Sean Stone’s 10 Things to Learn: Ancient Wisdom for the Modern Soul

Tucker Carlson (0:04)

AI is suddenly taking over the world, technology progressing faster than people can metabolize or understand. And yet the population doesn't seem to be thriving, people don't seem happier.

So it's possible that technological progress isn't really progress, if the cost is the destruction of our social fabric and an epidemic of unhappiness and loneliness. Maybe that's why we need to return to truths that bring meaning to our lives. Our friend Sean Stone has just written a book about that. Here it is. It's called 10 Things to Learn, Ancient Wisdom for the Modern Soul. It's available now on tuckercarlsonbooks.com. He joins us now to tell us all about it.

So Sean, in some ways, it's kind of a striking claim that you're making. You're saying that the ancient world, a world without, I don't know, space travel or even flush toilets, was wiser in some ways than our world, this technologically advanced civilization that we live in. How was it wiser, do you think?

Sean Stone (1:05)

Because wisdom isn't necessarily a product of technology.

As we know, wisdom is something that's earned, that's lived. And so the ancients, I think, understood things about the nature of humanity. And it's not only ancient. I mean, we draw upon in the book, we draw upon some films that are a little bit closer to us time-wise. But yeah, a lot of the stories that I drop on are from the East, the Bhagavad Gita, a lot from the Bible, a lot of Bible stories, the Christ story, and then obviously Ancient Greece. And so why? Because we've been telling stories for thousands of years, and I think that's essential to the human experience, right? Why do we look to stories? When I grow up, it was like, what was the moral of the story when you watch a movie or when you read a book? That was always the question. And I don't know that people are necessarily thinking along those terms anymore. We got so much streaming at us that it's almost more about the spell of continuation, especially you see with TV shows and whatnot, where it's just meant to hook you and keep you almost like the old days with the episodics where it's like it's the next commercial, right? So you can say what happens next, stay on the edge of your seat.

But the duty of a story, of a book or a myth or a movie even, is always that experience of engaging with something, and then sitting with it, having it, hopefully having a cathartic experience through that process of watching a total story or hearing a story and allowing yourself to be moved by it or learn something from it. So that's, I think, the heart of what I'm trying to do here, is just sort of boil down some lessons that we can take from these stories from the ancient world and even some closer to the modern world.

Tucker Carlson (2:57)

What an interesting observation. So you're saying that previous civilizations in previous times have focused on what people are like, the nature of humanity, you called it. So that suggests that human nature doesn't change. Technology may change, the outward manifestations of a society may change, but people do not.

Sean Stone (3:18)

Yeah, we're still grappling with what it means to be human.

I started grappling with it, I guess, when I was young, and I came back to it with a documentary called MetaHuman, where I was interviewing people like Deepak Chopra and others, and we were at the cusp of, as you know, a transhuman agenda, transhuman age, where people are talking about this idea of modifying the human, transforming the human, modifying us genetically, modifying us by potentially merging us with computers and whatnot. And yet we don't really understand what it even is to be a human being, right? And we have this body, we have a body that has a certain level of, well, not a certain level, a huge amount of knowledge itself, right? The body is so wise, it's so intelligent, and it connects us, you know, I believe, to the spiritual realm. You know, we feel it with our emotional states, for example. And you know, really having higher mental intelligence and cognitive ability does not necessarily make you a more empathetic being, more emotionally attuned being, right? So as they say, like, there's emotional intelligence, and that, you know, having higher IQ, let's say, it doesn't necessarily translate to having a greater bandwidth for emotional intelligence.

Tucker Carlson (4:32)

That's for sure. This paradoxical thing is happening where, as life becomes physically easier for people, more comfortable, more abundant food, less physical labor, people are not getting happier, but instead are getting more despondent to the point where the suicide rate rises. What is that?