The guest
Niall Ferguson: Scottish-American historian and author of 16 books on money, power, war, and empire; formerly at Harvard, now at Stanford's Hoover Institution and a co-founder of the University of Austin.
What this episode covers
Ferguson and Lex Fridman spend the first hour on the University of Austin, a new institution Ferguson is launching to defend academic freedom against what he calls a chilling culture of self-censorship and 'totalitarianism light' on campus. They then turn to financial history, tracing money from Mesopotamian clay tablets to bills of exchange to bitcoin, which Ferguson frames as 'an option on digital gold' and part of a fintech revolution. The conversation moves to counterfactual history, where Ferguson argues British intervention in WWI in 1914 was a catastrophic turning point that led to communism and Nazism. They close with COVID leadership failures, social-media-driven polarization, the role of literature as a 'simulation,' and Ferguson's view that the meaning of life is the intergenerational transfer of wisdom.
Recommended on this episode
BookRecommended
The Brothers Karamazov
Fyodor Dostoevsky
“you can't really be a complete human being if you haven't read the brothers karamazov”
“you can't really be a complete human being if you haven't if you haven't read the brothers karamazov you will not really you're not grown up”— guest
BookRecommendedISBN verified
The Captive Mind
Czeslaw Milosz
“there's a fantastic book ... which has a fantastic passage”
“there's a fantastic book that i'm going to misremember milos is the captive soul the captive mind rather which has a fantastic passage”— guest
The guest's own work
BookBy the guestISBN verified
The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World
Niall Ferguson
“in the book ascent of money you give a history of the world through the lens of money if the financial system is uh evolutionary nature”— Lex Fridman
BookBy the guest
Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe
Niall Ferguson
“in the book doom the politics of catastrophe your newest book you describe wars pandemics and the terrible disasters in human history”— Lex Fridman
BookBy the guest
The Pity of War
Niall Ferguson
“This argument was central to my book the pity of war i i also did an essay in virtual history about this”— guest
BookBy the guestISBN verified
Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals
Niall Ferguson
“i i also did an essay in virtual history about this and it's always amused me that from around that time i began to be called a conservative historian”— guest
BookBy the guestISBN verified
The War of the World
Niall Ferguson
“he was in many ways articulating the establishment view uh and i tried to show in a book called war of the world how that establishment worked”— guest
BookBy the guestISBN verified
The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power
Niall Ferguson
“in a book called the square in the tower i argued that it would be very costly for the united states to allow the public sphere to continue to be dominated by a handful of big tech companies”— guest
BookBy the guest
Kissinger (biography)
Niall Ferguson
“i've learnt a lot from reading kissinger and talking to kissinger since i embarked on writing his biography a great many years ago”— guest
Also referenced (named, not recommended)
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The Age of AI: And Our Human Future
Eric Schmidt and Henry Kissinger
“i've just taken delivery of my copy of the book that eric schmidt and henry kissinger have co-authored on artificial intelligence”— guest
BookReferenced
Life and Fate
Vasily Grossman
“if only if one reads grossman's life and fate just to take one example one enters a a hellscape that it's extremely hard to imagine oneself in”— guest
BookReferencedISBN verified
Mein Kampf
Adolf Hitler
“it's out of the experience of defeat in 1918 as hitler makes clear in mind camp that he becomes radicalized and enters the political realm”— guest
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The German Catastrophe
Friedrich Meinecke
“this is a really interesting point that friedrich meinecker makes in d deutsche catestor for the german catastrophe the german intellectuals became technocrats”— guest
BookReferenced
Philip Zelikow's book on the failure to make peace in 1916
Philip Zelikow
“as philip zeliko showed in his recent book on the failure to make peace in 1916 woodrow wilson tried and failed to intervene and broker a piece in 1916”— guest
BookReferenced
Scott Gottlieb's COVID book (Uncontrolled Spread)
Scott Gottlieb
“that definitely wasn't trump's fault scott gottlieb's book makes that very clear it's just been published recently”— guest
BookReferencedISBN verified
In Search of Lost Time (A la recherche du temps perdu)
Marcel Proust
“i'm currently in the midst of the later stages of of proust's great allah and observation of human relationships is perhaps more meticulous than that of any other writer”— guest
BookReferencedISBN verified
On the Road
Jack Kerouac
“one of my earliest literary simulations was to reenact jack kerouac tripping on the road when i was 17”— guest
BookReferenced
Crime and Punishment
Fyodor Dostoevsky
“raskolnikov's nightmare at the end of crime and punishment in which he imagines in his dream a world in which a terrible virus spreads”— guest
BookReferenced
The Idiot
Fyodor Dostoevsky
“i've uh aspired to be the idiot from prince mishkin from dostoevsky and in aspiring to be that i have become the idiot”— guest
BookReferenced
War and Peace
Leo Tolstoy
“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”— guest
MediaReferenced
The Chair
Netflix
“there are lots and lots of things that are very annoying about academic life ... they're they're made fun of in that recent netflix series the chair”— guest
BookReferencedISBN verified
Porterhouse Blue
Tom Sharpe
“tom sharpe's porterhouse blue did it it's it's an inherently comical subject professors at least used to be amusingly eccentric”— guest
MediaReferenced
Roblox
Roblox Corporation
“the next things that will happen i think will be that uh tokens in game spaces like roblox will become fungible”— guest
Big reveals from this episode
- Ferguson cites a survey finding 85% of self-described liberal students would report a professor for saying something offensive.
- He says many campus behaviors are reminiscent of Stalin's Soviet Union and Mao's China, calling it 'totalitarianism light.'
- Ferguson argues payments don't need to be money, reframing crypto as a payments system like medieval bills of exchange.
- He calls central bank digital currency 'a terrible idea' that copies the Chinese surveillance model.
- His central counterfactual: a better world might have resulted if Britain stayed out of WWI and Germany won, averting Stalin and Hitler.
- Ferguson argues leadership was marginal in COVID; failure of public health bureaucracies (CDC testing) drove excess deaths, not Trump.
- He says Trump's correct move would have been to make Mike Pence pandemic tsar and 'get the hell out the way.'
- Lex reveals he walked away from a planned Kissinger/Schmidt podcast over being offered only 40 minutes with Kissinger.
Worth remembering
- Money predates coins; debt relations between creditors and debtors were recorded on Mesopotamian clay tablets ~5,000 years ago.
- Bills of exchange in 14th-century Italy created the first peer-to-peer, network-verified payment system.
- Ferguson argues money is fundamentally about trust, and hyperinflation is a crisis of confidence in the means of payment.
- He predicts that if every millionaire held 1% of wealth in bitcoin, the price would be around $75,000.
- The German currency was destroyed not once but twice between 1918 and the late 1940s.
- The 14th-century Black Death killed 30-50% in some places and is history's worst pandemic.
- Ferguson notes the opioid epidemic killed as many on Obama's watch as COVID did on Trump's, yet Obama was never blamed.
- He estimates the anti-vax network may have killed roughly 200,000 vaccinatable Americans.
- Ferguson says the real 'simulation' is literature, and one lives richly by juxtaposing one's life against great writers.
- He defines the meaning of life via Burke's social contract between the dead, the living, and the unborn.
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