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

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“In the Soviet bloc or in Mao's China, the sort of totalitarianism light that I think we're contending with here, which manifests itself as denunciations, people informing on superiors, some people using it for career advantage. Other people reduced to hapless, desperate apology to try to exonerate themselves, people disappearing metaphorically, if not literally. All of this is so reminiscent of the totalitarian regimes that I studied earlier in my career that it makes me feel sick. What makes me really feel sick is that the people doing this stuff, the people who write the letters of denunciation, are apparently unaware that they're behaving exactly like people in Stalin Soviet Union. They don't know that. So they clearly have, there's been a massive educational failure. If somebody can write an anonymous or non-anonymous letter of denunciation, anonymous anonymous.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And of course, the people who want to downplay this say, oh, well, there only have been 100 and something in disinvitations, or oh, there really aren't that many cases. But the point is that the famous events, the events that get the attention, are responsible for a general chilling that, as you say, spreads to every part of the university and creates a very familiar culture in which people are afraid to say what they think. Self-censorship, look at the heterodox academy data on this, grows and grows. So now a majority of students will say this is clear from the latest heterodox academy surveys. We are scared to say what we think in case we get denounced, in case we get cancelled. Well, that's just not the correct atmosphere for a university and a free society. To me, what's really creepy is how many of the behaviors I see on university campuses today are reminiscent of the way that people used to behave in the Soviet Union.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stem part of the campus. It's contagious. This is something Nicholas Kristakis should look at because he's very good at looking at the way in which social networks like the ones that exist in a university can spread everything. But I think when we look back and ask, why did wokism spread so rapidly and rapidly out of humanities into other parts of universities? And why did it spread across the country and beyond the United States to the other English-speaking universities? It's because it's a contagion. And these behaviors are contagious. The president of a university, I won't name, said to me that he receives every day at least one denunciation, one call for somebody or other to be fired for something that they said. That's the crazy kind of totalitarianism light that now exists in our universities.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're not separate worlds, you know, in CP Snow's sense of the chasm between science and arts. Because on a university campus, everything is contagious from a novel coronavirus to the behaviors that are occurring in the English department. Those behaviors, if denunciation becomes a norm, undergraduate denounces professor, teaching assistant denounces undergraduate, those behaviors are contagious and will spread inexorably first to social science and then to natural sciences. And I think that's part of the reason why when this started to happen, when we started to get the origins of disinfitation and cancel culture, it was not just a few conservative professors in the humanities who had to worry. Everybody had to worry because eventually it was going to come even to the most apparently hard.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And these are not separate worlds in two senses. I've just taken delivery of my copy of the book that Eric Schmidt and Henry Kissinger have co-authored on artificial intelligence, the central question of which is what does this mean for us broadly?”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Here by a self driving vehicle, allowing me to have my lunch and prepare rather than focus on the other crazy people on the road. So that's the dream that we can create something which is partly classical and partly 21st century. And we look around and we don't see it. If you don't see an institution that you really think should exist, I think you have a more responsibility to create it.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Highly Socratic in its structure. I think it would be great to bring that to the United States where it doesn't really exist. But at the same time, I think we should be doing some very 21st century things, making sure that while people are reading and studying classic works, they're also going to be immersed in the real world of technological innovation, a world that you know very well. And I'd love to get a synthesis of the ancient and classical, which we're gradually letting fade away with the novel and technological. So we want to produce people who can simultaneously talk intelligently about Adam Smith, or for that matter, Shakespeare or Proust, and have a conversation with you about where AI is going and how long it will be before I can get driven.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“85% of self described liberal students said they would report a professor to the university administration if he or she said something they considered offensive, and something like 75% said they'd do it to a fellow undergraduate. That's the kind of culture that's evolved in our universities. So we need a new university in which none of that is true, in which you can speak your mind, say stupid things, get it completely wrong, and live to tell the tale. There's a lot more going on, I think, because when you start thinking about what's wrong with the modern university, many, many more things suggest themselves. And I think there's an opportunity here to build something that's radically new in some ways and radically traditional in other ways. For example, I have a strong preference for the tutorial system that you see at Oxford and Cambridge, which is small group teaching and”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Obnoxious undergraduate then. Today, if people like us exist today, they must live in a state of constant anxiety that they're going to be outed for some heretical statement that they made five years ago on social media. So part of what motivates me is the desire to give the me's of today a shot at free thinking and really I'd call it aggressive learning, learning where you're really pushed. And I just think that stopped happening on the major campuses because whether at Harvard where I used to teach or at Stanford where I'm now based, I sense a kind of suffocating atmosphere of self-censorship that means people are afraid to take even minimal risk in class. I mean, just take, for example, a survey that was published earlier this year that revealed, this is of undergraduates in four-year programs in the US”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For people like me today, people aged 18, 1920 today who are intellectually very curious, ambitious but inexperienced because the mindfields today are absolutely lethal and one wrong foot and it's cancellation. I said this to Peter Thiel the other day. Imagine being asked now. I mean, we were obnoxious undergraduates. There's nothing that Peter did at Stanford that Andrew Sullivan and I were not doing at Oxford and perhaps we were even worse. But it was so not career ending to be an absolutely insufferable.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This day, and I think it's because maybe because of evolutionary psychology, we need to be together in one relatively confined space when we're in our late teens and early 20s for the knowledge transfer between the generations to happen. That's my feeling about this. But in order for it to work well, there need to be very few constraints. There needs to be a sense that one can take intellectual risk. Remember, people in the late 10s and early 20s are adults, but their inexperienced adults. And if I look back on my own time as an undergraduate, saying stupid things was my MO, my way to finding good ideas was through a mindfield of bad ideas. I feel so sorry for my”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of knowledge between generations. That is a very sacred activity and it seems to withstand major changes in technology. So this form that we call the university predates the printing press, survived the printing press, continue to function through the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you need to create a new one. And so after much deliberation, we decided to do it. And I think it's a hugely timely opportunity to do what people used to do in this country, which was to create new institutions. I mean, that used to be the default setting of America. We sort of stopped doing that. I mean, I look back and I thought, why are there no new universities? Or at least if there are, why do they have social impact? It seems like we have the billionaires. We have the need. Let's do it. So you still believe in institutions, in the university, in the ideal of the university. I believe passionately in that ideal. There's a reason they've been around for nearly a millennium. There is a unique thing that happens on a university campus when it's done right. And that is the transfer.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I had never anticipated that this would happen in my lifetime, my academic career began in Oxford in the 1980s when anything went. One sensed that a university was a place where one could risk saying the unsayable and debate the undebatable. So the fact that in a relatively short space of time a variety of ideas, critical race theory or wokism, whatever you want to call it, a variety of ideas have come along that seek to limit and quite drastically limit what we can talk about strikes me as deeply unhealthy. And I'm not sure, and I've thought about this for a long time, you can fix it with the existing institutions.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You are one of the great historians of our time, respected, sometimes controversial. You have flourished in some of the best universities in the world, from NYU to London School of Economics to Harvard, and now to Hoover Institution at Stanford. Before we talk about the history of money, war and power, let us talk about a new university. You are part of launching here in Austin, Texas. It is called University of Austin UATX. What is its mission, its goals, its plan? Think it's pretty obvious to a lot of people in higher education that there's a problem. And that problem manifests itself in a great many different ways. But I would sum up the problem as being a drastic chilling of the atmosphere that constrains free speech, free exchange, even free thought.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Work when it is work on things you're passionate about is a source of meaning, is a source of happiness, and Because in doing that work, you surround yourself by human beings, your team. The choice of that team is essential, it's critical for the search for meaning, for the pursuit of happiness. Anyway, right now get a free seventy five dollars sponsored job credit to upgrade your job posting at indeed dot com slash lex. Get it at ND dot com slash Lex offers value through december thirty first of this year terms and conditions apply go to indeed dot com slash lex. The pursuit of happiness, my friends. This is the Lex Friedman podcast, and here is my conversation with Neil Ferguson.”
2021-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #239 – Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source