Niall Ferguson is a historian at Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is the author of 16 books on the history of money, war, power, and catastrophe. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
1:34 - University of Austin (UATX)
34:29 - Sam Harris
52:56 - Elon Musk
1:01:15 - Money
1:11:10 - Hyperinflation
1:16:35 - Bitcoin
1:33:17 - Ethereum and smart contracts
1:42:04 - Worst disasters in human history
2:04:02 - How history will remember the current pandemic
2:17:36 - Hope for the future
2:26:06 - Love
2:32:44 - Meaning of life

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The following is a conversation with Neil Ferguson, 1 of the great historians of our time, at times controversial and always brilliant, whether you agree with him or not.

He's an author of 16 books on topics covering the history of money, power, war, pandemics, and empire.

Previously at Harvard, currently at Stanford, and today, launching a new university here in Austin, Texas called the University of Austin, a new institution built from the ground up to encourage open inquiry and discourse by both thinkers and doers, from philosophers and historians to scientists and engineers, embracing debate, dissent, and self-examination, free to speak, to disagree, to think, to explore truly novel ideas.

The advisory board includes Steven Pinker, Jonathan Haidt, and many other amazing people with 1 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.

To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

And now, here's my conversation with Neil Ferguson.

You are 1 of the great historians of our time, respected, sometimes controversial.

You have flourished in some of the best universities in the world, from NYU to London School of Economics, to Harvard, and now to Hoover Institution at Stanford.

Before we talk about the history of money, war and power,

let us talk about a new university you're a part of launching here in Austin, Texas.

What is its mission, its goals, its plan?

I think it's pretty obvious to a lot of people in higher education that there's a problem.

And that problem manifests itself in a great many different ways.

But I would sum up the problem as being a drastic chilling of the atmosphere that constrains free speech, free exchange, even free thought.

And I had never anticipated that this would happen in my lifetime.

My academic career began in Oxford in the 1980s when anything went.

1 sensed that a university was a place where 1 could risk saying the unsayable and debate the undebatable.

So the fact that in a relatively short space of time, a variety of ideas, critical race theory or wokeism, whatever you want to call it, a variety of ideas have come along that seek to limit and quite drastically limit what we can talk about, strikes me as deeply unhealthy.

And I'm not sure, and I've thought about this for a long time, you can fix it with the existing institutions.

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.

I mean, that used to be the default setting of America.

I mean, I look back and I thought, why are there no new universities?

Or at least if there are, why do they have so little impact?

It seems like we have the billionaires, we have the need, let's do it.

So you still believe in institutions, in the university, in the ideal of the university?

There's a reason they've been around for nearly a millennium.

There is a unique thing that happens on a university campus when it's done right.

And that is the transfer of knowledge between generations.

That is a very sacred activity and it seems to withstand major changes in technology.

So this form that we call the university predates the printing press, survived the printing press, continued to function through the scientific revolution, the enlightenment, the industrial revolution, to this day.

And I think it's because, maybe because of evolutionary psychology, we need to be together in 1 relatively confined space when we're in our late teens and early 20s for the knowledge transfer between the generations to happen.

That's my feeling about this but in order for it to work well there need to be very few constraints.

There needs to be a sense that 1 can take intellectual risk.

Remember, people in their late teens and early 20s are adults, but they're inexperienced adults.

And if I look back on my own time as an undergraduate, saying stupid things was my MO.

My way to finding good ideas was through a minefield of bad ideas.

I feel so sorry for people like me today, people age 18, 19, 20 today who are intellectually very curious, ambitious, but inexperienced because the minefields today are absolutely lethal And 1 wrong foot and it's cancellation.

I said this to Peter Thiel the other day, imagine being us now.

I mean, we were obnoxious undergraduates.

There's nothing that Peter did at Stanford that Andrew Sullivan and I were not doing at Oxford, and perhaps we were even worse.

But it was so not career-ending to be an absolutely insufferable, obnoxious undergraduate then.

Today if people like us exist today, they must live in a state of constant anxiety that they're going to be outed for some heretical statement that they made 5 years ago on social media.

So part of what motivates me is the desire to give the me's of today a shot at free thinking and really, I'd call it 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, or at Stanford, where I'm now based, I sense a kind of suffocating atmosphere of self-censorship that means people are afraid to take even minimal risk in class.

I mean, just take, for example, a survey that was published earlier this year that revealed, this is of undergraduates in four-year programs in the US,

of self-described liberal students said they would report a professor to the university administration if he or she said something they considered offensive.

And something like 75% said they do it to a fellow undergraduate.

That's the kind of culture that's evolved in our universities.

So we need a new university in which none of that is true, in which you can speak your mind, say stupid things, get it completely wrong and live to tell the tale.

There's a lot more going on, I think, because when you start thinking about what's wrong with a modern university, many, many more things suggest themselves.

And I think there's an opportunity here to build something that's radically new in some ways and radically traditional in other ways.

For example, I have a strong preference for the tutorial system that you see at Oxford and Cambridge which is small group teaching and highly Socratic in its structure.

I think it'd be great to bring that to the United States where it doesn't really exist.

But at the same time, I think we should be doing some very 21st century things, making sure that while people are reading and studying classic works, they're also going to be immersed in the real world of technological innovation, a world that you know very well.

And I'd love to get a synthesis of the ancient and classical, which we're gradually letting fade away, with the novel and technological.

So we want to produce people who can simultaneously talk intelligently about Adam Smith, or for that matter, Shakespeare or Proust, and have a conversation with you about where AI 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 partly classical and partly 21st century, and we look around and we don't see it.

If you don't see an institution that you really think should exist, I think you have a more responsibility to create it.

something bigger than just liberal education, also including science, engineering, and technology.

I should also comment that, you know, I mostly stay out of politics and out of some of these aspects of liberal education that's kind of been the most controversial and difficult within the university, but there is a kind of ripple effect of fear within that space into science and engineering and technology that I think has a nature that's difficult to describe.

It doesn't have a controversial nature, it just has a nature of fear, where you're not, you know, you mentioned saying stupid stuff as a young 20 year old, you know, for example, deep learning, machine learning is really popular in the computer science now as an approach for creating artificial intelligence systems.

It is controversial in that space to say that anything against machine learning, saying sort of exploring ideas that saying this is going to lead to a dead end.

Now, that takes some guts to do as a young 20 year old within a classroom, to think like that, to raise that question in a machine learning course.

It sounds ridiculous, because it's like who's going to complain about this?

But the fear that starts in a course on history or some course that covers society, the fear ripples and affects those students that are asking big, out of the box questions about engineering, about computer science.

And there's a lot, you know, there's like linear algebra that's not going to change, but then there's like applied linear algebra, which is machine learning.

And that's when robots and real systems touch human beings.

And that's when you have to ask yourself these difficult questions about humanity, even in the engineering and science and technology courses.

And these are not separate worlds in 2 senses.

I've just taken delivery of my copy of the book that Eric Schmidt and Henry Kissinger have co-authored on artificial intelligence, the central question of which is what does this mean for us broadly?

Snow's sense of the chasm between science and arts.

Because on a university campus, everything is contagious from a novel coronavirus to the behaviors that are occurring in the English department.

Those behaviors, if denunciation becomes a norm, you know, undergraduate denounces professor, teaching assistant denounces undergraduate, those behaviors are contagious and will spread inexorably, first to social science and then to natural sciences.

And I think that's part of the reason why, when this started to happen, when we started to get the origins of disinvitation and cancel culture, it was not just a few conservative professors in the humanities who had to worry.

Everybody had to worry because eventually it was going to come even to the most apparently hard stem part of the campus.

This is something Nicholas Christakis should look at because he's very good at looking at the way in which social networks like the ones that exist in a university can spread everything.

But I think when we look back and ask why did wokeism spread so rapidly and rapidly out of humanities into other parts of universities And why did it spread across the country and beyond the United States to the other English-speaking universities?

The president of a university I won't name said to me that he receives every day at least 1 denunciation, 1 call for somebody or other to be fired for something that they said.

That's the crazy kind of totalitarianism light that now exists in our universities.

And of course, the people who want to downplay this say, oh, well, there only have been 100 and something in disinvitations or, oh, there really aren't that many cases but the point is that the famous events, the events that get the attention are responsible for a general chilling that, as you say, spreads to every part of the university and creates a very familiar culture in which people are afraid to say what they think.

Self-censorship, look at the Heterodox Academy data on this, grows and grows.

So now a majority of students will say, this is clear from the latest Hedredox Academy surveys, we are scared to say what we think in case we get denounced, in case we get cancelled.

But that's just not the correct atmosphere for a university in a free society.

To me, what's really creepy is how many of the behaviors I see on university campuses today are reminiscent of the way that people used to behave in the Soviet Union, or in the Soviet bloc, or in Mao's China.

The sort of totalitarianism light that I think we're contending with here, which manifests itself as denunciations, people informing on superiors, some people using it for career advantage, other people reduced to hapless, desperate apology to try to exonerate themselves.

People disappearing metaphorically if not literally.

All of this is so reminiscent of the totalitarian regimes that I studied earlier in my career, that it makes me feel sick.

And what makes me really feel sick is that the people doing this stuff, the people who write the letters of denunciation, are apparently unaware that they're behaving exactly like people in Stalin's Soviet Union.

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're doing that.

But people haven't been taught the realities of totalitarianism.

For all these reasons, I think you need to try at least to create a new institution where those pathologies will be structurally excluded.

So maybe a difficult question, maybe you'll push back on this, but you're widely seen politically as a conservative.

Hoover Institution is politically conservative.

What is the role of politics at the University of Austin?

Because some of the ideas, people listening to this, when they hear the ideas you're expressing, they may think there's a lean to these ideas.

There's a conservative lean to these ideas.

There will certainly be people who say that because the standard mode of trying to discredit any new initiative is to say, oh, this is a sinister conservative plot.

But 1 of our co-founders, Heather Hying, is definitely not a conservative.

She's as committed to the idea of academic freedom as I am, but I think on political issues, we probably agree on almost nothing.

But politics, Max Weber made this point a long time ago, that politics really should stop at the threshold of the classroom, of the lecture hall.

And in my career, I've always tried to make sure that when I'm teaching, it's not clear where I stand politically, though of course undergraduates insatiably curiously want to know, but it shouldn't be clear from what I say because indoctrination on a political basis is an abuse of the power of the professor, as Weber rightly said.

So I think 1 of the key principles of the University of Austin will be that Weberian principle that politics is not an appropriate subject for the lecture hall, for the classroom, and we should pursue truth and enshrine liberty of thought.

If that's a political issue, then I can't help you.

I mean, if you're against freedom of thought, then we don't really have much of a discussion to have.

And clearly, there are some people who politically seem quite hostile to it.

But my sense is that there are plenty of people on the left in academia.

I think of that interesting partnership between Cornel West and Robbie George, which has been institutionalized in the Academic Freedom Alliance.

After all, 50 years ago, it was the left that was in favor of free speech.

The right still has an anti-free speech element to it.

Look how quickly they're out to ban critical race theory.

Critical race theory won't be banned at the University of Texas.

Everything will be up for discussion, but the rules of engagement will be clear.

Chicago principles, those will be enforced.

And if you have to give a lecture on, well, let's just take a recent example, the Dorian Abbott case.

If you're giving a lecture on astrophysics, but it turns out that in some different venue, you express skepticism about affirmative action, well, it doesn't matter.

We want to know what your thoughts are on astrophysics because that's what you're supposed to be giving a lecture on.

I mean, at the Oxford of the 1980s, there were communists, and there were ultra-Tories.

At Cambridge, there were people who were so reactionary that they celebrated Franco's birthday, but they were also out-and-out communists down the road at King's College.

The understanding was that that kind of intellectual diversity was part and parcel of university life.

And frankly, for an undergraduate, it was great fun to cross the road and go from outright conservatism, ultra-Toriism to communism.

But the issue is when you're promoting or hiring or tenuring people, their politics is not relevant.

And when it started to become relevant, And I remember this coming up at the Harvard History Department late in my time there, I felt deeply, deeply uneasy that we were having conversations that amounted to, well, we can't hire X person despite their obvious academic qualifications because of some political issue.

That's not what should happen at a healthy university.

Will University of Austin be a physical in-person university or virtual university?

What are some, in that aspect, where the classroom is?

There may be an online dimension to it because there clearly are a lot of things that you can do via the internet.

But the core activity of teaching and learning I think requires real space.

And I've thought about this a long time, debated Sebastian Thrun about this many, many years ago when he was a complete believer in, let's call it the metaversity, to go with the metaverse.

I mean, the metaversity was going to happen, wasn't it?

But I never really believed in the metaversity.

I didn't do MOOCs because I just didn't think you'd A, be able to retain the attention, B, be able to cope with the scale, scaled grading that was involved.

I think there's a reason universities have been around in their form for about a millennium.

You kind of need to all be in the same place.

So I think answer to that question, definitely a campus in the Austin area, that's where we'll start.

And if we can allow some of our content to be available online, great, we'll certainly do that.

Another question is, what kind of courses and programming will it offer?

We think that we need to begin more like a startup than like a full service university from day 1.

So our vision is that we start with a summer school, which will offer provocatively the forbidden courses.

We want, I think, to begin by giving a platform to the professors who've been most subject to cancel culture and also to give an opportunity to students who want to hear them to come.

So we'll start with a summer school that will be somewhat in the tradition of those institutions in the interwar period that were havens for refugees.

So we're dealing here with the internal refugees of the woke era.

It'll be an opportunity to test out some content, see what students will come and spend time in Austin to hear.

So that's part A, that's the sort of, if you like, the launch product.

And then we go straight to a master's program.

I don't think you can go to undergraduate education right away because the established brands in undergraduate education are offering something it's impossible to compete with initially because they have the brand, Harvard, Yale, Stanford, And they offer also this peer network, which is part of the reason people want so badly to go to those places.

Not really the professors, it's the classmates.

So we don't want to compete there initially.

Where there is, I think, room for new entrants is in a master's program.

And the first 1 will be in entrepreneurship and leadership.

Because I think there is a huge hunger amongst people who want to get into, particularly the technology world, to learn about those things.

And they know they're not really going to learn about them at business schools.

The people who are not going to teach them leadership and entrepreneurship are professors.

So we want to create something that will be a little like the very successful Schwarzman program in China, which was come and spend a year in China and find out about China, we'll be doing the same, essentially saying come and spend a year and find out about technology.

And there'll be a mix of academic content.

We want people to understand some of the first principles of what they're studying.

There are first principles of entrepreneurship and leadership, but we also want them to spend time with people like 1 of our co-founders, Joe Lonsdale, who's been a hugely successful venture capitalist and learned directly from people like him.

I think there are other master's programs that we will look to roll out quite quickly.

I have a particular passion for a master's in applied history or politics and applied history.

I'm a historian driven crazy by the tendency of academic historians to drift away from what seem to me the important questions, and certainly to drift away from addressing policy-relevant questions.

So I would love to be involved in a master's in applied history.

And we'll build some programs like that before we get to the full liberal arts experience that we envisage for an undergraduate program.

And that undergraduate program is an exciting 1 because I think we can be innovative there too.

I would say 2 years would be spent doing some very classical and difficult classical things, bridging those old divides between arts and sciences.

But then there would also be in the second half, in the junior and senior years, something somewhat more of an apprenticeship where we'll have centers, including a center for technology, engineering, and mathematics, that will be designed to help people make that transition from the theoretical to the practical.

And I think like any early stage idea, we'll doubtless tweak it as we go along.

We'll find things that work and things that don't work.

But I have a very clear sense in my own mind of how this should look 5 years from now.

And I don't know about you, I mean, I'm unusual as an academic because I quite like starting new institutions and I've done a bit of it in my career.

You got to kind of know what it should look like after the first 4 or 5 years to get out of bed in the morning and put up with all the kind of hassles of doing it.

Not least the inevitable flack that we were bound to take from the educational establishment.

And I was graciously invited to be an advisor to this University of Austin.

to help in whatever way I can is several.

So 1, I would love to see Austin, the physical location, flourish intellectually and especially in the space of science and engineering.

Another reason is I am still a research scientist at MIT.

And I see this effort that you're launching as a beacon that leads the way to the other elite institutions in the world.

I think too many of my colleagues, and especially in robotics, don't see robotics as a humanities problem.

But to me, robotics and AI will define much of our world in the next century and not to consider all the deep psychological, sociological, human problems associated with that.

To have real open conversations, to say stupid things, to challenge the ideas of how companies are being run, for example.

It's very difficult to talk about the difficult questions about technology when you're employed by Facebook or Google and so on.

The university is the place to have those conversations.

That's right, and we're hugely excited that you want to be 1 of our advisors.

We need a broad and eclectic group of people, and I'm excited by the way that group has developed.

Some of my favorite intellectuals are there, Steve Pinker, for example.

But we're also making sure that we have people with experience in academic leadership.

And so it's a happy coalition of the willing looking to try to build something new, which as you say, will be complementary to the existing and established institutions.

I think of the academic world as a network.

I've moved from some major hubs in the network to others, but I've always felt that we do our best work not in a silo called Oxford, but in a silo that is really a hub connected to Stanford, connected to Harvard, connected to MIT.

1 of the reasons I moved to the United States was that I sensed that there was more intellectual action in my original field of expertise, financial history, and that was right.

I think I'd have stagnated if I'd stayed at Oxford, but at the same time, I haven't lost connection with Oxford.

I recently went and gave a lecture there in honor of Sir Roger Scruton, 1 of the great conservative philosophers.

And the burden of my lecture was the idea of the Anglosphere, which appealed a lot to Roger, will go horribly wrong if illiberal ideas that inhibit academic freedom spread all over the anglosphere and this network gets infected with these, I think, deeply damaging notions.

So yeah, I think we're creating a new node.

I hope it's a node that makes the network overall more resilient.

And right now there's an urgent need for it.

I mean, there are people whose academic careers have been terminated.

Peter Boghossian, who was harassed out of Portland State for the reason that he was 1 of those intrepid figures who carried out the grievance studies hoaxes, exposing the utter charlatanry going on in many supposedly academic journals by getting phony gender studies articles published.

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Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth | Lex Fridman Podcast #239