The Magician and the Emperor

Derren Brown is a magician, mentalist, and the author of Happy, and this series follows him through Marcus Aurelius's private notebook, the Meditations. Before he opens Book One, Brown explains what stoicism actually asks of a person and why the current craze around it, especially among young men, gets the emperor's own philosophy backwards. Then he turns to his own strange career, the years spent fooling audiences for a living, and starts building the case for why a man who lies onstage might have something true to say about a Roman emperor's most private thoughts.