Kind: captions
Language: en
the following is a conversation with
neil ferguson one of the great
historians of our time at times
controversial and always brilliant
whether you agree with him or not he's
an author of 16 books on topics covering
the history of money power war pandemics
and empire
previously at harvard currently at
stanford and today
launching a new university here in
austin texas called the university of
austin a new institution built from the
ground up to encourage open inquiry and
discourse by both thinkers and doers
from philosophers and historians to
scientists and engineers embracing
debate dissent and self-examination free
to speak to disagree to think to explore
truly novel ideas the advisory board
includes stephen pinker jonathan height
and many other amazing people
with one exception
me i was graciously invited to be on the
advisory board which i accepted in the
hope of doing my small part in helping
build the future of education and open
discourse especially in the fields of
artificial intelligence robotics and
computing we spend the first hour of
this conversation talking about this new
university before switching to
talking about some of the darkest
moments in human history and what they
reveal about human nature
this is the lex friedman podcast to
support it please check out our sponsors
in the description and now here's my
conversation with neil ferguson
you are one of the great historians of
our time respected sometimes
controversial you've flourished in some
of the best universities in the world
from nyu to london school of economics
to harvard
and now to hoover institution at
stanford
before we talk about the history of
money war and power
let us talk about a new university
you're part of launching
here in austin texas
it is called university of austin
uatx
what is its mission its goals its plan
i think it's
pretty obvious
to a lot of people in higher education
that there's a problem
and that problem manifests itself in a
great many different ways but i would
sum up the problem as being
a drastic
chilling of the atmosphere
that constrains free
speech free exchange even free thought
and i had never anticipated that this
would happen in my lifetime my academic
career began in oxford in the 1980s when
anything went one sensed that a
university was a place where one could
risk
saying the unsayable and
debate the undebatable
so the fact that
in a relatively short space of time
a variety of ideas critical race theory
or wokeism whatever you want to call a
variety of ideas have come along
that seek to limit and quite drastically
limit what we can talk about
strikes me as deeply unhealthy and i'm
not sure and i've thought about this for
a long time you can fix it with the
existing institutions
i think you need to create a new one and
so after much deliberation
we decided to do it and i think
uh it's a hugely
timely opportunity
to do what people used to do in this
country which was to create new
institutions i mean that used to be the
default setting of america we sort of
stopped doing that i mean i look back
and i thought why why why are there no
new universities or at least if there
are why do they have so little impact
it seems like we have the billionaires
we have the need let's do it so you
still believe
in institutions in the university in the
ideal of the university i believe
passionately in that ideal
there's a reason they've been around for
nearly a millennium
there is a
a unique
thing that happens
on a university campus when it's done
right and that is the transfer of
knowledge between generations
that is a very sacred activity and it
seems to
withstand major changes in technology so
this
form that we call the university
predates the printing press
survive the printing press
continue to function through the
scientific revolution the enlightenment
uh the industrial revolution
to this day
and i think it's because maybe because
of evolutionary psychology we need to be
together
in one
relatively confined space
when we're in our late teens and early
20s for the knowledge transfer between
the generations to happen that's my
feeling about this but in order for it
to work well
there need to be very few
constraints there needs to be a sense
that one can take intellectual risk
remember
people in their late teens and early 20s
are adults but they're inexperienced
adults
and
if i look back on my own time as an
undergraduate saying stupid things was
my mo
my way to finding good ideas was through
a minefield of bad ideas
i feel so sorry for my
for people like me today people age 18
19 20 today
who are
uh intellectually very curious
ambitious but inexperienced because
the minefields today
are absolutely lethal and you know one
wrong food
and it's cancellation i said this to
peter thiel the other day
imagine being asked now i mean we were
obnoxious
undergraduates
there's nothing
that peter did at stanford that andrew
sullivan and i were not doing at oxford
uh and perhaps we were even worse
but it was so so not career ending to be
to be an absolutely insufferable
obnoxious
undergraduate then
today if we if we
if people like us exist today they must
live in a state of of constant anxiety
that they're going to be
outed for some heretical
statement that they made five years ago
on social media so
part of what motivates me is that it's
the desire to give
uh
the means of today a shot at free
thinking and
really
i i'd call it
uh
aggressive learning learning where
you're really pushed
and i just think that stopped happening
on the the major campuses because
whether at harvard where i used to teach
at stanford where i'm now based i
i sense a kind of suffocating atmosphere
of self-censorship
that that means people are afraid to
take even minimal risk in in class i
mean just just take for example a survey
that was published earlier this year
that revealed
this is of undergraduates in four-year
programs in the us
85 percent of self-described liberal
students said they would report a
professor to the university
administration if he or she said
something they considered offensive and
something like 75 said said they do it
to a fellow undergraduate that's the
kind of culture that's evolved in our
universities so we need a new university
in which none of that is true in which
you can speak your mind say stupid
things get it completely wrong and live
to to tell the tale there's a lot more
going on i think because when you start
thinking about what's wrong with a
modern university many many more things
suggest themselves and i think there's
an opportunity here to build something
that's radically new in in some ways and
radically traditional in other ways for
example i have a strong preference for
the tutorial system that you see at
oxford and cambridge which is small
group teaching
and and highly socratic in its structure
i think it'd be great to bring that to
the united states where it doesn't
really exist but at the same time i
think we should be doing some very 21st
century things
making sure that while people are
reading and studying classic works
they're also going to be immersed in the
real world
of technological innovation a world that
you know very well
and i'd love to get a synthesis
of the ancient and classical which we're
gradually letting
fade away with the novel
and technological so we we want to
produce people who can simultaneously
talk intelligently
about adam smith or for that matter
shakespeare or proust
and
have a conversation with you about where
a.i is going and how long it will be
before i can get driven
here by
a self-driving vehicle allowing me to
have my lunch and prepare rather than
focus on the other crazy people on the
road so that's the dream that we can
create something which is you know
partly classical and partly 21st century
and we look around and we we don't see
it if you if you don't see an
institution that you really think should
exist i think you have a more
responsibility to create it
so you're thinking including
something bigger than just liberal
education also including science
engineering and technology i should also
comment
that
you know i mostly stay out of politics
and out of some of these
aspects of liberal education that kind
of been the most controversial and
difficult within the university
but there is
a kind of ripple effect of fear within
that space
into science and engineering and
technology
that i think
has uh has a nature that's difficult to
describe it doesn't have a controversial
nature it just has a nature of fear
where you're not
you know you're not just saying stupid
stuff as a young 20 year old
you know
for example deep learning machine
learning is really popular in the
computer science now as an approach for
creating artificial intelligence systems
it's
it is controversial in that space to say
that
anything against machine learning saying
sort of exploring ideas that saying this
is going to
lead to a dead end
um now
that that takes some guts to do as a
young 20 year old within uh within a
classroom to think like that to raise
that question in a machine learning
course it sounds ridiculous because it's
like who's going to
uh complain about this but the the fear
that starts
in uh
in a course on history
or
on the
some course that covers society the fear
ripples and affects those students
they're asking big out of the box
questions about engineering about
computer science and there's a lot you
know there's like linear algebra that's
not going to change
but then there's like applied linear
algebra which is machine learning and
that's when
robots and
real systems touch human beings and
that's when you have to ask yourself
these difficult questions about
about humanity even in engineering and
science and technology courses and these
are not separate worlds in two senses
i've just
taken delivery of my copy of the book
that eric schmidt and henry kissinger
have
co-authored on artificial intelligence
the central question of which is what
does this mean for us broadly
but they're not separate worlds
you know in cp snow's sense of you know
the the chasm between science and arts
because on a university campus
everything is contagious from a novel
coronavirus to the behaviors that are
occurring
in the english department
those behaviors if denunciation becomes
a norm
you know undergraduate denounces
professor teaching assistant denounces
undergraduate those behaviors are
contagious and will spread inexorably
first to social science and then to
natural sciences and i think that's
that's part of the reason why when this
started to happen when we started to get
the origins of
disinvitation and cancel culture
it was not just a few conservative
professors in the humanities who had to
worry everybody had to worry because
eventually
it was going to come
even to the most apparently
hard stem part of the the campus it's
it's contagious this is something
nicholas christakis should look at
because he's very good at looking at the
way in which
social networks like the ones that exist
in a university can spread everything
but i think when when we look back and
ask why did wokism spread so rapidly and
rapidly out of humanities into other
parts of universities and why did it
spread across the country and d beyond
the united states to the other
english-speaking universities it's
because it's a contagion
uh and and these behaviors are
contagious
the president of a university i won't
name said to me that he receives every
day at least one
denunciation one call for somebody or
other to be fired for something that
they said that's the crazy kind of
totalitarianism light
that now exists in our uh our
universities
and of course the people who want to
downplay this say oh well there only
have been 100 and something in dis
invitations or oh there really aren't
that many cases but the point is that
the famous events the events that get
the attention are responsible for a
general chilling that as you say spreads
to every part of the university and
creates a
very familiar culture in which people
are afraid to say what they think
self-censorship look at the heterodox
academy data on this grows and grows so
now a majority of students will say this
is clear from the latest heterodox
academy surveys we are scared to say
what we think in case
we get denounced in case we get
cancelled but that's just not the
correct atmosphere
for a university in a free society
to me what's really
creepy is how many of the behaviors i
see on university campuses today are
reminiscent of the way that people used
to behave in the soviet union
or in the soviet bloc or in maui's china
the sort of totalitarianism light that i
think we're we're contending with here
which manifests itself as
denunciations
people informing on superiors
some people using it for career
advantage
other people reduced to hapless
desperate apology
to try to exonerate themselves people
disappearing
metaphorically if not literally all of
this is so reminiscent
of the totalitarian regimes that i
studied earlier in my career that it
makes me feel sick and what makes me
really feel sick is that the people
doing this stuff the people who write
the letters of denunciation are
apparently unaware that they're behaving
exactly like people in stalin's soviet
union they don't know that
so they clearly have there's been a
massive educational failure if somebody
can write an anonymous or non-anonymous
letter of denunciation and not feel
shame i mean you should feel morally
completely contaminated as you are doing
that but but people haven't been taught
the realities of totalitarianism for all
these reasons i think you need to try at
least to create a new institution
where those pathologies will be
structurally excluded
so
maybe a difficult question maybe you'll
push back on this
but you're widely seen politically as a
conservative
hoover institution is politically
conservative
what is the role of politics at the
university of austin because some of the
ideas people listening to this when they
hear the ideas you're expressing
they may think there's a lien to these
ideas there's a conservative lean to
these ideas is there such a lien
there will certainly be people who say
that because the standard mode of
trying to discredit any new initiative
is to say oh this is a sinister
conservative
plot
but one of our
co-founders heather heing is definitely
not
a conservative
she's as committed to the idea of
academic freedom as i am but i think on
political issues we probably agree on
almost nothing
and at least i i would guess but but
politics max weber made this point a
long time ago
the politics really should stop at the
threshold of the the classroom of the
lecture hall and in my career i've
always tried to make sure that when i'm
teaching
it's not
clear where i stand politically though
of course undergraduates and insatiably
curiously want to know but it shouldn't
be clear from what i say because
indoctrination
on a political basis is an abuse of the
power of the professor as weber rightly
said
so i think one of the key principles of
of the university of austin will be that
barbarian principle that politics is not
an appropriate uh
subject for the lecture hall for the
classroom
and we should pursue truth
and enshrine
liberty of thought
if that's a political issue then i can't
help you i mean if you're against
freedom of thought then we don't really
have much of a discussion to have
and clearly there are some people who
politically seem quite hostile to it but
my sense is that there are plenty of
people on the left in academia i think
of that interesting partnership between
cornell west and robbie george
which has been institutionalized in the
academic freedom alliance it's
bipartisan this issue it really really
is after all
50 years ago it was the left that was in
favor of free speech
the right still has an anti-free speech
element to it look how quickly they're
out to ban critical race theory critical
race theory won't be banned at the
university of texas wokism won't be
banned everything will be up for
discussion but the rules of engagement
will be clear chicago principles those
will be enforced
and
if you have to give a lecture on well
let's just take a recent example uh the
dorian abbott case if you're giving a
lecture
on
astrophysics
but it turns out that in some different
venue you express skepticism about a
formative action well it doesn't matter
it's irrelevant we want to know what
your thoughts are on astrophysics
because that's what you're supposed to
be doing a lecture on that used to be
understood i mean at the oxford of the
1980s there were communists and there
were ultratories at cambridge there were
people who were so reactionary that they
celebrated franco's birthday but they
were also out and out communists down
the road at king's college
the understanding was that that kind of
intellectual diversity was part and
parcel of university life and frankly
for undergraduate it was great fun to
cross the road and go from you know
outright conservatism ultra tourism to
communism one learns a lot that way
but the issue is
when you're promoting or hiring or
tenuring people
their politics is not relevant it really
isn't
and when it started to become relevant
and i remember this coming up at the
harvard history department late in my
time there
felt deeply deeply uneasy that we were
having conversations
that amounted to
well we can't heart x person despite
their obvious
academic qualifications because
of some political
issue
that that's not what should happen at a
healthy university
some practical questions
will university of austin be a physical
in person university or virtual
university what are some uh
in that aspect where the classroom is
it will be a real space institution
there may be an online
dimension to it because there clearly
are a lot of things that you can do
uh
via the internet but the core activity
of of teaching and learning i think
requires real space and i've thought
about this a long time debated
sebastian throne about this many many
years ago when he was a complete
believer in let's call it the
metaversity to go with the metaverse i
mean the metaversity was going to happen
wasn't it but i never really believed in
the metaversity i didn't do moocs
because i just didn't think you'd a be
able to retain the attention b be able
to cope with the scale scaled grading
that was involved i think there's a
reason universities have been around and
that they're formed for about a
millennium you kind of need to all be in
the same place so i think answer to that
question definitely a campus in the
austin area that's where we'll start
and if we can
allow some of our content to be
available online great we'll certainly
do that
another question is what kind of courses
and programming will it offer is that
something you can speak to what's your
vision here
we think that we need to begin
more like a startup than
like a full service university from day
one so our vision is that we start with
a summer school
which will offer provocatively the
forbidden courses
we we want i think to begin by giving
a platform
to the professors who've been most
subject to council culture and also to
give an opportunity to students who want
to hear them to come so we'll start with
the summer school that will be
somewhat in the tradition of uh of those
institutions in the interwar period that
were havens for refugees so we're we are
dealing here with the internal refugees
of of the work era
we'll start there uh it'll be an
opportunity to test out some
uh some content see what uh students
will come uh
and spend time in austin to hear so
that's part a that's the sort of uh
if if you like the launch product and
then we go straight to a masters
program i don't think you can go to
undergraduate education right away
because the established brands in
undergraduate education are offering
something it's impossible to compete
with initially because they have
the brand harvard yale stanford and they
offer also this peer network
which is part of the reason people want
so badly to go to those places not
really the professors it's the
classmates so we don't want to compete
there initially where there is i think
room for new entrants is in
a masters program
and the first one will be
in entrepreneurship and leadership
because i think there's a huge hunger
amongst people who want to get into
particularly the technology world to
learn about those things and they know
they're not really going to learn about
them at business schools the people who
are not going to teach them leadership
and entrepreneurship are professors
so we want to create something that will
be a little like the very successful
schwarzman program in china which was
come and spend a year in china and find
out about china
we'll be doing the same essentially
saying come and spend a year and find
out about technology and there'll be a
mix of academic content we want people
to understand some of the first
principles of what they're studying
there are first principles of
entrepreneurship and leadership but we
also want them to spend time with people
like one of our co-founders joe lonsdale
who's been a hugely
successful venture capitalist and and
learned directly from people like him so
that's the kind of initial offering i
think there are other masters programs
that we will look to roll out quite
quickly i have a particular passion for
a masters in applied history or politics
and applied history i'm a historian
driven crazy by the tendency of academic
historians to drift away from what
seemed to me the important questions and
certainly to drift away from addressing
policy relevant questions so i would
love to be involved in
in in a masters in applied history
and we'll we'll build some programs like
that
before we get to the full
liberal arts
uh experience that we envisage for an
undergraduate program
and that undergraduate program is an
exciting one because i think we can be
innovative there too i i would say two
years would be spent doing some very
classical and difficult classical things
those old divides between arts and
sciences but then there would also be in
the second in the second half in the
junior and senior years
something somewhat more of an
apprenticeship where we'll have centers
including a center for uh technology
engineering mathematics
that will be designed to to help people
make that transition from the
theoretical to the the practical
so that's the vision
uh and i think like any
like any early stage
uh idea we'll doubtless tweak it as we
go along we'll find things that work and
things that don't work
but i have a very clear
sense in my own mind of how this
should look five years from now
and i don't know about you i mean i i'm
unusual as an academic because i quite
like starting new institutions and i've
done a bit of it
in my career
you got to kind of know what it should
look like
after the first four or five years to
get out of bed in the morning and put up
with all the kind of
hassles of doing it not not least the
inevitable flack that we we're bound to
take from the educational establishment
and i was graciously invited to be an
advisor to this
university of austin and one
the reason i would
love to help in whatever way i can
is several so one i would love to see
austin the physical location flourish
intellectually and especially
in the space of science and engineering
that's really exciting to me
another
reason is i am still a research
scientist at mit i still love mit
and i see this effort
that you're launching as a as a
beacon that leads the way to the other
elite institutions in the world
i think too many of my colleagues and
especially in robotics
kind of see
don't see robotics as a humanities
problem
but to me
robotics and ai will define much of our
world in the next century and for not to
consider all the deep psychological
sociological
human problems associated with that
to have real open conversations to say
stupid things to challenge the
ideas that
of how
companies are being run for example
that is the safe space it's very
difficult to talk about the difficult
questions about technology when you're
employed by facebook or google and so on
the university is the place to have
those conversations that's right we're
hugely excited that you want to be one
of our advisors we we need a a broad and
an eclectic group of people and i'm
excited by the way that group has
has has developed uh it has some of the
some of my favorite intellectuals are
there uh steve pinker uh for example
uh but but we're also you know making
sure that we have
people with experience in
academic leadership
and so it's a it's a
happy uh coalition of the willing
looking to try to build something new
which as you say will be complementary
to
the existing and established
institutions i think of the academic
world as a as a network i've moved from
some major hubs
in the network uh to others but i've
always felt that we do our best work
not in a silo called oxford but
in a silo that that is really a hub
connected to stanford connected to
harvard connected to mit
one of the reasons i moved to the united
states was that i sensed that there was
more
intellectual action in my original field
of expertise financial history and that
was right it was it was a good move i
think i'd have stagnated if i'd stayed
at oxford
but at the same time i i haven't lost
connection with oxford i recently went
and gave a lecture there
in honour of sir roger scrutin one of
the great conservative philosophers
and the burden of my lecture was
the idea of the anglo-sphere which
appealed a lot to roger will go horribly
wrong if
illiberal ideas that inhibit academic
freedom spread all over the anglo-sphere
and this network gets infected with
these i think deeply uh deeply damaging
notions so
yeah i think we're creating a new node
uh i hope it's a node that makes the
network overall
more resilient
and
right now there's an urgent need for it
i mean there are people
whose academic careers have been
terminated
uh i'll name two who are involved peter
bogosian who was harassed out of
portland state
for the reason that he was one of those
uh
intrepid figures who carried out the
grievance studies
hoaxes exposing the utter charlatan ray
going on in many supposedly academic
journals by getting phony
gender studies articles published was
genius and of course
so put the noses out of joints of the
academic establishment that he began to
be subject to disciplinary actions so
peter is going to be involved and in a
recent uh shocking british case the
philosopher kathleen stock has
essentially been run off the campus of
sussex university in england
uh for trans uh for violating the the
increasingly complex rules about
discussing
transgender issues and
women's rights she will be uh one of our
advisors and i think also one of our
founding fellows actually teaching uh
for us in our in our first uh iteration
so
i think we're creating a node that's
badly needed those people i mean i
remember saying this to
the uh the other founders when we first
began to talk about this idea uh to
barry weiss uh and to panic and losses
pano canelos as well as to heather heing
we need to do this urgently because
there are people whose livelihoods are
in fact being destroyed by these
extraordinarily illiberal campaigns
against them and so there's no time to
hang around and come up with the perfect
design this this is an urgently needed
lifeboat and let's start with that and
then we can build something spectacular
taking advantage of the fact that all of
these people have
well they now have very
real skin in the game they they need to
make this a success and and i'm sure
they will help us make it a success
so you mentioned some interesting names
like heather heing barry weiss and so on
stephen pinker somebody i really admire
he too was under a lot of quite a lot of
fire
uh
many reasons i admire him one because of
his optimism about the future
and two how little of a dam he seems to
give
about the like walking through the fire
there's nobody more zen about walking
through the fire than stephen pinker but
anyway you mentioned a lot of
interesting names jonathan height is
also interesting there
um who is involved with this venture at
this early days
well one of the one of the things that
that i'm excited about is is that we're
getting people from
inside and outside the academic world so
we've got
arthur brooks who for many years ran the
american enterprise very s enterprise
institute very successfully
has a harvard role now teaching
uh and uh and so he's somebody who
brings i think a different perspective
there's obviously a a need to get
uh experienced
uh
academic leaders involved
which is why i was talking to larry
summers about whether he would join our
uh board of advisors uh the chicago
principals
owe a debt uh to the former president
of chicago and he's uh graciously agreed
to be in the board of advisors i could
go on it would become a long and tedious
list but
my goal in in trying to get
this happy band to form has been
to signal that it's a bipartisan
endeavor it is not a conservative
institution that we're trying to build
it's an institution that's committed to
academic freedom and the pursuit of
truth
that will mean it uh when it uh takes uh
robert zimmer's chicago principles and
enshrines them in its its founding
charter and will make those
uh
something other than honored in the
breach which they seem to be at some
institutions
so the idea here is is to grow this
organically
we need
rather like the academic freedom
alliance that robbie george created
earlier this year we need breadth
and we need to show that this is not
some kind of
institutionalization of the intellectual
dark web uh though we welcome founding
members of that
that
nebulous body it's really something
designed for all of academia to provide
a kind of reboot that i i think we all
agree is is needed
is there a george washington type figure
who is is there a president elected yet
or is is who's going to lead this
institution hannah canelos the former
president of st john's is the president
of university of austin and so he is our
george washington
i don't know who alexander hamilton is
i'll lead you to guess
it's funny you mentioned idw
intellectual dark web have you uh
talked to your friend sam harris about
but any others he um
he is another person i really admire and
i've talked to online and offline
quite a bit for
not belonging to any tribe
he
stands boldly on his convictions
when he knows they're not going to be
popular
with like he based
he basically gets canceled by every
group he sort of he doesn't shy away
from controversy
and not for the sake of controversy
itself he is
one of the best examples to me of a
person who thinks freely
i disagree with him on a few quite a few
things but i deeply admire that he is he
he is what it looks like to think freely
by himself it feels to me like he
represents a lot of the ideals of this
kind of effort yes he would be a natural
fit sam if you're listening i hope
you're in
uh i think in in the course of his
recent intellectual
quests he did collide with one of our
founders heather hying so we'll have to
model civil disagreements at the
university of austin it's extremely
important that we should all disagree
about many things but do it
amicably
one of the things that has been lost
sight of perhaps it's all the fault of
twitter or maybe it's something more
profound is that it is possible to
disagree in a civil way and
and still be friends i certainly had
friends at oxford who were far to the
left of me politically and they are
still among my best friends so the
university of austin has to be a place
where we can
disagree
uh
we can disagree vehemently but we can
then go and have a beer afterwards
that's that's in my mind a really
important part of university life
learning the difference between the
political and the and the personal so
sam is a i think a a good example as a
you of a certain kind of intellectual
hero
who has
been willing to
go into the
cyber uh sphere the metaverse and carve
out an intellectual
space
the podcast
and
debate everything fearlessly his
uh
essay was really an essay on black lives
matter and the question of police
racism was a masterpiece of 2020
and
and so he i think is a
a model of what
we believe in
but we can't save the world with
podcasts good though
yours is
because there's a kind of
solo element
to this form of public intellectual
activities it's also there in substance
where all our best writers
now seem to be including our founder
barry weiss
the danger with this uh approach is
ultimately
your subscribers are the people who
already agree with you and we are all
therefore in danger of preaching
to the choir
i think what makes an institution like
university of austin so attractive is
that we get everybody together
uh at least part of the year
and we
do that informal interaction at lunch
at dinner
uh that allows
in my experience the best ideas to form
intellectual activity isn't really a
solo voyage historians often make it
seem that way but i've realized over
time that
i do my best work in a collaborative way
and scientists have been better at this
than people in the humanities
but what really matters what what's
magical about a good university is that
interdisciplinary serendipitous
conversation that happens on campus
tom sergeant the great nobel
prize-winning economist and i used to
have these
kind of random conversations in
elevators at nyu or in corridors at
stanford and sometimes they'd be quite
short conversations but in that short
serendipitous exchange
i would have
more intellectual stimulus than in in
many a seminar lasting an hour and a
half so
i think we want to get the sam harris's
and and lex friedman's out of their
darkened rooms
and give them a chance to interact in a
much less structured
way than we've got got used to again
it's that it's that sense that sometimes
you need some free willing unstructured
debate to get the really good ideas i
mean to talk anecdotally for a moment i
look back on my oxford
undergraduate experience and i wrote a
lot of essays and attended a lot of
classes but intellectually the most
important thing i did was to write an
essay on the viennese satirist carl
krause
for
a an undergraduate discussion group
called the cannon club and i probably
put more work into that paper than i put
into anything else except maybe my final
examinations
even although
there was only really one senior member
present the historian jeremy cato i was
really just trying to impress my
contemporaries
and that's the kind of thing
we want
the great intellectuals
the great intellectual leaps forward
occurred
often in somewhat unstructured settings
i'm from scotland you can tell
from my accent a little at least
the enlightenment happened in late 18th
century scotland in a very interesting
interplay between the universities which
were very important glasgow edinburgh st
andrews and
the coffee houses and and pubs of uh the
scottish cities where
a lot of unstructured discussion often
fueled by copious amounts of wine to
place
that's what i've missed over the last
few years let's let's just think about
how hard academic social life has become
that
we've reached the point
that amy chua
becomes the object of a full-blown
investigation and media storm for
inviting to
yale law school students over to her
house
to talk
i mean when i was at oxford it was
regarded as a tremendous honor to be
asked to go to one of our tutors homes
the social life of oxford and cambridge
is one of their great strengths there's
a sort of requirement to
sip unpleasant sherry with the dons and
we've kind of killed all that we've
killed all that in the us because nobody
dares have a social interaction with an
undergraduate or exchange an informal
email in case the whole thing ends up on
the front page of the local or student
newspaper so that that's what we need to
kind of restore the
the social life of academia so there's
magic we didn't really address it sort
of explicitly
but there's magic to the interaction
between students there's magic
in the interaction between
faculty the people that teach and
there's the magic and the interaction
between the students and the faculty and
it's it's an iterative process that
changes everybody involved
so it's like world experts in a
particular discipline are changed
as much as the students as the 20 year
olds with the
with the wild ideas
each are changed and that's the magic of
it that applies in liberal education
that applies in this in the sciences too
that's probably maybe you can speak to
this why so much
scientific innovation has happened in
universities there's something about the
youthful energy
of like young minds
graduate students undergraduate students
that inspire some of the world experts
to do some of the best work of their
lives yeah well the human brain we know
is at its most dynamic uh when people
are pretty young
you know this with your background in
math people don't get better at math
after the age of 30.
and
this is important when you think about
the intergenerational character of
university the older
people the professors have the
experience
but they're fading intellectually from
much earlier than anybody really wants
to admit
and so you get
this intellectual
shot in the arm
from hanging out with people who are
circa 20
don't know shit but the brains are kind
of like cooking yeah
i look back on
the career i've had in teaching which is
over 25 years where cambridge oxford nyu
harvard and uh
i have extremely strong relationships
with with students uh from those
institutions
because
they would
show up whether it was at office hours
or in tutorials
and disagree with me
and for me it's always been about
encouraging
some active intellectual rebellion
telling people i don't want your essay
to echo my views if you can find
something wrong with what i wrote great
or if you can find something i missed
that's new fantastic
so there is definitely as you said a
magic in that interaction across the
generations and
it's extraordinarily difficult i think
for an intellectual to make the same
progress
in a project in isolation
compared with the progress that can be
made in these very very special
communities what does a university do
amongst other things it creates a
somewhat artificial environment
of of abnormal job security that's the
whole idea of giving people tenure
and then a relatively high turnover new
faces each year
and an institutionalization
of
thought experiments and actual
experiments
and then you get everybody living in the
same kind of vicinity so that it can
spill over into 3 a.m conversation well
that that always seems to me to be
a pretty potent combination let's ask
ourselves a counterfactual question next
let's imagine let's imagine that
uh the the world wars happen
but but there are no universities
i mean how does the manhattan project
happen with with no academia to take
just one of many examples in truth how
does britain even stay in the war
without bletchley park without uh be
being able to crack the german
uh cipher the academics
are
unsung partly sung heroes of these
conflicts
the same is true in the soviet union the
soviet union was a terribly evil and
repressive system but it was good at
science and that kept it in the game not
only in in world war ii kept it in the
cold war so
it's clear that universities are
incredibly powerful intellectual force
multipliers and our our history without
them
would look very different sure some
innovations would have happened without
them that's clear the industrial
revolution didn't need universities in
fact they played a very marginal role in
the key technological breakthroughs of
the industrial revolution in its first
phase
but by the second industrial revolution
in the late 19th century
german industry would not have leapt
ahead of british industry if the
universities had not been superior and
it was the fact that the germans
institutionalized scientific research in
the way that they did that really
produced a powerful powerful advantage
uh the problem was that
this is a really interesting point that
friedrich meinecker makes in d deutsche
catestor for the german catastrophe
the german intellectuals became
technocrats homo faber he says they knew
a great deal about their speciality but
they were alienated from broadly
speaking humanism and that is his
explanation one of his explanations for
why this very scientifically advanced
germany goes down the path of hell led
by hitler
so when i come back and ask myself what
is it that we want to do with a new
university
we want to make sure that we we don't
fall into that that german pit where
very high levels of technical and
scientific expertise are decoupled from
the fundamental
foundations of
of a free society
so liberal arts are there i think to
stop the scientists
making fausty impacts and that that's
why it's really important that people
working on ai
read shakespeare
i think you
said the academics are unsung heroes of
the 20th century
i think there's kind of an intellectual
a lazy intellectual
desire to kind of
destroy the academics that the academics
are the source of all problems in the
world
and i personally believe that exactly as
you said we need to recognize that
the university is probably where
the ideas that will protect us from the
catastrophes that are looming
ahead of us
is that's where those ideas are going to
come from people who who work on
economics can argue back and forth about
john main arcanes
but i think it's pretty clear that he
was the most important economist
and certainly the most influential
economist of the 20th century and i
think his ideas are looking
better
today in the wake of the financial
crisis than they have at any time since
the 1970s but imagine
imagine john maynard keynes without
cambridge you can't
because someone like that doesn't
actually
doesn't actually exist
without the incredible hot house
that a place like cambridge wars in
keynes's life he was a product of a kind
of hereditary intellectual elite
it had its vices
but you can't help but admire the sheer
power of the mind i've spent a lot of my
career reading keynes and i i revere
that intellect it's so so powerful
but you can't have people like that if
you're not prepared to have
king's college cambridge
and and it comes with redundancy i think
that's the point there are lots and lots
of things that are very annoying about
academic life
that you just have to
you have to deal with they're they're
made fun of in that recent netflix
series the chair and it is easy to make
fun of academic life uh tom sharpe's
porterhouse blue did it it's it's an
inherently comical
subject
professors at least used to be amusingly
eccentric
but we've sort of killed off that
side of academia by turning it into
an increasingly
doctrinaire place
where eccentricity is not tolerated i'll
give you an illustration of this i had a
call this morning from a british
academic
who said can you can you give me some
advice because they're trying to
decolonize the curriculum
this is coming from the
diversity equity and inclusion officers
and it seems to me that what they're
requiring of us is a fundamental
violation of academic freedom because it
is
determining ex-ante what we should study
and teach
that's what's going on and that's the
thing that we really really have to
resist because that kills the university
that's that's the moment that it stops
being
the magical place of intellectual
creativity
and simply becomes an adjunct of the
ministry of propaganda
i've loved
the time we spent talking about this
because it's such a hopeful message for
the future of the university that
i still share with you
uh
the love of the ideal of the university
so very practical question you mentioned
uh summer
which summer are we talking about so
when uh i know we don't want to put hard
dates
here but what year are we thinking about
when is this thing launching what are
your thoughts on this we are moving as
fast as our resources allow uh the goal
is to offer the first uh of the
forbidden courses uh next summer summer
of 2022 and
we hope to be able to launch an initial
uh
albeit relatively small scale masters
program
in the fall of next year
that's that's as fast as is humanly
possible
uh so yeah we're really we're really
keen to get going and i think the the
approach we're taking is
uh
somewhat imported from silicon valley
think of this as a startup
don't think of this as something that
has to exist as a full service
university on on day one
we don't have the results of that you
need billions and billions of dollars to
build a university sort of as a as a
facsimile of an existing university but
that's not what we want to do i mean
copying copying and pasting harvard or
year or stanford would be a futile thing
to do they would probably you very
quickly end up with the same pathologies
so we do have to come up with a
different design and one way of doing
that is to grow it organically from
something quite small
elon musk
mentioned in his usual humorous way on
twitter
that he wants to launch the texas
institute of technology and science
tits
some people thought this was sexist
because of the acronym tits
so first of all i understand their
viewpoint uh but i also think there
needs to be a place for humor on the
internet
even from ceo so on this podcast i've
gotten a chance to talk to quite a few
ceos
and what i love to see is authenticity
and humor is often a sign of
authenticity the
the quirkiness that you mentioned is
such a beautiful characteristic of
professors and faculty and great
universities
is also beautiful to see as ceos
especially founding ceo so
anyway
the deeper
point he was making is showing an
excitement for the university as a place
for big
ideas in
science technology engineering so to me
if there's some kind of way if there is
a serious thought that he had behind
this tweet
not to analyze elon musk's twitter like
it's shakespeare but if there's a
serious thought
um i would love to see him supporting
the the flourishing of austin as a place
for science technology for these kinds
of intellectual developments that uh
that that we're talking about like make
make a place for free inquiry
civil disagreements
coupled with
great education and conversations about
artificial intelligence about technology
about
engineering so i'm actually gonna uh
i hope there's a serious idea behind
that tweet and i'm gonna i'm gonna chat
with him about it i do too i do too i uh
most of the
uh
biggest uh
storms and teacups of my academic career
have been
caused by bad jokes that i've made
these days if you want to make
bad jokes being a billionaire is a great
idea uh
i'm not here to defend elon's uh
twitter style or sense of humor
he's not gonna be remembered for his
tweets i think uh he's gonna be
remembered for the astonishing
companies that he's built and his his
contributions
in a whole range of of fields
from spacex to tesla
and solar energy and i very much hope
that we can
interest elon in this project we need
not only elon but a whole range of uh
his peers
because
this takes
resources universities are not cheap
things to run especially
if as i hope we can make as much of
uh
the the tuition
uh covered by scholarships and bursaries
we we want to attract the best
intellectual talent
to this institution
the best intellectual talent is somewhat
randomly distributed through society and
some of it is in the bottom quintile of
the income distribution
and that makes it hard to get to elite
education so
this will take resources
the last generation of
super wealthy plutocrats the generation
of the gilded age of the late 19th
century
did a pretty good job of founding
universities
chicago wouldn't exist uh but for the
money of that era
and so my message to not only to elon
but to all of
the peers all of those people who made
their billions uh out of technology over
the last couple of decades is this is
your time i mean and this is your
opportunity to create something new i
can't really understand why
the wealthy of our time are content to
hand their money
i mean think of the vast sums mike
bloomberg recently gave to johns hopkins
to his established institutions
when
on close inspection those institutions
don't seem to spend the money terribly
well
and in fact one of the mysteries of our
time is the lack of due diligence that
hard-nosed billionaires seem to do when
it comes to philanthropy
so
i think there's an opportunity here for
this generation of very talented wealthy
people to to do what their their
counterparts did in the late 90s and
early 20th century and and create some
new institutions
and they don't need to put their names
on the buildings they just need to do
what what the founders of
of chicago university of chicago did
create something new that will that will
endure
yeah uh mit is launching a
college of computing and um
steven schwartzman has
given quite a large sum of money i think
in total a billion dollars
and
as somebody who loves computing and
somebody who loves mit i want some
accountability
uh for mit becoming a better institution
and this is once again why i'm excited
about university of austin because it
serves as a beacon look you can create
something new
and this is what the great institutions
of the future should look like
and steve schwartzman
uh is also uh an innovator the idea of
creating a college on the tsinghua
campus
and creating a kind of rhodes program
for students from the western world to
come study in china was was steve's idea
and and i was somewhat involved did some
visiting
professing there
it taught me that you can create
something new
uh in that area of graduate education
and quite quickly attract really strong
applicants because the people who finish
their four years at harvard or stanford
know
that they don't know a lot
and i
having taught a lot of people
in that
group know how intellectually
dissatisfied they often are at the end
of four years
i mean they may have beautifully gained
the system to graduate sumo or magna cum
laude but they kind of know
they they'll confess it after a drink or
two they know that they gained the
system and that intellectually it wasn't
the fulfilling experience they wanted
and they also know that an mba from a
comparable institution would not be a
massive intellectual step forward so i
think what we want to say
is here's something really novel
exciting that will
be intellectually very challenging i i
do think the university of austin has to
be difficult
yeah um i'd like it to feel a little bit
like surviving navy seal training to
come through this program because it
will be intellectually demanding
and that i think should be a magnet so
yeah steve if you're listening uh please
join elon in in supporting this and and
and peter thiel if you're listening i
know how skeptical you are about the
idea of creating a new university
because
heaven knows peter and i have been
discussing this idea for years and he's
always said well no we thought about
this and it just isn't going to work but
i
really think we've got a we got a
responsibility to to do this well
steve's been on this podcast before
we've uh spoken a few times so i'll send
this to him i hope he does actually get
behind it as well so i'm i'm super
excited by
the ideas that we've been talking about
that this uh effort represents and
what ripple effect it has on the rest of
society so thank you that was a time
beautifully spent and i'm really
grateful for the
the fortune
of
getting a chance to talk to you at this
moment in history
because i've been a big fan of your work
and the reason i wanted to talk to you
today is
about all the excellent books you've
written about various aspects of history
through money war
power pandemics all of that but i'm glad
that
this we got a chance to talk about this
which is not looking at history it's
looking at the future
this is a beautiful little uh fortuitous
uh
moment i appreciate you talking about it
in the book ascent of money
you give a history of the world through
the lens of money
if the financial system is uh
evolutionary nature much like life on
earth what is the origin of money on
earth
the origin of money
predates coins
most people kind of assume i'll talk
about coins but coins are relatively
late
developments
back in ancient mesopotamia so i don't
know 5 000 years ago
there were
relations between creditors and debtors
there there are even in the simplest
economy
uh because of the way in which
agriculture works
hey i need i need to
plant these seeds but i'm not going to
have crops for x months
so we have clay tablets in which
simple debt transactions are inscribed i
remember looking at great numbers of
these in the british museum when i was
writing the ascent of money and that's
really
the beginning of money the minute you
start recording a relationship between a
creditor and a debtor you have something
that is quasi money
and that is probably what these um
clay tablets mostly denoted
from that point on
there's a great evolutionary experiment
to see what the most convenient way is
to
record
relations between creditors and debtors
and
what emerges
uh
in the time of the ancient greeks
are coins metal
tokens
uh sometimes
uh a valuable metal sometimes not
usually bearing the imprint of a state
or a monarch
and that's the sort of more familiar
form of of money that we still use today
for very very small transactions i
expect coins will
all be gone by the time
my youngest son is my age but but
they're a last remnant of a very very
old way of of doing
of doing simple transactions and when
you say coins you mean physical coins
i'm talking about coins has been
rebranded into digital space yeah not
coin based coins actual coin coins you
know the ones that jangle in your in
your pocket and you kind of don't know
quite what to do with once you have some
so
that that became an incredibly
pervasive
form of of of paying for things money's
just a
it's just a crystallization of a
relationship between a debtor and a
creditor and coins are just very
fungible
you know whereas a clay tablet relates
to a specific transaction
coins are generic and fungible they can
be used in in any transaction so that
was an important evolutionary advance
if you think of financial history and
this was the point of the ascent of
money as an evolutionary story there are
punctuated equilibria
people get by with coins for a long time
despite their defects as a means of
payment
such as that they can be debased
they can be clipped uh it's very hard to
avoid
fake or debased money entering the
system
but coinage is still kind of the basis
of payments all the way
through the roman empire out the other
end into the so-called dark ages it's
still how most things are settled
in cash transactions in the early 1300s
you don't get a big shift until after
the black death
when there is such a need to monetize
the economy because of chronic labor
shortages and feudalism begins to
unravel
that you you just don't have a
sufficient uh amount of coinage and so
you get bills of exchange and i'm really
into bills of exchange
because and this i hope will capture
your listeners
and viewers imaginations
when they start using bills of exchange
which which are really just pieces of
paper saying you know i owe you over a
three month period while goods are in
transit from florence to london
you get the first
uh peer-to-peer payment system which is
network verified because they're they're
not coins they don't have a king's head
on them they're just pieces of paper
and the verification comes in the form
of signatures and you you need
ultimately some kind of
guarantee if
i write an iou to you build change i
mean you don't really know me that well
we only just met so you might want to
get endorsed by i don't know somebody
really credit worthy like elon
and so we we actually can see in the
late 14th century in northern italy in
england and elsewhere the evolution of
a peer-to-peer network system of of
payment
and that's actually how world trade
grows because you just couldn't settle
long oceanic transactions with coinage
it just wasn't practical
all those
treasure chests full of doubloons which
were part of the way in which the
spanish empire worked really inefficient
so bills of exchange are an exciting uh
part of the story and they illustrate
something i should have made more clear
of the ascent of money
that not everything used in payment
needs to be money
classically economists will tell you oh
well money money has three different
functions
it's you've heard this a zillion times
right it's a unit of account it's a
store of value and it's a medium of
exchange
now there are three
or four things that are worth saying
about this and i'll just say two one
it may be that those three things are a
trilemma and it's very difficult for
anything to be all of them this point
was made by my hoover colleague manny
rincon cruz last year and i still wish
he would write this up as a paper
because it's a great insight
the second thing that's really
interesting to me is that
payments don't need to be money
and if we go around as economists love
to do saying well bitcoin's not money
because it doesn't fulfill these
criteria
we're missing the point that you could
build a system of payments
which i think is how we should think
about crypto that is isn't money doesn't
need to be money it's like bills of
exchange it's network-based verification
peer-to-peer transactions without
without third-party verification
when it hit me the other day that we
actually had this precedent for crypto i
got quite excited and thought
i wish i had written that in the ascent
of money
can you sort of from a first principles
like almost like a physics perspective
or maybe a human perspective
uh describe where does the value of
money come from like where is it
actually
where is it so it's a sheet of paper or
it's coins
but
it feels like in a platonic sense
there's some kind of thing that's
actually storing the value as us a bunch
of ants are dancing around and so on
i come from a family of physicists i'm
the black sheep of the family my
mother's a physicist my sister is
and uh so when you ask me to explain
something in physics terms i
i get a kind of little part of me dies
because i know i'll fail
but in in truth
it doesn't really matter what we decide
money is going to be and anything can
record
uh crystallize the the relationship
between the the creditor and the debtor
it could be a piece of paper it can be a
piece of metal it can be nothing can
just be a digital entry
it's
trust that we're really
talking about here
we are
not just trusting one another we may not
but we are trusting
the money
so
whatever we use to represent
the credited debtor relationship whether
it's a banknote or a coin or whatever
it does depend on
us both trusting it
and that doesn't always pertain
what we see in episodes of inflation
especially episodes of hyperinflation is
a crisis of trust a crisis of confidence
in
the means of payments
and this is very traumatic for the
societies to which it happens
by and large human beings particularly
once you have a rule of law
uh system of the sort that evolved in
the west and then became generalized
are predisposed to trust one another
and
the default setting is to trust money
even when it depreciates a quite steady
rate as the us dollar has done uh
pretty much uninterruptedly since
the 1960s
it takes quite a big disruption for
money to lose that trust but i think
essentially what money should be thought
of as
is a series of tokens that can take any
form we like and can be purely digital
which represent our
transactions as as creditors and debtors
and the whole thing depends on our
collective trust to work
i had to explain this to stephen colbert
once in the
call burster the old old show that was
actually funny and
when he said um
so so so neil could i be money and i
said yes you know we could
we could settle
a debt with a human being that was quite
common
in much of history but but it's not the
most convenient
form of money
money has to be convenient that's why
when they worked out how to make
payments with cell phones the chinese
simply went straight there from bank
accounts they skipped out credit cards
you won't see credit cards in china
except in the hands of naive tourists
how much can this trust
bear
in terms of uh us humans with our human
nature testing it
it seems that i guess the surprising
thing is the thing works
a bunch of self-interested ants running
around
trading in trust
and it seems to work except for
a bunch of moments in human history when
there's hyperinflation like you
mentioned
and it's just
uh
it's just kind of amazing it's kind of
amazing that us humans if i were to be
optimistic and sort of hopeful about
human nature
it gives me a sense that
people want to lean on each other they
want to trust
that certainly
i would say probably now a widely shared
view amongst evolutionary psychologists
network scientists it's one of
uh nicholas christakis's argument in a
recent book
and i think economic history broadly
bears this out but you have to be
cautious
the cases where the system works
are familiar to us
because those are the
those are the the states and the eras
that produce a lot of written records
but when
the system of trust collapses and the
monetary system collapses with it
there's generally quite a paucity of of
records i found that when i was
writing
doom and so we slightly are biased in
favor
of the periods when trust
prevailed and the system functioned
it's very easy to point to a great many
episodes of very very intense monetary
chaos even in the relatively recent past
in the wake of the first world war
multiple currencies not just the german
currency multiple currencies were
completely destroyed the russian
currency the polish currency
there were currency disasters all over
central and eastern europe in the early
1920s
and that was partly because
over the course of the 19th century a
system had evolved in which trust was
based on gold and rules that were
supposedly applied by central banks
that system
which produced relative price stability
over the the 19th century fell apart as
a result of the first world war and and
as soon as it was gone as soon as there
was no longer a
clear link between those uh banknotes
and coins and gold the whole thing went
completely haywire
and i think we should remember that the
extent of the monetary chaos from
certainly 1918
all the way through to the late 1940s i
mean the german currency was destroyed
not once but twice in that period and
that was one of the most advanced
economies in the world
in the united states
there were periods of intensely
deep deflation prices fell by a third in
the great depression and then very
serious price volatility in the
immediate post-world war ii period so
it's a bit of an illusion maybe it's an
illusion
for people who've spent most of their
lives in the last 20 years
we've had a period of exceptional price
stability
since this century began
in which
a regime of central bank independence
and inflation targeting appeared to
generate steady below 2 inflation in
much of the developed world was a bit
too low for the central bankers liking
and that became a problem in the
financial crisis but we've avoided major
price uh instability for the better part
of 20 years in most of the world there
haven't really been that many
very high inflation episodes and hardly
any hyperinflationary episodes venezuela
is one of the very few zimbabwes another
but if you take a hundred year view or a
200 year view or if you want to take a
500 year view you realize that
quite often the system doesn't work
if you go back to the 17th century there
were multiple competing systems of
coinage there had been a great inflation
that had begun the previous century
the price revolution caused mainly by
the arrival of new world silver
i think
financial history is a bit messier than
one might think
and
the more one studies it the more one
realizes that the need for the evolution
the reason bills of exchange came along
was because the coinage systems had
stopped working the reason that
banknotes started to become used more
generally first in the american colonies
in the 17th century then more widely in
the 18th century was just that they were
more convenient than
any other way of of paying for things we
had to invent the bond market in the
18th century to cope with the problem of
public debt which up until that point
had been a recurrent source of
instability
and then
we invented equity finance
because bonds were not enough
so i would prefer to think of
of the financial history as a series of
crises really that are resolved by
innovations
and in the most recent episode very
exciting episode of financial history
something called bitcoin
initiated a new
financial or monetary revolution in
response i think to the growing
crisis of the fiat money system
can you speak to that so
what do you think
about bitcoin what do you think it is
the response to what are the growing
problems of the fiat system
what is this moment in human history
that is full of challenges that bitcoin
and cryptocurrency is trying to overcome
i don't think bitcoin
was devised by satoshi
whoever he was
for fear of
a breakdown of the fiat currencies
if it was it was a very far-sighted
enterprise because certainly in 2008
when the first bitcoin paper appeared it
wasn't very likely that a wave of
inflation was coming if anything
there was more reason to fear deflation
at that point i think
it would be more accurate to say
that with the advent of the internet
there was a need for a means of payment
native to the internet
typing your credit card number into a
random website it's not
the way
to pay for things on the internet
and i'd rather think of bitcoin as the
first iteration the first attempt to
solve the problem of how do we pay for
things in what we must learn to call the
metaverse but
let's just call it the internet for old
times sake
and ever since that initial
innovation the realization that you
could use computing power and
cryptography to create
peer-to-peer payments without
third-party verification
a revolution has been gathering momentum
that poses a very profound threat to the
existing legacy system of banks and and
fiat currencies
most money in the world today is made by
banks not central banks banks
that's what most money is it's entries
in bank accounts
and
what bitcoin represents is an
alternative mode of payment that really
ought to render banks obsolete
i think this financial revolution has
got past the point at which it can be
killed
it was vulnerable in the early years
but it now has sufficient adoption
and has generated sufficient additional
layers i mean ethereum was in many ways
the more important innovation because
you can build a whole
system of of payments and ultimately
smart contracts on top of ether i think
we've now reached the point that it's
pretty hard to imagine it all being
killed
and it's just survived an amazing thing
which was the chinese shutting down
mining and shutting down everything and
still here we are
uh in fact crypto's thriving
what we don't know is how much damage
ill-judged regulatory interventions are
going to do to this financial revolution
left to its own devices i think
decentralized finance provides
the native
monitoring financial system for the
internet
and the more time we spend in
the metaverse the more use we will make
of it the next things that will happen i
think will be that
uh tokens in game spaces like roblox
will become fungible
as my nine-year-old spends a lot more
time playing on
computer games than i ever did i can see
the entertainment is becoming
a game-driven phenomenon and in the game
space
you need skins for your avatar
the economics of the internet
it's evolving very fast and in parallel
you can see this payments revolution
happening i think that all
that all goes naturally very well and
generates an enormous amount of wealth
in the process
the the problem is
there are people in washington with an
overwhelming urge to intervene and and
disrupt this evolutionary uh process
partly i think
out of a muddled sense that there must
be a lot of nefarious things going on if
we don't step in many more will go on
this i think greatly exaggerates how
much criminal activity is in fact going
on in the space
but there's also the vested interests at
work
it was odd to me
maybe not odd perhaps it wasn't
surprising but the bank for
international settlements earlier this
year published a report
uh one chapter of which said this must
all go let's all stop
it's all got to be shut down
and it's got to be replaced by central
bank digital currency
and martin wolf in the financial times
read this and said i agree with this
and one suddenly realized that the the
banks are clever they had they'd
achieved the intellectual counter-attack
uh
with uh almost no fingerprints on the
weapon
i think central bank digital currency is
a terrible idea
i can't imagine why we would want to
copy a chinese
model that essentially takes all
transactions and puts them directly
under the surveillance of a central
government institution but
that suddenly is a
serious counterproposal
so on the one side we have a relatively
decentralized
technologically
innovative
internet native
system of payments that has the
possibility to evolve to produce a full
set of
of smart contracts
reducing enormously the transaction
costs that we currently encounter in the
financial world because it gets rid of
all those middlemen who take their cut
every time you take out a mortgage or
whatever it is that's one
alternative on the other side we have a
highly centralized system in which
transactions will by default be under
the surveillance of the central bank
seems like an easy choice to me but hey
i have this thing about personal liberty
so that's where we are i don't think
that the regulators can can kill uh
web 3 i think we're supposed to call it
web 3 because crypto is now an
obsolescent term they can't kill it but
they can definitely make it difficult
and
throw a lot of sand into the machine
and i think worst of all they can spoil
the evolutionary story by
by creating central bank digital
currency that i don't think we really
need or
we certainly don't need it in the
chinese form
but do you think bitcoin
has a strong chance to take over the
world so
become the primary you mentioned the
three things that make money money
become the primary methodology by which
we store wealth we
exchange no
no i think what bitcoin is
this was a phrase that i i got from my
friend matt mclennan first eagle an
option on digital gold so it's the gold
of the system
but currently it behaves like an option
that's why it's quite volatile because
we don't really know if this
brave new world of
crypto is gonna work
but if it does work then bitcoin is the
gold because of the finite supply
what role
we need gold to play in the metaverse
isn't quite clear i love that you're
using the term metaverse this is great
well i i just like the metaversity as a
kind of yeah
as the antithesis of what we're trying
to do in in austin but
i love it but can you imagine i'm using
it sarcastically i come from glasgow
where all novel words have to be used
sarcastically so the metaverse sarcastic
but see the beauty about humor and
sarcasm is that
the joke becomes reality i mean it's
like using the word big bang to describe
the origins of the universe it becomes
like that
it will after a while it's in the
textbooks yeah and nobody's laughing
yeah well that's exactly right so sticky
yeah
um i'm on the side of humor but it is a
it is a dangerous activity these days
anyway i think bitcoin is is the option
of digital gold
the
the role it plays is probably
not so much storage value right now it's
just nicely not very correlated asset in
your portfolio when i updated the ascent
of money which was in 2018 10 years
after it came out
i wrote a new chapter in which i said
bitcoin which had just sold off after
its 2017 bubble
will rise again through adoption
because if every millionaire in the
world
has point two percent of his or her
wealth in bitcoin the price should be
fifteen thousand dollars and if it's one
percent it's seventy five thousand
dollars
and it
might not even stay at one percent
because i mean look at its recent
performance if you
if your exposure to stocks global stocks
had been hedged with a
significant uh crypto holding you would
have aced the last few months
so i think the non-correlation
[Music]
property is very very important in
driving
adoption and the volatility also drives
adoption if you're a sophisticated
investor uh so i think the adoption
drives uh uh bitcoin up
because it's the option of digital gold
but it's also just this nicely not very
correlated asset that you want to hold
in in a world where the hell i mean the
bank central bank is going to tighten
we've come through this massively
disruptive episode of the pandemic
public debt soared money printing sword
you could hang around with your bonds
and wait for the euthanasia of the
rontier you can hang on to your tech
stocks and just hope there isn't a
massive correction or dot dot dot well
and it seems like a fairly obvious
strategy to make sure that you have at
least some crypto
for the coming year
given what we likely have to face
i think what's really interesting is
that on top of ethereum
a more elaborate
financial system is
being built
stable coins are the interesting
puzzle
for me
because we need off-ramps
you and i have to pay taxes in u.s
dollars
and
there's no getting away from that
the irs is going to let us hold crypto
as long as we pay our taxes and the only
question in my mind is what's the
optimal off-ramp
to make those taxes make those tax
payments
probably it shouldn't be a currency
invented by facebook never struck me as
the best solution to this problem
maybe it's some kind of fed coin
or maybe one of the the existing
algorithmic stable coins does the job
but we clearly need some stable off-ramp
so you don't think it's possible for the
irs within the next decade to be
accepting bitcoin as tax payments
i doubt that
having dealt with the irs now since when
did i first come here 2002
it's hard to think of an institution
less likely to
leap into the
21st century when it comes to to
payments no i think i think we'll we'll
be
we'll be tolerated
crypto world will be tolerated as long
as we pay our taxes that's the and it's
important that we're already at that
point
and then the next question becomes well
does gary gensler define everything as a
security and do we then have to go
through
endless regulatory contortions to
satisfy the sec
there's a whole bunch of of
uncertainties that the administrative
state excels at creating because you
know that's just how that's how the
administrative state works you'll do
something new hmm
i'll decide whether that's a security
but don't expect me to define it for you
i'll decide in an arbitrary way and then
you'll owe me money so all of this is
going to be very annoying and you know
for people who are trying to run
uh exchanges or uh innovate in the space
these these regulations will be annoying
but the problem with fintech is it's
it's different from tech broadly defined
you know when tech got into e-commerce
with amazon when it got into social
networking with facebook
there wasn't a huge regulatory jungle to
navigate but welcome to the world of
finance which has always been
a jungle of regulation because the
regulation is is there to
you know basically entrench the
incumbents that's what it's for so
it'll be a much tougher fight than the
fights we've we've seen over
other aspects of the tech revolution
because because the incumbents are are
there and they see
the threat
and in the end
satoshi said it very explicitly it's
peer-to-peer payment without third party
verification and all the third parties
are going wait what
we're the third parties
so there is a connection between power
and money
you've mentioned world war one
from the perspective of money so
power money war
authoritarian regimes
from the perspective of money do you
have hope that cryptocurrency can help
resist war
can help
resist the negative effects of
authoritarian regimes
or is that a silly hope
wars
happen
because the people
who have the power to command armed
forces
miscalculate
that's generally what happens
and we will have a big war in the near
future if
both the chinese government and the us
government miscalculates
and they unleash lethal lethal force on
one another and there's nothing that any
financial institution can do to stop
that
any more than the rothschilds could
rothschilds could stop world war one
and they were then the biggest bank in
the world by far with massive
international financial influence
so let's accept that war is
is in a different domain
war
would impact the financial world
massively if it were a war between the
united states and china because
there's still a huge
china trade on
wall street is long china
europe is long china
so the conflict that i could foresee in
the future is one that's highly
financially disruptive
where does crypto fit in
crypto's obvious
utility in the short run
is as a store of
wealth of transferable wealth for people
who live
in dangerous places
with
failing not just failing money but
failing rule of law
that's why in latin america there's so
much interest in crypto because latin
americans have a lot of monetary history
to look back on and not much of it is
so i think that the short run
problem that crypto solves
is and this goes back to the the digital
gold point
if you are in a dangerous place with
weak rule of law and weak property
rights
here's a new and better way
to have portable wealth
i think the next
question to ask is
would you want to be long crypto
in the event of world war three
what's interesting about that question
is that world war three would likely
have a significant cyber dimension to it
and i don't want to be a hundred percent
in crypto if
they crash the internet
which between them china and russia
might be able to do
that's a fascinating question whether
you want to be holding
physical gold or digital gold in the
event of world war iii the smart person
who studied history definitely wants
better both
and
so let's imagine world war iii has a
very very severe cyber component to it
with high levels of disruption
yeah you'd be glad of the old the old
shiny stuff at that point
so
diversification still seems like the
most important truth of a financial
history yeah and and what is crypto it's
just this wonderful new source of
diversification but you'd be nuts to be
a hundred percent in bitcoin i mean i i
i have some friends who are probably
quite close to that close to 100
i
i'd marr the i'd mar the bowls of steel
yeah
uh in whatever way that balls of steel
takes uh to takes form
uh you mentioned smart contracts what
are your thoughts about
in the context of the history of money
about ethereum about smart contracts
about kind of
uh
more systematic at scale formalization
of agreements between humans
i think
it must be the case
that a lot of the complexity in a
mortgage
is
redundant
that when we are confronted with pages
and pages and pages and pages of small
prints
uh we're seeing some
manifestation of of the late stage
regulatory state
the transaction itself is quite simple
and most of the verbage is just ass
covering by regulators
so i think the smart contract
although
i'm sure lawyers will
email me and tell me i'm wrong
can deal with a lot of the plain vanilla
and maybe not so plain transactions that
we want to do
and eliminate yet more
intermediaries
that's my
my kind of working assumption and
given that a lot of
of financial transactions
have the potential at least to be
to be simplified automated
turned into smart contracts that that's
probably where the future goes
i can't see an obvious reason why my
range of different financial
needs let's think about insurance for
example
will continue to be met
with instruments that in some ways are
100 years old
so i think we're still
an early stage of a financial revolution
that will greatly streamline
how we take care of all those financial
needs that we have uh mortgages and
insurance leave leap to mind you know
most households are
are penalized for
being financially poorly educated and
confronted with oligopolistic
financial services providers so you kind
of leave
college already in debt
so you start
in debt servitude and then
you gotta somehow leave her up to buy a
home if you can because everybody's kind
of telling you you should do that so
so you and your spouse you are getting
even more leveraged and you're
you're long one asset class called real
estate which is super illiquid
i mean
already i'm
i'm
crying inside at the thought of
describing so many households financial
predicament in that way and i'm not done
with them yet because oh by the way
there's all this insurance you have to
take out and here are the providers that
are willing to insure you and here are
the premiums you're going to be paying
which are kind of presented to you
that's your that's your car insurance
that's your home insurance and if you're
here it's the earthquake insurance and
pretty soon you're just bleeding money
in a bunch of monthly payments to the
mortgage
lender to the insurer
to all the other people that lent you
money
and let's look at your balance sheet it
sucks
you know there's this great big chunk of
real estate and what else have you
really got on there
and the other side is a bunch of debt
which is probably paying too high
interest
the typical household in the median
kind of range is is at the mercy of
oligopolistic financial services
providers go down further in the social
scale and people are outside the
financial system altogether and those
poor folks have to rely on
banknotes and informal lending with huge
punitive rates
we have to do better than this this has
to be
this has to be improved upon and i think
what's exciting about our time is that
technology now exists that didn't exist
when i wrote the ascent of money to
solve these problems when i wrote this
under money which was in 2008
you couldn't really solve
the problem i've just described
certainly you couldn't solve it with
something like microfinance that was
obviously not
viable the
interest rates were high the transaction
costs were crazy but now we have
solutions and the solutions are
extremely exciting so fintech is this
great force for good that brings people
into the financial system
and reduces transaction costs crypto is
part of it but it's just part of it
there's a much broader story of fintech
going on here where
you get suddenly you get financial
services on your phone don't cost nearly
as much as they they did when there had
to be a bricks and mortar building on
main street that you kind of went humbly
and beseeched to lend you money i'm
excited about that because it seems to
me very socially transformative
i'll give you one other example of
what's great
the people who really get sculpt in our
financial system are senders and
receivers of uh remittances
which are often amongst the poorest
families in the world the people who are
like my wife's family in east africa
really kind of hand to mouth
and if you send money to east africa or
the philippines or central america it's
it's the transaction costs are awful
uh
i'm talking to you western union
we're gonna solve that problem
so ten years from now the transaction
cost will just be negligible and the
money will go to the people who need it
rather than to rent seeking financial
institutions so i'm on the side of the
revolution with this because i think the
incumbent financial institutions
globally are doing a pretty terrible job
and
middle class and lower class families
lose out and
thankfully technology technology allows
us to fix this yeah so fintech can
remove a lot of inefficiencies in the
system i'm super excited myself maybe as
a machine learning person in the data
oracles so
converting a lot of our physical world
into data so
and have smart contracts on top of that
so
that no longer is there's this fuzziness
about what is the concrete nature of the
agreements you can tie your agreement to
weather you can tie your agreement to
the behavior of
certain kinds of financial uh systems
you can tie your behavior to
i don't know uh i mean all kinds of
things you can connect it to the body in
terms of human um sensory information
like uh you can make an agreement that
if you
don't lose five pounds in the next month
you're going to pay me a thousand
dollars or something like that i don't
know it's a stupid example but it's not
because like you can create all kinds of
services on top of that you can you can
just create all kinds of interesting
applications that completely
revolutionize
how humans transact
i think
of course
we don't want to
create a world of
chinese style social credit
in which our behavior
becomes so transparent
to
providers of financial services
particularly insurers that
uh
when i try to go into the pub i'm i'm
stopped from doing so
every time you take a drink your
insurance goes up
right or my credit card won't work uh in
certain restaurants because they serve
you know ribeye steak
i fear that world because i see it being
built in china and
we we must at all costs make sure that
the western world has something
distinctive to offer
uh it can't just be oh it's the same as
in china only the data go to
to five tech companies rather than to
xi jinping so
i think the the way we need to steer
this world is
in the way that
our
data
are
by default vaulted on our devices
and we choose
when to release the data yes
rather than the default setting being
that the data are available
that's important i think because it was
one of the biggest mistakes of
the evolution of the internet that that
in a way the default was to let our our
data be plundered it's hard to undo that
but i think we can we can at least uh
create a new regime
that in future makes privacy default
rather than
open access default
in the book doom the politics of
catastrophe
your newest book you describe wars
pandemics and the terrible disasters in
human history
which stands out to you as the worst in
terms of how much
it shook the world and the human spirit
i am glad
i was not around
in the mid 14th century when the bubonic
plague
swept across eurasia
as far as we can see
that was history's worst pandemic
maybe there was a comparably bad one in
the
reign of the emperor uh justinian but
there's some reason to think it wasn't
as bad
and the more we learn about
uh
the 14th century with the more we
realized that it really was across
eurasia and the the mortality was 30
in some places 50
in some places higher there were whole
towns that were just emptied
and when one reads about the black death
it's an unimaginable
nightmare
of of
death and
madness in the death with flagellate
orders wandering from town to town
seeking to ward off divine retribution
by flogging themselves
people turning on the local jewish
communities as if it's somehow their
fault
that must have been a nightmarish time
if you ask me
for an an also ran a runner-up it would
be
it would be world war ii uh in eastern
europe
and in many ways
it might have been worse because
for a medieval
peasant the sense of being on the wrong
side of divine retribution must have
been overpowering
in the mid-20th century
you knew
that this was man-made
murder on a massive industrial scale
if only if one reads grossman's life and
fate
just to take one example
one enters a
a hellscape
that it's extremely hard
to imagine
oneself in
so these are two of the great disasters
of of human history and
if we did have a time machine if one
really were able to transport people
back and
and give them a glimpse of these times
i think the post-traumatic stress would
be enormous people would come back from
those those trips even if it was a
one-day excursion with guaranteed
survival uh in a state of of utter shock
you often explore counterfactual
hypothetical history this which is a
fascinating thing to do uh sometimes to
a controversial degree
and again you walk through that fire
gracefully
so let me ask maybe about uh
world war ii or
in general or what key moments in
history of the 20th century
do you think if something else happened
at those moments we could have avoided
some of the big atrocities stalin's
holomore hitler's holocaust miles great
chinese famine
the great turning point in in world
history
is is august the 2nd 1914
when the british cabinet decides
to intervene
and what would have been
a european war
becomes a world war
and with british intervention it becomes
a massively larger and more protracted
conflict
so very early in my career i became very
preoccupied with the deliberations on
that day
uh and the
surprising decision that a liberal
cabinet took to to go to war
which you might not have bet on that
morning because
there seemed to be a majority of cabinet
members who would be disinclined and
only a minority including winston church
who wanted to go to war so that's one
turning point i often wish i could
get my time machine working and go back
and say wait stop
just think about what you're going to do
and by the way let me show you a video
of europe in 1918 so that's one can we
linger on that one
that one
uh a lot of people push back on you on
in the
because it's so
difficult
so the idea is if i could try to
summarize and
you're the first person that made me
think about this very uncomfortable
thought
which is uh
the ideas in world war one it would be a
better world if britain stayed out of
the war
and germany won right
uh thinking now in retrospect that the
whole story of the 20th century thinking
about
stalin's rule of 30 years thinking about
hitler's rise to power and
the atrocities of the holocaust but also
like you said on the eastern front
the death of tens of millions of people
through the war
and also sort of the political prisoners
and the suffering connected to communism
connected to fascism all those kinds of
things
well that's one
that's one heck of an example of why
you're just like fearless in this
uh particular style of exploring
counterfactual history so can you
elaborate on that
idea and maybe why this was such an
important day in human history
this argument was central to my book the
pity of war i i also did an essay in
virtual history about this and it's
always amused me that
from around that time i began to be
called a conservative historian because
it's actually a very left-wing argument
the people in 1914 who thought britain
should stay at the war were the left of
the labour party who split to become the
independent labour party
what
would have happened well first of all
britain was not ready for
war in 1914 there had not been
conscription the army was tiny
so britain had failed to deter germany
the germans took the decision that they
could risk
uh going through belgium
using the schlieffen plan to fight their
two-front war
they they calculated that britain's
intervention would either not happen or
not matter
if britain had
been strategically
committed to preventing germany winning
a war in europe they should have
introduced conscription 10 years before
had a
meaningful land army and that would have
deterred the germans
so the liberal government
provided the worst of both worlds a
commitment that was more or less secret
to intervene
that the public didn't know about in
fact much of the liberal party didn't
know about but without really the means
to make that intervention effective a
tiny army with just a few divisions
so it's perfectly reasonable to argue as
a number of people did in uh on august
the 2nd 1914 that britain should not
intervene after britain had not
immediately intervened against the
french revolutionary armies back in the
1790s it had played an offshore role
ultimately intervening but not
immediately intervening
if britain had stayed out
i don't think that france would have
collapsed immediately as it had in 1870
the french held up remarkably well to
catastrophic casualties in the first six
months of
the first world war
but by 1916 i don't see how uh
france could have kept going if britain
had not joined the war
and i think the war would have been over
perhaps at some point in 1916.
we know that germany's aims would have
been significantly limited because they
would have needed to keep britain out if
they'd succeeded in keeping britain out
they'd have had to keep britain out and
the way to keep britain out was
obviously not to make any annexation of
belgium to limit german war aims
particularly to limit them to eastern
europe and from britain's point of view
what was not to like
so the russian empire is defeated along
with france
what does that really
change
if the germans are sensible
and
we can see what this might have looked
like
they focus on eastern europe
they take chunks of the russian empire
perhaps they
create as they did in the
uh in the piece of brest-litovsk an
independent or quasi-independent poland
in no way does that pose a threat to the
british empire in fact it's a good thing
uh britain never had had a particularly
good relationship with the russian
empire after all
the key point here is that the germany
that emerges from victory in 1916
has a kind of european union it's the
dominant part
of an enlarged germany with a
significant missile europa
whatever you want to call it customs
union type arrangement with
neighboring countries
including one suspects austria-hungary
that is a very different world
from the world of 1917-18 the
protraction of the war for a further two
years
its globalization which britain's
intervention made inevitable
as philip zeliko showed in his recent
book on the failure to make peace in
woodrow wilson tried and failed to
intervene and broker a piece in 1916 so
i'm not the only counterfactualist here
the extension of the war for a further
two years with escalating slaughter the
death toll rose because the industrial
uh capacity of the armies grew greater
that's what condemns us to the bolshevik
revolution
and it's what condemns us ultimately
to nazism
because it's out of
the experience of defeat in 1918 as
hitler makes clear in mind camp that he
becomes radicalized and enters the
political realm
take out those additional years of war
and hitler's just a failed artist it's
the it's the end of the war
that
turns him into
the demagogue
you asked what are the things that
evolve avoid the totalitarian states
as i've said british
intervention for me is the most
plausible and it takes out all of that
malignant history that follows from the
bolshevik revolution it's very hard for
me to see how lenin gets anywhere if the
war is over
that looks like the opportunity for
the
the constitutional
elements uh the liberal elements in in
russia
there are other moments at which you can
imagine history taking a different path
if
uh
the provisional government in russia had
been more ruthless
it was very lenient towards the
bolsheviks but if it had just rounded
them up and shot the bolshevik
leadership that would have certainly
cut the bolshevik revolution off
one looks back on the
conduct of the the russian liberals with
the kind of despair at their their
failure to see the scale of the threat
that they face and the ruthlessness that
the bolshevik leadership would evince
there's a counterfactual in germany
which is interesting
i think the weimar republic destroyed
itself in two disastrous economic
uh
calamities the inflation and then the
deflation
it's difficult for me to imagine hitler
getting to be
reich chancellor without those huge
economic disasters so another part of my
early work explored alternative policy
options that the german republic the
weimar republic might have pursued
there are other contingencies that that
spring to mind in 1936 or 38 i think
more plausibly 38
britain should have gone to war
the great mistake was munich
hitler was in an extremely vulnerable
position in 1938
because remember he didn't have russia
squared away as he would in 1939.
chamberlain's mistake was to fold
instead of uh
of going for going for war as church or
rightly saw and and that there was a
magical opportunity there that would
have played into the hands of the german
military opposition and conservatives to
to snuff hitler out
over czechoslovakia
i could go on the point is that the
history is not some inexorable narrative
which can only end one way it's a garden
of forking paths
and at
many many
junctions in the road
there were choices
that could have averted the
calamities of the mid-20th century i
have to ask you about this moment
before you said i could go on this
moment of chamberlain and hitler snuff
hitler out
in terms of czechoslovakia
and uh we'll return to the book doom on
this point what does it take to be a
great leader in the room with hitler or
in the same time and space as hitler
to snuff him out to make the right
decisions
what what is so it sounds like you put
quite a bit of the blame on the man
chamberlain and give credit
to somebody like a churchill so what is
the difference where's that line you've
also
uh written a book about henry kissinger
who's an interesting sort of
person that's been through
throughout many difficult decisions in
the games of power so what does it take
to be a great leader in that moment that
particular moment sorry to keep talking
is fascinating to me because it feels
like it's man on man conversations that
define history well hitler was bluffing
uh he really wasn't ready for war in
1938 the german economy was clearly not
ready for war in 1938
and
and chamberlain made a fundamental
uh miscalculation along with his
advisors because it wasn't all
chamberlain he was
in many ways
articulating
the establishment view uh and i tried to
show in a book called war of the world
how that establishment worked it
extended uh through the bbc into the
aristocracy to oxford there was an
establishment view chamberlain
personified it churchill was seen as a
warmonger
uh he was at his lowest point of
popularity in 1938 but what is what is
it that chamberlain gets wrong because
it's conceptual
chamberlain is persuaded that britain
has to play for time because britain is
not ready for war in 1938.
he fails to see that the time that he
gets that he buys at munich is also
available to hitler
everybody gets the time and hitler's
able to do much more with it because
hitler strikes the pact with
with stalin
that guarantees
that germany can fight a war on one
front in 1939.
what does chamberlain do builds some
more aircraft
so the great mistake of the strategy of
appeasement was to play for time i mean
they knew all was coming but they were
playing for time not realizing that
hitler got the time too
and after he partitioned czechoslovakia
he was in a much stronger position not
least because of all the resources that
they were able to plunder uh
uh from czechoslovakia
so that was the conceptual mistake
churchill
played
an heroic role in pointing out
this mistake and predicting accurately
that it would lead to war on worse terms
what does it take
it takes a distinct courage
to be unpopular and churchill was deeply
unpopular at that point people would
listen to him in the house of commons in
silence on one occasion uh lady astor
shouted rubbish
so he went through a period of being
hated on
the other thing that made churchill a
formidable leader was that he always
applied history to the problem
and that's why he gets it right he he
sees the historical problem much more
clearly than than chamberlain so i think
if you go back to 1938
there's no realistic counterfactual in
which churchill's in government in 1938
you have to france collapse for
churchill to come into government
but you can certainly imagine
a
tory elite
that's thinking more clearly
about the likely dynamics they haven't
seen this
i guess problem of conjecture to take a
phrase from kissinger
which is that whatever they're doing
in postponing
the war has the
potential to create a worse starting
point for the war
it would have been risky in 1938 but it
was a way better situation than they
ended up with in 1939 a year later
you asked about kissinger and i've
learnt a lot from reading kissinger and
talking to kissinger since i embarked on
writing his biography a great many years
ago
i think one of the most important things
i've learned
uh
is that
you can apply history to contemporary
problems it may be the most important
tool that we have in
that kind of decision making
you have to do it
quite
ruthlessly and
rigorously
and in the moment of crisis
you have to take risk
so
kissinger often says in his early work
the temptation of the bureaucrat is to
wait for more data but ultimately the
decision
making that we do under uncertainty
can't be based on data
the problem of conjecture is that you
could take an action now
and incur some cost
an avert disaster
but you'll get no thanks for it because
nobody is grateful for an averted
disaster
and nobody goes around saying wasn't it
wonderful how we didn't have another 911
on the other hand you can do nothing
incur no upfront costs and hope for the
best
and you might get lucky the disaster
might not happen
that's in a democratic system the much
easier
path to take
and i think
the the essence of leadership is to be
ready
to take that upfront cost avert the
disaster and accept that you won't get
gratitude
if i may make a
comment an aside about henry kissinger
so he i think at 98 years old currently
has still got it
yeah he's brilliant
it's very very impressive i
can only hope that my brain has the same
durability that his his does because
it's a formidable intellect and it's
still in
in as sharp form as it it was 50 years
ago so you mentioned eric schmidt's in
his book they reached out to me didn't
want to do this podcast
and i'm i'm i know eric schmidt i've
spoken to him before i like him a lot
obviously um
so they said
we could do a podcast for 40 minutes
with
eric 40 minutes with eric and henry
together
and 40 minutes with henry so those are
three different conversations
and i had to like i had to do some soul
searching because i said fine 40 minutes
with eric we'll probably talk many times
again
fine let's talk about this ai book
together for 40 minutes
but i said what i wrote to them said i
would hate myself if i only have 40
minutes to talk to henry kissinger
as i had to hold my ground went back and
forth and in the end decided to part
ways over this and i sometimes think
about this kind of
difficult decision
um in the podcasting space
of
when do you walk away
because um
there's a particular world leader
that i've mentioned in the past where
the conversation is very likely to
happen
and
as as it happens
those conversations can often be
you know unfortunately this person only
has 30 minutes now i know we agreed for
three hours but unfortunately and you
have to decide do i stand my ground on
this
on this point i suppose that's the thing
that journalists have to think about
right like um
do i hold on to my integrity in whatever
form that takes and do i stay in my
ground even if i
lose a fascinating opportunity anyway
it's something i thought i thought about
and
something i think about and with henry
kissinger i mean
he's had a million amazing conversations
in your biography so it's not like
something is lost but it was still
nevertheless to me some soul searching
they had to do as a as a kind of
practice for
what to me is a higher stakes
conversation
i'll just mention is vladimir putin
i can have a conversation with him
unlike any conversation he's ever had
partially because i'm a fluent russian
speaker
partially because i'm messed up in the
head in certain kind of ways that make
for an interesting dynamic because we're
both judo people we both are
certain kinds of human beings that can
have a much deeper apolitical
conversation
i have to ask to stay on the topic of
leadership
you've uh in your book doom
have talked about wars pandemics
throughout human history
and
in some sense saying that all of these
disasters are man-made
so humans have a role in terms of the
magnitude of the effect that they have
on human civilization
without taking cheap political shots can
we talk about covid19
how will
history remember the coven 19 pandemic
what were the successes with what were
the failures
of leadership
of of man of humans
doom was a book
that i was
planning to write before yes the
pandemic struck as a history of
of the future based in large measure on
science fiction
it had occurred to me in 2019 that i had
spent too long not reading science
fiction and so i decided i would
liven up my
my intake
by getting off history for a bit and
reading science fiction
because history is great at telling you
about the perennial problems of power
putin is always interesting on history
he's become something of a historian
recently with uh his essays and lectures
but what history is bad at telling you
is well what will the effects of this
discontinuity of technology be
and so i thought i need some science
fiction to think more about this because
i'm i'm i'm tending to miss
the importance of technological
discontinuity
if you read a lot of science fiction you
read a lot of plague books because
science fiction writers are really quite
fond of the plague scenario so the world
ends in many ways in science fiction but
one of the most popular is the lethal
pandemic so when
when the first
email came to me i think it was on
january the third from my medical friend
justin stebing funny pneumonia and wuhan
my antennae began
to tingle because it was just like
one of those science fiction books that
begins in just that way
in a pandemic
as larry brilliant the epidemiologist
said many years ago the key
is early detection and early action
that's how you deal with a novel
pathogen
and almost no western country did that
we know it was doable because the time
and ease and the south koreans did it
and they did it very well
but really no western country got this
right
some were unlucky because super spreader
events happened earlier than in other
countries italy was hit very hard very
early for other countries the real
disaster came quite late russia which
has only relatively recently had a
really bad experience
the lesson for me is quite different
from the one that most journalists
thought they were learning last year
most journalists last year thought
trump is a terrible president he's
saying a lot of crazy things
it's his fault that we have high excess
mortality in the united states
the same argument was being made by
journalists in britain boris johnson dot
dot dot brazil bolsonaro dot dot dot
even india narendra modi
the same argument
and i think this argument is wrong in a
few ways
it's true that the populist leaders said
many crazy things
and broadly speaking gave poor guidance
to their
their populations
but i don't think it's true to say
that with different leaders these
countries would have done significantly
better if joe biden had magically been
president
a year earlier i don't think the us
would have done much better because the
things that caused excess mortality last
year weren't presidential decisions they
were
utter failure of cdc to provide testing
that definitely wasn't trump's fault
scott gottlieb's book makes that very
clear it's just been published recently
we utterly failed to use technology for
contact tracing which the koreans did
very well
we didn't really quarantine anybody
seriously there was no enforcement of
quarantine
and we exposed the elderly to the virus
as quickly as possible in elderly care
homes and
these things have very little to do with
presidential incompetence
so i think
leadership
is of somewhat marginal importance in a
crisis like this because what you really
need is your public health bureaucracy
to get it right and very few western
public health bureaucracies got it right
could the president have given
better leadership yes
his correct strategy however was
to learn from barack obama's playbook
with the opioid epidemic
the opioid epidemic killed as many
people on obama's watch as covert did on
trump's watch
and it was worse in the sense because it
only happened in the u.s and each year
it killed more people than the year
before over eight years
nobody to my knowledge has ever
seriously blamed obama for the opioid
epidemic
trump's mistake was to put himself front
and center of the response to claim that
he had some unique insight into the
pandemic and to say
with every passing week more and more
foolish things until even
a significant portion of people who'd
voted for him in 2016 realized that he'd
blown it which is why he lost the
election
the correct strategy was actually to
make mike pence
the pandemic tsar and get the hell out
the way
that's what my advice to trump would
have been in fact it was in february of
last year
so the mistake was
to to try to lead
but actually
leadership in a pandemic's almost a
contradiction in terms what you really
need is your public health bureaucracy
not to fuck it up and they really really
fucked it up and that was then all
blamed on trump yes you know jim fallows
writes a piece in the atlantic that says
well being the president's like flying a
light aircraft it's pilot error and i i
read that piece and i thought does he
really after all the years he's spent
writing think that being president is
like flying a light aircraft i mean
it's really nothing like flying a light
aircraft being president is you sit on
top of a vast bureaucracy with how many
different agencies 60 70 we've all lost
count
and you're surrounded by advisers at
least a quarter of whom are saying this
is a disaster we have to close the
borders and the others are saying no no
we have to keep the economy going that's
what you're running on in november
so being a president in a pandemic is a
very unenviable position
uh because you actually can't
you can't really determine whether your
public health bureaucracy will get it
right or not you don't think to push
back on that just like being churchill
in a war is difficult
so
leaving trump abiding aside what i would
love to see from a president is somebody
who makes great speeches and arouses the
public to push the bureaucracy the
public health bureaucracy to get their
shit together to fire certain kinds of
people to do i mean i'm sorry but i'm a
big fan of powerful speeches especially
in the modern age with the internet it
can really move people instead
the lack of speeches
resulted in certain kinds of forces
uh
amplifying division over whether wear
masks or not or all
it's like it's almost like the public
pick some random topic over which to
divide themselves and there was like a
complete indecision which is really what
it was
fear
of the of uncertainty materializing
itself in some kind of division and then
you almost like busy yourself with the
red versus blue politics as opposed to
some i don't know fdr type character
just stands and say
uh
fuck all this bullshit that we're
hearing we're going to manufacture 5
billion tests this is what america is
great at we're going to build the
greatest testing infrastructure ever
built
or
something or even with the vaccine
development but that was what i was
about to interject yes in a pandemic the
most important thing is the vaccine if
you get that right then you should be
forgiven for much else and that was the
one thing the trump administration got
right because
uh they went around the bureaucracy with
operation warp speed and achieved a
really major success
so i think the paradox of of
the
the 2020
story in the united states is that the
one thing that mattered most the trump
administration got right
and it got so much else wrong that was
sort of marginal that we were left with
the impression that trump had
been to blame for the whole disaster
which wasn't really quite right
sure it would have been great if we did
operation warp speed for testing
but ultimately vaccines are more
important than tests and
this brings me to the question that that
you raised there of polarization and why
that happened
now in a book called the square in the
tower i argued that it would be very
costly for the united states to allow
the public sphere to continue to be
dominated by a handful of big tech
companies that this ultimately would
have
more adverse effects than simply
contested elections and i think we saw
over the past 18 months uh just how bad
this could be because
the odd thing about this
country is that we came up with vaccines
with 90 plus percent efficacy
and about 20 of people refuse to get
them and still do refuse
for reasons that seem
best explained
in terms of the anti-vaxx network which
has been embedded on the internet for a
long time predating the pandemic
reni diresta wrote about this
pre-2020
and this this anti-vax network has
turned out to kill maybe 200 000
americans who could have been vaccinated
but were persuaded through magical
thinking that the vaccine was riskier
than the virus whereas
you don't need to be in epidemiology you
don't need to be a medical scientist to
know that the virus is about two orders
of magnitude riskier than the vaccine
so again
leadership
could definitely have been better
but the politicization of everything
was not trump's doing alone it
happened because our public sphere has
been dominated by a handful of platforms
whose business model
inherently promotes polarization
inherently promotes fake news and
extreme views because those are the
things that get the eyeballs on the
screens and sell the ads i mean this is
now a common place
but when one thinks about the cost of
allowing this uh
kind of thing to happen it's now a very
high human cost
and we were foolish to leave uncorrected
these structural problems in the public
sphere that were already very clearly
visible in 2016. and he described that
like you mentioned that there's these
networks they're almost like laying
dormant
waiting
for their time in the sun and they
stepped forward in this case and that
those network effects just
the service catalyst for whatever
the bad parts of human nature i do hope
that there's kinds of networks that
emphasize the the better angels of our
nature to to to quote steven pinker it's
just
clearly and we know this from all the
revelations of the facebook
whistleblower there is clearly a very
clear tension
between the business model of a company
like facebook
and the public good
and they know that
i just talked to the founder of
instagram i i
yes that's
the case but it's not
from a technology perspective
like absolutely true of any kind of
social network i think it's possible to
build actually i think it's not just
possible i think it's pretty easy if you
set that as the goal to build social
networks
that
don't have these negative effects
right
but if the business model is we sell ads
and the way you sell ads is to maximize
user engagement then the algorithm is
biased in favor of fake news and extreme
views but it's not it's so it's not the
ads a lot of people blame the ads
uh the
the problem i think is the engagement
and the engagement is just the easiest
the dumbest way to solve the ads i think
there's much different metrics that
could be used to make a lot more money
than the engagement in the long term it
has more to do with planning for the
long term so
optimizing the selling of ads
to make people happy with themselves in
the long term
as opposed to some kind of addicted like
dopamine feeling and so that's to me
that has to do with metrics and
measuring things correctly and sort of
also creating a culture with what's
valued to have difficult conversation
about what we're doing with society all
those kinds of things and i i think once
you have those conversations this takes
us back to the university of austin kind
of
once you have those difficult human
conversations you can design the
technology that will actually make
for
help people grow become the best version
of themselves help them be happy in the
long term
what
gives you hope
about the future
as somebody who studied some of the
darker moments of human history what
gives you hope
a couple of things
first of all
the united states
has a very unique operating system
which was very well designed by the
founders who thought a lot about history
and and realized it would take quite a
a novel design to prevent the republic
going the way of all republics because
republics tend to end up as tyrannies
for reasons that were well established
by the time of the renaissance
and it gives me hope that this design
has worked very well
and with student enormous stress test
stress test in the last
in the last year i became an american in
i think
one of the most important features of
this operating system is
that it is the magnet for talent
here we sit
uh
part of the immigration story
in uh you know in a darkened room
with funny accents talking to russians
walk into a recording studio and talk
about america it's it's very much like a
joke
and elon's a south african and so on and
thiel is a german and we're
we're extraordinarily fortunate that the
natives let us come and play
and and play in a way that we could not
in our countries of birth
and as long as the united states
continues to exploit that superpower
that it is the talent magnet
then it should out innovate the
totalitarian competition
every time
so that's
that's one reason
for being an optimist
another reason and it's quite a
historical reason as you would expect
from me
another reason that i'm
optimistic is
that my kids
give me a great deal of hope they range
in age from 27 down to four
but each of them
in their different way
seems to be finding a way
through this
crazy time of ours without losing
contact with
that culture and civilization
that i hold dear i don't want to live in
the metaverse as mark zuckerberg
imagines it to me that's a kind of
ghastly hell
i
think western civilization is the best
civilization
and i think that almost all the truths
about the human condition can be found
in western
literature
art
and music
and i think also that the the
civilization that produced the
scientific revolution has produced the
great problem-solving
tool that eluded the other civilizations
that never really
cracked science
and what gives me hope is that despite
all the temptations and distractions
that their generation
[Music]
had to contend with my children in their
different ways have found the
found their way
uh to literature and to art and to music
and
and they are civilized
and i i don't
i don't claim
much of the credit for that i've done my
best but i think it's deeply encouraging
that
that that they found their way to the
things that i think
are indispensable for a happy life a
fulfilled life nobody i think can be
truly fulfilled
if they're cut off from the great body
of western literature for example i've
thought
a lot about
elon's argument that we might be in a
simulation
no no there is a simulation it's cold
literature
and we just have to decide whether or
not to enter it
i'm
currently in the midst of
the later stages of of proust's great
allah and
observation of
human relationships is perhaps more
meticulous than that of any other writer
and it's impossible not to find yourself
identifying with
marcel and his
obsessive jealous relationships
particularly with alberti
it's the simulation and you you decide i
think
as a sentient being how far to
in your own life
reenact these more profound
experiences that others have written
down one of my earliest literary
simulations was to reenact jack kerouac
tripping on the road when i was 17
culminating and getting very wasted in
the hanging gardens of zochimilco not to
be
not to be missed and
it hit me just just as i was reading
proof that's really how to live a rich
life that one lives life but one lives
it
juxtaposing one's own experience
against the more refined experiences of
the great the great writers so it gives
me hope that my children do that a bit
do you include the
the russian authors very much in the
canon
yes i don't read russian um
but i was entirely obsessed with russian
literature as a schoolboy
i read my way through dostoyevsky
tolstoy turganyev
i uh check off
i think um
of all of those writers
tolstoy had the biggest impact because
at the end of war and peace there's this
great essay on historical determinism
which i think was the reason i became a
historian
but i'm i'm really
temperamentally a kind of togenyev
person
oddly enough
i i think if you if you haven't read
those novelists i mean you can't really
be a complete human being if you haven't
if you haven't read the brothers
karamazov you will not really
you're not grown up and so i think i
think in many ways those are the
greatest
the greatest novels raskolnikov's
remember raskolnikov's nightmare at the
end of crime and punishment
in which he imagines in his dream a
world in which a terrible virus spreads
do you remember this
and this virus has the effect of making
every individual think
that what he believes is right
and
in this
self-righteousness
uh people fall on one another and commit
appalling violence
that's raskolnikov's nightmare and it's
a prophecy it's a terrible prophecy of
of russia's future
yeah it's uh
and coupled with that is probably the i
also like the french the existentialist
all that that the full spectrum and
germans hermann has said and just that
range of human thought has expressed the
literature it's fascinating i really
love your idea that
the simulation
like
one way to to live life is to kind of
explore these other worlds and borrow
from them yes
wisdom that you then just map onto your
own lives you almost like stitched
together your life with these kind of
pieces from literature the highly
educated person is constantly struck
by illusion
everything is an allusion to something
that one has read
and that
is the simulation that's what
the real metaverse is it's the imaginary
world that we enter when we read
empathize and then recognize in our
daily lives
some scrap of
the shared experience that literature
gives us
yeah i think i've uh aspired to be the
idiot from prince mishkin from
dostoevsky and in
aspiring to be that i have become
the idiot i feel at least in part
um
what you mentioned the human condition
does love have to do
what role does it play in the human
condition friendship
love
is
the drug
kind is uh this was a great roxy music
line
uh that brian ferry wrote and love is
uh the most powerful and and dangerous
of all the drugs
uh the um
the
driving force that overrides our reason
and of course uh it is the
it is the primal it's the primal urge
so
what a civilized society has to do is to
prevent that drug that primal force from
creating mayhem so there have to be
rules
uh
like monogamy
and
rituals like like marriage that that
reign love in and make the
the addicts
uh at least
more or less uh under control and i i
think that's
that's part of why i'm i'm a romantic
rather than a you know steve pinker
enlightenment rationalist because
the romantics realized that that love
was the drug
it's like
the difference in sensibility
between uh handel and wagner
and i i had a vagnerian phase when i was
an undergraduate i still remember
thinking
that in in
uh as old as libra's toad
that wagner had got the closest to sex
that anybody had ever got
in in music
or perhaps to love
i'm i'm
lucky that i love my wife and that uh
that we were
by the time we met
you know smart enough to understand
that that love is a drug that you have
to kind of take
in in in certain careful ways
and that
it works best in
the context of a
of a stable family
that's that's the key thing that one has
to sort of
take the drug and then submit to the
the the conventions of of of marriage
and family life
i
i think in that respect
i'm a kind of tamed romantic contain
romantic that's how i would like to
think about it and that's the degree to
which your romanticism is tamed can be
then channeled into productive work
that's why you're a historian and a
writer is the breast is that love is
channeled through the writing so if
you're going to be addicted to anything
be addicted to work
i mean we're all addictive but yeah the
thing about workaholism is that it is
the most productive addiction and uh
and rather that than drugs or booze so i
i'm i'm
yes i'm always trying to channel my
anxieties in into work
i learnt that at a relatively early age
it's a sort of massively productive way
of coping with the inner demons
and again we should teach kids that
because
let's come back to our earlier
conversation about universities part of
what happens at university is that
adolescents have to overcome all the
inner demons and these include
deep insecurity
about one's appearance about one's
intellect and then
madly raging hormones that cause you to
behave like a complete fool with
the people to whom you're sexually
attracted all of this is going on in the
university how can it be a safe space
it's a completely dangerous space by
definition
yeah so
so yeah teaching young people how to
manage these storms uh
you know that's part of the job and and
we've we're really not allowed to do
that anymore because we can't talk about
these things for fear of the title nine
officers kicking down the door and
dragging us off in chains and like you
said hard work and something you call
work ethic
in civilization
is um is a pretty is a pretty effective
way to
achieve i think a kind of happiness in a
world that's full of anxiety or at least
exhaustion so sleep well
well there is there's a beauty to the
exhaustion too that's why running this
manual work
that some some part of us is built for
that right i mean we are
products of of evolution and
our adaptation to a technological world
is a very imperfect one so
hence the kind of masochistic urge to to
run
uh
i i'd like
outdoor exercise i don't really like
gyms
so i'll go for long punishing runs in
in woodland
hike up hills
i like swimming in lakes and in the sea
because there just has to be that
physical
uh activity in order to do the good
mental work and so
it's all about trying to do the best
work
that's my sense that we we have
some random allocation of talent you
kind of figure out what it is that
you're relatively good at and you try to
do that well i think my father
encouraged me to think that way
and you don't mind about being average
at the other stuff the kind of sick
thing is to try to be brilliant to
everything i hate those people
you should really not worry too much if
you're just
an average double bass player which i am
or kind of average skier which i
definitely am
doing those things okay is is part of
leading a rich and fulfilling life
i was not a good actor but i got a lot
out of acting as an undergraduate turned
out after three years of experimentation
oxford that i was
broadly speaking better at writing
history essays than
uh my peers and that was my edge that
was my comparative advantage and so i've
just tried to make a living from from
that slight edge yeah
that's a beautiful way to describe a
life
is there a meaning to this thing is
there a meaning to life what is the
meaning of life
i was brought up by a physicist and a
physician
they were more or less committed
atheists who had left the church of
scotland
as a protest against sectarianism in
glasgow
and so my sister and i were told from an
early age life was a cosmic accident
and
that was it
there was no great meaning to it
and i i can't really get past that
isn't there beauty
to being an accident at a cosmic scale
yes i wasn't taught to to feel negative
about that and if anything
it was a frivolous
a frivolous insight the whole thing was
a kind of joke
um
and and i think that
atheism isn't really a basis for
ordering a society but
it's
been all right for me
i don't have a kind of sense of of a
missing religious
faith
for me
however there's clearly some embedded
christian ethics in the way
my parents lived and so we were kind of
atheist calvinists
who had kind of deposed god but carried
on behaving as if we were members of the
elect in in a moral universe so
that's kind of um
the state of mind that
i was left in
and
i
i think that
we aren't really around long enough
to claim that our individual lives have
meaning
but what
edmund burke said is true the real
social contract is between the
generations between the dead the living
and the unborn and the meaning of life
is
for me at least
uh to live in a way that honors the dead
seeks to learn from their accumulated
wisdom because they do still outnumber
us they outnumber the
the living by quite a significant margin
and then to be mindful of the unborn and
our
responsibility
to them
writing books is a way of communicating
with the unborn
it may or may not succeed and probably
won't succeed if my books are never
assigned by work professors in the
future
so what we have to do is more than just
write books and record podcasts there
have to be institutions i'm 57 now
i realized recently that succession
planning had to be the main focus of the
next 20 years because
there are things that i really care
about
that i want future generations to have
access to
and
so the meaning of life i do regard as
being intergenerational transfer of
wisdom
ultimately the species will go extinct
at some point
even if we do colonize mars one senses
that physics will catch up with this
particular organism but it's in the
pretty far distant future
and so the meaning of life is to make
sure that for as long as there are human
beings
they are able to
live the kind of fulfilled lives
ethically fulfilled intellectually
fulfilled
emotionally fulfilled lives that
civilization has made possible
it would be easy for us to revert
to the uncivilized world
there's a fantastic book
that i'm going to
misremember milos is the captive soul
the captive mind rather
which
has a fantastic passage
here
he was a
polish
intellectual who says americans can
never imagine what it's like
for civilization to be completely
destroyed as it was in poland at the end
of by the end of world war ii to have no
rule of law to have no security of even
person never mind property rights they
can't imagine what that's like and what
it will lead you to do
so one reason for teaching history is to
remind the lucky
uh
generation z members
of california that
that civilization is a thin film and it
can be destroyed remarkably easily
and to preserve civilization is a
tremendous
responsibility that we have it's a huge
responsibility
and we must we must not destroy
ourselves whether it's in the name of of
wokism or the pursuit of
the metaverse preserving civilization
and making it available not just to our
kids but to people we'll never know
generations ahead that's the meaning
and
do so by studying the lessons of history
right not only studying them but then
acting on them
for me the biggest problem is how do we
apply history more effectively it seems
as if our institutions including
government are very very bad at applying
history
lessons of history are learnt poorly if
at all analogies are drawn crudely often
the wrong inferences are drawn
one of the big intellectual challenges
for me is how to make history more
useful and this was the kind of thing
that
professors used to hate but really
practically useful so that
policymakers and citizens
can think about the decisions that they
face with
a more historically informed
body of knowledge
whether it's a pandemic the challenge of
climate change what to do about taiwan
i can't think of a better set of
uh of things to know
before you make decisions about those
things than the the things that history
has to offer well i love the discipline
of applied history basically going to
history and saying
what
are the
key principles here that are applicable
to the problems of today right and how
can we solve that great philosopher of
history r.g collingwood
said in his autobiography which was
published in 1939
that the purpose of history
was to reconstitute past thought
from whatever surviving remnants there
were
and then to juxtapose it
with our own predicament and that's that
juxtaposition of past experience with
present experience that is so important
we don't do that well
uh and indeed we've we've flipped it so
that academic historians now think their
mission is to travel back to the past
with the value system of 2021 and
castigate
uh the the dead for their racism and
sexism and transphobia and whatnot and
that's exactly wrong
our mission is to go back and try to
understand what it was like to live in
the 18th century
not to go back and condescend to the
the people of the past and once we've
had a better understanding once we've
seen into their lives read their words
tried to reconstitute their experience
to come back
and understand our own time better
that's what we should really be doing
but academic history has gone completely
haywire and it does almost the exact
opposite of what i think it should do
and by studying history
walk beautifully gracefully through the
simulation as you described by mapping
the lessons of history into the world of
today we have virtual reality already in
our heads we do not need oculus
in the metaverse
this was an incredible hopeful
conversation in in many ways that did
not expect i thought our conversation
would be much more about history than
about the future and it turned out to be
the opposite
thank you so much for talking today it's
a huge honor to finally meet you to talk
to you thank you for your valuable time
thank you lex and good luck with putin
thanks for listening to this
conversation with neil ferguson to
support this podcast please check out
our sponsors in the description
and now let me leave you with some words
from neil ferguson himself
no civilization
no matter how mighty it may appear to
itself is indestructible
thank you for listening and hope to see
you next time