Chris Williamson Niall Ferguson is a historian, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution & Stanford University and an author.
We often hear that history tends to repeat itself. But if you’re a professional historian, just how accurate is that statement? What are the big lessons that we keep missing? And how doomed is our future if we don’t learn from the past?
Expect to learn Niall’s opinion on the quote “History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but It Often Rhymes”, why everyone should read more history, the biggest lessons most people keep ignoring, why the modern abandonment of formal education for smart people is actually a good thing, just how big of a threat China is to the West, what Niall thinks will happen in America in 2024 and much more…
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#history #politics #niallferguson
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00:00 Are There Patterns to History?
08:51 If History Can’t Be Repeated, is it Just BS?
17:54 Why You Shouldn’t Compare Great Historical Empires
23:10 How To Learn from History More Effectively
30:18 How the Printing Press Created the Information Revolution
36:58 Areas of History We Don’t Know Enough About
48:00 Niall’s Thoughts on the 2024 Presidential Election
57:32 Where to Find Niall Ferguson
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Hello you beauties. Access all episodes 10 hours earlier than YouTube by Subscribing on Spotify – https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts – https://apple.co/2MNqIgw. Here’s the timestamps:
00:00 Are There Patterns to History?
08:51 If History Can’t Be Repeated, is it Just BS?
17:54 Why You Shouldn’t Compare Great Historical Empires
23:10 How To Learn from History More Effectively
30:18 How the Printing Press Created the Information Revolution
36:58 Areas of History We Don’t Know Enough About
48:00 Niall’s Thoughts on the 2024 Presidential Election
57:32 Where to Find Niall Ferguson
42:36 well, augmented reality scenario sounds good. Or just flight to Europe and do a proper Historian Tour. Historians should be tour guides
Looking forward to listening. I've always enjoy his talks and intereviews. Perhaps the Missus will be next up? She is an absolute powerhouse and has so much to teach and share.
It was thoroughly shocking in the early 2000s when Americans better educated than I am thought it was the best of ideas to have a nice military adventure in Afghanistan. The real predictive power of history when considering that move was to ask how much Afghans have changed over time.
They didn't even remember the 80s, much less the three wars the British Empire had three. They did not need to look further, but they didn't do even that. Afghanis have not changed in five hundred years, and really not that much in the five hundred before that. The part you reference about math, etc, was a veneer, just as the super-western culture that was there in the 1970s. The only thing that stuck from the Muslim occupation is the religion, and that barely.
Professor Ferguson is incorrect about the possibilities for Afghanistan. Seriously, was he watching the last twenty years — which confirm the previous thousand years?
When I was in Europe (Germany, Switzerland) I learned about doom, i.e., the fact that certain actions can snowball — even the most innocent and innocuous-seeming. Americans have no concept of doom, i.e., you just wipe the board clean and start a new story, reinvent yourself endlessly.
If I had a time machine the first thing I'd want a bird's eye view of would be the battle of Agincourt, followed by the battle of Cannae and then maybe the battle of Mount Badden (King Arthur vs the Saxons).
Most? Americans are so ill-iinformed and under-educated that one can't really predict what this ignorance will lead to. It is astounding how inept and shallow our K-12 educatioal system truly is. A total faliure. I predict this general ignorance will not result in bliss. And then there is voter fraud……
The one fact that we live in a time that has never been preceded in history tells quite simply that the past is not useful as an analogy for very much, we have never had this technological stage before in history, the fact that the fertility of the world is now approaching the reproductive level globally and will pass this point is perhaps the historically most significant moment in the world's history when the world's women globally give birth to fewer than 2.1 children per woman, and this will happen in THIS decade, contrary to UN forecasts, very apt for this debate in hate about forecasts and their ability to hit right,
The peak of the world's population, which will most likely hit around 2050, with between 8½-9.0 billion in the world, is our world's greatest moment in history,
I am personally far more frightened by empty kindergartens than the prospect that the world's oceans may rise by half a meter in the year 2100,
and our absent ability to see this as the greatest moment in the world's history right now, when the climate debate dominates the debate, will be seen as we look today at the debate that took place in the 1890s-1910s that horse manure would flood the big cities in a few decades, inside the future.
we live in a time where the history book is empty for the future, we simply cannot predict where the world will end up, what it will look like in just 20-50 years, let's say in 100 years. only the demography gives us a relatively clear picture of the future, and it is a picture of a gray-haired tsunami that will hit our economies and society we have as a perspective for the future, roughly the opposite of what this climate alarmist debate now assumes for the future,
Chris, you are making breathtaking progress. I subscriped to your channel maybe a year ago (along with DOACEO etc.) and somehow unsubscribed at some point, as I had the subjective impression that you produced a bit too much of bro-content.
And now I saw the first bits of the Weinstein interview and I am in the midst of this Fergusson piece. Really amazing and brilliant! Your journey and growth gives me (and lots of others, I assume) hope, how much you can achieve, if you put all your energy into a project. I mean "just recently" you were organising club events (I am not putting that down in any way) and now you are competently interviewing one of the most renowned professors of history in the world. I am really certain that you will continue to grow and rise. Thank you for all your work!
OK, so pleading for dictatorship is good?
This is one of the things I’ve watched online where I didn’t feel a little bit bad for wasting my time. Well done Chris.
If you zoom out far enough there is general pattern that is exhibited by each civilization in history.
This man is a Neocon.
To be fair leftist did get mad about trump winning in 2016 but that’s only because MORE PEOPLE CAST THEIR BALLOTS FOR THE OPPOSITE CANDIDATE. People hate when elections and their vote mean nothing. Then in the second run when trump lost he lost by nearly 5 million more votes than he did the first time. So both times more people voted for the democratic candidate by millions so the democrats getting upset we very much justified. The right storming the capital on the other hand was not. Because although they didn’t get their vote their vote was also a smaller percentage and technically lost both times. That context makes one a cry for justice and the other sore losing.
I don't trust this guy one bit.
Isn't he one of the WEFs top intellectuals and an ardent European Union fan?
Very concerned by how chummy the conservative guys at Stanford are with him and how people on the right seem to revere him. I think he's devious.
Gavin Newsom? My god are Americans completely insane? Voting in complete financial ruin. Seriously?
😂 Gavin Newsome
So why then are the Democrats doing as they are now? If they do not want to face the same actions against themselves, one would think they would stop the persecution of Trump now and remove those from prison that were charged in the January 6th nonsense and persecution for doing what the Democrats have done several times not to mention the destruction from Black Lives Matter.
Interestingly in Germany and Austria the history lessons in school end with beginning of WWII..
"Russia is a failed state with a pile of rusting weapons"… really???
Very sophisticated it sounds, but really it is the same old TDS… "It is best that Trump doesn't win".
This man seems to be a supporter of suppressing disinformation/misinformation (in my book, such people are unmitigated a***oles).
I do hope Niall really does his EMPIRES as next big project.
We had a teacher that finished our grade 9 curriculum on the Nazis 1 week early just so she could squeeze in the horrors of Communism on her own volition. It did wonders for us, expanding our understanding and built up our resistance against utopian ideas, so easily fallen into by young minds. Learning about all the other empires would do the same for the ages of conquest.
21:00 – the origins of modern Britain go back to 1066, so we're a few decades out from a 1000 year run. It's not the vast Empire that it once was but, in that one thousand year history, that big Empire was a pretty brief period. And it still has a bunch of overseas territories so it's not like the empire's completely over. Its former colonies or rank among the most prosperous nations in the world and they all still have good relations. No one really thinks that it's on the edge of collapse. The US is not Rome or even the British Empire. It never has been. The US is not dependent on colonies and even if you wanted to call places like the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico a colony, they're dependent on the US, not the other way around. If you took away Guam we're not going to lose our grain dole. The US needs very little that it can't get domestically or at least trade with Canada and Mexico for. The US is what it is because no other country is capable and because enough countries trust the US to be the global hegemon.
I prefer to just compare everyone I don't like to Hitler. Makes it simpler that way.
46:40 why is this a mystery? The British crush the rebellion, cleared the highlands, packed all the troublemakers on boats and exported the problem to North America. It's no mystery. The process is underway right now in El Salvador. The only question for them is what to do with all the people they've rounded up.