Ancient Rome vs. Peptides

Happy Monday!

One of my favorite activities is reading. The most recent book I've been reading, completely unrelated to peptides, sparked the idea for today's email.

Stay with me because I promise it will make sense by the end.

The most popular drug in human history had more than seventy ingredients.

The ingredients included Viper flesh, opium, cinnamon, wine, and honey. They were cooked together and then aged for years before anyone would use it.

It was called theriac. It started as a snakebite antidote and turned into a cure for everything.

Galen, the most famous physician in the Roman world, claimed it could treat chronic headaches, vertigo, hearing loss, bad vision, and rabies.

He also said it could calm the sea.

And his most important patient took it every single day.

Marcus Aurelius.

Yes, Marcus Aurelius, the emperor and Stoic who wrote Meditations.

Galen said he used it greedily, almost like food.

History

I've been reading SPQR by Mary Beard, which is a history of ancient Rome.

I've always been drawn to books about history, not because history repeats itself. It doesn't.

Humans repeat themselves.

The technology changes. The empires rise and fall. The molecules get better. But the species running the whole thing hasn't changed much in a very long time.

Theriac stuck around until the late 1800s.

Eighteen hundred years of the smartest people alive taking a snake-and-opium paste and swearing by it.

The Romans

Interestingly enough, Roman writers were complaining about moral decline for CENTURIES while the empire was still growing.

Cato, Sallust, and Livy all remarked that their ancestors were tougher, they had become complacent, and that luxury would lead to their downfall.

However, the same Romans writing about how soft everyone had gotten were also lining up for the miracle paste.

Complaining about the decline and buying the cure-all. At the same time. From the same people.

All those years ago, humans still knew one inherent flaw of human nature.

Even though humans know what to do, they will do anything to find a shortcut for the unavoidable obstacles of life.

Uncomfortable

Theriac wasn't nothing. It had opium in it. People took it and genuinely felt better, which is exactly why it lasted eighteen hundred years.

But feeling better and being better are two different things.

Theriac was their Ozempic.

A GLP-1 will pull forty pounds off somebody who changed nothing about their life.

BPC-157 will get a tendon feeling better while you keep doing the thing that hurt it.

Peptides work, and that's the problem!

They work well enough to let you postpone the reckoning.

The bill still shows up, you just get a few more years of not looking at it.

The Foundation

I love peptides. I've built a lot of my life around them, and I use them. You'd be hard-pressed to find a bigger fan of peptides than me.

But they sit on top of a healthy foundation. They don't replace it.

You have to train.

Real weight, real progression, for years, not a six-week block when you feel motivated.

You have to sleep.

Actual sleep, on a schedule, in a dark room, for at least 7 hours per night.

You have to be honest with yourself about alcohol consumption.

You have to eat protein and real food most of the time.

You have to run blood work and actually look at it. Not order a panel and let it sit in your inbox.

None of that is new.

None of it is interesting.

Nobody's going viral for making a video about it.

But just like 2,000 years ago, the same principles still apply.

And unfortunately, most humans still behave just like they did 2,000 years ago.

Final Thoughts

I don't think peptides, when used intelligently, are going to be anybody's downfall.

In fact, I think they're going to be some of the best life extension tools we've ever had, and I think the next twenty years are going to be remarkable.

But I've watched enough people now to see the pattern clearly.

The guy who fixes his foundation and then adds peptides keeps improving for decades.

The guy who reaches for peptides instead of fixing his foundation buys himself a few good years and then runs out of road.

Both of them feel great for a while.

Only one of them is actually going somewhere.

So would Marcus Aurelius have been a peptide user?

I think so.

He had access to the fanciest compound on earth, and he took it daily.

BUT…He also got up every morning and did the hard thing anyway, and wrote a book about it that people are still reading eighteen hundred years later.

The Theriac didn't write Meditations.

And your peptides can't do the work for you.

Have a great week!

Best,

Hunter Williams

Sources

Beard, M. SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome. Liveright, 2015.

Karaberopoulos, D., et al. "The theriac in antiquity." The Lancet, 2012. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(12)60846-0/fulltext

Galen, De Theriaca ad Pisonem / De Antidotis (on Marcus Aurelius's daily use)