I want you to close your eyes for a second. We
are going on a trip. We're traveling back in
time about two and a half thousand years to the
island of Sicily. And we are not just going to
the beach. We are hiking up the side of Mount
Etna. Which is an active volcano, mind you. This
is not a leisurely stroll. Definitely not. The
air is thick with sulfur. It smells like rotten
eggs and burning earth. The ground is actually
vibrating under your feet because this mountain
is alive. And it's hot. It is so hot, unbearably
hot. So we get to the very edge of the caldera,
the precipice, you know, looking down into the
boiling lava below and standing right there on
the edge of oblivion is a man. And he is not
dressed for hiking. No, not at all. He's wearing
these purple robes, which was the most expensive
dye in the ancient world. He has a golden wreath
on his head like a king or a god. And on his
feet. He's wearing these heavy, very distinct
bronze sandals. He looks at his followers. He
raises his arms, declares that he is no longer
mortal, but has become an immortal god. And he
jumps. The ultimate dramatic exit. I mean, you
can't top that. He holds himself into the volcano.
And the legend says, you know, he wanted to disappear
completely so that when people couldn't find
his body, they would just assume he descended
to Olympus. He wanted to fake his own apotheosis,
his own becoming a god moment. Exactly. But the
volcano, the volcano had the last laugh. It did.
It did. A little while later, the volcano sort
of burps. Wow. And it spits out exactly one bronze
sandal. Wow. It lands at the feet of his followers.
It's the ultimate debunking. It is such a fantastic
story. Almost certainly a myth, but it tells
us everything we need to know about the subject
of today's Dipe Dive. Right. We're talking about
Empedocles of Acragas. And this story, it just
sets the stage so perfectly because it captures
the two sides of his reputation. Okay, what are
the two sides? Well, on one hand, you've got
the mad philosopher, the guy with the god complex
who thinks he can cheat death. But on the other
hand, you have a man who was so influential,
so larger than life, that people told these stories
about him for centuries. And? That is our mission
today. We want to look past the bronze sandal.
We want to understand how this one man who lived
in the 5th century B .C. managed to bridge this
gap between being like a mystical shaman who
claimed to control the weather and a hard -nosed
scientist who basically invented the periodic
table, proposed a form of natural selection,
and proved air was a physical substance. It's
a massive resume. And that tension you just mentioned
between the shaman and the scientist, that is
the key. We put those things in different boxes,
you know. You have your physics professors over
here and your gurus or mystics over there. Empedocles
didn't see a difference. He saw it as all one
thing. He is the bridge. He's that moment in
history where magic starts to turn into mechanics.
So let's unpack this life because even without
the volcano jump, it is pretty wild. He was born
around 494 B .C. in Acragas. Right. And before
we get into the man, we have to talk about the
place, Acros. In Sicily. in sicily and if you're
imagining like a dusty little village with a
few goats you have to get that out of your head
sicily in the 5th century bc was the new world
of the greek empire oh really yeah it was booming
it was the frontier so it's like new york or
dubai or something exactly it was incredibly
wealthy culturally vibrant and chaotic Acragas
was famous for luxury. There's a great quote
that says the people of Acragas built their houses
as if they were going to live forever and dined
as if they were going to die tomorrow. I love
that. So Empedocles is growing up in this environment
of like. Excess and high stakes. Yeah. And he
wasn't nobody, right? His family. Oh, far from
it. He came from serious old money. His grandfather,
who was also named Empedocles, won a horse race
at the Olympia. Okay. I feel like in modern times,
winning a horse race is cool, but it's not that
big of a deal. In the ancient Greek world, winning
at Olympia was everything. It was like winning
the Super Bowl and Oscar and the presidency all
in one afternoon. It gave your family immense
social capital. So our Empedocles, he grows up
in the lap. of luxury. He flourished around 444
B .C., give or take. But he didn't just sit around
counting his grandfather's trophy money. He became
a celebrity in his own right. I mean, Aristotle,
the heavy hitter of philosophy, called Empedocles
the father of rhetoric. Which is a huge, huge
compliment. It means he wasn't just smart. He
was persuasive. He knew how to move a crowd.
And he needed that skill. He did, because he
was traveling from town to town, essentially
performing his philosophy. Performing. What do
you mean by that? I mean, he wasn't giving dry
lectures in a classroom. He was a poet. He's
actually the last major Greek philosopher to
write his ideas in verse. In poetry. Epic hexameter,
the same style as Homer. He wanted his science
to sing. And so he would show up in these towns,
probably with a whole retinue of servants dressed
in his purple and gold, claiming to be a healer
and a prophet. It sounds a bit like a traveling
revival show. There's definitely that vibe. I
mean, he claimed he could cure illnesses, control
the winds. And even bring the dead back to life.
Yeah. Yeah. That one's a pretty bold claim. It's
a bold claim. I can teach you physics and also
I can resurrect your grandma. It shows the scope
of his ambition, though. He did not think small.
And this larger -than -life persona is probably
why there are so many weird stories about his
death. Right. We started with the volcano, which
is the most famous one, recorded by the biographer
Diogenes Luricius. But that's not the only theory,
is it? No, and the alternatives are just as entertaining.
There's the removed -from -Earth theory. Okay.
Heraclitus Ponticus wrote that Empedocles threw
a feast and during the night he was just plucked.
Taken. The alien abduction theory of antiquity.
Basically. He just ascended into the sky. Then
you have the, you know, the boring version. Aristotle
thought he just died of old age at 60. Right.
The sensible explanation. Yeah. Some others said
he lived to be 109. But my favorite by far has
to be the satire by Lucian. Oh, Lucian is great.
He's the ancient equivalent of a stand -up comic,
just roasting everyone. And Lucian suggested
that when the volcano erupted, it didn't kill
Empedocles. What did it do then? The blast launched
him into the stratosphere, he landed on the moon,
and he survived there, living on dew. The first
astronaut. It's hilarious, but it also shows
you that even the comedians of the time recognized
Empedocles as someone who just didn't belong
on Earth. He was other. It's so interesting that
his death often overshadows his life. People
know the sandal story, but they don't know the
mind behind it. So I want to pivot now to what
he actually thought. Because beneath the gold
wreath and the poetry, this guy was a rigorous
thinker. Let's talk about the four roots. This
is the big one, his biggest innovation. This
is the cornerstone of Western science for 2 ,000
years. Right. We all learned this in school,
or we see it in movies like The Fifth Element.
Fire, air. earth, water. Empedocles is the originator
of that list. He is. Before him, philosophers
were usually what we call monists. Monists, meaning
one. Meaning they thought the world was made
of one thing. Thales thought everything was made
of water. Heraclitus thought everything was fire.
Anaximenes thought it was air. It feels a bit
like they were just guessing, like, I like water,
so everything is water. It was a bit more logical
than that. But yeah, they were trying to simplify
the incredible complexity of the world down to
a single substance. Empedocles looked around
and said, it's too complicated for one thing.
It has to be a mixture. And he called them roots,
right? He didn't use the word elements. Correct.
The word element, which is Stocean in Greek,
that was likely coined by Plato a bit later.
Empedocles called them rhizomata or roots. Roots.
That implies something living, something that
things grow from. Exactly. It's a much more organic
metaphor. And true to his style, he didn't just
give them scientific names. He used a code. He
associated them with gods. So he's mixing theology
and chemistry. Right from the start. He linked
Zeus, the king of gods, with fire, or maybe the
aether, the bright, shining stuff. He linked
Hera, the life bringer, with earth or air. The
sources differ. Adonius, which is another name
for Hades, was earth. Okay. And water. And water
was nestus. Nestus. I don't know that guy. It's
a local Sicilian cult name for Persephone or
a similar water deity. Empedocles wrote this
beautiful line about her. Nestus, who moistens
mortal springs with tears. That is lovely. So
water is literally the tears of a god. It's poetry,
but the concept behind it is hard science. Empedocles
argued that these four roots are eternal, indestructible,
and unchangeable. Wait, unchangeable? But...
Wood burns and becomes ash. Yeah. Water evaporates.
Things change all the time. And this brings us
to the biggest intellectual hurdle that Empedocles
had to clear. We have to talk about a guy named
Parmenides. Parmenides. I've heard the name,
but remind me what his deal was. Parmenides was
the giant of philosophy right before Empedocles,
and he had trapped everyone in a logical nightmare.
Okay. He argued that nothing comes from nothing.
That sounds reasonable. You can't pull a rabbit
out of a hat if the rabbit isn't already in the
hat. Right. But Parmenides took it to its logical
extreme. He said, if nothing comes from nothing,
then nothing new can ever exist. Because if it
didn't exist before and it exists now, it must
have come from nothing, which you just said is
impossible. Uh -oh. Therefore, change is an illusion.
Movement is an illusion. The entire universe
is one solid, frozen, unchanging block of being.
Well, that's obviously wrong. I'm moving my hand
right now. I can see things changing outside
the window. Your senses tell you things change.
But Parmenides said your senses are lying to
you. Logic tells you change is impossible. It
was a crisis. Philosophy was stuck. How do you
explain the real world without breaking the fundamental
rules of logic? And Empedocles found the loophole.
He found the loophole. He said, OK, Parmenides,
you were right. Nothing is ever created or destroyed.
The roots, fire, air, earth. Water are eternal.
They never change. But they can add. So the ingredients
are eternal, but the recipe changes. Precisely.
This is the birth of the concept of the mixture.
Think of a painter. He has four colors on his
palette. Say, red, white, black, and yellow.
Those colors are constant. Red is always red.
Right. But the painter can mix them to create
a tree, a face, a river. The picture changes.
If he wipes the canvas, the painting is gone,
but the paint itself still exists. That makes
so much sense. So when a tree dies, the earth
and water and fire inside it don't actually die.
They just come apart and go somewhere else. Exactly.
Reality is a remix. Everything we see, this microphone,
your body, that volcano, is just a temporary
arrangement of the four roots. That sounds incredibly
modern. It's basically the law of conservation
of matter. Matter is neither created nor destroyed,
only transformed. It is the grandfather of that
law. He established the idea that the universe
is a closed system. Okay, so we have the building
blocks, the Legos, so to speak. Yeah. But Legos
don't just build themselves. If I dump a box
of bricks on the floor, they don't magically
turn into a castle. They just sit there. What
makes them move? This is his second stroke of
genius. He realized that matter needs energy
to move it. So he introduced two opposing forces,
love and Greek, philotes and strife, or nikos.
Love and strife. Again, these sound like emotions,
not physical forces. In his world, they are both.
He projected his human experience onto the cosmos.
Love is the force of attraction. It's what pulls
unlike things together. It mixes water with earth
to make mud. It binds people together in friendship.
And strife is the opposite. Strife is the separator.
It pushes things apart. It segregates. It separates
the oil from the vinegar in salad dressing. It's
a repulsive force. So the entire universe is
just a battleground between these two forces.
Yes. And it's not a static battle. It's a cycle.
Empedocles mapped out a whole cosmic history
that goes in a loop. It has four distinct stages.
Okay, let's walk through the stages. I want to
visualize this. Okay. Stage one is the sphere.
Imagine a time where love is completely, 100
% dominant. Strife has been pushed all the way
outside the universe. So every particle of earth,
air, fire, and water is perfectly mixed together.
Like a smoothie. A perfect, seamless smoothie.
There are no lumps, no distinctions, no sun,
no moon, no trees, no people. Just a perfect,
featureless sphere of being. It sounds peaceful,
but also kind of terrifying. There's no me in
the sphere. Exactly. It's divine. It's perfect.
But it's static. Nothing happens. Then comes
stage two, the intrusion of strife. Strife starts
to leak back in from the edges. Corruption begins.
Or the creation begins, depending on how you
look at it. Strife starts to cut into the sphere.
It begins to separate the elements. The smoothie
starts to curdle. Vortices form. This is likely
the Big Bang moment of his cosmology. Things
start spinning and separating out. And this leads
to stage three. Stage three is the world of phenomena.
This is where Empedocles believed we are living
right now. We are halfway between total unity
and total separation. We are in the war zone.
Yes. Love is trying to keep things together.
That's why your body doesn't just fall apart
into a pile of dust and water. But strife is
trying to pull them apart. That's why we have
death and decay. The tension between the two
creates the complexity of life. And then finally,
stage four. Stage four is total separation. This
is when strife wins for a time. Love is gone.
Imagine the universe organized into four massive
separate layers. A ball of pure earth in the
middle, surrounded by a shell of pure water,
then a shell of air, then a shell of fire. So
no mixing at all. No life. Nothing. Just dead
layers. And then. It doesn't just end there,
does it? No, because then love begins to creep
back in, mixing them all up again, and we start
heading back toward the sphere. It's a pendulum.
It just swings back and forth forever. A cosmic
heartbeat. expanding and contracting, uniting
and separating forever and ever. It's amazing
how he takes this physical theory and then applies
it to biology. Yeah. Because when I was reading
the notes on his theory of evolution, I honestly
thought I was misreading it. It sounds like a
horror movie. It really, really does. This is
the monster section of his philosophy. Right.
So Empedocles is trying to explain where animals
come from. But he doesn't say a god made a horse.
And he doesn't say a fish crawled onto land.
What does he say? He describes the early stages
of the world when love was just starting to mix
things up again from that state of separation.
He calls it the Lego phase, though obviously
he didn't use that word. Right. He says that
before whole animals existed, individual body
parts were just Wandering around. Wandering around.
Yes. He writes about heads without necks, arms
without shoulders, and eyes wandering alone bereft
of foreheads. I'm sorry. I'm picturing a giant
eyeball just rolling across the landscape. That
is absolute nightmare fuel. It is Hieronymus
Bosch meets ancient Greece. It's total chaos.
So what happens to these wandering limbs? Well,
they start bumping into each other. And because
love is the force of attraction, they stick together
randomly. This is what he calls the hybrid phase.
Random assembly. So you might get an arm attached
to an ear. Or much, much worse. Empedocles describes
creatures with double faces, offspring of oxen
with human faces, humans with ox heads, and creatures
of double sex. Man -faced oxen. It sounds like
the minotaur, but everywhere. Just these groaning,
mismatched monstrosities stumbling around. Exactly.
But here is the scientific brilliance hidden
inside the monster movie. He asks the question,
why don't we see... man -faced oxen walking around
today. Because they're terrifying. Because they
died. Empedocles argues that most of these random
combinations were not adapted to survive. The
man -faced ox maybe couldn't chew glass properly.
The head walking on arms couldn't reproduce.
So they perished. They were filtered out by nature.
Wait a minute. That is, that's natural selection.
It is the core mechanism of natural selection.
2 ,000 years before Darwin. Darwin said that
nature produces variations and the environment
selects the ones that work. Empedocles is saying
the exact same thing. Wow. He believed nature
produced these random monsters and only the ones
that happened to fit together correctly, the
ones where the teeth matched the stomach and
the legs could actually run, only those survived
to have babies. That is absolutely incredible.
He missed the slow change over millions of years
part, but he nailed the survival of the fittest
part. He did. He viewed the order we see in nature
not as a perfect design by a god, but as the
survivor of a massacre. The beautiful horses
and lions we see today were just the lucky few
who weren't monsters. That is a dark but brilliant
way to look at the world. It forces us to rethink
the history of science. We think of evolution
as a 19th century idea, but here it is in 450
BC written in poetry. So we've got physics, we've
got evolution. But Empedocles wasn't just observing
the outside world. He was deeply, deeply concerned
with the inside world. The soul. This is where
the shaman comes back in a big way. Empedocles
was a firm believer in metempsychosis. Which
is reincarnation. Transmigration of the soul,
yeah. He believed that the soul is an immortal
thing that travels through different shapes over
time. It can be a human, an animal, or even a
plant. Even a plant. Yes. Empedocles actually
claims to remember his past lives. There's a
very famous fragment where he says, For I have
already been a boy and a girl, a bush and a bird
and a mute sea fish. He remembers being a bush.
I wonder what that felt like. Photosynthesis
and vibes. Probably very peaceful until a goat
comes along. But for Empedocles, this isn't just
a fun past life story. Reincarnation was a punishment.
A punishment? How so? He believed that we, or
at least some of us, are what he called fallen
daemons. Daemons. Like demons. In Greek, a daemon
isn't necessarily evil. It's more like a divine
spirit. A minor god. Empedocles believed we used
to live in that perfect sphere of love. We were
divine and we were blissfully happy. But then,
we committed a crime. What crime did we commit?
The text suggests bloodshed. Or maybe perjury,
breaking a sacred oath. We trusted in strife.
We engaged in violence. And as punishment, we
were cast out of the sphere and forced to wander
this chaotic earth. So we were grounded. For
a very long time. The sentence is 30 ,000 seasons,
which... Probably means cycles. Wow. 30 ,000
seasons. That is a long time to think about what
you did. And you have to spend those seasons
cycling through mortal bodies. You're tossed
from the ocean as a fish to the air as a bird
to the land as a beast. The elements themselves
hate you. He writes, the force of the air pursues
them into the sea. The sea spits them onto the
threshold of the earth. Nobody wants the sinner.
Nobody wants you. You're in exile. This explains
the vegetarianism, doesn't it? It connects perfectly.
Empedocles was a militant vegetarian. But it
wasn't for health reasons or animal welfare,
as we think of it. It was a cosmic necessity.
Because if souls reincarnate into animals. Exactly.
If you kill a cow and eat a steak, you might
be killing and eating your late grandfather.
Or a fallen god who is serving his time. It's
essentially cannibalism. Spiritual cannibalism.
He writes this horrifying passage about a father
lifting up his own son, who has changed form
into an animal, and slaughtering him while saying
a prayer. He calls it the ultimate horror. raises
the stakes of dinner. It does. But notice the
consistency, right? In the sphere of love, everything
is united. There is no killing. In the world
of strife, we kill and eat each other. So by
being vegetarian, Empedocles is trying to reject
strife. He is trying to live according to the
law of love. He's trying to act like he's already
back in the sphere. Exactly. It's an act of rebellion
against the chaos of the world. It's beautiful
in a way. He sees every living thing as a brother
or sister in exile. It's a radical empathy that
flows directly from his physics. Okay, I want
to switch gears now. We've been very high concept
cosmic cycles, reincarnated bushes. Yeah. But
I want to talk about a specific kitchen utensil.
Ah, the klepsydra. The water thief. When I read
about this, I had trouble visualizing it. Can
you walk us through what this thing actually
is? Sure. Picture a sphere made of bronze, maybe
the size of a grapefruit or a large orange. Okay,
holding the bronze grapefruit in my mind. On
the bottom of the sphere, there are lots of tiny
holes, like a sieve or a colander. On the top,
there is a long, narrow neck, like a bottleneck,
with a single open hole at the very tip. Got
it. Siv on the bottom, one hole on top. Now imagine
you're Empedocles. You're playing with this thing
in a basin of water. You dunk the sphere underwater.
What happens? Water rushes in through the siv
at the bottom, right? Naturally. But what happens
if you put your thumb over the top hole before
you dunk it? If I cover the top hole and push
it down, the water can't get in, or very little
gets in. It stays mostly empty. Why? Well...
Because the air is trapped inside. It's pushing
back. The air is inside. Stop and think about
that statement for a second. To us, that's obvious.
But in 450 BC, most people, most philosophers,
thought air was nothing. It was void. Empty space.
Right. If a cup has no water in it, we say it's
empty. But Empedocles sees the water trying to
get in and something invisible is pushing it
back. The nothing is fighting the something.
And winning. And winning, exactly. Yeah. The
air effectively blocks the water. Then, if he
lifts his thumb off the top hole while it's still
underwater, what happens? The air rushes out
and the water rushes in. You can feel the air
against your finger. It's a physical thing. It's
such a simple experiment. A child could do it.
And that's the brilliance. He used a common household
tool, basically a ladle or a wine thief, to prove
a massive point in physics. Air is a corporeal
substance. It's a body. It takes up space. It
exerts pressure. He proved the invisible world
is physical. He eliminated the void from physics,
at least for a while. He showed that even when
things look empty, they are full of matter. And
he even applied this to the human body. He thought
breathing worked the same way, blood and air
moving in and out of pores, driven by pressure,
just like the Clepsydra. It really shows that
he wasn't just a mystic having visions in a cave.
He was an observer. He's running experiments.
He was. And this brings us to another one of
his scientific hits, light. Oh, right. The speed
of light. Well, the idea of the speed of light.
Empedocles was the first person we know of to
suggest that light travels. As opposed to what?
Just being there instantly? Teleporting. As opposed
to being instantaneous. Aristotle, much later,
argued that light is just a state of the air.
Like, if I open the door to a dark room, the
room is instantly lit. It happens all at once.
Right. Empedocles said, no, light is a substance.
It's a form of fire. It has to stream from the
sun to the earth. And if it moves, it must take
time to get here. He was right. It takes about
eight minutes for light to get from the sun to
us. He couldn't measure it, obviously. The idea
was probably inconceivable. But his intuition...
He thought we see things because tiny particles,
effluences, fly off objects and hit our eyes.
The high -five theory of vision. Something has
to physically touch you. Exactly. And he had
this quirky little add -on, this idea that, like,
is known by like. We see fire because we have
fire in our eyes. We perceive water because we
have water in us. So if I didn't have any fire
in my eye, I would be blind to a candle. That
was the theory. It's biologically wrong, of course,
but the core concept that sensation is a physical
interaction between the observer and the object
is the basis of all modern sensory science. It's
fascinating. He's right about the general mechanics,
like particles are moving, even if he's wrong
about the specific details, like fire in the
eyeballs. Exactly. He's building the foundation.
So we have this massive body of work, but there's
a mystery that plagued scholars for centuries.
It seemed like Empedocles had a split personality.
This is the two poems problem. Traditionally,
scholars thought Empedocles wrote two completely
different books. One was called On Nature, and
it was the science book physics. The Elements
Evolution. The textbook. Right. And the other
was called Purifications. And that was the religious
book reincarnation, vegetarianism, the fallen
demon. And it makes sense why people would think
they were separate. It's hard to imagine the
same guy writing about the pressure of air in
Eclipse, Sidra, and I was a bush once. It fits
our modern bias, doesn't it? We like to separate
science and religion. So historians just assumed
he had a scientific phase and then a religious
phase. Maybe he found religion in his old age
or something. But then. 1999 happened. The Strasburg
Papyrus. This is a real -life textual detective
story. It's so cool. What happened? Where did
they find it? In a library in Strasbourg, France,
scholars finally examined some papyrus fragments
that had just been sitting there neglected for
decades. They had been used to make a kind of
papier -mâché wreath for a mummy in Egypt. Wait,
they were mummy wrapping? Basically, yeah. In
antiquity, old scrap paper was often recycled
to make cartonage for mummies. So these fragments
were painstakingly peeled apart. And when they
read the Greek text, they realized it was Empedocles.
What did it say? This is the bombshell. They
found over 50 new lines of his poetry. And in
these fragments, the religious stuff about the
daemons and sin was woven directly into the scientific
stuff about the elements and the cosmic cycle.
So they weren't two different books. Or if they
were, the content wasn't separated into science
and religion. The Strasbourg papyrus showed us
that for Empedocles, physics was theology the
story of the fallen daemon is part of the story
of the cosmic cycle exactly you are a fallen
soul because of the force of strife you are reincarnating
because the elements are separating and mixing
in this stage of the cycle the cycle of your
soul and the cycle of the universe are the same
thing they're one unified story there's a profound
realization it means he wasn't a schizophrenic
thinker he was a unified thinker he was trying
to build a theory of everything To him, understanding
the four roots wasn't just chemistry, it was
the path to salvation. If you understand how
the universe works, you can purify your soul
and get back to the sphere of love. Science is
a spiritual practice. Precisely. So let's bring
us all back to the edge of the volcano. We started
with this image of a madman jumping into the
lava. But now, after looking at his work, who
do we see standing there? We see the bridge.
Empedocles stands right on the fault line between
the old world of myth and the new world of reason.
He uses the language of gods, Zeus, Hera, Nestus,
to explain the laws of matter, like the elements
in conservation. He gave us the four elements,
a theory that dominated science until the periodic
table was invented. He gave us the foundational
idea that the universe is a closed system. that
nothing comes from nothing. Things just get rearranged.
He gave us a preview of natural selection and
the survival of the fittest centuries before
anyone else. And he proved air exists with essentially
a kitchen ladle. And he did it all while wearing
bronze sandals and writing in Hicks Amateurverse.
He truly was one of a kind, a complete original.
As we wrap up, I want to leave you with a final
thought, something to chew on about that cosmic
cycle. Empedocles believed the sphere, that state
where love is totally dominant, was the perfect
state. It was heaven, utopia. Yes. Total unity.
No conflict. But in that state, we don't exist.
There are no individuals. There is no you, no
me, no deep dive to listen to. We're just a blended
smoothie. That's the irony, isn't it? Existence,
our specific individual lives, is only possible
because of strife. Strife. breaks the unity strife
creates the separation that allows me to be distinct
from you and for you the listener to be distinct
from us so in a strange way we owe our existence
to the bad guy of his cosmic drama we need a
little bit of cosmic conflict just to be ourselves
so the next time your life feels chaotic or things
feel like they are falling apart Maybe remember
Empedocles. That chaos isn't just a nuisance.
It's the only reason you're here at all. Strife
is what makes you, you. A provocative thought
to end on. Thanks for diving deep with us. Until
next time.