The following is a conversation NEO ferguson, one of the great historians of our time at times controversial and always brilliant, whether you agree with him or not. He's an author of sixteen books on topics covering the history of money, power, war, pandemics, an empire previous at harvard currently at stanford, and today launching a new university here in Austin Texas called the university of Austin, a new institution built from the ground up to encourage open inquiry and discourse, but both thinkers and doors for philosophers, historians to scientists and engineers, embracing debate, descent and self examination free to speak. To this agree to think to explore truly novel ideas. Advisory board includes steven pinker job.

in height and many other amazing people. With one exception me, I was graciously invited to be on the advisory board, which I accepted in the hope of doing my small part in helping build the future of education and open discourse, especially in the fields of artificial intelligence, robotics and computing. We spend the first hour of this conversation talking about this new university before switching to talking about some of the darkest moments in human history and what they reveal about human nature and now a quick few seconds summary of the sponsors check them out in the description is the best way to support this podcast. First, as prisoner wine, my wine of choice, second stripe. A payment platform. Third is coinbase a platform I used by crypto currency, for this forsake. Matic make a delicious mushroom coffee and, fifth,

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did with the founders of the creators of the aforementioned cryptic currencies by the way. The funny thing is this episode with awe Neil Ferguson We talked quite a bit about money. We talk quite a bit about bitcoin other other. The currencies he's the author of the assent of money, a book. You should definitely check out that gives you the full history of money. He updates that book. I think a couple years ago recently, it just gives you others, brilliant the world through the lens of money, and in this conversation we talk about, how could a currency is the future, so coin base? Is

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terms and conditions apply, go to. Indeed, there come flash lacks the pursuit of happiness. My friends, this is the works friedman. Podcast in here is my conversation with Neil ferguson. The You are one of the great historians of our time, respected, sometimes controversial. You flourished in some of the best universe in the world from and why you to london, school of economics to harvard and now to hoover institution at Stanford. Before we talk about the his You have money, war and power. Let us

talk about a new university, you are a part of launching here in Austin Texas. It is called university of Austin. U a t x, what is it's mission? It's goals, it's plan. I think it's pretty obvious to a lot of people in higher education that there's a problem and that problem manifests itself in a great many different ways, but I would sum up the problem as being a drastic shilling of the atmosphere that constrains free speech, free exchange, even free thought, and I had no

anticipated that this would happen in my lifetime. Academic career began in oxford in the nineteen eighties, when anything went one sense that a university was a place where one could risk saying the unsaleable one debate beyond debatable. So the fact that in russia If the short space of time, a variety of ideas, critical race, theory or woke, is one of you want to call. A variety of ideas have come along that seek to limit and quite drastically limit what we can talk about strikes

as deeply unhealthy and I'm not sure- and I thought about this for a long time- you can fix it with the existing institutions. I think you need to create a new one, and so after much deliberation we decided to do it and I think it's a hugely timely opportunity to do what people used to do in this country, which was to create new institutions that mean that used to be the default setting of america. We I stopped doing that. I mean I look back and I thought why why? Why don't universities, or at least if there are? Why do they have so little impact? It seems like we have the billionaires. We have the need. Let's do it so used to believe and institutions in the university in the ideal of the university, I believe passionately in that ideal.

There's a reason they ve been around for nearly a millennium. There is a a unique thing that happens on a university campus when it's done right, and that is the transfer of knowledge between generations. That is a very sacred activity and it seems to withstand major changes technology. So this form that we call the university predict. the printing press survive. The printing press continue to function through the scientific revolution, the enlightenment. There, two revolution to this day and I think it's because, maybe because of evolutionary psychology, we need to together in one relatively confined space.

When we re not late teens and early twenties for the knowledge transfer between the generations to happen, it that's my feeling about this, but in order for it to work well, there need to be very few constraints. There needs to be a sense. that one can take intellectual risk, remember people in the late, teens and early twenties are adults but their inexperienced adults. And if I look back on my own time as an undergraduate saying, stupid things was my m o. My way to finding good ideas was through a minefield of of bad ideas. I feel so sorry for my for people like me today, people aged eighteen, nineteen, twenty two day who, ah ah intellectually, very curious, ambitious but inexperienced, because the minefields today

absolutely lethal and you know one wrong food and its consolation. I said the stupidity of the other day. Imagine being ass! Now I mean we were noxious undergraduates, there's nothing. The he did at Stanford, Andrew Sullivan. Then I would not doing at oxford, and perhaps we were even worse, but it was set Oh not career, ending to be to be an absolutely insufferable obnoxious undergraduate, then today, if we, if we, if people like us, exists today, they must live in a state of of

constant anxiety that they're going to be outside for some heretical statement that they made five years ago on social media, so part of what motivates means. That is the desire to give them the means of today a shot at free thinking and really I tol its aggressive learning. Learning where you're really pushed and I just think that stopped happening on the major campuses, because, whether at harvard where I used to teach at stanford, where I now based, I I sense kind of suffocating atmosphere of self censorship. The that means people are afraid

to take even minimal risk and in class I mean just just take, for example, a survey that was published earlier this year that revealed this is of undergraduates and for your programs in the? U s. Eighty five percent of self describe liberal student said they would report the professor to the universe, it ministries and if he or she said something they consider defensive and something that seventy five percent said said they deem it to a fellow undergraduate. That's the kind of culture that seville, in our universities, so we need a new university which none of that is true in which you can speak, o mine, say stupid things, get it completely wrong and lived to tell The tale there's a lot more going on. I think, because when you start thinking about what's wrong with the modern universe,

de many many more things suggest themselves and I think, there's an opportunity here to build something: that's radically new and in some ways and radically traditional in other ways. For example, I have a strong preference for the tories system. Let you see at oxford and cambridge, which is small group teaching and an highty socratic in its structure, and it would be great to bring that the united states where it doesn't really exist, but at the same time I think we should be doing some very twenty first century things making sure that while people are reading and studying classic works, they are also going to be a most in the real world of technological innovation. The world, you know very well and are a glove to get a sin.

is, is of the ancient and classical which were gradually letting fade away with the novel, ah and technological. So we we want to produce people who can simultaneously talk intelligently about Adam Smith or for that matter, shakespeare or Proust. An have a conversation with you about where I is going and how long it will be before I can get driven here by a self driving vehicle allowing me to have my lunch and prepare, rather than focus on the other, crazy people on the road. So that's the dream that we can create, something which is in a partly classical partly twenty first century, and we look around and we we don't see it if you'd. If you don't see an institution that you really think should exist, I can give a more responsibility to create it so you're thinking, including something bigger than just

about education ass, including science, engineering and technology, should also comment that you know I mostly stare of politics and out of some of these, aspects of liberal education. It could have been the most controversial and difficult within the university, but there is a kind of ripple effect of fear within that space. Into science and engineering and technology that I think as a as an issue. That's difficult to describe it. It doesn't have a controversial nature. Just has a nature of fear where you're not you know, you might think stupid stuff is a young twenty year old. You know that, for example, learning. A machine learning is really popular in their computer size. Now, as an approach for its creating artificial intelligence systems, its it, it is

controversial in that space. To say that ain't, the against machine learning saying so serve exploring ideas. The thing this is going to lead to a dead end, now that that take some guts to do as a young twenty year old within within a classroom to think like that that question in a machine learning course itself ridiculous. This like who's, going to complain about this, but that the fear that starts in in it and, of course, on the tree why, on on the court was some course the cover society, the fear, ripples and affects those students. There asked big out of the box questions about engineering about computers. and and there's a lot. You know, there's like linear, algebra, that's not going to change, but then there's like applied linear alger wishes, machine learning and that's when robots and

real system touch human beings and that's when you have to ask yourself these difficult questions about about humanity, The events in engineering in size and technology courses, and these are no separate worlds in two senses. I've just taken delivery of my copy of the book Eric smith and Henry Kissinger have coauthored on artificial intelligence, the central question of which is what does this mean for us broadly, but they're not separate worlds. You know in cp, snow's sense of you know the the chasm between science and arts, because on a university campus, everything is contained. from a novel carogne of ours to the baby is the occurring in the english departments, those behaviors. If denunciation becomes a norm undergraduate denounces

if, as a teaching assistant denounces undergraduate, those behaviors are contagious and will spread inexorably. First, a social science indented to natural sciences, and I think that's that's part of the reason why This started to happen when we started to get the origins of of disinfect this invitation and cancel culture. It was not just a few conservative professors in the humanities who had to worry. Everybody had to worry because eventually it was going to come even to the most apparently hard stem part of the the campus. It's it's contagious. There's something nicholas crustacea should look up if he's very good at looking at the way in which social networks like the ones that exist in a university, can spread everything. But I think when, when we look back and ask, why did woke Islam spread so rapidly and rapidly out of humanities into other

parts of universities, and why did it spread across the country and indeed beyond the united states, to the other, english speaking, universities, it's because its contagion and and these behaviors ah contagious, the president of a university, I will name said to me that he was thieves every day at least one denunciation, one code for somebody, or rather to be fired for something that they said. That's crazy kind of totalitarianism, light that now exists in our universities and of

the people who want to downplay the say, oh well, there only have been a hundred and something in this invitations. All. Oh there really out that any cases. But the point is that the famous events, the events that get the attention, are responsible for a general chilling that, as you say, spreads to every part of the university and creates a very familiar culture in which people are afraid to say what they think self censorship. Look at the heterodox academy data on this grows and grow. So now a majority of students will say this is clear from the latest heterodox academy surveys. We are scared to say what we think in cash ass we get denounced in case we get cancelled, but just not the correct atmosphere for a university in a free society. To me. What's reading creed p, is how many of the behaviors I see on university camps today are reminiscent of the way the people used to bathe in the soviet union or in the soviet or MAO's china, the solid

later in life that I think would wig contending with here, which manifests itself as denunciations, people informing on superiors some people using it for career advantage. Other people reduced to how plus desperate apology to try to exonerate themselves people disappearing. metaphorically, if not literally, all of this is so reminiscent of the totalitarian regimes that I studied earlier in my career, that it makes me feel sake. I'm almost really feel sick is that the people doing this stuff. The people who write the letters of denunciation, apparently unaware that their behaving exactly like people in stolen soviet union. They don't know that so they clearly have there's been a massive educational failure If somebody can write an anonymous or non anonymous letter of denunciation and not feel shame, I mean you should

feel morally completely contaminated, as you are doing that, but but people haven't been taught the realities of totalitarian. For all these reasons, I think you need to try at least to create a new institution where those pathologies will be structurally excluded. So maybe it if your question may be pushed back on this, but your widely seen political is a conservative covers two is politically conservative. What is the role of politics at the university of arson biggest with the ideas? People a thing to this when they hear that ideas? Your expressing.

They may think. There's a lean to these ideas. There is a conservative lean to the ideas. Is there such a lean? That will certainly be people who say that, because the standard mode have tried to discredit any new initiative is to say. Oh, this is a sinister conservative, ah plot, but one of our co founders, Heather Hyang, is definitely not a conservative she's is committed to the idea of academic freedom, as I am, but I think on political issues, we probably agree on almost nothing, and at least I I would guess, but but politics max paper made this point a long time ago. The politics really should stop at the threshold of

the classroom of the lecture hall and in my career, I have always tried to make sure that when I'm teaching, it's not clear where I stand politically, though of course undergraduates and insatiably curiously want to know, but each be clear from what I say, because indoctrination on a political basis is an abuse of the power of the professor, as vapor rightly said. So I think one of the key principles of of the university of Austin will be that the baron principle that politics is gnaws an appropriate ah for the lecture lecture for for ass room and we should pursue truth and enshrine liberty of thought. If that's a political issue that I can't help you, if your guns, freedom of thought, then we don't really have much of a discussion.

To have a clearly. There are some people who politically seem quite hostile to it, but my senses that there are plenty of people on the left in academia, think of that interesting partnership between Coronel, west and Robbie george, which spin institutionalized in the academic? Freedom aligns eight's by partisan position. Really really is after all, fifty years ago, it was the left that was in favour of free speech. The right still has an anti free speech, an element to look how quickly there out too, to ban critical race theory critical race. There won't be banned at the university of texas workers. Won't, be banned. Everything will be up for discussion, but the rules of engagement be clear, chicago principles. Those will be enforced and

if you have to give a lecture on well. Let's just take a recent example, the dorian abbot case, if you're giving a lecture on astrophysics, but it turns out that in some different venue you expressed scepticism about affirmative action. Will it doesnt matter its irrelevant? We want to know what your thoughts are: an astrophysics, because that's what you're supposed to be giving a lecture on that used to be understood mean that the oxford of the nineteen eighties there were communists and there were ultra tories at cambridge there were people who was so reactionary that they celebrated franco's birthday, but they were also out and communists down. The road of kings college the understanding was that that kind of intellectual diversity was part and parcel of university life. frankly for undergraduate. It was great fun to cross the road and go from in an outright conservatism, ultra

Tourism to communism. One learned a lot that way, but the issue is when you promoting or hiring tendering people their politics is not relevant. It really isn't. I wanted started to become relevance, and I remember this coming up the harvard history department late in my time, their felt deeply deeply uneasy but we were having conversations that amounted to well. We can't hot ex person, despite their obvious academic qualifications because of some political issue, that that's not what should happen at a healthy university, some

article questions will university of arson and be a physical in person, university or virtual university. What are some ma in that aspect where the classroom, as it will be, a real space institution that may be an online dimension to it, because there clearly are a lot of things that you can do via the it's an but the core activity of of teaching and learning. I think, requires real space and I've thought about this: time to baited Sebastian thrown about this many many years ago, when he was incomplete. Believer in, let's call it the metal veracity to go with the matter of us in the matter, City was going to happen, wasn't it, but I never really believed in the metal veracity. I didn't do mewks because I just didn't think you'd a amiable retain the attention be able to cope with the scale scaled grading that was involved

I think, there's a reason universities have been around and that their form for about a millennium. You continue to will be in the same place. So I think answer to that question. Definitely a campus in the austin area. That's where will stars and if we, allow some of our content to be available online. Great will certainly do that the question is what kind of courses in programming will it offer that something can speak to? What's your vision here, we think that we need to begin more like a start up then like a fool service university from day one. So our vision is that we start with a summer school which will offer provocatively the forbidden courses. We we once, I think, to begin by giving

a platform to the professors who have been most subject to council culture and also to give an opportunity to students who want to hear them to come so will start with a summer school. That will be, Somewhere in the tradition of thought of those institutions, the into war period that were havens for refugees where we are dealing here with the internal refugees, a of the work era will start their it'll. Be an opportunity to test out some some content see warts, students will come and spend time in all, the year. So that's poor a that's the sort of far. If, if you like the launch product, then we go straight to a masters programme. I don't think you can go to undergraduate education right away.

Because the established brands and undergraduate education or offering something it's impossible to compete with initially because they have the brown harvard yale Stanford and they offer also this p a network which is part of the reason people, one so badly said, go to those places, not really the professors it's the classmates. So we don't want to compete their initially. Where there is, I think, room for new entrants, easing a masters programme and the first one will be in entrepreneurship and and leadership. because I think there is a huge hunger amongst people who want to get into particular technology world to learn about those things, and they know that not read again to learn about the met business. Schools people who are not going to teach them leadership and entrepreneurship are professors. So we want create something that will be a little like the very successful schwartz programme in China, which was

come and spend a year in china and find out about china. we'll be doing the same. Essentially, come and spend a year and and find out about technology and they'll be a mix of academic content. We want people to understand some of the first principles of what their studying there are. Four principles of entrepreneurship and leadership, but we also want them to spend time with people like one of Co founders, Joe lonsdale who's, been a hugely access, successful, venture, capitalist and and directly from people like him, so. that's the kind of initial offering. I think there are other masters programmes that we will look to roll out quite quickly. I have a particular passion for him, does in applied history or politics and applied history. I'm a historian and crazy by the tendency of academic historians to drift away from what seemed to me the important questions, and certainly to do

away from addressing policy relevant question, so I would love to be involved and in in a masters in applied history and will will build some programs like that before we get sir, the fool, liberal arts experience that we envisage for an undergraduate programme, an undergraduate programmes and exciting, because I think we can be innovative there too. I I, I would say two years would be spent doing some very classical and difficult, classical things, bridging those divide between arts and sciences, then there would also be in the second in this, can half in the junior and senior years something what more of an apprenticeship where we'll have centres, including a sense of full, ecology engineering, mathematics that will

designed to to help people make that transition from the theoretical to the practical. So that's the vision and I think like any like any early stage idea, will doubtless tweak it as we go along will find things that work and things that don't work, but I the very clear sense in my own mind, of how this should look five years from now, and I dont about you. I mean I am unusual as an Academic cause, I quite like starting new institutions, and I've done a bit of it in my career o connor know what it should look like after the first four or five years to get out of bed in the morning and put up with all the kind of hassles of doing it not not least the inevitable flak that we were bound to take from the educational establishments and I was graciously invited to be an adviser to this

university lost then, and what the reason I would die. I have to help in whatever way I can is several so one. I would love to see. Austin the physical location flourish, intellectually, and especially in the space of science and engineer, as really exciting. To me. Another reason is: I am still research. Scientists have mit eyes, still love mit, and I see this effort, there you are launching, as as a beacon at least the way to the other elite institutions in the world. I think, too, My colleagues and special robotics kind of sea don't see robotics as a humanity's problem, but to me

audits and I will define much of our world in the next century and four do not to consider all the deep logical sociological, human problems associated with that have real open conversations to say, stupid things to challenge the ideas that how companies are being run, for example, that is the safe space, is very difficult to talk about the difficult questions about technology, when your employed by face book, a google and so on the universities, the place to have those conversations. That's right usually excited that you want to be one of our advisers. We we need a broad and an eclectic group of people and I'm excited by the way that group has has has developed

It has some of the sum of my favorite intellectuals or their steve pinker, for example, but we are also in a make sure that we have people with experience in in academic leadership, and so it's it's a. happy a coalition of the willing looking to try to build something new which, as you say, will be complementary to the existing and establish institutions. I think of The academic world is, as a network, I've moved from some major hobbs in the network to others, but I have always felt that we do our best. Work, not Dana silo, cold oxford, but in asylum that that is really a hop connected. Stanford connected to harvard

enacted to mit. One of the reasons I moved to the united states was that I sense that there was more intellectual action in my original field of expertise, financial history- and that was right. It was it was a good move. I think I'd have stagnated if I stayed at oxford, but at the same time I I haven't lost connection with oxford. I recently went and gave a lecture there in honor of sir roger scruton, one of the great conservative philosophers and the burden of my she was the idea of the anglo sphere which appeal to lots of roger will go horribly wrong. If illiberal ideas, the inhibit academic freedom, spread all over the angler sphere, and this network gets infected with these. I think deeply deeply dot damaging notions, so yeah I think we're creating a new knowed, I hope its renewed, the mix, the network overall, more resilient ends.

right now, there is an urgent need for their people, whose act careers have been terminated, all name too, who were involved Peter ferguson, who was harassed out of important state, for the reason that he was one of those intrepid figures who carried the grievance studies hoaxes, exposing the authors knowledge and re going on in many supposedly academic journals by getting phony gender studies. Articles published the genius, of course, so putin noses out of joint of the academic establishment? He began to be subject to discipline reactions, so Peter is going to be involved and, in a recent shocking british case, the fullest,

the catholic stock has essentially been run off. The campus of sussex university in england for trends for violating the the increasingly complex rules about discussing transgender issues and women's rights, she will be one of our advises. I think also one of our funding fellows actually teaching foras inner in our first iteration. So I think we creating a note that badly needed, though those people I mean. I remember saying this to the yard: the other founders when we first met To talk about this idea to bear, Why, sir answered panic analysis how can I was as well as to heather hieing. We need to do this urgently because there are people whose livelihoods are, in fact being too droid by these extraordinarily illiberal camp, means against them and so does

time to hang around and come up with the perfect design. This. This is an urgently needed lifeboat, and let's start with that, and then we can build something spectacular, taking advantage of the fact that all of these people have will they now have very real skin in the game they they need to make this a success, and I am sure they will help us make it a success. As you mentioned, some interesting names I cover hieing, very wise and so on see them anchor somebody I really admire. He too was under a lot of quite a lot of fire. many reasons I admire one because of his optimism about the future and to how little of a damn he seems to care about the like walking. the fire there's nobody more than about walk into the fire and soon bigger. But anyway

I mentioned a lot of interesting names. Jonathan height is also interesting there and who is involved with this venture at this early days. Well, one of the one of the things that that I'm excited about is his: we're getting people from inside and outside the academic world. So we ve got off the brooks who, for many years, ran the american enterprise various at enterprise institute, very successfully has a harvard role now teaching and an answer he somebody who brings, I think, a different perspective that there is obviously a and a need to get experienced. Academic leaders involved, which is

I was talking to larry summers about whether he would join our board of advisors up. The chicago principals owe a debt that to the former presidents of Chicago and he's graciously agreed to be in the board of advisors. I could go on. It would become a long and tedious list, but my goal in in trying to get to this. Api ban to form has been to signal that it's a bipartisan endeavor. It is nos a conservative institution that we're trying to build it's an institution that is committed to academic freedom and the pursuit of truth. That will mean is when it takes. Ah Robert Zimmer Chicago principles and enshrine the minutes its founding charter and will make those something other than honoured in the breach which they seem to be at some institutions. So the idea here is is to grow this organically. We needs rather like

academic freedom alliance that Robbie george created earlier this year. We need breadth and we need to show that It is not some kind of institutionalization of the intellectual doc web, though we welcome founding members of that that nebulous body It's really something design for olive academia to provide a kind of reboot that I I think we all agree is is needed Is there a george washington type figure, who is? Is there a president elected yet or as as what who's going to lead? This is satanic and I lost the former president of Saint John is the president of university Boston, and so he is our george washington then, who Alexander Hamilton? I guess it's funny much. I d w intellectual dark web I've. You are a talk, you friends, I'm harris about but any of the sea. He is on The person I really admire, and I

to online and offline, quite a bit for not to any tried. He stands boldly in his convictions. When he knows you're not going to be popular with like he base, he basically gets cancelled by every group he serve. He doesn't shy away from controversy and not for the sake of controversy itself. He is one of the best ample to me of a person who thinks freely. I disagree with them a few to quite a few things, but I deeply admire that he's here. He is what it looks like to think freely by himself if it feels to me, like he, represents a lot of the ideals of this kind of effort. Yes, he would be a natural fit sam as you're listening, I hope, you're in art, I think in in the course of his recent intellectual quests. He did collide with one of our founders, heather Hyang, so we'll have to model civil disagreements and the

the university of Austin its extremely important that we should all disagree about many things, but do it amicably, one of the things that has been lost sight of perhaps it's all the fault of two or maybe it something more profound, is that it is possible to disagree, in a civil way and and still be friends. I certainly had friends at oxford who were far It left me politically, and they are still among my best friends. So the university of Austin has to be a place where we can disagree. Are we could disagree vehemently, but we can then go and have a beer afterwards? That's that's in my mind, a really important part of university life learning the difference between the political and the and the personal ceasar sam. I think up. A good example as a you of a certain of intellectual hero Who has been? Will

to go into the cyber sphere, the men diverse and carve out and intellectual space, the the podcast and debate everything fearlessly, his I essay was really an essay on black lives matter and the question of police racism was a masterpiece of twenty twenty and then so. He, I think, is a model of what we believe in, but we can't say the world with podcast. Good though yours is because there is a kind of. Solar elements to this form of of public intellectual activity. It's it's also there in substance, where all our best writers now seem to be including our finder.

Very wise. The danger with this approach is ultimately your subscribed. As are the people who already agree with you, and we are all therefore in danger of preaching to the choir. I think what makes an institution like university of Austin so attractive is we get everybody together or at least part of the year, and we do that informal interaction at lunch at dinner. That allows, in my experience, the best ideas to form intellectual He isn't really a solar voyage historians often it seem that way, but I realized over time that I do my best work in a collaborative way and scientists have been better if this than people in the humanities. But what really matters? What what's magical

A good universities that into disciplinary serendipitous conversation that happens on campus Tom sergeant the great nobel prize winning We must and I used to have these kind of random com nations in elevators and why you were in corridors at stanford, and sometimes they be quite short conversations but in that short serendipitous exchange I would have more intellectual stimulus than in. in many a seminar lasting an hour and a half, so I think we want to get Some heiresses and annex friedman out of their dark and rooms, and give them chance to interact in a much less structured way than we ve got got used to again. It's that its sense that sometimes you need some free willing, unstructured debate to get the really good ideas talk anecdotally. For a moment. I looked back in my oxted undergraduate exe

In summary, I wrote a lot of essays and attend a lot of classes but intellectually the most important, thing I did was to write. an essay on the villanies satirist call cries for a graduates discussion group called the canning club, and I probably put more work into that paper. Then I put into anything else, except maybe my final examinations. Even although there was any really one senior member present the historians. Me cattle, I was really just trying to impress by contemporaries and that's the kind of thing we want the great intellectuals, the great intellectual leaps forward, kurt often in somewhat unstructured settings. I'm from scotland you can tell from my axe and a little at least The enlightenment happened in late eighteenth century scotland, in a very trusting into play, but in the universities which were very important glasgow, edinburgh,

andrews and the coffee houses and pubs of the scottish cities. Where a lot of unstructured discussion, often. Fuelled by copious amounts of wine to place. That's what I've missed over the last few years. That's that's just think about how hard academic social life has become, that we reached the point that Amy Tewa comes, the objects of a full blown investigation and media storm for inviting to yale law school students. over to her house to talk, I mean when I was the box regarded as a tremendous honour to be asked to go to one of our tutors home. The social life of oxen cambridge is one of the great strength as a sort of requirement to sip unpleasant, sherry with the dance and we ve conic killed. All

We killed all that in the us, because nobody dares have a social interaction with an undergraduate or change an informal email in case. The whole thing ends up on the front page of the local or student newspaper, so that that's what we need to kind of restore the social life of academia. So there's magic within really address as that of explicitly but there's magic to the interaction between students, there's magic in interaction between faculty that people they teach in there magic and the interaction between the students in the faculty in it is the iterative process that changes everybody involved so psych world exports in particular discipline, are changed as much as the students the twenty year olds, with the with a wild ideas. Each are changed ass, the magic of that lies in liberal education. That applies in this in the sizes to that's- probably, maybe to speak to this. Why so much

scientific innovation has happened in universities there's something about the youthful energy of Young minds graduate students and the graduate students that inspire some of the world experts to do some the best work of their lives. Will human brain we know is at its most dynamic when people are paying. You know this with your background in math people don't get better at math after the age of thirty, and that this is important when you think about the intergenerational character of university, the older people, the professors, have the experience but their fading intellectually from much earlier than anybody really wants to admit, and so you get this intellectual shot in the arm. From hanging out with people who are soccer. Twenty, don't know shared bars. Brains are gone like cooking near my look back on,

We arrive at an teaching which is over twenty five years, where cambridge oxford and why harvard- and I have extra the strong relationships with with students of from those institutions, because they would show up whether it was in office hours, rynch authorities and disagree with me and for me it's always been about encouraging some act. Intellectual rebellion telling people. I don't want your essayed to echo my views. If you can find something wrong with what I wrote rates or if you can find coming. I missed that's new fantastic, so there is definitely a you said- a magic in their interaction across the generations and its truly difficult. I think foreign intellectual to make the same progress.

In a project in isolation compared with the progress that can be made in these very, very special communities. What does a university due? Amongst other things, it creates a somewhat artificial environments of of of abnormal job security. That's the whole idea giving people tenure and then a relatively high turn over new faces each year and an inch the chief limitation of thought, experiments and actual experiments, then you get everybody living in the same kind of vicinity, so can spill over into three a m conversation. Well that that always seems to me to be a pretty potent combination. Let's ask ourselves a counterfeit question x. Imagine that's imagine that I the the world wars happen, but but there are no universes

I mean how does the manhattan project happen with with no academia to take just one of many examples? In truth, how does Britain even stay in the war without blatchy part without being able to crack the german cipher, the academics are unsung partly sung heroes of these conflicts. same is true in the soviet union. The sum in was terribly evil and repressive system, but it was good signs and that kept it in the game not mean in in world war, two kept it in the cold war. So It is clear that universities are incredibly powerful intellectual for small suppliers and are our history without them would look very different shore. Some innovations would have happened without that's clearly and us revolution didn't need universities. In fact, they played a very marginal role in the key technological breakthroughs of industrial revenue,

in its first phase but by the second industrial revolution in the late nineteenth century german, industry would not have left ahead of british industry if the universities had not been superior, and it was the fact that the german institutionalize scientific research in the way that they did, that really produced a powerful, powerful advantage, the problem of course, that this is a really interesting points that friedrich minor can make indeed george curtis tool for the german catastrophe, the german intellectuals became technocrats who favour he says they knew great deal about their speciality, but they were alienated from broadly speaking, humanism. That is his explanation of one of his explanations for why this very scientifically advanced germany goes down the path of hell led by hitler. So when I come back and ask myself what is it that we want to do with the new university? We want

make sure that we we don't fall into that. That german tat were very high levels of technical and scientific expertise decoupled from the fundamental foundations off. Of a free society, so labour lots of there. I think to stop the scientists making feisty impacts and that that's why it's really important that people working on a I reach it, spear. I think you said there democrats are unsung heroes of the twentieth century. I think he's kind of an intellectual a lazy intellectual desired. He's gonna destroy the academics. that the academics are the source of all problems in the world, and I They believe that, exactly as you said, we need to recognise that the university is pro blue, where the ideas that will protect us from the catastrophe,

that are looming ahead of us is that, were there ideas are going to come from people who work on economics can argue back and forth about John maynard keynes. But I think it's pretty clear that he was the most important economist uncertainty Influential economist of twenty century, and I think his ideas are looking better today in the wake of the financial crisis. The may have at any time since the nineteen seventeen, but imagine imagine John maynard keynes. Without cambridge, you can't because someone like that doesnt actually does not actually exist. without the incredible hothouse that a place like cambridge wars in keynes, his life- he was a product of a kind of hereditary intellectual elite, had its vices, but you can't help but admire

the sheer power of the mai. I've spent a lot of my career reading keynes, and I I that in selected so so powerful, but you can't calf people like that I am not prepared to have king's college cambridge and it comes with redundancy. I think that's the point. There are lots of It's the things that are very annoying about academic life that you just have to. You have to deal with they're they're made fun of in that recent netflix series, the chair, and it is easy to make fun of academic life, Tom Sharpe's, porter blue? Did it? It's it's an inherently comical subjects, professors at least use. To be a eccentric, but we sort of killed off that's side of academia by turning it into an increasingly doctrinaire place, eccentricity he's not tolerated. I'll. Give you an illustration,

this. I had to call this morning from abridge academic who set? Can you can you give me some advice because they're trying to de colonise the correct kill him. This is coming from the diversity, equity and inclusion offices, and it seems to me that what their requiring of is a fundamental violation of academic freedom, because it is determined ex ante what we should study and teach that's what's going on, and that's the thing that we really really have to resist, because that kills the universe. That's that that's the moment that it stops being the magical places intellectual creativity and simply becomes an adjunct to the ministry of propaganda, I've loved we spend talking about this because it such a hopeful message for the future, the university that I say share with you. Ah,

the love of the ideal of the university, so very practical question You mention the summer wits are we talking by someone? I know we're gonna put hard dates here, but would you are we are we thinking about one? Is this thing launching what are your thoughts on this? We are moving as fast as resources allow the goal is to offer the first of the forbidden courses at next summer summer of twenty twenty two

And we hope to be able to launch an initial ad up, albeit relatively small scale, masters program in the fall of next year. That's that's as fast as is humanly possible, so yeah, but we're really really keen to get going, and I think the the approach we're taking is ah somewhat imported from silicon valley. Think of this as a startup, don't think of this as something that has to exist as a full service university an on day one. We we don't have the resources that you do the billions and billions of dollars to build. university sort of as a as a facsimile of an existing university? But that's not what we want to do. I mean copying. Copying and pasting orbital year was Stanford would be a futile thing to do. They think they would probably you very quickly end up with the same pathologies, so we do have to come up with a different design and one way of doing as to grow organically from something quite small elon musk

mentioned in his usual humorous way on twitter that he wants to launch the texas institute technology and science tits. Some people thought this was sexist, because the acronym Overall, I understand their viewpoint, but I also think there needs to be a place for human rights on the internet you're from see ourselves on this pike s. I've gotten a chance to talk to court. If you see does and what I love the seas. Authenticity and humor is often a sign of authenticity, the the working us that you mention is such a beautiful characteristic of our professors. Faculty in great universities is also beautiful, cfcs, especially pharmacy. Also anyway, the deeper point he was making is showing an excitement for the universe,

as a place for big ideas in size techniques. Engineering. So to me, if there's some kind of way If there is a serious thought tat he had behind miss to eat, not to analyze mosques. Musk's twitter, like its shakespeare, But if there is a serious thought, I would love to see him supporting The flourishing of often is a place for science technology for these kinds, intellectual development data that that there were talking about May I make make a place for free inquiry civil disagreements coupled with great. Education and conversations about artificial targets, but biotechnology about engineering. So actually, I hope, there's a various idea behind that twin I'm gonna, wanna, chow

I'm about it. I do too. I do too. I most have the biggest storms in tee. Cups of my academic career have been caused by by Jokes that I've met these days. If you want to make bad jokes being a billionaire, is great idea, I'm not here too Defending lawns twitter style or sense of humor, he's not gonna. Be remembered for his tweets, I think he's gonna be removed, for the astonishing companies that is built and his His contributions in a whole range of the fields from space access to tesla and solar energy, and I very much hope the weaken interests alone in this project. We needs

not only on but a whole range of his peers, because this takes resources universes, cheap things to run, especially if, as I hope we can make as much of ah The the tuition covered by scholarships and nurseries wee wee wants to attract the best intellectual talents to this institution. The best intellectual town is somewhat randomly distributed through society, and some of it is in the bottom quincel of income distribution, and that makes it hard to get too late, education, so this will take resources. The last generation of super wealthy plutocrats, the generation of the gilded age of late nineteenth century, did a pretty good job of finding universities that Chicago wooden exist.

but for the money if that era, and so my message to not only to ilan but to all of the the peers. All of those people who made their billions out of technology over the last couple of decades This is your time, and this is your opportunity to create something new. I can't really I understand why the wealthy First time are content to hand their money. I mean think of the vast sums might Bloomberg recently gave to johns hopkins to his stably students. Petitions, when, on closer inspection, those institutions, don't seem to spend the money terribly well and in one of the mysteries of our time is the lack of due diligence. The hard nosed billionaires seem to do when it comes to philanthropy, so I think that opportunity here for this generation of a very talented, wealthy people to to do there there counter.

Posted in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and and creates a mule institutions, and then only to put names in the buildings, they just need to do what what the founders of the car. We god did create something new that will that will endure. Yeah mit launching college of computing and she was has- has given quite a large sum of money, I think in total a billion dollars and as somebody less computing, as somebody who was mit, I want some accountability for mit becoming a better institution. this is once again why I'm excited by university of asking, because it serves a beacon, look even create something new, and this is what the great institutions at a future should look like. Its de schwartz it is also an innovator. The idea of creating a college

the singapore compass and creating a kind of programmes for students from the western world comes study in china was with Steve idea and- and I was somewhat involved- did some visiting professing there. It taught me that you can create something new that area of graduate education and quite quickly attract really strong applicants, because the people who feel is there for years at harvard or stanford know that they don't know a lot, and I having taught a lot of people in that group, know how intellectually dissatisfied they often are at the end of four years, I mean they may have beautifully game. The system to graduate summa magda come loud it, but the common, no, they they'll confess it after a drink or two I know that they gave the system under intellectually wasn't the fulfilling experience they were. It may also know that

An mba from a comparable institution would not be a massive intellectual step forward, So I think what we want to say is here. If something really novel, exciting. That will be intellectually very challenge. I I do think the university of Austin has to be difficult. like to feel a little bit like surviving navy seal training to come through this programme, because it will be intellectually demanding that I think, should be a magnet. So yes, if, if you're listening, please join elon and in supporting this and and and and pizza he'll. If you're listening, I know how you are about the idea of creating a new university. Heaven knows Peter I have been discussing this idea for years and he's always said. Well, no, we thought about this and it just isn't going to work, but I really think we've got a we've got a responsibility to to do this, while

He has been on the spot gas before we've spoken a few times so I'll send this to him. I hope he does actually get behind it as well. Some I'm super excited by that de as they have been talking about that this effort represents an what ripple effect has in the rest of society. Thank you, those time beautifully spent, and I'm really, grateful for the the fortune of getting a chance to talk to you at this moment in history because I've been a big fan of your work, and the reason I wanted to talk to you today is above all the x. Books, you ve written about various aspects of history through money, war power. Pandemics of that, but I am glad that this cut. We got a chance to talk about this, which is not looking and histories looking at the future this is a beautiful little fortuitous.

Sir moment I appreciate you talking about it. In the book assent of money, you give a history of the world through the lens of money. If the financial, system, as evolutionary nature, much like life on earth. What is the origin of money on earth. the origin of money preach eight coins and most people kind of assume all talk about coins, but coins are relatively late. Developments back an ancient mesopotamia so odd, Five thousand years ago there were relations between creditors and death. Is there there already in the simplest economy. Because of the way in which agriculture works pay, I need I need to plant these seeds, but I'm not gonna have crops for six months, so we have clayton,

what's in, which simple debt transactions are inscribed remember, looking at great numbers of in the british museum, when I was writing the ascent of money in that's really the beginning of money that the minute use recording a relationship between a credit from the desert. You have something that is quays. I money not is probably what these clayton. It's mostly denoted from that point on this great evolutionary experiment to see what the most convenient way is. Records. Ah relations between creditors in debtors and what emerges in the time of the ancient greeks coins metal tokens? Sometimes

voluble metal, sometimes not usually bearing the imprint of a state or a monarch and that's the sources more familiar form of of money that we still use today for very, very small transactions. I expect coins will or begun by the time my youngest son is my age but they're alive remnant of a very, very old way of of doing of doing simple transactions and when we say coins. You mean physical coins talking about points have been rebranded Just yeah, not coinbase, coins actual coin coins. You know the ones that jangle in your in your pocket and you kind of don't know quite what to do with once. You have some so that that that that became an incredibly pervasive form of of of of paying for things. Monies just it. It's just the crystallization of a relationship between her debtor and a creditor and the coins are fungible. You know

as a clay tablets relates to specific transaction coins, are generic and fungible. They can be used in any transactions, and that was an important evolutionary advance. If you think of financial history in this was the the assent of money as an evolutionary story, there are punctuated equilibria people get by without, means for a long time, despite their defects as a means of payment such as that they can be debased, they can be clips, it's very hard to avoid fake or debasement entering the system, but coinage is still come of the basis of payments all the way. Through the roman empire at the other end into the so called dark ages. Still home most things are settled in kashmir, actions in the early thirteen hundreds. You don't get a big shift until after the black death

when there is such a need to monetize the economy, because a chronic labour shortages and feudalism begins to unravel the two. You just don't have a sufficient amount of coin agency. You get bills of exchange and I'm really into bills of exchange because- and this I hope, will capture your listeners. And viewers imaginations way They start using bills of exchange which, which are really just pieces of paper, saying you know I owe you over a three month period, while goods on transit from florence to london. You get the first peer to peer payment system, which is network verified because their thick they're not coins. They don't have a kings head on them, they're just pieces of paper and the verification comes in the form of signatures, and you you needs

ultimately some kind of guarantee. If I write an I you too, you build changed them. You don't really know me that where we only met you might want to get endorsed by. I don't know somebody really creditworthy, like ilan and so we actually can see in the late fourteenth century. In northern sudan, in england and elsewhere, the evolution of a peer to peer network system of of payment- that's actually high world trade grows. Could you just couldn't settle long oceanic transactions with coinage? Just wasn't practical all those treasure chest full of the balloons which were part of the way in which the spanish empire What really inefficient so bills of exchange and exciting part of this story, and they illustrate something. I should have made more clear the assent of money that now everything used in payment needs to be money, class

Key economists will tell you all well money money as three different functions. It's you ve heard this million times right, it's a unit of account, it's a store of value and it's a medium of exchange. Another three or four things that are worth saying about the son, I'll just say too one it may be that those three things are a try lemme on its very difficult for anything to be all of them. This point was made by my I have a colleague manny rincon cruise last year, and I still wish he would write this up as a paper, because it's a great insight, the second thing. That's really interesting to me is that payments don't to be money and If we go around as economists love to do say. Well, bitcoins, not money because it doesnt fulfil. These criteria were missing the point that you could build a system of payments and which I think is how we should think about. Crypto that is isn't money does need to be money. It's like bills of exchange, its network based verification peer to peer,

actions without without third party verification when it hit me the other day that we actually have this precedent for crypto. I got quite excited thought o shine, written that the assent of money can use user from first principles like almost physics perspective or may be human perspective. Described where does the value of money come from where's it actually, where is it so the sheet of paper or its coins, but it feels like a platonic sense, some kind of thing: that's actually storing value as possible. Of answer dancing around and on. I come from a family physicists, I'm the black sheep of the family, my my as a physicist, my sister is and that so, when you ask me to explain something in physics terms, I I get a kind of little part of me dies. I fail, but an interest

It doesn't really matter what we decide. Money is going to be an anything can record crystallise the thoroughly shit between the creditor and the data? It can be peace paper can be piece metal. It can be, nothing can speed. Digital entry, its trust that we really talking about here- We are not just trust him another we may not, but we are trusting the money. so whatever we used to represent the creditor. Relationship, whether its banknote recoil whatever it does depend on us. Both trusting is. And that doesn't always pertain war. We

seen. Episodes of inflation, especially obsessive hyperinflation, is a crisis of trust, a crisis of confidence in the mean the payments and this very traumatic for the societies to which it happens?. By and large human beings, particularly once you have a rule of law system of the sort involved in the west and then became generalized are predisposed to trust one another and the default setting is to trust money, even when it depreciates at a quite steady rate as the. U S, dollar has done pretty much uninterruptedly since the nineteen. sixties. It takes quite a big disruption for money to lose that trust, but I, Essentially, what money should be thought of ass. he's a series of tokens that can take any form we like and can be purely digital, which represent on transactions, is as criticism

letters and the whole thing depends on our collective trust to work. I may add to explain this stephen cobo once in the commercial field, culture that was actually funny and right right words. When he's Adam so sick, send you I be money, and I said yes in a week we could we could settle a debt with the human being is quite common in much of history, but but it's not the most convenient form of money. Money has to be convened, that's why, when they worked out how to make payments with cell phones, the chinese simply went straight there from bank accounts, they skip type credit cards. You won't see credit cards and china, except in the hands of naive tourists. How much can this trust bear in terms of us humans with our human nature testing it? It seems that I guess

Surprising thing is the thing works, a bunch of self interested ants running around a trading entrust it seems to work, except for bunch of moments in human history when there's hyperinflation, like a merchant- and it's just just kind of amazing kind of amazing the us humans. If I were to be optimistic, a sort of hopeful but human nature, It- gives me a sense that People want to leave on each other they wanted trust. certain, nay, I would say, probably now widely shared view, amongst evolutionary psychologists network scientists, it's one of nicosia stacks. His argument in a recent book on an economic history broadly bears this out, but you have to be cut

show us the cases where the system works are familiar to us, because those are the those of the states in the areas that produce a lot of written records, but when the system of trust collapses and the monetary system collapses with it. There is generally quite positive of records. I find that when I was writing, do, and so we slightly a biased in favour of the periods when trust prevailed and the system functions. It's very egypt To a great many episodes of very, very intense monetary chaos, even in the relatively recent past, in the wake of the first world war, multiple currencies, not just the german currency, multiple currencies were completely destroy the russian currency, the polish currency. They were currency that is all over centrally.

In europe in the early nineties, twenties, and that was partly because over the course of the nineteen, century a system had evolved in which trust was based on gold and rules that were supposedly applied by central banks. That system which produce relative price stability over the the nineteenth century it fell apart as a result of the first world war and as and as soon as it was gone as soon as the was no longer a clear link between those banknotes and coins and gold. The whole thing went completely haywire and I think we should remember that the extent of the monetary chaos from certainly nineteen eighteen all the way through to the late nineteen, forty seven, the germ currency, was destroyed once but twice in that period, and that was one of the most advanced economies in the world. In the

states there were periods is off intensely deep. Deflation prices fell by a third great depression and then very serious price volatility in the immediate post world war two period, so it's of an illusion. Maybe it's an illusion for people who ve spent most did the lives. In the last twenty years, we ve had a period of exceptional price stability. Since this century began In which a regime of central bank independence and inflation targeting appeared to generates steady below two percent inflation and much of the developed world was a bit too low for the central bankers liking a map, a problem in the financial crisis, but we avoided major price instability for the better part of twins he is in most of the world. They haven't really mean that many very

high inflation episodes and hardly any hyperinflation rhapsodes Venezuela's one of the very few zimbabwe's another. But if Take a hundred you view or two hundred you view of you. Wanna take a five hundred. You view you realize that quite often the system doesn't work. If you go back to the seventeenth century, there were multiple competing systems of coinage. There had been a good inflation that had begun the previous century, the price revolution caused mainly by around the new world silver, I think actual history, is a bit messier than one might think, and more once studies it, the more one realises that the need for the evolution, the reason bills of exchange came along was because the coinage systems had stopped working. The reason the banknotes started to become used more generally, first in the americas,

listen seventeenth century then more widely in the eighteenth century was just that they were more convenient than any other wave of paying for things. We have to invent the bond market in the eighteenth century to cope with the problem of public debt, which, up until that point, had been a recurrent source of instability and then invented equity finance because bonds were not enough, so I would prefer to think youth of the financial history as a series of crises really the resolved by innovations and, in the most recent episode very exciting episode of financial history, something called bitcoin. initiated a new financial or monetary revolution in response, I think to the growing crisis- the fear money system? Can you speak to that? So what do you think? I'm bob coin. What do you think it is a response to what are the growing problems of the future system? What is

moment in human history. That is full of challenges that bitcoin cryptic crises trying to overcome. I dont think bitcoin was devised bicetre she, whoever he was for fear of a breakdown of the vehicle if it was- it was a very far sighted enterprise, because certain in two thousand eight, when the first bitcoin paper appeared, it wasn't very likely that a wave of inflation coming. If anything, there was more reason to fear deflation. At that point, I think it would be more accurate to say that with advent of the internet. There was a need for a means of payment native to the internet typing your credit, number into random websites, not the way to pay for things on the internet and I'd rather think of bitcoin as the first iteration. The first attempt to solve the

How do we pay for things in what we must learn to call the massive ass, but let's just call it the internet? old time's sake, and ever since The initial innovation The realisation that you could use computing power talk cryptography to create peer to peer payments, third party verification A revolution has been gathering momentum that poses a very profound threat to the eu, thing legacy, system of banks and fear, currencies most money in the world today is made by banks nor central banks, banks, that's what most money is its entries in bank accounts and what bitcoin represents is an alternative mode of payment. That really ought to rend the banks obsolete. I think this finance revolution has got past the point at which it can be killed. was vulnerable in the early years. now has sufficient adoption and has generated sufficient

additional lairs when the theorem was in may- ways, the more important innovation, because you can build a whole system of of payments and ultimately smart contracts on top of either. I think we ve now reached the point that it's pretty hard to imagine it well being killed- and it's just survived an amazing thing, which was the chinese shutting down mining and shutting down everything- and still here- we are in fact scriptores thriving. What we don't know is how much damage ill judged. Reg. the tree? Interventions are going to do to this financial revolution left to it. Devices, I think decentralized. Finance provides the native monitoring financial system for the internet and The more time we spend in the metaphor, the more you sweet will make of it. The next things that will happen, I think, will be that

tokens in game spaces, like roadblocks, will become fungible as my nine year olds, and a lot more time playing on computer games than I ever did I can see the entertainment is becoming a game driven phenomenon and in the game. Space you need skins for avatar, the economics of the internet, its evolving very fast, and in parallel you can see this payments revolution happening. I think that all that old goes naturally very well and generates an enormous amounts of wealth in the press, that's the problem. Is there are people in washington with an overwhelming urge to intervene and an disrupt this evolutionary process? Partly, I think the muddled sense that the must be allotted nefarious things going on if we don't

step in many more will go on this. I think greatly exaggerates how much criminal activities, in fact going on in the space but there is also the vested interests at work. It was old to me, maybe not all. Perhaps it wasn't surprising that the bank for international settlements earlier this year, published a report one chapter of which said this must all go so stop soul, gotta be shut down it's gonna be replaced by central bank digital currency in Malta, wolf in the financial times read. This is that I agree with this. I once only realised that the banks are clever. They had they achieved the intellectual counterattack, with almost no fingerprints on the weapon. I thought, central by digital currencies are terrible idea I can't imagine why we would want to copy a chinese model. The essentially eggs, all transactions and puts them directly under the surveillance of a central government institution, but that

suddenly is syria this council proposal. So in the one side, we have a relatively decentralized technologically innovative internet native system of payments that has the possibility to evolve to produce a full set of of smart contracts, reducing enormously the transaction costs that we currently encounter in the financial world. It gets rid of all those middle men who take neck out every time you take out a morgue to whatever it is, that's one alternative, but other side. We have already centralized system in which transactions will, by default, be under the surveillance of the central bank, seems like an the choice to me but hey. I have this thing about personal liberty, so that's where we are. I dont think that the regulators can can kill web three and it was possible.

It went three prescriptive is now an obsolescent term. They can't killers, but they can definitely make it difficult and through a lot of sand into the machine, and I think worst of all they can spoil the evening. in history by by creating central bank digital currency that I don't think we really need all. We certainly don't need it in the chinese form. The do think bitcoin has a strong. To take over the world so become the primary mission of three things that make money money, because the primary methodology by which we store wealth, we exchange no. No, I think what bitcoin is. This was a phrase that I I got from my friend Matt mclennan, first eagle an option on digital gold, the it's the gold of the system, but

early bathed like an option. That's why it's quite volatile, because we don't really know if this brave new old of crypto is gonna work, but if it does work them because the gold, because of the finest What role we needs goal to play in the massive us isn't quite it's clear. I love that you're using the term metaverse. This is great, but I I I just like the metaverse city as a kind of as the antithesis of what we're trying to do in in austin, but can you imagine I'm using sarcastically. I come from Glasgow. Were all novel words have to be? U sarcastically. The met of the sarcastic us here. The beauty about humor and sarcasm is that the job, becomes reality. I mean it using the word big bang, to describe the origins of the universe it becomes like? a world after one it's in the textbook gang nobody's laughing young. Well, that's exactly risers, sticky, yeah

I'm in the sight of humor, but it is, it is a dangerous activity. These days anyway, I think bitcoin is, is the option of digital gold. The the role it plays is probably not so much to revalue, right now. It's just nicely not very correlated esa and your portfolio when I updated sense of money which was in twenty eighteen. Ten years after it came out, I wrote new chapter in which I said bitcoin in which had just sold off after its two thousand. Seventeen bubble will rise. Again through adoption- because if every millionaire in the world has point two percent of his or her wealth in bitcoin price should be Ten thousand dollars is one percent at seventy five thousand dollars on it. might not even stay at one percent, because I mean look at its recent performance if you, if you are exposed

to stop squabble stocks have been hedged with a significant crypto holding. You would have aced the last few months, ah, so I think the non correlation property is very, very important in driving adoption, and the volatility also drives adoption, if you're a sophisticated investor. Ah, so I think the adoption drives the bitcoin up because it's the option digital go, but it's also justice nicely not very correlated asset that you want to hold in in a world where the hell I mean the banks and wise going to tighten with come through this massively disruptive episode of the pandemic public debt, sword, money, printing sort But you could hang around with your bonds and wait for the euthanasia. The rancheria you can hang on to your tech stocks and just hope there isn't a massive correction or dot dot, dot women and it seems like a fairly obvious

strategy to make sure that you have at least some crypto. The coming year, given what we likely have to face, I think, what's really interesting, is that, on top of the theory, I am a more elaborate financial. The system is being built. both coins are the interesting puzzle for me because we need off ramps. Ultimately, you and I have to pay taxes in: u s dollars. And there is no getting away from that. The IRA, is gonna. Let us hold crypto as long as we pay our taxes and The only question, in my mind, is what the optimal off from to make those taxes make those tax payments. probably it shouldn't be a currency in to buy. Facebook. Never struck me as the person,

into this problem baby. It's some kind of fed coin, Or maybe one of the existing algorithmic stable does the job. We clearly need some stable off from the? U dont think his boss, for the ira's within next decade to be accepting bitcoin is tax payments. I doubt that having dealt with the irs nice since, when did I first come here, two thousand tune. Hard to think of an institution less likely to reap into the twenty four century when it comes to to payments. No, I think I think we'll will be, will be tolerated. Crypto world will be tolerated. As long as we pay our taxes, that's the end is in sight We're ready at that point and then the next soon she becomes well, does guard against it. fine everything is security and do we then have to go through endless regular

we contortions to satisfy the s? He see, there's a whole bunch of of uncertainties that they administrative. date, excels at creating cause in an that's just how that's how the administrative state works. You do something new I'll decide where less security, but don't expect me to define it for you all decide in an arbitrary way and then you'll money, so all of this is going to be very annoying and you for people who From run, exchanges, war, innovate in the space. These these regulations will be annoying, but the problem with thin tec is it's. It's different from tech broadly defined. In a when tat got into a coma with amazon when it got into social networking with facebook. There wasn't a huge, regular free jungle to navigate, but welcome to the world of finance, which has always been a jungle of regulation, because the regulations is. Is there too.

In a basically entrench the incumbents. That's what it's for so it'll be much tougher fight than the fight swift. We ve seen over other aspects of the tec revolution. They could cause the incumbents or are there and they see that the threat and, in the end suppose she said it very explicitly. Its peer to peer payment without third party verification and all the third parties are going away what are the third parties? So there is a connection between power and money. Imagine what were one from the perspective of money so power money, war very tarrying regimes from the past of money do have hope that kept a currency can help resist war can help resists the negative, effects of authoritarian regimes.

or is it a silly hope. Wars- happen, because the people who have the power to command armed forces miscalculate, that's generally what happens and we will have a big war in the near future. If both the chinese gum and the? U S, government miss calculates and they unleash lethal lethal force on one another and there's nothing that any financial institution can, Do to stop that any more than the roth's cults could rothschilds could stop world war one and they were then the biggest bank in the world by far with massive international financial influence. So let's accept that war is is in a different domain.

war would impact the financial world massively if it were a war between the united states and china, because their stilly Huge choice, a trade on wilson his long. China. Europe has long china, so the conflict than I can foresee in the future is one that's high, financially disruptive. Where does crypto fit in. Crypto is obvious utility in the short run, isa. the store of wealth of transferable wealth for people who live in dangerous places, with failing not just feeling money but failing rule of law That's why in latin america, the so much interest in crypto, because latin americans have a lot of monetary history to look back on and not much of it is good. So I think that the short run problem that crypto souls is- and this goes back to the

the digital gold point. If you are in a dangerous place with weak rule of law and weak property rights, here is a new and better way to have portable wealth. I think the next question to ask is, would you want to be long crypto in the events of world war? Three! What's interesting about that. is that world will three would likely have a significant cyber dimension to it, and I I want to be a hundred percent in crypto if they crashed internet which we'd them china and russia- might be able to do that. The fascinating question whether you want to be holding fast A gold or digital gold in the The world war, three, the smart,

person who study. History definitely wants, but a both ends. So, let's imagine world will three has a very, very severe cyber component to it with high levels of disruption. Yeah, you be glad of the old, the old shiny stuff at that point, so. Diversification, still seems like the most important truth of financial history, and I what is crypto it's just this wonderful new source of diversification, but you'll be not to be a hundred per cent in bitcoin I mean I I I have some friends who were probably quite close. that was two hundred and ninety eight. I admire the I admire the bowls of steel, yet in whatever way that balls of steel takes two takes form. You mentioned smart contracts where you thought about

in the context of the history of money, about a theory, I'm smart contracts, but kind of more systematic ets at gale formalization of agreements between humans. I think it must be the case that a Of the complexity in a mortgage is redundant, That, when we are confronted with pages and pages and pages and pages of small prince, we are seeing some manifestation of of the late stage regulatory stays the transaction itself is quite simple and most of the verbiage asked covering by regulators. so I think the smart contract, although I'm sure, lawyers for email And tell me I'm wrong: can do

with the loss of the plane, vanilla and maybe not so plain transactions that we want to do. And eliminates yet more intermediaries. That's my my kind of working assumption and given the lot, of financial transactions, have the potential well at least to be to be simplified. Automated turned into smart contracts that that's probably where the future go who's, I can't see an obvious reason why my range of different financial needs- that's think about insurance, for example, will continue to be mess with instruments that in some ways are a hundred years old. So I think we're still. at an early stage of a financial revolution that will greatly streamline how we take care of all those financial

needs that we have more than just an insurance. We leap to mind in a most households are our penalized for being financially poorly educated and confronted with oligarchy, take financial services providers, so you can't leave College ready in debt cease thought in debt servitude then you gotta somehow leave raft. Buyer, oh! If you can cause every kind of telling you you should do that, so so you and suppose you are getting even more leverage and you're your long one asset class called real estate, which is super illiquid. I mean already I'm I'm crying inside the thought of disk.

Having so many households financial predicament in that way, and I'm not done with them yet because, oh by the way, this always insurance you have to take out a near the providers. There are willing to ensure you, and here the premiums are going to be paying which are kind of presented to you. That's your that's your car insurance. That's your home! Insured! and if you hear the earthquake insurance and pretty soon you just bleeding money in upon one of monthly payments to the mortgage lending, to the insurer to all the other people that light you money unless your balance sheet at socks. You hurt, there's this great big chunk of real estate What else? If you really got on there and the other side is a bunch of debt which is probably paying too high interest the typical hustle,

in the median kind of ranges, is at the mercy of of or oligopolistic financial services providers go down further in the social scale, and people are outside the financial system altogether and those poor folks have to rely on bank notes and informal lending with huge punitive rates we have to do better. This has to be this has to be improved upon, and I think, what's exciting about our time is that technology now exists. That didn't exist when I really send money to solve these problems. When I wrote this and the money which is in two thousand eight, you couldn't really solve the problem I just described, certainly you consult with something like micro finance that was obviously not viable. The interest rates were high. That transaction costs were crazy, but now we have solutions and the solutions are extremely exciting, so thin tec is this great force for good that?

brings people into the financial system and reduces transaction costs gripped as part of it, but it's just part of it. There's a much broader. Story offence at going on here, where you get suddenly you get for them services on your phone. Don't cost nearly as much as they they did when they had to be bricks and mortar building on main street that you kind of went humbly and beseeched to lend you money. I'm excited about that because it seems to me very socially transformative I'll. Give you one other example of what's great, the people who really get scalped in our financial system are senders and receivers of remittance, which are often amongst the poorest families in the world. The people who are like my Why suddenly in east Africa really caught a hand to mouth, and if you send money to east Africa or the philippines or central america, it's it's. The transaction costs are awful, I'm talking to you. Western union

We are going to solve that problem. Certain he's from now. The transaction costs would this be negligible and the money will go to the people who need it rather than to rent seeking financial institution. So I'm on the side of the revolution with this, because I think incumbent financially Putin's globally are doing a pretty terrible job and middle class and law, class families lose eyes. Am thankfully technology technology allows us to fix this, yes, a fintech, can remove a lot of inefficiencies in the system. I'm super excited myself maybe as a machine learning person in the data oracles, so converting a lot of our physical world into data and have small contracts. On top of that, so that no longer there's this fuzzy nervous about what is the conquered, nature. The agreements you can t your agreement to whether you can tie your agreement to the behaviour of some

certain kinds of financial systems can tie your behaviour. To. I don't know me all kind think you can connect to the body in terms of human sensory information like You can make an agreement that if you dont, lose five pause in the next month you're going to pay me a thousand dollars or something like that. I don't know it's a stupid example boats, not because I like you, can create a kind of services on top of. Could you can just create all kinds of interesting up? asians, a completely revolutionise how humans transact. I think, of course, we don't want to create a world of any style social creditors in which our behaviour become so transparent too.

Provided financial services, particularly insurers. That's when I try to go into the pub I'm I'm stopped from doing so. Everything I can drink. Your insurance does up a writer or by credit card would work in so in restaurants because they serve, you know, revise steak. I fear that world, because I see it being built in china and we must at all costs make sure that the western world has something distinctive to offer it cannot just be. Oh, it's the same as in china. Only the data go two to five tech companies rather than to set to shipping so think that the way we need to steer this world is in the way that our data on by default vaulted on our device. is an we choose

when to release the data rather than the default. Setting being that the data are available. That's important, I think, because it was one of the biggest mistakes of the evolution of the internet, that that, in a way the default was to let out our data be plundered. Thought undo the, but I think we can. We can at least a new regime that in future makes privacy default rather than open access to full in the book doom, the politics of catastrophe, your new s book you describe wars, pandemics and the terrible disasters in human history which stands out to you as the worst terms of how much It shocked the world and the human spirit. I am glad I was not around in the middle

thirteenth century when the bubonic plague swept across Eurasia. As far as we can see that was histories worst pandemic. Maybe there was a comparably bad one in the reign of the emperor justinian, but there's some I do think it wasn't this bad and the more we learn about the footing entry with the more we realise that it really was a cross eurasia and the mortality was thirty percent in some places. Fifty percent in some places higher the world towns that we're just emptied and when one reads about the black death it, An unimaginable nightmare of of death and madness in the death with fledgling orders wandering from the town see him ward off divine retribution by flogging themselves.

Turning on the local jewish communities, as if somehow their fault, that must have been a nightmarish time. If you ask me for an an also ran a runner up? It would be it would be world war, two in eastern europe, And in many ways it might have been worse because for medieval peasant sense of being on the wrong side of divine retribution must have been overpowering the mid twentieth century. You knew that This was man, maids murder. on a massive industrial scale if one lee if one reads: Grossman's life and fate just take one example: One enters a hell scape that six ringlets hard to imagine oneself in

So these are two of the great disasters if of human history, and if we did have a time machine if we really were able to transport people back in and give them a glimpse of these times, I think the post, traumatic stress would be enormous. If would come back from those those two even if it was a one day excursion with guaranteed survival in a state of utter shock. You often spoke a faction hypothetical history, this, which is a fascinating to do sometimes too controversial degree And again you walked that fire gracefully autonomy maybe about our world war two or in general all what key moments. the history of the twentieth century. Do you think if some

as happened at those moments, we could have avoided some of the big atrocities. Stalin's harder, more hitler's holocaust, MAO's, great chinese famine, the great turning point in in world history is, is august, the second nineteen fourteen when the british cabinet decides to intervene what would have been a european war. But comes a world war with intervention, it becomes a massively larger and more protracted conflict. so very early in my career. I became very preoccupied with the deliberations on that day and the supply rising decision that a liberal cabinet took two to go to war, which you might not battle on that morning, because that does seem the majority of cabinet members who would be disinclined

and only a minority, including winston churchill who wanted to go to war. So that's one turning point. I often wish I could get my time here working and go back and say, wait stop to think about what you're going to do and by the way, let me show you a video of europe nineteen eighteen. So that's what linger on that, one that one. A lot of people push back on in because it so difficult The idea is, if I could try to summarize in you're the first person that made me think about this very uncomfortable. What which is ideas in world war, one it will, A better world of Britain stayed out of the war. in germany. One right. Thinking now in retrospect the whole story of the twentieth century, thinking about Stalin,

rule thirty years thinking about hitler's rise to power and the atrocities of the holocaust, but So, like you said on the eastern front, the death of tens of millions of people throughout the war and also sir political prisoners and the suffering connected to communism connected to fascism all those kinds of things, while that's one one heck of an example of why you're just like fearless in this particular style of exploring counterfactual history so can you elaborate on that idea? be why this was such an important day in human history. This argument was central. in my book, the pity of war. I I also did an essay in virtual history about this, and it's always amused me- that from right, That time I began to be called a conservative historian because is actually a very leftwing argument. The people in nineteen fourteen who thought Britain should see-

at the war were the left, the labour party, who split to become the independent labour party. What would have happened well, first of all, britain was not ready for war. In nineteen fourteen that not been conscription, the army was tiny, so Britain had failed to deter germany. The germans took the decision that they could risk going through belgium using the schlieffen plan to fight their two front war. They they calculated that Britain's intervention would either not happen or not matter If Britain had been strategically committed to preventing germany winning a war in europe, they should have introduced conscription ten years before had a meaningful land army and that would have deterred the germans. So the liberal government provided the worst of both worlds, a commitment that was more or less secret to intervene that the public didn't know about

that much of the liberal party didn't know about, but without really the means to make that intervention effective. A tiny army with just a few divisions, so is perfect reasonable to argue, as a number of people did in august, the second monday fourteen that britain should not intervene Britain had not immediately intervened against the french revolutionary armies back in seventeen. Ninety is it had played an off. Full roll ultimately intervening, but not immediately intervening if Britain had stayed ours. I dont think that france would have collapsed immediately as it had in eighteen. Seventy, the french held up remarkably well to catastrophic casualties in the first six months of the first world war, but by nineteen. Sixteen, I don't see how france could have kept going. If Britain have not joined the war, the war would be over, perhaps at some point, nineteen. Sixteen, we

that germany's aims would have been significantly limited because they would have needed to keep written out if they succeeded in keeping Britain that they have had a keeper at night and the way the keeper. It was obviously not to make any annexation of belgium to limit german war aims, particularly to limit them to eastern europe and from Britain's point of view, what was not so said the russian empire is defeated along with france. What does that really chain? If the germans are sensible- and we can see what this might have looked like they focus on eastern europe, they take chunks of the russian perhaps perhaps the creators they did in the in the piece of off skirt independent, crazy, independent poland. In no way does that pose a threat to the british empire. Fact it's a good thing. Britain never had had a particularly good relationship with the russian empire. After all, the key point here

Is that the germany that emerges from victory in nineteen sixteen has occurred? the european union is the dominant power off an enlarged germany with Faye significant missile. I hope whatever you want to call it customs union type arrangement with neighbouring countries, looting. One suspects, Austria, hungary,. that is a very different world from the of nineteen. Seventeen, eighteen, that protraction of the war for further two years. its globalization, which britain's into she made inevitable as philip Zella

showed in his recent book on the failure to make peace in nineteen. Sixteen that woodrow Wilson tried and failed to intervene and broker peace in nineteen. Sixteen are not the only counterfactual list here, the extension of the war for a further two years with escalating slaughter. The death toll rose because the industrial capacity of the armies grew greater. that's what condemns us to the bolshevik revolution and it's what condemns is ultimately to nazism, because it's out of The experience of defeat and nineteen eighteen as hitler makes clear in my camp that he becomes radicalized and enters the political realm. Take out those additional years of war and a needless just a failed artist. It's the it's the end of the war that turns him into the demagoguery.

You asked one of the things that of all avoid the totalitarian states. As I've said, british non in Pension for me is the most plausible and it takes out all of that malignant history that follows from the bolshevik revolution. It's very hard for me to see our lenin gets anyway, if the war is over, that looks like the up unity for the the constitutional elements. The liberal elements and in russia There are other moments at which you can imagine history taking a different path if the provisional government in russia had be more ruthless. It was very lenient towards the bolsheviks, but if it had just rounded them up and shot the bolshevik leadership, that would certainly cut the bullshit

revolution off? One looks back on the conduct of the the russian liberals with the kind of despair at their their failure to see the scale of the threat that they face and the ruthlessness that the bolshevik leadership would have since there is a cancer factual in germany, which is interesting. I think the weimar republic destroyed itself into disastrous economic calamities, the inflation and then the deflation. It's dead for me to imagine hitler getting to be rice, chancellor, without those huge economic disasters. So another part of my early work explored alternative policy options that the german republic, the weimar republic, might have pursued, There are other contingencies that that spring to mind, nineteen, thirty, six or thirty eight. I think we'll plausibly thirty, eight britons

I have gone to war. The great mistake was munich:. that was in an extremely vulnerable position in nineteen thirty, eight, because women he didn't have russia's Away where's, he wouldn't nineteen thirty nine chamber. Mistake was to fold instead of ah of going for going for wars, so rightly saw, and and that there was a magical opportunity there that would have played into the hands of the german military opposition and conservatives to to snuff hitler out over czechoslovakia. I could go on. The point is that that history is not some inexorable narrative which can only end one way. It's a garden of the king parts and it many many junk in the road that were choices that could have averted the calamities of them are twentieth century. I have to ask about this moment

before he said I could go on this moment of chamberlain and hitler snuff hitler out in terms jack czechoslovakia and out it will return to the book doom. On this point, what does it take to be a great leader in the room with hitler or in the same time and space hitler to snuff him out to me the right decisions. What what is So it sounds, like you put quite a bit of a the blame on the man chamberlain and give credit to somebody like a churchill. So was the difference. Was that line you also written a book by Henry Kissinger was an interesting sort of person has been thrown out through many difficult decisions in the games of power what does it take to be great leader at that moment? That particular moment sorry to keep talking is fast aid to me because it feels

like its men on man, conversations that define history will hit those bluffing He really wasn't ready for nineteen thirty. Eight. The german economy was clearly not ready for nineteen, thirty, eight and a table made a fundamental miscalculation alone with his advisers, because it wasn't all chamberlain. He was in many ways articulating the establishment view and I tried to show it to become more of the world how that establishment worked it extended through the bbc into the aristocracy,

oxford. There was an establishment view chamberlain, personified it. Churchill was seen as a warmonger. Ah, he was at his lowest points of popularity in nineteen thirty eight. But what is what is it that chamberlain gets wrong because it's conceptual chamberlain is persuaded that britain has to play for time, because britain is not ready for war in nineteen thirty eight. He fails to see that the time that he gets that he buys at munich is also available to hitler. Everybody gets the time and hitler's able to do much, well with it, because it strikes the pact with with stolen that guarantees that germany can fight a worn one front in nineteen, thirty, nine modest chamberlain build small aircraft, so the great mistake of the strategy of appeasement was to play for time. I mean they knew or was coming, but they were playing for time, not realizing that hitler got the time to add after he partition czechoslovakia.

He was a much stronger position, not least because of all the resources that they were able to plunder, ah ah from czechoslovakia. So that was the conceptual mistake. Churchill played on a right role in pointing out this mistake. And predicting accurately that it would lead to war on worse terms. What does it take? It takes a distinct courage to be unpopular and churchill was deeply unpopular at that point. People would listen to him in the house of commons in silence on one occasion: ah, lady, asked shouted rubbish, so he went through appear to be hated on the other thing that made churchill up from it

leader was that he always applied history to the problem and that's why he gets it right. He he sees the historical problem, much more clearly than the chamberlain. So I think if you go back to nineteen thirty, eight there's no realistic counterfactual in which churchill's in government nineteen, thirty it you have to france collapse for trouble to come into government, but you can certainly imagine, tori elites, that's thinking more clearly about the likely dynamics. They haven't seen this. I guess problem of conjecture, to take a phrase from Kissinger which is that, whatever their doing in postponing the war has the petition to create a worse starting point for the war it been risky. Nineteen thirty April was a way better situation than they ended up with mounting thirty nine a year later, the

but Kissinger and I've learned a lot from reading kissinger and talking to kissinger since I am box and writing his biography a great many years ago, I think One of the most important things I've learned ah, is that you can apply history to contemporary problems. It may be the most important tool that we have and that kind of decision making you have to do it quite. ruthlessly and rigorously and in the moment of crisis you have to take risk. So Kissinger often says in his early work the temptation of the bureaucratic to wait for more data, but all merely the decision making that we do

drawn certainty, call won't be based on data. The problem of conjecture is that you could take an action now and incur some cost and avert disaster, but you'll get no thanks for cause. Nobody grateful for an averted disaster and nobody goes around saying. Wasn't it wonderful? I would did not another nine eleven and you can do nothing, incur no up front costs and hope for the best. And you might get lucky. The disaster might not happen. That's in a democratic system, the much easier path to take, and I think The essence of leadership is to be ready to take that up front cost of the disaster and accept that you won't get gratitude. If I may make a comment on the side about Henry Kissinger, so he

think it? Ninety eight years old currently has still gotta his brilliant. It's very, very If I can only hope that my brain has the same durability that his his does, because it's a formidable intellect- and it's still in in as shop form as it, it was Two years ago, the mentioned Eric Schmidt and his book they reached to me. Did you want to do this by gas and m m no Eric Schmidt has spoken and before I come him obviously, so they said we could do a pike s. Forty minutes with Eric forty minutes with Eric unhurried together and forty as with henry so there's a three, Different conversations- and I had to like to do some soul searching the said, fine, forty minutes, there will probably talk me times again. Fine, let's talk about this ay book book

for forty minutes. By said, what I wrote to them is that I would hate myself if I only have forty minutes to talk to as I had the whole. My ground went back and forth any and decided to part ways over this, and I sometimes think about this cut. difficult decision in the park asking space, oh When do you walk away, because on there's a particular world leader that I have mentioned in the past the conversation is very likely to happen and, as. As it happens, those conversations can often be Fortunately, this personally has thirty minutes now. I know we agreed for three hours, but unfortunately- and you have to decide to I stand my ground on this on this point, as possessed the thing that journalists have think about right, gum.

Do I hold onto my integrity in whatever form it takes and joy I stand my ground even if I lose a fascinating opportunity anyway, someday. I thought a thought about and do something I think about and with Henry kissinger, I mean, he's had a million amazing conversations in your biographies was not like something is loss, but but it was still nevertheless to me, some soul searching that do do as as a kind of practice for two words. he's a higher states conversation I'll just mention- is putin why, have a conversation with him. Unlike any conversations ever had partially because I'm a russian speaker. partially because I'm messed up in the head and certain kind of ways that make for an interesting dynamic because we're both judo people were both are. certain kinds of human beings, it can have a much deeper apolitical conversation. I have to ask the stay on the topic of leadership.

You in your book doom have talked about wars, pandemics, throughout human history and in some sense saying that all of these disasters- and made so humans have a role in terms of the magnitude of the fact that they haven't human civilization without taking cheap political shots. Can we talk about covered nineteen. how will the history remember the covenant nineteen pandemic or were the successes with what were the failures of leadership of of man of humans? Do was a book that I was planning to right before the pandemic struck as a history of of the future, based in large measure in size,

action it had occurred to me in twenty nineteen that I spent two long, not reading science fiction, and so I decided I would liven up my my intake by getting off history for a bit and reading science fiction, We created telling you about the perennial problems of power. Putin is all interesting on history has become something The historian recently with the his s, isn't lectures, but what histories I'm telling you is what will the effects of this discontinuity of technology be so I don't need some science fiction to think more about this cause. I'm I'm tending to miss the importance of technological discontinuity. If you read a lot of science fiction, you read a lot of of plague books cosette. Science fiction. Writers are really quite fond of the plague scenario. So the world ends in many ways and science fiction, but one of the most popular as the lethal pandemics a when when the first

they came to me. I think it was on january, the third from my medical friend, justin stepping funny pneumonia and who had my ten. I began to tingle because it was just like. one of those science fiction books that begins and just that way in a pandemic. As Larry brilliantly epidemiologist said many years ago, the key is early detection and early action. That's how you deal with a novel path. And almost no western countries that we know is doable book. The taiwanese in the south koreans did it and they did it very well. But really no western country got this right, somewhere unlucky, because super spreader events happened earlier than in. The countries. Italy, was hit very hard, very early for other countries. real. Disaster came quite late. Russia, which is only relatively recently, had a really bad experience.

The lesson for me is quite different from the one that most journalists thought they were learning. Last year, most journalist last year, thought trumpeter the president, he seeing a lot of crazy things. It's his fault that we have high access mortality in the united states. The same argument was being made by journalists in britain, boris Johnson, dot, dot, dot. Brazil careful scenario, dot, dot, dot, even india neuron promoting the same argument- and I think this argument is wrong in a few ways. It's true, the the populist leaders said many crazy things and, broadly speaking, gave poor guidance to their their populations, but I don't think it's true to say that with different leaders, these countries would have done significantly better Joe Biden, magic, leaping president,

a year early, I dont think the. U s would have done much better because the things that caused excess mortality last year weren't presidential decisions- they were auto failure. Cdc to provide testing but definitely wasn't troms vault scott got leaps boot makes it very clear has just been published recently. We also they fail to use technology for contact tracing which the koreans did very well we didn't really quarantine anybody seriously. There was no enforcement of quarantine and we, exposed the elderly too, the virus as quickly as possible and elderly care homes, and

Things have very little to do with presidential incompetence. So I think leadership is a somewhat module importance in a crisis like this, because what you really need is your public health bureaucracy to get right and very few western public health bureaucracies got it right. Could the present have given better leadership? Yes, his correct strategy, however, was to learn from

Barack Obama's playbook with the opioid epidemic, the opioid epidemic, killed as many people on obama's watch, as Cova did on trump's watch and it was worse in a sense because it only happened in the: u s and each year it killed more people than the year before over eight years. Nobody to my knowledge ever seriously blamed obama for the opium epidemic. Troms mistake was to put himself fronts and centre of the response to claim that he had some unique insight into the pandemic and to say with every passing, we more more foolish things until even us, nick and portion of people who voted for an twenty sixteen realised that he'd blown it, which was why he was the election. The correct strategy was actually to make MIKE pence dependent pixar and get the hell out the way, that's what my advice to trump would have been. In fact it was in february of last year, so the mistake was to to try to lead.

But actually leadership and pandemics. Almost a contradiction in terms what you really need. It is your public health bureaucracy not to fuck it up, as he really really fucked it up, and that was then all blamed on trump s in a given found his right to peace in the atlantic. That says well being the presence like flying, lie: aircraft its pilot error. Last I read that peace now thought. Does he greedy after all the years he spent writing, think that being present is like flying alight aircraft? I mean it's really nothing like firelight aircraft being present. Is you sit on top If a vast bureaucracy with how many different agencies sixty seventy we've all lost count and you're surrounded by advisers, at least a quarter of whom are saying this is a disaster. We have to close the borders and if the others are saying, no, no, we have to keep the economy going, that's what you're running on in november so being present in a pan, I make is a very unenviable position, because you actually com. You can't read it

herman, whether you public health bureaucracy will get it right or not. Do you don't think to push back on that it just like being churchill in a war, is difficult, so leaving trump. by the side, but I would love to see from a press, as somebody who makes great speeches. And arouses the public to push to bureaucracy, the public health bureaucracy to get their shit together to fire certain kinds of people to do I'm sorry, but I'm a big fan of powerful speeches, especially in the modern age with the internet. It can really move people. Instead, the lack of speeches salt in certain kinds of forces amplifying division.

over whether wet wear masks or not? Or do all of this? It's like it's. It's almost like the public picked some random topic over which to divide themselves and there was like a a complete indecision which is really what it was fear and of the of uncertainty, materializing itself in some kind of division, and then you almost like busy yourself with the red verses, boo politics, as opposed to some. I don't know of your type character, just stands and say: fuck off is bullshit that were hearing we're going to manufacture five billion tests. This would America is great at we're going to build the greatest testing infrastructure ever built or something or even with the vaccine development, but that was what I was about to enter J s in a pandemic. The most important thing is the pack. If you get that right, then you should be forgiven for much else, and that was the one thing the trump administration got right, because they were

around the bureaucracy with operation warp, speed and achieved it. The reedy major success. So I think the paradox of the the twenty twenty story in the united states is that the one thing that mattered most the trump administration right, and it got so much else wrong. That was sort of marginal that we were left with the impression the trumpet been to blame for the whole disaster, which wasn't really quite right. sure it would have been great if we did operation warp speed for testing, but ultimate Vaccines are more important than tests, and this brings me to the question that that you raised their polarization why that happened,

now in a book called the square in the tar. I argued that it would be very costly for the united states to allow the public sphere to continue to be dominated by a handful of big tech companies that this ultimately would have more adverse effects than simply contested elections, and I think we saw over the past eighteen months. I just how bad this could be, because the odd thing about this country is that we came up with vaccines with ninety plus percent ethical about twenty percent of people, refused to get them and still do refuse for reasons that seem best explained in terms of the anti vaccinate work which has been embedded on the internet for a long time predating the pandemic, rented it

astor wrote about this pre twenty twenty and this. This anti vax network has turned out to kill. Maybe two hundred thousand americans who could have been vaccinated but were persuaded through magical thinking that the vaccine was riskier, The virus, whereas you don't need to be an epidemiologist. You don't need to be a medical scientist to know that the virus is about two orders of magnitude riskier than the vaccine. So again, leadership could definitely have been better But the political opposition of everything was not trumps doing alone. It happened because our public sphere has been dominated by a handful of platforms whose business model inherently promotes. Polarization inherently promotes fake news and extreme views, because those things that get the eyeballs on the screens and sell the ads. I mean this is now commonplace, but when one thinks about the call

of allowing this kind of thing to happen, it's not very high human cost and we were foolish to leave on corrected these structural problems in the public sphere that were already very clearly visible in twenty. Sixteen He described it like. You mentioned the thirties networks that are almost like lying dormant, awaiting Their time in the sun- and they stepped forward in this case and that those network affects gis, disservice catalyst for whatever the bad part of nature. I do hope that those kinds of networks that emphasise that better angels of our nature to two costume pinker, it's just clearly and we know this from all the revelations of the facebook whistleblower. There is clearly a very clear tension between the business model of a company like facebook and the public good,

They know that I just talked to the father for instagram at a yes, that's the case, but it's not from a technology perspective like absolutely true of any kind of social network. I think it's possible to build exciting. It's not just possible. I think, is pre easy if you said that as the goal to build social networks that don't these negative effects bright. But if the business model is we sell ads and the way you adds to maximize user engagement. Then the algorithm is biased in favour of fake news and extremely much. That is so. the a lot people blame the ads, though the promise is the engagement and engagement is just the easiest. The dumbest way to solve, as I think, there's much different metrics that could be used, make a lot more money than the engagement in the long term is has more to do with planning for the long term. So

optimizing the selling of adds to make people happy with themselves. In the long term, as opposed to some kind of addicted, like document feeling So that's to me that has to do with metrics measuring things correctly and sort of also creating a culture with his what's valued. have difficult conversations about what we're doing with society all those kinds of things. I think once you have those conversations takes us back to the universe. You often cut a what, You have those difficult human conversations you can design the technology that will actually make for help. People grow become the best version of themselves, help them be happy in the long term. What gives you hope about the future

sure, as somebody who studied some of the darker moments of human history, what gives you hope a couple of things? First of all united states has a very unique operating system, which was very well designed by the founders, should form a lot about history and an realized. It would take care a novel design to prevent the republic going the way of all republics republics tend to end up as tyrannies for real that will well established. The time of the renaissance, and it gives me hope that this design has worked very well and with student enormous stress test stress test in the last:

In the last year I became an american twenty eighteen. I think one of the most important features of this operating system is that it is the magnet for talent here. We sets ah part of the immigration story, in a in a in a darkened room with funny accents at tulsa got an a russian walkout in a russian walk into a recording, studio and and talk about america. It's it's very much like a joke and he launches of african and so on, and he as a german and were were extraordinary fortunate that the natives, let us, come and play ah and and play in a way that we could not in our countries of birth.

As long as the united states continues to exploit that super power that it is the talent magnus, then it shoot out, innovate that totalitarian competition. Every time said. That's that's one reason for being an optimist, another reason at its core, Storing reason, as you would expect from me, Another reason that I am optimistic is that my kids, me a great deal of hope. They range in age from twenty seven down to four, but each of them in their different way- seems to be finding a way through this crazy time of ours without losing contact with them.

That's culture and civilization that I hold dear I dont, want to live in the metaphors, as mark Zuckerberg imagines. To me, that's a kind of ghastly hell. I think since civilization is the best civilization, and I think that all all the truths about the human condition can be found in western literature. ought and music and, I think, I said that that the civilization that produce the scientific revolution has produced the great problem, solving tool that eluded the civilizations, that never reedy cracked science- and what gives me hope is that, despite all the temptation in distractions that their generation had to contend with My children and their different ways have found this path

found their way to literature unto to art and music and and they all civilised, and I I don't. I don't claim much of the credit for that. I've done my best, but I think its deeply encouraging that then that they found their way the things that I think are indispensable for a happy life, a life. Nobody, I think, can be truly fulfilled if they cut off from the great body of western literature, for example, A lot about you lawns argument that we might be in a simulation There is a simulation, it's cold literature and we just have to decide whether or not to enter it. I'm currently in the midst of the later stages of of priests, great ally, shifted tom penalty

priests, observation of. Human relationships is perhaps more meticulous than that of any the writer and it's impossible not to find yourself identifying with a marcel and his obsessive jealous relationships, particularly with Alberto, it's the simulation and you you decide, I think as a sentient being how far too, in your own life reenact these more profound experiences the separating down one of my oldest the tree simulations was too reenact jack relax trip on the road when I was seventeen culminate, in getting very wasted in the hanging gardens of such a milk and not to be not to be missed and it hit me just just. Does I was reading Proust that that's really how to live a rich life that that one lives life, but one lives it juxtapose.

in one's own experience against the more refined experiences of the great the great writers? So it gives me hope that my children do that a bit do you include the the russian authors very much in the canon? Yes, I don't read russian, but I was entirely obsessed with russian literature. As a schoolboy, I read my way through dostoevsky tolstoy to guinea. If I ah Chekhov, I think, come of all of those writers,

tolstoy had the biggest impact because at the end of war and peace, there's this great essay on historical determinism, which I think was the reason I became a historian, but I'm I'm really temperamentally at a kind of took any person. Ah, oddly enough, I I think if you, if you haven't, read those novelists I mean you can't really be a complete human being. If you haven't, if you haven't, read the brothers karamazov really you not grown up an, and so I think I think in many ways those all the greatest, the greatest novels raskolnikov, remember occult raskolnikov nightmare at the end of crime and punishment in which he imagined Hence, in his dream, a world in which a terrible virus spreads remember this, and this virus has the effect of making every individual thing

that what he believes is right and in this a self righteousness. People fallen, one another and commit appalling violence, that's raskolnikov nightmare and it's a prophecy. It's a terrible prophecies of russia's future yet in couple do. That is probably the us, like the french, the the existentialist all that that that the full stop german germans herman has just that range of human thought as express allergic fastened. I really I love. You idea that the signal shouldn't, like one waited to live. Life is the kind of for these other worlds and borrowed from them. Yes, wisdom that you then just

map onto your life's. You, you almost stick together your life for these kind of pieces from literature. The highly educated person is constantly struck by illusion if is an illusion to something that one has read, and that is the simulation. That's what. The real massive us, it's the imaginary world, that we answer when we read empathize then recognise in our daily lives. Some scrap of the shared experience that this year gives us you. I think I ve aspired to be the idiot from prince mission from this. The ascii, an inn aspiring to be that I have become the idea that I feel a recent part. What

in the human condition. Does love have to do? What role does it play in the human condition? Friendship, love, love is the truck. Long kind is art. This was the great roxy music line That brine, very right and love is the most powerful and and dangerous of all the drugs. The young. Driving force overrides rides our reason, and of course it is the it is, the primal it's the primal urge so what a civilised society has a duty to prevent that drug that prime force from

creating mayhem there have to be rules like monogamy and rituals like like me, I read that the rain love in and make the the addicts at least more or less under control, and I I think, that's. That's part of why I'm I'm a remand sake rather than being steve, pinker, enlightenment, rationalist. Because the romantics realised that the love was the drug. It's nice. The difference in sensibility between handle involved- and I I had a vague near in- I- was graduate. I still remember thinking that in in in his old lee bestowed, the vaudeville had got the closest to sex that anybody

had ever goats in in music, will press to love. I'm I'm. ok, that I love my wife and the We were by the time we met. Smart enough to understand the that. Love is a drug that you have to kind of take in in in in certain careful ways and that it works best in the context of a of a stable family? That's that's the key thing that one has to sort of take the drug and then submit to the that the conventions of of of marriage and family life- I I think in that respect, I am at a common team

mounting contain romantic- and so I like to think- and this inquiry to which your romanticism is tamed, can be then channeled into productive work. That's why you're historic writer is there s that love is channeled through the writing to if you're going to be adapted to anything, be addicted to work I'll, be we're all addictive, but near the thing at work. All ism is that it is the most productive addiction nearer than rather than than than than drugs or booze So I am I'm yes, I'm always trying to channel my anxieties in into work. I learnt that to relatively early age? It's a sort of massively productive way of coping with the inner demons. And again we should teach kids that, because that's come back to our earlier conversation about universe, is part of what happens at university

the adolescence have to overcome all the inner demons, and these include deep insecurity about once appearance about once intellects and then madly raging hormones that cause you to bay. Like a complete fool with the people to whom your sexually attracts and all of this is going on in the university, how can it be a safe space it's a completely dangerous, sat by definition, soap, so yeah. I love teaching young people how to manage these storms. Ah, you know that's part of the job and, and we've we're really not allowed to do that anymore, because we can't talk about these things for fear The title. Nine offices kicking down the door and tracking is often chickens and, like you, the hard work and some tea com, work, ethic and civilization. Is this is a pretty is a pretty effective way to achieve. I think a kind of happiness in a way

this form of anxiety, so at least exhaustion set out, but what there is. There is a huge exertion to others, while running this manual work that some some part of us is built for that bright. When we are products of the revolution, Our adaptation to a technological world is a very imperfect one, so, the kind of masochistic urged to try to run, I I'd like outdoor exercise, I don't really like Jim's so on, oh for long, punishing, runs in in woodland, pica pills I like swimming in lakes and in the sea because they're just has to be that physical activity in order

do the good mental work, and so it's all about trying to do the best work. That's my sense, the wee wee. I have some random allocation of talent. You can't figure out what it is that you're relatively gouda, and you try to do that. Well, I think my father encouraged me to think that way and you don't mind about being average at the other stuff. The kind of sick thing is to try to be brilliant everything I hate. Those people should really not worry too much if you're, just an average double bass player, which more current average scale, which I definitely am doing. Those things okays is part of leading a rich in fulfilling life. Ah, I was not a good actor, but I got a lot of acting as an undergraduate turned out after three years of experimentation. Oxford that I was, broadly speaking, better writing history s.

then my peers, and that was my edge. That was my comparative advantage, and so I ve just try to make a living from from that slight edge as beautiful way to describe alike, Is there a meaning to this thing, their meaning to life? What is the meaning of life. I was brought up by a physicist and a physician They were more or less committed atheists who had left the church of scotland as a just against sectarianism in Glasgow, and my sister and I were told from an early age. Life was a cosmic accidents, and that was it. There was no great meaning to it and I I can't really get past them. isn't there beauty to being an accident at a cosmic scale? Yes, I wasn't taught it to feel negative about that and if anything, it was

frivolous a frivolous insight that the whole thing was a kind of joke and- and I think that atheists. Him isn't really a basis for ordering a society. But it's it's been a right for me. I don't have, kind of sensitive of a missing religious faith. For me, however, desk clearly some embedded christian ethics in the way my parents, gives lived, and so we were kind of atheist calvinists who had kind of deposed, but carried on behaving as if we were members of the elect and in a moral universe? So that's kind of and the state of mind that I thought I was left in and I I think that we are ready around long enough.

To claim that our individual lives have meaning, but wool Edmund burke said, is true the real social contract is between the generations between the dead, the living on the unborn and the meat of life is, for me at least to live in a way that honours the dead seeks to learn from their accumulated? Listen because they do still number ass, their number, the the living by quite a significant origin and then to be mindful of on born and all our response bittacy to them. Writing books is a way of communicating with the unborn. It may or may not. Succeed, probably won't succeed if my books and never assigned by work proof. So in the future. So what we have to do is more than just write, books and record podcast they'd there have to be institutions, fifty seven now I realize

recently, that succession planning had to be the main focus of the next twenty years, because there are things that I really care. Then I want future generations to have access to, and so the meaning of life I do regard as being in today, rational transfer of wisdom. Ultimately, the species will go extinct, some points even if we do, colonized mars, one senses that physics will catch up with this particular organism, but it's in the pretty far distant future, and so the meaning life is to make sure that, for as long as there are human beings, they are able to live. The kind of fulfilled lives ethically fulfilled intellectually fulfilled. Emotionally fulfilled lives that civilization has made possible. It would be easy for us to reverse.

To the uncivilized world. Does a fantastic book that that I'm going to Miss. Remember me losses the captive so the captive mind, rather, which has a fantastic passage it. He was a polish. Intellectual who says, americans can never imagine what it's like civilization- to be completely destroyed as it was in poland at the end of by the end of world war ii To have no rule of law to have no security, if even person never mind property rights hans. Imagine what that's like and what it will lead you to do. So what in teaching. History is to remove the lucky generations, Z, members of california- that's the civilizations, a thin film can be destroyed remarkably easily

and to preserve civilization, is a tremendous responsibility that we have a huge responsibility. We must not destroy ourselves whether it's in the name of of workers all the pursuit of the matter: preserving civilization and making it available not just to our kids, but people will never know generations ahead. That's the meaning- and do so by studying the lessons of history right, not only studying them but then acting on them. For me, the biggest problem is How do we apply history more effectively? It seems as if our institutions including government, a very very bad at applying history, lessons of history le poorly, if at all, Analogies drawn crudely often the wrong inferences drawn one of the biggest

she'll. Challenges, for me is how to make history more useful, and this was the kind of thing that professes used to hate but really practically useful, so that policy makers and citizens can think about decisions that they face with a more historically informed body of knowledge, whether it's a pandemic, the challenge of climate change, what to do, but taiwan, I can't think of a better set, of of things to know before you decisions about those things than than do the things that history has to offer. While love the discipline of applied history busy gone to his jane saying, what are the key principles here: they're apple the was to the problems of today right and how can we saw that great philosopher of history, Rg Collingwood said in his autobiography, which was published in nineteen thirty? Nine, that the purpose of history was to reconstitute path.

The thought from whatever surviving remnants there were and then to juxtapose it with our own predicament, and that's that juxtaposition of past experience with present experience that is so important. We don't do that well, and indeed we we flipped it so that academic historians know think their mission is to travel back to the past with the value system of twenty twenty one and castigate the dead for their racism and sexism and transphobia fought not an that's exactly wrong. Our mission is to go back and try to understand what it was like to live in the eighteenth century, not to go back and condescended to the people of the past. And once we ve had a better understanding what we ve seen into their lives, read their words. Try to reconstitute their experience come back and understand our own time, better, that's what we should really be doing, but academic histories gone completely a warrant, and it does almost the exact opposite of what I think

should do and by studying. History, walk beautifully gracefully through this simulation, as it is rob by mapping the lessons of history into the world of today we have sure reality already in our heads. We do not need oculists and the metaphor. This was an incredible hopeful. Conversation and in many ways that did not expect, I thought our conversation would be much more about history than about the future and it turned out to be the opposite. Thank you So much for talk. It is a huge to finally meet you to talk to you. Thank you for your valuable time, like election. Good luck with Putin. Thank for listening to this conversation with new ferguson, the sport. Despite gas, please check out our sponsors in the district and now let me leave you some words from Neil ferguson himself, no civilization. No matter how mighty you may appear to itself his indestructible. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time

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