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PODCAST

Socratic State of Mind Podcast

Exploring the wisdom of history"s greatest men and women to help us live more productive, tranquil, and moral lives. andrewperlot.substack.com

society & culture philosophy

All Episodes

9:47

The Oracle in Our Books

Socratic State of Mind Podcast ·

2025/10/30

We’re locked in.Our habitual thoughts wear on the brain like wheels on a dirt road, creating hard-to-escape ruts we might feel doomed to follow. Sometimes we’re stuck traversing these rutted tracks year after year, and when emergencies or uncertainties arise, we’re ill-equipped to escape them and find solutions. The feeling is ancient, and our progenitors created a variety of solutions. When beset by personal or geopolitical troubles that seemed inescapable with their normal cognitive toolboxes, the

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12:54

How to Shoot at Better Targets

Socratic State of Mind Podcast ·

2025/10/27

I draw my bow and let the arrow fly. Does it strike the target? Does it split my last arrow down the middle, quivering amid concentric circles? Does the audience gasp and break into applause?Not the right questions. They will, in fact, drive us to madness and ruin.There’s often an audience in the stands, but it would be better if the stadium were deserted or if the crowd roared in inscrutable silence. Better if bullseyes earned no prizes. Better if targets existed for calibrating future efforts

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10:30

When They Come For Our Unintuitive Ideas

Socratic State of Mind Podcast ·

2025/10/23

The Enlightenment is limping across the world stage. Classical liberalism — if not the “liberalism” invective hurled across the halls of Congress like a curse — appears to be on its back foot. Some cheer this reversal while others bemoan the downfall of something great.But for a moment, let’s put aside the rightness or wrongness of the Enlightenment’s “fixes,” to mankind’s ancient problems and ask — do they seem intuitively correct?You’d think they would after all this time. Some — like natural law

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8:32

Why Stoics Are Cool With Your Orgasms

Socratic State of Mind Podcast ·

2025/10/13

In a recent subscriber chat I was asked how I deal with the Stoics’ sex-negative approach to life. Which confused me, because I wouldn’t characterize Stoics as disliking sex or finding it morally problematic. Or at least they don’t find it more problematic than our drives for food, resource accrual, prestige, and pain avoidance, which also have the potential to lead to bad outcomes. So I’m going to expand on my reply here, but first, we need to cover some basics:* Stoicism is not a religion (though

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5:51

You're Probably Not Stuck If You're Doing This

Socratic State of Mind Podcast ·

2025/10/06

“Heraclitus says somewhere that ‘all things move and nothing stays,’ and likening beings to the flow of a river, says, ‘you can not step in the same river twice.’” — Plato, Cratylus, 402aWe want to be better — it’s only natural. Moving closer to our values and learning to live them out has many benefits, and this transformation is at the heart of good philosophy. People start down the path and quickly observe their practice and inner discourse improving them in ways obvious and invisible.First

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5:26

Philosophy's Joyful Secret Weapon

Socratic State of Mind Podcast ·

2025/09/29

Nothing can replace the right inner discourse. Genius will not; the world is full of tortured geniuses encased in hells of their own making. Wealth will not; those who don’t squander their wealth often live in terror of losing it. Luck will not; luck turns on us all eventually. The wrong inner discourse transforms blessings to ash and problems into catastrophe. We’ll always be slaves to externals if we can’t talk to ourselves about it the right way.At its best, philosophy improves inner discourse by

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11:06

This Is How You Escape Your Funk

Socratic State of Mind Podcast ·

2025/09/18

The duldrums, we might call it. Or malaise. Maybe we can’t put our finger on what’s wrong, but something’s not right. We’re unsatisfied, vaguely anxious, and unsure what to do. This is the complaint the Roman knight Annaeus Serenus brought to his teacher, the philosopher Seneca, in On Tranquility of the Mind. Serenus had a lot going for him. He held considerable power as the prefect of the Vigiles Urbani , Rome’s night watch and fire brigade. This implies that he was trusted by the emperor Nero, and

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9:19

The Hidden Greatness of Misfits and Outcasts

Socratic State of Mind Podcast ·

2025/09/15

“Overly Cerebral” — it’s an accusation frequently hurled against philosophy, the pursuit of excellence (arete/virtue), or even modern ideas of success. “Mancoded” was how one acquaintance described the writing of Marcus Aurelius to me. Others consider excellence capitalistic, unempathetic, or not set up for those with different cognitive abilities or impoverished circumstances. Maybe they’ve tried stepping up in traditional ways and can’t or won’t make them work, and so they decide the game is

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7:18

What Gandalf & The Stoics Got Right About Temptation

Socratic State of Mind Podcast ·

2025/09/11

You’ll take the chocolate treats home from the store and only eat them on special occasions in very moderate portions. This is what you tell yourself in the aisle, eyes gleaming.There are people who do this. It sounds wise and moderate. But it’s a roll of the dice many people are better off not making. When we try, we often lose. Our society is full of people failing to eat moderately in our taste utopia, who can’t exercise moderately in our sedentary world. Moderate social media use and screen

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9:42

How Humanity Can Escape Its Last Delusion

Socratic State of Mind Podcast ·

2025/09/08

Prior generations were overwhelmed by new mediums, so they were duped in strange ways. Today we’re so deeply sunk in another medium that we’re also easily fooled. Think about it. * Orson Welles caused mass hysteria with his 1938 War of the Worlds radio broadcast. Listeners really thought Martians were invading.* When Shakespeare filled the Globe Theater with his stories, people rushed the stage to save actors pretending to be murdered.* Robinson Crusoe was one of the earliest mass-produced fiction

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4:38

Plato Haters Still Like This About His Philosophy

Socratic State of Mind Podcast ·

2025/09/04

What if Plato is deluded? Most people said they enjoyed reading Gorgias as part of our readalong, but the feeling wasn’t universal. One subscriber said this:“…I like your articles so I gave [Gorgias] a try, but I was disappointed. I don’t get why Plato and Socrates are held up as philisophical paragons. Some of their claims are ridiculous. As you say, I don’t buy that it’s better to be punished than to get off scot-free. Prison terms aren’t some magic moral cleansing agent for sin.”Let’s run with

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12:19

This Will Keep You Fat

Socratic State of Mind Podcast ·

2025/09/01

We’ve covered popular misconceptions about obesity, and found that people placing moral judgments on food choices are slimmer and healthier. But during a recent subscriber chat, someone argued I’d only demonstrated that food moralizers are slimmer while failing to prove that pleasure itself was a primary driver of obesity — isn’t it just an innocent byproduct? So I’ll take another crack at it and clarify what I mean. Many factors contribute to obesity, but if I could choose only one principle to

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12:16

When Socrates Fought His Shadow

Socratic State of Mind Podcast ·

2025/08/25

This is my second and final Gorgias read-along essay. In the first, we heard Socrates’s unconventional view that Rhetoric is contemptible because it persuades without creating understanding. He also insists it’s better to be wronged than to do wrong to others. Now we get to see what the opposite of these opinions looks like when played out to their natural conclusion.Socrates comes out swinging!This time, he’s struggling against a kind of shadow Socrates holding polar-opposite values — Callicles, a

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12:39

How Plato Accidentally Created a Far-Right Icon

Socratic State of Mind Podcast ·

2025/08/21

Every digital street corner has a Callicles these days, calling for the strong to cast off their shackles and remake the world.Which is weird. The Philosopher Plato probably dropped Callicles — a real-life Athenian sophist — into his dialogue, Gorgias, so he could have Socrates wipe the floor with him. We’ll dive into Callicles’s Socratic clash in my second read-along essay next week, but let’s quickly sum up his ideas:* Law of the Jungle: It’s natural and right for the strong and capable to

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17:43

Plato's Gorgias Is Darker Than You Think

Socratic State of Mind Podcast ·

2025/08/15

You’ve still got time to join our Gorgias read-along, and I hope you do. Gorgias is a powerful piece that changed how I look at the world and conduct my life. Today, we look at the ominous first half of the dialogue. The seemingly pedantic beginning of Gorgias is darker than it seems.To see why, let’s play the WWWWWH game I used long ago as a newspaper reporter.Who:Socrates: Our “protagonist,” whom I describe here.Gorgias: The nicest interlocutor of this dialogue. He’s happy to engage with Socrates

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8:48

How Plato Wrote For Eternity

Socratic State of Mind Podcast ·

2025/08/11

“The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”— Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, Part II, Chapter 1Plato thought it no slight to put his greatest wisdom into fantasy.He was a playwright as a young man, and though he burned his plays after finding Socrates and his philosiphia — his love of wisdom — Plato brought the playwright’s touch to the philosopher’s craft. His goal was admirable: luring average

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12:05

They Want to Stop You: Bypass Them With Your Mouth

Socratic State of Mind Podcast ·

2025/08/07

“Philosophy teaches us to act, not to speak.” — Seneca, Letters, 20.1Shut up!No, seriously. Stop telling the world. Stop updating the fam. Stop impressing the gram. If you’re broadcasting what you’re up to or the big plan ahead, you’re probably making a mistake. If you’re name-dropping and holding up accomplishments for the crowd's admiration, that’s still a mistake, but for entirely different reasons. You can call it being humble if you want, or “don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched,”

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6:58

How Attention Brings Pleasure To Weight Loss

Socratic State of Mind Podcast ·

2025/08/04

“…by never relaxing our attention, we shall escape at least a few faults.” — Epictetus, Discourses, 4.12.19The yawning vacuum ripped open when we avoid overeating and heavily processed tasty food can be filled by virtue, but only if we’re paying attention.Previously, we’ve:* Determined that most of the things talking heads claim drive our obesity epidemic miss the mark. * Identified a group of Christians who place moral aspersions on food choice and end up dramatically thinner, and discussed a

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9:20

The Injustice Of Being Obese

Socratic State of Mind Podcast ·

2025/07/28

Original article: https://andrewperlot.substack.com/p/the-injustice-of-being-obese“Luxury in food is not only unnecessary but harmful to the body, the soul, and society.”— Musonius Rufus, Lectures and Sayings, Fragment 18No one wants to be the bad guy.So justice — one of the four parts of virtue — is a beloved topic on the political right and left, though the sides conceptualize justice and just actions very differently.People who make a show of justice-alignment often deviate from it in their

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10:26

Virtuous Tricks That Convince The Obese To Eat Better...

Socratic State of Mind Podcast ·

2025/07/23

Original Article: https://open.substack.com/pub/andrewperlot/p/virtuous-tricks-that-convince-the?r=1xulhu&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true“Of all corporeal operations, digestion is the one which has the closest connection with the moral condition of man.” — Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste, 82Muhahah!I feel so Machiavellian writing that headline.It’s bunk, of course, because you can’t trick people into virtue — but some tricks might help them realize

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