Below is an edited and heavily condensed transcript of the interview. To watch the full, unedited interview, go over to the Seize the Moment Podcast.
Ashley Bohrer: Why don’t you start by talking a little bit about your backgrounds, both individually and how you started the podcast together?
Leon Garber: My background is clinical. I’m a clinical mental health counselor. My first love before psychology was actually philosophy. About ten years ago, I first discovered Plato and a bunch of different thinkers in the field. I am somebody who struggled with depression and anxiety since pretty much I can remember. before I even discovered psychology, and before I really understood or even cared about what therapy was, I discovered philosophy. What was interesting to me about philosophy that I realized that I could use certain truths to soothe myself. When I was a kid, I was really terrified of death and the meaninglessness of life. I was like, ‘what does this all mean? It’s all really scary!’ I’m was just a kid thrust into the world without knowing how to make sense of it. And so, of course, I was really anxious! I had what’s called existential dread, existential anxiety. At the time, I was thinking, ‘how do I soothe myself?’ Maybe by finding out some universal truths! It was then that I discovered Plato. According to Plato, the world made sense. It was a system that that had a purpose and had a pattern, and if you made sense of it, or understood how it worked, you really wouldn’t be afraid of it. For me, philosophy was very soothing because it helped me map out a blueprint to navigate the world and to kind of make sense of it. I know, Alen has a little bit of a different take on where his story began.
Alen Ulman: In my family, there’s a history of mental illness, and as a child, I struggled to understand why people behaved the way they did. Why did they get angry all the time? Why were these people mad at me? Why would I get mad at them? What are the inner workings going on? What motivates people right to to act in the way they do? And I started to try to understand that by fostering more of my more of an interest in psychology and philosophy. For example, I came to understand that sometimes it isn’t that you’re doing something wrong, but that they’re feeling something within themselves, and they project that on you. One of the things that also garnered my interest in this field was learning about the ego. There are different definitions of the ego depending what discipline you’re looking at, but one that I particularly like to work with is identification with thought. And what’s fascinating to me is the day that I learned that I wasn’t my thoughts, I wasn’t my beliefs, I wasn’t my feelings, I was something greater than that. It opened me up to a different world. Whereas before I would be subject to ruminating thoughts or certain kinds neuroticism, or believing in every little thing that I would hear and being reactive, the moment I learned that that’s not really who I am. That’s not really who anyone is, for that matter. That changed one how I felt about myself and my life, and also felt how I changed how I felt about other people and the way that they behaved in our conversations. People that before I used to argue with or have disagreements with, or just had bad juju or bad vibes with, it was it shifted, we ended up being able to, to listen to each other. Then I thought, ‘Okay, what if this could be taught? What if we can, can this and teach it? What if, what if there’s a way that this can be made mainstream? And then I started to see all these podcasts, things on the internet just becoming viral? And I was thinking, why can’t this be viral? Like, why can’t certain bits of info that are completely useful to everyone — why can’t that be made popular?’
LG: The beginnings of the podcast started the first time I went to Alen’s place. I know you we can’t see it on camera, but there’s this great bookshelf here. I look at his bookshelf, and the first thing that catches my eye is Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. I was like, Alen, you read this? And he’s like, yeah, and I kind of knew there that there was something special or something could kind of happen…I had a blog at the time, which I still do. The blog deals with the philosophy of mental health issues… But the thing is writing doesn’t reach as many people as potentially video series would reach. I spoke with [the editor of the site that hosts the blog], and he suggested I create mental health videos, where I would share tips to, for example, overcome burnout or ways to manage stress. But then I thought that because Alen and I have such similar interests, we could take this kind of type of video series, and fuse our understandings together, where we could kind of feed off of each other, maybe we would provide more value together
AU: I think having genuine, authentic conversations is a great way to do it. Because the approach to videos ‘These are the seven steps to address mental health’ are actually very valuable — I’m not discounting them – but I think podcasts accomplish something else. As long as it’s not scripted, and you’re literally just letting things fly, there’s a genuine exchange that goes on. I noticed that people really like it. They like authenticity, they they’re attracted to it
LG: We really focus on questions that truly interest us, specifically on the relationship between philosophy and mental health. Often the two are so intertwined that it’s actually difficult to tell what’s philosophy and what’s clinical. Take one of our guests for example: this person is a philosopher. Even though his book is technically philosophy, and it’s published under the philosophy section, it’s actually more clinical than anything because he talks about feelings and managing them in a way that’s more productive and conducive to your well being, which is obviously very clinical but still, he’s considered to be a philosopher. As a society, we don’t really talk about or hear about ways to become better people on CNN or the nightly news; all we really know about is like all the garbage that’s going on in the world, which obviously has its merit. I mean, we do need that information. But there aren’t many new shows, or many shows, in general, helping us grow and helping us develop. So when we decided to start bringing guests on the show, we wanted to find experts that could not only teach our audience, but teach us as well. We try to find what this person has to teach that is not widely available unless you are taking a college course. What we love about public philosophy is that it takes a topic that many people find to be really terrifying – like oh my God, philosophy, I’ll never understand this, right? But we say, not only will you understand it, but you’re also going to be able to use it in your day to day.
AB: What really struck me in both of your personal stories was how philosophy was really like a mechanism to just understand yourself, your experiences and the people around you. That’s not normally how I think most people think about philosophy, right? I think the dominant image of a philosopher is like someone with elbow patches, and a blazer sitting in a dusty library poring over books in an indecipherable or ancient language or something! I’m wondering if you could talk a bit more about how, in doing public philosophy, you are able to make abstract and complicated concepts more accessible? How do you engage with this material and make it exciting and come alive and feel relevant and applicable to the day to day things that your viewers and listeners are encountering?
LG: Thankfully, for us, we’re not starting from scratch. There’s already a wonderful foundation of public philosophy for us. One of the books that comes to mind is the recent one, How to Live a Good Life . We’ve had a bunch of the philosophers from that book on our show. The wonderful thing is if you look at some of the literature, it’s already available; all we’re really doing is providing a media platform and merging the two together.
AU: There’s also the fact that since we’re actually engaging with the material, and people are listening to us engage with it, it’s different than reading it, or having listening to an audiobook. The way it’s broken down in conversation, I just feel like it makes it more relatable to people. In conversation through different tonal pitches, through just our own excitement, through the guests’ excitement, it just makes it more digestible. Or another way to put it is that it makes a different portion of the audience resonate with it that would not have resonated with other forms of exposure philosophy. Let’s put it that way.
LG: And if I could try to conceptualize what we do, I think it would be like akin to being in the classroom. We’re like the students that try to ask all of the questions that everybody has.
AU: We try to take the the position of our listeners by asking questions like, ‘What is all this about? How, how can I live this way?’
LG: I think also philosophy and psychology flex different muscles because our backgrounds are so different. On one episode with Massimo [Pigliucci], there was something he actually taught me on the show that almost literally changed my whole framework of therapy. He was on the show, and we were talking about what it means to be a rational actor. He talked about how going back to Plato, reason was put on a pedestal, and I talked about how even in therapy, the point is often to get the patient to be a more rational actor in their life. Reason has to be at the forefront in order to control emotions. But his conception was different. Massimo actually said, that it’s not that between reason and emotions, one has to control the other; there has to be a harmony between the two. That means there has to be an agreement. The point is that reason doesn’t have to bludgeon the emotions; there’s actually some truth in your emotional responses. That helped me see when reason and the emotions work together, essentially, what you get is the pinnacle of health. Obviously, it’s idealistic, but that’s what we strive for. But the point is that from him, from his perspective, for somebody who is a philosopher, rather than a therapist, I was able to apply that in a completely or almost completely different field. I thought that was really cool.
AB: I really love that example that you just gave about your your practice being really shifted by something that a philosopher exposed you to, and I was wondering if both of you could talk about the relationship between philosophy and psychology. I think normally in academic philosophy, there tends to be this really huge division between psychology and philosophy where these are two totally different things: if you have a question about like the nature of reality, go talk to your philosopher, if you have a question about dealing with your own emotions or your own brain, go talk to a psychiatrist or a psychologist. I’m interested if you can talk about how and why you bring these two areas together, and how they work off each other and what each discipline can learn from the other.
LG: If I were to sum it up, I think philosophy can teach psychology how to think and the fallacies of thinking and then psychology can teach philosophy why thinking and why thinking fallacies are important to one’s well being and one’s growth.
AB: Nice. I like that the idea of focusing on why ideas are important to growth and well-being. You (Leon) have said on your own blog that you think about ideas as medicine. I was wondering if you wanted to expand on that: what does it mean for ideas to be medicine?
LG: The idea is that essentially the truth can actually be healing. For example, we know that depression is linked to all sorts of fallacies: overgeneralization, black and white thinking, mental filtering, etc. Sometimes, if somebody can give you a new idea, or it can give you a more holistic or more rational perspective on your life, what they can do is they can help alleviate your symptoms, which hopefully, as the therapy process goes on, makes it a little bit easier for you to accept. The point is that, let’s say you give somebody a pill. It changes their brain chemistry, and it makes it actually more likely that they’re going to have a healthy form of thinking. There is a huge misconception that people have of mental illness: that the pill actually cures the depression It’s actually not that simple. The pill provides the patient with enough internal stimulus to go through therapy, and to actually go through the cognitive processes of thinking. Whereas when a person who needs medication isn’t medicated, what they’ll do is they’ll give you a million and one reasons why their thinking is right, or where your thinking is wrong. The point is that if you provide somebody with medication, what that does is it allows them to at least open themselves up to reinterpreting their worlds. It’s the reinterpretation itself that is the healing factor. It’s the ideas that are ultimately doing the healing.
AB: So far, we have talked a lot about taking these ideas, philosophical and psychological. and distilling them or translating them into a more digestible, accessible, practical, concrete way for your listeners. I want to give you the opportunity to speak the other way: if you could say something or make an ask of professional philosophers, what would that be? What would you like to see professional philosophy get better to make your job as public philosophers easier?
AU: I would love to see more conversations between academics, professional philosophers, people from different fields, to see how they can come together and work together. And also, like, I read academic journals, but the public doesn’t and can’t. I think philosophers could think more about presentation and framing, and could find more creative ways to present the most essential knowledge in a form that gets spread to a wider audience. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a podcast; it could be something else. It could be through music or art or something else.
Alen Ulman
Alen D. Ulman is a content creator and lifelong auto-didact. Alen manages the page Ego Ends Now which is a growing community for expanding consciousness with vital information about science, medicine, self actualization, philosophy, psychology and methods to overcome identification with compulsive thought. The purpose of Ego Ends Now is to make sure to give everyone in it's community every tool available to add levity in their own lives, making it a very real possibility for them to create a life of their own design, and help impact the world and our global community positively.
Leon Garber
Leon Garber is a philosophical writer, contemplating and elucidating the deep recesses of man's soul. He is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor/Psychotherapist — specializing in Existential Psychotherapy, Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy, and Trauma Therapy — and manages a blog exploring issues of death, self-esteem, love, freedom, life-meaning, and mental health/mental illness, from both empirical and personal viewpoints.
