Stoicism: How To Think Like A Roman Emperor - Donald Robertson - #274

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hi friends, welcome back. On to today's guest. Donald Robertson is a psychotherapist and an author, and his new book, How to Think Like a Roman Emperor, is one of my favorites that I've ever found on Stoicism. People are getting tattoos of Marcus Aurelius, copies of his meditations sold out at the beginning of the pandemic, and yet he was just some bloke 2000 years ago. What made him so special? So today, expect to learn how Stoicism and cognitive behavioral therapy are intrinsically linked, why an existential crisis can be useful, how Marcus Aurelius dealt with his anger, why Donald thinks we lost the wisdom of the ancient Greeks, and much more. Awesome. Just straight up awesome this episode. Donald is Scottish, which just means that everything he says is hilarious and kind of like old timey great. You're going to really enjoy this one. If you do, make sure that you press subscribe and share it to a friend. This is a wonderful overview of how Stoicism works and gives us some great context about how we can be more robust mentally. I know that you're going to love this. Please welcome the wise and very wonderful Donald Robertson.
You're a cognitive behavioral therapy trained psychologist. Why are you writing about Marcus Aurelius?

**Donald J. Robertson** (1:32)
That's a really good question, because actually my first love was philosophy. And I think I came to philosophy looking for a philosophy of life, really. You know, something that would help me feel better about life, cope with adversity. And I didn't find it at university when I was doing my philosophy degree.
And so then I started training in psychotherapy and stuff like that. Then after that, I realized I had missed something, which is the one major school of ancient philosophy that you don't normally study in an undergraduate philosophy curriculum. So it's like the stone that the builders rejected became the cornerstone kind of thing. And so I discovered stoicism, and I thought this is the thing that I was looking for the whole time I was at university, nobody ever told me about. And so I got into stoicism and I realized it was also the philosophical inspiration for cognitive therapy. Not a lot of people know that. So the two things wedded together. And I thought, oh, cognitive therapists must all be really into stoicism then. And it turned out they weren't. So I ended up writing a book about that. And I thought, oh, this is a nerdy obscure subject that no one's ever going to be interested in. I'm never going to be talking about this on podcasts or anything like that in the future. And then it's weirdly, it became trendy. Like a few years after I started writing about it. And I got dragged into this thing that suddenly people were getting tattooed on them and stuff like that. It kind of became a bit hip, just as I was getting a little bit old, actually. I feel like, you know, I'm getting older now, it's all young kids that are into it and stuff. It's I'm reliably told by the publishing industry that it's millennials that work in the tech industry that are the demographic that are into stoicism.

**Chris Williamson** (3:13)
Why do you think that is?

**Donald J. Robertson** (3:15)
Well, see, the thing is, you know, I always think I'm in a very lucky position because I talk to so many people. So sometimes when I'm answering questions about stoicism, I think that's easy because I've asked them and they keep telling me why it is. So I'll tell you what they've told me, basically. So they tell me that they feel overwhelmed by social media and the news media bombarding them with alarmist stuff about things that aren't under their direct control. They think the media are trying to fear monger and instil hatred, which is accurate, probably, and they don't know how to deal with that. And they feel that they need some kind of philosophy of life to cope with it. But like Nietzsche said, God is dead, but we're still kind of living in his shadow. So they want something that's kind of like what Christianity used to do for our grandparents and so on. But a lot of people today, especially I think in the tech industry, are quite rationalist, and they want a secular philosophy that's based on reason rather than faith, revelation or tradition. And so they find in Stoicism, and there are historical reasons for this, why they would, a secular alternative to Christianity and a kind of secular... They want something like CBT that is bigger, that's a whole, like a Western yoga, they also say. I'm just telling you all the stuff they tell me, man. It's like, we don't have you. So like, yeah, they tell me, we want a Western yoga, it's like Buddhism, but Western. And so they want more than CBT, they want a whole way of life. And so that's what Stoicism gives them.