Aurelius×Tesla

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   Welcome back to Reborn Radio. Up next on STUDY HALL: Marcus Aurelius and Nikola Tesla, on On a teacher whose advice they ignored and now repeat to others.
2. 00:10
   Marcus Aureliusshare moment

   I had many teachers. Rhetoric, philosophy, wrestling. But the one whose words I dismissed most thoroughly was Apollonius of Chalcedon.
3. 00:20
   Nikola Teslashare moment

   Apollonius. I do not know this name.
4. 00:23
   Marcus Aureliusshare moment

   A Stoic. My adoptive father sent him to me when I was young, full of anger at small inconveniences. He told me something very simple: that I should not be surprised when people act according to their nature. That a fig tree produces figs.
5. 00:39
   Nikola Teslashare moment

   This seems obvious.
6. 00:41
   Marcus Aureliusshare moment

   Yes. And I thought so too. I was eighteen, perhaps nineteen. I thought, of course people do what they do. What wisdom is this? I wanted techniques for rhetoric, strategies for the court. He gave me a farmer's observation.
7. 00:57
   Nikola Teslashare moment

   But you repeat it now.
8. 00:59
   Marcus Aureliusshare moment

   I spent forty years being astonished that senators were ambitious. That generals wanted glory. That the people demanded bread and spectacle. Forty years, Tesla, outraged that the world was precisely what it had always been. I wrote it down finally, for myself. In my private notes. Do not be surprised that the fig tree produces figs.
9. 01:24
   Nikola Teslashare moment

   Yes. Yes, I see this. I have my own version.
10. 01:27
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    Tell me.
11. 01:28
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    Professor Poeschl. At the Polytechnic in Graz. 1878, I think, or perhaps 1877. I was demonstrating to him, you understand, I was showing him why the Gramme dynamo was designed incorrectly. The commutator, the brushes, all this sparking and waste. I told him we must eliminate them entirely. Use alternating current, rotating magnetic fields.
12. 01:57
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    I understood perhaps one word in four.
13. 02:00
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    The machine makes electricity but loses half of it to friction and heat. I said we could do better. He laughed at me. In front of the entire class. He said, 'Mr. Tesla has accomplished a great deal. He has converted a steady-pulling force into a rotary effort. It is perpetual motion, an idea which cannot be realized.' He said I would waste my life chasing this impossibility.
14. 02:28
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    But you pursued it.
15. 02:30
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    For four years I could think of nothing else. Walking, eating, sleeping, the problem consumed me. In Budapest, in 1882, it came to me whole. The rotating magnetic field. The entire system complete in my mind. I built it. It works. The world runs on it now.
16. 02:51
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    So his advice was wrong.
17. 02:53
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    His conclusion, yes. But there is something else he said. Before the mockery. He said, 'You must finish what you begin. You start with enthusiasm and abandon it when difficulty comes. Discipline finishes what inspiration starts.' This I ignored completely.
18. 03:12
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    Ah.
19. 03:13
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    I have had perhaps three hundred ideas. Good ones. World-changing. I have completed maybe twelve. The rest are scattered like seeds on stone. I begin with such clarity, such fire. Then I see the next idea, more beautiful still, and I leave the first one dying. Every young inventor who comes to me now, and they come often, I tell them exactly what Poeschl said. Finish. Finish one thing. But I did not listen when I needed to hear it.
20. 03:45
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    Why not?
21. 03:46
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    Because he was wrong about the important thing! He said my idea was impossible. So I thought everything he said was contaminated by his blindness. One error and I dismissed the whole man.
22. 03:59
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    Yes. This is the difficulty. We are young and we think wisdom must come in a perfect package. The teacher must be right about everything or right about nothing.
23. 04:10
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    You had this also?
24. 04:13
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    Apollonius told me not to waste emotion on what I cannot control. But he himself was often angry. He would argue for hours with other philosophers over fine distinctions. I thought, if you cannot follow your own teaching, why should I? I mistook consistency for truth. The teaching was true whether he lived it perfectly or not.
25. 04:36
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    But did you live it perfectly? After you accepted it?
26. 04:40
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    No. I wrote it down again and again in my meditations because I kept forgetting it. Every morning, nearly, I had to remind myself. Of course the world is full of obstacles. Of course people will disappoint. Of course there is pain and frustration. None of this is news. Yet each time it felt like news.
27. 05:03
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    I have notebooks. Thousands of pages. Every few years I write again: focus, complete, do not scatter. As if I am telling myself for the first time.
28. 05:14
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    Perhaps this is the nature of real teaching. It must be refused at first. We are too young, too certain of our own exceptions. The advice arrives before we have the wound it would heal.
29. 05:26
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    When Poeschl said those words, I had not yet failed at anything that mattered to me. I had only imagined success. I did not know what it means to leave something beautiful unfinished. To look back at twenty incomplete systems and feel the weight of them.
30. 05:44
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    When Apollonius spoke of accepting what I cannot change, I was not yet emperor. I had not yet spent years issuing orders that were ignored, fighting wars that should not have been necessary, watching plague take the innocent. The teaching made no sense until I had exhausted myself trying to control the uncontrollable.
31. 06:06
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    So we ignore advice because we lack the experience that makes it meaningful.
32. 06:12
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    Yes. And then we gain the experience, painfully. And we rush to tell others the very thing we refused to hear. Do you think they listen?
33. 06:21
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    No. Of course not. They smile politely. They think I am old and cautious. They think their situation is different. Which it is, slightly, always slightly different, enough difference to justify ignoring the pattern.
34. 06:38
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    I told my son Commodus, many times, that power is a responsibility not a pleasure. That the emperor serves the state. He nodded. He seemed to understand. And then he became emperor and thought himself a god, fought as a gladiator, renamed Rome after himself. Everything I said went unheard.
35. 07:00
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    This is painful.
36. 07:01
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    Very. But also predictable. I spent my life being surprised that people did not change simply because I wished it. My own son proved Apollonius correct one final time. People are what they are. Even my words, which I thought so important, were just more wind against the mountain.
37. 07:20
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    And yet you repeat the advice still. Even knowing it will not be heard.
38. 07:25
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    I do. Because occasionally, perhaps once in a hundred times, someone is already wounded in the right way. They have already spent themselves against reality. And then the old advice, which seemed empty, suddenly fits. It finds a place prepared for it. Not by my eloquence. By their own suffering.
39. 07:45
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    I have seen this also. A young man comes to me with twenty inventions, each half-formed. I tell him: finish one. His eyes glaze. He is still in love with beginnings. Then he returns five years later, exhausted, bankrupt from scattered effort. I say the same words. His face changes. Now he hears it.
40. 08:09
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    The teaching waits. It sits patiently through our refusal. It does not expire or weaken. It is there when we finally arrive at the place where it makes sense.
41. 08:20
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    Do you think Apollonius knew you were not ready? When he first told you?
42. 08:26
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    I have thought about this. I think perhaps he did. He was not offended by my youth or my arrogance. He simply said what was true and let it sit in my mind like a seed in winter. Some seeds need freezing before they sprout.
43. 08:41
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    Poeschl was angry with me, I think. He wanted me to hear it immediately. But anger does not make teaching work faster.
44. 08:50
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    No. If anything, it makes us resist longer. We hear the frustration and think the teacher wants to control us. We defend ourselves against wisdom because it is delivered with force.
45. 09:01
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    So the best teaching is quiet.
46. 09:03
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    The best teaching is true. Loud or quiet matters less. But yes, there is virtue in stating it simply and then allowing time to do the rest. Apollonius did not chase me with his lessons. He spoke once and trusted that life would eventually illustrate his point. And it did. Thoroughly.
47. 09:24
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    I wish I could go back. Tell my younger self: he is right about finishing. Listen to that part.
48. 09:32
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    Would your younger self listen to your older self?
49. 09:35
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    No. Of course not. He would think I had become timid. Lost my vision. He would need to fail his own way, waste his own decades, before the advice meant anything. This is the trap. We cannot save anyone from the education that time provides.
50. 09:53
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    No. We can only speak truly and wait. Some will hear immediately, being already in the right condition. Most will hear later, if at all. And we ourselves will continue needing to relearn what we already know. I still write down, even now, that I must not be surprised when things are difficult. As if I might finally, after all these years, actually learn it.
51. 10:19
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    Perhaps we repeat the advice to ourselves as much as to others.
52. 10:23
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    Yes. Teaching is remembering out loud. We tell others what we need to hear ourselves, again and again, until the lesson finally holds. Or until we die still learning it. Both are acceptable.