Plato’s Apology 2: Free Speech Hero?
Summary
Socrates insults his jury, dares them to sentence him to death, then makes fun of them when they do. Unswerving commitment to truth? Troll’s defence? Suicide by jury? All of the above?
Credits
References
Transcript
Note: this is transcribed using an online transcription service so it’s probably going to have a few errors. We do don’t have time to go through these all carefully but still thought that it would be more helpful than having no transcript at all.
Clif Mark 0:11
Today, we're going to see Socrates insult his jury, dare them to sentence him to death, and then make fun of them when they do in the process, becoming a legend forever.
I'm Clif Mark. This is good in theory.
Last episode, we covered the first half of Plato's apology. And to summarize what happened briefly. Socrates gets up on stage to defend himself against charges of impiety and corrupting the youth. And he says, more or less, these charges are ridiculous. They're just rumors started by my haters. And my haters hate me, because I've been making them look stupid. And speaking of stupid, have you met my accuser Meletus? And then he calls up his accuser, Meletus, interrogates him for a little while, catches him in some contradictions. And we are going to pick up the story today, right at the end of Meletus and Socrates's exchange. The format is going to be the same: I'm going to paraphrase the text and then break in every so often to explain what's going on. The first paraphrase today covers a lot of ground. It goes from the conversation between Socrates and Meletus, right to the end of the defense speech. So let's get back to Socrates's apology.
[paraphrase] Socrates 1:44
I think it should be obvious to everyone here that Meletus has no idea what he's talking about when it comes to either piety or educating the youth and he probably has no business filing charges about these things.
However, I think we all also know that this trial is not really about piety or corruption. It's about me doing philosophy and pissing people off. I confess to both of those things. But philosophy isn't a crime, and neither is making people hate me. And I will tell you all right now that I have no plans of stopping either of those things, just because you're threatening me with death.
I served in the Army three times. And when my commanders told me to hold my ground, it didn't matter what the risk was to my personal safety, I held my ground. And when the Oracle gives me a command, it's the same deal. Meletus says that I'm impious, but I've devoted my life to serving the Oracle and to serving Athens by living this philosophical life. If I abandon philosophy, just because you guys put me on trial, that would be the true impiety And that's why I promised all of you today, that as long as I draw breath on this earth, I will be out on the streets, telling you that you should be ashamed of yourselves for worrying more about money in your bodies than about the condition of your soul.
This whole city is like a noble, sleepy horse. And I am the gadfly stinging you to wake you up. And many of you will just want to swap me so you can go back to dozing. But you shouldn't, because I am the greatest gift that the God has given the city. And the only reason I'm even bothering to defend myself today is to save you from making the mistake of depriving yourself of me.
Some of you may be thinking, if I care so much about this city, why don't I do the right thing and come down to the assembly and make a contribution to politics? Like a regular Athenian citizen? Why do I spend all my time in the marketplace gossiping with teenagers instead? Well, I'll tell you, it's because I actually care about doing the right thing. I care about justice. And that means that if I got involved in politics, you would have killed me a long time ago. I served on council once. And it wasn't my idea. My name came up, but I did my duty.
And you remember that big naval battle with the generals that the sailors drowned because there was a storm coming in? Well, the assembly was very mad, and they wanted to try all of the generals at once in one collective trial. And I was in charge of the proceedings that day. And I said no, because collective trials are illegal in Athens. And do you think that the assembly thanked me for reminding them of the laws and with adjusting to do was no, they turned on me, and they started clamoring to put me on trial along with the generals. I was lucky to survive that day.
That was when the democracy was in charge. But it was the same thing when the oligarchs were in charge. When the 30 took over the city, they called me in for other men. And they ordered us to bring in Leo salami and kill him. And you know what I did. That didn't sound very just to me. So I just went home, and let the other guys do it. And I probably would have been killed for that, too. If that government didn't fall before they could come after me.
The point I'm trying to make is, it doesn't matter who's in charge at the moment. That's just how politics works. If you're the kind of person who cares about doing the right thing, where then covering your ass, you're gonna wind up dead, and that's why I stay out of it. That's why any just man or any philosopher has to lead a private life, not a public one.
And before I finish, I'd like to say one more thing about this ridiculous charge. corrupting the youth. Some of you seem to have this idea that I'm going around brainwashing your sons with some bizarre doctrine. But how could that even be? My whole thing is that I don't know anything. The only thing I know is I know nothing. Remember that. So how could I teach anything? And this is also why I never charge a fee for lessons. I don't have any knowledge. So I could hardly charge money to teach someone something. If you see me, talking in the marketplace, I'm just trying to work through some questions myself. And anyone who wants to stop and join me and help me out is welcome to, but it's a conversation. We're doing philosophy together. This isn't a teacher student relationship. And that means that if some people happen to do some bad things after they talk to me, you can hardly blame me for that and look around If I corrupt so many young men, where are they? There are hundreds of you here. If I corrupted anyone here personally, or if I corrupted anyone close to you, like a brother or a son, please come up and say what bad advice that was that I gave you. mellitus. Do you know anyone that actually corrupted bring them up?
Nobody.
That's strange, because there are lots of people that I know here. There's Crito and Lysanius and Antiphon. There's Plato and Adeimantus. All of these people are either my close associates or their family of my close associates. And none of them are saying they were corrupted. And I don't think any of you here would say that these men are corrupted either.
So if I'm such a bad influence, how did these guys turn out so well? How come nobody is getting up to give an example of someone I corrupted. It's because everyone who actually knows me, would rather help me than testify against me. It's because Meletus is lying. And I'm telling the truth.
I know this speech is not what a lot of you expected to hear. Maybe you expected me to come up here and beg and cry, and ask for mercy and parade my family across the stage. So you could see that I have three sons and that you would pity me. And maybe you're even a little bit angry, because that's what you did when you were in court. Well, I think that's all a disgrace. Seeing a grown man cry and beg, because he's afraid to die is embarrassing. And in fact, it is disgraceful for this whole city that that actually works here. Whether you feel sorry for me, or whether you hate me, should make no difference to whether you find me guilty. I told you the truth. Now it's up to you to decide what the just thing to do is.
Clif Mark 9:15
And that is the end of Socrates’s defense speech. And I would like to point out that the very last thing that Socrates does before the jury goes to make a decision is to insult them. He accuses them of begging and crying on stage and even worse, of letting their decisions be influenced by that kind of thing. And that accusation may seem a little bit out of the blue when you hear it for the first time. But actually in Athens, it wasn't uncommon for people to do this to bring their families on stage to really try and boost the jury's pity before they went to make a decision.
And so Socrates, he shames the audience for that. And that's fair enough. Maybe you agree with him on his idea of justice. But his attitude towards the audience has been the same throughout. He's been antagonistic. He's been insulting them.
If you think about that argument he makes about politics about how people in politics are so paranoid and stupid that they're a danger to any person of integrity. Well, Socrates, he's not referring to some separate class of politicians. There are no fat cats down in Washington in Athens, Athens is a direct democracy. That means his fellow citizens are the politicians he's talking about. It's the same people who are sitting on the jury. So he's calling them stupid and paranoid and a danger to every person of integrity. It seems like the whole vibe of Socrates’s defense is that, you know, I've spent my whole life trying to help yank your heads out of your asses. And this is how you thank me.
This is not the approach of a man who's trying to endear himself to the jury. I wouldn't do this. If I was on trial and wanted to live. If I was on trial for something that I thought was based on rumors that fooled a lot of the jury, I would, I would give the jury an out. I would say, you've been deceived by some very clever people, anyone could have believed it. But nonetheless, these charges are not true.
Socrates’s approach is more like these charges are transparently idiotic, and so is anyone who believes them. So what is going on? Why is Socrates being such a jerk to the jury?
Some people, they think that it's a kind of suicide by jury, that Socrates is just done with living and so he's trying to annoy the jury into killing him. And I agree that for sure, Socrates is not doing everything he can to stay alive.
I think there's more going on here than a straight up suicide. And the best way I can explain what I think is going on, is to consider two different components of a court defense to different cases, you have to make two different goals that you have if you're trying to be found innocent.
So the first thing you have to do is build a substantive case. This is where you use arguments and facts to try to show that you are innocent, that you didn't do the thing. The other case you have to make is a rhetorical case or an emotional case. And this is where you win the jury over to your side. So they're no longer in a mood to punish you.
Obviously, these two things are related because if they think you didn't do it, they'll probably be more sympathetic to you. And if they are feeling sympathetic towards you, they're more likely to think that you didn't do it. However, they're two distinct things. But if you're actually on trial, you want to do both. You want to prove make a rational case that you didn't do it, but you also want them to like you so they don't want to kill you. You make an emotional case, and you make a substantive case.
And that's what makes Socrates his defense weird. He doesn't do both. He does make a substantive case for his innocence. his accusers make out like he's corrupting the youth by filling their heads with all these impious ideas. And Socrates is saying, No, no, no, you've got it wrong. If you took the time to listen to what I'm actually doing, it's not that at all. First of all, I was commanded to do this by the Oracle. So it's pious, not impious. Second of all, as a gadfly, I'm trying to wake people up and make them more virtuous. Therefore, even though it's annoying to some people, it's supposed to make people better not corrupt them. I'm serving the city. My trolling is a patriotic public service. And what evidence does Socrates give for this? Well, he admits that it's tough because he has years and years of rumors working against him and he only has a limited time to try to prove them wrong. It's a little bit his word against the rumors that people have been spreading. But he does say that anyone who knows him will say that it's true. And he points out several times throughout the trial, that there are no actual witnesses to confirm the crimes that he's accused of. It's all hearsay. This is a decent defense, I think. I don't think Socrates is straight up trying to commit judicial suicide here.
However, when it comes to the other part of his defense, his rhetorical emotional case, it really doesn't seem like he's trying to win over the jury. Josiah Ober is a Plato scholar whose research I used when I was writing these pods. And he says that, at the trial, Socrates the gadfly was giving his last best sting. And so the point of the gadfly thing is that Socrates stings people by pointing out the contract actions in their thinking, their actions, their speech, the ways that they're hypocrites and don't really live up to what they say they believe.
And so, when Athens put Socrates on trial, Socrates turns the table and he puts Athens on trial, he starts critiquing the city. And the main target is Athenian justice. And I think that that last little rant he does, about how pity and the other emotions should not matter to justice, that's kind of the main critique. He's saying, look, Athens, if you really want to justice, you'd go by reason, facts and arguments alone. Feelings are extraneous. And here Socrates is kind of stating the obvious. I think, nobody would disagree with him. Not really today and not really in Athens. Nobody would stand up and say, “No, Socrates facts and reason don't matter. Only our feelings matter.” But that's where the sting comes.
Socrates is pointing to the contradiction between what everyone says--that facts and reason matter to justice--and how things actually work. Because Socrates is saying that how things actually work is that in Athens, instead of carefully evaluating reason, in fact, they just call it a huge mob of randoms who know nothing about the actual case or nothing about the issues involved. And their heads are already filled up with rumors that have no witnesses to back them up. And then they make their decisions in a single afternoon, based on completely irrelevant factors like personal resentment towards Socrates, which speakers are best at rhetoric, whether they find Socrates annoying or not, and whether or not he cries and begs these people, Socrates says, are relying purely on the rhetorical emotional side of the case the irrelevant side, and they ignore what really matters to justice like reason, truth and argument. They're all feelings, no facts.
I find this case that Socrates makes against the Athenian justice system pretty interesting because it's very similar to the same kind of arguments that people make today against the so-called court of public opinion. People say it's unfair to be tried in the court of public opinion, because people just rely on emotions, rumors, the pre-existing opinions of the people who are involved. And this critique makes sense in Athens because their legal system actually is organized a lot like a court of public opinion. It's just a bunch of random people deciding in a single afternoon, based on a couple of speeches. And so a lot of the procedural rules and complications of modern justice systems are meant to avoid this kind of thing.
Anyway, Socrates is criticizing Athens, he's stinging them, pointing out their failures and hypocrisy ease, but it's also a test, you can go one of two ways, just like when Socrates is trolling people in the marketplace. Because there's two basic responses that you can have. If someone shows you that you're wrong or ignorant about something, which is Socrates, this whole deal, so you can stop, realize that you're wrong about something. And then you can think about revising your beliefs or your actions, you can do a little bit of work on yourself. And some people do respond to Socrates this way. Some people like to be shown that they're wrong. Think of that fun, mind-blown feeling that you get if someone shows you that something that you always thought was true is actually different from what you thought it was. And this can motivate people to want to learn more. And people have these kinds of reactions. They become Socrates’s friend. But the other response that people tend to have when someone points out their ignorance is to get defensive and to deny it and dig in and attack whoever made them feel bad by pointing out their ignorance.
And that's what Socrates's haters do. So his whole life Socrates is doing this gadfly thing to Athenians, one by one, showing them that they're stupid. And then they either learn something from him and become a friend or they hate him and become his enemy. And now that he has a platform in the attention of the entire city, Socrates is doing it to all of them at once.
And that gives an extra twist to his annoying antagonistic behavior. Socrates has to be mean, because if he begged and cried, or even if he was just friendly and likeable, and they did acquit him, that might only be because he manipulated their feelings. They wouldn't have done it for the right reasons. He wouldn't have woken them up and made them do the just thing. So Socrates has done them and he's putting them to the test. And the question is Will the noble horse of Athens wake up and change its ways? Or will they swat the gadfly dead, the vote is 280 to 220, approximately, to swat him dead. That's the big decision, Socrates is found guilty.
But it's not quite the end of the dialogue. Because after the verdict in Athenian trials, there is also a sentencing portion. And how it works is that the accuser gets to pick a punishment that they think is appropriate. And then the defendant gets to propose an alternative punishment that they think is appropriate. And then the jury gets to pick which one they want to do. And the idea is you get more moderate sentences at the end. In this case, Meletus proposes the death penalty. And then Socrates gets up to give this counter assessment
[paraphrase] Socrates 21:00
You know what? I am not even mad. I'm actually surprised it was so close. If just 30 of you voted differently, I would have walked free. But that's not what happened. And Meletus has proposed the death penalty. What shall I propose as an alternative? It's supposed to be something that I deserve. And so I'm asking myself, what does a man who spent his entire life trying to help you all become better people really deserve?
When someone wins the Olympics, you honor them with free lunch in the prytanium for the rest of their lives. And if I'm honest, I think I do you a lot more good than someone who won a wrestling match. So that's what I propose. Socrates eats free in the prytanium for the rest of his days. What? You think I'm being arrogant? What else am I going to pick? I can't pick something bad because I didn't do Anything wrong? prison. No chance.
Exile? If my own fellow citizens hate me so much that they want me dead, I don't think I'll do any better anywhere else. Now, I know what some of you are thinking. You don't really want to kill me. I'm old. I'm not actually that evil. You just wish I would knock it off with the philosophy. And if I promise to do that, maybe you'd let me go.
But I can't do it.
I know you think I'm being ironic, but I'm not. I honestly believe that the best thing a man can do is to discuss virtue every day. And that the unexamined life is not worth living. So I won't promise to stop. I think I deserve the free lunch thing. But I'm going to sweeten the pot for you guys. My friends over there, they made me promise that I would at least offer a fine, and they will guarantee 30 minutes. But remember, I'm only making this offer because I promised my friends I would. And they don't care about money. So giving it away is no big punishment for me. That's my assessment. free lunch for me 30 minae for you. Take it or kill me.
Clif Mark 23:29
I love this part of the apology. It's just such a massive middle finger to the jury. Socrates is convicted the penalty on the table is death, and this is his last chance to bargain for his life.
And if he wanted to, his chances are very good because the vote to convict him was almost down the middle. He just has to convince a few of the people who voted guilty that he deserves something less than death and the fine that he offers the 30 minae. That's a lot of money that amounts to about eight years worth of wages for a craftsman.
There's no way of knowing for sure. But I really believe that if Socrates offered the exact same amount of money, but he got up and said, I'm really sorry about all this, guys, I've been a real pain in the ass. And I see that now. Please accept this fine instead of killing me. I think the jury would have accepted it.
But Socrates does the exact opposite of that. He gets up and says, I'm not sorry at all, you should be sorry. And what I really deserve is to be honored by all of you with a state pension. Here's some money that I don't care about, and it's not my money anyway. And if you take it, I'm gonna walk out that door and start telling you how stupid you all are this afternoon.
I'm not sure if Socrates was trying to be found guilty. But once he was found guilty, he was not trying to live and this last little screw Apparently hit home because when the jury voted on a punishment, more of them voted to kill Socrates than originally voted to find him guilty in the first place. That means that there are people in the audience who five minutes ago, voted that they thought he was innocent or ready to let them go. And they heard this little speech and decided, let's kill him anyway.
Now, the final part of the dialogue happens because the bailiff isn't ready to take Socrates away. And so he just gets a chance to stand up there and address the audience one last time.
[paraphrase] Socrates 25:41
You did it. You sentenced a 70 year old man to death for making you feel silly. You should have just waited I have one foot in the grave anyway. This is really going to hurt Athens's reputation. Everyone who doesn't like this city is going to love that you did this And to those of you out there who voted to convict I know you're sitting there telling yourselves that you came in here with an open mind. And that you listen to both sides, and I just didn't have the arguments that you needed to hear, to be convinced to my innocence. Well, that's nonsense. My arguments were good. You convicted me, because I didn't come out here and beg and cry. That would have saved me for sure. But I would rather give my kind of defense and then die after they give your kind of defense and then have to live with it. And since I'm on my way out, here is a little prophecy. You're going to regret this. You wanted to avoid giving an account of your life. And you thought that killing me would help. But you forgot about my young friends. Do you think that all the boys I have taught to see right through you are going to stop asking questions. There's no chance of that and you can't kill them all. So here's my gentle suggestion to you. Maybe, instead of trying to crush everyone who ever criticizes you, just take a look at your own life, examine it a little. And maybe they won't have so much ammunition.
And to those of you out there who voted to acquit
I know this looks bad, but please don't worry about me. I'm not worried. I actually feel pretty good about how today went. Yes, I'm going to die. But how do we know that’s so bad? I figure it can go one of two ways. Either it's like a long dreamless sleep, in which case fantastic.
Or you go to the afterlife with all the other dead souls who ever lived. And to me, that sounds incredible. Homer and Hesiod, Odysseus and Sisyphus, wouldn't you give to hang out with these literal legends and chat with them. I can go around questioning and testing them just like I did here. And once I'm in the underworld, they can't put me to death for it. Am I right?
All right, it looks like they're ready for me and it's time to park. You go back to your lives, and I'll go to my death. Goodbye, everyone.
Clif Mark 28:26
And that is Socrates' defiant last stand, the end of Plato's apology. Socrates' story was always going to be famous because nothing this dramatic ever happens to a philosopher. So people were bound to come back to it. But like I said before, it's really Plato's retelling that makes this legendary.
You've got Socrates annoying. Absolutely. But he's utterly committed to his philosophical mission. A man of integrity, courageously standing up to the Athenian State telling off his enemies and then facing his death with dignity and jokes. And on the other side, you have Athens, irrational emotional intolerance. They have a world historical level teacher on their hands, who just wants to help them be better people, and they decide to kill him rather than learn from them. tisk tisk Athens.
And as I mentioned before, as well, when you've got very clearly drawn heroes and villains, the story lends itself very well to morality tales. People come back to the story all the time and the exact moral of the story changes depending on what political axe the person telling the story has to grind. For example, Martin Luther King Jr. In his letter from Birmingham Jail, he says that, if you don't support civil rights struggles, you're being a bit of an Athens During the Cold War in the 50s, you had some people saying that Socrates his story showed that communism was bad. And he had other people retelling it to show that anti communist persecution and McCarthyism was bad. And then, in the Federalist Papers, either Alexander Hamilton or James Madison, they refer to the Socrates story. And they try to use it to argue that if you don't limit the size of state legislators to a relatively small number, you're going to wind up like Athens. So the story can be recruited to all kinds of different causes.
But one of the ones that I see the most, is about free speech. And so the big example here is John Stuart Mill. John Stuart Mill is a liberal philosopher from 19th century England. And he is very, very into freedom of expression. He writes a famous essay on it, On Liberty, and in his chapter on freedom of action. J S Mill talks about two examples of what happens when you start censoring unpopular opinions. One of them is Socrates, who Mill calls the most virtuous man of his age, and the other is Jesus Christ. So that is the level that Mill put Socrates on. And the moral of the story is if you start censoring unpopular opinions, you're basically murdering philosophy Jesus.
Now, I don't have a big problem with freedom of expression. But this is one sided. This is a polemical point that mill is making. And part of the reason that I think that this book, this story of Socrates is trial lends itself so well to these kinds of polemics is that Plato has given us a totally one sided story. He left us an idealized version of Socrates a side of the story, rewritten to be this rhetorically brilliant statement that we don't know if actually happened on the day And Plato completely leaves out all the speeches from the accusers anyone explaining why they might have voted guilty in any account of the background context that might tell us why so many Athenians were ready to see Socrates go down. And why they waited till then he's 70 years old, and he's been doing this forever. There are a lot of questions that Plato doesn't answer in this text.
Why doesn't he?
There are a lot of possible reasons, I don't know for sure. One reason could be that he's still mad at Athens for killing his teacher and he doesn't want to give them the airtime. Another is that at the time when he's writing it, he's running his own philosophy school in Athens. So he has a personal interest in publicly making the case that you shouldn't kill philosophers.
But then there's also the fact that when Plato is writing, he knows that everyone in his audience--all of his readers are already gonna know what happened. Because Socrates’ trial was this massively well known public event. So when Plato publishes a book on it, he's not the only one writing about it. Everyone knows what happened. So he can put his piece out there and people can fill in the rest of themselves. But we, the readers in the 21st century, do not necessarily know this context. We don't know the other side of the story.
And I think it's really important that we look into it at least because if you can imagine a person today, who is angry that they're being silenced that they're being told that they shouldn't say whatever they're saying. I would be completely unsurprised. If they gave exactly the same defense that Socrates did. Socrates, his defense is basically “Hey, the people who are coming after me are oversensitive crybabies who can't stand it when anyone questions, their beliefs. They're taking me out of context and misinterpreting what I'm saying, and actually, I'm just telling the uncomfortable truths that a lot of you people aren't ready to hear. You should be thanking me.”
That is the classic trolls defense, even the bit where Socrates says that he can't be responsible for the people who do bad things after he talks to them because he didn't explicitly tell them what to do. Even that sounds familiar to me. I think Socrates, his argument is just typical of people who are mad about being silenced, and they're trying to defend themselves. And sometimes, the argument is right. Sometimes tellers of uncomfortable truths are unfairly persecuted by a bunch of oversensitive people who are judging them out of context is definitely true sometimes.
But it's not always true. Some people are just running that defense when actually they're doing something questionable. Maybe they're spreading hate speech. That's inspiring violence. Maybe it's terrorist propaganda. Maybe they're recruiting each other into Satanism, whatever. My point is that I can't really assess Socrates' arguments, or where I stand in this whole case, unless I know at least something about the other side.
For two episodes, we've heard Socrates say what he thought of Athens. And we're going to get even deeper into some of his arguments, especially his critique of politics. But starting next episode, I'm also going to start filling in with the Athenians might have thought of Socrates, and why some of them thought that he was so dangerous, that it was safer to kill him rather than let them carry on doing philosophy. And to me, this other side of the story makes things a lot more interesting. Because if you come and tell me that killing an innocent old man is wrong, boring. But if you tell me you have a good argument, that killing philosophy, Jesus is actually the right thing to do sometimes. I'll listen to your argument.
Conclusion
That was good in theory for this week. Thank you Clayton Tapp of Orb Music Werx for the opening theme music and David Zikovitz for the closing theme. And thanks Marijke Bouchier for the podcast art and Justine Mark, my sister, for editing and support. And thank you for listening. If you enjoyed the show, please share it with someone else who you think would like it? At the end of every episode, I like to take something that is related to the topic, but that I couldn't quite fit into the overall plot of the main episode.
Today. I talked a lot about how Socrates his story has been adapted and readapted throughout history, and I gave a lot of political theoretical examples, jazz mill Martin Luther King, the Federalist Papers, but there has also been a lot of pop culture depictions of Socrates. John Steinbeck had a novel in 1940s. There were CBS radio shows there being plays, there being TV shows and movies, and I even found a neat series of historical novels set in ancient Greece by Gary Colby. The first one is called the parrot please commission. And Socrates is in it as the protagonist, little brother who pitches in and helps to solve mysteries.
But my favorite piece of Socratic pop culture, the one that forms my first distinct memory of Socrates is Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.
It's a 1989 comedy. And if you don't know this movie, it is key cultural content. People born in the 80s we don't know can't reuse primarily as Neo from the matrix or as john wick. We know him as Ted, Theodore Logan, the best friend of Bill s Preston Esquire. The movie is about two not-that-bright California teens who are in danger of flunking out of high school if they don't get an A on their history presentation.
But then comedian George Carlin turns up from the future, wearing an oversized trench coat and wraparound sunglasses. And he's writing a time traveling phone booth. And he gives a phone booth to bill and Ted and they travel through history and gather up all these historical figures that they're going to bring back to San Dimas to help them with their history presentation. Anyway, they go through the ages and they pick up Billy the Kid and Abe Lincoln and Genghis Khan and Joan of Arc and Napoleon. And of course, they stop in ancient Athens to pick up Socrates.
The Socrates character in this movie--I rewatched it recently--he doesn't speak English, so he doesn't really have any lines but he did stick in my head for the 30 years or so since I last saw the movie. So I'm going to recommend that you watch the trailer on YouTube and you be excellent to each other. Thanks for listening
Bill 39:22
Socrates Hey, we know that
Ted 39:26
Yeah, hey look them up. Oh, it's under so crates. Oh yeah
Bill 39:37
So crates. The only true wisdom consistent knowing that you know nothing
Ted 39:46
that's us, dude. Oh yeah.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai