources, like Diogenes Laartius, for example, maybe you know, writing many centuries later, they they had access to books that we don't, that had been written much earlier, right?
• 2:36:03
  SPEAKER_00: So they're not just kind of like making all this stuff up, you know, many centuries later.
• 2:36:08
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes what they're doing is reporting stuff that they've read in books that were written closer to the original period, potentially, right?
• 2:36:16
  SPEAKER_00: So the re the reasons why they could potentially be right about these details.
• 2:36:21
  SPEAKER_00: So again, we we could think, okay, let's pretend that we have no idea what he originally did uh for a living.
• 2:36:30
  SPEAKER_00: He probably he must have d had some kind of trade, because his family probably, you know, had some kind of trade that he would have inherited and trained in as a young man.
• 2:36:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um like why not like accept that it's being a sculptor or a stonemason because that's what we're told later.
• 2:36:48
  SPEAKER_00: Like we can't be absolutely sure of that, but it makes a lot of sense.
• 2:36:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um and it definitely contributes in an interesting way to the story of his life, but we could be wrong about it, right?
• 2:37:03
  SPEAKER_00: But it allows us to tell uh a more rounded story about him.
• 2:37:11
  SPEAKER_00: He did something when he was a young guy, and then he abandoned doing it, right?
• 2:37:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so at the very least, it gives us the idea where it allows us to communicate the idea of somebody that abandoned the profession that he would have inherited from his father, which is almost certainly must be the case, you know.
• 2:37:32
  SPEAKER_00: But it could be that it was, you know, it was some other trade that he did.
• 2:37:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um so there's I guess when I'm uh approaching writing it, um you know, uh these imaginative exercises I think were very useful for me.
• 2:37:51
  SPEAKER_00: And so when I'm I'm reading the Platonic dialogues or xenophon as well, you know, I'll sometimes imagine that I'm engaging uh in a conversation with the characters.
• 2:38:04
  SPEAKER_02: Would you like this to me, I love this.
• 2:38:07
  SPEAKER_02: The book is way cooler now to imagine Socrates almost guiding the spirit of Socrates guiding you in some of the creative decisions.
• 2:38:14
  SPEAKER_02: Would you say this might be the only because you've read a lot of Socrates' biographies and books, would you say this might be the only one written that Socrates, as we know him, would actually be like, Oh, I'm happy with this, you know, as opposed to, oh, it's just like a objective account.
• 2:38:32
  SPEAKER_02: Sounds like it could be something that like he's he could be like, Oh, nice work.
• 2:38:35
  SPEAKER_02: I'm happy that this is taking some of the spirit.
• 2:38:38
  SPEAKER_00: I wonder, I mean, again, yeah, yeah, yeah, like that's I guess that's what I try to do by uh dramatizing it rather than doing what would be technically referred to as an academic history, where we weigh up the evidence and stuff.
• 2:38:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um I wrote it in a more narrative style, so it's more like a screenplayer movie or something like that.
• 2:38:56
  SPEAKER_00: I I do believe that Socrates would probably prefer that to an academic history, as would many ancient authors, because they think the point is you're telling a story that it's meant to inspire people, right?
• 2:39:11
  SPEAKER_00: And even if this like you know, alternative versions of it, or there might be some question over the accuracy of certain details.
• 2:39:20
  SPEAKER_00: That's not the main thing.
• 2:39:21
  SPEAKER_00: The main thing is do the people come away from it feeling like they get what Socrates was about, and they could see how his the Socratic method would really benefit people, some of the challenges and obstacles that he he may have faced and overcome and so on.
• 2:39:40
  SPEAKER_00: Like, you know, does it have an edifying effect?
• 2:39:43
  SPEAKER_00: Does it have a motivational, inspiring effect?
• 2:39:47
  SPEAKER_00: That's the main thing.
• 2:39:48
  SPEAKER_00: Like in Plutarch's Lives, for example.
• 2:39:50
  SPEAKER_00: Plutarch says he is one of the earliest biographers, you know, he's writing these accounts, which are probably of questionable accuracy in many cases, because they they're meant to teach people about virtue and strength of character, like they have an edifying effect, not just that they're just not not they're not just meant to be like historical records.
• 2:40:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um so yeah, I do think I think Socrates would probably think, look, you know, the the yeah, like the main benefit that people could derive from this is that they would be inspired to ask these questions.
• 2:40:25
  SPEAKER_00: And I I write at the beginning of the book, when you're reading the dialogues, I think it helps when you're talking about how to read books and stuff.
• 2:40:33
  SPEAKER_00: I should say that I mention in the introduction that if you imagine that you're one of the characters in the dialogues, or both of the characters in the dialogues, and really try and put yourself in their shoes, I think you'll gain a lot more from the book because then you experience what it's like to face certain questions and to be caught in certain contradictions, like it's almost an assault course for your mind.
• 2:41:01
  SPEAKER_00: You're kind of going through the paces of you know wrestling with certain fundamental ideas and and questions yourself.
• 2:41:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um I think there's more to be gained from it that way.
• 2:41:14
  SPEAKER_00: And I think, yeah, like Socrates would say by putting yourself in in the shoes of the characters in the dialogue, um experiencing it in in your imagination, you're more likely to learn something than just by treating it as a kind of academic exercise.
• 2:41:34
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, wow.
• 2:41:37
  SPEAKER_02: Well, thank you so much for the time and level of endurance.
• 2:41:44
  SPEAKER_02: I know that you you've been speaking previously to this discussion as well, so I love the passion that you bring.
• 2:41:51
  SPEAKER_02: Like it's just it's inspiring to me how meaningful these books and these thinkers are to you, and it makes me more like all I want to do is read more about Socrates now, which I think is.
• 2:42:06
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's like, you know, I often think as time goes on, get older, you've got like less time left.
• 2:42:13
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, when I think about that, I think what out of all the books that I've read, what are the ones that I benefit from most?
• 2:42:20
  SPEAKER_00: And again, like I mean, it could be I could say oh it's modern books and psychological research, but they're not really the books that stick with me and inspire me.
• 2:42:28
  SPEAKER_00: I do get a lot from them, but I Plato's Apology is one of the I read it when I was like 16 or 17 or something, and it's got its hooks into me like in a in a weird way, partly because of the kind of poetry of it and the the powerful nature of the the the images and the extreme nature of the the the philosophical uh points being made.
• 2:42:49
  SPEAKER_00: There's something about that that is significant, I think, and you know, we tend to water down things a little bit more.
• 2:42:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, the the something like Greek tragedy is really tragic.
• 2:43:05
  SPEAKER_00: Like, you know, the the ancient literature in some ways takes more adopts more extreme positions, but which again might might mean that it, you know, we we'd question it more, but it has a more power leaves a more powerful impression on a mind and provokes more thought, provokes more questions, I think.
• 2:43:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um you know, Socrates says many deeply paradoxical things, like, you know, injustice harms the perpetrator more than the victim, no man does evil knowingly, you know.
• 2:43:39
  SPEAKER_00: These are questions that people have wrestled with for thousands of years.
• 2:43:42
  SPEAKER_00: Like even if they don't agree with him, that's kind of a contagious idea that you want to kind of like chew over and keep returning to could he be right?
• 2:43:52
  SPEAKER_00: Like, is there some sense in which he's right?
• 2:43:54
  SPEAKER_00: What are his reasons for that?
• 2:43:55
  SPEAKER_00: I think there's a lot of truth in the things that he says, but I I maybe I'm qualifying that by saying even if you don't accept these ideas, it still can have a very powerful effect on you, like to confront them and explore them.
• 2:44:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um the foreign ideas, in a sense, to to modern the prevailing values of of modern society.
• 2:44:20
  SPEAKER_00: So they force us to kind of like step outside of our typical assumptions like and question things from a radically different perspective.
• 2:44:30
  SPEAKER_00: So there's a there's a power to this ancient literature, you know, I think that is almost timeless.
• 2:44:38
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, I don't I don't have any hesitation recommending it to people.
• 2:44:42
  SPEAKER_00: I do feel passionate about it.
• 2:44:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's in sp it's been inspiring to me.
• 2:44:47
  SPEAKER_00: You know, the strange irony is like, you know, like as time goes on, I get older, I read a lot of books over the years.
• 2:44:53
  SPEAKER_00: Like these were some of the first books I ever read.
• 2:44:56
  SPEAKER_00: You know.
• 2:44:57
  SPEAKER_00: And uh yeah, like the you know, I find myself going back to the beginning, like the things that you know that originally excited me.
• 2:45:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought when I first read Plato describing these dialogues with Socrates, I I'dn't I I'd never read anything like this before.
• 2:45:16
  SPEAKER_00: It kind of blew my mind.
• 2:45:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um I thought, you know, I think for the first thing that hit me was I'd learned uh studied the Bible at school and Sunday school and stuff like that.
• 2:45:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um I had no idea that somebody uh who lived uh like 400, 500 years before uh the New Testament was written could be posing questions like this and you know reasoning and in a in such a kind of rigorous and and logical way.
• 2:45:55
  SPEAKER_00: It seemed so radically different from the but and yet it resonated with the religion that I'd been taught as a child.
• 2:46:03
  SPEAKER_00: But I I had assumed that people prior to the time of the New Testament were more kind of primitive and superstitious in their thinking.
• 2:46:14
  SPEAKER_00: Like uh I never imagined that that somebody like Plato or Aristotle would write and say the things that they did.
• 2:46:22
  SPEAKER_00: That seemed extraordinary to me.
• 2:46:26
  SPEAKER_00: And uh it seemed like they were much more contemporary in their thinking than I could have imagined them uh to be.
• 2:46:34
  SPEAKER_00: It really had a very profound effect on me.
• 2:46:38
  SPEAKER_00: And also when I read some of the ancient uh texts, you know, in many cases I they reminded me of Eastern philosophy, Buddhism and Taoism and stuff like that.
• 2:46:49
  SPEAKER_00: And and it that came as a shock to me.
• 2:46:51
  SPEAKER_00: I thought I thought you had to go to India to learn about Buddhism and yoga and stuff.
• 2:46:59
  SPEAKER_00: I thought I'm gonna have to save up for a flight to India one day to study with the Sinnyasins and like go to Japan or somewhere and study Buddhism, and then I read Plato and I read the Stoics, and I thought a lot of the stuff is different, but there's similar kind of ideas, you know, and this is part of my own culture, and nobody told me about this.
• 2:47:22
  SPEAKER_00: You know, how come no one told me?
• 2:47:24
  SPEAKER_00: Like there's all the stuff like in uh in Western philosophy about impermanence and mindfulness and contemplating your own mortality and you know, all of that.
• 2:47:36
  SPEAKER_00: Like why didn't we get why wasn't that how come I know about Buddhism but I didn't know about this?
• 2:47:42
  SPEAKER_00: Like it's like it was hidden in my back it's like it was hidden in my back garden or something like that, you know.
• 2:47:48
  SPEAKER_00: Do you know what I mean?
• 2:47:49
  SPEAKER_00: Like So it was right there, and no one told no one even mentioned to me this stuff even existed.
• 2:47:57
  SPEAKER_02: So the book How to Think Like Socrates is out November 19th.
• 2:48:03
  SPEAKER_02: Um I was looking on Audible as well, it says that you've you're narrating the book as well.
• 2:48:11
  SPEAKER_00: I had to practice pronouncing 254 Greek names.
• 2:48:16
  SPEAKER_00: And I have a friend who lives in Greece and I work very closely with, she's kind of a freelance editor that I work with, and she's a classicist, she's an expert on Greek and Latin.
• 2:48:28
  SPEAKER_00: So my knowledge of ancient Greek is pretty limited, but luckily my friend Lauya is peerless in her ancient Greek and Latin, funnily enough.
• 2:48:42
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, she coaches me, and uh yeah, I had to go in a recording studio and with an audio director and a sound engineer, and it's it's probably took five days, and then after that, I had to go in for another two days and record something else that I was doing, a different project for Sam Harris's Waking Up app.
• 2:49:01
  SPEAKER_00: I had to record a course of lectures on stoicism, like that I had to write and sit up and record one after another.
• 2:49:10
  SPEAKER_00: So I've did quite I had a whole stint of a lot of time in a recording studio recently.
• 2:49:16
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, I do the audio recording, and again, that's like pros and cons.
• 2:49:20
  SPEAKER_00: Like some people don't like the fact that I've got a a funny accent, right?
• 2:49:25
  SPEAKER_00: But other people do like it because it's kind of different, and so some people are go, it's more interesting because it's like a regional accent, you know.
• 2:49:33
  SPEAKER_00: So I always think if you if everybody likes what you're doing, then what you've done is probably banal.
• 2:49:41
  SPEAKER_00: Like, and so if some people can't stand what you're doing, and other people really like it, then it's probably because you're kind of trying, you're doing something that's a little bit different, right?
• 2:49:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I you know, so I take pride in that, you know.
• 2:49:55
  SPEAKER_00: I don't I don't fear kind of criticism, I don't expect that uh everything that I do is going to be everybody's cup of tea.
• 2:50:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's fine if some people can't stand my accent or they can't stand CBT or they they they horrifies them that I've kind of dramatised bits of Socrates' life or whatever.
• 2:50:17
  SPEAKER_00: Because other people would be fine with all that stuff, right?
• 2:50:20
  SPEAKER_00: It's kind of like if you made I think of it as like often I think of writing as like making music, it's very similar in many ways.
• 2:50:26
  SPEAKER_00: It'd be like if you made an album, if you imagine making an album that everybody thinks is okay.
• 2:50:31
  SPEAKER_00: Like, you know, it would be if you make uh a heavy metal album that's like a classic, there's gonna be a lot of people that just can't stand heavy metal.
• 2:50:40
  SPEAKER_00: There's no way that everybody's gonna like it, or like an amazing jazz album.
• 2:50:43
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of people hate jazz, right?
• 2:50:46
  SPEAKER_00: So I I tend to find that the people that don't like these books are are mainly just they don't like the concept of combining history and philosophy and uh and psychotherapy in this way.
• 2:50:59
  SPEAKER_00: But if they're cool with the interdisciplinary approach, then generally I think that they like it.
• 2:51:05
  SPEAKER_00: So I don't I you know I definitely I'm actually basically I'm just happy as long as I can see that some people really like it, you know, because I'm I I'm I always kind of think it's not for it's not meant to be for everybody, but as long as there are some people that are like my 17-year-old self and like I am today, you know, this is definitely the book, you know, that I would have wanted to read.
• 2:51:30
  SPEAKER_00: I would have been I would have thought this book was awesome when I was 17.
• 2:51:33
  SPEAKER_00: I would say that categorically, you know.
• 2:51:35
  SPEAKER_00: If I could go back in time, my 17-year-old self would be like, wow, this is exactly what I was looking for, right?
• 2:51:40
  SPEAKER_00: So I just I kind of hope there's the there are other people out there that are like that and go, yeah, this is awesome.
• 2:51:46
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I find it really engaging, like there's all this kind of action and history and cool things that I didn't know about before.
• 2:51:54
  SPEAKER_00: That's how you know that kind of thing really turned me on to philosophy is learning more about the history and learning more about the characters.
• 2:52:02
  SPEAKER_00: Every when I well when I was at university studying philosophy, um I you know I I took to it really well, surprisingly well.
• 2:52:10
  SPEAKER_00: But partly, again, you asked me about how to read books and stuff, I would wherever possible read biographies of the authors.
• 2:52:17
  SPEAKER_00: I read biographies of Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell, a bunch of other more obscure philosophies.
• 2:52:24
  SPEAKER_00: Because I thought if I can picture the author, then this stuff that seems pretty abstract and dry at times, kind of becomes more three-dimensional for me.
• 2:52:34
  SPEAKER_00: Because I I think, oh yeah, I know the guy that wrote this.
• 2:52:37
  SPEAKER_00: Like I can imagine him saying it.
• 2:52:39
  SPEAKER_00: I've seen pictures of him and stuff like that.
• 2:52:41
  SPEAKER_00: It comes more alive for me than it would be normally, and so it made it easier for me to engage with it and easier for me to remember what he'd said and stuff.
• 2:52:49
  SPEAKER_00: So I was, I guess that was one of my techniques for studying a subject is to literally go and read biographies and gather what information I could about the author to facilitate the the process.
• 2:53:05
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's a really good one.
• 2:53:06
  SPEAKER_02: I like as well, like when the author narrates the book, I just know that they know the content.
• 2:53:13
  SPEAKER_02: It's they're not just performing it, and it just there's something extra meaningful about that for me.
• 2:53:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um I write uh there's another thing about writing books, like you mentioned, and I can't remember if I said this to you earlier, but when I write a book, the way that I approach it is what I call audio first.
• 2:53:31
  SPEAKER_00: So I don't imagine that I'm writing a print book.
• 2:53:35
  SPEAKER_00: I imagine that I'm writing an audiobook.
• 2:53:38
  SPEAKER_00: And then because you could write a really good print book that sounds kind of clunky when you try and narrate it, but if you write a good audiobook, it's also definitely gonna read well as a print book anyway, right?
• 2:53:55
  SPEAKER_00: So I thought that I figured that out early on, and I thought, in that case, I should assume that I'm writing audiobooks first and foremost, you know, rather than assuming that I'm writing print.
• 2:54:06
  SPEAKER_00: Why th why would I think I'm writing a print book that just happens and then it may or may not work as an audiobook?
• 2:54:13
  SPEAKER_00: It would make more sense to write it as an audiobook because I know that that's going to work as a print.
• 2:54:18
  SPEAKER_00: Like, so I I definitely write it as an audiobook, and that means that I'll read stuff aloud a lot more and get people to read the the contents to me.
• 2:54:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um and uh that to me that's uh another kind of like key part of the the writing process.
• 2:54:36
  SPEAKER_00: Like it has to sound okay as well as looking okay on the page.
• 2:54:41
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes there'll be things that you write that just sound weird when you you read them, or sound really kind of clunky when you go to to read it aloud.
• 2:54:52
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think there is an audiobook for stoicism and the art of happiness.
• 2:54:57
  SPEAKER_00: I haven't been able to find it.
• 2:54:58
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 2:54:59
  SPEAKER_00: That wouldn't see that that was a book I wrote a long time ago, and it had to follow a format for a series, the Teach Yourself series, that I don't think really lends it.
• 2:55:07
  SPEAKER_00: I think they do have audiobooks, but to me that format doesn't seem to lend itself that well to being recorded as an audiobook.
• 2:55:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, because they have sections of the book, and yeah.
• 2:55:19
  SPEAKER_00: I think it would sound weird.
• 2:55:20
  SPEAKER_00: Like, so now I mean I guess in part also when I'm writing books now, I write them in a much in a more of a narrative style.
• 2:55:31
  SPEAKER_00: Like uh I write them almost a little bit like a a play, you know.
• 2:55:38
  SPEAKER_00: Plato lends himself to that in Xenophon because they're dialogues anyway, you know.
• 2:55:43
  SPEAKER_00: I just kind of dramatic them in a dialogue is like a play, but with a lot of talking and not as much scene setting and so on.
• 2:55:54
  SPEAKER_00: So I just add some elements to it to to make it a little bit more three-dimensional, add a little bit more action, like a little more description of body language and facial expressions and stuff like that as well, to make it come come alive a bit more.
• 2:56:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um but yeah, like writing it is uh an audiobook and in a way that kind of prompts the other thing.
• 2:56:18
  SPEAKER_00: I suppose when you you're writing something for audiobook is that people I think when they're listening to audiobooks don't have the same attention span.
• 2:56:27
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, raising I think it's useful to focus on raising questions for the listener, uh, rather than just kind of like stating loads too many facts.
• 2:56:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 2:56:39
  SPEAKER_00: But and and telling a story where they can kind of get lost in the story maybe and get the gist of it, you know, like rather than just kind of giving them a lecture that they might that might kind of go in one year, and if they're driving the car or they're running on a treadmill or something like that, and listening to it, they're maybe just getting like snippets.
• 2:56:56
  SPEAKER_00: But if it's a you're describing a scene and telling a story, they're they're more likely to be immersed in it and getting the sense of what's happening.
• 2:57:05
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 2:57:07
  SPEAKER_02: That's awesome.
• 2:57:07
  SPEAKER_02: I'm I've been using the Waking Up app since it launched as well, so I'm very excited to see your is it a course or an interview?
• 2:57:15
  SPEAKER_02: It's a course, it comes out in January, I believe.
• 2:57:18
  SPEAKER_02: Awesome.
• 2:57:19
  SPEAKER_02: On stoicism.
• 2:57:20
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, can't wait for that.
• 2:57:22
  SPEAKER_02: Alright, well, thank you once again for almost going three hours.
• 2:57:26
  SPEAKER_02: I appreciate your time.
• 2:57:27
  SPEAKER_02: Um welcome, it's been a pleasure.
• 2:57:30
  SPEAKER_02: Great, thanks.
• 2:57:31
  SPEAKER_02: Cheers.