Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8yZpKsaSbU
the jurgen experience so i recently saw you on instagram posting about marcus aurelius yes and so i want to can we view your channel please so in my in the next book that i'm working doing the recipe for the 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 probably one of the topics that's supposed 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 [ __ ] epictetus has already said it 2000 years ago isn't that wild yeah it's unbelievable and so it reminds me and i want to give him kudos on the show so you know nasim talib is sure yeah so nassim is a good friend of mine he's 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 you know we might be empirically validating what they've already philosophized but so so so your you know 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 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 just we can get
a kind of an understanding of how they thought about things it's to me one of the more uh amazing things about history is to peer into the it's almost like you 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 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 uh called the um the what is it immortality code and it's uh brian murray rescue who has he's gone through uh ancient greek culture and uh all of the uh ulucidian 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 wow 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 uh ritualistic experiences they were tripping right and this is the birthplace of democracy this is the birthplace of a lot of these uh thinkers these great thinkers of uh you know that age and of course uh roman emperors uh forbade it and they outlawed it and they in in the book they sort of detail how it uh migrated to other countries and you can find the same remnants in the pottery in these other countries and you can literally pat you could track the path of their escape from these areas where they were more restrictive and and and trying these ritualistic uh experiences in other places but yeah it's the the immort it's the immortality key or code key the immortality key it's an amazing book really really and brian was on the podcast and because of him being on the podcast harvard has opened up a field of study wow 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 they 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