What I learned from reading Socrates: A Man for Our Times by Paul Johnson.

Socrates was the first person to demonstrate that life is open to philosophy at all times, in every part, among all kinds of people, and in every experience and activity.

Often hailed as the founder of philosophy, Socrates taught, and indeed strove to embody, his credo that how each of us chooses to live and die has great meaning.

He influenced the way in which we think about moral choices as well as the way we make them in our daily lives.

In this brilliant biography, renowned historian Paul Johnson offers a fresh and fascinating portrait of a charismatic man whose ideas Still shape our decision-making our ethics and our ideas about the body and the soul That was from the back cover of the book that I want to talk to you about today which is Socrates a man of our times and was written by Paul Johnson I wanted to read this book now because a few episodes ago on episode 249 there was a quote from Steve Jobs that I thought was interesting and he said I would trade all of my technology for an afternoon with Socrates and I thought reading a biography of Socrates and then talking to you about it would help put context for you and I into what that statement by Steve Jobs meant.

And then when I went to search for a biography of Socrates made sense in the last year I discovered the author Paul Johnson.

I've read now 3 This is the fourth biography of his that I've read so back on 225 episode 225 I read his Winston Churchill biography, which was absolutely fantastic on 226 I read his book called heroes from Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar to Churchill and De Gaulle and then on episode 240 I read his biography of Mozart and 1 of the things I like about Paul Johnson is he writes these 200 page biographies on a bunch of historical figures I think he's got like 10 or 12 of them and reading these shorter books is a great way to get some ideas and from historical figures into your brain quickly and if you want like it's a good introduction say hey that I find a person interesting let me go find maybe a deeper more in-depth in biography so I want to start the very beginning of the very first page and he's gonna talk about something is very fascinating because this is a what I feel is a main theme of Founders.

And what I've discovered, and I try to always point out to you, is that there's always It was fascinating how great entrepreneurs would arrive at similar conclusions, even though they lived at different times in history, they lived in different parts of the world, and they worked in different industries.

And Paul starts this book comparing that Socrates thought similarly to Confucius and Ezra.

He says there's always a spirit of the times even in deep antiquity strong and almost identical impulses drove forward the elites and societies separated by unabridged chasms of space." So that strong and almost identical impulses is what I've noticed across a lot of these biographies as well.

We cannot explain these coordinations because she's saying they didn't know each other, that they were not aware of each other's existence even if they write a similar thoughts but this is the punchline here but we can profitably study them 2 and a half millennia ago in 3 advanced areas where literacy existed but was still in its infancy 3 outstanding individuals echoed 1 another in insisting that the distinction between their civilizations and the surrounding barbarism must be reinforced by systematic moral education.

And that is what Paul noticed and that's what he's going to explain over the next several pages.

The fact that Confucius, Ezra, Socrates, they thought that if you change, it was possible to remove ignorance and improve your life through education.

So it says, Confucius was born in China in 551 BC.

He was a clever child and while still a schoolboy conceived the notion of devote devoting his life to the moral and cultural Transformation of society by a new kind of education that is exactly what Socrates does but he does it later in life It was Confucius's view that education was the key to everything.

I think Socrates would agree with that as well.

A person should be so deep in study, Confucius believed, that he forgets to eat, so full of joy in learning that he ignores all practical worries and so busy acquiring knowledge, he does not notice old age coming on.

Then after Confucius, he brings up the Hebrew priest and scribe Ezra, talks a little bit about that, but then he really ties together that they were all around at similar times.

So it says, when Ezra began his mission, his dedication to education, Socrates was 12.

And Socrates had been born in Athens 9 years after Confucius died.

And then I want to skip ahead to when he explains why this is important.

Why are you spending the first few pages of a biography of Socrates talking about this.

And he says to all 3 men education involve learning all that was most valuable in their societies beyond but beyond knowledge education was a process whereby virtue or the ability to lead a good life was acquired.

And the reason I underline that part is because to me that is exactly the point of educating yourself of constantly learning is I'm just trying to figure out how to lead a good life that is the.

The education learning is the means to that end Socrates was in no doubt that education was the surest road to happiness.

He was the first person we know of who pondered deeply on what makes humans happy and how such a blessing can be acquired." And then he's going to talk about like, why would you want to read a biography of Socrates?

And You notice that when you read some of his books, he was an unabashed fan of Churchill and it shows through in his writing.

Same thing is very apparent in the book that I'm holding in my hand.

Such a man is well worth knowing and for 2, 500 years, the learned and the intellectually enterprising in all countries have sought to know him.

I like that he chose those words sought to know him because over the next several pages he's going to go into I think 1 of the most important things to understand if this is your first introduction to Socrates.

It's why you can read an entire biography of him and at the end not really know who he was so the Socratic problem is essentially like it's extremely difficult to try to reconstruct an accurate historical image of Socrates because all of first of all Socrates didn't write anything down And there's everything that survived through history.

They're all the accounts of him as a person were variable and a lot of times contradictory.

And so he says the more 1 penetrates from the superficial to the essence of the man, the more difficult it becomes.

And so a lot of what we know about him came from 2 of his pupils to remarkable men attach themselves to him and sought to immortalize him in words Xenophon and Plato.

And as much as the author like Socrates I think if you read between the lines he dislikes Plato Plato is not only a genius, but 1 of a particular kind.

He was an academic, the very first academic, in fact, for after Socrates' death, he founded this place.

He calls it a study place, which we would think of as a think tank.

And it was called the Academy, From which the profession takes its name it was the earliest university and its prize alumnus who came to play those classes.

When he was 17 was Aristotle so he connects Socrates to he did he connects it for us so if you think about this like yeah He goes from Socrates to Plato Plato to Aristotle you and I have discussed Aristotle because all the back on episode 232 I read a biography of Alexander the Great and Aristotle was actually Alexander the Great's private tutor.

And then he goes on quite a bit about what he's like listening all the problems trying to separate truth from fiction when at the core of the big problem was that books are actually copied by hand.

This is thousands of years before the invention of the printing press.

And so he says all these factors and many other slovenly habits increased a large number of textual errors inevitable in hand copying books and as the manuscript chain stretched over centuries an incorrupt text became an impossibility.

But to Paul's opinion he's like you can't let that stop you from actually studying worthy people and he feels Socrates is definitely worthy of time.

He says, nonetheless, Socrates himself is known to us as a man and a thinker, as a real living and adorable human being.

And so he gives us an Overview of what Greek society was at this time.

He talks a lot about the Olympics, but really there's just a sentence before I get into like a brief introduction of Socrates that I thought was very fascinating because at the same time reading this book I happen to reread my past highlights from Coco Chanel's biography and there's a sentence in here that made me think of Coco Chanel.

It's talking about like why do the Spartans were the Spartans dominating the Olympics?

And so it says in these times Sparta was the first city to train its athletes Professionally and just as it took its warfare with deadly seriousness They usually emerged the overall victor So he's saying they usually won both the because they were so serious about their profession in both professional sports and warfare.

They usually won both of those contest for whatever reason.

When I got to that sentence, I thought of 1 of my favorite quotes from Coco Chanel and she said it is a moral to play at one's living And if you listen to the my Coco Chanel podcast, I've done 2 or if you've read it read any biographies of her You know that she was obsessed She loved what she did, but she took it deadly serious and way before she had worldwide global success.

She would say stuff like, hey, I'm not here to play.

And I think the Spartans would have agreed with her.

He's going to kind of renounce that later on, be famous for walking around, doesn't bathe, has no shoes, very little clothing, doesn't have any money, But says his father gave him a good education had him like they had an emphasis on physical fitness at the gymnasium he dedicated his life to reading writing athletics music tradition says he went into his father's trade as a stone carver but there's a little bit of there's a lot a little bit a lot of ambiguity about that here's his personality Socrates was never a bore he was far from it and in fact Socrates disliked allowing his emotions to show in his face.

4 centuries later, Cicero, who seems to have known a lot about him, said that to show fears or emotions on your face was undignified.

And so Cicero would repeat to his followers, always keep the same expression, like Socrates.

Socrates was a soldier and an admirable 1.

He was not a pacifist as a citizen of Athens which he loved.

Okay so that's something that is repeated maybe no exaggeration like 30 times in the book.

He had a deep love for his city of Athens.

It's going to later on when he like he's sentenced to death and he refuses to flee, even though he had a very easy path to flee.

Part of that it was because Even though he disagreed with the justice system in Athens He thought it was He had to obey it because of his love for the city and he said if I had to go in exile If I'm not living in Athens, I'd rather die Anyway, so so as a citizen of Athens, which he loved Socrates felt it a duty to fight her battles And so there's many examples where he served as a soldier.

This is this one's happening in 4 4 32 BC.

And it says Socrates fought in the painful Athenian retreat from a city that I cannot pronounce.

Socrates showed remarkable endurance and courage.

All the more admirable because at the time he was 46 years old when I got to that part the note I left myself is 1 of my favorite mantras in the history of entrepreneurship comes from the founder of 4 Seasons.

Socrates thought it was important for the human condition to endure discomfort and to basically be have complete control over your physical body.

So a few pages later goes back into his high pain tolerance and just his unique perspective on how to live life.

I got a bunch of highlights on these next few pages.

No discomfort or shortage of food or drink seem to dismay him.

Socrates indifference to physical well-being clothing, food, drink, warmth and shelter.

Everything except human company, which he always relished and needed was a characteristic throughout his life.

He decided early in life to be a teacher or as he would have put it an examiner of men and that such was to be his occupation but not his profession.

Hence, 1 of his objects was to reduce his needs to an absolute minimum.

So he'd go into like the public square where everybody's selling things.

He would observe the shop displays and he would say to friends and people around him, how many, look at how many things I can do without various or saying survive in different forms and it's all about indifference of the desires of your physical body is the way I would say this very safe saying survive in different forms.

I only drink when I am thirsty those kind of things he kept fit in the stadium And the gymnasium and he would say a healthy body is the greatest of blessings He would frequent he was a frequent dancer.

That's fantastic saying it is good for me He did not disdain drinking in company, but he was never seen drunk.

When asked what makes a young man virtuous, he would reply, avoiding excess in anything.

And then the overview of Socrates continues for another few pages.

It's the most common note as I'm reading this book.

It was just 1 word unbothered in this example of that sometimes he was mocked asked why he didn't resent such treatment.

He replied if a donkey kicks you do you take legal action against him.

There were many things he deplored but nothing left him depressed.

His opinions were often unusual and even revolutionary and that is actually going to lead to his death unfortunately.

And then before he goes into what Socrates actually believed and more on his philosophy, Paul spends an entire section of the book building like this historical context for the society in the time in which Socrates lived.

If you get the book, this is part 3, you can actually skip over most of it.

The vast majority of my highlights are gonna come after this section.

I do have a few quotes I want to read to you and some of this is actually good writing.

This is actually 1 of the best quotes you can ever find because he's going to tie in the leader of Athens at this time, Pericles, to Churchill.

And so Paul says, it was Socrates' good fortune that he came to maturity when Athens was reaching its splendid but lonely apogee.

And so the definition of the word apogee was actually taught to me by a friend a few years ago.

He was talking about the fact that it's the point in the orbit of the moon in which it's furthest from Earth.

But what Paul means in this context, it's the highest point in the development of something.

And so he's saying that it's reaching its Apogee at the time that Socrates is alive He says that these are rare moments in history And so he compares what's happening in Athens at this point in history to the 1940s in Britain and to me before I read the quote that he's about to that he wrote in the book right now this is 1 of the best in my opinion 1 of the best quotes that you can actually find and Churchill said let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty and so bare ourselves that if the British Commonwealth and its empire last for thousands years men will still say this was their finest hour and to me what makes that statement so remarkable is because what Churchill's really saying is like us and we're not we're not enduring this for today we're not enduring this for next month we're not going through this great struggle for struggle for next year we're doing this for history And then you got to get ready for an absolutely incredible paragraph.

And this is where he's going to describe what like what was Pericles philosophy, what was his mindset?

It was Pericles gift to transmute Athenian optimism into a spirit of constructive energy and practical daimonism that swept through the city like a controlled whirlwind.

Pericles believed that Athenians were capable of turning their brains and hands To anything of which human ingenuity was capable running a city in an empire soldiering naval warfare founding a colony drama sculpture painting music law philosophy poetry oratory education science and they could do it better than anyone else.

That is just fantastic writing and a fantastic idea behind the words, if you think about it.

The underlining theme of Pericles' speech were that human beings were not the helpless victims of fate but masters of their own destiny.

I'm glad I'm reading this book in the sequence in which I am because if you think about what you and I just studied back on episode 247 Henry Flagler Rockefeller's partner and back on 248 with the biography of Rockefeller.

And really a ton of examples throughout a lot of the biographies that you and I have gone over, but especially in the robber baron era, they just had a fund, a different fundamental belief than I see present in modern society.

And that was that you can be master of your fate too.

You can change the world around you, you can change the law, you can build a business, you can change the trajectory of history.

A few pages later He goes back to this idea.

Pericles in proclaiming this grandiose vision was not alone.

He was the leader of a cluster of stars, gifted men of all kinds, united by their high opinion of human capacity.

And to me, that is just an endorsement of why you and I must read biographies of great people because you see this it's inspiring It's comforting it fires you up They are gifted men and women of all kinds united by their high opinion of human capacity Here's a little bit more description of the society that Socrates lived in before we get to the plague and then we get into the plague.

I should say not the plague, the plague and then more on just the way he thought.

It was really what I'm going after, like why I want to study him.

And I have a couple of examples of what I would guess that Steve Jobs got out of studying him.

So it says, at the time, Athens was a mobile society, upward and sideways, so much so that a young slave called Pisan worked hard and intelligently at the bank where he ran errands and won his freedom, won his freedom and later parlayed his way into getting citizenship from the Assembly, or possibly bought it, most likely bought it if we know anything about human nature, right?

And then he wind up ending, he ended up as the richest man in Greece.

In Socrates' time, a champion wrestler became a well-known philosopher.

Playwrights and historians became generals and generals historians.

Poets became statesmen and politicians wrote plays.

An architect might found a colony and a man who made lamps might rule that city.

I just had an idea that spawned to my mind.

If you listen to the episode I just did on the partnership between Ben Franklin and George Washington.

Think about what you and I know of Ben Franklin and how unlimited he was at what he thought he could do and how he would Apply his almost universal genius to whatever to building a company to starting a country to creating a new area of science Let me read that again and let's think about Franklin as almost like a metaphor for what's happening at this point in history in Athenian society.

An architect might found a colony and a man who made lamps might rule the city.

So unfortunately Pericles is going to die in this plague about a year after it kills a lot of his family.

In 430 BC Athens was afflicted by the worst plague in her history.

The reason I'm bringing this up is not really for the history lesson, but it's the surprising way in which Socrates acted during the plague.

Socrates survived the plague, something his friends noted with surprise.

While many Athenians fled the city or kept to their houses, Socrates continued his usual practice of walking the streets and talking to all, regardless of possible contagion.

The fact that he escaped was taken as a tribute to his generally healthy life and exercises.

By now, he was 40, a middle-aged man and becoming in his own in his own way an Athenian celebrity it is time for us to turn to his work and in particular his idiosyncratic methods of practicing philosophy and so at almost 40 Socrates realizes what his life's mission is.

This is what he's going to practice for the next 30 years until he dies.

The onset and ravages of the plague, the death of Pericles and the decline of his regime, the prosecution of his leading followers and the general malaise in Athens had a personal effect on Socrates.

They forced him to ponder seriously his function in life.

Wondering why I'm here, what should I be doing with my life?

He had always been a thinker and enjoyed talking and debating with fellow Athenians.

And so when I get to this part, I actually thought of 2 things that I heard Jeff Bezos say.

1, he says that you don't get to choose your passions, your passions choose you, right?

And then he would give advice to younger people.

This is, you know, older Jeff Bezos when he's already wildly successful.

And he's like, listen, you could have a job or you could have a career or you could have a calling and that you should try to keep searching until you find your calling.

And so at this point in Socrates life, he has found his calling.

That's a very interesting description of Socrates.

The dynamic impulse within him, the dynamic impulse within him, that's how you know you have a calling, right?

The dynamic impulse within him was to ask and then use the answer to the question to frame another question.

So that's also known today as the Socratic method, which you're probably already familiar with.

The investigation of the internal world of man was something he could do and wanted to do.

He had always been accustomed to walk the streets of Athens to study the activities of people.

And so Paul's description of what Socrates did as an activity and who he was as a person, some of this just made me laugh, this was 1 of them, all of these people, so he's walking around the streets of Athens studying people and he says all of these people had tongues in their heads and he gradually discovered that they were happy to use them.

So he asked them questions and they answered.

There is abundant testimony that Socrates had charm.

He got on with people of all kinds and classes.

He made the people he questioned and cross-questioned feel important and he seemed to find their answers valuable.

I don't want to skip over how important that sentence is.

He made the people he questioned feel important.

That made me think when I got to that section, I read Danny Meyer's autobiography.

It's called Setting the Table, the Transforming Power of Hospitality and Business, way a long time ago.

It's probably like Founders 20 or 25, somewhere back there.

But he said something in that book that he applied to his business.

I want to take what he said and this idea that socrates did in his work because that's an idea that we can use in our work and what danny realized he studied mary k the the fantastic female uh...

Entrepreneur and founder of a cosmetics empire.

And so Danny Meyer said that Mary Kay would teach her salespeople that everyone goes through life with an invisible sign hanging around their neck that reads make me feel important.

And I think the reason Danny put that in his book is because also it's a really important lesson for entrepreneurs to understand the value of making your customer feel valued and important 1 Socrates found that he could do this, his reason told him that it was his work in life.

So before I continue that paragraph, my interpretation of this, like he thinks this is God talking to him, really I consider like your intuition.

Whatever you want to call it, doesn't matter.

But to me that inner voice, what I call intuition, like tells you about your calling, And so it's telling Socrates about his calling as well an inner voice confirmed this People said you seem to have a gift for talking to people Socrates And getting their opinions You ought to do you ought to go in for public life and stand for political office but his inner voice said no it never and this is what Socrates realize that your inner voice never tells you what to do but it was emphatic he said in telling him what not to do.

And in case I forget, this also comes into play later on when he's sentenced to death.

Because you have to understand the time in history and specifically in Athens, he gets accused of corrupting the youth and impiety.

And so piety to them at their time meant that you have to respect all the Greek gods right they're polytheistic and the dead in your ancestors right and the reason this was so important that everybody had to adhere to this is like if they believed that there was 1 impious person which is what Socrates was accused of being because he said he had a direct connection like he heard the voice of God singular God monotheistic.

If there was 1 impious person in their city, They believe this was extremely dangerous because that might bring the wrath of all the gods on the city So that'll come up later on but just in case I forget to bring up that point Let's go back to what he's doing what he feels his life his life's work is He's just always at this was really fascinating to me He's like he was asking questions because I find this interesting to about how people did their work and so he's extremely interested in how things were done by experts craftsmanship fascinated him he accumulated a good deal of information concerning products and processes.

By knowledge, so you see, the author makes the point, like, well, this collection of information that Socrates is doing every day, we would call this knowledge, but Socrates would not, because he had a different definition, and really, a fundamental understanding of Socrates is that he just doubted that he knew that much.

And if he's clearly, like you can read between what he's saying, like if I don't know that much, humans just in general are capable of not knowing that much.

And he always talks about, like there's a ton of, like if you go and read a bunch of quotes from Socrates, like it talks about like true wisdom is knowing that you know nothing the more you know the more you realize you know nothing he talks about like listen there's 2 kinds of people there's wise people who know they're fools and then the fools who think they are wise and so we get a little insight into why he would say stuff like that over and over again by knowledge he meant wisdom or insight and he always disclaimed possessing any.

He seems to have felt he knew nothing about the things that really mattered.

Others had no more wisdom than he but they would not admit it he believed." And so a few pages later it goes into how like his how he practiced philosophy was different than how other people practice philosophy.

And the second part of this is where I really started thinking about like, okay, this kind of reminds me of what Steve Jobs would get out of studying Socrates and how you can apply it to actually designing of your product and your company.

2 fundamentally distinct kind of philosophers.

The first tells you what to think the second how to think Socrates belongs to that second group emphatically he was interested in people and keenly anxious to discover how people think and whether they can be encouraged to think more clearly and usefully so I haven't got to the really the part of double underlined about Steve Jobs but that is you know I've done what 13 podcasts on Steve I've read I don't even know thousands of pages every single book that I can possibly find about the guy and what's interesting is like the more you get to know him the more interesting he becomes but the reason like main takeaway from him is this like I don't think I've ever read about anybody else that had the Steve Jobs clarity of thought is the 1 trait if I can only choose 1 trait from Steve that's the 1 I want to possess He just thinks so much more clearly than I do.

It's just, it's actually amazing how clear his thinking is.

And I think that is why also why his, the products he made were so popular and adored because you need the clarity of thought before it goes into like the vast amount of work that you have to do.

He always says there's a tremendous amount of craftsmanship between the idea and the finished product.

And you can almost think about trying to clarify your own thought.

It's like there's a vast majority of amount of work that most people don't do, which I think Socrates would agree with, between having an idea and actually getting that thought and your thinking as clear as possible.

He would encourage people to think clearly and usefully.

His methods in cross-questioning the subjects demonstrate time and again what he's up to.

He wants to show that on almost any topic, this is what made me think of Steve Jobs, the received opinion is nearly always faulty and often wholly wrong.

He asks a simple question, gets the usual answer, and then proceeds to show using further questions springing from a vast repertoire of occupations, history, both human and natural, and literature, that the usual answer not only fails to fit all the contingencies implicit in the question, but also contradicts analytical reason at its highest, or even common sense at its lowest.

And this is the part I double underlined and made me think of Steve Jobs' application of the way Socrates thought...

Socrates was always suspicious of the obvious.

And if you think about the whole of Steve Jobs career almost every single I would say almost every single product he made was always counter to what else was going on.

So when I got to this section, I really sat here for a little bit and thought, it's like, okay, Socrates is always suspicious of the obvious, the truth is very, very obvious.

In my mind's eye, I could see Steve Jobs thinking of it too.

It's like, I'm looking at the landscape of computers, of the personal computer, and I'm gonna do something drastically different with the Apple II.

I'm looking at the landscape of phones, I'm gonna do something drastically different with the iPhone.

And I think a way to compress that idea down to like a maximum that you and I can carry with us is just be suspicious of the obvious.

A couple pages later, another part that made me think of Steve Jobs.

What is particularly liberating about Socrates and is just as relevant today as in the 5th century BC is his hostility not just to the right answer, but as to the very idea of there being a right answer.

He would have been particularly opposed to our modern system that is used in every kind of bureaucratic form-filling and increasingly in examination papers at all levels of the education system of asking people not to give their answers to a question but to examine various answers and pick the right 1.

And this double underline part is the the most Steve Jobs part of all this.

This denial of independent thought by individuals was exactly the kind of mentality he spent his life resisting.

So now we go back to Socrates and what it was like interacting with him.

When the great economist John Maynard Keynes was asked what made a successful capitalist, he replied, animal spirits mainly.

Really the way you think about animal spirits is like you're just you're naturally exuberant.

He was talking about The economists terms like he was describing like how people arrive at financial Decisions in like times of economic stress or uncertainty, but I think about like he Socrates is being naturally exuberant And he says this observation applies to Socrates, too There was about him a vigor of mind a power or cheerfulness vivacity and liveliness Some vital power or energy seemed to flow into and out of him.

He had a zest for life and a desire to convey it by revving up the minds of those with whom he came into contact.

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#252 Socrates: A Man for Our Times