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

“From that point on, there's a great evolutionary experiment to see what the most convenient way is to record relations between creditors and debtors. And what emerges in the time of the ancient Greeks, Are coins metal, tokens sometimes of valuable metal, sometimes not, usually bearing the imprint of a state or a monarch. And that's the sort of more familiar form of money that we still use today for very, very small transactions. I expect coins will all be gone by the time my youngest son is my age. But they're a last remnant of a very, very old way of doing simple transactions.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The origin of money Predates coins. Most people can't assume I'll talk about coins, but coins are relatively late developments. Back in ancient Mesopotamia, so I don't know, 5,000 years ago. There were relations between creditors and debtors. There are even in the simplest economy because of the way in which agriculture works. Hey, I need to plant these seeds, but I'm not going to have crops for X months. So we have clay tablets in which simple debt transactions are inscribed. I remember looking at great numbers of these in the British Museum when I was writing the Ascent of Money. And that's really the beginning of money. The minute you start recording a relationship between a creditor and a debtor, you have something that is quasi-money. And that is probably what these clay tablets mostly denoted.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd like it to feel a little bit like surviving Navy SEAL training to come through this program because it will be intellectually demanding. That, I think, should be a magnet. So, yeah, Steve, if you're listening, please join Elon in supporting this. And Peter Thiel, if you're listening, I know how skeptical you are about the idea of creating a new university because heaven knows, Peter and I have been discussing this idea for years and he's always said, well, no, we thought about this and it just isn't going to work. But I really think we've got a responsibility to do this.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They don't know a lot. And I, having taught a lot of people in that group, know how intellectually dissatisfied they often are at the end of four years. I mean, they may have beautifully gamed the system to graduate summer, magnet cum laude, but they kind of know they'll confess it after a drink or two. They know that they gamed the system and that intellectually it wasn't the fulfilling experience they wanted. And they also know that an MBA from a comparable institution would not be a massive intellectual step forward. So I think what we want to say is here's something really novel, exciting, that will be intellectually very challenging. I do think the University of Austin has to be difficult.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Steve Schwartzman is also an innovator. The idea of creating a college on the Tsinghua campus and creating a kind of Rhodes program for students from the Western world to come study in China was Steve's idea. And I was somewhat involved, did some visiting professing there. It taught me that you can create something new in that area of graduate education and quite quickly attract really strong applicants because the people who finish their four years at Harvard or Stanford know.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Close inspection, those institutions don't seem to spend the money terribly well. And in fact, one of the mysteries of our time is the lack of due diligence that hard-nosed billionaires seem to do when it comes to philanthropy. So, I think there's an opportunity here for this generation of very talented, wealthy people to do what their counterparts did in the late 90s and early 20th century and create some new institutions. And they don't need to put their names on the buildings. They just need to do what the founders of Chicago, University of Chicago did, create something new that will endure.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The last generation of super wealthy Plutocrats, the generation of the gilded age of the late nineteenth century, did a pretty good job of founding universities. Chicago wouldn't exist, but for the money of that era. And so my message to not only to Elon, but to all of the peers, all of those people who made their billions out of technology over the last couple of decades is this is your time. I mean, and this is your opportunity to create something new, I can't really understand why the wealthy of our time are content to hand their money, I mean, think of the vast sums Mike Bloomberg recently gave to Johns Hopkins, to establish institutions.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The best intellectual talent is somewhat randomly distributed through society, and some of it is in the bottom quintile of the income distribution, and that makes it hard to get to elite education. So this will take resources.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do too. I do too. Most of the biggest. Storms and teacups of my academic career have been caused by bad jokes that I've made. These days, if you want to make bad jokes, being a billionaire is a great idea, I'm not here to defend Elon's Twitter style or sense of humor. He's not going to be remembered for his tweets, I think. He's going to be remembered for the astonishing companies that he's built and his contributions in a whole range of fields from SpaceX to Tesla. Solar energy. And I very much hope that we can interest Elon in this project. We need not only Elon, but a whole range of his peers because this takes resources. Universities are not cheap things to run, especially if, as I hope, we can make as much of The tuition covered by scholarships and bursaries. We want to attract the best intellectual talent to this institution.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Somewhat imported from Silicon Valley. Think of this as a startup. Don't think of this as something that has to exist as a full service university on day one. We don't have the resources for that. You did billions and billions of dollars to build a university sort of as a facsimile of an existing university, but that's not what we want to do. I mean, copy and pasting Harvard or Year or Stanford would be a futile thing to do. They would probably very quickly end up with the same pathology.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We are moving as fast as our resources allow. The goal is to offer the first of the forbidden courses next summer, summer of 2022. And we hope to be able to launch an initial, albeit relatively small scale master's program in the fall of next year. That's as fast as is humanly possible. So yeah, we're really keen to get going. And I think the approach we're taking is”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's what's going on. And that's the thing that we really, really have to resist because that kills the university. That's the moment that it stops being the magical place of intellectual creativity and simply becomes an adjunct of the Ministry of Propaganda”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sharp's porterhouse blue did it. It's an inherently comical subject. Professors at least used to be amusingly eccentric. But we've sort of killed off that side of academia by turning it into an increasingly doctrinaire place where eccentricity is not tolerated. I'll give you an illustration of this. I had a coal this morning from a British academic. Said, can you give me some advice? Because they're trying to decolonize the curriculum. This is coming from the diversity, equity, and inclusion officers, and it seems to me that what they're requiring of us is a fundamental violation of academic freedom because it is Determining ex ante what we should study and teach.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Imagine John Maynard Keynes without Cambridge. You can't because someone like that doesn't actually exist without the incredible hot house that a place like Cambridge Wars in Keynes' life. He was a product of a kind of hereditary intellectual elite. It had its vices. But you can't help but admire the sheer power of the mind. I've spent a lot of my career reading Keynes and I revere that intellect. It's so, so powerful. But you can't have people like that if you're not prepared to have King's College Cambridge. And it comes with redundancy. I think that's the point. There are lots and lots of things that are very annoying about academic life that you just have to deal with. They're made fun of in that recent Netflix series The Chair. And it is easy to make fun of academic life.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People who work on economics can argue back and forth about John Maynard Kane's. But I think it's pretty clear that he was the most important economist and certainly the most influential economist of the 20th century. And I think his ideas are looking... Today, in the wake of the financial crisis than they have at any time since the 1970s. But imagine...”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They knew a great deal about their speciality, but they were alienated from, broadly speaking, humanism. And that is his explanation, or one of his explanations, for why this very scientifically advanced Germany goes down the path of hell led by Hitler. So when I come back and ask myself, what is it that we want to do with a new university, we want to make sure that we don't fall into that German pit where very high levels of technical and scientific expertise are decoupled from the fundamental foundations of a free society? So liberal arts are there, I think. to stop the scientists making Faustian pacts. That's why it's really important that people working on AI reach Shakespeare.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's clear that universities are incredibly powerful intellectual force multipliers and our history without them would look very different. Sure, some innovations would have happened without them. That's clear. The Industrial Revolution didn't need universities. In fact, they played a very marginal role in the key technological breakthroughs of the Industrial Revolution in its first phase. But by the second industrial revolution in the late 19th century, German industry would not have leapt ahead of British industry if the universities had not been superior, and it was the fact that the Germans institutionalized scientific research in the way that they did that really produced a powerful, powerful advantage. The problem was that, and this is a really interesting point, that Friedrich Meiniker makes in Die Deutsche Catastrofer, the German catastrophe, that German intellectuals became technocrats, Homo Faber, he says.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, how does the Manhattan Project happen with no academia to take just one of many examples? In truth, how does Britain even stay in the war without Bletchley Park, without being able to crack the German cipher? The academics are unsung or partly sung heroes of these conflicts. The same is true in the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was a terribly evil and repressive system, but it was good at science and that kept it in the game, not only in World War II, it kept it in the Cold War.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And an institutionalization of thought experiments and actual experiments. And then you get everybody living in the same kind of vicinity so that it can spill over into 3 a.m. conversation. Well, that always seems to me to be a pretty potent combination. Let's ask ourselves a counterfactual question next. Let's imagine that the world wars happen. But there are no universities.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Telling people, I don't want your essay to echo my views. If you can find something wrong with what I wrote, great. Or if you can find something I missed that's new, fantastic. So there is definitely, as you said, a magic in that interaction across the generations. And it's extraordinarily difficult, I think, for an intellectual to make the same progress in a project in isolation compared with the progress that can be made in these very special communities. What does a university do amongst other things? It creates a somewhat artificial environment of abnormal job security. That's the whole idea of giving people tenure, and then a relatively high”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I look back on the career I've had in teaching, which is over 25 years where Cambridge, Oxford, NYU, Harvard. And I have extremely strong relationships with students from those institutions because they would show up, whether it was at office hours or in tutorials and disagree with me. And for me, it's always been about encouraging some active intellectual rebellion.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The human brain, we know, is at its most dynamic when people are pretty young. You know this with your background in math. People don't get better at math after the age of 30. And this is important when you think about the intergenerational character of university. The older people, the professors have the experience, but they're fading intellectually from much earlier than anybody really wants to admit. And so you get this intellectual shot in the arm from hanging out with people who are circa 20 don't know shit. Brains are kind of like cooking.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, when I was at Oxford, it was regarded as a tremendous honour to be asked to go to one of our tutor's homes. The social life of Oxford, Cambridge is one of their great strengths. There's a sort of requirement to sip unpleasant sherry with the Dons. And we've kind of killed all that. We've killed all that in the US because nobody dares have a social interaction with an undergraduate or exchange an informal email in case the whole thing ends up on the front page of the local or student newspaper. So that's what we need to kind of restore the social life of academia.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Enlightenment happened in late 18th century Scotland in a very interesting interplay between the universities, which were very important, Glasgow, Edinburgh, St. Andrews, and the coffee houses and pubs of the Scottish cities where a lot of unstructured discussion often fueled by copious amounts of wine took place. That's what I've missed over the last few years. Let's just think about how hard academic social life has become. That we've reached the point that Amy Tua becomes the object of a full-blown investigation and media storm for inviting to Yale Law School students over to her house to talk?”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There was only really one senior member present, the historian Jeremy Cattle. I was really just trying to impress my contemporaries. And that's the kind of thing we want. The great intellectuals, the great intellectual leaps forward occurred, often in somewhat unstructured settings. I'm from Scotland, you can tell from my accent a little at least.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stimulus than in many a seminar lasting an hour and a half. So I think we want to get the Sam Harris and Alex Friedmans out of their darkened rooms and give them a chance to interact in a much less structured way than we've got used to. Again, it's that sense that sometimes you need some free-willing unstructured debate to get the really good ideas. I mean, to talk anecdotally for a moment, I look back on my Oxford undergraduate experience and I wrote a lot of essays and attended a lot of classes. But intellectually, the most important thing I did was to write an essay on the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus for an undergraduate discussion group called the Cannon Club. And I probably put more work into that paper than I put into anything else except maybe my final examinations, even although”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we do that informal interaction at lunch, at dinner, that allows, in my experience, the best ideas to form. Intellectual activity isn't really a solo voyage. Historians often make it seem that way, but I've realized over time that I do my best work in a collaborative way. And scientists have been better at this than people in the humanities. But what really matters, what's magical about a good university is that interdisciplinary, serendipitous conversation that happens on campus. Tom Sargent, the great Nobel Prize-winning economist and I, used to have these kind of random conversations in elevators at NYU or in corridors at Stanford, and sometimes they'd be quite short conversations, but in that short serendipitous exchange, I would have more intellectual”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Solo elements to this form of public intellectual activity. It's also there in substack where all our best writers now seem to be including our founder Barry Weiss, the danger with this approach is ultimately your subscribers are the people who already agree with you and we are all therefore in danger of preaching to the choir. I think what makes an institution like University of Austin so attractive is that we get everybody together at least part of the year.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The difference between the political and the personal. So Sam is, I think, a good example as a you of a certain kind of intellectual hero who has been willing to go into the cyber sphere, the metaverse, and carve out an intellectual space, the podcast and debate everything fearlessly. His essay was really an essay on Black Lives Matter and the question of police racism was a masterpiece of 2020. And so he, I think, is a model of what we believe in. But we can't save the world with podcasts good though yours is. Because there's a kind of”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He would be a natural fit, Sam, if you're listening. I hope you're in. I think in the course of his recent intellectual quests, he did collide with one of our founders, Heather Hying. So we'll have to model civil disagreement at the University of Austin. It's extremely important that we should all disagree about many things, but do it amicably. One of the things that has been lost sight of, perhaps it's all the fault of Twitter or maybe it's something more profound, is that it is possible to disagree in a civil way and still be friends. I certainly had friends at Oxford who were far to the left of me politically, and they are still among my best friends. So University of Austin has to be a place where we can disagree vehemently, but we can then go and have a beer afterwards. That's, in my mind, a really important part of university life.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hannah Canelos, the former president of St. John's, is the president of University of Austin. And so he is our George Washington. I don't know who Alexander Hamilton is. I'll lead you to guess.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To signal that it's a bipartisan endeavor, it is not a conservative institution that we're trying to build. It's an institution that's committed to academic freedom and the pursuit of truth that will mean it when it takes Robert Zimmer's Chicago principles and enshrines them in its founding charter and will make those something other than honored in the breach, which they seem to be at some institutions. So the idea here is to grow this organically. We need, rather like the academic Freedom Alliance that Robbie George created earlier this year, we need breadth, and we need to show that this is not some kind of institutionalization of the intellectual dark web, though we welcome founding members of that nebulous body. It's really something designed for all of academia to provide a kind of reboot that I think we all agree.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, one of the things that I'm excited about is that we're getting people from inside and outside the academic world. So we've got Arthur Brooks, who for many years ran the American Enterprise Institute very successfully, has a Harvard role now teaching. And so he's somebody who brings, I think, a different perspective. There is obviously a need to get experienced academic leaders involved, which is why I was talking to Larry Summers about whether he would join our board of advisors. The Chicago principles owe a debt to the former president of Chicago, and he's graciously agreed to be in the board of advisors. I could go on. It would become a long and tedious list. But my goal in trying to get this happy banta form has been”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can build something spectacular taking advantage of the fact that all of these people have, well, they now have very real skin in the game. They need to make this a success. And I'm sure they will help us make it a success.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For violating the increasingly complex rules about discussing transgender issues and women's rights, she will be one of our advisors. And I think also one of our founding fellows actually teaching for us in our first iteration. So I think we're creating a node that's badly needed. Those people, I mean, I remember saying this to the other founders when we first began to talk about this idea to Barry Weiss and to Panicanos' panocanalos as well as to Heather Hying. We need to do this urgently because there are people whose livelihoods are in fact being destroyed by these extraordinarily illiberal campaigns against them. And so there's no time to hang around and come up with the perfect design. This is an urgently needed lifeboat. And let's start with that.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With these, I think, deeply damaging notions. So, yeah, I think we're creating a new node. I hope it's a node that makes the net. More resilient, and right now there's an urgent need for it. I mean, there are people whose academic careers have been terminated. I'll name two who are involved, Peter Bogossian, who was harassed out of Portland State for the reason that he was one of those intrepid figures who carried out the grievance studies, hoaxes, exposing the utter charlatanry going on in many supposedly academic journals by getting phony gender studies articles published as a genius. And of course, so put the noses out of joint of the academic establishment that he began to be subject to disciplinary actions. So Peter is going to be involved. And in a recent shocking British case, the philosopher Kathleen Stock has essentially been run off the campus of Sussex University in England for”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not in a silo called Oxford, but in a silo that is really a hub connected to Stanford, connected to Harvard, connected to MIT. One of the reasons I moved to the United States was that I sensed that there was more intellectual action in my original field of expertise, financial history. And that was right. It was a good move, I think, kind of stagnated if I'd stayed at Oxford. But at the same time, I haven't lost connection with Oxford. I recently went and gave a lecture there in honor of Sir Roger Scruton, one of the great conservative philosophers. And the burden of my lecture was the idea of the Anglosphere, which appealed a lot to Roger, will go horribly wrong if illiberal ideas that inhibit academic freedom spread all over the Anglosphere. And this network gets infected.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, and we're hugely excited that you want to be one of our advisors. We need a broad and eclectic group of people. And I'm excited by the way that group has developed. It has some of my favorite intellectuals are there, Steve Pinker, for example. But we're also making sure that we have people with experience in academic leadership. And so it's a happy coalition of the willing looking to try to build something new, which as you say, will be complementary to the existing and established institutions. I think of the academic world as a network. I've moved from some major hubs in the network to others, but I've always felt that we do our best.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Somewhat more of an apprenticeship where we'll have centers, including a center for technology, engineering and mathematics, that will be designed to help people make that transition from the theoretical to the practical. So that's the vision. And I think like any early stage idea will doubtless tweak it as we go along. We'll find things that work and things that don't work. But I have a very clear sense in my own mind of how this should look five years from now. And I don't know about you. I mean, I'm unusual as an academic because I quite like starting new institutions and I've done a bit of it in my career. You've got to kind of know what it should look like after the first four or five years to get out of bed in the morning and put up with all the kind of hassles of doing it.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In applied history or politics and applied history, I'm a historian driven crazy by the tendency of academic historians to drift away from what seemed to me the important questions and certainly to drift away from addressing policy-relevant questions. So I would love to be involved in a master's in applied history. And we'll build some programs like that before we get to the full liberal arts experience that we envisage for an undergraduate program. And that undergraduate program is an exciting one because I think we can be innovative there too. I would say two years would be spent doing some very classical and difficult classical things, bridging those old divides between arts and sciences. But then there would also be in the second half in the junior and senior years.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're not really going to learn about them at business schools. The people who are not going to teach them leadership and entrepreneurship are professors. So we want to create something that will be a little like the very successful Schwarzmann program in China, which was come and spend a year in China and find out about China. We'll be doing the same. essentially saying come and spend a year and find out about technology. And there'll be a mix of academic content. We want people to understand some of the first principles of what they're studying. There are first principles of entrepreneurship and leadership, but we also want them to spend time with people like one of our co-founders, Joe Lonsdale, who's been a hugely successful venture capitalist and learn directly from people like him. So that's the kind of initial offering. I think there are other master's programs that we will look to roll out quite quickly. I have a particular passion for a master's.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the sort of, if you like, the launch product. And then we go straight to a master's program. I don't think you can go to undergraduate education right away because the established brands in undergraduate education are offering something it's impossible to compete with initially because they have the brand Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and they offer also this peer network, which is part of the reason people want so badly to go to those places, not really the professors, it's the classmates. So we don't want to compete there initially. Where there is, I think, room for new entrants is in a master's program. And the first one will be in entrepreneurship and leadership. Because I think there is a huge hunger amongst people who want to get into particularly the technology world to learn about those things. And they know.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We think that we need to begin more like a startup than like a full service university from day one. So our vision is that we start with a summer school. Which will offer provocatively the forbidden courses. We want, I think, to begin by giving a platform to the professors who've been most subject to council culture and also to give an opportunity to students who want to hear them to come. So we'll start with a summer school that will be Somewhat in the tradition of those institutions in the interwar period that were havens for refugees. So we are dealing here with the internal refugees of the work era. We'll start there. It'll be an opportunity to test out some content, see what students will come and spend time in Oslo.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Will be a real space institution. There may be an online dimension to it because there clearly are a lot of things that you can do via the internet. But the core activity of teaching and learning, I think, requires real space. And I've thought about this a long time, debated Sebastian Thun about this many, many years ago where he was a complete believer in let's call it the metaversity to go with the metaverse. I mean, the metaversity was going to happen, wasn't it? I never really believed in the metaversity. I didn't do MOOCs because I just didn't think you'd A, be able to retain the attention, B, be able to cope with the skilled grading that was involved. I think there's a reason universities have been around and their form for about a millennium, you kind of need to all be in the same place. So I think answer to that question definitely a campus in the Austin area, that's where we'll start.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To communism. One learns a lot that way. But the issue is when you're promoting or hiring or tenuring people, their politics is not relevant. It really isn't. And when it started to become relevant, and I remember this coming up at the Harvard History Department late in my time there, I felt deeply, deeply uneasy that we were having conversations that amounted to, well, we can't hire X person despite their obvious academic qualifications because Some political issue. That's not what should happen at a healthy university”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To give a lecture on, well, let's just take a recent example, the Dorian Abbott case. If you're giving a lecture on astrophysics, but it turns out that in some different venue you express skepticism about affirmative action, well, it doesn't matter. It's irrelevant. We want to know what your thoughts are on astrophysics because that's what you're supposed to be using electron. That used to be understood. I mean, at the Oxford of the 1980s, there were communists and there were ultra-Tories. At Cambridge there were people who were so reactionary that they celebrated Franco's birthday, but they were also out and out communists down the road at King's College. The understanding was that that kind of intellectual diversity was part and parcel of university life, and frankly for an undergraduate, it was great fun to cross the road and go from outright conservatism ultra Tories.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a political issue, then I can't help you. I mean, if you're against freedom of thought, then we don't really have much of a discussion to have. And clearly there are some people who politically seem quite hostile to it. But my sense is that there are plenty of people on the left in academia. Think of that interesting partnership between Cornell West and Robbie George, which has been institutionalized in the Academic Freedom Alliance. It's bipartisan, this issue. It really, really is. After all, 50 years ago, it was the left that was in favor of free speech. The right still has an anti-free speech element to it. Look how quickly they're out to ban critical race theory. Critical race theory won't be banned at the University of Texas. Wokeism won't be banned. Everything will be up for discussion. But the rules of engagement will be clear. Chicago principles, those will be enforced. And if you have...”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From what I say, because indoctrination on a political basis is an abuse of the power of the professor, as Weber rightly said. So I think one of the key principles of the University of Austin will be that Viberian principle, that politics is not an appropriate subject for the lecture hall, for the classroom. And we should pursue truth. And enshrine liberty of thought.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Will certainly be people who say that because the standard mode of trying to discredit any new initiative is to say, oh, this is a sinister conservative plot. But one of our co-founders, Heather Hying, is definitely not a conservative. She's as committed to the idea of academic freedom as I am. But I think on political issues, we probably agree on almost nothing. And at least I would guess. But politics, Max Weber made this point a long time ago, that politics really should stop at the threshold of the classroom, of the lecture hall. And in my career, I've always tried to make sure that when I'm teaching, it's not clear where I stand politically, though of course undergraduates insatiably curiously want to know, but it shouldn't be clear.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“feel shame. I mean, you should feel morally completely contaminated as you are doing that. But people haven't been taught the realities of totalitarianism. For all these reasons, I think you need to try at least to create a new institution where those pathologies will be structurally excluded.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source