Ancient Greek Wisdom Every Man Needs To Hear - Donald Robertson

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

Why would anyone care about this old, dead white guy or whatever? He bec- I- I love Socrates. I- I love Marcus Aurelius, but Socrates is, like, the next level, you know. I- I really am excited to- to be able to talk and- and write about him and stuff. Socrates was a... I'll tell you why. This is gonna seem like an odd answer, right? There's Eric Clapton, right? And guys like that. And then there's Jimi Hendrix, right? Eric Clapton's an amazing guitarist, but Jimi Hendrix, to me anyway, sounds like he's from another planet, right? Jimi Hendrix took his guitar to bed with him. He woke up in the morning, strapped his guitar on and fried eggs wearing his guitar. He went to the lavatory wearing his guitar, right? Psychologists call that time on task. Like he was constantly practicing and stuff, like he was obsessed with it. Socrates reminds me, in that solitary regard, of Jimi Hendrix because the way he's described to us is that he's a guy who abandoned everything else and just spent all day, every day, discussing what he considered to be the most important questions in life with anybody. The- the greatest intellectuals that he could find in the, uh, in the known world. Prostitutes, uh, politicians, uh, slaves, you name it. Everybody from all walks of life. So he had... He was like the Jimi Hendrix of philosophizing. Like he never took his guitar off. He was constantly doing... I can't imagine someone in modern society spending that amount of time really analyzing the contradictions in someone else's thinking. So Socrates, to me, is a kind of unique individual. And it- it comes through. We don't know, there's this thing called the Socratic problem, that we don't know but we should acknowledge it at the beginning, that we don't know for sure how close a representation Plato's Dialogues or the other sources that we have are of the real Socrates. But I think his character comes through to some extent. The- those dialogues are probably semi-fictional, like they're embellished a bit. But the real guy kind of shines through to some extent, and he must have been an extraordinary individual. He's somebody who has a tremendous capacity for thinking outside the box, for spotting logical contradictions, and he said some of the most radical things in the history of Western philosophy. Not only that, I see him as the godfather of modern self-help and self-improvement psychology or the great-great-granddaddy of cognitive behavioral therapy. So as a- a psychotherapist, a cognitive behavioral therapist, you know, I- I look to Socrates as somebody who stands at the very origin of our tradition. But also, I think in some ways we've kind of gone astray, in ways that he warned us about. So by going back and looking at what he originally said, I think we can figure out maybe, and see beyond, some of the mistakes that we might have made along the way.