#44. The Influence of Stoicism on Psychology - Dr. John Sellars

At its core, Stoicism is a tool in the pursuit of self-mastery, perseverance, and wisdom: something one uses to live a virtuous life. However, the English language has dealt great injustice to the word “Stoic.” Dr. John Sellars, Reader in the History of Philosophy at Royal Holloway, University of London, and Research Fellow at King's College London, joins along with Dr. Johannes Karl, Dublin City University, to give us an introduction to Stoicism and how these ideas born in Ancient Greece  have been instrumental in the modern day through understanding emotions, designing behavioral therapies and conceptualizing developmental psychology.

Dr John Sellars : http://www.johnsellars.org.uk/

Chapters

• 0:00 Background and Journey into Philosophy
• 4:00 Understanding Stoicism
• 13:17 Revival of Stoicism
• 27:45 The Stoic theory of Emotions
• 38:00 Stoicism, Cognition and Behavior
• 43:16 Stoic emphasis on community and ethical living
• 54:06 Stoicism and other philosophical and psychological traditions
• 1:00:51 Stoicism in Context
• 1:16:03 Final Thoughts

Transcript

0:04

Awesome. Welcome, everybody, to the Smooth Brain Society. I am Sahir. Today, we're going to be taking a little bit of a detour from our usual discussions on neuroscience and psychology and talk a little bit about philosophy and psychology. And for that, we have Dr. John Sellers on. He is a reader in philosophy at Royal Holloway University of London and is a research fellow at King's College London and a member of Wolfson College Oxford. He is the author of Lessons in Stoicism, The Four-Fold Remedy and his most recent book, Aristotle Understanding the World's Greatest Philosopher. Along with him, we always have a co-host today. We've got Dr. Johannes Kahl on. He's an assistant professor in psychology at Dublin City University. He was on for episode 14 where he spoke about rituals. He was our guest back then. And for anybody who listens to the podcast, they would know that we try to get a co-host on who has no clue about the topic. But in this case, I have no clue about the topic. So we have Johannes on who could help guide the conversation further in case we get stuck somewhere. So yeah, welcome back Johannes and welcome Dr. John Sellers. Thank you. Yeah, thanks for having me. Awesome. Let's start where we start with. everyone, how did you get into your work? How does one become a reader in philosophy? Just a little background on your journey. Yeah, sure. So, when I was at school, when I was doing my A levels, long, long time ago, I studied a number of subjects, one of which was politics. And we did loads of stuff about, you know, how politics works, how elections work, what goes on in the House of Parliament, all of that kind of stuff. And then on a Friday afternoon, when we kind of covered all of that fairly boring material, the guy that was teaching us politics used to ask us open-ended questions like, what is justice? What is freedom? What is equality? And I think that was probably my first taste to thinking about philosophical questions. So I kind of got the bug and then went to study philosophy at university. And this was a long, long time ago now. And I've never left. So, and I think fairly early on, I became interested in ancient philosophy in particular. For whatever reason, it kind of caught my imagination. Many of the ancient philosophers are kind of thinking about very sort of practical, existential questions. I mean, Socrates in particular, the kind of sort of poster boy for ancient philosophy is asking these big questions about, you know, how should I live my life? What's a good life look like? And those questions really kind of caught my imagination. And so as things went on, I became interested in a number of different thinkers. And I often found out that all the people I was interested in had some kind of connection to this. slightly obscure group of ancient philosophers called the Stoics. So for instance, for my undergraduate degree I wrote about the 17th century Dutch philosopher Spinoza, who has lots of interesting things to say about the emotions. And while I was working on him, I was finding all of these references in the literature to the fact that Spinoza was doing something very similar to these other guys, the ancient Stoics. And this happened to me a number of times and it suddenly made me think, well maybe the Stoics. are the kind of common point of reference for all of the different things I'm interested in. And so I dug into that a bit further and I ended up writing my PhD on stoicism and it's just continued since then. So I'm going to ask something very basic then. What is Stoicism? Yeah, absolutely. So this is a school of philosophy that develops in Athens and then becomes very popular in Rome. The early Stoics are kind of inspired by Socrates in some ways. So they're interested in these questions about how to live a good life. And they think the key to that is to live a virtuous life, an excellent character, right? So the key to living well is to have the right character traits. And this is in contrast to their contemporaries, the Epicureans, who think that the key to a good life is all about enjoying pleasure and minimizing pain, right? So at the time when they first set up, this is the contrast, right? Either you think it's about pleasure and pain, or you think it's about virtue and vice. And so the Stoics are on the virtue and vice side following Socrates. So that's part of what they're doing. Now, of course, Socrates' most famous pupil and follower was Plato. And Plato developed this very otherworldly, idealist metaphysics. And that's something that I never found particularly interesting or convincing. I was never particularly attracted to that. The Stoics, by contrast, were materialists. So the Stoics think that everything that exists is a physical body. right, the natural world is all that there is. So they combine this kind of Socratic approach to ethics, but also with a, what seemed to me a very plausible kind of sort of materialist understanding of nature, right, everything that exists is the physical world around us, and there's nothing beyond that. And they're also empiricists, so they think that everything that we know, we acquire through the senses, right. So in terms of their kind of thinking about knowledge and you could think of them as being sort of surprisingly modern in their outlook. So that's the kind of sort of the broad brush foundations. And I guess we can dig a bit more into some of the other details as we go along. From what you said, it seems like this idea of being virtuous and stuff kind of links to what almost what religions sort of fill in to an extent, isn't it? And I'm guessing these guys were before that time or before a lot of modern day religions are. So do you see any parallels there between, like you said, they're modern thinkers? Do you see any links there between this idea of living a virtuous life without the need of religion or without the need of the current organized religions? I'm sorry, the only reason I ask is because we've done a few episodes recently on changes in religion across different countries? And so that was the first thing which one mind kind of went to. Yeah, no, absolutely. It's a really good, it's a good question. So there is a sense in which the kind of ancient Greek philosophical schools are responding to the same sorts of questions that a number of organized religions are responding to, right? They're giving a metaphysics, they're giving a kind of a worldview about what exists. And they're also giving a kind of ethical framework about, you know, how you should live your life. I mean, the big difference, of course, is that the ancient philosophers will claim that they're offering a rational foundation for the advice that they're giving, right? So they're going to try to offer us arguments for why we should believe these things and why we should act in this way. And so that, I suppose, is the difference from many organized religions. Now, I mean, that's a kind of slightly contentious thing to say, right? There's a lot of rational theology out there where people are offering arguments for the existence of God or whatever. And I imagine adherents of some religions will want to say that, you know, there is, you know, there's space for plenty of argument within religion. But ultimately, there's also an element of simple faith or belief, right? And there's not to be any of that when we're thinking about Stoic philosophy. They give us arguments from the foundations up. And if you find the arguments convincing, then you'll go with them. And if you don't find the arguments convincing, then these aren't the guys for you. And there are other philosophies out there that you can try and see if they, you know, and seem more convincing for you or not. I think just directly following on because like as someone that is, as John knows, a bit of a dabbler from the psych side in stoicism, I would describe myself as an interested dabbler. I think for psychologists, one of the things that is really interesting, or I think really hard for us to understand is how virtue was thought of by the Stoics. So what is virtue actually for them? Because we always equate virtue with some vague, culture-specific morality. I think that's an interesting point. Yes, absolutely. So, I mean, when we think of virtue, I mean, when I first studying first started studying all of this, the word virtue, I found fairly off putting to be perfectly honest, right. And also, I mean, particular virtues like justice or courage sound very kind of sort of fanciful and, you know, how courageous are you in your typical everyday life, right? This doesn't really sound like it's really appropriate. having excellent character traits, right? So these are internal qualities rather than external qualities. I mean there's interesting discussions about the kind of the origins of this way of thinking about ethics and about how to live, which is in traditional Greek culture beforehand, the idea of a virtuous or excellent person would be someone who was physically who was successful in their everyday life, who was wealthy, who was born to a noble family, right? These are all external traits that make someone a really good, admirable person. And if you like the philosophical revolution was to say those things aren't key, those external things. What really matters are internal character traits. Those are the things that determine living a good life. That's the kind of... big transformation that Socrates in particular makes. And the word we're translating here as virtue, you might equally translate as just excellence, right? So for instance, an athlete at the ancient Olympic Games who won all of their races would be described as having virtue, right? Which kind of made more sense for us today, right, to say that person was excellent, right? They're an excellent athlete. We wouldn't say they're a virtuous athlete. So We can think of it in a slightly, in a slightly non-moral sense. So the English word virtue might mislead us a little bit. Um, I mean, there's a sense, I mean, given that we're thinking about psychology here as well, there's a sense in which we might describe it simply as something like mental health, right? Having your internal frame of mind, you know, in an, in an optimal condition. Um, um, and part of that is going to involve, um, you know, being a decent human being, behaving well towards other people. So that's where the kind of ethical component comes in. And I always found that really, really interesting. Like that's partially what as psychologists drew me over a bit to the philosophy side. Then I'm not poo-pooing my own discipline. Yeah, I'm not going to get beaten up by the psychologist, but like in psychology, due to the way historically it has developed in the United States, there's a lot of. What I sometimes think about is epicurean focus. A lot of research is dedicated on how to maximize your happiness, how to be free of both physical and mental anguish, like what is it, like ataraxia and aponia, if I remember my things minimally. I find it kind of interesting, versus there are research lines on character strengths, resilience, all of that, but I always had the feeling they take the backseat in psychology. And so this, for example, what I found so interesting when I from a psych side first started engaging with like stoic writing that I'm like, Hey, those are actually all things that people still study, but that sometimes take a bit of a bit of a sidestep like this idea of, yeah, developing internal virtues that you because I'm also really interested in values and that people can achieve excellence in those, that it's something that people can work on. And I found that kind of interesting. And not to steal from Sahir, but I have one last question that I have to ask because it's been burning on my soul since I've actually started reading. Where did the Stoics actually go? I was wondering the same thing, because when you were talking, you did make quite a bit of jump in years. So yeah, where did they go? Why did the school die out, do you mean? Yeah. So I mean, the school flourishes for a good few hundred years in Athens, probably comes to an end in Athens in about the first century BC. And some of the other kind of philosophy schools in Athens come to an end around the same time for various political reasons, right? So Plato's Academy probably stopped operating around that time. The ideas are hugely popular in Rome, in the Roman Empire, particularly in the first and second centuries AD, and then after that they start to kind of fall out of view. And we don't know entirely why that is the case. Obviously around that time you've got the rise of Christianity. You've also got a revival in Platonic philosophy which like Christianity has a kind of otherworldly component. And so sometimes it's often said, well, Christianity and Platonism kind of become the most popular schools of thought in late antiquity, and they go on to kind of shape the agenda throughout the Middle Ages. And now I'm not entirely convinced by that as an explanation. I mean, it's not obvious that... someone who might be attracted to Stoic ideas would suddenly decide, oh, I'm going to ditch that and go off and become a Platonist instead. So it's not entirely clear why that happens, but around the sort of third century AD, for whatever reason, Stoicism starts to kind of fall out of favour. But in the Latin West in the Middle Ages and through the Renaissance, the philosophical are incredibly popular. I mean, they're still widely read. And Seneca's letters also are very popular throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and are widely read. So the Stoic ideas don't disappear altogether. They don't go away completely. I mean, sort of traditional humanist education in the Renaissance and in early modern Europe, the first thing you would do is learn Latin. And once you've learned Latin, the first thing you would be expected to do is read Almost every educated person in that period of European history will be reading Cicero and learning Stoic ideas. So they're always kind of sort of floating in the background, we might say. Do you think such ideas are coming more to the fore now in this daily discourse? Yeah, I mean, the last 10-15 years, there's been a real revival of popular interest in Stoicism, I would say. There was a book by a guy called William Irvine called A Guide to a Good Life that was published in 2009. the first kind of breakthrough sort of popular book that attracted quite a lot of attention. And then I and a group of colleagues set up something called Stoic Week in 2012 and that's attracted a certain amount of attention over the last 10 years or so. And then I can't remember the precise date but after we did that a guy called Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman published a book called The Daily Stoic. which has been absolutely huge and sold millions of copies around the world. So, yeah, it's slowly picked up over the last 10 years or so. And now I think there's, you know, there's a huge amount of interest out there. Just to immediately corroborate that, I actually wanted to send John an email with that recently because I found it funny. I walked into my local bookstore and bookstore writing implement retailer and They obviously sell all kinds of books and prominently on one of the books was a sign stoicism can also be found in the psychology section. And it was the literal only sign that called out for people where they can find other interest areas and I found it really interesting. And again, it's obviously a perception bias, but like if you look around, there's so many articles like on the BBC recently, also like in other language newspapers. also just to further that I think there is definitely a revival but I just want to follow up on that John. Do you think it's a revival of stoicism or of, I don't know how to make a smaller case s sound with my mind, of what I would consider naive stoic ideology? Yeah I mean that's a good question. I think if you rummage around in the recesses of the internet, you'll find anything, right? And so there are places where you will find a kind of stoicism in the everyday English sense of the word, right? So kind of stiff upper lip, emotional repression, you know, about resilience and fortitude and self-control, but without much of the wider sort of stoic thinking. So I'm sure there's a certain amount of that out there in certain places. But what I think what's really interesting is the number of people that are genuinely interested in Stoic philosophy proper, right? So, I mean, a standard narrative that people say is that there are a group of kind of guys in Silicon Valley that are very interested in Stoicism, because it will make them tough and resilient and successful and enable them to make even more money, right? Which kind of misses the point. misses, you know, a number of key points, right? Because one of the things the Stoics will say is, well, it's not about making money, that's not going to make you happy, right? Obviously, we'd all rather be wealthy rather than poor, we'd all rather be healthy rather than sick. But no matter what circumstances we find ourselves in, if we've got the right character traits, we can still live a good life, right? That's the kind of one of the core Stoic ideas. So, so those guys perhaps missed the point, right? I don't know if these guys actually exist, right? I've never been to Silicon Valley. I've never spoken to anyone from Silicon Valley, but that's the kind of the kind of popular narrative line. But I mean, I've encountered lots and lots of people that are really interested in the stoic philosophy proper, and they're interested in the ethical component of it. They're looking for some kind of set of values. So to come back to what we were saying earlier about religion, if someone doesn't have a strong religious affiliation, they're looking for a kind of sort of a secular ethics, right, a set of values that they can live by. And stoicism, I think, is really appealing to those sorts of people who are also often very interested in the kind of the social side as well. So the stoics will argue for a kind of cosmopolitanism, right? All human beings are ultimately the same and equal. We all have a kind of shared sense of rationality and wherever we come from. know, really doesn't make any difference. So there's a kind of a cosmopolitan ethics, which again, you know, is very positive. So people are interested in that too, and not just a kind of a superficial stiff upper lip sense. Which by the way, I can't recommend based on research I have done. The stiff upper lip one really doesn't help you with achieving your goal of becoming tougher. Before I step aside again and let's say here ask his burning questions that I can see that he has. I have two tiny following questions. Because the stiff-up ellipticals he described and again it's mostly guys. My question is, is stoicism a man's thing? There are two questions out there. Are there... Do we have writers? And again I know it's a... conservation issue. But are there writers in the stoic tradition, like are there women writers in the stoic tradition? And why do you think has it become conceptualized as like a man's thing? And I know that's a very difficult question. So, I mean, it's certainly not a man's thing, for sure. And I, you know, in, the people that I've met recently who are interested in stoicism, it's a very mixed group. I mean, it's more or less 50-50 in terms of sort of gender splits. So I really don't think it attracts more men than women today. Sadly, in antiquity, they pretty much all were men, right? So we're looking at primarily men. We certainly don't have any writings from any ancient female Stoics. We might have one or two names, but sadly not loads. I mean, that just reflects the social conditions of the time, right? You know, not many women had access to education and so on. One of the ancient Stoics we have, Musonius Rufus, has sometimes been presented as a kind of proto-feminist. He writes a couple of texts about why your daughters should be educated as well as your sons, and whether women should study philosophy too, to which he says resoundingly, yes, they are as rational as men, and that's the defining characteristic of a human being. So they should... engage in philosophy just as much. So we see a kind of, you know, fairly progressive attitudes for the time being expressed, but not too many examples from antiquity, unfortunately. As for why the kind of idea that it might be more of interest to men, why that idea persists, I think comes back to the stiff upper lip element, right? The idea that, you know, men tend to be sort of less forthcoming with their emotions. And so, yeah, stoic, in that everyday sense, the lowercase s, Stoicism, is often sort of tied up with being tough and macho. But Stoicism proper, the philosophy, you know, as you know, Johannes, from your work, doesn't share anything with that attitude. Do you also think that what we talk about, we spoke about men and women, but do you also think in a, which feels like a somewhat increasingly partisan nature, a philosophy which is a, which kind of encourages cosmopolitanism might find it harder to break through? I'm referencing, we just saw the French elections a day before recording British elections as well where you see like, you tend to see the more... I won't say extreme sides, but like people tend to moving away from the center and their voting and things like that. The topics which are discussed mostly in the news, mostly online are also seem to be quite partisan at the moment. So do you think something which encourages cosmopolitanism would find it harder to break through in the most recent times? But it's not as if that's obviously a clear majority in every country. On the contrary, there are still huge numbers of progressive liberal people that want to push back against those kind of ideas. And so those people are certainly be drawn to this stoic idea of cosmopolitanism. And you might get a few people from a different kind of political persuasion who... think that this is all about tough autonomous resilience and might kind of associate it with you know more right-wing views perhaps but again I think that kind of misses something important about stoicism which does want to stress this cosmopolitan element. I mean one other thing I'll say about politics is that one of the things quite interesting about stoic attitude to politics We see politically active Stoics object to certain Roman emperors like Nero and Domitian, because they were really bad characters. They weren't opposing the imperial monarchy as such. They didn't want to challenge that political system, which many of us might think is deeply problematic. They were challenging the ethical failings of particular leaders. And then in the second century AD, you have a Stoic Marcus Aurelius become emperor, right? And there's no problem with that happening either, right? So they're kind of neutral with regard to the political system, right? They kind of they think that that's really not the issue, right? You find yourself in the situation in the system that you find yourself in. But what does matter are the ethical credentials of the particular individuals that have power, whether it's autocracy or democracy. whichever it is. And that feels like a kind of a, you know, a still very relevant lesson for us today, right? Yeah, I agree. My granddad used to say that, or he used to say things like a good dictator is way better than a corrupt elected leader. So yeah, comes to the same thing as in like, it depends on the character of the person more than what is obviously said with Mark Aurelio specifically is You can be as virtuous as you want, but it might not pass down to your offspring. And which is kind of interesting itself. That's yeah, it's it might not pass directly on. And the one of the things that I've because I've been looking at Sahir and like Sahir and I just as a as a PSA. We'll probably come from two very different angles to psychology. So he has a neuro guy, he pokes things with sticks and sees what they do. And I come from the more ephemeral culture side. So in that role, I kind of, so he can pretend to be a materialist versus I can be. Pretend to be some kind of platonic form guy. which I'm not, but I just for sake of argument. But one of the things that I found really fascinating when I started reading Stoicism is some of the theories that underpin some of the central concepts, like for example, emotions, and how they manage to bridge some of those, like how they, for me at least, connect some of the materialist explanations with some of the more, you know, context things. And if you have five seconds time and not in five seconds, that might be too short. But like what is the actual stoic theory of emotions? Like where, because I think that's something that people often don't really grasp. Like where do they sit? Where do they come from? Yeah, so, so that I mean, the full the full the full account would go like this. So we receive in we receive in sensations from the external world, right, and they come through our senses. And they we often make very quick value judgments about the the sensations that we receive, right? So some sensations we receive, and the way the Stoics describe this is that the information that we receive from our senses is presented to our conscious mind in the form of a proposition, right? So the cat is on the mat, right? The sun is shining, the train is late, or whatever it might be. And what we often do, almost unconsciously, is add value judgments to that information. So... Rather than, so we receive the information, the train is late. But the proposition that's presented to our mind is the train is late and I'm going to be late for the job interview and everything's gone wrong and my whole life is going to fall apart, right? And that's the that's the proposition that's presented to our minds And then we um, either assent or reject the proposition, right? So the sun is shining we assent to that And that creates the belief in our mind that the sun is shining, right? And if we make the right judgments about the information that we receive, then we've got reliable beliefs, we've got knowledge. And now, what the Stoics argue is that when we make judgments or a sense to these propositions that have a value judgment added to them, that's going to create an emotional response in us, right? So if we judge that something really good is happening, not just a neutral state of affairs, but if we judge something really good is happening, that's gonna create a positive emotion within us. And if we judge that something terrible is happening, that's gonna create a negative emotion within us, right? And another key part is that they say, once we've made that judgment and the emotion has been created within us, that emotion then takes on a life of its own. So as we all know, once someone becomes very angry, they can't just turn it off. You can't just talk them out of it. The angry emotion has got to kind of take its course. And then once people have calmed down afterwards, you can then talk to them about what went on. So once we create these emotions, they become irrational and they're out of our control and there's nothing we can do about it. But we do have complete control over that initial moment of ascent or judgment. Right. And so we can go through a process of training to interrogate those propositions that are presented to our mind. And anyone that has a value judgment in it, we want to pause before assenting to it to assess whether actually we should really assent to this, right? The train is late. I'm going to miss the job interview. It's the end of the world. It's like, well, wait a minute. Is it really the end of the world? And what are the actual consequences of this happening? Are they gonna be as bad as my initial unconscious catastrophizing might lead me to think? And so it's about creating that kind of cognitive distance, which then gives us kind of the ability to completely control our emotions, right? So it's not that you kind of have these kind of big toxic emotions within you and you try and repress them or control them. which as Johanna knows is a very bad thing for anyone to do, it's about making different value judgments at the outset so you don't generate those emotions in the first place. So that's how kind of where we would draw the distinction between the kind of stiff upper lip sense of stoicism, which is kind of the bad sense, and then stoicism proper, which means, yeah, you avoid generating those emotions in the first place by making correct judgments. I just wanted to get a clarification on that. So in this case, you're kind of saying that I'm not responsible for my actions once I reach that limit of like, if something's happened and now you're angry, your actions then while you're angry, for example, the person in that sense does not really have control over it or... Well, I mean, as a matter of fact, we all know this, if someone's really, really angry, they are literally out of control, aren't they? I mean, they're still responsible. because they made the judgement at the outset. Right? Okay. So we would still hold them responsible, but as we all know, if someone's really angry and out of control, you can't reason with them, right? So... True, but you can... But I guess my point was what behaviour you use to get rid of that anger. Would you just like shout into a pillow versus would you punch a wall versus, you know, like levels of behaviour for your anger. that kind of behavioral control is what I was thinking of. Yeah, I mean, we do have one ancient text which talks about certain techniques people might use to kind of deal with emotions once they're in the grip of them. And I think one of them talks about just sort of counting to 10, but just to try and calm yourself down. So very kind of sort of mundane things like this. The reason actually why I pulled on that is because one of the things that always struck me and now it's getting really inside psych baseball, but to some extent, it always sounds like it kind of reminds me of predictive processing like Lisa Barrett Feldman's work around the issue that emotions are partially constructed, they're both an input, they're also an output. And I always found the striking like how from both a philosophical and let's call it more newer research angle, you can come to very similar ideas. One other thing, John, just something, are there, and now I'm getting probably too inside baseball and philosophy, are there true emotions? Are oi patias a thing? Yes, so I mean the Stoics talk about good emotions, right? Emotions that is perfectly fine to have. And the reason why they think some emotions are okay is because they're the product of correct judgments rather than having made a mistake, right? So if someone has kind of a good character and they're aware that they have a good character, and they make the judgment about that, they're making a value judgment about something and it's correct, right? And so that would generate a positive emotion and there's nothing wrong with that positive emotion because it's not based on a mistake, right? So this is where we come back to the idea that these guys are philosophers rather than anything else, right? Things that are things that are mistaken, that lead to false beliefs, those are the things that are problematic. But if it's a true belief, you know... if you kind of make an objective assessment about the state of your life at the moment and you say well you know on balance things are pretty good you know I've got my health I'm you know there's food on the table I've got you know clean water on tap you know from a global perspective I'm doing pretty damn good at the moment despite whatever little minor inconveniences there might be I'm not living in the middle of a civil war There are many, many things that I should objectively be grateful for. And then I can make a correct value judgment, right, about the quality of my life on a global scale. I'm incredibly fortunate and privileged. And that can generate a positive emotion, right? That can, you know, what the Stoics will call an emotion of joy, which is, which is, you know, a perfectly justified thing to, to feel. I wanted to pick on this because this might be interesting from a philosophy's perspective because you said true belief but if someone believes that but that's someone believing that something's true right like it could be completely wrong in terms of thing but if they believe it true does that mean that whatever value judgments they've made therefore on are good judgments? or it has to be true. Okay, it's not just they believe it's true. It just it has to be true. Yeah, it would have to be true. Right. And so for instance, if I were to if I were to spiral into a bad into a bad kind of sort of psychological state, and I was to catastrophize about how terrible my life was, because various things had gone wrong, right, and get myself into a very low, low state, right, then someone else could come along. and say along the lines I was just describing, look, objectively, your life is in fact going incredibly well and you're incredibly fortunate. Your state of sort of depression or anxiety is based on a genuine mistake. If you can just gain that kind of distance and make a more objective judgment about the quality of your life, you'll realize that in fact, your psychological problems now are based on an error that you've made. I mean, this is, this is, we're now getting into the, if we, what we might call the kind of stoic background to cognitive behavioral therapy, right? Many of the founders of cognitive behavioral therapy were explicitly inspired by sort of stoic thinking, this kind of idea that it's not things that upset us, but our judgments about things. And so if we can change our judgments, we can actually solve a number of the sort of psychological problems that we might be facing. So with that, do in the stoicism literature, do you have you found like any sort of there must be talking about certain remedies for things like this, right? So what sort of like therapies treatments, I know what you they would call it in, in terms of if people are tend to be like making all these false judgments from time to time, how to bring them in, because it's, if it was a bit not strange, but it's a lot harder when nowadays if you point to someone and tell them look, your life's not that bad for X, Y and Z reasons. They could still be like, no, I don't believe that. So. Yeah, I mean, that's the task of that kind of psychotherapy, right? To try to help people to think through those sorts of issues. One of the things I mentioned earlier, the real challenge is to gain that kind of cognitive distance from... the kind of the impressions you receive with the external world, the value judgments you might add to them, and then making the judgment right gaining that cognitive distance, so you don't make sort of snap judgments about things. That's if you like the real challenge. And there are various sort of techniques that the ancient Stoics talk about to try and sort of encourage that. I mean, one they do, a very famous one, is often described as the pre-meditation of future evils. And so the idea is that what you might do before... so at the beginning of your day, for instance, you might think through all of the things that you're planning to do that day, and you might think about the various ways in which things could potentially go wrong. Think through how you might respond if... the situation went horribly wrong. And also perhaps think through, okay, and if it does go wrong, what would I do instead? What would be my backup plan, right? And by thinking through all of that in advance, then later on, when you find yourself in the midst of the situation, if something does suddenly go wrong, right, whatever that might be, then rather than snapping to make a judgment that something terrible has happened, you've already thought through this scenario. right? So you've already got the kind of cognitive distance. So rather than fall into a kind of a negative emotional state, you can say, okay, I've already thought this through, I know what the appropriate way to respond to this is, and I'm immediately going to go to my backup plan, I've already worked out what it is I'm going to do. And so by doing that reflection in advance, you're able to cope with those difficult situations when they happen. And then the kind of the flip side thought through all those different scenarios and all those different possible outcomes. If it turns out that everything goes smoothly, right, and nothing goes wrong at all, rather than just kind of unthinkingly accepting that, you've actually, you're all the more grateful, right? You're all the more grateful and happy that things have gone well, because you were conscious of all the ways it could have gone wrong, because you thought those through as options, right? So you can cope better when things go badly, and you can be more grateful when things go well. Just one of the things chiming in, one of the, from my work and that, but I also found really interesting. And again, it is, the link isn't hard to make based on the translation from into English. If you look at like the meditations, like a lot of the techniques in there, you know, like the, I envision myself, you know, ever smaller and I envision myself zooming out like this. physical or temporal understanding, like sure, like there are millions of people before me, there will be millions of people after me. Sure, I exist, but how important am I actually? I find it kind of interesting because to me, as someone that has done a bunch of stuff on mindfulness, I find this convergence actually kind of interesting. There are similar struck me about, for example, the stoic literature, is there's never a denial of self. Like in a lot of the more Buddhist-inspired Decentrum literature, it kind of always leads to realizing in the end that the self is some kind of scam. That by believing that you have a self, you invite suffering upon yourself. And if you would just realize there is no self, you could no longer suffer. But that's, for example, for I always find kind of interesting that you see this underpinning of materialism. And for people that are, I think, more inclined to materialism, I think that a lot of the stoic mindfulness, and I put it here in the most quotation marks that I could ever put it because mindfulness is already a terrible transition of what's happening there, might actually be more appealing. I think they have historically been like I think probably meditations the meditations or whatever your local country translation of it is probably Yeah, quite widely read as a self help thing, which I'm not sure if it was meant to be. Yeah, I mean, so this so this is Marcus Aurelius his meditations right so this is his private notebook reflections to himself. I mean, there's been some debate amongst the kind of scholars, was this ever intended for publication or not? I don't think it was. There are various remarks that actually make no sense to us whatsoever today, because they're comments on obviously something that happened to him in his life, and he doesn't give us the context, and in the same way that you wouldn't give the context if you were just writing notes to yourself in a diary. So I think it's entirely private. This is him kind of working through the issues that he's dealing with in his own life. And so there's a sense in which it was a self-help book, right, this is him engaging in a kind of journaling practice in order to think through all of his problems that he's dealing with. And I think it is widely read in those terms today. And it's all underpinned by stoic ideas, but he almost never mentioned stoicism. And again, why would you if you're just writing private notes to yourself? So I think a lot of people pick it up as a kind of a self-help book without even necessarily registering that he's a Stoic philosopher or he's drawing on Stoic ideas. So there's a very kind of, you know, I'm not saying this in a critical way, but there's a, there's a kind of a very superficial way in which you can read the meditations as a book full of helpful advice. And then there's another whole group of readers that go a bit deeper and say, okay, I want to learn more about Stoic philosophy and put this in context. and understand all the ideas that are kind of implicit and underpinning all of this. And although we don't want to get too lost in the individual, I mean, it's worth thinking about Marcus Aurelius for a moment. So he's Roman Emperor. He's the most powerful man in the Western world. He's got huge responsibility. He's got people, you know, coming to him, asking for favours all the time, trying to get him to do things for them. It's the biggest ego trip you could imagine anyone having to go on, right? Being in that kind of position of power, right? And so he's got to try to manage that, right? How does he cope with that kind of responsibility and adulation without losing his mind? And so, as you have, Johannes says, part of it is reminding himself regularly, look, in the larger scheme of things, from an objective point of view, I'm nothing, I'm nobody. I'm just this tiny speck of matter that has come together within a vast infinite universe. And I'll be here for just a moment and then I'll be gone. Right? And so this is him kind of counterbalancing the huge ego trip of all these lackeys coming to him in court all day telling him how he's so brilliant and powerful. And so that's how he kind of manages that situation for himself. Another thing, just one final thought on that as well is Marcus Aurelius clearly had problems dealing with other people, right? Because he often talks about the importance of treating other people well, right? He often says, look, we're all parts of a single community, but the cosmopolitan idea is really strong in the meditations. We're all parts of this single community. We're all parts of this single organism. We're all working together for a common goal, etc, etc. Don't ever get angry with people. Remember that they are your fellow brothers and sisters. etc. Now that sounds to me like someone who is really getting wound up by people in his day job as emperor, who has to constantly remind himself, look, these people, they're not being like this on purpose and I have to keep reminding myself that these are my brothers and sisters rather than letting them get under my skin. So you can see him doing this kind of self-therapy. I always find that kind of interesting because I think it's also really hard to, because again, I get wound up by people. Obviously, the worst I can do is snarkily fill out a form. If I'm the emperor of the known world with power above life and death, I might need an extra reminder to not chop off people's heads. Which again, some of the emperors desperately would have needed. But one of the things that I actually find kind of interesting here again from a psychology perspective, I'm kind of flipping around the head because again, I if someone goes way, way back to the stuff I talked with, say, here in the beginning, I'm really interested in like culture and I'm really interested also in how we have those different conceptualizations of well-being. And in the West, we tend to think about our own well-being. We think about kind of going from the inside out, you know, from like the inside core, like there's my own well-being, there's my own happiness, and once I'm happy and well, I can help others. But I find it kind of interesting that what you see in the meditations flips that on its head. It's like, I should remember my ethical role in the world. I should remember my relationship to others, my place in the grander machinations of the universe, even though I might not understand them. And that actually helps me to deal with my anger, with my recklessness with other people, with my worries. And I find that actually kind of interesting. And I sometimes wonder if that's a perspective that is less relevant in psychology nowadays due to its post-World War II developmental history. And I wonder if that's something why we see this revival interest also of stoic, and I'm again putting in the quotation marks here, self-help literature. Like a lot of the books that come from a genuine stoic angle because it offers a genuine alternative where it's like, hey, instead of like, well being comes outside of you and then you can think about others. It's like, think about others and try to live a good life. And that helps you to put your own emotions and your own struggles on some kind of focus. Yes, yes. And those two things are very closely interrelated, right? So that sort of self-help sense of wellbeing and then the ethical component. I mean, one criticism I've often heard of the modern revival of stoicism is that it's just being reduced to self-help, right? This has just become a technique for to help people feel better or to become more resilient or whatever it might be. But in fact, That's certainly not true in ancient Stoicism where precisely as you say these two things are very closely interconnected. But also within the kind of people that are interested in Stoicism today, as we were saying earlier about people looking for sort of a set of secular ethical values. They're often very interested in these two things coming together very closely. And I mean, you guys may know, will probably know more about this than me. But if you just think about some of the literature about sort of psychological well-being. or just think about your basic sort of common sense attitudes, you know, to, to get outside and to connect with other people and to be part of your community. I mean, these are all things that are good for people, right? Psychologically, if you're kind of, you know, tied up in your, in your room at home and you never go outside and you never connect with other people. I mean, you know, that, that's not healthy for people, right? So, um, there's a sense in which the wellbeing comes from. feeling you're part of a community and contributing in some way. These are all positive things that people can do to make themselves feel better. And again, there's a kind of a philosophical belief underpinning all of this. So the idea that we are by nature social animals, right? We're born into communities, we're born into families, we're not isolated individuals. And to see ourselves as isolated individuals who are all in competition with one another. That's an error, right? That's a mistake, right? That's just not, you know, if you think about small children in families, right? We're dependent on other people. As a matter of biological fact, we're dependent on other people for our very survival, right? And, you know, there's a sense in which we live in a culture which sometimes encourages us to lose sight of that fact. And that can itself cause problems for some people. I thought I always wanted really interesting again, and because it's my parallel interest because very, like if you go to the very active like mindfulness researcher, and again, mindfulness is also drawn from like a religious philosophical canon. Again, there's a three hour podcast and they would actually went wrong there. But like what do you hear commonly from people that are actually more deeply immersed or immersed in the in the background is hey, you're leaving a lot of stuff here to the wayside. And kind of what you extract here is, well, if you just sit really still and breathe a bit, you might be less sad, but like you leave the, why are you less sad, Ankle? And why that is important kind of behind. And that gets me to my question. And that's a bit of a pointy question. Do you think psychologists should read more philosophy? Well, yeah, absolutely. Everyone should read more philosophy, right? So by extension, the psychologist should too. I mean, of course, historically, you know, as. There's there's no historically, there's no great difference distance between these disciplines. Right. I mean, you know, there's an effort in what the late 19th century to turn psychology into a science. But until that point, you know, there is no great distance between these two disciplines. One of the famous early Stoics, Chrysippus, is writing works about the nature of the soul, he's writing works about the nature of emotions and how to cope with them. He is a psychologist, as well as a philosopher, as well as a physicist, and those sorts of divisions between different subjects just didn't exist. So if, for instance, you're a physicist and you're interested in the history of science, then inevitably you're going to be reading Greek philosophy because... That's where the science happened in antiquity. And so you could say the same thing to psychologists. If you're interested in the back history of your discipline, it's ancient Greek philosophy you're going to need to read because that's where the origins of psychology are in the Western tradition. Yeah, well, I was going to say, I, Johannes will not pronounce it because it was a German, right? Wilhelm, what was it? Who will have one who was the first psychologist until then, psychology was just philosophy. Or for all intents and purposes. But you brought up the Western sense. So I thought Johannes and you would be good people to ask this. Do you see these kind of ideas? more common in other cultures? I know the origins as far as you've read, osteoicism is in Greek philosophy, but have you found other roots or other similar kind of practices or ideas in different cultures? Cause I know around the same time or older, I give this example a lot because I know of it a lot. It's like the Pythagoras theorem, which is in maths, which is linked to Pythagoras was found in ancient India in thousand BC and even further back being used and seen in Mesopotamia, but it's linked to Pythagoras. I know that's a maths one, but do you see sort of these ideas in other cultures or in other philosophical thinkers from around the world? I mean there are certainly parallels to be drawn in other traditions for sure. I mean we've mentioned Buddhism half a dozen times, haven't we? And there's certainly a literature... on parallels between some aspects of Stoicism and some aspects of Buddhism. I don't think there's any direct influence either way, they originated independently. We do have some information about kind of cultural interaction in the Hellenistic period between Greece and India, but I think both of the basic sets of ideas were developed independently. And also in the Chinese tradition, I mean people have There's literature on Stoicism and Taoism in particular, where there are some interesting points of contact. And also in the kind of sort of Chan Buddhism that you see in China that then goes on to become Zen Buddhism. Sometimes people have drawn connections there. And people have even made connections with Confucianism as well. So, I mean, without wanting to sound too pick a mix, but there are resonances in both the Indian and the Chinese traditions. that echo some of the ideas we find in Stoicism and people have started to do some of the sort of comparative work. I think what's quite interesting in the Indian and the Chinese context that are different from the Western context is the kind of Western division between philosophy and religion, right, was something that we talked about earlier, is not so clear cut in those two traditions, right? If you go to China and you say, okay, Confucianism, is it a philosophy or is it a religion? There's almost a sense in which you're kind of taking Western concepts and trying to impose them on a culture where that kind of division doesn't necessarily make sense in the way that someone from the West would want it to. And so, yeah, I mean, I think that's quite interesting. I mean, I'm not sure what we can take away from it. Perhaps there's a sense in which that division... that strict division between philosophy and religion that we're familiar with in the West, perhaps ought not to apply so much to ancient Greece either in quite the way. Maybe this is a product of the 18th century enlightenment. And just as we perhaps doing a bit of violence if we try and impose that on ancient Chinese thought or ancient Indian thought, perhaps it's not entirely suitable for imposing on ancient Greek thought either. about Confucianism. The thing that immediately strikes me is the, and I think you raised it before, the idea that there are some relationships that are naturally relevant to us, like the whole preferred and different angle to some point, especially when it comes to relationships, which is quite foundational to Confucian thinking. Why should I show filial piety? Well, because It's natural, which I find kind of interesting. The other area that I sometimes have wondered, and I'm not sure how much research has gone into that, is I always wondered how much actually made it over during the Golden Age of Islam, like from copying over Greek sources, because I think like the Greek to Arabic pipeline was actually relatively good. in terms of scribes. So I always wondered how much of that is still there in philosophical thinking that just doesn't make it on the main stage? Yeah, that's a really good question. So the medieval Arabic philosophical tradition was predominantly Aristotelian. So very heavily influenced by Aristotle, almost all of his not so much of the early Stoic, as we were talking about earlier, the early Stoic text had already kind of dropped out of circulation by the fourth or fifth century AD, so there was a sense in which they were already gone before the translation movement into Arabic really got going, right? But it does look like one Stoic text did get translated into Arabic, which was the short handbook of Epictetus. which, so Epictetus, Stoic philosopher, about 100 AD, who famously said a number of the things that were hugely influential on cognitive behavioral therapy, right? It's not things that upset us, it's our judgments about things. There are some things we can control and there are some things we can't. And if we get those mixed up, we're likely to get ourselves into a bit of a mess. So these ideas, it looks like probably were translated into Arabic. And the very first philosopher in the Arabic tradition, a chap called Al-Kindi, he wrote a text called On the Art of Dispelling Sorrows, which is a kind of psychotherapeutic text. And people have looked at this and think, you know, they can see some sort of echoes of Epictetus's stoic thinking in that text. So there is an element that looks like it does make it into the Arabic tradition. I think that also kind of gets to Sahir's point. What I always found interesting is the fact that different philosophical systems gave rise to similar elements. They obviously never gave rise to the identical one due to the curse of dimensionality. But the fact that it resonates out and influences traditions and thinkers across time and place for me is always an indication that that then kind of like also like those ideas then often get taken and you know like get indigenized and like people integrated into their own thought systems because it just clicks with existing systems. Just on the survival, John, I have a question for you. Imagine you wake up tomorrow, you open up the BBC and it tells you, hey, there has been a new What Stoic text or what's tech from which thinkers or what's even specific writing? Would you be most excited if they've managed to find a complete copy that is actually readable? Yeah, wow. I mean, there are so many things, aren't there, that it would be great to have. So, I mean, I mentioned Epictetus just a moment ago. There's a book we have called Discourses, which is his kind of sort of main text. and we've got four books of it, but it looks like there were originally eight. So it looks like half is lost. So the other half of that would be a nice thing to find. The Chrysippus, who I mentioned earlier, who we're told that he wrote 705 books, right? Now, I mean, put that into context. So Aristotle's book, The Ethics, that we, the Nicomachean Ethics that survives today, that's... That's in 10 books, right? So, but even so, that could be like sort of 70 books in sort of modern length. All of them are gone, a whole lot are lost. So some of that would be interesting. His predecessor, who was head of the Stoa, a chap called Cleanthes, he is said to have written a four volume commentary on the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus, which would have... which would preserve all of Heraclitus, which is otherwise lost, and would give a kind of foundational account for understanding Stoic physics. That would be an incredibly exciting thing to find. But to chip in on this, right, so I don't know if either of you are familiar with this, but there's a famous library in Herculaneum in Italy that was buried by the same eruption and people have been recovering texts from this library over the last 200 years. And most of them have been works of Epicurean philosophy rather than Stoic philosophy. But there have been a couple of small Stoic fragments that have been found amongst these burnt papyrus scrolls that have been excavated from the site of this villa in Herculaneum. And at the moment, there are all sorts of new developments to see if they can decode some of these scrolls, right? So the problem with these things is they're carbonized. And if you try to unroll them, they literally crumble into dust in your hands, right? So the ones that were easily unrollable have all been done. So the key is to get an MRI scanner, which can produce a kind of a 3D image of this scroll without you having to open it. And people are starting to do that now. And then you've got the decipherment task, which is a nightmare. Um, but what they're now starting to do is use AI to recognize particular letter forms within these 3d MRI scans of these scrolls and pick up lines of text. So without even having to open one of these things, you can decode. and pull out text from some of these scrolls. And the first success of doing this happened very recently, just a couple of months ago, and there were a couple of news stories about it. So folks, there is a very real possibility in the future that we might find some otherwise lost Stereo text from these scrolls from Herculaneum that have not been deciphered yet. That's incredible. We'll be a heck of a work to update your syllabus. Yeah. But yeah, that's the reason why I thought about it, because I'm like, I'm interested what comes out of that. Imagine that. My mind still kind of boggled being like things which have been subject to basically lava or somehow being able to reread things. Those notes which you tore up and threw in the bin can easily be found. Do more to delete your trails then. Is that a segue into today's sponsor? No, I have no sponsor, unfortunately. Not yet. That sounded awfully like a transition into some kind of VPN sponsor. Ah damn. I wish, I wish NordVPN. Do you want your data to be safe against lava and also recovery after you burn it by lava? Do you want your Stoics text safe from recovery? Yeah. Oh my God. See, good to know AI is used for something good. Most of the things which I hear is from my friends in creative who keep losing jobs. Thanks, Jed. So we've been recording for about an hour and 10 now. And I know you guys have to leave soon. How I had I still had quite a few questions because like Johannes said, you could easily do a three hour podcast on this thing. I wanted to ask one thing before. we'd sort of go into wrap ups. From all the things you've read, have you found any internal inconsistencies in Stoicism? In the stuff which you've read? Do you, in the sense, do you, with your, with all the theories and things, sometimes, I guess, you know how you find contradictory information and things when you look up previous writings or when, yeah, writers of the time wrote things. Do you find any internal contradictions or things like that or no? I mean, not flat contradictions as such, but there are all sorts of interpretive puzzles that the kind of experts have been working on for a long time. And in part, that's the product of the fact that so many of the foundational texts are lost, right? So it's like trying to piece together a jigsaw puzzle. I mean, a couple of ones that keep coming up again, I suppose, are, I mean, the Stoics are determinists, right? So they believe in causal determinism. And yet at the same time, they think we've got complete power and freedom and autonomy over our judgments. So how do you square that circle? What kind of an account are they giving to explain to how we might reconcile those two things? And people have constructed what we call in philosophy a compatibilist account of human freedom, where you can explain how that might fit together. So that's one thing. Another thing as well is, I mean, the Stoics have a broadly positive account of human nature. They think that if you leave someone alone and they develop autonomously and healthily, they'll develop and grow up into a virtuous human being, and they'll be good. And the reason why people don't is because they've been subject to bad influences in some way that has corrupted them along the way. And so the question is, well, how did that corruption first come about? Why did it all go wrong? Why, why is it that none of us are virtuous or as virtuous as we would like to be? Right. Um, so again, there's that question, right? There's a kind of a, they kind of say vice is everywhere, right? Nobody's perfect, but we're all naturally, um, propelled towards being virtuous. What's going on there? So I suppose those are a couple of the puzzles that people are still trying to work out. Just on one more thing, because we've talked a lot about emotions, but as you talk about where does non-virtue actually come from, I think one psychology group that also potentially benefits quite a lot from looking at stoic literature is developmental psychologists. And again, here, please don't hit me. Again, my Greek is awful. I think it's called onycosis. This idea of how you essentially start to first associate things whether they're good, whether they're bad. I distinctively remember that there is some kind of theory around it, how we actually start to acquire those judgments. And for me, when I read that initially, I'm like, That sounds awfully like something that a developmental psychologist might be interested in. Like, how do we start developing value judgments and how do those link to emotions? And that's what I kind of find so interesting around, like, Stoic philosophy, because, again, I know we have sometimes we have bits and bobs missing, but because it's a coherent framework where the bits kind of have to fit together, which I think is sometimes what we miss in psychology, because each of us, you know, Like Sahir standing in a scorn and poking things with a stick. I'm standing there chastising people for not doing enough culture comparative research. A developmental psychologist stand there and is like, well, you managed to put something in the correct box. That's good. But we never create this integrated account. And it's kind of interesting and refreshing to see people that worked or try to work out a comprehensive account. I find it actually just for me as a psychological researcher kind of stimulating to see. encourages me to think about how do the Yeah, I mean the developmental account is very oikoeosis the thought is modern human beings, preservation, they argue. our basic value judgments are shaped by the fact that we have this natural instinct to self-preservation. So if something benefits us, we call it good, and if something harms us, we call it bad. So where's the origin of ethics and morality? It's from that. It's as simple as that. Food is good, poison is bad, and we build up from that, and everything else is built on that very simple naturalistic foundation. You don't need any platonic form of the good living in some heaven somewhere. to explain why things are good and bad. It's just as simple as this. But as we develop and as we grow and we become more sophisticated, and in particular, as humans become rational adults, we kind of shift our sense of identity, right? So rather than identifying myself with just this biological creature that's trying to survive, who's just thinking in terms of... food and shelter are good and poison and cold are bad. I start to think of myself as a rational agent who wants to be rational, who wants to behave well towards other people. And so I start to call those things good, right? So I start to value rationality. I start to value positive character traits. And that's how we start to then say, well, the virtues are good and the vices are bad. It's still... those value judgments still grow out of that basic instinct, right? It's just that we've kind of shifted our sense of self, we've shifted our sense of what it is we're trying to preserve. I'm no longer just trying to survive as an animal, I'm trying to survive as a rational social animal. And the things that help me survive as a rational social being are the things I now call good. So yeah, again, all very naturalistic and in some respects all seems kind of surprisingly modern. for something that is so old. That's very good. How about we end with these? How about we end with final dots? Johannes, any final dots from you? Please, psychologists, please start defining your constructs better. Stop calling things randomly Stoicism, even if they're not. That applies to all psychological constructs. Please stop calling things Machiavellism if they have nothing to do with Machiavelli. It's- I think what people, especially where I come from a psych site here, should take away is that behind a lot of these slapdash labels that we put on constructs, there is actually a huge amount of thinking and a huge amount of history that people should explore before they just say, well, Stoicism is never crying or never being afraid. everyone is afraid it's a natural reaction to some point. That's the ship thing, I think. And yeah, some deeper thoughts on that would sometimes not hurt. No, I agree with you, Johannes, on that, because I came into this conversation with the least introduction to Stoicism, and I always thought that it was with Stoic and that stiff upper lip idea, and the entire conversation completely disposed of that. And shows how a lot of terms are just taken out of context aren't labeled properly. And it does not help anyone's understanding of anything really. Um, but yeah, uh, thank you so much. Uh, John, I'll let you have the floor. Any final thoughts, any final advice you'd like to give our listeners? I mean, I suppose the last thing I would say is it feels like we're going back to antiquity to kind of excavate. these kind of obscure old dead ideas. But I mean, as we've sort of seen in parts of our conversation, these ideas have been around, you know, throughout western history. They transmitted into the Arabic philosophical tradition. They circulate throughout the Middle Ages. They're really important in the Renaissance, the early modern period. They're kind of implicitly been part of the, you know, our story, you know, throughout human history. So sometimes people pick up stoic texts and they kind of really connect with them and they really resonate for them because these ideas in fact aren't that alien to them at all. They've always kind of implicitly been in the air, it's just people didn't know what to call them or what to label them. And I think that's one of the reasons why people connect with these ideas. And for someone who perhaps might be curious about Buddhism, for instance, but who might find... some of the kind of the cultural trappings slightly sort of, you know, sort of out of their comfort zone because, you know, there's all sorts of stuff that, you know, feels very alien to them. You'll find similar ideas within the stoic tradition that they might kind of be able to sort of connect with much more easily and so it offers a kind of another access to some of those sorts of ideas. in a way that might be more accessible for some people. Awesome. Thank you so much. Thank you, John. Thank you, Johannes. Thank you. Thank you, everyone for listening. I don't do many of the like Johannes was talking about sponsorships and stuff. I don't do many of that. I don't do a lot of like and subscribe, surprise, sorry, like and subscribe things. But thanks everyone for listening. If you do, if you do like conversations, please tell. Friends share it around. That's probably the best way to get more people listening. And yeah, again, thank you so much, John. Thanks, Johannes. Thanks, everybody, for listening. And until next time, take care.