Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Niall Ferguson: DOOM! (#273)

Episode Date: November 20, 2022

Niall Ferguson’s most recent book is Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe. In this book he posits that disasters are inherently hard to predict. Pandemics, like earthquakes, wildfires, and financial crises. and wars, are not normally distributed; there is no cycle of history to help us anticipate the next catastrophe. But when disaster strikes, we ought to be better prepared than the Romans were when Vesuvius erupted, or medieval Italians when the Black Death struck.   Yet in 2020 the responses of many developed countries, including the United States, to a new virus from China were badly bungled. Why? While populist leaders certainly performed poorly in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, Professor Ferguson argues that more profound pathologies were at work. Drawing from multiple disciplines, including economics, cliodynamics, and network science, Doom offers not just a history but a general theory of disasters, showing why our ever more bureaucratic and complex systems are getting worse at handling them. Niall Ferguson, MA, D.Phil., is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a senior faculty fellow of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard, where he served for twelve years as the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History. He is the author of sixteen books.  In 2003, Ferguson wrote and presented a six-part history of the British Empire for Channel 4, the UK broadcaster. The accompanying book, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power, was a bestseller in both Britain and the United States. The sequel, Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire, was published in 2004 by Penguin, and prompted Time magazine to name him one of the 100 most influential people in the world. The international bestseller, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World, published in 2008 was adapted into a PBS series, winning the International Emmy award for Best Documentary, as well as the Handelszeitung Economics Book Prize. In 2011 he published Civilization: The West and the Rest, also a Channel 4/PBS documentary series. A year later came the three-part television series “China: Triumph and Turmoil.” The book based on his 2012 BBC Reith lectures, The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die, was a New York Times bestseller within a week of its publication. Ferguson has been a contributing editor for Bloomberg Television and a columnist for Newsweek. He began writing a twice-a-month column for Bloomberg Opinion in June 2020. www.niallferguson.com twitter.com/nfergus Connect with me: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 📸 Instagram: https://instagram.com/DrBrianKeating  🔔 Subscribe https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list; just click here http://briankeating.com/list ✍️ Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog.php 🎙️ Listen on audio-only platforms: https://briankeating.com/podcast Subscribe to the Jordan Harbinger Show for amazing content from Apple’s best podcast of 2018! Can you do me a favor? Please leave a rating and review of my Podcast:  🎧 On Apple devices, click here, https://apple.co/39UaHlB scroll down to the ratings and leave a 5 star rating and review The INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast. 🎙️On Spotify it’s here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2G3PRMUhxGQkyQzLiiCqlf?si=8656119458df4555 🎧 On Audible it’s here : https://www.audible.com/pd/Into-the-Impossible-With-Brian-Keating-Podcast/B08K56PXJX?action_code=ASSGB149080119000H&share_location=pdp&shareTest=TestShar Other ways to rate here: https://briankeating.com/podcast-  Support the podcast on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating  or become a Member on YouTube- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One reason I wanted to call it the politics of catastrophe is that there is a, I think, a false dichotomy between natural and man-made disasters that people have in their heads. And so they think of a pandemic as a natural disaster, but a war as a man-made disaster. And the book argues, taking its cue from Amartya Sen's work on famines, that that dichotomy is a false one and that disastrous events, while they may have natural points of origin, are only as disastrous as we make them. Welcome everyone to another exciting episode of the Into the Impossible podcast with your fearful host. I used to call myself that during this time of former time of pandemic podcasting, although today

we're talking about the pandemic, at least for part of the interview with Neil Ferguson, a distinguished scholar at the Hoover Institution, senior fellow, former professor, chair professor at Harvard University. And Neil and I got into a great deal of fun in this episode talking about existential risk, talking about pandemics, plagues, space shuttle disasters, titanic sinking, the human mind enumeracy, and even some controversial things,

like his involvement with a new university called the University of Austin, Texas, which he's one of the founding faculty members thereof. We talked about his book, primarily called Doom, although we also talked about his former project called The Ascent of Money, which was a phenomenal discussion of the role of financial instruments throughout human history as a financial economist and how he would update it in the Bitcoin error.

We actually got into Bitcoins and aliens. The only thing we didn't cover is the simulation hypothesis. That would be too on the nose. But we talked about other types of disasters, And I do think his blend of erudition of scholarship is a welcome compliment to the scientists that I normally speak to. He's not a scientist, although his relatives, his mother and his sister, I think, are both physicists. So he could be an honorary physicist. And it was really quite a delight to talk to him.

I had so much fun. I didn't think talking about the doom of humanity, of plagues, of famines, of destruction could be so delightful and fun. But it was. So I want to implore you to enjoy this episode. And if you do, please do leave a review on iTunes or Audible or leave a rating anywhere you get your podcast. You can leave ratings nowadays. And in some places like Apple Podcasts and Audible, you can leave written reviews. So do that.

And you could be like a very recent review left by Nuzzi. I always learned something new and interesting here. Refreshing and insightful. Thank you, Nuzzies so much. One of the best podcasts from Pavi 1, 3, 2, 4. Listening to Learning, retains your attention in each episode from the start to a minute. I think it's wonderful. I love hearing that. And it keeps me going. I don't ask for much other than to make sure you subscribe to my newsletter, Briankeating.com slash list, and my YouTube channel, Dr. Brian Keating. And now I bid you adieu into this wonderful conversation with a renowned scholar, Neil Ferguson, of Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and soon University of Texas, Austin. Enjoy and let me know what you thought of the episode.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. So it's a great pleasure to be welcoming today, a renowned scholar, a thinker, really one of my favorite intellectuals. I think it's safe to call a public intellectual of the first and highest order. It's a great pleasure to have you here. You're joining us from Stanford. Is that correct, sir? That is right. Brian, I'm on a rather sleepy campus where relatively few people are around.

No students as yet. Well, I have sort of a mixed history with Stanford. It almost caused my doom because I was fired. The only time I've ever been fired in my life was from Stanford University. We're not going to talk about that, though. It led to me talking to you in some ways, though, so it couldn't have been all bad. And I'll save that for another day. But I want to start by asking you first and foremost to do that, which you're never supposed to do.

But I always say, what else can you do? but judge a book by its cover. And we're here celebrating the paperback release of this really phenomenal book that I read, but I really enjoyed listening to because you narrated it, which is wonderful. And it's called Doom. It's got a very cheerful title. So if you wouldn't mind showing the book, the politics of catastrophe. I feel like you're underselling it a little bit.

It's so rich with science, with history, with irreverent wit, with humor. I mean, for a book about Doom, it was really a pleasure to read. What is the meaning of the title and the cover illustration, my friend? Well, I think you should judge a book by its cover. Actually, I spent a lot of time thinking about coverers, but this one was probably a mistake. So the idea of the book was to write a general history of disaster,

which didn't really exist. All disasters, man-made and natural, all in one place. And I say to people when I talk about this book, If you can think of a disaster that's not in this book, I'll give you a free book. The idea of the book jacket was that I just loved the image of this guy sinking a pot with the raging wildfire behind him. It was taken a few years ago in Oregon, I think. And I persuaded my American publishers to go with that as an image.

And it also was supposed to signal it's not a book about COVID, although COVID is in it. It's a book about disasters generally. but I think it was probably a mistake because it doesn't really say that it's a history book. And so the paperbag looks radically different. And the paper bag is, I think, a much better jacket. And I have to give credits by German publishers, DBA, who said, this is a history book. It needs to look like a history book. The book, I think, isn't the depressing read that its title might imply.

I think I might have wanted to write a bestseller. in the sort of Markham Gladwell range, I'd have called it fun, the politics of partying or something like that. And that would have been a great read for the post-pandemic American public. But it's a book about disaster on our relationship to it. And because I'm from Glasgow, the west of Scotland,

the kind of gallows humor is part of how I relate to disaster. And so it's not, in fact, a dismal read. I hope in places it's in a maybe, Carborough way quite fun. But I wanted to get our strange relationship to disaster. And the advent of COVID gave it a perfect peg. Yeah. Yeah. And it truly is, I mean, the one, you know, just in all seriousness, that the only thing I would take issue is it's the subtitle is the politics. But really, you make a very convincing case that, you know, politics is only partially the blame. And I wonder if that was, you know, born of the moment in which it was written. As I understand,

you were in Montana, squirled away with your lovely family, and writing it amidst the, you know, feigning, you know, fanda decadal moments of 2020 right after the election or around the election. COVID was still in the news, no vaccine on the horizon. And so politics obviously was in the news

when you're writing it, but when it came out, you know, I wonder if that really summarizes or does justice to the full breadth and scope. I mean, you take a panoramic view of it, long before the politics, of the state really made an impact. So maybe you can capitulate a little bit to the readers that might not be familiar with it yet, although hopefully they'll get the book in all its forms.

You know, what is the role of politics? How much can man really do, our politicians really do, to avert, presage, or predict, or remedy a doom disaster type scenario? Well, less than the public and the media think. I think that's part of the reason I gave it that subtitle. One reason I wanted to call it the politics of catastrophe is that there is a, I think, a false dichotomy between natural and man-made disasters that people have in their heads. And so they think of a pandemic as a natural disaster, but a war as a man-made disaster. And the book argues, taking its cue from Amar Tens' work on famines, that that dichotomy is a false one. And that disastrous events, while they may have natural points of origin, are only as disastrous as we make them.

So let's take the example of the pandemic. Whether you subscribe to the lab leak hypothesis or not, doesn't really matter. Even if the new virus was a natural zoonotic mutation, the way that the Chinese authorities handled the outbreak in Wuhan, suppressing information about it and essentially lying about human-to-human transmission meant that it was a pandemic. It could have been contained, and perhaps in a society with greater freedom, it would have been contained. But right from its origins, you can't understand COVID without the politics of the Chinese

Communist Party. And then you ask the question, well, why does this virus have such different impacts on different countries? Why is there almost no excess mortality in Taiwan, which is right next door to the People's Republic, and very high mortality in, say, the United States, and even higher mortality relatively in some Latin American countries. That can't be explained in terms of, I don't think, in biological terms. It's the same virus, basically. And there really aren't big human genetic differences explaining the outcomes.

The outcomes have to do with very great variation. public health policy. And one of the arguments that was very live in 2020 when I was writing the book was that it was all Donald Trump's fault in the United States. Jim Fallows read a piece for the Atlantic saying it's pilot error, that if the pilot's incompetent, the plane crashes. And I really thought that couldn't be right. So part of the motivation towards the end of the book is to say it's highly unlikely that one can attribute that. that much agency, that much importance to the President of the United States, it's much more plausible that this is a failure of the Centers for Disease Control or the Department of Health

and Human Services. It's a failure of the public health bureaucracy, just as success in Taiwan was success on the part of the bureaucracy. This is a long-winded way of saying that most disasters have a kind of man-made or political character, even a volcanic eruption, is not is not an entirely natural disaster if you've chosen to build a bloody great city right at the foot of the volcano. And then you rebuild it after the eruption as if there's not going to be another one at some future date. So that's part of the thinking there. I'm not a scientist, but of course a lot of science is involved in a book like this. What I can write about credibly is the ways in which human decision making fails to manage the risk or the

uncertainty around mutations of viruses or geological events. Yeah, and actually that was one of the more depressing aspects of it to me was given the amount of the scope, the budget, the ascription of agency, I remember January 15th, 2020, I was at a Shabbat dinner with some friends and I had just been invited to visit a cosmology experiment in, of all places, Tibet in that coming April. And my friend said, well, you better think a little bit about that because there's this, you know, new disease called COVID. I'd heard a little bit about it. And he said, yeah, you know, the Chinese, they're pretty amazing. You know, they built a hospital in eight days that, you know, can double as a prison and, and they can fit, you know, 8,000 people. And I was like, oh, that's kind of interesting. And then,

you know, two months later, of course, all help were exclusive, including here in America. And I was thinking if my friend, you know, some Yenta at a Shabbat dinner can know this when we have, you know, the billion dollar three-letter agencies of all countries, I mean, is this a failure of, you know, truly of just the bloating the size of God? I mean, how could the NSA, the CIA, the FBI, you know, the NHS, whatever in England, they all failed with trillions of dollars of budget. Are these things just intrinsically, I mean, it's not an asteroid impact. It's not, you know, it's a virus that we had by satellites. If my friend knew, in other words, they were building a hospital, why didn't we have enough masks? I mean, what can we attribute that to? Well, the simple answer is it wasn't all

because the president was a populist with an impulse control problem. The failure is clearly much further down the chain of command within the public health bureaucracy. And that's a recurrent theme of the book that the point of failure is not always at the top and it actually quite seldom is right at the top. I got that from Richard Feynman. Yeah, I was going to say the Challenger disaster. We'll get to Richard Feynman at the end of this conversation. I'd sort of trail that for your listeners who probably are Feynman fans. That's right. We're going to get to measure. But I got as an epiphany, Feynman's insight into the Challenger as really not being attributable to Ronald Reagan. It was attributable to the NASA bureaucracy and one person in particular.

But in the case of COVID, CDC clearly did much worse than early CDC in, say, 1957-58, when there was a pretty serious influenza pandemic, despite being now a much larger organization with a much larger budget. And you can delve into the failures in the UK in the same way, and that increasingly is happening. I don't think we'll ever have a full public inquiry into the failure of the the US public health bureaucracy of the sort that we probably need. I mean, we need a sort of 9-11 commission to understand why the guy whose job it was to be the Undersecretary for preparedness admitted in 2018 that the pandemic preparedness plan wouldn't work and why nothing was done

about that. We really need to know more about that. But my read based on publicly available information in 2020 was that key parts of the public health bureaucracy simply screwed up and the most obvious example is testing. Why did the Taiwanese control the outbreak at the beginning when the population was at its most vulnerable? Because they very quickly got to a point where they could test on a large scale. And we utterly failed to do that. In fact, CDC prevented testing being available by insisting that that they monopolizes, shutting down private initiative. That meant that I think I probably had COVID at the beginning, because I had been in Asia right at the beginning of January.

I was sick as a dog in late January and February, but I couldn't get a test. Even on the Stanford campus, which you would have thought of as a pretty cutting edge place for medical science, and that was just one of multiple failures. I think the bureaucracy knew, as surely as their financial counterparts in 2006, that they were not ready for a crisis.

And yet they sat with their meaningless 36-page pandemic preparedness plan and waited for the disaster to strike. And I think kind of hoping that it wouldn't strike on their watch. That's my broad take. And I think this is a generally relevant point about disaster, whether you're talking about the Challenger or the Titanic or for that matter, World War I, any disaster. we're very inclined to say blame it on the president, blame it on the king, blame it on the emperor.

That's a sort of powerful human impulse. And in fact, people at the top of hierarchies of power quite want us to attribute power to them. But it's the same point Tolstoy makes about Napoleon in war and peace. He thinks he's really important. He thinks he's in charge. But you can't really explain what's going on in and around 1812 purely in terms of his decisions and his orders. So in the same way, disaster really tends to be magnified by points further down the chain of command. And that search for the point of failure was what motivated me to call it the politics of catastrophe, using the term politics quite broadly.

Yeah, and I think you make this very distinct and accurate distinction between the politics or maybe the human comprehension of power law. type effects and normal distribution or Gaussian distributions. I'm tempted because you're a Scotsman to call them Maxwell Boltzman distributions in honor of the great James Clerk Maxwell who died too soon. Maybe we'll talk about him when I want to talk about social media, which you're quite adept at. But, you know, there are single individuals who change history, Lee Harvey Oswald, Hitler, and then there are collective things that, you know, takes all societies. a hold of them are, you know, genocides and so forth. They're, you know, partially collectivist and

partially individualist. I wonder if that's, you know, kind of the innumeracy, as the mathematician palace has called it, you know, the failure of the human brain to really comprehend what is a power law, what is a normal distribution, and to falsely ascribe things in the past to witchcraft and spirits, and now we ascribe everything to science. And, and of course, that was one of the major, you know, kind of thrust of your earlier work, especially, you know, with your so-called six killer apps. And maybe we can talk a little bit about that. Has science, you know, really lived up to the hope of its, you know, what it portended to be. And when you called it a killer app, the scientific method and medicine, those were two of the three of the six killer

apps that you spoke about. How will they fare during this pandemic and more broadly speaking? Are we too reliant on them, as Arthur C. Clark said, any sufficiently advanced technology? is in distinguishable from magic? Or are we not reliant enough and we're innumerate as Palos might say? Your summer starts now with Memorial Day deals at the Home Depot. It's time to fire up summer cookouts

with the next grill for burner gas grill on special buy for only $199. And entertain all season with the Hampton Bay West Grove seven-piece outdoor dining set for only $499. This Memorial Day get low prices guaranteed at the Home Depot while supplies last.

Priceen valid May 14th or May 27th. US only exclusions apply. See Home Depot.com slash price match for details. Well, this is a big preoccupation for the Ferguson family. I come from a scientific family. My mother's a physicist and so is my sister. My father was a physician. I'm the black sheep of the family.

I went into history, which is I was reading the other day as much lower IQ students. I wish I'd known that back in 1980 when I was applying to Oxford. Well, I think the big takeaway here is that we've made extraordinary advances in our scientific understanding as a species. There's just no contest, the medieval peasant, even the medieval monarch, was clueless in the face of the Black Death by comparison with us.

And yet, and yet, despite these enormous advances, we fared quite poorly in the face of a not-very-deadly virus by historic standards. I mean, this definitely wasn't. anything that could compare with the pneumonic and bubonic plague of the 14th century. And I've been struggling to try to work that problem out. There's a tendency in, let's call them populist circles, to grumble that somehow the scientists failed. But that's not right. I was really impressed by the way scientists as a global community, responded to the challenge presented by the new SARS-CoV-2 virus and the new disease.

In fact, part of what got me through 2020 was drinking from a firehose of scientific publication in too many disciplines to list, in which an enormous number of people struggled collectively to understand the nature of the challenge. That was definitely not the point of failure. and of course you had, within an amazingly short space of time, the huge success of vaccines with higher than 90% efficacy in the phase three trials, things that happen after I'd finished writing the book, but which I kind of felt would happen, I had a good feeling about where those vaccines would come out.

So where did things go wrong? Not, I think, amongst scientists. There were failures amongst public health officials and scientists who were playing a public role as advisors. And I think that happened on both sides of the Atlantic. And the reason it happened, I think, was that the incentives meaningfully change when you move from engaging in science as a vacation, seeking to arrive at truth through experimental methods,

and doing policy. And you could illustrate this with the case of my near namesake, Neil Ferguson, the epidemiologist at Imperial College, whose March 2020 paper set the scene for lockdown policies on both sides of the Atlantic. And what's interesting about the case of Neil Ferguson is that there were, I thought, obvious problems with the paper. and I'm not even a trained scientist in the assumptions it made about the infection fatality rate, in the assumptions it made about what measures would be necessary to contain spread, in his readiness to think that the Chinese had got it right with draconian lockdowns, and I could go on and on. But that paper was seized upon by public health bureaucracies that were panicking

and by politicians who were suddenly panicking. And it led to a series of extremely costly policy. errors. The biggest flaw was that he and other epidemiologists simply ignored the economic consequences and I'd say broader social consequences of lockdowns as a problem, as if it really wasn't their concern. And as a result, they massively understated the costs of the policy that they were recommending. And I think they overstated the benefits. So it wasn't so much that bad science was being done, though I think the model that Ferguson used, you. probably was deeply flawed. It was more that it then became very quickly politicized and led to

bad policy choices in which the trade-offs, and that's the central problem of any policy decision-making process, the trade-offs were just completely bungled. Not being able to really distinguish, as you make clear in the book, you know, the difference between risk and uncertainty. We in the scientific, you know, experimental scientific community, we're building instruments in foreign countries, in my case in Chile with my collaboration. And we have these risk registers and they have some expected, you know, value of impact and dollars and personnel and so forth. And you have to be quite clinical about it. But then, you know, I'll turn around. I'll see some of the same students that work in my lab, you know, on their skateboards here in Southern California, you know, with a mask on,

you know, no helmet. And with a cell phone, you know, in front of their faces, they're barreling down the main, you know, quad. And I just feel like there's, in trend, and these are highly educated, you know, scientifically literate individuals. I wonder if that's, if it's just, you know, the human nature that we are just, we are, we are incapable of grasping, as I said, you know, before, and you pointed out in the book, the power law versus the normal curve. I mean, is this just, I mean, we obviously have to do something to try to counter it, but, but I think weighing the true cost-benefit analysis is not something more. were particularly adept at doing.

I know, for example, I didn't have global pandemic on my risk register in 2019. I don't know too many people that did. But how do we balance that need for freedom? We're not wearing a helmet, you know, on a skateboard versus the, you know, you must wear a mask and you must get tested. How do we balance that in a Western, you know, weird, so-called weird country like the U.S.? What would help if we taught kids about probability? and risk at school, but we don't.

And in fact, we make no attempt to teach our young future citizens about risk management in any domain. From personal safety to personal finance, we really allow people to go through our educational system without getting them to think in a probabilistic way about risk and uncertainty. I think that's the first mistake that we make. of course by our nature we're evolved apes we have a set of of cognitive skills that are quite well suited to hostile environments and so we can sometimes do the right thing instinctively and impulsively but in the modern environment of a post-industrial society a lot of the things that we were evolved to be good at aren't really that useful and i think your your example of the student on the

the skateboard with the cell phone and the mask on, which of course there were many people in the same, playing the same part on the Stanford campus, cycling around the campus with masks on. I think that illustrates our fatally flawed nature as a species. And part of the reason for writing Doom was to get myself to think in a more rational way about my predicaments. How long am I likely to live at the age of with my background. It's not that comfortable to think about life expectancy, especially when you're 58 and from Glasgow. But you've got to do it. We've had a lot of conversation about this in our household recently since the attack on Salman Rashdi, which was not that long ago. My wife, Ayyane Herssey Ali, has also received multiple death threats. In fact, was over the years for

her work on Islamic extremism. And when the news came through that Salman and had been attacked in that horrible fashion, I could see a yarn very worried, deeply anxious, reverting to a state of fearfulness that I remember from years ago. And I had to sit down and say, look, the risk never went away, not for Salman Rushing, not for you. It is a risk, but we seek to manage it. But the risk to me of cancer is probably a bit bigger. my friend, Andrew Jane, just died at 59 of cancer.

And the risk to our boys of being hit by a car, because they're not that used to traffic, is higher than either of these risks. And we should worry much more about that than we do. And so part of the reason for writing the book, Doom, is to expose the fact that for all kinds of strange reasons, we have a cognitive difficulty when it comes to thinking about risk and uncertainty, we love

love to fixate on the wrong things. And we'd like the idea of cataclysmic disaster. We'd love to watch movies about that or read books about that. There's always a kind of market for the movie contagion. In fact, people were watching that movie during the early stages of COVID, which I think a lot of journalists were getting some of their ideas about, what are they call fomite and all this stuff that turned out to be nonsense. It's all in that movie. Yeah, I don't think they did the scientific research. The end of the world is fascinating. It is. Medium-sized disasters of the sort we're quite likely to encounter, kind of boring.

And the statistics of our risk at any given stage of life, which are widely available, just people don't really, they don't internalize them. Even if you kind of show them, and I used to show my students these risks when talking back in the post-9-11 period about terrorism, I'd kind of try to get them to think about this. it's not something that comes naturally to us. And that was what motivated me to write the book, partly to explore my own relationship to mortality and risk. The final part I'll make is that we don't like how big the domain of uncertainty is. And this is a point others have made. That's Intel had made it ages ago in The Black Swan.

We really want much more to be calculable risk and much less to be incalculable uncertainty than is, in fact, the case. And power laws are helpful in this respect, especially if you live in California, because you know there's going to be some bloody great earthquake at some point, but you don't know when and you don't know how big. And there's just no way of getting a handle on that except that it can happen. That's as far as we can really go. And so so many things inhabit that domain, including it turns out wars, the things that historians are interested in, which are the big disastrous events. because they occupy this realm of uncertainty, they're governed by power laws or they're randomly distributed in the case of wars, it just seems to be that such a fundamental point about history that it should be central to what we as historians do rather than a sort of afterthought if it appears at all.

Yeah, and just paying attention as you list, you know, you keep mentioning, you know, where do these different pandemics, disasters, fall in terms of the spectrum of distribution of events that claimed, even a half a percent of human life. And I'm not, you know, obviously every human life is precious. We don't have to get into that debate. But, but I remember thinking, you know, throughout this book, that there's kind of this commonality. And you end the book with, I don't think it's much of a spoiler, but you end the book with, I forget the author, the Journal of the Plague Year. That quote, yes. And the quote, you know, being basically like 100,000 died in London in 65,

but I'm still alive. And I found myself wondering, you know, you as you just mentioned, with your family, your children, your wife. You know, how do we balance this kind of, it seems to me that quote, the plague lear quote, is along the lines of, you know, Ernest Becker's denial of death, you know, that there's sort of a coping mechanism that human beings have to put off, you know, the thoughts of our eventual, we know we're going to die.

In fact, I think that's what Homo sapiens means. I mean, we are the only creature that knows that our existence is finite. And yet, and yet, we want to balance that with, you know, the memento mori with the denial of death. So how do you personally, how do you strike that balance between the precious, you've described yourself in your earlier years in your first marriage as a workaholic? Now you've got these young children that you treasure, your wife that you're so deeply committed to. How do you balance that personally the desire to have all this output, but also to spend time with your kids? You're not going to get that back. How do you balance the

Momentumory with the denial of death. I guess that's the succinct way. Well, the first point I'll make is that growing up, I was born in 1964, with my grandfathers having served in the World Wars, I was aware in a way that I suspect most Californian kids today aren't aware of the proximity of death, that it was luck that had got my grandfathers through. And the first book that I published had to do with the First World War, there's a song that the soldiers sang, and I quoted in doom, in the trenches on the eve of the battle of the song, and it's a parody of a Salvation Army hymn, The bells of hell go tinglinga ling for you, but not for me. And that song captures how a late teen's early 20,

British man cope with the prospect of an incredibly risky attack on the German lines in 1916. Oh, death, where is thy sting a ling, oh grave thy victory. They laughed in the face of imminent death. I was haunted by that as a boy. And I never really ceased to be aware of that, the proximity of death, but the need to laugh at it. I remember reading Hamlet as a teenager at school and realizing that that is a play

in which a man comes to terms with mortality. That's really the point of the play. Then I walk into the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. I'm in my mid-20s. I think I had my first academic job in Cambridge. And there in the Fitzwilliam Museum is a painting. by an Italian artist Salvatore Rosa depicting the death of most of his family in an outbreak of plague in Naples in the mid-17th century. And there is an inscription on the painting which sums up the human condition more succinctly than anything I've ever seen.

And it is conceptio-culp, Nasci-Pena, Labo Vita, Neckesimori, Conception. is sin, birth is pain, life is work, and death is inevitable. And I remember seeing that and thinking, that's it. That sums it all up. And now we must try to live as best we can as if it's more than that. And so I think as with the soldiers in the trenches, my philosophy has been be aware of the finite nature of life. Be aware that it could be cut off cruelly. And with that awareness in your mind, in the back of your mind, but try to achieve as much as you possibly can. Now, I hope that I'm selfless at least some of the time.

I know that I've been motivated by an intellectual ambition from a very early age to try to understand the world better. That's what sent me down the path of history, because what seemed to me elusive about the world as I was growing up was not the kind of thing my mother and sister were interested in. It felt to me as if the movements of heavenly bodies or of particles were not the real problem. The real problem was the tendency of human beings to murder one another and to work out why that kept happening was for me a more powerful imperative. Reading Tolstoy was a big reason why I became a historian. Why on earth did the Russian people and the French people slaughter one another?

That's really the central question of that book. So I've tried to understand the world better with that big question in the back of my mind. And that's the thing that gets me out of bed in the morning. And at the same time, I've tried, and I hope I've succeeded in some measure to be a good son, a good husband, and a good father and a good friend. because those are the things that really matter in the end. Because you're not going to get, your gravestone doesn't have a bibliography on it. You'll not see many of those. You know, it doesn't actually list your publications.

Your H index. It doesn't usually fit. Well, that's the whole resume virtues versus eulogy virtues. I think David Brooks and Rabbi Soloveitchuk had spoken about Adam 1 versus Adam 2. I guess the kind of thought that does give me some. hope maybe to segue into our conversation about science fiction and maybe using what you just said. You've often, I mean, you mentioned this fact that, you know, this fascinating notion that human beings kill each other. And in my field, there's this obsession with finding alien life. I mean, the James Webb Space Telescope was just recently launched and is returning spectacular images recently this, we're recording this in late summer.

they detected the signature of carbon dioxide on an exoplanet called with the winsome name WASP 36B, I think it's called. I was going to call my third son that name, but I didn't. Anyway, but the hope that we're going to find extraterrestrial life, and that somehow it's going to be benevolent, not like, you know, the three-body problem that you quote from so deliciously and delightfully. And I did have the honor of meeting St. Lou when he came to Chicago, just before the pandemic, actually, a phenomenal intellect and writer. But, you know, the assumption is that even if they're not benevolent, at least there's life that will give us some sort of meaning and intensity. And I've said this, I said this in Lex Friedman's

podcast when I was on a few months back. I said, I don't think anything will happen. And I actually have a proof for that because in 1996, Bill Clinton stood on the White House lawn and said, we found material from Mars that seems to indicate byproducts of respiration from Martian meteor microbes. And people went out in Bosnia, you know, Herzegovina War that you described. That's kept going, just as you described and do them. I don't think a damn thing would change if we discovered life on another planet tomorrow. Maybe it would change for a week or two. What do you think about the prospects for the impact on history of a discovery such as the credible existence, not of just technological life, just of life in general, in the universe

outside of Earth. Well, if it were to be discovered, I'd be terrified because I think Liu Sishin is onto something with his theory of cosmic sociology, which is in the second volume of the trilogy, the dark forest. The argument there for those who don't know the book is that if one does discover intelligent life, one should immediately seek to destroy it before it destroys you. And even if you're technologically ahead of it, now, there's no guarantee that it won't overtake you at some future date. It's an extraordinarily brilliant insight.

Maybe it's just an insight into the way the modern Chinese mind works. But the idea that new life would be benign is one that we must definitely resist. it seems to me much more probable that it would either intentionally or unintentionally be very bad for us. The second thing I'd say is that if it were to turn out to be good or appear good in the first instance, there's plenty of science fiction that tells you it'll turn out to be bad later. So be very afraid, even if they seem nice, maybe be especially afraid. But you're right. we discovered would not radically alter our ways of behavior.

And Lisa Schen makes that point too. Once it's clear that the trisolarans are going to invade Earth, they have collaborators amongst radical environmentalists and nihilists who actually think humanity should be eradicated. So we wouldn't all come together in the face of a common threat any more than we did in the face of SARS-CoV-2 stroke COVID-19. I mean, in fact, what's fascinating about the way we behave as a species is that we can keep our old feuds going, even in the face of a common enemy.

That makes the experiment, the natural experiments of 2021 really interesting. If anything, we in fact became more divided, both domestically and internationally than we had been in 2019. It doesn't make me terribly optimistic about that scenario, but I'm going to go with the very low probability view. I can't help feeling that, you know, we've been looking at this for a while. And like you, I was excited by the exoplanet with signs of, well, not life, but maybe the potential for life. But I don't know. I just suppose it's just can't help feeling that, you know, here I am 58.

and I'm sure I was thinking about this when I was a kid 50 years ago. Yeah. Yeah. Probably because he has to be pretty low at this point, even though, yeah. I mean, tell me I'm wrong. Yeah. And I think that there is a value to, you know, speculating, obviously, you know, and what I do is, although I prefer actually science, science fact, science nonfiction to science fiction,

even though I am the associate director of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human imagine it. We'll get to him in a bit. But there's something of a podcaster's trifecta lately, which I don't know if you're familiar with, but aliens, which we covered, the simulation hypothesis, which is typically I had on Nick Bostrum recently. But I want to skip ahead because you're so knowledgeable about so many different topics. But the third in the trifecta is, of course, Bitcoin. And you, of course, are known for the Ascent of Money, this phenomenal award-winning a series that you did back a decade plus ago. I can't believe how long ago it was.

It seems like it was just yesterday. You haven't aged appreciably, whatever you're taking. I want to get a dose of that, Neil. But you did your thesis on hyperinflation in the 1920s in Germany, and I wonder, like, do you see echoes of both the dangers of hyperinflation rearing its head around the world right now? Or do you see the benefit for something like a Bitcoin-like object to, to prevent such rampant hyperinflation scenarios that you are so well studied in. What are your thoughts

now on Bitcoin? I haven't read much, not to say that's just a lack of my scholarship. I have, I read in late 2020 about some of your thoughts on it. But what are your thoughts, recent thoughts about Bitcoin? Well, I updated the Ascent of Money in 2018 on its 10th anniversary and published a couple of new chapters in that new edition, one of which was about cryptocurrency. And in the course of writing that, I changed my mind. Prior to then, prior to 2017, I'd been pretty much a skeptic in the standard way that economists tend to be and ignored my then teenage son when he had urged me to buy Bitcoin at 300 bucks.

And then as he got older and I got wiser. and he was graduating from high school, I said, why don't you come out to Stanford and work here for a bit? And help me understand this. So we did a little bit of collaboration, Lachlan and I. And I came around to a view that's a little idiosyncratic, but let me run this past you. As a financial historian,

I think I take a different view from economists of how these things work. economists really don't want lots of changes in the institutional infrastructure of the economy because they want to take that for granted and focus on other things, on movements of income and employment. They're not even that interested in money anymore. I'm interested in the way financial institutions change over time, and they change a lot, and they change in a very evolutionary way.

And it became clear to me that we were probably living through a financial revolution propelled by the internet. And it was highly unlikely that we would continue to have the financial methods of payment that predated the internet for very much longer. It can't be rational for us to be typing credit card numbers into random websites to pay for stuff. So point one, the financial system is bound to evolve and to, to evolve to produce payments that are more naturally native to the internet. Point number two, you can do things that you couldn't do before with the advent of blockchain. And the idea of having a peer-to-peer system of payment that doesn't require third-party verification of any kind is it's an old idea, but it's now a possible idea.

Third point, if you've come up with this novel technology, all that really matters is that is a possible idea. All that really matters is adoption. That's the key to the spread of a technology. Does it get adopted on a sufficient scale? And I think the answer to that is clearly yes. It already has been adopted on a pretty large scale. Big enough, I think, to be pretty hard to kill in the case of Bitcoin. And I think it has the potential to get even larger.

So in 2018, I made the following observation, if every millionaire in the world had 0.2% of his or her wealth in Bitcoin, the price would be, I'm not going to do this from memory, something like 17,000. And if it went to 1%, then the price would be more like 70,000. And that's the range that one should probably think about in the near term. And that's kind of the range within which Bitcoin has fluctuated over the past couple of years. And my sense is that we're now in one of those lulls during which it will be decided, partly by legislation and regulation, how much adoption there is in the next phase. And that's the uncertainty at the

moment. And I think the same applies more generally to decentralised finance. It applies to all those things that are being built on top of Ethereum. I'm broadly an optimist about this because I don't see the status quo as defensible, our bank-dominated, fiat-dominated system is too defective in too many ways to survive. But it's not yet certain to me that it will be replaced by a blockchain-based system of finance when centralized AI platforms of the sort that evolved in China might just be more convenient and easier and cheaper to run. So that seems like the real uncertainty which of these two forms, decentralized or centralized, ultimately prevails. But the old systems, the legacy systems dying.

Last thing I'll say, which I think is already something I've said, but the last last thing I'll say is that, of course, there's going to be hyperinflation in Argentina and a bunch of other countries that are in the process of blowing up their currencies in a familiar way. There won't be hyperinflation in the United States. In fact, we're sort of barely going to make it into double-discuit. digit inflation the way things are going. You'll get double digit inflation in the UK and elsewhere in Europe, but that's more, I think, a result of supply disruption on the energy side than of monetary

policy. But the range of inflation is much more, I think, 1970s than most people yet realize. Because if you're young enough that you don't remember the 1970s, then you can't easily imagine how we could suddenly have got here after 20 years of 2% or less than 2% inflation. But the point of financial history is that it tells you that's what happens. And there was nothing natural about below 2% inflation. It's just I don't think inflation is the reason for cryptocurrency. And it was always puzzling to me that the people who were promoting Bitcoin promoted it as a solution to the problem of inflation. Because of the fixed supply? That was the reasoning. But you know, Gold hasn't really been a great hedge against inflation in most of history.

So, I mean, if your argument is, hey, this is just as good as gold, this is digital gold, then the reason for selling it isn't really that it's a hedge against inflation. Bitcoin's a hedge against expropriation, as gold generally has been. It's just a form of holding your wealth that is quite hard for governments to confiscate. That's why crypto is popular in places with poor rule of law and governments that incline towards confiscation. The idea that it was a solution to an inflation problem was weird, particularly in 2008 when Satoshi's paper appeared, when inflation definitely wasn't the problem. So I think there's a slight non-sequitur in a lot of the thinking that goes on about this,

just in the same way that economists, when they say, oh, well, it's not a store of value and it's not a unit of account, blah, blah, blah. they're missing the point. What people are interested in is not textbook definitions of money. What they're interested in is, how can I make payments with the lowest possible transaction cost and inconvenience? And that will be the question. The answer to that question will determine what emerges as the dominant payment system. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough.

Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your oceanfront room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises.

It matters where you stay. Hilton for the stay. Yeah, I mean, I see it also, you know, depressingly, it doesn't seem like if it only got one percent adoption of millionaires globally, it doesn't seem like it could ever have an effect on inflation, almost by definition, as a ballast, counterweight, what have you. And I've also seen it, you know, with the shutdowns and I do want to get to,

I don't know how much more time you have left. Please feel afraid to interrupt. We can cut short any of these long questions. I don't get conversations like this every day. Brian, this is a pleasure. Okay, it's my pleasure. I'm convinced more than yours. But I want to say with the fact that, you know, there was,

during the recent Canadian trucker strike where, you know, it was a coin base was forced to close and, you know, doing operations. And there's all sorts of payment systems that can be manipulated. It doesn't seem like it is decentralized, really, Bitcoin itself. And I feel like there is one network that, you know, which you've written about the powers of network effects. And I want to get into that as well. But thinking about networks, I mean, unless you have a benevolent dictatorship

or you have truly decentralized, I don't think, as you say, that we'll ever be able to truly claim that it's, that it's, you know, free from, from central domination. And I want to maybe segue, you do mention briefly, you know, these kind of world organizations that play a role, perhaps not as menacing in 2020 as they are now, the WEF, Davos, and so forth. Are these entities, you know, the boogeymen that, at least on the conservative right, people are making them out to feel?

You know, we hear a lot about Davos and Klaus Schwab and so forth. Are they really capable of impacting or causing any effect on daily lives here in America? Let's just be, you know, venally Americo-centric. Can these boogeymen really affect us in any way? I mean, are they just kind of chimerical meant to enrage and just polarize further so that there's engagement to sell more ads on Twitter? Well, the United States has vastly more power than any of those public or non-public institutions that you mentioned, and it's kind of comical for Americans who enjoy the protection of one of the most powerful empires in history,

to be worried about a conference that's held annually in a Swiss ski resort. Come on. Where is Klaus Schwab's navy? I can't remember. where he keeps his ballistic missiles. It's all stupid. It's stupid because the reality is that organizations like the World Economic Forum or the Bilderberg group or the Trilateral Commission, I mean, I've attended meetings of all of these bodies, of course I'm part of the conspiracy of globalists. But I mean, I'm here to report to somebody who's highly sympathetic to what we might call the

populist constituency of Middle America. America, I'm here to report that they actually are embarrassingly weak and confused on the whole about what to do with the world, even if they had power. The World Economic Forum meeting of January 2020 was entirely dominated by a discussion of climate change. In its global risk report, which must have been prepared the previous year, the risk of a pandemic didn't appear at all. And so I ran around the conference center trying to persuade people that they should change

the agenda to a pandemic because that was slightly faster moving than climate change. No takers. And I was regarded as having slightly lost my marbles when I emailed Schwab to say, by the way, there are five people listed in the participants' booklet from Wuhan. You probably need to warn everybody that this could be a super spreader event. So, no, I mean, there's much less there that meets the eye. Now, in the book The Square and the Tower, I try to argue that that doesn't mean they're insignificant because I think it was quite important that Schwab built the World Economic Forum up as a network

for promoting ideas about, particularly about free capital movement, international investment, let's call it globalisation. I think that did spread the word. I think it was important that Nelson Mandela went to Davos and was kind of. can't have persuaded to ditch socialist goals from the African National Congress's manifesto, but it's interesting that he was persuaded not by Klaus Schwab, but actually by the Chinese people who were there. It's like, no, forget about socialism. That stuff doesn't work. But no, I think these things matter, but they don't matter the way the conspiracy theorists think they matter, in the

same way that the network of Jewish bankers, which I studied early in my career, the Rothschild, the war bugs, etc. That was a real thing. And there was a network there and it was important. It played a very big part in the history of 19th century industrialization and an economic development. But in terms of political power, it was much weaker than all the conspiracy theorists of that time claimed. And that was made very clear when anti-Semitic politicians like Hitler came to power and very easily were able to destroy. the network of Jewish finance. So, you know, my sense is that these things are important to study,

but if you're going to study them, you've got to keep a sense of perspective. And that's what the conspiracy theorists don't bother doing. Aker's not really studying them at all. They're really just projecting collective neuroses on fantasy networks, fantasy organizations that are much more powerful than they really are. That seems very akin to the, you know, a script. as you make very strongly in doom to want to place blame on the foot of the most powerful leaders in the world. And as you make very clear throughout many of these disasters, quote

unquote, they have almost no power. And in fact, they serve to undermine their own causes in many effects. I want to turn now to an ultimate source of power, and that's tenure and academia. You and I are members of an august field. I always say, you know, how do you know that being a professor is the best job in the known universe, and it's because it is the only profession that Neil Armstrong, another Neil, took up once he came off of the moon, he became a professor in Ohio. I don't know if you knew that, but that was the only thing that could top going to the moon literally. How is being a professor impacted you? What part of your identity, whether it was at Harvard or your work as a fellow and a scholar at the Hoover Institution? What is being a scholar? What is being a scholar?

our professor, what does that mean to you as a man, as an identity as a father? How does it impact you? And what do you see as the future of our profession? It's over a thousand years old. It really hasn't changed that much. What do you see of the future of what we do? I became an academic because I value intellectual freedom above everything else. And I wanted to be able to pursue my ideas wherever I wanted, without, I have a boss. I have a deep horror of being bossed around. And that's academia, because academic institutions in most of history are remarkably decentralized in the sense that governance is not really that centrally organized. University presidents and their British equivalents, vice chancellors,

are kind of as powerful as the Queen is powerful in the British constitution. In truth, Power in Britain is in the House of Commons. Power in most universities is with the tenured faculty. And that meant that the Republic of Letters seem very appealing to me. If I could become a fellow of an Oxford or Cambridge College, then the world would leave me alone in an agreeable study, lined with books. I would be able to write those books myself, read the books of others,

teach my thinking to bright young people, and that teaching part was half the year. I mean, three, eight-week terms. I didn't really even have to ask about the money because as far as I was concerned, the salary didn't need to be that high. I was getting the office space and half the year to write books. And if I couldn't make money from doing that,

then I made a big mistake to begin with. So that was straightforward. Nothing else that was on offer in 1985 when I graduated compared With that, I'd have hated finance. I considered journalism. I'm glad I decided to do that as a hobby. There weren't really any other things that I thought much about. The problem has turned out to be, and I never saw this coming in the 80s, 90s, or even into the 2000s, that universities have ceased to be places that prioritize free inquiry.

Quite the reverse, they have become, rather as they've been, rather as they've been, probably were in the Middle Ages places that prioritise orthodoxy and conformism and they now exist to constrain thought and speech in ways that are deeply repellent to me and I think deeply dangerous for our society. So I've been forced to rethink my relationship to academia. I ended up ceasing to be a professor. I gave up my chair at Harvard and came to the Hoover Institution six years ago. I'm senior fellow at the institution. I don't teach at Stanford, partly because they don't want me to teach, and partly because it suits me. And now I'm involved in creating a new university in Texas, the University of Austin, in the belief that we have to create new institutions to model

free inquiry because the old institutions simply won't repair themselves, certainly not in my lifetime. So that's been my journey. And when we think about, you know, the vulnerability to disaster collapse. It strikes me that the university is rather cavalier, at least, you know, the existential threats that they might have. I recently did a project with some friends, physicists, well-known Carlo Revelli, as well as the leader of the Large Hadron Collider, that CERN Fabiola Gianati and other people. Where we took Galileo's, I'm known for my finger puppets, you know, forgive me. This will get one of you. someday, but this is Galileo.

And I took his dialogue on the two chief world systems, which was the explication of Copernicanism, that got him ultimately imprisoned, although it's not such a bad prison if you've ever gone to our Chetri. It's actually a place that Bernie Madoff would have gladly traded places with old Galileo. But the point being, we took all of his words, we had them digitized, and with modern artificial intelligence engines like GPT3 and others, we could actually, actually, you know, have a simulacrum of Galileo that we could prompt and ask questions of, I think I'm a good professor, you know, I think I'm above average, although most people think they're above average.

But I don't think I can compare to him or to, you know, Herr Einstein or James Clerk Maxwell. So what advances will University of Austin, Texas? What will they make use of to differentiate or will it be, you know, just faculty that are maybe a strange in some way. My friend Peter Bogassian, who's been on the show as well as Lex Friedman, who I know, I know they're involved, but what innovations, if any, are they going to do, or is it going to be, you know, a sage scraping a piece of rock and another piece of rock, you know, just like they did in Bologna and 1080. Well, you're right that universities have been around in that form for a millennium and it's time to rethink the model. And we will do that.

That's part of the fun of an enterprise like this. Sure, we'll attract some Khradenko, as the Germans say, some people who think against the current, and that's crucial. And it wouldn't be worth doing if there weren't people like Peter who clearly need a new home where they can do their work freely. I think there are a bunch of innovations that we have in mind. One is to rethink the whole structure. Departments are silos, and within those silos, intellectual corruption can run amok. So we are thinking more in terms of interdisciplinary centres that will have finite lives. In other words, it'll be a shape-shifting institution where we'll be trying to avoid the pathologies of the modern university

in which there are sovereign departments that engage in self-perpetuation of bad ideas. I think the second thing that's exciting to me is that we want to end this notion of the campus as something divorced from reality, but accentuate and emphasize the relationship between study and subsequent activity. Let's stop pretending that everybody's going to be a professor. That's not the case. It's not the case for the people doing PhDs. It's certainly not the case for the people doing undergraduate studies. Let's consider the very real point that they have to play roles when they graduate.

And let's begin that process. So I think the University of Austin will have a lot of practice and a lot of interaction, particularly in junior and senior years, with what we call the real world. So I think that's a second important way in which the institution will be different. The third thing that I think we need to be quite open about is that we want to pursue the meritocratic ideal, above all, other criteria for selection in the same way that the military does. I wonder where the intellectual Navy SEALs are today. I'd like to see the intellectual green berets.

Why is the military so comfortable with its elitism and academia so uncomfortable with it, to the point that it is now throwing out conventional ways of selection for academic merits? So we are going to be, I think, self-confidently interested in intellectual elitism. And that's going to seem pretty refreshing compared with a few other institutions

that I could mention today. Yeah, I think we should welcome the competition. I've expressed my optimism that it succeeds. I think competition is not just good for better phones, but it's good for education. And now with the advent of now monetizing all the privately held debt for college, college students. I think there's going to be less of an incentive for traditional universities

to rein in cost to cut administration and bureaucracy, et cetera. Well, you know, we've reached the end of the regularly scheduled portion of the podcast, but if you'll indulge me in slightly more forbearance for a few more minutes, I have three existential questions that I'd love to ask you to look into your crystal ball and also to look back as if through a telescope. If you wouldn't mind answering what I call the thrilling three. are the fantastic four. We will now play the final three existential questions. Which begins, and they're all in some way related to Sir Arthur C. Clark.

The first one has to do with his famous quote, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, which we open the podcast with. If you ever heard that voice, it's not my voice. It's him. And actually, I don't know if you knew this name, but the word podcast comes from Sir Arthur C. Clark. I don't know that.

Because 2001, of course, Dave asked how to open the pod bay doors. And the pod is what the iPod was named after by Tony Fidel or Steve Jobs. I can't remember which one. And, of course, podcasts are played on iPods, but no longer. So the iPod doesn't even exist. Anyway, that's the connection to Arthur C. Clark. I think it's cute. I want to ask you, what if you had to take any one object or learning or learning or

or wisdom from all of humanity with your vast swath of history that you're aware of. What would you put on a monolith, like in 2001, those menacing objects that are maybe like time capsules from an ancient civilization? What would you want to brag about or just to say that humanity had discovered through its course of existence for a future civilization to find maybe in a billion years? Well, I've already done the Latin inscription that sums up the human condition, so I can't reuse that. I mean, the key insight from my studies is that technology changes the nature of life,

but not human nature. And the fact that we can understand Thucydides and Shakespeare relatively easily tells us that human nature has changed staggeringly. little over 2,000 years. And that tells us the limits of technology. You can, you can change the way that we communicate. Clearly in the 18th century, you and I would have written letters to one another and read one another's publications. But we wouldn't really have interacted that differently. We're still engaged in a kind of subtle duel of minds. We're trying to work out

which of us is smarter. It's probably you. But that, that's the key point that people forget. We're not that plastic. Yeah, that is true. And I think we're underestimating. I always say we have to have a little bit of swagger, but you have to be humble at the same time. As Gandhi said, we should always keep in mind that dust could crush us and not that we always crush the dust. And it's interesting because Feynman, of course, answered that question. And you refer to Feynman in the middle of the book and the Challenger affair, but also for his kind of Mr. Smith goes to Washington, all shucks type of attitude. And he said it was the atomic hypothesis, that everything is made of atoms,

whirling around each other. And I feel like, although as a physicist, I have to support, you know, I'm duty-bound to support anything Feynman says or does, but at the same time, I still feel like that fails to grasp the sum total of what makes humanity as a whole so amazing, so precious, so fragile,

and so worthy of preservation. And yet, as I said, you know, when I hear, oh, it's going to change everything when we discover, actually, I'm like, you can go down to the Pacific ocean, a couple miles from where you or I are at different parts of the Pacific Ocean, scoop up life, and it doesn't change the fact that we're still, you know, polluting the earth and doing all sorts of devastation, let alone all the genocides of the last hundred years should disabuse people.

Okay, next question. As another quote from Sir Arthur, he said, when a distinguished but elderly scientists states that something is possible, they are almost certainly right. But when they say something is impossible. They are very probably wrong. I want to say, ask you, Neil, what have you changed your mind on? And you're not a scientist, but let's say, I'll change scientists as a scholar. What did you once think was impossible and are now wrong about, or what do you think that most people have wrong? Or just in general, what have you changed your mind about when have you been wrong? And most recently, if you know. But most do you think time travel is impossible, but it's not.

Because that's what historians do. I'm engaged in this activity at the moment. With an enormous imaginative effort, I travel every day back to the late 1960s and early 1970s. I'm writing a biography of Henry Kissinger. And I reenact in my head what was going on. What I can infer from the surviving documents was happening. And in that process of imaginative reconstitution,

I'm engaged in time travel. I didn't believe this was possible until my Ukrainian friend, Victor Pinjuk, said as he opened a bottle of, I think it was a 1991 or 92 Bordeaux, he said the only kind of time travel that's possible is this, that we can travel in time with wine. And that was the epiphany. I suddenly realized, well, of course, of course. Just as you can taste the wine that was made in 1991, you can in fact, reconstruct with your imaginative power what in fact was going on then and even further back. So time travel is possibly. It's what I do. I am a time lord. Talking science fiction. Doctor Who was my favorite character still is in all of television.

It's the only television series that is in fact worth watching. Forget Game of Thrones. It's history for morons. Doctor Who is a time lord and so am I. Very good. Well, yeah, I often have said it the other way around that time travel into the future is possible. It's called your children. And it could be your biological children. It could be your ideological children, of which you have many, many millions around the world. But the problem is that we're greedy because we want to take our bodies and travel to the future.

But no, you can teleport your values very deeply into the future. And maybe in a part two, we'll get a chance to explore more about fatherhood. I can't resist asking you, and maybe this is more appropriate for IAN, but you've suffered a fair share of controversy and, you know, there's an Italian expression. The higher you fly, the more people shoot at you or things like that. But I want to harken to George Orwell, not 1984, what you talk about in Doom, but animal farm where, you know, Benj, the pig, I forget the pig's name, but the pig says to Benjamin the donkey, you know, you're so resplendent, you've got the delightful tail. You're so lucky. I just have this short, curly, licking, useless thing. It doesn't do anything. And Benjamin the donkey says, yeah, the good Lord gave me the tail to swat away the flies, but I'd rather not have the flies and not need the tail. Tell me, you know, in your life,

you've gotten so much, you've had so much courage, you've done so many things. You also get a lot of criticism. Would you trade the tail for the lack of flies, or are you comfortable with this trade that you've made in your life to be at the cutting edge, to be courageous, but also to take your fair share of criticism. Well, to vary the analogy, you know you're over the target when the flack is incoming. And my goal in setting out to write history to understand the way the world works better was not to confirm what others already thought, but to challenge it. There would be no point writing books that simply replicated what previous authors had said. So by design, I set out to be disagreeable. And if there were no flies buzzing around me,

if there were no incoming flag, I would be failing. My old mentor Norman Stone once said to me, I wear my enemies like medals. And the thing about that is that's just the right way to think about it. So if any of my enemies are listening, buzz on, just buzz on flies. Well, no, this has been such a delight sharing your wit, your wisdom, this phenomenal book. I can't wait for your upcoming book, which you've mentioned is about Kisinger. Consume everything you do and keep up the wonderful work. And thank you so much for coming on the End of the Impossible podcast. Thank you, Brian.

Thanks to a scientist for humoring a mere historian. It's been a pleasure. Thank you. Well, that's a wrap on this. episode with Neil Ferguson about doom. Wasn't that fun and uplifting? I actually got a lot out of this episode, including really talking to somebody who balances a phenomenal output, a dozen books or so, documentary series about money, and his new project that he's working on, Henry Kissinger, controversial figure, but important historical sweep of humanity. So I hope you enjoyed it as

much as I did. Again, I only ask you to do really two things. Subscribe to my mailing list, Brian Keating.com slash list so I can keep you apprised of all the cool happenings and science and technology on the podcast and the YouTube channel, which is Dr. Brian Keating. And leave a rating. Our number of reviews are just so helpful and keep me in the forefront so I can continue to get great guests like Neil and other just wonderful intellects and keep this project going the Into the Impossible Project. It's now over two years we've been doing it. I couldn't do it without you. So thank you. And I implore you to have a magical rest of your week. Thanks everybody. All. Pay off your home, travel for life, drive a Ferrari. In celebration of the world premiere of the

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