#417 — Philosophy for Life

Making Sense with Sam Harris

Waking Up with Sam Harris

Samharris, Currentevents, Politics, Ethics, Religion, Neuroscience, Science, Society & Culture, Philosophy

4.6 • 29.1K Ratings

🗓️ 28 May 2025

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sam Harris speaks with Donald Robertson about Stoicism and the good life. They discuss the relationship between wisdom and virtue, ancient versions of psychotherapy, parallels between Stoicism and Buddhism, practical vs. analytical styles of philosophy, CBT’s origins in Stoicism, the difficulty of self-criticism, techniques for reframing upsetting experiences, the lives of Marcus Aurelius and Socrates, the psychological pitfalls of using social media, and other topics.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and we'll only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe
0:21.9	at samharris.org. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely
0:27.3	through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider
0:31.7	becoming one. I am here with Donald Robertson. Donald, thanks for joining me.
0:39.6	That's a pleasure to be here, Sam.
0:41.6	So how would you summarize your background academically, intellectually, philosophically?
0:47.9	Well, my first degree was in philosophy, and my master's degree was at an interdisciplinary center. And I wanted to combine
0:56.9	philosophy and psychotherapy. That's what I was studying. So I did what a lot of people do. I had
1:03.1	one run at it and then completely changed my mind. So I was trying to combine existential
1:08.9	philosophy and psychoanalysis.
1:12.0	My dissertation was on Jean-Paul Sartre and existential psychoanalysis.
1:17.2	And I decided it just wasn't working out for me.
1:19.9	So I started again from scratch and I began looking at stoicism and cognitive behavioral therapy.
1:25.3	And that's what I've been doing.
1:26.7	I was a psychotherapist. I
1:28.2	pursued a clinical career instead of an academic one. And then I started writing books about it.
1:34.0	And somewhere along the line, stoicism became what the young people call a thing. It sort of,
1:39.1	I had a moment and became popular. Yeah. Yeah. That was, it's due to people like yourself and Bill Irvin and Ryan Holiday.
1:47.2	And I should say you've written a couple of books here.
1:49.5	You have How to Think Like a Roman Emperor, which I think I got it in, maybe it was 2020, 2019.
1:56.3	When did that come out?
1:57.1	Came out in 2019.
	...

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