The Minefield Used to Be the Point: Niall Ferguson on Universities, Money, and 1914

Niall Ferguson has taught at Oxford, the London School of Economics, New York University, Harvard, and now the Hoover Institution at Stanford. Lex Fridman introduces him as one of the great historians of the age, author of sixteen books on money, war, power, pandemics, and empire, and, on the day of the taping, as a founder of a new university in Austin, Texas. University of Austin, or UATX, is being built, Ferguson says, because something obvious has gone wrong in higher education. He sums it up as a drastic chilling of the atmosphere that now constrains free speech, free exchange, even free thought.

He did not expect this in his lifetime. His academic career began at Oxford in the 1980s, when, as he puts it, anything went. A university was a place where you could risk saying the unsayable and debate the undebatable. In a relatively short span, a cluster of ideas he groups as critical race theory or "wokeism" arrived with the aim of limiting, quite drastically, what can be talked about. He has thought for a long time about whether the existing institutions can be fixed. His conclusion is that they cannot. You need to create a new one.

He still believes passionately in the university as an ideal. The form has been around for nearly a millennium, predating the printing press and surviving the scientific and industrial revolutions, because something unique happens when people in their late teens and early twenties share a confined space: knowledge transfers between generations. For that to work, there have to be very few constraints. People that age are adults, but inexperienced adults. Looking back on his own undergraduate years, Ferguson says saying stupid things was his method. His way of finding good ideas was through a minefield of bad ones.

He feels sorry for the intellectually curious 18-year-old of today, because the minefields are now lethal. One wrong foot and it is cancellation. He said as much to Peter Thiel: he and Andrew Sullivan were obnoxious, even insufferable, undergraduates at Oxford, and it was not career-ending. Their counterparts now live in constant anxiety that some heretical remark from five years ago on social media will be outed. A survey published earlier that year found that 85 percent of self-described liberal students in American four-year programs would report a professor to the administration for something they considered offensive; about 75 percent said they would do it to a fellow undergraduate. At Harvard, where he used to teach, and Stanford, where he is based, he senses a suffocating atmosphere of self-censorship. People are afraid to take even minimal risk in class. The point of a new university is to give the young a shot at free thinking again, at what he calls aggressive learning, in a place where you can get it completely wrong and live to tell the tale.

Fridman, who mostly stays out of campus politics, describes a ripple of fear from the humanities into science and engineering. The fear does not always look controversial. It just makes a 20-year-old in a machine-learning course hesitate before saying that deep learning might be a dead end. Linear algebra will not change, he notes, but applied linear algebra becomes machine learning, robots touch human beings, and suddenly even engineering students inherit the caution that began in a course on society. Ferguson agrees that these are not separate worlds. He has just taken delivery of the book Eric Schmidt and Henry Kissinger co-authored on artificial intelligence, whose central question is what the technology means for us broadly.

On a campus, he says, everything is contagious, from a novel coronavirus to the behaviors of the English department. If denunciation becomes a norm, undergraduate denouncing professor, teaching assistant denouncing undergraduate, those behaviors spread inexorably, first into the social sciences and then into the natural sciences. That is why cancel culture was never only a problem for a few conservative humanists. Nicholas Christakis, Ferguson suggests, should look at universities as social networks that spread everything. Wokeism moved so rapidly out of the humanities, across the country, and then through other English-speaking universities because it is a contagion.

The president of a university Ferguson will not name told him that he receives at least one denunciation a day, one call for somebody to be fired for something they said. People who downplay the problem count the public disinvitations and say there have not been that many. Ferguson’s reply is that the famous events produce a general chilling. Heterodox Academy surveys now show a majority of students afraid to say what they think. The atmosphere, he insists, is not the correct one for a university in a free society.

What creeps him out is how much of it resembles the Soviet Union, the Soviet bloc, or Mao’s China: informing on superiors, using denunciation for career advantage, hapless apology, people disappearing in a metaphorical sense. He calls it totalitarianism-lite. The people writing the letters appear unaware that they are behaving like people in Stalin’s Soviet Union, which he takes as a massive educational failure. If you can write an anonymous or signed denunciation and not feel shame, education has already failed. "You should feel morally completely contaminated as you are doing that." For all these reasons, he wants an institution where those pathologies are structurally excluded.

Fridman puts the awkward question: Ferguson is widely seen as a conservative, Hoover is conservative, so is University of Austin a conservative project with a lean? Ferguson expects that charge, because the standard way to discredit a new initiative is to call it a sinister conservative plot. One of the co-founders, Heather Heying, is definitely not a conservative. She is as committed to academic freedom as he is, and on political issues he guesses they agree on almost nothing. The relevant authority, for him, is Max Weber: politics should stop at the threshold of the classroom and the lecture hall. In his own teaching he has tried to make sure students cannot tell where he stands. Indoctrination, Weber said, is an abuse of the professor’s power.

If the pursuit of truth and liberty of thought counts as a political issue, he says he cannot help you. Fifty years ago it was the left that favored free speech; the right still has an anti-free-speech element, visible in the rush to ban critical race theory. Critical race theory will not be banned at University of Austin, nor will wokism. Everything will be up for discussion, under the Chicago principles, enforced. He cites the Dorian Abbot case: if you are giving a lecture on astrophysics, skepticism about affirmative action expressed in some other venue is irrelevant. At 1980s Oxford there were communists and ultra-Tories; at Cambridge some people celebrated Franco’s birthday while outright communists taught down the road at King’s. That diversity was part of university life, and crossing the road was how undergraduates learned. Politics should be irrelevant to hiring and tenure. When it started to matter in Harvard’s history department late in his time there, he felt deeply uneasy.

The school will be a real-space institution, with a campus in the Austin area. There may be an online dimension, but the core of teaching and learning, he thinks, requires being together. He debated this years ago with Sebastian Thrun, a believer in what Ferguson now sarcastically calls the metaversity. He never believed in it, and he did not do MOOCs, because he did not think you could hold attention or grade at that scale. Universities have been around for about a millennium for a reason. You kind of need to all be in the same place.

They will not open as a full-service copy of Harvard. Ferguson wants to grow it like a startup, because copying Stanford would quickly reproduce the same pathologies, and because building a facsimile takes billions they do not have on day one. The launch product is a summer school of "forbidden courses," a platform for professors most subject to cancel culture and for students who want to hear them, in the tradition of interwar havens for refugees. He calls the targets the internal refugees of the woke era. Peter Boghossian, run out of Portland State after the grievance-studies hoaxes, and Kathleen Stock, run off the University of Sussex for her writing on transgender issues and women’s rights, will be involved. Then a master’s in entrepreneurship and leadership, mixing first principles with time around people such as co-founder Joe Lonsdale, modeled a little on Stephen Schwarzman’s program in China. Ferguson also wants a master’s in applied history. Undergraduate education comes last, because you cannot initially compete with the brand and peer network of Harvard, Yale, and Stanford. The undergraduate dream, when it arrives, is two years of difficult classical work, then an apprenticeship through centers that include technology and engineering: people who can talk about Adam Smith and also about where AI is going. Pano Kanelos, former president of St. John’s, is the president, their George Washington. Steven Pinker, Jonathan Haidt, Arthur Brooks, Larry Summers, and Robert Zimmer, who is owed a debt for the Chicago principles, are among the advisors. Ferguson’s aim is to signal that this is bipartisan, not an institutionalization of the Intellectual Dark Web, even if founding members of that loose network are welcome.

Fridman raises Sam Harris as someone who belongs to no tribe and thinks freely even when it costs him. Ferguson agrees Harris would be a natural fit, with a caveat: Harris collided with Heather Heying in a recent intellectual dispute, so University of Austin will have to model civil disagreement. It is extremely important, he says, that they disagree about many things and do it amicably. Something has been lost, perhaps to Twitter, perhaps to something deeper: the knowledge that you can disagree and still be friends. He had Oxford friends far to his left who remain among his closest. The university has to be a place where you can disagree vehemently and then go have a beer. Learning the difference between the political and the personal is part of the education.

Harris’s 2020 essay on Black Lives Matter and police racism is, for Ferguson, a masterpiece and a model of what they believe in. But you cannot save the world with podcasts. The form is solo, and so is the Substack, including co-founder Bari Weiss’s. The danger is that your subscribers already agree with you. You end up preaching to the choir. What makes a campus attractive is getting people together, at least part of the year, for the informal interaction at lunch and dinner where, in his experience, the best ideas form. Historians often pretend intellectual life is a solo voyage. Scientists have been better at collaboration. The magic is interdisciplinary, serendipitous conversation. He used to bump into the Nobel economist Tom Sargent in NYU elevators and Stanford corridors. Short, random exchanges gave him more stimulus than many a ninety-minute seminar.

He wants the Harrises and Fridmans out of their darkened rooms. Looking back on Oxford, the most important intellectual work he did was not a class but an essay on the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus for an undergraduate discussion group, the Cannon Club, written to impress his contemporaries. The Scottish Enlightenment, he notes, happened in an interplay between the universities of Glasgow, Edinburgh, and St Andrews and the coffee houses and pubs. That social life has become almost impossible. Amy Chua became the object of an investigation and media storm for inviting Yale Law students to her house to talk. At Oxford it was an honor to be asked to a tutor’s home. In the United States, nobody dares an informal email with an undergraduate in case it ends up on the front page of the student newspaper.

The human brain is at its most dynamic when people are young; people do not get better at math after 30. Professors have experience but are fading earlier than anyone wants to admit, and they get an intellectual shot in the arm from hanging around 20-year-olds who do not know much and whose brains are cooking. Tenure, high turnover, thought experiments, and everyone living nearby so talk can spill into 3 a.m. is a potent combination. Friedrich Meinecke’s explanation of the German catastrophe was that German intellectuals became technocrats, *homo faber*, expert in a specialty and alienated from humanism, which is one reason a scientifically advanced country went to hell under Hitler. Ferguson does not want a new university to fall into that pit. Liberal arts are there to stop scientists making Faustian pacts. That is why people working on AI should read Shakespeare. John Maynard Keynes, the most influential economist of the twentieth century, is unimaginable without Cambridge. The academics, he says, are unsung heroes of the century; without them there is no Manhattan Project and no Bletchley Park. What kills the magic is an order, already arriving from diversity offices in Britain, to decolonize the curriculum in advance. Determining *ex ante* what may be studied is a fundamental violation of academic freedom. That is the moment a university becomes an adjunct of the ministry of propaganda.

They are moving as fast as resources allow: forbidden courses in the summer of 2022, then a small master’s in the fall, as fast as is humanly possible. Ferguson imports a Silicon Valley habit of mind. Do not think of this as a full-service university on day one. Fridman raises Elon Musk’s joke about a Texas Institute of Technology and Science, and the fuss over the acronym. Ferguson is not there to defend Musk’s Twitter style. Musk will be remembered for SpaceX, Tesla, and solar energy, not his tweets. Most of the worst storms in teacups of Ferguson’s own academic career, he adds, were caused by bad jokes. These days, if you want to make bad jokes, being a billionaire is a great idea. He very much hopes Musk can be interested in the Austin project.

Universities are not cheap, especially if much of the tuition is covered by scholarships. The best intellectual talent is randomly distributed, including in the bottom quintile of the income distribution. The last generation of Gilded Age wealth did a pretty good job of founding universities; Chicago would not exist without that money. His message to Musk and his peers is that this is their time. He cannot really understand why the wealthy of our moment are content to hand vast sums to established institutions that, on close inspection, do not spend the money terribly well. Mike Bloomberg’s gift to Johns Hopkins is the example. One mystery of the age, he says, is the lack of due diligence that hard-nosed billionaires seem to do when it comes to philanthropy. They do not need their names on the buildings. They need to create something new that will endure.

Fridman notes that Stephen Schwarzman has given on the order of a billion dollars toward MIT’s college of computing, and that he wants accountability. Ferguson calls Schwarzman an innovator for placing a college on the Tsinghua campus, a Rhodes-like program for Western students in China. Teaching there showed Ferguson you can create something new in graduate education and attract strong applicants quickly, because people who finish four years at Harvard or Stanford often know they gamed the system. They will confess after a drink or two that it was not the intellectual experience they wanted, and that an MBA would not be a massive step forward. University of Austin, he says, has to be difficult. He would like it to feel a little like surviving Navy SEAL training. Peter Thiel, with whom he has discussed a new university for years, has always said it will not work. Ferguson thinks they now have a responsibility to try.

Fridman turns to *The Ascent of Money* and asks, if the financial system is evolutionary, what is the origin of money? Ferguson’s first correction is that money predates coins. About five thousand years ago in ancient Mesopotamia, even a simple agricultural economy produced relations between creditors and debtors: you need to plant seeds and will not have crops for months. Clay tablets record those transactions. He looked at great numbers of them in the British Museum while writing the book. The minute you record a relationship between a creditor and a debtor, you have something that is quasi-money. From that point on, financial history is an evolutionary experiment in the most convenient way to keep that record.

Coins, metal tokens usually bearing the imprint of a state or monarch, emerge with the ancient Greeks. They are an advance because they are fungible. A clay tablet relates to a specific transaction; a coin can be used in any of them. Coinage, despite debasement, clipping, and counterfeits, remains the basis of payments through the Roman Empire and the so-called Dark Ages. The big shift comes after the Black Death. Chronic labor shortages unravel feudalism, the economy needs to be monetized, and there is not enough coinage. Bills of exchange appear: pieces of paper saying I owe you, over the three months while goods travel from Florence to London. Because they have no king’s head, verification comes from signatures and endorsements. If you do not know the debtor well, you might want a creditworthy name on the paper. Ferguson’s joke is that you might want Elon. Late fourteenth-century northern Italy and England already had a peer-to-peer, network-verified payment system. That, he says, is actually how world trade grew. You could not settle long oceanic transactions with chests of doubloons.

Bills of exchange illustrate something he wishes he had made clearer in the book: not everything used in payment needs to be money. Economists recite three functions, unit of account, store of value, medium of exchange. His Hoover colleague Manny Rincon-Cruz suggested those three may be a trilemma, very difficult for anything to be all of them at once. The second point is that payments do not need to be money. If we dismiss Bitcoin because it fails the textbook tests, we miss that you can build a system of payments that is not money, like bills of exchange: network-based verification, peer-to-peer, without third-party settlement. When that historical precedent hit him, he got quite excited and wished he had written it into *The Ascent of Money*.

Where, Fridman asks, does the value actually reside? Ferguson comes from a family of physicists and warns that a physics answer will fail. It does not really matter what we decide money will be. Paper, metal, or a digital entry can crystallize the creditor-debtor relationship. What we are really talking about is trust. We may not trust one another, but we trust the money. When that confidence breaks, especially in hyperinflation, the trauma for the society is immense. Default setting, once you have a rule-of-law system, is to trust money even as it depreciates at a steady rate, as the dollar has done since the 1960s. It takes a big disruption to lose that trust. He once told Stephen Colbert that Colbert could be money: debts have been settled with human beings, but it is not convenient. Convenience is why China skipped credit cards and went from bank accounts straight to phones.

Fridman is amazed the trust machine works as often as it does. Ferguson is more cautious. Evolutionary psychologists and network scientists, including Christakis, argue that people want to lean on one another, and economic history broadly bears this out, but the record is biased. Periods when trust prevailed leave written records; collapses leave a paucity of them, as he found writing *Doom*. After the First World War, not only the German currency but the Russian, Polish, and others across Central and Eastern Europe were destroyed. A nineteenth-century system of gold and central-bank rules had produced relative price stability; once the gold link was gone, the whole thing went haywire. Germany’s currency was destroyed twice between 1918 and the late 1940s. In the United States, prices fell by a third in the Great Depression, then swung violently after the Second World War. The last twenty years of below-two-percent inflation under independent central banks are the exception. On a hundred-year or five-hundred-year view, the system quite often does not work. Financial history, as he prefers to tell it, is a series of crises resolved by innovations: bills of exchange when coinage failed, banknotes for convenience, the bond market for public debt, equities because bonds were not enough. Bitcoin, in that telling, initiated a monetary revolution in response to a growing crisis of the fiat system.

He does not think Satoshi designed Bitcoin in 2008 out of fear that fiat currencies were about to break. If anything, deflation was the nearer worry. The better story is that the internet needed a native means of payment. Typing a credit card number into a random website is not the way to pay on the internet. Bitcoin was the first iteration. Computing power and cryptography made peer-to-peer payments without third-party verification possible, and that poses a profound threat to banks and fiat currencies. Most money in the world today is made by banks, not central banks: it is entries in accounts. Bitcoin is an alternative mode of payment that really ought to render banks obsolete. The revolution, he thinks, has passed the point at which it can be killed. It has enough adoption and additional layers. Ethereum may have been the more important innovation, because you can build payments and smart contracts on top of it. Crypto just survived China shutting down mining and shutting down everything. What we do not know is how much damage ill-judged regulation will do.

Left alone, decentralized finance is the native financial system of the internet, and the more time we spend in what we are supposed to call the metaverse, the more we will use it. The Bank for International Settlements published a report arguing the whole thing should be shut down and replaced by central-bank digital currency; Martin Wolf in the *Financial Times* agreed. Ferguson suddenly realized the banks had landed an intellectual counter-attack with almost no fingerprints on the weapon. Central-bank digital currency is, he says, a terrible idea. He cannot imagine why we would copy a Chinese model that puts every transaction under the surveillance of a central government institution. On one side, a relatively decentralized, internet-native system that can evolve smart contracts and strip out middlemen. On the other, a highly centralized system in which transactions are surveilled by default. It seems like an easy choice. He has this thing about personal liberty. Regulators cannot kill what is now called Web3, but they can throw sand in the machine, and worst of all they can spoil the evolutionary story by creating a Chinese-style CBDC.

Will Bitcoin take over the world as the primary store of wealth and medium of exchange? No. A phrase he got from his friend Matt McLennan at First Eagle is that Bitcoin is an option on digital gold. It is the gold of the system, but it currently behaves like an option, which is why it is volatile: nobody knows if this world will work. If it does, Bitcoin is the gold because of finite supply. What role gold needs to play in the metaverse is not quite clear. When he updated *The Ascent of Money* in 2018, he wrote that if every millionaire put 0.2 percent of wealth in Bitcoin the price should be $15,000; at one percent, $75,000, and it might not stay at one percent. Non-correlation drives adoption, and so does volatility if you are sophisticated. He would want some crypto going into a year of tighter policy, soaring public debt, and money printing, but he would be nuts to be 100 percent in Bitcoin. In a World War III with a severe cyber component, you might be glad of the old shiny stuff. Diversification remains the most important truth of financial history. Crypto’s short-run utility is portable wealth for people in dangerous places with failing money and weak rule of law, which is why Latin America is so interested. Wars, though, happen because people who command armed forces miscalculate. The Rothschilds, then the biggest bank in the world, could not stop 1914. Finance will not stop a U.S.-China war either.

Stablecoins are the interesting puzzle, because you still need an off-ramp. You and I pay taxes in dollars. The IRS, in Ferguson’s experience since 2002, is the institution least likely to leap into twenty-first-century payments; he doubts it will take Bitcoin this decade. Crypto world will be tolerated as long as it pays its taxes. Then Gary Gensler may define everything as a security, and the administrative state will do what it excels at: refuse to define the rule in advance, decide arbitrarily, and send you a bill. Fintech is not like the rest of tech. Amazon and Facebook did not have to cross a jungle of regulation. Finance has always been that jungle, because regulation is there to entrench incumbents. The fight will be tougher than other tech revolutions, because the third parties Satoshi wanted to remove have noticed that they are the third parties.

A lot of the complexity in a mortgage, Ferguson suspects, is redundant. Pages of small print are a manifestation of the late-stage regulatory state. The transaction itself is quite simple; most of the verbiage is ass-covering. Lawyers will email him to say he is wrong, but his working assumption is that smart contracts can handle a lot of plain-vanilla, and maybe not so plain, deals and eliminate yet more intermediaries. Insurance is another example: instruments that are in some ways a hundred years old. Most households are penalized for being financially poorly educated and then confronted with oligopolistic providers. You leave college in debt, lever up to buy an illiquid house because everyone says you should, stack on car, home, and earthquake insurance, and bleed monthly payments. The median household’s balance sheet, in his description, sucks. Further down the income scale, people are outside the system altogether, stuck with banknotes and informal lending at punitive rates.

When he wrote *The Ascent of Money* in 2008, the technology to fix this did not exist. Microfinance was not viable. Now it does, and he finds it extremely exciting. Fintech is a force for good that brings people into the system and cuts transaction costs. Crypto is only part of a broader story in which financial services arrive on a phone instead of a bricks-and-mortar building you enter humbly to beseech a loan. Remittances are the brutal example. Senders and receivers are often among the poorest families in the world; his wife’s family in East Africa lives hand to mouth. Sending money to East Africa, the Philippines, or Central America, the costs are awful. He names Western Union. Ten years from now, he expects those costs to be negligible, with the money going to the people who need it rather than to rent-seeking institutions. He is on the side of the revolution because incumbent financial institutions globally are doing a pretty terrible job, and middle- and lower-class families lose.

Fridman, as a machine-learning person, is excited about data oracles that could tie contracts to weather, markets, even whether you lost five pounds. Ferguson’s fear is the other direction: a Chinese-style social-credit world in which behavior is so transparent to insurers that you are stopped at the pub because every drink raises your premium, or your credit card will not work in restaurants that serve ribeye. That world is being built in China. The West, he says, must at all costs offer something distinctive. It cannot be the same system with data flowing to five tech companies rather than to Xi Jinping. Data should by default be vaulted on our devices, released when we choose. One of the biggest mistakes in the evolution of the internet was that the default was to let our data be plundered. It is hard to undo, but a new regime can at least make privacy the default going forward.

Fridman asks, from *Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe*, which disaster most shook the world and the human spirit. Ferguson is glad he was not around in the mid-fourteenth century, when bubonic plague swept Eurasia. As far as we can see, that was history’s worst pandemic, worse, he thinks, than the one in Justinian’s reign. Mortality was 30 percent in some places, 50 in others, higher still in towns that were simply emptied. Reading about the Black Death, he says, is an unimaginable nightmare of death and madness: flagellant orders wandering from town to town, people turning on local Jewish communities as if the plague were their fault.

The runner-up is the Second World War in Eastern Europe, and in some ways it might have been worse. A medieval peasant could at least feel on the wrong side of divine retribution. In the mid-twentieth century you knew this was man-made murder on a massive industrial scale. Read Grossman’s *Life and Fate* and you enter a hellscape it is extremely hard to imagine oneself in. If a time machine offered even a one-day excursion with guaranteed survival, the post-traumatic stress on return would be enormous.

Fridman asks for the key moments at which something else could have averted Stalin’s Holodomor, Hitler’s Holocaust, Mao’s famine. Ferguson’s answer is not 1933 or 1941. The great turning point in world history is 2 August 1914, when the British cabinet decides to intervene and what would have been a European war becomes a world war. British intervention makes the conflict massively larger and more protracted. Very early in his career he became preoccupied with the deliberations of that day and the surprising decision a Liberal cabinet took. There seemed that morning to be a majority disinclined to go to war, and only a minority, including Winston Churchill, who wanted it. He often wishes he could take a time machine back and say stop, think, and by the way let me show you a video of Europe in 1918.

Fridman restates the uncomfortable thought Ferguson first made him consider: that it would have been a better world if Britain had stayed out and Germany had won. The argument was central to *The Pity of War* and to an essay in *Virtual History*. It has always amused Ferguson that from around that time he began to be called a conservative historian, because it is actually a left-wing argument. The people in 1914 who thought Britain should stay out were the left of the Labour Party, who split to become the Independent Labour Party. Britain was not ready. There had been no conscription; the army was tiny. Britain had failed to deter Germany. The Germans calculated that British intervention would either not happen or not matter, and they risked the Schlieffen Plan through Belgium. If Britain had been strategically committed to stopping a German win in Europe, it should have introduced conscription ten years earlier and built a meaningful land army. The Liberal government provided the worst of both worlds: a more or less secret commitment to intervene that the public, and much of the Liberal Party, did not know about, without the means to make the intervention effective.

If Britain had stayed out, he does not think France would have collapsed immediately as in 1870. The French held up remarkably well to catastrophic casualties in the first six months. By 1916, though, he does not see how France could have kept going, and he thinks the war would have been over perhaps at some point that year. Germany’s aims would have been limited, because keeping Britain out meant not annexing Belgium and focusing on Eastern Europe. From Britain’s point of view, what was not to like? The Russian Empire is defeated along with France. Germans take chunks of it, perhaps creating, as they later did at Brest-Litovsk, a quasi-independent Poland. That poses no threat to the British Empire; if anything it is a good thing. Britain had never had a particularly good relationship with Russia. The Germany that emerges from a 1916 victory looks like a kind of European Union: the dominant part of an enlarged Germany with a Mitteleuropa customs-union arrangement, including, one suspects, Austria-Hungary. That is a very different world from 1917 and 1918.

Protracting the war two more years, which British intervention made inevitable, globalizes it. Philip Zelikow’s book on the failure to make peace in 1916 shows Woodrow Wilson tried and failed to broker one; Ferguson is not the only counterfactualist. The death toll rose because the industrial capacity of the armies grew. That extension, he argues, condemns us to the Bolshevik Revolution and ultimately to Nazism. It is out of the experience of defeat in 1918, as Hitler makes clear in *Mein Kampf*, that he becomes radicalized and enters politics. Take out those additional years and Hitler is just a failed artist. It is hard to see how Lenin gets anywhere if the war is over. That looks like an opportunity for Russia’s constitutional and liberal elements. Another fork: if the Provisional Government had been more ruthless, rounded up the Bolshevik leadership and shot them, the revolution is cut off. Ferguson looks back on the Russian liberals with despair at their failure to see the threat.

There are later forks. Weimar destroyed itself in two economic calamities, inflation then deflation; it is difficult for him to imagine Hitler becoming Reich Chancellor without them. In 1938, more plausibly than 1936, Britain should have gone to war. Munich was the great mistake. Hitler was extremely vulnerable because he did not yet have Russia squared away as he would in 1939. Chamberlain folded instead of fighting, as Churchill saw. There was a magical opportunity that would have played into the hands of the German military opposition and conservatives to snuff Hitler out over Czechoslovakia. History, Ferguson says, is not an inexorable narrative with one ending. It is a garden of forking paths. At many junctions there were choices that could have averted the calamities of the mid-twentieth century.

What does it take to be a great leader in the room with Hitler? Ferguson does not make it only Chamberlain’s personal failing. Hitler was bluffing; the German economy was not ready for war in 1938. Chamberlain articulated an establishment view that ran through the BBC, the aristocracy, and Oxford. Churchill was seen as a warmonger, at his lowest point of popularity. The conceptual error is specific. Chamberlain is persuaded that Britain must play for time because it is not ready. He fails to see that the time he buys at Munich is also available to Hitler. Everybody gets the time, and Hitler does much more with it, striking a pact with Stalin that lets Germany fight on one front in 1939. What does Chamberlain do? Build some more aircraft. After partitioning Czechoslovakia, Hitler is stronger, not least because of the resources plundered. The great mistake of appeasement was to play for time without realizing the other side got the time too.

Churchill’s heroic role was to point out the mistake and predict, accurately, that it would lead to war on worse terms. What it takes, Ferguson says, is a distinct courage to be unpopular. People listened to Churchill in the House of Commons in silence; on one occasion Nancy Astor shouted "rubbish." He went through a period of being hated. The other thing that made him formidable is that he always applied history to the problem, which is why he sees it more clearly than Chamberlain. There is no realistic 1938 in which Churchill is already in government; you need France to collapse for that. You can imagine a Tory elite thinking more clearly about the dynamics. They had not seen what Kissinger later called the problem of conjecture: postponing the war can create a worse starting point. 1938 would have been risky. It was a way better situation than 1939.

From years of reading and talking to Kissinger while writing his biography, Ferguson has learned that applying history to contemporary problems may be the most important tool in that kind of decision-making. You have to do it ruthlessly, and in a crisis you have to take risk. Kissinger says the temptation of the bureaucrat is to wait for more data, but decisions under uncertainty cannot be based on data. The problem of conjecture is that you can act now, incur a cost, and avert a disaster for which you will get no thanks, because nobody is grateful for an averted disaster. Nobody goes around saying how wonderful it was that we did not have another 9/11. Or you can do nothing, incur no upfront cost, and hope you get lucky. In a democracy that is the much easier path. The essence of leadership is to be ready to take the upfront cost, avert the disaster, and accept that you will not get gratitude.

Fridman asks, without cheap political shots, how history will remember COVID-19. *Doom* was a book Ferguson had planned before the pandemic, as a history of the future based on science fiction, because history is good on perennial problems of power and bad on technological discontinuity. Science-fiction writers are fond of plague. When an email arrived on 3 January from his medical friend Justin Stebbing, "funny pneumonia in Wuhan," his antennae tingled. It was just like the opening of those books. Larry Brilliant’s line is that the key with a novel pathogen is early detection and early action. Almost no Western country did that. Taiwan and South Korea showed it was doable. Some countries were unlucky with early superspreader events; Italy was hit very hard very early; Russia’s worst stretch came late.

The lesson he draws is different from the one most journalists thought they were learning. The populist leaders, Trump, Johnson, Bolsonaro, Modi, said many crazy things and gave poor guidance. It is not true, he thinks, that different leaders would have produced significantly better outcomes. If Biden had magically been president a year earlier, the United States would not have done much better, because the things that caused excess mortality were not presidential decisions. They were the CDC’s utter failure to provide testing, which Scott Gottlieb’s book makes clear was not Trump’s fault; the failure to use technology for contact tracing as the Koreans did; the lack of serious quarantine enforcement; and the exposure of the elderly in care homes. Leadership is of somewhat marginal importance in a crisis like this. What you need is a public-health bureaucracy that gets it right. Very few Western ones did.

Trump’s real mistake, in Ferguson’s view, was to put himself front and center, claim unique insight, and say more foolish things each week until even a chunk of his 2016 voters thought he had blown it. The correct strategy was Obama’s playbook on the opioid epidemic, which killed as many people on Obama’s watch as COVID did on Trump’s, was unique to the United States, and got worse every year for eight years, and for which almost nobody blamed Obama. Make Mike Pence the pandemic tsar and get out of the way. That was Ferguson’s advice in February 2020. Being president in a pandemic is not, contra Jim Fallows, like flying a light aircraft. You sit on a vast bureaucracy of some sixty or seventy agencies, with advisers split between closing borders and keeping the economy going because you are running in November. The paradox of 2020 is that the one thing that mattered most, the vaccine, the Trump administration got right by going around the bureaucracy with Operation Warp Speed. It got so much else wrong that was sort of marginal that the impression stuck that Trump had been to blame for the whole disaster. Vaccines matter more than tests. Sure, Warp Speed for testing would have been great.

Then there is polarization. In *The Square and the Tower* Ferguson argued it would be costly to let the public sphere be dominated by a handful of big tech companies, with effects worse than contested elections. The country produced vaccines with more than 90 percent efficacy, and about 20 percent of people still refuse them. Renee DiResta had written before 2020 about an anti-vax network embedded on the internet. That network, he says, has turned out to kill maybe 200,000 Americans who could have been vaccinated, persuaded by magical thinking that the shot was riskier than a virus about two orders of magnitude more dangerous. The politicization of everything was not Trump’s doing alone. It happened because platforms whose business model promotes polarization, fake news, and extreme views, the things that get eyeballs and sell ads, dominate the public sphere. Those structural problems were visible in 2016 and left uncorrected. Fridman pushes back that engagement, not ads as such, is the dumb metric, and that different metrics plus the difficult conversations a place like University of Austin is for could design networks that help people rather than addict them. Ferguson does not disagree that the tension with the public good is now obvious.

What gives him hope, after studying dark moments? First, the United States has a unique operating system, designed by founders who thought hard about history and about how republics become tyrannies. It has just withstood an enormous stress test. He became an American in 2018. One of the system’s most important features is that it is a magnet for talent. Here they sit, he says, in a darkened room with funny accents; Elon is South African, Thiel is German, and the natives let them come and play in a way they could not in their countries of birth. As long as the United States keeps that superpower, it should out-innovate the totalitarian competition. Second, his children, from 27 down to four, are finding their way through this crazy time without losing contact with the culture he holds dear. He does not want to live in the metaverse as Mark Zuckerberg imagines it. That, to him, is a kind of ghastly hell. Western civilization produced the scientific revolution, the great problem-solving tool other civilizations never really cracked, and almost all the truths about the human condition in its literature, art, and music.

There is a simulation, he tells Fridman, who has been thinking about Musk’s argument. It is called literature, and we decide whether to enter it. He is in the later stages of Proust, whose observation of jealous relationships is perhaps more meticulous than any other writer’s. One of his earliest literary simulations was reenacting Kerouac at 17, culminating in getting very wasted in the hanging gardens of Xochimilco. A rich life, as it hit him while reading Proust, is lived by juxtaposing one’s own experience with the more refined experience of the great writers. Russian literature is inside that canon even though he does not read Russian. Tolstoy had the biggest impact, because the essay on historical determinism at the end of *War and Peace* is why he became a historian; temperamentally he is more of a Turgenev person. If you have not read *The Brothers Karamazov*, he says, you are not grown up. Raskolnikov’s nightmare at the end of *Crime and Punishment*, a virus that makes every individual sure he is right and then people fall on one another, is a prophecy of Russia’s future. The highly educated person is constantly struck by allusion. That is the real metaverse: the imaginary world we enter when we read, empathize, and then recognize scraps of shared experience in daily life.

Love, he says, quoting Roxy Music, is the drug, the most powerful and dangerous of them, the primal urge that overrides reason. A civilized society has to prevent that force from creating mayhem, with rules like monogamy and rituals like marriage. That is why he is a romantic rather than a Pinker-style Enlightenment rationalist. The romantics realized love was the drug; the difference in sensibility is Handel versus Wagner, and as an undergraduate he thought Wagner in the *Liebestod* had got as close to sex, or perhaps to love, as anyone had in music. He is lucky to love his wife and to have been, by the time they met, smart enough to take the drug in careful ways, in a stable family. A tamed romantic: channel the addiction into work, the most productive addiction, rather than drugs or booze. Universities are where adolescents have to overcome inner demons, including raging hormones. How can that be a safe space? It is a completely dangerous space by definition. Teaching young people to manage those storms is part of the job, and they are not really allowed to do it anymore for fear of Title IX officers. Work ethic, outdoor punishment, long runs in woodland, swimming in lakes, is how he keeps the mental work possible. Figure out the random allocation of talent, do that well, and do not try to be brilliant at everything. His edge, after three years of Oxford experimentation, was writing history essays slightly better than his peers.

The meaning of life? He was brought up by a physicist and a physician, committed atheists who had left the Church of Scotland in protest against Glasgow sectarianism. He and his sister were told life was a cosmic accident. He cannot really get past that, and was not taught to feel negative about it; the insight was almost frivolous. Atheism is not a basis for ordering a society, but it has been all right for him. What remained were embedded Christian ethics, atheist Calvinists who had deposed God and carried on as if they were members of the elect. Individual lives are not around long enough to claim meaning, but Edmund Burke was right: the real social contract is between the dead, the living, and the unborn. The dead still outnumber us. Writing books is a way of talking to the unborn, and it will fail if woke professors never assign them, so there have to be institutions. At 57, succession planning is the work of the next twenty years. Czesław Miłosz’s *The Captive Mind* has a passage Ferguson wants Americans to hear: they cannot imagine civilization completely destroyed, as in Poland by the end of the Second World War, with no rule of law and no security of person, let alone property. Civilization is a thin film and can be destroyed remarkably easily, whether in the name of wokism or the pursuit of the metaverse. Academic history has flipped the mission. R. G. Collingwood wrote in 1939 that the purpose of history was to reconstitute past thought and juxtapose it with our predicament. Instead, historians now travel back with the value system of 2021 and condescend to the dead. We already have virtual reality in our heads. We do not need Oculus. The job is to apply history, then act on it.