ROUGH TRANSCRIPT: Niall Ferguson and Martin Gurri LIVE
We hosted a Zoom discussion with our favorite doominaries about the many ways our world could end: conflict with China, mental health implosion, Scottish aggression, etc.
The following is a rough transcript of our live event with Niall Ferguson and Martin Gurri.
Please note that this is a full, rough, unedited transcript. If you’d like us to polish and edit these transcripts, please consider supporting Uncertain Things as a paid subscriber!
Martin Gurri: I thought two English accents in this, in this group was too many, right? I, I, I knew
Niall Ferguson: I'm not English. I'm Scottish. Be careful. Be very careful.
Vanessa Quirk: Hello Adaam.
Adaam James: Hi Vanessa.
Vanessa Quirk: How are you feeling today? Chipper, it seems.
Adaam James: I oh I'm so chipper. I just came up with the best, absolutely. Best podcast headline I ever conceived.
Vanessa Quirk: Yeah, don't tell the people what it is. Make them go to the dispatch to find out. Okay. Yes. Don't even back. Don't even date it and have them get like message you. Is it this one?
Adaam James: Yes. What is this headline you're so proud of? If somebody figures it out, it will be embarrassing for them. It will be embarrassing for me. . But you know, it's funny, you know, different places have different conventions for headlines and some audiences or outlets like the dispatch kind of lend themselves to Shameless dad joke punnery.
Vanessa Quirk: Mm-hmm. . Oh, that's my favorite. That is my favorite. And
Adaam James: then I don't let you have any fun in uncertain things. I, I just shut down your puns whenever you pitch them and pitch them. You do.
Vanessa Quirk: You let me have them in the newsletter. You let my pun flag.
Adaam James: That's true, but not for the episodes. It's not the tone we're going for.
Vanessa Quirk: Yeah. You're very into the, the one two punch of mystery snark for uncertain. It's like, like the headline is like, Ooh, what are we talking about? And then the, the subtitle is like, yuk yuk yuk yuk.
Adaam James: That's what it's, that's, that's exactly it. Anyway, today, today we are thrilled to be sharing with you our first live event virtual, but live with people together from all over the world at the same time. And it was with pod favorites, Niall Ferguson. And Martin Gurri
Vanessa Quirk: I mean, we didn't have to do very much at am Niall and Martin really, really brought their a game, so that was the best part about it.
Adaam James: Correct. Exactly. We, we, I think I, I intervened for maybe, maybe a total of six minutes in the whole mm-hmm. event, and they were just able to run free with their vivacious disagreements.
Vanessa Quirk: Yes. Well, for those who, if you don't know who Niall and Martin are, shame on you. Go back in our back catalog. We have a great conversation with both of them. Niall Ferguson, economic historian, columnist for Bloomberg
Adaam James: Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford, and author of many books including Doom and The Great degeneration, uh, Martin Gurri, former c i a analyst, author of The Revolt of the Public, the Unofficial Uncertain Things bible.
Vanessa Quirk: two brilliant gentlemen who we talked to about similar topics on different occasions and who we were, as you mentioned. Quite glad to discover that they disagreed a lot, which wasn't we, we didn't necessarily think or know that they would, so that was fun.
Adaam James: So the theme that got this whole event together was the apocalypse because cuz we like talking about the, the possible ways in which our civilization could end. It started from me writing a piece for our newsletter. It was titled Cancel Vultures.
Vanessa Quirk: See, Punny title. That one I did come up with and you let me run with it.
Adaam James: I let you have your wins . Um, that it's the, the idea of the newsletter was, uh, following our conversation with Peter Turchin to tie in some of the threads from that conversation into previous talks we had with Gurri and Ferguson. And you said, huh, maybe we should just bring them and, and have, have a panel. Um, and we reached out to Gurri and Ferguson and they both said, yes, we'd love to talk to each other on, on your live event. So, uh, so there we go. We structured it around three or four different ideas that we cared about, and we knew that they had been either writing or thinking about, um, in which our, our society is currently struggling.
So we started with the. Shall we say the epistemic or our knowledge institutions, just to get our media bashing out of the way. From there, we got to the second point of contention between Niall and Martin, which is whether we are at a second Cold War. And whether it said war is likely to get warmer
Vanessa Quirk: and, and not just a little warmer, but like nuclear warmer.
Adaam James: And then on that note, we turn to ask whether we are being too apocalyptic and how that plays into our depression epidemic. We got a great round of q and a, which. , sadly, to me at least we had to cut short. Uh, Vanessa, do you want to explain to the people why we had to cut our, uh, q and A short? Oh,
Vanessa Quirk: Lord, I, I was trying out a new setup. Well, first of all, we had technically only scheduled an hour and a half, so technically we were not cut short in that we were five minutes over actually. But second of all, um, in the middle of the q and a session, I realized that my computer was not charging and I could not, for the life of me figure out why in while trying to also moderate a panel discussion. And so I was ready for us to finish so that I could press stop and actually have the recordings from said discussion. Cuz if I hadn't all would've been lost and then it would've been a catastrophe. So catastrophe was averted.
Adaam James: And we have a wonderful piece of audio out of it of you bolting to the corner of your room to charge your computer at the very end.
Vanessa Quirk: Um, but the q and a portion, I wanted to talk about that. It was awesome. So we had a little bit of back and forth about how long the q and A portion should be and we settled on half an hour. Who knows? Maybe in a future event we'll actually extend it a little bit more. Cuz, cuz it was just so nice to hear people's voices.
Cause we're just, I mean, we talk about the void, but we also just talk into the void as podcast hosts. And so having people, having real voices attached to real humans and real suits and and outfits was just a really great experience for us,
Adaam James: especially some of the. No, but seriously, everything you just said, plus kudos on the idea to cap attendance. We originally capped it at 35 attendees and we extended to 45 because of demand. But keeping it small actually allowed a higher percentage of people to participate, which felt more intimate and real. I don't know. I really like that. Also, thank you to everyone who subscribed to us as a result, and a few of you even, uh, decided to become paid subscribers, which is amazing cuz you make it possible for us to keep doing this thing that is just the two of us. Um, so thank you.
Vanessa Quirk: Speaking of people who support us and allow us to do cool things, uh, shout out to Mr. Connor Lynch who helped us produce the event. He was our wingman making it all happen. So thank you Conna.
Adaam James: And lastly, uh, Vic, we haven't forgotten about you. We usually do transcriptions and week after we publish the episode, keep your eyes out on the uncertain.substack.com website. It will be there. Um, and I guess with that,
Vanessa Quirk: Niall ferguson and Martin Gurri Live.
Okay, I think we are ready to get started. Uh, welcome everybody to the first ever Uncertain Things live event. Uh, we are so excited to be here today. We have our esteemed guests, Niall Ferguson and Martin Gurri. We have a pretty exciting few moments up ahead for you. Uh, some great conversation followed by q and a. Um, but you know what? We just wanna get right into it. So Adaam, you wanna, you wanna take us away with the first question?
Adaam James: Okay. So, Naval gazing amoebas that we are as journalists, we're gonna start by talking about the media. Martin wrote his incredible book, revolt of the Public about, uh, which is the, uh, unofficial or have we decided that it's the official Uncertain things Bible he wrote about how technological change can affect social stability and specifically how social media and the changes that we've experienced in how we communicate information are at the root of growing social upset. You should read the book and you should listen to our episode with Martin, but one of the key processes that it describes is how 20th century centralized institutions, including established media, have lost their grasp and authority over the public.
We are experiencing that as declining trust in media, but also in the way that the media plays into that loss of trust. So I wanna bring up to pieces from the news recently, one news coming from the Department of Energy and the F FBI that the lab theory is being. Accepted more broadly as a likely explanation for the origin of Covid 19.
If you lived in this world for the past three years, you know that many, a prominent news outlet has four years downright dismissed this hypothesis as a cookie, slightly racist conspiracy theory. And it seems that despite the, the updates, most outlets are still refusing to fully acknowledge their mistake to themselves.
It seems to me as much as to their readers. On the other side of the political spectrum, we have the lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News. During the discovery process of which we, uh, we found out unsurprisingly, perhaps that during the post-election 2020 drama of Stop the Steal. , which Fox covered heavily.
Many of the executives and hosts were internally discussing just how much they disbelieve the stories that they were pedaling on their show, that they were feeding their audiences about, uh, an alleged election fraud in order to please their audience. In other words, they kept alive a lie that would culminate in the January 6th riot. Um,
what's fascinating to me is the different types of media dishonesty, where on the, the, the liberal side, you encounter what seems to be in ideological blindness in an unwillingness to admit otherwise. Whereas on Fox News, the story is much more cynical. People know that they're pro getting lies and they're, they do it nevertheless.
So I wanna start here and wonder what it means as we start building towards. Unified apocalypse. What does it mean that our sources of information are authoritative? Sources of information are so corrupt, either by ideological blindness or sheer mercenary cynicism?
Niall Ferguson: Well, I think there's always a danger in conversations about, uh, journalism with journalists because there's a tendency, uh, which is very advanced these days for the news media to think that it's the story.
And this, uh, becomes a somewhat uh, uh, I think circular conversation. I, I'm not sure that this is really the, the, the revolutionary development of our, our times. I'm in the midst of writing a book in which a great deal of the action takes place in the 1970s. Uh, what was the equivalent disaster, which everybody was.
Thinking about then the answer is the Vietnam War, uh, hardly need to tell, uh, Martin this. And there was an official narrative, uh, which was the domino theory required the United States to shore up the government of Vietnam. Uh, and then it became clear that that was not entirely true. And with the, uh, publication of the Pentagon Papers, uh, the public was suddenly treated to an inside, uh, account of what in fact had happened in the 1960s.
And the reasons for the escalation, uh, in Vietnam under Lyndon Johnson there then was an attempt to shut that, uh, door disastrously unsuccessful attempt, uh, that then contributed to the crisis of Religiousy of, of Richard Nixon's administration. If one goes back through the news coverage of, of Vietnam and then of Watergate, It's striking to me how, how familiar, uh, the discussions are.
Uh, on one side, uh, there's an administration that's abusing its power and seeking to exert, uh, pressure, uh, uh, not only on its political opponents, but on its opponents in the press ultimately resorting to a legal means to do that. On the other side, you have a public that is, uh, increasingly polarized, uh, on the issue.
And, uh, there are indeed outbreaks of, of, of violence, uh, in, in the period, as well as a general sense of disenchantment with the system. So whenever people tell me that there's something very special about our situation in 2023, I say, did I introduce you to 1973? And, and, and you won. Find that our position is a whole lot, uh, worse.
In fact, it's very similar. Uh, the Trump presidency ended with a massive crisis of legitimacy, uh, uh, January the sixth. And, and the Nixon presidency, of course, ended in, in Watergate. Impeachment played a part in, in both cases, and the media became. A story, which is what the media really loves. The New York Times loves nothing better than reporting on the New York Times.
And I think that's all pretty familiar, the novel thing. And here at Marson, you may disagree with me or you may agree wholeheartedly. The novel thing is clearly the internet and the advent of social media to use the term, uh, casually because ultimately traditional media have become quite reliant on social media for, uh, raw content.
And I, the novel thing is really the way in which news has become, uh, structurally different. In the age of the internet that the old institutions play. Their old game. Governments try to manipulate the media, the newspapers want to write about themselves. That's all old hat. But what's novel is platforms such as Twitter, uh, but also increasingly, uh, uh, TikTok in which a considerable amount of power is, is given to the user, to ordinary people who aren't journalists to generate, uh, news and commentary.
And of course, and uh, both Martha and I have written about this, the ecosystem of the internet went from being very decentralized to being quite centralized. Our own network platform was very fast. Uh, it became monetized through ad sales. It became corrupted by bots. It's continuing to be corrupted. The corruption will not stop and it will get worse with, uh, artificial intelligence.
And that's what's new. Not the stuff about, uh, traditional media, not the ways in which government tried to manipulate it, but the complete transformation of the nature of news and our perception of the news by the internet and the network platforms.
Martin Gurri: Well, I, I would say I, I probably have an advantage over you, Niall. Uh, you, you're, you look very distinguished and graying, but I am way older than you are. I was there in the seventies. Okay. And, um, my, my sense is there were many similarities. There were profound differences. Profound differences. Um, I think. At the core, uh, the Vietnam era of Vietnam controversy was about, um, shared values, who was right and who was wrong.
All right? And I think once it became, it took a long time for the American public, actually took years and years, and I was a young man waiting to see whether it was gonna be drafted or not at that time. Um, it took years to tip over into a majority of the public being against the war. Um, it took a lot.
Of, um, uh, television theater in, in the Senate, uh, to persuade people that what Nixon had done made it impossible for him to stay precedent. But they, we were debating more or less within a single moral structure, within a single belief about facts. Alright? I think the place we're at right now is, is extraordinarily different.
I think the causes are what you mentioned. I think this is gigantic upsurge of information, this gigantic babble of voices that. Jonathan h calls the Tower of Babel. Um, and, and what we are debating today, what is in dispute almost every occasion is not the facts, but the frameworks that constitute the facts.
So there's a battle of frameworks that goes back and forth and, and, um, and the, and the framework seems to shift in the strangest way since there is no authority from the top. And we, I guess we can start, start with that, since the, the elites have lo lost trust and they're the ones who interpret the world for us.
Um, I mean, when Nixon was, was, uh, basically forced to resign. Um, Bo Ford stepped in. I mean, this is a guy who had been in, uh, in, uh, in Congress all his life. Uh, and I mean, pretty much everybody rallied behind him. It's not like he, he, we were cheering, but everybody rallied behind him. He had at least our best wishes.
Um, right now there is no trust. There is no ability to gather trust because unless you can live in the same framework, you can't persuade people of anything. Um, and I think that is a profound consequence of, of the tsunami of information that has bashed institutions that simply we're not adapted for it.
Niall Ferguson: It seems to me that we're not, we're not that far, far apart. I mean, in the end, I think if one asks how big a disruption has there been in our time, you could say much as, as Martin has said, well, Trump, uh, went so far as to instigate insurrection. Uh, and, uh, that was a one of the great bungled coup attempts of, of modern times. Uh, but actually the system, uh, withstood that Joe Biden himself in 1970s figure became president. Sure.
Adaam James: But in part that's because of the incompetence of the planning
Niall Ferguson: in part. I mean, it's hard to dignify with, with the word planning, but my point is the continuity of, of, uh, the system striking Joe Biden's, uh, sworn in embarks on an entirely classic progressive democratic governmental course. We're gonna spend more money, we're gonna grow the government
Adaam James: progressive in the original 20th century sense,
Niall Ferguson: in the original sense of, of Roosevelt and Johnson. And, uh, quietly retains a number of Trump's policies. And so we had, uh, a, a very shocking event. What's really interesting to me is how very quickly we moved on, and this may be a big difference, uh, between then and now, uh, new cycles have become shorter.
Uh, I was looking at, uh, some interesting data on that this week. You know, the average story has a three week lifespan. If you had told me even a year ago that the US government would announce it had shot down unidentified flying objects over, uh, the United States, I would've said, man, that'll be the biggest story of 2023 and maybe of the 2020s, the ufo.
I mean, they, they called them unidentified flying objects and that story was gone in even less than three weeks. Uh, so I, what's fascinating to me is this extraordinary attention deficit disorder. That means that news, news, Even a coup, even our UFOs over America. It's like, eh, that was interesting for two weeks. By week three, it's like, next. That I think is different because in the seventies, Watergate was a story for three years until . I mean, it was really, uh, amazing how long that story kept going. And the, the journalists, uh, uh, unceasingly, uh, drummed it into people even when there was viewer and reader of fatigue.
So I, maybe that's the thing that, that is interesting here. It's not just there's a legitimacy crisis. I think there was a pretty big legitimacy crisis for the elite at the end of Vietnam and at the time of Watergate. What I'm really struck by is we just have such an, a short attention span that it'd be impossible to do anything like Watergate now.
Adaam James: So here's why I think the lab leak actually is interesting. It's not just that established media. Seems incapable of moving on because they were so attached to the idea that the, the lab leak is nothing but a conspiracy theory. That they're no incentivized by a, covering their asses and are resistant of admitting a mistake.
What's fascinating is the total lack of curiosity from people in the media industry. That's the thing that really draws my attention, is you get confirmation from government agencies, from the quote unquote establishment that the lab theory has some grounding, if not high likelihood of being correct, but still the, the way that people who you would expect to show a modicum of curiosity seem to be actively looking for ways to resist and reject any kind of evidence that supports the hypothesis. and it shows up with real journalists and it shows up with people in the entertainment industry like, like Colbert and the Daily Show. People who you'd, you'd assume have no actual horse in the race joking about, oh, the Department of Energy says, so I'm, I'm gonna wait for the D M V to weigh in. What is that?
Read paragraph three in the original Wall Street Journal article about, about the Department of Engen. Y'all understand why the agency weighed in? Um, I, I, are they being intentionally thick? I, I just think that this aggressive in curiosity, aggressive in curiosity, is something new.
Vanessa Quirk: I feel like it has to do with ideological capture. A clinging to overarching narratives. Like what, what else would shut down your curiosity to that extent, if not that? Right. And then, and I think it's related to what Niall was saying in terms of the news cycle being so short. If no one event can hold your attention, then you've got to map an event onto a broader ideological narrative in order to make it more interesting and, and essentially stickier.
Adaam James: But that's just the thing. What ideology exactly is being served or bolstered by denying the lab leak theory? The, I mean, I mean the, the, the latest reports came from the Biden administration, even though there were still ongoing debates internally about it. But, and it's, that's fine. But what I'm seeing from the information industry, from the knowledge industry is nihilism or at least a complete loss of the ability to, to be curious and ask. What, what's going on here?
Niall Ferguson: Well, RA rational debate is very difficult if your first, uh, question to yourself is, what's the other side's position on this? Cause mine can't be that. Now this, uh, I think is part of Trump derangement syndrome, but in the wake of Trump's, uh, election, uh, many people, including in, in the universities as well as in comedy shows, and, uh, on a mainstream liberal media, would tend to simply ask the question, if Trump's in favor of this, if that's Trump's position, then it must be wrong.
Now, if you remember the way that the, uh, COVID 19 pandemic began in the United States initially, The left were the skeptics. They were more likely to say that it was just influenza and that Trump, by referring to the Wuhan flu, was of course just engaged in racism. I can remember the pieces that appeared in New York Times in the Washington Post, which made it seem as if the most significant thing about the pandemic was what it might do to race relations in the United States.
Because Trump had state sounded a fairly anti-Chinese position from the outset of his campaign. There was a reflexive tendency to think that anything that was negative. About China couldn't possibly be right because it fit into Trump's narrative. Therefore, you c couldn't possibly endorse it. Now, I was writing Doom in 2020 and it was very clear then that there were problems with the wet market hypothesis about the origins of origins of Covid.
It was distinctly plausible that there had been a lab leak. It was also already obvious that gain of function research had been going on into bat viruses and that the US had supported that research. All of that was quite obvious. Uh, in 2020. You are right Adaam. That the in curiosity and willingness to censor the story, not only by, uh, mainstream media, but also by people in epidemiological uh, circles, think of the, the kind of mood that prevailed in some universities on, on this issue.
The really remarkable thing is, Ideological commitments, partisan affiliations transcended the basic curiosity that I still felt, and I still feel about the origins of the pandemic. We not even curious enough to have a proper inquest into what happened. Why did the United States handle this so badly?
Lots of lockdown, lots of disruption, and still lots of deaths. There is no desire to answer that question. There won't be anything like the nine 11 Commission. I know that Phillip Cello's tried to make it happen and been defeated because ultimately there's much more interest in partisan validation than in finding out what the hell happened. And that's, that's disturbing.
Martin Gurri: I would, I would add to that, um, my friend under a Mirror whose book, um, post Journalism, I recommend to everyone. Um, Talks about how the ideological, sort of narrative anchoring of, of the media elites to what it calls discourse narrowing. I mean, there's suddenly there are all kinds of subjects that nobody pays attention to, and then a handful of subjects that everybody hammers on.
So you have this enormous, at the moment, this is an enormous, um, flow of information as never in history. Uh, I mean many times, many levels of magnitude as never in history. And this conformity in the very, uh, this poverty of, of, of subjects that actually get discussed with any kind of depth.
Adaam James: Well, not to bring in the c word into the conversation, but Chomsky's, uh, manufactured consent is, is also very much around that idea. But in which interestingly was a, about Vietnam originally,
Martin Gurri: right
Vanessa Quirk: I thought the C word was China. I thought you were about to segue us adaam
Adaam James: No, that would've been too smooth.
Vanessa Quirk: All right, then I'm gonna take us there. So we've already touched on it a little bit with UFOs and the lab leak, but I do wanna talk about China more fully. So Niall, you wrote a Bloomberg piece recently, which cited a RAND Corporation study, uh, what makes a power great. And in it they say it's namely economic productivity, technological innovation, social cohesion, and national will. So I wanna ask you about these last two, social cohesion and national will, because both seem in short supply these days in the us. Uh, so Niall, um, what's your take on the lack of a strong, cohesive, optimistic narrative about who we are as a superpower? Like does this lack of a narrative inevitably set us up to seed power and influence to China?
Niall Ferguson: The RAND study was interesting, although I went on to point out that if you really wanna define national power, The ability to manufacture weapons and ammunition for a sustained period is probably somewhat more important.
Right, right, right. When it comes to shove and, uh, and, and you know, in any case, you can feel very, uh, lacking in social cohesion until someone, uh, attacks, uh, your territory and kills your people. And lo and behold, your national cohesion comes back. I mean, Ukraine was a deeply divided country. I know it well.
I'm visited at almost every year. Over the last decade. Uh, nothing has united that country, uh, perhaps in its entire history, quite the way that the Russian invasion of last, uh, February, uh, did. So I, I think these sorts of worry tend to get overdone and, uh, It's a somewhat academic view of, of, of power in the, in my view, the real problem the United States has at the moment is that it is in a Cold War.
It's in a new Cold War with China. It's been in that Cold War for at least four or five years. The Chinese have probably been in it, in their own minds for longer than that. And we do not have the kind of capabilities that, uh, that we had in the first Cold War. And the, the opposition, the rival superpower, is significantly more technologically capable than the Soviet Union Watts.
And that's really concerning. The, the thing that stunned me when I delved into it was just how quickly the United States would run out of hardware of precision missiles if it went to war with China over Taiwan today. In fact, we've,
Vanessa Quirk: it's already struggling to provide to Ukraine, right?
Niall Ferguson: Yeah. Our stocks of certain categories of weapon have essentially been exhausted or are close to being exhausted by one effect is a proxy war that we're waging against Russia with Ukrainian troops. So that's the big story in my view. We are, we don't have the military industrial complex that Dwight Eisenhower worried about, uh, because we are a really no longer the world's dominant manufacturing part. China now occupies that position and China certainly could churn out a lot more weapons than the United States where it to be involved in that kind of war.
Adaam James: Okay. So Niall, we're gonna get back to your point about capabilities, but first I want to get your thoughts. on something, both of you, and especially Martin actually, because I still think that there's something different about what's going on here that does have something to do with social media and the way that it colors our engagement with the world.
So here's my totally, totally unscientific survey of this question, but I've been having conversations with my Israeli friends for, oh, it wasn't over seven years since the Trump phenom has a reason in the US about why things seem to have disintegrated so terribly in in this country in terms of the political discourse.
And my working theory for a while was that Israel just still has. As Martin said, a shared set of values. We work on a framework of familiarity, and while we may disagree a about who's right and who's wrong, we are at least having the same conversation. And I thought this had everything to do with how small Israel is the, uh, cultural similarity, the, the scale, and the fact that we had the experience of being under threat, as, you know, as a unifier.
But then a friend of mine suggested that maybe the, the problem here is actually a lot more Martin Gurri-esque maybe it's about the fact that, uh, social media and specifically Twitter has had low penetration in Israel at the time in contrast to the us. And I said, okay, that's interesting. If that's the case, let's see what happens if and when Twitter starts taking over the, the, the Israeli conversation.
And sure enough, five, six years later, Twitter is the public square in Israel as well, and the tone of the conversation has completely changed. In fact, the fractiousness that's going on in the Israeli conversation reminds me of the American political discourse during the Trump years. Much more siloed, much more heated, and not at all conversational.
In fact, everything has become more American, as I often complain. There's, uh, there's been an adoption of American memes into the Israeli polity, many of which don't make sense at all. You sometimes hear people talking about the Second Amendment in the context of Israeli politics, a country that has no constitution, let alone amendments, but all of this is symptomatic of the way that the political conversations around the world seem to have converged into.
A singular, vague mush of international culture war that no longer really makes any sense anywhere and is not really about policies or the realities in which people live, but it's about showing allegiance to. An abstract tribe that only exists online. And as a result, there is a loss of solidarity in connection to people who live next door. Who are your neighbors who share your immediate concerns and experiences, but who technically belong to the wrong tribe in this global culture war.
Martin Gurri: Yeah. Let's, let's put the, the people next door, um, issue till later. Cuz I think that's an important one. But, um, I think part of the difference between, uh, my youthful days in the seventies and, and, uh, the sixties less, uh, and, and, uh, and now is we do spend, I think the average American spends something like seven hours online. Right? Okay. We plunge into this, this thing, and we are, um, it's, it's like, uh, the. Um, seedy subconscious of the human race, like the reptile brain of the human race. Okay? And things that are usually not said out loud are, are screamed out loud.
The discourse is, is, uh, I mean, I remember in the old days the protest, Vietnam protest, of which I was an honorable attendant. Um, when you you used the, the word fuck, it was like, whoa, we are really being edgy here. You know? Now, I mean, I can't go to screaming television without three outta four words. That's the one, you know, , so you plunge into this medium. Everything is coarsened. Everything is kind of like the, the, what Freud would've called the i we're living in the, in, in the end of the human race.
Um, and I think that reflects back out when, because the, the battles are fought in that medium, seven hours. You live in this, you're an American, uh, and, um, you are not, there's no incentive to come to arrangements and no, there the incentive is to strike a pose to get a following, to be the loudest voice to, you know, be the edges yet.
So I think there's something in there. And there is also one last thing. There is the person you are when you go in there. And I think we talk about that enough, right? Because when you go into this medium that we're now sharing, okay, you're, you're you in a sense, but you, you've kind of radically transformed the dig. The digital self is flat. I it is a historical, it's deco contextualized. It's almost infantile. And you know, infants have what they call a grasping reflex. You know, I think people just wanna grasp to something, right? So, you know, if, if you want, for example, um, you know, you want community, it, my behavior feels like a me. So you, you get, that gets perverted into mob behavior and many other kind of similar things like that where, where you are reaching for something, meaning you're reaching for meaning, you're reaching for certainty and ending up almost at its opposite because you're just clinging to something or someone.
Niall Ferguson: I think the other point, Adaam, which, uh, you raised is that on, on global platforms there is convergence. And so it's not just that Israel developed, uh, a Trumpy style of, of politics or, or American style polarization between. Uh, penong secular liberal types and, and, and populist nationalists. It's the same happen in Brazil.
The same it Siemens has happened in almost any, uh, country that has exposure to these, these platforms. So I think that's not entirely surprising. If you create global, giant, global networks, then the, the things that go viral will go viral everywhere. They're like the SARS COV two virus.
The question is, how, how permanent is this transformation? It seems to me that one possibility exists that we, we may be underestimating because we are who we are and we do what we do. We may fail to realize that for many people, those hours online are mostly spent consuming sports. Uh, Videos of animal, uh, animals, you know, the dancing ferrets, that, that, that they're not
Vanessa Quirk: guilty.
Niall Ferguson: Actually consuming toxic political content all the time. And, and that's really quite a minority activity. It's always been a mistake to infer reality from Twitter, and that's, I think that's something that, that I've become very conscious of. Uh, you might as well infer it from, from TikTok, and that might actually be a better guide. The other thing, which I would would emphasize is, uh, to paraphrase, you know, Mike Tyson, every society's polarized until it gets smacked in the mouth. And let's remember nine eleven's not that long ago. It's a lot more recent than Vietnam. And it, it was remarkable how very quickly after the terrorist attacks of 2001 American Unity surged, and it remained quite durable through that 12 or or 24 month period. Until things began to go wrong in, in Iraq. So my sense is that all of these polarized societies, including Israel, would still react somewhat as Ukraine did, were they, to suffer a really lethal blow by, by a foreign aggressor that this just hasn't happened to the United States for a while.
A balloon over Montana doesn't come close. Uh, but, but whether to be, uh, whether to be, uh, a, a conflict, let's imagine the US-China relationship deteriorator, it's very rapidly, which is perfectly plausible in my view. We're at that stage of the Cold War, where you go from Korea to Cuba, only much more fat, much more rapidly than happened in Cold War.
I. If the United States and China go, I eyeball to, I eyeball over Taiwan, I would, I would predict, uh, a significant decline of that polarization. There's already a bipartisan consensus on China. It's about the only bipartisan issue in America today, and I'm struck by how, uh, how both sides are competing to see who can be most hawkish on China.
I think the American public is not that far behind. The polling shows really big shifts in towards hostility towards China over the last few years. And in that sense, I think the polarization is a, a phenomenon of peace time, just in the way that Britain was highly polarized in the 1930s. Uh, the debates at Oxford's Union about would you fight for king and country divided the the elites, and I think that reflected a broader division that was all gone by 1940.
Adaam James: I definitely take your point that this type of polarization requires a degree of peace in. This is actually something that I have been referring to often as peace, privilege, that you get to occupy yourself in this amorphous cultural war as opposed to worrying about existential threats. In fact, you can even argue that the reason that American style polarization has entered the Israeli bloodstream is because Israel has experienced a decade of relative quiet and prosperity.
Despite everything, Israel two has experienced a moment of peace privilege. Martin makes the point in his book that a lot of the, this energy towards rebellion that has been bubbling up over the past 10 years has a lot to do with boredom. That's a fukiyama point that once the. Liberal democratic project has won.
The public is gonna rebel against it precisely out of something between un we and boredom. But that doesn't mean that the ensuing Sunni Shiite divide that his is, is, is now playing out in the us. This religious war between right and left won't outlive this moment of peace and prosperity. And in fact, there are signs that these divisions persist and even heighten during moments of real threat. Think natural disasters like the blizzard in Texas or the fires in California, or accidents like the train derailment in Ohio. Uh, I don't, I don't recall any sense of unity emerging from those moments.
Martin Gurri: Well, I think, I think Niall just phrased it as a question, and I think that's, that's probably the most important question right now, right? Is, is to what extent is this a permanent structural, uh, horror that we're living through? To what extent is it we're living in this crazy, the world of fumes inside, uh, um, the internet. And that takes us back to the neighbors, right? And I very firmly have this principle, which is, you know, I, I go online and go famous people like Trump and, and, uh, and Biden are yelling at me online, and people want me to do this and do that.
And the horrible things are being said o of each other. Then I, then I, and I despair. Then I lift my eyes and you guys can't see it, but there's my window out there. And while, while all these horrors are happening in my screen, there's my neighbors, they're walking their dogs, they're jogging, they're clipping their, you know, their bushes and they have no notion.
Cause I'm Cuban. I can tell you when a society's really broken, I, I came from one. Okay. You know, they have no notion of how amazing it is to watch that and how under unaware they are of their own freedom and their own security. Right. So, which is real and which is not, that is the most profound question right now, I think.
Adaam James: Okay. Before we turn to the question of mental health, I want to get back to Niall's point about the possibility of the Cold War turning hot. Is this a threat you feel? We are not taking seriously enough.
Niall Ferguson: I mean, Martin can comment on this, uh, too, I'm sure the, the, the United States Defense Establishment is, uh, a very, very expensive operation. We spend an awful lot of money, uh, on projects to produce the next generation Pfizer plane, uh, or the next generation, uh, submarine. And the reality is that, uh, as we can see in Ukraine, uh, 21st century warfare will still require lots of tanks, artillery pieces, uh, shells, uh, and for that matter, the 21st century piece, drones, uh, unmanned, uh, uh, vehicles of varying kinds.
And it's just hard to mass produce those with the industrial base that we have today. Uh, and, and I think that's important because latent in any Cold War, Is the possibility of the hot war and, and not just proxy wars. We, we need to bear in mind that if there's a war over Taiwan, it has clearly the possibility to escalate into a large scale conflict regional, if not global, Japan would be a competent, without question.
There's no way the United States could fight a war to defend, uh, or liberate Taiwan without Japan's involvement, uh, on the scale of such a conflict. Jims to this, tried to visualize it in a recent book would be absolutely cataclysmic much, much larger than the war in, in Ukraine. Uh, and I, I do think this would focus, mines like nothing else, nothing quite like a sinking aircraft carrier to, uh, put aside the petty dispute.
Uh, of the internet, and this is the difference between war and natural disaster. Adaam, I, I'm a natural disaster, like a pandemic or an earthquake or whatever. You know, you can turn that into, into retail politics. You can make that partisan issue. But an attack on US forces or US civilians is a completely different thing, uh, particularly if there's, because of the agency.
What is different because we think of it as a man-made disaster and we regard not unreasonably. Uh, there is being malice, uh, at work. So I think that would tra drastically alter the, the landscape. And I do think the, the seeds of national unity have already been planted in the debates over Chinese economic, the Chinese economic challenge.
China's responsibility for the pandemic. Uh, you know, we got a, a measure taking shape at the moment to ban TikTok in the United States. The US Congress is on the war path. The US Commerce Departments imposed really quite stringent sanctions on chi on the Chinese economy in the last, uh, in the last year. To an extent that people underestimate. We are on the road to war with China. The Chinese see that. Listen to what Xi Jinping just said in Beijing, and this makes all of. All of our kind of meme battles, the endless and ultimately tedious debates about twitter all will pale into utter insignificance if there's a war over Taiwan.
Adaam James: So with that in mind, is the campaign that we're supporting in Ukraine, do you see that as a distraction or as good signaling that the US will stand by Its proxies?
Niall Ferguson: It, it plays exactly the same role in Cold War II that the Korean War played in Cold War. I, it's the first hot war that makes you realize the new geopolitical landscape. And that's why it, it's so important that last month Anthony Blinken said, we think the Chinese are thinking of providing lethal aid, Russia. They must not do that. I mean, of course we're providing any amount of lethal aid to Ukraine. If the, the warning against China's supporting Russia with lethal aid. I mean, China's already exporting all kinds of non-lethal and deal you stuff to China, to to Russia.
That's the, that's the classic Cold War paradigm where both sides end up arming their, their proxies. Uh, but we'll get to the Cuban Missile Crisis, which was of course the most dangerous moment of Cold War. I I think much more quickly than we we did in, in, in the 1950s and sixties. I think we'll get to our Taiwan crisis quite quickly and that will be an absolutely decisive moment in world history because if there's a war, it'll be disastrous economically and in other ways if the US folds, that will be the end of us. Uh, predominance. Uh, if the US succeeds in defeating China, that will reassert us predominance. These are the big issues that are coming down the pike fast. It could be next year if the Taiwanese election produces a result that be Beijing really doesn't like.
Adaam James: Okay, we said we were gonna talk about the mental health epidemic. So , um, with the granted possibility of a nuclear standoff. Are we, we society, not just Vanessa and I being too much or too little catastrophical in our mindset, seeing the state of depression, widespread depression in the us You've made a point, Niall, in one of your articles that we have been so focused on teen depression that we've myopically missed the point that this is actually a society-wide problem. Deaths of despair going up all over the country, opioid epidemic, fentanyl, epidemics, suicides. We are. A sad and lonely country at this moment is our depression, the cause or the result of our miserable politics.
Martin Gurri: One question I would ask is, um, with, with, um, those kind of pathologies and, and the younger you get, the more, uh, severe they become. I, I was just thinking about that cuz I mean, the first thing you need, uh, if you're gonna go to war is. Unfortunately, a goodly supply of young men. All right? And I look at the generation just coming up the Zoomers, and it is the most fragile and, um, sort of unrealistic, I would say generation. I think we, boomers are pretty damn unrealistic.
But, but what's coming up, uh, with the Zoomers is the idea that, um, you know, words mean harm and that we, we, um, we're supposed to somehow not say certain things, not be, not believe certain things could be given safe space. Now, um, the question as I was, uh, listening to Niall is, is this a generation that even if we rally together, and by the way, I am not a hundred percent sure that's gonna happen. I, it might, I would hope that we would, um, but I'm not sure that we will. Uh, but even if we rally together, do we have the human material? Forget about the factories, the human material that would win a war.
Niall Ferguson: Well, the, the answer to the question, if you believe the youth risk behavior survey that was just published, uh, by the CDC is no, no chance, uh, I'll just give you some examples. 30% of high school girls considered attempting suicide during the past year. Uh, 24% made a suicide plan during the past year. That's what they say now that, uh, that translates, it seems to me, probably into a rather implausibly large number of suicide attempts. And I think we must acknowledge here that some of what's going on is almost a social competition to see who has the most, uh, trauma.
Uh, it's not really the teenagers who are co committing suicide. And this is the key point of the piece. It's actually the middle-aged, uh, and interestingly, predominantly white Americans who are succumbing to what Angus Deaton, uh, uh, called deaths of despair. These deaths of despair include, uh, alcohol, drug, uh, and other overdoses as well as suicide with firearms. I, I'm more worried actually about those deaths of despair than I am about the, the, the suicidal fantasies, uh, or brooding of, of teenagers. But I think if you add an all together, there's no way you can avoid concluding that something's very wrong with the mental health of Americans at all. Pretty much all ages.
Maybe the, the boomers are the least affected by this. And I, I, I delved into this out of a kind of sense of, uh, of, of shock that things have, have got this bad one. Can't blame this all in the pandemic. The pandemic certainly made it worse. The deaths of despair were there before D date and tr traded to be some of them back to the financial crisis.
But this is a remarkable phenomenon. And, and to go to your question, Martin, it could be that our society is just too sick as well as too divided to withstand the, the, the challenge of, of, of a conflict. Then it would be France, 1940. And I, I do find myself going back to Sartre more and more, uh, and the, the great trilogy that he, he wrote around the debacle of French, French defeat and asking myself, you know, are we that, are we that bad? And would we, would we fold that easily? I, I think not because I think, I think if one like you looks at the window, uh, or if one travels around the country, if one gets away from the, the capitals of neurosis on the coastal in the coastal cities, it doesn't look like, it doesn't look like France on the eve of the, the debacle. But it's, it's, it's striking. And I think if one were to get comparable data, survey data from, uh, all suicide data from European countries would not look as bad. I'm pretty sure.
Adaam James: Also to speak in defense of the neuroses on the coasts. Living in a place that has experienced several psychic breaks over the past several years, New York City. I think that as long as you step outside of a few neighborhoods in Brooklyn where people really do perpetually live in search of the next reason to despair and maybe get angry, you'll find that most people just want to live and, and spend time with people that they care about. It's shocking. I think that's why I agree with the person Next door hypothesis and why I'm not as pessimistic as my questions may suggest.
Vanessa Quirk: Well, the media consumption habits of, of our fellow liberal elites, I think is far more damaging to our, our psyches and the, the actual people around us in our, in our liberal cities.
Niall Ferguson: One interesting point to, to add Vanessa, is when, when teenagers are asked why they're, uh, so gloomy or depressed or suicidal, they do often cite climate change. And I think it's at least arguable that the constant repetition of alarmist accounts of the imminent end of the world due to climate change, has added to the sense of, uh, de amongst young people. They, they get a lot of this, uh, at school as well as on social media as well as on mainstream, uh, media. Greta Thonberg's become the personification of this mood.
Adaam James: And it's always worth reiterating that when talking about things like teen anxiety, the problem is never the teenagers. It's almost always the adults and the information they're feeding the kids or the, the, the behavioral patterns that they are cultivating. and climate change is a good example because it shows how arguably good intentions can lead to generational anxiety, then don't even end up advancing the purported cause of addressing environmental concerns.
Martin Gurri: Yeah. And, and I don't know how good the intentions are and I, I would add to, to, to, um, um, the climate change, um, all these ideas associated with, um, with identity, which, when you turn to race, Basically make it seem like their progress is impossible, right?
We're systemically racist country, nothing will ever change when it comes to gender. It's this massive confusion. It could be 81 of 72 genders. And I mean, okay, I was a young man once going through puberty. Somebody had told me it could be one of 72 things, I would've dropped dead on the spot. I mean, it would just would've been too tough. So I think, uh, all these ideas, uh, weigh on young people and, and I think they, they, I mean, there are people who believe them very, very, um, intently. Um, and mostly they're people who are not, I don't think, uh, happy with our traditional way of life. I mean, they wanna change us radically. So there, there's an intent behind all.
Vanessa Quirk: I mean to defend some of those people there, there is a trade off with that, you know, exploration of sexual and gender identity. You know, you get freedom to pursue whatever it is you are or you need or want to be. And the trade off is the uncertainty which can have the psychological side effects of depression and anxiety.
Adaam James: I don't see it as about freedom, at least not the way that I understand the word. I see a lot of attempting to belong to groups. I see a lot of lists of prescribed, um, pseudo prescribed categories where you can check your own box, but not so much. Be yourself and don't give a crap about how it's perceived.
Martin Gurri: It's the most conformistic moment in my long lifetime. And the young are the most of all. And I asked a young woman, I said, you know, when I was young, um, I mean, all people would tell us, you're supposed to be this way. This is the way you're, and we would just give her the middle finger. I mean, it was like, you know, no, that's not the way it's gonna happen. Um, and that made us feel free. Okay. And, um, she said, yeah, the difference is we don't fight the older generation. The older generation actually, we get along with great. It, it's somebody among ourselves that if we say the wrong thing will turn on us. So it's this terrible dynamic of not knowing exactly what is the minefield you're going to die on, right. At any given moment.
Vanessa Quirk: Okay. We should open up the floor now to questions. Um, so we have one ready from Vic about the problem with the polarization in education today, both in the academy, but also on the internet. Um, the problem with that being, of course, the internet has a tendency to polarize people even more. Um, so Niall, why don't you take this one first.
Niall Ferguson: I think there's a really serious crisis. Of American education right now, and it extends from the elite universities where I've spent much of my career all the way down, uh, to the most, uh, junior public schools. It probably has a lot to do with the way teacher training has become itself a vector of ideological, uh, indoctrination. Uh, it has a lot to do with the power of teachers unions, uh, and the peculiar institution of tenure. But whatever the explanation, I have lost confidence in American education to the point of not wanting to educate my, uh, sons, uh, here. In the belief that that not only is the education dangerously close to indoctrination in places, but also that is just not very good.
Uh, I mean, Americans are not well trained in, in the fundamental skills, uh, when it comes to mathematics. Uh, the literacy numbers are, are lousy. You look at the PSA scores, if you want data on that. And, and this is a big problem, and you are right Vic, to mention it, because ultimately the United States rose to power not cause of the exceptional geographical location, not cause of the natural resources.
It, it really rose because the United States attracted very talented people from all over the world and educated them better than elsewhere. And the education was better in the 19th century and better in the 20th century than the education available to most people in most of the world. And that's not true anymore and that's really probably a bigger problem than anything we've talked about so far.
Martin Gurri: I mean, all I would add would be, um, that it in many ways and at every level, Niall's right about that. Uh, education, um, given these ideological imperatives that I, I mentioned earlier, has become sort of like a self lobotomizing process, right? It's like, uh, who are we? Well, we are our past, right? That's our, our, our communal or shared memory. Well, if we live in a systemically evil society, then obviously the past is something to be discarded, not to be studied, right? Um, and literature that was part of that past and that is to be part of our d n a and cultural dna for sure, uh, is to be rejected because mostly white males and who cares what they have to say. Um, so I, I think the, the kinds of, of knowledge that in times of trouble people turn to, which is in the past, they look at this history and look at this, you know, poem. I mean, poetry is what I go to when, when I am troubled, right? I feel like that's way better than any kind of preaching any kind of, uh, Pros. It there just, it reaches your soul. If we discard literature, um, we are really lobotomized. We are, we're, we lose ourselves in a, in a certain way. And I think our education today is well on the way to doing that. Okay.
Vanessa Quirk: Let's go for another question.
Will Brouwer: Thank you for the talk. That was, that was excellent. Um, so I am from London and in my twenties, and I was just wondering, uh, shorter question, like what is the biggest threat that is keeping you up at night? Is it the escalation with china? Is it something completely different? And then maybe as a follow up, at least most of my peers here in London, if you ask them what threats keeps them up at night, it is the end of the world through climate change. And I was just wondering, um, like, you know, why there is such a disconnect between what people have anxiety over?
Niall Ferguson: Martin, why don't you go first?
Martin Gurri: Oh, okay. Well, what keeps me up at night is. I am not, I am much more sanguine about China than Niall is. Uh, I, I do not believe, I mean, what do I know? Having lived through the old Cold War, this one doesn't feel like one to me yet. Uh, it's missing a powerful, powerful, ideological element, which was really what gave the Cold War. It, it's salience. Um, I feel like we are as, as the moment when the, uh, the printing press was assembled and within a hundred years, Europe was plunged into the 30 years war. Uh, we are in a moment of informational transformation. It's in, in our structure and many things happen that we, we think we're doing one thing, but, but there's a knockoff effect and something else happens.
Like in a printing press, you print a, a hymnal with three words that are different from mine. Now I have to kill you. Right. So that's a 30 years war. And I'm sure if you went to the 30 years war and asked what do you think of the printing press? Any sane person would say That's the most horrible, destructive innovation can get rid of it. Please. And it turned out to be of course, the most liberating innovation ever. But we are in that early moment today. And, and, and it's a bumpy ride for democracy. And, and I'm a pretty simple believer in democracy. I don't have a whole lot of nuance to it. And my what keeps me up at night is I'm gonna end up in Cuba again.
Vanessa Quirk: In terms of censorship or, or what specifically?
Martin Gurri: In, in terms of any number of things. Uh, but that, that being one of 'em, the one other one being a, a loss of, um, loss of, um, faith in democracy. So we go to a strong man, or we, or we disintegrate, which I think is actually more likely we disintegrate into a bunch of war bands and, uh, are incapable of organizing anything on a national level. It can be, it can happen many number of ways. I don't pretend to be a prophet, but that's what keeps me up at night. It's a loss of democracy, the end of democracy.
Niall Ferguson: H hard for me to disagree with what Martin said because the book, the Square and the Tower basically is based on that analogy with the 17th century and the idea of the, yeah, it's a great global printing press. Uh, and, and the, the only thing I would add is that the difference between now and the 17th century is, is nuclear weapons and. I think we decided to stop worrying about them after 1991. And, and that, that was a mistake because, uh, they're there, uh, and they are the thing that, that really would keep me awake at night if I had trouble sleeping.
I mean, logically, that's just the thing that makes the 21st century and the second half of the 20th century scarier than previous centuries. We do have the capacity to destroy vast numbers of people very, very quickly with those weapons, but I actually have a terrible confession to make, to will. I know I should worry about nuclear war or indeed the 30 years war, but in practice, because I belong to the, the generation of the, the, that was born in the 1960s, I worry much more about Manchester City overtaking arsenal and winning the Premier League. I think you probably should be able to relate to that will, but I genuinely worry much more about that than probably entirely healthy.
Vanessa Quirk: I don't know. That might actually be a healthier perspective.
Martin Gurri: I thought two English accents in this, in this group was too many. Right.
Niall Ferguson: I, I, I knew I'm not English. I'm Scottish. Be careful. be very careful. . We'll leave, we'll leave that aside for, for the sake of the next question.
Audience Member 2: Uh, my name is Klu. I am from Istanbul. And that was an excellent tool really. And my question is, um, in the Cold War, there were like, uh, the first Cold War between us and U S S R. There were, there were also some tradeoffs. What would be the tradeoffs, uh, between us and China?
Niall Ferguson: I'll go first since I'm more committed to the Cold War analogy than, than Martin is. Uh, by the way, I disagree with Martin, that there's a very ideological dimension to this, but it's much more apparent if you're in China, uh, or for that matter in, in Russia, where they constantly go on about, Uh, the difference between their, their systems and our decadent and corrupt, uh, democracy. Uh, so I think we shouldn't underestimate how ideological it looks, at least to the other side.
Adaam James: So you're saying it is ideological, we're too decadent to see it,
Niall Ferguson: right. I mean, we, we, we underestimate the extent to which they are criticizing our most fundamental values, uh, including democracy, uh, indeed, particularly democracy, but also a whole range of, of more recent developments.
Adaam James: Uh, you, you're saying that you're saying China is not in favor of classical liberalism.
Niall Ferguson: Correct. And Russia is extremely anti woke and seeks to exploit conservative sentiment in, or popular sentiment in the West by rolling out tropes that also work quite well on Fox News. So I think we shouldn't underestimate the ideological character of Xi Jinping.
He is a committed Marxist Leninist. The, uh, standing committee on the poll bureau is, uh, far more wedded to. Uh, to Marxist, Leninist, and even Stalinist ideology than people in the West realize. Partly cuz people in the west are bamboozled by visits to Shanghai and, and Beijing and don't really pay attention to what the Chinese Communist Party says to itself. I mean, the tradeoffs in called war. I'm not sure how far they really included constraining, uh, Germany and Japan, but there's no doubt that Germany and Japan were constrained in Cold War One. I'm not sure how big a threat they would otherwise have posed. The, the interesting point about Cold War one is the enormous economic benefits to the United States.
Uh, the spinoffs from, uh, defense tech were enormous. They included the. Let's not forget where that originated. Uh, so there are, there are benefits as well as costs to Cold War. The costs took the form of what I've called the Third World's War, where large scale conflict raged in what it's fashionable to cause cold, the global south.
And I think if one looks at the new Cold War, it's conceivable that there will be proxy wars and maybe Ukraine's the first of the series. But it's also conceivable that there will be benefits, I'm sure us, uh, the US is investing more right now in artificial intelligence and quantum computing than it would've invested, had be carried on believing in a win-win relationship, uh, with China. So I think this is the right way to think about it. One must always remember though, there is this danger in any Cold War that it becomes hot
Adaam James: in homegrown, in homegrown ai,
Niall Ferguson: Right, correct. Martin?
Martin Gurri: My sense of what the tradeoffs were in the, uh, cold War I was, we often had, as we do in every war, to hold hands with some pretty slimy characters because they just happened to be on our side. Right. And I mean, uh, let's face it, we were allied with Stalin, who's about as slimy as they come and in World War ii, and we had some, some pretty seedy people in, in, in, in, uh, in the Cold War Heino, she Cold War. Yeah. Yeah. I, that was one. There were many others. Like I had, um, I, I, since I, I don't subscribe to the cold wari concept.
I, I, I honestly don't know what the parallel would be with that today. Um, except to say that ideologically speaking, the difference is Risa, we cited with those people in the old days was because they stood in our minds and in their own mouths as bastions against communism. Right. And I don't know a single country in the world that reads, um, Pronouncements and goes, that's the way I want to be. Right. I mean, it, it's not even a system. It's an evolved, I don't think they are Marxist Leonard. Some, there's some weird combination of a skeleton of a Marxist len, totalitarian, repressive state, and a kind of like a mafia of people who have inherited from a second generation.
I mean, that, it's a, it's a very weird thing that is not exportable. And that's the main thing that the, the communism in the old days, and people forget this, appealed to very, very pure souls. It was not bad people who went for it and many, many idealists Who then, so I I, the trade off instance, I think in our benefit in that regard.
Vanessa Quirk: I see a question in the chat I'd like to ask, and this might be our last or maybe second to last question, depending on timing. Uh, so Abdul Bala in the chat asks, what are your thoughts on the declining fertility rates? Is it the existential threat that someone lines seem to believe? Or could less people having children be a quote unquote natural response to overpopulation, especially in countries like Japan?
Niall Ferguson: Well, it's a great question, uh, to ask Abdul. If you look at the, the China challenge, the most obvious, uh, bit of reassuring information from an American or Western standpoint is that China's population is going to plunge. It could fall by as much as half between now and the end of the century. If you look at the latest United Nations population projections, and that's almost all driven by, uh, by the decline in fertility, uh, which, uh, I mean, it's, it's hard to reverse with any conceivable policy.
And, and this applies in other countries to South Korea, Japan, you've already mentioned, uh, in your, in your question. But remember, this isn't globally true, uh, because in Africa, uh, it hasn't yet happened and therefore there's going to be a very sustained growth in Africa's population. And indeed, all the population increase in the world between now and the end of the century will be in Africa.
Uh, what that leads to is anybody's guess. Uh, you could imagine Malian scenarios. You can imagine mass migration to Europe. Uh, but I think we have to remember that peak humanity is, is not, is not yet here as long as that, uh, continues to be the case in, in, in Africa, I don't have in a Elon Musk's, uh, fear that we're going to just die out through, uh, a lack of, uh, of procreative.
Energy and even he, he can't compensate, uh, for that, um, that, that seems, that seems a fairly unlikely scenario, um, because I can, can see if one takes a, a very long view. Uh, no really good explanation for why fertility increased. Uh, in England, uh, in the 18th century, that was an important prelude to the Industrial Revolution. Uh, it's one of the most important demographic shifts that happens. There are big demographic shifts that also happen once modern medicine starts to make real inroads on infant mortality in family size changes. So this is a trend that I'm not yet going to turn into a kind of species ending, uh, uh, secular phenomenon. It might well be that in, in changed conditions you could see fertility recovering parts of the world. I wouldn't, I wouldn't rule that out.
Martin Gurri: Yeah, fertility is really unpredictable. Uh, there has been through history. Um, I, I. I, I would say that, uh, uh, the decline here when, again, when at least negatively, and I guess don't quote me on this, but just a thought, it, it seems to me again, when I talk to young people, it's the same thing that we were talking about before. If the world's could I end, and if human beings essentially destroyers of the earth, and if we live in an unjust society, why on earth would you want to bring up a child into that? Um, so I think in a very, um, strange and, and um, mysterious way, uh, our moral dilemmas that we've been talking about are moral crisis almost are tied up with our fertility cycles.
Vanessa Quirk: Okay. One last question, but we will definitely cut you off if you take longer than 30 seconds. So, um, who do we have, Connor?
Audience Member 2: Well, good evening everybody. It's, uh, that was absolutely fascinating talk Martin, I'm really sorry to know that English accent for you to contend with, um, . Uh, so very quickly there, my question is, um, do you believe that China is keeping, deliberately keeping the Ukraine war going and not using any influence it has with, uh, with Putin in order to deplete Western munitions? So it allows, uh, it, it to more easily attack Taiwan. And this is a quick follow on from that. What would Europe's response be to any attack on Taiwan? Will we join in militarily in a response?
Vanessa Quirk: Thank you, Damien.
Adaam James: Oh, Damien, I love your suit by the way,
Martin Gurri: Niall, you wanna take it?
Niall Ferguson: I don't think China's prolonged the war. I don't think China's in a position to stop the war. I think the United States may have prolonged the war and, and indeed it's arguable that Britain contributed to that at an early stage in the war. And I think there was a way, uh, of uh, at least trying to stop it. Uh, that's one for the history books. We can't really say at this point. Uh, uh, for sure. Uh, in the event of a war over Taiwan, uh, the United Kingdoms in many ways committed through orcas. Although it's not clear how binding the commitment would be, I think the Europeans would try their hardest, the Germans in particular to be non-aligned, be very hard for them to do though, cuz their security depends on the United States. So they're not really non-aligned.
Adaam James: Okay. Can we squeeze in just one question that isn't cold War,
Niall Ferguson: but we can only have five seconds left about logically.
Martin Gurri: We can do a haiku.
Vanessa Quirk: Okay. Rather than a five second question, let's have Martin and Niall, uh, leave us with some, some parting thoughts,
Martin Gurri: if I may. I, I, yeah. I, I feel like, uh, conversations like this tend to talk about, um, tremendous social and political forces and so forth and, um, I always try to remember and to make people remember that, you know, there's such a thing as human agency and much of what the future will be like is, it's not gonna be determined by the internet. The internet doesn't have any will. So, um, and it's not gonna be determined by, uh, some vague ideological, um, pronouncements. It's gonna be de determined by a lot of billions of individual choices that get made between now and the indefinite future. And, and I think that's needs to be said cuz we tend to lose sight of that.
Niall Ferguson: I'll, I'll conclude with the following reflection, uh, Martin, earlier extolled, the virtues of poetry. But let me, uh, extol the virtues of prose. Uh, Warren Peace. One of the great novels is about the individual, uh, and the tides of history. Everybody should read it. The thing I've read the most, uh, with the most pleasure recently has been, uh, the novels of Thomas Hardy and Hardy, uh, constantly. I wrote my thesis on Hardy. There you go. Hardy constantly reminds us not only of agency, but contingency that we as individuals can make one small decision that can have catastrophic or very benign consequences. It, the, the real essence of this conversation is how do we remain sane in an apparently crazy world bent on self-destruction?
And the answer is to read Hardy . Talking of Englishmen.
Adaam James: You know, Hardy in his, uh, first description of the Heath in return of the Native, I think he says that the landscape suggested tragic possibilities, which I think for is a perfect way to wrap up this conversation. Maybe that will end up being our, uh, title for this episode. If you have not yet read Doom or Revolt to the Public, uh, shame on you. If you haven't listened to our previous episodes with these two fine gentlemen, shame or, or as much shame on you. No. But seriously, thank you all for joining us. Thank you, Martin. Thank you Niall. Thank you Connor. Thank you, all of you for your questions and participation and, um, share us with your friends and enemies and stay sane.
Niall Ferguson: Thank you.
Martin Gurri: Thanks everybody.
Vanessa Quirk: Oh, thank God.