The Impact of Marcus Aurelius and Ancient Philosophers

So I recently saw you on Instagram posting about Marcus Aurelius. Yes. And so I want to, can we veer to that for a second? Sure, please. So in my, in the next book that I'm doing, The Recipe for a Good Life, of course I get into the history of all sorts of cultures that have explored the good life. It's not as though I'm the first guy to write about this. Actually one of the topics that's been most written about. None have been as prolific as the ancient Greeks. And so, and so when I, when I saw your thing about Marcus Aurelius, I was about to write you to say, well, I've come to that same realization because, so as I was doing my research for the book, every time I would get an insight that I thought was original to me, I'd say that fucker Epictetus has already said it 2,000 years ago. Is that wild? It's unbelievable. Yeah. And so it reminds me and I want to give him kudos on the show. So do you know who Nassim Taleb is? Sure. Yeah. So Nassim is a good friend of mine. He's a fellow Lebanese. And so many years ago he was kind of egging me, teasing me, saying, I don't really understand what you study in psychology, God. Everything that there is to know about psychology and human nature, the ancient Greeks have already covered it. And so I, I mean, he was just egging me on, but then many years later as I'm preparing for this book, I'm like, I think he might be right. We might be empirically validating what they've already philosophized, but so, so, so your, your post about Marcus Aurelius really resonated with me at exactly that same moment. It's quite fascinating when you read his, his writing. It's unbelievable. Because he was so wise and his decisions for what he would concentrate on and not concentrate on and you know, how he would accept people's flaws and mistakes that they'd made as if they had never made them. And this just approach to stoicism and his philosophy on life. The Greeks were the Greeks and the Romans. And you know, if you look at the, the history of these ancient civilizations that dominated the world at that period of time and the, we can get a kind of an understanding of how they thought about things. That's to me, one of the more amazing things about history is to peer into the, it's almost like we have a little bit of a time machine to peer into the mindset of these people that were so wise thousands and thousands of years ago and that their words are applicable today. Yeah. Well, I mean that speaks to the universality of the human condition, right? So I always tell my students when I'm teaching about evolutionary theory, I say, look, you can use cultural products as fossils of the human mind, right? The human mind doesn't fossilize, but the products that is left from human minds, we can study its contents in the same way that paleontologists studies fossil remains. So I can, I can connect to the mind of an ancient Greek poet and understand what he's talking about as though he's speaking today, because the software that's running his mind and mine is identical. He doesn't know what an iPhone is. He doesn't know what a podcast is, but he knows about sexual longing. He knows about paternity uncertainty. He knows about sibling rivalry. Those are the universal themes that are invariant across time and place. And so one of the things that I love about being an author is that I get to be connected through ideas with all of these immortal souls, you know? And so it's really a beautiful thing to write and to create. And that the fact that I independently thought of something that Epictetus thought 2000 years ago connects me with him. Yes. Truth. It's just you developed an understanding of human beings and of human nature, and you have deciphered from this and extracted some truth. And it turns out other people have done the same thing. Fantastic. It is fantastic. You know, there's a great book called the, the, what is it? Immortality Code. And it's Brian Murarescu who has, he's gone through ancient Greek culture and all of the Ulyssedean mysteries and looked into all of their rituals and tried to figure out like what was going on. And one of the things that they've done is going over pottery and finding that there's remnants of psychedelic substances in these, in these pottery jars. And so these wine jars, these jugs, these as pottery, they found that they were imbibing in wine that was dosed with lysergic acid. So they had different kinds of ergot and different kinds of things that would produce psychedelic states. So all of these, you know, like when, when people would go there to learn and when people would go to have these ritualistic experiences, they were tripping. And this is the birthplace of democracy. This is the birth birthplace of a lot of these thinkers, these great thinkers of, you know, that age. And of course, Roman emperors forbade it and they outlawed it and they, in the book, they sort of detail how it migrated to other countries. And you can find the same remnants in the pottery in these other countries. And you can literally, you can track the path of their escape from these areas where they were more restrictive and, and trying these ritualistic experiences in other places. But yeah, it's the, the, it's the immortality key or code key, the immortality key. It's an amazing book, really, really interesting. Brian was on the podcast and because of him being on the podcast, Harvard has opened up a field of study. Well, and in that particular area where they're looking at psychedelic substance use in ancient Greece, because it's irrefutable now because of the residue. Now they now have scientific evidence. They have residue that shows that they were most certainly flavoring their wine with this stuff. That's another thing that I didn't know. I always thought wine was wine. It was fermented fruit. It's not their wine. They would always add things to the constantly added stuff to their wine. Their wine was never just wine. Their wine was most of the time wine with other things and oftentimes psychedelic substances like ergot mixed in with the wine.