Modern Wisdom - #675 - Niall Ferguson - The Shocking Lessons Of History Everyone Has Forgotten

Episode Date: September 2, 2023

Niall Ferguson is a historian, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution & Stanford University and an author. We often hear that history tends to repeat itself. But if you're a professional historian, just how accurate is that statement? What are the big lessons that we keep missing? And how doomed is our future if we don’t learn from the past? Expect to learn Niall's opinion on the quote “History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but It Often Rhymes”, why everyone should read more history, the biggest lessons most people keep ignoring, why the modern abandonment of formal education for smart people is actually a good thing, just how big of a threat China is to the West, what Niall thinks will happen in America in 2024 and much more... Sponsors: Get 20% discount & free shipping on your Lawnmower 4.0 at https://manscaped.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first box at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Get 15% discount on your first order from Collars&Co at https://collarsandco.com/ (use code: MW15)  Extra Stuff: Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Neil Ferguson, he's a historian, senior fellow at Stanford University, and an author. We often hear that history tends to repeat itself, but if you're a professional historian, just how accurate is that statement? What are the big lessons that we keep missing and how doomed is our future if we don't learn from the past? Expect to learn Neil's opinion on the quote, history doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes. Why everyone should read more history, the biggest lessons, most people keep ignoring, why the modern abandonment of formal education for smart people is actually a good thing.

Just how big of a threat China is to the West, what Neil thinks will happen in America in 2024. And much more. This episode is brought to you by Element. Stop having coffee first thing in the morning, your adenosine system that caffeine acts on isn't even active for the first 90 minutes of the day, but your adrenal system is and salt acts on your adrenal system. Element contains a science-backed electrolyte ratio of sodium potassium and magnesium with

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an extremely comfortable polo feel, there come a variety of styles and colours and design to look great by themselves. You can wear them to dress up or dress down, you can wear them under a blazer or with shorts at the beach. They are super versatile. And best of all, if you're a guy who goes to the gym, you are no longer paying a price in terms of how awful you feel throughout the day because your shirt is stiff. You too can basically be wearing not- it's the equivalent of wearing nothing. It's like being naked, but acceptable. Head to colours and Co and use the code MW15 for 15% off your first order. That's collarsandco.com and MW15, a checkout. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Neil Ferguson. Just how accurate do you think the quote is? History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes. It's doubly inaccurate, because first of all, it wasn't what Mark Twain said.

People usually attribute it to Mark Twain of Huckleberry Thin Fame, but actually Twain didn't say that. He said something much more complex about history being like a kaleidoscope. Remember those kaleidoscopes who used to have as kids and the pattern shifts, but there's a kind of regularity to it. That's what Twain actually said, not that it doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. And it's inaccurate also because history doesn't repeat itself in the way that we would like it to be very nice

if it had that kind of predictable pattern, but in truth, it doesn't. And you can try to look for patterns, but you'll frequently be disappointed. And that, I think, is one of the most important lessons that I've learned. History is not regular and cyclical and predictable. It's actually pretty noisy and volatile and unpredictable. And that's what makes my life interesting. I can't tell you with any certainty what's going to happen in the next seven days, never mind the next 10 years. Does that limit the lessons that we can learn from history then?

Given that as you've said, it's not as cyclical, it's not got this sort of recurrent theme. I think it means that we've got to learn rather different lessons from the ones we want to learn. We want cookie cutter lessons as in if a dictator is elected, there will be World War II. That kind of, we love those simple lessons, and we hate being told actually there were dictators who didn't start wars, they're not all Hitler. So we have to look for a different approach to learning lessons. Instead of wanting Kukikata lessons, we should realize that the most important lesson of history is that it is as unpredictable and non-linear as sport. It's not a story, the kind that you read to your kids with a beginning and middle and a happy ending. It's as unpredictable as a game,

but it's more open-ended. It's like a game of football that never stops, or a game of chess that never ends where the board is so large, that there never can be a conclusive winner. And if one recognizes that that's the lesson, that there's lots of contingency and chaos, and that even small decisions kind of massive consequences and big decisions can have no consequences. Learning

that about the historical process will lead us, I think, to make better decisions in the present, because it will get us away from what I would call bad lesson learning. So bad lesson learning takes the form of, just to give you one example. The United States deciding to invade Iraq and believing that it would be quite easy to establish democracy there because American troops would be welcomed in Baghdad like the

liberators of Paris, towards the end of World War II. That was a terrible, bad lesson of history. The right lesson was, it's extremely difficult if you topple a dictator to establish a stable government in the ruins of the dictator's regime. It can be done, but it's really expensive and it takes ages. So I think there are lessons to be learned from history, but we tend to try to learn simple ones, and that's where we go wrong. Is part of this due to the fact that you identified the neatness of a story, the beginning, the middle, the end, this nice closure, it's something that's sufficiently familiar, that it feels like an old pair of leather shoes. But it is the job of historians, a lot of popular modern historians,

to make stories compelling. They need to be able to captivate the reader. So is this problem in some part laid at the feet of you and your colleagues for making history so compelling and familiar to us in a narrative sense somehow. Well, if you're writing a history book, there is certainly an expectation that it should be ideally as readable as a novel. I'll give you an example.

Orlando Fiejie's wrote an excellent history of the Russian Revolution called a People's Tragedy. When you frame an historical episode as a tragedy, the reader kind of knows what to expect. It's not going to end well. There'll probably be bodies all over the stage at some point towards the end. So that's fair enough, and it's a good history of the Russian Revolution, one of the best in English. But it slightly lulls the reader into thinking that there could only really be one outcome, one sequence of events, that it was sort of bound to produce this dysfunctional totalitarian regime that was bound to last until about the late 1980s and then fall upon.

Oh, the inevitabilities baked into the framing. We know the story, and so we can't have read it with this sense that it's all destined to fail, but to fail over a prolonged 70 year period. And I think that's not right. I think there were times when the Russian Revolution could have been aborted, the Bolsheviks could have lost. There were times when the Russian Revolution could have led all the way to World War 3, think of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

There are lots of different ways this story could have ended. And I really love history that keeps that sense of the possible alternatives alive. I think it's better to read history as a series of forking paths, with a keen awareness of other futures that might have happened, rather than to think the minute you pick up the book, oh, there's going to be a revolution in Russia, the Romanovs are going to be overthrown, liberalism will fail, the Bolsheviks will seize power, things will go to bad to worse understand, to know the story, and then to read it as if it's a novel, I think, is actually a big pitfall. Much better to be aware that they are constant turning points, moments when it could have gone differently.

Stalin could have been arrested. He thought he was gonna be arrested at one point when Hitler invaded. This is an astonishing moment because Stalin had been completely certain he wouldn't. And ignored all the intelligence that he got saying the Germans are going to invade the Soviet Union. He ignored it all, said it was all propaganda, we would say fake news.

And so when the Germans actually did invade and the Red Army was in total disarray, not least because he purged or killed all its most competent officers, Stalin retreated to his dacha in a kind of state of panic, and wondered when his colleagues on the Politburo would turn up Alan retreated to his dacha in a kind of state of panic, and wondered when his colleagues on the Politburo would turn up and arrest him, as he'd arrested many of his colleagues in the past. They did turn up, and he kind of expected them

to put on the handcuffs. And instead they kind of said, please come back to Moscow, we can't actually function without being terrorised by you. So that was just one of the many moments in history of the Soviet Union that might have produced a completely different outcome, because I think if Stalin had been arrested, then it's hard to imagine that the Soviet Union wouldn't have lost World War II, that would have been a kind of political vacuum. That's a different 20th century right there.

And in my work, and I've been doing this now for more decades than I like to count, I constantly try to keep the reader aware that are these other paths that we could have gone down. Just as right now today, our lives, your life, my life, everybody who's listening's lives, they could go in a completely different direction because of some disaster that strikes. I get hit by a car crossing park avenue and everything's different from that moment on just because I wasn't paying attention when I

crossed the road. That's the historical reality that we have to keep reminding ourselves of. That's the historical reality that we have to keep reminding ourselves of. Why is it the case given that human nature has been relatively stable for all of recorded history to be stable, it's been stable for 120,000 years, and group dynamics seem sometimes to reliably be similar as well? Why is it the case then that we don't have this cyclical nature to history? Is it the disproportionate effect of chance? Is it the fact that, as you mentioned, a lot of very large things can occur to you to very small inputs? What is it that's causing this fractured, fragmented kaleidoscope rather than a nice smooth wheel?

Yeah. Well, you've said something very important, which is that there are certain constant features of human nature, and that is right, which is why we can understand theucidides. It's why we can understand Shakespeare. The human condition, particularly when it comes to love and death and power, that hasn't really changed much. Even although our lifespans are much longer than the people of Thucydides' time, and the nature of life has radically altered, not least because of technology. So there's something very important about that, which is why it's worth studying history. Because if Thucyd he was just unintelligible to us and Shakespeare made no sense,

well, we couldn't possibly learn a thing from the experience of the past, we like reading about aliens, but they're not aliens, they're people, that's a really important thing, which when you come to ponder, it's remarkable. How amazing is that? The people who were born thousands of years ago when life expectancy was in the 20s can express themselves in ways that we can understand in our

radically altered world. I never cease to be amazed by the fact that we have any connection at all with the people of the past. Now, there's a critical difference that I've just hinted at, which is that there is this technological innovation that really starts to accelerate from the late 18th century and makes the world different decade after decade. And in ways that are quite unpredictable, there's the exponential growth in living standards that comes from the industrial revolution. But there's other things also happening, the kind of unintended consequences of labor-saving technology.

So that's part of the reason that history doesn't repeat itself, because for example, once you have nuclear weapons, war can never be quite the same again. And so you can't really perfectly learn from 1914 what to do in 2024, because in 1914, although they could risk a massive conventional war, there wasn't the possibility of utter planetary destruction. But there's an even more important point than that that I want to make. And that is disasters. We may be kind of the same homo sapiens as the ancient Athenians, but we inhabit a planet where all kinds of random stuff happens and we can't control it. The disasters that

constantly punctuate history, massive volcanic eruptions, enormous earthquakes, cataclysmic floods, up plagues, all that kind of natural stuff, and then the man made calamities, as we like to call them, like wars. These things happen in a totally non-cyclical way. There's just no pattern to the incidence of large-scale organized violence. There's no pattern to the incidence of massive volcanic activity. And that's why there's no cycle of history, because while we may be trying in our unchanging human way to achieve power and love and all the rest of it, we're doing it in a chaotic environment

and we just don't know what's gonna happen next, but I'm absolutely sure that when you plot all the different shocks that nature and we ourselves inflict on the planet. There is no cycle there. There can't be. It just statistically isn't observable. I think one of the reasons that people like and are comforted by the idea that history repeat itself or echoes is it gives us a sense of control. It makes us believe that we

have a prediction engine, that if we read enough of the past, we can actually work out what's going to go on in the future. That's right. Political scientists and social scientists, especially economists, feel that if they can only model the historical process, then they will be able to project the future with some degree of certainty. And this is a constantly disappointing exercise, but it doesn't stop them trying.

And to see just how hard it is, let's look back on the predictions of just of the economy over the last 20 years or so. The bell prize winning economists have been wrong again and again about major economic shocks from the financial crisis that began in 2008 through to the pandemic. There's still an ongoing debate about what caused the big inflation surge of 2021-2022. There were eminent economists laden down with honors who were sure that there would be a transitory inflation episode in the wake of the pandemic and the only way they've been

able to stay true to that hypothesis is by changing the meaning of the word transitory over and over and over again. So you look back and you realize even now, the best paid economists in the world here in New York and Wall Street, the people with the most cutos at the International Monetary Fund, they do a terribly bad job, even of predicting what growth and inflation will be 12 months from now. The Federal Reserve employs some really smart people. They have PhDs. It's really hard to get a job there. It doesn't pay that well. But once you've been at the Fed, you get hired by the hedge funds and you make tons of money. So this is very competitive.

And they were so crazily wrong about where interest rates would be right now, two years ago. about where interest rates would be right now, two years ago, they were like 500 basis points off. They were wildly, wildly wrong. And that was just over a two-year time horizon. So, we would love history to be predictable so that we just apply our model and say, oh, here's the fiscal policy, here's the monetary policy. This will be the inflation rate, and this will be interest rate. We'd keep trying to do that. But then you go back and this is what we historians do. You go like, hey, let's see how those projections actually did. Let's take a look. And I'll give you a good example.

The Congressional Budget Office, Congressional Budget Office constantly tries to project what the federal debt will be in relation to US gross domestic product. And it does this exercise on a highly regular basis. And it's always wrong. And not just a bit wrong. It's gone wildly wrong. It's been, it's underestimated the direction of the debt consistently for 20 plus years now. And they'll keep publishing those projections. And they'll keep being discussed. And people will write op-eds about them and go on TV to talk about them. But the truth is and they'll keep being discussed and people will write op-eds about them and

go on TV to talk about them. The truth is they'll continue to be wrong because there's something fundamentally flawed in the model. The model is a simplification, but it is such a big simplification of reality of the historical process that it's basically always wrong. There's a concept called the bullshit asymmetry principle, which is it takes far less energy to produce bullshit than it does to refute it, therefore the world is filled with unrefuted bullshit.

Right. Especially on TV. Especially on TV. And it must be said probably on podcasts too, though. Correct. We are contributing to that asymmetry of bullshit right now. I'm trying my best to be anti-bullshit. It's like kind of anti-matter.

And the key to anti-bullshit is that it doesn't go viral. It just doesn't go. Anti-bullshit, it's just doomed not to go viral on Twitter. And so you carry on doing your best, but you will always be swamped by the bullshit. Yeah. So, have you got two examples of a scenario which, if we were using this sort of typical, cyclical, very nice and neat approach with history, you would have said, well, this happened in the past and this happened after the past. And they were broadly similar in terms of inputs,

but that the outcomes were unbelievably far apart. Is there an illustrative example that you can think of there? Well, a good source, for examples, is the history of empire because people always want to use the history of empire to think about American power. And so every decade there will be at least one book and usually more than one saying we are Rome. We are in the predicament of the Roman Empire and our decline and fall is inevitable because we are decadent and we like bread and we like circuses, except we have burgers and American football. But that's the thesis and it's always kind of reliable. If you're a publisher, you'll sell books with the We Are Rome hypothesis. And of course, history is basically the history of Empires. It is

mostly about Empires, even although we like to tell ourselves it's really about nation states. Nation states are basically quite a recent invention. Most of history, if you just mean all the recorded histories about empaths because the empaths do stuff and they have pretty good record keeping and that's that's most of what we study. So we have a pretty good sample size of imperial rise and zenith and decline and fall. Because empires do that. That's why most of the empires that ever existed don't exist today, including the British Empire and the French Empire

and all the other empires that existed when our grandparents were around. So it ought to be possible for you to thought to have some kind of general theory of imperial rise and fall. And that ought to be a cycle of history that we can work with. And then we could say, oh, okay, so the United States has reached its past the zenith and it's now in the kind of late phase. So we should expect to climb and fall to begin in 2028. The problem is that when you sit down with all the empires that ever existed,

the first thing you realize is there's this massive discrepancy in duration, that the Nazi Empire barely made it past a decade. And in fact, if you only start counting from the reoccupation of the Rhineland, it's not even that. And the Roman Empire is like a thousand years. So Gibbons' great decline in fall of the Roman Empire covers a millennium. So you know that, I mean, sure, the empires rise and they have a good, good kind of period of dominance and then they decline and fall.

But is it going to happen in a few years or is it going to take a few centuries? There's no way of knowing. And that's why the temptation to draw analogies with past empires is quite hazardous. It's always possible to find a case and say, oh, you see, here we are, we're just about where Britain was in pick a decade. I've done this myself. I did this for the economist just before the US abandoned Afghanistan. I wrote a piece of the economist saying, the US has beginning to look at Britain between the wars, kind of too much debt, kind of overextended. And I used that

analogy to make the argument that the US is getting to be where Britain was in the mid 20th century, over stretch. It's not a new argument. And as part of my anti-Bulshut mission, I would say it's only one of a dozen analogies I could have used, and I could equally well have said that the United States is where the British Empire was in the 1820s. And in the 1820s Britain was going through a rough patch, had beaten Napoleon, had a ton of debt, all kinds of social problems, lots of deep division, polarization. I could have written a piece saying that's where the US is today. polarization, I could have written a piece saying that's where the US is today. And the good news is that after Britain came out of the 1820s, it expanded its empire over the next 100 years,

almost uninterruptedly, and ruled the world. There's no way of knowing which is the right analogy. You just pick the one that suits your journalistic purpose and off you go. But if I'm being absolutely brutally honest, there's no real way to be sure which analogy is the right one. That's the terrible truth. We don't know.

Given that, what are the lessons that people should take from history? It sounds like a very damning indictment of reading history as a tool for understanding really anything except the stuff that's already happened. You know, are there, is there anything that you can take from this that is actually instructive for where you live now? Oh, yes, absolutely. And that's what motivates me. That's why I get out of bed in the morning,

because history is so much better at helping you think about the future than those models that I told you about earlier, which predictably get it wrong. What does history enable you to do? It enables you to do what I just did to realize that the sample size of analogies is quite large. You know, what's the right analogy for the situation of Britain today? Don't just take the first, most convenient one that occurs to you, bear in mind that

there actually are quite a lot of countries that had empires at one time and then couldn't afford them anymore and had to get rid of them and then had to readjust to that experience of decolonization and then remake themselves as nation-states. And you know, the range goes from the Netherlands to Russia and you've got to sort of sit down and think, well, let's look at all the different countries that went through this. Which one is the better fit? Is it likely that Britain's is going to end up kind of like the Netherlands? I think it is. I think Britain in many ways is already quite like the Netherlands. It's just that we haven't fully come to terms with that loss of status. It's not so likely, I think, that Britain would end up like Russia desperately

trying to get its imperial groove back even after it's really long gone and all that's left is this kind of stockpile of rusting weapons. So I think the lesson that I would take, the reason that I call it applied history, is that you've got to be kind of systematic. You're really looking for analogies, and you've got to make sure that you kind of comprehensive, that you try to find them all before jumping to the conclusion that you're tempted by. And your mindset should be not, oh please confirm me in my original prejudice. My mindset is always, please get rid of my original prejudice and teach me something new and interesting. I'll give you another example. People have been running around with their hair on fire since 2015, 2016, when Donald Trump suddenly burst onto the scene as a credible presidential candidate

as opposed to a joke figure. And it's been enormously difficult for liberal intellectuals, academics, and journalists to make sense of the fact that this man got to be president and could be president again. So what's the right analogy? A lot of people lazily out of prejudice said, oh, he's a fascist, he's Mussolini, or he's Hitler. And these were really bad analogies, because you don't need to go to into war Europe to find good analogies to understand all Trump. There's a populist tradition in the United States that goes back to the 19th century. There have been quite a few characters in American history like him with his ideas and his style.

Who like it? Well, people you've never heard of, there was a guy named Dennis Kirini who led something called the California Workers Party in the late 19th century, and Kirini's position was that we had to close the border and keep out building up the immigrants. He actually had build the wall as a slogan. There's a cartoon showing a wall being built across San Francisco,

Harba. He was anti-Chinese. That was a big part of Cierney's appeal. He was anti-elitist. He was really somebody who kind of relished being a common man without any pretensions. somebody who kind of relished being a common man without any pretensions. And all the policies that Keirney stood for, including restriction of immigration and China bashing, I mean, that has all been in American politics before, but it's been forgotten. Of course, Keirney never got to be president. No populist until Trump has succeeded in getting to be president, but we've had populists before offering that combination of immigration restriction and elite bashing. And you didn't need to look for analogies in interwar Europe.

The United States is nothing like interwar Europe. I mean, I've studied interwar Europe. If I had a time machine and you and I got into it, and we went off to Italy in the 1920s or Germany in the 1930s about a day there. But like this is totally different. This is like this is crazy. Every other person is in a uniform. I mean, the thing about Donald Trump's America is that you hardly saw a nobody in a uniform except occasionally there'd be somebody coming back from Afghanistan and in airport. But this is the thing that I'm

constantly struck by. If you study history rigorously, you're constantly struck by how unlike the mid-20th century our time is. And yet people seem only to know about the mid-20th century. It's sometimes as if the only history that anybody knows is the history of reading my mind. I've got in front of me. Godwin's Law, as an online discussion grows, the probability of a comparison to Nazis are Hitler approaches 100%. Many people are quick to compare things to Nazi Germany because it's the only history they think they know.

The history channel has a lot to answer for. So does GCSE and A level history and but it's not only in the UK, I mean there is this extraordinary overemphasis on the mid-20th century as if that's the only history we should really bother knowing about. I mean I studied part part of my career I spent studying that period but But actually think that the 17th century is much more illuminating if we want to understand our time, because in the 16th and 17th century, they had to contend with a new communication technology,

the printing press, and it completely changed everything. It suddenly drastically lured the barrier to entry. You could get your thoughts out on paper much more easily than on an illuminated manuscript. We are living through a comparable period in which the public sphere is completely be transformed by technology. And yet, nobody bothers studying the 17th century outside a few Oxford and Cambridge colleges. The 17th century was a time when mercenaries were enormously powerful. There was a guy

named Valensstein who was the pregozion of the Holy Roman Empire. We can learn a lot from that period. And it's much more interesting and illuminating than trying to fit everything into Germany in 1933, which is, I'm afraid, what we now do, as you say, almost in every online discussion. What was the response like when the print and press became widely available? What did it change? What do people not realize about what it changed and how did governments and people that wanted to restrict access and stuff respond?

Well, as the printing press spread through Europe from the late 15th century into the 16th century, it was a highly decentralized technology. You really had no central control. Printing presses were springing up all over Germany and especially northern Europe. And initially, religious reformers like Martin Luther said, oh great, now we can get the truth about the church and about Christian doctrine out and more effectively explain what's wrong with today's Roman Catholic church. And that was certainly true. That message spread like wildfire in Northern Europe and very quickly, Luther was able to convince a great many people, not only in Germany, but all the way across the channel in England that something had to

change. And so that part was right. But what Luther didn't anticipate was that once you can print the Bible and print criticism to the Roman Catholic Church, you can print anything. And pretty quickly, people were printing anything. There's one moment when, remember where it was now, there's a tone inside Germany where they say, can we print a translation of the Quran. And Luther goes, um, yeah, I guess, I guess so, because if we print it then, people will see how false it is. But before long, there are people publishing tracts about how to identify witches. You know, how to spot a witch.

There's a whole best-selling book, designed to help you identify the Wichissou liver monsters. And these tracks about witchcraft lead to the so-called witch craze, a crazy persecution wave directed at perfectly innocent people, mostly women, that led to mass executions in all kinds of parts of Europe and beyond Europe and in the American colonies. So the unintended consequence of the printing press was that you not only disseminated serious discussion of how to reform the Roman Catholic Church, you also disseminated all kinds of crazy stuff, like there are witches amongst us, and we need to kill them.

So I think that's a really important lesson. Like the internet, the printing press, allowed crazy stuff to go viral, because given the choice between reading about constipation and transubstantiation, or witches, yeah, you can see why a lot of people would say, can I have the book about witches? Because I'm not that interested in transubstantiation,

but witches. So I think that's one very obvious way in which the printing press had unintended consequences. You have 130 years of religious warfare after the printing press starts being used to disseminate religious ideas. Because it's not long before the Catholics are publishing their tracks saying that Luther's a heretic and he too should be killed. So yeah, I mean, there was a pretty obvious lesson to be learnt about the internet from the printing press, but if you went to Silicon Valley as I did

in 20, when did I move 2016, what really amazed me was the utter optimism that prevailed everywhere. The internet was awesome and all its consequences would be awesome and if everybody was connected that would be awesome. And I mean I'm like but there could be some downsides to connecting everybody. Have you considered that? And I'm like why? But if you have an entire community of people who don't know any history at all, and that would never cross their minds, which was why people were surprised and shocked when crazy stuff started to go viral on social media.

Spectral evidence was one of the most interesting things I learned about when looking at the witch trials that They were using this spectral evidence which was essentially Like hysterical eyewitness testimony Done done to a poltergeist in the room that said yes. She is actually a witch and these things had been going on for month maybe even years and then they had been going on for maybe even years. And then they got in contact somehow with the head court, whatever the equivalent was there, the biggest magistrate in America. And they said, we've been doing a lot of these cases based on spectral evidence. That's all right, isn't it? That's okay. Sorry, what the fuck is this? Spectral evidence. So yeah, that was one thing that came to mind.

Another was, was it Thomas Blackmore, Thomas Blackburn, the first person to translate the original Bible from Latin into the common language in the UK, and he was very quickly persecuted and killed. And one of the reasons for that was that if you no longer need to have the priest as your conduit between yourself and God, if you have a personal relationship, there is a massive loss of control. The huge loss of control, because they are no longer the vector about the reformation was the idea that people should be able to read scripture themselves in a language that they understood rather than having it read to them in Latin. That was a revolutionary idea. And I think that the lesson is that one should not expect that kind of radical change in the boundaries of knowledge

to have only good consequences. Mass literacy had many good consequences. I'm sure, unquestionably, that the benefits exceeded the costs of mass literacy. We know they did because in parts of Europe where the reformation succeeded and literacy rates went up, economic growth was much higher over the succeeding 300 years. So net benefits were great, but there were costs too,

to suddenly going from a basically illiterate society to a literate one. And I think in our thinking about the internet, and this should also inform our understanding of artificial intelligence, we need to be more aware of the likely costs of drastic changes in the structure of the public sphere. What other areas of history do you wish that we could, if we take this entire pie of people's history knowledge, 99.5% of which is taken up with Nazi Germany, other than 16th, 17th century and freedom of access to information and propagation

of information, what are the other big chunks that you wish that more people knew about? Well, the interesting thing is that even if you had a kind of ideal curriculum at school or university, it would still are met a huge percentage of human history because most of the people in history led unrecorded lives in non-literate agricultural societies. And so, with the best will in the world, it's really hard to recapture the human past. We're inevitably going to capture this really unrepresentative sample, which over-represents the literate and the urban. I think if I were designing a curriculum for my 11-year-old son, I would attempt to make it much broader in its chronological and geographical scope than is available

in any school today. I would rather that he knew a little bit about everything, than that he knew everything about the rise of Hitler. Thomas, who is 11, came across a terrific video online, which I think Bill Wurtz did, which is a complete history of the world as a kind of which is a complete history of the world as a kind of crazy musical animation. It's really good. It's better than you've all know a Harari because it's funny. And I wish I could remember the exact URL I would give it to you all. But I'm sure if you Google kind of Bill Wirt's Total History of the World, you'll get something. And what I love about that video is it just does everything, including the Phoenicians, the Central Asian Carnates.

It kind of does its best to give you a pretty comprehensive overview. And when you do it that way, you realize that most history is, as I said earlier, it's going to empires, but no kinds of strange places. I mean, let's not pretend it was only people in Western Europe who did empire, they were really late to the empire game. Everybody else would be doing empires for centuries, including Africans, including the incursion the Aztecs. Empire is actually the standard form of

historical polity, and it's everywhere. And that's what I would love to be able to do. My ideal history course is just called Empires, it's just like all the Empires, it's trying to understand them all. Let's realize they're basically everywhere. They mostly do slavery to varying extents. They have very varied durations,

they have different business models, but that's kind of what history is. And there should be some much better grand unified theory of empire than we have. I was in Santa Fe a couple of weeks ago at the Santa Fe Institute hanging out with my favorite physicist, Jeffrey West, who's a brilliant guy. He did a book called Scale that everybody should read. And we have this kind of pipe dream that will join forces and kind of do empires sort of for physicists. And then all of history will be intelligible. Maybe not in a Billworks video, but in a course

that will give you a sense of just the kind of weird biodiversity of history, it's kind of strange, it's a strange menagerie, this zoo full of empires, some of them are giant like elephants, some of that tiny like mice, and that's kind of a Jeffrey West's take on the natural world. I think it probably applies to the historical world too. So watch this space, that's my next big project. It's got me thinking about this stat, I learned 60% of Americans don't own a passport. And when you live on a inner country, which is essentially a continent and has, you know, 50 little countries all attached that will allow you to use your currency and speak your language and go and work there if you want to. Then I guess a bit of a justification is why would you need to. But the lack of worldliness, I do think contributes to myopia in America. And I wonder whether there's

almost like a temporal myopia as well that is it's something similar. If you only know the last hundred years of history and of that last hundred years, you really only know ten years between like 1935 and 1945, you end up trying to retrofit things that are happening now to a very small number of examples and perhaps broadening that level of education would add a little bit of ballast to stabilizer to some of the conversations we're having. Imagine if there were time machines like air buses and you could go to the airport and just fly to the destination in the past of your choice. The problem with tourism is that it often gives people the impression that they know more about the world than they do. So there are very many Americans who do have passports and when they travel do have passports and when they travel,

they go to Scotland to play golf, and then they go to Paris to have fancy meals or do shopping and then they'd probably go to Florence. And then they come back with an enormous sense of their own knowledge of Europe. But if all you know about Scotland is golf, you should watch the movie Train Spotting five times as a kind of corrective. I think it might be the same with time travel. Like everybody would be like, let's go to 1933. Oh yes, let's go to 1933 and see Hitler come to power again. it'll kind of give us a terrible feeling of nausea and then

we'll come home or where else would people want to go if they were time travelers? It's like, let's go back to the swinging 20s and get drunk with Scott Fitzgerald. There'll be a bunch of destinations that will be really popular. And I'd be that one guy on the little plane going to the piece of West failure in 1648. It's like, I should go to the piece of West failure in 1648 and find out how they stop the 30 years of work because we need something like that soon in the world today. But yeah, I mean, time machines, I think a lot about time machines because we don't have them. We'll never have them, I suspect.

And that means the only kind of time travel we can do is basically by reading history, or we can go and see movies which are actually worse because you know, you can go and see Oppenheimer, but you'd be better off reading the book if you really want to understand what happened. But yeah, we can sort of do time travel with books and movies, but I suspect it's a bit like tourism.

We're all go to the same places and come back with an exaggerated sense of our own knowledge. Yeah, I had this conversation the other day with a friend who was telling me about Afghanistan in Afghanistan in the sort of maybe like 3, 4, 500 AD and that it was a bastion of maybe physics and mathematics and a few other places and we were discussing this sort of witness with history that we kind of know unless we do invent a time machine, we know all of the things that we're going to know about history. There are maybe some texts somewhere that are hidden, there are maybe some archaeological digs that can be done. There are inferences that can be drawn, but when we're looking at, you know, original source material, we've captured at least a large portion, probably, of what we're going to be able to capture.

So it's really, it's really like going over a crime scene with very limited evidence and it got me thinking about just how different our world would be if the Library of Alexandria hadn't been burned. If we hadn't lost a load of this stuff to some Islamic crusades against some heretical knowledge as well. Or how different it would be if all of the ancient learning had been lost. I mean, that's a counterfactual that I think a lot about because if all of the ancient Athenian and Roman texts had been lost, there would have been no Renaissance. And it's hard to imagine quite how what we think of as Western civilization would have been possible. Or maybe we'd have had all those ideas all over again.

I'll give you a good example as a counterpoint to Afghanistan as a place that wasn't a basket case. Scotland, if you had gone there in the 17th century, would have been just like Afghanistan today, because in Scotland in the 17th century, it's kind of warring mountains, tribes, religious fanatics, extreme carvenists control the capital, Edinburgh. Their concert is incredibly violent. One of the most mind-blowingly high homicide rates, much higher than any American city today in ex-Chicago looked like the Garden of Eden. And so 17th century Scotland looks like Afghanistan. And then, and it's a very mysterious

process, but in the space of a few decades, you go from the 1745 Jacobite rising civil war, carnage to the Enlightenment, to Scotland being one of the great centres of intellectual innovation of the late 18th century. And Walter Scott writes a great novel, perhaps the greatest historical novel, Waverly, really addressing this question, how on earth does Scotland go from being Afghanistan to being affords in this really short space of time? And I still think that's one of the most interesting questions, because if it's possible to stopping Afghanistan can actually become a center of, not only intellectual innovation,

but economic dynamism, the Adam Smith Scotland. When the Adam Smith Scotland is just a couple of decades after the Battle of Colombo. That's to me one of the most amazing examples in history of total non-linearity, total discontinuity, radical upgrade from civil war to enlightenment. If it's possible in 17th century, Scotland, 18th century, Scotland, then it should be possible in 21st century Afghanistan.

What are your predictions for the next five to ten years in terms of what we're going to see popular politics in America? I know I've heard you say not super long ago that you felt that a lean toward conservatism seems not unlikely. But we've got different forces and different defense mechanisms on both sides for something like Trump or even anything that looks remotely like him. So what's your, what, lick your finger, put it in the air, what are you tasting on the wind? Well, I think, let me try and apply my methodology of, of rigor here rather than just taking the first analogy off the shelf. I think that the Biden presidency is

can't unlikely to be a two-term presidency. In the same way that Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter and George Bush Sr. could only be one-term presidents, I feel Joe Biden's a one-term president. Now, in that case, and by the way, the economics and the polling all would substantiate the fact that he's not in a strong position to get reelected. That means the Republican nominee is quite likely to win.

But the Republican nominee right now is quite likely to be Donald Trump. He's far ahead of the competition, Ronda Santas isn't really getting much traction. And so we are in the amazing situation that a man who has just been indicted of trying to overturn the last election. And that's just one of the many criminal charges

he faces right now, could be re-elected. And it's not the, it would be the second time in American history that somebody had two non-consecretive terms. Grover Cleveland did it in the late 19th century. I think the probability of Trump coming back is much higher than most people realize right now. Because just as in 2015, people struggled to imagine Trump being present the first time, they struggle again with the kind of cognitive barriers to giving that a high probability. So I'm kind of struggling to see what stops him now, unless the Democrats panic and persuade Biden not to run early next year and parachute in Gavin Newsom. I think if they do that, Trump won't win because Americans

will see an old guy and a young guy, a young kind of good-looking guy, though I'm not sure how good-looking, but they're kind of going to choose the young guy, regardless of the fact that he's left California a kind of wasteland. So I think if Biden's the nominee all the way through, Trump could win. And then we will have an extraordinary time in American history, because the left will refuse to acknowledge that result, just as much as Trump

refused to acknowledge his defeat. And the republic will become very politically unstable under those circumstances. Just to come back to my Roman point, it's not really the Roman Empire that the United States is like. It's the Roman Republic that it's like. And Republican institutions historically have not been fantastically long lived.

Most republics in history have not been long lived. It's only relatively recently that we had long lived republics and any political theorists from the ancient world or the Renaissance or the Enlightenment would have said well republics 10 not to last because at some point they either choose tyranny or they descend into Corruption and a demagogue comes to power. All of the processes that we see at the moment at work would not surprise traditional political theorist. So I think the Republic has more to worry about than if you like than the Empire. And you

know if Trump is re-elected, I shall be quite glad to be sitting safely in England watching it from a distance. I'm not sure I'd want to be here if that happened. Why? I think that could get very nasty. I could get very nasty. I'm kinetic nasty. Yeah, because I mean, the left will take to the streets of Donald Trump is re-elected

They will become the election deniers at that point and I think the Trump Second Trump administration will be ruthlessly well prepared for power in a way that the first Trump administration wasn't so Yeah, that's my kind of that's my crystal ball It's interesting. I definitely think there is a case of tit for tat, an ever escalating tit for tat, rebuttal. The same as anybody that's had a little bit of an argument with their partner and one evening you came home late and the next morning there was a nasty note, red saying, hope you had a good night, like,

and there's no milk in the fridge, and then you have to sleep in the spare room for a couple of days or whatever. And then the next time that your partner does that, you remember that, you keep it in the back of your mind, and you think, oh, maybe I wasn't so bothered about this, or maybe this wouldn't have triggered in my mind, but I'm actually, they did this to me,

so I'm gonna do it to them, so I'm gonna stick it to them. And I do feel like one of the echo, sort of cyclical, replicating trends that was created with the pushback that Trump gave to the election result three years ago is, okay, all right, well, that's now on the table. That is a discussion, which is on the table, election to now. And as soon as anybody says, how can you be doing this, people from the left, were you not the ones that were saying that this should have been accepted and the left will say, well, were you not the ones

that said that this could have never happened? How are you? Do you not storm the capital? Did you not deny the, and it's this like super juvenile, you hit me last type game. And yeah, I do worry about what doorways that opens in future. Well, that's why monoke is a turn out to be more stable than republics because you have a personification of of the state that is above partisan politics. But in a republic, it's all or nothing by partisan conflict. And I think if one looks back at the 19th century, American politics

was a contact sport, then it century, American politics was a contact sport, then it's gone back to being a contact sport after a period when there was a certain gentlemanly bipartisanship, at least for periods of the 20th century. And that's gone. And we're now back into the kind of contact sport that Dickens writes about when he visits the United States. So the tip for that thing is important. And from a Republican vantage point, Democrats didn't expect, except the legitimacy of Trump's victory in 2016. Although that's often forgotten, there was a great wave of protest against Trump Trump in his first year, including if you remember, the women's march. The great, I think, critical moment has arrived when many Americans think that a double standard

has been applied, that Trump was targeted by the justice system and the Biden's were given treatment that was quite different. And that's a really important shift that's happening in American politics right now. Joe Biden is inextribly losing his Amtrak Joe regular guy image because of his son and his involvement with his son's business dealings. And the more that happens, the more people will say, well, there's nothing really to choose between them. You can say what you like about Donald Trump, but they're all corrupt, they're all crooked. And that's going to be important, I think, in the final phase of the election next year, when it will be decided by independent voters and swing voters in a small number of states and indeed in a small number of counties. Because that's how machine politics works. Most states and most counties are already predictable,

but a small number are not. And I think those arguments about double standards will count for a lot. Much more than arguments about whether the 2020 election was stolen, it's the sense that a double standard has been applied that will help Trump. Now, as I said, concluding reflection, history's not really capable of giving you a crystal ball. It doesn't allow you to say with any real confidence who win the next election, even though it's less than 18 months away. But if you start playing

the game of pattern recognition, you can start to see why Biden is a weak candidate, why if he continues to seek reelection, he could be a one-term president, and why under those circumstances, Donald Trump, despite all that happened on January of the 6th,, 2021 could get reelected. That's all I'm saying. Neil Ferguson, ladies and gentlemen, I really, really love your energy. I love your insight and feeling very ballasted and stabilized now after learning about some stuff that I didn't from history. What are you working on next? What should people expect from you and how can they keep up to date with those things? Volume two of my biography of Henry Kissinger, I'm working on that every waking hour except when I'm doing podcasts for you. Hey, good. And that will be the next book that I publish while you're

waiting for that. You can buy Doom, the politics of catastrophe, which was the book that I published most recently, a couple of years ago now, and regular readers of my column, which appears for Bloomberg opinion, can hear my thoughts every two weeks when I drop a column there. Neil, I appreciate you very much. Thank you. Cheers, Chris.