YouSaid · the spoken record

Niall Ferguson

lines on the record: 166
first: 2021-11-08
most recent: 2021-11-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Read their words, tried to reconstitute their experience to come back and understand our own time better. That's what we should really be doing. But academic history's gone completely haywire, and it does almost the exact opposite of what I think it should do.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great philosopher of history, R.G. Collingwood. Said in his autobiography, which was published in 1939, that the purpose of history was to reconstitute past thought from whatever surviving remnants there were, and then to juxtapose it with our own predicament, and that's that juxtaposition of the past experience with present experience that is so important, we don't do that well. And indeed, we've flipped it so that academic historians now think their mission is to travel back to the past with the value system of 2021 and castigate the dead for their racism and sexism and transphobia and whatnot. That's exactly wrong. Our mission is to go back and try to understand what it was like to live in the 18th century, not to go back and condescend to the people of the past. And once we've had a better understanding, once we've seen into their lives,”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. Not only studying them, but then acting on them. For me, the biggest problem is how do we apply history more effectively? It seems as if our institutions, including government, are very, very bad at applying history. Lessons of history are learnt poorly, if at all, analogies are drawn crudely, often the wrong inferences are drawn. One of the big intellectual challenges for me is how to make history more useful, and this was the kind of thing that professors used to hate, but really practically useful so that policymakers and citizens can think about the decisions that they face with a more historically informed body of knowledge, whether it's a pandemic, the challenge of climate change, what to do about Taiwan. I can't think of a better set of things to know before you make decisions about those things. That history has to offer.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Civilizations are thin film, and it can be destroyed remarkably easily. And to preserve civilization is a tremendous responsibility that we have. It's a huge responsibility. And we must not destroy ourselves, whether it's in the name of wokism or the pursuit of the metaverse. Preserving civilization and making it available not just to our kids, but to people we'll never know generations ahead. That's the meaning”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To the uncivilized world. There's a fantastic book that I'm going to misremember, Milos the Captive Soul, the captive mind rather, which has a fantastic passage. He was a Polish intellectual who says, Americans can never imagine what it's like for civilization to be completely destroyed as it was in Poland at the end of World War II, to have no rule of law, to have no security of even person, never mind property rights. They can't imagine what that's like and what it will lead you to do. So, one reason for teaching history is to remind the lucky generation Z members of California that”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Twenty years because there are things that I really care about. That I want future generations to have access to. And so the meaning of life I do regard as being intergenerational transfer of wisdom. Ultimately, the species will go extinct at some point. Even if we do colonize Mars, one senses that physics will catch up with this particular organism. But it's in the pretty far distant future. And so the meaning of life is to make sure that for as long as there are human beings, they are able to live the kind of fulfilled lives ethically fulfilled, intellectually fulfilled, emotionally fulfilled lives, that civilization has made possible. It would be easy for us to revert”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But what Edmund Burke said is true. The real social contract is between the generations, between the dead, the living and the unborn. And the meaning of life is, for me, at least, to live in a way that honors the dead, seeks to learn from their accumulated wisdom because they do still outnumber us. They outnumber the living by quite a significant margin. And then to be mindful of the unborn and are responsibility to them writing books is a way of communicating with the unborn. It may or may not succeed, it probably won't succeed if my books are never assigned by work professors in the future. So what we have to do is more than just write books and record podcasts. There have to be institutions. I'm 57 now. I realized recently that succession planning had to be the main focus of the next...”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I wasn't taught to feel negative about that. And if anything, it was a frivolous insight that the whole thing was a kind of joke. And I think that atheism isn't really a basis for ordering a society, but it's been all right for me. I don't have a kind of sense of a missing religious faith. For me However, there's clearly some embedded Christian ethics in the way my parents lived. And so we were kind of atheist Calvinists who had kind of deposed God but carried on behaving as if we were members of the elect in a moral universe. So that's kind of... The state of mind that I was left in. And I think that... We aren't really around long enough to claim that our individual lives have meaning.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was brought up by a physicist and a physician. Were more or less committed atheists who had left the Church of Scotland. As a protest against sectarianism in Glasgow. And so my sister and I were told from an early age life was a cosmic accident. And that was it. There was no great meaning to it. And I can't really get past that.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“some random allocation of talent. You kind of figure out what it is that you're relatively good at and you try to do that well. I think my father encouraged me to think that way. And you don't mind about being average at the other stuff. The kind of sick thing is to try to be brilliant to everything. I hate those people. You should really not worry too much if you're just an average double bass player, which I am, or kind of average skier, which I definitely am. Doing those things okay is part of leading a rich and fulfilling life. I was not a good actor, but I got a lot out of acting as an undergraduate. Turned out three years of experimentation at Oxford that I was, broadly speaking, better at writing history essays than my peers, and that was my edge. That was my comparative advantage. And so I've just tried to make a living from that.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, we are products of evolution and our adaptation to a technological world is a very imperfect one. So hence the kind of masochistic urge to run. I like outdoor exercise. I don't really like gyms. So I'll go for long punishing runs in woodland, hike up hills. I like swimming in lakes and in the sea because there just has to be that physical activity in order to do the good mental work. And so... All about trying to do the best work That's my sense that we have.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, yeah, teaching young people how to manage these storms, you know, that's part of the job and we're really not allowed to do that.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's come back to our earlier conversation about universities. Part of what happens at university is that adolescents have to overcome all the inner demons. And these include deep insecurity about one's appearance, about one's intellect, and then madly raging hormones that cause you to behave like a complete fool with the people to whom you're sexually attracted. All of this is going on in the university. How can it be a safe space? It's a completely dangerous space.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, if you're going to be addicted to anything, be addicted to work. I mean, we're all addictive, but. The thing about workhorism is that it is the most productive addiction. And rather that than drugs or booze. So I'm always trying to channel my anxieties into work. I learned that at a relatively early age. It's a sort of massively productive way of coping with the inner demons. And again, we should teach kids that because...”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Isold as Lieber's toad that Wagner had got the closest to sex that anybody had ever got in music, or perhaps to love. I'm lucky that I love my wife and that we were... The time we met Smart enough to understand that lovers are a drug that you have to kind of take in certain careful ways and that it works best in the context of a stable family. That's the key thing that one has to sort of take the drug and then submit to the conventions of marriage and family life. I think in that respect, I'm a kind of tamed romantic.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Love is This was a great Roxy music line. That Brian Ferry wrote. And love is the most powerful and dangerous of all the drugs. Driving force that overrides our reason. And of course, it is the It is the primal urge. What a civilized society has to do is to prevent that drug, that primal force from. Creating mayhem, so there have to be rules like monogamy and rituals like marriage that reign love in and make the addict, at least more or less under control. And I think that's part of why I'm a romantic. Rather than Steve Pinker, enlightenment rationalist, because the romantics realize that love was the drug. It's like The difference in sensibility between Handel and Wagner And I had a Wagnerian phase when I was an undergraduate. I still remember thinking that in”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The highly educated person is constantly struck by illusion. Everything is an illusion to something that one has read. And that is the simulation. That's what... The real metaverse is the imaginary world that we enter when we read, empathize, and then recognize in our daily lives some scrap of the shared experience that literature gives us.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Temperamentally, a kind of Togenyev person, oddly enough. I think if you haven't read those novelists, I mean, you can't really be a complete human being if you haven't read The Brothers Karamatsov. You're not really grown up. And so I think in many ways those are the greatest novels. Raskolnikov's, remember Raskolnikov's nightmare at the end of crime and punishment in which he imagines in his dream a world in which a terrible virus spreads. Do you remember this? And this virus has the effect of making every individual think that what he believes is right. And in this self-righteousness, people fall on one another and commit appalling violence. That's Raskolnikov's nightmare. And it's a prophecy. It's a terrible prophecy of Russia's future.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I don't read Russian. But I was entirely obsessed with Russian literature as a schoolboy. I read my way through Dostevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekhov. I think... Of all of those writers, Tolstoy had the biggest impact because at the end of war and peace, there's this great essay on historical determinism, which I think was the reason I became a historian. But I'm really.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's the simulation and you decide, I think as a sentient being how far to, in your own life, reenact these more profound experiences that others have written down. One of my earliest literary simulations was to reenact Jack Kerouac's tripping on the road when I was 17, culminating and getting very wasted in the hanging gardens of Zochimilco, not to be missed. It hit me just as I was reading Proust that that's really how to live. Juxtaposing one's own experience against the more refined experiences of the great writers. So it gives me hope that my children do that a bit. Do you include the”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I don't claim much of the credit for that. I've done my best. But I think it's deeply encouraging that they found their way to the things that I think are indispensable for a happy life, a fulfilled life. Nobody I think can be truly fulfilled. They're cut off from the great body of Western literature, for example. I've thought a lot about Elon's argument that we might be in a simulation. No no, there is a simulation, it's cold literature, and we just have to decide whether or not to enter it. I'm currently in the midst of the later stages of Proust's great a la recherche du temper du. And Proust's observation of human relationships is perhaps more meticulous than that of any other writer. And it's impossible not to find yourself identifying with Marcel and his obsessive, jealous relationships, particularly with Albertine.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That culture and civilization that I hold dear, I don't want to live in the metaverse, as Mark Zuckerberg imagines it. To me, that's a kind of ghastly hell I think Western civilization is the best civilization and I think that almost all the truths about the human condition can be found in Western literature, art and music. And I think also that the civilization that produced the scientific revolution has produced the great problem solving tool that eluded the other civilizations that never really cracked science. And what gives me hope is that despite all the temptations and distractions that their generation Had to contend with my children and their different ways have found their way to literature and to art and to music and they are civilized.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Recording studio and talk about America, it's very much like a joke. And Elon's a South African and so on and Tiel is a German. And we're extraordinarily fortunate that the natives let us come and play and play it in a way that we could not in our countries of birth. And as long as the United States continues to exploit that superpower, that it is the talent magnet, then it should out-innovate the totalitarian competition every time. So that's one reason for being an optimist. Another reason, and it's quite a historical reason, as you would expect from me. Another reason that I'm optimistic is that my kids Give me a great deal of hope they range in age from twenty seven down to four. But each of them, in their different way, seems to be finding a way through this crazy time of ours without losing contact with”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A couple of things First of all The United States has a very unique operating system. which was very well designed by the founders who'd thought a lot about history and realized it would take quite a novel design to prevent the republic going the way of all republics because republics tend to end up as tyrannies for reasons that were well established by the time of the Renaissance and it gives me hope that this design has worked very well and with student enormous stress test in the last year. I became an American in twenty eighteen and I think one of the most important features of this operating system is that it is the magnet for talent. We Part of the immigration story. In a darkened room with funny accents.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's to me, that has to do with metrics and measuring things correctly and sort of also creating a culture with what's valued. Conversat What we're doing with society, all those kinds of things. I think Have those conversations, this Back to the University of Austin Once you have those difficult human conversations, you can design That will actually make”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. But if the business model is we sell ads and the way you sell ads is to maximize user engagement, then the algorithm is biased in favor of fake news and extreme views.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just clearly, and we know this from all the revelations of the Facebook whistleblower, there is clearly a very clear tension between the business model of a company like Facebook and the public good. And they know that.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was not Trump's doing alone. It happened because our public sphere has been dominated by a handful of platforms whose business model inherently promotes polarization, inherently promotes fake news and extreme views, because those are the things that get the eyeballs and the screens and sell the ads. I mean, this is now a commonplace, but when one thinks about the cost of allowing this kind of thing to happen, it's now a very high human cost. And we were foolish to leave uncorrected these structural problems in the public sphere that were already very clearly visible in 2016. And you described that... Like you mentioned that there's these networks that are almost like laying dormant.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The odd thing about this country is that we came up with vaccines with 90 plus percent efficacy and about 20% of people refused to get them and still do refuse. For reasons that seem best explained in terms of the anti-vax network, which has been embedded on the internet for a long time predating the pandemic, Renid Arster wrote about this pre-2020. And this anti-vax network has turned out to kill maybe 200,000 Americans who could have been vaccinated but were persuaded through magical thinking that the vaccine was riskier than the virus. You don't need to be an epidemic. You don't need to be a medical scientist to know that the virus is about two orders of magnitude riskier than the vaccine. So again, leadership could definitely have been better, but the politicization of everything”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it got so much else wrong that was sort of marginal that we were left with the impression that Trump had been to blame for the whole disaster, which wasn't really quite right. Sure, it would have been great if we'd had Operation Warp Speed for testing, but ultimately vaccines are more important than tests. This brings me to the question that you raised there of polarization and why that happened. Now, in a book called The Square in the Tower, I argued that it would be very costly for the United States to allow the public sphere to continue to be dominated by a handful of big tech companies, that this ultimately would have more adverse effects than simply contested elections. And I think we saw over the past 18 months just how bad this could be because”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Red vs. Blue Politics, as opposed to some, I don't know, FDR type character just stands and says Fuck all this bullshit that we're hearing. We're going to manufacture five billion tests. This is what America is great at. We're going to build the greatest testing infrastructure ever built or something or even with the vaccine development. But that was what I was about to interject. In a pandemic, the most important thing is the vaccine. If you get that right, then you should be forgiven for much else. And that was the one thing the Trump administration got right because they went around the bureaucracy with Operation Warp Speed and achieved a really major success. So, I think the paradox of the 2020 story in the United States is that the one thing that mattered most, the Trump administration got right.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Determine whether your public health bureaucracy will get it right or not. You don't think to push back on that, just like being Churchill in a war is difficult. So, leaving Trump and Biden aside, what I would love to see from a president is somebody who makes great speeches and arouses the public to push the bureaucracy, the public health bureaucracy, to get their shit together, to fire certain kinds of people. I mean, I'm sorry, but I'm a big fan of powerful speeches, especially in the modern age with the internet. It can really move people. Instead, the lack of speeches resulted in certain kinds of forces amplifying division over whether wear masks or not or it's like it's almost like the public picked some random topic over which to divide themselves. And there was like a complete indecision, which is really what it was fear of uncertainty, materializing itself in some kind of division. And then you almost like busied yourself with the”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But actually, leadership in our pandemic is almost a contradiction in terms. What you really need is your public health bureaucracy not to fuck it up. And they really, really fucked it up. And that was then all blamed on Trump. You know, Jim Fallows writes a piece in The Atlantic that says, well, being the president is like flying a light aircraft, it's pilot error. And I read that piece and I thought, does he really, after all the years he spent writing, think that being president is like flying a light aircraft? I mean, it's really nothing like flying a light aircraft. Being president is you sit on top of a vast bureaucracy with how many different agencies, 60, 70, we've all lost count. And you're surrounded by advisors, at least a quarter of whom are saying this is a disaster. We have to close the borders. And the others are saying, no, no, we have to keep the economy going. That's what you're running on in November. So being the president in a pandemic is a very unenviable position because you actually can't really...”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Trump's mistake was to put himself front and centre of the response to claim that he had some unique insight into the pandemic and to say with every passing week more and more foolish things until even a significant portion of people who'd voted for him in 2016 realized that he'd blown it which was why he lost the election. The correct strategy was actually to make Mike Pence the pandemic SAR and get the hell out of the way. That's what my advice to Trump would have been in fact it was in February of last year. So the mistake was to try to lead”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Leadership, yes. His correct strategy, however, was to learn from Barack Obama's playbook with the opioid epidemic. The opioid epidemic killed as many people on Obama's watch as COVID did on Trump's watch. And it was worse in a sense because it only happened in the US, and each year it killed more people than the year before, over eight years. Nobody, to my knowledge, has ever seriously blamed Obama for the opioid epidemics.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Year earlier. I don't think the US would have done much better because the things that caused excess mortality last year weren't presidential decisions. They were utter failure of CDC to provide testing. That definitely wasn't Trump's fault. Scott Gottlieb's book makes that very clear. It's just been published recently. We utterly failed to use technology for contact tracing, which the Koreans did very well. We didn't really quarantine anybody seriously. There was no enforcement of quarantine. And we exposed the elderly to the virus as quickly as possible in elderly care homes. And these things had very little to do with presidential incompetence. So I think leadership is of somewhat marginal importance in a crisis like this because what you really need is your public health bureaucracy to get it right. And very few Western public health bureaucracies got it right. Could the president have given better”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kissinger often says in his early work, the temptation of the bureaucrat is to wait for more data, but ultimately the decision making that we do under uncertainty can't be based on data. The problem of conjecture is that”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Guess, problem of conjecture to take a phrase from Kissinger, which is that whatever they're doing in postponing the war has the potential Create a worse starting point for the war. It would have been risky in 1938, but it was a way better situation than they ended up with in 1939, a year later. You asked about Kissinger, and I've learned a lot from reading Kissinger and talking to Kissinger since I embarked on writing his biography a great many years ago. Think one of the most important things I've learned. Is that you can apply history to contemporary problems. It may be the most important tool that we have in that kind of decision making. You have to do it quite ruthlessly and rigorously. And in the moment of crisis, you have to take risk. So”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be unpopular, and Churchill was deeply unpopular at that point. People would listen to him in the House of Commons in silence on one occasion Lady asked her shouted, rubbish! So he went through a period of being hated on. The other thing that made Churchill a formidable leader was that he always applied history to the problem. And that's why he gets it right. He sees the historical problem much more clearly than Chamberlain. So I think if you go back to 1938, there's no realistic counterfactual in which Churchill's in government in 1938. You have to France collapse for Churchill to come into government. But you can certainly imagine a Tory elite that's thinking more clearly about the likely dynamics. They haven't seen this.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everybody gets the time, and Hitler's able to do much more with it because Hitler strikes the pact with Stalin that guarantees that Germany can fight a war on one front in 1939. What does Chamberlain do? Builds some more aircraft. So the great mistake of the strategy of appeasement was to play for a time. I mean, they knew what was coming, but they were playing for time, not realizing that Hitler got the time too. And after he partitioned Czechoslovakia, he was in a much stronger position, not least because of all the resources that they were able to plunder from Czechoslovakia. So that was the conceptual mistake. Churchill played an heroic role in pointing out This mistake and predicting accurately that it would lead to war on worse terms. What does it take? It takes a distinct courage.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Little was bluffing. He really wasn't ready for war in 1938. The German economy was clearly not ready for war in 1938. And Chamberlain made a fundamental miscalculation along with his advisors, because it wasn't all Chamberlain. He was in many ways articulating the establishment view. And I tried to show in a book called War of the World how that establishment worked. It extended through the BBC into the aristocracy, to Oxford. There was an establishment view. Chamberlain personified it. Churchill was seen as a warmonger. He was at his lowest point of popularity in 1938. But what is it that Chamberlain gets wrong? Because it's conceptual. Chamberlain is persuaded that Britain has to play for time because Britain is not ready for war in 1938. He fails to see that the time that he gets, that he buys at Munich, is also available to Hitler.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are other contingencies that spring to mind in 1936 or 38, I think more plausibly 38, Britain should have gone to war. The great mistake was Munich. Header was in an extremely vulnerable position in 1938. Because remember, he didn't have Russia squared away as he would in 1939. Chamberlain's mistake was to fold instead of going for war, as Churchill rightly saw. And there was a magical opportunity there that would have played into the hands of the German military opposition and conservatives to snuff Hitler out over Czechoslovakia. I could go on. The point is that history is not some inexorable narrative which can only end one way. It's a garden of forking paths. Many, many junctions in the road. There were choices that could have averted the calamities of the mid twentieth century.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was very lenient towards the Bolsheviks, but if it had just rounded them up and shot the Bolshevik leadership, that would have certainly cut the Bolshevik revolution off. One looks back on the conduct of the Russian liberals with the kind of despair at their failure to see the scale of the threat that they face and the ruthlessness that the Bolshevik leadership would evince. A counterfactual in Germany, which is interesting. Think the Weimar Republic destroyed itself in two disastrous economic calamities, the inflation and then the deflation. Difficult for me to imagine Hitler getting to be Reich Chancellor without those huge economic disasters, so another part of my early work explored alternative policy options that the German Republic, the Weimar Republic might have pursued.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You asked what are the things that avoid the totalitarian states. As I've said, British non-intervention for me is the most plausible, and it takes out all of that malignant history that follows from the Bolshevik Revolution. It's very hard for me to see how Lenin gets anywhere if the war is over. That looks like the opportunity for the constitutional elements, the liberal elements in Russia. There are other moments at which you can imagine history taking a different path. If the provisional government in Russia had been more ruthless,”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's globalization, which Britain's intervention made inevitable. Philip Zellico showed in his recent book on the failure to make peace in nineteen sixteen. Woodrow Wilson tried and failed to intervene and broker a peace in nineteen sixteen. So I'm not the only counterfactualist here. The extension of the war for a further two years with escalating slaughter, the death toll rose because the industrial capacity of the armies grew greater. That's what condemns us to the Bolshevik Revolution. And it's what condemns us ultimately to Nazism. Because it's out of the experience of defeat in 1918, as Hitler makes clear in Mein Kamp, that he becomes radicalized and enters the political realm. Take out those additional years of war, and Hitler's just a failed artist. It's the end of the war that turns him into the demagogue.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We can see what this might have looked like. They focus on Eastern Europe. They take chunks of the Russian Empire. Perhaps they create as they did in the Piece of Breast Latovska, an independent or quasi-independent Poland. In no way does that pose a threat to the British Empire. In fact, it's a good thing. Britain never had had a particularly good relationship with the Russian Empire after all. The key point here is that the Germany that emerges from victory in 1916 A kind of European Union. It's the dominant power of an enlarged Germany with a significant Mittel Europa, whatever you want to call it, customs union type arrangement with neighboring countries. Including one suspects Austria-Hungary. That is a very different world. From the world of 1917. The protraction of the war for a further two years.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think that France would have collapsed immediately as it had in 1870. The French held up remarkably well to catastrophic casualties in the first six months of the First World War. But by 1916, I don't see how France could have kept going if Britain had not joined the war. And I think the war would have been over perhaps at some point in 1916. We know that Germany's aims would have been significantly limited because they would have needed to keep Britain out. If they'd succeeded in keeping Britain out, they'd have had to keep Britain out. And the way to keep Britain out was obviously not to make any annexation of Belgium, to limit German war aims, particularly to limit them to Eastern Europe. And from Britain's point of view, what was not to like? So the Russian Empire is defeated along with France. What does that really change? If the Germans are sensible and...”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it was perfectly reasonable to argue, as a number of people did on August the 2nd, 1914, that Britain should not intervene. After all, Britain had not immediately intervened against the French Revolutionary Armies back in the 1790s. It had played an offshore role ultimately intervening, but not immediately intervening. If Britain had stayed out.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If Britain had been strategically committed to preventing Germany winning a war in Europe, they should have introduced conscription 10 years before, had a meaningful land army, and that would have deterred the Germans. So the liberal government provided the worst of both worlds, a commitment that was more or less secret to intervene that the public didn't know about. In fact, much of the Liberal Party didn't know about, but without really the means to make that intervention effective, a tiny army with just a few divisions.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This argument was central to my book, The Pity of War. I also did an essay in virtual history about this, and it's always amused me that from around that time I began to be called a conservative historian because it's actually a very left-wing argument. The people in 1914 who thought Britain should stay at the war were the left of the Labour Party who split to become the independent Labour Party. What would have happened? Well, first of all, Britain was not ready for war in 1914. There had not been conscription, the army was tiny. So Britain had failed to deter Germany. The Germans took the decision that they could risk going through Belgium. Using the Schlieffen plan to fight their two front war. They calculated that Britain's intervention would either not happen or not matter.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source