The Shocking Lessons Of History Everyone Has Forgotten - Niall Ferguson

just how accurate do you think the quote is history doesn't repeat itself but it often rhymes it's doubly inaccurate because first of all it it wasn't what Mark Twain said people usually attribute it to Mark Twain of Huckleberry Finn Fame but actually twin didn't say that he said something much more complex about history being like a kaleidoscope remember those kaleidoscopes who used to have as kids and and the pattern shifts but there's a kind of regularity to it that's what Twain actually said not uh that it doesn't repeat itself but it Rhymes and it's inaccurate also because history doesn't repeat itself in the way that we would like it to be very nice if it had that kind of uh predictable pattern but in truth uh it it doesn't and you can try to to look for patterns uh but you'll frequently be disappointed and that that I think is one of the most important lessons that I've learned history is is not regular and cyclical and predictable it's actually pretty noisy and and and volatile and unpredictable and that's that's what makes my life interesting I I can't tell you with any certainty what's going to happen in the next seven days never mind the next 10 years does that limit the lessons that we can learn from history then given that as you've said it's not as cyclical it's not got this sort of recurrent theme I I think it means that we've got to learn rather different lessons from the ones we want to learn we want cookie cutter lessons as in if a dictator is elected there will be World War II that that kind we love those simple lessons and we hate being told actually there were dictators who didn't start wars they're not all Hitler so we have to look for a different approach to learning lessons instead of wanting cookie cutter lessons we should realize that the most important lesson of history is that it is as unpredictable and non-linear as sport it's not a story the kind that you read to your kids with a beginning a middle and a happy ending it's it's as unpredictable uh as a as a game but but it's more open-ended it's like a game of football that never stops or a game of chess That Never Ends where the board is so large that there never can be a conclusive winner and if one recognizes that that's the lesson that there's lots of contingency and chaos and that even small decisions kind of massive consequences and big decisions can have no consequences learn that about the historical process will lead us I think to make better decisions in the present because it will get us away from what I would call bad lesson learning so bad lesson learning takes the form of uh just to give you one example uh the United States deciding to invade Iraq uh and believing that it would be quite easy to establish democracy there because American troops would be welcomed in Baghdad like the liberators of Paris uh towards the end of World War II that was a terrible bad lesson of History uh the right lesson was it's extremely difficult if you topple a dictator to establish a stable government in the ruins of the dictators regime it can be done but it's really expensive and it takes ages so I think there are lessons to be learned from history but we tend to We tend to try to learn simple ones and that's where we go wrong is part of this due to the fact that you identified the the neatness of a story the beginning the middle the end this nice closure uh it's something that's sufficiently familiar that it feels like an old pair of leather shoes but it is the job of historians a lot of you know popular modern historians to make stories compelling they need to be able to Captivate the reader so is this problem in some part laid at the feet of you and your colleagues for making history so compelling and and familiar to us in a narrative sense somehow well if you're writing a history book there is certainly an expectation that it should be ideally as readable as a novel I'll give you an example Orlando 5g's wrote an excellent history of the Russian Revolution called a people's tragedy when you frame an historical episode as a tragedy the reader kind of knows what to expect it's not going to end well there'll probably be bodies all over the stage uh at some point towards the end so that's fair enough and it's a good history of the Russian revolution revolution one of the best in English but it it slightly lulls the reader into thinking that there could only really be one outcome one sequence of events that it was sort of bound to produce this dysfunctional totalitarian regime that was bound to last until about the late 1980s and then fall apart oh the inevitability is baked into the framing we know the story and so we kind of read it with this sense that it's all destined to fail but to fail over a prolonged 70-year period And I think that's not right I think there were times when the Russian Revolution could have been aborted the Bolsheviks could have lost uh there were times when the Russian Revolution could have led all the way to World War III think of the Cuban Missile Crisis there are lots of different ways this story could have ended and I really love history that keeps that sense of the possible Alternatives alive I think it's better to read history as a series of forking paths with a keen awareness of other Futures that might have happened rather than to think the minute you pick up the book oh there's going to be a Revolution in Russia the romanov's going to be overthrown liberalism will fail the Bolsheviks will seize power things will go to bad for to worse understand to know the story and then to read it as if it's a novel I think is is actually a big Pitfall much better to be aware that they are constant turning points moments when it could have gone differently Stalin could have been arrested he thought he was going to be arrested at one point when uh Hitler invaded uh this is an astonishing moment because Stalin had been completely certain he wouldn't uh and ignored all the intelligence uh that he got saying the Germans are going to invade the Soviet Union ignored it all said it was all propaganda we would say fake news uh and so when Germans actually did invade and the Red Army was in total disarray not least because he purged or killed all its most competent officers Stalin retreated to his Dutcher in a kind of state of panic and wondered when his colleagues in the Pollock Bureau would turn up and arrest him as he'd arrested many of his colleagues in the past they did turn up and he kind of expected them to put on the handcuffs and instead they kind of said please come back to Moscow we we can't actually function without uh being terrorized by you so that was just one of the many moments in the history of the Soviet Union that might have produced a completely different outcome because I think if Stalin had been arrested then it's hard to imagine that the Soviet Union wouldn't have lost World War II uh there would have been a kind of political vacuum that's a different 20th century right there and in my work and I've been doing this now for more decades than I like to count I constantly try to keep the reader aware there are these other paths that we could have gone down just as right now today our lives your life my life everybody who's listening's lives they could go in a completely different direction because of some disaster that strikes I get hit by a car Crossing Park Avenue and everything's different from that moment on just because I wasn't paying attention when I crossed the road that's the historical reality that we we have to keep reminding ourselves of why is it the case given that Human Nature has been relatively stable for all of recorded history it's been stable it's been stable with 120 000 years and group dynamics seems sometimes to reliably be similar as well why is it the case then that we don't have this cyclical nature to history is it the uh disproportionate effective chance is it the fact that as you mentioned a lot of very large things can occur due to very small inputs what is it that's causing this fractured fragmented Kaleidoscope rather than a nice smooth wheel yeah well you've said something very important which is that there are certain constant features of human nature and that is right which is why we can understand facilities it's why we can understand Shakespeare uh The Human Condition particularly when it comes to Love and Death and power that hasn't really changed much even Although our lifespans are much longer than the people of thucydides time and the nature of life has radically altered not least because of of Technology so there's something very important about that which is why it's worth studying history because if if two cities was just unintelligible to us and and Shakespeare made no sense well we couldn't possibly learn a thing from the experience of the past we like reading about aliens but they're not aliens they're they're people that's that's a really important thing which when you come to ponder it's remarkable how amazing is that the people who were born thousands of years ago when life expectancy was in the 20s can express themselves in ways that we can understand in our radically altered world I never cease to be amazed by the fact that we have any connection at all with the people of the past now there's a critical difference that I've just hinted at which is that the there is this technological innovation that really starts to accelerate from the late 18th century and and makes the world different uh decade after decade and and and in ways that are quite uh unpredictable uh there's the exponential growth in living standards that comes from the Industrial Revolution but there's other things also happening uh the kind of unintended consequences of of uh labor-saving technology so that's part of the reason that history doesn't repeat itself because for example once you have nuclear weapons War can never be quite the same again uh and so you can't really perfectly learn from 1914 what to do in 2024 because in 1914 although they could they could risk a massive conventional War there wasn't the possibility of utter planetary destruction but there's an even more important Point than that that I want to make and that is disasters we may be kind of the same Homo sapiens as the ancient Athenians but we inhabit a planet where all kinds of random stuff happens and we can't control it uh the disasters that constantly punctuate history uh massive volcanic eruptions enormous earthquakes cataclysmic floods are plagues all that kind of natural stuff and then the man-made calamities as we like to call them like Wars these things happen in a totally non-cyclical way there's just no pattern to the incidence of large-scale uh organized violence uh there's no pattern to the incidence of of massive volcanic activity and that's why there's no cycle of History because while we may be trying in our unchanging human way to achieve power and love and all the rest of it we're doing it in a chaotic environment and we just don't know what's going to happen next but I'm absolutely sure that when you plot all the different shocks that nature and we ourselves inflict on the planet there's no cycle there there can't be it just statistically isn't isn't observable I think one of the reasons that people like and are comforted by the idea that history repeats itself or Echoes is it gives us a sense of control it it makes us believe that we have a prediction engine that we can if we read enough of the past we can accurately work out what's going to go on in the future that's right and political scientists and social scientists especially economists feel that if they can only model the historical process then they will be able to project the future with some uh degree of certainty and this is a constantly disappointing exercise but it doesn't stop them trying and to see just how hard it is let's look back on the predictions of uh just of the economy over the last uh 20 years or so Nobel prize winning economists have been wrong again and again about our major economic shocks from the financial crisis that began uh in 2008 through to the pandemic there's still an ongoing debate about what caused uh the big inflation surge uh of uh 2021 2022 uh there were eminent economists Laden down with honors who were sure that the there would be a transitory inflation episode in the wake of the pandemic and the only way they've been able to stay uh stay true to that hypothesis is by changing the meaning of the word transitory over and over and over again so you you look back and you realize even now the best paid economists in the world here in New York and Wall Street the the people with the most Kudos at the international monetary fund uh they do a terribly bad job even of predicting what growth and inflation will be 12 months from now the Federal Reserve employs some really smart people they have phds it's really hard to get a job there uh it doesn't pay that well but once you've been at the fed you get hard by the hedge funds and you make tons of money so this is very competitive and they were so crazily wrong about where interest rates would be right now two years ago they were like 500 basis points off they were wildly wildly wrong and that was just over a two-year time Horizon so we would love history to be predictable so that we could just apply our model and say oh here's the fiscal policy here's the monetary policy this will be the inflation rate and this will be interest rate we keep trying to do that but then you go back and this is what we as stories do you go like hey let's see how those projections actually did let's take a look and I'll give you a good example the Congressional budget office Congressional budget offers constantly tries to project what the federal debt will be in relation to U.S gross domestic product and it does this exercise on a highly regular basis and it's always wrong and not just a bit wrong it's kind of wildly wrong it's been it's underestimated the direction of the debt consistently for 20 plus years now and they'll keep publishing those projections and they'll keep being discussed and people will write op-eds about them and go on TV to talk about them but the truth is they'll continue to be wrong because there's something fundamentally flawed in the model the model is a simplification but it is such a big simplification of reality of the historical process that it's basically always wrong there's a concept called the [ __ ] asymmetry principle which is it takes far less energy to produce [ __ ] than it does to refute it therefore the world is filled with unrefuted [ __ ] and right especially TV especially on TV and it must be said probably on podcasts too though we have contributing we are contributing to that asymmetry of [ __ ] right now I I'm trying my best to to be anti-bull shirt um it's like kind of antimatter and the the key to to anti-bull [ __ ] is that it is much less it doesn't go viral it just doesn't go I mean anti-bull [ __ ] it's it's it's just doomed not to go viral on Twitter and so you carry on doing your best but you will always be you will always be swamped by the [ __ ] yeah so give me have you got two examples of a scenario which if we were using this sort of typical cyclical very nice and neat approach with history you would have said well this happened in the past and this happened after the past and they were broadly similar in terms of inputs but that the outcomes were unbelievably far apart is there an illustrative example that you can think of there well a good uh source for examples is uh the history of Empire because people always want to use the history of Empire to think about American power and so every decade there will be at least one book and usually more than one saying we are Rome you know we are in the predicament of the Roman uh Empire and our Decline and fall uh is inevitable because we are decadent and we like bread and we like circuses except we have burgers and and American football but it's that that's the thesis and it's always kind of reliable if you're a publisher you'll sell books uh with the we are Rome uh hypothesis uh and of course history is basically the history of Empires it is mostly about Empires even although we like to tell ourselves it's really about nation states nation states are basically quite a recent invention most of History if you just mean all in of recorded histories about Empires because the empires do stuff and they have pretty good record keeping and that's that's most of what we study so we have a pretty good sample size of Imperial rise uh and Zenith and Decline and fall uh because Empires do that that that's why most of the empires that ever existed don't exist today including the British Empire and the French Empire all the other Empires that uh that existed when our grandparents were around so it ought to be possible you'd have thought to have some kind of general theory of Imperial rise and and fall and that ought to be a cycle of history that you know we can work with and then we could say oh okay so the United States has reached uh it's past the Zenith and it's now in the kind of late phase so we should we should expect Decline and fall to begin in 2028 the problem is that when you sit down with all the empires that ever existed the first thing you realize is there's this massive discrepancy uh in duration that the Nazi Empire barely made it past a decade and in fact if you only start counting from the reoccupation of the Rhineland it's not even that and the Roman Empire is like a thousand years so Gibbon's great Decline and fall of the Roman Empire covers a millennium so you don't know I mean sure the empires rise and they have a good good kind of period of dominance and then they Decline and fall but is it going to happen in a few years or is it going to take a few centuries there's no way of knowing and that's why the temptation to draw analogies with past Empires is is quite quite hazardous it's always possible to find a case and say oh you see here we are we're just about where Britain was in pick a decade this is I've done this myself I did this for The Economist just before the US abandoned Afghanistan I wrote a piece of The Economist saying ah the US is beginning to look a bit like Britain between the wars kind of too much debt kind of overextended um and I use that analogy to make the argument that the US is is getting to be where Britain was in the mid-20th century overstretched it's not a new argument and as part of my anti-bull [ __ ] Mission I would say it's only one of a dozen analogies I could have used and I could equally well have said that that the United States is where the British Empire was in the 1820s and in the 1820s Britain was going through a rough patch had beaten Napoleon had a ton of debt all kinds of social problems lots of deep division polarization I could I could have written a piece saying that's where the US is today and the good news is that after Britain came out of the 1820s it expanded its Empire uh over the next 100 years almost uninterruptedly and ruled the world there's no way of knowing which is the right analogy you just pick uh you pick the one that that suits your journalistic purpose and off you go but if I'm being absolutely uh brutally honest uh there's there's no real way to be sure which analogy is the right one that that's that's the that's the terrible truth we don't know given that what are the lessons that people should take from history it sounds like a very damning indictment of reading history as a a tool for understanding really anything except the stuff that's already happened you know the other is there anything that you can take from this that is actually instructive for where you live now oh yes absolutely uh and that's that's what motivates me that's why I get ahead of bed in the morning because history is so much better at helping you think about the future than those models that I told you about earlier which predictably get it wrong uh what does history enable you to do it enables you to do what I just did to realize that the sample size of analogies is quite large you know what's the right analogy for the situation of of Britain today uh don't just take the first most convenient one that occurs to you bear in mind that there actually are quite a lot of countries that had Empires at one time and then couldn't afford them anymore and had to get rid of them and then had to readjust to that experience of decolonization and then remake themselves as nation states and you know the the range goes from the Netherlands to Russia and and you've got to sort of sit down and think well let's look at all the different countries that that went through this which one is is the better fit is it is it likely that Britain's is going to end up kind of like the Netherlands um I think it is I think Britain in many ways is already quite like the Netherlands it's just that we haven't fully you know come to terms with that loss of status it's not so likely I think that Britain would end up like Russia desperately trying to get its Imperial Groove Back even after it's really long gone and all that's left is this kind of stockpile of rusting weapons so I think the lesson that I would take the reason that I call it applied history is that you've got to be kind of systematic you're really looking for analogies and you've got to make sure that you you kind of comprehensive that you try to find them all before jumping to the conclusion that you're tempted by and your mindset should be not oh please confirm me in my original Prejudice my mindset is always please get rid of my original Prejudice and teach me something new and interesting uh I'll give you another example people have been running around with their hair on fire since 2015 2016 When Donald Trump suddenly burst uh onto the scene as a credible presidential candidate as opposed to a joke figure and it's been enormously difficult for Liberal intellectuals academics and journalists to make sense of the fact that this man got to be president and could be president again so what's the right analogy a lot of people lazily out of prejudice said oh he's a fascist he's Mussolini or he's Hitler and these were really bad analogies because you don't need to go to interwar Europe to find good analogies uh to understand Donald Trump there's a populist tradition in the United States that goes back to the 19th century there have been quite a few characters in American history like him with his ideas and his style who like well people you've never heard of there was a guy named Dennis Kearney who led something called the Californian Workers Party in the late 19th century and kearney's position was that we had to close the border and keep out building the immigrants he actually had built the wall as a slogan there's a cartoon showing a wall being built across San Francisco Harbor he was anti-chinese that was a big part of of cuny's appeal he was anti-elitist he was really uh somebody who kind of relished being a common man without any pretensions and all the policies that Kearney stood for including restriction of immigration and China bashing I mean that that has all been in American politics before but it's been forgotten of course currently never got to be president no populist until Trump has succeeded in getting to be president but we've had populists before offering that combination of immigration restriction and uh and Elite bashing and you didn't need to you didn't need to look for analogies in into war Europe the United States is nothing like into war Europe I mean I've studied into war Europe if I had a time machine and you and I got into it and we went off to Italy in the 1920s or Germany in the 1930s we had a day there we'd be like this is totally different this is like this is crazy every other person is in a uniform I mean the thing about Donald Trump's America is that you hardly saw anybody in a uniform except occasionally there'd be somebody coming back from Afghanistan in an airport but this is the thing that I'm I'm constantly struck by if you study history rigorously you're you're constantly struck by how unlike the mid-20th century our time is and and yet people seem only to know about the mid-20th century it's sometimes as if the only history that anybody knows is the history of you are reading my mind I've got in front of me Godwin's law as an online discussion grows the probability of a comparison to Nazis our Hitler approaches 100 many people are quick to compare things to Nazi Germany because it's the only history they think they know yeah the History Channel has a lot to uh answer and so forth so does so does gcsc in a level history and but it's not only in the UK I mean there is this uh extraordinary over emphasis on the mid-20th century as if that's the only history we should really bother knowing about I mean I studied part part of my career I spent studying that that period but but actually think that the 17th century is much more Illuminating if we want to understand our time because in the 16th and 17th century they had to contend with a new communication technology the printing press and it completely changed everything it's suddenly drastically lowered the barrier to entry you could you could get your thoughts out on on paper much more easily than on an illuminated manuscript we're living through a comparable period in which the public sphere has completely be transformed by technology and yet nobody bothers studying the 17th century outside a few Oxford and Cambridge colleges the 17th century was a time when mercenaries were enormously powerful there was a guy named Valenstein who was the progosian of the Holy Roman Empire we can learn a lot from that period and it's much more interesting and Illuminating than trying to fit everything into uh Germany 1933 uh which which is I'm afraid what we know we now do all as you say almost in every online discussion what was the response like when the print and press became widely available what did it change what do people not realize about what it changed and how did governments and people that wanted to restrict access and stuff respond well as the printing press spread throughout Europe from the late 15th century into the 16th century it was a highly decentralized technology you really had no central control printing presses were springing up all over uh Germany and especially Northern Europe and initially religious reformers like Martin Luther said oh great now we can get the truth about the church and uh about Christian doctrine out and and more effectively explain what's wrong with today's uh Roman Catholic Church and and that that that was certainly true that that message spread like wildfire in northern Europe and very quickly uh Luther was able to convince a great many people not only in Germany but all the way across the channel in England that that something had to change and uh and so that part was right but what Luther didn't anticipate uh was that once you can print the Bible and print criticism to the Roman Catholic Church you can print anything uh and pretty quickly people were printing anything there's one moment when I can't remember where it was now uh there's a town in South Germany where they say can we can we print a translation of the Quran and Luther goes um yeah I guess I guess so because if we print it then people will see how false it is uh but before long there are people publishing tracts about how to identify witches you know how to spot a witch there's a whole best-selling book uh are designed to help you identify the witches who live amongst us and these tracts about witchcraft lead to the so-called witch craze a crazy uh persecution wave directed it perfectly innocent uh people mostly women that led to mass executions in all kinds of Parts uh of Europe and Beyond Europe and in the American colonies so the unintended consequence of the printing press was that you you not only disseminated serious uh discussion of how to reform the Roman Catholic Church you also disseminated all kinds of crazy stuff uh like there are witches amongst us and we need to we need to kill them so I think that's a really important lesson like the internet the printing press allowed crazy stuff to go viral because given the choice between reading about consubstantiation and transubstantiation or witches yeah you can see why a lot of people would say can I have the book about witches because I kind of I'm not that interested in transubstantiation but witches so I think that's that's one very obvious way in which the printing press had unintended consequences you have 130 years of religious Warfare after the printing press stops being used to disseminate religious ideas because not long before the Catholics are publishing their tracks saying that Luther's a heretic and he too should be killed so yeah I mean there was a pretty obvious lesson to be learned about the internet from the printing press but if you went to Silicon Valley as I did in 20 when did I move 2016 what really amazed me was the utter optimism that prevailed everywhere that the internet was awesome and all its consequences would be awesome and if everybody was connected that would be awesome and I mean I'm like but there could be some downsides to connecting everybody have you considered that like why but if you have an entire community of people who don't know any history at all and and that would never cross their minds which is why you know people were surprised and shocked when crazy stuff started to go viral on on social media spectral evidence was one of the most interesting things I learned about when looking at the witch trials that um they were using this spectral evidence which was essentially like hysterical eyewitness testimony done done to a poltergeist in the room that said yes she is actually a witch and these things have been going on for months maybe even years and then they got in contact somehow with the head court or whatever the equivalent was there the biggest magistrate in America and they said this um we've been doing a lot of these cases based on spectral evidence that's um that's all right isn't it that's that's okay sorry what the [ __ ] is spectral evidence uh so yeah that was one thing that came to mind another was um was it Thomas Blackmore Thomas Blackburn the first person to translate the original Bible from Latin into the common language in the UK and he was very quick he persecuted and killed and one of the reasons for that was that if you no longer need to have the priest as your conduit between yourself and God if you have a personal relationship there is a massive loss of control there a huge loss of control because they are no longer the vector the the middle bit of The Hourglass that you're getting squeezed through on your way out to about the Reformation was the idea that that people should be able to read scripture themselves in a language uh that they understood rather than having it read to them in Latin that was a revolutionary idea and I think that the lesson is that one should not expect that kind of radical change in the boundaries of knowledge to have only good consequences Mass literacy had many good consequences I'm sure unquestionably that the benefits exceeded the costs of mass literacy we know they did because in in parts of Europe where the Reformation succeeded and literacy rates went up economic growth was much higher over the succeeding 300 years so net benefits were great but there were costs too to suddenly going from a basically illiterate Society to a illiterate one and I think in our thinking about the internet and this should also inform our understanding of artificial intelligence we need to be more aware of the likely costs of drastic changes in the structure of the public sphere what other areas of History do you wish that we could if if we take this entire pie of people's history knowledge 99.5 percent of which is taken up with Nazi Germany uh other than 16th 17th century and freedom of access to information and propagation of information what are the other big chunks that you wish that more people knew about well the interesting thing is that even if you had a kind of Ideal curriculum a school or university it would still omit a huge percentage of human history because you know most of the people in history LED unrecorded lives in uh in non-literate agricultural societies and so with the best will in the world it's really hard to recapture the human past we're inevitably going to capture this really unrepresentative sample which over represents the the literate and the urban I think if I were designing a curriculum for my 11 year old son I would attempt to make it much broader in its chronological and geographical scope than is available in any school today I would rather that he knew a little bit about everything uh than that he knew everything about the rise of Hitler uh Thomas who is 11 came across a terrific uh video online which I think Bill wurtz did which is a complete history of the world as a kind of crazy musical animation it's really good uh it's better than Yuval Noah Harare because it's funny and I I wish I could I remember the exact URL uh I would give it to you all but I'm sure if you Google kind of Bill Works total history of the world you'll get something and what I love about that video is it just does everything uh including the Phoenicians uh the Central Asian carnates it kind of does its best to give you a pretty comprehensive overview and when you do it that way you realize that most history is as I said earlier it's kind of Empires but in all kinds of strange places I mean let's not pretend it was only people in Western Europe who did Empire they were really late to the Empire game everybody else would be doing Empires for centuries including Africans including the Incas and the Aztecs Empire is actually the standard form of of historical uh polity and it's it's everywhere uh and and that's that's what I would love to be able to do my ideal history course is just called Empires it's just like all the empires let's try and understand them all let's realize they're basically everywhere they mostly do slavery to varying extents um they have very varied durations they have different business models but that's kind of what history is and there should be some much better Grand unified theory of of Empire than we have I was I was in Santa Fe a couple of weeks ago at the Santa Fe Institute hanging out with my favorite physicist Jeffrey West who's a brilliant guy he did a book called scale that everybody should read and we have this kind of pipe dream that will join forces and and kind of do Empires sort of for physicists and then all of history will be intelligible uh maybe not in a bill Works video but in a course that will give you a sense of just the kind of weird biodiversity of History it's kind of strange it's strange it's a strange Menagerie this Zoo full of Empires some of them are giant like elephants some of that tiny like mice and that that's that's kind of Jeffrey West's take on the natural world I think it probably applies to the historical world too so watch this space that's my next big project it's got me thinking about this stat I learned UH 60 of Americans don't own a passport and when you live on a in a country which is essentially a continent and has you know 50 little countries all attached that will allow you to use your currency and speak your language and go and work there if you want to then I guess a bit of a justification is why would you need to um but the lack of worldliness I do think contributes to uh myopia um in America and I wonder whether there's almost like a a temporal myopia as well that is it's something similar if you only know the last hundred years of history and of that last hundred years you really only know 10 years between like 1935 and 1945 you end up trying to retrofit things that are happening now to a very small number of examples and perhaps broadening broadening that level of Education would add a little bit of ballast or stabilizer to some of the conversations we're having imagine if there were time machines like uh airbuses and you could go to the airport and just fly to the destination in the past of your choice uh the problem with tourism is that it often gives people the impression that they know more about the world than they do so uh there are very many Americans who do have passports and when they travel uh they go to Scotland to play golf uh and then they go uh to Paris to have uh fancy meals or do shopping and uh and then they'd probably go to Florence and then they come back with enormous an enormous sense of their own knowledge of Europe uh but if all you know about Scotland is golf uh you should watch the movie Trainspotting five times as a kind of corrective I think it might be the same with time travel like everybody would be like let's go to 1933. oh yes let's go to 1933 and see Hitler come to power again uh it'll it'll kind of give us a terrible feeling of of nausea and then we'll come come home or you know where else would people want to go if they were Time Travelers it's like let's go back to the let's go back to the swinging twenties and get drunk with Scott Fitzgerald to be like there'll be a bunch of destinations that would be really popular and I'd be that one guy on the little plane going to the Peace of West failure in 1648 it's like I think you should go to the piece of Westphalia in 1648 and find out how they stop the 30 years walk because we need something like that soon uh in the world today but but yeah I mean time machines I think a lot about time machines because we don't have them never have them I suspect and that means the only kind of time travel we can do is basically by reading history or we can go and see movies which are actually worse because you know you can go and see Oppenheimer but he'd be better off reading the book If you really want to understand what happened but yeah we we can sort of do time travel with books and and movies uh but I suspect it's a bit like tourism we all go to the same places and come back with an exaggerated sense of our own knowledge yeah I had this conversation the other day with a friend who was telling me about Afghanistan in the sort of maybe like three four five hundred A.D and that it was a Bastion of maybe physics and Mathematics and a few other places and we were discussing this sort of weirdness with history that we kind of know unless we do invent a time machine we know all of the things that we're going to know about history there are maybe some texts somewhere that are hidden there are maybe some archaeological digs that can be done there are inferences that can be drawn but when we're looking at you know original Source material we've captured at least a large portion probably of what we're going to be able to capture so it's really it's really like going over a crime scene with very limited evidence and it got me thinking about you know just how different our world would be if the Library of Alexandria hadn't been burned if we hadn't lost a load of this stuff to some Islamic Crusades against some heretical knowledge as well or how different it would be if all of the ancient learning had been lost uh I mean that that's a counter factual that I think a lot about because if all of the ancient Athenian and Roman texts had had been lost there would have been no Renaissance and it's hard to imagine quite how what we think of as Western Civilization would have been would have been possible or maybe we'd have had all those ideas all over again I'll give you a good example as a counter a point to Afghanistan as a a place that wasn't a basket case Scotland if you had gone there in the 17th century would have been just like Afghanistan today because in Scotland in the 17th century uh it's kind of Warring Mountain tribes religious Fanatics extreme Calvinists control the capital Edinburgh they're cons it's incredibly violent had one of the most mind-blowingly high homicide rates much higher than any American city today next Chicago looked like uh the Garden of Eden and and so 17th century Scotland looks like Afghanistan and then and it's a very mysterious process but in the space of a few decades you go from the 1745 Jacobite Rising Civil War Carnage to the enlightenment to Scotland being one of the great centers of intellectual innovation of the late 18th century and uh you know Walter Scott writes a great novel perhaps the greatest historical novel Waverly really addressing this question how on Earth does Scotland go from being Afghanistan to being Athens in this really short space of time and I still think that's one of the most interesting questions because if it's possible to to stop being Afghanistan kind of actually become a center of of not only intellectual Innovation but economic dynamism the Adam Smith Scotland I mean the Adam Smith Scotland is just a couple of decades after the Battle of Culloden uh you know that's that's to me one of the most amazing examples in history of total non-linearity total discontinuity radical upgrade from you know Civil War to Enlightenment if it's possible in 17th century Scotland 18th century Scotland then it should be possible in 21st century Afghanistan what are your predictions for the next five to ten years in terms of what we're going to see popular politics in America I know I've heard you say not super long ago that you felt that a lean toward conservatism seems not unlikely um but we've got different forces and different defense mechanisms on both sides for something like Trump uh or or even anything that looks remotely like him so what's your lick your finger put it in the air what are you what are you tasting on the Wind well I think uh let me try and apply my my methodology uh of of rigor here rather than just taking the first analogy off the shelf I think that uh the Biden presidency uh is kind of unlikely to be a two-term presidency uh in the same way that uh Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter and George Bush Senior could only be one-term presidents I feel Joe Biden's a one-term president now in that case and by the way the economics and the polling all would substantiate the fact that he's not in a strong position to get reelected that means the Republican nominee is quite likely to win but the Republican nominee right now is quite likely to be Donald Trump uh he's far ahead of the competition Ron DeSantis isn't really getting much traction and and so we are in The Amazing situation that a man who has just been indicted of trying to overturn the last election and that's just one of the many criminal charges he faces right now uh could be re-elected uh and it's not the it would be the second time in American history that somebody had two non-consecutive terms Grover Cleveland did it in the late 19th century I think the probability of trump coming back is much higher than most people realize right now uh because just as in 2015 uh people struggled to imagine Trump uh being president the first time they struggle again uh with the kind of cognitive barriers to to giving that a high probability so I'm kind of struggling to see what stops him now unless the Democrats panic and persuade Biden not to run early next year and parachute in Gavin Newsom I think if they do that Trump won't win because Americans will see an old guy and a young guy a young kind of good looking guy though I'm not sure how good looking but they're kind of going to choose the young guy uh regardless of the fact that he's left California a kind of wasteland so I think if Biden's the nominee all the way through uh Trump could win and then we will have an extraordinary time in American history because the left will will refuse to acknowledge that result just as much as Trump refused to acknowledge his defeat and the Republic will become very politically unstable under those under those circumstances just to come back to my Roman point it's not really the Roman Empire that the United States is like it's the Roman Republic that it's like and Republican institutions historically have not been fantastically long-lived most republics in history have not been long-lived uh it's only relatively recently that we had long-lived republics and uh any political theorists from the ancient world or the Renaissance or the enlightenment would have said well republics tend not to last because at some point they either choose a tyranny or they descend into uh corruption and a demagogue comes to power all of the processes that we see at the moment at work would not surprise uh traditional political theorists so I think the Republic has more to worry about than if you like than the Empire and you know if Trump is is re-elected I shall I shall be quite glad to be sitting safely in England watching it from a distance I'm not sure I'd want to be here if that happened well that would get I think that could get very nasty I could get very nasty I'm kinetic nasty yeah yeah because I mean they'll take to the left will take to the street so Donald Trump is re-elected they will become the election deniers at that point and I think the Trump second Trump Administration will be ruthlessly well prepared for power in a way that the first Trump Administration wasn't so yeah that's my kind of that's my crystal ball so far as I like it it's interesting I I definitely think there is a case of um Tit for Tat an Ever escalating Tit for Tat rebuttal the same as anybody that's had a little bit of an argument with their partner and and one evening you came home late and the next morning you there was a nasty note read saying hope you had a good night like and there's no milk in the fridge and and then you have to sleep in the spare room for a couple of days or whatever um and then the next time that the your partner does that you remember that you keep it in the back of your mind and you think oh maybe I wasn't so bothered about this or maybe this wouldn't have have triggered in my mind but I'm actually they they did this to me so I'm gonna do it to them so I'm gonna Stick it to them and I do feel like um one of the Echo uh uh sort of cyclical uh replicating trends that was created with the uh pushback that Trump gave to the election results three years ago uh is okay all right well that's that's now on the table that is a discussion which is on the table election dinner and as soon as anybody says how can you be doing this people from the left were you not the ones that were saying that this should have been accepted and the left will say well were you not the ones that said that this could have never happened how are you are you do you not storm the capital Did you not deny and it's this like super juvenile uh you hit me last type game and uh yeah I I do worry about what doorways that opens in future well that's why monarchies turn out to be more stable than republics because you have a personification of uh of the state that is above partisan politics that in the Republic it's all uh or nothing bipartisan conflict and I think if one looks back at the 19th century American politics was a contact sport then it's gone back to being a contact sport after a period when there was a certain gentlemanly bipartisanship at least for periods of the 20th century and that that's gone and we're now back into the kind of contact sport that Dickens writes about when he visits the United States so the tip for tap thing is important um from a republican Vantage Point Democrats didn't expect accept the legitimacy of Trump's victory uh in 2016. although that's uh that's often forgotten there was a great uh wave of protest against uh Trump in his first year including if you remember the women's March uh the the great I think critical moment uh has arrived when many Americans think that a double standard has been applied that that Trump was targeted by the justice system and the bidens were given treat treatment that was quite different and that's a really important shift that's happening in American politics right now Joe Biden is an extroably losing his Amtrak Joe regular guy image because of his son and his involvement with his son's business dealings and the more that happens the more people will say well there's nothing really to choose between them you can say what you like about Donald Trump but they're all corrupt they're all crooked and that that's going to be important I think in the Final Phase of the election next year when it will be decided by independent voters and swing voters in a small number of states and indeed in a small number of counties because that's how machine politics works most States and most counties are already already predictable but a small number or not and I think those arguments about double standards uh will count for a lot much more than arguments about whether the 2020 election was stolen it's the sense that a double standard has been applied that will help Trump now as I said concluding reflection history is not really capable of giving you a crystal ball it doesn't allow you to say with any real confidence who win the next election even though it's less than 18 months away but if you start playing the game of pattern recognition you can start to see why Biden's a weak candidate why if he continues to seek re-election he could be a one-term president and why under those circumstances Donald Trump despite uh all that happened on January the 6th 2021 could get reelected that's all I'm saying Neil Ferguson ladies and gentlemen I really really love your energy Neil I love your your Insight in feeling very balusted and stabilized now after learning about some stuff that I didn't from history what are you working on next what should people expect from you and how can they keep up to date with those things Volume 2 of my biography of Henry Kissinger I'm working on that uh every waking hour except when I'm doing podcasts it's really good and uh and and that will be the next book that I I publish while you're waiting for that you can buy Doom the politics of catastrophe which was the book that I published most recently A couple of years ago now and regular readers of my column which appears for Bloomberg opinion can hear my thoughts every two weeks when I when I drop a column there well I appreciate you very much thank you cheers Chris if you enjoyed that episode then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks and don't forget to subscribe