donald-roberston.mp3

Donald Robertson: [00:00:00] I think often people vacillate between two different types of love and one involves accepting other people, like loving them as they are, and the other aspect of love is wanting someone to achieve their potential and to flourish. And we think when we talk about love, about romantic relationships and many forms of love, the best template for love, general parental love. As you think about your relationship with your own children, you know, it's easier to understand this tension between accepting them for who they are, but also wanting them to grow into something better and to to to achieve their potential.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:00:51] What's up, everybody? Welcome to the artists Data Science podcast, the only self development podcast for Data scientists. You're going to learn from and be inspired by the people, ideas and conversations that'll encourage creativity and innovation in yourself so that you can do the same for others. I also host open office hours and you can register to attend by going to bitly.com/adsoh. I look forward to seeing you all there. Let's ride this beat out into another awesome episode. And don't forget to subscribe to the show and leave a Five Star Review.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:01:51] Our guest today is a philosopher and psychotherapist with a special interest in Stoicism and cognitive behavioral therapy as a trainer.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:02:00] He specializes in e-learning and web development, taking an evidence based approach to the treatment of anxiety and the relationship between ancient philosophy and modern psychotherapy. In addition to being involved in research on the use of e-learning as a vehicle for delivering training and self-help. He's the author of six books on philosophy and psychotherapy and one upcoming graphic novel. So please help me in welcoming our guest today, author of Stoicism and the Art of Happiness and How to Think Like a Roman Emperor, Donald J. Robertson. Donald, thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule to be on the show today.

Donald Robertson: [00:02:40] Well, thank you very much for having me on the show. It's a pleasure to be here. And I'm very much looking forward to our conversation.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:02:46] Same here man a super, super excited. Before we jump into the philosophy of Marcus Aurelius, let's learn a little bit about you. So where did you grow up and what was it like there?

Donald Robertson: [00:03:01] Well, I'm from Scotland, as you can probably tell. I grew up on in the west coast of Scotland in the TEMCO there. And I lived there until I was about 19 20 when I went to university in Aberdeen for four years. And then I lived in England for many years before emigrating to Canada about six or seven years ago. And I would get around a bit these days. And at the moment I'm living in Athens and Greece.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:03:27] So how is living in Athens, in Greece, like, have you been able to get out much? How's the situation there with covid?

Donald Robertson: [00:03:35] Oh, it's a good place to be. It's not been too badly by covid. And there's quite an outdoor culture here. Still very warm here. It's about 40 degrees today. Wow. So it's a bit easier to kind of go out and explore the awesome stuff. 

Harpreet Sahota: [00:03:53] A lot better than the negative 10 in Winnipeg right now.

Donald Robertson: [00:03:57] Or is it really. Yeah. Yeah, it's actually. So when you're in high school, what did you think your future would look like?

Donald Robertson: [00:04:07] I was a kind of drop out from school. So I honestly, I really believe the Mafia chose pretty bleak. I thought I was going to end up being a criminal or just when I was a boy growing up. This is before the Internet. So my horizons were very limited.

Donald Robertson: [00:04:25] You know, the guys in my time who came from blue collar families got blue collar jobs and they they didn't have the same sense of social mobility. And I remember when I was a kid speaking to careers guidance counselor, I play when I was about 17 or something and I said, I've been reading Freud and I wanted to be a psychotherapist. And the counselor said, well, that's just a crazy idea. Like, it costs a lot of money to train and not so many middle class families and can afford for the kids to do stuff like that.

Donald Robertson: [00:04:58] She said you should get an apprenticeship as a mechanic or something like that in a while. You still got the chance to do. And she thought this is the craziest idea she'd ever had in her life. And for some reason, I guess I walked away from that a lot, but then cast a day or two later I decided that I didn't agree with her and I hated that anyway.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:05:19] So how different is life now than you had imagined it would be? Or is this pretty much the future that envisioned for yourself?

Donald Robertson: [00:05:26] Oh my life now is very different. When I was a boy, I had no idea I could never have imagined my life would be like as now. I thought it would be like my father's life. My father worked on building sites. My mother was a cleaner and my family were quite poor. My father passed away when I was about thirteen, fourteen years old and my mother was a widow. She brought me up when I was in high school. She cleaned the teachers houses for a living and so we, we came from her background and I could never have imagined that I'd end up being a professional writer and psychotherapist staff and traveling the world and things.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:06:13] So talk to us now about your experience then as a practicing psychotherapist, and how did that lead you to Stoicism?

Donald Robertson: [00:06:22] Mm.

Donald Robertson: [00:06:25] Well, I kind of became interested in Stoicism because I went to university to study academic philosophy and I wanted to find a job at the end of it. And someone suggested to me that being a psychotherapist was a good job for someone with a background in philosophy. And so that means we I got into your training as a counselor and psychotherapist and, you know, then I realize that Stoicism was the type of philosophy that inspired cognitive behavioral therapy. And so everything kind of came together for me. I saw the connection between philosophy and psychotherapy and a particular type of philosophy that ended up spending the rest of my life studying. 

Harpreet Sahota: [00:07:21] What's up artists! I would love to hear from.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:07:24] You feel free to send me an email to the artists of Data Science at Gmail dot com. Let me know what you love about the show. Let me know what you don't love about the show and let me know what you would like to see in the future. I absolutely would love to hear from you. I've also got open office hours that I will be hosting and you can register by going to Bitly.com/adsoh. I look forward to hearing from you all and I look forward to seeing you in the office hours. Let's get back to the episode. 

Harpreet Sahota: [00:08:04] Yeah, I first came into contact with Stoicism through CBT as well.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:08:09] I was reading a book called Feeling Good. And in doing research for that, it's kind of like like I tend to do. I just go down rabbit holes and didn't have to go too far down the rabbit hole to to learn that CBT was based on a other type of therapy, what thing was called REBT or something like that. And then that was in itself taking essence of Stoicism. Can you talk to us about the relationship between CBT and Stoicism?

Donald Robertson: [00:08:34] REBT is kind of the precursor or the first major form of CBT, depending how you look at it. As founded in the mid 1960s, early 1960s by a New York psychotherapist called Alice and Alice had been a psychoanalytic therapist in this tradition inspired by Freud.

Donald Robertson: [00:08:54] And like a lot of people in the 50s who was becoming disillusioned with the psychoanalytic approach and elsewhere, something I always admire people for doing, he rather than kind of shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic and tweaking things a bit, he decided to completely start again from scratch so he can arrest everything everywhere he went. I'm going to scrap this whole thing and start completely from the beginning. And so he thought, well, if I was going to invent a new form of psychotherapy, what would it look like? And he thought that he remembered reading Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus and his youth when he was about 17. He'd read books are released and that seemed to him like an obvious basis for psychotherapy.

Donald Robertson: [00:09:36] In fact, the ancient Stoics had a psychotherapy and some modern classicists when we first began doing our conferences and things like that, said, well, you guys are kind of projecting psychotherapy or reading psychotherapy into the story text. And I thought that shows a terrible, woeful ignorance of the history of the subject because the medical therapeutic metaphor was always present in ancient philosophy is very common and ancient. So it's actually well-known books on psychological therapy, although they don't actually survive today. We know they existed and we have other references to them. So at Ellis looked at the surviving Stoic texts and you know, it's natural that he would think this seems like a type of therapy because originally was. And so he developed the rational, emotive behavior therapy.

Donald Robertson: [00:10:29] Now, psychotherapy was going through a revolution because of research on emotions in the field of psychology.

Donald Robertson: [00:10:36] And there's something that we call the cognitive revolution in psychotherapy that happened. So therapists and researchers developed what's called the cognitive theory of emotion, which says our emotions are shaped fundamentally by underlying beliefs or cognitions. And that happens to be essentially what the Stoics also believed 2300 years ago. And Ellis wanted to teach this to his clients and his students, and he did it using a quote from Epictetus and which is incorrect in the handbook. Passage number five, it says, It's not things that upset, as are opinions about them as a cognitive theory of emotion in a nutshell. And another good way of explaining it is that in therapy, clients will say they're anxious that depressed or they're angry. And the first session they'll talk about how terrible that is, how it's ruining their relationships, how it's affecting them at work, how it's affecting the quality of life and so on. And and then they reach a point in that first session where having given a lot of reasons why they should change the way that they feel, because it's having all sorts of terrible consequences for them, they'll say, I know it doesn't make sense. I know. Causing all this harm to me and other people in the long run, I can't help it, it's just how I feel unless we say something really interesting to them.

Donald Robertson: [00:11:56] He'd say, yes, but it's not just how you feel. It's also how you think. That's the cognitive theory of emotion in a nutshell, because if we believe that our emotions are shaped by underlying beliefs, first of all, that raises our self awareness because we can begin to try and clarify and identify what those underlying beliefs actually are. And they have a general structure as well, which I mentioned in a moment. And then we can question whether they're true or false or helpful, unhelpful or rational, rational, logical, or whether there might be alternative, more realistic, more constructive ways of looking at the same situation. So many people's emotions contain unfounded assumptions about the future or about other people's motives are or they contained sweeping generalizations about our excessively strong value judgments, about the situations that we face and those can be questioned. So someone who is depressed might think, nobody likes me, everybody hates me. I think I'll go and eat worms. Nursery rhyme. But you get the idea. Nobody likes me. Everybody hates me. But do they? Is that actually true or is it an overgeneralization? Right.

Donald Robertson: [00:13:06] It's not true. It's probably false. Right. So we can begin. It's not just how you feel. It's also how you think. And if you question those thoughts, then the feelings that go with them would probably change as well. And so that opens up a whole toolbox armamentarium, as we like to say, of techniques, cognitive techniques. The Stoics knew that two thousand three hundred years ago. That's how Stoicism influenced cognitive therapy. Both Ellis and later Aaron T Beck the the other main pioneer of cognitive behavioral therapy cite the Stoics as their main philosophical inspiration. For that reason and from that shared philosophical premise, they were not only to take other concepts and techniques from the Stoics, but they were banned in any case to arrive at similar conclusions about what treatment would look like. Because if you believe that emotions are caused by underlying thoughts and beliefs, it's natural that you then want to use techniques to clarify those beliefs, question them, find alternative beliefs, compare them to other people's beliefs. And, you know, the type of therapy and techniques you'd come up with would probably have a lot of similarities, even though they're separated by a period of over two thousand years.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:14:15] Thank you very much for sharing that and really appreciate that. Super, super insightful. Now, I think in this modern age, we're dealing with a new I guess I want to call it an emotion, but maybe it's not emotion, maybe its more of a state of mind. And that's just this distractedness. And I know it's something I tend to to deal with on a daily basis.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:14:35] How could CBT and Stoicism help us stay focused in a world where everything is meant to distract us?

Donald Robertson: [00:14:42] And gosh, there's actually several answers I can think of to that question first and most obviously very recently in the field of psychotherapy over maybe the last ten years or so, there's been increasing interest in, ah, the way we focus attention just literally directly. I guess that relates to one of the foundational principles of Stoicism, which is to distinguish between things that we can control and things that we don't control, and then psychotherapy that has very profound implications. And it can confirm the confusion between things that we control and things that we doing is fundamental to many mental health problems in many very specific ways. It may not have time to go into just know that there are many clients would be many examples of this, but one of them would be people kind of naturally, assuming that the focus of attention is automatic when they're anxious. I can't help just constantly keep thinking about this lot. And actually we have not complete voluntary control, but quite a lot of voluntary control over the way that we focus attention. I can give you one very simple example of that is very clear. People who suffer from social anxiety disorder, also called social phobia, we know from psychological research on them that this is my specialism as a therapist. Incidentally, they there's a very, very high correlation between social anxiety and what we call self focused attention.

Donald Robertson: [00:16:20] So feeling that everyone's looking at you, that you're the center of attention and paying a lot of attention to your own face, your body, your breathing, paying a lot of attention to your own thoughts, focusing excessively on yourself. And that might seem obvious in people kind of describe that. But it's a very tight correlation. And we know that also, if you train, you can train people who have social anxiety to focus more attention on the people who. Whom they're speaking, so if they were giving a wedding speech, must be a conference on whether they would focus more on the audience, and probably that's just because it's got to do with the way that they look and someone who has social anxiety stare at their hands or stare at the lectern and kind of avoid making eye contact or looking out at the audience. And so obviously, they can muster up and voluntarily look out more and they can train themselves to to concentrate more on the audience, the contracts themselves into doing it as well by counting how many people in the audience have blue eyes. For instance, know, I'm just looking at somebody in the audience and imagining that they're going to try and sketch their face afterwards to force themselves into a situation where they have to pay more attention to the other people.

Donald Robertson: [00:17:33] And we also know that many of the things that people do to try and cope with anxiety backfire by increasing so focused attention so someone with social anxiety might try to breathe and a more relaxing way, which seems like a plausible technique. But often it's actually quite counterproductive. It does more harm than good, because if you think too much your breathing, then you're focusing even more attention on yourself. And that's another way of avoiding focusing attention on the audience of the people to whom you're speaking, which would be the normal way to use your attention when you're speaking. So we can play people audio recordings that directly instruct them how to restrain their attention just by getting them to exercise it and focusing on several things at once, broadening the scope of their attention, focusing more on certain stimuli in the environment and things like that. And so the Stoics, I think, would potentially give us advice. It's a little bit like that. But also the Stoics want to say that we will naturally and they write about us, that we will not only focus our attention on things that we think are really important.

Donald Robertson: [00:18:44] If you believe that something is really important, your brain like a pet dog or something like that. Kind of like if you shine a laser towards your cat, will kind of run after to the light and play with it. If you think something is really important, your brain will think about, pay attention to it for them. Right. And the Stoics want us to reappraise our values so that we realize that our own faculty of judgment is really important and our own character is really important. So we begin to really focus more attention on our use of judgment and also in being distracted by things on social media and stuff like that. Often that's because the news media and social media are designed to hijack our emotions highjack our amygdala by telling us shocking might be things like the news says very alarmist things to tries to frighten us, make us angry and so on.

Donald Robertson: [00:19:49] And the Stoics would encourage us to avoid allowing our emotions to be hijacked by questioning these things, by broadening our perspective on them so that they are less emotionally evocative and the same way that Socrates and the Stoics thought that the Sophists manipulated people's emotions. The Facebook and Twitter and CNN and Fox are the modern day digital sophists. And, you know, Stoicism and Socratic philosophy are designed to counteract the use of rhetoric, propaganda, emotional tactics that the media use in the same way that the sophists used to use them to manipulate crowds in ancient Athens, in ancient Rome.

Donald Robertson: [00:20:37] So the Stoics have many, many techniques to help them remain aloof from those kind of rhetorical strategies.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:20:44] Thank you very much. Appreciate that. I guess this focus is something that I think Marcus Aurelius was dealing with because there are several passages, passages in Meditations where he says you concentrate every minute on doing what's in front of you. So, yes, a lot of this stuff is it's new, but it's the same because it's still human nature. And we haven't changed much, have we?

Donald Robertson: [00:21:09] He said something very interesting about it is one of the major themes of the meditations that he keeps coming back to is this idea that he should concentrate his attention on the fundamental goal of life.

Donald Robertson: [00:21:20] So in a way, it seems like an obvious thing. He says, what should I be concentrating on what should I be focusing on? If it's everything I do, every thought that goes through my mind. I should ask myself, does this actually help me to get closer to eudaimonia or does it move me in the opposite direction? And he thinks we're all over the place normally and that we should ask ourselves, what is the fundamental goal in life? What's the most important thing for Stoics is eudaimonia, Arati, was moral wisdom, enlightenment of a sort, moral enlightenment and Marcus thinks, if you believe that that's the number one thing, the most important thing in life is the meaning of life. It's a telos for everything is about. You'll have to ask yourself, are you actually right now doing anything to get closer to that? Or are you just distracting yourself from it by going on Facebook or watching reality TV or stuff, you know, out of you going off the track and wandered off in the opposite direction? This is a constant theme. He's always trying to drag himself back towards the true goal, the fundamental goal in life.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:22:31] And speaking of wisdom and and virtues and excellence of character, I'd like to dig into some of these concepts to clarify these for the audience here. So talk to us about this Stoic concept of practical wisdom.

Donald Robertson: [00:22:48] So the Stoic definition of wisdom is really simple. You know, one of the things that benefits me most, I think in therapy, you know, the job of a therapist, in a sense, is like the job of a translator. So therapists have to read scientific research, which is kind of dry and abstract and technical, and then you have to sit down in front of fifteen year old kids or old ladies or, you know, people who don't speak English as a first language or a postman or whoever ran the mixture of people may come into a consulting room and you have to take the psychological research that you've been reading and translate it into terms of passing in front of.

Donald Robertson: [00:23:26] You can relate to understand. And I find that helpful.

Donald Robertson: [00:23:33] And I've also found it helpful. Having a nine year old daughter asked me about philosophy and history and stuff, trying to kind of explain things to her. So I first of all, I would say to my daughter, do you know what the word was to means? And she said, well, I'm not really sure that. And I said to you, I think in a way the most important thing is just to use that word sometimes to kind of think about it and ask ourselves, even a very tiny baby step. Like Socrates said, the unexamined life is not worth living and that we should constantly be asking ourselves what was the means. But even if we just begin to wonder about it a little bit, it's a magical word is different from knowledge or cleverness or intelligence. And it's a word that we don't really talk about that much today. But just asking in casual conversation, what makes somebody wise rather than smart, clever, shrewd by interesting conversation. That's the type of conversation that Socrates thought we should be having. Now, if I was talking to my daughter about it, I say, I think maybe wisdom is understanding which things are genuinely important in life and which things aren't really important in life, and that maybe that's different from the sort of things that the majority of people spend their time pursuing.

Donald Robertson: [00:24:54] You know, maybe wisdom consists in being able to look at what other people think is important and realizing that it isn't. And realizing  that things that other people seem to be ignoring are actually much more important. That shift in our values changes our emotions or behavior or quality of life, potentially. That's what it's meant by more wisdom. And it's actually give us a formal definition of wisdom. And they say it's the knowledge of good, bad and indifferent things, which is just slightly more convoluted way of saying, you know, understanding what's important and what isn't important in life. And for Stoics, that would be really fundamentally grasping that the only truly good thing is areti or virtue. And that health, wealth, reputation and things like that are relatively indifferent. And those things are only as valuable as the years that we make of them ultimately. And so it's that's how we define wisdom. But more fundamentally, I think that asking ourselves to define wisdom is really the starting point. It's the beginning of philosophy.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:25:56] And can you walk us through these cardinal virtues of Stoicism? What was the first of all, I guess, unpacking that word, Cardinal, like, why go from. Yeah, where does that come from? And are there other virtues that that we should consider?

Donald Robertson: [00:26:11] If I remember rightly, it's a Latin term of Latin origin that wasn't used in ancient philosophy, but it was introduced by medieval Christian authors and assimilated the four virtues. So very famous model it became popular in the Renaissance, is popular in Middle Ages, and the Stoics seem to really embrace it. But it's older than the Stoics and there's traces of it in Plato's writings. Its seems that maybe Socrates was familiar with it. But nobody really knows where this distinction came from and the expression.

Donald Robertson: [00:26:46] I don't know if I remember rightly in Latin, that refers to a change like on a door, and so the idea is that it's fundamental that hinges on which door is balanced. And for some reason, the ancient Greeks often, but not always over time, increasingly embraced as a four fold model. And Plato is a little bit more ambivalent about it. Sometimes he talks about and not in those terms, and sometimes he's he's got a slightly broader conception of virtue. But the four virtues are wisdom, justice, courage and temperance. He can translate them in different ways. The translation is a little bit problematic in some ways. So wisdom is generally the most important, most fundamental one kind of encompasses the other virtues. Justice is kookiest. One may maybe to translate second trickiest one to translate the words into a Sunni and Greek, and sometimes it used to be translated righteousness as well. Some scholars might even say just means moral virtue. I would say social virtue might be a way of translating it. It's broader than our concept of justice. Justice to seems kind of legalistic, but the Sunni is a virtue that a mother may exhibit to us our children. We can call that justice. Why? It's interpersonal virtue in terms of the way you relate to individuals or the way you relate to society as a whole. Very simple. And that that makes the structure obvious. So wisdom is the fundamental virtue of understanding the value of things. And then justice consists in understanding and to practice in terms of how you relate to society and your family and your friends and other individuals as the social and personal application of moral wisdom and the story to tell us that the chaos in A consists of two main elements fairness and beneficence or kindness. So trying to treat us fairly and equally, but also trying to help them into the good. You know, again, that goes a little bit beyond what we might think of by the word justice today. So maybe social structure will get better.

Donald Robertson: [00:29:04] And then the other two terms in ancient writings, wisdom and justice are often seen as the two most important. There's a passage, Marcus Aurelius, where he actually says that justice is the most important virtue, interestingly. So usually it's wisdom and then justice is almost as important. Revise with a social dimension. And then the other two, the virtues, courage and temperance on a slightly different level. They relate to our passions.

Donald Robertson: [00:29:31] And so courage is a virtue that we require in order to overcome the passion or the emotion of fear and to master that. And temperance is a virtue that allows us to master our desires and desires are another form of passion. The word passion in Greek philosophy includes in what we call emotions and desires. So temperance allows us to master our excessive or irrational desires or cravings, our unhealthy desires. It's also sometimes translated as moderation. The degree where the Sofra Sunny that's actually probably the hardest one to translate almost in Greek means something implies something almost a bit like mindfulness or being self-possessed, having moderation, controlling your desires, but also being very aware of your habits and cravings and desires. And courage is probably the simpler one. But the Greek term for courage, Andrea, also kind of implies endurance, like enduring tiredness or fatigue would fall under the heading as well. So in Epictetus allegedly had a slogan. You may have heard this as an ancient author that says one of Epictetus, his favorite sayings was endure and renounce and that of the other. He doesn't say so. Clearly, that seems to correlate with those two virtues of self mastery. To endure is the virtue of courage allows us put up with pain and to face the things of which we're emotionally frightened and we endure frightening things. We endure uncomfortable or painful things through the virtue of courage and real endurance, and to renounce things as a virtue of moderation, softness in a temperance Brennan so excessive, unhealthy or harmful desires and cravings.

Donald Robertson: [00:31:22] And I'm very simply, I would say the way they all fit together is wisdom is the core justice of the case. And he has wisdom applied to our interpersonal relationships. And because we have fears and desires in order to live in accord with wisdom and justice, we require those other two virtues to master our fears and desires so that we can live consistently in accord with. Wisdom and justice, otherwise fear and cravings, would lead us astray and prevent us from being able to live justly.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:31:55] So the way I kind of conceptualize it from conceptualizing this incorrectly. It's like if we were to have two poles and on one end would be the virtues and then with the other end the opposite of the virtues be passions. Is that the correct way to think about that?

Donald Robertson: [00:32:13] Yeah, I think so. Basically. I mean, normally we'd say the vices of the opposite, but the passions are essentially very closely related to the vices and I should say a little bit of Stoic psychology.

Donald Robertson: [00:32:25] It's just a quirk of the Greek language, I think, or perhaps particularly in the Stoic writings. The word passion used in an unqualified way really is used to refer to irrational excess of unhealthy passion. So the Stoics describe them to those three qualities. But it's confusing because when they refer to passion, emotions and desires and they're generally thinking of unhealthy ones, but they also distinguish those from healthy, rational, proportionate desires, the upper thigh. So they also qualify passionately. But there are also good passions, healthy passions like love, joy, even healthy forms of shame, the Stoics think, which would be like what we would think of as having a conscience, like those healthy aversion, like being averse to corruption, having an aversion to doing things that are dishonest. Epictetus talks about that quite a lot. And there are also - the Stoic theory of emotion is actually a very nuanced. The Stoics also acknowledge that there are involuntary emotions, call them poto-passions. Seneca calls them first movements. In Greek the propathia. And you can say that the emotions are gripped into good, bad and indifferent ones. So generally, it sounds like the stories are mainly talking as if all emotions are bad, but they're not. They think they're also good emotions that we should be trying to cultivate and they're also indifferent. Emotions are the precursors of emotion, which we should definitely not view as bad Epictetus as we should view them as natural and inevitable.

Donald Robertson: [00:34:11] So if he gives a there's a famous example, I should actually in another also called Goliath's spec, convoluted because he tells a story about having met an unnamed Stoic teacher who was caught in a boat during a storm at sea and then takes out a copy of Epictetus, his discourses, and tells them about and reads them apart of the slightly convoluted story. But the upshot is, Ghalia says to this guy, you're famous Stoic teacher, can have lots of historical fun trying to guess who the guy is that he's talking about, by the way. But he says, this guy you're a famous Stoic teacher from Athens. And I noticed during the storm everyone was freaking out and you weren't screaming, are crying, are praying to the gods, but you turned pale and you were shaking because they all really thought they were going to die. And the sport utility scaled as well. And he's in the guy said, well, the Epictetus and the Stoic teacher say that there are these involuntary emotions and even an experienced sailor during a storm like that would naturally feel afraid. And those are involuntary. So we should accept them, view them with indifference. If we thought they were bad, we'd be ashamed of them, try to repress or conceal them a battle against them.

Donald Robertson: [00:35:25] And the Stoics think that would be like trying to control something that's beyond your direct control, but instead you should just shrug them off. I even welcome them with indifference. They're neither here nor there. They shouldn't be viewed as bad or shameful. They're just things that happen to you. And he said what matters is how we respond to them for what we do next. And so rather than complaining or screaming or running around going, we are dwelling on them. Afterwards, the Stoic philosopher just shrugged and moved on, whereas other people were still fretting about them. So we have these involuntary and natural emotions and then what we have control over is how we will respond to them. And this to me is incredible because this is very similar to a contemporary - three stage cognitive model of emotion proposed by Aaron T Beck, the founder of cognitive therapy. So the states have a far more nuanced and state of the art cognitive model of emotion than most people assume. And it's a shame that more people don't appreciate that, because really not understanding that leads to a lot of widespread misconceptions about what the Stoics are saying. They are what people think. The Stoics want us to kind of try and repress all our emotions and stuff, whereas actually you could argue that.

Donald Robertson: [00:36:47] They want us to shrug off and accept and to stop fighting against some aspects of our anxiety and voluntary aspects of anxiety, and they want us to do something that we would do a lot in modern therapy, which is to get people to become clearer about which aspects of anxiety of depression are involuntary and which aspects are actually under the voluntary control. Most people spend too much time being ashamed of or struggling against the inventory, automatic aspects of mental health problems. And they neglect to take responsibility for ownership of control over things that they could potentially control. For instance, when someone's anxious, their heart starts beating really fast. Hands start sweating. They can't control the physiological response.

Donald Robertson: [00:37:36] Epictetus would say it's neither here nor there. It's just a natural process. You should view it with indifference rather than viewing it as a bad thing. But you do have control over how much time you choose to spend worrying about her. You can sit for hours dwelling on and ruminating about her, and that's something that people tend not to take control over. They just allow it to run amok. Whereas a modern psychotherapist would say, you know, you can just stop thinking about it. There was a voluntary thought process is like you could just go off and do something else. And in fact, we have to do that if we want to go to sleep. We do that every night when we have intrusive thoughts that come into our mind to we think of like get to sleep. I have to get up for work tomorrow [inaudible] I'll think about this tomorrow. So it's perfectly natural to see voluntary engagement with intrusive thoughts of people who have severe mental health problems. Find it difficult to do that. Then they can learn how to do it.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:38:33] Speaking of misconceptions about Stoics and Stoicism. I think Stoicism gets a bad rap. People may think that those who practice Stoicism or cold or unemotional, but that's not really true, is it?

Donald Robertson: [00:38:46] I love this question. It's the most common misconception of Stoicism. In the ancient world. People thought that as well, and the Stoics seem to be fairly experienced at refuting that. So there's a recurring kind of figure of speech in the ancient writings is in the early Greek fragments of thinkers and Cicero, it's in Epictetus, I think its in Seneca as well. So there's a familiar phrase that they use. They say the wise man doesn't have a heart of stone or iron. He's not like a statue. So he's not in the wiseman, the Stoic ideal isn't to be unemotional fact. On the contrary, the Stoic ideal - Marcus Aurelius describes and the beginning of the book of the meditations, book one he's talking about, one of his Stoic teacher, Sextus of Carinthia. And Marcus says he was free from passion by what she means, the irrational excess of unhealthy passions and yet full of love, in the words he uses, is philistorgia.

Donald Robertson: [00:39:45] So the problem with translation, they are so clearly you can't say free of passion and yet full of love and be using the word passion to include love. It's obvious from that that he means bad, unhealthy passions. And the word that he uses for love is a very specific, Stoic technical term that probably is translated as natural affection or familial affection. It's the kind of love that parents would have for the children or we could. The phrase that we might use today is probably love, platonic love. So he's he's full of this kind of philosophical, paternal, brotherly love or affection towards his fellow man. And so it's so strange that people think of sex as being like Mr. Spock are like robots or whatever. And in fact, what they're saying is that their ideal is to be full of this kind of pure love towards our fellow men and women. That's their ideal. And it's a little hint of that comes from Xenos Republic, which is perhaps the founding text, The Stoicism, although it's lost hers. Now, one of the things we know about it is that Zino describe this utopian Stoic society and the patron God of that society was Eros, the God of love. And there are many references scattered throughout the Stoic literature to this idea that the goal is to experience a particular type of rational love towards our fellow men. And also, I think the Stoics want us to cultivate a sort of rational self-love as well.

Donald Robertson: [00:41:14] I really believe that's quite fundamental to Stoicism and ah, this idea of what we call justice. It's a shame because like I mentioned earlier, that's quite a cold legalistic term. The social virtue. The kalisunni is all about love. That's a healthy passion that that goes along with it.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:41:34] By the time this episode releases, it'll be US Thanksgiving will be kicking off the holiday season. So I think talking about this concept of natural affection, I think is going to be great for the season that we're going to be heading into here. So talk to us about the psychological practice for expanding and cultivating this natural affection and friendship towards the rest of mankind.

Donald Robertson: [00:41:59] Well, we you mentioned, I think earlier this fragment from the circles of hierarchy's, which is really cool, a little strange little concept. And so it's people have techniques like this typically says that we should imagine then like the layers of an onion almost, we have these concentric relationships to our relationship with our self self-love and with our spouse and with our family, our friends of our society and a nation, the whole human race and these kind of expanding circles. And he thinks what we should aim to do is to psychologically bring people that are in each of the circles one step closer. So we treat our fellow countrymen as if they were members of our family, which are cousins, as if they were brothers and so on and so forth. And he actually, as well as he implies that we should visualize things that way. He doesn't quite frame it in those terms, but we can make that visualization exercise. He says we should think about it. But he actually also mentions using a verbal technique. He says we should call our friends brother, why we should call acquaintances, friends and so on. And you can see perhaps hints of that in the meditations. Some Marcus talks about viewing strangers as his kinsmen and referring to them as brothers and the way that members of a monastic order perhaps to others as brothers and so on.

Donald Robertson: [00:43:41] In the third meditations Marcus talks, but viewing people in general as his can, his brothers and sisters. So doing something a bit like this verbal technique that we find in hieroglyphs and also in the histories we get some corroboration of this is kind of the other way around. We were told that Marcus' friends and acquaintances with his teachers. We call him the son and people would refer to him. And this is a slightly more intimate terms. We see people somebody said this to me the other day. So on Facebook, someone would say, oh, Marcus seems like they say he was like a cold character. I do a character in the meditations. He's not at all like that. And we have his private correspondence and also the histories. We are told that he was very kind of gregarious. He was serious, but very friendly and affectionate in his private letters. He's gushing with affection. And so when we talk about foster care, bye. If you want to kind of see her and Marcus, you read his letters differently. There's not a lot of philosophy. In the 19th century, a cache of letters were found that belonged to Marcus Kornelius, front of his rhetoric teacher a and a close family friend. And most of them are between France and Marcus Aurelius, but some of them are to other people that they knew.

Donald Robertson: [00:45:00] Marcus' adopted brother, Lucius Verus. And it's clear that he's an incredibly loving and affectionate guy. The other thing that emerges from those letters just is a little bit of trivia is that we can clearly see it's like having a window into his real personal life because it were never meant for publication. So we see what he was actually like when he was talking to people that he knew intimately. And he the one thing that's crystal clear is he clearly Marcus clearly demonstrates that he's very tactful and adept at reconciling arguments between his friends and that he clearly is somebody who's cut out for a career as a kind of diplomat, which is partly what has his role became as as emperor. And then to some extent prior to that, he often had to negotiate peace treaties with the enemy tribes and things. He must have been really good at it. Judging by the letters, he's a very observant, tactful, sensitive, highly articulate man and very good at resolving disputes between people. We can see him in action doing that. And I think it's is fairly impressive. He's not just talking about doing it, we can see him doing it and that's part of his loving and affectionate nature. He wants his friends to get along with one another and he wants them to bury the hatchet and stuff.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:46:28] This natural affection, I think it manifests itself in relationships we have throughout life. Mentors, mentees, teachers, teammates at work, at home, in our family life, and as members of a larger community. I love what you say in your book that to become a Stoic is to learn what it means to have natural affection for our friends and family in accord with wisdom and virtue, and Seneca says in Epistles 52 on choosing our teachers, that we should choose as a guide, one whom you will admire more when you see him act than when you hear him speak. So what better guide to choose than the man whose philosophy you write about and How to Think like a Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius. So building on the circles of Hierocles, let's start at the center here.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:47:15] What can Marcus teach us about improving our relationship with ourselves?

Donald Robertson: [00:47:20] I think that's a very important question. It's very profound question. Sometimes not explicitly stated in the literature, but it's implied in many, many passages. For instance, in On Anger, when Seneca's talking about his nightime review, the Golden Verses of Pythagoras's, he talks about and actually doing something that he seems to be comparing to the sounds like the Socratic Lingus. He says he interrogates himself like a witness in court, which is what the Socratic method is, is usually described as being like. And he also says he does it in a friendly way and he treats himself like a friend rather than doing an aggressive, dictatorial sort of way. I think there's a paradox about the very nature of love, which is I think often people vacillate between two different types of love and one involves accepting other people, like loving them as they are and and for who they are, warts and all, as they say. And then the other one and the other aspect of love is wanting someone to achieve their potential and to flourish. And we think when we talk about love, about romantic relationships and stuff, there are many forms of love.

Donald Robertson: [00:48:36] And actually, I think it's easier and the best template for love generally, I think many wise men and women agree, is, is parental love. If you think about your relationship with your own children, you know, it's easier to understand this tension between accepting them for who they are, but also wanting them to grow into something better and to to to achieve their potential. And so if you really, really want your kids to flourish and to become wiser and stronger and more courageous, you've got to be careful that that doesn't lead you to despise who they are or if they fall short of that standard, to get frustrated with them. Yeah. So love can easily turn into, hey, if we're not careful, life's difficult. Our emotions are complex sometimes because when we love someone a lot, we end up getting angry with them. If you're not careful and also loving someone for who they are, what you have to be careful. That doesn't become too passive by. And we underestimate the potential why we don't see who they could be. Sometimes love also has to be tough by, you know, if we really love someone we want might want them to grow stronger, more independent to liberate them rather than being stuck where they are and stagnating, as it were.

Donald Robertson: [00:49:53] So there has to be some kind of something. We have to juggle these these two seemingly contradictory things. And I think the Stoics have an answer to that. They it's related to what their fundamental idea about their being two different types of value and then also runs through their philosophies. And we find that very clearly in the concept of the reserve clause. So the the Stoics think that we should want things outside of our direct control to tonneau in the way that it's rational to prepare. So other people are a good example of something that's beyond the direct control. So we should want our kids to become wise and virtuous by it. It's perfectly reasonable to do certainly it wouldn't be very reasonable to want our kids to become foolish and vicious. Right. So of course, the Stoics prefer the children become wise and virtuous and flourish as as human beings. But simultaneously, we we we will simultaneously accept that it's not under our direct control and emotionally accepting the possibility that the opposite might happen.

Donald Robertson: [00:51:08] And so the Stoics want us to have this kind of philosophical attitude towards our relationship where we it's kind of like that phrase, hope for the best, but prepare for the worst by where we we want the best from our people. But we want to, in a sense, lightly and with a certain kind of philosophical detachment. So we go into desiring a certain outcome, but simultaneously knowing that it's it's not entirely under control and it's probably in the hands of fate. Also, like Cicero uses a metaphor of a spearman or an archer, and he says that he can aim the arrow at a target, so we need to aim at the target of having our kids flourish, be wise and virtuous while simultaneously accepting that the target might be a move or a gust of wind by blow the arrow.

Donald Robertson: [00:52:01] Of course, he doesn't get all upset and freak out if he misses the target. He just does his best and accepts the outcome with equanimity. And so this is a cliche and ancient philosophy was that even the wisest teacher has we were students, but it doesn't stop him from trying. So Socrates famously had a couple of really obnoxious students and Critias and Alcibiades and also Socrates, his three sons were supposedly thoughts and not very admirable people. So people would say, well, even Socrates had bad children and students. It didn't turn out that well, but it didn't stop him from trying his best to to be wise and Fracture's teacher. And that's his way of expressing love.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:52:49] Yeah. I'm curious how this works. If it goes the other way. You talk about a parent towards their children, but what if a child wishes to see more virtuous characteristics in their parents, but their parents seem to be set in their ways and not flourishing and not growing? How would that how that work out?

Donald Robertson: [00:53:07] I think it's a similar kind of relationship. The other thing the Stoics would say, and this may be a good starting point in any of these discussions, is that we maybe we perhaps go into it.

Donald Robertson: [00:53:20] But often the case in Socrates would say we go into these discussions often back to front. So we should be thinking more rather than changing, trying to change or reform other people directly by exerting influence over them. We should think more in terms of setting an example through our own character, and that should be our priority. So Stoic would say, yeah, I'd like my parents or my children to be wiser and more virtuous. But first and foremost, I need to exhibit those qualities myself by and hope that they'll learn from my example. And then maybe second to that, I might consider how to interact with them in terms of stuff I say to them, which I try to influence them. But before I try to lecture somebody, I should just pause and ask myself whether I'm actually embodying the qualities that I'd like them to develop. Otherwise, I'm just going to make myself into a hypocrite. If I give someone into trouble and I start lecturing them how they want to behave, I should always pause and think whether I can be doing more of myself to actually embody those qualities.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:54:31] I found it very interesting in Meditation's that he dedicates an entire like the opening first 10 percent of the book, almost its debts and lessons.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:54:42] So who are some of the teachers and mentors that Marcus talks about and what role did these teachers and mentors play in his life?

Donald Robertson: [00:54:51] I like your statistic. It's probably about 10 percent of the book. There are 17 people I think he mentions and the role either family members or teachers. So the first person he mentions is his grandfather. And he says about him that he had a noble character and he was free from anger. I think that's interesting because Marcus then says that he had problems of controlling his own anger. And throughout the Meditation's anger is the emotion that he refers to most often. So sneakily, people often struggle to try and take out some sort of structure to the meditation is actually kind of diverse and unstructured, but anger is certainly effeminate. And that's the one of the first qualities he mentions in the opening sentence.

Donald Robertson: [00:55:36] And the other people are other interesting things. I'll give you some trivia, actually. This is gonna be a bit nerdy. But for people anyone whose read the meditations, heres things you might not have thought about. Like it's odd that he mentions an unnamed slave who was his childhood tutor when he was a small child. And he doesn't mention Herodes Atticus. I'm in Athens at the moment. And there are a number of buildings here that still stand. The Odeum of Herodes Atticus on the side of the Acropolis. He was a world famous sophist and orator. He was a billionaire philanthropist and is a family friend of Marcus Aurelius. And he was his Greek rhetoric tutor. Meditation's is written in Greek, the language that Herodes Atticus trained Marcus in. And Marcus never mentions. I mean, there's nothing positive to say about him. And he was notoriously horrible man. He was put on trial for kicking his pregnant wife to death. Yeah, it's horrible. But he got off for for that. But he did a number of other atrocious things, got a bad temper. So Marcus doesn't mention people like that. He's a world famous orator. Instead, he mentions a guy whose name he can't even remember, who is like a mentor to him when he was a small boy and he says, this guy taught me not to listen to slander. He taught me to to be willing to undertake hard work.

Donald Robertson: [00:57:02] He taught me, you know, and this is Marcus's is writing this three or four decades later after he'd known this guy. It's no wonder he can't remember his name. And he's probably a slave, or a freed man in his mother's household. So that's really interesting that he places more importance on what this guy taught him than on some of the most famous teachers in the empire has had been paid to to teach him fortune and culture. It's another strange thing for a as the amount of impotency he puts on having learned virtue from his mother.

Donald Robertson: [00:57:49] So they we have a couple of lectures from Musonious Rufus, the teacher of Epictetus, about the idea that is the same in men and women. And the women should learn philosophy the same as boys and women didn't normally learn philosophy. Increasing Rome in ancient Greece, philosophy was typically but not always taught in the gymnasium sports grounds. Women weren't allowed anywhere near them. They weren't even allowed in the front door. There's a story that a couple of women attended, went to Plato's lectures, but it had to do so disguised as men.

Donald Robertson: [00:58:21] Whereas the Stoics seemed to have embraced teaching women philosophy and believed the ancients didn't really think that women could have virtue. In fact, the word for courage that we mentioned earlier, Andrea, literally is manliness. So in contradiction and to them, to the fact that women can possess the virtue of courage and manliness and being women is a very common insult. Even Marcus even uses it himself. Sometimes it's pervasive. And so we never really have thought twice about it. It's just to say someone is willing to say that that weak and foolish, such so sexist ancient society, despite all of that. And I should say also we don't know a great deal about what they at least said about this, but we know that we have a number of intriguing book titles from we get a long list of titles from these talks and sometimes the titles are revealing. So there's a book by Cleanthis, the second head of the store called That Virtue is the Same in Men and Women, which clearly seems to preempt these lectures by Musonius Rufus, which are written centuries later. So I don't think this is something Musonius Rufous has come up with. I think he's referring to an idea that goes back to the perhaps the very origins of Stoicism, I think perhaps even to Socrates, really ultimately dries up. But Marcus embodies the virtues the same and men and women, because when he's going through his role models, one of them is his mum. That's quite striking. I so in a culture that thinks to be womanish, he's being weak and self-reliant, foolish. Marcus thinks his mum taught him more about manliness and structure, courage and integrity than some of the most highly acclaimed philosophers and teachers in the Empire who are his tutors in his youth.

Donald Robertson: [01:00:13] So he's embodying this idea that virtue is the same in men and women, that he could learn about virtue from a woman like his mother. And I'm even suspicious that he may have been his mother that introduced Marcus to Stoicism.

Donald Robertson: [01:00:25] There's a little tiny hint that Marcus's mother and but we know that Marcus, his mother, knew Julius Rusticus, who was his main mentor, because Marcus says in passing that Rusticus is a very powerful letter to his mother. So I wonder whether his mother knew Rusticus before he became Marcus, his teacher. And then she said, This guy's my friend, great Stoic philosopher. He should be the tutor to my son.

Donald Robertson: [01:00:54] And she was we know she was a highly cultured woman and very interested in great literature. You know, the phrase behind every great man, there's a great woman like Marcus makes it pretty clear why his mum, because his dad died when he was a small child. Mum had a more prominent role in his upbringing than would be typical, perhaps for a Roman noble.

Donald Robertson: [01:01:14] And then so that's quite striking. The other striking thing is the guy, another guy that he doesn't mention. So Marcus talks at great length about Antoninus Pius thats the person he says most about. Antoninus Pius, his adoptive father, in the preceding emperor. And clearly, Marcus thinks that's his main role model. So it's not Stoic. It's a guy who was interested in philosophy that wasn't really, as far as we know, committed to school or philosophy. But Marcus thinks he seems to embody more of the virtues he wants to. Than anyone else, he is crystal clear that he views him, so he says he views himself as a disciple of Antoninus Pius, as a template for what it means to be a good emperor. And and he says a great deal about him. But he says nothing about Hadrian, his adoptive grandfather, the emperor that preceded Antoninus - although Marcus knew Hadrian when he was a child. And it was Hadrian that selected Marcus to be a future emperor. And almost everything Marcus says. But Antoninus Pius, you can put in brackets after the opposite of history. And it seems like it's an implicit criticism for Romans, by the way, to mess someone over and ignore them was considered a very damning thing.

Donald Robertson: [01:02:26] You know, as one of the worst things you could do to someone is to damn their memory and stike out their name and never mention them again. Marcus, it seems almost like he's doing that to Hadrian.He says of Antoninus Pius, No one would ever call him a sophist. Well, everyone called Hadrian a sophist. But Hadrian was at the very center of the second sophistic. He surrounds himself with sophists. So it really sounds like he's he's having a pope, Hadrian. And directly by the things he says in praise of Antoninus Pius  in his mind, perhaps I'm speculating. Hadrian embodied what it means to be a really bad emperor, corrupt and Antoninus Pius are polar opposite and Marcus perhaps didn't want to be Ceasar to be a future emperor because he saw I don't want to end up with Adrian. He was hated by the Senate. When he died, he turned into a paranoid megalomaniac dictator with spies everywhere and having parties and murdering his his rivals. And then Antoninus luckily intervened as a kind of interim ruler for quite a long period of time. And I think that convinced Marcus Marcus to this place and thought, well, hang on a minute.

Donald Robertson: [01:03:40] This guy is proving to me that it's possible to be a Roman emperor and be uncorrupted by power. By otherwise, I mean, I believed that was possible for me to become emperor would have ended up with Adrian. So those are some of the things I think that are going on in that part of the book. Some interesting kind of subtexts, potentially. And he praises his to teach because he also praises his Aristotelian teacher, Platonist teachers. It's kind of interesting. You know, it's it's interesting also, like I say, to notice, he doesn't mention Adrian or or these articles or several other people that we would have imagined. He mentions his adoptive brother, Lukas Varus, in fleetingly like a footnote, and he says he was grateful for his loyalty and affection. I think that is damning him with faint praise. Right. And I think if we maybe this is speculation on my part, but I think that implies that Marcus had concerns about his loyalty by and he is praising his loyalty is like which in brackets, which kind of surprised me. Why I would have thought maybe he would have posed a threat as a rival to the throne, but he doesn't.

Harpreet Sahota: [01:04:57] And then it is interesting how he said about his brother to have the kind of brother I did one whose character challenged me to improve my own and when I was very ambiguous. Yeah, well, when I read when I read it the first time, when I heard it was like, oh, he must have really awesome. Brother, don't read your book. And his little brother is kind of a dick.

Donald Robertson: [01:05:14] Yeah. And you know, it's ambiguous. So my brother challenged me to improve my own character because your brother was a raging alcoholic and a playboy and he inspired you to be the opposite way. You know, we don't know for sure. So many historians believe that the historical gangster trashes Lucious Varus for a couple of political reasons or because it makes for a better story. So I read there's a good biography of Lucious. Ferrus actually argues that he wasn't as bad as that history might be. But I actually I, I they may exaggerate things, but I think there's probably a lot of truth in what they say. And I think Lucifer is probably was quite, quite different from Marcus and maybe about the emperor in some ways, maybe also, you know, one of a puts like this, but maybe in some ways a prototype of what Commodus later became there. If you're a Roman emperor, there are a number of ways. So first of all, being a Roman emperor kind of sucks, right? Believe it or not, because a lot of them were assassinated. So it's quite stressful job, the sword of Damocles hanging over your head all the time. And it's understandable. A lot of people didn't really want to become Roman emperor. And so how do you hang on to power? How to survive is Roman emperor.

Donald Robertson: [01:06:35] There are kind of three main things I think you need to potentially juggle. So one is if the legions are on your side. And so first and foremost, the Roman emperor is a. Chief of the Roman regions, and that's not really NSA is traditionally that's meant to be where his authority comes from, it's actually technically the regions that appoint him emperor. And so if you've got the regions on your side, that helps a lot. And that can be difficult, because if you're at one side of the empire, the regions that the other side of the empire might never set eyes on you, and maybe they're commanded by a general that they spent decades with. If he doesn't like you, they're probably going to be more loyal to their general than they are to some guy they'd never met before. And then the Senate, if you have them on your side, that makes a big difference. I absolutely hated hearing ended up having partizan Senate and the Senate in general despised him. But Antonymous Pius was loved by the Senate because he was kind of a career politician. And we saw him very much as one of their own.

Donald Robertson: [01:07:37] And then the other one is just the population in general being on your side because they see you as a popular figure. Marcus had the Senate on his side from the Senate. Later, he got the Army on his side. When he went to the front and the northern frontier, he gradually won the respect of the army and are some things that tell us that. But I don't think he ever really I think he's kind of the general population at Rome and throughout the Empire, a bit more of an ambivalent attitude towards him. And they didn't kind of warm to him the way that they would with some noton some emperors alienate the army and alienate the Senate. And that's a very dangerous situation because then their only option is to become a celebrity, a populist, and threw bread and circuses or whatever to try and win over the love of the population. And that's generally a very precarious strategy. Lucio's varus didn't have to really fight to defend his position because Marcus was like his patron, but he was popular with the regions and popular, very popular with the general public.

Donald Robertson: [01:08:50] He would - Lucius Verus would be like a celebrity who like owns a football team and is involved in sports like Elton John, a guy on the football team doesn't. And so so people like he was a big fan of the gladiatorial games and very closely associated with the chariot races and so the legions and the general public.

Donald Robertson: [01:09:17] So Lucius is a very familiar character, Campbellton character, also played by a celebrity, someone that was more relatable than Marcus, seemed a bit more aloof to them, and comments alienated the Senate and the Army. And he tried to follow this kind of strategy on his own of throwing expensive games and winning the love of the public.

Donald Robertson: [01:09:41] But you could also call that becoming a sellout and like trying to become like a reality TV star or a celebrity or something. Today, when emperors do, that's when they really start to become increasingly corrupt because they forget about doing their job properly and it's all about PR.

Harpreet Sahota: [01:10:02] So what can Marcus then teach us about being better teammates? Because it seems like that is a huge piece of being empire. And even I think Stoic philosophy talks a great deal about working with others. So what can we learn about being better teammates from Marcus?

Donald Robertson: [01:10:20] Just as an aside, I'd say when people often have kind of a simplistic idea of what it means to be a Roman emperor, and even the Romans didn't even really have a world that equates to what the emperor for as an emperor is like a king of kings, and that in some ways really clashes with what they meant by Augustus Imperator.

Donald Robertson: [01:10:44] So Marcus, some emperors ruled in a very autocratic way, like a dictator. But Marcus was very different and so is, I'm telling this pious.

Donald Robertson: [01:10:54] He made a point of as soon as he was acclaimed emperor he appointed the emperor. So he didn't want to be perceived as an autocrat. He wanted to be seen as he perceived as really jointly alongside a cool ruler to balance things over. And he wanted to be seen as a servant of the Senate and the public. And so allegedly, this story has to tell us that any major appointments he made of decisions he made, he sought approval first from the Senate rather than doing things unilaterally.

Donald Robertson: [01:11:28] And also, there's a remarkable, remarkable passage that Cassius Deo, Roman senator, who are one of our main histories, claims that when the civil war broke out against Marcus, Marcus says that he would have been. Willing to step down as emperor and voluntarily appear in front of a Senate hearing, his authority had been impeached by the support of a dsdj.co/artists the general who started this war against him.

Donald Robertson: [01:11:59] And he said I would have answered the criticisms calmly, rationally and quote, in front of a Senate hearing, you guys to the side that I don't have to be emperor. I trust you guys to to make the right decision. I would have just appeared in front of you to help his case.

Donald Robertson: [01:12:15] I to talk to my case. And I didn't quite happy for you to decide whether I should continue in power or not. That's an absolutely remarkable thing to say.

Donald Robertson: [01:12:23] Even the American president today would struggle to have the humility required to voluntarily step down from power, not to appear here as far as he had been impeached. But so in some ways, Marcus was also a Roman emperor, a less autocratic ruler than some modern day presidents or prime ministers. So that's a strange concept, at least according to the surviving histories. How could you be more of a team?

Donald Robertson: [01:12:56] Marcus wants us to recognize our own imperfection and bias that's integral to Stoicism, to realize that we are creatures of passion. None of us are perfect. None of the Stoics found those claimed to be gurus of perfect.

Donald Robertson: [01:13:13] We're all in the same boat together. We all have flaws in our ability to reason and therefore, to some extent it's rational to console others and that we have to try hard.

Donald Robertson: [01:13:28] The problem in life is identifying people whose judgment we can trust that you said earlier. But finding a mentor is a tricky thing. Marcus's physician, Gaylan, has a whole book about how to find a mentor. He says you have to look for somebody whose life provides evidence of the character rather than just the stuff they say. You have to look at their record, as it were, their track record, and have the shown wisdom, integrity, courage, self discipline and so on and learn from them so they know to be a team player. I think we have to respect other people. We have to see the potential within them while also accepting that they have certain limitations. We have to lead by example rather than trying to hector or lecture other people. And we have to we also have to be philosophical about things and accept that things aren't always going to turn out as we wish. And you know, that ancient Stoic principle, we have to not get our panties in a twist if things don't always turn out exactly as we'd like them to. That's what Marcus is essentially saying. You have to have a relatively relaxed attitude.

Donald Robertson: [01:14:35] He says a key to the way that Marcus ruled is in the meditation's as a passage where he says that you can't expect to achieve Plato's Republic, which is strange. You'd think he would have said zero republic is a common cliche for you can expect Utopia tomorrow. Rome wasn't built in a day, ironically, is what we would say. He said, you must be satisfied if you make one small step in the right direction. And we can see from Marcus's legislative record that he makes small, incremental changes towards increasing the rights of slaves and women. For example, it can abolish slavery overnight. Good luck doing that.

Donald Robertson: [01:15:16] He already faced a civil war, but if he tried to abolish slavery he wouldn't have woken up the next morning, you know, and he would almost certainly have been assassinated in a civil war throughout the empire. But what he did do was try to make small, incremental changes and the right direction. And so I think Marcus would say sometimes you've got to kind of pick and choose your battles and you've got to accept that there are things that you don't like, but you might not be able to change overnight and nevertheless remain committed to your goals and try even if it's moving at a snail's pace. You know, as long as you keep your eyes on the goal and you're still moving in the right direction, that's maintained. And that allows you to collaborate even with people that you might not like very much of his values you might not share like, but still just keep nudging them, leading by example, accepting incremental change like the slow, softly, softly and patient political approach typical of some of the Stoics.

Harpreet Sahota: [01:16:16] Thank you very much. I appreciate that. And I know we're running a bit long on time here. There's so many other questions I wanted to to ask you, but we'll we'll be to wrap it up here. So last formal question before I jump into a quick random round. It is one hundred years in the future. What do you want to be remembered for?

Donald Robertson: [01:16:36] Nothing. I don't have any real desire to be remembered for anything. I'd like Stoicism still to be a thing. Look, I think it would have - it's a perennial philosophy and I think because people are still studying it. But Marcus Aurelius talks about this idea of, you know, whether he'll be remembered in the future.

Donald Robertson: [01:17:00] And he's a strange he's quite accepting of the fact that he thinks people will forget about him. And so it's odd that we are still reading his book and admiring the fact that he says that one day going to remember his name. So I'll tell you an odd thing for Marcus was that by the time he's writing the meditations, there would be people that he met, statesmen and women officers who only knew of Adrian as a statue and as somebody they read about in books, whereas Marcus remembered meeting him and growing up in his career as a child, going hunting with them and stuff, maybe. And I think as you get older, you know, you can have that strange experience of of seeing how time changes and perceptions change over time. But I I'd like to think that in the future, people would love in a way that's more consistent with Stoic philosophy and philosophy will still be guiding them. But I don't have a desire to be remembered in the future.

Harpreet Sahota: [01:18:00] Very, very Aurelius like of you. I really like that answer. So jumping into the ring around here, first question is, what are you currently most excited about or currently exploring?

Donald Robertson: [01:18:13] Um, I'm working on a graphic novel and it's a long haul, but I'm working on it lot. We've only just started covering the pages. We've got the second colored page now. So for us, there's a lot of what is about a year to write scripts and get the whole thing done in draft or pencil form. And my artist Xenomorph Ragger in Portugal has just colored the second page, so I'm quite excited, but we've just got to work on out of the way so I know where this is going to push.

Donald Robertson: [01:18:40] I can say very vaguely that we are in the process tentatively planning a military Stuart Cohen type conference because over the years have been many people. Earlier this year I spoke to the Marine Corps University in Quantico, and I'm kind of interested in the possibility of doing more work with people in different branches of the armed forces around the world in the future, something we're currently looking into.

Harpreet Sahota: [01:19:09] I'm really excited about that graphic novel - Verissimus, right?. Is that how you say that? Super, super excited for that to come out and then hopefully soon after a animation. So what do you believe that other people think is crazy?

Donald Robertson: [01:19:27] What do I do? Other people think that I believe is great. What?

Harpreet Sahota: [01:19:32] Hopefully. Hopefully, yeah. Well, believe. Do you have that other people might think is crazy.

Donald Robertson: [01:19:36] Oh, what's a

Donald Robertson: [01:19:36]  Belief that I have that other might think is crazy. Honestly, there are loads.

Donald Robertson: [01:19:42] Gosh. And I don't believe that happiness is a feeling and I believe the loving other people is more important than being loved by them.

Donald Robertson: [01:19:59] I mean, I believe lots of things that I don't think it matters whether you die or not, as long as you have loved, is that I think being dead isn't a problem. I think never having existed suck that way. The fact that it existed at all I think is good enough. You shouldn't then worry about the fact that one day you'll sister exist and that I get to see people with you. That seems crazy that the day I realize that is the day I stopped really worrying about dying. I felt just really mad because I used to exist. That's good enough. And that doesn't make sense to most people. But it made sense to make sense to me. That's how I like to think about things. There are many things I believe that I guess other people think are crazy. But those are those are a few of them.

Harpreet Sahota: [01:20:52] Yeah. I mean, I guess there's an infinite amount of time where you were not born and they'll be there at a time when you're not alive. Yeah. If you could have a billboard placed up anywhere, what would you put on it?

Donald Robertson: [01:21:05] Oh, gosh. Let me say that. Well, whenever I see someone shove the front or they I think the first time someone put a book in front of me and said, can say nice. I thought I feel like I should write something on it. And the first that came into my mind was a quote from Horace as deal to be wise. And so I know I always books I to be eyes and I feel like I don't know if it's very practical advice, but it seems pretty fundamental to me.

Donald Robertson: [01:21:31] I said earlier just asking what was the basis of a powerful question and just thinking in terms of making some effort to live more wisely would be the first and most. Stamp and philosophy is, you know, we can talk all day about what Stoicism teaches or other philosophies teach, but the fundamental decision to try to be a wiser person is that that initial step that many people don't even bother.

Donald Robertson: [01:21:59] To me, it's the foundation I compare it to when I was the young guy, a brief look into martial arts at the taekwando jujitsu and stuff like that. And I remember some of the old Japanese karate teachers would say what the most important thing is learning how to do a flying, spinning back, kick your stance. And that's the foundation of everything else. And that seems like the most banal saying, you know what to do. So that I can learn how to stand properly when I want to learn how to fly and cakes and stuff like that, like Brisley. But I think that's true of many subjects. Like the most important part is this your stance and Stoicism? It's not all the subtleties of the philosophy. It's the fundamental stance. Why? And part of it is daring to be wise. So that's why I would say daring to be wise is that the stance since the foundation of everything else and Stoicism. That's what I like it a lot.

Harpreet Sahota: [01:22:55] What are you currently reading?

Donald Robertson: [01:22:57] I am currently reading - what am I currently reading - like I'm listening to an audio book. I can't remember the name of this, but the history of disease in the Roman Empire like plagues and stuff. Yeah, that's like the main thing. And I'm reading a bunch of stuff from work. I'm rereading a bunch of biographies of Marcus Aurelius because I'm about to write a biography of a really. So I have to go back and read a lot of books that I've already read several times that I'm with the most graphy will open up the random question generator just for a couple of questions here.

Harpreet Sahota: [01:23:46] All right. First question is going to be what's your favorite book?

Donald Robertson: [01:23:50] My favorite book is The Meditations. But the Apology - Plato's Apology is a book that I really, really love.

Donald Robertson: [01:23:59] And I would recommend the which is one of the most beautiful philosophical texts over what is something you can never seem to finish, something I never seem to finish in slamming Greek.

Donald Robertson: [01:24:15] I'm I'm not I'm not the best at languages. So I always seem to be kind of like starting and trying really hard.

Donald Robertson: [01:24:21] And then I come my enthusiasm pitas, and I'll leave it for like a year or two and then come back and pick it up again. I've never finished loving modern or ancient Greek.

Donald Robertson: [01:24:32] What talent would you show off in a talent show?

Harpreet Sahota: [01:24:35] What talent would I show off in a talent show? Um, gosh, I'm sure I have some kind of obscure talents, but I'm I'm really I get really good at cooking something.

Donald Robertson: [01:24:52] I'm very good at making a Greek salad called Dacos. Why I believe among the world's best at last. But I've made out make tacos for everyone.

Harpreet Sahota: [01:25:05] I love to try some of that. So, Donald, how can people connect with you? Where could they find you online?

Donald Robertson: [01:25:11] My website has my eLearning site, mazlo the courses and downloads and stuff, and all my social media is connected to that. And my Web address is just Donald gropers and names such as my name, Donald Gross and this that instead of dot com, dot net, dot name and Amy, and if they've got the other people to contact me, the contact form of fatal like articles and videos and stuff.

Harpreet Sahota: [01:25:36] Yeah, I'll definitely be sure to include a link to that. The show notes doubt. Thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule to be on the show today. I really, really appreciate you spending some of your evening with me. Thank you.

Donald Robertson: [01:25:48] No problem. It's been a pleasure. And thank you very much for having me along.