Transcript
00:00:00 The following is a conversation with Neil Ferguson,
00:00:02 one of the great historians of our time,
00:00:04 at times controversial and always brilliant,
00:00:07 whether you agree with him or not.
00:00:09 He’s an author of 16 books on topics covering
00:00:13 the history of money, power, war, pandemics, and empire.
00:00:18 Previously at Harvard, currently at Stanford,
00:00:21 and today launching a new university here in Austin, Texas
00:00:25 called the University of Austin,
00:00:28 a new institution built from the ground up
00:00:31 to encourage open inquiry and discourse
00:00:34 by both thinkers and doers,
00:00:36 from philosophers and historians
00:00:38 to scientists and engineers,
00:00:40 embracing debate, dissent, and self examination,
00:00:43 free to speak, to disagree, to think,
00:00:46 to explore truly novel ideas.
00:00:49 The advisory board includes Steven Pinker, Jonathan Haidt,
00:00:53 and many other amazing people with one exception, me.
00:00:58 I was graciously invited to be on the advisory board,
00:01:01 which I accepted in the hope of doing my small part
00:01:04 in helping build the future of education and open discourse,
00:01:08 especially in the fields of artificial intelligence,
00:01:10 robotics, and computing.
00:01:12 We spend the first hour of this conversation
00:01:14 talking about this new university
00:01:16 before switching to talking about
00:01:18 some of the darkest moments in human history
00:01:21 and what they reveal about human nature.
00:01:24 This is the Lex Friedman podcast.
00:01:26 To support it, please check out our sponsors
00:01:28 in the description.
00:01:29 And now, here’s my conversation with Neil Ferguson.
00:01:35 You are one of the great historians of our time,
00:01:37 respected, sometimes controversial.
00:01:40 You have flourished in some of the best universities
00:01:42 in the world, from NYU to London School of Economics,
00:01:45 to Harvard, and now to Hoover Institution at Stanford.
00:01:49 Before we talk about the history of money, war, and power,
00:01:53 let us talk about a new university.
00:01:55 You’re a part of launching here in Austin, Texas.
00:01:59 It is called University of Austin, UATX.
00:02:04 What is its mission, its goals, its plan?
00:02:09 I think it’s pretty obvious to a lot of people
00:02:13 in higher education that there’s a problem.
00:02:17 And that problem manifests itself
00:02:19 in a great many different ways.
00:02:22 But I would sum up the problem
00:02:24 as being a drastic chilling of the atmosphere
00:02:30 that constrains free speech, free exchange,
00:02:34 even free thought.
00:02:36 And I had never anticipated
00:02:38 that this would happen in my lifetime.
00:02:40 My academic career began in Oxford in the 1980s
00:02:43 when anything went.
00:02:45 One sensed that a university was a place
00:02:48 where one could risk saying the unsayable
00:02:51 and debate the undebatable.
00:02:54 So the fact that in a relatively short space of time,
00:02:58 a variety of ideas, critical race theory or wokeism,
00:03:02 whatever you want to call it,
00:03:02 a variety of ideas have come along
00:03:04 that seek to limit and quite drastically limit
00:03:08 what we can talk about strikes me as deeply unhealthy.
00:03:12 And I’m not sure, and I’ve thought about this
00:03:14 for a long time, you can fix it
00:03:15 with the existing institutions.
00:03:18 I think you need to create a new one.
00:03:20 And so after much deliberation,
00:03:22 we decided to do it.
00:03:24 And I think it’s a hugely timely opportunity
00:03:29 to do what people used to do in this country,
00:03:33 which was to create new institutions.
00:03:34 I mean, that used to be the default setting of America.
00:03:37 We sort of stopped doing that.
00:03:38 I mean, I look back and I thought,
00:03:39 why are there no new universities?
00:03:41 Or at least if there are,
00:03:42 why do they have so little impact?
00:03:45 It seems like we have the billionaires,
00:03:48 we have the need, let’s do it.
00:03:50 So you still believe in institutions,
00:03:53 in the university, in the ideal of the university?
00:03:56 I believe passionately in that ideal.
00:03:59 There’s a reason they’ve been around for nearly a millennium.
00:04:02 There is a unique thing that happens
00:04:08 on a university campus when it’s done right.
00:04:11 And that is the transfer of knowledge between generations.
00:04:16 That is a very sacred activity.
00:04:18 And it seems to withstand major changes in technology.
00:04:22 So this form that we call the university predates
00:04:25 the printing press, survive the printing press,
00:04:29 continue to function through the scientific revolution,
00:04:32 the enlightenment, the industrial revolution to this day.
00:04:37 And I think it’s because,
00:04:39 maybe because of evolutionary psychology,
00:04:41 we need to be together in one relatively confined space
00:04:48 when we’re in our late teens and early twenties
00:04:51 for the knowledge transfer between the generations
00:04:54 to happen.
00:04:56 That’s my feeling about this,
00:04:58 but in order for it to work well,
00:05:00 there needs to be very few constraints.
00:05:03 There needs to be a sense
00:05:05 that one can take intellectual risk.
00:05:07 Remember, people in their late teens and early twenties
00:05:10 are adults, but they’re inexperienced adults.
00:05:14 And if I look back on my own time as an undergraduate,
00:05:17 saying stupid things was my MO.
00:05:21 My way to finding good ideas
00:05:24 was through a minefield of bad ideas.
00:05:28 I feel so sorry for people like me today,
00:05:33 people age 18, 19, 20 today,
00:05:36 who are intellectually very curious
00:05:40 ambitious, but inexperienced
00:05:42 because the minefields today are absolutely lethal.
00:05:47 And one wrong foot and it’s cancellation.
00:05:52 I said this to Peter Thiel the other day,
00:05:54 imagine being us now.
00:05:57 I mean, we were obnoxious undergraduates.
00:06:01 There’s nothing that Peter did at Stanford
00:06:03 that Andrew Sullivan and I were not doing at Oxford.
00:06:06 And perhaps we were even worse,
00:06:08 but it was so not career ending
00:06:11 to be an absolutely insufferable,
00:06:17 obnoxious undergraduate then.
00:06:21 Today, if people like us exist today,
00:06:24 they must live in a state of constant anxiety
00:06:28 that they’re going to be outed for some heretical statement
00:06:32 that they made five years ago on social media.
00:06:35 So part of what motivates me
00:06:37 is the desire to give the me’s of today a shot
00:06:42 at free thinking and really,
00:06:46 I’d call it aggressive learning,
00:06:51 learning where you’re really pushed.
00:06:54 And I just think that stopped happening
00:06:56 on the major campuses because whether at Harvard
00:06:59 where I used to teach or at Stanford where I’m now based,
00:07:02 I sense a kind of suffocating atmosphere of self censorship
00:07:07 that means people are afraid
00:07:09 to take even minimal risk in class.
00:07:12 I mean, just take, for example,
00:07:14 a survey that was published earlier this year
00:07:17 that revealed this is of undergraduates
00:07:20 in four year programs in the US.
00:07:23 85% of self described liberal students
00:07:26 said they would report a professor
00:07:28 to the university administration
00:07:30 if he or she said something they considered offensive.
00:07:33 And something like 75% said they do it
00:07:36 to a fellow undergraduate.
00:07:38 That’s the kind of culture
00:07:39 that’s evolved in our universities.
00:07:41 So we need a new university in which none of that is true,
00:07:44 in which you can speak your mind, say stupid things,
00:07:48 get it completely wrong and live to tell the tale.
00:07:52 There’s a lot more going on, I think,
00:07:54 because when you start thinking about
00:07:56 what’s wrong with a modern university,
00:07:58 many, many more things suggest themselves.
00:08:01 And I think there’s an opportunity here
00:08:03 to build something that’s radically new in some ways
00:08:06 and radically traditional in other ways.
00:08:10 For example, I have a strong preference
00:08:11 for the tutorial system that you see at Oxford and Cambridge,
00:08:15 which is small group teaching
00:08:17 and highly Socratic in its structure.
00:08:21 I think it’d be great to bring that to the United States
00:08:23 where it doesn’t really exist.
00:08:25 But at the same time,
00:08:26 I think we should be doing some very 21st century things,
00:08:30 making sure that while people are reading and studying
00:08:33 classic works, they’re also going to be immersed
00:08:37 in the real world of technological innovation,
00:08:41 a world that you know very well.
00:08:44 And I’d love to get a synthesis of the ancient and classical,
00:08:49 which we’re gradually letting fade away
00:08:52 with the novel and technological.
00:08:55 So we wanna produce people who can simultaneously
00:08:58 talk intelligently about Adam Smith,
00:09:02 or for that matter, Shakespeare or Proust,
00:09:06 and have a conversation with you about where AI is going
00:09:11 and how long it will be before I can get driven here
00:09:14 by a self driving vehicle,
00:09:17 allowing me to have my lunch and prepare
00:09:18 rather than focus on the other crazy people on the road.
00:09:22 So that’s the dream that we can create something
00:09:25 which is partly classical and partly 21st century.
00:09:29 And we look around and we don’t see it.
00:09:31 If you don’t see an institution
00:09:33 that you really think should exist,
00:09:35 I think you have a more responsibility to create it.
00:09:38 So you’re thinking including something bigger
00:09:41 than just liberal education,
00:09:43 also including science, engineering and technology.
00:09:46 I should also comment that I mostly stay out of politics
00:09:51 and out of some of these aspects of liberal education
00:09:55 that’s kind of been the most controversial
00:09:57 and difficult within the university.
00:09:59 But there is a kind of ripple effect of fear
00:10:04 within that space into science and engineering
00:10:08 and technology that I think has a nature
00:10:14 that’s difficult to describe.
00:10:16 It doesn’t have a controversial nature.
00:10:17 It just has a nature of fear
00:10:19 where you’re not, you mentioned saying stupid stuff
00:10:22 as a young 20 year old.
00:10:27 For example, deep learning, machine learning
00:10:30 is really popular in the computer science now
00:10:32 as an approach for creating artificial intelligence systems.
00:10:36 It is controversial in that space
00:10:40 to say that anything against machine learning,
00:10:43 saying, sort of exploring ideas that saying
00:10:46 this is going to lead to a dead end.
00:10:49 Now, that takes some guts to do as a young 20 year old
00:10:54 within a classroom to think like that,
00:10:57 to raise that question in a machine learning course.
00:10:59 It sounds ridiculous because it’s like
00:11:01 who’s going to complain about this?
00:11:03 But the fear that starts in a course on history
00:11:10 or on some course that covers society,
00:11:13 the fear ripples and affects those students
00:11:16 that are asking big out of the box questions
00:11:18 about engineering, about computer science.
00:11:22 And there’s a lot, there’s like linear algebra
00:11:24 that’s not going to change,
00:11:26 but then there’s like applied linear algebra,
00:11:29 which is machine learning.
00:11:30 And that’s when robots and real systems touch human beings.
00:11:34 And that’s when you have to ask yourself
00:11:36 these difficult questions about humanity,
00:11:39 even in the engineering and science and technology courses.
00:11:42 And these are not separate worlds in two senses.
00:11:46 I’ve just taken delivery of my copy of the book
00:11:50 that Eric Schmidt and Henry Kissinger have coauthored
00:11:53 on artificial intelligence,
00:11:55 the central question of which is,
00:11:56 what does this mean for us broadly?
00:11:59 But they’re not separate worlds in C.P. Snow’s sense
00:12:04 of the chasm between science and arts,
00:12:07 because on a university campus,
00:12:09 everything is contagious from a novel coronavirus
00:12:13 to the behaviors that are occurring
00:12:16 in the English department.
00:12:18 Those behaviors, if denunciation becomes a norm,
00:12:23 undergraduate denounces professor,
00:12:25 teaching assistant denounces undergraduate,
00:12:27 those behaviors are contagious
00:12:28 and will spread inextricably first to social science
00:12:31 and then to natural sciences.
00:12:32 And I think that’s part of the reason why
00:12:35 when this started to happen,
00:12:37 when we started to get the origins of disinvitation
00:12:40 and cancel culture,
00:12:42 it was not just a few conservative professors
00:12:45 in the humanities who had to worry,
00:12:47 everybody had to worry,
00:12:48 because eventually it was going to come
00:12:51 even to the most apparently hard stem part of the campus.
00:12:57 It’s contagious.
00:12:58 This is something Nicholas Christakis should look at
00:13:00 because he’s very good at looking at the way
00:13:03 in which social networks like the ones that exist
00:13:06 in a university can spread everything.
00:13:08 But I think when we look back and ask,
00:13:10 why did wokeism spread so rapidly
00:13:13 and rapidly out of humanities
00:13:15 into other parts of universities?
00:13:17 And why did it spread across the country
00:13:19 and beyond the United States
00:13:21 to the other English speaking universities?
00:13:23 It’s because it’s a contagion.
00:13:25 And these behaviors are contagious.
00:13:28 The president of a university I won’t name said to me
00:13:32 that he receives every day at least one denunciation,
00:13:37 one call for somebody or other to be fired
00:13:40 for something that they said.
00:13:43 That’s the crazy kind of totalitarianism light
00:13:46 that now exists in our universities.
00:13:50 And of course the people who want to downplay this say,
00:13:52 oh, well, there only have been a hundred and something
00:13:54 in disinvitations or,
00:13:56 oh, there really aren’t that many cases.
00:13:57 But the point is that the famous events,
00:14:00 the events that get the attention
00:14:02 are responsible for a general chilling
00:14:05 that as you say, spreads to every part of the university
00:14:07 and creates a very familiar culture
00:14:10 in which people are afraid to say what they think.
00:14:13 Self censorship, look at the heterodox academy data on this
00:14:16 grows and grows.
00:14:17 So now a majority of students will say,
00:14:20 this is clear from the latest heterodox academy surveys,
00:14:23 we are scared to say what we think
00:14:24 in case we get denounced, in case we get canceled.
00:14:28 But that’s just not the correct atmosphere
00:14:31 for a university in a free society.
00:14:33 To me, what’s really creepy
00:14:36 is how many of the behaviors I see
00:14:39 on university campuses today are reminiscent
00:14:41 of the way that people used to behave in the Soviet Union
00:14:44 or in the Soviet block or in Maoist China.
00:14:47 The sort of totalitarianism light
00:14:49 that I think we’re contending with here,
00:14:52 which manifests itself as denunciations,
00:14:56 people informing on superiors.
00:14:59 Some people using it for career advantage.
00:15:02 Other people reduced to helpless desperate apology
00:15:07 to try to exonerate themselves.
00:15:09 People disappearing metaphorically, if not literally.
00:15:12 All of this is so reminiscent of the totalitarian regimes
00:15:16 that I studied earlier in my career
00:15:17 that it makes me feel sick.
00:15:20 And what makes me really feel sick
00:15:21 is that the people doing this stuff,
00:15:23 the people who write the letters of denunciation
00:15:26 are apparently unaware that they’re behaving exactly
00:15:29 like people in Stalin’s Soviet Union.
00:15:31 They don’t know that.
00:15:32 So they clearly have,
00:15:33 there’s been a massive educational failure.
00:15:36 If somebody can write an anonymous
00:15:37 or non anonymous letter of denunciation and not feel shame.
00:15:41 I mean, you should feel morally completely contaminated
00:15:44 as you’re doing that, but people haven’t been taught
00:15:47 the realities of totalitarianism.
00:15:49 For all these reasons, I think you need to try
00:15:52 at least to create a new institution
00:15:54 where those pathologies will be structurally excluded.
00:16:01 So maybe a difficult question.
00:16:04 Maybe you’ll push back on this,
00:16:06 but you’re widely seen politically as a conservative.
00:16:09 Hoover Institution is politically conservative.
00:16:12 What is the role of politics at the University of Austin?
00:16:15 Because some of the ideas, people listening to this,
00:16:18 when they hear the ideas you’re expressing,
00:16:21 they may think there’s a lean to these ideas.
00:16:23 There’s a conservative lean to these ideas.
00:16:26 Is there such a lean?
00:16:28 There will certainly be people who say that
00:16:30 because the standard mode of trying to discredit
00:16:34 any new initiative is to say,
00:16:36 oh, this is a sinister conservative plot.
00:16:41 But one of our cofounders, Heather Heying,
00:16:45 is definitely not a conservative.
00:16:49 She’s as committed to the idea of academic freedom as I am.
00:16:53 But I think on political issues,
00:16:54 we probably agree on almost nothing.
00:16:57 And at least I would guess.
00:17:00 But politics, Max Weber made this point a long time ago,
00:17:04 that politics really should stop at the threshold
00:17:07 of the classroom, of the lecture hall.
00:17:09 And in my career, I’ve always tried to make sure
00:17:11 that when I’m teaching,
00:17:13 it’s not clear where I stand politically,
00:17:17 though of course undergraduates
00:17:19 insatiably curiously want to know,
00:17:22 but it shouldn’t be clear from what I say
00:17:24 because indoctrination on a political basis
00:17:28 is an abuse of the power of the professor,
00:17:30 as Weber rightly said.
00:17:32 So I think one of the key principles
00:17:35 of the University of Austin will be
00:17:38 that Weberian principle that politics
00:17:40 is not an appropriate subject
00:17:45 for the lecture hall, for the classroom.
00:17:48 And we should pursue truth
00:17:51 and enshrine liberty of thought.
00:17:56 If that’s a political issue, then I can’t help you.
00:17:58 I mean, if you’re against freedom of thought,
00:18:01 then we don’t really have much of a discussion to have.
00:18:04 And clearly there are some people
00:18:06 who politically seem quite hostile to it.
00:18:08 But my sense is that there are plenty
00:18:10 of people on the left in academia.
00:18:12 I think of that interesting partnership
00:18:14 between Cornel West and Robbie George,
00:18:18 which has been institutionalized in the Academic Freedom Alliance.
00:18:22 It’s bipartisan, this issue.
00:18:23 It really, really is.
00:18:25 After all, 50 years ago, it was the left
00:18:28 that was in favor of free speech.
00:18:30 The right still has an anti free speech element to it.
00:18:33 Look how quickly they’re out to ban critical race theory.
00:18:37 Critical race theory won’t be banned
00:18:38 at the University of Texas.
00:18:39 Wokism won’t be banned.
00:18:41 Everything will be up for discussion,
00:18:44 but the rules of engagement will be clear.
00:18:46 Chicago principles, those will be enforced.
00:18:49 And if you have to give a lecture on,
00:18:53 well, let’s just take a recent example,
00:18:56 the Dorian Abbott case.
00:18:57 If you’re giving a lecture on astrophysics,
00:19:02 but it turns out that in some different venue
00:19:04 you express skepticism about affirmative action,
00:19:08 well, it doesn’t matter.
00:19:09 It’s irrelevant.
00:19:10 We want to know what your thoughts are on astrophysics
00:19:13 cause that’s what you’re supposed to be giving a lecture on.
00:19:16 That used to be understood.
00:19:17 I mean, at the Oxford of the 1980s,
00:19:19 there were communists and there were ultra Tories.
00:19:22 At Cambridge, there were people who were so reactionary
00:19:25 that they celebrated Franco’s birthday,
00:19:28 but they were also out and out communists
00:19:30 down the road at King’s College.
00:19:32 The understanding was that that kind of intellectual diversity
00:19:36 was part and parcel of university life.
00:19:38 And frankly, for an undergraduate,
00:19:40 it was great fun to cross the road
00:19:42 and go from outright conservatism,
00:19:45 ultra Torism to communism.
00:19:47 One learns a lot that way.
00:19:50 But the issue is when you’re promoting
00:19:52 or hiring or tenuring people,
00:19:54 their politics is not relevant.
00:19:57 It really isn’t.
00:19:59 And when it started to become relevant,
00:20:01 and I remember this coming up
00:20:03 at the Harvard history department late in my time there,
00:20:06 I felt deeply, deeply uneasy
00:20:09 that we were having conversations
00:20:11 that amounted to, well, we can’t hire X person
00:20:15 despite their obvious academic qualifications
00:20:19 because of some political issue.
00:20:24 That’s not what should happen at a healthy university.
00:20:28 Some practical questions.
00:20:31 Will University of Austin be a physical in person university
00:20:36 or virtual university?
00:20:38 What are some in that aspect where the classroom is?
00:20:42 It will be a real space institution.
00:20:46 There may be an online dimension to it
00:20:50 because there clearly are a lot of things
00:20:52 that you can do via the internet.
00:20:56 But the core activity of teaching and learning
00:21:00 I think requires real space.
00:21:02 And I’ve thought about this a long time,
00:21:03 debated Sebastian Thrun about this many, many years ago
00:21:07 when he was a complete believer in,
00:21:09 let’s call it the metaversity to go with the metaverse.
00:21:12 I mean, the metaversity was going to happen, wasn’t it?
00:21:14 But I never really believed in the metaversity.
00:21:16 I didn’t do MOOCs because I just didn’t think you’d,
00:21:20 A, be able to retain the attention,
00:21:22 B, be able to cope with the scaled grading that was involved.
00:21:27 I think there’s a reason universities have been around
00:21:29 in their form for about a millennium.
00:21:32 You kind of need to all be in the same place.
00:21:34 So I think answer to that question
00:21:36 definitely a campus in the Austin area.
00:21:39 That’s where we’ll start.
00:21:41 And if we can allow some of our content
00:21:45 to be available online, great, we’ll certainly do that.
00:21:48 Another question is what kind of courses
00:21:50 and programming will it offer?
00:21:52 Is that something you can speak to?
00:21:54 What’s your vision here?
00:21:55 We think that we need to begin more like a startup
00:22:00 than like a full service university from day one.
00:22:05 So our vision is that we start with a summer school,
00:22:09 which will offer provocatively the forbidden courses.
00:22:12 We want, I think, to begin by giving a platform
00:22:18 to the professors who’ve been most subject
00:22:21 to council culture and also to give an opportunity
00:22:23 to students who want to hear them to come.
00:22:25 So we’ll start with a summer school
00:22:27 that will be somewhat in the tradition
00:22:30 of those institutions in the interwar period
00:22:33 that were havens for refugees.
00:22:34 So we’re dealing here with the internal refugees
00:22:37 of the work era.
00:22:39 We’ll start there.
00:22:41 It’ll be an opportunity to test out some content,
00:22:45 see what students will come and spend time in Austin to hear.
00:22:51 So that’s part A.
00:22:52 That’s the sort of, if you like, the launch product.
00:22:56 And then we go straight to a master’s program.
00:23:00 I don’t think you can go to undergraduate education
00:23:03 right away because the established brands
00:23:06 in undergraduate education are offering something
00:23:09 it’s impossible to compete with initially
00:23:11 because they have the brand, Harvard, Yale, Stanford,
00:23:14 and they offer also this peer network,
00:23:19 which is part of the reason people want so badly
00:23:21 to go to those places, not really the professors,
00:23:24 it’s the classmates.
00:23:25 So we don’t wanna compete there initially.
00:23:28 Where there is, I think, room for new entrance
00:23:31 is in a master’s program.
00:23:35 And the first one will be in entrepreneurship
00:23:37 and leadership.
00:23:39 Because I think there’s a huge hunger
00:23:42 amongst people who want to get into,
00:23:44 particularly the technology world,
00:23:46 to learn about those things.
00:23:47 And they know they’re not really going to learn
00:23:48 about them at business schools.
00:23:50 The people who are not going to teach them leadership
00:23:53 and entrepreneurship are professors.
00:23:55 So we want to create something that will be a little like
00:23:59 the very successful Schwarzman program in China,
00:24:02 which was come and spend a year in China
00:24:05 and find out about China.
00:24:07 We’ll be doing the same, essentially saying,
00:24:09 come and spend a year and find out about technology.
00:24:12 And there’ll be a mix of academic content.
00:24:15 We want people to understand some of the first principles
00:24:18 of what they’re studying.
00:24:19 There are first principles of entrepreneurship
00:24:21 and leadership, but we also want them to spend time with
00:24:24 people like one of our cofounders, Joe Lonsdale,
00:24:26 who’s been a hugely successful venture capitalist
00:24:30 and learn directly from people like him.
00:24:33 So that’s the kind of initial offering.
00:24:35 I think there are other master’s programs
00:24:37 that we will look to roll out quite quickly.
00:24:39 I have a particular passion for a master’s
00:24:42 in applied history or politics in applied history.
00:24:45 I’m a historian driven crazy by the tendency
00:24:48 of academic historians to drift away from
00:24:51 what seemed to me the important questions
00:24:53 and certainly to drift away from addressing
00:24:56 policy relevant questions.
00:24:57 So I would love to be involved in a master’s
00:25:01 in applied history.
00:25:02 And we’ll build some programs like that
00:25:06 before we get to the full liberal arts experience
00:25:11 that we envisage for an undergraduate program.
00:25:15 And that undergraduate program is an exciting one
00:25:17 cause I think we can be innovative there too.
00:25:19 I would say two years would be spent doing
00:25:22 some very classical and difficult classical things,
00:25:26 bridging those old divides between arts and sciences.
00:25:30 But then there would also be in the second half
00:25:34 in the junior and senior years,
00:25:37 something somewhat more of an apprenticeship
00:25:41 where we’ll have centers, including a center
00:25:43 for technology engineering mathematics
00:25:47 that will be designed to help people make that transition
00:25:51 from the theoretical to the practical.
00:25:54 So that’s the vision.
00:25:57 And I think like any early stage idea
00:26:02 we’ll doubtless tweak it as we go along.
00:26:04 We’ll find things that work and things that don’t work.
00:26:07 But I have a very clear sense in my own mind
00:26:10 of how this should look five years from now.
00:26:14 And I don’t know about you.
00:26:14 I mean, I’m unusual as an academic
00:26:16 cause I quite like starting new institutions
00:26:18 and I’ve done a bit of it in my career.
00:26:22 You got to kind of know what it should look like
00:26:25 after the first four or five years
00:26:27 to get out of bed in the morning
00:26:28 and put up with all the kind of hassles of doing it.
00:26:31 Not least the inevitable flack that we were bound to take
00:26:35 from the educational establishment.
00:26:39 And I was graciously invited to be an advisor
00:26:41 to this University of Austin.
00:26:45 And the reason I would love to help
00:26:49 in whatever way I can is several.
00:26:52 So one, I would love to see Austin,
00:26:55 the physical location flourish intellectually
00:26:58 and especially in the space of science and engineering.
00:27:03 That’s really exciting to me.
00:27:05 Another reason is I am still a research scientist at MIT.
00:27:09 I still love MIT and I see this effort
00:27:14 that you’re launching as a beacon
00:27:19 that leads the way to the other elite institutions
00:27:23 in the world.
00:27:24 I think too many of my colleagues
00:27:26 and especially in robotics kind of see,
00:27:31 don’t see robotics as a humanities problem.
00:27:35 But to me, robotics and AI will define much of our world
00:27:40 in the next century.
00:27:41 And for, not to consider all the deep psychological,
00:27:46 sociological, human problems associated with that.
00:27:51 To have real open conversations, to say stupid things,
00:27:55 to challenge the ideas that,
00:27:59 of how companies are being run, for example.
00:28:03 That is the safe space.
00:28:05 It’s very difficult to talk about the different
00:28:08 questions about technology when you’re employed
00:28:11 by Facebook or Google and so on.
00:28:13 The university is the place to have those conversations.
00:28:17 That’s right, and we’re hugely excited
00:28:18 that you want to be one of our advisors.
00:28:21 We need a broad and an eclectic group of people.
00:28:26 And I’m excited by the way that group has developed.
00:28:31 It has some of the, some of my favorite intellectuals
00:28:33 are there, Steve Pinker,
00:28:36 for example, but we’re also making sure
00:28:40 that we have people with experience in academic leadership.
00:28:46 And so it’s a happy coalition of the willing,
00:28:51 looking to try to build something new,
00:28:54 which as you say, will be complimentary
00:28:56 to the existing and established institutions.
00:29:00 I think of the academic world as a network.
00:29:04 I’ve moved from some major hubs in the network to others,
00:29:10 but I’ve always felt that we do our best work,
00:29:13 not in a silo called Oxford, but in a silo
00:29:17 that is really a hub connected to Stanford,
00:29:21 connected to Harvard, connected to MIT.
00:29:24 One of the reasons I moved to the United States
00:29:26 was that I sensed that there was more intellectual action
00:29:30 in my original field of expertise, financial history.
00:29:35 And that was right.
00:29:37 It was a good move.
00:29:39 I think I’d have stagnated if I’d stayed at Oxford.
00:29:43 But at the same time, I haven’t lost connection with Oxford.
00:29:46 I recently went and gave a lecture there
00:29:48 in honor of Sir Roger Scruton,
00:29:50 one of the great conservative philosophers.
00:29:52 And the burden of my lecture was the idea
00:29:56 of the Anglosphere, which appealed a lot to Roger,
00:30:00 will go horribly wrong if illiberal ideas
00:30:04 that inhibit academic freedom spread
00:30:06 all over the Anglosphere.
00:30:07 And this network gets infected with these,
00:30:11 I think, deeply damaging notions.
00:30:15 So yeah, I think we’re creating a new node.
00:30:18 I hope it’s a node that makes the network overall
00:30:21 more resilient.
00:30:23 And right now there’s an urgent need for it.
00:30:25 I mean, there are people whose academic careers
00:30:28 have been terminated.
00:30:30 I’ll name two who are involved.
00:30:32 Peter Boghossian, who was harassed out of Portland State
00:30:37 for the reason that he was one of those intrepid figures
00:30:43 who carried out the grievance studies hoaxes,
00:30:47 exposing the utter charlatanry going on
00:30:50 in many supposedly academic journals
00:30:53 by getting phony gender studies articles published.
00:30:56 This is genius.
00:30:57 And of course, so put the noses out of joint
00:31:00 of the academic establishment
00:31:02 that he began to be subject to disciplinary actions.
00:31:05 So Peter is going to be involved.
00:31:07 And in a recent shocking British case,
00:31:10 the philosopher Kathleen Stock has essentially
00:31:12 been run off the campus of Sussex University in England
00:31:18 for violating the increasingly complex rules
00:31:21 about discussing transgender issues and women’s rights.
00:31:26 She will be one of our advisors.
00:31:28 And I think also one of our founding fellows
00:31:30 actually teaching for us in our first iteration.
00:31:35 So I think we’re creating a node that’s badly needed.
00:31:38 Those people, I mean, I remember saying this
00:31:40 to the other founders when we first began
00:31:44 to talk about this idea to Barry Weiss
00:31:48 and to Panna Canellos as well as to Heather Haying.
00:31:52 We need to do this urgently because there are people
00:31:55 whose livelihoods are in fact being destroyed
00:31:58 by these extraordinarily illiberal campaigns against them.
00:32:02 And so there’s no time to hang around
00:32:05 and come up with the perfect design.
00:32:07 This is an urgently needed lifeboat.
00:32:10 And let’s start with that.
00:32:11 And then we can build something spectacular
00:32:13 taking advantage of the fact that all of these people have,
00:32:16 well, they now have very real skin in the game.
00:32:19 They need to make this a success.
00:32:21 And I’m sure they will help us make it a success.
00:32:24 So you mentioned some interesting names
00:32:27 like Heather Haying, Barry Weiss, and so on.
00:32:30 Steven Pinker, somebody I really admire.
00:32:32 He too was under a lot of, quite a lot of fire.
00:32:35 Many reasons I admire him.
00:32:37 One, because of his optimism about the future.
00:32:40 And two, how little of a damn he seems to give
00:32:44 about like walking through the fire.
00:32:48 There’s nobody more zen about walking through the fire
00:32:50 than Steven Pinker.
00:32:51 But anyway, you mentioned a lot of interesting names,
00:32:54 Jonathan Haidt is also interesting there.
00:32:56 Who is involved with this venture at this early days?
00:33:00 Well, one of the things that I’m excited about
00:33:04 is that we’re getting people from inside and outside
00:33:08 the academic world.
00:33:09 So we’ve got Arthur Brooks, who for many years
00:33:12 ran the American Enterprise Institute very successfully,
00:33:17 has a Harvard role now teaching.
00:33:20 And so he’s somebody who brings, I think,
00:33:23 a different perspective.
00:33:27 There’s obviously a need to get experienced academic leaders
00:33:34 involved, which is why I was talking to Larry Summers
00:33:38 about whether he would join our board of advisors.
00:33:43 The Chicago principals owe a debt
00:33:46 to the former president of Chicago.
00:33:50 And he’s graciously agreed to be in the board of advisors.
00:33:54 I could go on.
00:33:54 It would become a long and tedious list.
00:33:56 But my goal in trying to get this happy band to form
00:34:01 has been to signal that it’s a bipartisan endeavor.
00:34:06 It is not a conservative institution
00:34:08 that we’re trying to build.
00:34:09 It’s an institution that’s committed to academic freedom
00:34:12 and the pursuit of truth that will mean it when it takes
00:34:18 Robert Zimmer’s Chicago principles
00:34:20 and enshrines them in its founding charter.
00:34:22 And we’ll make those something other than honored
00:34:26 in the breach, which they seem to be at some institutions.
00:34:29 So the idea here is to grow this organically.
00:34:33 We need, rather like the Academic Freedom Alliance
00:34:36 that Robbie George created earlier this year,
00:34:39 we need breadth.
00:34:40 And we need to show that this is not
00:34:42 some kind of institutionalization
00:34:45 of the intellectual dark web, though we
00:34:47 welcome founding members of that nebulous body.
00:34:52 It’s really something designed for all of academia
00:34:55 to provide a kind of reboot that I think we all agree is needed.
00:35:00 Is there a George Washington type figure?
00:35:02 Is there a president elected yet?
00:35:04 Or who’s going to lead this institution?
00:35:07 Panos Kanellos, the former president of St. John’s,
00:35:10 is the president of University of Austin.
00:35:12 And so he is our George Washington.
00:35:15 I don’t know who Alexander Hamilton is.
00:35:17 I’ll leave you to guess.
00:35:18 It’s funny you mentioned IDW, Intellectual Dark Web.
00:35:21 Have you talked to your friend Sam Harris about any of this?
00:35:28 He is another person I really admire
00:35:30 and I’ve talked to online and offline quite a bit
00:35:34 for not belonging to any tribe.
00:35:39 He stands boldly on his convictions
00:35:43 when he knows they’re not going to be popular.
00:35:46 Like he basically gets canceled by every group.
00:35:51 He doesn’t shy away from controversy.
00:35:54 And not for the sake of controversy itself,
00:35:57 he is one of the best examples to me
00:36:00 of a person who thinks freely.
00:36:02 I disagree with him on quite a few things,
00:36:06 but I deeply admire that he is what it looks
00:36:10 like to think freely by himself.
00:36:12 It feels to me like he represents
00:36:14 a lot of the ideals of this kind of effort.
00:36:16 Yes, he would be a natural fit.
00:36:18 Sam, if you’re listening, I hope you’re in.
00:36:21 I think in the course of his recent intellectual quests,
00:36:25 he did collide with one of our founders, Heather Haying.
00:36:28 So we’ll have to model civil disagreements
00:36:31 at the University of Austin.
00:36:32 It’s extremely important that we should all
00:36:35 disagree about many things, but do it amicably.
00:36:38 One of the things that has been lost sight of,
00:36:41 perhaps it’s all the fault of Twitter
00:36:42 or maybe it’s something more profound,
00:36:44 is that it is possible to disagree in a civil way
00:36:47 and still be friends.
00:36:49 I certainly had friends at Oxford
00:36:52 who were far to the left of me politically,
00:36:54 and they are still among my best friends.
00:36:56 So the University of Austin has to be a place
00:36:58 where we can disagree vehemently,
00:37:03 but we can then go and have a beer afterwards.
00:37:06 That’s, in my mind, a really important part
00:37:09 of university life, learning the difference
00:37:12 between the political and the personal.
00:37:15 So Sam is, I think, a good example, as are you,
00:37:19 of a certain kind of intellectual hero
00:37:24 who has been willing to go into the cyber sphere,
00:37:31 the metaverse, and carve out an intellectual space,
00:37:37 the podcast, and debate everything fearlessly.
00:37:42 His essay, it was really an essay on Black Lives Matter
00:37:48 and the question of police racism,
00:37:50 was a masterpiece of 2020.
00:37:54 And so he, I think, is a model of what we believe in.
00:38:01 But we can’t save the world with podcasts,
00:38:03 good though yours is,
00:38:06 because there’s a kind of solo element
00:38:11 to this form of public intellectual activity.
00:38:15 It’s also there in Substack,
00:38:16 where all our best writers now seem to be,
00:38:19 including our founder, Barry Weiss.
00:38:22 The danger with this approach is, ultimately,
00:38:26 your subscribers are the people who already agree with you,
00:38:30 and we are all, therefore,
00:38:32 in danger of preaching to the choir.
00:38:35 I think what makes an institution like University of Austin
00:38:38 so attractive is that we get everybody together,
00:38:41 at least part of the year,
00:38:44 and we do that informal interaction at lunch, at dinner,
00:38:51 that allows, in my experience, the best ideas to form.
00:38:57 Intellectual activity isn’t really a solo voyage.
00:39:00 Historians often make it seem that way,
00:39:02 but I’ve realized over time that I do my best work
00:39:06 in a collaborative way,
00:39:08 and scientists have been better at this
00:39:10 than people in the humanities.
00:39:12 But what really matters,
00:39:13 what’s magical about a good university,
00:39:16 is that interdisciplinary, serendipitous conversation
00:39:19 that happens on campus.
00:39:21 Tom Sargent, the great Nobel Prize winning economist and I,
00:39:24 used to have these kind of random conversations
00:39:27 in elevators at NYU or in corridors at Stanford,
00:39:31 and sometimes they’d be quite short conversations,
00:39:34 but in that short, serendipitous exchange,
00:39:38 I would have more intellectual stimulus
00:39:40 than in many a seminar lasting an hour and a half.
00:39:44 So I think we want to get the Sam Harris’s
00:39:47 and Lex Friedman’s out of their darkened rooms
00:39:51 and give them a chance to interact
00:39:54 in a much less structured way than we’ve got used to.
00:39:59 Again, it’s that sense that sometimes
00:40:02 you need some freewheeling, unstructured debate
00:40:05 to get the really good ideas.
00:40:07 I mean, to talk anecdotally for a moment,
00:40:08 I look back on my Oxford undergraduate experience
00:40:12 and I wrote a lot of essays and attended a lot of classes,
00:40:14 but intellectually, the most important thing I did
00:40:18 was to write an essay on the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus
00:40:22 for an undergraduate discussion group called the Canon Club.
00:40:27 And I probably put more work into that paper
00:40:29 than I put into anything else,
00:40:31 except maybe my final examinations,
00:40:33 even although there was only really one senior member
00:40:36 present, the historian Jeremy Cato,
00:40:38 I was really just trying to impress my contemporaries.
00:40:41 And that’s the kind of thing we want.
00:40:45 The great intellectual leaps forward, occurred,
00:40:51 often in somewhat unstructured settings.
00:40:54 I’m from Scotland, you can tell from my accent,
00:40:57 a little at least.
00:40:59 The enlightenment happened in late 18th century Scotland
00:41:03 in a very interesting interplay between the universities,
00:41:07 which were very important, Glasgow, Edinburgh,
00:41:10 St Andrews, and the coffee houses and pubs
00:41:14 of the Scottish cities where a lot of unstructured discussion
00:41:19 often fueled by copious amounts of wine took place.
00:41:24 That’s what I’ve missed over the last few years.
00:41:27 Let’s just think about how hard academic social life has become.
00:41:32 That we’ve reached the point that Amy Chewer
00:41:37 becomes the object of a full blown investigation
00:41:41 and media storm for inviting to Yale Law School students
00:41:47 over to her house to talk.
00:41:50 I mean, when I was at Oxford, it was regarded
00:41:52 as a tremendous honor to be asked
00:41:54 to go to one of our tutors homes.
00:41:58 The social life of Oxford and Cambridge
00:41:59 is one of their great strengths.
00:42:01 There’s a sort of requirement to sip
00:42:03 unpleasant sherry with the dons.
00:42:06 And we’ve kind of killed all that.
00:42:08 We’ve killed all that in the US because nobody
00:42:10 dares have a social interaction with an undergraduate
00:42:13 or exchange an informal email in case
00:42:15 the whole thing ends up on the front page of the local
00:42:18 or student newspaper.
00:42:19 So that’s what we need to kind of restore,
00:42:22 the social life of academia.
00:42:25 So there’s magic.
00:42:26 We didn’t really address this sort of explicitly.
00:42:29 But there’s magic to the interaction between students.
00:42:33 There’s magic in the interaction between faculty,
00:42:37 the people that teach.
00:42:38 And there’s the magic in the interaction
00:42:39 between the students and the faculty.
00:42:41 And it’s an iterative process that changes everybody involved.
00:42:46 So it’s like world experts in a particular discipline
00:42:48 are changed as much as the students,
00:42:52 as the 20 year olds with the wild ideas,
00:42:56 each are changed and that’s the magic of it.
00:42:59 That applies in liberal education,
00:43:01 that applies in the sciences too.
00:43:03 That’s probably maybe you can speak to this,
00:43:05 why so much scientific innovation
00:43:08 has happened in universities.
00:43:10 There’s something about the youthful energy
00:43:13 of like young minds, graduate students,
00:43:16 undergraduate students that inspire
00:43:18 some of the world experts
00:43:19 to do some of the best work of their lives.
00:43:21 Well, the human brain we know is at its most dynamic
00:43:25 when people are pretty young.
00:43:27 You know this with your background in math,
00:43:29 people don’t get better at math after the age of 30.
00:43:32 And this is important when you think about
00:43:36 the intergenerational character of university.
00:43:39 The older people, the professors have the experience,
00:43:44 but they’re fading intellectually
00:43:46 from much earlier than anybody really wants to admit.
00:43:50 And so you get this intellectual shot in the arm
00:43:55 from hanging out with people who are circa 20,
00:43:59 don’t know shit, but brains are kind of like cooking.
00:44:04 I look back on the career I’ve had in teaching,
00:44:07 which is over 25 years at where Cambridge, Oxford,
00:44:10 NYU, Harvard, and I have extremely strong relationships
00:44:15 with students from those institutions
00:44:19 because they would show up,
00:44:23 whether it was at office hours or in tutorials
00:44:26 and disagree with me.
00:44:28 And for me, it’s always been about encouraging
00:44:31 some act of intellectual rebellion,
00:44:35 telling people, I don’t want your essay to echo my views.
00:44:38 If you can find something wrong with what I wrote, great.
00:44:41 Or if you can find something I missed that’s new, fantastic.
00:44:45 So there is definitely, as you said,
00:44:47 a magic in that interaction across the generations.
00:44:49 And it’s extraordinarily difficult, I think,
00:44:53 for an intellectual to make the same progress
00:44:57 in a project in isolation
00:45:00 compared with the progress that can be made
00:45:03 in these very special communities.
00:45:05 What does a university do?
00:45:07 Amongst other things,
00:45:09 it creates a somewhat artificial environment
00:45:13 of abnormal job security,
00:45:15 and that’s the whole idea of giving people tenure,
00:45:18 and then a relatively high turnover, new faces each year,
00:45:22 and an institutionalization of thought experiments
00:45:27 and actual experiments.
00:45:29 And then you get everybody living
00:45:30 in the same kind of vicinity
00:45:31 so that it can spill over into 3 a.m. conversation.
00:45:34 Well, that always seems to me
00:45:36 to be a pretty potent combination.
00:45:39 Let’s ask ourselves a counterfactual question next.
00:45:41 Let’s imagine that the world wars happen,
00:45:47 but there are no universities.
00:45:51 I mean, how does the Manhattan Project happen
00:45:53 with no academia, to take just one of many examples?
00:45:58 In truth, how does Britain even stay in the war
00:46:01 without Bletchley Park,
00:46:02 without being able to crack the German cipher?
00:46:07 The academics are unsung, or partly sung heroes
00:46:11 of these conflicts.
00:46:14 The same is true in the Soviet Union.
00:46:15 The Soviet Union was a terribly evil and repressive system,
00:46:19 but it was good at science,
00:46:21 and that kept it in the game,
00:46:23 not only in World War II, it kept it in the Cold War.
00:46:27 So it’s clear that universities are incredibly powerful,
00:46:32 intellectual force multipliers,
00:46:35 and our history without them would look very different.
00:46:40 Sure, some innovations would have happened without them.
00:46:42 That’s clear.
00:46:43 The Industrial Revolution didn’t need universities.
00:46:45 In fact, they played a very marginal role
00:46:47 in the key technological breakthroughs
00:46:49 of the Industrial Revolution in its first phase.
00:46:52 But by the second Industrial Revolution
00:46:54 in the late 19th century,
00:46:55 German industry would not have leapt ahead
00:46:58 of British industry if the universities
00:46:59 had not been superior.
00:47:01 And it was the fact that the Germans institutionalised
00:47:04 scientific research in the way that they did
00:47:07 that really produced a powerful, powerful advantage.
00:47:11 The problem was that,
00:47:13 and this is a really interesting point
00:47:15 that Friedrich Meinlka makes in Die Deutsche Katastrophe
00:47:18 for the German Catastrophe,
00:47:19 the German intellectuals became technocrats, homo faber,
00:47:24 he says.
00:47:25 They knew a great deal about their speciality,
00:47:28 but they were alienated from, broadly speaking, humanism.
00:47:31 And that is his explanation,
00:47:33 or one of his explanations for why
00:47:35 this very scientifically advanced Germany
00:47:37 goes down the path of hell led by Hitler.
00:47:41 So when I come back and ask myself,
00:47:43 what is it that we want to do with a new university,
00:47:47 we wanna make sure that we don’t fall into that German pit
00:47:52 where very high levels of technical and scientific expertise
00:47:56 are decoupled from the fundamental foundations
00:48:00 of a free society.
00:48:04 So liberal arts are there, I think,
00:48:05 to stop the scientists making Faustian pacts.
00:48:09 And that’s why it’s really important
00:48:11 that people working on AI reach Shakespeare.
00:48:15 I think you said that academics are unsung heroes
00:48:19 of the 20th century.
00:48:21 I think there’s kind of an intellectual,
00:48:25 a lazy intellectual desire to kind of destroy
00:48:30 the academics, that the academics are the source
00:48:32 of all problems in the world.
00:48:34 And I personally believe that exactly as you said,
00:48:37 we need to recognize that the university
00:48:40 is probably where the ideas that will protect us
00:48:45 from the catastrophes that are looming ahead of us,
00:48:50 that’s where those ideas are going to come from.
00:48:52 People who work on economics can argue back and forth
00:48:56 about John Maynard Keynes.
00:48:58 But I think it’s pretty clear
00:49:00 that he was the most important economist
00:49:03 and certainly the most influential economist
00:49:05 of the 20th century.
00:49:06 And I think his ideas are looking better today
00:49:11 in the wake of the financial crisis
00:49:12 than they have at any time since the 1970s.
00:49:15 But imagine John Maynard Keynes without Cambridge,
00:49:19 you can’t because someone like that doesn’t actually exist
00:49:24 without the incredible hothouse
00:49:27 that a place like Cambridge was in Keynes’s life.
00:49:30 He was a product of a kind of hereditary
00:49:32 intellectual elite, it had its vices.
00:49:36 But you can’t help but admire the sheer power of the mind.
00:49:40 I’ve spent a lot of my career reading Keynes
00:49:42 and I revere that intellect, it’s so, so powerful.
00:49:47 But you can’t have people like that
00:49:49 if you’re not prepared to have King’s College Cambridge.
00:49:53 And it comes with redundancy.
00:49:55 I think that’s the point.
00:49:56 There are lots and lots of things
00:49:57 that are very annoying about academic life
00:50:00 that you just have to deal with.
00:50:03 They’re made fun of in that recent Netflix series,
00:50:06 The Chair.
00:50:07 And it is easy to make fun of academic life.
00:50:10 Tom Sharp’s Porterhouse Blue did it.
00:50:13 It’s an inherently comical subject.
00:50:17 Professors at least used to be amusingly eccentric.
00:50:20 But we’ve sort of killed off that side of academia
00:50:24 by turning it into an increasingly doctrinaire place
00:50:30 where eccentricity is not tolerated.
00:50:33 I’ll give you an illustration of this.
00:50:34 I had a call this morning from a British academic
00:50:38 who said, can you give me some advice
00:50:40 because they’re trying to decolonize the curriculum.
00:50:45 This is coming from the,
00:50:47 diversity, equity and inclusion officers.
00:50:50 And it seems to me that what they’re requiring of us
00:50:54 is a fundamental violation of academic freedom
00:50:56 because it is determining ex ante
00:50:59 what we should study and teach.
00:51:02 That’s what’s going on.
00:51:04 And that’s the thing that we really, really have to resist
00:51:08 because that kills the university.
00:51:10 That’s the moment that it stops being
00:51:13 the magical place of,
00:51:15 being the magical place of intellectual creativity
00:51:20 and simply becomes an adjunct
00:51:22 of the ministry of propaganda.
00:51:24 I’ve loved the time we’ve spent talking about this
00:51:27 because it’s such a hopeful message
00:51:28 for the future of the university
00:51:30 that I still share with you
00:51:35 the love of the ideal of the university.
00:51:37 So very practical question.
00:51:39 You mentioned summer.
00:51:43 Which summer are we talking about?
00:51:44 So when, I know we don’t wanna put hard dates here
00:51:48 but what year are we thinking about?
00:51:51 When is this thing launching?
00:51:52 What are your thoughts on this?
00:51:53 We are moving as fast as our resources allow.
00:51:57 The goal is to offer the first of the forbidden courses
00:52:01 next summer, summer of 2022.
00:52:03 And we hope to be able to launch an initial,
00:52:08 albeit relatively small scale master’s program
00:52:12 in the fall of next year.
00:52:14 That’s as fast as humanly possible.
00:52:18 So yeah, we’re really keen to get going.
00:52:21 And I think the approach we’re taking
00:52:22 is somewhat imported from Silicon Valley.
00:52:27 Think of this as a startup.
00:52:29 Don’t think of this as something that has to exist
00:52:31 as a full service university on day one.
00:52:33 We don’t have the resources for that.
00:52:35 You did billions and billions of dollars
00:52:36 to build a university sort of as a facsimile
00:52:40 of an existing university,
00:52:41 but that’s not what we want to do.
00:52:42 I mean, copying and pasting Harvard or Yale or Stanford
00:52:45 would be a futile thing to do.
00:52:46 They would probably, you very quickly end up
00:52:49 with the same pathologies.
00:52:50 So we do have to come up with a different design.
00:52:52 And one way of doing that is to grow it organically
00:52:54 from something quite small.
00:52:56 Elon Musk mentioned in his usual humorous way on Twitter
00:53:02 that he wants to launch
00:53:03 the Texas Institute of Technology and Science, TITS.
00:53:09 Some people thought this was sexist
00:53:11 because of the acronym, TITS.
00:53:13 So first of all, I understand their viewpoint,
00:53:16 but I also think there needs to be a place
00:53:18 for humor on the internet, even from CEOs.
00:53:21 So on this podcast, I’ve gotten a chance
00:53:23 to talk to quite a few CEOs.
00:53:26 And what I love to see is authenticity.
00:53:29 And humor is often a sign of authenticity.
00:53:33 The quirkiness that you mentioned
00:53:36 is such a beautiful characteristic
00:53:39 of professors and faculty in great universities
00:53:42 is also beautiful to see as CEOs, especially founding CEOs.
00:53:46 So anyway, the deeper point he was making
00:53:51 is showing an excitement for the university
00:53:54 as a place for big ideas in science, technology, engineering.
00:53:59 So to me, if there’s some kind of way,
00:54:02 if there is a serious thought that he had behind this tweet,
00:54:07 not to analyze Elon Musk’s Twitter like it’s Shakespeare,
00:54:10 but if there’s a serious thought,
00:54:13 I would love to see him supporting the flourishing of Austin
00:54:18 as a place for science, technology,
00:54:20 for these kinds of intellectual developments
00:54:22 that we’re talking about,
00:54:25 like make a place for free inquiry, civil disagreements,
00:54:31 coupled with great education and conversations
00:54:35 about artificial intelligence, about technology,
00:54:37 about engineering.
00:54:39 So I’m actually gonna,
00:54:41 I hope there’s a serious idea behind that tweet
00:54:43 and I’m gonna chat with him about it.
00:54:46 I do too.
00:54:47 I do too.
00:54:48 Most of the biggest storms in teacups of my academic career
00:54:56 have been caused by bad jokes that I’ve made.
00:54:59 These days, if you wanna make bad jokes,
00:55:04 being a billionaire is a great idea.
00:55:08 I’m not here to defend Elon’s Twitter style
00:55:12 or sense of humor.
00:55:14 He’s not gonna be remembered for his tweets, I think.
00:55:18 He’s gonna be remembered
00:55:19 for the astonishing companies that he’s built
00:55:22 and his contributions in a whole range of fields
00:55:26 from SpaceX to Tesla and solar energy.
00:55:31 And I very much hope that we can interest Elon
00:55:35 in this project.
00:55:36 We need not only Elon, but a whole range of his peers
00:55:41 because this takes resources.
00:55:45 Universities are not cheap things to run,
00:55:47 especially if, as I hope,
00:55:49 we can make as much of the tuition
00:55:55 covered by scholarships and bursaries.
00:55:57 We want to attract the best intellectual talent
00:56:02 to this institution.
00:56:04 The best intellectual talent
00:56:05 is somewhat randomly distributed through society.
00:56:08 And some of it is in the bottom quintile
00:56:09 of the income distribution.
00:56:11 And that makes it hard to get to elite education.
00:56:13 So this will take resources.
00:56:17 The last generation of super wealthy plutocrats,
00:56:22 the generation of the Gilded Age of the late 19th century,
00:56:25 did a pretty good job of funding universities.
00:56:28 Now Chicago wouldn’t exist, but for the money of that era.
00:56:33 And so my message to not only to Elon,
00:56:35 but to all of the peers, all of those people
00:56:38 who made their billions out of technology
00:56:41 over the last couple of decades is this is your time.
00:56:44 I mean, and this is your opportunity
00:56:45 to create something new.
00:56:47 I can’t really understand why the wealthy of our time
00:56:51 are content to hand their money.
00:56:53 I mean, think of the vast sums Mike Bloomberg
00:56:56 recently gave to Johns Hopkins to established institutions.
00:57:01 When on close inspection, those institutions
00:57:05 don’t seem to spend the money terribly well.
00:57:10 And in fact, one of the mysteries of our time
00:57:12 is the lack of due diligence
00:57:14 that hard nosed billionaires seem to do
00:57:16 when it comes to philanthropy.
00:57:19 So I think there’s an opportunity here
00:57:21 for this generation of very talented, wealthy people
00:57:25 to do what their counterparts did in the late 19th
00:57:29 and early 20th century and create some new institutions.
00:57:32 And they don’t need to put their names on the buildings.
00:57:34 They just need to do what the founders of Chicago,
00:57:39 University of Chicago did,
00:57:40 create something new that will endure.
00:57:45 Yeah, MIT is launching a college of computing
00:57:49 and Stephen Schwarzman has given quite a large sum of money,
00:57:54 I think in total, a billion dollars.
00:57:56 And as somebody who loves computing,
00:57:59 as somebody who loves MIT, I want some accountability
00:58:03 for MIT becoming a better institution.
00:58:07 And this is once again,
00:58:08 why I’m excited about University of Austin
00:58:10 because it serves as a beacon.
00:58:12 Look, you can create something new
00:58:14 and this is what the great institutions
00:58:16 of the future should look like.
00:58:18 And Steve Schwarzman is also an innovator.
00:58:22 The idea of creating a college on the Tsinghua campus
00:58:26 and creating a kind of Rhodes program
00:58:28 for students from the Western world
00:58:30 to come study in China was Steve’s idea.
00:58:33 And I was somewhat involved,
00:58:35 did some visiting, professing there.
00:58:38 It taught me that you can create something new
00:58:42 in that area of graduate education
00:58:45 and quite quickly attract really strong applicants
00:58:49 because the people who finished their four years
00:58:52 at Harvard or Stanford know that they don’t know a lot.
00:58:57 And I, having taught a lot of people in that group,
00:59:02 know how intellectually dissatisfied they often are
00:59:06 at the end of four years.
00:59:08 I mean, they may have beautifully gamed the system
00:59:10 to graduate summa magna cum laude,
00:59:12 but they kind of know they’ll confess it
00:59:15 after a drink or two.
00:59:16 They know that they gamed the system
00:59:18 and that intellectually it wasn’t
00:59:20 the fulfilling experience they wanted.
00:59:22 And they also know that an MBA from a comparable institution
00:59:26 would not be a massive intellectual step forward.
00:59:29 So I think what we want to say is,
00:59:32 here’s something really novel, exciting,
00:59:35 that will be intellectually very challenging.
00:59:37 I do think the University of Austin has to be difficult.
00:59:42 I’d like it to feel a little bit like
00:59:44 surviving Navy SEAL training to come through this program
00:59:47 because it will be intellectually demanding.
00:59:49 That I think should be a magnet.
00:59:51 So yeah, Steve, if you’re listening,
00:59:54 please join Elon in supporting this.
00:59:56 And Peter Thiel, if you’re listening,
00:59:59 I know how skeptical you are about the idea
01:00:02 of creating a new university because heaven knows,
01:00:04 Peter and I have been discussing this idea for years
01:00:06 and he’s always said, well, no, we thought about this
01:00:08 and it just isn’t gonna work.
01:00:09 But I really think we’ve got a responsibility to do this.
01:00:15 Well, Steve’s been on this podcast before.
01:00:17 We’ve spoken a few times, so I’ll send this to him.
01:00:19 I hope he does actually get behind it as well.
01:00:22 So I’m super excited by the ideas
01:00:26 that we’ve been talking about that this effort represents
01:00:29 and what ripple effect it has on the rest of society.
01:00:32 So thank you.
01:00:33 That was a time beautifully spent.
01:00:36 And I’m really grateful for the fortune
01:00:41 of getting a chance to talk to you
01:00:43 at this moment in history
01:00:45 because I’ve been a big fan of your work
01:00:47 and the reason I wanted to talk to you today
01:00:50 is about all the excellent books you’ve written
01:00:53 about various aspects of history through money, war,
01:00:58 power, pandemics, all of that.
01:01:00 But I’m glad that we got a chance to talk about this,
01:01:04 which is not looking at history, it’s looking at the future.
01:01:07 This is a beautiful little fortuitous moment.
01:01:12 I appreciate you talking about it.
01:01:15 In the book, Ascent of Money,
01:01:17 you give a history of the world through the lens of money.
01:01:21 If the financial system is a evolutionary nature,
01:01:24 much like life on earth,
01:01:26 what is the origin of money on earth?
01:01:28 The origin of money predates coins.
01:01:33 Most people kind of assume I’ll talk about coins,
01:01:35 but coins are relatively late developments.
01:01:40 Back in ancient Mesopotamia,
01:01:41 so I don’t know, 5,000 years ago,
01:01:44 there were relations between creditors and debtors.
01:01:49 There are even in the simplest economy
01:01:52 because of the way in which agriculture works.
01:01:55 Hey, I need to plant these seeds,
01:01:58 but I’m not gonna have crops for X months.
01:02:01 So we have clay tablets
01:02:03 in which simple debt transactions are inscribed.
01:02:07 I remember looking at great numbers of these
01:02:09 in the British Museum
01:02:10 when I was writing The Ascent of Money.
01:02:12 And that’s really the beginning of money.
01:02:15 The minute you start recording a relationship
01:02:18 between a creditor and a debtor,
01:02:19 you have something that is quasi money.
01:02:22 And that is probably what these
01:02:23 clay tablets mostly denoted.
01:02:28 From that point on,
01:02:30 there’s a great evolutionary experiment
01:02:32 to see what the most convenient way is
01:02:36 to record relations between creditors and debtors.
01:02:42 And what emerges in the time of the ancient Greeks
01:02:47 are coins, metal, tokens,
01:02:51 sometimes a valuable metal, sometimes not,
01:02:55 usually bearing the imprint of a state or a monarch.
01:02:59 And that’s the sort of more familiar form of money
01:03:03 that we still use today for very, very small transactions.
01:03:07 I expect coins will all be gone
01:03:09 by the time my youngest son is my age,
01:03:12 but the money that I have is still there.
01:03:15 My youngest son is my age,
01:03:18 but they’re a last remnant of a very, very old way
01:03:21 of doing simple transactions.
01:03:24 And when you say coins, you mean physical coins.
01:03:27 I’m talking about coins have been rebranded
01:03:30 in the digital space as well.
01:03:31 Yeah, not coin based coins, actual coin coins.
01:03:34 You know, the ones that jangle in your pocket
01:03:36 and you kind of don’t know quite what to do with
01:03:38 once you have some.
01:03:39 So that became an incredibly pervasive form
01:03:44 of paying for things.
01:03:47 Money’s just a, it’s just a crystallization
01:03:50 of a relationship between a debtor and a creditor.
01:03:52 And the coins are just very fungible.
01:03:55 Whereas a clay tablet relates to a specific transaction,
01:03:58 coins are generic and fungible.
01:04:00 They can be used in any transaction.
01:04:02 So that was an important evolutionary advance.
01:04:05 If you think of financial history,
01:04:06 and this was the point of the ascent of money,
01:04:08 as an evolutionary story, there are punctuated equilibria.
01:04:12 People get by with coins for a long time,
01:04:15 despite their defects as a means of payment,
01:04:19 such as that they can be debased, they can be clipped.
01:04:23 It’s very hard to avoid fake or debased money
01:04:27 entering the system.
01:04:28 But coinage is still kind of the basis of payments
01:04:31 all the way through the Roman Empire,
01:04:34 out the other end into the so called dark ages.
01:04:36 It’s still how most things are settled
01:04:39 in cash transactions in the early 1300s.
01:04:43 You don’t get a big shift until after the Black Death,
01:04:47 when there’s such a need to monetize the economy
01:04:50 because of chronic labor shortages
01:04:52 and feudalism begins to unravel,
01:04:54 that you just don’t have a sufficient amount of coinage.
01:04:58 And so you get bills of exchange.
01:05:00 And I’m really into bills of exchange,
01:05:03 because, and this I hope will capture your listeners
01:05:07 and viewers imaginations,
01:05:10 when they start using bills of exchange,
01:05:13 which are really just pieces of paper saying,
01:05:17 I owe you over a three month period
01:05:19 while goods are in transit from Florence to London,
01:05:23 you get the first peer to peer payment system,
01:05:27 which is network verified,
01:05:29 because they’re not coins,
01:05:31 they don’t have a King’s head on them.
01:05:33 They’re just pieces of paper.
01:05:35 And the verification comes in the form of signatures.
01:05:38 And you need ultimately some kind of guarantee
01:05:42 if I write an IOU to you, bills of exchange,
01:05:46 I mean, you don’t really know me that well,
01:05:48 we only just met.
01:05:49 So you might wanna get endorsed by, I don’t know,
01:05:52 somebody really credit worthy like Elon.
01:05:54 And so we actually can see in the late 14th century
01:05:58 in Northern Italy and England and elsewhere,
01:06:00 the evolution of a peer to peer network system
01:06:04 of payment.
01:06:06 And that’s actually how world trade grows,
01:06:09 because you just couldn’t settle
01:06:11 long oceanic transactions with coinage.
01:06:14 It just wasn’t practical.
01:06:15 All those treasure chests full of the balloons,
01:06:18 which were part of the way in which the Spanish empire worked
01:06:21 really inefficient.
01:06:22 So bills of exchange are an exciting part of the story.
01:06:26 And they illustrate something I should have made more clear
01:06:29 in the ascent of money,
01:06:31 that not everything used in payment needs to be money.
01:06:36 Classically, economists will tell you, oh, well, money,
01:06:39 money has three different functions.
01:06:41 It’s you’ve heard this a zillion times, right?
01:06:43 It’s a unit of account, it’s a store of value,
01:06:46 and it’s a medium of exchange.
01:06:49 Now, there are three or four things
01:06:51 that are worth saying about this, and I’ll just say two.
01:06:53 One, it may be that those three things are a trilemma,
01:06:57 and it’s very difficult for anything to be all of them.
01:06:59 This point was made by my Hoover colleague,
01:07:01 Manny Rincon Cruz last year,
01:07:03 and I still wish he would write this up as a paper
01:07:05 because it’s a great insight.
01:07:07 The second thing that’s really interesting to me
01:07:09 is that payments don’t need to be money.
01:07:12 And if we go around, as economists love to do,
01:07:16 saying, well, Bitcoin’s not money
01:07:17 because it doesn’t fulfill these criteria,
01:07:20 we’re missing the point
01:07:21 that you could build a system of payments,
01:07:24 which I think is how we should think about crypto
01:07:26 that isn’t money, doesn’t need to be money.
01:07:29 It’s like bills of exchange.
01:07:30 It’s network based verification,
01:07:33 peer to peer transactions without third party verification.
01:07:38 When it hit me the other day
01:07:39 that we actually have this precedent for crypto,
01:07:41 I got quite excited and thought,
01:07:43 I wish I had written that in the Ascent of Money.
01:07:46 Can you sort of from a first principles,
01:07:48 like almost like a physics perspective,
01:07:51 or maybe a human perspective,
01:07:54 describe where does the value of money come from?
01:07:58 Like where is it actually, where is it?
01:08:01 So it’s a sheet of paper or it’s coins,
01:08:04 but it feels like in a platonic sense,
01:08:08 there’s some kind of thing
01:08:09 that’s actually storing the value.
01:08:11 As us, a bunch of ants are dancing around and so on.
01:08:15 I come from a family of physicists.
01:08:17 I’m the black sheep of the family.
01:08:18 My mother’s a physicist, my sister is.
01:08:21 And so when you asked me to explain something
01:08:23 in physics terms, I get a kind of little part of me dies
01:08:27 because I know I’ll fail.
01:08:30 But in truth, it doesn’t really matter
01:08:33 what we decide money is going to be.
01:08:36 And anything can record, crystallize
01:08:41 the relationship between the creditor and the debtor.
01:08:46 It could be a piece of paper, it can be a piece of metal.
01:08:48 It can be nothing, can just be a digital entry.
01:08:51 It’s trust that we’re really talking about here.
01:08:56 We are not just trusting one another.
01:08:59 We may not, but we are trusting the money.
01:09:03 So whatever we use to represent
01:09:08 the creditor debtor relationship,
01:09:10 whether it’s a banknote or a coin or whatever,
01:09:13 it does depend on us both trusting it.
01:09:19 And that doesn’t always pertain.
01:09:21 What we see in episodes of inflation,
01:09:25 especially episodes of hyperinflation,
01:09:26 is a crisis of trust, a crisis of confidence
01:09:29 in the means of payments.
01:09:33 And this is very traumatic for the societies
01:09:34 to which it happens.
01:09:38 By and large, human beings,
01:09:40 particularly once you have a rule of law system
01:09:43 of the sort that evolved in the West
01:09:44 and then became generalized,
01:09:46 are predisposed to trust one another.
01:09:49 And the default setting is to trust money.
01:09:52 Even when it depreciates at a quite steady rate
01:09:54 as the US dollar has done pretty much uninterruptedly
01:10:00 since the 1960s, it takes quite a big disruption
01:10:05 for money to lose that trust.
01:10:07 But I think essentially what money should be thought of as
01:10:11 is a series of tokens that can take any form we like
01:10:15 and can be purely digital,
01:10:18 which represent our transactions as creditors and debtors.
01:10:23 And the whole thing depends on our collective trust to work.
01:10:27 I had to explain this to Stephen Colbert once
01:10:29 in the Colbert Show, the old show that was actually funny.
01:10:33 And it was a great moment when he said,
01:10:38 so Neil, could I be money?
01:10:41 And I said, yes, we could settle a debt
01:10:47 with a human being that was quite common in much of history,
01:10:50 but it’s not the most convenient form of money.
01:10:55 Money has to be convenient.
01:10:56 That’s why when they worked out
01:10:58 how to make payments with cell phones,
01:11:00 the Chinese simply went straight there from bank accounts.
01:11:04 They skipped out credit cards.
01:11:06 You won’t see credit cards in China,
01:11:08 except in the hands of naive tourists.
01:11:10 How much can this trust bear
01:11:14 in terms of us humans with our human nature testing it?
01:11:18 I guess the surprising thing is the thing works.
01:11:21 A bunch of self interested ants running around
01:11:25 trading in trust.
01:11:27 And it seems to work except for a bunch of moments
01:11:31 in human history when there’s hyperinflation,
01:11:33 like you mentioned.
01:11:34 And it’s just kind of amazing.
01:11:38 It’s kind of amazing that us humans,
01:11:40 if I were to be optimistic and sort of hopeful
01:11:42 about human nature, it gives me a sense
01:11:45 that people want to lean on each other.
01:11:49 They want to trust.
01:11:51 That’s certainly, I would say probably now,
01:11:54 a widely shared view amongst evolutionary psychologists,
01:11:59 network scientists.
01:12:00 It’s one of Nicholas Christakis’s argument
01:12:03 in a recent book.
01:12:05 I know economic history broadly bears this out,
01:12:08 but you have to be cautious.
01:12:12 The cases where the system works are familiar to us.
01:12:18 Because those are the states and the eras
01:12:23 that produce a lot of written records.
01:12:26 But when the system of trust collapses
01:12:30 and the monetary system collapses with it,
01:12:32 there’s generally quite a paucity of records.
01:12:35 I found that when I was writing Doom.
01:12:38 And so we slightly are biased in favor of the periods
01:12:42 when trust prevailed and the system functioned.
01:12:47 It’s very easy to point to a great many episodes
01:12:50 of very, very intense monetary chaos,
01:12:53 even in the relatively recent past.
01:12:55 In the wake of the First World War,
01:12:58 multiple currencies, not just the German currency,
01:13:01 multiple currencies were completely destroyed.
01:13:03 The Russian currency, the Polish currency.
01:13:05 There were currency disasters all over
01:13:08 Central and Eastern Europe in the early 1920s.
01:13:12 And that was partly because over the course
01:13:16 of the 19th century, a system had evolved
01:13:18 in which trust was based on gold
01:13:22 and rules that were supposedly applied by central banks.
01:13:27 That system, which produced relative price stability
01:13:32 over the 19th century, fell apart
01:13:35 as a result of the First World War.
01:13:36 And as soon as it was gone, as soon as there was no longer
01:13:40 a clear link between those banknotes and coins and gold,
01:13:44 the whole thing went completely haywire.
01:13:47 And I think we should remember that the extent
01:13:50 of the monetary chaos from certainly 1918
01:13:54 all the way through to the late 1940s.
01:13:56 I mean, the German currency was destroyed
01:13:57 not once but twice in that period.
01:14:00 And that was one of the most advanced economies
01:14:01 in the world.
01:14:02 In the United States, there were periods
01:14:06 of intensely deep deflation.
01:14:09 Prices fell by a third in the Great Depression.
01:14:12 And then very serious price volatility
01:14:15 in the immediate post World War II period.
01:14:17 So it’s a bit of an illusion.
01:14:19 Maybe it’s an illusion for people who’ve spent most
01:14:24 of their lives in the last 20 years.
01:14:26 We’ve had a period of exceptional price stability
01:14:29 since this century began in which a regime
01:14:34 of central bank independence and inflation targeting
01:14:37 appeared to generate steady below 2% inflation
01:14:42 in much of the developed world.
01:14:43 It was a bit too low for the central bankers liking.
01:14:46 And that became a problem in the financial crisis.
01:14:49 But we’ve avoided major price instability
01:14:52 for the better part of 20 years.
01:14:54 In most of the world, there haven’t really been
01:14:56 that many very high inflation episodes
01:14:59 and hardly any hyperinflationary episodes.
01:15:00 Venezuela’s one of the very few, Zimbabwe’s another.
01:15:03 But if you take a 100 year view or a 200 year view,
01:15:06 or if you want to take a 500 year view,
01:15:08 you realize that quite often the system doesn’t work.
01:15:12 If you go back to the 17th century,
01:15:14 there were multiple competing systems of coinage.
01:15:17 There had been a great inflation that had begun
01:15:19 the previous century.
01:15:21 The price revolution caused mainly by the rise
01:15:24 and caused mainly by the arrival of new world silver.
01:15:28 I think financial history is a bit messier
01:15:31 than one might think.
01:15:33 And the more one studies it, the more one realizes
01:15:37 the need for the evolution.
01:15:40 The reason bills of exchange came along
01:15:41 was because the coinage systems had stopped working.
01:15:45 The reason that banknotes started to become used
01:15:47 more generally first in the American colonies
01:15:50 in the 17th century, then more widely in the 18th century
01:15:52 was just that they were more convenient than any other way
01:15:56 of paying for things.
01:15:57 We had to invent the bond market in the 18th century
01:16:00 to cope with the problem of public debt,
01:16:02 which up until that point had been a recurrent source
01:16:04 of instability.
01:16:06 And then we invented equity finance
01:16:10 because bonds were not enough.
01:16:12 So I would prefer to think of the financial history
01:16:16 as a series of crises really that are resolved
01:16:18 by innovations and in the most recent episode,
01:16:22 very exciting episode of financial history,
01:16:25 something called Bitcoin initiated a new financial
01:16:29 or monetary revolution in response, I think,
01:16:31 to the growing crisis of the fiat money system.
01:16:36 Can you speak to that?
01:16:37 So what do you think about Bitcoin?
01:16:41 What do you think it is a response to?
01:16:43 What are the growing problems of the fiat system?
01:16:46 What is this moment in human history
01:16:49 that is full of challenges that Bitcoin
01:16:52 and cryptocurrency is trying to overcome?
01:16:55 I don’t think Bitcoin was devised by Satoshi,
01:17:00 whoever he was, for fear of a breakdown
01:17:06 of the fiat currencies.
01:17:08 If it was, it was a very far sighted enterprise
01:17:11 because certainly in 2008,
01:17:12 when the first Bitcoin paper appeared,
01:17:14 it wasn’t very likely that a wave of inflation was coming.
01:17:18 If anything, there was more reason
01:17:20 to fear deflation at that point.
01:17:22 I think it would be more accurate to say
01:17:26 that with the advent of the internet,
01:17:28 there was a need for a means of payment
01:17:31 native to the internet,
01:17:33 typing your credit card number into a random website.
01:17:36 It’s not the way to pay for things on the internet.
01:17:40 And I’d rather think of Bitcoin as the first iteration,
01:17:43 the first attempt to solve the problem
01:17:45 of how do we pay for things
01:17:46 in what we must learn to call the metaverse,
01:17:48 but let’s just call it the internet for old time’s sake.
01:17:52 And ever since that initial innovation,
01:17:56 the realization that you could use computing power
01:17:58 and cryptography to create peer to peer payments
01:18:01 without third party verification,
01:18:04 a revolution has been gathering momentum
01:18:07 that poses a very profound threat
01:18:08 to the existing legacy system of banks and fiat currencies.
01:18:13 Most money in the world today is made by banks,
01:18:15 not central banks, banks.
01:18:17 That’s what most money is, it’s entries in bank accounts.
01:18:21 And what Bitcoin represents
01:18:24 is an alternative mode of payment
01:18:27 that really ought to render banks obsolete.
01:18:31 I think this financial revolution
01:18:33 has got past the point at which it can be killed.
01:18:37 It was vulnerable in the early years,
01:18:39 but it now has sufficient adoption
01:18:42 and has generated sufficient additional layers.
01:18:45 I mean, Ethereum was in many ways
01:18:47 the more important innovation
01:18:48 because you can build a whole system of payments
01:18:52 and ultimately smart contracts on top of ether.
01:18:55 I think we’ve now reached the point
01:18:56 that it’s pretty hard to imagine it all being killed.
01:18:59 And it’s just survived an amazing thing,
01:19:01 which was the Chinese shutting down mining
01:19:03 and shutting down everything.
01:19:04 And still here we are, in fact, cryptos thriving.
01:19:09 What we don’t know is how much damage
01:19:13 ill judged regulatory interventions are going to do
01:19:16 to this financial revolution.
01:19:19 Left to its own devices,
01:19:20 I think decentralized finance provides
01:19:24 the native monetary and financial system for the internet.
01:19:29 And the more time we spend in the metaverse,
01:19:32 the more use we will make of it.
01:19:34 The next things that will happen, I think,
01:19:36 will be that tokens in game spaces like Roblox
01:19:40 will become fungible.
01:19:42 As my nine year old spends a lot more time
01:19:45 playing on computer games than I ever did,
01:19:47 I can see that entertainment
01:19:49 is becoming a game driven phenomenon.
01:19:52 And in the game space, you need skins for your avatar.
01:19:56 The economics of the internet, it’s evolving very fast.
01:20:01 And in parallel,
01:20:02 you can see this payments revolution happening.
01:20:04 I think that all goes naturally very well
01:20:08 and generates an enormous amount of wealth in the process.
01:20:13 The problem is there are people in Washington
01:20:17 with an overwhelming urge to intervene
01:20:20 and disrupt this evolutionary process.
01:20:25 Partly, I think out of a muddled sense
01:20:28 that there must be a lot of nefarious things going on.
01:20:31 If we don’t step in, many more will go on.
01:20:34 This, I think, greatly exaggerates
01:20:35 how much criminal activity is in fact going on in the space.
01:20:39 But there’s also the vested interests at work.
01:20:42 It was odd to me, maybe not odd,
01:20:45 perhaps it wasn’t surprising,
01:20:47 that the Bank for International Settlements
01:20:48 earlier this year published a report,
01:20:52 one chapter of which said this must all go, must all stop.
01:20:55 It’s all gotta be shut down
01:20:57 and it’s gotta be replaced by central bank digital currency.
01:21:00 And Martin Wolf in the Financial Times read this
01:21:02 and said, I agree with this.
01:21:04 And one suddenly realized that the banks are clever.
01:21:07 They had achieved the intellectual counterattack
01:21:11 with almost no fingerprints on the weapon.
01:21:15 I think central bank digital currency is a terrible idea.
01:21:18 I can’t imagine why we would want to copy a Chinese model
01:21:22 that essentially takes all transactions
01:21:25 and puts them directly under the surveillance
01:21:26 of a central government institution.
01:21:28 But that suddenly is a serious counterproposal.
01:21:34 So on the one side, we have a relatively decentralized,
01:21:39 technologically innovative internet native system
01:21:44 of payments that has the possibility to evolve,
01:21:46 to produce a full set of smart contracts,
01:21:51 reducing enormously the transaction costs
01:21:54 that we currently encounter in the financial world
01:21:56 because it gets rid of all those middlemen
01:21:57 who take their cut every time you take out a mortgage
01:22:00 or whatever it is.
01:22:01 That’s one alternative.
01:22:03 But on the other side, we have a highly centralized system
01:22:06 in which transactions will by default
01:22:08 be under the surveillance of the central bank.
01:22:10 It seems like an easy choice to me,
01:22:12 but hey, I have this thing about personal liberty.
01:22:15 So that’s where we are.
01:22:17 I don’t think that the regulators can kill web three.
01:22:22 I think we’re supposed to call it web three
01:22:24 because crypto is now an obsolescent term.
01:22:26 They can’t kill it,
01:22:28 but they can definitely make it difficult
01:22:30 and throw a lot of sand into the machine.
01:22:33 And I think worst of all,
01:22:35 they can spoil the evolutionary story
01:22:37 by creating central bank digital currency
01:22:40 that I don’t think we really need.
01:22:42 Or we certainly don’t need it in the Chinese form.
01:22:48 Do you think Bitcoin has a strong chance
01:22:51 to take over the world?
01:22:53 So become the primary,
01:22:57 you mentioned the three things that make money, money,
01:23:00 become the primary methodology
01:23:02 by which we store wealth, we exchange.
01:23:05 No.
01:23:07 No, I think what Bitcoin is,
01:23:09 this was a phrase that I got from my friend,
01:23:12 Matt McLennan at First Eagle,
01:23:13 an option on digital gold.
01:23:15 So it’s the gold of the system,
01:23:18 but currently behaves like an option.
01:23:20 That’s why it’s quite volatile
01:23:22 because we don’t really know
01:23:23 if this brave new world of crypto is gonna work.
01:23:29 But if it does work, then Bitcoin is the gold
01:23:31 because of the finite supply.
01:23:33 What role we need gold to play in the metaverse
01:23:37 isn’t quite clear.
01:23:38 I love that you’re using the term metaverse.
01:23:40 This is great.
01:23:41 Well, I just like the metaversity
01:23:43 as the antithesis of what we’re trying to do in Austin.
01:23:48 But can you imagine I’m using it sarcastically?
01:23:52 I come from Glasgow where all novel words
01:23:54 have to be used sarcastically.
01:23:55 So the metaverse, sarcastic.
01:23:57 But see, the beauty about humor and sarcasm
01:24:00 is that the joke becomes reality.
01:24:03 I mean, it’s like using the word Big Bang
01:24:05 to describe the origins of the universe.
01:24:07 It becomes like that.
01:24:09 It will.
01:24:10 After a while, it’s in the textbooks
01:24:11 and nobody’s laughing.
01:24:12 Yeah, well, that’s exactly right.
01:24:14 Humor is sticky.
01:24:16 Yeah, I’m on the side of humor,
01:24:18 but it is a dangerous activity these days.
01:24:21 Anyway, I think Bitcoin is the option of digital gold.
01:24:25 The role it plays is probably not so much store of value.
01:24:31 Right now, it’s just nicely not very correlated asset
01:24:33 in your portfolio.
01:24:35 When I updated the Ascent of Money,
01:24:36 which was in 2018, 10 years after it came out,
01:24:40 I wrote a new chapter in which I said,
01:24:43 Bitcoin, which had just sold off after its 2017 bubble,
01:24:48 will rise again through adoption
01:24:51 because if every millionaire in the world
01:24:54 has 0.2% of his or her wealth in Bitcoin,
01:24:57 the price should be $15,000.
01:24:59 If it’s 1%, it’s $75,000.
01:25:03 And it might not even stay at 1%
01:25:06 because, I mean, look at its recent performance.
01:25:08 If your exposure to global stocks had been hedged
01:25:13 with a significant crypto holding,
01:25:16 you would have aced the last few months.
01:25:19 So I think the non correlation property
01:25:23 is very, very important in driving adoption.
01:25:26 And the volatility also drives adoption
01:25:28 if you’re a sophisticated investor.
01:25:31 So I think the adoption drives Bitcoin up
01:25:35 because it’s the option of digital gold,
01:25:37 but it’s also just this nicely not very correlated asset
01:25:40 that you wanna hold.
01:25:41 In a world where, what the hell?
01:25:43 I mean, the central bank’s gonna tighten.
01:25:46 We’ve come through this massively disruptive effort
01:25:48 of the pandemic, public debt soared,
01:25:51 money printing soared.
01:25:54 You could hang around with your bonds
01:25:56 and wait for the euthanasia of the Rontier.
01:25:59 You can hang on to your tech stocks
01:26:01 and just hope there isn’t a massive correction
01:26:03 or dot, dot, dot.
01:26:05 Well, and it seems like a fairly obvious strategy
01:26:07 to make sure that you have at least some crypto
01:26:10 for the coming year, given what we likely have to face.
01:26:15 I think what’s really interesting is that
01:26:17 on top of Ethereum,
01:26:20 a more elaborate financial system is being built.
01:26:26 Stable coins are the interesting puzzle for me
01:26:32 because we need off ramps.
01:26:34 Ultimately, you and I have to pay taxes in US dollars.
01:26:39 And there’s no getting away from that.
01:26:43 The IRS is gonna let us hold crypto
01:26:45 as long as we pay our taxes.
01:26:48 And the only question in my mind is
01:26:50 what’s the optimal off ramp to make those taxes,
01:26:54 make those tax payments?
01:26:57 Probably it shouldn’t be a currency invented by Facebook.
01:27:01 Never struck me as the best solution to this problem.
01:27:05 Maybe it’s some kind of Fed coin
01:27:09 or maybe one of the existing algorithmic stable coins
01:27:12 does the job.
01:27:13 But we clearly need some stable off ramp.
01:27:16 So you don’t think it’s possible for the IRS
01:27:18 within the next decade to be accepting Bitcoin
01:27:21 as tax payments?
01:27:22 I doubt that.
01:27:24 Having dealt with the IRS now
01:27:25 since when did I first come here, 2002,
01:27:29 it’s hard to think of an institution less likely
01:27:32 to leap into the 21st century when it comes to payments.
01:27:37 No, I think we’ll be tolerated, crypto world will be tolerated
01:27:44 as long as we pay our taxes.
01:27:46 And it’s important that we’re already at that point.
01:27:48 And then the next question becomes,
01:27:50 well, does Gary Gensler define everything as a security?
01:27:53 And do we then have to go through endless
01:27:56 regulatory contortions to satisfy the SEC?
01:28:00 There’s a whole bunch of uncertainties
01:28:03 that the administrative state excels at creating
01:28:06 because that’s just how the administrative state works.
01:28:09 You’ll do something new.
01:28:10 Hmm, I’ll decide whether that’s a security
01:28:13 but don’t expect me to define it for you.
01:28:15 I’ll decide in an arbitrary way and then you’ll owe me money.
01:28:18 So all of this is going to be very annoying.
01:28:21 And for people who are trying to run exchanges
01:28:25 or innovate in the space, these regulations will be annoying.
01:28:29 But the problem with FinTech is it’s different from tech,
01:28:31 broadly defined.
01:28:33 When tech got into eCommerce with Amazon,
01:28:36 when it got into social networking with Facebook,
01:28:40 there wasn’t a huge regulatory jungle to navigate.
01:28:43 But welcome to the world of finance,
01:28:45 which has always been a jungle of regulation
01:28:48 because the regulation is there to basically entrench
01:28:53 the incumbents.
01:28:54 That’s what it’s for.
01:28:56 So it’ll be a much tougher fight than the fights
01:28:59 we’ve seen of other aspects of the tech revolution
01:29:04 because the incumbents are there and they see the threat.
01:29:09 And in the end, Satoshi said it very explicitly.
01:29:13 It’s peer to peer payment without third party verification.
01:29:15 And all the third parties are going, wait, what?
01:29:18 We’re the third parties.
01:29:20 So there is a connection between power and money.
01:29:24 You’ve mentioned World War I from the perspective of money.
01:29:29 So power, money, war, authoritarian regimes.
01:29:35 From the perspective of money,
01:29:37 do you have hope that cryptocurrency can help resist war,
01:29:42 can help resist the negative effects
01:29:46 of authoritarian regimes?
01:29:48 Or is that a silly hope?
01:29:50 Wars happen because the people who have the power
01:29:57 to command armed forces miscalculate.
01:30:02 That’s generally what happens.
01:30:06 And we will have a big war in the near future
01:30:09 if both the Chinese government and the US government
01:30:12 miscalculates and they unleash lethal force on one another.
01:30:17 And there’s nothing that any financial institution
01:30:20 can do to stop that any more than the Rothschilds
01:30:24 could stop World War I.
01:30:26 And they were then the biggest bank in the world by far
01:30:28 with massive international financial influence.
01:30:32 So let’s accept that war is in a different domain.
01:30:38 War would impact the financial world massively
01:30:42 if it were a war between the United States and China
01:30:44 because there’s still a huge China trade on.
01:30:49 Wall Street is long China, Europe is long China.
01:30:54 So the conflict that I can foresee in the future
01:30:56 is one that’s highly financially disruptive.
01:31:00 Where does crypto fit in?
01:31:02 Crypto’s obvious utility in the short run
01:31:07 is as a store of wealth, of transferable wealth
01:31:11 for people who live in a world
01:31:12 of transferable wealth for people who live
01:31:15 in dangerous places with failing,
01:31:18 not just failing money, but failing rule of law.
01:31:21 That’s why in Latin America,
01:31:22 there’s so much interest in crypto
01:31:24 because Latin Americans have a lot of monetary history
01:31:26 to look back on and not much of it is good.
01:31:30 So I think that the short run problem that crypto solves
01:31:35 is, and this goes back to the digital gold point,
01:31:39 if you are in a dangerous place with weak rule of law
01:31:43 and weak property rights,
01:31:44 here is a new and better way to have portable wealth.
01:31:51 I think the next question to ask is,
01:31:56 would you want to be long crypto
01:31:59 in the event of World War III?
01:32:02 What’s interesting about that question
01:32:03 is that World War III would likely have
01:32:05 a significant cyber dimension to it.
01:32:07 And I don’t want to be 100% in crypto
01:32:10 if they crash the internet,
01:32:13 which between them, China and Russia might be able to do.
01:32:17 That’s a fascinating question,
01:32:19 whether you want to be holding physical gold
01:32:22 or digital gold in the event of World War III.
01:32:25 The smart person who studied history
01:32:27 definitely wants a bit of both.
01:32:29 And so let’s imagine World War III
01:32:33 has a very, very severe cyber component
01:32:35 to it with high levels of disruption.
01:32:38 Yeah, you’d be glad of the old shiny stuff at that point.
01:32:43 So diversification still seems like
01:32:47 the most important truth of financial history.
01:32:52 And what is crypto?
01:32:53 It’s just this wonderful new source of diversification,
01:32:56 but you’d be nuts to be 100% in Bitcoin.
01:32:59 I mean, I have some friends
01:33:02 who are probably quite close to that.
01:33:04 Close to 100%, yeah.
01:33:05 I’d mar the balls of steel.
01:33:11 Yeah, in whatever way that balls of steel takes form.
01:33:18 You mentioned smart contracts.
01:33:20 What are your thoughts about,
01:33:21 in the context of the history of money,
01:33:23 about Ethereum, about smart contracts,
01:33:25 about kind of more systematic at scale
01:33:30 formalization of agreements between humans?
01:33:33 Well, I think it must be the case
01:33:40 that a lot of the complexity in a mortgage is redundant.
01:33:49 That when we are confronted with pages and pages
01:33:51 and pages and pages of small prints,
01:33:55 we’re seeing some manifestation
01:33:58 of the late stage regulatory state.
01:34:01 The transaction itself is quite simple.
01:34:04 And most of the verbiage is just ass covering by regulators.
01:34:09 So I think the smart contract,
01:34:12 although I’m sure lawyers will email me
01:34:16 and tell me I’m wrong,
01:34:17 can deal with a lot of the plain vanilla
01:34:20 and maybe not so plain transactions that we want to do
01:34:24 and eliminate yet more intermediaries.
01:34:28 That’s my kind of working assumption.
01:34:31 And given that a lot of financial transactions
01:34:37 have the potential at least to be simplified,
01:34:41 automated, turned into smart contracts,
01:34:45 that’s probably where the future goes.
01:34:48 I can’t see an obvious reason
01:34:49 why my range of different financial needs,
01:34:54 let’s think about insurance, for example,
01:34:56 will continue to be met with instruments
01:35:00 that in some ways are 100 years old.
01:35:05 So I think we’re still at an early stage
01:35:08 of a financial revolution that will greatly streamline
01:35:12 how we take care of all those financial needs that we have,
01:35:17 mortgages and insurance leap to mind.
01:35:20 Most households are penalized
01:35:23 for being financially poorly educated
01:35:27 and confronted with oligopolistic
01:35:29 financial services providers.
01:35:31 So you kind of leave college already in debt.
01:35:35 So you start in debt servitude
01:35:40 and then you got to somehow lever up
01:35:43 to buy a home if you can,
01:35:45 because everybody’s kind of telling you you should do that.
01:35:47 So you and your spouse,
01:35:50 you are getting even more leveraged
01:35:53 and your long one asset class called real estate,
01:35:57 which is super illiquid.
01:35:59 I mean, already I’m crying inside at the thought
01:36:03 of describing so many households financial predicament
01:36:07 in that way, and I’m not done with them yet
01:36:09 because, oh, by the way,
01:36:10 there’s all this insurance you have to take out
01:36:13 and here are the providers that are willing to insure you
01:36:15 and here are the premiums you’re gonna be paying,
01:36:17 which are kind of presented to you.
01:36:19 That’s your car insurance, that’s your home insurance.
01:36:22 And if you’re here, it’s the earthquake insurance.
01:36:23 And pretty soon you’re just bleeding money
01:36:26 in a bunch of monthly payments to the mortgage lender,
01:36:30 to the insurer, to all the other people that lent you money.
01:36:35 And let’s look at your balance sheet, it sucks.
01:36:39 There’s this great big chunk of real estate
01:36:41 and what else have you really got on there?
01:36:43 And the other side is a bunch of debt,
01:36:45 which is probably paying too high interest.
01:36:48 The typical household in the median kind of range
01:36:52 is at the mercy of oligopolistic
01:36:56 financial services providers.
01:36:57 Go down further in the social scale
01:37:01 and people are outside the financial system altogether.
01:37:03 And those poor folks have to rely on bank notes
01:37:07 and informal lending with huge punitive rates.
01:37:10 We have to do better than this.
01:37:12 This has to be improved upon.
01:37:15 And I think what’s exciting about our time
01:37:17 is that technology now exists that didn’t exist
01:37:20 when I wrote The Ascent of Money to solve these problems.
01:37:22 When I wrote The Ascent of Money, which was in 2008,
01:37:26 you couldn’t really solve the problem I’ve just described.
01:37:30 Certainly you couldn’t solve it
01:37:31 with something like microfinance.
01:37:32 That was obviously not viable.
01:37:35 The interest rates were high,
01:37:38 the transaction costs were crazy, but now we have solutions
01:37:42 and the solutions are extremely exciting.
01:37:43 So FinTech is this great force for good
01:37:46 that brings people into the financial system
01:37:48 and reduces transaction costs.
01:37:50 Crypto is part of it, but it’s just part of it.
01:37:53 There’s a much broader story of FinTech going on here
01:37:55 where suddenly you get financial services on your phone,
01:38:00 don’t cost nearly as much as they did
01:38:03 when there had to be a bricks and mortar building
01:38:05 on main street that you kind of went humbly
01:38:08 and beseeched to lend you money.
01:38:10 I’m excited about that
01:38:11 because it seems to me very socially transformative.
01:38:14 I’ll give you one other example of what’s great.
01:38:17 The people who really get sculpted in our financial system
01:38:21 are senders and receivers of remittances,
01:38:25 which are often amongst the poorest families in the world.
01:38:29 The people who are like my wife’s family in East Africa
01:38:32 really kind of hand to mouth.
01:38:34 And if you send money to East Africa
01:38:36 or the Philippines or Central America,
01:38:39 it’s the transaction costs are awful.
01:38:41 I’m talking to you, Western Union.
01:38:44 We’re going to solve that problem.
01:38:47 So 10 years from now,
01:38:48 the transaction costs will just be negligible
01:38:51 and the money will go to the people who need it
01:38:53 rather than to rent seeking financial institutions.
01:38:55 So I’m on the side of the revolution with this
01:38:57 because I think the incumbent financial institutions globally
01:39:01 are doing a pretty terrible job
01:39:03 and middle class and lower class families lose out.
01:39:08 And thankfully, technologically,
01:39:10 technology allows us to fix this.
01:39:11 Yeah, so FinTech can remove a lot of inefficiencies
01:39:14 in the system.
01:39:15 I’m super excited myself,
01:39:16 maybe as a machine learning person in data oracles.
01:39:20 So converting a lot of our physical world into data
01:39:25 and have smart contracts on top of that.
01:39:27 So that no longer is there’s this fuzziness
01:39:30 about what is the concrete nature of the agreements.
01:39:34 You can tie your agreement to weather.
01:39:37 You can tie your agreement to the behavior
01:39:40 of certain kinds of financial systems.
01:39:44 You can tie your behavior to, I don’t know,
01:39:47 I mean, all kinds of things.
01:39:48 You can connect it to the body
01:39:50 in terms of human sensory information.
01:39:53 Like you can make an agreement
01:39:56 that if you don’t lose five pounds in the next month,
01:40:01 you’re going to pay me $1,000 or something like that.
01:40:03 I don’t know.
01:40:04 It’s a stupid example, but it’s not going to happen.
01:40:06 It’s a good example, but it’s not
01:40:08 because like you can create all kinds of services
01:40:10 on top of that.
01:40:11 You can just create all kinds of interesting applications
01:40:15 that completely revolutionize how humans transact.
01:40:19 I think, of course, we don’t want to create a world
01:40:26 of Chinese style social credit
01:40:29 in which our behavior becomes so transparent
01:40:34 to providers of financial services,
01:40:36 particularly insurers that when I try to go into the pub,
01:40:42 I’m stopped from doing so.
01:40:44 Every time you take a drink, your insurance goes up.
01:40:47 Right, or my credit card wouldn’t work
01:40:51 in certain restaurants because they serve ribeye steak.
01:40:56 I fear that world because I see it being built in China.
01:40:59 And we must at all costs make sure
01:41:02 that the Western world has something distinctive to offer.
01:41:07 It can’t just be, oh, it’s the same as in China.
01:41:09 Only the data go to five tech companies
01:41:13 rather than to Xi Jinping.
01:41:16 So I think that the way we need to steer this world
01:41:21 is in the way that our data are by default
01:41:26 are by default vaulted on our devices
01:41:31 and we choose when to release the data
01:41:36 rather than the default setting
01:41:38 being that the data are available.
01:41:40 That’s important, I think,
01:41:41 because it was one of the biggest mistakes
01:41:43 of the evolution of the internet
01:41:45 that in a way the default was to let our data be plundered.
01:41:50 It’s hard to undo that,
01:41:51 but I think we can at least create a new regime
01:41:56 that in future makes privacy default
01:41:59 rather than open access default.
01:42:04 In the book, Doom, The Politics of Catastrophe,
01:42:07 your newest book, you describe wars, pandemics
01:42:11 and the terrible disasters in human history,
01:42:15 which stands out to you as the worst
01:42:17 in terms of how much it shook the world
01:42:21 and the human spirit.
01:42:22 I am glad I was not around in the mid 14th century
01:42:27 when the bubonic plague swept across Eurasia.
01:42:32 As far as we can see, that was history’s worst pandemic.
01:42:36 Maybe there was a comparably bad one
01:42:38 in the reign of the emperor Justinian,
01:42:42 but there’s some reason to think it wasn’t as bad.
01:42:45 And the more we learn about the 14th century,
01:42:50 the more we realize that it really was across Eurasia
01:42:53 and the mortality was 30% in some places,
01:42:57 50% in some places higher.
01:43:00 There were whole towns that were just emptied.
01:43:03 And when one reads about the Black Death,
01:43:06 it’s an unimaginable nightmare of death
01:43:12 and madness in the death with flagellant orders
01:43:17 wandering from town to town.
01:43:18 Town to town seeking to ward off divine retribution
01:43:22 by flogging themselves,
01:43:24 people turning on the local Jewish communities
01:43:27 as if it’s somehow their fault.
01:43:28 That must have been a nightmarish time.
01:43:32 If you ask me for an also random runner up,
01:43:36 it would be World War II in Eastern Europe.
01:43:42 And in many ways, it might have been worse
01:43:46 because for a medieval peasant,
01:43:50 the sense of being on the wrong side of divine retribution
01:43:53 must have been overpowering.
01:43:56 In the mid 20th century,
01:43:59 you knew that this was manmade murder
01:44:04 on a massive industrial scale.
01:44:06 If one reads Grossman’s Life and Fate,
01:44:10 just to take one example,
01:44:12 one enters a hellscape
01:44:15 that it’s extremely hard to imagine oneself in.
01:44:21 So these are two of the great disasters of human history.
01:44:24 And if we did have a time machine,
01:44:27 if one really were able to transport people back
01:44:30 and give them a glimpse of these times,
01:44:34 I think the post traumatic stress would be enormous.
01:44:37 People would come back from those trips
01:44:39 even if it was a one day excursion with guaranteed survival
01:44:44 in a state of utter shock.
01:44:48 You often explore counterfactual and hypothetical history,
01:44:51 which is a fascinating thing to do,
01:44:53 sometimes to a controversial degree.
01:44:57 And again, you walk through that fire gracefully.
01:45:01 So let me ask maybe about World War II or in general,
01:45:08 what key moments in history of the 20th century
01:45:12 do you think if something else happened at those moments,
01:45:15 we could have avoided some of the big atrocities,
01:45:18 Stalin’s Baltimore, Hitler’s Holocaust,
01:45:21 Mao’s Great Chinese Famine?
01:45:25 The great turning point in world history
01:45:28 is August the 2nd, 1914,
01:45:33 when the British cabinet decides to intervene
01:45:38 and what would have been a European war
01:45:43 becomes a world war.
01:45:46 And with British intervention,
01:45:47 it becomes a massively larger and more protracted conflict.
01:45:51 So very early in my career,
01:45:53 I became very preoccupied with the deliberations
01:45:55 on that day and the surprising decision
01:46:00 that a liberal cabinet took to go to war,
01:46:04 which you might not have bet on that morning
01:46:06 because there seemed to be a majority of cabinet members
01:46:10 who would be disinclined and only a minority,
01:46:12 including Winston Churchill, who wanted to go to war.
01:46:15 So that’s one turning point.
01:46:16 I often wish I could get my time machine working
01:46:20 and go back and say, wait, stop.
01:46:22 Just think about what you’re going to do.
01:46:24 And by the way, let me show you a video of Europe in 1918.
01:46:28 So that’s one.
01:46:29 Can we linger on that one?
01:46:31 That one, a lot of people push back on you
01:46:37 because it’s so difficult.
01:46:40 So the idea is, if I could try to summarize,
01:46:43 and you’re the first person that made me think
01:46:46 about this very uncomfortable thought,
01:46:50 which is the ideas in World War I,
01:46:54 it would be a better world if Britain stayed out of the war
01:46:58 and Germany won.
01:47:00 Right.
01:47:03 Thinking now in retrospect at the whole story
01:47:06 of the 20th century,
01:47:08 thinking about Stalin’s rule of 30 years,
01:47:11 thinking about Hitler’s rise to power
01:47:14 and the atrocities of the Holocaust,
01:47:18 but also like you said on the Eastern front,
01:47:21 the death of tens of millions of people through the war
01:47:25 and also sort of the political prisoners
01:47:28 and the suffering connected to communism,
01:47:30 connected to fascism, all those kinds of things.
01:47:34 Well, that’s one heck of an example
01:47:37 of why you’re just like fearless
01:47:39 in this particular style
01:47:42 of exploring counterfactual history.
01:47:44 So can you elaborate on that idea
01:47:47 and maybe why this was such an important day
01:47:50 in human history?
01:47:52 This argument was central to my book, The Pity of War.
01:47:55 I also did an essay in virtual history about this
01:47:58 and it’s always amused me that from around that time,
01:48:01 I began to be called a conservative historian
01:48:03 because it’s actually a very left wing argument.
01:48:05 The people in 1914 who thought Britain should stay
01:48:07 at the war were the left of the Labour Party,
01:48:10 who split to become the Independent Labour Party.
01:48:14 What would have happened?
01:48:16 Well, first of all, Britain was not ready for war in 1914.
01:48:19 There had not been conscription.
01:48:21 The army was tiny.
01:48:23 So Britain had failed to deter Germany.
01:48:25 The Germans took the decision
01:48:27 that they could risk going through Belgium
01:48:30 using the Schlieffen Plan to fight their two front war.
01:48:34 They calculated that Britain’s intervention
01:48:37 would either not happen or not matter.
01:48:41 If Britain had been strategically committed
01:48:46 to preventing Germany winning a war in Europe,
01:48:48 they should have introduced conscription 10 years before,
01:48:51 had a meaningful land army
01:48:53 and that would have deterred the Germans.
01:48:55 So the Liberal government provided the worst of both worlds,
01:48:59 a commitment that was more or less secret to intervene
01:49:03 that the public didn’t know about.
01:49:05 In fact, much of the Liberal Party didn’t know about,
01:49:07 but without really the means
01:49:09 to make that intervention effective,
01:49:11 a tiny army with just a few divisions.
01:49:14 So it was perfectly reasonable to argue
01:49:16 as a number of people did on August the 2nd, 1914,
01:49:19 that Britain should not intervene.
01:49:21 After all, Britain had not immediately intervened
01:49:23 against the French Revolutionary armies back in the 1790s.
01:49:27 It had played an offshore role, ultimately intervening,
01:49:30 but not immediately intervening.
01:49:32 If Britain had stayed out,
01:49:35 I don’t think that France would have collapsed immediately
01:49:38 as it had in 1870.
01:49:40 The French held up remarkably well
01:49:42 to catastrophic casualties
01:49:44 in the first six months of the First World War.
01:49:47 But by 1916, I don’t see how France could have kept going
01:49:52 if Britain had not joined the war.
01:49:54 And I think the war would have been over perhaps
01:49:56 at some point in 1916.
01:49:59 We know that Germany’s aims
01:50:00 would have been significantly limited
01:50:02 because they would have needed to keep Britain out.
01:50:04 If they’d succeeded in keeping Britain out,
01:50:06 they’d have had to keep Britain out.
01:50:07 And the way to keep Britain out was obviously
01:50:09 not to make any annexation of Belgium,
01:50:11 to limit German war aims,
01:50:14 particularly to limit them to Eastern Europe.
01:50:16 And from Britain’s point of view, what was not to like?
01:50:19 So the Russian Empire is defeated
01:50:21 along with France.
01:50:24 What does that really change?
01:50:27 If the Germans are sensible
01:50:29 and we can see what this might’ve looked like,
01:50:33 they focus on Eastern Europe,
01:50:35 they take chunks of the Russian Empire,
01:50:38 perhaps they create as they did
01:50:40 in the piece of Brest Litovsk,
01:50:44 an independent or quasi independent Poland.
01:50:47 In no way does that pose a threat to the British Empire.
01:50:49 In fact, it’s a good thing.
01:50:52 Britain never had had a particularly good relationship
01:50:54 with the Russian Empire after all.
01:50:57 The key point here is that the Germany that emerges
01:51:00 from victory in 1916 has a kind of European union.
01:51:05 It’s the dominant power of an enlarged Germany
01:51:09 with a significant middle Europa,
01:51:12 whatever you want to call it,
01:51:13 customs union type arrangement with neighboring countries,
01:51:17 including one suspects, Austria, Hungary.
01:51:22 That is a very different world from the world of 1917, 18.
01:51:27 The protraction of the war for a further two years,
01:51:32 it’s globalization,
01:51:33 which Britain’s intervention made inevitable.
01:51:36 As Philip Zelikow showed in his recent book
01:51:39 on the failure to make peace in 1916,
01:51:43 Woodrow Wilson tried and failed to intervene
01:51:46 and broker a peace in 1916.
01:51:47 So I’m not the only counterfactualist here.
01:51:50 The extension of the war for a further two years
01:51:53 with escalating slaughter, the death toll rose
01:51:56 because the industrial capacity of the armies grew greater.
01:52:00 That’s what condemns us to the Bolshevik revolution.
01:52:04 And it’s what condemns us ultimately to Nazism
01:52:08 because it’s out of the experience of defeat in 1918
01:52:13 as Hitler makes clear in Mein Kampf
01:52:15 that he becomes radicalized and enters the political realm.
01:52:21 Take out those additional years of war
01:52:23 and Hitler’s just a failed artist.
01:52:26 It’s the end of the war that turns him into the demagogue.
01:52:33 You asked what are the things
01:52:34 that avoid the totalitarian states.
01:52:38 As I’ve said,
01:52:39 British nonintervention for me is the most plausible
01:52:42 and it takes out all of that malignant history
01:52:45 that follows from the Bolshevik revolution.
01:52:48 It’s very hard for me to see how Lenin gets anywhere
01:52:51 if the war is over.
01:52:53 That looks like the opportunity
01:52:55 for the constitutional elements,
01:52:59 the liberal elements in Russia.
01:53:02 There are other moments at which you can imagine history
01:53:05 taking a different path.
01:53:07 If the provisional government in Russia
01:53:11 had been more ruthless,
01:53:13 it was very lenient towards the Bolsheviks,
01:53:15 but if it had just rounded them up
01:53:17 and shot the Bolshevik leadership,
01:53:19 that would have certainly cut the Bolshevik revolution off.
01:53:23 One looks back on the conduct of the Russian liberals
01:53:27 with the kind of despair at their failure
01:53:30 to see the scale of the threat that they faced
01:53:33 and the ruthlessness that the Bolshevik leadership
01:53:35 would evince. There’s a counterfactual in Germany,
01:53:38 which is interesting.
01:53:40 I think the Weimar Republic destroyed itself
01:53:43 in two disastrous economic calamities,
01:53:48 the inflation and then the deflation.
01:53:51 It’s difficult for me to imagine Hitler
01:53:53 getting to be Reich Chancellor
01:53:56 without those huge economic disasters.
01:53:59 So another part of my early work explored
01:54:02 alternative policy options that the German Republic,
01:54:06 the Weimar Republic might have pursued.
01:54:09 There are other contingencies that spring to mind.
01:54:12 In 1936 or 38, I think more plausibly 38,
01:54:17 Britain should have gone to war.
01:54:19 The great mistake was Munich.
01:54:23 Hitler was in an extremely vulnerable position in 1938,
01:54:27 because remember, he didn’t have Russia squared away
01:54:30 as he would in 1938.
01:54:31 As he would in 1939.
01:54:33 Chamberlain’s mistake was to fold instead of going for war
01:54:39 as Churchill rightly saw.
01:54:41 And there was a magical opportunity there
01:54:44 that would have played into the hands
01:54:45 of the German military opposition and conservatives
01:54:48 to snuff Hitler out over Czechoslovakia.
01:54:52 I could go on.
01:54:53 The point is that history is not some inexorable narrative,
01:54:59 which can only end one way.
01:55:01 It’s a garden of forking paths.
01:55:03 And many, many junctions in the road,
01:55:09 there were choices that could have averted
01:55:11 the calamities of the mid 20th century.
01:55:14 I have to ask you about this moment,
01:55:16 before you said I could go on,
01:55:18 this moment of Chamberlain and Hitler,
01:55:20 snuff Hitler out in terms of Czechoslovakia.
01:55:25 And we’ll return to the book Doom on this point.
01:55:29 What does it take to be a great leader
01:55:32 in the room with Hitler,
01:55:33 or in the same time and space as Hitler,
01:55:38 to snuff him out, to make the right decisions?
01:55:44 So it sounds like you put quite a bit of a blame
01:55:46 on the man, Chamberlain,
01:55:49 and give credit to somebody like a Churchill.
01:55:53 So what is the difference?
01:55:54 Where’s that line?
01:55:55 You’ve also written a book about Henry Kissinger,
01:55:58 who’s an interesting sort of person
01:56:01 that’s been throughout many difficult decisions
01:56:04 in the games of power.
01:56:06 So what does it take to be a great leader in that moment?
01:56:08 That particular moment, sorry to keep talking,
01:56:10 is fascinating to me,
01:56:12 because it feels like it’s man on man conversations
01:56:15 that define history.
01:56:17 Well, Hitler was bluffing.
01:56:19 He really wasn’t ready for war in 1938.
01:56:21 The German economy was clearly not ready for war in 1938.
01:56:25 And Chamberlain made a fundamental miscalculation
01:56:31 along with his advisors,
01:56:32 because it wasn’t all Chamberlain.
01:56:33 He was in many ways articulating the establishment view.
01:56:39 And I tried to show in a book called War of the World
01:56:41 how that establishment worked.
01:56:42 It extended through the BBC, into the aristocracy,
01:56:46 to Oxford.
01:56:47 There was an establishment view.
01:56:48 Chamberlain personified it.
01:56:49 Churchill was seen as a warmonger.
01:56:53 He was at his lowest point of popularity in 1938.
01:56:56 But what is it that Chamberlain gets wrong?
01:56:59 Because it’s conceptual.
01:57:00 Chamberlain is persuaded that Britain has to play for time
01:57:03 because Britain is not ready for war in 1938.
01:57:06 He fails to see that the time that he gets,
01:57:09 that he buys at Munich is also available to Hitler.
01:57:13 Everybody gets the time
01:57:15 and Hitler’s able to do much more with it
01:57:17 because Hitler strikes the pact with Stalin
01:57:19 that guarantees that Germany can fight a war
01:57:23 on one front in 1939.
01:57:25 What does Chamberlain do?
01:57:26 Build some more aircraft.
01:57:28 So the great mistake of the strategy of appeasement
01:57:31 was to play for time.
01:57:32 I mean, they knew war was coming,
01:57:34 but they were playing for time,
01:57:35 not realizing that Hitler got the time too.
01:57:39 And after he partitioned Czechoslovakia,
01:57:42 he was in a much stronger position,
01:57:43 not least because of all the resources
01:57:45 that they were able to plunder from Czechoslovakia.
01:57:50 So that was the conceptual mistake.
01:57:52 Churchill played an heroic role in pointing out
01:57:58 this mistake and predicting accurately
01:58:00 that it would lead to war on worse terms.
01:58:04 What does it take?
01:58:05 It takes a distinct courage to be unpopular.
01:58:11 And Churchill was deeply unpopular at that point.
01:58:13 People would listen to him in the House of Commons
01:58:16 in silence.
01:58:17 On one occasion, Lady Astor shouted, rubbish.
01:58:22 So he went through a period of being hated on.
01:58:26 The other thing that made Churchill a formidable leader
01:58:29 was that he always applied history to the problem.
01:58:32 And that’s why he gets it right.
01:58:35 He sees the historical problem
01:58:37 much more clearly than Chamberlain.
01:58:39 So I think if you go back to 1938,
01:58:44 there’s no realistic counterfactual
01:58:45 in which Churchill’s in government in 1938.
01:58:48 You have to have France collapse
01:58:49 for Churchill to come into government.
01:58:51 But you can certainly imagine a Tory elite
01:58:57 that’s thinking more clearly about the likely dynamics.
01:59:02 They haven’t seen this, I guess, problem of conjecture,
01:59:06 to take a phrase from Kissinger,
01:59:08 which is that whatever they’re doing in postponing the war
01:59:13 has the potential to create
01:59:16 a worse starting point for the war.
01:59:20 It would have been risky in 1938,
01:59:21 but it was a way better situation
01:59:23 than they ended up with in 1939, a year later.
01:59:27 You asked about Kissinger,
01:59:28 and I’ve learned a lot from reading Kissinger
01:59:31 and talking to Kissinger since I embarked
01:59:33 on writing his biography a great many years ago.
01:59:37 So I think one of the most important things I’ve learned
01:59:42 is that you can apply history to contemporary problems.
01:59:46 It may be the most important tool that we have
01:59:49 in that kind of decision making.
01:59:52 You have to do it quite ruthlessly and rigorously.
01:59:58 And in the moment of crisis, you have to take risk.
02:00:03 So Kissinger often says in his early work,
02:00:08 the temptation of the bureaucrat is to wait for more data,
02:00:12 but ultimately the decision making
02:00:14 that we do under uncertainty can’t be based on data.
02:00:18 The problem of conjecture is
02:00:19 that you could take an action now and incur some cost,
02:00:24 an avert disaster, but you’ll get no thanks for it
02:00:28 because nobody is grateful for an averted disaster.
02:00:32 And nobody goes around saying, wasn’t it wonderful
02:00:34 how we didn’t have another 9 11.
02:00:38 On the other hand, you can do nothing,
02:00:40 incur no upfront costs and hope for the best.
02:00:44 And you might get lucky, the disaster might not happen.
02:00:47 That’s in a democratic system, the much easier path to take.
02:00:54 And I think that the essence of leadership is to be ready
02:00:59 to take that upfront cost, avert the disaster
02:01:02 and accept that you won’t get gratitude.
02:01:05 If I may make a comment, an aside about Henry Kissinger.
02:01:10 So he, I think at 98 years old currently has still got it.
02:01:16 He’s brilliant.
02:01:17 It’s very, very impressive.
02:01:19 I can only hope that my brain has the same durability
02:01:23 that his does because it’s a formidable intellect
02:01:26 and it’s still in as sharp form as it was 50 years ago.
02:01:31 So you mentioned Eric Schmidt’s in his book
02:01:34 and he reached out to me that he wanted to do this podcast.
02:01:37 And I know Eric Schmidt, I’ve spoken to him before.
02:01:41 I like him a lot, obviously.
02:01:44 So they said, we could do a podcast for 40 minutes
02:01:48 with Eric, 40 minutes with Eric and Henry together
02:01:52 and 40 minutes with Henry.
02:01:54 So those are three different conversations.
02:01:58 And I had to like, I had to do some soul searching
02:02:00 because I said, fine, 40 minutes with Eric.
02:02:02 We’ll probably talk many times again.
02:02:04 Fine, let’s talk about this AI book together
02:02:07 for 40 minutes.
02:02:09 But I said, what I wrote to them is that I would hate myself
02:02:12 if I only have 40 minutes to talk to Henry Kissinger.
02:02:16 And so I had to hold my ground, went back and forth
02:02:18 and in the end decided to part ways over this.
02:02:21 And I sometimes think about this kind of difficult decision
02:02:25 in the podcasting space of when do you walk away?
02:02:34 Because there’s a particular world leader
02:02:38 that I’ve mentioned in the past
02:02:40 where the conversation is very likely to happen.
02:02:43 And as it happens, those conversations could often be,
02:02:50 unfortunately this person only has 30 minutes now.
02:02:53 I know we agreed for three hours, but unfortunately,
02:02:56 and you have to decide, do I stand my ground on this point?
02:03:01 I suppose that’s the thing that journalists
02:03:03 have to think about, right?
02:03:04 Like, do I hold onto my integrity
02:03:09 in whatever form that takes?
02:03:11 And do I stay my ground
02:03:12 even if I lose a fascinating opportunity?
02:03:16 Anyway, it’s something I thought about
02:03:17 and something I think about.
02:03:19 And with Henry Kissinger, I mean,
02:03:21 he’s had a million amazing conversations in your biography,
02:03:25 so it’s not like something is lost,
02:03:27 but it was still nevertheless to me
02:03:28 some soul searching that I had to do
02:03:30 as a kind of practice for what to me
02:03:34 is a higher stakes conversation.
02:03:36 I’ll just mention it as Vladimir Putin.
02:03:40 I can have a conversation with him
02:03:41 unlike any conversation he’s ever had,
02:03:44 partially because I’m a fluent Russian speaker,
02:03:47 partially because I’m messed up in the head
02:03:49 in certain kinds of ways that make
02:03:50 for an interesting dynamic,
02:03:52 because we’re both Judo people,
02:03:54 we both are certain kinds of human beings
02:03:58 that can have a much deeper apolitical conversation.
02:04:02 I have to ask to stay on the topic of leadership.
02:04:05 You’ve, in your book, Doom,
02:04:08 have talked about wars, pandemics throughout human history,
02:04:13 and in some sense, saying that all of these disasters
02:04:18 are manmade.
02:04:20 So humans have a role in terms of the magnitude
02:04:23 of the effect that they have on human civilization.
02:04:27 Without taking cheap political shots,
02:04:30 can we talk about COVID 19?
02:04:33 How will history remember the COVID 19 pandemic?
02:04:38 What were the successes,
02:04:39 what were the failures of leadership of man, of humans?
02:04:44 Doom was a book that I was planning to write
02:04:49 before the pandemic struck.
02:04:52 As a history of the future based in large measure
02:04:55 on science fiction.
02:04:57 It had occurred to me in 2019
02:04:59 that I had spent too long not reading science fiction,
02:05:02 and so I decided I would liven up my intake
02:05:08 by getting off history for a bit and reading science fiction.
02:05:12 Because history is great at telling you about the perennial
02:05:14 problems of power.
02:05:16 Putin is always interesting on history.
02:05:18 He’s become something of a historian recently
02:05:21 with his essays and lectures.
02:05:23 But what history is bad at telling you is,
02:05:25 well, what will the effects of discontinuity
02:05:27 of technology be?
02:05:29 And so I thought I need some science fiction
02:05:31 to think more about this,
02:05:32 because I’m tending to miss the importance
02:05:36 of technological discontinuity.
02:05:39 If you read a lot of science fiction,
02:05:41 you read a lot of plague books,
02:05:43 because science fiction writers are really quite fond
02:05:46 of the plague scenario.
02:05:48 So the world ends in many ways in science fiction,
02:05:50 but one of the most popular is the lethal pandemic.
02:05:52 So when the first email came to me,
02:05:56 I think it was on January the 3rd
02:05:58 from my medical friend, Justin Stebbing,
02:06:00 funny pneumonia in Wuhan, my antennae began to tingle
02:06:05 because it was just like one of those science fiction books
02:06:08 that begins in just that moment.
02:06:10 It begins in just that way.
02:06:14 In a pandemic, as Larry Brilliant,
02:06:18 the epidemiologist said many years ago,
02:06:20 the key is early detection and early action.
02:06:25 That’s how you deal with a novel pathogen.
02:06:28 And almost no Western country did that.
02:06:31 We know it was doable because the Taiwanese
02:06:33 and the South Koreans did it, and they did it very well.
02:06:36 But really no Western country got this right.
02:06:40 Some were unlucky because super spreader events
02:06:43 happened earlier than in other countries.
02:06:45 Italy was hit very hard very early.
02:06:47 For other countries, the real disaster came quite late.
02:06:50 Russia, which has only relatively recently
02:06:53 had a really bad experience.
02:06:56 The lesson for me is quite different from the one
02:06:59 that most journalists thought they were learning last year.
02:07:03 Most journalists last year thought,
02:07:05 Trump is a terrible president.
02:07:07 He’s saying a lot of crazy things.
02:07:10 It’s his fault that we have high excess mortality
02:07:12 in the United States.
02:07:14 The same argument was being made by journalists in Britain,
02:07:17 Boris Johnson, dot, dot, dot,
02:07:19 Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, dot, dot, dot,
02:07:21 even India, Narendra Modi, the same argument.
02:07:26 And I think this argument is wrong in a few ways.
02:07:30 It’s true that the populist leaders said many crazy things,
02:07:34 and broadly speaking gave poor guidance
02:07:37 to their populations.
02:07:40 But I don’t think it’s true to say
02:07:43 that with different leaders,
02:07:44 these countries would have done significantly better
02:07:46 if Joe Biden had magically been president a year earlier.
02:07:50 I don’t think the US would have done much better
02:07:52 because the things that caused excess mortality last year
02:07:55 weren’t presidential decisions.
02:07:57 They were utter failure of CDC to provide testing.
02:08:00 That definitely wasn’t Trump’s fault.
02:08:03 Scott Gottlieb’s book makes that very clear.
02:08:04 It’s just been published recently.
02:08:06 We utterly failed to use technology for contact tracing,
02:08:10 which the Koreans did very well.
02:08:12 We didn’t really quarantine anybody seriously.
02:08:16 There was no enforcement of quarantine.
02:08:19 And we exposed the elderly to the virus
02:08:21 as quickly as possible in elderly care homes.
02:08:23 And these things had very little to do
02:08:25 with presidential incompetence.
02:08:28 So I think leadership is of somewhat marginal importance
02:08:33 in a crisis like this,
02:08:34 because what you really need
02:08:35 is your public health bureaucracy to get it right.
02:08:38 And very few Western public health bureaucracies
02:08:40 got it right.
02:08:42 Could the president have given better leadership?
02:08:45 Yes.
02:08:47 His correct strategy, however,
02:08:49 was to learn from Barack Obama’s playbook
02:08:52 with the opioid epidemic.
02:08:55 The opioid epidemic killed as many people
02:08:58 Obama’s watch as COVID did on Trump’s watch.
02:09:01 And it was worse in a sense
02:09:03 because it only happened in the US.
02:09:05 And each year it killed more people
02:09:06 than the year before, over eight years.
02:09:09 Nobody to my knowledge has ever seriously blamed Obama
02:09:12 for the opioid epidemic.
02:09:14 Trump’s mistake was to put himself front and center
02:09:17 of the response to claim that he had some unique insight
02:09:21 into the pandemic and to say with every passing week,
02:09:24 more and more foolish things
02:09:26 until even a significant portion of people
02:09:29 who’d voted for him in 2016 realized that he’d blown it,
02:09:32 which was why he lost the election.
02:09:34 The correct strategy was actually to make Mike Pence
02:09:37 the pandemic czar and get the hell out of the way.
02:09:41 That’s what my advice to Trump would have been.
02:09:42 In fact, it was in February of last year.
02:09:45 So the mistake was to try to lead,
02:09:49 but actually leadership in a pandemic
02:09:52 is almost a contradiction in terms.
02:09:54 What you really need is your public health bureaucracy
02:09:56 not to fuck it up.
02:09:58 And they really, really fucked it up.
02:10:00 And that was then all blamed on Trump.
02:10:02 Jim Fallows writes a piece in the Atlantic that says,
02:10:05 well, being the president’s like flying a light aircraft,
02:10:07 it’s pilot error.
02:10:09 And I read that piece and I thought,
02:10:10 does he really after all the years he spent writing
02:10:13 think that being president is like flying a light aircraft?
02:10:16 I mean, it’s really nothing like flying a light aircraft.
02:10:19 Being president is you sit on top of a vast bureaucracy
02:10:22 with how many different agencies, 60, 70,
02:10:24 we’ve all lost count.
02:10:25 And you’re surrounded by advisors,
02:10:27 at least a quarter of whom are saying, this is a disaster.
02:10:30 We have to close the borders.
02:10:31 And the others are saying, no, no,
02:10:33 we have to keep the economy going.
02:10:34 That’s what you’re running on in November.
02:10:37 So being a president in a pandemic
02:10:39 is a very unenviable position
02:10:42 because you actually can’t really determine
02:10:45 whether your public health bureaucracy
02:10:47 will get it right or not.
02:10:48 You don’t think to push back on that,
02:10:50 just like being Churchill in a war is difficult.
02:10:54 So leaving Trump by an aside,
02:10:57 what I would love to see from a president
02:10:58 is somebody who makes great speeches
02:11:03 and arouses the public to push the bureaucracy,
02:11:06 the public health bureaucracy,
02:11:08 to get their shit together,
02:11:09 to fire certain kinds of people.
02:11:11 I mean, I’m sorry, but I’m a big fan of powerful speeches,
02:11:15 especially in the modern age with the internet.
02:11:17 It can really move people.
02:11:19 Instead, the lack of speeches
02:11:23 resulted in certain kinds of forces
02:11:27 amplifying division over whether to wear masks or not,
02:11:31 or it’s almost like the public picked some random topic
02:11:35 over which to divide themselves.
02:11:37 And there was like a complete indecision,
02:11:39 which is really what it was,
02:11:41 fear of uncertainty materializing itself
02:11:45 in some kind of division.
02:11:46 And then you almost like busy yourself
02:11:48 with the red versus blue politics,
02:11:50 as opposed to some, I don’t know,
02:11:52 FDR type character just stands and say,
02:11:57 fuck all this bullshit that we’re hearing.
02:11:59 We’re going to manufacture 5 billion tests.
02:12:02 This is what America is great at.
02:12:04 We’re going to build
02:12:05 the greatest testing infrastructure ever built,
02:12:08 or something, or even with the vaccine development.
02:12:12 But that was what I was about to interject.
02:12:15 In a pandemic, the most important thing is the vaccine.
02:12:18 If you get that right,
02:12:19 then you should be forgiven for much else.
02:12:21 And that was the one thing
02:12:22 the Trump administration got right,
02:12:23 because they went around the bureaucracy
02:12:27 with Operation Warp Speed
02:12:28 and achieved a really major success.
02:12:33 So I think the paradox of the 2020 story
02:12:40 in the United States is that the one thing that mattered most
02:12:43 the Trump administration got right,
02:12:45 and it got so much else wrong
02:12:47 that was sort of marginal,
02:12:49 that we were left with the impression
02:12:50 that Trump had been to blame for the whole disaster,
02:12:53 which wasn’t really quite right.
02:12:56 Sure, it would have been great
02:12:57 if we did Operation Warp Speed for testing,
02:12:59 but ultimately vaccines are more important than tests.
02:13:02 And this brings me to the question
02:13:06 that you raised there of polarization and why that happened.
02:13:11 Now, in a book called The Square and the Tower,
02:13:13 I argued that it would be very costly for the United States
02:13:17 to allow the public sphere to continue to be dominated
02:13:20 by a handful of big tech companies,
02:13:22 that this ultimately would have more adverse effects
02:13:25 than simply contested elections.
02:13:27 And I think we saw over the past 18 months
02:13:31 just how bad this could be,
02:13:32 because the odd thing about this country
02:13:37 is that we came up with vaccines with 90 plus percent efficacy
02:13:42 and about 20% of people refused to get them
02:13:44 and still do refuse for reasons that seem best explained
02:13:52 in terms of the anti vaccine network,
02:13:54 which has been embedded on the internet for a long time,
02:13:56 predating the pandemic.
02:13:58 Renny DiResta wrote about this pre 2020.
02:14:02 And this anti vaccine network has turned out
02:14:04 to kill maybe 200,000 Americans
02:14:07 who could have been vaccinated,
02:14:08 but were persuaded through magical thinking
02:14:11 that the vaccine was riskier than the virus.
02:14:14 Whereas you don’t need to be an epidemiologist,
02:14:17 you don’t need to be a medical scientist
02:14:18 to know that the virus is about two orders
02:14:20 of magnitude riskier than the vaccine.
02:14:23 So again, leadership could definitely have been better.
02:14:30 But the politicization of everything
02:14:33 was not Trump’s doing alone.
02:14:35 It happened because our public sphere has been dominated
02:14:39 by a handful of platforms whose business model
02:14:43 inherently promotes polarization,
02:14:46 inherently promotes fake news and extreme views,
02:14:49 because those are the things that get the eyeballs
02:14:51 on the screens and sell the ads.
02:14:53 I mean, this is now a commonplace.
02:14:55 But when one thinks about the cost
02:14:57 of allowing this kind of thing to happen,
02:15:01 it’s now a very high human cost.
02:15:04 And we were foolish to leave uncorrected
02:15:06 these structural problems in the public sphere
02:15:09 that were already very clearly visible in 2016.
02:15:12 And you described that, like you mentioned,
02:15:16 that there’s these networks that are almost like
02:15:18 laying dormant, waiting for their time in the sun,
02:15:22 and they stepped forward in this case.
02:15:25 And that those network effects just disservice catalyst
02:15:30 for whatever the bad parts of human nature.
02:15:34 I do hope that there’s kinds of networks
02:15:36 that emphasize the better angels of our nature,
02:15:38 to quote Steven Pinker.
02:15:40 It’s just clearly, and we know this
02:15:43 from all the revelations of the Facebook whistleblower,
02:15:46 there is clearly a very clear tension
02:15:49 between the business model of a company like Facebook
02:15:54 and the public good, and they know that.
02:15:57 I just talked to the founder of Instagram.
02:16:00 Yes, that’s the case, but it’s not,
02:16:03 from a technology perspective,
02:16:06 absolutely true of any kind of social network.
02:16:08 I think it’s possible to build,
02:16:09 actually I think it’s not just possible,
02:16:12 I think it’s pretty easy if you set that as the goal,
02:16:15 to build social networks
02:16:16 that don’t have these negative effects.
02:16:20 Right, but if the business model is we sell ads,
02:16:26 and the way you sell ads is to maximize user engagement,
02:16:30 then the algorithm is biased
02:16:31 in favor of fake news and extreme views.
02:16:33 So it’s not the ads, a lot of people blame the ads.
02:16:36 The problem I think is the engagement,
02:16:40 and the engagement is just the easiest,
02:16:42 the dumbest way to sell the ads.
02:16:43 I think there’s much different metrics
02:16:46 that could be used to make a lot more money
02:16:48 than the engagement in the long term.
02:16:50 It has more to do with planning for the long term,
02:16:53 so optimizing the selling of ads
02:16:56 to make people happy with themselves in the long term,
02:17:01 as opposed to some kind of addicted like dopamine feeling.
02:17:07 And so that’s, to me that has to do with metrics
02:17:09 and measuring things correctly
02:17:11 and sort of also creating a culture
02:17:13 with what’s valued to have difficult conversations
02:17:16 about what we’re doing with society,
02:17:18 all those kinds of things.
02:17:19 And I think once you have those conversations,
02:17:22 this takes us back to the University of Austin,
02:17:23 kind of once you have those difficult human conversations,
02:17:27 you can design the technology that will actually make
02:17:30 for help people grow,
02:17:32 become the best version of themselves,
02:17:34 help them be happy in the long term.
02:17:36 What gives you hope about the future?
02:17:41 As somebody who studied some of the darker moments
02:17:44 of human history, what gives you hope?
02:17:49 A couple of things.
02:17:52 First of all, the United States
02:17:56 has a very unique operating system.
02:17:58 Which was very well designed by the founders
02:18:02 who’d thought a lot about history
02:18:03 and realized it would take quite a novel design
02:18:07 to prevent the republic going the way of all republics
02:18:10 because republics tend to end up as tyrannies
02:18:12 for reasons that were well established
02:18:14 by the time of the Renaissance.
02:18:16 And it gives me hope that this design has worked very well
02:18:20 and withstood an enormous stress test in the last year.
02:18:25 I became an American in 2018, I think one of the most
02:18:31 important features of this operating system
02:18:34 is that it is the magnet for talent.
02:18:38 Here we sit, part of the immigration story
02:18:45 in a darkened room with funny accents.
02:18:50 A Scot and a Russian walk into a recording studio
02:18:54 and talk about America, it’s very much like a joke.
02:18:58 And Elon’s a South African and so on,
02:18:59 and Teal is a German.
02:19:00 And we’re extraordinarily fortunate
02:19:03 that the natives let us come and play
02:19:07 and play in a way that we could not
02:19:09 in our countries of birth.
02:19:12 And as long as the United States continues
02:19:14 to exploit that superpower, that it is the talent magnet,
02:19:18 then it should out innovate
02:19:20 the totalitarian competition every time.
02:19:24 So that’s one reason for being an optimist.
02:19:30 Another reason, and it’s quite a historical reason
02:19:33 as you would expect from me.
02:19:35 Another reason that I’m optimistic
02:19:39 is that my kids give me a great deal of hope.
02:19:45 They range in age from 27 down to four,
02:19:48 but each of them in their different way
02:19:52 seems to be finding a way through this crazy time of ours
02:19:58 without losing contact with that culture
02:20:04 and civilization that I hold dear.
02:20:08 I don’t want to live in the metaverse
02:20:10 as Mark Zuckerberg imagines it.
02:20:12 To me, that’s a kind of ghastly hell.
02:20:15 I think Western civilization is the best civilization.
02:20:20 And I think that almost all the truths
02:20:23 about the human condition can be found
02:20:27 in Western literature, art, and music.
02:20:34 And I think also that the civilization
02:20:36 that produced the scientific revolution
02:20:38 has produced the great problem solving tool
02:20:42 that eluded the other civilizations
02:20:44 that never really cracked science.
02:20:47 And what gives me hope is that
02:20:50 despite all the temptations and distractions
02:20:53 that their generation had to contend with,
02:20:57 my children in their different ways
02:20:58 have found their way to literature
02:21:03 and to art and to music, and they are civilized.
02:21:09 And I don’t claim much of the credit for that,
02:21:14 I’ve done my best,
02:21:15 but I think it’s deeply encouraging
02:21:17 that they found their way to the things
02:21:21 that I think are indispensable for a happy life,
02:21:25 a fulfilled life.
02:21:26 Nobody, I think, can be truly fulfilled
02:21:30 if they’re cut off from the great body
02:21:32 of Western literature, for example.
02:21:34 I’ve thought a lot about Elon’s argument
02:21:38 that we might be in a simulation.
02:21:41 No, no, there is a simulation, it’s called literature.
02:21:44 And we just have to decide whether or not to enter it.
02:21:49 I’m currently in the midst of the later stages
02:21:53 of Proust’s great A l´heure échec du temps perdu,
02:21:57 and Proust’s observation of human relationships
02:22:01 is perhaps more meticulous than that of any other writer.
02:22:05 And it’s impossible not to find yourself identifying
02:22:09 with Marcel and his obsessive, jealous relationships,
02:22:14 particularly with Albertine.
02:22:17 It’s the simulation.
02:22:18 And you decide, I think, as a sentient being,
02:22:23 how far to, in your own life,
02:22:26 reenact these more profound experiences
02:22:30 that others have written down.
02:22:31 One of my earliest literary simulations
02:22:34 was to reenact Jack Kerouac’s Trippin on the Road
02:22:37 when I was 17, culminating in getting very wasted
02:22:40 in the Hanging Gardens of Xochimilco, not to be missed.
02:22:44 And it hit me, just as I was reading Proust,
02:22:48 that that’s really how to live a rich life,
02:22:51 that one lives life, but one lives it
02:22:53 juxtaposing one’s own experience
02:22:56 against the more refined experiences of the great writers.
02:23:00 So it gives me hope that my children do that a bit.
02:23:04 Do you include the Russian authors in the canon?
02:23:09 Yes, I don’t read Russian,
02:23:12 but I was entirely obsessed
02:23:14 with Russian literature as a schoolboy.
02:23:17 I read my way through Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev,
02:23:22 I, Chekhov.
02:23:24 I think of all of those writers,
02:23:29 Tolstoy had the biggest impact
02:23:31 because at the end of War and Peace,
02:23:33 there’s this great essay on historical determinism,
02:23:36 which I think was the reason I became a historian.
02:23:39 But I’m really temperamentally a kind of Turgenev person,
02:23:46 oddly enough.
02:23:48 I think if you haven’t read those novelists,
02:23:51 I mean, you can’t really be a complete human being
02:23:54 if you haven’t read the Brothers Karamazov.
02:23:57 You’re not really, you’re not grown up.
02:24:00 And so I think in many ways,
02:24:02 those are the greatest novels.
02:24:05 Raskolnikov, remember Raskolnikov’s Nightmare
02:24:09 at the end of Crime and Punishment,
02:24:12 in which he imagines in his dream
02:24:15 a world in which a terrible virus spreads.
02:24:19 Do you remember this?
02:24:20 And this virus has the effect of making every individual
02:24:23 think that what he believes is right.
02:24:27 And in this self righteousness,
02:24:31 people fall on one another and commit appalling violence.
02:24:36 That’s Raskolnikov’s Nightmare, and it’s a prophecy.
02:24:39 It’s a terrible prophecy of Russia’s future.
02:24:44 Yeah, and coupled with that is probably the,
02:24:47 I also like the French, the existentialists, all that.
02:24:50 The full spectrum and German’s Hermann Hesse
02:24:53 and just that range of human thought
02:24:57 as expressed in the literature is fascinating.
02:24:58 I really love your idea that the simulation,
02:25:04 like one way to live life
02:25:08 is to kind of explore these other worlds
02:25:11 and borrow from them wisdom
02:25:14 that you then just map onto your own lives.
02:25:17 You almost like stitch together your life
02:25:20 with these kind of pieces from literature.
02:25:22 The highly educated person is constantly struck by illusion.
02:25:27 Everything is an illusion to something that one has read.
02:25:32 And that is the simulation.
02:25:34 That’s what the real metaverse is.
02:25:38 It’s the imaginary world that we enter when we read,
02:25:42 empathize, and then recognize in our daily lives
02:25:45 some scrap of the shared experience
02:25:48 that literature gives us.
02:25:51 Yeah, I think I’ve aspired to be the idiot
02:25:54 from Prince Mishkin from Dostoevsky
02:25:57 and in aspiring to be that,
02:25:59 I have become the idiot, I feel, at least in part.
02:26:06 What, you mentioned the human condition,
02:26:09 does love have to do?
02:26:12 What role does it play in the human condition?
02:26:15 Friendship, love.
02:26:20 Love is the drug.
02:26:24 Love is, this was the great Roxy music line
02:26:32 that Brian Ferry wrote.
02:26:33 And love is the most powerful
02:26:37 and dangerous of all the drugs.
02:26:41 The driving force that overrides our reason.
02:26:46 And of course, it is the primal urge.
02:26:53 So what a civilized society has to do
02:26:57 is to prevent that drug, that primal force
02:27:00 from creating mayhem.
02:27:03 So there have to be rules like monogamy
02:27:08 and rituals like marriage that reign love in.
02:27:13 And make the addicts at least more or less under control.
02:27:21 And I think that’s part of why I’m a romantic
02:27:27 rather than a Steve Pinker, enlightenment rationalist.
02:27:32 Because the romantics realized that love was the drug.
02:27:37 It’s like,
02:27:39 the difference in sensibility between Handel and Wagner.
02:27:45 And I had a Wagnerian phase when I was an undergraduate.
02:27:49 And I still remember thinking that in,
02:27:54 as old as Lieberstod,
02:27:56 that Wagner had got the closest to sex
02:27:59 that anybody had ever got in music,
02:28:03 or perhaps to love.
02:28:05 I’m lucky that I love my wife and that we were,
02:28:12 by the time we met, you know, smart enough to understand
02:28:18 that love is a drug that you have to kind of take
02:28:22 in certain careful ways.
02:28:25 And that it works best in the context of a stable relationship
02:28:30 it works best in the context of a stable family.
02:28:36 That’s the key thing.
02:28:38 That one has to sort of take the drug
02:28:40 and then submit to the conventions
02:28:44 of marriage and family life.
02:28:47 I think in that respect, I’m a kind of tamed romantic.
02:28:55 Tamed romantic.
02:28:56 That’s how I’d like to think of myself.
02:28:58 The degree to which your romanticism is tamed
02:29:01 can be then channeled into productive work.
02:29:03 That’s why you are a historian and a writer
02:29:05 is the best that love is channeled through the writing.
02:29:08 So if you’re going to be addicted to anything,
02:29:09 be addicted to work.
02:29:12 I mean, we’re all addictive,
02:29:13 but the thing about workaholism
02:29:15 is that it is the most productive addiction.
02:29:19 And rather that than drugs or booze.
02:29:22 So yes, I’m always trying to channel my anxieties
02:29:27 into work.
02:29:28 I learned that at a relatively early age,
02:29:31 it’s a sort of massively productive way
02:29:33 of coping with the inner demons.
02:29:36 And again, we should teach kids that
02:29:39 because let’s come back to our earlier conversation
02:29:42 about universities.
02:29:43 Part of what happens at university
02:29:45 is that adolescents have to overcome all the inner demons.
02:29:49 And these include deep insecurity
02:29:52 about one’s appearance, about one’s intellect,
02:29:55 and then madly raging hormones
02:29:58 that cause you to behave like a complete fool
02:30:00 with the people to whom you’re sexually attracted.
02:30:03 All of this is going on in the university.
02:30:05 How can it be a safe space?
02:30:07 It’s a completely dangerous space by definition.
02:30:11 So yeah, I learned teaching young people
02:30:13 how to manage these storms,
02:30:16 that’s part of the job.
02:30:18 And we’re really not allowed to do that anymore
02:30:20 because we can’t talk about these things
02:30:22 for fear of the Title IX officers kicking down the door
02:30:24 and dragging us off in chains.
02:30:26 And like you said, hard work
02:30:28 and something you call work ethic in civilization
02:30:35 is a pretty effective way to achieve, I think,
02:30:39 a kind of happiness in a world that’s full of anxiety.
02:30:42 Or at least exhaustion so that you sleep well.
02:30:46 Well, there is beauty to the exhaustion too.
02:30:49 That’s why running, there’s manual work
02:30:52 that some part of us is built for that.
02:30:55 Right.
02:30:56 I mean, we are products of evolution
02:30:59 and our adaptation to a technological world
02:31:03 is a very imperfect one.
02:31:04 So hence the kind of masochistic urge to run.
02:31:11 I like outdoor exercise.
02:31:14 I don’t really like gyms.
02:31:16 So I’ll go for long punishing runs in woodland,
02:31:21 hike up hills.
02:31:24 I like swimming in lakes and in the sea
02:31:27 because there just has to be that physical activity
02:31:32 in order to do the good mental work.
02:31:34 And so it’s all about trying to do the best work.
02:31:39 That’s my sense that we have
02:31:43 some random allocation of talent.
02:31:45 You kind of figure out what it is
02:31:47 that you’re relatively good at
02:31:48 and you try to do that well.
02:31:51 I think my father encouraged me to think that way.
02:31:55 And you don’t mind about being average at the other stuff.
02:31:58 The kind of sick thing
02:31:59 is to try to be brilliant at everything.
02:32:01 I hate those people.
02:32:02 Should really not worry too much
02:32:04 if you’re just an average double bass player, which I am,
02:32:08 or kind of average skier, which I definitely am.
02:32:12 Doing those things okay
02:32:13 is part of leading a rich and fulfilling life.
02:32:16 I was not a good actor,
02:32:19 but I got a lot out of acting as an undergraduate.
02:32:22 Turned out after three years of experimentation at Oxford
02:32:25 that I was, broadly speaking,
02:32:27 better at writing history essays than my peers.
02:32:32 And that was my edge.
02:32:34 That was my comparative advantage.
02:32:35 And so I’ve just tried to make a living
02:32:37 from that slight edge.
02:32:40 Yeah, that’s a beautiful way to describe a life.
02:32:44 Is there a meaning to this thing?
02:32:46 Is there a meaning to life?
02:32:47 What is the meaning of life?
02:32:49 I was brought up by a physicist and a physician.
02:32:54 They were more or less committed atheists
02:32:56 who had left the Church of Scotland
02:32:59 as a protest against sectarianism in Glasgow.
02:33:03 And so my sister and I were told from an early age
02:33:05 life was a cosmic accident, and that was it.
02:33:10 There was no great meaning to it, and I can’t really
02:33:18 get past that.
02:33:19 Isn’t there beauty to being an accident at a cosmic scale?
02:33:24 Yes, I wasn’t taught to feel negative about that.
02:33:27 And if anything, it was a frivolous insight
02:33:32 that the whole thing was a kind of joke.
02:33:34 And I think that atheism isn’t really a basis
02:33:40 for ordering a society, but it’s been all right for me.
02:33:46 I don’t have a kind of sense of a missing religious faith.
02:33:53 For me, however, there’s clearly some embedded
02:33:59 Christian ethics in the way my parents lived.
02:34:03 And so we were kind of atheist Calvinists
02:34:08 who had kind of deposed God, but carried on behaving
02:34:11 as if we were members of the elect in a moral universe.
02:34:14 So that’s kind of the state of mind that I was left in.
02:34:21 And I think that we aren’t really around long enough
02:34:29 to claim that our individual lives have meaning.
02:34:31 But what Edmund Burke said is true.
02:34:35 The real social contract is between the generations,
02:34:38 between the dead, the living, and the unborn.
02:34:41 And the meaning of life is, for me at least,
02:34:45 to live in a way that honors the dead,
02:34:48 seeks to learn from their accumulated wisdom
02:34:50 because they do still outnumber us.
02:34:52 They outnumber the living by quite a significant margin.
02:34:55 And then to be mindful of the unborn
02:34:58 and our responsibility to them.
02:35:03 Writing books is a way of communicating with the unborn.
02:35:07 It may or may not succeed, and probably won’t succeed
02:35:10 if my books are never assigned
02:35:12 by work professors in the future.
02:35:14 So what we have to do is more than just write books
02:35:16 and record podcasts, there have to be institutions.
02:35:20 I’m 57 now.
02:35:22 I realized recently that succession planning
02:35:25 had to be the main focus of the next 20 years
02:35:29 because there are things that I really care about
02:35:33 that I want future generations to have access to.
02:35:38 And so the meaning of life I do regard
02:35:41 as being intergenerational transfer of wisdom.
02:35:46 Ultimately the species will go extinct at some point.
02:35:50 Even if we do colonize Mars, one senses
02:35:53 that physics will catch up with this particular organism,
02:35:56 but it’s in the pretty far distant future.
02:35:59 And so the meaning of life is to make sure
02:36:01 that for as long as there are human beings,
02:36:04 they are able to live the kind of fulfilled lives,
02:36:11 ethically fulfilled, intellectually fulfilled,
02:36:14 emotionally fulfilled lives
02:36:16 that civilization has made possible.
02:36:19 It would be easy for us to revert to the uncivilized world.
02:36:24 There’s a fantastic book that I’m going to misremember.
02:36:30 Milosz is the captive soul, the captive mind rather,
02:36:34 which has a fantastic passage.
02:36:38 He was a Polish intellectual who says,
02:36:43 Americans can never imagine what it’s like
02:36:46 for civilization to be completely destroyed
02:36:49 as it was in Poland by the end of World War II,
02:36:52 to have no rule of law, to have no security of even person,
02:36:56 nevermind property rights.
02:36:58 They can’t imagine what that’s like
02:36:59 and what it will lead you to do.
02:37:03 So one reason for teaching history
02:37:04 is to remind the lucky Generation Z members
02:37:10 of California that civilization is a thin film.
02:37:15 And it can be destroyed remarkably easily.
02:37:18 And to preserve civilization
02:37:19 is a tremendous responsibility that we have.
02:37:23 It’s a huge responsibility.
02:37:25 And we must not destroy ourselves,
02:37:27 whether it’s in the name of wokeism
02:37:30 or the pursuit of the metaverse.
02:37:33 Preserving civilization and making it available,
02:37:35 not just to our kids, but to people we’ll never know,
02:37:38 generations ahead, that’s the meaning.
02:37:40 And do so by studying the lessons of history.
02:37:45 Right, not only studying them, but then acting on them.
02:37:48 For me, the biggest problem is,
02:37:50 how do we apply history more effectively?
02:37:53 It seems as if our institutions, including government,
02:37:56 are very, very bad at applying history.
02:37:59 Lessons of history are learned poorly, if at all.
02:38:02 Analogies are drawn crudely.
02:38:04 Often the wrong inferences are drawn.
02:38:06 One of the big intellectual challenges for me
02:38:08 is how to make history more useful.
02:38:12 And this was the kind of thing that professors used to hate,
02:38:15 but really practically useful,
02:38:16 so that policymakers and citizens
02:38:19 can think about the decisions that they face
02:38:22 with a more historically informed body of knowledge.
02:38:27 Whether it’s a pandemic, the challenge of climate change,
02:38:29 what to do about Taiwan.
02:38:31 I can’t think of a better set of things to know
02:38:36 before you make decisions about those things
02:38:39 than the things that history has to offer.
02:38:41 Well, I love the discipline of applied history,
02:38:43 basically going to history and saying,
02:38:45 what are the key principles here
02:38:50 that are applicable to the problems of today?
02:38:52 Right.
02:38:53 And how can we solve that?
02:38:54 The great philosopher of history, R.G. Collingwood,
02:38:57 said in his autobiography, which was published in 1939,
02:39:01 that the purpose of history was to reconstitute
02:39:05 past thought from whatever surviving remnants there were,
02:39:10 and then to juxtapose it with our own predicament.
02:39:14 And that’s that juxtaposition of past experience
02:39:17 with present experience that is so important.
02:39:19 We don’t do that well.
02:39:22 And indeed, we’ve flipped it
02:39:24 so that academic historians now think their mission
02:39:26 is to travel back to the past with the value system of 2021
02:39:31 and castigate the dead for their racism and sexism
02:39:36 and transphobia and whatnot.
02:39:38 And that’s exactly wrong.
02:39:40 Our mission is to go back and try to understand
02:39:42 what it was like to live in the 18th century,
02:39:44 not to go back and condescend to the people of the past.
02:39:49 And once we’ve had a better understanding,
02:39:51 once we’ve seen into their lives, read their words,
02:39:53 tried to reconstitute their experience,
02:39:55 to come back and understand our own time better,
02:39:58 that’s what we should really be doing.
02:40:00 That’s what we should really be doing.
02:40:01 But academic history has gone completely haywire,
02:40:04 and it does almost the exact opposite
02:40:05 of what I think it should do.
02:40:07 And by studying history, walk beautifully, gracefully
02:40:11 through this simulation, as you described,
02:40:14 by mapping the lessons of history into the world of today.
02:40:17 We have virtual reality already in our heads.
02:40:20 We do not need Oculus and the metaverse.
02:40:24 This was an incredible, hopeful conversation
02:40:27 in many ways that I did not expect.
02:40:29 I thought our conversation would be much more
02:40:31 about history than about the future,
02:40:33 and it turned out to be the opposite.
02:40:35 Thank you so much for talking to me today.
02:40:36 It’s a huge honor to finally meet you, to talk to you.
02:40:38 Thank you for your valuable time.
02:40:40 Thank you, Lex, and good luck with Putin.
02:40:43 Thanks for listening to this conversation
02:40:45 with Neil Ferguson.
02:40:46 To support this podcast,
02:40:47 please check out our sponsors in the description.
02:40:50 And now, let me leave you with some words
02:40:52 from Neil Ferguson himself.
02:40:54 No civilization, no matter how mighty it may appear
02:40:57 to itself, is indestructible.
02:41:00 Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.