#634: Niall Ferguson, Historian — The Coming Cold War II, Visible and Invisible Geopolitics, Why Even Atheists Should Study Religion, Masters of Paradox, Fatherhood, Fear, and More

Brought to you by Wealthfront http://wealthfront.com/tim high-yield savings account, ShipStation http://shipstation.com/tim shipping software, and Athletic Greens http://athleticgreens.com/tim all-in-one nutritional supplement. Niall Ferguson (@nfergus https://twitter.com/nfergus/), MA, DPhil, FRSE, is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a senior faculty fellow of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard. He is the author of 16 books, including The Pity of War https://www.amazon.com/Pity-War-Explaining-World-ebook/dp/B00USBM9EQ/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, The House of Rothschild https://www.amazon.com/House-Rothschild-Niall-Ferguson/dp/0140240845/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, Empire https://www.amazon.com/Empire-Demise-British-Lessons-Global-ebook/dp/B004ROT3TY/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, Civilization https://www.amazon.com/Civilization-West-Rest-Niall-Ferguson-ebook/dp/B0054TVW04/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, and Kissinger, 1923–1968: The Idealist https://www.amazon.com/Kissinger-1923-1968-Idealist-Niall-Ferguson-ebook/dp/B00SI0B94K/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, which won the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Prize. He is an award-winning filmmaker, too, having won an International Emmy for his PBS series The Ascent of Money https://www.pbs.org/show/ascent-of-money/. His 2018 book, The Square and the Tower https://www.amazon.com/Square-Tower-Networks-Freemasons-Facebook-ebook/dp/B073NPCBL5/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, was a New York Times bestseller and also adapted for television by PBS as Niall Ferguson’s Networld https://www.amazon.com/Disruption/dp/B085XKR1XY/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20. In 2020 he joined Bloomberg Opinion as a columnist. In addition, he is the founder and managing director of Greenmantle LLC, a New York-based advisory firm; a co-founder of Ualá, a Latin American financial technology company; and a trustee of the New York Historical Society, the London-based Centre for Policy Studies, and the newly founded University of Austin. His latest book, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe https://www.amazon.com/Doom-Politics-Catastrophe-Niall-Ferguson/dp/0593297377/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, was published last year by Penguin and was shortlisted for the Lionel Gelber Prize. Please enjoy! This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront http://wealthfront.com/Tim! Wealthfront http://wealthfront.com/Tim is an app that helps you save and invest your money. Right now, you can earn 3.3% APY—that’s the Annual Percentage Yield—with the Wealthfront Cash Account. That’s more than fifteen times more interest than if you left your money in a savings account at the average bank, according to FDIC.gov. And when you open an account today, you’ll get an extra fifty dollar bonus http://wealthfront.com/Tim with a deposit of five hundred dollars or more. Visit Wealthfront.com/Tim http://wealthfront.com/Tim to get started.​ * This episode is also brought to you by ShipStation https://www.shipstation.com/tim. Do you sell stuff online? Then you know what a pain the shipping process is. ShipStation https://www.shipstation.com/tim was created to make your life easier. Whether you’re selling on eBay, Amazon, Shopify, or over 100 other popular selling channels, ShipStation lets you access all of your orders from one simple dashboard, and it works with all of the major shipping carriers, locally and globally, including FedEx, UPS, and USPS. Tim Ferriss Show listeners get to try ShipStation https://www.shipstation.com/tim free for 60 days by using promo code TIM. There’s no risk, and you can start your free trial without even entering your credit card info. Just visit ShipStation.com https://www.shipstation.com/tim, click on the microphone at the TOP of the homepage, and type in “TIM”! * This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim. I get asked all the time, “If you could use only one supplement, what would it be?” My answer is usually AG1 https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim by Athletic Greens https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim, my all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body in 2010 and did not get paid to do so. I do my best with nutrient-dense meals, of course, but AG https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim further covers my bases with vitamins, minerals, and whole-food-sourced micronutrients that support gut health and the immune system. Right now, Athletic Greens https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim is offering you their Vitamin D Liquid Formula free with your first subscription purchase—a vital nutrient for a strong immune system and strong bones. Visit AthleticGreens.com/Tim https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim to claim this special offer today and receive the free Vitamin D Liquid Formula (and five free travel packs) with your first subscription purchase! That’s up to a one-year supply of Vitamin D as added value when you try their delicious and comprehensive all-in-one daily greens product. * [05:45] How Niall's multi-faceted career has gone according to plan. [08:00] The license to be outrageous in academia ain't what it used to be. [14:53] High table, dregs of Château Lafite, and hyperbolic references. [20:26] A. J. P. Taylor and the philosophy of history. [25:00] How does a historian find an "ear" for historical resonance? [29:48] What Niall would ask A. J. P. if they were Château Lafite drinking buddies. [34:30] An appetite for tweed. [36:40] Historical contingency. [43:40] A. J. P. Taylor reading for beginners and counterfactual history. [46:41] Dan Carlin, Elon Musk, and Gavrilo Princip. [48:39] What Niall gets out of digging deep into historical correspondence. [54:04] Cold War II — what can we do? [1:10:44] Keeping Cold War II from heating up into World War III. [1:16:37] Economic interdependence does not preclude conflict. [1:20:02] Ways Niall is using his grasp of history to change the world for the better. [1:26:11] How Niall's toolkit for enacting change has evolved over the years. [1:28:55] Thoughts on fatherhood. [1:36:15] Why someone raised as an atheist takes his kids to church. [1:42:42] Has marriage to ex-Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali changed Niall's view of Western philosophy? [1:46:22] Life under fatwa. [1:51:00] Parting thoughts. * For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsors http://tim.blog/podcast-sponsors Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/. For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts http://tim.blog/transcripts. Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books http://tim.blog/books. Follow Tim: Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss https://twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferriss https://instagram.com/timferriss/ YouTube: youtube.com/timferriss https://www.youtube.com/timferriss Facebook: facebook.com/timferriss https://www.facebook.com/TimFerriss/ LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferriss http://linkedin.com/in/timferriss Past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast include Jerry Seinfeld https://tim.blog/2020/12/08/jerry-seinfeld/, Hugh Jackman https://tim.blog/2020/06/26/hugh-jackman/, Dr. Jane Goodall https://tim.blog/2020/04/16/jane-goodall/, LeBron James https://tim.blog/2018/11/27/lebron-james-mike-mancias/, Kevin Hart https://tim.blog/2020/05/20/kevin-hart/, Doris Kearns Goodwin https://tim.blog/2018/09/07/doris-kearns-goodwin-leadership/, Jamie Foxx https://tim.blog/2015/12/06/jamie-foxx/, Matthew McConaughey https://tim.blog/2020/10/19/matthew-mcconaughey/, Esther Perel https://tim.blog/2017/05/21/esther-perel/, Elizabeth Gilbert https://tim.blog/2020/05/08/elizabeth-gilbert/, Terry Crews https://tim.blog/2017/12/20/terry-crews-how-to-have-do-and-be-all-you-want/, Sia https://tim.blog/2020/08/12/sia/, Yuval Noah Harari https://tim.blog/2020/10/27/yuval-noah-harari/, Malcolm Gladwell https://tim.blog/2016/06/21/malcolm-gladwell/, Madeleine Albright https://tim.blog/2020/05/27/secretary-madeleine-albright/, Cheryl Strayed https://tim.blog/2017/03/30/cheryl-strayed/, Jim Collins https://tim.blog/2019/02/18/jim-collins/, Mary Karr, https://tim.blog/2020/11/11/mary-karr/ Maria Popova https://tim.blog/2014/10/21/brain-pickings/, Sam Harris https://tim.blog/2020/05/15/sam-harris-2/, Michael Phelps https://tim.blog/2021/01/21/michael-phelps-grant-hackett/, Bob Iger https://tim.blog/2020/01/16/bob-iger/, Edward Norton https://tim.blog/2019/10/31/edward-norton-motherless-brooklyn/, Arnold Schwarzenegger https://tim.blog/2015/02/02/arnold-schwarzenegger/, Neil Strauss https://tim.blog/2014/06/24/neil-strauss/, Ken Burns https://tim.blog/2019/09/12/ken-burns/, Maria Sharapova https://tim.blog/2017/08/26/maria-sharapova/, Marc Andreessen https://tim.blog/2016/05/29/marc-andreessen/, Neil Gaiman https://tim.blog/2019/03/28/neil-gaiman/, Neil de Grasse Tyson https://tim.blog/2019/10/03/neil-degrasse-tyson/, Jocko Willink https://tim.blog/2016/09/21/jocko-willink-on-discipline-leadership-and-overcoming-doubt/, Daniel Ek https://tim.blog/2020/12/03/daniel-ek/, Kelly Slater https://tim.blog/2020/09/08/kelly-slater/, Dr. Peter Attia https://tim.blog/2019/11/27/peter-attia-fasting-metformin-longevity/, Seth Godin https://tim.blog/2016/02/10/seth-godin/, Howard Marks https://tim.blog/2018/09/25/howard-marks/, Dr. Brené Brown https://tim.blog/2020/02/06/brene-brown-striving-self-acceptance-saving-marriages/, Eric Schmidt https://tim.blog/2019/04/09/eric-schmidt/, Michael Lewis https://tim.blog/2020/05/01/michael-lewis/, Joe Gebbia https://tim.blog/2018/03/08/joe-gebbia-co-founder-of-airbnb/, Michael Pollan https://tim.blog/2018/05/06/michael-pollan-how-to-change-your-mind/, Dr. Jordan Peterson https://tim.blog/2021/03/01/jordan-peterson/, Vince Vaughn https://tim.blog/2017/05/31/vince-vaughn/, Brian Koppelman https://tim.blog/2020/04/23/brian-koppelman/, Ramit Sethi https://tim.blog/2019/05/07/ramit-sethi/, Dax Shepard https://tim.blog/2020/11/18/dax-shepard/, Tony Robbins https://tim.blog/2014/10/15/money-master-the-game/, Jim Dethmer https://tim.blog/2020/05/18/jim-dethmer/, Dan Harris https://tim.blog/2020/11/19/dan-harris/, Ray Dalio https://tim.blog/2017/09/13/ray-dalio/, Naval Ravikant https://tim.blog/2015/08/18/the-evolutionary-angel-naval-ravikant/, Vitalik Buterin https://tim.blog/2021/03/08/vitalik-buterin-naval-ravikant/, Elizabeth Lesser https://tim.blog/2021/03/16/elizabeth-lesser/, Amanda Palmer https://tim.blog/2019/04/18/amanda-palmer-2/, Katie Haun https://tim.blog/2021/02/18/katie-haun/, Sir Richard Branson https://tim.blog/2017/10/09/richard-branson/, Chuck Palahniuk https://tim.blog/2020/09/02/chuck-palahniuk/, Arianna Huffington https://tim.blog/2017/10/18/arianna-huffington/, Reid Hoffman https://tim.blog/2015/08/31/the-oracle-of-silicon-valley-reid-hoffman-plus-michael-mccullough/, Bill Burr https://tim.blog/2017/09/17/bill-burr/, Whitney Cummings https://tim.blog/2015/06/26/whitney-cummings/, Rick Rubin https://tim.blog/2015/05/15/rick-rubin/, Dr. Vivek Murthy https://tim.blog/2020/03/26/vivek-murthy/, Darren Aronofsky https://tim.blog/2017/09/09/darren-aronofsky/, Margaret Atwood https://tim.blog/2022/02/22/margaret-atwood/, Mark Zuckerberg https://tim.blog/2022/03/24/mark-zuckerberg/, Peter Thiel https://tim.blog/2014/09/09/peter-thiel/, Dr. Gabor Maté https://tim.blog/2018/02/20/gabor-mate/, Anne Lamott https://tim.blog/2021/07/09/anne-lamott/, Sarah Silverman https://tim.blog/2022/01/12/sarah-silverman/, Dr. Andrew Huberman https://tim.blog/2021/07/06/andrew-huberman/, and many more. 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• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

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• 0:44Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:29Tim Ferriss?

  Just click the microphone at the top and type in code TIM, T-I-M. One more time. Ship more and grow more with ShipStation. Shipstation.com, promo code TIM.

• 1:43Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time what I would take if I could only take one supplement. I've been asked this for years. The answer is invariably AG1 by Athletic Greens. I view it as all-in-one nutritional insurance. So you can cover your bases. If you're traveling, if you're just busy, if you're not sure if your meals are where they should be, it covers your bases. I've recommended it since The 4-Hour Body, which was Eons ago, 2010, and I did not get paid to do so. With approximately 75 vitamins, minerals, and whole food sourced ingredients, you'll be hard pressed to find a more nutrient dense formula on the market. It has a multivitamin, multi mineral greens complex, probiotics and prebiotics for gut health and immunity formula,

• 2:28Tim Ferriss?

  digestive enzymes and adaptogens. You get the idea. It is very, very comprehensive. And I do my best, of course, to focus on nutrient dense, proper meals. But sometimes you're busy. Sometimes you're traveling. Sometimes you just want to make sure that you're getting what you need. AG1 makes it easy to get a lot of nutrition when whole foods aren't readily available. It's also NSF certified for sport, making it safe for competitive athletes as what's on the label is in the powder. It's the ultimate all in one nutritional supplement bundle in one easy scoop. Right now Athletic Greens is giving my audience a special offer on top of their all in one formula, which is a free vitamin D supplement

• 3:10Tim Ferriss?

  and five free travel packs with your first subscription purchase. Many of us are deficient in vitamin D. I've found that true for myself, which is usually produced in our bodies from sun exposure. So adding a vitamin D supplement to your daily routine is a great option for additional immune support. Support your immunity, gut health and energy by visiting athleticgreens.com/tim. You'll receive up to a year's supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your subscription. Again, that's athleticgreens.com/tim.

• 3:44Tim Ferriss?

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

• 3:48Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 3:50Speaker 02

  Now would have seemed a good time.

• 3:54Speaker 01

  I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 4:06Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. I'm going to skip my preamble to get to the guest today, Neil Ferguson. You can find him on Twitter @N Ferguson, N-F-E-R-G-U-S, M-A-D-F-L-F-R-S-E. We may get into what that is, is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a Senior Faculty Fellow of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard. He's the author of 16 books, good lord, that's a lot of books, including The Pity of War, The House of Rothschild, Empire, Civilization, and Kissinger, 1923 to 1968, The Idealist, which won the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Prize. He is an award-winning filmmaker, too, having won an international

• 4:51Tim Ferriss?

  Emmy for his PBS series, The Ascent of Money. His 2018 book, The Square and the Tower, was a New York Times bestseller and also adapted for television by PBS as Neil Ferguson's Net World. In 2020, he joined Bloomberg Opinion as a columnist. In addition, he is the founder and managing director of Green Mental LLC, a New York-based advisory firm, a co-founder of Uala, a Latin American financial technology company, and a trustee of the New York Historical Society, the London-based Center for Policy Studies, and the newly-founded University of Austin. His latest book, Doom, subtitled The Politics of Catastrophe, was published last year by Penguin and was shortlisted for the Lionel Gerber Prize. Neil, so nice to see you. Thanks for making the time.

• 5:35Speaker 01

  Good to be with you, Tim, and guilty as charged. All that you just said is true, and I cannot deny it.

• 5:41Tim Ferriss?

  All of the things, and we're going to unpack all sorts of bits and pieces of that. And I wanted to start with an observation, and you can correct this observation if it's an illusion, a mirage, a misreading of the facts. Noah Feldman says hello, by the way, as a side note.

• 5:56Speaker 01

  Hello back to Noah.

• 5:58Tim Ferriss?

  And that is, you put into words something that has struck me about your career. And that is that it's not really one career. You have at least three careers. So major historian, sort of best of the best, played the ivory tower game brilliantly well. Then, public historian slash public intellectual, we could parse out or relabel any number of those. And then afterwards, you have advisory firms and the company involvement and so on. The first question I want to ask related to this, and certainly you can revise that. But what was your first experience in reaching a broader public with your ideas outside of academia?

• 6:41Speaker 01

  I always felt that if I was gonna be a historian, it should not be for some tiny exclusive audience confined to ivory towers, whether in Oxford or Cambridge or Harvard. My hero when I was a schoolboy was a British historian, A.J. P. Taylor, who not only wrote terrific books. I think the first history book I remember engaging with was his Illustrated History of the First World War. But he also would write newspaper columns and do lectures on television and get into public rouse.

• 7:22Speaker 01

  And that always struck me as a highly attractive way of life. You would be in the morning, sitting in your oak panelled studies, surrounded by books, smoking your pipe and giving tutorials. But in the afternoon, you'd bash out a thousand words for the Daily Express. And then you'd deliver a quick lecture on the 1848 revolutions for the BBC. And then you'd be in time for a high table at seven. That was always the plan. I never aspired to be a dry as dust academic at all. In fact, it's striking how successfully I've executed a plan that I hatched when I was a teenager.

• 8:00Tim Ferriss?

  So this leads into, I suppose, a question, maybe even part answered it, which is, let me set the table by saying, I have a lot of involvement with friends in academia, with researchers who are

• 8:16Tim Ferriss?

  De facto involved in academic settings and there's a lot of fear-based career planning in those circles, sort of seeking a prestige and social support or endorsement. You seem to have been a skeptic of whatever container people have attempted to put you within and have become an iconoclast in many respects. Is that lack of fear, what appears to be a lack of fear, something that was developed? Is it simply because you had already hatched a plan to leave the confines? For instance, in the one case of academia, therefore you weren't worried about them booting you out.

• 8:59Tim Ferriss?

  Where does that openness to criticizing what's around you come from?

• 9:05Speaker 01

  Well, you have to remember that I'm old. I'm 58, so when my career-

• 9:10Tim Ferriss?

  Well, you've been at it for a while.

• 9:12Speaker 01

  The launch zone in the mid 1980s, when I was an undergraduate at Oxford, was very different compared with the launch zone at Harvard or Yale or Stanford today. And I'm not sure it's possible to be me today. In fact, it almost certainly isn't. We forget that the 1980s were a high point of academic freedom. Because academic freedom's not something that's always been there. It had to kind of be fought for in the later 20th century and I was one of the beneficiaries of a tremendous climate of intellectual freedom in Britain in the 80s. The battles had really been fought in the 60s and 70s or earlier.

• 9:55Speaker 01

  And we took for granted that we could say the most outrageous things, calculatedly offensive things, and pay no price. I used to call myself a punk Tory because I had been a schoolboy when the Sex Pistols burst onto the scene in 1976. Three years later, Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister and she was almost as infuriating to many people as Johnny Rotten. And I loved that. I just loved the fact that the Sex Pistols shook up music and she shook up politics. And I arrived at Oxford in the early 80s at the same time as my old friend Andrew Sullivan and we were just odious. We were just the most obnoxious young men and we-

• 10:39Speaker 01

  Took pride in in our outrageous discourse, as it would be called today. There was a a famous occasion when somebody threw a, it wasn't famous, it was famous to us, somebody threw a party to celebrate the deployment of cruise and perishing missiles to Western Europe. And the invitation was the neck of a champagne bottle with a mushroom cloud coming out of it. And that was one of the milder things that we did. So at that time, there were very limited downside risks to being obnoxious. And I think that was true in the US too. I said to Peter Thiel the other day, you know, you couldn't be you now, eighteen year old Peter Thiel now would would be kind of destroyed on

• 11:21Speaker 01

  the launchpad, whereas you could be as obnoxious as we were at Oxford, at Stanford, and actually positively benefit from it. There were some risks to going into the academic profession even then, though, because there's a period in your academic career, even in the nineteen eighties, when you're capable of being destroyed on the launchpad, because you do need people to write letters of reference and you do need committees to give you jobs and you need them also to agree to publish your first book, all that stuff. And so I'll give you an example of my risk averse behaviour. I did a lot of journalism in the eighties when I was a graduate student. I couldn't

• 12:01Speaker 01

  have afforded to do a PhD otherwise, because I really had no money beyond a very meager scholarship. And I was doing research in Germany, which was quite expensive in those days for a British student. And so I did a lot of journalism, but I did it under assumed names. There was a chap named Alec Campbell. There was F F Gillespie who wrote for Punch Magazine. And for several years, I led a double life, where Neil Ferguson was this somewhat right-leaning but terribly rigorous scholar. But these other personas would be writing in even for the Daily Mail, which was a really scandalous thing for an aspiring academic to do. And I was outed, I can remember quite early on, an old rival of mine

• 12:46Speaker 01

  going around telling everybody that in fact Alec Campbell was me and those Y O Y pieces in the Daily Mail were by me. And I probably, he thought that would kill me and it didn't.

• 12:57Tim Ferriss?

  What was the blood feud between you and this arch rival? What was he, what was he hoping to gain? Was he hoping to gain from this or just simply annihilate you by outing the scandal of identity flak jackets that you've been using?

• 13:10Speaker 01

  Maurice Cowling, one of the great conservative historians of Cambridge, once characterized the three virtues in life as irony, geniality and malice. And I think my contemporary was motivated by all three. It wasn't that he was meditating a career extinction. It was just a combination of irony, geniality and malice. He presumably was sitting at high table and there was a lull in the conversation. And he said, oh, by the way, did you know that that awful Alec Campbell in the Daily Mail is really Neil Ferguson? And I do remember being seized by panic when I realized that he'd outed me. But by that point, I think I'd got far enough up the ladder.

• 13:54Tim Ferriss?

  You've reached escape velocity on some level.

• 13:56Speaker 01

  Or maybe there's another theory about this, which I'll, I'll briefly share. You've got to remember that before the internet, communications were, were really quite terrible in the horizontal domain. So you had vertical communication, you could listen to the BBC if they didn't ban your single, you could do that. But Oxford and Cambridge didn't communicate very much. And so you could be outed in Oxford, but still get a job in Cambridge because the news had not in fact traveled across the country. In the same way that my mentor, Norman Stone, got a job in Oxford despite having behaved quite outrageously in Cambridge. But his, his Cambridge backers were really trying to export him to Oxford. So they purged themselves in their letters of reference and no one in Oxford really bothered

• 14:42Speaker 01

  to pick up a phone and say, is any of this true? So I think what really happened was that I was outed in Oxford, but in the nick of time, got a job in Cambridge and was able to start a new life with a clean sheet.

• 14:53Tim Ferriss?

  So I'm gonna make a confession as a knuckle dragging Long Islander. I don't actually know what High Table is or the High Table. I can imagine in my mind, some British high society function, maybe with some fantastic adult beverages. But what image should High Table conjure in my mind?

• 15:11Speaker 01

  Well, you're right about the beverages. You've watched some Harry Potter movies.

• 15:17Tim Ferriss?

  I have, yes.

• 15:18Speaker 01

  That's all you need to know. So it's basically the case that Hogwarts is a sort of entertaining amalgam of Eton and an Oxford College. Quite a lot of it's actually shot at Christchurch. And you'll remember that when they have their spectacular feasts, the teachers sit on a slightly elevated dice with a big, long table and Gand- not Gandalf, wrong wizard.

• 15:44Tim Ferriss?

  It does look like Gandalf.

• 15:45Speaker 01

  I get my, I get my.

• 15:47Tim Ferriss?

  Dumbledore.

• 15:47Speaker 01

  Dumbledore, I get my children's fiction confused because I have to watch so much of it. Dumbledore gives his speeches from that High Table. And if you go to dinner at Christchurch, essentially you will see a version of Hogwarts, slightly less visually striking, but the same basic idea. And the thing that's attractive about Oxford and Cambridge, if you come from Glasgow, remember, you think Long Island is, is low.

• 16:10Tim Ferriss?

  A backwater.

• 16:11Speaker 01

  Let me tell you about Glasgow. So I came from what was once one of the great industrial metropoles of the British Empire. But by the 1970s was Rust Belt. We were doing Hillbilly Elegy before G D Vance was even born, I think. And it was, it was quite a, quite a messy place. And Oxford, by comparison, just looked like a really high end BBC costume drama in which the men wore tweed suits and they dined at High Table. And at High Table, the most delicious wines were served. And all of this was irresistibly attractive to me when I was a teenager. I thought, I go, I'm gonna get out of Glasgow and I'm gonna have a study like that. And I'm gonna eat at High Table and wear a tweed suit.

• 16:54Speaker 01

  And I did those things and it was great.

• 16:57Tim Ferriss?

  Was it, did it live up to the dreams?

• 17:00Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 17:00Tim Ferriss?

  What did you like about it? What did you like about it?

• 17:02Speaker 01

  In those days, when I made it first to High Table, it was in Cambridge. And I was at a college, Christ's College, that had been immortalized in a novel, The Masters, by C. P. Snow, in which Cambridge politics provides the drama. And academic politics has its own peculiar appeal. As Henry Kissinger famously said, "It's so poisonous because the stakes are so low." Very good line.

• 17:29Tim Ferriss?

  Now, you are actually of good authority to say, did Kissinger also say, "I left academics because I couldn't stand the politics"? Something along those lines? Or is that just one of those attributed to Abraham Lincoln or Oscar Wilde quotes floating around on the internet?

• 17:42Speaker 01

  I mean, Kissinger said so many things that you deny he said something, and the next day you find it in one of the documents. So he probably said that, but it certainly fits. But I, I got to Christ's and there were, in fact, three masters, two former masters and one regularly dining, one current serving master, regularly dining at High Table. And the vicious way in which the former masters undermined the serving master was my introduction to academic politics. Luckily, one of the former masters was Sir John Plum, Jack Plum, a very influential historian of that generation. He had come from humble origins in the town of Leicester, but had risen through the academic

• 18:24Speaker 01

  ranks, had been involved at Bletchley Park during the war, had got to know the Rothschild family, and had been introduced to the lights of Chateau Lafitte by the Rothschilds. And he used to serve Chateau Lafitte at special occasions such as

• 18:40Tim Ferriss?

  This is a nice wine, I assume.

• 18:42Speaker 01

  One of the great Bordeaux's.

• 18:43Tim Ferriss?

  Oh.

• 18:44Speaker 01

  Unavailable in Long Island, but, and in Glasgow, but available in Cambridge. And so I fell in with him. He would, on his, in his 85th birthday, serve some fantastic vintage. And the younger dons, you know, the engineering fellows would sort of take a couple of sips and then, and then leave most of it undrunk and go back to their laboratories. And this would send Jack into a rage. He would seethe. He was a very cantankerous old man. And I, as the junior most fellow, I remember on one occasion, I was such a shameless sycophant. But also with a taste for Chateau Lafite. I said after they'd all gone, I said, Jack, it's a terrible shame to to waste this wine. I'm going to drink the dregs from the glasses that

• 19:28Speaker 01

  they've left. He loved me for that. I also, you know, I lived to tell the tale. None of them had any obviously lethal infectious diseases. And it's the most wonderful wine. And once you've drunk Lafite, it's hard to go back to what you were drinking before.

• 19:43Tim Ferriss?

  You're spoiled, spoiled for life. That scene should make it into a screenplay at the turn of some act. I mean, that is a fantastic scene. May I drink the dregs?

• 19:52Speaker 01

  It was, it was a good move because Jack Plum was one of the great academic patrons. Simon Sharma was was one of Jack's proteges and Linda Colly. And so by sucking up to Jack, I did my career no harm at all. Because when Jack wrote a reference, when he wrote a letter of reference, he would begin, not since Edward Gibbon has an historian written this level of quality, wildly hyperbolic references. So yeah, you know, academic politics involves that kind of odious behavior. And I'm afraid I was capable of it in my, in my twenties, still am, still am.

• 20:25Tim Ferriss?

  Skilled, one might say. So let's go back to AJP Taylor. Number of questions about AJP Taylor. I had never heard this name. I'm ashamed to admit until doing some research for this conversation. And number of questions, again, with the baseline of Long Island kept in mind, because these are probably going to be fairly 101 questions. One is, how should people think about defining philosophy of history? That's number one. And number two is, the Taylor line related to historical sensibility being similar to musical sensibility? And if you could just say more about that?

• 21:11Speaker 01

  The philosophy of history is barely studied or indeed taught. And yet you can't really be an historian without a philosophy of history. You have to understand the nature of causation. These days, nobody bothers with that, which is why a lot of academic history is garbage. I became fascinated by the philosophy of history at that time when I was drinking Chateau La Feet with Jack Plum and realised that there was a very central problem. Namely, that any causal statement, this is obvious to philosophers and it's obvious to people who do the law, implies a counterfactual. In other words, if we say that the conversation between Tim Ferriss and Neil Ferguson

• 21:52Speaker 01

  in November 2022 led to the outbreak of war between China and the United States the following year, that implies that if we hadn't had the conversation, the war wouldn't have happened. And so the what-if question, what if they hadn't had the conversation, is a legitimate question. In the same way, if you think that Hitler was the key architect of World War Two and it wouldn't have happened without him, then it's legitimate to ask, what would have happened if Hitler had in fact been assassinated prior to September 1939? So those what-if questions were of great importance to me as a young scholar and teacher. That was how I used to teach students. I would say, well, what if, what if that hadn't happened? What if Britain hadn't intervened in 1914?

• 22:37Speaker 01

  Taylor was a historian who was sympathetic to that approach. His view was a somewhat sceptical, ironical view that men only learn from history how to make new mistakes. And his books are shot through with the role of contingency. One of the things that made Taylor attractive to me in parentheses was his brilliant prose style. Up there with George Orwell as one of the master stylists of the 20th century and a tremendous master of paradox and of one-liners too. The line about the 1848 revolutions as being the turning point when Germany failed to turn. All that stuff I found exciting because...

• 23:22Speaker 01

  Being able to write like that is also the way to convince a reader, to be able to talk like that is to convince an audience. So that's how the philosophy of history relates to the style of of history. The second question that you asked about music, his assertion that the historical sensibility is a bit like the receptiveness to music is right. History is not a science. It can't be a science because we can't rerun events in laboratory and see if consistently war breaks out in nineteen thirty nine with or without Hitler. So what we're doing when we study the past, as a great Oxford philosopher of history, R G Collingwood said, is we're kind of reconstituting past human experience from the bits and pieces

• 24:06Speaker 01

  that have been left behind. And as we do that, it's a very subtle process of mental reenactment of experience. And I'm not sure that Taylor was wrong to compare it to that musical side of the human psyche. Interestingly, someone else said much the same thing, a man named Fritz Kramer, who was Henry Kissinger's great mentor during and after World War Two. And Kramer said that Kissinger had this kind of sensibility. He was attuned to history. I think that's a very, very right. You've got to have the ear for it. And it's quite obvious when one reads a book, when a historian's tone deaf and shouldn't really have gone into the business,

• 24:51Speaker 01

  just as it would be obvious if they tried to conduct an orchestra or play a concerto. So yeah, I think it's much closer to music than it is to science.

• 25:00Tim Ferriss?

  How does that show up for you, having a trained ear in historical resonance, let's just say, the ear for history? How does that show up when it is part of an author's constitution or developed repertoire? What does it look like in their writing or their thinking?

• 25:22Speaker 01

  When I was writing the history of the Rothschild Banks and family back in the nineteen nineties,

• 25:30Speaker 01

  I spend a lot of my time reading through dusty old letters and diary entries and minutes of meetings. And the most striking documents were the letters that the Rothschild brothers wrote to one another, there were five of them, they'd come out of the Frankfurt ghetto. They had built, within an amazingly short time, the most powerful financial institution in Europe, already by the eighteen twenties. And they wrote almost daily to one another because they no longer lived together. One was in London, one was in Paris, one was in Vienna, one was in Naples, and one was in Frankfurt. So these letters were almost more like phone calls, and they were extremely hard to decipher

• 26:13Speaker 01

  because they wrote in Hebrew characters, which were extremely difficult to read, even if you knew Hebrew. The only way I could access the letters was to have a scholar who could read them, a wonderful man named Mordecai Zucca, read them aloud onto audio cassettes. So I spent a lot of time listening to these letters, and when he read them aloud, they were mostly German with occasional Hebrew words. They were electrifying documents, they cast an entirely new light on the nineteenth century, and they were entirely absorbing, not least because they were so regular, so it was very high-frequency correspondence.

• 26:53Speaker 01

  And I can remember one letter, and I'll never forget the experience of hearing it, in which the eldest of the brothers, whose name was Amshel, described what it was like, for the first time, to own land. He bought a garden on the outskirts of Frankfurt. Prior to that, Jews had not been allowed to own real estate, and he, as a result of the upheavals caused by the French Revolution, suddenly was able to do that. And he writes to the brothers, saying, "I bought the garden, and last night, I slept in it, I slept outside in the garden." And he described the feeling, and I remember, and it still makes my spine tingle, the feeling of...

• 27:39Speaker 01

  Excitement that this quite dry man, because he was a, almost had the mentality of the accountant amongst the brothers. But this quite dry man had done that. He'd slept outdoors for the first time in a garden that he owned. And I was moved to tears. And I thought, what is this like? Why is this such a moving document? And I remembered the moment in Beethoven's Fidelio when the prisoners are let out into the open air. He actually uses the expression, "freier Luft", free air. And that prisoners chorus, when they sing what it is to be in the open air, struck me as exactly the appropriate music for that moment.

• 28:19Speaker 01

  And I remember putting it on my then stereo player and listening to Beethoven and listening again to the letter and thinking, this is an enormously important document which captures what emancipation means, what it is to be suddenly given a civil right that you've previously been denied. And often in my career, I've had these epiphanies, moments when a document suddenly reveals something profound. And often that moment of connection has a musical dimension to it. The best historians have that ability to bring the experiences of the dead alive, bring them back to life,

• 29:03Speaker 01

  make you empathize with them despite the distance in time and in space and in experience. And that, that's a hard thing to do. Not many people can do it well. Many historians these days don't even try because they don't feel that our mission is to reconstitute past experience. They feel that our mission is to go back and judge people in the past for their sins by our standards. And that means that there's a project, which I think is very hostile to historical understanding, to change the mission of the historian. Instead of trying to reconstitute past experience, we're really just sitting there passing judgments on past actions. I'm very against that. I think it produces very bad history. It also produces quite boring history.

• 29:48Tim Ferriss?

  So if we go back to AJP, what did AJP stand for?

• 29:53Speaker 01

  Alan Taylor, I forget what, probably John Percival, but I might be wrong. But he was known as Alan to his intimates, but in those days, people quite often published with only their initials. It created perhaps a certain distance between the author and the public. I never contemplated being N C Ferguson, though. It's just too off putting, isn't it?

• 30:15Tim Ferriss?

  Non-commissioned Officer Ferguson, I do like it, though. So Dr. Taylor said, as you mentioned, men only learn from history how to make new mistakes. Now, he seems, I don't know this person at all, but as you described, being a master of paradox, also being a wordsmith and gifted in that particular way, that there may be some truth in this statement, but he also dedicated his life to history. So if you got a few drinks, a few glasses of Chateau Lafitte into Dr. Taylor and said, all right, all right. I know that's a great line, but like, why is history important to you? Why do you, why have you dedicated your life to this? How do you think he might answer that?

• 30:55Speaker 01

  I'm pretty sure he was Mr. Taylor. In those days, people didn't bother getting doctorates. They were regarded as.

• 31:01Tim Ferriss?

  I'm using Dr. More in the doctor's capacity for.

• 31:05Speaker 01

  The English regarded doctorates as a German invention that one didn't, didn't need to sully one's life with, perhaps wisely. So Taylor's conviction was that most people thought wrongly about the past, had misconceptions about it, and these misconceptions led them into error. So one of the most controversial books he ever wrote was a book on the origins of the Second World War, in which he argued very.

• 31:40Speaker 01

  Paradoxically, as a contrarian, that really Hitler had not been particularly unusual German leader and that Hitler's foreign policy had in some ways been a continuation of previous foreign policies and that the war was really the fault of the blundering incompetence in London and Paris, who had made the policy of appeasement and had pursued it very ineptly. The book is still worth reading, even although these days most people would disagree with Taylor because they would argue, as I would argue, that Hitler was a kind of monster whose ideology and whose personality were very unusual and a departure from German tradition.

• 32:21Speaker 01

  At any event, the book is brilliant and it's designed to force you to reassess your assumptions about why World War Two happened. I'm motivated by the same belief that most people think wrong things about the past and base their actions on these erroneous assumptions. And the job of the historian is to challenge the conventional wisdom about past events in the belief that the conventional wisdom's actually quite a dangerous thing. So it's to me uninteresting to write a book that essentially repeats the arguments that have been made before. I have no motivation to write a book unless it's challenging what people have thought

• 33:05Speaker 01

  about the past, whether it's the origins of the First World War, which I wrote a book about, whether it's the nature of 20th century conflict, whether it's the history of money, whatever it is, I'm motivated to say something that challenges received opinion in the belief that by doing that I might possibly improve decision-making in the present and future. I believe, and I've always believed, that we are trying to learn lessons from the past. And when Taylor said that men only learn from the past how to make new mistakes, he wasn't dismissing the possibility of learning from history, but he was being ironical. It's probably right that no matter how hard we try, we'll end up making new mistakes.

• 33:47Speaker 01

  But that's not a council of despair, and I passionately believe that the study of history Must be motivated by a desire to do better, or at least to fail better next time. So that I think is what you'd have got from Taylor if you'd plied him with Chateau Lafitte, although Taylor would, he would have resisted your very American impulse to get a sincere answer.

• 34:13Speaker 01

  And I'm enough of an American now to give sincere answers, but the typical British Don of Taylor's generation would have just, they would, he would not have been able to resist the temptation to tease you.

• 34:26Tim Ferriss?

  Maybe I need more of that. Maybe I should spend more time at the high table.

• 34:29Speaker 01

  I can arrange that.

• 34:30Tim Ferriss?

  You have, you have, you have given me an appetite for some tweed, I will be honest.

• 34:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's good in winter. And look, the thing about tweed is it's there for places where there's no central heating. And these Oxford colleges, their buildings often date back to, to before the Reformation. It wasn't as if England was famous for its central heating, even in the 20th century. And so to understand the tweed suit as a phenomenon, you have to remember, these studies are pretty cold, even if you've got a fire in the grate. Now that we're heading towards another energy crisis, I believe the tweed suit will recover. Maybe not in the United States, but in England, pretty soon, there's going to be a run on tweed suits.

• 35:09Tim Ferriss?

  You heard it here first, folks. Alpha. Neil Ferguson is long tweed.

• 35:13Speaker 01

  I'm long tweed.

• 35:17Tim Ferriss?

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• 36:40Tim Ferriss?

  A few miscellaneous. Mordecai, incredible name, always one of my favorites. You mentioned Percival, that may not have been the P of the AJP, but also a fantastic name. Could you say a bit more about the role of contingency? The, I guess, the through line, one of the through lines of Taylor's writing? And you can answer these out of order, of course. For someone who wanted to get a good taste of his writing, because your description of paradox and the use of paradox and powerful metaphor and prose is really appealing to me. Where would you suggest someone start? Or where would you suggest perhaps I start?

• 37:24Speaker 01

  I'll give you a couple of examples of historical contingency. First, the decision for war in 1914 was taken in Britain on a weekend, which was an unusual time for the British Cabinet to meet. And when they went into the meeting, I think it's fair to say that nobody really knew how it would turn out.

• 37:57Speaker 01

  In particular, the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George, was expected to be against intervention because he had been a man of the left. And it was not obvious that intervening in the war was a particularly left liberal thing to do. There were plenty of people in the Cabinet who had deep reservations about intervening in the war, and it was seen as something that the Conservatives were much more enthusiastic for. And so people expected Lloyd George to speak up against intervention. He'd already given indications prior to August the 2nd that he had doubts about the wisdom of action. But he didn't, even although he was handed a note by one

• 38:39Speaker 01

  of his Cabinet colleagues encouraging him to speak up. He had decided that it would ultimately be better for David Lloyd George if Britain went to war, and he was right because he ended up becoming Prime Minister during the war, because Herbert Asquith had descended into a kind of alcoholic fog. That's a good example of how one individual's action or lack of action can have very profound consequences. And I wrote a lot about that in The Pity of War and in the book Virtual History, because I think it's important for people to understand that while there are great historical forces at work, there were

• 39:18Speaker 01

  powerful forces driving Europe towards conflict prior to 1914. There is a very important role for contingency, and that continues to be true today. And one should think about the historical process. And in a similar way, let me give you a contemporary example.

• 39:34Tim Ferriss?

  May I pause just for one second? So in terms of contingency, just the use of that word, I think of contingency in the context of, say, contingency plan. In this case, do you mean it's a split test with an alternate version of historical reality where someone did or did not do something, did or did not play a part in a given conversation? Is that what you mean by contingency?

• 39:55Speaker 01

  Contingency here means a relatively small event or decision. It doesn't need to be a decision. It can be something accidental, has very major consequences. And historical causations like that, something relatively small, can have tremendous ramifications. I'll give you another illustration. This year, most people, including the US government, thought that if Russia invaded Ukraine, the Ukrainian government would quite quickly fold. And it was assumed that Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, would bail. He didn't. He gave his famous response, "I don't want an air ticket, I want ammunition."

• 40:40Speaker 01

  And Zelensky's courage, when they were closing in on Kiev with a high probability that they would assassinate him, the Russians, turned the course of history in a way that I think is now quite widely understood. People know Zelensky is an important historical figure. He gets a lot of attention because he is a charismatic figure who understands how to how to use modern media to communicate with an audience. That's that's the benefit of having a very seasoned entertainer as your president. But I think what's really important there is that his courage, particularly the famous video selfie video where he says, "I'm here, the defense minister is here, we're here, they're standing in the streets of Kiev, the Russians are closing in at that point on

• 41:25Speaker 01

  the capital." That was a tremendous act of courage, but it emboldened ordinary Ukrainians not to fold. And it also intimidated the collaborators who were ready to help the Russians not to act. So the contingency there is, if Zelensky had gone according to our expectation and taken the plane, then Putin would have had Kiev within a matter of days or weeks, and the war would be over. So I think one of the things that's exciting about the study of history is you're trying to remind yourself again and again that what happened, that what we know happened, might have gone the other way, that the Cuban Missile Crisis ended in both sides essentially

• 42:10Speaker 01

  backing down was not predetermined. There was a moment when a Soviet submarine commander gave the order to fire a nuclear tipped torpedo at US naval surface ships.

• 42:21Speaker 01

  So we came within a hairsbread of World War III. These alternate worlds, these histories that didn't happen, have to be alive in your mind when you're writing history. The fatal mistake is to write history as if it was bound to happen the way it happened. And this, of course, is the mistake that a great majority of historians make. Forgetting that we don't know at the time, at the moment, we didn't know the morning of the 24th of February that Zelensky would stand his ground. Nobody knew that. I wonder if even Zelensky at that moment knew what it was that he was going to do. So I say all this because I think it's really important to convey to your listeners and viewers

• 43:05Speaker 01

  how exciting history is and how studying it makes you understand the course of events in your own life better. Removes that passivity that sometimes people succumb to. If you think great historical forces are going to have inevitable outcomes, if you have a deterministic view of the historical process, it's very easy to lapse into fatalism. Yeah, absolutely. There's the other trap, which is the conspiracy theories. Well, you know, the truth of the matter is that actually Soros and the Rothschilds are orchestrating all this. Again, you throw up your hands and you abandon the attempt to understand how the historical process works. Okay, what should one read to get a flavor of Alan Taylor's extraordinary talent? He did a lot of- You have a very good short-term memory, by the way. You have a very good short-term memory.

• 43:50Speaker 01

  I do my best. Please continue. Taylor's masterpiece is quite a dense read and I wouldn't recommend it. The Struggle for Mastery in Europe. That's the book I most admire, but it's probably the last thing to start with. It's The Widowmaker. Yeah, I mean, I, I love the book, but I'm a little idiosyncratic. I like long and dense books, but the essays that he wrote, which were often book reviews, are available in paperback collections. In the old days, they used to publish the essays of historians. I wish they still did because I would have many more books to my credit if I could just repackage my essays as books. But he, his, his books of essays are really worth reading. In the same way that if you want to get to Orwell-

• 44:33Speaker 01

  Don't just read Animal Farm in 1984, read Orwell's amazing essays. There are four fantastic volumes of Orwell's essays, and he and Taylor between them were just such masters of short-form English prose. You will just feel like you're eating Turkish delight as you read your way through their essays.

• 44:53Tim Ferriss?

  In the vein of adding to your tally of books published, if the book doesn't exist with the title, The Histories That Didn't Happen, just saying, has a nice ring to it, a bit of alliteration, easy to grasp, not too abstract in any case.

• 45:06Speaker 01

  Lewis Namier was a great Cambridge historian who said that the key to history was having a sense of what didn't happen. And I always think of Thelonious Monk's line about jazz, it's the notes you don't play. And as a jazz fan, I think history has to have that kind of Thelonious Monk feel to it, where you're kind of telling the reader, this didn't happen, but it nearly did. And people at the time thought about it. This is the key rule, by the way. You can't just fantasize and devise counterfactuals that are entirely out of your imagination. You have to go with things that people at the time thought might happen. It's a really important guardrail on counterfactual

• 45:51Speaker 01

  history. That's the fancy term for what-if history or histories that didn't happen is counterfactual history. And I'm a passionate believer in it. And I'm proud to say that despite my making the argument for counterfactual history back in the 1990s, that's a long time ago now, it's still counterculture. It is still what the cool kids do in history, and the establishment still looks down on it. I used to be annoyed about that. I used to think, why don't they understand? Why do these people not see you have to talk about what didn't happen? And now I'm glad that it's still cool and minority and, you know, kind of underground. That's fine with me. You established historians, carry on doing what you're doing. You carry on saying, we're only here to

• 46:33Speaker 01

  study what did happen. You carry on doing that, but just know that the cool kids have seen through this, and they know that it's really BS. You have to talk about what didn't happen to understand what did happen, obviously.

• 46:46Tim Ferriss?

  Or all the things that so nearly didn't happen. And I'm no historian, I make no claims otherwise, don't play one on the internet. However, I did listen. Don't know how you feel about this podcast, but I have enjoyed many episodes of Hardcore History by Dan Carlin, who would not call himself a historian either, but he did an episode on the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and everything that came of that. And when you dig into the specifics, I mean, it is just mind boggling to think how that came about and how many near misses. It just boggles the mind to think how, as

• 47:26Tim Ferriss?

  you put, if you zoom too far out and just view history as these inevitable tectonic plates, then there's a fatalism that can set in and you throw up your hands and move on to just staring at TikTok all day or whatever you might do. And at the same time, if you bleed into the conspiracy theory side of things, same outcome. But I need to do more reading.

• 47:48Speaker 01

  By the way, Dan Carlin is great. I love what he does. I haven't heard that particular episode. Anything that gets a wider audience for history is good. And I recently heard his great interview with Elon Musk about the technology of World War II. It's brilliant. And it's brilliant partly because Elon knows a lot about the hardware of World War II. And so you think of World War II as kind of an engineering problem in the end. It's like, who can build better planes, better tanks, all that stuff. But Carlin's doing terrific work. And yeah, you're right. 1914 is a perfect illustration because Princip, the assassin, totally fails the first time. And how many assassins get a second chance? Because the driver of the target takes the wrong turning.

• 48:31Tim Ferriss?

  And then stops right next to the bar where you're getting hammered because you failed your first attempt, or whatever the story is. It's crazy. Are there any other examples of correspondence that you have been taken by, not necessarily in the same way, but in a similar way to the exchanges between the Rothschilds? And the reason I ask is, I have had, I consume a lot of biographies. I do read a fair amount of history, but I don't really know how to assess historians. And I wish I had a way of establishing the biases upfront, because we are all human, subjective. There must be biases, I'd imagine. So, much like a conflict of interest or special interest section in a scientific paper, like,

• 49:14Tim Ferriss?

  okay, at least we know what chips these people have on the board. So I have defaulted to looking for correspondence that was never intended for publication as a way to get a view into the thinking of the time, what was happening at the time. Are there any other examples that pop up when I use the prompt correspondence?

• 49:36Speaker 01

  Part of what's attractive about historical study is reading the letters and diaries of the dead or very, very old and the non-published material. If you inhabit the world of the published, which many historians do, that is to say, they essentially write their books on the basis of things that have been published, whether it's books or articles, you are really doing research at one remove from reality. I've written books like that, and there is a role for them because you're really synthesizing the scholarship of many, many authors and trying to produce a single distilled version of what happened. But there's a difference between writing a book based on published material and writing

• 50:21Speaker 01

  a book based on unpublished material, and it's a huge difference. I attach much more importance to books that I've written based on unpublished material and books that others have written. Why? Because that which is published is essentially filtered. A huge filter has determined what sees the light of day in print. When you enter an archive, the only filter is that nobody destroyed it and somebody thought to preserve it in at least enough of an orderly form that you can look at it. And this is a radically different world that you enter. It's not a perfect representation of reality, but it's a lot closer to reality than the published material.

• 51:06Speaker 01

  And so let me illustrate the point. As I write the biography of Henry Kissinger, the first volume of which came out a few years ago, I'm writing the second volume now. There is, of course, a very well-established narrative about the Vietnam War, about the Cold War, about the opening to China, about the Middle East. It's all very well-established. There are lots of books out there about it. But when you enter the realm of the unpublished correspondence, including transcripts of telephone calls, even the tapes of telephone calls, which were certainly not supposed to see the light of day. Because the Nixon administration is the best documented administration of all time. Thanks to Nixon's ultimately fatal error of taping everything.

• 51:50Speaker 01

  The world is a very different one from that world that you thought you understood thanks to Christopher Hitchens. I mean, Christopher Hitchens's book on Kissinger sold many copies. It contains, I think from memory, 12 footnotes. It refers to that many sources. It is a work of journalism of outrageous superficiality. It's a polemical hatchet job, and it shouldn't be treated as history. Hitch was a friend of mine. I miss him. But it's important to recognize that that's not a work of history, really. Another way of thinking about this is what's the ratio of words read to words written? Now, I wish, Tim, that that ratio was published on the front of books.

• 52:33Speaker 01

  So this is a one-to-one book, like he read basically one word for every word that he wrote. And this is a hundred-to-one book, and this is a thousand-to-one book. And thousand-to-one, it seems like it's about right. I mean, most books are really not worth reading because their ratio is close to unity. There may even be books where the ratio is below unity, that they've written actually more words than they read in preparing to write the book. Sounds like the internet in a nutshell, yeah. Yeah, right. I mean, that's the blogosphere. It's like, ah, why bother doing research? I have a great opinion. I'm a very much a thousand-to-one kind of person. I like... To dig deeply and broadly and to enter that realm of the unpublished.

• 53:15Speaker 01

  And I'm insatiable as I enter it. I can never be entirely satisfied. I'm reconstructing Kissinger's life almost on an hour by hour basis to try to see a new way of thinking about the 1970s, which was a pivotal decade in a great many ways. To rethink that decade is my current mission. And of course, I won't succeed in changing that many people's minds because most people made up their minds about Henry Kissinger long ago in about, I don't know, 1974. But I do think we have to rethink the Cold War as a matter of urgency because we're in one. We're in a new Cold War, in Cold War II. And if we don't think long and hard about what went right and what went wrong in Cold

• 53:59Speaker 01

  War I, there is a high probability that we're going to repeat some pretty serious mistakes.

• 54:04Tim Ferriss?

  So let's talk about Cold War II. I was actually going to segue to your thinking and observations of the not mutually exclusive combination of maybe conditions that have been set over the last five to 10 or more years that are now leading to certain types of inertia in terms of trends, converging trends that may or may not be avoidable. Then there's a lot of wiggle room with independent actors and so on, as we've discussed. But I've read you describe Cold War II, I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, as China senior partner, Russia junior partner.

• 54:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 54:43Tim Ferriss?

  In contrast to Cold War I. If you were placing bets on likely events or developments over the next handful of years, what would you put out as perhaps some reasonably probable scenarios that we'll see develop?

• 55:02Speaker 01

  The cliche quote often ascribed to Mark Twain is that history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. He never said that.

• 55:11Speaker 01

  Twain never used those words. That's a made up quote. What Twain actually said back in the eighteen seventies was that history is a bit like a kaleidoscope and as you turned it, certain patterns could repeat themselves. So let's think about this as a kaleidoscope. You'll remember those things we had as kids where you kind of stick it to your eyes like hmm, that's psychedelic. What happens if I turn, oh, that's also psychedelic but different.

• 55:36Speaker 01

  Cold War one had certain common features with Cold War two and and there were certain very important differences. So we shouldn't expect things to play out exactly the same. On the other hand, it's clear that we have an ideological rivalry between the United States and the People's Republic of China. There is clearly a technological race going on. There is also a geopolitical dimension to this, a conventional territorial dimension. And this is a point Graham Allison made in his book Destined for War. There's some probability that they end up in a hot war because what's a Cold War? George Orwell coined the phrase to mean a peace that is no peace. It is something that has latent

• 56:17Speaker 01

  the possibility of an actual hot war. And I think the United States and China have been in this kind of Cold War situation for at least four years, maybe longer. I think the Chinese would probably say longer, but we didn't notice. We didn't notice the beginning of Cold War one either. When Orwell talked about Cold War in nineteen forty five and Churchill in nineteen forty six talked about an iron curtain, most Americans were, no, no, no. Stalin's been our ally in World War Two. You're just war mongering. And it took until nineteen fifty when there was a hot war in Korea for most Americans to say, ah, maybe they're right. I mean, Kennan wasn't immediately hailed as a prophet when he talks about containment. The thing about Cold Wars is that by and large, people in the West don't really notice their beginning

• 57:03Speaker 01

  and take a while to understand the scale of the challenge. So we're at that early Cold War stage. I think that's a good analogy. That works well. And also, this war in Ukraine is like the Korean War. It's the first hot war of Cold War two and it makes you kind of get that you're in a Cold War. As in Cold War one, the hot war happens in a slightly unexpected location. The hot war that kicked off Cold War one was Korea. And the US hadn't really been paying very close attention to Korea when that kicked off. So if you take this kind of approach and recognize that there are similarities,

• 57:46Speaker 01

  except that instead of a nuclear arms race, we're in an AI race and a quantum computing race. If you recognize the difference, which is there's much more economic interpenetration between the US and China than there ever was between the US and the Soviet Union, you're then in a position to start hazarding guesses about what happens next, which is what you asked me to do. And these are very difficult things to get right. And I often think that if one makes a right prediction, it's more luck that it turns out to be right than judgment, because this is a complex system of enormous complexity.

• 58:25Speaker 01

  So when we try to say anything about global politics, we're really engaged in an exercise beyond our human brains. But let me have a go. Right now, the US and China are on collision course over Taiwan. Taiwan is to this Cold War what Cuba was to the last Cold War. It's the flashpoint. It's an island in close proximity to one of the players. Then it was close to the US. This time it's close to China. It's an island which seems to be worth more than its territorial size would suggest. Actually, Taiwan's more important than Cuba ever was, because Taiwan is where 92% of the most sophisticated semiconductors in the world are manufactured by TSMC.

• 59:10Speaker 01

  And so in some ways, the potential for a crisis over Taiwan is higher than the potential ever was for a crisis over Cuba. So I think what happens next is that we end up with a showdown over Taiwan at some point in the next few years. It could be in 2024, when there's an election scheduled in Taiwan. And it would also make sense to do it then from a Chinese point of view, because who knows who will be president in 2025, but probably not somebody as completely incompetent as Joe Biden. So my sense is that the crisis is not far away, even although the Chinese don't look terribly ready for a full-blown invasion. And that's the thing that I'll be watching most closely in the coming years.

• 59:52Speaker 01

  The other thing to remember is, and this again is in the nature of a guess, that A characteristic feature of Cold War I was that crises would happen in multiple locations at roughly the same kind of time. So the Middle East always mattered and it was the place where things would periodically blow up. I think the Middle East is about to blow up again because the Iranian regime clearly has an incentive to get into a war because when it's at war, it can slaughter domestic opposition with much greater ease. So I'm afraid that we're probably going to see a Middle Eastern crisis even before Taiwan blows up. And what worries me the most, Tim, is that the lesson of Cold War I is that we only narrowly avoided World War III, as I said already. So if we're in this kind

• 1:00:36Speaker 01

  of a scenario where there are crises in Eastern Europe, potentially in the Middle East, potentially in the Far East, I think just keeping this a Cold War will be quite a challenge. That will be a good outcome if we just say, hmm, that was Cold War II. And it'll be a great outcome if it ends the same way as Cold War I with peaceful victory for the West. But there is no guarantee at this point that Cold War II stays cold, and there is no guarantee at this point that the United States and its allies win. And that's the real lesson of Cold War I. It was not inevitable that it stayed cold, and it was not inevitable that we won.

• 1:01:10Tim Ferriss?

  To follow up on a few things that you mentioned, and as background, I was an East Asian Studies major at Princeton, spent ninety-six, part of ninety-six, about six months studying at two universities in Beijing. So I was able to see the bicycles Beijing prior to the Audi and BMW Beijing that we see today. But the reason I mention that is that I then subsequently traveled quite a lot in South America and a fair amount in Africa. And I was able to see, quite obviously, the extensive infrastructure that was being built by Chinese companies, also seemingly often with governmental, Chinese governmental support. And

• 1:01:55Tim Ferriss?

  From a geopolitical, natural resource and resource distribution perspective, this is not my area of expertise, but it seems like China has been playing three-dimensional chess for a while now with respect to all of that. As you mentioned, Taiwan is strategically, from a technological and manufacturing perspective, non-trivial compared to, say, Cuba. And my question is, what can the US do? Or is it a day late and a dollar short? I don't want to make it too fatalistic, but for the US to be prepared or prepare itself and not just be pseudo-prepared, which we have been for many things in the last several

• 1:02:40Tim Ferriss?

  years, what can be done? What would you suggest?

• 1:02:42Speaker 01

  Well, you're right to point out that this is a global challenge, that China's focused not only on Taiwan, or for that matter, the South China Sea, on its own neighborhood. It has been pursuing an ambitious and quite heterogeneous global strategy since Xi Jinping came to power. And the Belt and Road Initiative is only part of that. There are all kinds of other things, digital Silk Road, the export of surveillance technology to governments in the developing world, investment in lots of technology companies in emerging markets. You can see the infrastructure when you go to Africa.

• 1:03:23Speaker 01

  Even 10 years ago, when I made a documentary about this for British television, a place like Zambia had really quite extraordinary and visible Chinese presence, not only in football stadiums and highways, but also in mining and agriculture. So there is no question that we confront a new kind of Chinese challenge, because there really hasn't been an era until now when China was so clearly pursuing a global strategy. And by the way, that strategy was copied from the West. There was a conscious decision by Chinese leaders to learn from Western history.

• 1:04:03Speaker 01

  And to try and adopt some of the things that we had done, that Chinese empires hadn't done, really hadn't even contemplated doing since all the way back in the 15th century. So this hybrid China, which simultaneously has continuities from Chinese imperial history, from the Mao era, is also a China doing things that China hasn't done in the past. I think the United States has adopted recently a strategy of technological containment. That's most obvious in the recent restrictions imposed by the Commerce Department that are designed to prevent China advancing technologically by denying it access to the most sophisticated

• 1:04:48Speaker 01

  semiconductors and the equipment you need to make them. So our strategy is to try to freeze China's technological advance and we'll see how that goes. Seems hard to do. Right, so on the one side, it's extremely hard to build TSMC in mainland China. And I think there's some reason to believe they can't. But the idea that you can just sort of use economic sanctions to keep your principal adversary permanently behind you technologically, to me, historically seems like a stretch. And would seem also to me to raise the incentives for Xi Jinping to take Taiwan.

• 1:05:30Speaker 01

  Because if he can't access the TSMC products, then he can either try and get control of TSMC, but if he fails and we blow it up or they blow it up, then he's no worse off. But we're a lot worse off. So I think there are downside risks to our strategy of technological containment that aren't being given enough attention. Broadly speaking, I think a regime like China's is at its most dangerous when it starts to feel that its strategic options are narrowing and that there may in fact be only a small window of opportunity to bid for primacy or at least parity with the dominant superpower. We could do an awful lot more creative things than we're doing in developing countries.

• 1:06:16Speaker 01

  That is to say, we could compete much better in Africa. But the problem is, when we go to Africa, we come bearing aid. It usually has lots of strings attached to it. When the Chinese show up, there are not many strings. And it's not aid, it's investment, to put it very simply. So we're not really offering a particularly attractive alternative. A concrete example of this is when we decided that it would be a bad idea for Huawei to supply the world's 5G networks. We went around telling everybody Huawei very bad. But we didn't have a better alternative. As my friend, one of my African friends complains, that you come and tell us not to buy Huawei. We listen and then we say, so what should we buy?

• 1:07:01Speaker 01

  And it's like, oh, we don't know. Or try Ericsson, it's way more expensive and they won't give you any credit, but try Eric. I mean, that that's stupid. So we can't expect to win Cold War II if we have no better product. At least when the Soviets were going around Africa saying, you know, we'll, we'll give you the planned economy. We had a better idea. We definitely had a better pitch than the planned economy. What concerns me is that our strategy in Cold War II at this point looks very risky and quite likely to fail. And that's because when you read the most recent national security strategy document, we write things like, we don't want to have a Cold War. This is not a Cold War.

• 1:07:44Speaker 01

  And then we go right ahead and list all the things that we're doing that makes it very clear that we are in a Cold War. That's cognitive dissonance.

• 1:07:51Tim Ferriss?

  Well, it's like the news that I see every day now, which is like, we may, you know, so and so says we may be entering a recession in six to 12 months. I'm like, am I seeing a different version of reality here?

• 1:08:03Tim Ferriss?

  Thou doth protest too much.

• 1:08:05Speaker 01

  Cognitive dissonance is is painful to to manage, whether you're talking about the economy or about our foreign policy. So, yeah, I mean, that's kind of what I'm thinking a lot about and I do it tentatively because. Things could change direction in an unexpected way. American politics is always a bit of a wild card, but it's pretty clear that the pendulum is swinging to the right. That means that there's a pretty high probability of a Republican president by January twenty twenty five. And who knows, if Donald Trump is reelected, he could call off Cold War Two in an afternoon. He could fly to Beijing. Do the best deal, such a great deal with my good friend Xi Jinping.

• 1:08:49Speaker 01

  That could happen, and most people struggle a little bit with that part of thinking about history. Could you say a bit more about that? Why would it be so easy? That's what he would have done if he'd been reelected. Trump doesn't want to be in Cold War Two. He thinks it's stupid. He just wanted to do trade war. And what's funny about the Trump administration was that Trump kind of turns everybody's attention to China. Wins the argument, convinces everybody China's a major threat, but all he really wanted to do was a trade war with tariffs. And the point of the tariffs was to kind of beat China up, and then he was going to go to Beijing and do a great deal. That was the plan. There was going to be a photo op. And of course, he didn't win, and so that didn't happen. And ironically, the Biden administration

• 1:09:29Speaker 01

  has been more hawkish on China than the Trump administration was, and that's also a product of American politics, because at some point in twenty twenty, Biden's handlers said to him, you can't win unless you're as hawkish on China as Trump and maybe more hawkish. And so Biden, who'd in fact been anything but hawkish during his time as vice president, on the campaign trail started to beat up on China. And then they got stuck with this hawkish policy, which is now dominating their whole strategy. So I think it's important to recognize that Trump's foreign policy, however you think about Trump, however much you hate Trump, and many people listening to this will have major reasons for hating Trump, but the foreign policy objectivity was quite successful. And it was quite successful without risking.

• 1:10:16Speaker 01

  Conflict, Trump was not somebody who wanted actual war. He just wanted trade war. And the trade war was always intended to be a temporary measure. You were imposing the tariffs and then you were going to go to China and say, well, we'll take the tariffs off if you do this. So I can imagine a scenario where, quite easily can imagine a scenario where Trump gets reelected and does that. And at that point, you know, Cold War II would at least temporarily be in some kind of suspension.

• 1:10:44Tim Ferriss?

  So I'd love for you to poke holes in a bunch of things I'm going to say because they're not, I wouldn't call them terribly well informed. We'll start there. So ample fodder for conversation. The first thought is that if mainland China, well, first of all, I've been very impressed with the geopolitical, both visible and invisible, or less visible strategies that have been deployed by the People's Republic. It's always seemed very long-term investment versus aid, like you mentioned. And it seems to me like if mainland China wanted to take Taiwan, there are many things that would suggest they could do it non-violently.

• 1:11:26Tim Ferriss?

  There are other ways for them to isolate Taiwan, just as an island. There are probably multiple ways they could cut off various types of access. It's not as easy for allies to, say, supply aid to Taiwan compared to, say, Ukraine, where there's also a sort of imminent neighbor threat that is perceived in Europe. So that's the first thought to me is that it doesn't seem like it would actually be that hard if they were to approach it and say, hey, look, guys, nobody wants a violent outcome here. You're going to be on your own. Maybe the US steps in, probably not. Your military, yes, you have mandatory service, but let's be real, you don't get a whole lot of practice.

• 1:12:09Tim Ferriss?

  I have to imagine, to your point, though, moving quickly could be to their benefit. And secondly, and again, then you can rip all this to shreds. Second is more an observation that perhaps even if we are totally inept,

• 1:12:26Tim Ferriss?

  We are still saved in the sense that China and the US are so economically entangled that China could end up being like the rider on the horse and the horse is the US, but they can't shoot their horse in the head. Like, they still need the horse, whether that is a byproduct of a lot of reserve currency in the form of treasuries or US dollars or whatever, or trying to sustain exports so their domestic economy doesn't face all sorts of issues. The question then, I guess, is, do you see either of those holding any water, or do you think to take Taiwan, it would escalate, putting aside the Trump intervention, to a physical hot war type of conflict?

• 1:13:11Speaker 01

  The challenge for Beijing is that the kind of softly-softly approach, which was essentially to use economics and information warfare to bring Taiwan closer to the PRC has failed. And it was obviously failing back in 2020, when all Chinese efforts to influence the Taiwanese election came to nothing. And if one looks at the sentiment of the Taiwanese population, it's gone not in the direction of full independence, but it leans towards, we like the status quo, and we'd ultimately like independence one day. So the direction of travel from the vantage point of Beijing is very uncongenial.

• 1:13:54Speaker 01

  That's the first point. The second point is that there are things that you can do short of an amphibious landing, blockade being the obvious one, and they sort of showed us that they could do that. But a blockade's an act of war. Even if you haven't landed the troops on the beach, you're still using coercion to assert control over Taiwan. And this is where US policy is crucial.

• 1:14:22Speaker 01

  The US has had for half a century, more or less, a policy of strategic ambiguity, where it's not quite clear what we would do in such a scenario. We acknowledged this was one of Kissinger's achievements, the One China Principle. We don't treat Taiwan as an independent country formally. On the other hand, we reserve the right under 1979 legislation to prevent any violent change in Taiwan's current status. The problem is, we really moved away from that ambiguity in the last couple of years. It began, I think, with discussion in foreign policy circles of strategic ambiguity. Do we really need it? Richard Haas wrote a piece about that for Foreign Affairs.

• 1:15:04Speaker 01

  But now Biden himself, on three, is it four occasions, has talked as if there's no ambiguity. We will definitely defend Taiwan. And although those statements have been walked back, we've succeeded in signaling to the Chinese that we're no longer committed to strategic ambiguity. And we also keep talking about practical ways in which we will make Taiwan a porcupine, as able to defend itself as we made Ukraine. We also, in addition to that, treat Taiwan de facto as an independent country when someone like Nancy Pelosi goes there. And every single aspect of her behaviour is that which you would expect the Speaker of the House of Representatives to engage in, in an independent country.

• 1:15:49Speaker 01

  So I think from Beijing's point of view, we have shifted our position on Taiwan in a way that is profoundly troubling to them because Xi Jinping's number one priority, the reason he extended his time in office, let me be clear about it, the number one reason he did that was to take Taiwan under the control of the Chinese Communist Party. So if we are saying, actually, no ambiguity, Taiwan is an independent country and we'll defend it, that is a major problem for Xi Jinping. So I think that's why even a blockade would...

• 1:16:25Speaker 01

  Force the United States to take action. I don't think there's a scenario in which this administration would sit back and say, oh, well, never mind, that's just the one China policy. Now my short term memory is failing me because the second question you asked was.

• 1:16:44Tim Ferriss?

  No, there really, there were two, more or less, uh, two elements. The second element was the mutual life support situation.

• 1:16:54Speaker 01

  Clearly, this is something very different about Cold War II. The economic ties between the United States and the Soviet Union were minimal and trivial. Whereas Chimerica still exists. Now, this was one of my favorite neologisms. Back in two thousand and seven, I came up with Chimerica to explain the near fusion of the Chinese and American economies. But I also used that word to make a pun on the word chimera. So the argument in two thousand and seven was this isn't sustainable, folks. And sure enough, it hasn't been. I think there are still many people in the US who can't get past the extents of US investment in China, Chinese investment in the US. The trade deficit is still enormous. We buy a lot of Chinese stuff.

• 1:17:38Speaker 01

  And they say, and therefore we can't possibly have a conflict. Sometimes this takes the form of there won't be a war over Taiwan because both sides would be so economically hurt by that. And I call this the theory of mutually assured financial destruction. The problem with all of this is, to switch analogies, you could have said all of these sorts of thing about the United Kingdom and Germany on the eve of nineteen fourteen. And indeed, somebody did. Norman Angel wrote a whole book called The Great Illusion, saying, there's no possibility that they have a war. It would just be so financially ruinous. Well, actually, it's true that the UK and Germany were very, very interdependent economically

• 1:18:20Speaker 01

  in the early nineteen hundreds, but they stopped being economically interdependent in a matter of days when war broke out. Decoupling happened so fast that it's kind of amazing to look back on it. The Royal Navy literally cut the submarine telegraph cables from Germany to the rest of the world within days of the outbreak of war. And legislation was introduced that effectively expropriated German nationals' holdings of British assets. The US did the same when it joined the war in nineteen seventeen. So. I keep warning people that economic interdependence does not preclude conflict, and you will be amazed how fast the decoupling happens when the conflict begins. And if you don't believe me, let me introduce you to Russia.

• 1:19:03Speaker 01

  Because what happened to Russia after February the twenty fourth was unbelievably rapid decoupling from the Western economy, not the world economy. They're still able to trade with China and India, but they really got switched off very aggressively by sanctions imposed immediately after the outbreak of war. So I think it's clear that our playbook is very sanctions reliant, and the Chinese know this. And so they know that in the event of conflict, they will face aggressive American sanctions. And I dare say, going back to your point about their ability to plan, that they are hard at work. In fact, I know they're hard at work right now to try and sanctions proof themselves. And also to make sure that any measures like that blow back on the US

• 1:19:48Speaker 01

  and cause significant harm to US economic interests too. So I don't rely at all on the economic interdependence. I don't think that's in any way an obstacle to conflict. It just makes the conflict really expensive. But hey, World War One was really expensive, didn't not happen.

• 1:20:02Tim Ferriss?

  So is there anything then, going from observer and student of history to spotter of patterns? Is there anything that you're doing right now or would like to do as an agent of change to try to steer things in any direction or another? Doesn't have to be specific to China, it could be.

• 1:20:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, it would be strange if I just sat in my study at the Hoover Institution having conversations like this and then going and playing tennis. So part of what has been central to my life in the last decade has been trying to apply history to contemporary problems and then do something about it.

• 1:20:52Speaker 01

  That means mostly advice. I'm not probably that well suited to political office. I don't have any aspirations to be Henry Kissinger, i.e. go from being a professor to being national security advisor. That's not really a plausible trajectory for me. But I think that in advising people in decision-making positions, I can achieve something. So there are a couple of aspects to this. One is that about 10 years ago, I created something called Greenmantle, which I think you mentioned in your nice introduction. And Greenmantle is an advisory business that works with a relatively small number of mostly financial clients just to understand the world using the application of history.

• 1:21:35Speaker 01

  And it's been a way for me to do work that is off the radar, not in the public domain, that therefore isn't subject to the incentives that exist in the public domain. So when you do journalism, you can't be boring. You have an obligation not only to inform, but to, at some level, entertain. And therefore, the minute you enter the public domain, you are going to make things more interesting than they may actually be. Whereas if I'm working at Greenmantle, I just have to be right. And often, the right answer is quite boring. And boring but important is what I like.

• 1:22:16Speaker 01

  So I'm kind of happily engaged in helping people who manage fairly large asset pools think about how the world is going. And I can afford to be very boring and nerdy when I do that. I can be quite boring on the subject of semiconductors, or I can be quite boring on the subject of the US Treasury market, or monetary policy, or whether the Chinese have the naval capacity to do an amphibious landing. I spend a lot of my time relishing the nuts and bolts, the granular analysis that makes pattern recognition serious.

• 1:22:55Speaker 01

  Punditry on cable TV is like the opposite of that. And although I'll sometimes go on cable TV, not least to sell my books. I hope I I never engage in the kind of punditry that is just designed to get me retweets and social media followers. You can always predict the end of the world and get attention. My book Doom makes fun of the pattern where the incentives to predict the end of the world are very strong. And World War Three and the next financial crisis, you can predict that every year. And have an audience, no matter how many times you're wrong, because people will always pay to be told the end of the world is nigh. So I'm not interested in that.

• 1:23:38Speaker 01

  I'm interested in doing the kind of pattern recognition that gets it right, which I think, for example, Greenmantle did. In January twenty twenty, we told clients, there is a global pandemic coming, it's going to be hugely disruptive. We got that right in January, right at the beginning. Beginning of twenty twenty one, there's going to be an inflation mess. They've really screwed this up. Beginning of this year, Russia is going to invade Ukraine with eighty percent probability. So that's kind of part of what I do. And I find it very intellectually rigorous because unlike in academia, when you're wrong, there are consequences. And being wrong will get you fired on Wall Street. That's very good for focusing the mind.

• 1:24:20Speaker 01

  Second thing I do is talk to the people who make policy or in the future may make policy. And I'm always willing to go to Washington or for that matter to London and share my thoughts with the people who have the very arduous task of taking decisions under pressure and under uncertainty with very little time. I am privileged. I get paid to think and read. Nobody in government has time to do either of those things. You're just in meeting after meeting and call after call, as Kissinger said, you draw down your intellectual capital in government because you don't have time to accumulate any. So I'm always happy to put myself at the service of the people who have the difficult tasks. I'm bipartisan about that.

• 1:25:04Speaker 01

  I would be as ready to talk to Jake Sullivan as I was to talk to H R McMaster. It's just that Jake never calls me up, but I'm here. And that's what I'm more than happy to do with all humility because. One thing's for sure, the people in the Situation Room know things that we don't know. They just know a lot of things we don't know. And if you are in the position of being an academic who pontificates, you should always be quite humble. Because there's just no way that you know the half of it. So, yeah, that's my approach. I think it's been, it's something I got better at. I mean, I can certainly look back to the early days when I was trying to be involved in policy discussions

• 1:25:48Speaker 01

  shortly after moving to the US, and I was pretty amateurish then. I think the analytical framework of the book Colossus was correct, namely, the neoconservative project to kind of build empires in Iraq and Afghanistan will fail. And my criticisms of the neoconservative project were pretty much right, but I don't think I went about that in a very intelligent way. I was too new.

• 1:26:11Tim Ferriss?

  What has changed? How has the toolkit developed or the framework? How has that changed over time? What has made you more professional and less amateur in how you approach these discussions?

• 1:26:26Speaker 01

  Doing it with a team rather than being the solo tweet-clad superhero. Ultimately, these things are too complicated and difficult for any one person to be able to fit it all together and know enough. So when Green Mantle came into existence, my policy was to hire my smartest students to come and work with me, to think about this and see if applying history could even work. And then crucially, having taken them on to encourage them to disagree with me and tell me that I'm wrong. And now, most of what I will say on these subjects, as in our discussion, is informed by lots of work that other younger, smarter people do.

• 1:27:11Speaker 01

  I'll give you an example. Back when the idea of Cold War II kind of first hit me, it hit me because Green Mantle was doing some work on Huawei. And there was a map of the world which showed countries that were using Huawei technology, countries that had essentially refused to use it, and the countries that hadn't made up their minds. And I remember thinking when I saw the map, ah, it's a Cold War map. That's a recognizable Cold War map, one side, two sides, non-aligned.

• 1:27:37Speaker 01

  And so I got excited and started to think about this. And I said, hey, we really need to work on that issue and that issue. And what are we doing about challenges to the dollar? What are we doing about semiconductors? And out of that, those discussions came some really good work by other people. Chris Miller's new book, Chip War, which I highly recommend is the just the best book on why semiconductors really matter. And Ike Fryman has done some excellent work on climate aspects of Cold War II, because climate is a Cold War issue, given that China is responsible for a huge proportion of the increase in in CO2 emissions over the last 20 years. So I'm glad to say that I no longer fly solo. I work in a team. I've learned a lot from

• 1:28:18Speaker 01

  good leaders of teams, how to build a network that is greater than the sum of its parts. And I I think that's why the quality of analysis is better than it was pre-Greenmantle, when I was inclined to try and do everything myself. And, you know, that way you make mistakes. I made some terrible mistakes pre-Greenmantle. I got interest rates really wrong in 2010, and Krugman, Paul Krugman, was able to jump up and down on me with hobnail boots on, because he was right and I was wrong. And, you know, I learned a valuable lesson then. If you're gonna go out there and do battle with Nobel laureates, you better have done your homework.

• 1:28:55Tim Ferriss?

  So I'm gonna take a left turn here. So we've been talking about a lot of macro issues, about a lot of current geopolitical issues. I want to ask you about fatherhood. So I have a note here. The fatherhood has been the best thing you've ever done. And as someone who does not yet have children, but someday hopes to, could you please expand on that? I'd love to hear why that is the case.

• 1:29:22Speaker 01

  Well, I only have five children.

• 1:29:25Tim Ferriss?

  Well, you got you got some work to do to catch up with Elon, but you're doing all right.

• 1:29:29Speaker 01

  There are, there are others who've beaten me, and I I won't catch up. I'm too old to have any more children. Because in the end, you can have children.

• 1:29:41Speaker 01

  At fifty eight, but you will not be good at soccer when they are ready for soccer. And you have a moral obligation to be able to go and kick that ball around. I I have children who range in age from twenty eight down to five. And I can say unequivocally that they are the best thing that ever happened to me. And the thing I care, the people I care most about. And I never tire of of watching them grow, helping them in any way I can. Fatherhood for me has been more fulfilling than I would ever have imagined.

• 1:30:21Speaker 01

  I think most people, most men, let me say, most men before they become fathers secretly dread the loss of freedom, the regime of diapers and the prospect of being vomited on. And all of these things will happen when you become a father, you will be vomited on. Diapers will become a very large and unpleasant part of your life. And you won't be able to go out anything like you were able to before. On the other hand, there is something far more fulfilling about helping an infant learn than anything is available to us. So I don't know that I've been a tool, a great father.

• 1:31:06Speaker 01

  I think I've been okay. And the way I would think about the role is, is yeah, it's very much pedagogical. I I very assiduously read to my children and get them to read and make books a big part of of life. I think that's that's really critical because these days as children grow up, there are way more distractions than there were in in my day. And you have to make a constant concentrated effort as a parent to make sure that they get into the habit of reading. Reading books, because almost all the accumulated wisdom of our species is in fact contained in books. And some of these books are quite old and unlikely to be assigned in contemporary education.

• 1:31:51Speaker 01

  So that's a big part of it. Then there is all the kind of that funny business of teaching children to be good. What is it to be good? What is it to be kind? How does one actually convey that? How can one make a child creative without over scheduling them with Mondays piano, Tuesdays coding, Wednesdays Mandarin, you know, that kind of typical parenting? And I'm, you know, I'm still learning. I'm still trying to get better at it, while at the same time, making sure that all the children got the same kind of deal. Cause I'm quite egalitarian about these things and there can be no favoritism. They all must think they're the favorite. So these are the things that if, if you gave me the chance, I would talk about with greater

• 1:32:33Speaker 01

  enthusiasm and at greater length than, than about anything else. But you know, nobody really wants to listen to somebody else talk about their children. It's the world's most boring subject, just like, you know, when people get out their phones to show you pictures of, of their children and then they can't find them because they have too many pictures. A little part of you dies, right? Cause it's, it's not that interesting.

• 1:32:52Tim Ferriss?

  Well, to me at the moment, this is interesting. So since, since I have the mic in front of me, I'll keep prying. When you said, I'm okay, and I might be getting the exact phrasing wrong, not great. Why do you say that?

• 1:33:06Speaker 01

  Absence, because passive my life's journey took me away and continues to take me away from my children quite a bit. Um, there's that great moment in one of the Austin Powers movies, Daddy Wasn't There. Do you remember that? We all love Austin Powers in our family and it's part of being a Ferguson that you watch the Austin Powers movies much earlier than is appropriate. But I've been away a lot. I mean, I I was so negligent as to take a job in the United States in two thousand two or thereabouts, when I had three children in school in England and my then-wife wouldn't move. And I remember saying, well, if I don't go, I'll I'll regret it.

• 1:33:48Speaker 01

  So I'll commute. That was a little bit crazy, and I wouldn't advise anybody to do that. It meant that I was away quite a lot. It probably made the breakdown of the marriage inevitable. So, yeah, I think my older children would all agree that they didn't see enough of me. And I've had to compensate for tho- those absences by, you know, trying to be present in in other ways. So, you know, it's it's difficult. I think the truth is that if you're trying to lead three careers, as you said at the beginning, if you're trying to do good academic work and at the same time engage in some kind of public life and then also do all this advising,

• 1:34:30Speaker 01

  you're going to work seventeen-hour days and you'll be in New York and Washington and London. And I used to travel to the point of insanity prior to the pandemic. And then the pandemic stopped that, forced me to stop. And for a year I lived in Montana and I didn't travel more than about five miles from the house. And so I saw the two younger children every day. And it was wonderful. It was wonderful. My now ten-year-old and I would go for a walk every day. We called it the philosophical walk. And it was after he'd done with his schoolwork and I had sort of done enough work on my then-current book and we would just have a walk. I wasn't doing that before and I'm doing it less now. So,

• 1:35:12Speaker 01

  no, I'm not going to get great, but the test is always, are your children going to turn to you in the moment of crisis? Are they going to tell you the good news when there is good news? Are you able to remain in contact even when there's a great distance geographically between you?

• 1:35:34Speaker 01

  And on that basis, you know, I think I get a B plus. And I would say to anybody who's highly motivated, super driven type A personality, do what you have to do, but remember the relationship that you have with your children is more important than anything else. And on your tombstone, it doesn't say wrote a hundred and fifty emails a day or closed X deals, or it doesn't say publish sixteen books. That's not what the gravestones say. They talk about whether you were a good son, whether you were a good husband, and whether you're a good father. That's the gravestone. People forget that. But that's the gravestone.

• 1:36:15Tim Ferriss?

  Mortality is a good, as good a stepping stone as any to the, the next question, which is also related to parenting. And this may be a set of comments that are locked in the amber that, that you would revise. So I'd be curious to hear your thoughts. So here goes. It seems that, based on some of the reading I've done, several things. One is that you have been inoculated against religious faith yourself on some level. But two, that you believe your children should understand the Christian frameworks since, and I think the quote you used, it is still the operating system of North America and most of Europe. Would you mind saying more about that? Is that a misquote?

• 1:36:59Tim Ferriss?

  Did I find that on the Daily Beast? I don't think so.

• 1:37:03Speaker 01

  That most reliable source. Yeah, no, I was brought up an atheist. My parents left the Church of Scotland Presbyterian Established Church in Scotland mainly, I think, because of the sectarianism that was rife in Glasgow and the enmity between Protestants and Catholics, which dominated the kind of culture of the, the city in, in their day. And also because as scientists, they embraced a kind of robust enlightenment skepticism about, about religion. And this was therefore not a decision that I took. We just didn't go to church. And when we talked about those questions, my mother would say, life is a cosmic accident. Deal with it.

• 1:37:48Speaker 01

  That was how I was raised and

• 1:37:50Tim Ferriss?

  High five, go out and play.

• 1:37:51Speaker 01

  And in practice, my parents were still Presbyterians. We had all the kind of classic Calvinist behaviours, work ethic, all that stuff, deferred consumption, feeling of superiority, which I think is inherent in being a member of the elect. It's just there was no God, no afterlife. And at the point of death, your body began to decompose and

• 1:38:14Tim Ferriss?

  All the duty without any of the payoff.

• 1:38:17Speaker 01

  No, yeah, so it was kind of ultimately, it worked for me. And I don't think there's any kind of way I could find to religious faith. I would, I would just, I would feel a phony. On the other hand, I don't think it's a good operating system for a society. And all attempts to build a society on atheism have produced terrible horrors. I mean, think Soviet Union. Anti clericalism, anti Christianity doesn't have a great record. So I came to the position, partly under the influence of Oxford, religious observance, as opposed to belief, is very beautiful in Oxford and Cambridge, perhaps more beautiful than anywhere else. The choral tradition and Anglicanism

• 1:38:59Speaker 01

  is one of my favourite things. And I think it offers not only some kind of consolation, but it also offers social connections that you won't form in the workplace. So I came around to believing that although I didn't have religious faith, I should take my children to church. And I should make sure that they were educated in Christianity and indeed in, in other belief systems, but that Christianity would be the leading faith in our lives, because it's the leading faith in our, in our civilisation still. And it's silly to be ignorant of it. It is the operating system. Tom Holland has this terrific book Dominion, which points out

• 1:39:43Speaker 01

  that although we think we're secular, in reality, we are still a highly Christian society. And I think that's dead right. So everything gets coloured by the assumptions of Christianity, even the discussions on issues like climate change, which are supposed to be scientific in truth, fears of the apocalypse, the millenarian mindset are deeply rooted in Christianity. So.

• 1:40:09Speaker 01

  I think it's a slightly odd position, but not without its precedent to be in a church without real faith, but with a kind of respect for religious observance and a hope that the ethical legacy of Jesus Christ does not go extinct, because I don't think you become a good person spontaneously as a result of Darwinian natural selection. No, that's just not plausible. And so if you can use the Bible as a way of helping your children find their way to being good, then I think that's to be encouraged, even if you're as skeptical as I am about

• 1:40:53Speaker 01

  the existence of God, the possibility of an afterlife, all the rest of it.

• 1:40:57Tim Ferriss?

  So you mentioned earlier Hitch, one of your friends. And as you describe this, what I would love to know is, did you explicitly explain to your kids when you took them to church, what you were doing? In other words, there's historical significance to this. I don't believe we're automatically shaped into good, moral human beings by evolutionary pressure. Therefore, this is why I'm taking you to church. Or did you simply expose them and run the risk of them becoming diehards and sort of engendering a lifetime of headbutting with your children?

• 1:41:39Tim Ferriss?

  How explicit or non-explicit did you make things?

• 1:41:43Speaker 01

  I'm very explicit about things like that. I think children shouldn't be treated as children, which will sound slightly paradoxical, but it's a good idea to treat your children as intelligent mini adults. And I'm sure Thomas, who's 10, understood at once. I'm not sure Campbell knew what I was talking about, but he's only five.

• 1:42:06Speaker 01

  So I think I'm clear about this and we talk about it. Look, we have a very interesting religious heritage as a family. My wife Ayane is an ex Muslim, an apostate who left the religion that she was brought up in, having had a period of devout adherence as a young girl. So we come at religion in a kind of unusual way. So these things do get discussed. And Thomas is a very articulate boy, so it would be impossible to take him to a church without there being some initial discussion and explicit analysis of motive.

• 1:42:43Tim Ferriss?

  So you mentioned Ayane, so might as well mention her again. Ayane Hirsali, people should look this name up. How has your time with Ayane changed how you view Western philosophy, maybe even view the world or reality per se? I have to imagine, I mean, just given her life experience, her trajectory that is so difficult for either, well, I'll speak for myself, for me to envision in any experiential way. How has your time with her affected how you view things? I know that's a very broad question, but I'm going to leave it broad.

• 1:43:24Speaker 01

  Anybody who hasn't read one of my wife's books should do something about that. Ayane Hirsali Infidel is a pretty good place to start. That's her life story, her early life story, which gives you a sense of what it was to grow up as a girl in Islam in Somalia, to live in Saudi Arabia, to live in Kenya, to experience radicalization, to be a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, and then to go to the Netherlands to escape an arranged marriage, to gradually be exposed to Western freedoms, to begin to question faith, eventually to lose that faith, to become embroiled

• 1:44:06Speaker 01

  in the controversies that followed nine 11, to become a national figure in the Netherlands, a member of parliament, then to be the target of a fatwa, of death threats. All of this is in there and it's an extraordinary story. I've learned that the story there, which is startling and memorable in many ways, is the tip of an iceberg, a very...

• 1:44:32Speaker 01

  A deep trauma. I think that's the only way to to describe it. And

• 1:44:39Speaker 01

  we're still kind of learning about that and learning how to deal with it. So for somebody like me who led a happy life in a loving family where I was given every encouragement. It's humbling to think of a life so different, so much harder. And to realize that that's the life of of millions and millions of of girls all over the world. So that's point one. Point two is, and I dedicated the book Civilization to Ayaan for this reason. We take for granted the freedoms that we are given at birth. And it's very hard not to take them for granted if you grew up with the freedom of speech and

• 1:45:24Speaker 01

  political freedom, the freedom to organize, the freedom of association, all of those freedoms. But when you when you get to know and love somebody who didn't have those things and had to be persuaded by experience of their value, then you see things in a different light. And I I learnt more about the value of the Enlightenment from Ayaan than I I could have learnt from any other source. And that's partly why Civilization is dedicated to her because you've got to see the benefits of a free society with the eyes of somebody who's lived under unfreedom.

• 1:46:04Speaker 01

  With all the discrimination, the handicaps of being a girl in a strictly Muslim society, fully to appreciate them.

• 1:46:12Tim Ferriss?

  I second the recommendation on the read. The story is is really beyond remarkable. That's another statement. And

• 1:46:22Tim Ferriss?

  You mentioned the fatwa. How do you both relate to safety and fear? How do you think about how much weight to give to fear of what could happen? And I ask, especially in light of the not so distant attack on Salman Rushdie as an example. It's not like fatwas are just forgotten, it would seem. And I know there's a lot of coverage around that, many different takes. But how do you, how do you think about living life? And how much weight to give to fear what could happen versus, versus other factors?

• 1:47:02Speaker 01

  Well, I won't speak for Ayaan. It would be untrue for me to claim that she doesn't feel fear. The attack on Salman Rushdie was a heavy blow for us. Because it was a reminder that, that these death threats don't have expiry dates. There's no statute of limitations.

• 1:47:22Speaker 01

  But fear, I'll answer on my own behalf, is not, is not a factor. I don't fear these people. And I credit that to a Scottish upbringing.

• 1:47:40Speaker 01

  My grandfathers faced far greater peril in the world wars. My father's father served on the Western Front in one of the Highland regiments as a teenager. And my mother's father was in Burma with the Royal Air Force, fighting the Japanese. They had reasons to feel fear. I don't. And I have a complete contempt for terrorists that is not fake. I moved to the United States after nine 11 because I was supposed to give a lecture at NYU on, I think it was nine 12.

• 1:48:24Speaker 01

  Of course, I never gave that lecture, couldn't fly. But it kind of made my mind up to move to the US and to take a job at NYU, which is what I did. I resigned from Oxford shortly after nine 11. That's definitely, wasn't, I don't think I thought it through quite at the time, but it was undoubtedly the, the Scottish impulse to march towards the sound of gunfire. And ever since I've known Ayaan.

• 1:48:52Speaker 01

  I've felt a powerful obligation to protect her and make sure that she is kept safe. But never fear, because historically, we face many dangers. One can see the world is much less dangerous than it was in many respects, and in other respects, more dangerous than it's ever been. They didn't have to worry about nuclear war. The risks of catastrophe are in some ways elevated by the advance of science. And in other ways, science is reducing our vulnerability, extending our lifespans, giving us a shot, even if we're diagnosed with cancer.

• 1:49:32Speaker 01

  And I keep telling her and others, the dangers that we face include terrorists, but the probability is probably higher that we have an automobile accident or one of us gets diagnosed with cancer. So be not afraid. And the culture which I love about my part of the world, the culture of Scotland is, we don't feel fear. You can do anything to us, but you can't actually frighten us. And if you're brought up with that,

• 1:50:05Speaker 01

  if that sort of really drummed into you, that's a great source of strength. Of course, one fears odd things. I've always been more afraid of losing my reputation or my honor than losing my life. But the things that the terrorists want to induce, the kind of fear they want to induce, that is entirely foreign to me. And I defy them and I despise them. And I will use every, everything I can do to thwart them. Because ultimately, their threat is a threat that you can thwart.

• 1:50:44Speaker 01

  Salman Rushdie made a terrible mistake in announcing that he was dispensing with security and saying at the time he published his last book, I need to live my life. I said at the time that was a mistake, and it was. That is not our approach. But no fear, no way.

• 1:51:01Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you for answering that. Neil, we've covered a lot of ground. Is there anything else that you would like to to share, discuss, any closing comments, anything at all you'd like to request of people listening, anything you'd like to point their attention to before we wind this round one to a close?

• 1:51:26Speaker 01

  Given that the risk of cancer is not trivial when you're a 58-year-old Scotsman, I don't have anything else to say because if I say anything else, I'll be late for my dermatological appointment.

• 1:51:39Speaker 01

  On the basis of rational assessment of risk, I really better shut up.

• 1:51:44Tim Ferriss?

  I must go to my dermatologist, which makes perfect sense. Neil, and just for people listening who don't get the visual spelling here, N I A L L on Twitter at N Fergus, N F E R G U S. Thank you so much for taking the time today. I learned a lot. I have copious notes. I have many things to follow up on, and it's nice to see you again. So, thank you for making the time.

• 1:52:08Speaker 01

  Thank you, Tim.

• 1:52:09Tim Ferriss?

  And for everybody listening, we will link to everything that we discussed, all of the books, all of the resources, anything and everything at tim.blog/podcast. Just search Ferguson or Neil, N I A L L, and it will take you right there. Until next time, be just a little bit kinder than is necessary. Take care, do not be afraid, and thanks for listening.

• 1:52:32Tim Ferriss?

  Hey, guys. This is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric, as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends.

• 1:53:13Tim Ferriss?

  For instance, and it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time what I would take if I could only take one supplement. I've been asked this for years. The answer is invariably AG1 by Athletic Greens. I view it as all in one nutritional insurance. So you can cover your bases. If you're traveling, if you're just busy, if you're not sure if your meals are where they should be, it covers your bases.

• 1:53:56Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:54:41Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:55:23Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:55:33Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:57:02Tim Ferriss?

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