Welcome back.
Back in 1963, Life magazine asked author James Baldwin where he got his inspiration.
And I loved his response.
Baldwin said, quote, you think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world.
But then you read. You read a book.
It was reading books that taught me that the things that tormented me the most were the very things that connected me with all the other people who were alive or who have ever been alive.
In artist is a sort of emotional historian.
What a great quote. There's a related quote that I love from author Kelly Hayes who says quote, everything feels unprecedented when you haven't engaged with history.
That is so true. History's cast of characters and maybe the set design always changes.
But it's the same movie over and over again.
It's the same plot over and over again.
Everything feels unprecedented today when you haven't engaged with history.
That by the way was the big theme of my latest book, Same as Ever.
To me, the point of paying attention to history is not the specific details of certain events.
Because most of those details like the details of a certain recession or a certain war or a certain new technology, they're always random and they never repeat.
It's the big picture behaviors that recur in different eras and different generations and different societies.
That's what's interesting to pay attention to.
People were dealing with greed and fear a hundred years ago.
In the same way that they're going to be dealing with it, a hundred years from now.
In the more you see a behavior throughout history, the more you realize how ingrained it is in human behavior, which makes you more confident that it will be part of your future.
That I think is the only way to forecast the future with accuracy.
It's focusing on the behaviors and not the specific events.
I thought about this idea recently after reading a paper by a philosopher named Han-O-Sauer.
He criticizes philosophy's obsession with the ancient thinkers, like Plato and Aristotle those people, because he says they lived in a world of relative ignorance.
So not only were the ancient philosophers blind to most of modern science, which had not yet been discovered during their time, they knew little about other civilizations, which were often closed off from the rest of the world.
So Aristotle knew nothing about Chinese culture or biological evolution.
Socrates never saw a modern democracy, or of course had ever heard of social media.
They were blind to all these things.
Sauer writes, quote, We have good reason for thinking that historical authors were deeply wrong about almost everything.
We have statistical reasons for thinking that the best philosophers live now rather than in the past.
Given that we could be studying contemporary philosophers who are much less likely to be wrong about much fewer things, that we must rationally assumed that more of these philosophers live today than in the past.
I can appreciate part of this idea.
Of course there are topics that an average person today knows more about than an expert did even a hundred years ago to say nothing of 2000 years ago.
But this gets back to what you can actually learn from history.
What's great about reading old writers is not necessarily the wisdom of what they said.
It's comparing what people believed then versus what they believed today and seeing where it overlaps, trying to find things that never changed.
Marcus Aurelius once said, quote, We all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinions than our own.
Now I chose that quote because to be honest, it sounds like something that you would find written on an eleven dollar IKEA poster.
It's not that profound.
It's not that deep, to be honest.
But part of the value of reading something like that from Marcus Aurelius is that he said it almost 2000 years ago.
The age, the timelessness of it is what's important.
If that trite philosophy was true then and it's true today, then you know it's a fundamental part of how humans work.
And therefore of course it's going to be true for the rest of my life and the rest of your life.
So you should pay close attention to it.
A dull observation from history can become important when you realize that it is an enduring trait of human behavior.
And the opposite is true.
A current thinker, somebody alive today might say something that is complex and brilliant about say the midterm elections, but even if it's true, it might have the shelf life of a banana.
And so many things work just like that.
David Cemera, one of my favorite people from the podcast Founders, he once said quote, I don't read a story and say, oh, that person's dead now, I have nothing to worry about.
No, that personality type was alive then and then they're alive today.
And they will be alive in the future.
Human nature is constant.
That again, it's my favorite thing to find in history is when you find a behavior that reminds you of exactly what's going on today.
During the depths of the Great Depression in 1932, in Ohio lawyer and in Benjamin Roth wrote in his diary quote, people think if more money were printed, businesses would be better.
This is a false and vicious theory.
I am personally very much concerned with the question of inflation.
And it seems to me that there is a grave possibility that it will come unless the government at once balances its budget.
With an election coming, this seems out of the question.
Several months later in a different diary entry, he wrote quote, there is also considerable discussion about the new science of technology, which holds that new machinery has replaced many men in industry who will never find a job again.
I bring up those two passages because they are so similar to what people have said during modern recessions.
You could just copy and paste those paragraphs into any newspaper from 2008 or 2020 and they would fit right in.
And what's crazy is that Benjamin Roth felt the exact same way back in the 1930s.
When he was writing his Great Depression diary, he was struck by how similar the 1930s were to previous big recessions.
He wrote quote, I have done considerable reading about the depressions of 1837 and of 1873, I am amazed at the similarity to the conditions today.
One year later, he researched the Great Depression of 1893 and he wrote quote, I am again struck by the similarity.
The way that people responded to decline and how politicians behaved and how greed and fear controlled their investment decisions were identical to what they were in his era.
And what they were in his era are identical to what they are today.
That I think is some of the most valuable information that you can get your hands on.
Because of course, Benjamin Roth knew nothing about today's technology.
He knew nothing about the war in Ukraine or where the S&P 500 would trade in the year 2024.
It didn't even exist yet back in his day.
But he knew that economies have a long history of panic and sudden collapse that are driven by similar patterns of optimism, leading to debt and debt leading to crash.
It was the same in his day as it is today.
And the fact that he recognized it 90 years ago and it's still relevant today makes it critical information to learn from.
Because you know that if it tells our own future, the important thing is that somebody like Roth, who died in 1978, may teach you more about our future than a living analyst who deeply understands the technical detail of today's economy.
It's the opposite observation to the philosopher who said that all the old writers lived in a world of relative ignorance and therefore we shouldn't pay much attention to them.
I would draw actually the exact opposite conclusion.
Game designer Jane McMonigall once said quote, I've learned an important trick.
To develop foresight, you need to practice hindsight.
And you only get that deep appreciation of what never changes when you engage with history.
Open hour, one of the great long dead philosophers that sour night ignore, realize this when he himself said quote, the wise have always said the same things and fools have always done just the opposite.
That's it for this week.
We'll see you again next time.
