About halfway through this interview, my guest stopped answering my questions and started asking me his.
I have recorded 300+ conversations on SingularityFM. Being cross-examined on my own show by the man who literally wrote the book on the Socratic method was not in my notes.
Donald J. Robertson is a cognitive-behavioral psychotherapist, a founding member of Modern Stoicism, and president of the Plato’s Academy Center in Athens. His book, How to Think Like Socrates, makes a claim most of us have forgotten: ancient philosophy was never a body of theory. It was a training regime for the mind.
We recorded this in January 2025. Watching it back now, it reads less like a conversation about #Philosophy and more like a warning about the last eighteen months.
Socrates refused to write anything down. He distrusted a technology that let people carry around answers they had not personally earned.
Twenty-five centuries later, we have machines that will hand us any answer we want, instantly, in fluent and confident prose.
The interesting question is not whether those answers are correct. It is what happens to a mind that no longer has to struggle for them. That is the real #AI problem, and it is not technical.
So we went after the big ones. What does Socrates actually teach us about living wisely when the machines are thinking for us?
Where does knowledge end and wisdom begin?
And can #CriticalThinking survive as a habit when friction disappears from the process of knowing?
Donald’s answers surprised me. So did mine, once he started asking.
Full conversation in the first comment. Watch for the moment the tables turn.
Donald J. Robertson explores ‘How to Think Like Socrates,’ apply ancient wisdom to critical thinking and ethical challenges in the age of AI.