#37 The Lessons of History

So I recently read this book by Will Durant and Ariel Durant, and they wrote this book called The Lessons of History, where they basically took 5,000 years of history and compressed it all into 100 pages of a book. It's an incredible book. There's obviously some things I don't agree with in terms of their standpoint on certain things, but I think that their viewpoint is a very interesting viewpoint to look at through history. They have won the Pulitzer Prize from, um, and they've also won the Presidential Freedom Medal. And these people are some of the greatest historians the world has ever seen, or at least in our current time. And that's what people have said. And so I have about 11 highlights I want to go through in this short episode. I might make this an uncommon moment Because it's going to be on the shorter side. But I have about 11 highlights that I really want to just go through because one, I don't want to forget these. And two, it's important for like they put so much time, they've written like hundreds of pages of books on certain topics. You can look them up on Amazon. I'll include a link down below to get this book. It's like $10 for paperback. It's a really short book. You can probably read it in a weekend. It took me a couple of weeks just because I really wanted to digest it. But at the end of the day, this book is truly incredible. And the fact that they condensed that much time into this book, it's a no-brainer to read. Now, there are some parts I don't agree with, but I want to go through these highlights. And these highlights really stood out to me in certain parts of the book. So the first one is when sea power finally gives place to air power and transmit transport and war, we have seen one of the basic revolutions in history. So I believe they wrote this in like the '70s or '80s, I can't remember. I think it was 1968 if I were to be precise, if I'm remembering correctly. And they wrote this when we were going from— we didn't even really have Apple, we didn't have phones, but what you did see is there was airplanes, there was The so if we fast or if we rewind about couple thousand years, right? You look at this and sea power is what made a kingdom a kingdom. So you look at England, the fact that England, you know, went over to the United States, which is what it is now, which is the colonies, right? You sent over; they sent over the Mayflower, which now is legendary in American history. But you have this idea that because they sent it out, because Europe was a big power just because they had sea power or a navy or naval ships. And what's really interesting is they're saying based off all their research, when sea power finally gives way to air power or gives— finally gives place to air power and transport and in war. So we try— we fly across everywhere. We use drones, we use planes for war. We have seen one of the basic revolutions in history, and this is something that we have now seen in our current time and day. The next quote: The influence of geographic factors diminishes as technology grows. So when you think about your iPhone or computer, you're able to work from anywhere, message anyone at any time, call someone at any time. You can now, you know, you could call someone halfway across the world. It does not matter. It used to— you used to have to write letters, send it over through mail. It might not even make it. And there was no such thing as like an Amazon return if you bought something. Like, it is crazy how far we have progressed. And again, this quote, the influence of geographic factors diminishes as technology grows. Well, what's the other side of this? Well, the other side is that geographic factors were a main key for people like Britain. Britain, England was like an island and they had a great navy. And so they were able to go everywhere. They conquered a lot of people. Rome, same thing. But when you have technology, it really doesn't matter at that point what your geography is, because now we have nuclear weapons, we have sophisticated AI and systems with technology It doesn't really matter, and it actually diminishes the more technology grows. The next quote, this is on page 17: Man, not the Earth, mates civilizations. Man, not the Earth, mates civilizations. That's interesting because again, you know, the these geographic figures. Yes, you live in. You know, the United States or Canada or Mexico, wherever you're at. But at the end of the day, you know, people, a group of people, a unity of people make up a civilization, not necessarily the land that you're on. You know, not necessarily like there are, you know, there's people that pride the land. And as technology has grown, that has weakened, but it is interesting to read this quote. It's like people make up civilizations, not the geography necessarily. Now I really want to highlight this quote. It says, for this is the vital truth beneath its catchwords, that though men cannot be equal, their access to education and opportunity can be made more nearly equal. I love this because this is basically capitalism at its core. He will— Will Durant is saying that If you want to make a successful country, if you want a country to be successful, it's not this idea of democracy where we need government-funded schools, government-funded— you just go down the list— schools, churches, whatever it may be. It doesn't even have to be churches or schools, you know, government-funded programs. You, you have this push in America nowadays to go for government-funded grocery stores where everything is free and put on the American tax dollar. But what's fascinating about this is that the vital truth— what is the vital truth? That though men cannot be equal, because people like to play this game of if this guy is really, really rich, we're going to take him down a couple notches, and the poor person, we're going to bump him up a few notches— that is not the case at all. People Can be smart. People can be dumb. People can be super, super smart and play chess or 4D chess in the sense of like life, right? You're playing this game where you're thinking ahead, and the idea is that you might run into the fact that you know you might be thinking well there needs to be some equality. The thing is that though men cannot be equal, their opportunities can be equal, and that is why America is great. That is why capitalism is so great. It's because The opportunities can be equal, though men might not be equal in the sense everyone has equal worth. But in the sense of someone smarter, someone brings more GDP to an economy or more jobs, that's a lot different. But when you're saying, you know, this is the true thing of America, of capitalism, that their access to education and opportunity can be made more nearly equal. I thought that was really fascinating because that quote embodies America as it is, capitalism as it is, and this whole message that the rich need to be made like the poor or they need to give more to the poor and the poor need to have more government programs is like just not true at all. I think this next quote really embodies the whole idea of colleges as they are now. And what do I mean by that? Well, let's get into this quote. Once colleges were luxuries designed for the male half of the leisure class. Today universities are so numerous that he who runs may become a PhD. We may have not excelled the selected geniuses of antiquity, but we have raised the level and average of knowledge beyond any age in history. So what he's saying is basically Quantity over quality. We have, you know, we're probably not going to get a lot of Aristotles, a lot of Senecas, a lot of the people that you see in history, Alexander the Great. We're not going to get a lot of those, these great thinkers. But what we are going to get is we have raised the bar of knowledge. We're like, we are in an age, and I've said this in multiple past episodes now, we are at a time where we are the most gifted with knowledge we have ever been. You can go to your phone. Use AI and summarize a whole book, or you can go read a book right now online on a Kindle, or you can go to and just grab a book and read. Because back in the 1400s, Gutenberg's printing press, you had people— most people didn't have access to books. That was something for the rich. And you go through the whole time and it's like books and access to knowledge have been something that people have wanted access to, but they've never had it. Now we live in a, in a society and culture within the last 20-something years since the iPhone and the phone that now we have social media. So we are blessed and cursed at the same time. We are blessed with the fact that we can be the most knowledgeable in our field that we have ever been. But what is the flip side of that? Well, the flip side is that We don't know. We can get distracted so easily. And Seneca has talked about this. This is actually in my Seneca episode. I believe it's number 35. And this was one of my recent episodes. And the idea behind Seneca and what he was talking about is like, people have a hard time staying focused. And this was in, I believe, like 200 AD. And he's talking about this then. And what's crazy is we have iPhones and things to distract us even more. So we have to be even more diligent, even more focused, even more careful to really prevent things from distracting us, because this has been a human tendency for thousands of years to be distracted, to not be diligent. And so if we can really focus on what we've been given, whatever the, the purpose of your life has You know, is, right? Whatever you're meant to do, it's like being able to do that and not get distracted and being able— and, you know, it's tough to talk about because everyone gets distracted. I get distracted. But at times you really got to rein it in and just focus and you really got to focus. And I love doing these podcast episodes because they really push me. Like, I'll spend an hour just on one of these short episodes. I spent on one of my episodes, I got it up to— I recorded a 26-minute episode. I got it down to 13 minutes. It probably took me an hour to edit. And I love these episodes because I'm able to edit. I'm just super meticulous about almost everything, almost everything. And whether there's something that's not valuable, valuable to you as a consumer or you as a listener, it's like, I don't want You know, every single second I can save for you and for me listening back to this so I can get the most knowledge out of this episode when I come back to listen to it, it's like that is the most valuable that there is. And so this idea of focus, it's like really focus— focusing on what you're doing, the task at hand. And I've said this even in the running episode. These were in the— I think this was number 27, 28. Haruki Murakami's book about just focus. Like focus on the task at hand. That's a big key. And so going back to this, it's like we have raised that overall knowledge of everyone in the world, but what we don't have is people that think outside of the box, people that do things differently. We have amplified human tendencies of, you know, pride, envy. Like social media is a big cesspool of envy and pride. You go onto there and it's like, Oh, this person has something I don't have, and you want that. But, you know, then it can also amplify ambition and wanting to, you know, for me, I see David Sinner's podcast and I'm able to listen to that. I would've never been able to do that. But now that I can listen to it and learn about all these founders of history, I love that. I love listening to that. And that's something to aspire to. And now I wanna do my own thing with this podcast, but do it a little bit differently. So anyways, getting back to these, these quotes, I think that's a really interesting quote because colleges used to be luxury items for the rich and now they're just kind of a common thing that you're expected to go to. And if you don't, you're looked down upon. And that's really not the way that people should— young people should be pushed towards. You should be able to start a business if you want to. You should be able to go to college if it's needed, absolutely necessary. But if it's not, don't waste your time. Don't waste your money. Focus on what you want to do. That's the big key. So now both of them say in this next quote on the same page, consider education not as the painful accumulation of facts and dates and reigns, nor merely the necessary preparation of the individual to earn his keep in the world, but as the transmission of our mental, moral, technical, and aesthetic heritage as fully as possible To as many as possible for the enlargement of man's understanding, control, embellishment, and enjoyment of life. This is the idea of studying from the past. It's not this, you know, thing that you go to school for, because when you go to school, you hate learning about history. Why? Well, it's because they push these dates. They push these, like, who, you know, who was the King of England? When did he reign? Why, you know, and they push this as like what he says, a painful accumulation of facts of these certain history dates. But then there's also, you don't want it to be the other way where it's, you're just trying to prepare to earn a keep in the world. The idea is that you want this to be like a culture. You're, you're learning of a culture of a time. of a certain part of history. And he talks about it as a transmission of our mental— the mental state. What was the mental state of the people at that time? The moral state. What was their beliefs? You know, whether it was religion or their laws and codes, you know, technical, like how did they do certain things? What did they— like, as a technical example, if I were to guess, like, what did they ride around in? Was it boats? Was it cars? Was it horses? You know, and then aesthetic. What was the, you know, what were their clothing? What was their clothing like? What was, you know, the beauty of their houses? Like you are trying to learn from history and C.S. Lewis episode number 29 that I did, Why We Read, is actually really important. It's like, why do we learn about history? Well, it's because we wanna learn from the past. We wanna gain the 10,000 that you're getting when you read. You're getting to see 10,000 people's viewpoints potentially in one book because you're learning from the narrator and or you're learning from the author who is writing in this perspective. Maybe it's a true story, so you're learning about what he thought and what these people said to him, and you're learning through this one book all these people. But it's important to study the past. Why is that important? Because you get to see what the past was like. And another quote. That I don't know if he says in here, it's like, well, actually there's this big controversy. I kind of look at it, I kind of look at this as a controversy, but it's not really. It's, does history repeat itself or does human nature repeat itself, or is it both? Does— and I love what he says, and I think I have this in here, it's that history doesn't, you know, history repeats But it's in very large, like abstract, like, oh, this is very similar to this time. But I also think human nature does. When someone's being very prideful, you could probably read history books about someone being very prideful and point to them saying, oh, that is what that person is like. So I think it's a both. You know, you can look at human nature repeats itself and history repeats itself. And going back to this, it's like you want to understand the past and Really, by understanding the past, you can enjoy your life more because, you know, you've learned from people's mistakes, you've learned from what they've done wrong, and now you can take their advice. You know, and if you're a founder of a company or someone wanting to start a company, you can read about people who've started billions of billions of dollars of companies. You can learn about J.D. Rockefeller, who started the world's first billion-dollar company, if I'm not mistaken, and learn about his tactics, or Napoleon in war. And a lot of people in France, at least, Don't like Napoleon, but you gotta admire that Elon Musk likes Napoleon in his tactics of war and handling people. There's this idea that you want to study from the past so you can learn from people's mistakes and not make those mistakes, so you can better set up the future generations of you know humanity. So going on to the next quote: If progress is real despite our whining, it is not because we were born any healthier. Better or wiser than infants were in the past, but we are born to a richer heritage, born on a higher level of that pedestal which the accumulation of knowledge and art raises the ground and support of our being. The heritage, the heritage rises, and man rises in proportion as he receives it. So what they are talking about in this quote is we are built upon thousands and thousands of years. Of human history, we are built on the Roman philosophers, the you know Marcus Aurelius. We are built on America, the founding of America. We are built on you know Genghis Khan and Napoleon, and you know Europe and the whole East, right? So we are built upon that, but it's not because we were born any better; it's because we were born in a richer heritage, and that's why we need to study the past because we've been given all this knowledge. C.S. Lewis talks about this. We've been given all this knowledge. And to kind of reject it and say, no, we don't want that, is like rejecting the rich heritage like he's talking about that we've been given. And it's not because we're better, but it's because they have given us this rich heritage. And in turn, we want to leave a richer heritage to our children's children. And then you re— you really do a deep dive. And I love this last part. The heritage rises and man Rises in proportion as he receives it. What does this remind you of? Well, technology revolutions, you know, the Industrial Revolution, and the idea that like you go from a train to— you went from like the Industrial Revolution with trains, and then you went to cars, and you went through all these revolutions. Now we're going through the AI revolution. We went through the internet revolution, um, the dawn of the internet, the the era of the internet and the 2000s. And now we have trillions of dollars of company or trillions of dollars of worth in like Amazon, who is solely online. So this idea that, you know, we are built on richer heritage, we want to leave a better heritage for our children's children and future generations. But also the reason why we have been like this is because of those richer heritage. And the more you have a heritage, or the more the heritage rises, man rises in proportion of that. And now we're at the point of AI. And he says, history is above all else the creation and recording of that heritage. Progress is its increasing abundance, preservation, transmission, and use. This idea is you want to be able to write a book. You want to be able to read a book. You like transmission. Transmission, it like you're preserving the things that happened in Rome, all the writings. Transmission, it gets to us nowadays and then we're able to use it. And the more you can create a heritage of your civilization, then you're able to give more to You know, future generations. Now, this is the last quote that I had for the book, but it says, if a man is fortunate, he will, before he dies, gather up as much as he can of his civilized heritage and transmit it to his children. And that's all I'll leave you with because that's just such a powerful quote. You want to gather up as much knowledge as you can and transmit that to your children. And really give it to him. So I really, really like this book. I think it's a great book. There obviously there's some things I don't agree with within the book. Take it with your own viewpoint, but it is a really good book. It is fascinating to me that they squeezed 5,000 years within 100 pages. That's just crazy. And then I was able to squeeze this podcast episode. Into however long this has been. So I think it's truly incredible. But thank you for listening to this, and I will talk to you guys again soon.