Welcome 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.

An 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 100 years from now.

And the more you see a behavior throughout history,

the more you realize how ingrained it is in human behavior,

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