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

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Niall Ferguson (@nfergus), MA, DPhil, FRSE, is
the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution,
Stanford University, and a senior faculty fellow of the Belfer
Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard. He is
the author of 16 books, including The Pity of War, The House of
Rothschild, Empire, Civilization, and Kissinger, 1923–1968: The
Idealist, which won the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross
Prize.


He is an award-winning filmmaker, too, having won an
International Emmy for his PBS series The Ascent of Money. His
2018 book, The Square and the Tower, was a New York Times
bestseller and also adapted for television by PBS as Niall
Ferguson’s Networld. In 2020 he joined Bloomberg Opinion as a
columnist.


In addition, he is the founder and managing director of
Greenmantle LLC, a New York-based advisory firm; a co-founder of
Ualá, a Latin American financial technology company; and a
trustee of the New York Historical Society, the London-based
Centre for Policy Studies, and the newly founded University of
Austin.


His latest book, Doom: The Politics of
Catastrophe, was published last year by Penguin and was
shortlisted for the Lionel Gelber Prize. 


Please enjoy!


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[05:45] How Niall's multi-faceted career has gone according to
plan.


[08:00] The license to be outrageous in academia ain't what it
used to be.


[14:53] High table, dregs of Château Lafite, and hyperbolic
references.


[20:26] A.J.P. Taylor and the philosophy of history.


[25:00] How does a historian find an "ear" for historical
resonance?


[29:48] What Niall would ask A.J.P. if they were Château Lafite
drinking buddies.


[34:30] An appetite for tweed.


[36:40] Historical contingency.


[43:40] A.J.P. Taylor reading for beginners and counterfactual
history.


[46:41] Dan Carlin, Elon Musk, and Gavrilo Princip.


[48:39] What Niall gets out of digging deep into historical
correspondence.


[54:04] Cold War II — what can we do?


[1:10:44] Keeping Cold War II from heating up into World War III.


[1:16:37] Economic interdependence does not preclude conflict.


[1:20:02] Ways Niall is using his grasp of history to change the
world for the better.


[1:26:11] How Niall's toolkit for enacting change has evolved
over the years.


[1:28:55] Thoughts on fatherhood.


[1:36:15] Why someone raised as an atheist takes his kids to
church.


[1:42:42] Has marriage to ex-Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali changed
Niall's view of Western philosophy?


[1:46:22] Life under fatwa.


[1:51:00] Parting thoughts.


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