The Shocking Lessons Of History Everyone Has Forgotten - Niall Ferguson

1. 0:00 – 8:51

   Are There Patterns to History?

   1. CWChris Williamson0:00

      Just how accurate do you think the quote is, "History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes"?

   2. NFNiall Ferguson0:08

      (smacks lips) It's doubly inaccurate, uh, because first of all, it, it wasn't what Mark Twain said. People usually attribute it to Mark Twain of Huckleberry Finn fame. But actually, Twain didn't say that. He said something much more complex about history being like a, a kaleidoscope. Remember those kaleidoscopes we used to have as kids? And, and the pattern shifts, but there's a kind of regularity to it. That's what Twain actually said. Not, uh, 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, uh, predictable pattern. But in truth, uh, it, it doesn't. And you can try to, to look for patterns, uh, but you'll frequently be disappointed. And that, that I think is one of the most important lessons that I've learned. History is, is not regular or uncyclical and predictable. It's actually pretty noisy and, and, and volatile and unpredictable, and that's, that's what makes my life interesting. I, I can't tell you with any certainty what's gonna happen in the next seven days, nevermind the next 10 years.

   3. CWChris Williamson1:26

      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?

   4. NFNiall Ferguson1:35

      I, 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, that kind, 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 cookie-cutter lessons, we should realize that the most important lesson of history is that it is as unpredictable and nonlinear as sport. It's not a story, the kind that you read to your kids with a beginning, a middle, and a happy ending. It's, it's as unpredictable, uh, as a, as a game, but, but it's more open-ended. It's like a game of, 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 can have 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, uh, just to give you one example, uh, the United States deciding to invade Iraq, uh, 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, uh, towards the end of World War II. That was a terrible bad lesson of history. Uh, 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, I think there are lessons to be learned from history, but we tend to, we tend to try to learn simple ones, and that's where we go wrong.

   5. CWChris Williamson3:59

      Is part of this due to the fact that you identified, uh, the, the neatness of a story, the beginning, the middle, the end, this nice closure, uh, i- i- 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, and familiar to us, uh, in a narrative sense somehow?

   6. NFNiall Ferguson4:32

      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 Figes 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 gonna end well. There'll probably be bodies all over the stage, uh, at some point towards the end. So that's fair enough, and it's a good history of the Russian Revolu- Revolution, one of the best in English. But it, 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 apart.

   7. CWChris Williamson5:29

      Oh, the inevitability is baked into the framing.

   8. NFNiall Ferguson5:32

      We know the story, and so we kind of 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. Uh, there were times when the Russian Revolution could have led all the way to World War III. 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, a keen awareness of other futures that might have happened, rather than to think the minute you pick up the book, "Oh, there's gonna 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 fro- to worse under Stal-" Uh, to know the story, and then to read it as if it's a novel, I think is, is actually a big pitfall. Much better to be aware that there are constant turning points, moments when it could've gone differently. Stalin could've been arrested. He thought he was gonna be arrested at one point when, uh, Hitler invaded. Uh, this is an astonishing moment, because Stalin had been completely certain he wouldn't, uh, and ignored all the intelligence, uh, that he got saying the Germans were going to invade the Soviet Union. He ignored it all. Said it was all propaganda. We- we would say fake news. Uh, and so when (laughs) the Germans actually did invade and the Red Army was in total disarray, not least 'cause he'd purged all, or killed all its most competent officers, Stalin retreated to his dacha in a kind of state of pan- panic, and wondered when his colleagues in the Politburo would turn up and arrest him, as he'd arrested, uh, many of his colleagues in the past. They did turn up, and he kind of expected them to put on the handcuffs. Uh, and instead, they kind of said, "Please come back to Moscow. We- we can't actually function without, uh, being terrorized by you." So that was just one of the many moments in the history of the Soviet Union that might have produced a completely different outcome. 'Cause I think if Stalin had been arrested, then it's hard to imagine that the Soviet Union wouldn't have lost World War II. Uh, there would've 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, there are these other paths that we could've gone down, just as right now today, our lives, your life, my life, everybody who's listening's lives, they- 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 'cause I wasn't paying attention when I crossed the road. That's the historical reality that we- we have to keep reminding ourselves of.

   9. CWChris Williamson8:50

      Why

2. 8:51 – 17:54

   If History Can’t Be Repeated, is it Just BS?

   1. CWChris Williamson8:51

      is it the case, given that human nature has been relatively stable for all of f- recorded history, it's been stable, it's been stable for 120,000 years, and group dynamics, uh, 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, uh, disproportionate effect of chance?

   2. NFNiall Ferguson9:18

      Mm-hmm.

   3. CWChris Williamson9:18

      Is it the fact that, as you mentioned, a lot of very large things can occur due to very small inputs? What is it that's causing this fractured, fragmented kaleidoscope rather than a nice smooth wheel?

   4. NFNiall Ferguson9:29

      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 Thucydides, uh, it's why we can understand Shakespeare. Uh, the human condition, particularly when it comes to love and death and power, uh, 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, of technology. So, there's something very important about that, which is why it's worth studying history, because if, if Thucydides was just unintelligible to us, and- 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- they're- they're people. That's- that's a really important thing, which when you come to ponder it, it's remarkable. How amazing is that? That 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, uh, hinted at, which is that the- there is this technological innovation that really starts to accelerate from the late 18th century and- and- and makes the world different, uh, decade after decade, and- and- and in ways that are quite, uh, unpredictable. Uh, there's the exponential growth in living standards that comes from the Industrial Revolution, but there's other things also happening, uh, the kind of unintended consequences of- of, uh, 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, uh, and so you can't really perfectly learn from 1914 what to do in 2024, because in 1914, although they could, 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 wanna 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. Uh...... the disasters that constantly punctuate history, uh, massive volcanic eruptions, enormous earthquakes, cataclysmic floods, uh, 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, there's just no pattern to the incidents of large-scale, uh, organized violence, uh, there's no pattern to the incidents of, of massive volcanic activity, and that's why there is no cycle of history. Because while we may be trying in our unchanging human way to achieve power and, and love and all the rest of it, uh, 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, isn't observable.

   5. CWChris Williamson13:16

      I think one of the reasons that people like and are comforted by the idea that history repeats itself or echoes is it gives us a sense of control. It, it, it makes us believe that we have a prediction engine that we can... if we read enough of the past, we can accurately work out what's going to go on in the future.

   6. NFNiall Ferguson13:38

      That's right. And 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, uh, 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, uh, just of the economy over the last, uh, 20 years or so. Uh, Nobel Prize-winning economists have been wrong again and again about, uh, major economic shocks from the financial crisis that began, uh, in 2008 through to the pandemic. There's still an ongoing debate about what caused, uh, the big inflation surge, uh, of, uh, 2021-2022. Uh, there were eminent economists laden down with honors who were sure that there, there would be a transitory inflation episode in the wake of the pandemic, and the only way they've been able to stay, uh, st- stay true to that hypothesis is by changing the meaning of the word transitory over and over and over again. So you, you look back and you realize even now, the best paid economists in the world, here in New York and Wall Street, the, the people with the most kudos at the International Monetary Fund, uh, they, 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. Uh, it's really hard to get a job there. Uh, 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. 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 could 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 keep trying to do that. But then you go back, and this is what we, we historians do, you go back, and, "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 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.

   7. CWChris Williamson17:07

      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-

   8. NFNiall Ferguson17:15

      Yeah.

   9. CWChris Williamson17:15

      ... the world is filled with unrefuted bullshit. And-

   10. NFNiall Ferguson17:18

       Right, especially TV.

   11. CWChris Williamson17:19

       ... yeah. (laughs)

   12. NFNiall Ferguson17:19

       Especially on TV. And it must be said probably on podcasts too, though I haven't measured that.

   13. CWChris Williamson17:23

       Correct. We are contributing, we are contributing to that asymmetry of bullshit right now.

   14. NFNiall Ferguson17:27

       I, I'm trying my best to, to, to be anti-bullshit. Um, it's like kind of antimatter. And the, the key to, to anti-bullshit is that it is much le- it doesn't go viral. It just doesn't go... I mean, anti-bullshit, it's, it's, it's just doomed not to go viral on Twitter. And so you carry on doing your best, but you will always be, you will always be swamped by the bullshit.

   15. CWChris Williamson17:52

       Yeah. So

3. 17:54 – 23:10

   Why You Shouldn’t Compare Great Historical Empires

   1. CWChris Williamson17:54

      give me... uh, 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?

   2. NFNiall Ferguson18:20

      Well, a, a good, uh, source for examples is, uh, the history of empire. Because people always want to use the history of empire to think about American power. And so, every decade, uh, there will be at least one book, and usually more than one, saying, "We are Rome. We are in the predicament of the Roman, uh, empire and our decline and fall, uh, is inevitable, uh, because we are decadent and we like bread and we like circuses, except we have burgers and, and American football." But it's, that's, that's the thesis, and it's always kind of reliable if you're a publisher. You'll sell books, uh, with the "We are Rome," uh, hypothesis. Uh, 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 in, of recorded history is about empires. 'Cause empires do stuff and they have pretty good recordkeeping, and that's, that's most of what we study. So we have a pretty good sample size of imperial rise, uh, and zenith and decline and fall. Uh, because empires do that. 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, uh, that existed when our grandparents were around. So it ought to be possible, you'd have thought, to have some kind of general theory of imperial rise and, and, and fall, and, and that ought to be a cycle of history that, you know, we can work with. And then we could say, "Oh, okay, so the United States has reached, uh, it, it's past the zenith and it's now in the kind of late phase, so we should, we should expect decline 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, uh, 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's like 1,000 years. So Gibbon's Great Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire covers a millennium. So you don't know. 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 gonna happen in a few years or is it gonna take a few centuries? There's no way of knowing. And that's why the temptation to draw analogies with past empires is, is quite, quite hazardous. Um, it's always possible to find a case and say, "Ah, you see, here we are, we're, we're just about where Britain was in, pick a decade." This is, I've done this myself, I did this for The Economist just before the US abandoned Afghanistan, I wrote a piece for The Economist saying, "Ah, the US is beginning to look a bit like Britain between the wars. Kind of too much debt, kind of overextended." Um, and I used that analogy, uh, to make the argument that the US is, is, is getting to be where Britain was in the mid-20th century, over-stretched. It's not a new argument, and as part of my anti-bullshit 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, 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, I could've 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, it expanded its empire, uh, 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, uh, you pick the one that, that suits your journalistic purpose, and off you go. But if I'm being absolutely, uh, brutally honest, uh, there's, there's no real way to be sure which analogy is the right one. That, that's, that's the, that's the terrible truth. We don't know.

   3. CWChris Williamson23:05

      Given that, what are the lessons that people should take

4. 23:10 – 30:18

   How To Learn from History More Effectively

   1. CWChris Williamson23:10

      from history? It sounds like a, a, a ver- very damning indictment of reading history as a, a tool for understanding really anything except the stuff that's already happened, you know. The, the, are there, is there anything that you can take from this that is actually instructive for where you live now?

   2. NFNiall Ferguson23:27

      Oh, yes. Absolutely. Uh, and that's, 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. Uh, what does history enable you to do? Uh, 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, of Britain today? Uh, 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, uh, of decolonization, and then remake themselves as nation-states. And, you know, the, the, the range goes from the Netherlands to Russia.... and, and you have go- you've gotta sort of sit down and think, "Well, let's look at all the different countries that, that went through this. Which one is, is the better fit?" Is it, is it likely that Britain's just gonna end up kinda like the Netherlands? Um, I think it is. I think Britain, in many ways, is already quite like the Netherlands. It's just that we haven't fully, you know, 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 gotta be kinda systematic. You're really looking for analogies, uh, and you've gotta make sure that you, you're kinda comprehensive, that you, 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." Uh, I'll give you another example. People have been running around with their hair on fire since 2015, 2016, when Donald Trump suddenly burst, uh, onto the scene as a credible presidential candidate, as opposed to a joke figure. And it's been enormously difficult for liberal intellectuals, uh, 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 interwar Europe to, to find good analogies, uh, to understand Donald 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.

   3. CWChris Williamson26:33

      Who like?

   4. NFNiall Ferguson26:34

      Well, people you've never heard of. There was a guy named Denis Kearney who led something called the Californian Workers Party in the late 19th century and Kearney's position was that we had to close the border and keep out, uh-

   5. CWChris Williamson26:48

      Build the wall?

   6. NFNiall Ferguson26:49

      ... the immigrants. He actually had "build the wall" as a slogan. There, there's a cartoon showing a wall being built across San Francisco Harbor, and he was anti-Chinese. That was a big part of, of, of Kearney's appeal. He was anti-elitist. He was really, uh, uh, somebody who kinda relished being a common man without any pretentions. And all the policies that Kearney stood for, including restriction of immigration and China-bashing, I mean, that, that has all been in American politics before but it's been forgotten. Of course, Kearney 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, uh, and elite-bashing. And you didn't need to, 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, we went off to Italy in the 1920s or Germany in the 1930s and we had a day there, we'd be 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 anybody in a uniform, except occasionally there'd be somebody coming back from A- Afghanistan in an airport. But this is the thing that I'm, I'm constantly struck by. If you study history rigorously, you're, you're constantly struck by how unlike the mid-20th century our time is. And, 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-

   7. CWChris Williamson28:28

      Oh, my. You are r- reading my mind.

   8. NFNiall Ferguson28:30

      ... of interwar Europe.

   9. CWChris Williamson28:30

      I've got in front of me Godwin's Law. "As an online discussion grows, the probability of a comparison to Nazis or Hitler approaches 100%. Many people are quick to compare things to Nazi Germany because it's the only history they think they know."

   10. NFNiall Ferguson28:44

       Yeah. The History Channel has a lot to, uh, answer for.

   11. CWChris Williamson28:47

       Answer for. (laughs)

   12. NFNiall Ferguson28:48

       So does, so does GCSE and A-level history and ... But it's not only in the UK. I mean, there is this, uh, 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, that period, but, but I actually think that the 17th century is much more illuminating if we wanna 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 lowered the barrier to entry. You could, you could get your thoughts out, uh, on, on paper much more easily than on an illuminated manuscript. We're living through a comparable period in which the public sphere is completely being transformed by technology and yet nobody bothers studying the 17th century outside, uh, a few Oxford and Cambridge colleges. Uh, the 17th century was a time when mercenaries were enormously powerful. There was a guy named Wallenstein who was, uh, the Prigozhin of, uh, the Holy Roman Empire. Uh, we can learn a lot from that period and it's much more interesting and illuminating than trying to fit everything into, uh, Germany in 1933, uh, whi- which is, I, I'm afraid, what we now, we now do, as you say, almost in every online discussion.

   13. CWChris Williamson30:13

       What was the response like when the printing press

5. 30:18 – 36:58

   How the Printing Press Created the Information Revolution

   1. CWChris Williamson30:18

      became widely available? Wh- what did it change? What do people not realize about what it changed? Uh, and how did governments and people that wanted to restrict access and stuff respond?

   2. NFNiall Ferguson30:29

      Well, as, uh, the printing press spread throughout Europe from the late 15th century into the 16th century, it was a highly decentralized technology. Uh, you, you really had no central control. Printing presses were springing up all over, uh, Germany and, and especially northern Europe. And initially, religious reformers like Martin Luther said, "Oh, great. Now we can get the truth about the Church and, uh, about Christian doctrine out and, and, and more effectively explain what's wrong with today's, uh, Roman Catholic Church." And, and that, that, that was certainly true. That, that message spread like wildfire in Northern Europe. And very quickly, uh, Luther was able to convince a great many people, not only in Germany, but all the way across the channel in England, that, that something had to change. And, uh, and so that part was right. But what Luther didn't anticipate, uh, was that once you can print the Bible and print criticism to the Roman Catholic Church, you can print anything. Uh, and pretty quickly, people were printing anything. There's one moment when... Can't remember where it was now. Uh, there's a town in South Germany where they say, "Can we, can we print a translation of the Quran?" And Luther goes, "Um, yeah. Uh, I guess, I guess so, because if we print it, then people will see how false it is." Uh, 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, uh, uh, designed to help you identify the witches who live amongst us. And these tracts about witchcraft lead to the so-called Witch Craze, a crazy, uh, persecution wave (laughs) directed at perfectly innocent, uh, people, mostly women, that led to mass executions in all kinds of parts, uh, of Europe and beyond Europe in, in, uh, the American colonies. So, the unintended consequence of the printing press was that you, you not only disseminated serious, uh, discussion of how to reform the Roman Catholic Church, you also disseminated all kinds of crazy stuff. Uh, like there are witches amongst us and we need to, 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 consubstantiation and transubstantiation or witches, yeah, you can see why a lot of people would say, "Can I have the book about witches? 'Cause I kind of, I'm not that interested in transubstantiation, but witches." So, I think that's, 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 stops being used to disseminate religious ideas. Because it's not long before the Catholics are publishing their tract saying that Luther is a heretic and he too should be killed. So, yeah. I mean, there was a pretty obvious lesson to be learned about the internet (laughs) 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, that the internet was awesome and all its consequences would be awesome. And if everybody was connected, that would be awesome.

   3. CWChris Williamson34:01

      (laughs)

   4. NFNiall Ferguson34:01

      And I mean, I'm like, "But there could be some downsides to connecting everybody. Have you considered that?" (laughs) And they're like, "Why?"

   5. CWChris Williamson34:08

      (laughs)

   6. NFNiall Ferguson34:10

      But if you have an entire community of people who don't know any history at all and, and that would never cross their minds, which is why, you know, people were surprised and shocked when crazy stuff started to go viral on, on social media.

   7. CWChris Williamson34:23

      Spectral evidence was one of the most interesting things I learned about when looking at the witch trials that, um, they were using this spectral evidence, which was essentially, like, hysterical eyewitness testimony-

   8. NFNiall Ferguson34:38

      Yeah.

   9. CWChris Williamson34:39

      ... done, done to a poltergeist in the room that said, "Yes, she is actually a witch." And th- these things had been going on for month-, maybe even years. And then they, uh, got in contact somehow with the head court, whatever the equivalent was there, the, the biggest magistrate in America, and they said, "You know, this, um, we've been doing a lot of these cases based on spectral evidence. That's, um, that's all right, isn't it? That's g- that's okay?" And they, "Sorry, what the fuck is spectral evidence?"

   10. NFNiall Ferguson35:09

       (laughs) Yeah. Yeah.

   11. CWChris Williamson35:09

       Uh, so yeah, that was one thing that came to mind. Another was, um, (clears throat) 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 there. A huge loss of control, 'cause they are no longer the vector, the, the, the, the, uh, middle bit of the hourglass that you're getting squeezed through on your way out to-

   12. NFNiall Ferguson35:45

       Yeah, I mean, the most radical-

   13. CWChris Williamson35:46

       ... spiritual understanding.

   14. NFNiall Ferguson35:46

       ... thing about, about the Reformation was the idea that, that people should be able to read scripture themselves in a language, uh, that they understood rather than having it read to them in Latin. Uh, 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, 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.

6. 36:58 – 48:00

   Areas of History We Don’t Know Enough About

   1. NFNiall Ferguson36:58

   2. CWChris Williamson36:58

      What other areas of history do you wish that we could... If, if we take this entire pie of people's history knowledge, 99.5% of which is taken up with Nazi Germany, uh, other than 16th, 17th century, and freedom of access to information, a- and propagation of information, what are the other big chunks that you wish that more people knew about?

   3. NFNiall Ferguson37:24

      Well, the, the interesting thing is that even if you had a kind of ideal curriculum at school or university, it would still omit a huge percentage of human history, because, you know, most of the people in history led unrecorded lives, in, uh, in non-literate, uh, agricultural societies. And so with the best will in the world, it's really hard to recapture the human past. What we're inevitably going to capture this really unrepresentative sample, which over-represents the literate and the urban. I think if I were designing, uh, 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, uh, uh, than that he knew everything about the rise of Hitler. Uh, Thomas, who is 11, came across a terrific, uh, video online, which I think Bill Wurtz did, which is a complete history of the world as a kind of crazy musical animation. It's really good. Uh, it's better than Yuval Noah Harari because it's funny.

   4. CWChris Williamson38:55

      (laughs)

   5. NFNiall Ferguson38:55

      And (laughs) I, I wish I could, uh, remember the exact URL, uh, I would give it to you all, but I'm sure if you google kind of Bill Wurtz total history of the world, you'll get something. And what I love about that video is it just has everything. Uh, including the Phoenicians, uh, the Central Asian Khanates. 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 kind of empires, uh, but in all 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 had been doing empires for centuries, including Africans, including the Incas and the Aztecs. Empire is actually the standard form of, of historical, uh, polity, and it's, it's everywhere. Uh, and, and that's, 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. Let's try and understand them all. Let's realize they're basically everywhere. They mostly do slavery to varying extents. Um, 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, of empire than we have. I was, I was in Santa Fe a couple of weeks ago at the Santa Fe Institute, hanging out with my favorite physicist, Geoffrey 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 we'll join forces and, and kind of do empires sort of for physicists, and then all of history will be intelligible, uh, maybe not in a Bill Wurtz 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 strange. It's a strange menagerie, this zoo full of empires. Some of them are giant like elephants. Some of them are tiny like mice. And that, that's, that's kind of Geoffrey 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.

   6. CWChris Williamson41:10

      (laughs) It's got me thinking about this stat I learned, uh, 60% of Americans don't own a passport. And when you live on a... i- in a 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? Um, but the lack of worldliness I do think contributes to, uh, myopia, um, in America. And I wonder whether there's almost like a, a temporal myopia as well that i- is, it's something similar if you only know the last 100 years of history, and of that last 100 years, you really only know 10 years between like-

   7. NFNiall Ferguson41:55

      Mm-hmm.

   8. CWChris Williamson41:55

      ... 1935 and 1945. You end up trying to retrofit things that are happening now to a very small number of examples, and perhaps broadening, broadening that level of education would add a little bit of ballast or stabilizer to, uh, some of the conversations we're having.

   9. NFNiall Ferguson42:17

      I- imagine if there were time machines like, uh, airbuses, and you could go to the airport, uh, and just fly to, uh, the destination in the past of your choice...Uh, the problem with tourism is that it often gives people the impression that they know more about the world than they do. So, uh, there are very many Americans who do have passports, and when they travel, uh, they go to Scotland to play golf, uh, and then they go, uh, to Paris to have, uh, fancy meals or do shopping. And, uh, and then they probably go to Florence, and then they come back with enormous, uh, an enormous sense of their own knowledge of Europe. Uh, but if all you know about Scotland is golf, uh-

   10. CWChris Williamson43:10

       (laughs)

   11. NFNiall Ferguson43:11

       ... y- you should watch the movie Trainspotting five times as a kinda 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." Uh, it'll, it'll kind of give us a terrible feeling of, of nausea, and then we'll come, come home, or... You know, where else would people want to go if they were time travelers? It's like, "Let's go back to the, let's go back to the swinging 20s and get drunk with Scott Fitzgerald." There'd be, like, there'd be a bunch of destinations that would be really popular, and I'd be that one guy on the little plane going to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. It's like, "I actually go-"

   12. CWChris Williamson43:52

       (laughs)

   13. NFNiall Ferguson43:52

       "... to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 and find out how they stopped the Thirty Years' War 'cause we need something like that soon, uh, in the world today." But, 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, we can sort of do time travel with books and, and movies, uh, but I suspect it's a bit like tourism, where we all go to the same places, and-

   14. CWChris Williamson44:35

       Mm-hmm. More myopia.

   15. NFNiall Ferguson44:36

       ... we come back with an exaggerated sense of our own knowledge.

   16. CWChris Williamson44:39

       Yeah. I had this conversation the other day with a friend who was telling me about Afghanistan in the sort of maybe f- like, 3, 4, 500 AD, and that it was a, a bastion of maybe physics and mathematics and a few other places. Uh, and we were discussing th- this sort of weirdness with history, that we kind of know... Uh, 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 archeological 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.

   17. NFNiall Ferguson45:25

       Yeah.

   18. CWChris Williamson45:25

       So it's really, it's really like going over a crime scene with very limited evidence. And it got me thinking about, you know, 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 kno- knowledge as well.

   19. NFNiall Ferguson45:44

       Or how different w- it would be if all of the ancient learning had been lost. Uh, I mean, that, that's a counterfactual that I think a lot about. Because if all of the ancient Athenian and, and Roman texts had, 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, 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 counter, uh, point to Afghanistan as a, a place that wasn't a basket case. Scotland, if you had gone there in the 17th century, it would have been just like Afghanistan today. Because in Scotland, in the 17th century, uh, it's kind of warring mountain tribes, religious fanatics, extreme Calvinists control the capital, Edinburgh. They're consta- It's incredibly violent. Had one of the most mind-blowingly high homicide rates, much higher than any American city today. Makes Chicago look like, uh, the Garden of Eden. And, 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 centers of intellectual innovation of the late 18th century. And, uh, you know, Walter Scott writes a great novel, perhaps the greatest historical novel, Waverley, really addressing this question. "How on earth does Scotland go from being Afghanistan to being Athens 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, to stop being Afghanistan and kind of actually become a center of, of, of not only intellectual innovation, but economic dynamism, the Adam Smith Scotland... I mean, the Adam Smith Scotland is just a couple of decades after the Battle of Culloden. Uh, you know, that's, that's, to me, one of the most amazing examples in history of total non-linearity, total discontinuity, radical upgrade from, you know, civil war to enlightenment. If it's possible in 17th century Scotland, 18th century Scotland, then it should be possible in 21st century Afghanistan.

7. 48:00 – 57:32

   Niall’s Thoughts on the 2024 Presidential Election

   1. CWChris Williamson48:00

      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. Um, but we've got different forces and different defense mechanisms on both sides, uh, for something like Trump, uh, or, or even anything that looks remotely like him. So what's your... Lick your finger, put it in the air. What are you, what are you tasting on the wind?

   2. NFNiall Ferguson48:34

      Well, I think, uh, let me try and apply my, my methodology, uh, of, of rigor here, rather than just taking the first analogy off the shelf. I think that, uh, the Biden presidency, uh, is ki- unlikely to be a two-term presidency. Uh, in the same way that, uh, Gerald Ford and, and Jimmy Carter and George Bush Senior could only be one-term presidents, I feel Joe Biden's a one-term president. Now, in that case, um, 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. Uh, he's far ahead of the competition, Ron DeSantis isn't really getting much traction. And, 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, uh, could be reelected. Uh, and it's not the... It would be the second time in American history that somebody had two non-consecutive terms. Grover Cleveland did it in the late 19th century. So I think the probability of Trump coming back is much higher than most people realize right now, uh, because just as in 2015, uh, people struggled to imagine Trump, uh, being president the first time, they struggle again, uh, with the kind of cognitive barriers to, to giving that a high probability. So I'm kind of struggling to see what stops him now, uh, 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, uh, a young kind of good-looking guy, though I'm not sure how good-looking, but they're kinda gonna choose the young guy, uh, 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, uh, Trump could win, and then we will have an extraordinary time in American history because the Left will, 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, 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. Uh, it's only relatively recently that we had long-lived republics, and, uh, any political theorist from the ancient world or the Renaissance or the Enlightenment would've said, "Well, republics tend not to last because at some point they either choose, uh, a tyranny or they descend into, uh, corruption and a demagogue comes to power." All of the processes that, that we see at the moment at work, uh, would not surprise a 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, is reelected, I shall, 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.

   3. CWChris Williamson52:17

      Why?

   4. NFNiall Ferguson52:17

      I think that would get... I think that could get very nasty. That could get very nasty. Um-

   5. CWChris Williamson52:22

      Like kinetic nasty?

   6. NFNiall Ferguson52:24

      Yeah, yeah. Because I mean, they'll take to the str- the Left will take to the streets if Donald Trump is reelected. 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 in-

   7. CWChris Williamson52:46

      I, I like it-

   8. NFNiall Ferguson52:47

      ... so far as I have one.

   9. CWChris Williamson52:47

      ... I like it. It's interesting. I, I definitely think there is a case of, um, tit for tat, uh, a- an ever-escalating tit for tat rebuttal, the same as anybody that's had a little bit of an argument with their partner and, and, uh, one evening you came home late, and the next morning you, there was a nasty note read, saying, "Hope you had a good night," like, and there's no milk in the fridge and, and then you have to sleep in the spare room for a couple of days or whatever. Um, and then the next time that the, your partner does that, you remember that. You keep it in the back of your mind and you think, "Oh, well, I, maybe I wasn't so bothered about this, or maybe this wouldn't have, have triggered in my mind, but I'm actually... They, 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, um, one of the echo, uh, uh, uh, p- sort of cyclical, uh, replicating trends that was created with the, uh, pushback that Trump gave to the election result three years ago, uh, is, "Okay, all right, well, that's, that's now on the table. That is a discussion which is on the table, election denial..." 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, are you d- did you not storm the Capitol? Did you not deny?" Da-da-da-da-da-da. And it's this, like, super juvenile, uh, y- you hit me last type game. And, uh, yeah, I, I do worry about what doorways that opens in future.

   10. NFNiall Ferguson54:28

       Well, that's why monarchies turn out to be more stable than republics, because you have a, a personification of-... uh, of the state that is above partisan politics. But in a republic, it's all, uh, or nothing, bipartisan conflict. And I think if one looks back at the 19th 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, 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, the tit-for-tat thing's important. Um, from a Republican vantage point, Democrats didn't expect, uh, accept the legitimacy of Trump's victory, uh, in 2016.

   11. CWChris Williamson55:17

       Mm.

   12. NFNiall Ferguson55:18

       Uh, although that's, uh, that's often forgotten. There was a great, uh, wave of protest against, uh, Trump in his first year, including, if you remember, the Women's March. Uh, the, the great, I think critical moment, uh, has arrived when many Americans think that a double standard has been applied. That, that Trump was targeted by the justice system, and the Bidens were given treat- treatment that was quite different. And that's a really important shift that's happening in American politics right now. Joe Biden is inexorably 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." Um, and that, that's gonna 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, uh, already predictable, but a small number are not. And I think those arguments about double standards, uh, 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. Uh, now, as I said, concluding reflection, history is not really capable of giving you a crystal ball. It doesn't allow you to say with any real confidence who'll 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's a weak candidate. Why, if he continues to seek re-election, he could be a one-term president, and why under those circumstances Donald Trump, despite, uh, all that happened on January the 6th, 2021 could get reelected. That's all I'm saying.

   13. CWChris Williamson57:31

       Niall Ferguson,

8. 57:32 – 58:36

   Where to Find Niall Ferguson

   1. CWChris Williamson57:32

      ladies and gentlemen. I really, really love your energy, Niall. I, I love your, 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?

   2. NFNiall Ferguson57:49

      Volume Two of my biography of Henry Kissinger. I'm working on that, uh, every waking hour, except when I'm doing podcasts with you.

   3. CWChris Williamson57:57

      Hey. Good.

   4. NFNiall Ferguson57:58

      And, uh, and, and that will be the next book that I, I publish. While you're waiting for that, you can buy Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe, which was the book, uh, 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, when I drop a column there.

   5. CWChris Williamson58:23

      Niall, I appreciate you very much. Thank you.

   6. NFNiall Ferguson58:25

      Cheers, Chris.

   7. CWChris Williamson58:26

      If you enjoyed that episode, then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks. And don't forget to subscribe.

Episode duration: 58:36