The Stoicism Secrets Of Marcus Aurelius - Donald Robertson

1. 0:00 – 1:17

   Intro

   1. DRDonald Robertson0:00

      The quality of your life is shaped fundamentally by certain opinions that you hold, predominantly your value judgments. The things that you value and the things that you despise are gonna shape your character and therefore the quality of your life. (airplane whooshing)

   2. CWChris Williamson0:17

      Are you Marcus Aurelius's number one fan, do you think? Or do you think that you're the most-

   3. DRDonald Robertson0:21

      Definitely.

   4. CWChris Williamson0:21

      ... most educated on him, or one of the most educated on him that's alive at the moment?

   5. DRDonald Robertson0:27

      I, yeah, I mean, it doesn't seem like that much of a brag 'cause I've spent so much time having to read his stuff. I'm probab- I must be one of the people in the world that knows the most about Marcus Aurelius now just 'cause I've spent so much time writing stuff about him. And, uh, I kind of thought I learned a lot about him, and then obviously when you write other stuff, like you write, uh, from a different perspective. The graphic novel, I suddenly had to think, "What did this look like and what did that look like?" And so it made me explore his life from a bit of a different perspective. I had to visualize it more. And I thought, "Well, now I know everything I need to know about him." But then when I did the more academic biography, uh, that was to a, a more rigorous standard in a way, and, uh, I thought, "No, I'm now doing research that's even deeper than I did before." So, apparently there's always more to learn.

2. 1:17 – 8:34

   Why Marcus Aurelius Followed Greek Philosophy

   1. CWChris Williamson1:17

      So-

   2. DRDonald Robertson1:17

      Uh-

   3. CWChris Williamson1:18

      ... Marcus Aurelius.

   4. DRDonald Robertson1:18

      ... there can't be that much left.

   5. CWChris Williamson1:20

      Emperor of Rome.

   6. DRDonald Robertson1:22

      Yes.

   7. CWChris Williamson1:22

      But followed a Greek-born philosophy. Why?

   8. DRDonald Robertson1:25

      Yeah. Well, I'll, let, let's get into some obscure stuff then. I th- I've, I can't be 100% sure, but somebody started speculating , Chris, right? I reckon it was to do with his mum, partly. That's one reason. So his mum ... His father passed away when Marcus was, we think, about three or four years old, and so he was brought up to a large extent, although not exclusively, by his mother. Now, his mother was a very wealthy and powerful woman. She was a construction magnate, believe it or not, and we know that 'cause we have hundreds of bricks with her name stamped on them. She owned a, uh, a brick and tile factory and clay fields that were used in construction, so she was very wealthy and powerful woman, not like we might have kind of assumed, you know, in, uh, in Roman times. And she had a kind of ... She seems to have had an intellectual circle that surrounded her, like a salon, um, of intellectuals at their house, and so she was a very well-educated woman. Here's a bit of trivia for you. Marcus Cornelius Fronto, who is Marcus' Latin rhetoric tutor, and was considered the greatest Roman orator since Cicero, which is, you know, quite an accolade. We have a letter from him where he says to Marcus, he's writing to Marcus' mother in Greek, and he says, "Marcus," kinda pathetically, "Could you check my grammar and, like, vocabulary and stuff to make sure that it's okay before your mum reads it?" So Fronto, one of the greatest intellectuals of the era, is kind of intimidated by Marcus' mother.

   9. CWChris Williamson3:05

      That's cool.

   10. DRDonald Robertson3:06

       It is cool. And so 'cause she was really into Greek culture, um, and literature, I think she brought up her son to be, into Greek philosophy and that kinda led to Stoicism. Also, the other ... This is a real deep dive. Roman, uh, matriarchs were, are believed to have been the ones that were mainly responsible for choosing the tutors that were employed, and Marcus had an unusual number of Stoic philosophy tutors, so he got into Stoicism himself. But we also have to assume that his family were kinda steering him in that direction, and it was probably his mum that picked those Stoic tutors for him.

   11. CWChris Williamson3:47

       What was the culture of Rome like? Uh, were there philosop- were there Roman philosophers as well-

   12. DRDonald Robertson3:52

       Yeah.

   13. CWChris Williamson3:52

       ... obviously apa- apart from Marcus? What was the difference between them and the Stoics?

   14. DRDonald Robertson3:57

       I mean, the culture was that ru- Marcus was living through a, uh, a cultural movement called the Second Sophistic. So the Sophists, people may have heard of, is these kind of quasi-philosophers or intellectuals that, uh, Socrates was kind of jousting with intellectually. He was a critic of the Sophists. But there was a resurgence of popularity in the Roman Empire of the Sophists. So these were Greek orators and speech writers, and generally intellectuals who came over and they were viewed as exotic, and they became very trendy for centuries in the Roman Empire. And Marcus kinda grew up in the middle of that. So Hadrian, who was a huge figure in Marcus' life, he, Hadrian became Marcus' adoptive grandfather, and Marcus was brought into Hadrian's villa and raised in his household for around about six months towards the end of Hadrian's life. Hadrian kind of wanted to be a Sophist, like, he loved ... He spent a lot of time in Athens. He left ... He, he did a lot of construction in Athens. Like, he saw himself as an intellectual and surrounded himself with these Sophists. And Marcus grew up in this kind of, I guess we would say sort of pretentious intellectual culture, um, and his mum was kind of connected with that. The most influential Greek orator, the most influential intellectual, in a sense, of the period, was a guy called Herodes Atticus, who's famous now in Greece because, um, the Foo Fighters performed a concert at a building called the Odeon of Herodes Atticus. It's a famous building on the site of the Acropolis, which, uh, still exists and they can still-

   15. CWChris Williamson5:35

       I've been to it.

   16. DRDonald Robertson5:35

       Yeah, you've been there. And, like, uh, you know, Sting and, like, Brian Eno, all these kinda musicians perform there now. And, uh, Herodes Atticus was, like, a billionaire and a celebrity orator, like a rock star of the period. But he was also a really horrible man with a really bad temper. He was raised for a time in the same household as Marcus Aurelius' mother. Like, we know that's a little kinda fragment of a clue, so she knew...... the leading sophist of the era. So how's that? This guy that we think of as a Stoic or typically critics of these kind of pretentious intellectuals, his mum grew up in the same household as the most influential and famous sophist of them all. And he became a family friend, sort of, a kind of frenemy in a way, for the, the rest of Marcus's life. At one point he lunged at Marcus like he was gonna throttle him or something, and he was nearly executed by the Praetorian prefect, but Marcus stood up and, and told his guards to stand down.

   17. CWChris Williamson6:31

       I suppose if you are... I- i- if, if the person that is at the absolute tip of the spear of (clears throat) the cool movement of the time-

   18. DRDonald Robertson6:40

       Yeah.

   19. CWChris Williamson6:41

       ... also happens to be a bit of a dick-

   20. DRDonald Robertson6:43

       Yeah. (laughs)

   21. CWChris Williamson6:43

       ... that's a pretty good excuse to not want your son to grow up like that.

   22. DRDonald Robertson6:50

       That's a good description. I mean, what have we got against Herodes? I- he did that horrible thing. The Athenians hated him. They were always trying to sue him in court. Um, he, he kind of went... He was tried because he was accused of kicking his pregnant wife to death, although he was acquitted of that, but there was a kind of stigma that hung over him. Like, he, he kind of managed to dodge a bullet there. Um, so the irony is that we know... Here's another cool bit of trivia. Like, we know that Herodes Atticus had read Epictetus, and he kind of liked to quote him sometimes. Like, the Sophists would often quote philosophers, but they kind of appropriated it 'cause it sounded cool. Like, they didn't really live like philosophers. Like, it was more about, you know. They literally... Like social media today, they would give speeches where they tried to win, uh, the biggest round of applause, like getting the most likes or something like that. They, they were celebrities. So we know Epict-... Uh, Herodes Atticus criticized the Stoics because he said they espouse insensibility. He goes, "They root out the most kind of vibrant emotions, and you don't wanna end up like one of these guys, like a robot or whatever." And the Stoics said, "That's not at all what we're about." So this guy that's saying the Stoics are too unemotional, I think Marcus looked at him and said, "Dude, I don't want to be like you though." Like, "You've got an appallingly bad temper." And like, you know, I think that one of the things that really shaped Marcus was seeing these guys side by side and thinking, "This dude that's saying embrace your passions and all that is actually a kind of horrible, violent person." And these other guys are saying, "No, you have to learn to understand and to master your passions," Marcus loved and really admired those dudes in, just in a personal level, much more than, you know, he ever were to Herodes Atticus.

3. 8:34 – 17:24

   How Meditations Was Written

   1. DRDonald Robertson8:34

   2. CWChris Williamson8:34

      What was the story of how Meditations was actually written? 'Cause it was given... It was even a different name when it was first written, right?

   3. DRDonald Robertson8:41

      Yeah, it was called... Well, the earliest manuscript was headed To Himself, so it may be that that's the title that it was originally given. Which is kind of interesting because for... Ancient philosophers would sometimes say that to learn philosophy is to learn to discourse, to talk with yourself, which is a really... From a cognitive therapy point of view, you know, I'm a, a cognitive behavioral psychotherapist, this idea that it's about learning how to talk to yourself rationally is a really cool concept. And in the Meditations, Marcus kind of has this recurring phrase where he says every morning say to yourself. So the book consists of lots of things that he's telling himself to say to himself, so it's a very appropriate heading for it. How it was written, we believe that it was written pretty much coinciding with the First Marcomannic War, and I... It happens to be just after Marcus's main philosophy tutor, Junius Rusticus, dies. So I'm very tempted to visualize... Again when you do the graphic novel, you're trying to, like, visualize these things. You think, "Well, this guy's just died that is his main tutor." He's just left Rome pretty much for the first time to go to Austria and this climate that he finds very harsh. With the military, it's the first time he's really been, like, stationed himself with the military like this, like a real fish out of water suddenly. And he does not have... He may, he may have had some philosophers with him, but he did not really have this kind of circle of philosophers that he would have had at Rome. And we know Marcus write, uh, liked to write letters, so I imagine that he was probably writing letters to some of the philosophers that he was friends with. I wish we still had those. We have letters to his rhetoric tutor where they kind of gossip about philosophy a bit and stuff. But I imagine that when Rusticus died, Marcus was left thinking, "Who am I gonna talk to philo- about philosophy now?" Right? And if he'd been writing to him, it would have been very natural for him to think, "Maybe I need to carry on writing about philosophy. But instead of addressing letters to Rusticus, who's now passed away, I should write to myself." And I would like to imagine that some of the things that Marcus is saying in the Meditations must be things that he heard in lectures or that he'd read in books or that he'd discussed, uh, maybe written about in letters to Rusticus and, uh, the various other Stoic tutors that he had.

   4. CWChris Williamson11:03

      How much do you think is original thought then, and how much do you think is repurposed from people that, or, or, or places that we perhaps don't have access to anymore?

   5. DRDonald Robertson11:14

      That's a really good question, and the short answer is we just will die not knowing, Chris. Probably we'll never be able to figure that out, though I'll tell you some really cool trivia about it. The person that Marcus Aurelius quotes most often is Epictetus. Like, he clearly loves Epictetus. And he says at the beginning that one of the biggest moments in his life was when Junius Rusticus gave him a copy from his personal library of the Discourses of Epictetus. Now, the Discourses of Epictetus are quite long. They're like four volumes, but one ancient source says there were originally eight volumes. So half of them have gone missing, right? They were misplaced some, you know, sometime over the centuries, annoyingly. Now, Marcus quotes stuff that's in the Discourses, but he also quotes stuff from Epictetus that we've never heard before. So what's really cool is to imagine that Marcus Aurelius had read the four missing volumes of Epictetus. He knows even more about this dude than we do. And so, like, because they don't use quotation marks and they don't cite things, um-... certainly Marcus writing informally doesn't do anything like that. He occasionally will say, "As Plato said" or "As Epictetus said," so there's a clue. But some of the things he said look like they're quotes and they may be... Uh, maybe some of the stuff we attribute to Marcus Aurelius is actually stuff that Epictetus said that he's just copying down into his notes, you know, but hasn't... that doesn't have quotation marks around it, for all we know.

   6. CWChris Williamson12:38

      Are you familiar with Churchillian drift? Do you know what that is?

   7. DRDonald Robertson12:41

      No, I've not heard that expression before.

   8. CWChris Williamson12:43

      You need it. You need it in your life. So, you'll have heard a lot of people attribute quotes to "I, I, I, I, I think it was Churchill that said this thing."

   9. DRDonald Robertson12:51

      Uh-

   10. CWChris Williamson12:51

       It's, uh, the phenomenon whereby quotes that are kind of difficult to attribute end up moving slowly over time toward being Churchill. You could also have like an Einsteinian drift as well, I think. Like Einstein and Churchill. "I, I don't know who said this quote, so I'd better say Churchill said it, because it probably was." And what you have here is like an, uh, Aureliussen drift-

   11. DRDonald Robertson13:15

       Yeah.

   12. CWChris Williamson13:15

       ... in that-

   13. DRDonald Robertson13:16

       Yeah.

   14. CWChris Williamson13:18

       ... he... Because so much less of his work has been lost than other people around that time, or at least because so much of it has been preserved, um, that means if he's been condensing down other people's work, maybe he is taking, uh, license for other people's stuff.

   15. DRDonald Robertson13:35

       I mean, it could be that loads of the Meditations is just quotes from other books, for all we know. Like, I don't think it all is, because some of it's kind of personal to him. And I'll tell you, I'll tell you another really cool piece o- piece of trivia. F- first of all, just an aside about this Churchillian drift. You know, I... Just to interject a warning to your viewers, right? The internet is absolutely awash-

   16. CWChris Williamson13:56

       Replete. (laughs)

   17. DRDonald Robertson13:56

       I hate to br-... Replete with misattributed quotes, and there are a bunch that people attribute to Marcus Aurelius over and over again that happens so often, that you then... Eventually, they, they find their way into books and so you'll buy books and it's like-

   18. CWChris Williamson14:11

       What, what are the most-

   19. DRDonald Robertson14:12

       "... well, he never said that." Right.

   20. CWChris Williamson14:13

       ... what are the most misattributed Marcus Aurelius quotes?

   21. DRDonald Robertson14:18

       What are the most... There's, there's one that says, "Everything you see is just a perspective," or something like that, which is... doesn't even make sense semantically. You don't a-... You don't see a perspective, you see through a perspective, recently, of like, "Geez, Marcus Aurelius would never write that. That's nonsense." But, like, uh, he wouldn't say that anyway, 'cause it's kind of extreme relativism and Marcus would say... Now, that might be true of some things, but, like, you know, that Marcus believed that there are certainties in life. Like, he thought there were moral certainties in life. Now, I was going to say something of... I've forgotten what it was I was gonna say, Chris, about, uh, Epictetus or... Ah, maybe it doesn't matter. The Churchillian drift we were talking about.

   22. CWChris Williamson15:00

       Ah-

   23. DRDonald Robertson15:00

       And the... Or the quotes that are attributed to Marcus Aurelius not necessarily from him. That was very common in the ancient world. You know, the ideas end up... We only have about 1% of ancient literature surviving today, so, of course we're probably misattributing loads of ideas.

   24. CWChris Williamson15:19

       Is "the whole universe is change and life itself is but what you deem it", is that him?

   25. DRDonald Robertson15:25

       I... You know, I'm gonna say yes and no. Like, 'cause I think he would say himself that what he's doing there... I remember what I was going to tell you, actually. It relates to this. This is... You've given me a really good example. Um, in Greek, that's just, like, six words. It's, like, really, really concise, right? And he... You can tell from the context that what he's saying is... "The universe is change" is him referring to Heraclitus, and "life is opinion" is him referring to Epictetus. So he's trying to sum up these, his two favorite philosophers. I said earlier he made... his favorite person to quote is Epictetus. His second favorite person to quote is Heraclitus. And so these are like his two favorite philosophers, and he's trying to sum up the, their philosophy in just, like, as few words as possible. Um, and, uh, so he can memorize it really easily. This is a kind of like... He's making up slogans for himself. This is a thing that the, the Stoics would do. So by "the universe is change", he means what we call panta rhei, everything flows, like, uh, this kind of doctrine of impermanence that you fi- find in the Pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus that the Stoics really loved. "Life is opinion" is a bit more obscure. It needs to be unpacked a bit. What... He does not mean everything is just subjective. He's talking about when Epictetus says, uh, "It's not things that upset us, but rather our opinions about them." What he means is the quality of your life is shaped fundamentally by certain opinions that you hold. Predominantly your value judgments. So what he's saying is the things that you value and the things that you despise are gonna shape your character and therefore the quality of your life. So it, it... Unfortunately, you lose some meaning by trying to simplify and abbreviate things. That's what he's doing. He's trying to make it more memorable, but he's ended up saying something that people are going to misinterpret.

   26. CWChris Williamson17:18

       Well, you have to sacrifice, uh, context, uh, for brevity.

   27. DRDonald Robertson17:22

       Yeah.

   28. CWChris Williamson17:23

       Right? This is what... I mean,

4. 17:24 – 27:40

   Condensing Large Concepts

   1. CWChris Williamson17:24

      I'm a big fan of Naval Ravikant. I'm not sure if you've come across him.

   2. DRDonald Robertson17:27

      No, I haven't.

   3. CWChris Williamson17:28

      Very, very cool guy. So he's a, um, VC/angel investor, but also, I, I guess you'd class himself as a, a sort of garage philosopher as well. And he's very, very pithy. So he's like an aphorism, uh, factory, and he's constantly putting out these really, really cool short sort of aphoristic things. And, uh, he says basically the same thing. Look, the, the point is for this to kind of be like, um, like a buoy in the water and you know that below that, there's tons and tons-

   4. DRDonald Robertson17:58

      Yeah.

   5. CWChris Williamson17:58

      ... more stuff. It's kind of like, uh, just a little mental trigger. Look, this is the thing-

   6. DRDonald Robertson18:02

      Absolutely.

   7. CWChris Williamson18:02

      ... that you got to remember. There's a big concept. It's not worth just knowing the thing. You got to know the concept. But in order to remind you of the concept, here's the thing that sits above the water of it.

   8. DRDonald Robertson18:11

      Epictetus says almost exactly the same thing in one of his discourses. He says, "If you ask us what the goal of life is, we'll say it's living in accord with nature," or he says something else actually. And he says, "But then if you ask us, 'What does living mean?' and 'What does nature mean?'" It's gonna take a lot longer to unpack, like, those concepts. So he says, "You can condense things down into a short slogan, like just a few words, but then you're gonna have to explain what those words mean in order to avoid confusion." It's basically the same idea. He puts it really clearly. And it reminds me of, like, the other little bit of trivia I was gonna tell you, and this is just, like, a cool thing for people that are interested in the Meditations, right? So first of all, a bit of background. Uh, I, I meet a surprising number of people who think that we don't know anything about Marcus Aurelius, which is really weird, because he was a big deal back in the day. And one of the reasons I've written about him is we know more about Marcus Aurelius than we do about almost any other ancient philosopher, certainly far more than we know about any other Stoic, because he was a Roman emperor. So we have, like, three major surviving histories of his reign. We have a bunch of archeological evidence and inscriptions. We have references to him in loads of other writings. We have a record of his legal rescripts, like his, uh, his legal, um, agenda, uh, from the, the laws that he passed in Roman legal digests. But we also have a cache of letters that were found in the 19th century between Marcus and Marcus Cornelius Fronto, his rhetoric tutor that I mentioned earlier. And some people are disappointed by those letters, 'cause they're kinda mainly chitchatting. They talk about their aches and pains and the weather and stuff like that. There's not a lot of philosophy in them. But at one point... And Fronto tends to talk about these rhetoric exercises that he's setting Marcus, like how to practice, um, writing powerful speeches and how to phrase things effectively and stuff. But at one point, uh, Fronto sets this exercise for Marcus, and he basically has this thing where Marcus is trying to decide whether he wants to spend his time studying rhetoric or studying philosophy, and Fronto is kinda, kinda struggling to persuade Marcus, um, in order to retain his status at court as his main tutor. He's kinda... He was in competition, he says, with Rusticus, like, to be Marcus' main tutor as he gradually got older and shifted more towards philosophy. And what Fronto says is very interesting. He says basically that philosophers come up with these insights that are kind of obscure by their very nature. So if you think very deeply about things, you're gonna come up with stuff that's kinda hard to put into words. It's gonna seem like... Any original thought, it's gonna be like difficult to articulate at first. And he says, "So the philosophers end up saying weird stuff." Like, they make up jargon and things like that, and they say things that are kind of obscure. And he says, "If you want to really understand things, and if you want to communicate them effectively, you have to study rhetoric as well." Like, you're gonna have to figure out how to take these paradoxical ideas and put them into plain English, basically, for your own benefit, as well as the benefit of other people. And he tells Marcus, "You should take these insights and practice paraphrasing them repeatedly," so thinking of different metaphors, different words that you could use to try and get the meaning across. And you think, "Oh, that's cool." It's kind of like a rhetoric exercise. He's... This also shows him trying to figure out a way that he can hang on to his position in court. "So Marcus, don't just leave me and go off and do philosophy. You need rhetoric and philosophy," he wants to say. But also, the really cool thing about it is when scholars first read that letter, um, and he returns to it a few times in other places, they thought, "How weird is this? 'Cause that looks like that's what he's doing in the Meditations." Like, in the Meditations, he's taking these paradoxical ideas and it looks like he's par- He repeats them over and over again, like he's paraphrasing them. It looks like he's doing this thing that Fronto tells him to do, where he's turning an idea over and over in his mind and trying to articulate it in different ways so he understands it from different perspectives.

   9. CWChris Williamson22:09

      That's the problem I think a lot of people have with the social media, Twitterverse when it comes to deploying wisdom, that it's all, uh, all front and, uh, no substance, right? That people can use (clears throat) fancy rhetoric and fluent talking to cover up the fact that there's actually... it's a baseless argument that they're putting across, or there isn't anything deeper than that. Fluency-

   10. DRDonald Robertson22:30

       Yeah.

   11. CWChris Williamson22:31

       ... is used as a proxy for truthfulness or insight.

   12. DRDonald Robertson22:34

       Yeah, it sucks. We need to do something about that. Like, social media is awesome, like, but all good things kinda have their pros and cons, right? And one of the disadvantages of it is that it really seems to... I think there are features of social media that have made people more angry and confrontational, and it seems to have kind of really damaged people's ability to engage in reasoned argument somehow. Like, you see way more, kind of, fallacies, like ad hominem attacks, sweeping generalizations and stuff, on the internet than you'd normally expect to see just in an everyday conversation with other people. I think somehow it allows people to get away with saying irrational stuff more than... You know, you'd be challenged, perhaps, a little bit more or in a more effective way in a normal face-to-face conversation. There's another thing that happens which... You know, Socrates said an odd thing about the Sophists. Uh, here's a bit of trivia not a lot of people know about Socrates, right? Socrates used to pretend that he had a bad memory. He was kinda famous for it. He'd be like, "Oh, I've got this really bad memory." And it was part of the Socratic irony. It was feigned. And the reason he did it was because the Sophists were known for giving really long, elaborate speeches, right? And one of the risks of that is that often people disguise the weakest part of their argument by taking it for granted. It's like an unspoken premise. And then they'll build on it and build on it and build on it until everybody's kind of forgotten that the foundation was nonsense to begin with, right? And so Socrates would say, or interrupt the Sophists all the time. He wouldn't let them go for more than a sentence or two, and he'd say, "Well, hang on a minute. Let's just check."... by y- your starting point before we go any further. And that really aggravated them. Like, it was one of the things he was kind of known for and it didn't sound cool to listen to. People thought, "Well, the sophists are more entertaining. You can be passive. You just sit there and let it, kind of, wash over you." Like this colorful, like, uh, emotional speech and stuff. And Socrates kept interrupting them at the beginning and say, and not even letting them get started 'cause he'd say, "But the thing that you're assuming right from the very beginning, like, do we know for certain that that's absolutely true?" Or, "You've given this big speech about justice, but you haven't explained what justice means." Like, "Let's stop and just define, you know, the concepts that you're using before we even go any further."

   13. CWChris Williamson24:50

       I've got a quote from Zeno that may have had Churchillian drift on it, so I'm gonna stress test it with you about this exact thing. Uh, "Long, wordy, sophistic, uh, philosophical discussions were popular in ancient Rome and Greece. Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, took a totally different approach and was super concise. When someone complained-"

   14. DRDonald Robertson25:08

       Yeah.

   15. CWChris Williamson25:08

       "... that his philosophical arguments were very abrupt, Zeno agreed and replied, 'If I could, I'd abbreviate the syllables as well.'"

   16. DRDonald Robertson25:16

       Yeah. And where he gets that from is the Spartans. So we say that someone is Laconic if they are very, kind of, teus and abrupt. And Laconia is the region, like, the county or whatever, where the city of Sparta was located. So it mean- Laconic just means Spartan, right? The Spartans were known for speaking in this very concise, very brief way and the Stoics and Socrates were kind of known for modeling themselves a bit on certain aspects of, of Spartan culture. There's a really good anecdote about a sophist and the Spartan king. So there was a, a sophist, and this must have been relatively unusual, he went to Sparta and he spoke to the Spartan king. I guess the Spartan king was like, "I'm just going to find out what these guys are like. You know, I thought I'd check it out." So this guy is invited to the court and he gives a big elaborate speech, and then he says at the end of it to the king, uh, "What did you, you know, what did you think of that?" Um, and the king says, "Well, it went on so long," by Spartan standards. He goes, "I can't even remember the beginning, and therefore I didn't understand the middle, and so I can't agree with your conclusion." Like, which is a very Socratic-sounding things to say. You know, he wants to kind of go right back to the beginning of the speech and say, "Well, let's just roll it back a bit and look at where you started." I mean, the easiest way to explain that is, like I said earlier, people talk about courage or justice or wisdom, they blah, blah, blah. They say a lot of things, there's a lot of hot air, but Socrates would say, "Well, hang on a minute, we need to define what you mean by those words before we start using them." Otherwise, we kind of get lost in the weeds and we get lost in the weeds all the time on the internet.

   17. CWChris Williamson26:51

       Well... Yeah. I, I wonder why... You were talking about social media, I wonder why it is that, uh, people are able to make more obvious errors, uh, online. Maybe part of it is that the s- immediate social cost of doing something, like, you would see it in someone's face. If you start to stray or make a fallacy, you'll see someone go like that almost immediately.

   18. DRDonald Robertson27:16

       Yeah.

   19. CWChris Williamson27:16

       Whereas on the internet, you're a little bit more detached. It's bizarre because on the internet certain things are scrutinized more because the bandwidth is lower and it's this sort of staccato, I say a thing, then you prepare and you say a thing, then I prepare and I say a thing. So some of the stuff is more scrutinized, but some of the stuff is, uh, a lot less scrutinized and, uh, and able to be sort of slipped in a little bit more easily, especially when emotions are

5. 27:40 – 33:07

   What Marcus Aurelius Would Say About Social Media

   1. CWChris Williamson27:40

      running high.

   2. DRDonald Robertson27:40

      Yeah.

   3. CWChris Williamson27:40

      What do you think, uh, what do you think Marcus Aurelius would say about the current state of the internet and social media and tribalism and stuff like that?

   4. DRDonald Robertson27:48

      I, I think he'd have a lot to say about it and it may surprise people. I mean, he'd say, he'd talk about many aspects, some of the things that you've just touched on. Um, he'd say maybe on social media people are less able to interrupt you. Maybe also you can... you're not seeing their facial expression and stuff. You can also just ignore them. There are many people that post stuff out in social media and never read any of the responses. Like, so they're just kind of like spewing stuff out, but they're not really... I, in psychotherapy, you know, that to me sets alarm bells ringing. Like, 'cause people kind of need the socializing effect of getting feedback from other people. We need critics, we need disagreement in order to knock the rough edges off our thinking, basically. You know, but there are... some people are so kind of narcissistic or like they just want to put stuff out and, and not get any kind of feedback on it. And which is the opposite in the sense that the peer review, like, uh, method and, and sci- like, science is all about you put stuff out there and then you let everyone tear it to shreds. And that's kind of like how we learn stuff. But there are definitely intellectuals that avoid doing that, like the plague. Like, they don't present their ideas at conferences, you know, like, they don't engage with their critics and stuff like that. One of the things the Stoics... The Stoa is named after this public space in the agora. When the other philosophers had kind of retreated to some extent to these more private schools outside the city walls, the Stoics went, "No, we're going back to where Socrates did philosophy out in the marketplace so that anybody can come along and tell us that they think we're talking rubbish, like, and they, they can pick holes in our ideas 'cause we, we want to engage, like, with other people and we want to, to hear their criticisms rather than being, uh, afraid of it." There's a really cool quote actually from a rival school, from the Epicureans, but the Stoics say similar things, Marcus Aurelius says similar things to us. Epicurus said something deeply paradoxical. He said, "In a philosophical debate, everybody wa- wants to be the winner, right? But ironically, the person who benefits the most from a philosophical debate is the person who loses the argument." And that's a beautiful paradox. The guy that wins the argument doesn't really gain anything, but the guy that loses the argument potentially learns something. So Epicurus is like, "Why are you so desperate to win?" Like, Socrates actually talks as if he wants to be refuted. He kind of wants to, he wants o- other people to disprove him 'cause he thinks there's, you know, it's almost, almost like getting vitamins in your mind or something li- it's something nourishing and healthy about that. I think the other thing that Marcus would say that's related to this, and this might surprise people, um, unless they've just heard me saying it lots already, I think Marcus would find the internet, the striking thing about the internet is the amount of rage and anger and hatred and spite and stuff that's on it, and pa- passive aggressiveness and things. And the Stoics...... differ from modern psychotherapists that, I me- this has made me realize in a way, this is a shortcoming of my profession of modern psychotherapy. Let me back up and explain a little. (smacks lips) The stoics thought that the ma- the stoics did psychotherapy. They straight up just did psychotherapy. They wrote books called On Therapy. Um, some people find that hard to believe, like most of those books are lost now, apart from one by Seneca, which is called On Anger, which is on- stoic therapy for anger. And they thought the most urgent emotional problem to address was, was anger. Now, usually we talk roughly of there being three broad categories of negative emotion, anger, fear and sadness, right? So our anger, anxiety and depression, if you like, right? Clinicians, therapists mainly, predominantly see people with anxiety disorders and clinical depression or some combination thereof. There might be bits of anger, but people that predominantly suffer from anger tend not to seek therapy, right? So therapy has a kind of self-selecting audience to some extent. Angry people think you need therapy, buddy. Like, not me. So they're less likely to go and seek therapy. Where you see angry people is in institutions, like in prisons, in schools, in the military 'cause somebody else says, "Buddy, you've got an anger problem. You need to go and see a counselor or therapist about that." But angry people are generally resistant to seeking help 'cause they think they're in the right. There's a righteousness about it. They think they're in the right. I think for that reason, one of the risks of modern self-help, the internet is also awash with self-help, self-improvement advice. I think the downside of that is that people potentially focus all of their attention in the wrong areas and neglect, like the place where they're actually wounded the, the most deeply. So I am surprised how little discussion there is in self-improvement communities about anger. Like it kinda comes in, but it's not usually the main focus. And often people that talk about self-improvement do it in quite an angry, aggre- you know, it's surprising how hostile they can be in their conversations, like in YouTube comments and stuff like that. Um, it's like that's where the biggest blind spot is, and for that reason I like to call it the royal road to self-improvement. If people could just get past that blind spot and realize that's the biggest opportunity, like for actually transforming our character 'cause it's the most neglected part of our personality, and the stoics knew that.

   5. CWChris Williamson33:04

      Working on anger is the biggest opportunity.

   6. DRDonald Robertson33:05

      Working on anger.

6. 33:07 – 46:15

   Stoic View of Depression & Anxiety

   1. DRDonald Robertson33:07

      I think so.

   2. CWChris Williamson33:07

      What do you think the stoics would say about dealing with depression and anxiety?

   3. DRDonald Robertson33:12

      (smacks lips) Yeah, they think those are equally, uh, also very important areas. Like their main focus is on anger, but they think, uh, depression and anxiety are important as well. Um, the stoics, I mean, let's talk about some specific things that I think are actually helpful in practice. I like to chat and talk about trivia and things, but, uh, it's also good to just give people some practical takeaways, right? So in terms of coping with anxiety, there are a bunch of things. The stoics have many, many techniques actually. Um, one of them is, you know, we call it a view from above, like this idea of broadening your perspective. They were so far ahead of their time in comprehending this. So they would visualize the world as if seen from Mount Olympus or try and visualize the cosmos as a whole. Whenever they're talking about cosmology in ancient philosophy, in a sense, they're visualizing the whole of time and space. Marcus talks about this quite a lot as a psychological technique. In fact, at one point he says he does it every day. If you can imagine the effect of doing something like that every day. Now what I'd say about that is that we know now that when people become anxious or angry and also, or depressed, they exhibit cognitive biases and usually we don't realize that we have those biases because we're looking at the world through the biases. So it's like the Dunning-Kruger effect, like we're too biased to notice our own biases, right? And so when people are anxious, they engage in threat monitoring as it's sometimes called. So they'll, their focus of attention becomes quite narrow and quite selective, and they'll look for possible re- they'll look for reasons to worry. Same as angry people look for things to be pissed off about, like anxious people look for things to be frightened of, right? We... It's easy to see other people doing that, right? I mean like when you look at other people and they're anxious or angry, you think, "That guy's just looking for stuff to get angry about." It's obvious, but we don't realize when we're doing it ourselves because we're kind of, we're biased. We need other people to tell us that we're looking at things in a really biased, very selective way. The stoics realized that when we broaden our perspective spatially, chronologically, it helps to counteract this narrowing of attention that we tend to see in extreme emotions. And one of the dilemmas in modern psychotherapy is that when people have troubling thoughts, when they get upset, they usually go to one extreme or the other. So either they ruminate, right? So if somebody has an anxious thought that pops into their mind, either they spend way too much time going over and over it, like we call that w- the worrying cognitive style. So they'll go, "What if this happens? What if that happens? How am I gonna cope with it? What will I do?" And they'll, they'll, they'll, won't get to sleep for hours. They'll be lying in bed at night for hours, like, thinking about it, right, going round and round and round in circles, or they do the opposite, Chris. (smacks lips) An idea pops in their mind, you know, "What if I go bankrupt? What if my wife leaves me or something?" And they go, "I mustn't think about that. I have to block it from my mind." So they attempt thought suppression as we call it, and try and avoid thinking about it. So they either overthink it or they avoid thinking about it, and those are both highly toxic ways of coping with distressing information or ideas. And usually what happens is people kind of ricochet back and forth between either overthinking things or being extremely avoidant.And you see this all the time, and the, the sad thing is, there's gotta be a via media. There has to be another way, a third option. And the third option is to allow yourself to acknowledge the information or the thought, but in a more detached way. And one way of doing that is by gaining what we call cognitive distancing, so realizing it's just a kind of arbitrary thought. Like viewing it almost, like, from the side, like, and go, "Oh, Donald's telling himself that he could go bankrupt," or, "Donald's telling himself his marriage could collapse," or something like that. So you get a sense of objectivity about your own thoughts, like stepping to one side and noticing them like that. Aaron T. Beck, the founder of cognitive therapy said, "It's like you're looking at the world through rose-tinted glasses," or, you know, catastrophe-tinted glasses, in this case. And instead of looking through them and just thinking that's how the world looks, I feel like you took them off and looked at them, and went, "Oh, I see now those are the lenses that I was looking through," right? But another way of doing something similar is to broaden your perspective, and that allows you... that's not avoiding the thought. You're still acknowledging the thought, like... and it's not overanalyzing it and going round in circles. Like, you're not really engaging with it. You're just shifting your perspective. The key often... What both of those techniques have in common is that you continue to accept the thought, but you're shifting the perspective that you have on it, and that allows us to avoid this overthinking at one extreme or avoidant, uh, thought suppression way of coping at, at the other end. That's a takeaway that I'd like to kinda give people. You know, it's very simple. Learn to accept upsetting thoughts, but from a different perspective.

   4. CWChris Williamson38:21

      Is that slightly more for anxiety than depression, or for both?

   5. DRDonald Robertson38:24

      I think, uh, uh, what we know... I mean, I hesitate to say these words 'cause there's no panacea, but the closest thing that we have to a panacea in modern research in psychotherapy is cognitive distancing. We know that it works for anxiety and depression and, and really a whole bunch of different things, and it functions... These strategies function in a slightly different way for, for different problems, um, but they... This is used in the treatment of clinical depression. It can be used for anger as well. Now, they're pr- these are pretty general purpose strategies. They're tied up with what we call the modern... Over the past 20 years or so, the third wave in psychotherapy and evidence-based, research-based psychotherapy, and the move toward... which was influenced in part by Buddhist mindfulness meditation practices. So let me... In very plain English, uh, everybody would know when you do mindfulness meditation and a thought pops in your... You're sitting there cross-legged with your jaw sticks, Chris, and your beads on and all that, and, uh, suddenly a thought pops in your, like, your, your mind. You suddenly think, "Hang on a minute. What if nobody likes me, everybody hates me?" Or something like... you know, like, 'cause random thoughts just pop into our mind like that, like background noise. When you're meditating, you wouldn't think, "Jeez, what am I gonna do about that? Why is that? Is it something to do with my upbringing? What cau-" like, so then you wouldn't be meditating anymore, right? And you also wouldn't think, "Oh, I have to stop thinking about that." Like, "Get rid of that thought," like, "Quick, drink some whiskey or take some drugs," or something like, "Let's kind of distract myself." When you're meditating, you'd naturally think, "I have to acknowledge that thought, but then just do nothing in response to it, like, like a... just allow it to pass through my mind like the weather," right? And so it's natural when you're meditating that you adopt a detached perspective to intrusive thoughts. And so for that reason, researchers were very interested in studying that and looking at other ways it, it could be utilized. Um, in terms of broadening the perspective, I'll give you... This is my favorite cognitive therapy takeaway, right? 'Cause like there are techniques we use in therapy. I used to train therapists for a living, like for a long time in the UK. Um, some of the techniques we get therapists to do are, are a pain in the ass to teach, like they're complicated, and it's something s- that some people find easier to do than others. And then there's other techniques we use in therapy that are so simple I don't know why we don't teach them to kids, like they're like idiot-proof therapy techniques. And one of them is to say what happens next, so especially with chronic worriers. So when people worry, they'll think about feared catastrophes in the future and they'll keep replaying them over and over in their mind, but the weird thing about it is they'll focus on the worst part of an incident, and you have to ask yourself, why do you choose to begin at that point and end at that point? It's arbitrary, right? If you're thinking about th- your future, you could expand the duration of the clip so that it encompasses weeks or months or years or whatever, but you're amp- you ma- you amplify your anxiety if you focus on the setback or the worst part, and then you don't think about what would happen after, and you also prevent yourself from planning coping behavior, right? So it's a really dysfunctional thing to do. It's, it's got to do with the editing of the video, if you like, in your mind. Why would you choose that time slice? Like, that's what's kind of pathological about it. So in therapy all we have to do is to say, "Well, suppose that you did go bankrupt. What would probably happen next?" And then they might say, "Well, I'd sit at home and I'd cry a lot." And then you say, "So suppose you did go bankrupt and you sat at home and you cried a lot. What would probably happen next?" And they... and then someone might say, "Well, I'd have to start thinking of ways that I could kind of start another business or find a job," or something like that. And they say, "Okay, suppose that you did that, then what would probably happen next?" And you just keep asking that question over and over, so it forces them to broaden their chronological perspective. And usually that dilutes the feeling of anxiety 'cause they're now thinking about not just the worst part, but also bits where they're beginning to move on, so the anxiety's reduced. But it also forces them to problem solve, as we call it, and think of potential ways of coping, which is maybe something that they hadn't really, you know, taken time to think through previously. So just keep asking yourself, "Suppose even if that did happen, what would probably happen next?" And just nudge yourself past that initial catastrophic movie clip.

   6. CWChris Williamson42:44

      I like the fact that you're kind of front-loading hedonic adaptation into the mind right now.Mo- the studies say that a year after someone's become disabled or won the lottery, baseline happiness tends to go back to a similar sort of level as it was before.

   7. DRDonald Robertson43:00

      Yeah.

   8. CWChris Williamson43:00

      I'm not sure whether that's, uh, uh, how well, uh, researched and studied that is. But certainly in my life, when I think about when really good things have happened or when really bad things have happened, after a long enough time span, uh, life kind of feels the same. I, I ruptured my Achilles, uh, about two years ago.

   9. DRDonald Robertson43:17

      Yeah.

   10. CWChris Williamson43:18

       And, you know, yeah, the rehab period sucked and it was boring or whatever, but there was actually points of the recovery that I really enjoyed. There was points of the recovery where I got real senses of satisfaction, very, very good feelings from making progress. So, yeah-

   11. DRDonald Robertson43:35

       Yeah.

   12. CWChris Williamson43:35

       ... it's like a double-edged sword.

   13. DRDonald Robertson43:37

       Well, you're doing something... I think in a, in a sense there are two types of people in the world, right? There are people that learn from experience and people that don't. Like, so there are people, especially I think t- I'm kind of being slightly glib, but I think you ha- once you kind of like reach around about 40, you suddenly, you know, you potentially sit down and kind of look back on how your life has gone so far. And, and you kind of notice patterns and things in retrospect, and that is fundamentally a kind of wisdom. And, but some people don't seem to do that. Like, they don't seem to do that at all. Whereas other people very naturally, like you're doing, will just review, "So yeah, I had this accident." And then, you know, "How was it after? And I kind of adapted to it and that's how things panned out." And then you start to realize, well, maybe that's what's gonna happen in the future when I encounter other setbacks. Like-

   14. CWChris Williamson44:25

       But the bottom line is, the bottom line is that no matter what's happened to you, all of the fears that you had, all of the nightmares, all of the concerns and worry and sleepless nights and all that stuff-

   15. DRDonald Robertson44:34

       Mm-hmm.

   16. CWChris Williamson44:34

       ... anybody that's listening to this right now inevitably made it through that challenge because they're here to listen to this right now. Like, you have proof for however many years and decades you've been alive on the planet that no matter what the challenge was, you managed to get through it by the fact that you're still here.

   17. DRDonald Robertson44:50

       Yeah. I mean, another thing that we like to do, worry is one of... Actually my specialism is, uh, you mentioned anxiety, I specialize in treating anxiety disorders as a, a therapist, mainly in social anxiety, but other types of anxiety as well. And one of my favorite pieces of research on worry is that when you get people to keep worry diaries and just write all the stuff that they're freaking out about down, like keep a record of it, and then you kind of review it just for research purposes, really. Sometimes the things that researchers do just to gather information end up being accidentally therapeutic. So if we say, "Well, like, what percentage of those things actually happened? Or what percentage of them were as bad as you thought they were gonna be?" People go, "Oh, like, no, actually most of it never happened." And like, how much time, like how many hours have you spent over your life worrying about stuff that ended up not actually happening? Or if it did happen, you coped better or it wasn't as awful as you thought it was gonna be? And people will go, "Geez, I had like a large fraction of my life, like in retrospect has probably been spent worrying about stuff unnecessarily." And when you have that realization, Chris, when the scales drop from your eyes, like and you, you... Actually it's one thing someone telling you that, but it's another thing looking back on your life and going, "Geez, yeah, I had loads of wasted time, wasted years, like worrying about stuff that didn't even happen." Like, it makes you feel differently about the future and about things that are, are worrying you in the present, right?

7. 46:15 – 54:49

   How Crazy was Nero?

   1. DRDonald Robertson46:15

   2. CWChris Williamson46:15

      Speaking about depression and anxiety and stuff, just how crazy was Nero?

   3. DRDonald Robertson46:22

      Uh, I mean, like, w- first of all, I'll preface that I'm always surprised when people get upset on the internet, it's where they go to get upset, about how we can't be certain about a lot of things in history. And I think, geez, I thought everyone took this for granted. Like, this is... A premise of the conversation is we can't really know 100% for sure, right? So we're just basing it on what survives and stuff. But my- personally I think Nero was pretty crazy. Like, subsequent generations of Romans really vilified him. I mean, Marcus Aurelius uses him as an example of somebody who's crazy, a tyrant, and just dominated by his own anger and anxiety. So he, he uses Nero as like a, as code for that, as like an example of that. Um, I mean, I think Ne- Nero was a car crash. And o- one of the reasons was Nero, like, kind of instigated the second sophistic. Um, he loved Greek culture and he wanted to be an actor famously, and, uh, he would force people to come and applaud him. Like, they, they'd, he- they created a special cohort, like, of soldiers, like who would round people up at these festivals that he held and they'd stand around them with swords and like, they had to applaud Nero on stage, like reciting poetry and things like that. I mean, how fascistic like is that? It's like the Nuremberg rallies or something like that. "We're gonna execute you unless you applaud this terrible play that Nero's written or whatever." Right? It's crazy. Um, but I think part of the craziness of it is, you know, people talk a lot actually these days about narcissism. Like, I mean obviously it's always been a thing. But it's easy... One of the things that we've always known is that narcissistic individuals have a magnetism and charisma to them often. And that's true throughout history. Like, so Nero was a raging narcissist. Um, of course, like even from just what I've told you, right, it's clear this guy is a, a raging, you know, narcissist. And, uh, I think that's kind of part of the craziness. You become... This is, this is one of the fundamental things that the Stoics really warn us against, is being too preoccupied with winning approval from other people. Like, too preoccupied with what other people think of us. Nero's the extreme example of that going wrong.

   4. CWChris Williamson48:47

      So he's a vulnerable narcissist, not a grandiose narcissist then, based on what the literature would say?

   5. DRDonald Robertson48:53

      Yeah. He ended up committing suicide. Like-

   6. CWChris Williamson48:55

      Was he only, he was only 40 or something, wasn't he?

   7. DRDonald Robertson48:57

      Yeah, he was relatively young. Uh, he became emperor when he was very young, when he was a teenager. And so the, the later Romans would say one of the things that concerned them is if a, a... that Marcus was concerned about Commodus also being a very young emperor. And he said, "Well, this hasn't got a good track record," like. And actually, a similar thing happened to Commodus. The, the... I always think there's kind of, like, several ways that a Roman emperor can maintain power. Like, it, it's, it's difficult. It's a challenge, a daily challenge for how do you hang on to power in the Roman Empire? Um, you could be assassinated. There could be a civil war. So you need... ideally, you want the army to love you and be on your side. That helps. Julius Caesar had the army on his side, like, that then. He wasn't an emperor, he was a precursor of the emperors, but he, like, he had the army on his side. Um, Marcus Aurelius didn't have the army on his side initially. Like, he hadn't served in the military, but he seems to have really won them over, like, by the end. Like, they seem to have come to really revere him. You, you want to have the Senate on your side. Like, some emperors treated the senators like trash. They executed them, like, they had, um, purges of them. Whereas, like Hadrian, for example, had terrible purges where he persecuted the senators. The... uh, Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius saw themselves as working alongside the Senate more. They were viewed as kind of almost like the senators, like, you know, part, part of that like, um, you know, sharing power with them and so on. If you don't have the Senate on your side and you don't have the army on your side, you need to have the general public on your side, and the way that people did that in part was through almost turning themselves into celebrities in ancient Rome and throwing expensive gladiatorial contests that... to... like having TV shows today also, like reality TV, they would have these expensive public performances, festivals, like games to try and kind of win over the public and impress them. And I think everybody knew that was the most toxic way to try to hang on to power, like, because, like, eh, the popularity like that tends to be fickle, like, eh, people end up having to do stuff that's not really anything to do with running the state. Like, these guys like Nero and Commodus seem to kind of forget, like, about actually running the state and they become much more preoccupied with appearances. Um, and it usually leads to assassination, like, or them being overthrown in the end. And I think Marcus would have been horrified to realize the first thing that Commodus did when Marcus died was he abandoned the army, like, he alienated the Senate, and he dressed up as a... he dressed himself up. He put a, um... he had all these statues built of himself with a, a lion skin, the Nemean lion, like he was, uh, pretending that he was the god Hercules. Um, and, you know, he became a megalomaniac, like, he wanted people to worship him. And he went and fought in these gladiatorial contests like you see in the Ridley Scott movie. Like, because he was desperate to... like being a... he, he fought in the Coliseum like being a reality TV star or something like that. Like-

   8. CWChris Williamson52:06

      Did you see the-

   9. DRDonald Robertson52:07

      ... and it ended in disaster.

   10. CWChris Williamson52:08

       Did you see the Netflix series, I think it's called Roman Empire?

   11. DRDonald Robertson52:11

       Yeah. With Commodus in it?

   12. CWChris Williamson52:14

       I l- I must have watched each season of that five times. I, I don't know how historically accurate it is, but it is so entertaining. For me, that style of documentary that Netflix does, they've done World War II in color and the great events of World War II-

   13. DRDonald Robertson52:30

       Yeah.

   14. CWChris Williamson52:30

       ... in, in, in HD where you've got archive footage or, um, actors playing out what's going on interspersed with, um, experts and historians talking about it.

   15. DRDonald Robertson52:42

       Yeah.

   16. CWChris Williamson52:42

       Dude, I could, I could... that w- if that was all that was on TV, I'd be happy with that for the rest of time. It's so cool.

   17. DRDonald Robertson52:48

       I remember watching that and thinking the dramatizations are, are often kind of inaccurate in some ways, but that doesn't bother me because yeah, it's like it's a dramatization. I remember watching that and thinking I kind of liked the dramatizations better than I liked the, the talking head experts sometimes in it. Like, I kinda... you know, I thought some of the, the things that they were saying I didn't entirely, um, agree with. But I love watching things like that. When we were researching the graphic novel, I, I didn't read that. I'd never read that many graphic novels. And so I sat down and I thought, "I'm gonna read, look, a big pile of graphic novels," right? And I thought, "Geez, man, my job sucks. I've got to go to the library and just read comics all day." Like, but I couldn't do it. I found them kind of tedious. Like, I wasn't really... I was kind of struggling to get into it.

   18. CWChris Williamson53:31

       I, I've never got into them either.

   19. DRDonald Robertson53:33

       Yeah. And then, uh, I thought what I need to do is actually... sometimes you've got to approach things in a slightly roundabout way. So to research our graphic novel, I watched loads of movies. I rewatched loads of movies. I watched these kind of TV series that you're talking about, um, and I looked at them from the perspective of how could we do something similar in a comic book format? So I, I didn't get inspiration from other comics. I got inspiration much more from films and, uh, TV series.

   20. CWChris Williamson53:59

       Well, because you need to do the same thing, right? You need to set a scene. Where's the perspective? Where's the camera? Where are the protagonists?

   21. DRDonald Robertson54:04

       Yeah.

   22. CWChris Williamson54:04

       So on and so forth. What's the backdrop gonna look like?

   23. DRDonald Robertson54:07

       Oh, you can do... I mean, I think it's possible to do a graphic novel. I didn't even realize this at first, but of course, you can have a graphic novel where it's just a bunch of, uh, stick men talking if you really wanted, and, uh, you just dump a load of dialogue in it. But in the beginning, I thought, "We can't do that," right? Eh, I really... I don't want to do that. I want to have a story about Marcus Aurelius where there's a lot of action, and I want to have philosophy in it, but where we can, like, try and weave it into the action more. Like, so actually, if you took all the philosophy out of it, it would still be a really cool story. Like, I don't want a bunch of, like, stick men or a bunch of men in togas just like talking to each other loads. I want this... the philosophy to kind of emerge from the action more.

8. 54:49 – 59:54

   Releasing the Tiller

   1. CWChris Williamson54:49

      I started reading a guy called Jed McKenna last year, and he's got a book called, uh, Spiritual Enlightenment Now. So, he's a guy that says that he's awakened and is basically speaking, uh, stream of consciousness about what his life's like. He's running some sort of convent-y type thing in America, and I really, really fell in love with it. Whether the guy is awakened or not, completely, fully the, um, separation of self from everything else, like all of that, e- everything, he's, he's reached it. Um, whether that's true or not doesn't really matter because the writing to me is just so spectacular. And in it, he has this concept that he calls releasing the tiller, and he talks about how when you're in a boat, the tiller's the thing that's attached to the rudder. It's what you-

   2. DRDonald Robertson55:29

      Mm-hmm.

   3. CWChris Williamson55:29

      ... steer with. And he talks about, um, how most people grip the tiller very, very hard and uses this analogy in sailing that if you're sailing through a storm, one of the best ways to actually mo- maneuver the boat is to allow the tiller to maneuver itself, 'cause the boat will find the easiest path up and over the waves.

   4. DRDonald Robertson55:47

      Mm-hmm.

   5. CWChris Williamson55:48

      And he keeps on talking about that. And then I had Ryan Holiday on last year, and he was... I mentioned it to him, and he was like, "That's a lot like Amor Fati." You know, sort of loving your fate, about releasing the tiller, allowing yourself to be-

   6. DRDonald Robertson55:58

      Yeah.

   7. CWChris Williamson55:58

      ... sort of carried a little bit more. And I never got to speak to Ryan that much about that concept, although I did a little bit of research. So, I wondered if you could take me through what I need to know about-

   8. DRDonald Robertson56:09

      Sure.

   9. CWChris Williamson56:09

      ... loving your fate and, and where it came from and, and what you, your reflections have been on it.

   10. DRDonald Robertson56:13

       I'm glad you asked that 'cause I've got two things that pop into my mind immediately. Like, and one of them is a bit of trivia for you, but you asked me where does it come from. So, that phrase comes from Nietzsche, who was a, we think of him as a philosopher, but he was a professor of classical philology by profession, like of ancient languages. And as far as I know, no one has ever been able to trace that ph- that phrase, Amor Fati, to any surviving Latin text, right? So either it's a kind of like a phrase that Nietzsche just coined himself, um, which sounds odd 'cause it sounds very similar to... It really does sound very similar to things that Marcus Aurelius says. So it couldn't sound more stoic. Although Nietzsche, paradoxical as he is, often is kinda quite critical of stoics that seems to really rip off their ideas, uh, like really blatantly in other ways, right? Like, so, for a long time I thought, it's just this thing that Nietzsche came up with. And then I realized actually, although there's not a Latin version, there's a Greek version of that phrase. And, uh, I think it's Ɛστωρικὴ τύχη or something like that in Greek. And it, it's in, um, Johannes Stobaeus, if I remember rightly, in the list of maxims that come from the Delphic Oracle. So, people thought the Delphic Oracle was a, a woman. Again, another weird paradox. We think of Greek philosophy as mainly men. The Pythia, the priestess of Apollo was a woman, and the god Apollo supposedly spoke through her, like she was possessed by him or something. And we have all these maxims, there's like 160 odd that survive. Like, know thyself, all things in moderation, and, and the famous ones. And one of them is love your fate. And Plutarch, who was a famous philosopher, but also a priest of Apollo at Delphi, right? He says that the Pythia comes over these things that are like koans, they're like these... Most of them are two words in Greek, like, and they're very, very condensed. And he said that people have written books about philosophy many volumes long discussing them. So, they're like seeds that philosophy grows out of and becomes very verbose. To go back to what we were talking about earlier, I mean, normally it's the other way around. You take com- Marcus has taken this complex philosophy and compressing it into short phrases. But Plutarch says she would just spit out these two words and then people would go away and try and figure out what they meant and come up with a lots of different versions. For example, um, γνῶθι σεαυτόν was written and graved in the entrance to the temple of Apollo. And people think it means kind of mindfulness or like investigating your own character and stuff like that. It's a kind of s- a, um, a recurring theme in, in, uh, you know, uh, Greek philosophy, particularly in Socrates. But Seneca and Plutarch both say it's a memento mori. They say that know thyself means know that you are mortal. Like, because it's what you read as you're walking into the temple of Apollo at the entrance, before you're about to be in the presence of the immortal god Apollo. Like, so remember that you're not an immortal-

   11. CWChris Williamson59:14

       So it's not s-

   12. DRDonald Robertson59:15

       ... like you're just flesh and blood.

   13. CWChris Williamson59:15

       ... it's not to do with introspective work, reflections.

   14. DRDonald Robertson59:20

       It could be all of that.

   15. CWChris Williamson59:21

       Right.

   16. DRDonald Robertson59:21

       It could be both, right? So I guess that's what Plutarch is, means as well is, she just says something cryptic that sounds really cool. And some people take it away to mean you've got to really investigate yourself and explore this character. And other people say, "No, it means something completely different, but equally profound about remembering that you're like finite and mortal and stuff like that." So yeah, like that's, uh... I think it's really cool this idea of that people say our philosophy is dominated by men, but maybe it was a, there was a woman that was just kind of like pressing the buttons and initiating it all.

9. 59:54 – 1:06:03

   Ancient Psychedelic Mysteries

   1. DRDonald Robertson59:54

   2. CWChris Williamson59:54

      Have you read The Immortality Key by Brian Muraresku?

   3. DRDonald Robertson59:57

      The one about the kykeon, like, uh... Oh, here's another. We're on a trivia roll now, Chris.

   4. CWChris Williamson1:00:03

      I'm fine with that.

   5. DRDonald Robertson1:00:03

      Did you know, did you know that Marcus Aurelius had hardly been out of Rome, then he went and fought in, uh, along the Danube in, uh, in Austria, um, Hungary, in these countries. And then he, he eventually toured the east of the empire towards the end of his life, and he went to Athens. And during the height of the war, we're told, he made a vow that he was gonna go to Eleusis, just outside Athens, and be initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries. And that must have meant that he drank the kykeon, which is this small quantity of liquid, which some people believe contains something like ergot, like it's kind of precursor of, uh, LSD. 'Cause it's the cult of Demeter, the, the grain mother or the earth mother, the goddess of, of wheat and grain, and ergot grows naturally on wheat.... um, and so they believed that over the centuries, they created this hallucina- hall- hallucinogenic kind of liquid based on ergot that people drank as part of the ceremony. And it's weird to think that Marcus Aurelius may have drank it.

   6. CWChris Williamson1:01:11

      That's cool. I mean, I'd spoke to Brian and he, his work's fascinating. He's such an impressive guy. I was in, uh, uh, Guatemala about two months ago picking up my American visa and I went out for dinner with this guy that watches the show and he's got a huge YouTube channel in Spanish. In Spanish. And, uh, he was telling me that, um, Brian is completely fluent in Spanish. He... almost completely fluent in Portuguese. He is a full-time solicitor or some other, uh, like some sort of lawyer, law professor, and also is researching the Eleusinian Mysteries at the same time, and flying all over and going to Athens and trying to work out what's going on with ergot. And, uh, I- I was just really, really impressed with it. D- what are your thought? Do you think that this is legit? Do you think that they would've had a psychedelic brew that would've perhaps been a, a sacred ritual that many of the philosophers of the day went to do a, a tribute at?

   7. DRDonald Robertson1:02:09

      I don't know. I'm kinda keeping an open mind, but I think it's, like, uncertain. I definitely think it's possible. Um, and he says something actually that, that's true, which is generally if you speak to people in Greece, they're kind of more sympathetic to it. They're like, "Yeah, sure, of course." Like, (laughs) so there's less of- maybe less of a stigma around it. But I don't... who knows, like, whether it actually happened or not. We don't really know if Ma- when Marcus did that was almost certainly after he finished writing The Meditations, rather than before.

   8. CWChris Williamson1:02:37

      Oh, yeah. That's, that's something that we didn't, that we didn't quite clarify earlier on. So you mentioned that he's doing it when he's in basically modern-day Austria, it's freezing cold, but what's the time period? Is it, is this, uh, for, uh, o- over a long span of time or is this kind of condensed information that you have?

   9. DRDonald Robertson1:02:54

      When he wrote The Meditations?

   10. CWChris Williamson1:02:55

       Yes.

   11. DRDonald Robertson1:02:56

       Um, like our best gue- I could talk all day about the little bits of evidence that contribute towards this. There are bits of evidence that we can use to date The Meditations within a certain boundary. Like, for example, one... here's a cool bit of trivia. Like, at one point, he says, "At Corinthum," which is the main legionary fortress, uh, in modern-day Austria on the Danube. Now, when I was there, I went to Corinthum for a week doing research and I spoke to the director of archeology there, and I said, "Have you found any stuff here that might be relevant to, to Marcus Aurelius?" 'Cause often archeological remains don't tell us that much about, you know, philosopher's theories and things like that, right? Or kind of like specific stuff that we get from the text. But, um, they found a grave marker for a Praetorian Guard that's dated 171 AD and the Praetorian Guards were the emperor's personal bodyguards, so that strongly suggests that Marcus must have been in Corinthum in 171 AD, which kind of squares with other bits of evidence that we have. So he says, "I'm in Corinthum." When he wrote that in The Meditations, it, it, it may have been roundabout that time. Um, I mean, specifically I think he probably wrote it between roughly 171 and about 174 AD, and then the Civil War happened. And, uh, and I think that kind of marks, like, the end of it, roughly. But he was also-

   12. CWChris Williamson1:04:24

       But is that not a bit of a, is that not a bit of a shame, the fact that, you know, Marcus had a bunch more life to live and potentially-

   13. DRDonald Robertson1:04:31

       Yeah.

   14. CWChris Williamson1:04:31

       ... lessons to accumulate that aren't written down?

   15. DRDonald Robertson1:04:35

       Yeah. I think maybe he went and drank the kokeon and thought, "I've changed my mind about all this stuff that I wrote-"

   16. CWChris Williamson1:04:41

       It's bullshit. Bullshit. Burn it.

   17. DRDonald Robertson1:04:42

       "... about ten years ago." No, no, no. Like, I mean, it kind of looks like, especially the, people say the view from above, they thought seems kind of trippy and psychedelic, like some of the passages in The Meditations. They can imagine that he might have taken hallucinogenic substances before he wrote it. Um, he s- he took opium, but it seems like it was probably in quite small quantities. Um, Galen says he asked to reduce the dose, if I remember rightly, 'cause it was making him too drowsy.

   18. CWChris Williamson1:05:09

       Mm-hmm.

   19. DRDonald Robertson1:05:09

       He took it for insomnia and, uh, like a chronic, uh, chest and stomach pain that he was suffering, um-

   20. CWChris Williamson1:05:15

       People thought he had a, a stomach ulcer, right?

   21. DRDonald Robertson1:05:18

       Yeah.

   22. CWChris Williamson1:05:18

       That was one of the-

   23. DRDonald Robertson1:05:19

       He may have. Like, we're kind of guessing, but he talks about these pains and spitting blood and stuff, so he may have had a, an ulcer. He was pretty frail. There's a later Roman author, author that describes him centuries later in retrospect. He says he had diaphanous, transparent skin.

   24. CWChris Williamson1:05:35

       Mm-hmm.

   25. DRDonald Robertson1:05:35

       Like, so they certainly had this image of him as being kind of, like, very frail. And, like, it's often the case though, isn't it? Sometimes there are guys that are super fit and athletic and then they drop dead, like authorities or whatever, and then there's other guys that are really sickly and frail and they outlive everybody.

   26. CWChris Williamson1:05:52

       I mean, Warren-

   27. DRDonald Robertson1:05:52

       And Marcus was one of these. (laughs)

   28. CWChris Williamson1:05:54

       Warren Buffet has a-

   29. DRDonald Robertson1:05:56

       Marcus was-

   30. CWChris Williamson1:05:56

       ... a McDonald's every single day, I think.
10. 1:06:03 – 1:14:37

    How Marcus Aurelius Prepared for Death

    1. CWChris Williamson1:06:03

       too sure. So going back to the amorfoti thing-

    2. DRDonald Robertson1:06:06

       Uh-huh.

    3. CWChris Williamson1:06:06

       ... a lot of Stoicism is built around preparing for death. How do you think, uh, Marcus felt as he was dying and as death approached him?

    4. DRDonald Robertson1:06:17

       When I was writing the graphic novel, one of the things that changed about my perception of Marcus was, uh, I- I just sat up one day from working on it, and I thought... I just suddenly dawned on me, I thought, this guy must have really just woken up every morning and kind of pinched himself and thought, "Am I still alive?" Because everyone was dropping dead from the plague, this kind of variant of smallpox, we believe it was, the Antonine Plague. Um, he lost many friends and family members. He had 14 kids and half of them died before him. He... Fronto and Rusticus died. He, he could have been assassinated at any moment. There was a civil war against him.... and then he stationed himself in the Danube, at a place where we're told 20,000 Roman soldiers were killed in one day, in one of, of what would have been one of the worst defeats in Roman military history, be- probably before he went there. So, he was putting himself in danger, militarily as well. It's like, for a bunch of reasons, like, so when he's meditating on death in The Meditations, uh, I think it's interesting to realize that he was, just to put it bluntly, in an incredibly dangerous and precarious situation himself.

    5. CWChris Williamson1:07:27

       This isn't some abstract idea-

    6. DRDonald Robertson1:07:29

       Not abstract.

    7. CWChris Williamson1:07:29

       ... he's meditating on something that is at the, the forefront of his existence every day.

    8. DRDonald Robertson1:07:33

       I mean, have you ever been in a dangerous situation and f- and you, you kind of opinion, you thought, "Geez, like, ha- how do I actually survive that?" Like, I feel like Marcus did that every day. Like, he must have thought, "Wow, like, I'm still here, you know, I've survived many outbreaks, this horrible plague and stuff." So, it wasn't at all abstract for him, and, uh, and like, the other weird thing is, like I say, because he was frail, I think people... and 'cause he was famous, I think he was surrounded by people waiting for him to die. Even talk- he actually talks about that a bit in The Meditations. So, imagine what it would be like to have people gossiping all the time, "But when do you think he's gonna die? Like, I don't know, he's coughing all the time. He looks really frail. He's gonna keel over any minute."

    9. CWChris Williamson1:08:19

       (laughs)

    10. DRDonald Robertson1:08:19

        Like, imagine that's all the conversation that's going on around you, man, like for decades. Like, and so in The Medi- the Ta- Meditations, he's like, "I don't know. Maybe they're right." Like, you know, like, "Maybe I'm gonna keel over any minute." I, I think he had more opportunity than any of us to come to terms with his own mortality.

    11. CWChris Williamson1:08:38

        Okay, so let's say that you're a Stoic and you're meditating on death. Let's also say that death is at the forefront of your existence.

    12. DRDonald Robertson1:08:45

        Yes.

    13. CWChris Williamson1:08:45

        How, how do you not descend into a more hedonic style-

    14. DRDonald Robertson1:08:51

        Uh-huh.

    15. CWChris Williamson1:08:51

        ... of living?

    16. DRDonald Robertson1:08:53

        I think that's a really interesting question. Um, I mean, my experience is that that's not what it leads to, although I guess for some people it can. There's... First of all, let's preface that by saying the Stoics thought that meditating on death would lead you to embrace reason more as a gate to life, and I think part of it has to do with this kind of broadening of perspective that we mentioned earlier. It comes from the fact that I think when we contemplate our own mortality, what goes hand in hand with that is thinking about our life as a whole, rather than, you know, becoming too preoccupied with, like, moment to moment existence. Whe- when you're lying on your deathbed, you naturally tend to look back over your life as a whole, like... And I guess what the Stoics are doing is this kind of paradoxical balancing act, where on the one hand they want us to be really grounded in the present, but also, kind of at the back of our minds, also have this expansive awareness of the whole of space and time. They want us to have our cake and eat it, Chris. Like, they want us to be grounded in the present, but also aware of the totality of existence as the context within which the, the present moment takes place, and I think that changes the way that we perceive transient pleasures. Let me explain why. I'm gonna say something that I think is very profound, but- because Marcus Aurelius says it, right? There are many things over the years that I've learned in philosophy and psychology, and some of it sounds... What I've learned is some of the things that sound really deep and profound are usually BS, like, and not that deep, you know, when you kind of dig into them. But then, you know, often the most profound things are, are kind of relatively simple. Marcus talks at one point about how when people desire things, in a sense what they're doing is imagining the presence of something that's currently absent. What if I had a really nice car? I don't have a really nice car, but I'm imagining what it'd be like if I did have one. It's hypothetical. He says everyone does that kind of naturally. But he says, "What if you do the opposite and you imagine the absence of things that are currently present? Then rather than desire, you experience gratitude," right? It's a cool, neat, little rhetorical way of putting it, right? But there's also something much deeper going on there because if we expand our perspective so we acknowledge a broader context, then in addition to experiencing the presence of the things that we currently have, at the back of our mind or at the periphery of our awareness, we have to acknowledge there was a time before and there will be a time after this experience. Like, so we experience the presence and absence of something simultaneously by broadening our perspective. Sure, I have it now, like, but there was a time when I didn't have this, and one day it will be gone. Like, one day I'll be gone. So, we experience the presence, the pure presence of the present moment, but enveloped in this kind of nothingness or absence of individual things, but also of our entire life. And I think that when we broaden our perspective and we experience presence and absence of ourselves and the things we're enjoying simultaneously, it dilutes the intensity of our emotional experience, and I mean that in a good way. It kind of brings it within rational bounds, I would say. Like, and it's the same like if you're experiencing pain or discomfort, like, or pleasure, allows you... I think that perspective allows you to enjoy pleasure without being consumed by it, like, or, um, you know, without, uh, it becoming, uh, too much of an indulgence, without losing perspective. I guess that's a good way of phrasing it, allows us to keep perspective on the things that are, are causing us pain or pleasure.

    17. CWChris Williamson1:12:41

        Naval Ravikant says that desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.

    18. DRDonald Robertson1:12:47

        Yeah, it ki- like, the Stoics kind of say that as well. Um, they talk about it being... And, and modern psychology really, this is the formula really for anxiety, it's future-focused. Like, we t- the anxiety, uh, fear is the belief that something bad is gonna happen.... by other, we're going to be deprived of something that we desire. And a lot of fear is predicated on the stuff that we, we value. Like you say, you know, so in terms of society, um, most people that live in the first world are full of, consumed with anxiety about losing stuff that our parents never had to begin with. You know, like when I was a kid growing up, I love being able to say this now, you know, like, ah, we used to walk to school in the snow with no shoes and all that. You know, like when I was a kid, everything was made of wood and cost two pens, like back in the old days. But when I was a kid growing up in Scotland, we really, we really didn't have that much. We didn't have the internet, you know, like if I wanted to get books that were hard, it was hard to obtain books on philosophy in the small town that I lived in. And now we kind of take more and more stuff for granted, but we also live in abject terror of being deprived of these things. Whereas, you know, it would just bring us ba- back to the level of people throughout most of human history who are fairly content not to have central heating and the internet and the microwave oven and all this kind of stuff. Like we, we be, becoming overly attached to these things, we really set ourselves up for fear and anxiety and, and depression. It's crazy how you see people who are very wealthy and successful and then they lose it and commit suicide and you think, "But you still have more money than the majority of people, like, and more opportunity and more success." Like it's just that you had a relative loss in status. The Stoics want us to try and see through that and transcend it, I think.

11. 1:14:37 – 1:18:08

    Could Stoicism Be Cancelled?

    1. DRDonald Robertson1:14:37

    2. CWChris Williamson1:14:38

       Speaking of rich, powerful people, has cancel culture tried to come for Stoicism yet? I mean, it's a rich, white person elitist, uh, philosophy.

    3. DRDonald Robertson1:14:49

       Yeah. I love all this stuff in a way. I just kind of find it, like most things, I think ev- the key to life is paradox, isn't it? The key is to kinda, like I said before, about how can we accept a thought but without, you know, getting entangled with it? So there's gotta be like a third way. I think we have to be able to laugh at some of this stuff, but also kind of take it seriously at the same time. You know, you can't, you don't want it to get too serious, like you don't wanna laugh at it too much. It was like, it was kind of a, a, a middle road. I mean, I think some of it's kind of absurd, right? The Stoics ... Usually what people say is like the opposite of the truth. So the, the Stoics were famous for, in ancient Greece anyway, as a foreign philosophy. Like they were the immigrants. Um, Zeno was shipwrecked, he was Phoenician. Like, um, they, he's described as having dark skin. Um, like even the word that you actually use is black, but it probably just means that he was quite dark skinned. He was perceived as foreign, like very foreign, and his philosophy was perceived as a foreign import to Athens. He was a metic legally, like a, a, a, a, a permanent resident or a foreign immigrant at Athens. He wasn't an, an Athenian citizen. And most of the subsequent teachers came from what we would describe as the Middle East, now from Asia Minor. Um, so this idea that it's kind of these, this dominant tradition of white men is just historically not really accurate. Um, you know, like it's, it's if you really visualize what was going on, i- i- it's a philosophy of immigrants and people who were looked down on by the Athenians because they were foreigners, uh, uh, Athens. Um, so it's just not factually accurate to begin with. Um, is how I see it. I, ironically.

    4. CWChris Williamson1:16:40

       Well, uh, uh, pretty much everything is gonna be trampled by the cancel culture mob at some point, so I'm sure that you'll, uh, you'll probably have to defend some of the, the boundaries of Stoicism.

    5. DRDonald Robertson1:16:51

       And it's the other thing they tend to say is it's a philosophy for the Roman elite, which is kind of, there's a grain of truth in that. There's more truth ... First of all, there's both more and less truth in that than they realized. So first of all, Marcus Aurelius was elite, but they don't realize also that Augustus, the founder of the Roman Empire, was into Stoicism as well. Like, so Marcus wasn't the only emperor that was into Stoicism. And the others kind of like dabbled in it a bit as well, like, uh, Nero obviously and Hadrian, although they weren't really Stoics themselves as such. But Stoicism was like also a philosophy of poor people, uh, certainly at one point. Cleanthes, the second head of the Stoic school, watered gardens at night for a living, like really cheap manual labor that he did. He was notoriously poor. Um, he used to be a professional boxer, like, so he was this kind of, uh, you know, a- example of a, a poor working class dude, like that became a, a famous philosopher. And Epictetus was a former slave as well, obviously. And the Cynics as well lived like beggars basically. So the idea that it's just a philosophy for the Roman elite is just contrary to the historical facts basically. The Roman elite liked it, but it was also embraced by, you know, uh, poorer people and the slave class even.

Episode duration: 1:22:39