Since man is a moment in time, a transient guest of the earth, a spore of his species, a scion of his race, a composite of body, character, and mind, a member of a family and a community, a believer or doubter of a faith,

a unit in an economy, perhaps a citizen in a state or a soldier in an army. We may ask under the corresponding heads,

astronomy, geology, geography, biology, biography, ethnology, psychology, morality, religion, economics, politics, and war.

What history has to say about the nature, conduct, and prospects of man.

It is a precarious enterprise and only a fool would try to compress 100 centuries into 100 pages of

hazardous conclusions.

Yet we proceed.

That was an excerpt in one of my favorite paragraphs

in the first chapter of the book

that we talked about today, which is the lessons of history by Will and Ariel Durant.

You and I normally get together and speak about a biography of a person.

The way to think about the book that I'm holding my hand is,

this is a hundred-page biography on the human species.

And I can't think of more qualified authors to write something like this

than Will and Area to rant because they spent 40 years from 1935 to 1975

writing this 11 volume set called The Story of Civilization.

If you read a bunch of biographies of entrepreneurs, Will and Ariel Durants,

The Story of Civilization will pop up over and over again in their biographies because these entrepreneurs are reading it.

People like Larry Ellison and Elon Musk come to mind.

And part of what makes this book so special is they wrote the lesson of history after they

finished the story of civilization.

So you could think of this as like a hundred page synopsis or

...