Finding Your Values: Q&A with Donald Robertson
I'm going double grazing, I'm living in single glazed houses. Oh my god. And I was in this place, it's really bad. Minus three. Oh, I am.
Speaker 1:Hello. There I am, I'm back. Hello everyone, we're live, Donald, on the group again, so welcome back. I'm working on a new screen right now. 49 inches wide.
Speaker 1:You know? Oh, really? Biggie legs. So I'm looking into the camera now. So hello, everyone.
Speaker 1:Hello hello hello, evening, evening, evening. The big dawn of Love Island is talking values today, the choose values. Hello everyone, I need to get the other questions up actually.
Speaker 2:How did they end up in Love Island?
Speaker 1:I just need to see it happen. Your shirt basically is getting-
Speaker 2:Just because I wore that shot.
Speaker 1:Basically, I was going off, but I think we do need some philosophy on Love Island, I think it'll blow minds, know? They don't even know, some of them don't even know if Italy is a country and stuff like that, so.
Speaker 2:Is that right? Is that what they said then?
Speaker 1:I mean, some are intelligent, some are, majority of Well, yeah, Donald's wearing his worry hat because Look at my
Speaker 2:worry hat on, it's getting bad. I'm worried about the snow outside.
Speaker 1:Can I hand the leg, what do you reckon? Do you reckon it snowed much a thousand years ago? Is there any evidence for it?
Speaker 2:The weather was quite different in a lot of places. Was listening to an audio book about that by a historian a few weeks ago, and they were going into a lot of detail about geological evidence and stuff, textual evidence about how the climate was different and things like it used to rain a lot more in Italy, funnily enough, was talking about it in this, but even in the summer, because they know because the River Tiber flooded. So it's interesting. And maybe it was colder here because they talk about the Greeks, Diogenes, a cynic used to hug statues, like strip naked and hug bronze statues to endure hardship to toughen himself up. But it doesn't get that cold here normally.
Speaker 2:They'd only be able to do it like one day a year, so maybe it was colder back in the day.
Speaker 1:You think it'd be more, I don't know, why do I think it'd be more on the phone? I don't know. They were wearing togas and stuff, they were all good. You've gone on mute, you've gone mute for them.
Speaker 2:I've gone mute.
Speaker 1:Oh, you are, you're back. They were wearing togas, so they must have been quite warm in it, unless they were really hardcore men.
Speaker 2:I think they were just tough. Yeah, they made us turn off stuff back in those days, Scott. Like not like you and I, we've grown soft from too much Netflix and sushi and stuff like that.
Speaker 1:All right, well, I mean, most of us are going soft, yeah. But it probably is a problem as well. I think everybody wants this dream life from the movies. I remember you saying about, I think you're on mute, I think you've gone off again.
Speaker 2:No, it's just probably, is it just muting me if I don't speak for a while? You hear me now?
Speaker 1:I can hear you now, yeah. You were saying that romance back in those days was completely different to romance now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it varied in different countries and stuff, but in ancient Athens, most women were almost treated like slaves. They didn't go out of the house, except there was very limited where women could go. Except certain women like priestesses and like high class prostitutes, courtesans like led a more freer life in a sense, but women were treated like commodities in ancient Athens. And actually someone told me, one of the people at the of the institutes here at the American School for Classical Studies, they they wore painted masks, and the masks in the theatre, so the masks of men were brown and the masks of women were white, because the audience's preconception was that women had really pale skin, because they didn't go outdoors much. Guys all had amazing tans because they were outside all the time.
Speaker 2:They used to wrestle naked, that's you know, that's where the word gymnasium comes from, it means naked. Gymnos means naked in Greek. So like they thought people should exercise in the nude, like they would wrestle and box and stuff like these sports grounds in the sun. So they must have had amazing all over tans.
Speaker 1:Who made that rule up and the naked rule?
Speaker 2:I don't know. It was just put down, laid down in laws, like at the beginning of time. Oh my days. So they'd all get naked and they go you have to, it's the rules. It's the law in Athens.
Speaker 1:I wonder when that changed, who changed that law? Who finally said you know what, enough of this, I've had enough.
Speaker 2:I've had enough. Guys need to cover up when you're wrestling. Suspect it might have been Christianity. Like, you know, when priests and churches and things came along, they maybe thought we're going to need a few changes right about here in Athens. Wild.
Speaker 1:Oh my days, they would have had a nightmare with that because they didn't want to do anything with me. Well, hope everyone's learned a lot there from the old raw months of Athens, Any other comments, let me know. But just wait, I think we'll there's like 85 at the moment. We'll wait to see people coming in. Seven minutes past.
Speaker 1:Don, give us a rundown of what we're talking about today, Ian.
Speaker 2:We're talking about values.
Speaker 1:Values.
Speaker 2:And how to live more consistently in accord with your values. We have a lot of ancient philosophy, lot of stoicism, lot of Socrates, we're going to have a lot of modern evidence based psychotherapy, all things you like Scott basically. And I've got some questions, some deep questions.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like I've got like maybe one or two little stories, just about are you actually living in a world where your values and also, I'm going talk about how people sometimes can appear to be extremely busy, like running around like a headless chicken, maybe doing nothing of value.
Speaker 1:Oh that happens all the time.
Speaker 2:That happens a lot.
Speaker 1:All the time, what are you doing busy, oh yeah bro what are you doing, I know, it's Twitter for an hour, going back on my phone, writing one email, twitter again, there's a good book and it's called Deep Work by Karl Newport, quite interesting. Have you heard of these, so I come across this book in Be Water, my friend, by Sean and Lou, the four four arrangements by the ancient Toltec people of Mexico. They've got similar philosophy to the stoics in a way. Interesting, kind of interesting how it seems Buddhism, there's definitely strong links between all of them. They were talking about how other people's, while other people say it's not up, is it got nothing to do with you?
Speaker 1:Which is kind of like stoicism where you
Speaker 2:you're not Well, people think a lot of ancient philosophies looking back have many things in common. And maybe it's just because we're really only ones that are getting it wrong. You know, it's like, it's maybe just that we've deviated so much from what used to be common sense the world over.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you're right. But isn't it crazy that, you know, these are in South America, Mexico, then you are the stoics in Europe, then you are the Far East all coming to similar conclusions at the same time?
Speaker 2:That's often been said, like in particular, yeah, in the Axial Age, people sometimes call it like there's this period, like when they reckon Buddhism and the Upanishads and Daoism and like, Greek philosophy originated, like roughly around the same time, like everybody suddenly had a Eureka moment simultaneously, like I came up with similar ideas. It's often been noted.
Speaker 1:I was reading as well, seems to be a strong Buddhism linked to German philosophers, Nietzsche and stuff like that, loved a bit of Buddhism, didn't they?
Speaker 2:Schopenhauer, Schopenhauer is the one that's most into Buddhism actually. Was a Nietzsche who was kind of originally a bit of a follower of Schopenhauer, was influenced by him. Nietzsche's kind of influenced by, he read Buddhism, he was into a little bit, but Schopenhauer much more so.
Speaker 1:That's good yeah because as I said right across Nietzsche however you say his name would proclaim he was a Buddha of Europe something. Nice swim boy. No you're not mate, you're not a Buddha of Europe, Not at all. I reckon what we do today, Donald, is we're going to start with some questions, you don't mind. So
Speaker 2:what is a warm up? And then we'll get into and then we'll do the slides and talk about the values and stuff. I'm just adjusting my wee tartan blanket on my knees.
Speaker 1:Do know Wales beat Scotland on the weekend in rugby at one point, just so you know.
Speaker 2:Is that true? Yeah. You're making the argument.
Speaker 1:The dragon slayed the I guess for the bike.
Speaker 2:Just like that's, might tell me that at the beginning.
Speaker 1:Do you know what was interesting in mind? Reading up about a lot of Welsh history, the Welsh used to call somewhere the Old North, they used to call this place called the Old North which is basically Scotland.
Speaker 2:Really? That's another one.
Speaker 1:Called the Hain Ogleth, so there's definitely like a strong connection back in ancient times to the North where Scotland and Wales obviously. Okay, here we go, the dragon slave. Okay, so what do you think about being values driven in society that is driven by a few specific aspects, money, status and power? How can we navigate through this? Is it rare to find values driven company to work for, for example?
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, that's what you're saying, that's from Arusa, I think I'm saying that right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a good question. Right? It's a big problem. There's a problem in the ancient world as well. I really think it's something that's inherent to society in general, I think it's part of our constitution, that we naturally, in a society gravity towards being more focused on external goals, like wealth and property and what other people think of us.
Speaker 2:And it takes an effort to see through that, like the smoking mirrors, like the Stoics used to call it tephos, or tufos, like the smoke, the mist, the kind of illusion of society's prevailing values, consumerism, materialism, all this kind of stuff. It's difficult, it takes an effort. In the ancient world, they thought it took a real effort to try and smash through that and realise that true happiness. I mean, today, look how ridiculous we are, right? You know, throughout all of history, people have had less than we have today.
Speaker 2:Throughout all of history, people have had less than most of the poorest people in first world societies have today. Yet we're not satisfied. We're never satisfied. We always want to have more. But most of the people throughout history were reasonably satisfied with what they had.
Speaker 2:They've gotten with their lives and stuff, but it's never good enough. So that's what happens when you're focused on external goals. As you get older, I think you have more and more opportunity to review your life, especially during the pandemic. It's a shock. It's a wake up call to a lot of people, you know, you have a brush with death, or you start to kind of like, you know, be concerned about public health crisis.
Speaker 2:And maybe you think, is this what it's all about? You know, is it all just about the rat race and stuff like that? Maybe there's more to life than this. And you start to kind of like reappraise your values. Hopefully you have an existential crisis.
Speaker 2:Scott, have you ever had one of those? Like, midlife crisis, like you start to kind of think, maybe this is all smoke and minerals, maybe like, maybe it's not what life is really about. And it is difficult if you're in a company or an organisation, because values don't gel with your own. I think all that you can do is try to live as consistently in accord with your values as you can, while accepting the limits of your environment. And the ancient Stoics knew that they certainly people had jobs, they were legionaries and people held down different jobs in ancient society.
Speaker 2:Epictetus says, look, if there's a little bit of smoke in the room, put up with it, if there's too much smoke, then like the door is always open for you to leave. So if there's a bit of a clash with your values, stay in your job and try and work with it. But if there's a big clash with your values, maybe, know, virtually consistent leaving the job and trying to find something else.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Well, like you mentioned the stoics, like reading lives of the stoics with Ryan Aldey, so many stoics were involved in politics and in conflict and power and greed and stuff, Rene?
Speaker 2:Marcus really has said the problem with this in the meditations, he complains about it a lot. He says he gets quite frustrated with court life. I mean, you think he's in charge, right? But he feels that he's compromised a lot of the time. And, you know, it's difficult for him to occupy that position.
Speaker 2:So it wasn't easy for him. He had a lot of moral conflicts. Know, and he didn't want to be emperor in the beginning. Like, but he was persuaded that maybe he could do the job, like he'd be the best man for the job. And so he stepped up and he did it.
Speaker 2:And he tried to make the best of it that he could. But he reminds himself to be one of the things he says that might be useful. He says, look, you're not going to build the ideal utopian society overnight. He says, you won't build Plato's Republic overnight. He says, but you need to be satisfied, as long as you're moving in the right direction, even if it's only one small step at a time.
Speaker 2:That's the most powerful man in the world, saying that one of the most powerful men in history, saying you've got to be satisfied sometimes if you're making small changes, as long as you're moving in the right direction.
Speaker 1:Yeah, something from your book as well you touched upon then Marcus, he was, I think it's your book, where he talks about he would love to go on holiday to the countryside or whatever, then he realises that's no holiday, you've got to find it in your own mind basically, you've got to find peace of mind.
Speaker 2:That's right, you know, he says there's nothing that I can get in the countryside and the seaside and the hills, you know, no peace of mind that I can find out that I can't find in the army camp standing here on the front line in the blizzards, in this hostile environment. Like he didn't like the cold, He had a bit of a dodgy chest like Marcus Aurelius. He said he had to give these speeches. It's difficult giving a speech, I had problems giving speeches because the frigid air was kind of affecting my voice, he said, like I had chest problems.
Speaker 1:Good old Marcus, I like the realisation. I think a lot of people do that, they wait for two week holidays per year to live their life and they're like, if I have a holiday, it'd be better. No, you won't.
Speaker 2:There's a song about that, like living for the weekend. Yeah. Yeah, some people kind of like they just do their 95 and they're just saving it all up for the weekend. But you've got to make the most of every moment in life, I think, like, you know, you can't just be like storing up for like a few opportunities that you get to let your hair down. There needs to be more, there needs to be value in everything that you do if possible.
Speaker 2:Like try and find opportunities to do things that you value from moment to moment, I think in life.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's important. They touch upon that on the four arrangements. The fourth one is always do your best. And even if you hate doing something, just do your best and you think like joy and doing your best and stuff, which is good. But yeah, that's good.
Speaker 2:A job is worth doing, it's worth doing well, Scott.
Speaker 1:Think you did that.
Speaker 2:You used to sell me all the time.
Speaker 1:I think you did that with your books, I really do, fair play. But there's a good one here on the next follow on, are you ready now, the next question? Sure? I'm You're all ready for this exact question. I'd like to know how you differentiate between your own true values and values imposed on us, what our values should be if that makes sense.
Speaker 1:Let me say it again, I'd like to know how you differentiate between your own true values and values imposed on us.
Speaker 2:Bogus values, other people's values. They're not good at all. Those are none of our business in a way. We want our own values, our core values, authentic values to come to the fore. And I think partly that just kind of emerges organically by questioning your values and reflecting on them and defining them.
Speaker 2:But there are what I call perspective shifting exercises that you can do that help. I'm going to talk about them in a minute. But actually, one of them is, you know, you can just ask yourself, well, look, if other people weren't around, if I was in like, a post apocalyptic London, like in one of these movies, like I was the last man on earth, you know, would these values like still matter if other people weren't around to watch me? Like, know, or what if nobody else cared? Would these values still be important to me?
Speaker 2:You've got to ask yourself different questions until you can hit on the right one. But just try and remove other people from the equation somehow or other using your imagination and say what if they didn't know, what if they didn't care, what if they weren't around anymore? Would I still value creativity? Or would I still value compassion? You know, things, or I'm only doing it for them.
Speaker 1:You
Speaker 2:can use these thought experiments that helps a lot better.
Speaker 1:That's really good. Anyone, if you've got questions, anything about that, put them in. That's a great question actually. What values, like even justice, right? How many people have actually want to still do justice if it didn't have the like, yeah, it's the right thing to do side to it?
Speaker 1:Because a lot of people would thought. Pat
Speaker 2:on the back. Even if nobody's watching, like we still do the right thing, like would you do what's fair? There's in Plato's Republic, he's got a thought experiment about that. It's the famous one, it's called the Ring of Gyges. And it's kind of like very, it's obviously kind of similar, or reminiscent to that thing in Lord of the Rings.
Speaker 2:And because the Ring of Gyges is a ring of invisibility. And Plato says if nobody could see you, like if you were invisible, would you still act with justice? Like, would you still act fairly? Or would you just be going around stealing everything? Like, if you could get away with it, undercover a darkness, if you had the ring of invisibility, would your morality go out the window?
Speaker 2:Are you only doing it? Like, because you're frightened of the consequences? Or are you doing it because you actually believe in acting in a way that's honourable and virtuous and just?
Speaker 1:Tough question because then people will say, okay, of course I'm doing it because of the sake of doing it, Why don't we stay fit and then
Speaker 2:It reaches its own reward. That's what so many people say.
Speaker 1:Say no, know, virtue signalling, the virtue, the value of honesty.
Speaker 2:I guess virtue signalling is also connected to this idea of just kind of like doing it for other people. But the bottom line is, it's about when you look in the mirror and see yourself, like can you look yourself in the eye, can you look yourself in the mirror and actually feel some self respect? You know, like can you have some sort of admiration or self satisfaction, like from the way that you're living your life, that's when I think you know that you're on the right track. Like you're looking at a mirror at the end of the day and you think I did a good job today. Regardless of what other people think.
Speaker 2:Even like in Kipling Ziff, even if other people are losing their heads around you, if other people are condemning you, you still look in the mirror and think, I don't care, like I'm still proud of myself for what I did or what my grave, like with a sense of self respect and dignity, because I believe in what I did. You know, I think that's really the most important thing. That's what gives life value, you know. It's very elusive though, because we're easily sidetracked by trying to impress other people.
Speaker 1:That is the problem. That is the main problem.
Speaker 2:I'll tell you a good quote from Marcus Aurelius. Actually, Aurelius quotes something that another dude said, a guy called Antistines, who was a student of Socrates said it six hundred years earlier. And you see me doing mental arithmetic there.
Speaker 1:So you're a wizard.
Speaker 2:Arithmetic there. Hundred, about six hundred years earlier, this guy and so that's like a long time ago. Before Marcus. To him this was like us looking back on medieval times, this is ancient history to Marx Aurelius. So he said Antistina said 'tis kingly to do good, and yet be spoken of ill.
Speaker 2:And what he means is like if you can still do the right thing even though everyone else is laughing at you, condemning you, then like you're, that's really like the pinnacle, you're like, to the Stoics and the Cynics, kingliness is internal, like it's a character trait. And so they thought Diogenes is a Cynic and Antestinese were kingly individuals, kingly men, because they conquered themselves. And they thought Nero and Alexander the Great, and these guys were actually slavish men, because they were consumed by greed and vanity. So it's a topsy-turvy world that we live in, Marcus Aurelius would look back and go, Diogenes, although he's a beggar, has actually got the soul of a king, whereas guys like Nero have the opposite, really, they're enslaved by their passions, know, so things are sometimes the opposite of how they seem from the outside. But he said to his kingly to do good and yet be spoken of ill.
Speaker 2:And Marcus really has quoted that, it's obviously resonated with him. He thought, geez, I'm actually in this position of being an emperor, can I still lay in that position, do what I've considered to be the right thing? And you know, in a sense, he provoked a civil war, which in a way is a good sign. Like he was doing stuff that rocked the boat, they poisoned Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, they tried to depose him from being emperor by instigating a civil war against him. And it was because he was doing a lot of things that they didn't like that he did, right?
Speaker 2:Meritocracy, he started promoting people from humble origins. So he promoted the guy called Pertinax to be one of his lead generals, who was the son of a slave. Pertinax went on to become Roman Emperor, he succeeded Commodus, right, because Marx had really promoted this guy, people didn't like that. It was normally aristocrats that were generals, he was rocking the boat through this kind of meritocratic regime. And also consistently in his legislation, Marcus Aurelius improved the rights of slaves, a recurring theme in the legislation that he passed.
Speaker 2:Didn't abolish slavery, but he made it progressively easier for slaves to earn their freedom. So this was another important thing that rocked the boat as well, people didn't like that. Like, he recruited all the gladiators into the Roman army during a military crisis, because there was a huge invasion, people didn't like that, because it meant that the gladiators who were slaves potentially would earn their freedom, because you earned your freedom by joining the legion at the end of it. It's a very prestigious position to be a legionary in fact, so that rocked the boat, there was a lot of unrest about you can't take our slaves away, and give them jobs in the army and get paid and stuff, that's outrageous. So there are a lot of things that he did that rocked society in Rome.
Speaker 2:And you could say he pushed it far enough, If he pushed it like a little bit further, maybe he would have woke up dead, they would have poisoned him and he sleep or something like that. People think the Roman Emperor can do anything, obviously, can only do so much, so a quarter of them get assassinated.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's mad. That is mentally good. And like someone like one third of them died in their beds or something, most of died in their, you know, park or outside of their home. It shows they were always like on the move or on the front line or whatever. There's a common theme, Adonal, basically, society's created these values.
Speaker 1:And obviously the word society is very negative, these days people think it's a bad thing. There's obviously some good things society have done. I think that just this is a good thing, society's come together and gone, you know what, we shouldn't really be taking any of this shit. So maybe there's something we should do as well. There's also stuff we've been conditioned, we are all conditioned in some way, shape or form.
Speaker 1:So aren't you conditioned with your values and not come up with them yourself?
Speaker 2:Yeah, mean, this is obviously in ancient Greece, this is a common debate between Physis and Nomos. So Nomos is law or society and Physis is nature. And so the Greeks would debate whether something came from society, whether we're indoctrinated into it, or whether it was genuinely coming from nature, from our own nature. And sometimes it's difficult to kind of tease them apart. But the Stoics were what we call ethical naturalists, that's a technical term in philosophy, right?
Speaker 2:And what it means is that they actually believed that there was a natural law, that there are intrinsic values in nature itself. And people think that's a crazy idea, Donald, like surely all values are just man made, we make we pull them out of thin air, like we make them all up. Well, let me tell you buddy, this is what Socrates said, right? You know, we're never gonna, no one's ever gonna conclusively settle this, but I'll tell you what Socrates said. He said, look, right, humans are unique among animals, because of their capacity for reason.
Speaker 2:Other animals can think, they can use tools and stuff like that, but nothing like to the extent that humans can. Like they can't write poetry, like novels, and plan to write a book and things like that. So humans have this tremendous capacity for reason. We're self conscious, we use language, and we solve problems and apply reason. And Socrates and the Stoics realised that if you're thinking at all, then arguably, you're implicitly committed.
Speaker 2:If you're engaging in the process of doing thinking, having a wee conversation with yourself, like have a word with yourself as the same EastEnders. That's just so if somebody else that's a lot about like cognitive therapy. So Peggy Mitchell was going to have a word with yourself, like go and have a little conversation with yourself, still have a cognitive therapy with yourself in the mirror or whatever. So if you're thinking at all, if you're having a word with yourself, you want to arrive at the truth, right? Like, soon as we start thinking we're committed to the value of truth, arguably, by at least about the most important thing, nobody, Socrates said, nobody really wants to be wrong about the most important things in life.
Speaker 2:We all value truth implicitly. And that's why we bother using reason at all. Like we wouldn't bother thinking about things and trying to figure them out if we didn't care at all about the truth. So Socrates said, don't kid me, like you want to get to the truth just as much as I do. Like, that's what you use your noggin for.
Speaker 2:That's why you're going away and having a little word with yourself. That's why you think things through. Right? And Socrates said, Look, if you're committed to using reason, and trying to get to the truth, then you might as well do it properly. And if you're going to use reason to its full potential, and live rationally, like use reason consistently, if you were to really do that, then you would attain the virtue of wisdom.
Speaker 2:Someone that lives rationally, that consistently applies reason well, would have attained wisdom. And so the Stoics say this is how implicitly we get to the idea that wisdom is a value. Right? Because, you know, we can't shake it off. Like we're all committed to valuing truth and wisdom deep down.
Speaker 2:You know, like we get we go astray, we forget our values, like we lose touch with them. But Socrates and the Stoics wanted to say that all human beings are implicitly committed to the value of truth and wisdom. And then that gives them a starting point, gives them a foundation stone from which they can then build a system of values by asking themselves what wisdom looks like, what it consists in. You might say Donald, nobody can define what wisdom looks like. Philosophers have debated this for centuries.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but Socrates said, I've got a simple way of approaching it, I'm going to tell you what wisdom isn't. And he said wisdom isn't riddled with contradictions. Like, that's how he got his Socratic method. He said, I can't tell you exactly what wisdom is, I can tell you what it's not. Like wisdom isn't saying one thing and doing another.
Speaker 2:Like wisdom isn't contradicting yourself left, right and centre. Like, if you're contradicting yourself within the space of a couple of sentences, you're wrong. Like, you know, you can't say two contradictory things and be right. Like so wisdom at the very least consistent ironing out all the creases from your thinking, by becoming more consistent with yourself and making your actions more consistent with your words, removing hypocrisy and double standards from your thinking. And that's why, you know, I think most people can agree that there's something wrong with contradiction and hypocrisy.
Speaker 2:Why? Because it goes so fundamentally against the intrinsic value that we place on truth and reason. So I'm old fashioned in that way. I'm not an ethical relativist or a postmodernist. I agree with the ancient Greeks.
Speaker 2:Do have certain values that we're intrinsically committed to, and that we can potentially build a system of ethics out of that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's good. And then really, the values we look at, there's obvious things that are good and bad, I know we're all conditioned, but there are obvious things that are good and bad. Like don't hurt someone else, obviously that's a good thing. There are plenty of obvious ones that you can't really argue against. Do know what mean?
Speaker 1:Justice, you can't really argue that. Courage is a good one. Like, of course, it's good to be courageous. Otherwise, we'll all be stuck in a house like Gunther Thindmob.
Speaker 2:I think you can refine each of those, Scott. And Socrates did, he was way ahead of you, buddy. He was two thousand, like two thousand four hundred years ahead of you. You've got a lot of catching up to this, He's already said, Socrates already said, like, so people said, for example, like, causing other people pain would surely like be intrinsically a bad thing. But Socrates would say, well, then you may be able to think of exceptions to that.
Speaker 2:Like, for example, what if you were trying to help someone to build up their tolerance for pain and discomfort? Like, and they were approaching it as like a method of training, if it's physical pain, like it may actually be a way of developing endurance, right. And another example would be courage. Actually, the Socrates talks about this in Plato's Phigo and elsewhere. So he says, at the very least, what people call courage often might be a vice rather than a virtue.
Speaker 2:For example, Socrates says, look, a burglar might do things that are risky and dangerous. And some people would look at that and say that takes bravery. But Socrates would say, well, can you call that a virtue? Is that really courage in the sense of a virtue? And he also says sometimes people do courageous things because they're really scared of something else.
Speaker 2:So his example would be like in battle, somebody might fight really courageously against the enemy, because they're terrified of being captured and enslaved. And so he said, sometimes you'll find people doing things that appear virtuous, because they're driven by another vice. And so he said, you shouldn't judge things by surface appearance, you've got to dig a little bit deeper sometimes to figure out whether something actually is a virtue, whether it's a vice concealed as a virtue. So he didn't stop like at surface appearances, he wanted to come up with the surface more. But essentially, you're right, you know, most people agree and there's research that shows modern psychologists do research on values.
Speaker 2:And for all that people talk about relativism, and subjectivism and ethics, generally, when you survey people, there's a surprising amount of consistency in their core ethical values. So yeah, most people believe that honesty is a value, like justice is a value, courage is a value, like there's a surprising amount of consensus about that. But then when it gets tricky, Scott, is when you start applying it to individual cases. Like so people might disagree about whether a particular individual is honest or courageous. Right, so we disagree about how to apply, we agree abstract idea, we disagree about how to apply it in specific cases.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that makes sense. It also makes sense that if something has been around for thousands of years and the times and tested and different people, and it's still here now, we can probably be sure that it's kind of decent.
Speaker 2:That's a good sign.
Speaker 1:Yeah, apart from war maybe. But there's a good question here from Sarah, see if you can answer this, I'll get ready now, be prepared. So she's mentioned that if you've noticed in sparsely populated areas of the world, human values can be tainted into storms, because yeah, a lot of scrap in the coal mines, because one isn't tested and right or wrong, good or bad, so they're not educated. So when they're exposed to what we have globally accepted as societal norm, it's absolutely foreign to them. It's a really strange and interesting social experiment, like for example, cannibalism is accepted in remote parts of the world, but to the masses it's frowned upon.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, that's a tricky anthropological question. Gosh, why is the whole can of worms there? Because like, because there's different forms of cannibalism for a start, right? So actually gastronomic cannibal ism, where you're just eating people because you're hungry, by anthropologists have questioned whether there's any evidence of that. But what's more common is ritual cannibalism, you eat your ancestors as a part of a funeral ceremony, for example, or people in history were told that people would eat the remains of their enemies when they defeated them in battle, for example, to gain their strength.
Speaker 2:But the most common form of cannibalism I think is in funeral rituals. So like, would we condemn cannibalism? I think, see the the stoics actually talked about this, and people got annoyed with them because they said that the stoics said, cannibalism is, they thought, in itself morally indifferent. They thought it depends on the context in which you're doing it. So for example, if you were on a plane and it crashed in the wilderness, you know, we've heard these stories about like, people having to turn cannibal and eat the remains of the survivors.
Speaker 2:And that's a moral conundrum. Like we just say that that's cannibalism is immoral, or we say in a situation like that, if it's life or death. And the same thing actually happened in ancient Greece during sieges. So often the city would be besieged and the enemy surrounding it would say you guys are all going to starve, and that's how we're going to defeat you. People would often turn cannibal under those circumstances, not just killing people and eat them, but like if somebody was killed in battle, someone else died of starvation, they would eat the remains in order survive.
Speaker 2:So should we say that that's against some religions, but would we say it's inherently wrong? I think people may actually disagree about that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, understand. There is Dabbi Cambliss and a lot of like, I'm sure I read even in the Napoleonic Wars and stuff during the Russian invasion, where they were all just trapped and dying, they were eating rats and horses and I'm sure it said they mentioned cannibalism, sure it said, but I don't know, yeah, once you go extreme, you will do whatever to survive.
Speaker 2:What's the strangest thing you've ever eaten, Scott?
Speaker 1:Don't know, octopus or something like that. Antagas? No, I don't think I have actually, nice.
Speaker 2:No, it's made from sheep's lungs. That's horrible, yeah, I wouldn't eat that, but they've got stranger things than that in Greece. Wouldn't eat an octopus, I don't eat anything that's more intelligent than I am. Octopuses can use tools and stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they're really, can fit through the smallest gap as well, they're real pests, imagine they were on land, no way, they take over. That's actually one of my fears, it's like an octopus like lands on my face you know.
Speaker 2:That's a phobia, one day octopuses shall roll the earth,
Speaker 1:hopefully when I'm gone. Octopus' values would be what?
Speaker 2:An octopus' values, Well, I don't know, like, see, that's our checker, the philosopher Wittgenstein once said, if a lion could speak, Wittgenstein said, we wouldn't be able to understand it. And what he meant by that is that a lion's values, and its worldview would be so different from ours, like we really struggle to understand what it was talking about. Know, like why does it keep this, because this lie is going on and on about like, know, like smelling other lions poo and stuff. Don't understand why he's so obsessed with that. So Victorian time would say, like the lion's way of
Speaker 1:looking at the world would
Speaker 2:be so embedded in its nature and its instincts and stuff, it would just seem like it was talking crazy, you know, even if it could speak English. So I don't think, you know, it'd be hard to know what an octopus's values were. There's a famous paper, I think it's by Thomas Nagel, a philosophy paper called, it's something like, you know, is it possible to know, can we know what it's like to be a bat? Because bats have a sonar or whatever, and it's saying what are the limits of human imagination and empathy? Could you put myself in your shoes to some extent, but could you put yourself in the shoes of a bat and imagine what it would be like to be almost blind and navigate by sonar?
Speaker 1:That would be terrible, wouldn't it?
Speaker 2:Like you sort of imagine a little bit, but it'd be difficult to tell.
Speaker 1:No way.
Speaker 2:But rhinoceroses can hardly see, but they've got huge nasal cavities. And so they're really good at detecting smells, but smells linger for a long time. So rhinoceros lives in a world where it's still kind of perceiving animals and things that were there hours ago. Like it perceives the world in terms of like trails, like where things like used to be, like, you know, whereas our visual sense is much faster, more rapid. Like, could you imagine what we could talk about it?
Speaker 2:So if you can talk about it, you can kind of imagine that in a way, but it becomes harder and harder to put yourself in the shoes of another creature, more and more alien it is. So I don't know the answer to answer your question, Scott, I'm not really sure what the values of an octopus would be.
Speaker 1:Socrates were known.
Speaker 2:He would have had an answer to that one. They did love their octopuses, like they had octopuses on the shields of some of the Greek phalanxes, I think it might have been that maybe the Corinthians had an octopus on their shield, possibly.
Speaker 1:Do you know the danger of I think it was the sceptics, I remember reading some book on knowledge, like what is knowledge? And I spun out and I was like, I can't keep reading this book about knowledge because what is knowledge? They were talking about the sceptics would just be like, yeah, but how do you know that's true? But how do you know that? It's like, oh mate, honestly, we could go on forever.
Speaker 1:I mean, I say What's
Speaker 2:philosophy for you? But the traditional definition of knowledge is justified true belief. Justified true belief. So if you have a belief that's true, might just be luck, right?
Speaker 1:Is that knowledge?
Speaker 2:So if I say like, you know, how many marbles I'm holding in hand, and you go three, and I've got three, is that knowledge? Is that a lucky guess? It's a true belief. So Plato said, knowledge is true belief, but it has to be justified. You have to have a reason for believing that I've got three and for it to be correct.
Speaker 2:And then we would call that knowledge.
Speaker 1:Is this knowledge? You tell me something, I pass it on to someone else, it's right because you said it to me, but I don't actually know, because I just trust
Speaker 2:what you I
Speaker 1:don't think that's knowledge. Is it knowledge?
Speaker 2:I think it's a weak form of knowledge, think because we've got some justification, depends whether they trust you or not. If they think Scott told me and he's never lied to me before, then that would be a type of justification, but it's pretty weak form of justification. Some knowledge is more justified than others.
Speaker 1:Well, the question
Speaker 2:There are degrees of knowledge maybe. That's right down there, pretty low level. I'm not casting any aspersions in
Speaker 1:your
Speaker 2:trustworthiness, Scott, in saying that, but obviously, if they'd seen it with their own eyes, that would be a higher level of knowledge.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's true. It's an interesting one, knowledge debate. Because when you think about it, if we only base knowledge on everything we knew, we'd have to know, if I were to speak about electricity now, have to, I bet you have people who don't know how electricity and all this currents and stuff work in physics and the circuit system and all that stuff.
Speaker 2:You're saying is right, that most of our knowledge is acquired from other people and books that we read, you know, rather than based on experience. And it's a strange thing. One of the differences from ancient society is that, you know, in the ancient world or in pre literate society, a lot of people's knowledge comes from their own trial and error learning. You know, so we cannot think that we know more, but it's all secondhand knowledge that we've acquired from other people. Whereas, you know, one of the reasons that we were interested in ancient philosophers like is that more of their knowledge is acquired through their own reasoning and thinking, they put more effort and hard work into acquiring their wisdom, whereas we're just repeating stuff that other people have told us.
Speaker 1:Yeah, same to saying. Have you come across a guy called Richard Feynman, famous physicist? Yeah. Yeah, he's got some good stuff on like knowledge and beliefs and systems, a question you know on belief, how do you know a belief is true? How do you really know it is justified?
Speaker 2:It depends what type of belief it is. So that, you know, philosophers would say there's different types of justification for different types of belief. So I might believe that one plus one is two. So there would be, you know, there are mathematical proofs that we would use to justify that. I might believe that it's going to rain tomorrow, but it's different sort of evidence, meteorological evidence that we might use to justify that.
Speaker 2:So there's different types of justification for different types of belief, might be a different type of justification if you believe in aesthetic truths or moral truths or what would be an accurate interpretation of a work of art, for example, like, you know, there might be a different justification for arriving at conclusions, but things like that. So there are many, many different types of knowledge, therefore lots of different types of justification, or at least that's how we use the word knowledge in our society. But of course, is always this question, do we ever really know anything? And philosophers have of wrestled, like gone back and forth between this kind of like stricter criteria for knowledge, and there have been sceptics throughout history that question whether we can know anything, and then a looser definition of knowledge that says will we take it for granted in daily life that we know some things and don't know others and know things with varying degrees of certainty. Yeah, it depends whether we're using the word like strictly or loosely perhaps.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and what's your take? So someone's value is now moderation in terms of eating. My value is moderation, my value is honesty with myself. I'm not going to lie to myself, Donald, I'm not going to lie in my track and shoot about what I'm eating. What's the criteria for, are we expected to be perfect with that?
Speaker 1:Can we not go do it for the day? Like what are we going to do? How are we going to write that down and remember it every day? Like what are we doing?
Speaker 2:The value of moderation.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I think the thing about moderation really is, I think it's very closely tied to self observation and self knowledge. Like so, oh, I just noticed it's snowing again outside, like see the window behind me, like cool. I think like, it's a vague term, right? Moderation, it's a pretty loose term. And so I think it's really about judging what's appropriate.
Speaker 2:And sometimes it might be appropriate to do lots of exercise. And sometimes it might be appropriate to rest, like especially if you've got an injury or something like that, let's say, it might be a good idea to have a few days off. So moderation takes different forms depending on your circumstances, what your needs are at the time. And it requires self knowledge, self observation, and sound judgment to determine on a case by case basis, what's actually going be healthy and appropriate.
Speaker 1:What if I think is appropriate every time based on my needs, need to eat this Domino's pizza with all the cookies because I'm terrible, I feel terrible, Donald.
Speaker 2:That doesn't sound like moderation, Scott.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what if it's moderating my emotions?
Speaker 2:Well, let's see, you're using it to comfort eat? Yes. Well, the problem in psychotherapy terms, using stuff to manage emotions, unpleasant emotions like comfort eating, it's kind of a fool's errand in a way because it usually doesn't really resolve the emotions in the longer term. Like it's just a way of covering them up. And it often tends to make the problems worse.
Speaker 2:So not only are you going to probably be you know, gaining weight or whatever, affecting your health negatively, and then you can feel sad about that, like it's going maybe damage your self esteem, your self image or whatever. But like dealing with unpleasant emotions by distracting yourself from them, which is basically what comfort eating is, you know, really just doesn't address the underlying issue. It's like if you had toothache, like and you dealt with it by distracting yourself from it, masking it by taking painkillers or watching TV so you weren't thinking about it as much rather than just going to the dentist and getting the tooth pulled.
Speaker 1:I like that, I like it. It's a good one, it's a good one. I think a lot of people, because eating is such a big thing in our lives, we often have very cloudy judgment about eating and we don't actually see it objectively like the dentist like that.
Speaker 2:Eating, it's like I'm fasting today, like you know, I like to, I love to fast. Like it took me a long time to discover it. And then I felt so much healthier once I started getting into it. I do this one meal a day thing as well. Nice.
Speaker 2:I'm not like a big fitness guy, I do that. And Lalia makes me do it as well. Like she told me we're fasting every Monday, Donald, so I have to do as well now. Like this is what I call Scott, do you know I've got a name for this. I've got I've made up this new brand name, I'm going to trademark it, but it's called Live Like Lauya.
Speaker 2:But I think Live Like Lauya involves having a sneaky glass of wine every so often.
Speaker 1:Hey, that's good. Get it in.
Speaker 2:Is that alright? Is that loud? We only do it in our house
Speaker 1:though. Moderate.
Speaker 2:Lovely, in apartment. What was I saying like, yeah, like Socrates says a lot about eating. And like, love one of his famous slogans was that we should eat to live, not live to eat.
Speaker 1:Eat to live.
Speaker 2:Eat to live, not live to eat. So we shouldn't make like stuffing our faces like the goal of life, that's not what life is about. But we should eat like what's healthy for us, like whatever, like the things that we should eat should be things that contribute to our health and well-being. Like not just viewing, you know, life as an opportunity to indulge in eating junk food and things like that, we should eat to live not live to eat.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a good way to look at it. And people will say but food is I love food so much that it's part of my culture and family and stuff and it's like
Speaker 2:I've got a lot of doubts about that. Know, I'm going to say some controversial things here, Scott. I think a lot of the things that people say, I'm going to dig deep here, we'll do a deep dive here, I'm going to say something that many people might actually disagree with. Usually, people agree with a lot of things to say, this one's a controversial one. I don't actually believe that people enjoy many of the things that they say they enjoy, as much as they claim that they do.
Speaker 2:So people say, Oh, I really like I love chocolate or whatever. And I think do you though? Like, because as a therapist, a clinician, when I say to people, I want you to actually monitor the amount of pleasure that you get from chocolate or whatever, and rate it from zero to 10 at the time that you're eating it, it's invariably much lower than they think it's going to be. So I think a lot of it is all in their head, like it's kind of anticipation and stuff like, are you actually getting that much pleasure from eating chocolate, or from smoking a cigarette? I used to do smoking cessation and smokers would say, I really enjoy having a cigarette.
Speaker 2:So I get them to rate their satisfaction from it. And it was always far lower than they thought it was going to be. When I got them to think about it, thought actually, I'm not really enjoying it that much. Why would it just a mouthful of smoke? Like, you know, what's so enjoyable about that?
Speaker 2:Like so there's a lot of illusion, we deceive ourselves into thinking that we enjoy things more than we actually do enjoy them.
Speaker 1:I'd agree with that.
Speaker 2:And also people get all carried away about fancy expensive foods and stuff like that. I think it was just as
Speaker 1:much
Speaker 2:pleasure to be had in simple food like eating an apple, you know, drinking a
Speaker 1:glass
Speaker 2:of milk or whatever, know, we overcomplicate. Socrates thought we design foods that are meant to even Socrates two thousand four hundred odd years ago, Socrates said, Greek society is being ruined by people concocting overly complicated fancy foods. And they're doing it in order to stimulate their appetites so that they eat more than they would normally. Right? And Socrates said, if you eat simple food, like normally just eat like a steak, eat an apple or whatever, like you're not constantly kind of provoking your appetite, stimulating it.
Speaker 2:But if you're looking at all these amazing, you know, you go past the cake shop and it's got all these things that look beautiful and I mean, it's a con. In a way, like it's tantalising, it's jupping you into eating stuff that you're not really even hungry for. Your eyes are bigger than your stomach kind of thing. Like we've created this food culture, like we were jupping ourselves into eating more than we really need to and eating stuff that we don't actually enjoy that much and eating stuff that's going to make our teeth fall out, Scott.
Speaker 1:We don't want to.
Speaker 2:That's the best bit of advice. I asked my auntie when I was a wee boy, before I left Scotland, said, auntie, what's the best piece of advice you could give me for the rest of my life? And she said, Donald, look after your teeth.
Speaker 1:Good advice. I think imagine losing your teeth, it's not good.
Speaker 2:They don't come back, there's no time in the pot back on that one, Scott, they don't grow back.
Speaker 1:Soup for life, I don't know, I want the soups, not good. I think with eating outright, it's not so much the food, it's so much the service you get, you maybe feel special, you tell your friends you're going to some plant places, the social aspect, you get to dress up, you got to take a photo of Instagram, you get to say you've been there, got to, it's just like, it's not even about the food.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's not smoking minerals, like most things in life, it's a big con, and then you go out and pay loads of money to eat something that you could make yourself at home for a fraction of the price and probably do a better job of, you know, because it's all in the artifice of it, you're paying for the experience.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2:You know, but you know, like, so we Socrates saw this, like, turn off, he said, we're, you're duping yourself into drinking when you're not thirsty and eating when you're not hungry. Like by the way, a lot of the fancy ways that you're preparing food and like, you know, stimulating your appetite. You've to be careful about that. Like he was smart enough to see that even back then and warn people back in ancient Greece, like that you need to be careful, you know, you should be eating when you're hungry and drinking when you're thirsty, like, you know, get nourishing your body, giving it the things it actually needs, not tricking your appetite, which is what we're off to doing, know, like these restaurants you're talking about and stuff, it's all designed to trick us, to deceive our appetite, to eating stuff that's maybe not nutritious, not good for us, or maybe eat more than we would otherwise.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly. Hang on. I mean, we need some Socrates. Socrates should have done a fitness plan back in the day, reckon he should have done some nutrition plan, I think he would have made a lot of money.
Speaker 2:He did talk a lot about it, like he gave some people some really good advice about health and fitness. He said also, he said something very profound, he said hunger is the greatest relish. He said the paradox about people that stuff their faces and eat too much food and stuff like that, is he goes, they want to get as much pleasure as they can from food. But actually, they're enjoying their food far less than someone that moderates their appetite. Socrates said, I actually enjoy my food much more than any of you guys, because I eat it in moderation.
Speaker 2:But you guys are like eating loads of expensive food and stuff in your face, you take no pleasure from food anymore because you've ruined your appetites. Like your old mum used to say, you spoiled your appetite by like eating too much and too frequently and at the wrong times and eating too much fancy food and stuff like that. You can't enjoy the simple things in life anymore. As Socrates said hunger is the greatest relish, like it enhances your enjoyment of food. You know, Scott, the best meal I ever had, And I was when I was a boy, I used to go walking in the hills, like I went in the Caledonian Forest.
Speaker 2:And I went I didn't bring enough food with me. Like so I was carrying my backpack and stuff. I was out for like a week or so. And after like three or four days, I ran out of food. And like I went for like maybe a day or like a day and a half or something walking all day.
Speaker 2:And then I met a guy that was still walking, and he gave me a biscuit and a boiled egg. I was starving, it was the best meal I've ever had in my life.
Speaker 1:Was the boiled egg real? Yeah, the boiled eggs actually, try three boiled eggs in a row.
Speaker 2:Really?
Speaker 1:It's quite hard. Was it a nice, was it melty in the middle or was it hard?
Speaker 2:It wasn't even a good boiled egg. It was one of those ones that are like a lot of it, the shell doesn't come away easy. And the yellow bit had gone kind of all black or oxidised or whatever. But it's normally the sort of boiled egg I would have turned up my nose at. At that moment, it was probably the best building I've ever had.
Speaker 1:It's true, isn't it? The problem we have with letting ourselves go to that level with food these days is that it's so easy to overeat when we are in that mode of like, I'm so hungry, I need to eat too Yeah, because unprocessed foods are so high in calories. It's just like you could eat 2,000 calories today in like literally two minutes.
Speaker 2:I think I mean, I don't think fasting is for everybody, that's one thing I'd say, you know, I find it quite easy to do it, guess while I've got a slow metabolism, I don't get hungry that that quickly, you know. So one day I figured out I could fast quite easily and I felt a lot better when I do it. But one of the things that I get from fasting is that often when people again, when people think they're hungry, often it's not really hunger, like just blood. Yeah. Or agitated or something, you know, it's not real hunger.
Speaker 2:And I think many problems in life are caused by people misinterpreting their own feelings or bodily sensations.
Speaker 1:What would you say about so there's a good one here. What would you say about food being so heavily tied into emotion and present in any every meaningful memory in our lives? How do we see food as an objective or eaten as an objective concept in that regard?
Speaker 2:Marcus, really used to have this exercise for that. I mean, I don't know if this is everyone's cup of tea or not. But he would, he said when a banquet was in front of me, got just a dead pig, it's a dead bird, it's just fermented grape juice or whatever. He would kind of like try and describe things and really just more down to earth objective language. So like, God, this is the finest like, oh, like that Marks and Spencer's advert, they still have this.
Speaker 2:Isn't isn't this is the finest volleyball in nature of life, Like hand reeled chicken, this chicken was kissed on the beak every day. We made it into a chicken volleyball. And my, you know, it was reeled in the best seed. Marx will always be like, no, it's a dead chicken. It's a dead chicken about pastry.
Speaker 2:Like, so he would, but he's trying to not be negative about it, just be like really objective. Yeah, kind of like, you know, visualising things as realistically and objectively as he can in order to get away from the values that accrue around them. It's like stoicism, it's about getting back reality, you know, get back to like view things more realistically and more objectively. And then maybe we'd stop eating so much sushi and stuff and like, you know, eat just eat an apple. When I was a boy, my mom would go, here's an apple, eat that.
Speaker 2:What happened to, what happened, Scott? Did you end up eating all this weird stuff?
Speaker 1:I know, my mother gave me sleep for dinner, she did, go to bed. Wake up next day, oh, tie in, Well, that's good. I think we do tie too much emotion to food, I think we do overblow it a lot, and like obviously it's been a part of our life we have to eat, but we don't have to keep attaching the same emotions to eat and move forward, do we? We can say no.
Speaker 2:No, it's not, it shouldn't be, it's like it's a serious problem if it's becoming a form of self medication or a coping strategy, we're doing that comfort eating thing. A recipe for neurosis. It's a big mistake to begin using food in that way at all, because it's easy, it becomes a habit. Right? And I'm not, you know, aside from the fact that at least to overeating and other bad habits, like the even more fundamental problem is it prevents natural emotional processing from happening, doesn't work, you know, stuffing your face with cream puffs or whatever it is, eating a bag of Doritos, it's not really going to make your problems go away.
Speaker 2:It isn't going to actually resolve the underlying emotions. You to face your emotions and experience them sometimes in order for your brain to process them and for you to move beyond them. And so we you know, psychologically, we have to be careful about using any kind of method like that as a way of distracting ourselves from emotion. But then in addition to that, you've also got problems of overeating and eating junk food and so on, the impact it has on our physical health.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and what is obviously makes sense and valid point, but what would you say to people that say, listen, Donald, the emotions are so strong, mate, I can't control myself. Like, how can we get can our emotional response be so strong that we is that being shown in research why you literally cannot stop the action of doing something you don't want do?
Speaker 2:Well, what we tend to find actually, like obviously, you know, there's always exceptions. And sometimes people do have incredibly strong emotions that are difficult to control, although it's quite rare. But, you know, generally, what we tend to find in therapy, for example, in a mod deserved state of the art type of cognitive therapy called metacognitive therapy, right? It was developed in England by a psychologist called Adrian Wells. It's a leading evidence based research based form of psychotherapy.
Speaker 2:And one of the main things it does is get people to rate how uncontrollable they believe their worrying or rumination, their anxiety or the depression is. And generally, what we tend to find is that people underestimate how much control they potentially have over certain aspects of their emotional life. So I'm phrasing this carefully, because I think I mentioned to you before, people, when they talk about emotions, have this lump theory, like so we have this term that we use called folk psychology. And folk psychology is the way that you and I and everybody talks about the mind and emotions and stuff like that. So our society has kind of theories about emotions and stuff we take for granted.
Speaker 2:We have a crude simplistic idea of psychology that we all share in everyday life. And part of folk psychology, and this kind of naive default psychological view is that our emotions are just kind of like homogenous lumps, like anxiety is just this thing, depression is just this thing. And in fact, anxiety is composed of lots of different ingredients. It's a cake that's baked from lots of ingredients. And when you understand that it's very important, because it gives you more control.
Speaker 2:Like, because you think if my hand slipped, put in too much water, you've ruined the cake, right? You can ruin the cake of anxiety, you can turn it into something else by changing the ingredients. But you have to realise like that it is made of lots of different ingredients. And some aspects of anxiety, or depression or anger are voluntary, and other aspects are involuntary. And so the problem often is that people don't distinguish, they don't sort them into two categories, and realises bits of this that are voluntary, bits of it that are involuntary.
Speaker 2:And often people are struggling to control the involuntary parts, and completely neglecting to take control of the voluntary parts.
Speaker 1:Makes sense. Makes sense. And I got one point here for you first and then we'll move on to your values slideshow extraordinaire. Came across a study the other day last week actually says about mindfulness, This is quite interesting. It says, out of the five mindfulness skills proved effective during the first eight weeks of people with burnout, only the skill of non judging continue to counteract exhaustion.
Speaker 1:So I'd imagine like how exhausting is it to not always judge your thoughts?
Speaker 2:I need to know more about that study in order to comment on it. Haven't actually, I don't think I've seen it. I'll have a look at it, Mike. Because there are probably other aspects of, there may be other aspects of mindfulness that you could potentially dismantle and look at. So what about being non judgmental?
Speaker 2:Did you say non judging?
Speaker 1:Non judging our thoughts and our actions and stuff. So I think it's tying in with someone mentioned earlier about values like if I want to be moderate but tonight I'm not and then I'm conflicting in my mind, I'm judging myself all the time, That's causing conflict and it's causing burnout in people.
Speaker 2:Mean, one of the things that really exhausts people is making strong value judgments. And, you know, guilt and shame. Like people like the clients I see in psychotherapy, I mean, maybe half of them, a lot of them will tell me they feel exhausted. Right, the ones that are depressed and have generalised anxiety, often say they feel exhausted all the time. Because they're wrapped up in upsetting emotions, they're worrying, they're ruminating.
Speaker 2:It takes a lot of time to worry and to morbidly ruminate. It's amazing, you know, someone might spend a huge chunk of their life just going over unpleasant memories from the past or anxieties about the future. And it's tiring, it takes up a lot of your attention. So, you know, definitely, that a lot of that has to do with the type of value judgments that we make. Like I'd need to kind of like dissect that a little bit more, there's different types of value judgments.
Speaker 2:But the stoics essentially want us to suspend strong value judgments about things that aren't directly under our control. And they think that's really one of the keys to developing peace of mind.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that makes sense. Makes sense, everyone. We'll send it to you, then you can dissect it for next week. Great, go on.
Speaker 2:Someone, geez, you're giving me homework now, buddy.
Speaker 1:Actually, I'm, yeah, I just gave
Speaker 2:you homework. Just you Don't
Speaker 1:you mind looking at us?
Speaker 2:I'll have a look at it.
Speaker 1:See, I'm making you involve traction at you now.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'll have a look at it, I'll speed read it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, just have a little blip and just see.
Speaker 2:I haven't read a research study for a while, but my excuse for that is that I'll admit that I'm not as up to speed as I used to be on psychological research, because I've got to spend all my time reading ancient history now. I'm becoming too much of a jack of all trades. So like I did my ancient history and I did my philosophy, and then I've got my psychology and stuff, to get back and do a bit of a catch up with research, what I've missed out on over the past year or so.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, there's a good question here before you go into the slideshow actually. What are your views in jealousy? And is that classed as a judgment or an emotional response to something?
Speaker 2:I like jealousy, I haven't worked with her, I used to work with jealousy, like I was kind of racking my brains a little bit. And it's very closely tied up with, well, first of all, jealousy can take a number of different forms. So like for some people, what some people call jealousy might be predominantly about anxiety. And for another person, be a lot of anger mixed in with it. So often it's kind of like actually mixture of other more primitive emotions.
Speaker 2:But jealousy also is often tied up with suspicion, and tends to involve a lot of kind of worry or rumination as well, in my experience of working with clients that have kind of pathological jealousy. So there has to be usually, there's this kind of trait in psychology that researchers study called, psychologists are very interested in different forms psychological intolerance. So there's a thing called intolerance of uncertainty. So some people, if they say they're not really sure about something, like you're saying, you never really know anything for certain, Like, most people can live with that. They can go, know, I can never know for certain what my boyfriend's doing when I'm not watching him.
Speaker 2:I'm cool with that, like I trust him. Whereas other people, it drives them crazy. Like they don't know 100 for certain what's going on behind their backs. But you can never have 100% certainty. Like you've always got to accept a certain degree of uncertainty in life.
Speaker 2:And trying to get absolute certainty will usually drive you nuts. And actually often, you know, like, know, when you get paranoid and jealous and suspicious about other people often ends up in putting pressure on people, spying on them or engaging in behaviours that backfire by ruining the relationship and making the other person more defensive. So jealousy can obviously potentially be a really toxic thing. Yeah, I assume when we say jealousy, yeah, we're talking about, it's a three way relationship. Really, we have in mind when we're talking, people often confuse envy and jealousy.
Speaker 2:But when we talk about jealousy, we're really talking about distress that's caused by a relationship that someone has with someone else, like sort of three parties.
Speaker 1:Okay. And then envy is one on one?
Speaker 2:Envy is more one on one. It's about your, like, distress is caused by possessions that someone else has, or whereas jealousy is more about the relationships that other people have. So somebody that you love, maybe is flirting with somebody else, for example, another person becomes involved. So yeah, like that can really, you know, cause blood to boil. I think usually what happens, I find the clients that I work with when they've got jealousy, it's more their mind is absolutely racing about it, can't sleep at night, like because they're going through every scenario in their mind.
Speaker 2:So it's often that's bound up with this inability to just kind of tolerate a certain amount of uncertainty, trust, and the overthinking. Actually, we've got loads of really good therapy techniques these days for helping people overthinking. And overthinking can take many different forms. But jealousy is a typical example.
Speaker 1:Jealousies must be really close to anger, they must be like sisters, brothers and sisters, because if you're jealous, it's definitely this like, is like an anger to it, isn't it?
Speaker 2:You tend to be thinking people who are jealous tend to be kind of thinking through lots of worst case scenarios in their mind. Like, what if this is happening? What if that's happening? You know, and kind of, they also engage in threat monitoring. And that's when you can look for signs of danger.
Speaker 2:So you're kind of like, you know, if somebody says something, it can be interpreted one or two ways, you always choose the worst way. It's like you're looking for it, a form of confirmation bias in a way. You're looking for evidence that something's wrong. And if you look hard enough, you'll always find it.
Speaker 1:What are your thoughts on like, if someone's coming up to you being like, I'm not trusting of you or whatever, is that a reflection of their own actions? They're like, mirroring it back?
Speaker 2:It can be projection. You know, sometimes it's the case, there's a lot of projection in life. This is one thing that I would agree with Carl Jung about. I don't agree with many things that Jung said. I like his books, they're interesting.
Speaker 2:But I think he was right to say that a lot of psychology can be viewed as projection. Actually, even Marcus Aurelius, one point, way ahead of the game, says that when you're angry with people, often you need to look at yourself first and ask yourself whether you don't do the same things. So anger, Marcus, I really straight up says a lot of anger is projection. Like the things that annoy you most are often things that you're doing yourself. And it can be you can get a lot of self improvement in life just by using that simple tool of just asking yourself when you're upset with other people, is it maybe actually because you recognise something of yourself and them, you know, maybe at some level, are you really upset?
Speaker 2:You know, when you're jealous, and you're not like trusting your partner, is it you know, at some level, like, is it because you recognise that you yourself are untrustworthy? Like not always, but in some
Speaker 1:cases, you
Speaker 2:know, people that are jealous are also people that have cheated themselves in the past.
Speaker 1:And that's what drives them insane because they know they've done it.
Speaker 2:Know they would do it. So they know they don't trust anyone else. Like they've poisoned the well. It's a slippery slope, know, things have consequences, sometimes that are more lasting and more profound than people realise. So infidelity is one of them, like, you know, that can have these repercussions, can you ever really trust anyone again?
Speaker 2:If you know that you're prone to infidelity yourself. Yeah,
Speaker 1:It's hard. But everybody, people just do think of themselves or do know I mean? Even if they're doing a good deed, like most time people are thinking of themselves first anyway.
Speaker 2:Yeah, all they thought, like, and most of the time maybe, like, maybe that's human nature. But there are many instances in life where I think people behave altruistically. You know, like a good example would be kids, like if you're pretty, you know, when you're a parent and you've got kids, like, you know, often you'll put your kids ahead of yourself. Like, you know, should have, maybe this is biased or whatever, feel like many mothers, in particular, like feel like they would do anything for their kids and fathers as well. But like, you know, a lot of people would think, you know, they'd risk their life to save their kids, like doing them for them.
Speaker 2:And that's not self centred, like that's genuine altruism. Yeah. I that it does exist in society.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it does definitely not care, 100%. But yeah, that's good. Any other questions here before you crack on? I think so, I think interesting conversation, Donald. A lot of good questions have come in.
Speaker 1:So thanks everyone for
Speaker 2:This is just a warm up.
Speaker 1:This is just a warm up so we get blitzed away now. Yeah, well, at least I know, I doubt many people knew the difference between envy and jealousy. Actually didn't know.
Speaker 2:But Oh, they're different things. Yeah, that's right. They're slightly different emotions.
Speaker 1:So I'm envious of your hat, for example.
Speaker 2:Maybe envious of my hat, like, maybe jealous of your girlfriend or something like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, might be jealous of your relationship with Marcus Aurelius, I think you got better. I'm not happy about it, time to fight onward, we'll fight it out, that's what they did back in the day, like-
Speaker 2:The pan karate or whatever.
Speaker 1:Get us in there, let's get us to fight. Yeah, no, it's good. What are we talking about then with values, what are we doing, are we doing this? Well, shit
Speaker 2:slide up. Let's see.
Speaker 1:Think I've given you access
Speaker 2:to Can see that?
Speaker 1:I can see it, yeah, beautiful.
Speaker 2:It says Live like Louise, the four cardinal virtues and values in daily life. So what we're going to do is we're going to talk a little bit about virtues and stoic philosophy. And then we're going to talk about the idea of values in modern psychology. So what the stoics meant by virtues are arity, and what we mean by values in psychology today, actually, you'll see surprisingly similar. And then we're going to talk about putting it into practice.
Speaker 2:And I've got a lot of suggestions about how to put these things into practice. And a lot of penetrating questions. Tweeting us tonight, Donald. Of all, I've got a lot of quote from Marcus Aurelius. Actually, I've kind of butchered that, I've changed that a little bit just to kind of like, I've tweaked it a bit just to make it more relevant.
Speaker 2:But basically this is the gist of what he says. He says that vanity involves tying your well-being to what other people think of you. Greed involves tying it to the external events that befall you, but wisdom means deriving your well-being from your own actions. And this really is quite profound I think. So this is the core of Stoicism in a way, it's kind of a shift in values whereby the Stoics say what we should really prize more than anything else is the quality of our own actions.
Speaker 2:So the most important thing in life to the Stoics is to act honourably, to act wisely, to act with kindness and benevolence, and that's our number one priority in life, to be the sort of person that they could look in the mirror and admire whether or not other people admire them, whether or not they achieve material success. In terms of that. The Stoics think those things are of secondary value, and they're not the be all and end all in life. So this this little quote cuts to the core of Stoic philosophy. It's about making a shift in our perspective, so that we learn to place more importance on the quality of our own character and actions.
Speaker 2:That's why the Stoics say virtue is the only true good. So this is the four cardinal virtues, for some reason people love these cardinal virtues, I'll say a little bit about them. The term cardinal just means kind of like crucial, it comes from the Latin word for a hinge on a door, if I remember rightly, it's what, it's the linchpin, like the key thing. And it comes actually from the medieval Christian literature on virtues. So these virtues go all the way back to Socrates, we don't know exactly where they originate, they might be older, might have preceded Socrates.
Speaker 2:But it was only later in medieval times that they became known as the Four Cardinal Virtues. And then they find their way into Christian iconography, they're represented actually by the four evangelists in the New Testament, by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and by four animals. It's called the tetramorph, like this Christian image with four animals on it. And they're traditionally wisdom, fortitude, temperance and justice, or those can be translated into English in a number of ways. So the four cardinal virtues, the Stoics are particularly interested in these, And it's not meant to be a rigid system, they're meant to just be
Speaker 1:kind of like
Speaker 2:broad, flexible categories. And so there's lots of other virtues that kind of get classified under these. So it's just a little convenient model that people use to understand virtue ethics in the ancient world. But one thing I'd say about it, there's a lot of modern research on values. And these four cardinal virtues feature prominently in modern research on values.
Speaker 2:So they're still part of our society, like they're quite deeply ingrained, and people tend to refer to them often. So this the role that they play, this is why there are four virtues, There's a reason why they have these four. So I already mentioned wisdom, like the Stoics think that because we use reason, like we're implicitly committed to valuing the truth, or Socrates puts it, nobody wants to think in order to be wrong about stuff. Like we think in order to get to the truth. And if we're doing that properly, and we're doing it consistently, then we would have attained wisdom, we'd be living rationally and wisely.
Speaker 2:So sometimes wisdom is called prudence Sophia or Phronesis in Greek. And the Stoics define it as knowing what's important, knowing the nature of the good, so knowing what's important in life and what isn't important. My wee girl asked me what wisdom was. I really believe that many people could benefit just from, this sounds like an odd thing to say, but you know there's many things we could say about classical philosophy, I honestly think that just talking about what the word wisdom means would benefit a lot of people. Like just asking people what does it actually mean to live wisely?
Speaker 2:What does wisdom mean to you? What is wisdom? Like that's a really good question actually to pose to small children. Like you know that's the sort of question I would ask my little girl, what do you think wisdom is? Like what would it mean for someone to act wisely in this situation?
Speaker 2:It's different from just being clever or intelligent. What's wisdom? It's ingrained in our culture, we have all these archetypes like Merlin and Socrates, of these wise figures, Solomon, what does it really mean? We don't talk about it much today, it was all the ancient philosophers talked about. Like it's a concept that I think we need to tap into more and spend more time reflecting on.
Speaker 2:The word philosophy literally means the love of wisdom, like the preoccupation of trying to understand wisdom. So my little girl asked me once what wisdom was and I said, look, I think the best definition I can think of is that wisdom consists in understanding what things are actually most important in life, and also understanding that many of the things that other people think are important aren't actually that important. I think that's pretty much what wisdom consists of. And that happens to be very similar to what the Stoics said wisdom was, knowing what's important in life, knowing what's good, and what's bad and what's indifferent. And justice, the other values follow from this.
Speaker 2:So justice, which is a bad translation really of a Greek word, dekaiosune, used to sometimes be translated as righteousness, really it would be better translated as social virtue. It's virtue in our relationships with other people individually and collectively in society. And justice means acting with wisdom, acting with wisdom towards other people, individually and collectively, and also acting with fairness and kindness, these other subordinate values. So justice or the kaiosune can really just be seen as applying wisdom to our relationships with other people and doing it without hypocrisy, doing it more consistently. And I'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute.
Speaker 2:So you're going about Scott, you're living with wisdom, you're living with justice, you're doing okay, but there's a problem like fear and desire get in the way. Like we've got these internal barriers to action, as psychologists sometimes call them today. So our fears prevent us from acting consistently in accord with wisdom and justice. So if we're going to be sages, we're going to live like Socrates, like we're going to have to conquer our fear, and for that we're going to need the virtue of courage or fortitude, andrea, andreasonae in Greek. And we're going to have desires, we're going to want to eat a whole bag of cheesy Watsits one day, you're going to want to drink a couple of bottles of wine just because it tastes real good.
Speaker 2:But then you're not really going to be able to act consistently in a cold with Wisdom and Justice if you've drank two bottles of wine and eaten a whole bag of cheesy Watsits. So in order to act consistently in accord with wisdom and justice, you're going to need the virtue of moderation or temperance, a sophrosone in Greek. And actually, this one's also a hard one to translate because the Greek word almost could be translated as mindfulness. It means being kind of self possessed, like it means being aware of yourself and in control of your behaviour, acting in a way that's healthy and appropriate and accord with what wisdom dictates. So mastering your desires, mastering your fears in accord with wisdom so that you can live consistently with wisdom and justice.
Speaker 2:That's why we have those particular four virtues when you really understand in the Greek in particular, what they come from. And it's kind of a logical little system. And so that system of cardinal virtues has endured for over two thousand four hundred years, maybe more. Who are these lovely ladies, Scott?
Speaker 1:Woah, they are stunning.
Speaker 2:Classy ladies. These are the four virtues and you know, in no particular order of importance. On the left there, I think pouring wine, I would think, it looks like milk, is moderation. And then the lady with the black hair that's looking in the mirror, I'm pretty sure it must be wisdom. And then my favourite, the redhead, who for some reason is standing next to some shrubbery, is courage.
Speaker 2:And then the last one is like Lady Justice or whatever, represents justice. So again, in art and iconography, this idea of the Four Cardinal Virtues was very popular throughout the ages and Renaissance art and Christian iconography. And this system of four cardinal virtues, actually I stole a slide from another slideshow that I did for the military. I've been doing a lot of stuff for the military recently, for some strange reason, because I don't have any connection at all with the military. But they like stoicism, and they like this idea of having a code of honour.
Speaker 2:So you can make the Four Cards of Virtues until it was stoic code of honour. So a stoic like Marcus really is, he's dedicating himself to living consistently in accord with these virtues that he's figured out rationally. He's mapped out a whole plan of life for himself and he knows what he admires and other people, he admires people that are wise, he admires people that are just, he admires people for their self control, like he admires people who are courageous, and he wants to be able to look in the mirror and see that in himself, and that becomes his priority in life. So a stoic code of honour would be to love the truth and seek to cultivate wisdom, to conduct yourself with justice, fairness and kindness towards your fellow men and women, to have the courage to conquer your own fears, even the dread of death itself, and to exercise self discipline or moderation by learning to moderate your desires appropriately, and not eat all the sushi, like maybe have an apple occasionally or whatever. So I'll tell you a little story, think it's time for a story.
Speaker 2:There was a Socrates, we're told this, there was a guy who watched this conversation happened, Xenophon, who was an Athenian general, was friends with Socrates, and he says one day he saw this conversation and Socrates was talking to one of his best friends, possibly his best friend actually, Crito, was Socrates's childhood friend, and he was like a millionaire, right. So Socrates was quite poor, but he had rich friends and patrons. One of them was his childhood friend Crito. The legend goes actually that Socrates was originally a stonemason and a sculptor, and we're told that Crito removed him from his workshop and set him on his career as a philosopher. So he probably said listen I'll support you financially and you can become your patron and you can just go off and study philosophy, because I think you're such a talented individual, you don't have to work like in the stonemason's workshop anymore, he seems to have said to Socrates.
Speaker 2:So Socrates met Creto's son one day, Cretoglus, And this kid was just an adolescent, he became an adult in Greek society when he reached about 15. And so he was entering adult life, and he wanted to meet powerful and influential people. Socrates is a man of paradox, although he was poor and he hung out with some of the worst off people in society, poor people, slave people, immigrants, prostitutes. He was also a friend with some of the movers and shakers in Athenian society, the generals, the statesmen, some of the wealthiest and most powerful people were also his friends, so he moved between all strata of society. He's a very mysterious character, Socrates.
Speaker 2:And so Cratopoulos said, could you introduce me to some good friends, could you do what the kids today call networking? Like Socrates, can you help me with networking, like to meet people? And Socrates said, yeah sure, like what do you think are the best sort of friends to meet then? Kretopolis has got this list, right? It's like people have a checklist, you know, on dating sites in Scott's got a checklist.
Speaker 2:Yeah,
Speaker 3:I've seen them.
Speaker 2:They've got tall, dark and handsome white and into sports.
Speaker 1:Six foot three.
Speaker 2:Yeah, whatever, all that kind of stuff. But he's kind of got this mental checklist of the ideal friend that he wants to meet. So it'd somebody that would come and visit you when you're sick, they'd bring some lucas aid and some grapes or something hospital, they send you a birthday card every year, they'd lend you money if you're broke and stuff like that. And to his credit, if I remember rightly, he says also if you're kind of going off the rails a little bit, he'd maybe take you aside, might have a word with you and kind of put you back on the right track kind of thing. That's what a good friend would really be like.
Speaker 2:So he says like often in the Socratic dialogues, Socrates begins by asking a kind of rhetorical no brainer question. So he says, what would an ideal friend look like? And Cratopoulos is like, it's kind of obvious, right? Someone that does all these kind of things for you, that's what we want in an ideal friend. But then usually Socrates flips everything around if you're patient and you get halfway through the dialogue.
Speaker 2:It takes him a while to get there, like me, but eventually you know he'll ask a question that's a lot trickier. So he says to Crutoglos, that's very interesting, how many of these qualities do you possess yourself? Cratogolus is stunned, he's gobsmacked, because he doesn't really know the answer to that question. And he's like, not many of them? And so Socrates gives him a wee lecture and he says, so buddy, do you think maybe you've done this the wrong way around, you've got it all back to front?
Speaker 2:You came to me asking me how I could introduce you to the best people in society, people that make best friends. And actually, if you don't have any of these qualities, and I introduce you to people, I'd have to portray you as if you did. And then I'd be lying. And eventually they'd figure that out, they'd get annoyed with you, they'd get annoyed with me, they'd think that I wasn't really good as a matchmaker anymore, somebody thought he was really good at introducing people and networking and stuff. He thought they would lose faith in me in that respect.
Speaker 2:And he said, but you know if you've done the whole thing the other way around, and you came to me and said, 'Socrates, how do I become a good friend?' He said, we could have worked on that. And he says the other part would have followed naturally, because if you'd even shown the desire to become a good friend, and even more so if you'd worked on it and progressed in that direction, people, myself included, would be falling over themselves to introduce you to other good people in Athenian society. That bit would follow automatically. And Socrates's point is that this is one of his main recurring themes. I saw this on a wee poster, I've seen this on mugs and fridge magnets in Athens, that Socrates said that you should be in reality as you wish to appear.
Speaker 2:And this is often his argument, and he's saying this to Krotopolis, like you want to appear to other people to be a good friend, like you're actually you'd be better off figuring out how to genuinely become a good friend in actuality, how to cultivate the virtues, the qualities that you would admire in another person. So like there's always this kind of flip around, like we're putting too much emphasis on the external, and the Greek philosophers very often want us to turn it around and start working more on ourselves. And incidentally, I mentioned that Socrates was a stonemason, you know some people believe that the reason that he stopped being a stonemason was he wanted to make the perfect sculpture of a god or a goddess to exemplify wisdom, embody courage, and he could never get it right. He wasn't satisfied with his work. And he went around and he spoke to the other sculptors and other influential people in society, and he said can you tell me how to make a perfect sculpture of courage or to exemplify justice or compassion?
Speaker 2:And he figured out that nobody could really tell him how to portray these things in a work of art because they didn't really understand what justice was, they didn't really understand what courage was. And Socrates thought how the hell can you make a statue of a god that embodies pure courage, like if you can't even tell me what courage is. And so he put down his tools that day and he said, I'm going to give up sculpting stone and I'm going to start sculpting myself. He thought if I really understood what courage was, then I would have courage, then I would have achieved the kind of courage. If I really, really understood, if I really grasped justice, in order to really grasp it I'd have to become just.
Speaker 2:And he thought rather than trying to make an external representation of that, I need to turn my perspective around and my attention around and focus more on myself and start sculpting my own personality, my own character, to make myself wise, to make myself just, to make myself courageous, and to become an example to other people. That's why he stopped being a stonemason. So the Socratic method of questioning is all about virtue. Socrates went around asking people what is virtue and getting them to really reflect on it. And he usually begins by saying can you define justice, can you define wisdom, and sometimes they'd struggle, but usually they'd give an example of something, and then Socrates would grill them about it.
Speaker 2:The Socratic method of questioning in Greek is called the alenchus, which is the word that the Greeks used in court for cross examining a witness. So somebody stands up in court and they tell you what happened, the lawyer cross examining them would say, well you said you saw this happen, but earlier on you said something that contradicted that. So they point out contradictions or flaws in their testimony. So this is what Socrates calls his method, he'll say justice, what is wisdom, and then he'll point out contradictions and our testimony regarding the virtues. And some people hated that and got annoyed with him, and other people thought it was profoundly liberating, so he thought you've made me think much more deeply about the most important things in life.
Speaker 2:So often people's definitions are too broad or too narrow. I'll give you my favourite example, he's talking to a bunch of Athenian generals about courage, so it's very pertinent to them, they think they're experts on courage, like they instil courage in the men under their command, that's what they do. Socrates says, how would you define courage? Like in the general that he's talking to says, well courage is standing your ground in the face of the enemy, in the face of danger, like in a phalanx formation, like the soldiers, the infantrymen, the hoplites they're called in Greek, would form an infantry line, and they'd say like standing your ground even when the enemy are charging you and not running away from the battlefield, that's true courage. And Socrates said, well that's not a bad definition, I can see where you're coming from there.
Speaker 2:Just one thing, what about the cavalry? They charge at the enemy, so they're not standing their ground. And he said also the Spartans fight differently, even though they're infantry, they run into the middle of the enemy in order to break up the formation, and nobody would say that they lacked courage. And he said also another thing, your definition only applies to courage in battle, but surely people exhibit courage in times of peace as well. So what he's saying really is that their definition of courage is too narrow, and they need to revise it that they can think of a definition of courage that would apply across these different situations.
Speaker 2:So that's how Socrates will tend to question people, and then it proceeds into a very long and elaborate dialogue to try to really get to a more nuanced, a more insightful definition of justice or courage or whatever it is that's under examination. So we don't have to follow him in doing that, but the point is that he thinks that we should examine and question our own values so that we clarify them and develop more insight into them. That's what he was all about. He said at his trial when they were about to execute him, one of the things that Socrates said was nobody's going to stop me from doing philosophy, you guys want to stop me doing philosophy. If you equip me, I'm going to carry on doing it, I just want you to know that.
Speaker 2:So I'm not leaving this court on condition that I put a zipper on it. I'm going to carry on doing philosophy regardless, you're going to have to arrest me again. He said in court outrageously, it's a huge controversy. And he said, because I believe in his famous words, the unexamined life is not worth living. So he thought, what makes life worthwhile is clarifying our values.
Speaker 2:It's almost a meta value. He thinks the most important thing in life is the ability to reflect on and fully understand our other values. That's the type of wisdom. That's why philosophy means the love of wisdom, like it's the fundamental value that involves questioning and developing insight into other values like justice, courage and self discipline. So skipping forward to closer to home, in 1979 this book was published and it was seminal by Cognitive Therapy of Depression by Aaron T.
Speaker 2:Beck et al and his colleagues. And it was the first ever evidence based psychotherapy for clinical depression. And it's composed of several components, but a big part of it is a thing that we call activity scheduling, which is actually a behavioural therapy, it's not cognitive at all, that bit of it. And also it's a rip off because it was already described by a guy called Peter Lewinson earlier, who incidentally these guys never mentioned once in their book. Like so there was somebody who's ideally were boring, doesn't really get credited for it.
Speaker 2:Peter Lewinsen is the guy's name, he was there first. So what Beck and his colleagues figured out that when you're treating clinical depression, depressed people often abandon doing things that give them pleasure. So if I'm sitting talking to a client with a client with depression I'll say let's get a list of all the things that you used to enjoy doing before you became depressed. Used to like going out for meals, to like going out to the theatre, I Do like playing football? Do like going to visit my friends?
Speaker 2:Like how many of these things have you done in the last couple of weeks? Zero, right. And so I'll usually at that point say to the client, listen if I made a list of all the things that I enjoy most in life and then I abandon doing all of them, I'd probably become depressed. I say, why are you not doing any of these things? Do you know what they usually say?
Speaker 2:Because I feel too depressed to do them. That's what we call a vicious circle, right. So if you feel too depressed to do all the things that normally give you happiness, like you're kind of stuck in a rock, like your depression has become an excuse for doing things that are going to make you even more depressed. A good example would be a lot of people say that they feel too depressed to go and do exercise, like go to the gym or do sport, like when actually that's one of the best things you can do to alleviate depression. Like so it's a vicious circle, right.
Speaker 2:So in cognitive therapy and behavioural therapy for depression, what we normally do is get clients to make a list of pleasurable activities, or activities in the original model that give them a sense of achievement, they can succeed at something, a sense of mastery. And then to plan, you have a little form, like a diary, it's broken down hour by hour. I still use this by the way at work, I have a little form that I use when I want to work hard and I break my day into half hour slots. So with clinical depression we do this, one hour slots usually, and planning what you're actually going to do, so that you introduce in small steps more pleasurable activities or more activities that give a sense of achievement or mastery. At least that's what we did in 1979, we don't do it anymore, right?
Speaker 2:Because we realised that actually there's a more subtle way of approaching depression. It wasn't lacking a sense of external achievement or feelings of pleasure that made people depressed, it was more to do with lacking a sense of meaning and purpose, That was kind of missing from the original conception, so it's been revised now. We have an approach now that's simpler and more robust, it's called behavioural activation. It's a state of the art treatment for clinical depression. And so there's also a problem here, which is that depressed clients are often particularly preoccupied with achieving external goals, things that aren't entirely under your control, like passing an exam, earning a certain amount of money, getting a promotion, finding a new girlfriend or whatever, like achieving external goals.
Speaker 2:We call those extrinsic goals. So the problem with external goals is they're in the future, you're going to achieve them eventually, but it keeps your mind in suspense. You're always forgetting about the here and now, you're always preoccupied with the future, what might be. And that leads to a constant sense of dissatisfaction with the present. So people think being driven and goal focused is good, but often being goal focused underneath it is a burning dissatisfaction with where you currently are in the here and now.
Speaker 2:And it can take a long time to achieve, to pass the exam, or earn the money, or find the partner, like achieve these external results can sometimes take a while, then when you achieve it, guess what, you're satisfied for a while, then you want something else, it's never ending, you start pursuing another external goal that's situated in the future. And so you get stuck in a rut of constantly racing after something else, stretching after something else, and never really being able to experience any lasting sense of satisfaction, and then you've doomed yourself to generalised anxiety or clinical depression, like two closely related problems, or at least to you know to something subclinical, something milder like just you know sadness or dissatisfaction in general. It's become pervasive in our society. Now this guy I should say, I've written a lot of articles about politics and all sorts of contentious subjects. The most controversial article I've ever written Scott, is about John Lennon, Like, because he's a controversial figure.
Speaker 2:It's like when that woman that played Wonder Woman, Gal Gadot or Gal Gadot did that for you know, when they sang Imagine the celebrities and everybody went crazy about it. Like, I wrote an article about John Imagine because the lyrics are actually very similar to stoic philosophy. We'll set aside John Leynon, it doesn't matter who said this, right. I know that many people think John Leynon was a dislikable character in certain aspects of his life, but he said something very interesting. He said life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.
Speaker 2:And that's the same idea, that we can get too preoccupied with plans for the future, external or extrinsic goals, and then life kind of passes us by, we're not really dwelling in the here and now if we become too goal focused. Life's what happens to you where you're busy making other plans, it's passing you by. In other words, if you're not careful you become too future focused. Now values in this sense are defined as we sometimes call them intrinsic, like they have to do with inner fulfilment rather than external mastery or sources of pleasure. Intrinsic goals, we sometimes call values, like the qualities of our character, qualities of our own action, they're satisfied as soon as you begin to act.
Speaker 2:So an example of an extrinsic goal would be passing an exam. An example of an intrinsic goal would be having self discipline in your studies. Now if you think what you really value is being a conscientious student, like that value could be satisfied at least to some extent immediately, like as soon as you decide to get to work on it. As soon as I start acting like a conscientious student, I'm already getting something, I can look at myself, oh yeah I'm doing it, like I'm trying, I'm on the right path. So you can potentially, it's grounded in your actions in the present moment, and you can potentially get some kind of gratification or satisfaction immediately if you're focused on the quality of your own character and actions, rather than results that are projected into the future.
Speaker 2:You know, your character is here and now, your actions are here and now, you begin fulfilling your values here and now as soon as you even make an effort to act with compassion, an effort to be creative, an effort to act with self discipline, you're already beginning to act in a way that you can garner some self respect or satisfaction from. And so sometimes people who are extremely busy, like chasing around after external goals, in their own mind, in my consulting room when I sit and ask them, I've actually seen many clients with particularly with generalised anxiety, who tell me they're really, really busy, they're frantic, And I get them to identify their values, and then I say, how much time yesterday did you spend in like minutes doing stuff that was in accord with your core values? Do you know the most common answer to that question, Scott? No. Zero minutes.
Speaker 1:Absolutely.
Speaker 2:Like, most common answer, some people go, what I really value is creativity. Like I really, you know, that's I really want my life to be about. I go, how many minutes yesterday did you spend doing something creative? Zero. Like most common answer.
Speaker 2:Most of what I really value is compassion. I feel that life is all about helping other people, showing kindness and compassion to others. How many minutes did you spend doing that yesterday? Zero. Right?
Speaker 2:But I was busy doing nothing of value by your own standards. Right? It's amazing. And it's a shot, it's like an epiphany to people, it's a big deal. Like when they realise that the things that they most value in life, they've spent zero time actually.
Speaker 2:So they go, what have I been doing all day? Stuff that they don't really intrinsically value. So this is a sneaked in a little plug for my graphic novel, you know, it won't be available for like another year or two, you're not all going to be rushing out and buying it. But I like the artwork. Oh, there's something, man, I wish I'd put this up in a slide.
Speaker 2:Scott, a guy sent me yesterday a photo of a tattoo that he had done. Did I tell you this? He's a guy, I think he's a Czech guy in Brazil, he got some of my illustrators artwork from the comic that we're working on, this guy got it tattooed in his arm. I mean, like, I was really excited to tell the illustrator about that, Like somebody actually went out and got his artwork tattooed on him. So here the stoic teacher saying the stoics teach that learning to control desire can benefit us more than obtaining all the things that we desire.
Speaker 2:And this is the stoic paradox, like that they actually think that self discipline is more important than achieving external goods. Because they think what's really important in life is to be able to look at yourself and have some self respect, to have some degree of admiration, to look to be able to look yourself in the mirror and think, that's the kind of guy that I want to be or the kind of gal that I want to be. Like, so you can look up to other people and say I really admire that guy for his self discipline. But what the Stoics think, you know, what would it be like if you were more like the type of people that you admire? That's what the goal in life should be.
Speaker 2:Like do we really lose sight of that? A lot of times we end up chasing after external goods, pleasure, wealth, reputation and stuff like that, and not tapping into this much deeper sense of fulfilment that we get from becoming a particular type of person, such as a self disciplined person. So when we are defining what we mean by these values, similar to the stoic concept of virtues, they could be qualities of our character, like having kindness, creativity, patience, or self discipline. Those are qualities that we may attribute, character strengths, we might call them. They could be qualities of our action, like living wisely, acting with compassion, behaving honourably, these are all things that you can begin doing right away, or at least making the effort to do right away.
Speaker 2:Or fulfilling a role well, we can define them as being a good father, being a good son, husband, wife, colleague, being a good friend. So this is how people try and define intrinsic value, like character qualities, qualities of action, qualities in terms of how we fulfil a role. I admire that guy because like he does a really good job as a father, like he's a really good friend. I admire that guy because he really acts with compassion, he really behaves honourably, really exhibits creativity. This is what we mean by values as opposed to external goals.
Speaker 2:And so some of the benefits of value clarification, I'd ask you to think about it yourself, what difference do you think it would make if you were clearer about your core values? Because few people are, you know, when you begin really questioning them, if you were much clearer about where your values really lie, and in particular the character traits that you really admire, how might that actually affect your daily routine? Like you know the way that you lead your life, it's values that give us direction, it's like the compass by which we navigate, and yet most people are really vague about it. How would your life be different if your core values were more coherent, if they were more consistent with one another? What would happen if your actions were more consistent with your authentic core values?
Speaker 2:Can you imagine if you were living more consistently with your genuine core values, what would that look like? I'm just going to ask you a lot of difficult questions. And I want you, you know, really, you know, to think about these questions. And you know, right now, like to really think what would you, what would tomorrow be like? What would tomorrow be like, Scott?
Speaker 2:Like if you just dropped everything and decided that I'm going to actually really focus on doing the things that are fundamentally most important to me, I'm going to focus tomorrow on becoming more like the people I admire. How may your life change direction? Or would it?
Speaker 1:I'm not sure I would actually, I'd probably do more writing.
Speaker 2:You'd be doing more writing, buddy. Yeah. I don't know what I
Speaker 1:admire the fact that the written word can have such an impact, so maybe I would work on the written word a bit more, or that wouldn't change much, which I'm grateful for by the way, because, and yeah, same with you would imagine, you wouldn't change much now because you're doing what you love and you.
Speaker 2:I'm lucky, like I get to do my hobby.
Speaker 1:Yeah,
Speaker 2:so I think about that a lot. Like, you know, I'm doing a lot of the things that I would, I get to talk to people about philosophy all day long. So you know, I can't complain too much. But, you know, the thing about your values is even if you're in a situation where you're not able to write, not able to talk to people about philosophy, usually there's two things. First of all, like if you made an effort to get closer, so say somebody had a real boring dead end job that they weren't finding, say they worked in a cardboard box factory, Scott, and they made cardboard boxes all day and a conveyor belt, right?
Speaker 2:And they could pay peanuts for it, in a wee small town in Scotland, like just make a couple of boxes all day, right. And what they really want to do is like to be an artist, but they're going to have to save up money to go to art college or something like that. But fulfilling that value of being an artist may actually begin by just saving up the money. So even though they might think I'm not doing it right now, even though they might think like I'm doing this banal job, if they think yeah, but I'm doing it, like because I see it as intrinsically part of working towards becoming an artist. I'm exercising self discipline in the service of creativity.
Speaker 2:Like I'm doing this like because it's part of what's required in order to live a creative life. That would allow them to see it as more meaningful. And then the other thing that they could do is inject more even in a busy day, what I tend to find, you know, said most people say they spend zero time doing the core values or people that are depressed, or suffer from generalised anxiety do. Sometimes just doing, I might say to the point, what if you just spent five minutes writing some poetry, or like just doing a little bit of creative writing, you know, even if you're sitting in the lavatory when you do it or something like that, you know, even if you just turn the TV off for five minutes, could you not even just inject five or ten minutes a day when you're doing something that's really consistent with your values. So even if someone's in a dead end job and the circumstances are very, very limited, usually they can still find ways to inject a little bit more opportunity to act in accord with their values.
Speaker 2:And also values clarification for many people is the perfect place to start in terms of self improvement. Like say you don't have phobias, you don't have anxieties, you don't have big emotional problems to work on, work on values clarification. Like you know, work on identifying what your real values are in life and then trying to act more consistently in accord with them. Like everybody can do that to some extent, so it's again a royal road to self improvement. So let's dive into putting it into practice.
Speaker 2:I'll start a little bit about thinking about clarifying your values. So the questions that we normally ask clients in therapy, so I want you all to really think about these questions and it starts off with a very direct one, which is what asking yourself what ultimately is the most important thing to you in life? Just simply very direct, some people respond best to a blunt question upfront, what is the most important thing to you in life ultimately? And really kind of like trying your best to put that into words. Scott, over to you buddy.
Speaker 3:Tough one, I've asked the group as well to chime in. Think ultimately the most important thing in life to me. I'd say I'm recently inspired by the whole Bruce Lee stuff about being your true authentic self and maybe that being your work. So maybe the most important thing in my life right now is for
Speaker 1:me to really clarify
Speaker 3:who I am and then just have that radiating everything I do. Authenticity in your work. Yeah, that's what I would say right now.
Speaker 2:That makes sense as a character, a thing that you would admire in someone else. It's the sort of thing that you begin, you can begin doing immediately. So even if you think it takes time to get there, you can still admire yourself for making the effort in that direction. Say you spent all day trying to figure out what your authentic self was, and at the end of the day, you still haven't got there. You might still think, yeah, but still the fact that I tried, like it's still worthless, time's still well spent, like at least I was making an effort to do the thing that I consider to be the most important thing in life.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, do you know
Speaker 3:what the people are saying here and I think I'd like you to touch on this is happiness because I wouldn't say that happiness is the most important thing to me because I know that you can't just have happiness 20 fourseven
Speaker 1:but what are we saying
Speaker 3:to happiness as one of them?
Speaker 2:All right, I'm going to tell you something, I'm going say something controversial about happiness.
Speaker 3:I knew you'd have time, I knew it.
Speaker 2:Right, so the words like say in Greek philosophy, this is more obvious, because the word they use for happiness is eudaimonia. It's a famous word in philosophy, because it really, let me put it this way, if you ask people today what makes them happy, and they just say it's eating chocolate and watching Netflix and drinking a glass of Sauvignon Blanc or whatever, like, you know, that's a very superficial understanding of happiness, really, that's what the Greek philosophers would call hedonie or pleasure, like rather than happiness. There's another type of happiness that comes from the sense that you're acting in accord with your core values, right? So the problem is that we, I think we confuse, again, this is our folk psychology, we don't make a clear distinction in our language between different types of happiness. And so people often talk about happiness as if it's something you get from a bar of chocolate, right, and that's a completely different, that's a transitory, it's a superficial thing, it may even be an unhealthy thing in some cases, like, but there's another type of deeper existential happiness that comes from looking at yourself and realising that you're on the right track in life.
Speaker 2:And I think that's really what your Dymenaea consists of. And that's what the goal of ancient philosophy really was, you know, not just having a kind of warm glow inside, but really having confidence like that you're living a life that's meaningful and worthwhile. And that may be painful, like, you know, you might be enduring some amount of anxiety or stress or pain or discomfort or fatigue, like, but sometimes you're on a roll, like, you know, because you think I'm exactly where I should be in life right now. And you feel that you're doing something that's meaningful. That's the real goal of life, not just having a kind of pleasant tingle, a nice sensation or something like that.
Speaker 2:Those feelings come and go, but there's a deeper type of happiness that I think we could call a sense of fulfilment in life. And that's really what the word eudaimonia means, which is the holy grail, like the goal of Greek philosophy in general.
Speaker 1:I like how you explained in your book about joy, actually like Hercules had joy and he was going through hell, know mean, it was joy and being able to do, like joy instead.
Speaker 2:That's another word that they sometimes use, it's hard to translate. But this is the other word that they use to describe a more kind of meaningful sense of fulfilment. Even if you're, you know, tired, if you're a marathon, and every muscle in your body is aching, you know, but maybe somehow like deep down, you've got a tremendous sense of satisfaction, you know, because you think this is a kind of, the way I frame it is you look at yourself and think this is the type of person that I want to be. Feel like I'm on the right track in life. You know, I feel like I'm actually doing something meaningful.
Speaker 2:Like all those clients that you know, we talk to in therapy and we say like, you know, like they feel that they're not, their life is meaningless without purpose. Know they're doing all these pleasant things like drinking wine and taking drugs and watching Netflix and stuff like that, but they still lack a sense of meaning and purpose, so they lack a genuine sense of satisfaction in life. What they're missing is this ability to look at themselves and think, like, I admire myself, like I feel as if I'm in the right place doing the right thing, right? This is exactly where I should be right now.
Speaker 3:One more, because it's a good one, it's got a lot of likes, contentment.
Speaker 2:Again, I think contentment comes, you're never going to have contentment if you get too much into this goal focused frame of mind. There's a lot of modern research on this in psychology incidentally, so we do feel it's quite a kind of endemic problem. Going to, you only get contentment from learning to appreciate what you've already got, to some extent. Contentment comes from gratitude, and from being able to, you know, appreciate your own potential. But if you get too much into a driven goal focused state of mind, you eliminate any opportunity for experiencing contentment.
Speaker 2:You have to be able to pause. I think, I mean, this is a bit of a digression, but one of my favourite quotes from Marcus Aurelius says, if you imagine things that are absent as if they were present, then you experience craving or desire for them. So I imagine I've got a Mercedes, or imagine I've got the latest iPhone, but I don't really have it. Like, I'm just imagining what it would be like if I did, that just makes me crave it more. And that just gives me a sense of dissatisfaction with the present.
Speaker 2:But Marcus Aurelius says, well, if you make an effort to do the opposite and imagine the absence of things that are actually present, Like, so right now it's snowing outside, right? Imagine if I didn't have any heating, we didn't have windows, we didn't have a roof over my head. And I learned to be grateful for even the simplest things in life. Imagine I didn't have any food in the fridge, like you know, to eat tomorrow. Imagine I don't have any friends.
Speaker 2:And imagining the absence of things that you do have allows you to appreciate them more fully and experience more gratitude. And gratitude really is a much healthier emotion than craving or desire. But it takes more effort to cultivate it, I think. So the Stoics were particularly interested in making effort to cultivate gratitude and thereby lies the path to contentment, I think one of the paths. So another question would be what do you really want your life to stand for or be about?
Speaker 2:I'm going to come back to that in a moment. What sort of things do you want to spend your life doing? What do you think would actually be worthwhile to spend the rest of your life doing? What sort of person do you most want to be? That's one of my favourite questions.
Speaker 2:What sort of guy do you want to be, Scott? Like, you want to be a self disciplined guy? Do you want to be a compassionate guy? Do you want to be the sort of guy that's a really good friend? Like do you want to be like the sort of guy that's very patient with other people?
Speaker 2:So that way of framing it, I think is a good way of kind of getting at your underlying values. What's the sort of guy what sort of gal do you actually want to be in life? And there are more. How would you spend your time if you only had one month left to live? Marcus Aurelius goes further, he says, imagine you're already dead and you're on penalty time.
Speaker 2:Like you've got a reprieve, you've got an extra few days or few weeks, but you're already living on borrowed time, like what would you actually spend it doing? If this is your chance to do what's genuinely important to you in life, like it's now or nothing, like to do something actually meaningful and worthwhile under those circumstances, like what would you actually do? Or would you abandon your values? Like, if you really went for it and said, this is my last chance to do something that really, really matters, what would you do? What would you be doing if feelings like anxiety didn't hold you back?
Speaker 2:Like these questions, not all of these questions work for everybody. That's why we have a whole selection of them, right? So it might just be there's one of these questions that allows you to connect with your values, right? Or it might be that several of them do. For some people, the big question is, if your anxiety went poof, like if it was gone, if you could take a brave pill, and all your anxiety just dissipates, what would you do if anxiety wasn't holding you back, then what would you actually do?
Speaker 2:What would be the main thing, the most important thing you would do? So sometimes that allows people to kind of identify what their real values are. Or what would you do differently if you had more self confidence, or if you knew you had no fear of failure? Like if you were guaranteed to succeed, like what would be the main thing that you would do? What would be the most important thing you'd go out and do tomorrow?
Speaker 2:Like if you believe that you could never feel anything, what would be your priority? Like the number one thing you would do? Like if fear of failure, a lack of self confidence is holding you back. And once you've identified some of your values, some reason, like this question often works, you know, if people go, wow, compassion and patience, self discipline, and then you would say once you've got a few, you can say to people what's missing from that list? Like what's missing from that list of values?
Speaker 2:Are there any other values that aren't on that list? And often that's a good question, it gets people to dig a little bit deeper, might reflect a lot bit deeper on things. Ebenezer Scrooge, like, so I'm going to talk about the ghost of Christmas yet to come. And if you remember, I mean, you know, as you say, like to say stoicism is for life, it's not just for Christmas. Every Christmas, Christmas Carol, the Charles Dickens story, you know, we all see the movie, so lots of themes in it, like, and in particular, what we call memento mori contemplating your own mortality.
Speaker 2:So what Scrooge does, he's faced, he goes and looks at his own grave in the future, the ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, shows him his own grave and it's an epiphany to him, he realises, you know, eventually that he's got everything back to front in life. I like to say nobody's ever had written on their tombstone, wish I'd spent more time on Twitter. I wish I'd spent spent more time watching friends. I wish I'd eaten more chocolate. So this ultimate question, you know, of what if your time was up?
Speaker 2:Contemplating your own mortality often helps you to get things in perspective, to identify your real values, right? So we call this the eulogy exercise, imagine you're already toast. And not to find a point on it, And Scott and I are here at your funeral ceremony, we're reading the eulogy, and we're saying, well, like, know, was like, she was a lovely person. You know, she went on Twitter a lot and Instagram and shared a lot of chocolate, drank a lot of wine, watched a lot of friends. Oh, would you want us to say something else about you?
Speaker 2:What would you actually want your life to stand for? Like, how would you like to be remembered? You know, what would you like if there was just one thing you could put in your tombstone? Would it be spent a lot of time on Twitter, drank a lot of wine? Or would it be, you know, philanthropist, you know, like creative, you know, like somebody had showed real self discipline, you know, what do you want in your life to really embody, the values that you want to exemplify.
Speaker 2:And also, like in this example, you know, if you imagine that we're reading your eulogy, it's all over, but looking back on your life as a whole, what aspects of it seem like they were maybe a waste of time. We spend a lot of our time killing time by doing these distractions. So if you imagine this is that your time is up, you're looking back in your life, you know, well it seems like maybe it wasn't of value. Are there any activities you think, I could have probably done less of that, you know, maybe it was unnecessary to spend so much time doing this or that, And what could you have done instead that would have actually been more fulfilling and more worthwhile? These are the big deep questions, Scott.
Speaker 2:Like if you could do it all again, buddy, like what would you do differently? If you could do it all again, would you spend more time on Twitter?
Speaker 3:Probably just replying to
Speaker 1:your tweet,
Speaker 3:I'm having a go at you.
Speaker 2:Mine is a
Speaker 1:this is
Speaker 2:a lot of more of a methodology, this one, Aristotle describes this technique. I call it for the sake of what. So if you ask yourself, what do you, another way of approaching this, Cecile, what do you actually do all day? Like what are the things that you're actually pursuing? And then ask yourself, what you're doing this for the sake of?
Speaker 2:Like, why are you doing it? What's it for the sake of that you're doing this? So this is a really cool example, right? This one's kind of like, you know, it hits a lot of people home. So say like, one of the things you're doing is working really hard at the office, like working long hours, that's something you spend a lot of your time doing, like working long hours and stuff.
Speaker 2:What are you doing that for the sake of to get a promotion? So what are doing that for the sake of, like turn more money? So what are you trying to earn more money for the sake of to be able to buy a better house? So we're trying to buy a better house for the sake of to look after my family? So what are you doing that for the sake of in order to be a good father?
Speaker 2:So that's the core value, looking after your family, being a good father is maybe the underlying core value. And then the other stuff that you're doing is just a means to an end of fulfilling that value. But then that allows to ask you the magic question, ask yourself the magic question, is there a better way of being a good father? Is there an alternative way of being a good father rather than working long hours trying to get promotion and earn more money so you can buy a better house? Maybe you're going about it all the wrong way.
Speaker 2:Maybe it's back to front, maybe actually this is a bad way of being a good father. Maybe there are better ways of being a good father. Like, so really digging deep to try and find what the underlying value is, that's maybe implicit in some of your existing goals and actions, allows you to reappraise the things that you're pursuing. Maybe they're not, maybe you're going about things in an ineffective way, counter productive way, we'll do it. And sometimes we lose sight of the underlying goal.
Speaker 2:Like a miser is somebody who falls in love with money, but maybe originally wanted to acquire money so that he could buy stuff with it or spend it on his friends and family, But then he ends up just valuing money as an end in itself. So often what began as a means to an end, over time we lose sight of that and begin treating it too much as an end in itself. We forget why we're doing it, Scott. We lose sight of the ultimate goal, and then we're nowhere, you know, we're playing monopoly money in life, we're shuffling around tokens rather than really pursuing the real underlying value. We've lost sight of what it's all about.
Speaker 2:So there's another technique that in therapy we call the double standard strategy. And that's simply, you know, you can ask yourself and I've touched on this already, what are the qualities you most admire in other people? It's another way of getting at your core values. So it can be real people, like your friends, real friends, colleagues, or real historical figures, Alexander the Great or whatever, Mahatma Gandhi or John Lennon or whatever it is, That someone that you really admire, like what is it you admire about them? Or it could be imaginary friends, just imagining people, It could be legendary or mythological characters, it could be movie characters, could be Dirty Harry, know, it could be like whoever, you know, it could be Batman, it could be whoever, the characters in movies or novels, could be somebody even completely hypothetical.
Speaker 2:Like, so if you just try and imagine, like, what the ideal friend would be like, hypothetically, what qualities would they have? You know, like, what qualities is it that you really admire in Wonder Woman? Like, what qualities do you admire in some legendary mythological character? What qualities do you admire in Alexander the Great? It doesn't really matter.
Speaker 2:It's just a thought experiment. Like whether the real, imaginary, historical, modern, doesn't really matter. What are the qualities that you really admire in the people that you admire? And then like Socrates said to Crotopolis, how many of those qualities do you actually possess yourself? And then another question would be to build on that, what would happen if you became more like the people that you admire?
Speaker 2:So if I say to you, you know, who's your biggest hero in life apart from me?
Speaker 1:God,
Speaker 3:that's hard. Biggest hero. I need a hero.
Speaker 2:It's a hard question.
Speaker 3:I've got loads of heroes. When I aged five till 10, it was Bruce Lee, one hundred percent.
Speaker 2:Well, that'll do, I like Bruce Lee, but who doesn't like Bruce Lee? What's the thing that you most admire about Bruce Lee?
Speaker 3:That he was just full on Bruce Lee, he was an absolute legend and he
Speaker 1:was just kicking ass and he was just him.
Speaker 2:So how would you describe that as a quality or a character trait? What makes him kick ass and makes him mean like his self discipline or his authenticity? The
Speaker 3:authenticityself disciplineyou could tell that he
Speaker 1:was a master of his art.
Speaker 2:So if you had the authenticity and the self discipline of Bruce Lee, like how would that change your daily life?
Speaker 1:Big time. It definitely change my fitness for sure.
Speaker 2:And then not only would you be fitter, but you'd also like really admire yourself, right? You'd get self respect and fulfilment. Like you think, geez, I've got like this, you know, I've got this sort of self discipline that I really admire in other people. That's what we're going for here. It's not just the results, the consequences, but the character traits, like because there's something else that you get from that.
Speaker 2:So imagine you think, you know, how much you admire Bruce Lee, imagine you admired yourself that much, like, or even, you know, like you had a kind of sliver of that before, I can see some of that in myself, I'm really proud of myself. I mean, this is what the people that are doing your programme, you know, your turtles or whatever you call it, you call them turtles, like in Greek, like, you know, like I'm sure for them, like results are one thing, like, but they're not entirely under your control, and they don't come immediately. Like, But what can change your life actually is just having the determination and the self discipline. In a way that's even more important, because that will benefit you over the longer term. And also, I'll let you in on a secret, right, the self discipline and determination that you need to improve your fitness or lose weight or whatever, going to benefit you in other areas of life as well, going to benefit you in your relationships, going to benefit your work, across the board.
Speaker 2:These character traits are general. Like, if you develop self discipline, determination in one area of your life, endurance, like benefits you throughout the whole of your life and in many different roles, many different, it may change the way you interact with your kids, maybe also you become a better role model to your friends and family as well. So there's a magical value, like cultivating these values. And it's almost like an added bonus that you improve your fitness, or you lose weight, or something like that. Exactly.
Speaker 2:Even if somehow you failed to achieve those results, like that you develop the determination and self discipline, like in the process, you'd still have gained something incredibly valuable, like, you know, maybe even ultimately more valuable. That's the ironic way that the Stoics view these things, it's really the character trait that's more valuable and more important than the outcome, which is a radical view, like, That's the opposite of the way that most people look at things. Most people think self discipline is a means to an end, they think I want self discipline so that I can lose weight. The Stoics would think I'm trying to lose weight so that I can develop self discipline. It's the other way around, it's a character trait that's actually more important to them.
Speaker 2:Either way, it's good, you know, they're both good things, but the Stoics think it's the character trait that's actually the real gold dust. So another wee technique I like to do, it's kind of similar to the previous one, but I'll get two, we like to do two columns in CBT for some reason, banks, we own a lot of flip charts, right, at least back in the day, you'd have these big whiteboards and flip charts and stuff, you'd get a marker pen out and do two columns. So I would do desire and admire, and I'd say, you know, what are the things that you actually spend most of your time doing each day and I jot that down in one column. So we get a list of four or five things that somebody puts a lot of time and effort into, like their desires, their goals. And then in the other column I'd list the qualities they most admire in other people.
Speaker 2:And then I say, how come? I don't know why this is like a mic drop question for people, but it always is in the consulting room anyway. So we list all the things that they put a lot of time and effort into, then we list the things that they really admire, authenticity, self discipline and stuff like you said about Bruce Lee. And then I'll say, how come these two columns are different? And I'll go, like, what would your life be like?
Speaker 2:Like if you took all the things that you admire, like put in this column, self discipline and authenticity, moved it into the other column. Like what would happen if you put a lot of time and effort into cultivating self discipline and authenticity? You know, what would happen if you actually worked on those things and made them a priority, like studied them, like practised them, like how would that change your quality of life? Because you've told me that you think these things are really admirable, but you haven't put any effort into cultivating them. You're off chasing after all that stuff.
Speaker 2:But you could be pursuing these things.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a good one, Donald.
Speaker 2:We mentioned earlier, like, this is what I look like after, you know, a few more weeks in lockdown. Like Tom Hanks and Castaway. I think actually I've chopped it out here, but you might be screaming at Wilson. Do you remember Wilson? Is he basketball or whatever?
Speaker 2:He's got his Have you seen Castaway, Scott?
Speaker 1:Don't know, maybe maybe when I was What do mean? It's a classic. Is it? I mean, it's recognisable. Maybe I've seen many memes about it, I don't know.
Speaker 2:It's a classic. It's a bit sad though. Tom Hanks, he's one of the finest actors of all generation, like he gets stranded in a desert island, he's a postman, like stranded in an island, it's like Robinson Crusoe. And he kind of like struggles with the isolation of it. Right?
Speaker 2:So it says desert island strategy. So actually, mentioned this before we get started. So there is this big problem of okay, I've questioned my vote. Questioning your values this deeply will hopefully mean that you get closer to your authentic values. Values.
Speaker 2:But like sometimes people end up coming up with values because they think they're what other people would praise them for, right, something really other people's values. Like, so really you just have to subtract other people from the equation somehow, right. So you may, and again, there's no hard and fast answer to this, it's going to vary, you know, thought experiments work for different people. But basically you have to remove other people from the equation and ask yourself, would you say, what I really value would be compassion. And you think, well do you though really, like if other people didn't see that, if they weren't praising you for it, if you kind of remove other people's opinions, do you still value compassion?
Speaker 2:Is this authentic? You might go actually no, what I really value is self discipline more than compassion. You know, I guess I was just saying compassion because I wanted to kind of impress my girlfriend, and that's something that she goes on about, my mum and dad, society or whatever. So imagining you're on a desert island is a way of doing it, know, you can imagine you're the last man on earth or last woman on earth, like what would your values be? There's no one around to see it anymore, like no one's judging you, you're not impressing anybody, like you've subtracted that from the equation, like you know, with these values that you've identified, would you still pursue creativity?
Speaker 2:Would you still pursue compassion? Like if you weren't getting a claim or praise from other people. So somehow or another, you've just got to try and subtract other people's opinions from the equation. And then ask yourself, would I still value authenticity, self discipline, creativity or whatever your values are. And so then you've got to put it into practice, right.
Speaker 2:So normally very simply, once we've clarified someone's values, we normally then just brainstorm a bunch of things. So say self discipline, Scott, like we would say, let's come up with a list of things that you could actually do tomorrow that would exemplify self discipline. Like if you were being more self disciplined, like what's something that you could do differently tomorrow?
Speaker 1:What can I do tomorrow? Self discipline, I could wake up when my alarm goes off.
Speaker 2:Right, so you start off with something really specific and really simple like that, and then plan to do it. And then what we then want to do is like, usually at the end of the day, back on it and kind of rate your progress. So did you do that thing that constitutes self discipline for you? It might just be one small thing, but often that can, small changes have big consequences. So you might at the end of the day go, I feel a bit kind of more, I feel a bit prouder of myself because I just had that little bit more self discipline, to get up when my alarm clock went off or I got up a little bit earlier today.
Speaker 2:So I feel better about myself as a person now, I'm closer to being the sort of person I admire, sort of person I want to be. So preparing for action, you may have a lot of values that you've identified, you prioritize them, you'd ask yourself, which are your most important values? So authenticity, self discipline, which one's most important? Or you might ask yourself, which ones are you currently scoring lowest on?
Speaker 1:Do you know what, authenticity versus self discipline on the Desert Island is a tough one to answer.
Speaker 2:Which one would you say at the moment you're doing, if you give yourself over the past month, if you were to rate yourself marks out of 10 for authenticity and marks out of 10 for self discipline, which one would you rate highest?
Speaker 1:Authenticity.
Speaker 2:You rate highest? Yeah, you might say okay, so maybe there's more room for improvement on the self discipline then. So like if we're doing coaching or therapy, we might say well, let's focus about focusing on self discipline then Or you might ask yourself of the two, which ones do you think is most important to you in general?
Speaker 1:If I was on a desert island, I mean, could only be authentic to yourself. Mean, are the choices like doing me?
Speaker 2:Could be self discipline. So maybe self discipline is emerging?
Speaker 1:Yeah, self discipline has to be there for piling Yeah, of course.
Speaker 2:Right. And geez, you know, like, honestly, the Socrates and Xenophon, we have these two sources for Socrates, Plato's dialogues and Xenophon's dialogues. Xenophon's version of Socrates is all about self discipline. Weirdly, it's not how we normally think of him. It's like a master of self discipline, like an eye, you know, hero, an icon of it.
Speaker 2:So it's an interesting part of our philosophical tradition. So another thing you could do is contrasting consequences. This is the choice of Hercules that we sometimes talk about in Stoicism. It's this idea that there's like two paths ahead of you. Like, so like the left hand path would be suppose you just abandoned self discipline completely, like you didn't bother cultivating that, you stayed in the status quo, or maybe even deteriorated further, where it would be a week, a month, a year, ten years from now, like if you neglected self discipline, just to pick that value.
Speaker 2:And then imagine what your future would be like if you really put more effort into cultivating self discipline each day, even if it's just in small steps and stages, getting up a little bit earlier, you know, doing other things that are more consistent with it today, tomorrow, the day after, so that you are strengthening your ability to exercise self discipline, just through making small changes in your daily routine. Like where would you be a year from now, five years, ten years in the future, and then thinking about how five or ten years from now those two paths would contrast. Because thinking about the long term consequences is going to be a bigger difference, that tends to be more motivating for people. They might think well if I'm really self disciplined, like you know after one day's time it's not going to make that much difference, but thinking you know if you stick with it over the longer term potentially you could end up being a completely different version of yourself. How would that affect your relationships?
Speaker 2:How would that affect your work? How would that affect your physical health? But also more fundamentally, how would that affect the type of person that you are inside, like who you are. If you imagine the consequences, these are two different Scots, which one do you really want to be? Two different versions of yourself.
Speaker 1:Yeah, how many different versions of ourselves do you reckon could emerge? Because obviously there's different physical ways I could turn out, obviously. But in terms of who I am, how many actual different destinies or like well, not destiny, how many different potentialities are there of me?
Speaker 2:Four. Four. That's a no, captain. That's a
Speaker 1:no? Yeah, like are we who we really, really are when we are feeling joy, your like sense of a sense of purpose is like that. You
Speaker 2:know, I'm gonna just say, yeah, like, of course, that's what I think. I think when we're living consistently and accord with our core values, that's, that's real. That's the real, that's a real Scott. And actually, when you have to, you value self discipline, that's what you admire. I think if you were able to kind of like exercise more self discipline and cultivate it, you'd feel as if you were being more true to yourself.
Speaker 2:Know, you'd feel as if you were achieving more of your potential in life, perhaps. When we're not fulfilling our core values, like we feel as if we're not really who we've got the potential to be. You know, it's about self actualisation, becoming the sort of person you're destined to be, the kind of person that's within you in seed form just needs to be brought out into light of day. How do you get out into light of day? How do you realise your potential?
Speaker 2:By exercising these virtues, self discipline, courage, creativity, compassion, friendship, integrity, by cultivating these qualities allows the real you to emerge.
Speaker 1:Yeah, interesting, I like it.
Speaker 2:So we can also break it down into when you're planning what you're actually going to do differently, say your value is to be a good parent, you can break it down into kind of general strategies, and then more you want to get right down to specific things that you can go, I'm going to do this at a certain time. So general strategies for being a good parent might be spend more time with your kids, set a good example to your kids. So you can go, those are pretty vague, right, but the ways of being a good parent that you might come up with. But then you might say, well let's dig deeper to specific examples that you
Speaker 1:can actually schedule in your diary.
Speaker 2:Teach your kids to paint might be a way of spending more time with them, right. So you could do that on Saturday morning, you can actually schedule it in your diary, take your kids to the beach, you could do that Sunday afternoon, ask them questions about how they're feeling and what they did at school and stuff. Like how could you set a good example to your kids? You could stop smoking, you do that now. Like you can mind your language, you can start doing that immediately, or maybe there's particular situations, like when you watch a football match or something, your kids are around, maybe you can be more careful about the language you use.
Speaker 2:Like stop complaining about things in front of them. On a matter of I really think a lot of people would benefit from that, being negative in front of the kids, complaining about stuff in front of the kids sets a bad example, right? So it might be that that's something that you could change immediately, like you know tomorrow I'm going to see you tomorrow, if I can be more positive, like think more, say more constructive things about my kids, less negative stuff. There's the general, it's useful sometimes to identify general strategies that would be consistent with your values. So self discipline, Scott, you might go, well, you know, generally in terms of being self disciplined, managing your time, or another form of self discipline, you know, be moderating your diet, there's whole like different domains in which you could exit or you know, working more efficiently, might be a form of self discipline.
Speaker 2:But then you can get it right down to brass tacks of you know, getting up when your alarm goes off or doing specific tasks during the day.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think it's,
Speaker 3:cannot, would it be easier to self discipline, health, work, family?
Speaker 2:Yeah, you could break it down into domains like that as well in different areas of your life. This is not a common thing that we do in therapy and coaching. So what would self discipline look like at work? What would it look like in your relationships? What would it look like in terms of study?
Speaker 2:What would it look like in terms of health and fitness? So thinking about broad domains of your life, you might go, I've got self discipline when it comes to exercise, but I don't have self discipline when it comes to dealing with my kids. Right, so there might be one area where you're exercising a virtue, but other areas where you're not working out so well. So sometimes it's useful just to kind of, you know, map out these different, like draw different columns, the main different domains of your life, and just ask yourself, you know, which ones do you need to focus on. So then very simply, once you've figured out specific stuff that you need to do, like, you know, getting up when your alarm goes off, or maybe, you know, eating healthier foods, going to the gym, or whatever it is, each evening, I mean, kind of glibly, you know, the way that I would describe it is you just give yourself marks at a 10 for virtue.
Speaker 2:So you know, self discipline in this case, so you would say okay, like some zero to 10, what do I give myself for self discipline today? You know, and then you ask yourself, you give yourself five out of 10, go how can I make it five and a half or six out of 10 tomorrow? How can I get it closer to 10 out of 10 tomorrow? Authenticity, three out of 10? How can I get four out of ten, five out of 10 tomorrow?
Speaker 2:How can I get closer to 10 out of 10? So it's just a convenient question to ask to help you focus your mind more on the practical changes that you need to make. And the other classic Pythagorean questions from the philosopher Pythagoras, there's a famous poem called The Golden Verses of Pythagoras, and it comes from antiquity, and asks these questions. It says each night before you close your eyes, three times you should review the major events of the day and ask yourself, and I would say ask yourself vis a vis your virtues or values, like say in Scott's example, in terms of self discipline, what did I do well in terms of self discipline? What did they do badly in terms of self discipline?
Speaker 2:What could they do differently next time in terms of cultivating self discipline? So those are the three questions that philosophers traditionally ask themselves each evening before they went to sleep. And this is my little plug for my graphic novel, not really, my graphic novel that you can't buy, but you can get it tattooed.
Speaker 1:Well, Stuart, can you send me your favourite design?
Speaker 2:Because they're all because of the lockdown. I think my main thing for when the lockdown ends is I'm going to get straight down the tattoo parlor at the end of my street. You want me to send you a cartoon to get tattooed?
Speaker 1:I'm not a fan of tattoos, but what I'll do is I'll put it in front of my flat window of you Donald, I'll put some a big, I'll make it You'll have a
Speaker 2:screen that you've got for me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, basically you've a screen for you with the books and I'll make it work, I'll make something special.
Speaker 2:I printed a T shirt once with one of the panels on and it actually looked pretty cool. It's alright.
Speaker 1:Wait, I'll go next to your fancy shirt.
Speaker 2:Wait, I'll tell you what we've got. I've got an illustrator at the moment, and he's working on something that no one has ever seen before. So when I'm talking to the guys in the military, we always end up talking about how Socrates was a soldier, it was a hot play. And I'm like, nobody's ever seen that, Scott, because there aren't any pictures of it. Like that's well too obscure ones that people are drunk, there's no statues, no ancient depictions of it.
Speaker 2:So I paid an illustrator to make one. I've got a historical authenticity, I've got an expert on ancient armour and stuff that I work with as well, it's advising them to make it authentic. So we've got this beautiful poster by making for our military conference, it shows Socrates in armour as a hoplite in the Peloponnesian War, a little quote from Plato, like how he's meditating on the sunrise, like you when your alarm goes off.
Speaker 1:Yeah, apparently, Socrates had like a big nose or something, did he?
Speaker 2:He had like big nostrils.
Speaker 1:See that's his weapon and the armour, make sure that's nice and big.
Speaker 2:He said it was good because like he was better at smelling stuff. And he said he had eyes, Xenophon says that somebody had eyes like a crab, like bulging. And he says, they're good because it means he said, I could see, it's easier for me to see around me. I've got a wider range of vision because I've got bulging eyes. Plato is even worse, Plato says he looked like a torpedo fish, which is like a manta ray or something.
Speaker 1:Oh my God. Why couldn't wises a crab catch on them, instead of wise as an owl? I think we've mixed it up. He
Speaker 2:makes metaphor because it's like one of these, supposedly it's one of these fish that stings you and it paralyses you. And he said that Socrates' questioning caused aparea, like this feeling of confusion and mental paralysis. So when Socrates was questioning people about what is courage? Yeah, but what's it really like, they'd end up so kind of like confused, they felt sort of like they'd been stung by a torpedo fish, they were kind of like mentally paralyzed, and they'd go away and think, wow, you've blown my mind. But sometimes they got annoyed and made them drink hemlock.
Speaker 1:I need more of these stories, can you add that to the novel about Socrates and the fish and the crab?
Speaker 2:I like the fish and the crab story.
Speaker 1:Shows you, he got through it, got told he was bad words and stuff, so he go through it, Socrates got through the heat. If Socrates was online, if he was online these days on Twitter, he get a lot of heat, wouldn't he?
Speaker 2:People would hate him, like well you know the famous thing was they still have the theatre, the Theatre Of Dionysus is on this, no one ever tells you this right, there's an ancient theatre on the side of the Acropolis called the Theatre Of Dionysus, and there was a play, we know there was a play performed there by Aristophanes called The Clouds, And it's a satire comedy that makes fun of Socrates, just lampoons and ridicules him. See, he even says he's like dirty and smelly and pasty face and stuff like that. They were pretty cruel. And there's a story goes that there were some visitors from another city sitting there watching this play, and they're just absolutely roasting Socrates, right? And this guy turns to the other guy because he comes from Megara, like another part of Greece and he says, 'Who is this Socrates dude?' Like they're just shredding him on stage, they're making him out to be a complete like total charlatan, like a complete buffooning and stuff.
Speaker 2:And Socrates is sitting beside him watching the play and supposedly he just stands up like and turns around, introduces himself to the audience, like sits back down, enjoys the rest of the play because he was so above it. So yeah, I'm not bothered. Like, there's a whole play here just like saying, you know, what a jackass I am. The guy dressed up as me and like, you know, like ridiculing me and stuff. He's like, fine by me.
Speaker 2:This is about me, by the way. Hi, it's me.
Speaker 1:You'd have enjoyed it, there's a roast of
Speaker 2:Donald It's like being roasted.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the roast thing is funny, if you're gonna get roasted in front of people, it's a good, I admire that trait, being able to get voluntarily roasted. I mean, it's not nice if you just get attacked randomly, but if you say, do know what, like it's funny, carry on. Fair play. Fair play.
Speaker 2:I get it all the time, like on Twitter, I don't have to go far. So you get used to after a while if you're on the internet a lot and stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think if you really know yourself, I know you say this, insults just deflect in a way because you're not confused with who you are. Because if someone insults you and you make that part of you and then you get insulted, make a part of you, keep doing that, you really get confused who you actually are, if you know who you are and someone says to me, Scott, you're just like, someone will say like, Scott, you're nasty, you're like arrogant or whatever, I'm like, no, no, I'm just very direct in my speech, don't mean it in a bad way and I know who I am and I'm being direct because I admire direct honesty. So I wouldn't take it as an insult, but some people are like, I really, am I really bad, like I better change everything about me. Doctor.
Speaker 2:And also, can't please all the people all the time, you know, when somebody says something mean to me, like, you know, the first thing I tell myself is that those 7999999000 other opinions available in the world, know, like, there's like, this is just one opinion. I think, like, when somebody says something and you feel very strongly about it, you probably the problem is you put it under a magnifying glass. But you know, like if it was just that one person, and then you were listening to the opinions of billions of other people, like you wouldn't place that much importance on it, right? Like, so we forget, it's just one person out of brilliance. Also if you want to think about it the other way around, like right now at this present moment in time, Scott, somewhere in the world, there's somebody that would think like that you're a completely not an idiot.
Speaker 2:If they met
Speaker 1:you,
Speaker 2:they would think that you're like the most annoying person they've ever met in their life. And then there's probably someone else that would think the opposite, like that you're the best thing since sliced bread, right? And so some of it's just down to brook, like who you meet. Do you know what I mean? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like, and you need to, if you like part of stoic philosophy, Socratic philosophy, is this trap of we get too focused on the minutiae, like, and reminding yourself there's a whole bigger story out there, right? So you meet someone and they think you're a jackass, right? Well, you know, you might have never met that person, you might have gone and sailed through life and never bumped into that particular person. You know, like the luck of the drug could have just been that you met all the people that happen to think the opposite. And equally, you know, you might meet loads of people that seem to think you're the best thing since sliced bread, you know, but there's other people out there that would think the complete opposite, think of the biggest idiot, know, like the most horrible person I've ever met, you just haven't bumped into them yet, right?
Speaker 2:There's a lot of people in the world, different Yeah,
Speaker 1:I think you can't please them all, but you know what, the important thing is to realise that your friends from school or childhood or wherever, if you listen to what they think and what you're doing, you will never go on because they will always say, Oh, what's Scott up to, what's he doing with Bruce Lee? Oh Scott, you Bruce Lee? Are you like loving Bruce Lee? Or like, you think you're a stoic? Or are you like stupid stuff?
Speaker 1:And if you take that seriously, you'll never leave, it's shackles.
Speaker 2:I'll tell you as well, like if I, once you get older, I feel like once you hit 40, there should be like a sort of deal that you have to start paying less attention to other people's opinions, and learning more from your experience. You've got like once you hit 40, you've definitely got enough life experience. Like you're thinking about things more for yourself, right? You can look back on your life. Like, I like to do little calculations, like all the people I've lent money to, how many of them give me back over the course of my life, and things like that, right?
Speaker 2:So you can learn from your experience. But if I look back over the course of my life, all of the biggest decisions that I made, that really benefited me, especially someone who's self employed, I know, I for myself, run businesses and stuff. All of the best decisions that I've made, the biggest step forward, every single one of them, I guarantee you there were people lining up to tell me what a terrible idea it was. People laughing at it, just telling me it was a stupid idea, never going to work, like all the things that I did that actually worked. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:And it worked. If it was a good idea, if it was obvious, they'd already be doing it. A good idea is one that you think I can see how this would work, and other people can't. It's a novel idea, it's an original idea. Right?
Speaker 2:So don't be frightened of other people telling you that something's a stupid idea. Like, you know, you have to listen to the opinion of experts and stuff. But you also have to remember, like you have to come up with original ideas in life, you know, and if you're coming up with original ideas, other people are going to tell you that it's stupid, it doesn't make sense, it'll never work.
Speaker 1:You got to trust yourself, like just not even listen to your parents, nobody just do it like, and just see what happens. I mean, you can't keep relying on other people going, yeah mate, good idea, not good idea, you'll be waiting forever.
Speaker 2:I'll give you an example, the first book I ever had, I've written like about six books, and the first book, I'm a full time writer now, make most of my mind comes from writing books and stuff. And the first book that I wrote about fifteen years ago or something like that, was now. The book proposal I put in, do you know what the first ever book proposal I submitted, do you know what the title of the book was?
Speaker 1:Big Donald explores Greece.
Speaker 2:No, it's called How to Think Like a Roman Emperor. And the publisher turned it down, because they said they thought it was a stupid title for a book. That was like fifteen years ago. And then fifteen years later, that always bugged me. So thought, think it's a good title for a book.
Speaker 2:Like, I think it's stupid in a good way. Right? And so I found another publisher eventually that published it and became a bestseller. The first publisher I submitted it to fifteen years ago told me they thought it was a stupid title. I never, I had to wait a long time before I had an opportunity to use it.
Speaker 2:Again, might ask them and tell you when things are a bad idea, often it's a good sign.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I agree. I'm most interested in that, you know, when you say publisher, often it's like one dominant personality, probably was like, no, it's like one person usually it's not like a huge yeah exactly so that's another important thing it's always people not some godly entity saying no to you. Do you mean? But when is you wrote your first book launched, how did you deal with the first set of negative reviews you got in the face? You must have had some show.
Speaker 2:One of my books, the first review someone put on Amazon, they give it a one star review and they they said they thought it was rubbish. And that's hard. Because like, if you have like 10 reviews, or whatever, and someone gives a bad review, it kind of just gets absorbed and the rest of it, get the average, but the first guy that reviewed it trashed it, like that's bad luck. And then all the other people that reviewed it, give it good reviews. There's one of my books on psychotherapy from a long time ago.
Speaker 2:So I was like, oh man, like the first one. So now it's just going to sit there for ages on Amazon, we're like one star, and nobody else is going to buy it. And it took a while before other people eventually bought it and reviewed it and gave it good reviews. But when you get a bad review, I think the main thing is to seek out feedback and embrace it. Like I ran training courses and did conferences for all my life, really, all my adult life, I've done things like that.
Speaker 2:And always collected loads of feedback and always read through all detailed feedback. And there's always gonna be one or two people that don't like what you do and then other people that do. So you learn from exposure to it, to see things, all you need to learn is just to see it in the bigger picture, the wider context. But the funny thing is that when people hate something you do, they often talk as if they assume that everyone else is going to see it the same way. So they won't say I didn't like this lecture or whatever, but maybe other people did, they just go this was a rubbish lecture, speaker was garbage.
Speaker 2:And then you turn that feedback over and the next one is this is the best talk I've ever been to, the speaker was amazing. Turn over to the next one, it's like yeah, thought it really good about the lighting. But the guy that didn't like it, nine times out of 10 I think, you know, they'll often talk as if like they assume that everyone else is going to agree with their criticisms. And we had a rule that if somebody didn't like something about a course we were running, we'd kind of take it on board, but we wouldn't pay that much attention to it unless two people said it. Because often it's just that person, so it could be something like, didn't like the chairs, or the room is too cold, you think sure, but does anyone else say that?
Speaker 2:Like if two or more people say it, then we go okay, maybe we need to look at the chairs or the temperature in the room or whatever. This part of the course was really boring, fine, maybe you thought it was, but does anyone else say that? Like if two people say it, then maybe we go okay, maybe we need to look at revising that part of the course. But if it's only one person, chances are it's just their guide, it's more about them than about the thing.
Speaker 1:What notice helps with that is if you ask people what you could do to improve first and then start reading them and get used to seeing stuff that you don't necessarily want to see, that helps because first you're giving them a chance to come forward and it's not unsolicited. And two, exposure therapy type of thing, the more you get exposed to feedback that's not, because if someone just asks you all the time, Donald, you are the best thing ever, you need to change nothing, you wouldn't improve.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that whales off pretty fast as well, funnily enough. Yeah. Right? So you can say, isn't it amazing to get loads of praise? And so you get loads of praise when you write books, or you make a record, you do anything in public.
Speaker 2:Right? And it's kind of nice, it's not bad, it's nice, but it doesn't, it wears off pretty fast. Like, you know, you kind of get used to positive feedback if you can't let it go to your head, because you kind of hear it all time, go okay, like, people like your book, so they're like, it's nice. It last. And you're
Speaker 1:doing it because you love it as well. So regardless, you're doing it. Yes,
Speaker 2:you have to do, you know, and the funny thing about, like the of the things I find about writing, for example, is if look at things that I've written, I'll go this thing that I've written was really good, and I put a lot of work in it. And then this thing that I've written in my mind is kind of rubbish, I wrote it quickly, it could have been a lot better. But it may be that people prefer the thing that I don't like, you know, and so some of the articles or books that I've written that people like the most are not necessarily the ones that I'm proudest of. And some of the things that I'm most proud of and putting most work into are things that didn't really find an audience or maybe people disliked or whatever. Right?
Speaker 2:And I'll tell you another thing is like, if you do something, a talk or write a book or whatever, and you're just trying to please everybody, you're going to produce something that's banal. So if you, I think if you do something that's original, you have to accept that there's going be certain people almost inevitably don't like it. Like anything that you do that's original, like genuinely innovative, there's going to be some people that go, what the hell is this? Say it's music, it's cutting edge and stuff, you're doing something radically different, like you're an innovator, say you're Van Gogh, right, there's going to be people that go, what is this rubbish? Are you just going to try and please everybody?
Speaker 2:You're never going to do anything significant or creative if you just try to please everybody. That's a recipe for banality. Trying to please everyone, you're going to produce something that's like boring and vanilla every time. And you should take it as a badge of honour in a way, like if some people think what you do is amazing, and other people can't stand it or don't understand it, like it's a sign that you're doing something innovative.
Speaker 1:Think I've only got
Speaker 2:Do you know my favourite examples is Charles Darwin.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, he didn't give a shit today.
Speaker 2:Look all the shit, he got, people drew pictures of him all the time in newspapers as a monkey. They were like, this is crazy, this guy's an idiot, wallowed up, we've descended from monkey. What's he talking about, what an idiot? Like, he thought he was nuts. Imagine what he had to put up, thick skin he must have had to have.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Just think about like the mind, absolute mind you had to go through because he was like, am I actually a crazy person or am I being true? And he probably would have gone, you know what, I'm true, I know what I'm seeing, and he probably would have just gone whatever, like Socrates in a way with me, he must have got to that stage. Again, this comes down to being true to yourself, knowing who you are, you can take any shit coming at you, because you know who you are, I think it's important, it's like a shield.
Speaker 2:Okay, and also maybe it gets a lot easier as time goes on, you get older, I think you potentially have time you can develop more of a thick skin through exposure, As you get older, more time, more opportunity for exposure, like it stands to reason you can develop
Speaker 1:It's also exposure, isn't it? And you've to take risks as well to be exposed. If you don't take risks, don't take exposure, you're just going to be wrapped in cotton wool.
Speaker 2:But the other thing I find, with people like internet trolls or just people giving feedback or bad reviews, when somebody says something personal, an internet trolls always kind of assume that they've hurt your feelings as well. I quite like talking to them sometimes because they're like, you know, they fascinate me, so they kind of, they always are convinced that they've really got to you and hurt your feelings, right? But you sort of think, but what you've just said to me is nothing compared to stuff that people have said to me in the past, right? If you've been around long enough, and you've held all these guys on the internet shooting their mouths off and things like that, you know, and people kind of giving critical, you know, if you're in the public eye, and you give talks and write books, but you meet loads of people that absolutely trash you, and you think, 'Buddy, you're an amateur'. You know those guys have said far, far worse things, so this is like, it just seems like a drop in the ocean'.
Speaker 2:But no, this is one of the things about kind of insults and stuff is like you know you easily get used to them.
Speaker 1:Yeah and not about always fighting them as well, it's just like you know what, happy days, enjoy it, can't tell them about it, happens all the time. I remember I used to get so annoyed at reviews, think we had a review from our last challenge, someone didn't even start the challenge, they were like yeah, signed up wasn't for me, one star review, I'm like, you didn't even do the chat, I could have gone a bit, but it's the same with this one we're doing now, we're doing martial arts and yoga beginners course and it's risky and me and you were talking about flawless space risky and some people are going to be like, no, not, I just want some booty workouts by Donald Robertson every Monday, I want him to move his hips, but he's talking about Socrates instead.
Speaker 2:That's one of the weirdest ones, there are a surprising number of people out there who is worse, you're lucky you don't make movies, look all the people that give movies bad reviews before they've even been released. People write bad reviews of books that they've not actually, I think like literally the other day somebody was like, just going on a phone one about how they hated my books and stuff, but they hadn't read them. What sort of person wastes their time complaining about stuff that they've never even read, know, or movies that they've not seen. But it's weird, it's a thing that people do man, it's interesting.
Speaker 1:It's got to be that they admire you, and they would wish to have been the person that did that book. I reckon that's where it comes from.
Speaker 2:I don't know what it is. Mean, to be honest, don't even think about it that much. It's kind of, it's interesting in a way. But you know, you kind of get used to it, like also, think you have to learn to take a step back from praise. You know, I get far, far more praise, But that, you know, that's probably just been people being nice about things, right?
Speaker 2:So you write a book, know, if you make a film, you're gonna get loads of people giving you positive reviews and praising you and stuff. You can't let that go at your head either. And sometimes it's weird, like, you know, you'll meet people and they can be really quite over the top about it. And they'll talk to you like, you know, they know you personally and things like that. And that seems a lot bit strange sometimes.
Speaker 2:But all of these that the praise and criticism, need to be able to see it in context, you know, and take a step back from it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. Well, I got a final question for you, maybe you can help me answer it. I'm being who I am, so I'm straight talker, direct, don't mean any malicious intent. I say something that's direct and someone says to me that I hurt my feelings and I say, listen, you've taken it the wrong way. And they say, stop being so insensitive, stop it.
Speaker 1:Where is the line where I go, maybe I need a change or do I wait for them to accept that it's just the way I'm communicating is direct? Like, do know I mean? That's a conflict then. It's like, should I just then be more sensitive, but maybe I can't be more sensitive?
Speaker 2:The answer to that is that there isn't an answer to that, Right? And I think again, it's like you have to have a certain amount of tolerance of the uncertainty, right? Because people have varying degrees of sensitivity. Right? So you can never go the line, the line's there, Scott.
Speaker 2:Right? Right there. Why, if you go over that line, it's insensitive, right, just on this side of it, you're fine, buddy. Like, it's going to vary from one person to another. And you don't know.
Speaker 2:And so you have to base experience and trial and error. So what really matters, what actually matters, like, is whether you can adapt to other people's feedback. So you say something that offends somebody, and it may seem incredibly mild to you, what matters is if you do it differently next time, you might think I know that person, for whatever reason, this really strikes a nerve with them. Right? So you think, I won't say it to them again like that.
Speaker 2:Then with other people, maybe you push the boundaries and they just laugh at it and think it's hilarious and you think, well, will that person know that I can say that? Right? So I think it's about being adaptive, like, you know, and learning and not being kind of like rigid about it. That's the hard thing is being able to kind of observe and adapt and not trying to stick too much to a rigid rule.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you answered it, it's good question, it's a good answer. It's the thing in this, like if you are who you are and you can come across like some people are like, I will say like, oh, if I am who I am all the time, I feel like I'm annoying to people. It's like, if you are very full of energy and joy and full of joy and not annoy someone, it's a hard thing to then say well I'll have to be less of that in the future around that person, then I'm less myself, it's really tough because then it starts changing people.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you have to, you know, sometimes you've got to decide when has it changed too much, like when does it become inauthentic and you know, and then what's appropriate. Again, you've got to judge that on a case by case basis, like you know, it's different for everybody. Some people are more able to change certain traits, you know, for other people it just seems as if they're being false to themselves, right, but there isn't a hard and fast answer to that. And you know, also I think you've got to go easy on yourself and unless you're kind of like saying stuff that's obviously going to offend the majority of people, like you know, if you say something and it offends one individual person, like to some extent you've got to kind of think well, you know, there's no element of bad luck in that, know, you just picked the wrong person to say it to, and not going to like, and as long as you're wise enough to kind of phrase it differently with the next time, that's what really matters. But you shouldn't like, you know, if someone gets annoyed and they think you're a really insulting, you're really offensive person, you shouldn't say that too personally, because you think well, that's just with you.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And if 99% of other people wouldn't be offended by it, and I didn't know that you were going to be offended by it, like, well, it's unfortunate that you're offended by it, but it doesn't really, it doesn't really say something about your character as such.
Speaker 1:Great, you said you didn't have an answer, you lied, you're a liar Donald.
Speaker 2:Donald's sweet.
Speaker 1:It's your virtue for, there's no virtue,
Speaker 2:There's a really good Socratic dialogue about that. Socrates asks this question about what's worse, someone that lies on purpose or somebody that does it by accident. And it's a real riddle because the goal, surely lying on purpose is worse than lying by accident? And somebody says, Yeah, if you're lying on purpose, you can stop lying. Whereas if you're lying by accident, you can't stop.
Speaker 2:Like, surely it's worse to lie by accident. Like, and it's meant to just be a bit of a puzzle, I think that when I don't know what he really believed, but I think geez, yeah, maybe that's a tricky one, Socrates. What's worse? Lying on purpose means you're capable of stopping. Someone who lies by accident is incapable of stopping, surely in a sense that's worse.
Speaker 1:That is worse. That reminds me of what the martial arts instructor said last week. So it's like a similar thing. It's like two trained guys face to face and they've got a gun in their pockets. I've got a gun, you've got a gun.
Speaker 1:I'm trained, you're trained. If I start pulling my gun out to shoot you, you will actually shoot me first because your subconscious mind is faster than my conscious mind, even though I've pulled the gun first. So I'm using my conscious mind to move the gun, you're reacting unconsciously, which is quicker.
Speaker 2:We need to put that to the test. Yeah. We're after that music though, you must have seen The Good, The Bad and the Ugly and there's Clint Eastwood films. Have you seen the Spaghetti Restrooms?
Speaker 1:No. I definitely had those tapes in my house and as well.
Speaker 2:We need to have film night buddy.
Speaker 3:Think we
Speaker 2:get to watch all these classics.
Speaker 1:And we lost Love Island as well.
Speaker 2:Lost Love Island after them. We
Speaker 1:do that. We've gone Gogglebox, me and you.
Speaker 2:Think I saw a long time ago, a lot of that.
Speaker 1:I reckon we do well, Emma, we can laugh, we'll do it next time. Ben, Donald, people have loved it once again. So we're learning a lot guys, these talks are deep and long, the point is this stuff does take time to talk about, you can't just have a five minute chat about it. You've got to start thinking about this shit. Because if you don't, you're not going to get to the true meaning of life.
Speaker 1:Is that right, Don?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we're talking about two and a half thousand years of philosophy.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so in just three hours, like that's good time and then yeah a lot of people are definitely feeling they're on the right path to joining this group which is good news thanks everyone for tonight we've had a lot of discussion and it's been very insightful. I've had some breakthroughs. I've actually come up with
Speaker 2:a new
Speaker 1:marketing message for the brand, we'll talk to them. Yeah, I can't reveal it right now.
Speaker 2:That was a secret thing. I've got a lot of secrets about these things. My Plato's Academy secret, I don't tell anyone about that.
Speaker 1:No, don't tell anyone about that. That's a secret. Just give them the link to the
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, forgot about the link now.
Speaker 1:I am excited about Oh, by the way, this is what we finish on. Donald, tell them about the Stoic Con for Women.
Speaker 2:The Stoic Con for Women, yeah. So we've got a conference about stoicism, a virtual conference, obviously, because of the pandemic, in June, and it's mainly women and it's for women. So it's still racism for women and by women. You know, it's inclusive. So there's like at least one male speaker, and men are allowed to attend.
Speaker 2:And so it's not like it's all just like about feminism or something like it's about anything that women want to talk about in relation to stoicism. Like we just thought generally there seemed to be interest in it. And so we've got a lineup of speakers, and it's doing pretty well, like they're selling a lot of tickets. It's by donation, so you can just pay like a few dollars or whatever and get a ticket or you can donate more if you want. And it's all going to be online and yeah, like I'm quite excited about it actually.
Speaker 2:I think it looks really cool.
Speaker 1:We share the link in the group and stuff, yeah, that'll be good. Awesome. Double up on the learning, but thanks everyone. Yeah. Nice one, Donald.
Speaker 1:That's good. Lot of lot of good comments. Usually, no, I guess, and a lot of good comments that gone deep, so that's good news. Awesome.
