What I've Learned From Tides of History

Introduction to Audible

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0:12The mud hit Sukolgir in the back of the head. It was slightly gooey with moisture left over from the Euphrates flood, and the bulk of it landed directly on the man's bald spot, where it stuck for a moment before sliding off. On its way back to the ground, the mud left a streak along the farmer's already stained woolen skirt. The garment had been white at the beginning of the day, but digging a new irrigation ditch was dirty work. The farmer spun around and glared at his daughter. She smiled back at Sukolgir, and his glare melted away.

0:44He couldn't stay mad at her, no matter how much mud she flung on him. Lala was his joy. That was what her name meant in their Sumerian language, but it was true in a literal sense as well. Well, he lived for her, his only daughter. And at least she was digging. That smile reminded Sukolgir of Lala's mother, dead of a fever two years ago, and he turned away from the girl before she could see his face twist with the pain of the memory. It wasn't her fault that she looked so much like Ninkala, far more so than her two younger brothers.

1:16The boys were farther down the ditch, playing with their wooden spades more than doing any actual digging. Sukolgir couldn't blame them. He'd been the same way before he was ten years old, no matter how many times his father had clouded him on the ear and told him to get to work. Sukolgir barked at the boys to set to digging, but there was no malice in it. He'd certainly never lay a hand on them, unlike his father. The old man had always drunk too much palm wine, and he'd come home from the tavern angry. Neither Sukolgir nor his brothers, and certainly not their mother, had mourned his death.

1:47His children would think better of him, Sukolgir thought, leaning on his spade and taking a brief rest. His back ached after a week of steady digging, and he was glad for the break. He worked long hours in their field and orchard, honored the gods, and kept to his word. Unlike his father, he took wine in moderation, and never woke up bleary-eyed and ready to lash out at everyone around him. Their reed hut was immaculately clean and orderly, the wood and stone tools stacked neatly against the wall.

2:18The straw bedding changed every few days. Nobody flinched at the sound of a raised voice. Sukolgir's back spasmed. He gasped and leaned further onto the spade. He felt a hand on his arm. It was Lala, and she was looking at him with concern in her eyes. Immediately, he stood up, ignoring the pain stabbing downward through his hips and legs. He was fine, he said, picking up another spade full of sticky mud and flinging it up onto the growing bank. The end of their new canal was just ahead, the junction with the main channel flowing down the embankment from the Euphrates.

2:53With this new canal, Sukolgir could irrigate another field of wheat, or at least draw off enough water to create some scrubby grazing for the sheep and goats. He could afford to hire a laborer and buy some livestock. Then, maybe, he wouldn't have to work until his back ached. Until then, Sukolgir swallowed the pain and sank his spade back into the muck, flung it up and over his shoulder, and dug down again. Over and over, spade full after spade full, cubit by cubit, Sukolgir dug.

3:24Lala alongside him every step of the way. He would finish tomorrow, he thought. The sun was setting, he was tired, everything ached, from his muddy feet to his slowly expanding bald spot. The boys were filthy from head to toe. He had gone to the neighbors earlier and traded a basket full of dates for flatbread and lamb. It was time to eat and rest, at least for a short while. Well, there was always another task to do, and Sukolgir welcomed it. You know that moment when you order food and suddenly everyone around you gets very interested in your dinner?

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Welcome to Tides of History

5:12Hi, everybody. From Audible, welcome to another episode of Tides of History. I'm Patrick Wyman. Thanks so much for joining me today.

5:24I sat down to write the first episode of Tides of History exactly nine years ago. At that time, I was only nine months out of my PhD program and had about a dozen episodes of Fall of Rome, my first history podcast, under my belt. I had no conception of how many hundreds of episodes and millions of words I would write and record. Even the idea of spending the next decade working on a single show was beyond my wildest dreams. A great many things were past the horizon of my imagination and understanding then. In point of fact, I'm embarrassed at how little I knew about a huge swath of topics,

5:59including subjects on which I thought I was reasonably well-informed. That was the first lesson Tides of History taught me. The importance of humility. There's a literature on everything, every single thing you can imagine. And despite my professional training, I had been exposed to a far smaller portion of human history than I realized. I didn't know how deposit banking worked in the late Middle Ages, what Christopher Columbus's mental world really looked like, or how the chattel principle functioned in the early modern Atlantic world.

6:30When we approach a new area of study or interest, it's incumbent on us, the learners, to admit to ourselves how much there is around us to learn. In a world dominated by the Dunning-Kruger effect, the idea that the ignorant have no idea how truly ignorant they are, while the knowledgeable underrate their command, the most unique thing we can be is truly curious and open about the limits of our knowledge. I don't know is a perfectly acceptable answer to a question. I'll find out and get back to you soon is even better.

7:01The second thing I learned from making Tides of History was the centrality of storytelling to popular history. I spent most of our last scripted episode waxing rhapsodic on this topic, and I won't regurgitate it again, except to note that story is the foundation on which popular history builds. The spine that provides coherence to a morass of information that would otherwise be lost on the reader or listener. The third lesson Tides of History taught me relates not to the mechanics of knowledge acquisition or the methods of producing popular history content.

7:32It's about the nature of the past, how we know history at a basic, fundamental level, and why it matters in the grand scheme of things. Leaving aside the fact that history is interesting, a statement with which I fervently agree, I genuinely believe that history is important and useful, or at least that it should be. If you're listening to this, you probably agree with that too.

Why History Matters

7:55In today's episode, we're going to talk about that aspect of the human past. Why history isn't just another Marvel Cinematic Universe or Star Wars galaxy to which we can escape for some time away from the concerns of the present. How we can use history to better our understanding of the present and apply it as a tool to make sense of our problems today. And how engaging with the reality of the past, what people did to and for one another, makes us better and more empathetic people. I'm not talking here about the simple idea of those who don't remember the past are doomed to repeat it.

8:27That's a cliche. And while cliches aren't necessarily wrong, they are reductive and incomplete. We can and should do better than that. Let's start with that cliche, because I think it's a fairly common position among history enthusiasts, myself included. Why is it wrong, or more accurately incomplete, to say that those who don't remember the past are doomed to repeat it? The simple answer is that the past doesn't repeat itself, in any straightforward sense.

8:58Our ability to predict what will happen in the future on the basis of past events is pretty limited. The real world is not an equation where we plug in specific past situations as variables and then get an answer as to how things will go as we move forward in time. We are not living in 1930s Germany, the waning days of the Roman Empire, the early modern world amid the ferment that accompanied the emergence of the printing press, or any other past society. We are living in the here and now. Our place and time differs from any past point of comparison

9:30we might choose in so many ways that the act of comparing quickly becomes an exercise in absurdity. If we want to stick with the metaphor of an equation, the problem we immediately run into is the sheer number of variables, ranging from global and regional climatic conditions to the populations and population density of the societies being compared to the specific political formats involved in decision-making. Assume we wanted to talk about falling empires in the present. To illuminate where we stand today, we decide to compare it to the end of the Roman Empire in the West.

10:04Even before we get to issues like technology, social organization, cultural values, and all the other thousand things that shape a society in foundational ways, we have to ask what we're actually comparing. What does it mean for an empire to fall? Are we talking about losses of territory? The waning of political forms? Transformations of the norms that govern social relations? Shifts in the ethnic makeup of a polity? Some combination of those things? Or something else entirely?

10:35How quickly do those things need to happen for us to call it a fall? To return to our cliché, in what ways are we doomed to repeat the fall of the Roman Empire by not knowing about it? This gets at one of the cliché's major weaknesses. The more important the process we're trying to understand, the bigger it looms in the past and the present, the less apt any past parallel we might choose is going to be. The comparison is going to fall apart at some point because there are way, way too many points of differentiation

11:07between the two places and times we're trying to compare. This is where I like to turn to another wonderful concept about the past. The specific quote is often attributed to Mark Twain, but as far as I know, there's nothing to suggest he actually said it. Still, it's pretty good. The past doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes. Instead of looking to the past for direct parallels to our present experience or for predictions of the future, we are looking for rhymes. Echoes might be a better word, in that we're searching for the hints of familiarity reverberating through time and space,

11:41the aspects of past societies and their experiences that might illuminate our own. Those pasts are illuminating not because they're direct analogs, but because they make us think and give us a variety of potential pathways for analysis. To return to our metaphor of the equation, we're not going to be able to plug in values for variables, but at least we can try to figure out what the relevant variables actually are. Maybe those pathways of analysis will fit our purposes of trying to illuminate the present. Maybe they won't.

12:12Either way, though, we've moved past the reductive idea of history repeating itself and onto something that better appreciates the messiness of the real world. Now, comparative history is a real field. I did a course on it in graduate school with a few of my colleagues and spent an entire semester working through its mechanics and implications. It relies on the systematic comparison of two or more past societies or situations, like slavery in the antebellum South and Russian serfdom, at great length. It lays out the precise ways in which the Comparanda are and are not alike.

12:46The reason we don't see more explicit comparative history is because doing it well is really, really hard. You have to know both of the contexts you're comparing deeply, and in the end, it's often difficult to even isolate the particular variable or aspect of society that you want to explore, like unfreedom in the Russian and American cases. We don't have to do anything that systematic for history to be useful in the broad sense, but the limitations of comparative history as a discipline are a good reminder for those of us seeking to use it that it's not a plug-and-play situation.

13:19But even if what we get out of our knowledge of the past are rhymes or echoes rather than repeat performances, that's still extraordinarily valuable. The world is a complicated place. Figuring out what's happening, much less what to do about it, is a difficult task. History is an absolutely essential piece of that. How are we ever going to understand, say, voting rights, voting patterns, and race in the United States today without knowing the history of racial segregation and civil rights after the Civil War? We're not going to make sense of

13:52Ukraine and Russia by starting our studies in 2022, 2014, or even 1991. South Africa's history doesn't begin with Mandela's release from prison. And those are just the most direct and obvious cases. In far more instances, history is providing us with tracks to follow into the jungle of the unknown future. Hints about possible directions things might go. Vague ideas that allow the disparate pieces of the present to fall into a coherent pattern that we can understand.

14:24We need all the help we can get, and history has an enormous amount to offer. Thousands upon thousands of years of people trying stuff, sometimes failing and sometimes succeeding, but always leaving those of us who come after with something to take from their experiences.

14:49Whether you're exploring your current fascinations or discovering new ones, Audible has all the stories that'll introduce you to your most fascinating self. Tap into a whole new world of heated conversations with a saucy Romanticy series. Become your friend group's sci-fi expert on the latest blockbuster book-to-screen adaptation. Or find unexpected reveals through the exclusive episodes of a viral true crime podcast. However you choose to listen, Audible keeps you fascinated, so you can be just as fascinating. All in one easy app, with plans now starting at $8.99,

15:23you'll get access to over 1 million audiobooks and podcasts, including trending bestsellers, the hottest new releases, and exclusive podcasts you won't find anywhere else. Sign up now to become a member and get any audiobook every month, plus exclusive podcasts. Plans now start at $8.99. Audible. Be fascinated. Be fascinating. I'm Leon Nafok, best known as the host and co-creator of podcasts Slow Burn, Fiasco,

15:55and Think Twice, Michael Jackson. I'm here to tell you about my show, Final Thoughts, Jerry Springer, whose name is synonymous with outrageous guests, taboo confessions, and vicious onstage fights. But before The Jerry Springer Show became a symbol of cultural decline, its namesake was a popular Midwestern politician and a serious-minded idealist with lofty ambitions. Through dozens of intimate and revealing interviews with those who knew Springer best, I examined Springer's lifelong struggle to reconcile his TV persona with his political dreams and aspirations. Named one of the

16:29best podcasts of the year by The New Yorker and Rolling Stone, Final Thoughts, Jerry Springer is a story about choices. How we make them, how we justify them to ourselves, and how we transcend them, or don't. Listen wherever you get your podcasts, or binge the whole series ad-free right now on Audible. Start your Audible subscription in the Audible app.

Understanding History

16:49History is nothing more or less than the record of what people have been doing on this planet. For the most part, history refers to the last 5,000 years or so, since the dawn of writing in Mesopotamia and Egypt. Anything before that is prehistory, but I'm far less convinced of the importance of that divide than I was 10 years ago. From my perspective, anything that happened before the present is history, and we can learn about it through a variety of tools. Written texts are just

17:22one of those tools, and often not the most essential or appropriate for the task at hand. We've got to use everything at our disposal, including texts and archaeological evidence and anything else we can get our hands on. What matters is learning about what people have done, how they've organized their societies, how they've interacted with other groups, what practices they've relied on to survive, how they've innovated and adapted to new technologies, what steps they've taken to deal with changing environmental conditions.

17:52Human beings are extremely variable at every level from social organization to religious beliefs to subsistence practices and everything in between. One of the primary tasks of the historian, and even the layperson interested in history, is to make some headway in understanding just how different people can be through time and space. Very little about our world, how we live and act, is set in stone. Far more varies, whether we're talking about the crops people choose to grow, what deities they worship, who makes decisions for the

18:27group, what roles men and women are expected to play, and the thousand other details that make each society unique. The more we learn about past societies, the more we realize that they weren't like us in some pretty profound ways. I've spent a lot of time talking about slavery on tides over the past few months, and even more on my other show, Past Lives. One of the truly depressing realizations I had over those months of research was how few people throughout history have explicitly argued against owning and exploiting other human beings. A great many of us take for granted the

19:00idea that human life is supposed to have inherent value. If something that basic shouldn't be seen as a given, then how many other aspects of life are contingent and specific? Practically everything. The record of the past belongs to all of us, the entire human species. It is a resource to be used, to test our ideas about what's inevitable and immutable, and glimpse the spectrum of possibilities that people with our exact capabilities can attempt. This, to me, is where the ideas of echoes

19:32and rhymes really help us. We're not looking for direct parallels or answers to our burning questions in the vast store of examples we see in the human past. We're looking for starting points, ideas that we can work with, approaches that have been tried, fodder for brainstorming and thinking through the enormous issues that face us individually and collectively. That's a heck of a lot harder than pointing to a past situation and shouting that everything's going to turn out just like Europe in July of 1914, or the United States in the fall of 1860, or the Roman Empire in 376 AD. But it's much more intellectually defensible.

20:10I said something along these lines in last week's episode, and I hope it didn't come off as too harsh, but there's a huge difference between trying to actually understand something and knowing enough buzzwords to signal social status. Employing history to illuminate the present isn't a matter of casting about for a parallel that makes the user sound smart or authoritative, but about actually illustrating something. That starts with knowing the limits of what history can do for us. That might be surprising to hear from a historian who spent a long time making history content, but knowledge has many enemies.

20:44Ignorance is one, but I'd argue that falsely claiming special knowledge is substantially more dangerous. Just think about how the Founding Fathers are used in American political discourse. We can know a great deal about what that specific group of people thought and did. Many good books and just as many bad ones have been written on the topic. It's not a mystery what those guys thought about freedom of religion, slavery, the relationship of states to the federal government, or a dozen other important topics on which their thinking laid the groundwork for the United States to come. And yet, the Founding Fathers show up regularly

21:19as vague figures to whom politicians appeal for support, whether we're talking about stump speeches, Supreme Court decisions, or random internet arguments. Only rarely do the arguments ascribed to the Founding Fathers have any real bearing on life in the later 18th century or even what they actually said. The Founding Fathers exist today as a repository of authority for national myths, not living, breathing people who once ate, drank, laughed, argued, and were quite often wrong. That is precisely

21:49the danger I'm talking about here. When history becomes myth, it loses its grounding in the real world in which the people, ideas, and issues under consideration actually existed. It's unfortunate to say, but you can't really argue against myth by using history. That's something I've learned time and again while making this show over the past nine years. The folks who really want the Founding Fathers to have been card-carrying Christians who desired a Christian nation forevermore are never going to care what the Founding Fathers actually said or wrote about Muslims or Hindus. People who don't like

22:25immigration and blame the Roman Empire's fall on immigration don't actually care about real immigration into the Roman Empire, a thing that happened all the time for centuries without the collapse of political structures. There's a certain genre of myth-busting history out there that purports to correct the flawed record, with the implication that knowing the truth will set us free. I regret to inform you all that no matter how patiently you explain, how diligently you cite your sources and explain your reasoning, a substantial portion of the people you're trying to reach will

22:55never be convinced. The purposes that myth serves in defining identity and justifying the present matter a lot more than whatever facts or compelling interpretations of the actual past we might put forth. History, what we can really know about those times, is necessary to fight against pernicious myths, but it simply isn't enough. There's a line from Season 3, Episode 12 of The Wire, one of my favorite and, objectively, among the greatest TV series of all time. A character named Slim Charles says,

23:26If it's a lie, then we fight on that lie. Time and again, present and past, we see people fighting on the lie. The lie that God or Allah or Ares inevitably grants victory to the faithful. That Roman victory was eternal and always guaranteed. That the group living in the next valley over absolutely had to be exterminated and a thousand other things. What never changes is the willingness to fight on the lie so long as it takes people where they want to go. Easily disproved lies about the past don't persist because nobody has taken the time

23:59to correct them. They persist because they serve purposes for the people who espouse and deploy them. That was true a thousand years ago, it was true three thousand years ago, and it's true today. Perhaps even more so, given the choose-your-own-adventure style of media environment we all inhabit. Imagining alternative worlds to the one we live in is difficult for everyone. So accustomed are we to normalizing everything around us. But it's unthinkable when one carries the unshaken belief that things have to be this way, and in fact, ought to be this way.

24:31This belief, rather than the correction of myths or simple utility for predicting the future and avoiding past mistakes, is what knowledge of history actually fights. It's why history is worth studying. Things do not have to be as they are at this moment. There are other possibilities, other ways of living in the world and with each other. Sometimes those possibilities are worse, and we don't want to go back to them. That really is a lesson we can learn from history.

25:01If studying the system of interstate relations in which the Roman Republic existed taught me anything, it's that an anarchic, zero-sum contest between states is full of war, violence, and terror. The Romans, Syracusans, Carthaginians, Gauls, Greeks, and Macedonians who inhabited that world couldn't imagine an alternative in which annual wars and mass enslavement were not normal facts of life. That was not a better world. My great-great-great-grandparents living in less-than-ideal conditions in rural Ireland couldn't have imagined widely available vaccines to prevent

25:36infant and adolescent deaths. We know what that world looked like, and we don't have to go back. In many other cases, however, the past offers some inspiration. The fisherfolk and farmers who inhabited the Andean coastline for millennia learned how to build dense settlements and vast monuments in one of the world's harshest environments, and did so sustainably for thousands of years. I can think of dozens of past societies that had healthier attitudes toward death and the deceased than seems to be the norm in 21st century America. The past is most useful when we treat it as a repository of good and bad, a series of tools

26:12that help us better understand our world and the range of our possible actions within it. We don't have to be limited to what we're used to. There are other options, and the past offers us ways of thinking and behaving that we know have been tried before. They're an inspiration, and one of our most precious collective resources as a species. Whether you're exploring your current fascinations or discovering new ones,

26:44Audible has all the stories that'll introduce you to your most fascinating self. Tap into a whole new world of heated conversations with a saucy romantic-y series. Become your friend group's sci-fi expert on the latest blockbuster book-to-screen adaptation. Or find unexpected reveals through the exclusive episodes of a viral true crime podcast. However you choose to listen, Audible keeps you fascinated, so you can be just as fascinating. All in one easy app, with plans now starting at £5.99. You'll get access to over 900,000 audiobooks and podcasts, including trending bestsellers,

27:19the hottest new releases, and exclusive podcasts you won't find anywhere else. Sign up now to become a member and get any audiobook every month, plus exclusive podcasts. Plans now start at £5.99. Audible. Be fascinated. Be fascinating.

27:39I'm Raza Jaffrey, and in the new season of The Spy Who, we tell the story of Dr. A.Q. Khan, the spy who sold nuclear secrets to Iran. He was the scientist spy who stole nuclear technology from the Netherlands and used them to give Pakistan a bomb. But he didn't stop there. He became a black market atomic salesman, a fix-it man for rogue states seeking nuclear weapons, including Iran, Libya, and North Korea. And that left the CIA and MI6 in a race against time to put him out of business

28:14before the world's most wayward regimes get hold of the world's most destructive weapons.

28:22Follow The Spy Who now, wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also listen to the full season of The Spy Who Sold Nuclear Secrets to Iran early and at free on Audible. The greatest lesson I've drawn from Making Tides of History

Lessons from Making Tides

28:45flows directly out of that last insight. The idea that the past offers us countless examples, comparanda, concepts, and ways of life that we can learn from in fashions large and small. But that only works if we accept that on a fundamental level, the people of the past were like us in terms of the range of their physical, intellectual, and emotional capabilities. If you took someone from ancient Rome and raised them in a suburban household today, they would be indistinguishable from anybody else you saw around you.

29:15The same goes for the children of ancient Egyptian farmers or Austronesian maritime explorers. It's even true for a Neanderthal, who would probably get a second glance if you pass them on the street due to appearance alone, but otherwise hardly lack the mental capabilities necessary to function today. The reverse is also true. If we take an infant born in a hospital in the Bronx, travel back in time to ancient Athens, and raise that infant in classical Greece, the child will be indistinguishable from those actually born in Athens 2,500 years ago.

29:46People are people in every way that really matters. Whatever differences might exist at a genetic level between populations and groups, and I have yet to see convincing arguments on that front, they're far less important than what we share, a baseline level of cognitive, moral, and physical ability that hasn't changed much in the past 40,000 years, if not more. If we accept that this is true, and I fail to see how anyone with deep knowledge of past societies could really dispute it,

30:18then there are all sorts of implications for how we relate to those who came before us and what we ought to take from their lives and experiences. The first is that since past people were like us, those past people were no better or worse than we are today. They were simply different. That's not to say our predecessors on this planet always made good choices, came up with intelligent ideas, fought only necessary wars, or behaved in ways that we find palatable. Very much the opposite. The fundamental insight is that people did what they did,

30:50whatever those things were, for reasons that made good sense to them. We're never going to be able to fill in every gap in reasoning or assumption about the proper order of things that has slipped into the cracks of the textual and archaeological record over the millennia, but we should at least assume that they had some idea what they were up to. I realize this sounds extremely basic, but bear with me for a moment. When we look at what remains from past societies, whether those are texts, building foundations, burials, butchered animal bones,

31:20or microscopic traces of plants, we're not exactly getting the full picture. We're certainly not seeing what the people who actually wrote those texts or used those objects did when they looked at their pieces of parchment or cuts of beef. The space between what we see and what they saw is vast. Far too often, what fills the gap between their intentions and self-understanding and our grasp of their actions are assumptions, rooted in the belief that we know better than them. To be clear, this is often an unconscious belief.

31:53Of course, we, with our firm grasp of germ theory, gravity, internal combustion engines, and global weather patterns, know things about the world that people in the past didn't. Medieval people trying to treat the Black Death with palmanders and prayer were never going to solve the disease no matter how much they believed in the efficacy of their cures. The plague doctor, with his beak-like mask, is an effective symbol of medieval ignorance. But consider your average person today blessed with all of that accumulated knowledge from centuries of medical research and practice,

32:23and a certain sense of superiority that goes along with it. We surely wouldn't die with our lymph nodes swollen and Yersinia pestis bacteria coursing through our bloodstream. But without access to a doctor's office, antibiotics, and protective equipment, is there any reason to believe that we today would fare any better than the millions who perished 700 years ago? My answer to that question is no. We would not escape mass death, not without the trappings of centuries of progress that we ourselves played little role

32:53in bringing to fruition. We certainly wouldn't escape the mass fear and delusion that went along with that worst of pandemics if the collective responses to COVID-19 a few years back are anything to go by. With an enormous medical infrastructure, systems for developing and delivering vaccines, and the state capacity to weather an economic shock, deaths were kept far below what they might have been. Bereft of that infrastructure, we're all just people hoping for the best with the mental framework and tools at our disposal. In the absence of antibiotics,

33:24you'll take your chances with the palmander and the beak-shaped plague doctor's mask. We are not better than those people just because we happened to be born in a time with MRI machines and comprehensive blood tests. It's really easy to look at the past and think, I would do that better, or there's no way I would fall into that obvious trap, or of course we would understand that our way of life is no longer viable with the sea level rising. To that, I respond, look around you. Every time you see

33:54someone doing something and think, well, that wasn't smart, or what in the heck was that person thinking, they too are reflecting the range of abilities and actions that people in the past were capable of. There are plenty of idiots today, and there were plenty of idiots in the past too. Think about the first people who tried climbing on the back of a horse, something that took place somewhere between 5,500 and 6,000 years ago, probably in what's today Kazakhstan. They'd already been keeping horses for milk and meat for centuries, if not longer, but somebody had to be the first individual

34:25to decide to try to take one for a ride. In your heart of hearts, do you, listening to this today, think that person was setting out on a path that they knew would eventually lead to galloping hundreds of miles across the Eurasian Steppe and fundamentally remaking the world? No. A far more likely scenario is that a couple of guys drank too much fermented mare's milk and decided to see what would happen if they jumped on the semi-feral animal's back. Those initial actions, as essential as they were to changing the course of history,

34:56came from people trying stuff and not thinking particularly hard about the consequences. That's human too. And I think that's the biggest lesson I've learned from making Tides of History over all these years.

Human Capabilities and Limitations

35:09People are capable of truly extraordinary things. The early cultivators who figured out selective breeding, the ancient Egyptian engineers who laid out the Great Pyramid's plan to within fractions of an inch of true, the shipwrights who developed the globe-spanning design of the caravel in Iberia in the late Middle Ages, the French peasants who survived the Great Famine and the Black Death. I'm in awe of all of them and I think you should be too. People are also capable of truly mind-numbing stupidity,

35:40whether that's an obviously ill-fated military expedition, I'm looking at you, Marcus Crassus, or cutting down every tree near a settlement without regard for erosion or future fuel and lumber supplies. I'm in awe of those people, but for the opposite reason.

35:57For the most part, however, people were simply trying their best. That's true now and it was true at each and every point in the past. They didn't know where the paths they were following would go, for better or worse, any more than we do. They too struggled to imagine alternatives to the lives they led. The last representatives of the Clovis culture to spear a mammoth on the Great Plains 12,000 or so years ago couldn't have known that they would be the last. The first people to intentionally plant barley and wheat seeds

36:28in the Fertile Crescent around that same time had no idea that their simple act would change the world forever. Their descendants who took that technology to the shores of the Aegean didn't know that their descendants would colonize the continent of Europe. Christopher Columbus obviously wasn't aware that he would find the islands of the Caribbean when he left port in 1492. The Austronesian seafarers who left Taiwan 4,000 years ago were not clued in to the fact that they were embarking on a journey that would take their descendants to the most distant reaches of the Pacific.

36:59Hannibal didn't think he'd lose the Battle of Zama and Henry V couldn't have imagined what a crushing victory he would win over the French at Agencourt. The future is unknowable and the past is not a reliable guide to it. While it can't tell us precisely what will happen in the future the past can inspire us warn us and inform us about how and why we got here. More than anything history tells us about people our capacities for good and evil the various ways

37:30of life we've succeeded at building and failed to maintain the different beliefs that animate and drive us what pulls us together into groups and what drives us apart the past is an almost infinite storehouse of examples about what we humans are capable of like the government's warehouse of treasures at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark all we have to do is dig a bit and we can find something thought-provoking and transformative whatever we're experiencing in the present people have dealt with something like it

38:00in the past we are not alone in our joy or our suffering our contentment or our boredom our pain or our bliss I take a lot of comfort in that most of the billions upon billions of people who have ever lived have gone through some hard times and tough experiences and you know what they survived we've survived as a species that is worth knowing and celebrating follow Tides of History

38:32on the Audible app or wherever you get your podcasts you can listen to all episodes of Tides of History ad-free by joining Audible you've been listening to Tides of History and Audible Original the show is written and narrated by me Patrick Wyman sound design by Molly Bach for Airship sound engineered by Sergio Enriquez produced by Morgan Jaffe the executive producer for Audible is Jenny Lower Beckman the head of creative development at Audible is Kate Navin the head of Audible Originals North America is Marshall Louie the chief content officer

39:03is Rachel Giazza copyright 2026 by Audible Originals thanks again for listening until next time from Audible Originals this has been Tides of History