Niall Ferguson: History of Money, Power, War, and Truth | Lex Fridman Podcast #239

The following is a conversation with Niall Ferguson, one of the great historians of our time. At times controversial and always brilliant, whether you agree with him or not. He's an author of 16 books on topics covering the history of money, power, war, pandemics, and empire. Previously at Harvard, currently at Stanford, and today launching a new university here in Austin, Texas called the University of Austin, a new institution built from the ground up to encourage open inquiry and discourse by both thinkers and doers, from philosophers and historians, to scientists and engineers, embracing debate, dissent, and self-examination, free to speak, to disagree, to think, to explore truly novel ideas. The advisory board includes Steven Pinker, Jonathan Haidt, and many other amazing people with one exception: me. I was graciously invited to be on the advisory board, which I accepted in hope of doing my small part in helping build the future of education and open discourse, especially in the fields of artificial intelligence, robotics, and computing. We spend the first hour of this conversation talking about this new university before switching to talking about some of the darkest moments in human history and what they reveal about human nature. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, here's my conversation with Niall Ferguson. 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're a part of launching here in Austin, Texas. It is called University of Austin, UATX. What is its mission, its goals, its plan?

I 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, uh, speech, free exchange, even free thought. 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 wokeism, 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. I think you need to create a new one. And so after much deliberation, we decided to do it, and I think, uh, 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 go, "Why, why, why are there no new universities? Or at least if there are, why do they have so little impact?" It seems like we have the billionaires. Uh, we have the need. Let's do it.