Mastering Emotions with Stoic Wisdom and Socratic Thinking (Live Coaching with Donald Robertson)

Hey there, it's Michael, the head coach and president at Heroic. And I am so fired up to be sharing this luminary guest faculty session of Donald Robertson. It's the fourth time that he's joined us for a session with our coaches. Almost 150of those sessions now with world class authors, experts, peak performers, psychotherapists, leaders, all sorts of incredible folks who have come to help our coach community be better versions of themselves and support others in doing the same. But this session is particularly special and Donald just wrote a new book. You can pre order it today. How to Think Like Socrates. I cannot wait to dig into the wisdom. We've had a couple of conversations about this and the more I learn about the power of it, the more excited that I get. Make sure you watch till the end. The last 20 or 30 minutes get just increasingly more powerful. So the entire session is amazing. It increases through the end. You're going to get a ton out of it. Fired up to see many of you joining us and in Athens, Greece with Donald. That trip's coming up in just a couple of weeks. So can I wait to see many of you in person on the ground in Athens as we literally walk the places where these philosophers walk. The birthplace of democracy, Socrates, the Stoics, all of that. Can't wait for that. And to spend time together in person with Donald and Brian in Athens. But this husband's amazing. I hope you get a ton out of it. Check out the book, check it out at Barnes and Noble. Local bookstores like to support those local bookstores. And yeah, enjoy the session. Much more from us soon. What's up everybody? Welcome in. Thank you, Nat. Gita. Gita is in the pole position today. Ariel, great to see you. Anthony, great to see you. Kathy. Looking blurry, Kathy, but I see you there. Karen, Beth, Marcus, Aurelius, Claire, Timmy B. Shannon and friend Karen. Annie. So great to see all of you. Monica Kerr. Look at scroll, scroll, scroll. Fired up today. What was that?

That was awesome. Let's see the voice of God or something.

Yeah, let's get the, let's get the Perfect. All good. Fired up. Welcome back, heroic coach, coaching luminaries. Donald Robertson joining for nat. Can you confirm number four? I'm almost sure it's number four. We've also had heroic chats. Donald, you are an absolute joy and just such a fountain of brilliant wisdom. By the way, I noticed we've chatted a little bit about how to think like Socrates. Today we're going to go deep on how to think like Socrates. You Made a joke when you joined us for the last time. We were talking about our upcoming trip to Athens and the place of location. I was trying to bring up the book cover and it was my four year old, four day old daughter who popped up and you said, I didn't catch it live. You said, oh, there's a picture of young Socrates there. And I didn't. And I didn't catch it until the recording. So brilliant sense of humor as well. We've got notes on a ton of your books. How to think Like a Roman Emperor, the Philosophy of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Got a ton of plus ones, almost 20 plus ones, ton of quotes. You've had such a big impact on us and how we think about things. One of the world's best, if not the world's best. And I'm allowed to say that. I know that you can't say that, but I can say that cognitive behavioral therapists taking us actually using those concepts and applying it to our life. Right. Going from being a librarian of the mind to being a warrior of the mind. How do we apply these tools in our lives and how to think like Socrates. I'll tell you what, the more I've dug into this, the more excited I am to personally learn how to think like Socrates and to think more Socratically in my own life, to approach things more Socratically in my own life. To have that sense of both brilliant wisdom and then the kind of playful curiosity and even a little bit annoying, right?

Of like, yeah, well, Socrates can be a bit annoying sometimes. They did execute him eventually. Yeah. I was going to say that was such a nice introduction. I'm going to make sure I get recording of it and play it to my wife Casey so that she hears all these nice things that you've been saying about me. So I'm very flattered and I'm very excited to be back again. You know, it's great. I always enjoy talking to you, Michael, and to the, you know, the rest of your coaches and stuff because you're all people that are really interested in this stuff. You know, like you're an enthusiastic bunch and that's, you know, that's really. That goes a long way. That's the main thing. And so the fact that you're interested 2,400 years later and this kind of annoying, controversial Greek philosopher. There were a lot of people that didn't like Socrates back in the day because he asked too many questions and he kind of rocked the boat sometimes. But here we are 2,400 years later. Still trying to understand some of the things that he was saying. His pearls of wisdom. We're still digesting, I think. So looking forward to a deep dive. I like the sound of that.

Yeah. And I want to start with one of the biggest shifts for me in a genuine, like, perspective shift where I had shared with you previously, when I'd read Socrates or some of the dialogues, it was like this. What are you trying to tell me, Socrates? Let's get to the point. What's the thing you're trying to teach me? What's the end goal? And this shift round. No, no, no. In many ways, it's not even ever about. There's some things that he's trying to do, but it's much more about the journey. It's about the line of inquisition. So that was such a powerful shift for me, and I just really appreciate that and figured it'd be a good.

Place to kick us off, a good place to start. This is, in a way, it's quite a simple aspect of what Socrates was saying, but it's something that people struggled with at the time and still struggle with today. And I think one way of explaining it, Socrates tends to. Because he asks questions, he doesn't usually just give us. He does say a lot of cool sound bites, but he doesn't try to wrap his wisdom up in sound bites. The sophists did that so they would have slogans and maxims and they gave speeches and people would just memorize them verbatim and then go around repeating them. Right. But Socrates thought that was problematic. It was kind of too passive. He said, what you get then is just a bunch of opinions that you've absorbed from other people without really understanding the reasons why they would say those things. And so for Socrates, wisdom isn't just about opinions. You can't wisdom just by reading a book and memorizing what it says and regurgitating it or remembering a handful of slogans or something like that. So for Socrates, wisdom is much more of a dynamic process. It's like a cognitive skill. Like, it's a way of thinking, and it's a skill that he practiced all day long, every day. I said this. Everyone always thinks it's kind of weird when I say this, but I really mean it. Socrates reminds me, in a weird way, of Jimi Hendrix, Right? Because Jimi Hendrix, of whom am I also a great admirer. People say Jimi Hendrix famously took his guitar to bed with him. He woke up in the morning and he strapped his guitar on. He'd go to the lavatory Wearing his guitar, he'd be frying eggs at the cooker with his guitar still strapped on. So he had a lot of what psychologists call time on task. And one of the things that really jumps out at us about Socrates from the way he's described is a phenomenal amount of time on task. Like he quit his day job, as it were, and dedicated his life to doing philosophy. He said the unexamined life is not worth living. And so he dedicated his entire life, all day long, every day, to examining his life. And he did it in a very dynamic way in conversation and dialogue with his friends. So he's constantly developing these dialectical skills, like these critical thinking skills. He's developing the Socratic method. He doesn't just sit down and read a book or something like that. He's always debating everything. He's always encouraging people to question him very deeply. And he did that every day. Like even in the trial, he can't stop himself. He starts doing philosophy in the middle of the trial. And then when he's in prison and he's awaiting execution, his friends come around to visit him and he's still doing philosophy with him. He's practicing this cognitive skill that he's always developing. And I believe that there's some truth in that. I don't just think it's kind of artistic license. You know, the things that we're told about Socrates seem to portray somebody who seems incredibly skilled at thinking up counter examples to assumptions that other people are making. He seems very sharp and very creative and very good at spotting contradictions. Like somebody who's practiced all day long, every day, a la Jimi Hendrix.

Time on task can't help. And that for the true philosopher, right, it's not, let me dedicate some part of my life to philosophy and living a good life, but, but let me look at dedicating everything to it. And then like what's left over can be for, for the rest of having that, that full, full commitment. You, you make a connection too between, obviously you've done a lot around Stoicism. Stoicism is making a massive popular resurgence, right? The, the Stoicism in the, in the modern languages. Oh yeah, like jumping in, you've got all the different practitioners and, and authors. It's like it's becoming very, very trinity and popular power for a good reason. And you take this step back and say, let's look at actually Socrates and the contribution that he made, some of those underlying principles that the Stoics actually took and read with. So can you make that Connection for us.

Yeah, Socrates is like the godfather of Stoicism, if you like. You know, we have several accounts that suggest that the Stoics saw themselves as part of the Socratic tradition or. Or follows a Socrates. The most obvious example of that is Epictetus, who goes on and on about Socrates and tells his students repeatedly that they should try to emulate Socrates and take him as their supreme role model. And he names other philosophers that he admires, like Diogenes the Cynic and Heraclitus, but he mainly looks up to Socrates as his kind of number one role model, and we kind of get that. And Seneca gives us a list of his role models at one point, and the first one he mentions is Socrates. And Marcus Aurelius mentions Socrates about almost as often, I think, as he mentions Epictetus. So it's interesting. The Stoics tend to talk about Socrates more than they talk about Zeno or Chris Ipus, the founders of their own school, interestingly. So they take a lot from him. It may be that they are more influenced or equally influenced by Xenophon's Socratic dialogues than by Plato's, perhaps. So one of our main sources, our main source for knowing about Socrates is the dialogues of Plato, famously. But we also have loads of dialogues from Xenophon, a slightly older student of Socrates, who is a famous Athenian general. And the Stoics are quite into Xenophon's version of Socrates, who tends to be kind of more down to earth. He's not as into metaphysics, he's kind of more into practical, applied ethics and stuff. And the dialogues are shorter and easier to read, incidentally. So Socrates, for instance, influenced the Stoics in a number of ways. The most famous Stoic slogan is that people are not upset by events, but by their opinions about them. Well, in the next sentence, after Epictetus says that, he immediately goes on to refer to Socrates. And I think that he does that. He uses Socrates as an example of this because Socrates mentions the same idea in both Plato and Xenophon's dialogues. So this idea probably didn't originate with the Stoics. They're probably deriving perhaps their most famous idea from Socrates and also their ethic, which is kind of really the cornerstone of the whole philosophy. Cicero said that the Stoic ethics, their concept of virtue, was really the foundation of the entire philosophy. They get that largely from Socrates as well. Particularly there's a Platonic dialogue called Euthydemus, where Socrates. I'll tell you the argument very briefly, because it's so Important, if you bear with me. He asks a young man to list all of the things that contribute to flourishing. Basically cut a long story short. And he says, well, noble birth, wealth, status, health, good looks, all that kind of thing. He's like, everyone knows these are all things that contribute to a good life. And Socrates says, let's start with wealth. I can see how wealth would be a good thing if it was in the hands of somebody who's wise and virtuous. But what if you take a big pile of money and give it to somebody who's foolish and vicious? Surely they would just use it to do foolish and vicious things. So all that wealth really does is give you more control over your environment. And whether that's good or bad depends on whether you're wise or foolish. Right? And he says, spoiler alert. The same applies to all of the other external goods that you mentioned. Right? So all of these things are really external advantages or opportunities. And what makes them good or bad is the way that we use them either wisely and virtuously or foolishly and viciously. And this simple little argument we can see really influenced the Stoics and became central to their whole philosophy. And that's why they made it a central principle of Stoic ethics that virtue or wisdom. Moral wisdom is the only true good and externals you might prefer or disprefer. But they're merely kind of advantages in life. They're not intrinsically good in the sense of being the goal of life.

Yeah, we come back to that often, as you know, with that. This is a 2000 year old challenge, right? The challenge of being seduced by fame, wealth, hotness, the likes, the followers, the social media that's bringing forward those external goods and trying to convince us that that's the goal of life. Right. Can we come back to. Can we come back to virtue in that foundation in Socrates? So Socrates, godfather of Stoicism. Right. Very, very highly cited. And some of their biggest ideas have their origins in Socrates. Socrates in many ways is also the godfather of cbt. He was a practicing cognitive behavioral therapist thousands of years before that was a thing.

Yeah, I mean, it might be. This is my point of view as a therapist, and maybe some academics would think I'm overstating this, but I really mean it. When I read some of the Socratic dialogues, particularly some of the ones in Xenophon, I thought, he's clearly doing something that I can only describe as a precursor of cognitive therapy. And so there are bits where Socrates is talking about to great intellectuals like Protagoras, about more abstract concepts. But there are also dialogues where he talks to his friends and his family members. For example, there's one where he talks to his teenage son, Lamprocles. And Lamprocles big abstract metaphysical problem is that he gets really annoyed about his mum nagging him.

I cannot resonate with that at all.

And that sort. So that's what the whole dialogue is about. This teenage kid getting really wound up because his mum nags him too much. And so Socrates uses these really, what I consider to be incredibly artful questions to get Lamprocles to realize that he's confusing his impression of his mother with what he knows to be the reality about her. So on the one hand, she comes across as being unbearable and hostile when she's nagging him. On the other hand, when he thinks about it, he realizes that his mum has sacrificed a huge amount for him and really, really cares about him. So he has these two kind of conflicting perspectives. And Socrates helps him to kind of reconcile this and to see beyond the appearances that he's getting frustrated with and understand his relationship with his mother at a deeper level. And so that he's doing relationship counseling, he's doing family therapy, right? He really is in those dialogues. That seems kind of quite obvious to me. And the core of it is the Socrates, generally speaking, seems to take for granted what I would call a cognitive model of emotion. So he doesn't think generally that anger and fear are just kind of blobs of energy that flows, float around, or build up pressure inside you. He thinks anger and fear are deeply entwined with our beliefs and our judgments, the same as the Stoics did. The Stoics are deriving this idea from Socrates. And so therefore, philosophy becomes a therapy, right? Because if our beliefs make us angry and our beliefs make us frightened, our beliefs make us depressed. Then questioning those beliefs, examining them and trying to figure out whether they're rational or irrational, and figuring out a more helpful way of interpreting different situations, you know, might be the key to overcoming some of these emotions and replacing them with healthier ones. And another, an aside I'd make, there's a dialogue by Plato called the Protagoras where Socrates, in all honesty, he has this weird and quite convoluted conversation with Protagoras, who was the first great sophist, a great famous intellectual. And Socrates goes through this process where he kind of almost invents, he almost shows you the process of him inventing a form of cognitive therapy that we actually call problem solving training, or Problem solving therapy today, pst. It's got to do with weighing up the pros and cons, short term and long term, of different courses of action. So Socrates gives a whole rationale for why we would do this. He calls it a rational system of measurement. And what he calls a rational system of measurement in that dialogue, and he says it would be really important to. Overcoming irrational fears is basically essentially the same thing as what we now call problem solving therapy, which we have research studies to show that problem solving therapy is very effective as a treatment for clinical depression, for instance. So not only does he happen to be doing, in a number of different ways, something that preempts cognitive therapy, he actually leads us through the process of how he arrived at this method.

And what is the. So weighing up the pros and cons, what's the process for that one?

He says one of the problems that we face is that in the same way that a sound appears louder when it's close and quieter when it's far away, or that a fire seems brighter when it's close or dimmer when it's further away, pleasures seem more enticing when they're close and less so when they're further away. And pains are less scary when they're far away and they have a greater effect. And psychologists today call that temporal discounting. It's a cognitive bias. So Socrates says a wise person would know that and so they'd make efforts to compensate for it, so they'd be more careful to weigh up the longer term consequences of different courses of actions because we perceive them more dimly normally, but nevertheless, eventually the error that we would fall into if we were lacking in discipline and temperance. What we do would be to go to sacrifice our long term interests in favor of short term avoidance of pain or short term hit of pleasure. So we might do something like eating candy that's pleasurable short term, but it might be, causes a lot of pain in the long term. So self discipline, you know, in a way is about seeing beyond the kind of immediate, salient pleasures and pains that we have and thinking more about the more distant, the dimmer, longer term consequences. Socrates seems to think that's the key, not only to self discipline, but also to courage and temperance and wisdom in general, at least in that dialogue elsewhere. He thinks there's more to it than that, you know, but that's enough to show he's invented a form of cognitive therapy right before our eyes.

Yeah, seeing that future that we might move towards as a result of making different kinds of choices in this moment. Are there any questions that he comes back to on a repeated basis that you've found yourself or Socrates? You know, people often, they listen to Brian's plus ones every day as philosophers. Sometimes Brian's voice is in my head. Has Socrates voice been in your head? And what is he saying?

Yeah, I think I often think about different things that Socrates has said. Is there a particular question? Yeah, there are lots. And some of them are kind of quirky. One of the ones I like to talk to kids, like my own kids and other people's kids, chat about philosophy. I think if it's presented in the right way. Many of the things that Socrates says, like the parables in the New Testament are. They're so kind of agrarian and kind of mundane. Like, they're almost like Aesop's Fables in a way. Like, they're quite relatable to children. So Socrates will say, one of my favorite little quips is that he says to his friends. Apparently he liked to say to his friends, if you were a shepherd, would you know how many sheep you have? Right? And they say, well, if you're a shepherd, you basically have one job that's counting sheep, right? And not losing a sheep every so often. So shepherds are pretty good at counting sheep. Like, you know, they. They would normally know exactly how many sheep they've got and whether a wolf has eaten one when they weren't looking or not. And then Socrates says, okay. He usually starts off with what seems like a silly question, right? And then it suddenly starts to get a bit weirder. And he says, okay, so what's more important, friends or sheep? And people would say, well, like, generally speaking in life, friends are more important to us than sheep are. And so. And then Socrates says, well, how many friends have you got? And then people get stuck. They experience what. What Plato calls aparia, which is a kind of confusion that people often said they had. And they'd be like, well, I. Like, I don't know exactly. I mean, I've never really counted them. And Socrates would say, but you said that friends are more important than sheep. And a shepherd would know exactly how many sheep he's got, but you don't know how many friends you've got. And they would say, well, they might say, well, it's a kind of fuzzy concept. I've not, like, clearly defined what a friend is. And then Socrates would say, well, that's weird because you said friends are, like, really important, but you've never really thought about how you would define what one is. And Whether you include some people or exclude others from, from what you consider to be, surely it would be something that you would have spent time thinking about, right, if it was that important. And so he was really good at asking questions like that that highlight the way that we've neglected to clarify certain concepts that we take for granted in everyday life. He was good at making us aware of our own ignorance in a way that I think is quite helpful and healthy.

What other questions, what other parables, phrases have you found just popping up for you as you navigate this modern world?

Well, let me see. I think there are lots and lots of different examples I can give. I think one of them, which we'll probably come back to, Socrates in a dialogue written by Xenophon, is talking to a young guy called Euthydemus. I love this dialogue because Euthydemus is like probably about 15 years old and he's kind of embarking on adult life in Greek society. And he has a collection of books that's very extensive, that would be the ancient Greek equivalent of a self help or self improvement library. He says he's collecting the maxims of wise men in this library that he has. And Socrates is like, wow, that's awesome. Like, he praises him, he says, I think that's amazing that you've dedicated yourself to buying all these expensive books and really studying them. And then he says, what do you think is the most important quality that you want to develop in self improvement terms? And he says, justice, because he wants to be a great statesman and politician. So I need to understand the nature of justice. And Socrates asks him to define justice and shows within about two minutes that he doesn't really understand that much about it, right? So by questioning him about whether something's just or unjust, Socrates shows that all this kind of passive information that he's acquired from the books hasn't really helped him to understand the subject. He needs to set an exam, as it were. He needs to be questioned and to question himself, to put his, his knowledge to the test. And Euthydemus says later in the dialogue, once his brain is kind of fried by this, he says to Socrates, look, okay, I need to fix this, right? Where do you think I should start examining myself if I'm going to really improve my, my own character? And Socrates says, look, start by asking what's good and bad, right? And like fundamentally, and the Greeks by that mean what is good for us, what contributes to flourishing and what's, you know, contrary to that, like, what's fundamentally benefiting us are Healthy for our well being, our flourishing in life. This is your basic question, like there's other ones about the nature of justice, nature of courage that are kind of secondary to that. But your core question is what contributes to flourishing and what's antagonistic to it. I remember there's a book by the Dalai Lama called the Art of Happiness where somebody says, what's one of the most important questions you can ask yourself? And the Dalai Lama just says of anything that you're doing, ask yourself, does this contribute to my long term happiness or does it do the opposite? Right. And so Socrates is kind of saying to Euthydemus, this is your starting question. And then he goes again through a list of different things that most people would assume contribute to flourishing. And Socrates asks him, under any circumstances, could you imagine that wealth might do the opposite of contributing to flourishing? Could physical health sometimes contribute to flourishing, but might sometimes it do the opposite? So these kind of questions asking us to look at things from a different perspective, question our assumptions and particularly the values that we take for granted. Like, that's really, to me, the core of the questions that Socrates is asking. Like, it would be a bit like if I was going to paraphrase it, this isn't how he phrases it, but it's like he's saying, are you sure that that's always a good thing?

Right?

That's in a sense the gist of what his questions are driving at, right? What are the things that you're actually pursuing in life? Are you sure that that's always a good thing?

Right?

Wealth, reputation? Are you sure that that's always a good thing? Is that really the goal of life? So getting people to question their own values quite deeply. This inspired an approach to therapy that's been around since the 1970s that we call values clarification. And then it kind of fizzled out a bit, but in the last couple of decades it's become really topical again. And we now know values clarification seems to be quite important again in the treatment of clinical depression. But, but also in, it may benefit people in a number of other ways.

And this, this sense of, of focusing on the good, good being pro flourishing, it contributes to flourishing versus antagonistic having that long term arc. Right? To see the, the choices that I'm making now, are they contributing to long term flourishing over time? Right. Having that, that from that, that previous piece that you shared with us and being able to make that connection between the choices that I make, are they helpful? Are they not helpful? And then to, it's not that the things that we might be pursuing are bad per se, but if they're not good all the time, then it's not the root level that, that we want to be driving us. And you said time on task for Socrates was really time on task for trying to answer that question and get at that question.

And yeah, the way he puts it is I should be talking to my friends all the time about the most. The way he phrases it, which I quite like, is he says we should be talking about the most important things in life. Right? We should be spending more of our time examining the most important questions in life. So he talks about the nature of justice, the nature of wisdom, the nature of human flourishing. He doesn't beat about the bush. Well, he does a bit sometimes, but generally his conversations are always revolving around these really four questions. The interesting thing is modern academic philosophy sometimes kind of goes down a bit of a rabbit hole and loses sight a little bit of some of these questions. The feeling I had when I first started reading Socrates, Plato and Xenophon was that we were getting back to really central questions. Actually, if you don't mind, I'll tell you another little story about a different type of questioning. It's kind of related. There was another 15 year old boy called Crotobilus that's also in Xenophon's dialogues, and he comes to Socrates saying, can you help me make good friends? Like to network. And Socrates says, well, what are the qualities that you would most look for in a good friend? So again, it's an easy question initially to answer. So Krytobalus says, well, they'd lend me money if I was broke and they'd come and visit me if I was sick and you know, maybe if I was act active.

These poor, these poor people after the first question, like, I know their dialogue is written this way, but they always seem to come up with an answer that's like a softball, right?

Yeah. And they, they always kind of think Socrates is a bit of a dimwit at first, like. So they're like these questions, these are dumb questions, Socrates. I mean, obviously you'd want a friend, you know, to come to run to your house for dinner and you know, like to tell you if you thought they thought you were making a mistake about something and bloody, bloody blah. And then Socrates says, well that sounds, sounds a bit right. How many of those qualities do you exhibit yourself? And Kratopoulos is like, well, not very many of them. I mean, maybe none, right. And so Socrates says, well you've Got this all completely back to front then, haven't you? So you asked me, someone who has none of the qualities of a good friend, to introduce you to people who are good friends. And to do that I'd have to lie and pretend that you would make a good friend yourself. And they're going to figure that out eventually and then they're not going to trust me as a matchmaker of friends anymore. They're just going to get disillusioned in you. He said, what you should have done is ask me how you could become a good friend. That's the question that you should have asked me. And Kratobalus is like, well, okay, I see that now. I mean, maybe you're right. So how do I become a good friend? And so Socrates says, well, let's now discuss that and work on your own self improvement. Because if you had the qualities you've just described, people will be falling over themselves to introduce you to everybody that they know, right? So you kind of ask the question the wrong way around. It shouldn't be like, you know, how can I find good friends, but how can I become one? And this is related to a famous slogan that's attributed to Socrates, which is, we should be as we wish to appear. So rather than trying to figure out how to persuade people that we're likable or how to appear like we'd be a good friend, Socrates says you should be asking yourself you can, how you can in reality actually become a good friend. Not how can I appear confident, but how could I actually be confident in reality? He says we're misdirected by focusing too much on appearances. We've got to keep dragging ourselves back to these core questions about the type of person that we actually are in reality. How could I to be as I wish to appear? That's what you should be doing, Gretopolis, not just trying to appear like a good friend, but actually trying to become a good friend. And reality.

The.

A great deal of the, the advice that Socrates gives to his friends we would now describe as resembling what we call the Golden Rule. So the Golden Rule is usually associated with the New Testament, where it says, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. And the famous thing about it is you'll find ideas, moral guidance similar to that in almost all world religions and almost all ancient philosophies, but in particular in the Stoics and in Socrates. You find the Socrates is pretty emphatic about it. He doesn't kind of phrase it as concisely as that. But he's always encouraging people to identify the qualities that they admire in other people and then begin to act that way themselves, right? So if you want somebody to be a good friend towards you, you should take the first step, he says, and begin acting that way towards them. It's more important for you to exhibit those qualities than as for you to obtain them from somebody else. So the, the golden rule, I think is important because many people, when they read philosophy, particularly if they're reading Stoicism, I'll often hear people saying, well, it's all really interesting, but I'm not really sure what moral guidance the Stoics are giving me. It seems a bit abstract, like, you know, what is justice and what, what, what is virtue in practice? You know, and there are subtle and complex aspects to ancient ethics, right? There's no getting away from that. But at the same time there's this very simple moral guideline that underlies a lot of it, which is that we shouldn't be hypocrites, we should have integrity and we should treat other people as we would like to be treated by them. Socrates sees this simply as a contradiction. It's what we call in modern therapy a double standard. We have this thing in CBT called the double standard strategy, where you're applying one standard to other people and a different standard to yourself. Critobulus was guilty of double standard, right? He applied one standard to other people, expecting them to live up to this ideal of friendship, but he didn't try to live up to it himself. And Socrates said this is a contradiction, right? Or if you like, it's a kind of moral hypocrisy, right? And once you realize that you're doing that by resolving that contradiction like you're going to make quite significant moral psychological progress. You know, that's what your self improvement should really consist in.

And do we, do we have evidence or what evidence is there that Socrates started by applying all that to himself, right. And that he was on this wanting to be the good friend, the good moral upright, kind of. Did he have a double standard or did he practice that?

He definitely applies his method to himself. We don't have a lot of clear information about the origin of his method. Actually, Plato gives us kind of two slightly conflicting accounts. Maybe they can be made compatible. And one of them, he says that Socrates derived his method from this pronouncement that was made by the God Apollo at Delphi. It says, no man is wiser than Socrates. And Socrates thought, well, I need to go and find someone that's wiser than me and disprove this, because this can't be right. So he says, that's how I developed my method of questioning, by going to people that were acclaimed for their wisdom and interrogating them and putting them to the test. And he said something kind of funny about that, but I think it's true. He said, I found paradoxically that the people who had the biggest reputations for wisdom and the people who claimed to be wise were often the least wise. And other people who had no reputation at all for wisdom, like, often turned out to be closer to wisdom than they were, right? And he even gives good reason for believing this. And it's that when someone has a reputation for wisdom, they have to defend it, often, right? And, you know, because if you want to defend your reputation like the sophist, you make a lot of money by claiming to be wise. You can't afford to be wrong. But if you can't afford to be wrong, you can never grow or learn, right? So Socrates thought a kind of intellectual humility that poorer and, you know, less people of lower status, often prostitutes and slaves, he was talking to and people of relatively low status in Athenian society like he found, exhibited more wisdom than famous politicians, poets, and great teachers because they didn't have anything to prove. So they were more open to admitting their mistakes and therefore correcting them, like ironing out their contradictions. A lot of the intellectuals ran away from Socrates or they kind of tried to avoid engaging him in debate because they didn't want to be shown up, right? So one of the things that Socrates is famous for is this kind of intellectual humility. He said, you know, the greatest problem that we face is something that he describes as double ignorance. So again, in typical paradoxical fashion, Socrates says ignorance itself isn't that much of a problem. I might be ignorant about medicine, but as long as I know that I'm ignorant about medicine, then I would be motivated to go and find an expert and consult their opinion. Perhaps I might be ignorant about how to fix the engine in my car, but as long as I recognize that I'm ignorant about it, then I'm motivated to go and find a car mechanic and get his advice and try and find a good mechanic. But if I believe falsely that I know how to fix cars when in fact I'm ignorant about it, or if I falsely believe that I'm an expert on medicine when in fact I'm ignorant about it, then I'd be guided by my ignorance into making many mistakes and probably Often contradicting myself. So it's like the Dunning Kruger effect, a little bit like. So, you know, Socrates was a kind of forerunner of that. He said, the real problem is when you're ignorant of your ignorance or double ignorance, because then you allow your ignorance to guide you. Or you could call it a form of intellectual conceit or arrogance. So the core of his method, in a way, is about curing us of this intellectual conceit and exposing the limits of our knowledge. That's why Socrates said, I know only that I know nothing. He said, I realized I was only wiser in a paradoxical sense. The oracle said, no man is wiser than Socrates. And Socrates says, well, I don't really know that much, but these guys don't either. And so the only sense in which I'm wiser than them is at least I recognize that I'm not an expert. Whereas these guys think that they're experts on stuff that they don't really know anything about. These politicians don't know anything about the nature of justice or what's in the interests of society, but they pretend that they do. They act as if they do, you know, and usually it's easy to expose their ignorance. And the weird thing is, by the way, this is true of what many politicians today. A lot of the arguments that Socrates puts forward are very simple, like. But it's kind of interesting why people don't present them in the same way today. So Socrates used to say to politicians, how much time have you spent studying the nature of justice and what constitutes the welfare of society? And they would say, well, like, nope, I haven't really. And so Socrates would say, well, what makes you think you're qualified then to be a great statesman? And to you've gotten to see no idea what's good for society. That would be like a physician saying that he's no idea what's good for your physical health. He hasn't spent any time studying it, but he's going to prescribe drugs to you. So you're in exactly the same position. Don't you think it's weird that you spent zero time and effort ever trying to figure out what's in the interest of society, but you want us to put you in a position of prescribing things for society's welfare? And so in these dialogues, the people he's talking to would often feel quite ashamed about that. And sometimes they just get really annoyed with him and make him drink hemlock. And other times they think, okay, fair cop, you're Right. I should know about this stuff. Maybe I need to begin studying it. So anyway, I digress a little bit, but these are some of the things that kind of get me excited about Socrates. The relevance of what he's saying to our, the modern world, I think is sometimes quite startling. And often the questions he asks are pretty simple.

Yeah, we'll tap back on that. I want to make sure that I close the loop on. You said there was two origin stories, one of no one is wiser. And so there's this combination of, in my mind it's the playful, competitive, like, oh, let me go find somebody. This can't be too. Let me find them. And then, oh, wow, it's my not having double. It's my knowing that I don't know much. It makes me wise. But what's the other?

Socrates is an oddball and it takes a while to get used to him. He's not like other. He's not like Marcus Aurelius, he's not like most intellectuals. He's ironic. Right. And even his friends were sometimes not sure whether he was joking or serious. Right. But often it seems like there's a kind of strange combination, like he. He's joking and serious at the same time. And that takes a little bit of getting used to. Right. So the other explanation that Plato gives or appeals to, given the Symposium, is He says that 10 years before the plague of Athens, Socrates. So Socrates would have been, you know, like relatively young at that point. Ish. Like in his 30s, I think, or something that's towards the beginning of his philosophical career. He says that Socrates met this woman called Diotima and she was a priestess and she talked to him about the art of love. And this is quite remarkable because the conversation he describes at length shows Diotima applying question and answer method, like the Socratic method, to the concept of love and friendship and human relationships. And what Socrates was famous for was applying the dialectical method to apply ethical issues like that. Everyday moral problems of this kind, that might be his kind of trademark thing to a large extent, but here it's attributed to a woman called Diotima. And female intellectuals in ancient Greek society are kind of relatively rare because women were treated quite badly in Athenian society, with a few exceptions. But actually, as an aside, one of the interesting things about Socrates is there's this constellation of women around him that are really colorful, interesting characters. So actually the other story, it's the Pythia, the priestess of Apollo, another woman that tells that says, no man is wiser than Socrates and inspires his method. Here is another priestess called Diotima. Now, Diotima is not mentioned anywhere by any other ancient author, and we don't really know anything about her. But some modern scholars believe, and this is very controversial, it is very speculative.

But I adopt on Brand for Socrates. Right, right.

Some modern scholars believe that she may be a kind of pseudonym for a famous Athenian noble woman, or actually a famous Greek noble woman. She wasn't from Athens, called Aspasia, who was the courtesan and possibly later the wife of Pericles, the greatest statesman of classical Athens. So she was a hugely important privileged figure in Athenian society. But also reputedly, she was an expert on rhetoric and surrounded by a kind of intellectual circle, which, again, was kind of unusual in those times. She was an extraordinary. Like an exceptional woman. And we know very little about Socrates relationship with Aspasia, but we. He's frequently connected with her in various ways. We know there were several ancient dialogues that are lost now that portray Socrates talking to Aspasia, and we have various other fragments linking them. So the theory is that Dima in Plato's Symposium is actually a portrayal, a depiction of Aspasia, which would kind of make sense. Right, because it seems like elsewhere it's implied that one of the things that she taught Socrates was about matchmaking. So Socrates is obsessed with this idea of matchmaking, which seems odd to us today. We don't think that's what philosophers do. But Epictetus says to his students, we're jumping around a little bit here, so let's quickly jump forward like 400 years Epictetus. 400 years later, the Stoic philosopher said to his students, the main thing that you can learn from Socrates is how to get into debates about the most important things in life without it degenerating into a quarrel. So the main thing you can learn from him is this kind of skill of friendship, like, you know, how to be able to deal with controversial things. And actually, this is very relevant to therapy and cognitive therapy. We have to challenge people and ask them about quite sensitive subjects and provocative questions, but maintain a therapeutic alliance. Right. So that again, strikes me as Socrates being somewhat having the skill of a therapist. He's good at maintaining a working alliance with people, even when he's asking them really challenging questions, until he isn't, and they eventually make him drink hemlock. But generally speaking, he was surprisingly good at doing this all day long, every day without, you know, without people just punching him in the nose. Right. He did irritate some people along the way, but actually One of the things that Socrates seems to do is shift his focus onto talking. He starts off talking to famous intellectuals who would have been older men. And then as time goes on, he seems to progressively shift his focus on talking to younger men, like to like young adults and adolescents in Athens. And I think that's partly because he found them to be more open minded. Like as I said earlier, some of the great statesmen and great thinkers were kind of close minded. They didn't want to be asked questions like, you know, that offended them. Whereas nobody in their right mind thought that the youth of Athens were wise. Right. So Socrates thought these guys like, they don't mind debating justice with me all day long. And they could, they don't mind if they're mistaken about it. Like, you know, they're happy to keep coming back because they're ripe for learning. But the older generation are more closed minded and you know, they've got a reputation to protect. So this other story is that relatively early in his career Socrates is shown talking to this mysterious woman who might be Aspasia, about the art of love, friendship and matchmaking and stuff like that. Applying philosophy to down to earth everyday moral dilemma. And she's using something that resembles a Socratic method, weirdly like, which doesn't is tricky in terms of the chronology. She shouldn't be like. So is Plato implying that Socrates learned the Socratic method from her? Like that clashes with what he says elsewhere about Socrates developing this method because of the pronouncement of the Pythia. Maybe there's some way to reconcile these things. But you know, this is a good example of the problem that we have, the Socratic problem as it's called, which is we know of Socrates from satirical plays about him that were written during and performed during his lifetime, from dialogues which are resemble plays and from what's called the anecdotal tradition. So that's real chaotic, you know, mishmash of bits of little anecdotes here and there, often in much later authors. So we have this kind of message really. And there's a lot of contradictions in it. And none of these are historical or biographical accounts in the, the modern sense of the word. Right. We can't assume that everything Plato says about Socrates is meant to be verbatim true. And so there's a lot of debate about how much of it is dramatized or fictional, like how much of it is, is actually true. Whether some of the things Plato has Socrates saying are actually things that Socrates ever said or would have said or whether Plato is using Socrates as a mouthpiece for his own ideas. Right. So my position on that is a fairly traditional, simple one, which is that probably towards the beginning of his career, Plato was describing Socrates in a way that was more consistent with how everyone else saw him, and so probably closer to the real Socrates. And Xenophon is probably closer to. To the real Socrates as well. And so the commonalities between them probably indicate what the real Socrates was like. But in Plato's later dialogues where he talks about his famous theory of forms and gets much more metaphysical, I think that probably isn't something that Socrates ever said. That's probably Plato taking his own metaphysical ideals and using Socrates as a mouthpiece for them. So the oracle story, I believe, is true, but we don't know when it happened exactly. And that's annoying because whether it happened before or after other key events in his life might change how we understand the story of his life. But also, there are some modern scholars who believe that the story about the Pythia saying no man is wiser than Socrates might be a fabrication. I think that's unlikely because both Plato and Xenophon mention it. And there are other reasons why I think it's plausible. But some scholars think it might just be completely made up. So even that which is one of the most famous things about Socrates, there are, some scholars think that that might be fictional. I think it's important to include in the book because what we're. When in the book, what I tried to do is tell the. The story of the literary character of Socrates. So this is the Socrates we know and love, as it were. This is a Socrates that in the ancient world people read about.

You look like him, by the way. This is. This you on the COVID This is like.

I'm glad you say that. That's the slightly more buff Socrates, if I remember rightly. I think that's the one that stands outside the, the. The university in Athens. So they made him. They made him look quite buff the earliest.

We'll have to swing by and get it. You'll stand by, we'll get your picture.

Like, he's always on top of a pillar, so I have to clap. I might have to shimmy.

You stand on my shoulders, but, yeah, I'll get.

I'll get up there somehow. The early, early statues that we have of Socrates, he's. He's like. Looks very different. Like, he's bold and he's got a big pot belly and stuff. Like, it doesn't look like this. So the Greeks made Him look kind of like surprisingly buff. It's like. It's like that meme that says how I see myself.

Oracle story. You include the oracle story and it's in the book. It's important to have that.

I think so. It's a story that most people associate with Socrates, and it's the Socrates that we know and love. But I set aside this question of what was the real historical Socrates actually like, you know, because I think that's notoriously problematic to answer. But if we separate that and say, look, this is the story Plato and Xenophon and other sources tell us, if we try and mash it together, this is the image that's handed down to us of Socrates, Socrates. And it's. That's the inspiration for the Stoics. They didn't know Socrates. Stoicism originated 100 years after Socrates died. Like, they were inspired by the literary character of Socrates. Actually, I don't know if you know this story, but when Zeno was shipwrecked to Athens, the founder of Stoicism, he. He lost everything and he found a book and he. He started reading chapter two for some weird reason of this book. And that book is the memorabilia Socrates of Xenophon. Right. It's not Plato. Like, he supposedly found Xenophon's dialogues, which we have today, and that was what inspired him to turn his life around and become a philosopher. So Stoicism supposedly originated with Zeno reading Xenophon's memorabilia, his dialogues about all the stuff he remembered that Socrates had said to him.

I want to. The one quick question. I want to dig into some more of the coaching and the modern application piece. But was he mourned? You mentioned several times that, look, he took hemlock. Look, he ultimately went down this path and wasn't able to maintain friendships. And it's surprising that he maintained friendships for a lot of. And let's not forget how his story ended. But was he mourned? Was it. What was like the. The Greek, the Athenian. Was it a non.

Event?

What was the.

Oh, it was a. It was a big deal. Like, I think in the wake of it. So the Athenians of the time had a reputation for doing stuff that they regretted afterwards. Like, it's a good example of, you know, activists.

That's why SOC is like, you got to look forward, look at the consequences of your actions.

So he. He was executed. And I don't know how long it was before people started to kind of regret it, but it sent shockwaves through the ancient world. I mean, Socrates's death was like a martyrdom. And he, like, it's like the crucifixion of Jesus or something. In the ancient world, like, everyone knew about it. Everyone read the apology, like Plato's account of the trial. Like, everyone knew about the death of Socrates. It was one of the most famous events in the ancient world. It sent shockwaves through the ancient world and inspired generations of philosophers because of the way that he was unafraid. He was fearless in court and defended the practice of philosophy. So it was a big deal. And people. And I'll tell you a little bit of trivia, it's rare in some ways, often when we're reading ancient texts, as I've implied, reading classics can be frustrating because we're not. Sometimes what we have are, like, satires and kind of it's meant to be comedy and like little anecdotes and stuff. We don't know for sure, like how accurate these depictions are or even if they're meant to be taken literally sometimes. So it's kind of frustrating trying to figure out the truth. And so very rarely, we. We dig up something in the ground, like some piece of archaeological evidence that tie. That ties in with a piece of textual evidence that's like gold dust, right? Well, there's a couple of things we are told. Socrates, for you guys that are going to Athens, we're told that Socrates was besties with a shoemaker called Simon. Now, Socrates was famous for being barefoot in Athens. Like, he didn't wear shoes. So many people think, well, that's your anecdotal tradition, right? It's just a sort of ironic thing. Maybe it comes from a satire or something. They just thought it sounded cool to say that this guy that went around barefoot was friends with a shoemaker, and he would sit around all day in a shoemaker shop, but he never bought anything. Right? So it sounds kind of too good to be true. It's. It's. This sounds like, you know, like a tall tale kind of thing. Well, they were digging up the agora in Athens, the marketplace where all the shops are located. And they found the ruins of a shop, and they found nails that were used to make shoes. So they figured that this is probably the archaeologists figured out this looks like a shoemaker shop. And then from the ground, they pulled out the base of a calyx, which is like a wine cup, a ceramic wine cup that everyone had in ancient Greece. And people in ancient Greece would often carve their name on the base of the calyx. And in this shoemaker shop, they Pulled out of the ground a fragment of ax that has the name Simon engraved on it. Right. So either somebody thought I'm going to hide this here so that 2000 years later people think that this shoemaker really existed. Right. But it seems to confirm the story that if this is the same guy that there was a shoemaker called Simon and maybe Socrates did hang around in his shop like and do do philosophy with him. But the other thing, this is good, this does come around to your answering your question. They in the route, the, the, the co op and the prison. We're not 100 sure but we believe probably Socrates was put on trial in a court building and a prison that were also located in the Agora. And in that prison they found what appears to be a small statuette of Socrates. Now that's super weird as well because it's the kind of statuette that the ancient Greeks and Romans would, would often put in a, like a little shrine. Like today we would have like, you know, in some places you have a roadside shrine to commemorate somebody that's died or something. Like they would commemorate somebody who's died by doing that. So it kind of looks like maybe in the prison where he was executed somebody put up a shrine with a little statuette of Socrates kind of commem remembering him and commemorating his death. And maybe it is an expression of kind of regret or the, in a public building like the, you know, the, the Athenian, the Athenian society was kind of demonstrating its regret over the, the fact that they'd executed him there.

Sounds shocked, but I can't wait to again be there and to feel that that energy, right, that still exists in place but bring it back to the book cover. And by the way, I pulled up this week's note on the Righteous Mind by Jonathan Hyde. I listened to it three or four times and it in many ways it's, it's a modern similar kind of idea like befriend people. We have this common core, speak to the elephant, right? Be friends with people, let them know you care about them and then start to talk about some of these rational arguments etc. But how to think like Socrates? Ancient philosophy as a way of life in the modern world. As we've talked more and more about it and as I've again been more and more excited to think like Socrates myself, I keep coming back to like Socrates was one of the original coaches. He, he's practicing this art of therapy, of coaching, of helping people talk about what actually matters to them and helping them to live a good life by asking Questions and just this, like, ruthless focus where if you're not interested in that sort of thing, the guy is annoying. And if you're interested in that sort of thing, it's like, oh, my gosh, I just love spending time and talking about these things and helping to create a more flourishing life for myself, for those around me. What would Socrates, if he were with us today, coaching us on 2000 years later? 2000 years later, a lot looks very similar. Here's. Here's what I think you guys need to start thinking about and. Or what questions would he ask us such that we would find. Find that wisdom ourselves?

I. I'll tell you what I think he would say, for example, about cognitive behavioral therapy. And this might not apply as much to. To life coaching, but funnily enough, CBT is time limited. It's diagnosis driven. Happens in the consulting room. Usually takes 10, 20 sessions, typically. Sometimes it could be longer. First thing is Socrates would say a question that I often asked when I was doing CBT with my clients, which is, how come this process stops? Like, you know, how come it's just not permanent? Like, you know, why is it that we. We just do this as a means to an end, to get rid of panic attacks or anxiety, and we don't do it as a whole philosophy of life. You do it for, like, a few months, and. And then you're discharged from the treatment, and it's not really meant to be a lifelong practice. Right. So Socrates would look at CBT and think, well, why. Why wouldn't you just carry on doing it all day, every day, like, and do something similar? At least keep questioning your. Your beliefs? He'd do that. And then he'd also say, like, in cognitive therapy, we tend to. I think in the past, it was two symptoms focused because it was driven by diagnosis. And so that's a criticism that modern researchers have made over the past 20 years or so that previously cognitive behavioral therapists wanted to reduce anxiety or alleviate depression and stuff. And I think Socrates would say those are, like, secondary goals. Like, your primary goal should be to identify what the fundamental goal of life is and to act consistently with it. Like, you know, what's the most important thing in life? And do that, right? And then overcoming anxiety and dealing with depression are subordinate to that. Like, that's the main thing, though. You know, maybe depression stands in the way of doing that. Maybe anxiety and anger get in the way, in which case you're gonna have to do something about them. But what's the point in getting rid of anger? And anxiety and depression. If you still don't really know like what on it, from a positive point of view, what is you're actually supposed to be doing? You've got rid of the problem, but you don't, you still don't have like a solution for, you know, living life in general. So I think Socrates would say you guys need to look at the bigger picture more like you, you need to ask them the bigger questions, the more fundamental questions and think in a wider sense about life as a whole.

And did he, did he ever paint a vision of that future state the fund, like he's digging in, he wants the ultimate goal of life, right? Eudaimonia to flourish, to live with virtue. Did he paint a vision for what that might be like and how he might go about doing that on a collective basis or did he stay in the individual application?

I think, I believe his life exemplified that. You know, he spent most of his life talking to his friend. I mean, maybe a better way to put it, it sounds a little bit self indulgent if say he's just hanging around kind of arguing about the meaning of life all the time. But he was trying to help his friends. So I think a better example of it is if you look at those dialogues with Chiracrates, one of his friends and Lamprocles where he's friends with two brothers and they have an argument. Chaerephon is one of his longest standing childhood friends and his brother Chiracrates and they, they fall out, they're not talking to each other, they disagree seemingly over an inheritance. And so Socrates is, is helping them to examine why that's the case. He does it in a remarkably sophisticated way. So he talks to Chirakrates and first of all he questions his emotional coping like so he says, well, are other people as irritated with your brother as you are? And if not, why not? What's the difference between you and them? So he's bringing about cognitive distancing, right? And cognitive flexibility. He's getting Kaira Koreates to realize that there's something about his attitude, something about his beliefs that make him angry towards his brother. It's not his anger, it's not his brother that's making him angry. So his brother doesn't make other people angry, right? There's something about his interpretation of his brother's behavior that makes him angry. And then Socrates shifts from that to what we call problem focused coping. So he says, what are you going to do about this because your brother's still not speaking to you? So we've worked on your emotions and your perspective. Now let's work on your actual behavior. And then he brings in the golden rule, basically, and he encourages Chiracrates to take the initiative and to exhibit generosity to his brother, to behave towards him as he would like his brother to behave in return. So when we look at that, I guess the simplest answer I can give is, that's what I think Socrates thinks we should be doing with our life, is helping our friends, like, you know, by getting them to examine their values. Like, we should all be trying to contribute to the emotional you. I mean, like, you guys are working as coaches, so you'll do it. You are doing something like that, right? But everybody, in a sense, should be trying to help, educate, improve, alleviate the suffering of their fellow human beings, you know, and to do it in a kind of rational and philosophical manner. Because Socrates believed that by benefiting other people, we benefit ourselves. You know, there's a. One of the things I talk about in the book, there's this amazing metaphor that he uses in a dialogue called the First Alcibiades, where one of Plato's dialogues where Socrates says, he goes on and on about the saying, know thyself. It's obviously something that he's fixated on. And it was engraved outside the oracle, Delphi, the temple of Apollo at Delphi. And supposedly Socrates had been there and seen the inscription. So he thinks knowing thyself is kind of close to the goal of life. That's wisdom. That's what philosophers do. They learn to know themselves. And he's interested in how we would come to know ourselves, what that means. But Socrates thinks there's a problem because we have a blind spot. We have biases that prevent us from knowing ourselves properly. He says to Alcibiades, it's as if the God Apollo had commanded the eye to see itself. Like, so wisdom would be like an eye that sees itself. He basically says, which is a really an amazing metaphor. It's like a metaphor for mindfulness or something like that. And he says to Alcibiades, how can the eye see itself? And Alcibiades says, I don't know, like in a mirror or something. And Socrates is like, yeah, so how does the mind know itself? And Alcibiades is like, well, I guess you'd need, like a mirror for the mind. And Socrates said, basically says, yeah, that's why I'm talking to you. You are the mirror for my mind, right? The youth of Athens are the mirror of my mind. It's by engaging in dialogue, it's by Coaching people that we come to understand ourselves because we've got lots of biases. We're all ignorant and angry and you know, we get depressed and anxious and stuff like that. And it's hard to realize it sometimes because we don't see ourselves from the outside. But when we try to help other people, we develop the same skills that we can use to benefit ourselves. We understand what's making other people anxious and depressed and angry and the consequences of that. We develop insight and wisdom that allows us then to better understand our own biases and our own shortcomings. So we help ourselves the most in a sense by learning to help other people.

I have a mic. It's up here. It's connected to the wall or I would drop it. That's absolutely brilliant. Both the know thyself and what is the I work with Phil over to probably closer to 2 fit.243 sessions. I bet we're chalking on. And he thinks that my, my like personal quest is to know myself. Who am I at a, at a. At a root. And that. That's gone down some metaphysical turns. Definitely we'll check out though. But with that sense of knowing myself through other people. Right. My eyeball can't see itself. But by seeing the way that you see seeing a different perspective, I get a greater sense of, of who I am. And there's the, the Golden Buddha metaphor. Right. We're all the Golden Buddha. We've got plaster and stuff on us and we need to chip away and having others help us to chip away, to see that innate goodness. Live our own lives well and then don't go try to change the whole world. Try to help your friends. Help one person at a time. You're. You're those that you're connected to. Help them to live a better life. Ask questions when they're. They've got blinders on or they're looking at something that's causing them harm. Right. Versus being a pro. Flourishing behavior. Absolutely. And I'm even more excited. I was always excited. I've been more and more excited. We're like 13 days away or something. Like, I cannot wait to just soak all this up. Where can folks go to buy the book? Amazon. Any other place you want to point them to.

You can buy the book from all good bookstores and even some bad ones, as my publisher like to say. But actually Barnes and Noble we have to plug. That's a touchy subject these days with Amazon kind of dominating things.

Don't buy Amazon.

Barnes and Noble also Exist, as do many independent bookstores around the world. So it's an audiobook in hardback and ebook formats, and you can pre order it. Now, if you do pre order it, it does help us out a little bit because then the stores are more likely to kind of stock it and stuff. So if you're thinking about getting it and you pre order it, that's. Thank you, that helps. And also on the day that the book's published, which is 19 November in the U.S. and some other countries, I'll be doing like a live zoom Q A thing for everybody that's pre ordered. There's a form that you can fill out and you'll get an invite to come and everybody can ask me about the book and stuff like that. So when I wrote this book, a lot of the things that I write, I just wanted to. I just sat down and I thought, I want to write the kind of book that I wish that I could have read when I was 17. Right. That's all. And then I just kind of cross my fingers and I hope the other people are into the same kind of stuff that I was into when I'm 17 and that I'm still into today. But I thought if I could go back in time and, you know, when I was kind of searching for stuff, you know what, this is what I would have wanted. Like, I would have wanted something that has an engaging story. And I'll tell you as well, like, the thing about Socrates is like, when classicists look at these texts, they know there's an amazing story here. And it's kind of frustrating that, that people don't know about it because in the ancient world, everybody knew about it. Marcus Aurelius knew all this stuff about Socrates. He was this bigger than life character, right? And you know, we get. There's an illusion as well when we read the dialogues. There's something odd about them. They're kind of. They do mention historical events and famous figures, but nevertheless, usually when people read those dialogues, they have the sense of Socrates kind of a little bit in a vacuum. Like he's walking about a park or at his friend's house for dinner and he's talking about philosophy. Not that he's fighting in major battles in one of the biggest wars in world history, you know, and at the center of this huge political turmoil and the birth of democracy. And he lived through like one of the worst plagues in history and all this kind of stuff, right? Socrates lived through these seismic historical events, like right in the middle of it, he was best friends with some of the leaders of the Greek world and influencing them. He was a hot plate, he was a heavy infantryman and he fought in the Peloponnesian War. Peloponnesian War went on for 27 years. In parallel to most of Socrates philosophical career, he lived under the dictatorship of the 30 tyrants. And they tried to execute him, but he narrowly dodged that bullet. And then they eventually executed him under the democracy. So like when we tell the story of Socrates, we're like, it's not like he was just sitting, like you guys like to say, in a Librarian of the Mind, right? Like, he wasn't just some dude that sat around in parks talking about philosophy. He was much more of a man of action in a sense than people assume. His story is far more cinematic and dramatic than most people would normally realize. And so I think classicists sometimes feel a little bit kind of frustrated about that. They're like, this is like amazing story here, but there's not a movie about it. There should 100% be a movie about Alcibiades. He's like one of the most kind of amazing, sort of colorful, dramatic characters in history, really. Like Socrates friend is possibly his lover, right? I mean, these people are so colorful and so interesting and philosophy runs all the way through and politics. So I hope that people learn about that story. And it just. I just wanted to introduce them to how amazing the source material is. And so to make it easier, if I'd read this book, I would have found it a lot easier than to go and replay towards Republic. And so I wanted to create something that's like an on ramp, like that allows people to get into the history and into the classics and to like, you know, once you get into reading Shakespeare, there's so much that you can get from it. But it's hard for like somebody who's never read that kind of literature to just pick up Macbeth and start reading it, right? It helps if you've got a guide to it and somebody kind of helping you. So like, I think it's a, to me, a great privilege to have the opportunity to say to people, have you read this stuff? It's really cool, right? Read Plato's Apology. It would take you like 2 hours to read it. It's amazing. It's one of the most profound and moving texts in the entire history of Western philosophy. So I, I get quite excited about that. But it's not because I'm blowing my own trumpet. It's because I think of what I'm doing is kind of curating like the philosophical equivalent of Shakespeare, you know, this is all. Everyone agrees. This stuff is amazing. You guys should all read it.

And I, I am so grateful to you for. I can't wait to. I, I've been buying and buying the hardcover and also the audiobook. So I, I listened to it doing the dishes, etc and then I'll go back and revisit the text for. But you, you read it. Yeah, that's your. It's your beautiful.

I read it and. Okay, so much of here. I had to learn 254 Greek words and luckily I did study a little bit of ancient Greek a really long time ago, but I confuse it with modern Greek now and I speak it badly with the Scottish accent. So luckily I have a good friend called Lalia who is a classic scholar. She's an expert on Greek and Latin. And Lalia is my editor and she works very closely with me and she corrects my pronunciation and coaches me and makes me and coaxes me to make sure that I'm pronouncing 254 Greek names correctly. Fingers crossed.

Well, if it's ending like it was today, I'm sure it was fantastic. But a genuine. The more I've learned about this, which is a direct result of your having chosen to write this book, the more excited I get about Socrates, about revisiting some of those dialogues that I was one of those people like, I don't know. I just, I don't. Next. And now to feel the power and wisdom of them and to have this on ramp and to go to.

You go to Athens and stand where he stood. You're literally going to walk in academia platanos where like Socrates stood and where he was put on trial and executed, where Simon's shop is and go to the Acropolis and look down on it. It's pretty awesome. You can even get.

I gotta read this thing ahead of time. We gotta figure out some sort of. We'll revisit that. But yeah, and again, just, just deep, deep, deep, deep appreciation for you. And you know, we're excited to do whatever we can to get the book out there, highlight it. It feels like such an important message and practice in philosophy and just way of being in today's modern world. So how to think like Socrates? Ancient philosophy as a way of life in the modern world. Can I wait to stand in all those places with you? Donald? I think we have time for maybe one question. Natalie, I see your hand up.

Can you hear me? Yep. Perfect. Hi, I. And the thing that came to my mind was just from the heroic email.

It sounds like you specialize in treatment of anxiety.

And with anxiety rates on the rise.

I'm curious to hear if anxiety seems.

To be a problem at the time.

Of Socrates or if it's really a modern issue and what you have learned.

From Socrates and or Marcus Aurelius that has influenced your treatment of anxiety. Gosh, it's very difficult to make kind of historical and cross cultural comparisons about mental health. Right. So one of the complicating factors is that people seem to experience their emotions. There's some constants in emotion, but people express emotion differently in different cultures. So the ancient Greeks, for example, would like tear their hair and beat their chest and beat their heads with their hands and maybe sometimes tear at the skin when they were really upset. We don't do that today, generally speaking, but that was pretty common. People, they would rip their clothes and things when they were upset. In the ancient world, so much more kind of expressive of emotion. And I get the impression they probably experience, I guess from what we know about anthropology and so on, studying different cultures, they probably experience their emotions in a somewhat different way from the way that, that people do in 21st century Britain, Canada and America basically. So it's tricky to make a comparison. They do get anxious and they worry about things. They, in some ways they seem to think of anger as a more salient problem than we do, which is kind of interesting. Anger is a funny one because people tend not to seek therapy for anger as much as angry people think everyone else needs therapy. So they think I'm fine, it's you guys have all got a problem, it's all your fault. You guys need to have therapy. Where anxious and depressed people are more likely to self refer for therapy. But the stoics seem to definitely think we have an entire book by Seneca called On anger. And I think in the ancient world you kind of get this feeling that they're particularly concerned with anger. I guess it has more of a social impact than other emotions. What have we learned about dealing with anxiety from reading the ancients? That meant there are many things that we can learn about anxiety. One is that by looking at events from a broader perspective, like the view from above, that seems to help us to reduce our anxiety in many cases. And that's because when people are in the grips of a strong negative emotion, they usually narrow their scope of attention. We engage in selective attention and selective thinking and it's like you take a magnifying glass and put problems under them when you're anxious. Whereas you know, the Stoics are training themselves to do the opposite and look at the bigger picture. Socrates talks about that as well. The other thing that Socrates tends to say, and this is kind of linked to the, really the core of the Socratic method in some regards to. He always wants us to kind of look at things from different perspectives and questioning our initial impressions. He, he wants us to realize that what seems like a catastrophe or a bad thing in many cases turn out to be a good thing in the long run. And that again, that's just like something a therapist would say because it's our coach. Right? Like most of the clients that I've seen that have been made redundant over the years, and there have been many, it usually ends up being a good thing for them in the long run. And I think there are reasons for that. Many people get in the wrong job and they stay in it for longer than they should. And so sometimes it's a bad thing short term, but in the long term, often people then become self employed or they find a better role for themselves. The breakup of a relationship, a divorce or a romantic relationship that breaks up seems like a catastrophe at the time. But 20 years later, when you look back on it, usually people have a different perspective because they probably met someone else and they go, well, if I hadn't divorced my first wife, I wouldn't have met my second wife. Looking back on it, you might think seemed like a terrible catastrophe at the time, but now maybe I'm happier now because I met somebody else that I'm happier with in the long run. So Socrates always wants us to acknowledge this idea of the reversal of fortune and what seems like a good thing might turn out to be a bad thing. And what seems like a bad thing may turn out to be be a good thing. This is actually a theme in Greek tragedy, like. So it's a very familiar concept to him from his culture, but something I think that we can learn about anxiety and worry. We know from research on worrying that when people worry, they, they usually focus on the, the most anxiety provoking moment in a series of events and they don't even realize that that's arbitrary. Right. So if I'm thinking about something that could go terribly wrong, I could also then think about what happens the next day and the following week. Right. But if I did that, I'd be thinking about how I'd recover and I'd move on and it wouldn't be as worrisome for me to think about it that way. But if I Keep stopping at the worst point. I'm going to keep my anxiety at a peak level. So again, broadening our perspective chronologically and spatially seems to be something that the ancient Greeks were a bit more familiar with. And I think it's something that we could learn from today.

Thank you.

This has been a great session. I loved it. Oh, thanks. You're welcome. I'm glad you enjoyed it.

Donald, is there anything that we didn't touch on that you want to make sure we're thinking about practicing?

I'm going to. I'm going to say something controversial, right. So a guy interviewed me yesterday, a young fella that I like. I liked the questions he asked me and what was he? Sort of an influencer. And he said, do you have a problem with self help? And I said kind of like yes and no.

Right.

I love self help. I've read lots of self help books and I think they're really interesting, really valuable. But Socrates raises, I think, some important questions about the way that we consume self help. And as a therapist, and I think you guys as life coaches will be aware of this, but also cognitive therapists may be even somewhat more aware of it. So all cognitive behavioral therapists, when they assess clients in the initial session, will ask them about their coping strategies, particularly with anxiety, but for other problems. And so generally speaking, the coping strategies that people use are not helping them that much because if they were, they wouldn't be in therapy, right? So they have panic attacks, they have generalized anxiety. How do you cope with it? And they'll describe various techniques that they do. I try and distract myself, I repeat a mantra like I smoke weeds, I watch Netflix. You know, there'll be other strategies that people employ, and some of them are strategies that they've got from self help books and courses, right. Or strategies that they've kind of figured out themselves. But there's something about the way that they're using. Sometimes they'll be even be using CBT strategies, but in a kind of unhealthy way. Right. So there's some kind of problem here where people consume lots of self help but don't necessarily seem to be getting better. And Socrates says very similar things about people consuming the maxims of the wise but not necessarily getting better. And the problem is, he identifies it is that when we learn a rule or coping strategy is like a rule we follow when we learn a rule or a maxim or a strategy, if we're not careful, we tend to overgeneralize and apply it in situations where it's no longer the best approach, right? Modern research backs this up completely. So there are many different ways that people have a coping with stress. People that exhibit the most resilience and most well being are the ones that are capable of selecting from a broad repertoire of coping strategies and using different strategies in different situations. Some situations call for practical problem solving, other situations call more for emotional acceptance, maybe even a wait and see attitude. But what often happens is that people learn a strategy and it works well for them in one situation, two situations, three situations, and now they're hooked on it and they keep using that strategy in situations where it doesn't work anymore. So self help advice is great until it's not right. For example, you'll see in clients and therapy often have these rules that they follow that they're convinced makes sense. Like, you know, you should always speak your mind. Like seems like a good strategy, a good philosophy in life that's a great idea until it isn't right. There might be some situations where it'd be better for you to zip it temporarily, right? Like there may be other situations where it would be more helpful for you to say more, right? But someone who's genuinely resilient and it be would be the person who knows when to stay quiet and when to speak up and does it chooses those strategies selectively based on the the situation that they find themselves in. This modern research that refers to this as the problem of role governed behavior and what it shows is that long story short, people who learn a verbal rule to follow like a strat are taught a strategy. If you compare them to people who figure out the same strategy through trial and error through their own experience. People who are doing something because they've been told to do it will carry on doing it for longer even in situations where it's no longer working and it may even be detrimental to them. Whereas the people that figured that out through trial and error are quicker to adapt to changes in their environment, right? So the risk is that in consuming self help advice there's no such thing as a self help maxim that works perfectly in every situation or a strategy that works perfectly in every situation. Like, you know, the trick would be like Socrates says, to learn to think for yourself, to think of wisdom as a cognitive skill. And when we are doing that, what I do with all my clients is to say if we have a strategy, say it's the view from above, say it's Jordan Peterson saying you should tidy your room. Or say it's cognitive therapy saying you should write down your automatic thoughts what are the pros and cons of doing that? It's useful just to brainstorm. Could this strategy ever be unhelpful? Right, well, tidying your room might be a useful strategy for developing self discipline or something like that, but it may also be turned into an avoidance behavior. If you're not careful, it might annoy your partner. If you pursue it obsessively at times, it doesn't seem appropriate. Mindfulness is a good strategy sometimes might not be. If you've got social anxiety though, and your mindfulness heightens your self focused attention and makes you more self conscious. So mindfulness can potentially backfire if it's used in certain ways. Recording your automatic thoughts might be a good strategy sometimes, but if you've got generalized anxiety disorder and you overthink everything, it might just trigger you to ruminate like, and you might end up writing pages and pages and pages and notes. Be a problem and then it just becomes pathological. Right. So all self, we therapists see self help strategies being abused by clients all the time. Right. And so we have to be. Socrates is aware of this problem, he's very sensitive to it. And one way, I think, like I say, of countering it is simply to ask yourself, is there a good way and a bad way of using this technique? You know, what are the strengths and weaknesses of this technique? That's a very useful question I think, to ask particularly in a group setting, because then you can. It leads into troubleshooting and that process of thinking it through in a more flexible way is really the thing that I think is most healthy for self improvement and developing emotional resilience. So actually there's a term for this, we call it coping flexibility. In the research literature, people who have coping flexibility and aren't just a one trick pony who can think of different ways of responding to stressful situations and choose intelligently between them. Coping flexibility is particularly associated with emotional resilience. Whereas rigidly using what even what seems like a good coping strategy typically leads to problems in the long run if we're not careful.

I love it. And resonates deeply with. We've talked about before too. In that life will all. What are the. The only constant in life is change, right? It's full of pain, uncertainty, hard work. If we're trying to use the same thing all the time, it's just not going to work. So to have that flexibility and that emphasis on. In some ways it's even like, look, I wrote this book, it's an amazing book. Everyone should get the book and Read it. And generally, like, I'm excited to go get the book and read it. Barnes and Noble, your local bookstore, Pre orders help. November 19th, et cetera. We'll drop links everywhere. But even Socrates and the different dialogues that he has, you got to practice it. You got to try it out yourself. You got to have that flexibility where there's no. There's no one right answer for everything. And through that trial and error, through actually living, being like that, the guy, one of the thirty different Greek names you dropped on us so well, who had the library of wisdom in soccer, he's like, well, are you actually living it? Be like that guy and start to move towards practicing it and applying it, cultivating wisdom. I appreciate you a lot, a lot.

It's been a pleasure.

Anything, you know, we ask at the end, what's one thing we can do for you as individuals, as a community? We've got a lot, a lot of exciting things coming up together. But when you think about that, what's one thing we can commit to as individuals, as a community, to spread some ripples out in the world that you'd like to see spread?

I think I said this last time, but my big interest at the moment is the problem of anger, because I think it's neglected by psychotherapy and self improvement. I think there are whole communities based around self improvement on the Internet that are populated by angry young men, particularly in what people tend to call the manosphere. And I think it was a problem in an ancient world as well. And it's got to do with this fact that people often have a blind spot for anger. So they're kind of doing self improvement in other areas. They're dealing with their anxiety, they're dealing with their confidence. Confidence. But often they neglect to deal with their anger. And so anger is a social problem. You know, it can lead to political extremism, it can lead to violence, it can lead to wars. You know, it can lead to relationships breaking up. Why? So I think anger. I agree with the ancient philosophers. If we. We have to make an effort to address the problem of anger because it's not the top of most people's lists. But I think it's an overlooked issue and it's something that we can help with. There's a great deal of psychological research on anger. There are many coaching, cognitive behavioral therapy techniques that can benefit people with anger. I think exploring anger, talking about anger, you know, just raising the topic, heightening awareness of it, is a way that people can tangibly benefit the world, benefit society. I know their Friends, we're already long.

Do you have a couple minutes? Do you have a couple more minutes?

Yeah.

How do I help my kids with this, with anger and expressing anger, being curious about anger, right? Not like my three, almost four year old in particular. It's not a deep rage, but she gets upset when she doesn't, and I want to. So as we look at exploring anger, being curious about anger, allowing anger to be there and to be real and to bring what it's bringing, but avoiding the downside as I was, as I strive to bring forth the best in my children. Do you have a guidance?

I guess there's a couple of things that I would say, okay, bear with me. I'm going to do a very quick deep dive then. Right. So in terms of children in general, I think one of the most useful techniques is to model coping and to do that through the. What's called the talk aloud technique, right. So of course, modeling stuff, but that's not much help unless your kids can actually see what's going on between your ears. But they can't unless you say it out loud. So talking aloud about struggles that you're experiencing and how you're dealing with them, so saying, man, I'll admit I've had.

Moments of like, girl, I'm so angry right now.

Again, really, I'm not like, listen, I just need to take a breath and think about this, you know, think about how I'm coming across and what the consequences will be, you know, because I don't want, I don't want this to harm a relationship, but I do want to change things. So talking about your thought processes as you're trying to kind of cope with your anger and being a role model or somebody who's thinking about it rationally and coping with it calmly and maybe, you know, taking a time out sometimes and waiting till you've calmed down and then returning to a situation, noticing early warning signs of anger, right? So typically people don't notice. I. If you were getting angry, I would think your voice has changed and your facial expression has changed, right? You'd probably, maybe you'd frown and you tense your shoulders. Maybe your tone of voice would be different, your breathing would change, maybe you'd sigh, you might roll your eyes, you might stare. We don't notice that much when we are doing these things, but other people can see and hear it. So noticing that you're frowning, noticing that you're tensing your neck and shoulders allows you to spot anger at an earlier stage. So asking your kids, like, what are the earliest signs that you're beginning to get angry, what are the things that usually trigger it? Like if you were to make a list of the top five situations, and then in those situations, being on the lookout at an earlier stage for the early signs of anger happening. In many cases, spotting anger earlier is sufficient to derail it, funnily enough. But even if it wasn't, it would be the precursor of then doing other strategies anyway. So it's the foundation of everything is just catching it at an earlier stage. Noticing what had previously gone unnoticed though, right? Spotting stuff that you hadn't noticed before about your facial expression, about your tone of voice, about the thoughts that are popping into your mind. The other thing, anger is, in a sense, is easier to do this with because what clinicians and researchers have found, people believe that their emotions, people have an overly simplistic view of emotion, which is one of the biggest obstacles. So one part of that is that people think, you've got anxiety, you've got anger, you've got sadness, and they're just kind of like blobs of feeling. But anger differs from other emotions, and it often is actually more like a coping strategy. Anger has more voluntary components to it than anxiety and sadness typically do. And it often occurs in response to an initial preceding feeling. So what often happens is, somebody, may I go to shake somebody's hand? And they don't notice that I'm doing it. And so that hurts my. That hurts me in the feels. You know, I feel kind of overlooked and offended. And then I get angry maybe so quickly that I don't even notice. Right. So actually getting anger is a way of protecting myself against the initial feeling of heart or anxiety, of frustration. Now, noticing what the initial feeling was that you might, you might only have experienced for a split second is a way of dividing the process into phases. And that people say, if only I could slow this down. You can slow it down by becoming more aware of what the ingredients are and in particular, more aware of what the emotion that preceded the anger was. So noticing that and actually sitting with it for 5 or 10 seconds longer than normal and just doing nothing but allowing yourself to observe the initial feeling, accept, acknowledge it, digest it, give your time to self to digest it. Usually five, ten seconds have gone. It no longer feels like worthwhile getting angry, like it tends to derail the anger. But the other thing that you can do at other times is get people to think about. You have to talk in general to kids and young people about the nature of anger, because our society doesn't talk about the cost benefit analysis of anger, what the negative consequences are, and people often don't think about it. When people get angry, it introduces a lot of cognitive biases. So for example, people who are angry tend to underestimate risk. Their ability to evaluate the long term consequences of their actions is impaired. That tends to lead them to behave more impulsively, to place themselves and other people in danger sometimes, right? So you're not thinking straight typically when you're angry and so talking about the consequences of anger, talking at a later stage, right, when you're not angry, saying, do you know, like if you notice like angry people sometimes put themselves in danger, sometimes they take risks and things, you know, it kind of affects your judgment, you don't really think about the consequence. Sometimes people do things when they're angry and then regret it later because they're not really thinking clearly about the consequences of their actions, right? So having a discussion about the nature of anger. And so that when, if you can get people to see anger as more of a negative thing and be more aware of the negative consequences, it has more aware of alternatives to responding with anger. Even if it's only take a time out, even if it's only just wait and see and accept the initial feeling, even if it's maybe communicating in a different way, more assertively rather than aggressively, all of those things can defuse the feelings of anger. But there's also an idea that you get in Socrates and in the Stoics, which I found very simple and very useful. So if you've had this conversation and you've got people to reflect a little bit about the nature anger, I say to people, when you're becoming angry, ask yourself, what does you more harm? Your anger or the thing that you're angry about? The emotion or the trigger? Somebody didn't shake your hand, what does you more harm them? Not shaking your hand or are you getting enraged about it, but to understand that you've got economic thing, what does anger do to you? Does it affect your physical health? Does it affect your mental health? Does it affect your relationships? Does it affect your character? How does it affect your performance at work, your studies? How does it affect your life in general? Thinking about the broader and longer term impact of anger is I think important. And then asking yourself what does you more harm, your anger or the thing that you're angry about? In many cases, it's obvious that your own anger is a bigger threat. Now that question can recalibrate your mind in a number of ways that can defuse Anger. So, for instance, we talked earlier about when people get angry, they tend to shift their focus outside. That's partly because they're feeling pain inside. You just hurt my feelings. But if I think you're a jerk now, I'm not paying attention to the fact that you've hurt my feelings. So all my attention is on you. So I'm distracting myself from the pain that I'm feeling. Ah, that's like a band aid. That makes me feel a bit better. Getting annoyed with you makes me feel a little bit better. So I'm not dwelling on the, on the pain anymore. So getting people to become more aware by asking themselves that question forces them to shift their attention and mud again. So if you ask yourself, is my anger doing me more harm than the thing I'm angry about? That means I have to start thinking about my anger. That means now I'm dividing my attention rather than giving all of my attention to, to the outside world and to blaming other people. Right. It's difficult to continue being as angry if I'm now focusing part of my attention on my own conduct. That tends to dilute and confuse the. The anger cycle. So just generally getting young people to notice what they're doing with their facial expression and their body language and spot these early warning signs, be on the lookout in typical trigger situations. At other times, just talking to them more generally about the consequences of anger and how it affects us in different domains of life. And also training them to ask the question, what does you more harm, your anger or the thing that you're angry about as a way of interrupting the cycle of anger? Those are all things that I think that can help young people.

Well, thank you. Thank you for giving us not just the. The request to look at anger in our own lives and spread those rules out, but some practical tools for it and for me personally too, to. As I learned to navigate the joyful coming forth of young personalities and that applying those tools. And for me, the trigger of when I see anger, getting the opportunity to get curious about what's. What's beneath it for her. And what's that, what is that feeling that's driving that, that the anger is coming on the other side and what comes first.

Aaron T. Beck, the founder of cognitive therapy, did research on anger. And he says every single client, virtually every single client, he asked when he got them to track their automatic thoughts. In virtually every case, there was another emotion that preceded the anger. But often people weren't fully conscious of it until he asked them to keep a record of what they were experiencing and when they did, they were like. Anger is actually a response to pain, frustration, anxiety, some other preceding emotion. So that's very important because noticing that can then introduce a delay and that only takes a few seconds to defuse the anger.

Once again, just deep appreciation for you. I'll lock it in. Appreciate all the blessings and gifts in my life, in our lives. Appreciate you. We'll get this out quickly too. And again, how to think like Socrates. Grab it. I'll get it up first before you see little four day old Socrates. There you go. Get the book, Barnes and Noble, Donald. I'll give you a hug and a high five in real life here in.

Less than a couple of weeks in Greece. I'm looking forward to it. That's going to be fun.

And anyone joining us cannot wait to see all of you as well. Everyone who is here today, Monica, great to see you. Leonel, Rob, Anthony, Natalie, everyone that's off camera, everyone that's checking on the replay, appreciate all of you for being part of this community, striving to be the exemplar yourselves, change the world one person at a time together, starting with you and me. And all of us helping ourselves, helping our friends, thinking like Socrates and acting like Socrates. Day one, all in. Let's go.