Habits, Moderation & Ancient Wisdom w/ Donald Robertson & Layla Lloyd
I'm not going to say any Latin actually, I'm going say some Greek entrant oh no I will say some Greek, I will say some Greek, yes.
Speaker 2:Well Keenan, I'm going to put us in the group now. How are you both doing, good?
Speaker 3:Yeah, good, good.
Speaker 2:What's been on the agenda today eating some figs and some Greek fluffles.
Speaker 3:I doesn't like the figs.
Speaker 1:You don't like Greek figs?
Speaker 2:God no, overrated. Overrated Oh yeah, 100%.
Speaker 1:Not like with a nice slough of cheese and some olives though and a big glug of wine.
Speaker 2:Don't even like olives, that's the Welsh in me though, we eat stew and some cabbage probably.
Speaker 1:Stew and cabbage, yeah.
Speaker 3:They've got cabbage here, there's loads of meat and stuff, roast pork we had the other day, it was good.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you probably got fresh produce to be fair compared to us. Yeah, I'm on the old processed foods of here. Where's it? Let me get us on Facebook. So we're live, oh here we are, we're live.
Speaker 2:Hello everyone, Donald and Leila. Who was in the Christmas challenge that was introduced to Leila's powerful laughter? I wonder how many people remember that, changed their life mind. What languages do you know Leila?
Speaker 1:Ancient Greek, modern Greek. Greek.
Speaker 2:Greek is older than Latin isn't it?
Speaker 1:Yeah, a bit older, yeah,
Speaker 2:yeah, absolutely. I don't know why people think, I think Latin is older than Greek, do you mean? I think people think that, I thought that, till I did it on a quiz. I'm not sure why.
Speaker 1:I think maybe because more people have heard of Latin probably, but like interestingly enough, like they're actually based, the Latin alphabet actually comes from the Greek alphabet. So the Greek alphabet is written from left to right, but at one point the Etruscans took the alphabet over and wrote it from right to left, and then the Romans were like, oh, this is a great alphabet, and they took it over, and they started writing it from left to right again. So yeah, kind of between ancient Greek and Latin, there were the Etruscans who were this amazingly mysterious society that the Romans had to fight in order to take control of Italy.
Speaker 3:A few
Speaker 2:to them. Are they the people, the Romans, like, I I heard a story, the Rome formed by the men stealing women from another place.
Speaker 1:So yeah, was, yeah, exactly. That was the Sabine women, yeah. So that was like one of the villages nearby. They didn't have enough women or any women at Rome, so they were just like, oh, we'll just go steal some. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And that's how we've come to this amazing philosophy of stoicism from the start of this brutal thing. But what are the Etruscans were Etruscans, what part are they the bought South Of Italy or are we talking Yeah,
Speaker 1:exactly, exactly. That's where the name comes from. So, a lot of the Roman myths and folk tales come from Etruscan folk tales as well. So, the Romans had like a thousand different gods for the tiniest of things. So they had like a god for, you probably heard of this, they had a god for rust?
Speaker 1:It was like a god of rust, yeah.
Speaker 3:They had a god of poo. Yeah, they had a god of all. They poo.
Speaker 1:Poo. The god of Who is that? Donald. No. Yeah, exactly, you were the demigod of poo.
Speaker 1:He was like, yes, my father was the god of poo and my mother was the goddess of, or your mother was mortal. Doesn't really bear thinking about, does it?
Speaker 2:It's quite weird they would have just put a god to everything they saw, as if like, oh shit, that's poo, that must be a god. Do you mean, why is it, why so many gods? Why do they not think there's one god?
Speaker 1:I think it was just a really, I think it's kind of related to much more ancient religions, which are like animist, because you can't explain everything, you kind of say, well, because I can't explain this thing about why the flower goes brown in the autumn, I'm just going to invent a god that turns the flower brown. So it's a way of just explaining the world, and making it intelligible. So yeah, harks back to really ancient kind of way of life, which is very much kind of in nature, but also kind of not comprehending nature as well. But yeah, they did have like many, many, many gods, and many of them they got from the Etruscans because they were the sort
Speaker 2:of The main people, they just didn't have the battle power to keep them away, basically.
Speaker 1:They basically didn't have the battle power, but very few people had the battle power. In the end, the Romans just came in with their massive swords.
Speaker 2:And then later in the battle kept them away. They were scared of the Scottish. Now they build Hadrian's Wall.
Speaker 3:Was that the block?
Speaker 1:Well, I heard a very different story, which is that the Romans just couldn't be bothered, They couldn't take Scotland.
Speaker 3:So they
Speaker 1:just didn't fight hard enough. Anybody Scottish listening to this webinar now is gonna send
Speaker 3:me hate Well, can just prove that thesis because they moved the border further north to the Antamine Wall and then they retreated.
Speaker 1:We should do a webinar, the Romans and the Scots.
Speaker 3:Romans and Scots would be good.
Speaker 2:There's a place in Wales called Khmer then was one of the main Roman forts and there's a lot of history there with the Romans, it's mental how far they got, they got from Rome on foot to The UK over the sea as well. How long ago before the Romans did they have boats? Like who were the thieves first to make some boats?
Speaker 1:No, no, no. In fact, there's an amazing, I think the oldest boat in The UK to ever have been excavated is, it's in East Yorkshire somewhere.
Speaker 2:There's a film on it. I'm sure there's a film on it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's really old. It's like 5,000 years old or something, and they found it in the river, and it's just like a beautifully carved out tree trunk. So it would be like canoes in the Amazon or something, but yeah, we totally had boats in Britain before the Romans, yeah.
Speaker 2:The most important question is, have you seen the TV show plebs or plebs on ITV?
Speaker 1:Yes, and in fact, my claim to fame is that I taught at a school, my school before last was UCS and I mean this was like we're talking maybe ten-twenty years ago but one of the people that wrote plebs was at my pupil at the school that I taught at.
Speaker 3:What's the client?
Speaker 1:Oh it's about, it's just a kind of funny Life of Brian ish kind of
Speaker 3:In Rome.
Speaker 1:Really like life
Speaker 3:of Oh, it's kind of weird.
Speaker 2:It's basically three guys trying to get girls in ancient Rome
Speaker 3:and
Speaker 2:it's just funny. Is it plebs or was it plebs? Because there were people in Rome called plebs, weren't they? The Pua people. Am I saying
Speaker 1:that No, no, plebs. You're right. You're saying it right. Plebs is the right pronunciation. Plebs.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. Plebs.
Speaker 2:Your poor and your pleb. Okay. It's just a pleb, classic.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well you were, I mean, necessarily Plebs were not slaves. So there was a class beneath plebs. Damn it. So a slave was not a pleb. A pleb was just Plebs were just the people that voted,
Speaker 3:They just weren't nobles.
Speaker 1:Voted people into power, yeah. The plebs were like the power base for all Roman politicians.
Speaker 2:And with plebs, so were they born into a certain conditioning? So you know, we're born now, we go to work, blah, blah, Were the plebs born? They were like, you're a pleb, so you have to basically do this and that, go to school. What was it about?
Speaker 1:They didn't really go to school, I mean it was pretty hard to be born a pleb and to not be a pleb. The Roman orator Cicero, everybody calls him a new man, and they're really scathing about him because he becomes a senator, but he's actually actually only born a knight, and it's like, okay, well you're born a knight, and then you become a senator, and everybody's really snotty about him. But no one really was born a pleb, and then, I mean it was quite common to be born a slave, and then to kind of get your freedom from your master and then become a kind of ordinary citizen, like that was quite common.
Speaker 3:Well sometimes like that. Like eventually over time, one of Marcus Aurelius's generals was a guy called Pertinax
Speaker 2:and
Speaker 3:his father was a slave. Pertinax became a senior general, ended up becoming Roman Emperor
Speaker 1:So over generations, couldn't have social mobility over generations.
Speaker 3:But this dude was the son of a slave ended up his emperor, but it was about luck involved.
Speaker 1:Probably a bit of stabbing in the back as well.
Speaker 3:Was after an assassination.
Speaker 2:Well, I was listening to a podcast on ancient Rome before I went to Rome and they said that none of the plebs were able to become a console for ages or something. They couldn't have any power, basically like the French revolution, when it was like the directory and they had all the 95% of civilians and it was just like the 1% had all the power. Was similar to now, innit? I've also read a quote, how accurate is this? Ancient Rome is very similar to modern day Anglo Saxon rule like it is now.
Speaker 2:Like they're saying, the hierarchy that kind of, you can't get in, this is the top boy, he's just playing about. If you look at the houses of parliament, they're just having a laugh, they're just having a giggle playing a game and it's like, isn't that like the Senate was in ancient Rome?
Speaker 1:Well, mean, I like to think the Roman Senate was slightly more serious than the House of Commons. I mean, House of Commons is like schoolboys.
Speaker 3:Do think they're saying it or
Speaker 1:Yeah, if you've taught in a public school, then you look at the House of Commons and you're like, oh yeah, that's like my year eight. Yeah, that's like my year eight's having a food fight. But like year eight's having a food fight with posh voices.
Speaker 2:It's interesting. And then obviously the Greeks were the first people to do democracy, Renee. They were the first people to bring in, right, let's actually start voting on people in. And that was like, what 500 BC, what was it? 1,000 BC?
Speaker 1:It was the seventh century. So around 600 BC. So they'd had sort of Kings and tyrants and then they had this law giver called Solon who said, right, okay, we're going to reform the system. And yeah, and then you basically had, but it was easier to do it in Greece because the societies were much smaller. So Greece was made up of hundreds of city states called Polis, which is where we get political from.
Speaker 1:And because they weren't all democratic either, so Sparta wasn't particularly democratic, but because they just 'we', it was easy to kind of do direct democracy. So it was a bit like every time they had a vote, was like doing a referendum. It was like having the referendum again.
Speaker 3:Unless you're a slave or a woman or a foreigner.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and then it wasn't particularly Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:Women can
Speaker 2:imagine every decision not to go to a referendum like Brexit.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Do you
Speaker 3:know that's a funny story about that isn't it? Because orators used to be able to manipulate them. So they said that they were going to send a fleet of ships to attack an island because some guy whipped them up and then the next day they felt bad about it. Like another orator said, this is a terrible idea. Those people are innocent.
Speaker 3:So they had to send another ship to try and catch up with the fleet that they've sent, like and say, no, no, no, we've changed our mind. And that was yesterday, right? Like today, we realized it was a bad idea. Like, we all had a bit too much to drink. We didn't really mean it like quickly run after them and catch them and tell them no, turn around and come home.
Speaker 2:That reminds me of the film Troy a bit when they're having, they're drinking about and they're together, but they hate each other at the start and then they go away one drunk. How many wars do you reckon have been started in ancient times because someone got drunk and decided, fuck it, I'm gonna start a war.
Speaker 1:I I don't know if you could put a number on I mean, maybe Helen of Troy got stolen because people got drunk, Paris got drunk and he thought it would be a really good idea to steal this guy's wife.
Speaker 3:Seemed like a good idea at the time.
Speaker 1:Seemed like a good idea at the time. Then you wake up on the boat bound for the Bosphorus with a massive hangover, an incredibly beautiful woman and a thousand murderous ships behind you, that's like, yeah, I'm not gonna do
Speaker 2:that again. Dear.
Speaker 3:Best hangover ever, Scott?
Speaker 1:Literally. Pretty well. Yeah, hangover, really.
Speaker 2:First hangover film, God. What about, when was the first, I don't know if you know the answer, the first time people started talking about building habits or moderation and lifestyle or whatever, when did people start realising, I need to put a control on this? Is it when Rome was at his peak or something?
Speaker 3:Well, the first record that we have really of people talking about that would be the pre Socratics probably.
Speaker 2:How much control do they have over their life? So you know, like they were born, like what do you do if you were born poor those days? There was nothing you could do with that? Not really.
Speaker 3:But I mean, but then there's always kind of exceptional individuals manage to rise above the station or they're just lucky. But generally you have to be kind of fatalistic about things. But occasionally there's something like Perotinacs, like somebody's just in the right place at the right time.
Speaker 2:Like you Scotland, Donald, you escape the land.
Speaker 3:Otherwise I'd still be in Scotland, like shoveling poo. I
Speaker 1:mean, think the other thing about being born poor in ancient Greece is that it's not necessarily the worst thing because it's a very agricultural society. You've got your own plot of land with your family. Everything that you can eat, get off the land. Of course, there'll be famines and stuff from time to time. But I think the, when we think about like kind of being poor, that's maybe not the kind of emotional experience of a farmer in ancient Greece.
Speaker 1:But yeah, they certainly like, they talk about the importance of moderation from really early on, like June, '5 hundred BC.
Speaker 3:See Scott, they only had figs and they were happy.
Speaker 1:I know, it? Exactly.
Speaker 2:They were talking about moderation back end. Imagine we like zipped one of them to time now, think they'd have a heart attack, wouldn't they? They'd like
Speaker 3:They think we are crazy. I'm going to talk about Socrates and I think it's easy to imagine like Socrates today just thinking, yeah, this is like the opposite of what I told you to do. You'll see, you know, he had a lot of advice about, they always say things about their own society, all the youth today, they're really going off the rails and all this. And they talk about how people are becoming lazy and they're like, squandering too much money on expensive foods and stuff. And that was two thousand five hundred years ago.
Speaker 3:And since then, it's just kind of continued basically the same trajectory. So Socrates was like, yeah, I told you guys this was all a terrible idea.
Speaker 1:One really interesting thing about ancient Greece is that you know how like, if you're in Greece these days, you go to a restaurant in the summer and then you order the fish and then the bill comes and it's like €200 and you're like, why did I order the fish? I assumed it would be cheap because we're on the sea. So this was genuinely a thing that happened two thousand five hundred years ago. So unless you're just eating the little small fish, if you eat a big fish, it's expensive even in ancient Greece. Yeah, and there were jokes in Aristophanes about if you were rich enough to afford fish, you were probably a tyrant.
Speaker 1:There was, yeah. Why are
Speaker 3:fish so
Speaker 1:expensive? Because historically, actually the Mediterranean is not a great place for abundant fish, it's too salty. Mean, okay, you can get fish out of it, but it's just not the kind of total abundance of the really nice expensive stuff.
Speaker 3:Hadrian passed a law capping the price of fish during festivals, because he thought when they had a festival, was like we'd stop about like thousands and thousands of people come in And the guys selling the fish would go quadruple the prices.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like,
Speaker 3:and Patriot thought I'm done with it. Like that's you guys are just fleecing everybody. Yeah. So you pass the law so you can't can't put the price up for a fish.
Speaker 1:Yeah, see, well, they need to do that in that taverna, whereas having dinner last year and they charged me €200 for a fish. Don't overcharge the tourists just because it's the holiday season. Just because you can,
Speaker 3:it doesn't mean you should. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2:Well, so ancient Rome and Greece was a capitalist society?
Speaker 3:No, really.
Speaker 1:Nah, it wasn't capitalist. I mean, didn't have centralised production. I mean, all of the great art that we have from ancient Greece is done in tiny workshops, or by people just working by themselves. So there's no central production. So it's not capitalist.
Speaker 1:Sure, people like money, everybody always likes having money to have nice stuff, but it wasn't capitalist, ancient Greece.
Speaker 2:With your money as well, you have to obviously protect yourself, imagine, or was it like a bank? Because if you had to protect yourself, think of the stress or not, you have to go to sleep every night knowing someone could come and steal all your money.
Speaker 3:That's true.
Speaker 1:They did have bankers in ancient Greece and Rome but I think if you were just a normal civilian, you probably didn't put your money in a bank.
Speaker 3:The temples also stored, treasure and people's wolves were kept in the temples.
Speaker 1:Oh, hence the money lenders in the story in
Speaker 3:the Bible. Bible.
Speaker 2:And bulls have always loved taking cash, religions love it, give me some money.
Speaker 3:They're always getting raided as well, by barbarians. The people would be like, Oh, that's outrageous. You barbarians, you came in, totally ruined our, lifted our temple. But the barbarians like, Yeah, but that's where you put all the money.
Speaker 1:Exactly. I'll tell you what-
Speaker 3:put all the money in the temple, we would have left it alone.
Speaker 1:The worst thing that anybody ever put in a temple though, was like when the Ottomans put loads of gunpowder in the Acropolis. Then the Venetians shot a cannonball at it and brought the building down. Blew up. $16.87.
Speaker 2:Wow, that sounds like a good night to be fair.
Speaker 1:Fireworks, it would've been fireworks, yeah.
Speaker 2:Would've woke you up big time. So, Yiguan.
Speaker 3:I was gonna say, we just saw there's a reproduction of the in Nashville, in America, they've got a full size replica of Parthen with the marbles in it and everything.
Speaker 2:I like it, there's a replica Tuscan castle in Napa Valley where some guy, an Italian guy shipped over all authentic Italian things, bricks, whatever, and built in Tuscan castle with a wine vineyard. It's insane. It's stunning. I would rather live there than where I live now. That's how nice it is.
Speaker 2:And I kept thinking, wow,
Speaker 3:if this was how it
Speaker 2:is in the sun, it must have been quite good. If you're rich, if you're really rich, obviously, if you're poor, like sucked.
Speaker 1:Think I'd like to live in a castle on a vineyard as well.
Speaker 3:As long as someone else does all the dusting and stuff.
Speaker 1:Oh, the dusting, you're right, hate dusting. And
Speaker 3:you know that thing where you leave your mobile phone and you can't figure out
Speaker 1:what's the limit sign Oh, know, yeah.
Speaker 3:That's too big. It's annoying, it gets annoying after a while.
Speaker 2:Castles. That's why I'm downsized. Don't know. About fish? I don't even like fish, so I wouldn't have got ripped off in ancient Greece to be fair.
Speaker 3:Why do you like scotty, you don't like fish, don't like figs. You like stew. Stew water,
Speaker 2:sleep is good for lunch, dinner, all these things are really good, that's it. It comes from your childhood, see, if you let a child try loads of different foods,
Speaker 3:it has
Speaker 2:a better palate.
Speaker 3:You've got
Speaker 2:to do it yourself and overcome those silly things you have where I won't like it, you've never tried it. Yeah, but I won't like it. That's what you've got to get over as an adult. That's got to be something psychological Donald.
Speaker 3:Well, I'll and get my little girl to try lots of different foods.
Speaker 2:Should I do it?
Speaker 3:She eats a few things like, now she likes sushi.
Speaker 1:Expensive habit. Yeah,
Speaker 2:fish. Well, sushi's kind of fish, it?
Speaker 3:Some sushi. Some sushi's fish.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but Laila, what about, so if people are new to this chat who didn't meet you in the Christmas challenge, how would you describe yourself in a few sentences?
Speaker 1:Oh, describe myself in a few sentences. Okay, I was gonna say ex teacher, but I'm not really an ex teacher, it's just I don't teach in schools anymore. So I used to teach at a school in London called UCS, University College School, and then I taught at Eton, which is probably a school that people have heard of.
Speaker 2:We've heard of that.
Speaker 1:And basically I'm really interested in classics, that's my subject, and in the relation between ancient culture and modern life. And so I'm now living in Athens and I'm doing a master's in creative writing, and I'm trying to write about the ancient city of Athens, and how it meets the modern city of Athens, and everything that goes with that. So like talking to people, interviewing people, journeying around the city, writing about kind of like how the city appears to me, and yeah, trying to find those little points of comparison where I feel that the ancient city is kind of meeting the modern city. So yeah, I guess I'm like a teacher and a writer.
Speaker 3:I like
Speaker 2:it. Eton, Eton. What stories have you got from Eton? Were you there in Boris'?
Speaker 3:No, how do I learn that old? Oh my goodness, it's me.
Speaker 2:No, no, you would have you wouldn't have been born.
Speaker 1:Oh, I couldn't possibly tell any stories. I will say one thing, which is I think that like, think that, you know, they kind of wear their amazing garments, you know, they kind of have their incredible like tail coats and their like bow ties, like strip all of that away, and basically boys are kind of the same everywhere, I think.
Speaker 2:Do you think though that because like loads of the prime ministers and MPs come from Eton or those elite schools, they don't have real life experience in the working class in the villages to make decisions for most people.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, that's true of anybody, I guess, who's been to private school. It's not just Eton, I guess.
Speaker 3:And
Speaker 1:it's also true of most, I mean, it's not just true of Prime Ministers, it's true of politicians. I I guess actually, I mean, now we have a better number of politicians who have slightly more diverse backgrounds.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it would help. But
Speaker 1:it's just, who knows what it is? Is it because it's an all boys club, the houses of parliament, or is it just because of special confidence and training, I don't know, just- Connections. Yeah, I mean, connections is one thing, but there's also like,
Speaker 2:think that's Interesting, isn't it? How such a small area percentage in any country, even ancient Roman stuff has such an influence over all the people. Like is there any examples that where that's not happened? There's not really, when the French revolution turned into a mess, we can't really use that, but it's always the case, isn't it?
Speaker 1:French revolution.
Speaker 2:I like the French revolution, yeah. Big fan. I mean, I'm not fond of the killings, but it's an interesting time. Now, I like about it is they are the house of reason or the house of wisdom. They're like, let's be wiser, let's not talk about religion as much, let's talk about logic and stuff.
Speaker 2:I thought that's quite interesting. Then obviously-
Speaker 1:It's like hanging out with Donald.
Speaker 3:No, is this what it's like here?
Speaker 1:Yeah, wisdom.
Speaker 2:So when the Welsh independence movement happens in Scottish, Donald, you can set up the house of wisdom for both countries.
Speaker 3:We could do that. Or we could just get everybody to come to Athens to play to his academy.
Speaker 2:I think so, yeah, that'll be good. Mean, when that's ready, there's a party going on in the Plato's Academy. Plato definitely would have had a party to celebrate, wouldn't he?
Speaker 3:They did drink quite a lot of wine. They watered down their wine.
Speaker 2:That's what they say, that's everyone says. I don't think it's true, maybe it is. Are you doing a presentation, both of you or are going to chat habits?
Speaker 3:Yeah,
Speaker 1:have a presentation as well.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we might save Larry as well, you sub that as well. So we should probably do it while we jump into the presentation then Scott.
Speaker 2:Yeah, reckon. Let's see what's happening.
Speaker 3:Oh, you need to set up screen sharing.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, I'll do it off you now. You don't need to go to eat dinner to this part. I love them really, I love them really. There you go, think I've done it.
Speaker 3:That's it. Cool. Here we go. All right, so Scott we're going do moderation and breaking habits.
Speaker 2:I'm well interested in this.
Speaker 3:Shattering habits. Who's
Speaker 1:that? Oh, that's me.
Speaker 3:Hey, That's Laoja when she was a famous sci fi movie star.
Speaker 2:Looks like it. And
Speaker 3:then that's me. Wasn't as great as had darker hair. So I'm a cognitive behavioral psychotherapist, Lawrie is a classicist. And we're going to talk about moderation and stoic philosophy. Lawrie is going to talk about moderation and the Greek classics.
Speaker 3:And then I'm going to talk about breaking habits using behaviour therapy like old school behaviour therapy hasn't actually changed that much in about half a century. So let's talk about moderation in stoic philosophy first of all. So it starts with the women in a way. There are a number of ancient sources that say the priestess, the Pythia at Delphi, who gave these oracular pronouncements, taught the central doctrines of philosophy to Pythagoras. He was a pre Socratic philosopher and he was the first person really to kind of approach philosophy as a form of self improvement, like a kind of therapy and put a lot of emphasis on the idea of moderation because the god Apollo is associated with self control and moderation.
Speaker 3:And so philosophy was kind of inspired by the teachings that came from the temple at Delphi not far from here, just outside Athens. And in particular, there were two famous inscriptions on a pillar at the entrance to the temple and one was Ganothai Seoton which means know thyself and the other one was Maiden Agan which means nothing too much or as we say all things in moderation today. And there's another well known Greek saying which is moderation is best or metronariston. So these kind of sayings came from the temples, they were kind of like wisdom sayings, like maxims or precepts And the philosopher Plutarch says they're kind of like little seeds of wisdom like a Zen poem or something. And he says although they're very short, and sometimes in Greek they were just two words, there were huge books written discussing them, most of which are lost now, but they kind of were like seeds that came from the priestesses that spawned loads of philosophy.
Speaker 3:And Pythagoras and Socrates went on to develop these ideas. So maiden agon means nothing in excess, nothing too much as we say all things in moderation. And Socrates talked a lot about know thyself and also he talked a bit about this idea of nothing in excess. Socrates is very into moderation. So he says in the Socratic dialogues of a guy called Xenophon, like a famous Athenian general, who was one of Socrates' students, we're told that Socrates said of old the saying nothing in excess from the Delphic priestess appeared to be and really was well said.
Speaker 3:For he whose happiness rests within himself has his life ordered for the best, said Socrates. He is temperate and courageous and wise and when his riches come and go, when his children are given and taken away, he'll remember the proverb, neither rejoicing over much nor grieving over for he relies upon himself. So Socrates associates this with self control, not getting too carried away and excited and rejoicing about things too much and also not freaking out, getting upset and grieving excessively about bad things that happen. Now my thing is stoicism. So I'm very interested in the story of how stoic philosophy, which is kind of very popular at the moment, originated And so there was a Phoenician merchant, a guy who came from Cyprus called Zeno Arsutium who was shipwrecked near Athens and so he lost his entire fortune at sea, was a wealthy merchant and he was sitting kind of dejected at a bookshop in Athens and he heard someone reading book two of Xenophon's Memorabilia Socrates, so Xenophon's dialogues about Socrates.
Speaker 3:And Xeno had lost everything, he's sitting there and he hears a speech that's contained in that book. And this speech is a form of protreptic which is a speech that's intended to persuade other people to follow wisdom and virtue. It's also called an exhortation to philosophy. An exhortation to philosophy as a way of life. It'd be like a motivational speech today, it's also designed to get people to kind of convert to philosophy as a way of life.
Speaker 3:So Zeno was listening to somebody else reading Xenophon's record of Socrates's version of an original speech by a guy called Prodigus of Chios, an ancient sophist. So it's like a third or fourth hand version of what used to be a really famous influential speech well known in ancient world. We don't know what they called it but today we call it the choice of Hercules. And during the Renaissance there were many paintings inspired by it, there were pieces of classical music inspired by it, but not so many people are familiar with it today. I mean Socrates is telling this story about the choice of Hercules which is about moderation and self control.
Speaker 3:He begins with a quote from Hesiod, this famous ancient Greek poet and it's quite a famous quote. It says evil Scott can be easily found in Wales and elsewhere and freely smooth as the road and very near she dwells but sweat like with the turtles, the gods have set upon the way to goodness. Long and steep is the path to it and rough at first but if you reach the summit thereafter it is easy, hard though it was. And so he's saying well like you know there's two paths in front of you in life, Hesiod was saying. There's this one that seems like it's easy but it's actually going to lead to problems for you and then there's one that seems like hard work but once you've made it to the end, you'll look back and you'll feel much better for it.
Speaker 3:So don't always take the easy path in
Speaker 1:It's like the famous poem about Robert Frostburn, the road
Speaker 3:less traveled. The road less traveled, Yeah, take the road less traveled, Scott. So Hercules in this story symbolizes human perfection. His demigod is the son of Zeus. He symbolizes surprisingly, perhaps wisdom and virtue for the Stoics.
Speaker 3:And he's a young man, he's probably about 15 years old, he's about to embark on adult life in ancient Greek society. And he finds himself lost in the woods and he's facing a fork, two roads in front of them, one to the left and one to the right. This is a recurring idea in Greek philosophy and literature. And then two goddesses come forward and speak to him. And one of them is Arati, the goddess of virtue.
Speaker 3:And she speaks to him and she tells him that nothing truly good and admirable is granted to men without some effort on their part, which is the bold claim that Arati, the goddess of virtue makes to him. But there's another goddess who pushes in front of her and she says that her name is Eudaimonia or happiness and fulfilment but guess what Scott? She's lying.
Speaker 2:She always lies, always.
Speaker 3:Always lies this one right. And so this is a painting depicting it. Guess Arati is one with a red cloak And then the other one who claims to be Eudaimonia is one rather scantily dressed. Hercules, young Hercules is middle, we know it's Hercules because he's got his club. So almost always if you see a statue of an ancient Greek carrying a club, it's like, and particularly also if he has the lion's skin.
Speaker 3:Yeah, those are the typical characteristics of the God Hercules. So I was painting that. I did that myself, a rough that off this afternoon myself. There are lots of paintings. So today I'm going to read a little bit more actually today than I usually do because this is an amazing speech right.
Speaker 3:And so Arati really goes off on one about this other woman who in actual fact is called Kakia, who she's the goddess of vice or badness or wretchedness. So she's the sort of woman that your mother warned you against or something like that I guess. But Arati certainly doesn't approve of her. And this is what she says about she really lays into her. She says you don't even await the desire for what is pleasant but you stuff yourself with everything before you want it.
Speaker 3:You eat before you are hungry and you drink before you are thirsty. In order to make eating pleasurable once more, you're forced to constantly invent novel ways of preparing your food that will stimulate your appetite. To make drinking enjoyable even when you're not thirsty, you provide yourself with expensive wines and rush around searching for ice in summer. To make going to sleep pleasant you're forced to provide yourself with the softest beds and blankets that money can buy, for it's not work that makes you want to retire to your bed but boredom. You force the gratification of your sexual impulses before they're even aroused, employing all sorts of devices.
Speaker 3:Allegedly, you are denied the opportunity to hear that sweetest of all sounds praise of yourself from others and you're denied the sweetest of all sides for you will never contemplate any act of your own that is admirable. So this is what Arati is casting shade on the goddess of vice or khaki there. But the main thing that she criticises her for is this lack of moderation or lack of self control. And for eating and drinking before she's even hungry or thirsty, sleeping when she's not tired, and just kind of getting in a habit of overindulging. And this is central to the speech that converted Zeno Citium, the founder of stoicism when he heard this, he jumped up and he said, I'm going to go off and found stoicism.
Speaker 3:Socrates following on from telling this speech, reciting a speech from his friend Prodigus, he says lots of other cool things about eating and sleeping and exercise and drinking wine. And so one of the cool things he says, he talks a lot about opson which is this ancient Greek word for relish. And so in ancient Greek cuisine the meal would kind of have two components, they would eat a staple which would be like bread or beans or something that was widely available and cheap and easy to prepare. And then if you were lucky you'd have a little bit of relish with it, so some expensive cheese or some fish or something that had a stronger flavour and was maybe a little bit more expensive like a sauce, you'd have in smaller quantities to give the fruit flavour and to stimulate your appetite. And in ancient Greek society they had this word, 'Oxophagos' which means somebody that just eats the sauce, someone that just eats the relish.
Speaker 3:So this stuff that's meant to stimulate your appetite and it would be like someone who just rips out the middle of sandwiches, Scott. Or they get you know, Jammie Dodgers and they just eat the jam, or something like that. You would never do that, would you?
Speaker 1:I'm thinking about that famous scene in You've Got Mail when like Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks are like at the buffet and he's like this evil, you know, kind of money making bookshop owner. And he scrapes the caviar garnish off the planter and just eats it all himself. She's like, that's the garnish. You can't eat the garnish. So basically he's an opsophagus in that scene.
Speaker 3:Right? He's a massive opsophagus.
Speaker 1:Watch You've Got Mail
Speaker 3:for example. And I think Socrates would say we're all relish ethos today. We're all kind of we're surrounded versus the restaurant industry, food industry, it's all about over stimulating us. In Socrates, one of his big things was he says, if you overeat or over drink, beware of things that stimulate your appetite because you'll end up eating when you're not hungry and drinking when you're not thirsty. And that will potentially lead to overeating.
Speaker 3:But over time we engineer food to stimulate and so we should eat and only when we're hungry and drink when we're thirsty, he says stick to plainer simpler healthier foods. And for example like if you drink one glass of water that might be enough to satisfy your thirst. But if you're drinking beer or wine, you might drink I don't know how many pints of beer would you drink Scott?
Speaker 1:That's a personal question.
Speaker 3:That's too personal.
Speaker 2:Why in one go?
Speaker 3:Yeah, like someone may drink 10 pints of beer, even drink 10 pints of water, would you?
Speaker 2:God, no.
Speaker 1:No, exactly. That's disgusting. That's exactly the point
Speaker 3:that Socrates is making. So there's something about the beer that makes you want to drink more and more and more of it, like in a kind of artificial way, artificially stimulates your appetite. And the same might be if you eat a meal, you have your big roast dinner on a Sunday and you're really full up, you think I can't eat anymore. And then somebody brings out a really nice dessert. And you think, maybe I'll just have a little bit of that.
Speaker 3:And Socrates would say, you're not hungry, you're full up. And somebody has tricked you with this cunning witchcraft of making a tantalising dessert. To eat when you're not even hungry, you're already full up. And Socrates also famously said that hunger is the best of all relishes. So he said by exercising moderation, he thought you actually enjoy your food more because hunger is the thing that would add most to your enjoyment of food rather than putting expensive sauces on it and things like that.
Speaker 3:And Socrates was running up and down one day in the Agora and somebody said to him, like buddy what are you doing? Because he did a lot of strange things, he saw a lot of strange things in ancient Greece and someone said why are you running up and down like that Socrates?' And Socrates said I'm preparing the sauce for my dinner. And what he meant was he's working up a healthy appetite.
Speaker 1:Up a hunger, nice.
Speaker 3:So some other things that Socrates says about self control and one of the other dialogues of Xenophon, he says, Look, all men value liberty and despise slavery, says Socrates. This is a cliche and Athenian society, freedom, I can brave her, like everyone wants to be free. Nobody wants to be a slave. And the person he's speaking to sort of nods along and agrees with him about this like they usually do. And then Socrates usually throws a curveball at people.
Speaker 3:So he gets them agreeing, which seems like a simple enough question. So then but then he says, so why did more people not value self control? And his friend says, Well, what do you mean? And somebody says, Well, can any man be free if he's governed by bodily pleasures, and he can't do what would be best as a result of being governed by those desires for pleasure. Someone is no better than a slave, he says, if violent passions like desires and emotions prevent him from doing what he knows would be best.
Speaker 3:So he says you guys all go on and on about freedom but none of you are actually free because you're all enslaved by your own appetites and desires. So you live in a free society but you're not free men because you're slaves to yourselves And if you really valued freedom, you would conquer yourselves and become master of yourselves. And you would be able to exercise self control and moderation, otherwise you sacrificed your freedom. And another thing he says, he says loads of really cool interesting things right and I think I'd say about Socrates is I wouldn't expect it and even in nature world everyone didn't agree with everything he said. So often he asks questions and he says things in a tricky roundabout way and you go away thinking I'm not really sure I'm convinced by that argument, I don't know if I believe what Socrates said but it kind of bugs you and you keep thinking about it, you think it's still this kind of interesting idea, it sticks in your mind a little bit.
Speaker 3:He says lots of interesting ideas, lots of paradoxes. So he has this famous paradox about pleasure which I kind of touched on a little bit earlier. He says to one of his friends, have you ever noticed that although people say that self indulgence leads to pleasure like stuffing your face and things like that. It's rather self control above all things that does so paradoxically. So he says that you know being able to exercise moderation and self control prevents you from spoiling your appetite and so you'll get more enjoyment, more pleasure from the things that you're eating and drinking and from sleep and sex and things like that.
Speaker 3:Like if you over indulge in these things after a while, you cease to enjoy them, you spoil your enjoyment of them. And Socrates was saying this early on and then he also says, he adds a little bit to it, says self control is necessary for maintaining your physical fitness through exercise and self control is necessary for managing your household efficiently and self control is necessary for making yourself of benefit and use to your friends and to the community, the state in which you live. So therefore some of the most rewarding and praiseworthy skills in life require self discipline and a source of pleasure that are inaccessible to the lazy and self indulgent. So the lazy and self indulgent will never know the pleasures that come from running a well ordered and successful household or a business, from being a benefit to society and other people, from getting into sports and doing exercise and stuff like that, because they lack the self control to even begin doing any of those things. So they've cut off whole areas of life that would potentially be pleasurable to them, he says.
Speaker 3:So he's really going for it and arguing that self control leads to pleasure. So now I don't normally read stuff but I'm going read you, he gives us other speech a bit and it's similar to it's like a reprisal of the speech from Prodigus, but it's shorter. So I'm going to tell you what he says because it's pretty deep and it's typical Socrates. So he's talking to some of his friends about self control and moderation and self mastery. And he says, Gentlemen, that's you Scott.
Speaker 3:Suppose a war had broken out and we wanted to elect a leader under whom we stood the best chance of saving ourselves and defeating our enemies like Boris Johnson, Should we pick a man who has neither the ability to resist such things as food, wine and sex, nor tolerance for hard work and fatigue? And his friends are like well guess not. He says how would we expect such a person to either save us or subdue our enemies? Who would want to put somebody that can't even control himself in charge of the country? He's saying especially during a crisis.
Speaker 3:We don't apply that standard to our political leaders anymore, but Socrates thought it was crazy, like somebody who can't control themselves, why would you want no control in the country? He says suppose likewise that you were nearing the end of your lives, would you entrust such a man, someone who lacks any self control, with the education of your sons, the guardianship of your unmarried daughters or entrust your estate to his stewardship? Would you have confidence in someone lacking any self discipline to do these jobs? Would you entrust livestock or the management of other men or the supervision of their labour to an employee with this type of character? No, surely then if you would not even put up with an employee of this kind, far less should you endure the same defects to take root in your own character.
Speaker 3:You wouldn't hire this guy, so why would you want to be this guy? A weak willed man does not merely benefit himself while harming others, no he both harms others and harms himself much more because to ruin not only one's own home but also one's body and soul is the greatest injury of all, says Socrates. And who would appreciate the company of such a man at a dinner party if he cared more for the food and wine than he did for his friends? So he says greedy people like them more interested in the food, like who would want to even hang around somebody like that? Surely every man ought to regard self control as the foundation of moral goodness and to cultivate it before all else.
Speaker 3:That's a bold claim Socrates. Self control is the basis of all morality. Without self discipline who can either learn anything good or practice it to any degree worth mentioning? So now he's saying you need self control for education, is that true Laulie? Sure do, to learn a language and stuff like that.
Speaker 3:Who can escape degradation of his body and soul if he's a slave to his appetites? A man who is a slave to such pleasures ought to pray to the gods that he finds a good master for that may be the only way in which he can be saved because he's not going to be able to be a master to himself, Socrates is saying. And that's his little tirade if you like, You said your piece now Socrates, that's his little spiel about how important self control and moderation really is. And so with that in mind I'll hand over to Lal Yar who's going to talk a little bit about self control and moderation in Greek classics. Yeah, so
Speaker 1:I'm going to talk about moderation from a slightly different angle and I'm just going to start with, possibly, I don't know, the people who are watching this may be way too young to know who the person on the right is. Do you know who the person on the right is, Scott?
Speaker 2:No, I don't.
Speaker 1:You don't know it. Okay, so the one with the crazy arms. So that's Kate Bush, the singer.
Speaker 2:I know Kate Bush, I love her songs.
Speaker 1:So this is probably from like a concert circa like 1989 or something like that. And on the left, can we guess who that kind of person might be? Like, I don't know, she's not massively Queen? Kind of a queen. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, is royal. So this is a lovely actress called Constant Swain playing Antigone, who is a famous Greek heroine from Greek tragedy. And this was from a performance of the play from 2019, when plays were still happening from the American Shakespeare Center. So yeah, girl on the left is Antigone, so famous Greek heroine. Woman on the right is Kate Bush.
Speaker 1:And I will hopefully show you that there is a connection between these two lovely ladies.
Speaker 2:And
Speaker 1:I'm just going to get you to listen to a little song first. It's always nice to have a little break, you might listen to something, isn't it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, 100%.
Speaker 1:Okay. So I'm just gonna I'm just gonna pause it there because we don't need to hear the whole song. But we can always go back to it at the end, if we really wanna have a little dance around to Kate Bush. And I'm gonna try and make this smaller if I can.
Speaker 2:Maybe the Escape key.
Speaker 1:Oh, Escape. Okay, thank you. So you might not have caught the lyrics to that very catchy little tune, which is from 1993. I was, oh, how long was I? Oh, I was 10/1993.
Speaker 1:So I don't think I was quite dancing to this then, but I should have been. I really should have been. Oh, sorry. Didn't mean to do that. Just wanted to skip it on.
Speaker 1:Okay, so the lyrics of Kate's song go, 'See those trees bend in the wind. I feel they've got a lot more sense than me. You see, I try to resist.' And it kind of, she goes on to describe herself in her like ideal form as the reason why the song is called Rubber Band Girl is because she imagines herself as a little rubber band, which can like constantly like bend and be flexible and like always bounce back to success and life. So it's a song about flexibility. It's a song about bouncing back.
Speaker 1:And it's also about the danger of like resisting too hard against change. So she's not too happy with trying to resist. She wants to be like a little catapulting rubber band. And Antigone, who was our girl on the left, this is a play written by the Athenian playwright Sophocles in April, and it's really famous because it's part of the Oedipus trilogy. So Oedipus was a guy that accidentally married his mother, killed his father, and a whole bunch of ills, terrible things beset his house, the royal family, the city of Thebes, which is where he was from.
Speaker 1:And the third play in the trilogy is called 'Antigone' because it's about his daughter Antigone, and it's set after Oedipus's death. She's basically living in Thebes, the king is dead, and there's a civil war on, and she's got two brothers, and one of them is like fighting for the city, and her uncle who's taken over, and the other one is fighting against the city, and trying to usurp his uncle from power. Now unfortunately the two brothers kill each other in single combat, and her uncle says, 'You're not allowed to bury the one who was fighting against me.' But Antigone is like, well actually, he's my brother, so I'm kind of gonna bury him anyway, you know, like it's really important to me.' But her uncle brings out this law in the city, and he says that anybody who buries the body of this guy, Polynices, will be killed. They'll be put to death, capital punishment. But Antigone is like, I don't care.
Speaker 1:Your law is a stupid law. Yeah, like, don't care that it's the law, it's idiotic, and it goes against my conscience.' So she's like, I'm gonna bury my brother anyway.' And things don't work out too well for her. So she's actually engaged to Creon is his name, the tyrant of the city. She's actually engaged to his son, which is like super awkward. Like, can you imagine like, sitting around the Sunday lunch table and it's like, yeah, you kind of like buried the guy that like the law said you shouldn't anyway.
Speaker 1:I can't imagine how awkward that, I mean, let's face it, it was an awkward family already because like her dad was her brother and her mother was like her aunt. I mean, I don't
Speaker 2:know Anyway,
Speaker 1:so it was already like really weird, but then it got even more weird. So luckily her fiance kind of has a word for her on her behalf with his father. And he basically says, 'Look, you can't just like, you're talking about your niece here. You can't just enforce this stupid law on her. She's acting according to her conscience.
Speaker 1:I know it's the law, but it's okay. You can be flexible about the law. I know it's the law, but like think of the wider ramifications. And he says this, you know, he gives a long speech, but part of the really nice little bit of it is he says 'see how the trees that give way to the winter storms save their branches, while the stiff and rigid trees perish root and all.' So hopefully you can see why I kind of showed you the Kate Bush song to begin with, because there's like a, there's a lovely correlation between the two. I'll just come back to that.
Speaker 1:So on the one hand Kate says the trees that bend have got a lot of sense. If you try to resist it's not a very good idea for you, and the son says to his crazy law making father: 'Look, give way, don't enforce these laws too rigidly.' He's basically warning his father that bad things will happen to him if he enforces these laws too strongly, which indeed it does as the play unfolds. For the ruler, things do not go too well. I'm just going to skip back to the other slide actually, because this play Antigone has had indeed all of the plays of the Oedipus myth have been adapted throughout history, and you know they're an incredibly kind of fruitful source for storytelling basically, because it's such an amazingly kind of messed up family, and particularly 'Antigone' the play is really interesting politically because, and philosophically because it looks at this clash between the laws of the state and individual conscience here, and played out like really interestingly in the ancient play, but it's also been, and I'm just going to do a little shout out, I mean, no one's paying me to say this, but this novel came out three years ago, four years ago, and it's a retelling and updating of the Antigone myth set in present day UK and America.
Speaker 1:And it's really, really, really good and it kind of highlights all the same issues that are in the play, but in an amazing dramatic novel. So if anybody's looking for like a really good book to read, is inspired by the classics, but is super entertaining and accessible, I could definitely recommend this novel.
Speaker 3:It's an audiobook.
Speaker 1:I'm sure you can get it as an audiobook as well. It's really, really, really good. I can send you the name later, Scott. Yes. So yes, so we've got Kate Bush on the one hand, Antigone on the other.
Speaker 1:So the basic argument here is like, be flexible. Being flexible is good, and not doing anything too rigidly. So Antigone's fiancee asked the King, he says, 'even when a man is wise' so he's flattering his father a little bit, he says, 'It brings him no shame to learn many things, but especially not to be too rigid.' So he says, 'However old you are, however wise you are, however powerful you are, you know what you can learn. You can learn the art of not acting to excess. So yeah, the word actually that he uses in when he says don't be too rigid', he actually uses this phrase sorry for like skipping back a little bit he actually uses the phrase that Donald quoted earlier, which is 'mad and agon'.
Speaker 1:So 'agon' means 'too much' or excessively, and so the son is saying to the father, do not act in excess of your powers'. And he uses this word 'agan', in fact he uses the whole phrase 'medenagain', which is found on the Temple Of Apollo at Delphi, which means don't do anything in excess'. The other, as Donald said, the other motto which is on the Temple Of Apollo is 'Gonothi Sealton' which means 'know thyself'. But it's not just about self knowledge and wisdom, it's also about knowing your limits. So knowing your mortal limits, but also knowing your daily limits.
Speaker 1:So knowing what you're capable of, knowing how far you should push yourself, I. E. Moderation. So having an awareness of yourself, and knowing how to act moderately. But it's a really, I think that the quote from the play is something that we can all bear in mind when we look at, lawmakers, rulers, the present day.
Speaker 1:I think we can all think of an example where people in power have acted as we might feel like in excess of what is the right way to act, and it may be that they even act in a way that we think, I think often we might think, 'I would never have done that', like if that was me, I wouldn't have done it. You know, we might think in the way that people, you know, even for example, you know, a judgment in a criminal court, but also with, know, the way that, you know, I have no particular view either way, but you might even think about the way that certain governments like react to Covid, you know, maybe they're being too harsh, maybe they're being too strict or whatever. So it's always worth, you know, issues have been like debated for thousands of years, and not just by philosophers, but in drama as well, on the stage, as entertainment.
Speaker 2:You see it frequently when the world goes back to normal, people always know when a bouncer is abusing his power when they're overly aggressive with people and it's like you're abusing your power mate, you don't need to do it. So you can see it every weekend if you want to.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, yeah. I mean, can think of an example of where someone who's already in power basically just pushes it a little bit too much. So I think there we go. Actually, is the last thing I wanted to say was the really nice message from, I think the Kate Bush song is, so in another line she says, 'If I could only learn to give like a rubber band, I would be back on my feet.' And the son says to his father, the ruler, 'Even when a man is wise, it brings him no shame to learn many things, but especially not to be too rigid. So the last little bit that I just guess I wanted to leave you with was this idea of like wisdom and learning, and this is very much bound up with the idea of moderation, is actually like that sense and knowing yourself is connected with moderation.
Speaker 1:So you know your limits, then you know how to behave. And we can all think of examples as well from life where we're aware of our limits, we act in accordance with it, and you know what this ties in with the point that you made earlier about not getting too upset about things that go wrong, or too happy about things which are brilliant. That's also part of resilience, which is not kind of allowing yourself to be kind of swayed by either a success or a failure. So yeah, I think that this is very much to do with resilience as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's great. There's loads of good points there. Do you think it is like, we've known this for years, right? We've known for years the answers. Why are we always tricking ourselves as if there's gotta be something like complex?
Speaker 1:Think it's not, I think people are kind of, well, you know what, because exercising moderation and self knowledge is difficult. It's actually really hard. Actually really hard. So it's the hardest thing to like, know yourself and to think either I should be doing X or I'm not capable of that. So I think we kind of, we self deceive a lot of the time because it's easier to kind of just like delude ourselves than do the path which is really difficult.
Speaker 1:Like often moderation is the hardest worst, as Socrates pointed out. Moderation is like the hardest thing, and knowing yourself is super hard as well.
Speaker 2:Really hard. I think with moderation and stuff like that, there's a member who says moderation is sexy and it caught on after the last Christmas challenge. I'm trying to make moderation sexy, so give it an appeal. But it's just not appealing because obviously we've been conditioned to say stuff like no pain, no gain or like we've got so many of these sayings that mean we have to suffer or we have to do something crazy. Like we've been conditioned in this way and I don't know when it started, like did the Greeks and the Romans, were they promoting, well, they were promoting a life of who were the philosophers who were saying we should live for pleasure?
Speaker 2:They the- They're troublemakers. I mean, they're causing problems.
Speaker 3:That's a blame for us.
Speaker 1:I mean, other thing about the whole no pain, no gain' little phrase is that maybe it's just that we've kind of got it into our heads that pain is bad, but a little bit of discomfort to kind of get to the thing that you want to get to. Anything that's worthwhile is worth sweating over a little bit. And maybe we're just so used to having stuff come easy, that if we have to make a tiny bit of effort, it feels like pain. But it's not really pain. It's also about building good.
Speaker 1:I mean, you'll talk about this next, but in terms of breaking bad habits, but like building good habits. And you get into the habit of like, I've just started doing yoga, right? For the last ten days, and it was so hard on the first day. And now I like jump out of bed in the morning and I want to do my yoga because I've got into the habit, right?
Speaker 3:Didn't live like
Speaker 2:Yeah, live like LaLia, let's start it up, let's get it going. There's a good way, Robin Sharma, the 5AM club, mean, it's just the catchy title, but he explains habits quite well. He says, the first phase is like when you move into an apartment that needs to get done out, you've got to destroy, then it's the restructuring, which is you can kind of see it coming together and then at the end it all comes together. So you think when you start a new habit, you've got to basically go through a really destructive phase where it's really hard, it's not easy. But did the Romans and stuff know about habits?
Speaker 2:Were they just calling it the unconscious or were they calling it the universe? What were they?
Speaker 3:Aristotle actually said that our habits become second nature. Famously, we're sort of familiar with that phrase now but actually it's quite a profound thing. It says when you do something enough times it becomes a habit and then it transforms your character, it becomes who you are, it becomes like a new layer on your nature. What's his famous quote?
Speaker 2:He's got
Speaker 3:It's not of you,
Speaker 2:it's of me, he says something about me. Know what it is, it's like that famous sports one. Aristotle, yeah. Oh, what we repeatedly do, excellence then is not an act but a habit. I'm not sure if he actually said that though.
Speaker 3:He was very interested in habits and so were the like the Stoics were as well, subtease like a bit. But I'm going to talk to you now about what modern psychology behaviour therapy has Before
Speaker 1:you start your thing, I'll just give you some etymology. So the word habit is from the Latin verb habito, which means I live. So actually that's a really nice take home for habit. It's like, well, the very etymology of the word is something that we should live. And we get obviously the word habitat as a place where you live.
Speaker 1:So I think we need to think about habits as being not something that you pick up like a crash diet for like thirty days, but it should be something which just becomes part of your life.
Speaker 2:I love that. Weird how words have lost their true meaning. I was looking at the dictionary from a hundred years ago versus now, and the definitions are way less just completely simplified so much the words of less meaning basically. Strange. I love that.
Speaker 2:Lalia, I love it. Post out on Twitter or whatever you do. Get on Twitter, Facebook, wherever it is. Big fan.
Speaker 3:So I like talk etymology.
Speaker 2:So we're
Speaker 1:going to
Speaker 3:talk about HRT. Not hormone replacement therapy or whatever it's habit reversal therapy. So there's this weird thing that geeky people like me that are into behaviour therapy and stuff will say, I quite like saying this, it's kind of an opinionated thing, they'll say behaviour therapists nailed lots of common problems in the 1970s. Weirdly although we struggle with a lot of problems, some of the most robust techniques that we have in psychotherapy are some of the ones that were discovered relatively early on in the early days of behavioural psychology before we even did what we now call cognitive behavioural therapy. And one of the most robust techniques happens to be for breaking habits and there are loads of books on habits and they've got lots of useful information in them but nevertheless this technique was developed in the 1970s by two psychologists called Azrin and Nunn, it's very simple, it only requires one training session, it's mainly a self help technique, had a ninety percent success rate in helping people to break common habits.
Speaker 3:They just applied very basic behavioural psychology principles to it. And then you can see there's a book that they wrote which nobody reads apart from me. Because you'd have to buy a kind of grubby old sort of like used version of it I think to get it now probably, habit control in a day. But the randomized control trials that we have show that this is a very robust technique.
Speaker 1:You can walk through a toilet training in less than a day. Is that how you got into it?
Speaker 3:That was how I found out about it, yeah. The first thing, breaking habits requires motivation and self discipline like we've been talking about. And there are a number of ways that you can build motivation. As you know, none talk about that. I'm going to talk about their method, And they would say you have to start by building motivation.
Speaker 3:This technique, habit reversal therapy is really solid but you have to have a motivation in the first place to make it actually work. And so you can do, but so behavioral psychologists think well motivation isn't this like weird abstract thing. You create motivation by changing your behaviour and changing your environment, you manufacture motivation. And so you build motivation by rewarding yourself. For example, so you might say to yourself okay like if I follow this routine and I stick with it two weeks then I'll take myself on a holiday or something at the end or give myself some kind of reward.
Speaker 3:I'll talk a little bit more about rewards later or they say you set up a social contract so I'd say Laalya, I'm going to break my nose picking habit like once and for all, I'm going to do it over the next couple of weeks and if I don't do it I want you to punch me really hard in the face. Like I really mean it Lalya, I'm going to give it, I'm going to write it and sign it and give you a contract. So if you bring other people and you make it public, you kind of announce it, then you kind of feel the peer pressure. Sometimes that can be useful, varies a little bit, but in some cases you can use kind of peer pressure, you can use it in agreement to kind of remind yourself and to bind yourself and motivate yourself into following through with a strategy that works. And then another technique that's a bit cognitive is, I'll talk more about this in a moment, a very simple thing you can do, they call it an annoyance review.
Speaker 3:So would say you want to break a habit like picking your nose or eating eating too much sushi, snacking on candy or something. So you'd make a list of all the things that really piss you off a bit as habit and you'd read that list every day and you'd add stuff to it so you've got a really crystal clear list of all the things that piss you off most about this habit or your reasons or your motivation for wanting to break it so they're clear, you remember them and maybe even adding stuff That
Speaker 1:is awesome, So it's almost like a demotivational technique. Like a demotivates you from the chocolate and then you have your motivation to like Like because if you
Speaker 3:say, why do you want to stop smoking? They'll go, guess this and that. Like, but really, you can come up with a really specific detailed list of a whole bunch of reasons and people usually only think about one dimension. Like snacking on candy, why do I want to stop doing that? Don't know, like to lose weight or whatever.
Speaker 3:Well maybe it's bad for your teeth, maybe it's a waste of money, maybe if you broke this habit have more self confidence, more self esteem, more self control in general, may even have an effect on your relationships might be distracting you from work that you're doing when you go and get snacks and stuff like you can probably come out with a huge list of reasons why you would want to break this habit. So I know as a therapist, I'll ask the clients, why do you want to change this? They usually go on, because my wife told me to, or they'll kind of like vague, right? But the people that go, I can give you a list of reasons why I want to stop smoking. And they're really clear about it, I'm much more likely to succeed.
Speaker 3:So motivation isn't some like woolly thing. It comes from beliefs, from behaviours, from ways that you set up your, you can manufacture motivation like there are ingredients to motivation.
Speaker 2:I'm a big fan of that, I really like that. I think Atomic Habits talks about like doing the two minute rule where doing some of the two minutes to manufacture basically the motivation after two minutes to keep going.
Speaker 3:Yeah, often a good way to start is just do something for a little while. Darren Brown in Happy talks about one of his friends that doesn't like flossing his teeth. So the guy says to himself, well, I'll just floss one tooth. I'll do that. That's easy, Look at it's easy, just floss one tooth.
Speaker 3:And then he thinks, well, I might as well do the rest. I've started. Exactly. Called a habit by checking yourself. When I was a young guy and I did martial art, the guy that trained us in Taekwondo was brutal.
Speaker 3:So he'd have us go up and down the hall and do press ups and kicks and stuff. And he'd always go just do one more, just one more, like one more, like 20 more. You said that last time.
Speaker 1:It works with writing as well. Because sometimes I get up in the morning and I'm just like, Oh, I got to write 1,000 words. If I just sit down, I think I'm just going to write two sentences about the funny thing that Donald said yesterday. And then boom, suddenly I've written 1,000 words.
Speaker 3:Well, we're both writers and I do that as well. Go, I think I can't write another whole chapter, I'm gonna have to sit down and just write one sentence. But then you write a sentence, it's tons of a couple of paragraphs, because you get kind of drawn into it. Okay, building on that annoyance review idea, do you remember the choice of Hercules from earlier? So this is ancient philosophy but we also do something similar in modern cognitive behavioural therapy.
Speaker 3:So motivation also comes from contact with perceived consequences of your action and people say I know what the consequences are but they're usually really vague about them, they don't make them vivid and they don't think about them frequently. It's about really coming into contact where even if it's in your mind's eye with the consequences of your actions. So the way you might do it is like in the choice of Hercules, this path is the status quo where you carry on munching on your, eating your cheesy Watsits, eating a jumbo sized bag of cheesy Watsits every day or whatever your bad habit is. And then the other path is the path of arity, like when you exercise self control like Socrates is banging on about, you take cheesy watsits and you throw them in the bin or whatever and tell everybody that you know punch me in the face if I ever see me eating another cheesy watsit please. You've got 100% committed to stopping doing that.
Speaker 3:So you have these two paths in front of you. And then you visualise the consequences of them. So you visualise Scott, if you were to eat a jumbo pack of cheesy wats ups every day, for the next like week, for the next month, for the next six months, the next year, five, where do you think it would be five years from now?
Speaker 2:Big cheesy offset.
Speaker 3:Yeah. But what happens, like if you ripped it up, and you broke that habit, and you visualise where you would be six months, like five years from now. And I've done this hundreds of times, like with many hundreds of times with clients in therapy. And the first thing I would say is that they go, might think they'd say they'd lose weight or something, but it's bigger than that because it also means that they would develop more self confidence, more self esteem and become more adept to exercising self control. So often when we're doing habit breaking we say it's not about the cheesy wats at Scott, it's about your character, it's about arati, it's about the sort of person you are.
Speaker 3:Are you the kind of guy that can't stop himself from eating Cheesy Watsits? Are you the kind of guy that laughs in the face of Cheesy Watsits and exercises the virtue of self discipline? And so people say, well, I want to be that guy, it's not just about maybe losing the weight, it's about who you become. It's about being able to kind of have self respect because you're proud of yourself. And so to do that, you have to visualise the consequences.
Speaker 3:You have to visualise the consequences over the longer term because then the consequences will become more pronounced. And then it helps to have these two paths so that you can contrast them. So by contrasting the long term consequences you amplify your motivation to go, nobody in their right mind is going to go down the cheesy Watsuit road now, not when they've seen the long term consequences and compare them side by side. This is a version of you that eats a jumble bag of cheesy Watsuits every day And this guy not only is not doing that, but he's got more self confidence and self control in general. And when you can't confront those in your mind's eye and put them side by side, it's much more motivating than if you're just kind of talking about it and being a bit vague.
Speaker 3:You need to make it vivid, powerful and extreme, concrete specific, the long term consequences of it, not just for your health but for your relationships, your work, your daily routine, your self esteem, your character and contrast these two things side by side. That's why it's a fork in the road because the fork gets further and further and further apart the more you go down until it ends up being two completely different versions of yourself. All because Scott, cheesy Watsons.
Speaker 2:God, well, Don, let's refer to the question you're coming in. When I was skinny out, I had less confidence because I cared more. Someone saying they don't have a why and stuff. So like, well, how would you deal with the choice of Hercules if you don't have a strong enough why? Can you manufacture a why out of nowhere and go with it?
Speaker 2:Manufacturing
Speaker 3:your motivation, you've just got to think through the broader consequences of making a specific change. Why would I do this? It's not just for the weight loss or the fitness or whatever but it's about your character in general like I was saying a moment ago. If you give in to one habit that you know that you don't want to give in to, it's a slippery slope because you become more weak willed in general. And you'll notice the thing about people that are self disciplined in one area of a life often they're able to exercise self discipline more generally.
Speaker 3:So if I'm self disciplined in managing my diet, we're both fasting today aren't we? We're not even thinking about that, We fast every Monday, so we're fasting today but that makes me a better writer. It makes me a better father to my daughter. You become a better role model, you're able to exercise self awareness and self control in one little area of your life, then maybe I can be more self aware and exercise more self control when I'm writing or in parenting. You develop cognitive and behavioural skills that generalise.
Speaker 3:This is why it's a bit more than the cheesy whatsips. The why isn't just the cheesy whatsip or whatever it is, it's bigger than that, much bigger. It's about developing skills that will make you generally more resilient and also about a role model to other people that you might care about if you've got kids or whatever. So after building motivation the next step is what we call spotting early warning signs. We talk a lot about this.
Speaker 3:To break a habit it helps a lot to catch it early and then nip it in the bud and many people will break a habit purely by doing this alone. Not always but many people just by noticing their habit at an earlier stage, noticing the desire for cheesy wartsits and now the desire, the urge to have a cigarette at an earlier stage for many people is enough for them to derail it and step back from it. But even if that's not the case we're going to deploy like another technique on the back of it to break the habit. So sometimes self awareness is powerful enough by itself to break a habit. So the first thing you do is you have to raise awareness, you've got to first of make an effort, you've got to be motivated to spot the very earliest warning signs of a habit and then you have to ask yourself questions.
Speaker 3:So in therapy with a client I would say the habit could be worrying or the habit could be smoking cigarettes. So I might say to them like when you're beginning to feel an urge for cigarettes or cheesy waltzes or when you're just beginning to kind of worry excessively, what do you think is happening to your facial expression? What are you doing with your hands at that point? What happens to your eyes? Do you think your voice or your breathing change at all?
Speaker 3:If I was listening to you talk would I hear any difference in your voice at that point? Would someone observing and listening to you very closely notice any other subtle changes? And the reason is that if people become aware of things that they hadn't noticed before, that self consciousness inherently tends slow down and break the habit. It's what we call sometimes the de automatisation of a habit. So a good example would be you have good habits that you could break.
Speaker 3:So you know how to tie your shoelaces and how to tie a tie maybe but suppose you've got a wee boy and he's going to school and he says dad could you show me how to tie my shoelaces? Now you have to do it the other way around and suddenly it feels really awkward and you think geez man this is like I usually just go do do do and it's done, I didn't even think about it. Now I'm like I guess you put this through that bit and try to tie someone else's tie but can't think about it. Because you're having to think about the steps it feels awkward and clumsy and you de automatise, you break down a habit that way and that would be annoying if you were giving a speech or performing a concert, you wouldn't want to become clumsy and have to think of each step but it's useful if you want to break a bad habit. And so the way to break a bad habit is to really observe closely what you're doing right from the very earliest stages of it.
Speaker 3:One, so you might spot it earlier and two, just because if you spot more of the associated behaviours, the things that are going on at the time, it tends to take away the automatic quality of the habit. And that can be enough but often we'll add another step which is a competing response. So that could be when you notice that you're beginning to feel an urge to eat your cheesy watsuits, you do anything that's incompatible with the habit. So at this point boom you do something that makes it impossible to do the habit. Now in asarin and nun in generally in therapy the most common technique is to clench your fists for some reason, right?
Speaker 3:Because most of the habits that people want to break are called face, hand to face habits, biting fingernails, snacking on food, drinking alcohol, smoking cigarettes, pecking spot, like a great deal of the habits that people want to break are hand to face habits, funnily enough. No
Speaker 2:one says that. Why does nobody say that simple, Donald? Why is nobody saying this? Just we need to be Edward scissor hands in so we can't use your hands.
Speaker 3:Yeah, Edward scissor hands didn't even do that. Even chimpanzees find it comforting to put that, like to suck their thumb and put the hand to them, right? It's just there's something here really comforting about putting your hands to your mouth, it's like an instinctive thing. But a lot of our bad habits, not all of them, but a lot of our bad habits are picking your nose, like kind of involved in stuff like that and the physical bench makes it impossible to do that right. And like there's research on this what we call dismantling studies where we kind of shred the technique and we're trying to figure out which bits of it work.
Speaker 3:And so what the dismantling research showed was that for this to work you have to clench your fist for at least a minute And that sounds like nothing but if you do it for like ten seconds it gets kind of boring and after twenty or thirty seconds it's really boring. So a minute's like a long time to just sit there clenching your fists right And it's just like you're sending a message to this primitive part of your brain that says, geez, I really don't have to do that again. Like it's actually a form of what we call aversive conditioning and behavioural psychology. Your brain is kind of thinking that was so boring and tedious, I really don't want to do it again. So that will kind of damp inclination to give you the urge for cigarettes or cheesy wartsuits or whatever again.
Speaker 3:And also the original guys didn't realise this but subsequent researchers found that even as often happens if you slip and you smoke a cigarette and you've got a shit fuck, I want to smoke a cigarette before I even realised it or the Cheesy Watsons in my mouth already somehow it just jumped in my mouth. And I didn't even notice it was done, I missed that one right? So but what we found is that you clench your fists mainly to stop you from doing the habit but it also works if you clench your fists after
Speaker 1:you've had because
Speaker 3:it's still punitive Right? So you go, actually watch it, still have to do my fist clench thing. So again, you're still sending the message to your brain. If you even think about cheesy Watsons, and certainly if you put one in your mouth, you're going to have to do this boring thing, where you sit for a whole minute just clenching your fists. It takes self discipline to do that, this is why we start off with the motivation but if you can do it it'll kick the ass of your bad habits.
Speaker 3:It's very powerful and they're ninety percent success rate in the original outcome studies by getting people to stick to this and do it. You won't want to do your habit after a while it'll kind of like knock on its head. But it also helps to combine this with self instruction. So naturally when you're doing it it's almost like self hypnosis because you're quite concentrated and then you might as well say things to yourself and the way when people do this it feels like what we call assertiveness training but really you're being assertive with yourself and the types of things that people will usually say are either self efficacy statements as we call them like I can do this, I'm stronger than any habit, I can definitely do this. So kind of like telling yourself you can do it or telling yourself how important it is again to motivate yourself.
Speaker 3:So you might go I can do this, it's really important to me and then maybe thinking about you are not like I hate smoking cigarettes, money it costs affect my health. The example I said to my kids I can do this, I'm going to do it. Being quite confident and assertive in saying that and I certainly think you're stronger than the habit. You can do that, focus on it for about a minute or so, your habit's going to be scaled. It's going to be like the whack a mole, a lot of modems and you whack it but after a while your habit's going to go do know what, I'm not going to bother him, I'm not even going to bother showing up anymore if he's going to do that thing, so you diminish it.
Speaker 3:So that's habit reversal therapy, it's pretty simple. Lavia I have a job for you.
Speaker 1:Oh do I get to read it? Oh I love D. H. Lawrence. Do I get to read D.
Speaker 3:H. Lawrence? Ask you to read D. H. Lawrence.
Speaker 2:I'm expecting big things now. Let's go.
Speaker 1:A very great doctor taught me, Hermione said, addressing Ursula and Gerald vaguely. He told me for instance that to cure oneself of a bad habit, one should force oneself to do it. When one would not do it, make oneself do it, and then the habit would disappear. How do you mean?' said Gerald. 'If you bite your nails, for example, then when you don't want to bite your nails, bite them, make yourself bite them, and you would find the habit was broken.' 'Is that so?' said Gerald.
Speaker 1:'Yes, and in so many things I have made myself well. I was a very queer and nervous girl, and by learning to use my will, simply by using my will, made myself right. Well, well, well, I mean, that is a bold claim. However,
Speaker 3:it's backed up by research. And this is one of the mysteries to me, I'm a bit of a nerd about the history of psychotherapy, really of all the things to be into. And I can't figure out how DH Lawrence knew this. He says like is a very unusual idea and he attributes it to a famous doctor but we don't know, I don't believe he made this up because around the same time there was a famous psychologist called Knight Dunlap who also has one of the coolest names. This dude's name is actually Knight, like a medieval knight, Knight Dunlap.
Speaker 3:In the 1920s in America he was the president of the American Psychological Association so he was a famous psychologist and he invented a thing called negative practice which involves paradoxically doing a habit over and over again in order to break it. So this is different from the method that I described a moment ago, the habit reversal treatment. So habit reversal involves doing something incompatible with a habit, it's also called counter conditioning to break a habit by doing something opposite, a competing response. Negative practice is the opposite, just says do the habit over and over. And Knight Dunlap says we normally think if you repeat a habit, a behaviour lots of times that the habit gets stronger but he said you know what, he's a very astute psychologist, he said sometimes that doesn't happen, sometimes habits get weaker with repetition.
Speaker 3:And he noticed the example he gives is this was well known at the time in America in secretarial colleges because I'll quote Dunlap, he says the non professional typist and the learner like a novice typer frequently make persistent errors such as the transposition of the word the t h e into h t e when they're trying to type quickly and these errors are ordinarily eliminated with difficulty. It has been found however that even a small amount of practice in writing the word in the wrong way will eliminate the error. So he saw that in secretarial colleges they'll say type HTE 100 times and then when they practiced doing the bad habit it would actually weaken it rather than strengthen it. And Dunlap said this is contrary to what everybody assumes about how habits work And he didn't, he said he wasn't sure why this happened. But there are a number of experimental studies that show that it often works.
Speaker 3:So it's not 100% reliable, none of these techniques are, but often it does work more often than we would think. And so Dunlap said the main variable is the attitude. So if you're repeating a habit in order to break it or weaken it then that will tend to happen. It's cognitively mediated as we would say today so whether it strengthens the habit or weakens the habit will depend on what your intention is when you're doing the repetition weirdly. But other behavioural psychologists, a guy called Clark Hall who is also president of the APA said there are other possible explanations of this.
Speaker 3:In fact, I won't bore you with it but there are many reasons why repeating a behaviour over and over again can potentially break it, especially if you do it in a certain way. And so one of the things that helps is what's called massed repetition where you do something very, very quickly over and over again in a short space of time and that might break the habit because there's believed to be a mechanism called reactive inhibition, so it's part of your nervous system that if you do something very, very quickly over and over again your brain inherently builds up a kind of reluctance to do it, you're going to get a bit annoyed with it. And also if you repeat something over and over again in a short space of time you can develop feelings of discomfort or fatigue which would become associated with the habit and that would tend to almost like your body would be punishing itself for engaging the habit. So if you keep taking HDHG like 100 times, gets quite tiring and it becomes kind of unpleasant after like twenty, thirty, 40 times that you're doing it. And so your nervous system again is like I don't want to do this anymore, I've had enough of this, it's overkill.
Speaker 1:It reminds me a bit of, you know, everybody's had one of those friends at school who's been like, yeah, know the first time my mum saw me smoke your cigarette, she like made me smoke an entire pack. And then I never had one ever again. I never used to believe those stories. I
Speaker 2:did that
Speaker 3:to myself by accident. When I was a young guy, smoked cigarettes Monday, I smoked about 40. And I was sick as a dog. I told you that I did that with whiskey. I still don't really like scotch because when I was a kid I raided my dad's drinks cabinet and drank all of his whisky and when I was like 14 or 15 or something like that and after that the smell of whisky just to this day.
Speaker 2:That's interesting but do you think that has to be done when you're young versus now?
Speaker 3:It is and I thought we have research studies showing like for example typists but people are doing other experiments in psychology where we know we can see adults extinguish habits by repeating them in this way.
Speaker 2:I would say I
Speaker 3:think the other one, the habit reversal technique or the fist clenching or it could be anything that's incompatible, think you press your hands on your lap or something like that. That approach I think is probably more reliable but negative practice also works and for some people it's quite natural. Dunlop and people like that used it for things like, even things that seemed involuntary like blushing. So people that compulsively blushed, they would say what I want you do is to try really hard and make yourself blush. So like every time you're in a social situation, just keep focusing on trying harder and harder to force yourself to blush.
Speaker 3:And it seems like sometimes the voluntary effort can actually inhibit the habit from taking place. Imagine it makes it like 10 times worse and you have the worst blush of your life and you're trying to do it on
Speaker 2:a date or something.
Speaker 3:Generally speaking with this, if you repeat something many times in a short I'll tell you something even weirder right and this was only really, a psychologist called Titchener discovered this at the beginning of the twentieth century but we didn't, you know how some people discover something you don't know what to do with it? So Titchener found that if you repeat a short phrase or a word over and over for about a minute rapidly, aloud, it starts to feel kind of meaningless and people are like that's weird but so what? And then about ten or twenty years ago psychologists figured out you can actually use this in therapy. So you can get people who have all sorts of negative thoughts or worries My favourite example is nobody likes me, Lallie, everybody hates me, I think we'll go and eat worms, because the kids nursery, But it's not dissimilar to the core beliefs that people have in clinical depression. So pretty annoying.
Speaker 3:We know the opposite
Speaker 1:self fulfilling prophecy
Speaker 3:is forty five seconds. There's loads of research on these techniques. And so if you do it for forty five seconds after a while you go it just sounds weird when I say it now. I can have the thought and say it but I don't feel the emotions anymore. I feel a sense of, we call this verbal diffusion is the technical term.
Speaker 3:So I'm able to talk about the fact that nobody likes me but it just seems like I'm talking about somebody else having that thought, like I have a sense of detachment from it. And there are other reasons why that, I won't delve into explaining the reasons for it but there are a number of reasons why it has that effect And it's actually quite common technique. So the last thing I want to mention is old ladies because there's this thing in behavioural psychology called the grandma rule and it comes from a behavioural psychologist called Premack. And I think it was initially discovered in animal training. So many of the most robust techniques are the ones that behavioural psychologists go this works even with hamsters, This even works with rats and pigeons and stuff so it's definitely going to work on you.
Speaker 3:Like there are things that are so basic they're kind of ingrained in our nervous system and the PREMAX principle takes advantage of that. So it's very simple, if you want to build a habit there are many ways of building positive habits but a very simple one, one of my favourite ones, is they would look at things rather than giving yourself a simple reward like candy or what people kind of struggle sometimes to think of effective rewards, it seems a bit overly simplistic. And so the Prem Act principle says look at behaviours that are frequently occurring. So you look at your chimpanzee and you think what does it actually do all day? What does it do all day Scott?
Speaker 3:Scratches its ass. You say to the chimpanzee you're not allowed to scratch your ass anymore unless you solve the jigsaw puzzle first, then you can scratch your ass. Right? So the chimpanzee is like, I really want to scratch my ass. Why?
Speaker 3:And I normally let me do this all day long way. So it was a bit of solve the jigsaw puzzle. And then I can scratch when you scratch your ass as much as you like, like scratch your ass all day long if you want, but you have to solve jigsaw puzzle first every time. So this works in humans as well. So if I'm, I might say I'm not allowed to have my lunch unless I've written 1,000 words on a chapter that I'm working on.
Speaker 3:But a better example would be, you know, you're not allowed to watch TV, you make a rule for yourself that says, I can watch as much TV as I like but I have to do 20 press ups first, I have to go to the gym for half an hour first or whatever it is, I've got to do my yoga first, once I've done my yoga I watch Netflix. Or I can check Instagram but only after I've kind of prepared some healthy meals or something. Social media is a great one. So you can say you can do as much social media as you want but each time you go on to check your social media beforehand you have to do some exercise or you have to do something healthy or you have to do a lot about work or something that you're trying to increase the frequency of.
Speaker 2:So
Speaker 3:it's called the grandma rule because everyone's grandma says you can watch TV after you do your homework or you can have pudding but you have to finish your greens first. So you make a high frequency behaviour, a highly desirable behaviour contingent upon something that you're trying to make into a new habit basically. And you don't even need to think about things that you enjoy doing, it could just be things that you do frequently because the chances are the things that you do frequently you're going to feel like doing. You might say to yourself just checking social media, something you do frequently. If you look at your daily routine and go yeah I do that a lot, go well from now on I'm only allowed to do that after I've written a thousand words or something and an essay that I'm working on or maybe what do you do, what's something you do frequently?
Speaker 2:We've covered social media, covered
Speaker 1:TV. Have a dog scratching?
Speaker 3:Thinking about Kate Bush. I think about Kate Bush frequently. I can make a rule to myself.
Speaker 1:Now you're only allowed to think about Kate Bush if you have a conversation with Laalia about Greek tragedy first.
Speaker 3:I have to talk to Laalia about Greek tragedy first. And then I can think about keep it as many times as I want, but only if I've spoken to Larry about Greek tragedy first.
Speaker 1:He's got to do his homework So
Speaker 3:the grandma rule and then I've got like, same slide from a graphic novel again. So there you go Scott, that's like Socrates, Antigone and cutting edge evidence based psychotherapy for habit breaking. From the man
Speaker 1:that brought you how to potty train yourself.
Speaker 3:From the man that brought you how to potty train a Roman emperor.
Speaker 2:Well, we've covered all sorts of generations and years and centuries with the habits and basically it comes down to one word moderation, who would have thought All of it comes down to that. Simple. Okay, John or Donald, I got a task for you. I'm gonna randomly pick names in this list and they're gonna have to use one of the tools you've mentioned. So you've said one of them, just got your ass one, whatever, and I'm just gonna People will comment and they're gonna try it.
Speaker 2:Because I think people are listening, are people trying these things? I haven't tried all of them yet. They've tried one repressorment technique, which works a lot, but I haven't tried.
Speaker 3:All behavioural therapy techniques work basically. Cognitive therapy techniques are a lot about behavioural therapy techniques, they're all rock solid, basically, pretty much. They nailed them all in the 1970s. I feel like we were better at psychotherapy in the 1970s in some ways, weirdly. Yeah, like, I mean, they could all do the habit reversal technique, it's pretty robust.
Speaker 3:Find something that you want to break and then make yourself for one minute, like clench your fists every time you notice that you're even beginning to think about So
Speaker 2:that's habit reversal. So Suzanne, tip in, that is what you're doing. Habit reversal. Name another one Donald or name another one quickly.
Speaker 3:The choice of Hercules, visualising these two paths and the status quo versus self discipline, changing your habits and contrasting the long term consequences in your mind, maybe doing that every day to motivate yourself to make a behaviour change.
Speaker 2:Tyler, that's for you because I know you're looking at the five:two diet, I think, and you're looking at because things get boring, think about the two paths, choice of Firkeley's that's for you. Suzanne you're on it. One more Donald for someone because I'm I
Speaker 3:can do negative practice but I'll do the word repetition technique because that's a lot bit more state of the art. Taking a negative thought or limiting or negative belief, usually like a short sentence, like something that's kind of limiting or that's troubling you and then repeating it out loud as quickly as you can for approximately forty five seconds, maybe once a day.
Speaker 2:Jess Lambert, that's on you. Messing about. Okay, Donna, give me some more, give me some more. There's people wanting some more. So we're handing out stuff here.
Speaker 2:My
Speaker 3:God, Primax principle, make a rule, a hard and fast rule to yourself that you're only allowed to do something that you do a lot like go on social media or snack if you first do a habit that you're trying to create like doing yoga for ten minutes or 20 squat thrusts or something like that.
Speaker 2:That'll go to Susan Vickers, the Irish, that's for you. This is great giving homework to people mind. Donald, did you do the homework from last week looking at our study? Remember I spoke about our study and you were like, are you giving me homework?
Speaker 1:Did you send it to him?
Speaker 2:No, didn't send it.
Speaker 3:With
Speaker 2:a silly accent as well, are we doing the silly accent when we're doing the What was the silly accent one? Is that the one? The
Speaker 3:worry finger? We'll do that on my accent, when we go when we're worrying about something and we go
Speaker 2:nobody likes me, everybody hears me, everybody.
Speaker 3:And so you worry, you have to put it in your finger to move like a little finger bob.
Speaker 1:That is hilarious.
Speaker 3:You go like 'nobody
Speaker 2:likes me'
Speaker 3:you could give it like a Mickey Mouse voice or whatever. So you can worry about you like, but it's got to be like your finger that's saying
Speaker 1:it. Like getting a little hand puppet to do
Speaker 3:something. Yes. I used to have a hand puppet in my consulting room. Think it was city. Like city and then city going.
Speaker 3:City barking.
Speaker 1:You're a fool. You're so
Speaker 3:funny. Carry on doing that, but just get city to do it, right?
Speaker 2:Oh my days. Yeah, you did a Sean Connery accent, didn't you? We
Speaker 3:wanted to, I wanted to, he's dead now, but I wanted to get him to do a documentary about dinosaurs. So it could say, and
Speaker 2:you should
Speaker 3:use dinosaurs. Brontosaurus is my favorite. You'd love to hear like a Different Jamaican accent or a Scottish accent, whatever you can, if you worry in a different accent it tends to
Speaker 2:I love Owen, people love Owen Donald, They like Owen.
Speaker 3:Don't think about stuff, right? But it just doesn't have the same emotional impact on you.
Speaker 2:What have you got for Billy Joe Davis? He's put his hand up. He wants to speak.
Speaker 3:I think from the presentation that we did today, but we can do the view from above. So like, yeah, like honestly, like if you just do that every day, like, you'll become like perfect sage, become enlightened. Just imagine Laoghia, just imagine like you're looking down in the world from above and picture everything within a much broader spatial and temporal context.
Speaker 2:I like that one. I actually did a similar post on that today, Donald, on Instagram about the weight loss journey. Because if you look at only like three days or one day and your goes up or if you zoom out, your weight is going up and down all the time, but the trajectory is down. But you can only see that if you take the view from above.
Speaker 3:That's right. Saw that on your Instagram or whatever. Yeah, I do, I'm down with the kids, do actually have Instagram.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you've adapted, you've got your name on it now which is good so people can actually follow I've
Speaker 3:got Instagram there.
Speaker 2:You're gonna be an influencer, you're gonna start selling those finger puppets, you're gonna get a sponsored post.
Speaker 1:Negative thought finger puppets, oh my god. Yeah,
Speaker 2:I reckon though, you could really do something from all of these techniques, can you? You could have the bird to remind you to do the view from above, could have your worry hat and your little finger puppet,
Speaker 1:you
Speaker 2:could have your ass scratching hand to remind you.
Speaker 1:You could have your clap to remind you to behave like Hercules. Oh
Speaker 2:my God, I think we've got some million.
Speaker 3:I used to do that, also Albert might, I'll tell you another technique, right? There's a lot of crazy techniques in therapy that some of them are just crazy and some of them are crazy techniques, they're quite good. So I think it was Albert Ellis that did this or someone else, one of the other guys that did REBT, they have like a big inflatable mallet, these big toy Timmy mallet had, big inflatable mallet. And so when people were self critical, they say you can carry on being self critical but you have to hit your head with a mallet. You'll never be as good as other people.
Speaker 3:So carry on being a self criticism is low on but only on condition that you simultaneously hit yourself in the head with a big plastic blow
Speaker 1:up mallet. Did that work as well?
Speaker 3:Yeah, usually people are like, yeah, okay, it does seem a bit pointless doing this. Get the idea. It's like
Speaker 2:The things we got to do to trick our own mind. When you think of it, we're tricking ourselves to do these things. It's weird.
Speaker 3:I'll tell you another weird therapy technique that's pretty cool. And actually this I'll tell you weirdly, Albert Ellis swears and he's gone now, he died a while back, but he swore blind that he invented this technique called the shame attacking exercise in REBT. And they call it the banana walk. You find it if you do like REBT banana walk on YouTube. So you get a banana and you tie a bit of string around the end of it And then you have to walk through a shopping mall, by taking the banana for a walk like it's a wee dog.
Speaker 3:The idea is if you do this over and over again, you get desensitized to people laughing at you. So you overcome your sense of being ashamed, like you don't really give a shit. And I'll tell you weirdly when you train CBT they make you do stuff that's like that. Like I was lucky I got off lightly I just had to kind of collapse or something and like what a loop but somebody one of the guys had to go into a pharmacist and ask them if they had any extra small condoms.
Speaker 2:Oh my gaze. That's my job tomorrow now.
Speaker 3:But I'll tell you what's weird, don't know, Ellis didn't seem to know that, There's a square, there's a passage Dogenes' letter something like that where he says that one of the cynics, like Dogenes the cynic or maybe Carate is one of the other ones, got people to get a bottle and tie a bit of string around the neck of it, like take it for a walk in the So Albert Ellis, either he read that and forgot or it's just a coincidence but they had an ancient Greek thing that's virtually identical to the banana. I
Speaker 2:like that task. Who are we giving that task to then? Who
Speaker 3:is it? It's a quite hub, that's advanced.
Speaker 1:That's advanced. You
Speaker 3:can't go straight to boss level.
Speaker 2:I'm putting someone on there, I'm gonna pick someone up. I want photo evidence.
Speaker 3:Done that. I used to walk up to people and ask them what year
Speaker 2:it was.
Speaker 1:You didn't know or because you've been told to do that. Just to do
Speaker 3:that like for shame attacking. So I don't give a shit anymore. And when I was giving presentations like for social anxiety, I'll tell you stuff that I've done. So for social anxiety, I would deliver, I won't do it right now, right? But often I would just knock over a glass of water or something while I'm talking.
Speaker 3:Like, because people tell you, I'm really worried that I might, and I'll go, well, just on purpose. I always knock off the flip chart, which is crazy. It makes a real kind of like clap, like a noise. It used to freak everyone out. So, just cannot come around and knock over one of those big flip chart things and Oops, to kind of desensitise it so you don't really care and to deliberately go, I've forgotten the guy's name, what's it called like, so I deliberately forget a word or a name because people are like oh what if I forget something when I'm giving a presentation?
Speaker 3:So you'd be like well so what if you forget something when you're giving a presentation, it's not the end of the world? Like what happens if you deliberately forget stuff just to kind of get over yourself like so I would do that, I'd be like oh yeah, what's that thing called again? No one cares really, No. Getting the name of something. All right, I'll take my most extreme example.
Speaker 3:So on Harley Street, I had to stop doing stuff a bit on Harley Street because I worked there for a long time and I did a lot of
Speaker 2:Oh, you worked on Harley Street in London?
Speaker 3:Yeah, for a long time. Did you? Yeah, and I used to go out and I'd take people out to
Speaker 1:He'd bring his banana into work with him and
Speaker 3:you know because I had a tarantula in the drawer in my consulting room, I shared it with Real one? Yeah, but it was dead. But I kind of forgot that other people shared the route. There were people
Speaker 1:like, there's tarantula
Speaker 3:in the drawer. And I was like, oh yeah, I use that for phobias and stuff. I made the clients able to kiss it. And I'd be like, what are the chances you're going to kiss the tarantula? And they'd like zero chance.
Speaker 3:Then by the end of the week, they'd be kissing the tarantula.
Speaker 2:My god. No, no way.
Speaker 3:It was the closest I could get. I had a lot of weird stuff like that. But my favourite thing that I did was and I do this quite a lot. So I saw clients that had irritable bowel syndrome, right. And so part of it is the fear that they're going to lose control of their bowels in public sometimes, right?
Speaker 3:And they'd like, that'd be really embarrassing. And you'd be like, well, would it though? Like, is it really that big a deal, actually? And people are is Donald, you know, and so we kind of like, talk through what it'd be like. And so a lot of places I've been on Oxford Street, Regent Street, like, and so I would role model like I'd go first and then the client has to do it right.
Speaker 3:So I'd go in places and I'd go, I'm really sorry, and this is really embarrassing to have to say, but I've got this bowel problem and I've kind control of my bowels a little bit. Is there any chance I could use your bathroom just to clean up? I just feel so awkward about this, Loya. It's over and over again. Right?
Speaker 3:And the nicest one there was a guy went and saw in a sex shop and told the assistant and she was really she was like, Oh my god, like she was really, really helpful. Was like the nicest.
Speaker 2:I blame.
Speaker 3:Ran a shop selling doodles and vibrators and stuff. They're super compassionate about it. And then other people just look at you like crazy. And then other people are like, you know, we're not allowed to. A lot.
Speaker 2:That's mental.
Speaker 3:Over anxiety, Scott, where you've got to kind of expose yourself to it.
Speaker 2:You do really well on Impractical Jokers, you know that show? You would do really well in there, I think we should do a series.
Speaker 3:I told you my big insight as well, I invented a therapy technique, a little one, probably invented a few actually, but this is my favourite one. So to do exposure therapy for social anxiety is kind sometimes a little bit tricky because people that are socially anxious, what they're really anxious about is other people realising that they're socially anxious right. So I was like how are we going to artificially, like in just thought Can we replicate that? And I thought about this for a while, I thought maybe you could tell people your socializing, that's a bit weird, I guess you could do that. Then one day I was like, boom, solved it.
Speaker 3:I know how to do this. It suddenly came to me, I know exactly how to do this. And so I'd have clients that have severe social anxiety. And I'd be like, what would you say if I told you that I want you to walk into a coffee shop in Soho and speak to everybody that's there and say excuse me everyone, excuse me everyone, I was in here earlier and I think I might have left behind a book and I was wondering if anyone's found it right and it's a book called how to overcome social anxiety' right? And I thought because in doing that, you have to admit that you've got social anxiety and broadcast it to a whole room full of people.
Speaker 3:And can I really draw and then people are like, well, I don't know? It called again? Overcoming social anxiety. Alright, that one. So like, you have to kind of like really confront the social anxiety.
Speaker 3:And if you do that repeatedly, you desensitise to it. So I would do it and then the clients would copy me. The only thing is after a while, like people like that guy came in here a couple of weeks ago and he said the same thing but he was with somebody else back then right, so I had to move offices. And that's why immigrated to Canada. Yeah, you need to keep
Speaker 2:completely remembrance. You know what it reminds me of is that guy that does how he helps men go on dates and stuff, or the pickup artists and stuff like that. Isn't that what all they do is like, you go into a bar, you speak, it's like that film, what's it called? Crazy Stupid Love, have you seen it? That's you, you're Ryan Reynolds.
Speaker 1:I've seen the film but I haven't seen it.
Speaker 2:You are Ryan Reynolds.
Speaker 3:Albert Ellis, the guy that founded REBT, he went to Central Park and he couldn't get a date so he said I'm not leaving until I've asked for the phone number, 100 women, right and so he asked 100 women and I think he said he got like one phone number or something like really but he was like and I think he like the women's phone like you know didn't answer or something like that but like so he didn't have a good success rate but he said nevertheless by the end of it, he didn't really give a shit anymore. And he's completely desensitized to his anxiety about approaching attractive women. And then he got arrested for harassing people in the park or whatever.
Speaker 1:Every day.
Speaker 3:But was really anxious about speaking to people. And he just said, Doc, is there any chance I can get your phone number, I'll give you a call later. I'd like to ask you out on a date or whatever. You think it's not a big deal, but he was shy, you're skilled to do that. He did that 100 times.
Speaker 2:It's a numbers game, It's a numbers game. So obviously we'd all love to walk around with a crazy Scottish man named Donald Robertson telling us to do stuff because we'd feel confident next to the big Donald.
Speaker 1:That's my life.
Speaker 2:Yeah, see, you can walk around Athens, do whatever you want. What if you're on your own? I think if I'm with my best mate, I feel like invincible. My guy don't mind getting embarrassed, my friend's next to me. How do we sort that out?
Speaker 3:You see, practice. If you do embarrassing things, get used it, it doesn't really bother you anymore. You have to make an effort to overcome your fears. Like all excellent things Scott are as difficult as they are rare. Spinoza said that all excellent things are as difficult as they are rare.
Speaker 3:So sometimes you've got to pay a price, you've to make an effort, you've got to go out and do things you wouldn't otherwise do. But the benefits of it are enormous. Because one of the biggest obstacles in life is inhibition and shyness. It holds people back, it destroys their life throughout their whole life long till the day they die. They never did half the things they could have done because they were too shy, didn't want to ask someone on a date or whatever.
Speaker 3:It's by getting outside your comfort zone and making a conscious effort to do even small things, like gradually over time you become more self confident and less inhibited. But I should let Laui off.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm gonna leave you with Donald because he has many more, many more stories to tell you. But thank you for having me and it was lovely to see you. Thank you
Speaker 3:for joining us, Lance.
Speaker 1:Thank you to all the beautiful people who listen to a bit of Kate Bush.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yes, they loved it. Thank you. You coming back next week or?
Speaker 1:Well, I get asked, if Donald Yeah, no, no.
Speaker 3:Only by public demand, Scott. If there's any interest.
Speaker 2:You're gonna have to walk a banana unfortunately around half banana. If what if someone gets so freaked out by one occasion, like you said, and then you run away from it and
Speaker 3:it makes it
Speaker 2:worse. Surely they got to do these things with someone.
Speaker 3:They could do, you've just got to be careful you don't become too dependent on, we call that safety seeking behaviour and therapy. So maybe initially you'd have someone with you, but you need to wean yourself off that pretty quickly. Because, for example, like people, a lot of people who have panic attacks and stuff, they're always like clinging on to someone, they become addicted, dependent to having a safe person with them to protect them. And then that's a problem in itself. You need to get rid of all, you throw away all your crutches.
Speaker 3:But the other way you can do it is if there's something that happens that goes really badly, you review it in your mind. And you have to be careful how I explain this because this technique can backfire unless it's one of the most reliable techniques in therapy, but you have to do it properly. So if there's something that kind of was anxiety provoking or embarrassing, if you visualize it and relive it repeatedly for a prolonged period of time, then eventually the anxiety will go away, you'll habituate to it. So with a client that I'm working with, they say or ask someone out on a date once and they just humiliated me like and said something really kind of embarrassing to me in front of my friend. Now I'm like super embarrassed, like to do that.
Speaker 3:So if there's a vivid memory of something like that, that happened, you would say, make it into a movie clip and shut your eyes and just replay it in your mind. And go over it until your anxiety has reduced to a negligible level. So the anxiety will wear off with repeated exposure. And so once you've done that to the memory, make sure you go out. It should be easier now to go out and confront the situations.
Speaker 3:Mentally reviewing things is a powerful technique. Where it backfires us if people do it, don't do it for long enough. So they just visualise it a little bit and then they stop because it's kind of freaking them out. You have to kind of be patient and persevere with it for the feelings to habituate is the word we use, and wear off naturally. And often that requires like, maybe like a therapist helping you, or sometimes it's easier if you're listening to an audio recording that kind of talks you through visualising something.
Speaker 3:But we call that imaginal exposure therapy. It's one of the most reliable techniques in psychotherapy actually. But really, the main thing is get back in the saddle, like you get out there, put yourself, you can also do what's called constructing a hierarchy of exposure. The only reason I'm using technical terms is you're not just pulling this stuff out of any area. It's the stuff that we actually do those research studies on.
Speaker 3:And that means like, say somebody goes, I'm really nervous about asking women out in a day or just pick an example like that. And it seems like 10 out of 10 anxiety, you get them to rate it on a scale 10 out of 10 anxiety, we'll be able to do So you might go, okay, if you really think that's too much, start off, create like maybe a list of five things. So if that's 10 out of 10, what would be a 10? Or maybe just going up to a man or a woman that I find attractive and maybe like asking them what time it is or something like just initiating, like starting a conversation with them at least. And then what would be like five out ten would be on me, even if I just shut my eyes and kind of visualise doing it, that makes me a little bit anxious, whatever.
Speaker 3:And so you create a graduated hierarchy of exposure. So there's like a ladder and you pick, there's an easy thing, a medium thing and a difficult thing. And you do the easy thing, that may be just visualising it, or maybe watching someone else do something, or maybe watching a video clip of it on YouTube repeatedly, or doing something in a kind of partial way. And then you build up to doing the kind of 10 out of 10 thing that's the most anxiety provoking. But by that point, it will have gone from 10 out of 10 down to eight out of 10 or seven out of 10 hopefully, because some of the anxiety will have been removed from it because you've already done things that are similar.
Speaker 3:So like if you've got a phobia for, what's a big dog like a Rottweiler, like maybe you start off by taking your neighbor's poodle for a walk or something. If you've got dog phobia, you start off, you create a hierarchy. So go well, poodles are like three out of 10. And then Labradors are five out of 10. And then Alsatians are nine out of 10.
Speaker 3:And Rottweilers are like 10 out of 10. So we'll start off with the sausage dogs, like the fiddles, right. And then once you've mastered that, like we'll walk up to Labradors. And then once you've done that, you'll probably find that the Doberman pinchers and the Rottweilers will be like, oh, come down a little bit anyway. And then you need to work on those eventually as well.
Speaker 3:But whatever you do, everyone's favourite coping strategy is avoidance. So you just got to be really careful that people aren't looking for other strategies as a way of avoiding like dodging, like doing the main thing. Because there's a technique also called flooding that we know works pretty well, which is just where you get people to do the most extreme anxiety provoking thing and just wait for a really long time, wait long enough until the anxiety wheels off. But nobody wants to do that. Actually, it generally works when people do that, Although it's probably better if it's in a slightly controlled way, like there's a therapist supervising it.
Speaker 3:Indiana Jones has got snake phobia, and it gets dropped in that thing for the crypt and it's full of thousands of snakes and all that. That'd be like flooding. But you wouldn't just do that, you probably just wouldn't do that to yourself. It's probably better if it's like organised under the supervision of a therapist. And normally what you do is construct a hierarchy.
Speaker 3:So you go, let's start off with not even with baby steps, you usually start at least halfway up the hierarchy. So you start with something that's maybe six or seven anxiety, a guide, and then you work up to things that are a bit higher.
Speaker 2:So what about like in a social scenario? So apparently we might go back to normal in June, nobody's really seen other human beings for a while, you go to a first party, Donald, we're going to our first party. What's like a level one thing? Is that something like how can we introduce with a friend is our level one is comfortable and then are we saying like level three?
Speaker 3:It depends on the individual, you ask them how they feel about it and then you construct hierarchy. It could be just brainstorm stuff, like say, just being part of a conversation with someone else who's doing the talking, maybe just kind of like introducing yourself, maybe asking somebody a question about what they're talking about, what they're interested in. It's quite
Speaker 2:a good plan to go somewhere if you've got anxiety, social anxiety, like, right, this is what the five levels are.
Speaker 3:It's amazing how anxious people get about stuff that, do you know what, there are many things that help. And it's one of the biggest, I used to love working with social anxiety because I feel like it's not like spider phobia. I mean, if you overcome your spider phobia, you're going to be more confident in general, but it's not going to change the world, Scott. Right? But social anxiety really is something more philosophical.
Speaker 3:It's deeper, it's about people, like and how you interact with society and stuff. I really, I think it's very powerful. The way that we think about it, we put too much value in one person's opinion. Like if I'm a writer, for example I get reviews, so you read your reviews, if you have I don't know what they're like hundreds of reviews, I've got 1,200 or something, Amazon ratings reviews, and then Goodreads, 1000s of them, right? So there's going to be somebody that thinks your books shy or, you know, you're an idiot, you can't understand your accent or whatever it is.
Speaker 3:So, but when I see that, like, I kind of think, and this is just stating the truth. It's like the view from above, I go, that's one person's opinion out of 8,000,000,000 people or whatever, right? So if I think about it like that, I go there, guy's entitled to his opinion, right? And maybe I can even learn from it. But it's just one out of billions of potential opinions that other people might have.
Speaker 3:And some might agree with him and I was born about the thing. So you've got to kind of snap out of thinking it's the be all and end all. And it's the same with things like dating, you ask someone out on a date, and maybe they're laughing your face or they're not interested or whatever. You've got to think it's a bit like saying there's plenty more fish in the sea, but you have to kind of think to yourself, there's only one person. And there's like billions of other people that you haven't asked.
Speaker 3:So it's not like the beyond end all, when you really kind of put that in your mind's eye, it dilutes it, you kind of think what doesn't really matter that much. Because for all I know, like billions of other people would say yes, right? I just picked the wrong one. And a lot of the kind of, I'll let you in I mean, I think you learn a lot in life just from getting older. I think that once you hit 40, you have a moral obligation to look back on your life and learn something from it.
Speaker 3:You don't have any excuses now, you've hit 40. It's about time you sat down and had a word with yourself and actually learned something from your experience so far in life. And I think we learn simple things from our experience. For everyone there's always going to be people that criticise you, no matter what you do. I look back in my life, some of the most successful, without a shadow of doubt, of the most successful things that I've done, most important things I've done, I think every one of them, I was to make a list of the top five most biggest things I've done in my life, most important things, probably every single one of them, there were people telling me it was a stupid idea.
Speaker 2:True, or always comes from after a disaster. After it comes after, not a disaster, but a disaster at the time. Like, oh, I made this change after someone dumped me or this and that, I lost my job. They tend to do something and they knock on the net.
Speaker 3:There's a lot of naysayers in the world and you know, yeah, a lot of them. And the thing you have to remember is, if you have a new idea, like for a business or something like that, and everyone thought it was a great idea, then they'd all be doing it already. Right? So if you've got an idea, and other people are, I don't really get it, like they think it doesn't really work, it's a bad idea, that may be a good sign. Right?
Speaker 3:They can't see how it's going to work. So you've maybe come up with something original and they're going to see how it works when you prove to them that it works. It's going to be a good sign if they can't see it in advance because they'd be doing it already If it was obvious, what you want is something and no one else can see how this could possibly work. But you know that it can, then you're going to surprise them all. Like the bit, I told you like Roman Emperor, I wrote a book called How to Think, maybe I didn't tell you the whole story.
Speaker 3:The first book proposal I did maybe fifteen or twenty years ago, whenever I was. What
Speaker 2:part of your life are you on this? Because I wanna know, so you were at a part of your life where you thought, do I have enough to say or you like?
Speaker 3:I'm on Harley Street and I was living in London. I'll tell you what happened. The psychotherapist organisation said, there's loads of psych therapists that would be good at writing books, the UKCP. And they said, it's hard to get into publishing. So we've put together this little panel, and we'd like you guys to submit a proposal, and we're going to submit it to a publishing house.
Speaker 3:So I wrote a proposal for a book, and I sent it to them, and they turned it down. But the acquiring editor said, I thought your proposal was good. So you should submit it directly to the publisher. So I did Scott, they turned it down. And so So I phoned them up.
Speaker 3:Right? And I said, I sent you a proposal and you turned it down. Yeah, that's right. I said, so what sort of books do you want people to write? And they said, we'd really like someone to write a book called The Philosophy of cognitive behavioural therapy.
Speaker 3:So I took the proposal that I did, and I changed the title. And I didn't really change that much else about it. Tweeted a little bit and I sent it back to them. They sent me my first publishing contract.
Speaker 2:That's very just like left out the box thinking.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I thought I'm not going to keep submitting this and it keeps getting turned down. I'm just going to ask them what they want me to write. I thought it's pretty similar to what I was planning to do anyway. I'll just change the title. But you know what the title was that they turned down?
Speaker 2:What?
Speaker 3:How to think like a Roman Emperor? No. That's a rubbish title for a book. And then like ten or fifteen years or whatever it was later, eventually, I brought a book with the same title, I swear. And it sold 100,000 copies.
Speaker 3:It much better. But I sat on that for like ten or fifteen years because everybody told me it was a stupid name for a book.
Speaker 2:Well, there's a good quote. Yeah, but people it's the same as Henry Ford said, if I were to ask people what they wanted back in the day, they would have said that we wanted faster horses.
Speaker 3:Yeah, exactly. People don't know what they want. And sometimes you've got to show I had a friend that worked in design for a big car format funnily enough. And he used to say that he'd say people don't know what they want until you show them what they have. The job of designers is to show people new things.
Speaker 3:I realise I wanted that until you showed me. The world is very limited. And even writing books about when I first began studying stoicism, people said to me, it's like a new subject and nobody's going be interested in it. You know, why are you bothering to study this? And then that was like twenty five years ago now.
Speaker 3:And now it's like a quite a trendy thing. It's like in all the newspapers, it's like become a really big thing. I've got a whole kind of career of talking about and I never expected that it was by accident. But there were a few people like lining up to tell me, it's a waste of time and nobody's interested in this.
Speaker 2:It's interesting because there's a copywriter called Eugene Swabs who's got a quote that says you can't create mass designer. So he says like you can only fund what the world was. Like, even if you got that book out twenty five years ago, nobody would have bought it, you could have done as much marketing as you wanted.
Speaker 3:Maybe that's true. I'll tell you another example. Here's a very recent example. So we've got this conference called Stoic on ex women. Coming soon, for women that are interested in stoicism and for everyone really.
Speaker 3:And so I knew this would happen. It's the most controversial event I've ever been involved in. Even more than enough for some strange reason. And so when I first kind of teased it, there's a bunch of people, all the people on social media going, is a terrible idea. You can't do that.
Speaker 3:What a terrible idea. It's a great idea. It's going to do really well. But at first they couldn't envisage it happening. And so we decided to do it anyway.
Speaker 3:We're not going to listen to them. And it's going to be one of our most popular events, I think. It's already off to a really good start. So people will like, well, does that mean men can't attend it? No, men can attend it as well.
Speaker 3:Or you're gonna have any men speaking at it? No, we've got men speaking at it as well. But it's mainly organised by women and it's mainly for women. It's predominantly female speakers because we thought it would be nice to give women more of a platform to speak about stoicism because they're kind of a significant minority, 30% of the community. So it's not zero, it's a substantial minority of people around the stoicism, but they don't get their voices heard as much.
Speaker 3:Normally, of the books are by men and stuff. We thought, well, why not just have a conference and let all the women that we know that are interested in this subject kind of like get more prominence, like kind of try and redress the balance a bit. Well, you can't do that. Terrible idea. We've done it.
Speaker 3:We just did it anyway. And it's a great idea, we could do it again. Same with the military one. Like, I floated that idea. People said to me, I don't think it's a good idea.
Speaker 3:It's not I don't we can't really see how that's going to work. Stalker next military. I've got like about 40 speakers. Why, you know, it's more and more people like I got a new speaker today. So we've got all these people coming forward, like they want to be involved in it.
Speaker 3:We've got a Lieutenant General Frank Kearney. I've spoken to some senior US generals as well. Ryan Holiday speaking on it. We've got Nancy Sherman speaking on it, who's a professor at Georgetown University. So again, people are like, that doesn't seem like a great idea.
Speaker 3:I can't say that works. It's already I've done it. But any good idea, there'll be people lining up to tell you, it's never going to work. The time. I think once you're 40 or whatever, you look back and you kind of think the same way in little things like relationships and stuff and asking people out on dates and kind of getting criticism and rejection and stuff like that.
Speaker 3:You look back in your life and you think, well really did any of it actually matter that much? It's just one person's opinion. Often you have to remember I'm deadly serious about this, when you ask someone out on a date, when you ask somebody's feedback or opinion, you have to bear in mind it's only one person. There's billions of other people you could have asked, as a billion other people that you could ask out on a date, as a billion other and they wouldn't have responded. So you might just be unlucky.
Speaker 3:I used to say to novice, I used to train therapists, and they would say, I'd say what's the most important thing about getting off the ground with a therapist? Said, Well, confidence, we think you need to be confident. I said, Where do you think confidence comes from? Like, do you think it's just like, like magic or something like that? And they'd look at you blankly, don't know that's common.
Speaker 3:I said, Well, the main place that confidence comes from is experience, right? And what multiplies experience is feedback. Like, so if you do a lot of stuff, but you never get any feedback, you're not going to get confidence. So the thing that you're kind of scared of is people giving you critical feedback. But that's the main thing actually, that will build your confidence.
Speaker 3:And one of the things that the trainee therapist would never do, they all work one to one individually with clients. And I would say you should work with groups at the beginning, like even if it's running a workshop, or doing group therapy or even giving talks, because then you get feedback from 20 or 30 people, not just one person. And the risk you take is I see it all the time. So a therapist will work with a client and they say I'll teach you this negative practice technique or habit reversal or view from above. And the client will say I didn't really work out for me.
Speaker 3:And therapist will go well, I'm not going to bother doing that again. And you think well, maybe, if it had been another client, they would have said that's the best thing since sliced bread. So you need to be careful making generalisations based on one piece of feedback, because it's just the luck of the draw, potentially. And when they're at the beginning, they're maybe a bit self conscious or hesitant, you know, not like you're not as confident about doing stuff anyway, maybe less, you know, a little bit more hit and miss what they're doing. Like, if you work with a group of people, like what you potentially find is you teach them a therapy technique, one person benefits from it, then there's a domino effect and everybody else has benefit from it.
Speaker 3:I remember I had a group in Harley Street and we were working on insomnia. And I gave them all a recording that we'd made to listen to at night. There was like about six or seven people or so just a little group. And they were older clients. And I have to say, often you'll find that older people are not always but sometimes like less, like willing to follow others, like take instruction or whatever, like people get a lot of that, you can't teach an old dog new tricks kind of thing, people get a bit more set in their ways as they get older.
Speaker 3:I think we all do to some extent. So I was working with people and we gave them the recording. And we came back next to me and was like, how did you get on the recording? And they were like, didn't bother doing that. Think it worked or whatever.
Speaker 3:And then there was a, the youngest member of the group was like, came in and she said, did that recording. I've never slept like a log. It's you know, it's the greatest thing ever. Like I've never had such an amazing night's sleep. You know, like, I never thought I'd
Speaker 1:be able to get a
Speaker 3:good night's sleep again. That's just life saving for me. Next week, everybody was using it. Because they don't listen to me, Scott. They don't listen to that guy.
Speaker 3:Right? But it's the power of testimonial or what do you call it? Doctor. Social proof.
Speaker 2:Was the recording? Was he saying Sean Connery voice over?
Speaker 3:It was just me talking about dinosaurs and Sean Connery voice for like ten minutes. No, it's like a relaxation techniques and stuff like that.
Speaker 2:What would recommend? App like calm, headspace, that type of stuff?
Speaker 3:I'm not, you know, like I'm so old now, Scott, that I never really used apps, therapy apps and stuff like that. Can't, I've spoken to a few developers and things. So I'm not, I wouldn't claim to be an expert. I did work in developing elearning and did research for the UK department for the environment, funnily enough, and kind of with the Department of Health a bit for developing software like online website based for CBT for stress. But I've never really delved into apps that much.
Speaker 3:But I'm sure there must be. There's a lot of potential in them. Audio recordings are the thing I think, like audio recordings have a huge effort done properly. I've always believed and always found in my experience that they, I mean, I used to say to my students, honestly, it's the most underrated thing. Like, sometimes it might be the most important thing you do with a client is just give them a particular well designed audio recorder, like a proper one with cognitive therapy techniques on it or whatever and they can use that every day.
Speaker 3:Potentially, it's the most powerful thing a therapist could do. And I'm surprised it's not more widely utilised. Even some of the apps, things I don't think make as much use of audio as they possibly could. But yeah, that's definitely something I think people should be doing a lot more of. The right sort of guided meditation, Scott.
Speaker 2:Scott be right. Mean, do daily
Speaker 3:voice for
Speaker 2:the gang, but I'm not saying I do CBT. It's just me saying live one day at a time with some other bits. I
Speaker 3:like way you say that Scott, live one day at a time. I think that's going to be eventually when you get over your tattoo phobia. That's going to be your tattoo. Oh, yeah. Been for it.
Speaker 2:I'll do it for other people.
Speaker 3:I live for others.
Speaker 2:Everybody every time they see me, they'll say one day at a time. I've just made some present in the present moment. And what more can you give some give some
Speaker 3:Love in the present moment. I think actually that is very important. It's key thing. Mark, the Stoics talk about this a lot. You know, Marcus Aurelius, in particular talks about this idea of being in the here and now, like grounded in the present moment.
Speaker 2:How are we so I reckon we go on the here and now. What would you want? I'll save the next twenty seconds of what you're gonna say. I want you to talk about the here
Speaker 3:and now why we should live. Seneca talks about this, and he says something that's very beautiful. Read it and I thought this could have been written by a modern psychologist. Seneca says that animals like deer are grazing, they see a predator, they freak out, they defecate, like they run away in anxiety. But then once the predator is gone, they return to grazing as if nothing had happened.
Speaker 3:He says but human beings, if that was you or me, we'd carry on worrying about it for days, weeks, months, maybe years afterwards. We worry about things that haven't even happened yet, hypothetically in the future and we ruminate about things that happened decades ago in the past. Seneca says our greatest gift, our ability to reason is also our greatest burden, like it's a double edged sword. He's absolutely right about that. And there are many things we can do about that.
Speaker 3:But one is just remaining grounded in the present moment. Because worry is all about the future. And a lot of depressive thinking morbid rumination is all about the past. And you know, it's not going to cure every problem. But many problems like we know actually that pathological worrying can be helped a lot by people just becoming more centred and grounded in the present moment.
Speaker 3:And when you worry, you ruminate, you forget about the here and now and you get lost in thought, like projecting into the past or into the future. And that's one reason why it's so important to become grounded here and now. And that's where your locus of control is. You don't have any control in the future, you don't have any control over the past. Your sphere of control, the buttons you press, levers you pull are located right here now in the present moment.
Speaker 3:And so when you're not paying attention to that, like it's like taking the hands off the steering wheel, in your car. You need to watch what you're doing in the present moment in order to put your hands back in the steering wheel and actually remain in control of your own destiny.
Speaker 2:That was powerful.
Speaker 3:That's for people. That's you used the word destiny there.
Speaker 2:Just reeled off.
Speaker 3:Do this all day, Scott. It's almost like I've been doing it for several decades. I was in obscurity, like it was before the internet. Like I used to just do it in a wee room, like nobody knew. I was in a cave.
Speaker 3:And then ended up one day ended up on the internet and the whole world then knew like about the wonder of listening to me talk about Socrates and Lalia, we can talk about now she's gone. Why but we'll get like shouldn't I don't know, she said some Greek, she didn't say any Latin. Yeah, like, we'll get up to next time we get to like maybe do a couple of lines of poetry and Greek or Latin or whatever. Yeah, let's do it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I really enjoyed tonight, Donald. I appreciate your time and everything you're teaching us
Speaker 3:every week. Are back next
Speaker 2:week, obviously. Awesome.
Speaker 3:I look forward to seeing you then.
Speaker 2:Yes, I'll let you know
Speaker 1:how your daily voice mail
Speaker 2:does. Maybe you can do some more features.
Speaker 3:Well, you might let me do like a few more features. Would be good. Well, now I'm on Instagram, I see the turtles, they tag me sometimes. I do use social media, I'm normally on Twitter more. But I start to use Instagram.
Speaker 2:Your Instagram is Donnie J Robertson. People have been tagging this other Don Robertson.
Speaker 3:Is he the artist? There's a famous artist called Don Robertson. That's great. I like it when people tag him, because I get some of his business. Like the people people emailed me and there was a guy interviewing me that thought that I was him.
Speaker 3:And he was like, was kind of like talking to me about all like, you know, stuff about design and all that. And at first I was really confused. Was like,
Speaker 1:what's this guy talking about? And I was like, think some
Speaker 3:of other Don Robertson is like interviewing the other day? Oh, man.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's good. Well, see you tomorrow.
Speaker 3:Sleep like a log. Sleep like a baby log.
Speaker 2:Good night, everyone. Hi, so Donald, I'm good when I was. People loved it. Is Lalia back next week? Yeah.
Speaker 2:I think so.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's good
Speaker 2:because A
Speaker 3:week ago.
Speaker 2:We're covering Buddhism maybe next week. Know. Are we doing some? Do some just maybe cross reference. Cross reference.
Speaker 3:Oh, we can Yeah. Mentioned that, but, yeah, bring in some Buddhism.
Speaker 2:Bring in a new speaker, a legend. I'll get back to the emails out to those people across the And I'll post you an email.
Speaker 3:I was gonna ask you about that. Yeah. I mean, are you interested in that? I don't really know, Scott, when I do things. It's just she seems like I'll be honest, I posted a bit CrossFit and some people were kind of poo pooing it and they're like, we don't think much of CrossFit.
Speaker 3:And then other people really liked it. So I don't know. But the women I spoke
Speaker 1:to
