August 6, 2025 • 51 mins
How does a young Scotsman go from struggling actor and failed politician to internationally acclaimed (and knighted) historian? In a solo installment of GoodFellows, Sir Niall Ferguson, Hoover’s Milbank Family Senior Fellow, discusses his academic journey, fellow historians he admires, keys to successfully multi-tasking through life, plus how he and his spouse, Hoover Research Fellow Ayaan Hirsi Ali (who also appears in this episode), are raising their two sons. Also discussed: Sir Niall’s newfound passion for sailing, his non-Scottish attitude toward golf and fishing, why he doesn’t see retirement as a viable lifestyle, plus the pride he takes in a music legend recently lauding him as the “Jimi Hendrix” of his profession.
Recorded on July 30, 2025.
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>> Peter Robinson (00:00):
I'm Peter Robinson of Uncommon Knowledge.
(00:03):
To honor the remarkable scholarshipof Tom Sowell, renowned economist,
social theorist, public intellectual,and Hoover Senior Fellow,
we're inviting everyone inspired by hiswork to enter two national contests.
The Thomas Sowell Essay Contest isopen to high school students and
college undergraduates.
(00:23):
Students may explore a cultural issue ora policy issue through the lens of
Tom Sowell's work or reflect on how ThomasSowell changed their view of the world.
He certainly changed mine.
I imagine he may have changed yours.
The second contest,the Thomas Sowell Video Contest.
This is open to everybody.
(00:44):
It invites short, compelling videos,
up to three minutes that answerthe question, what lesson or
teaching from Thomas Sowell do Americansmost need to learn or remember today?
Winners of each competition will receivea $5,000 prize along with paid travel and
an invitation to a special celebrationof Thomas Sowell that will take place
(01:08):
here at the Hoover Institution onthe Stanford University campus.
All entries are due by August 31st.
Let me repeat that date.
That's an important one,all entries are due by August 31st.
To learn more and apply,
visit hoover.org/thomas-sowell-legacy.
(01:31):
hoover.org/thomas-sowell-legacy,
thank you.
[MUSIC]
>> Speaker 2 (01:47):
Welcome back to Goodfellows, a Hoover Institution broadcast examining
social, economic, political andgeopolitical concerns.
I'm Bill Whelan, I'ma Hoover Distinguished Policy Fellow, and
I'll be your moderator today.
Before I go any further,I should actually correct myself.
Today's show is not Goodfellows.
It is Goodfellow, singular.
We're going to talk to one of ourtrinity of Hoover Senior Fellows, and
(02:08):
today that honor goes tothe great Sir Niall Ferguson.
Sir Niall is the Hoover Institution'sMilbanke Family Senior Fellow.
He is, of course,one of the world's preeminent historians,
author of numerous books, columnists.
You mentioned it.
Niall, great to see you.
>> Niall Ferguson (02:21):
It's very good to be with you.
Though it feels a little strange,just the two of us.
>> Bill Whalen (02:25):
Does feel strange, but it also feels like deja vu, Niall, because
I'm looking at that background and I'mgetting very serious 2020 pandemic vibes.
Where are you?
>> Niall Ferguson (02:33):
Well, I am in Montana, and regular or early adopters,
I should say, of Goodfellows willremember that I spent more or
less all of the pandemic year 2020,
when Goodfellas came into existencein Montana in my log cab.
Bill wanted us to shake it up a bit.
(02:56):
And I'm going to do that now becauseI'm going to have to interrupt
my contribution to Shoota Woodpecker Yeah, a woodpecker.
Cuz right now, if you listen,
you can hear it drilling a holein the wall of my house.
This is Montana living.
And I think it's important that weshare the experience with our viewers.
(03:18):
So here goes.
And I love coming here.
It's beautiful in winter,it's beautiful in summer.
It's beautiful all the year round.
So this is one of my tranquil places.
>> Bill Whalen (03:31):
Not that I am wishing anybody ill, but
I missed the pandemic in two regards,Neil.
One, it was a lot easier to get you and
John at HR on the show because we had youunder what was basically house arrest.
Secondly, Niall, airline travel,
I have traveled three timesacross the US this year.
I've been slammed by cancellations anddelays each time.
It's rough out there.
>> Niall Ferguson (03:50):
Yes, it's of course, wrong to feel nostalgic for
a terrible time that caused notonly millions of premature deaths,
but also a great dealof economic hardship.
But there's no doubt that fora few of us, 2020 brought
a welcome relief from rushingaround in a kind of manic way
(04:13):
from pillar to post,from airport to airport, and it.
It obliged us to spendtime in one place and
indeed to spend time with our families.
And I remember vowing that Iwould never go back to the merry
go round of travel conferences here,speeches there.
(04:35):
And I've utterly broken the promise.
If anything, I've traveled more sincethe pandemic than I did before,
which just shows you that resolutionsare very, very hard to keep.
>> Bill Whalen (04:47):
Well, thank you for setting me up for my next question, Niall,
I'm a great admirer of peoplewho can multitask, and you, sir,
are a multitasker supreme.
In preparation for our show, Niall,
I came up with a list of howNiall Ferguson multitask.
I quit after item number 15, butlet me quickly blaze through these.
And you could add orsubtract a few if you'd like, Niall.
So there is your Hoover affiliation.
You're the managing director ofan advisory business called Greenmantle.
(05:10):
You are joint founder of a startupuniversity, the University of Austin.
You're currently writing a book,the second installment of Henry Kissinger.
By the way, Niall, I did a verykind of odd dive the other night.
And I was curious to where Henry Kissingeris buried, and I was actually quite
pleased to see it's Arlington NationalCemetery, I grew up in Arlington.
>> Niall Ferguson (05:25):
That's correct, and
I was there by the gravesidewhen he was laid to rest.
>> Bill Whalen (05:30):
Yeah, I think it's very fitting for him,
going on with your multitasking, Niall,you're the prolific writer of columns.
You run a substack, you give speeches,
you suffer fools like me gladlyin interview settings like this.
You are a incessant traveler,hence your moniker, the Flying Scotsman.
You read books going on.
You live anddie with the fortunes of Arsenal football.
You spend time in the UK withyour mother and your clan.
(05:53):
You maybe are spendingtime on your double base.
You try to get outdoors,you ski, you hike.
And last but really foremost, you areraising two boys with the remarkable eye
and Hersey Alley in an age whereit's not easy to be a young male.
So that's 15, Niall, did I miss any?
>> Niall Ferguson (06:08):
I think you omitted my new passion for sailing.
>> Bill Whalen (06:12):
Sailing?
>> Niall Ferguson (06:13):
I became an enthusiastic sailor in my 50s,
thanks to my dear friend Dom Ziegler andanother old friend, Charles Bayard.
And so one of the challenges isto fit that in to all the other
things that you've described.
And of course I have three olderchildren by my first marriage and
(06:36):
although they're grown ups now,they are still children to me.
And as two of them are in London andone is in Brooklyn,
that also entails a certainamount of travel because the most
important thing I do is beinga father by a long way.
That's the thing thatmeans the most to me.
(06:57):
And so if you're kind of listingactivities, that should go first.
>> Bill Whalen (07:03):
Yes. So what is the key to multitasking, Niall?
What is your advice to others who wantto live an active lifestyle like this?
>> Niall Ferguson (07:08):
Don't do it.
Don't do it, you'll die young.
You'll develop terrible ailments.
To be serious, I think the key to
a fulfilled life is to fill it full.
(07:28):
And I set out, I suppose,when I was in my final year at
Oxford as an undergraduateto become a historian.
But from the outset I realized I'd haveto do at least one other thing because
the prospects for a young scholar inthe 1980s weren't especially bright,
(07:50):
especially one who was alreadyseen as right leaning.
So I was a journalist at the sametime as I was a starter historian.
And that established the habitof wearing two hats and
toggling, as we now say,between the past and the present.
I've never stopped doing that.
(08:11):
I still do journalismalmost as a kind of habit,
because it forces me to thinkthrough what's happening now.
And that also, I think,informs the way I write about the past.
Now the trouble is, once you've gottwo hats, it doesn't take long for
you to start thinkingabout wearing a third,
because you've already establishedthat you can be two people.
(08:34):
Why not be three?
And so if I think back to just takethe case of green mantle to 2011.
I was then a professor at Harvard.
I'd written quite a few books andwas planning to write some more.
But there was somethingmissing in my life, and
it was a sense that I ought tobe offering insights not just at
(08:57):
One Night Stand events, butin a more iterative way.
And so I thought of setting up an advisorybusiness very loosely modeled on
the early years of S.G. warburg.
I'd just written a biographyof Siegmund Warburg, and so
I just copied what he'd done.
And that has proved a veryproductive third hat.
(09:18):
I won't go through all the other hats.
I would say that if you'regoing to try and do this,
that there are two prerequisites.
You have to be a workaholic.
You have to work every day, andyou have to work long hours on most days.
And the second prerequisiteis you have to have obsessive
(09:42):
compulsive disorder that sometimes OCD forshort.
But being really OCD, I prefer to putthe letters in the right order, CDO.
And if you are both a workaholic andhave OCD or CDO,
you'll be able to wear all these hats.
(10:02):
You'll be insufferable andvery hard to live with and
frustrating to work withbecause you'll be somewhere
else when you're supposed to be here.
But that's how it works.
>> Bill Whalen (10:17):
What if you shut it all down, Niall?
How would you spend your days?
>> Niall Ferguson (10:20):
I can't imagine doing that.
The thing that I learned from my father,who was a doctor and
a workaholic,was that all retirement is fatal.
It's fatal in 100 of cases.
And so there's no retirement in my future.
I'll work until I drop.
(10:43):
And I discovered in midlife thattaking holidays made me ill.
So I don't do that either.
I work in different places andthat's been a solution to the problem.
I'm content to go to seaside locations ormountain locations and
allow my family to frolic where theyplease as long as I can keep working.
>> Bill Whalen (11:09):
So, Sir Niall, I wanna shift gears now and
I wanna hack your phone for a minute.
To know you is to know that you haveall sorts of connections in this world.
I was reminded this recently when,of all people,
Chrissie Hynde went on social media andsaid a few words about you.
For those not familiarwith Chrissie Hinde,
she is the lead singer of the Pretender.
She has been, my God, Niall, she's beenwith that band for about a half a century,
(11:30):
hasn't she?
>> Niall Ferguson (11:31):
I'm too much of a gentleman to count the number of years.
>> Bill Whalen (11:34):
It's been a few years, so we can agree.
Anywho, she was on social media recentlyand she wrote the following about you,
Sir Niall Ferguson, and I quote, in caseyou're wondering what I've been doing,
I being Chrissie Hinde,I've been catching up on some reading.
I'm rereading Wuthering Heightsby Amelie Bronte.
What a great novel,one of the best ever written.
And of course, anything by our greatestliving historian, Niall Ferguson.
(11:55):
Or if you're too lazy to read,you can watch him on YouTube.
I had the privilege of seeinghim do a talk a few years ago.
In my opinion, he's the Jimi Hendrixof renowned historians.
So forget the bass,you're now playing a guitar.
>> Niall Ferguson (12:07):
I can die happy now.
Chrissie Hinde was a heroine of mine whenI was a youngster growing up in Glasgow.
I meant to see the Pretenderson several occasions and
I was rather astonished tofind myself on her radar.
(12:28):
It's deeply touching.
I guess it's a kind of indicationcuz I've always wanted my work
to reach beyond the academy.
But you kinda don't think you'regonna get through to the rock stars.
And then to be compared with Jimi Hendrix,
the greatest of all the rock guitarists,it's almost too much.
(12:49):
It's up there with a knighthood, isn't it?
I was deeply touched and it sent me rightback to my Pretender's vinyl collection.
>> Bill Whalen (13:01):
But here's the phone game,
I don't know if Chrissie Hyndeis in your phone contacts.
Well, I'm curious,if one were to look inside your phone and
look at all you have as contacts,who would they be surprised to see?
And you can pick,
Niall, a celebrity who we might besurprised as an acquaintance of yours or
maybe somebody who you don't see eye toeye with but whose opinion you value.
>> Niall Ferguson (13:19):
Well, I think my phone contacts wouldn't be a great place to
start a long time ago.
For reasons that are lost inthe mysteries of tech time,
an enormous number of contactspopulated that particular app and
it just became unmanageably large.
So what I do have is a spreadsheet.
(13:42):
This is the OCD, Niall,of the people that I really do
like to keep up with andpeople I send my journalism to.
And that does contain, I suppose,some surprising names.
Surprising perhaps froma political point of view.
I'll give you an example,Martin Jacques is an old friend.
(14:07):
He was at one timethe editor of Marxism Today.
And although he's now dead, I think EricHobsbawm's probably still on the list.
His daughter Julia certainly is.
And Eric was a card carryingcommunist more or less all his life.
I say this because it'simportant to remember that
(14:29):
politics is not a kind ofmatter of sectarian or
tribal allegiance which prohibits you from
fraternizing with anyonein the other tribe.
Most statements about politics havea great deal of uncertainty and
low confidence around them.
(14:50):
And one can have a set of principles, but
you can't be certain that those principleswill work wherever they're applied.
And I've always believed that we shouldtalk across ideological divides and
that's, I think,
one of the things that people mightfind surprising about my social network.
(15:10):
It's very heterogeneous andI follow on social media,
even people with whom I deeply andprofoundly disagree.
I think William Dalrymple,the historian and
I now disagree aboutjust about everything and
sometimes he drives me upthe wall with his social media.
(15:32):
But I've never unfollowed anybody onwhat used to be called Twitter and
is now X because one has to remainopen to contradictory ideas.
That's the essence of intellectual life.
So, I think, I'm an omnivoreintellectually and hope always to be one.
>> Bill Whalen (15:54):
I read an interview with you, Niall,
from a few years back that was reallyfascinating in a couple regards.
First of all, you mentioned that youonce served beer in a biker bar.
That's another topic for another day.
>> Niall Ferguson (16:04):
I didn't last long.
>> Bill Whalen (16:06):
But you talked about it, sound like it could have ended badly too,
if you weren't good at your job.
But you also talked about becominga historian, sort of a roundabout fashion.
You listed a lot of things that youwere not good at that had failed at, but
you found that you were good at historian.
So is that how yougravitated toward history?
You had tried other things andthen history came along?
Or was history always somethingin the back of your mind?
>> Niall Ferguson (16:26):
Well, history was in the forefront of my mind from my mid teens
when I read Tolstoy's War and Peace and
realized that the questions Tolstoyasked at the end of that great novel.
The greatest novel ever written, includingwhat is the power that moves nations?
Were the questions thatI wanted to address.
(16:48):
And that was what motivated me to applyto read history at Oxford when I was 17.
But when I got to Oxford, I realized that,and I knew this all along,
that beauty of the Oxford system was thatI could spend two years trying just about
everything else.
Because everything in those days rode onyour final examinations at the end of
(17:09):
the third year.
And so in the first and second year,I tried just about everything.
I tried acting.
I played the caterpillar in rather goodmusical version of Alice in Wonderland.
I tried jazz.
I took up the double bass andjoined a jazz band night in Tunisia,
(17:29):
which still exists to this day.
I was involved in film-making.
I really tried all the thingsthat I could have tried.
I tried politics.
I was highly unsuccessfulat the Oxford Union,
where British prime ministerstraditionally are trained.
And so by the end of the second year,I'd done all of these things and
(17:51):
was no good at them orwas at best average at them.
And then I realized, actually itwas an epiphany that came to me
while I was playingthe Caterpillar in Alice,
that I was only really any goodat writing history essays.
And I should probably get backto doing that, which I did.
>> Bill Whalen (18:06):
So what is exactly your worldview as a historian?
You mentioned earlier that you,
I think you said right ofcenter was the phrase you used.
Would you call yourself a conservative?
Do we need to really labelwhat a historian is?
>> Niall Ferguson (18:18):
Well, I was labeled from very early on conservative historian,
sometimes a Thatcherite historian.
I noticed that the newspapers that didthat never labeled anybody liberal
historian or socialist historian.
So it was obviously designed asa kind of subtle form of shaming and
deliberately intended to push people whowere right leaning out of the academy.
(18:41):
That was a part of the strategythat I can trace back to the 1980s.
But I don't think you should concealyour ideological proclivities.
I think authors should makeit clear where they stand so
that readers understand that.
At the same time, I don't think one shouldwrite history as a political project.
(19:02):
And I certainly have never donethat because, for example,
one of my earliest books, The Pity Of War,
makes the argument that Britain shouldnot have intervened in World War I.
At the time,that was an argument of the far left.
And so it's always beena little bit of a stretch for
my critics to say that it's all partof a vast right wing conspiracy and
(19:26):
yet that that argument has been made.
Counterfactual history asking whatmight have happened if things had gone
differently isn't a conservativeenterprise or shouldn't be.
It's only conservative insofar associalists or Marxist historians
think that there's only one deterministicway that history can work out.
(19:47):
I'm against that.
If that makes me a right wing historian,then okay.
But my own ideological orientations oweas much to the Scottish Enlightenment and
to classical liberalism as to conservatismas an American would understand it.
In fact,
I've just been reading Sam Tanenhaus'brilliant biography of William F Buckley.
(20:09):
I mean, if I had been born inthe same year as Bill Buckley,
I have disagreed with him about 50%of issues in Course of Our Lives.
So I'm not much of an Americanconservative on a broad range of issues,
and even in a British context.
Although I hugely admired Roger Scruton,the great conservative philosopher of,
(20:31):
of his generation, there werethings Roger and I disagreed about.
I disagreed with many of my conservativefriends about Brexit, for example,
when I actually was on the other side andvoted against it.
So I'm actually much harder topigeonhole ideologically than my critics
would like Duke Empire had the subtitleHow Britain Made the Modern World.
(20:54):
It's sometimes representedas a kind of imperialist,
colonialist nostalgia fest, butonly by people who've never read it.
Cuz if you read it, you'll see that itgives a pretty unblemished account of some
of the more horrendous episodes inthe history of the British Empire.
So I don't think history shouldbe a political enterprise.
And I think the more it's becomea political enterprise in
(21:17):
American history departments, the worseit's got from a scholarly point of view.
>> Bill Whalen (21:21):
And Niall,
what is the line Historians have todraw between advice and advocacy?
You advise world leaders,but when we go back and
look at how the Bidenpresidency became unraveled.
You could go back to thatmeeting in the Oval Office,
whatever room in the White House wherethe President sat down with historians.
They said, you can be FDR, you can be LBJ.
>> Niall Ferguson (21:40):
I think historians have to tread very warily in the corridors of
power.
Think of Arthur Schlesinger Jr becominga kind of shill for the Kennedys.
I think there's a role that one can play,but
one has to draw a distinction between it.
(22:00):
Max Weber drew a distinctionbetween politik and Wissenschaft,
between politics and scholarship,or science, if you like.
And I think these activitieshave to be kept separate.
So when I'm working on a history book,
I'm trying my very best to do as mysources of inspiration have taught me.
(22:23):
The great R.G Collingwood said,we're engaged in an exercise in trying
to recapture past thought from whateverremnants the people of the past
have left behind,to kind of reconstitute that past thought.
So that to quote Ranko, we can show howit actually was, how it essentially was.
That's the role of the historian.
(22:44):
That and nothing else.
But when you're asked foryour advice, as I periodically am,
then you must offer that.
Making clear that at some level it'sspeculative, because any advice is making
a series of assumptions or offeringa series of hypotheses about the future,
about the kind of policies that mightwork, and you can't have certainty.
(23:07):
This was what Kissinger calledthe problem of conjecture,
that in any bit of strategic advice,you've got to recognize that there's
great uncertainty, there are manymoving parts you don't control.
And the decision maker is at somepoint taking a leap of faith,
taking a kind of bet.
(23:28):
And so you operate differently whenyou're dealing with the future and
as opposed to the past.
>> Bill Whalen (23:35):
One thing about America, Niall, is we love to rush more everything.
And by that I mean we like to choosethe top four best of everything.
So with that in mind,
who was on Sir Niall Ferguson's Rushmoreof four great historians?
>> Niall Ferguson (23:47):
Well, I would put in order of the impression they made on
me the following names onhistorical Mount Rushmore,
the following faces, A.J.P.Taylor, the Great English
historian of great power relationsin the 19th and 20th century.
(24:08):
Then I think as an undergraduate,I was deeply impressed by
the work of Friedrich Meinecke,whose German Catastrophe
is one of the great essays of20th century historiography.
And I'd like a Germanhistorian to be up there,
because of the great impact Germanhistoriography had on me in my life.
(24:33):
You'd need to have Edward Gibbon,wouldn't you?
Because the Decline and Fall of the RomanEmpire is still one of the greatest works
of historical writing there's ever been.
And finally, David Hume,
whose History of England Idiscovered really quite recently.
Most people read Hume forhis philosophy, but
he was a brilliantly waspish writer anda true Tory in his approach to the past.
(24:56):
I highly recommend the History of England.
I could go on, butyou only asked for four.
>> Bill Whalen (25:01):
So according to the website, Niall, academicinfluence.com
the 10 most influential historians today,number one is David Christian, Russia.
Number two is Yuval Noah Harari.
And number three, Sir Niall Ferguson.
>> Peter Robinson (25:15):
Well, apart from the order, we can't really disagree.
>> Bill Whalen (25:18):
[LAUGH] Well put.
Right, Niall, if you're game,I want to switch topics now and
play a little game with you that we liketo call the Herbert Hoover questionnaire.
[MUSIC]
All right, Niall, here we go.
The Herbert Hoover question, ready?
(25:39):
Question number one,what is the best sandwich?
And you can choose Scottish,British or American.
>> Niall Ferguson (25:44):
Well, talking of fish, it's got to be smoked Scottish salmon
on brown bread with butter,lemon juice, and pepper.
>> Bill Whalen (25:54):
Okay.
What is the scariest animal?
>> Niall Ferguson (25:57):
The scariest animal?
>> Bill Whalen (25:59):
Two or four legs.
[LAUGH]>> Niall Ferguson: Well,
I think a grizzly bear is the animalyou'd least like to meet in Montana.
Okay, favorite action movie?
>> Niall Ferguson (26:11):
I think Goldfinger is the greatest of the Sean Connery Bond
movies.
>> Speaker 5 (26:17):
Do you expect me to talk?
>> Speaker 6 (26:19):
No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to buy.
>> Bill Whalen (26:22):
Do a little Sean Connery for us.
>> Niall Ferguson (26:25):
Well, that's certainly the film I'd recommend, Sean.
>> Bill Whalen (26:29):
[LAUGH] Well put.
Who's your hero of fiction?
>> Niall Ferguson (26:33):
It's either Edward Waverly in Waverly, Walter Scott's
great novel, orit's Pierre Bezukhov in War and Peace.
One of those.
>> Bill Whalen (26:44):
Apples or oranges?
>> Niall Ferguson (26:46):
Oranges.
I drink fresh orange juice every morning.
>> Bill Whalen (26:53):
What talent would you like to have that you currently do not possess?
>> Niall Ferguson (26:56):
One that our boss, Condoleezza Rice possesses.
I wish I were a concert pianist.
>> Bill Whalen (27:02):
Okay, which raises my question.
Do you play golf?
>> Niall Ferguson (27:04):
No, I hate golf.
I'm the only Scotsman who hates golf.
>> Bill Whalen (27:09):
And yet Cardi likes you.
>> Niall Ferguson (27:11):
It's one of the things I think we've agreed to disagree about,
the other one is Americanfootball a terrible game.
>> Bill Whalen (27:17):
Yes, exactly.
I know how you feel about that,we've had some run ins on that.
Let's see, when you fly,since you're the Flying Scotsman.
Window or aisle?
>> Niall Ferguson (27:25):
Window.
>> Bill Whalen (27:26):
Okay, favorite smell.
Favorite aroma?
>> Niall Ferguson (27:29):
The smell of Laphroaig,
the greatest of allthe Islay Malt Whiskies.
>> Bill Whalen (27:34):
[LAUGH] The most used app on your phone.
>> Niall Ferguson (27:38):
That's a good question.
I was going to say flightawareness [LAUGH].
The app you use to check if yourplane's going to depart on time.
>> Bill Whalen (27:51):
True.
Cats or dogs?
>> Niall Ferguson (27:53):
Dogs.
>> Bill Whalen (27:55):
Speaking of which, what is the latest on the dog front?
>> Niall Ferguson (27:58):
Well, this is really Campbell's realm because he has earned
a dog for his birthday to compensate for
the fact that Big Brother isgoing away to boarding school.
And he has set his hearton a chocolate Labrador.
>> Bill Whalen (28:14):
Gosh, I own a chocolate lab for 12 years, Niall.
>> Niall Ferguson (28:17):
We better talk about that offline.
>> Bill Whalen (28:20):
Does he have a name in mind?
>> Niall Ferguson (28:22):
I think he does, but I can't remember if I've agreed to it yet.
And I better not go on the recordin case that's binding.
>> Bill Whalen (28:28):
Yeah, it's like a birth announcement, so
I'll spill the beans on that one.
All right, you only get one song tolisten to for the rest of your life.
What is it?
And that sounds like hell, by the way.
>> Niall Ferguson (28:37):
Well, not if it's this one.
It's the Liebestod from Wagner's Tristan,which one could never tire of.
[MUSIC]
>> Bill Whalen (28:51):
Okay, describe the rest of your life in five words.
>> Niall Ferguson (28:55):
Well, I wish it were something like his longevity exceeded his
expectations, butI think it would be more honest to say.
And here I'm going to borrowfrom the Life of Gibbon.
Scribble, scribble, scribble,scribble, scribble.
>> Bill Whalen (29:13):
All right. Niall,
my father was getting in his final years,he was very obsessed about dying.
Not morbidly, but he wanted tomake sure his life was in order.
And one thing I asked him to do beforehe passed away is I asked him to write
his obituary.
Not because I wished him dead, butbecause I knew that when he passed away,
it would fall to me to make surehis obituary ran in newspapers.
And I didn't want to get anything wrong,as there is nothing.
(29:33):
When you become a journalist,Niall, what is the first thing you.
You do in a paper?
You put it on the obituary desk, why?
Because you have to learn the detail.
Because if you screw upsomebody's obituary and
you know you've done something terrible.
You've ruined a family.
So my father did his obituary.
So my question to you, Niall, is whenyou think about your legacy right now,
you're gonna be in the game fora long time, I assume.
I was looking at Bernard Lewis,for example.
(29:54):
Bernard Lewis was born in 1916.
He lives to be 101 years old, andhe's still working late into his 80s and
90s, still pumping it out.
So do you see yourself doing this?
Do you see yourself keeping up forthis for another 20 years or so
of intellectual thoughts?
>> Niall Ferguson (30:08):
I should be so lucky.
I think anybody who enters their 60s,
especially a male Glaswegian,needs to be aware that you're in,
as somebody said to me the other day,sniper's alley.
If you make it to 70, you'll probablymanage a good few more years.
But it's getting to 70that's the tough part.
(30:29):
And so I'm not making any assumptionsabout how long I'll last.
I think like your father about death,not out of fear,
because I was taught not to feel fear, but
because it would betremendously inconvenient and
(30:50):
I would be letting many people down.
So I wanna keep going forparticularly my children, but for
really all the people who rely on me.
But I don't take it for granted.
I think continuing to work is good foryou.
Henry Kissinger stopped working and wasstill working on a book on his deathbed.
(31:16):
But I don't think my DNA entitles meto the 100 years that he managed.
So I'll keep it up.
I certainly won't stop the scribbling,
but I'm trying to be a realist abouthow much longer I likely have.
At my father's funeral,one of the older women of
(31:36):
the family said, 77 a good age fora male Ferguson.
And I keep that in mind every day.
>> Bill Whalen (31:45):
What do you think happens when we die?
>> Niall Ferguson (31:47):
That's clear.
Our souls either go to heaven or to hell.
>> Bill Whalen (31:52):
By the way, a little detour for a moment.
Religion we did talk about.
We need to talk a littlebit about religion here.
Religion has become very much partof your life in the past few years.
>> Niall Ferguson (32:02):
That is true.
I'm a lapsed atheist.
That is to say,I was raised an atheist and
in the course of my late adulthoodhave come to Christianity.
And Ayaan and I and our sons were baptizedinto the Church of England last year.
Quite a journey.
>> Bill Whalen (32:22):
All right. Finally,
Neil August in the Hoover Institutionincludes what is called
the Summer Policy Boot Camp where youngcollege kids descend upon Hoover for
a week and they listen to the likes of youtalk about the great issues of the times.
And I think you've done these before andI imagine that afterwards somebody
approaches you and they ask youwhat is a very flattering question.
(32:42):
How do I become you one day?
>> Niall Ferguson (32:45):
Well, I'm looking forward to the boot camp and
perhaps somebody will come andask me that question and
I will give them an answer thatWinston Churchill gave a young American
when he was delivering a lecturesomewhere in the US after the war.
And the young man asked forthat kind of advice.
(33:06):
What advice would you give me if Iwanted to follow in your footsteps?
And Churchill replied,drink steadily, that's my advice.
>> Bill Whalen (33:16):
This is actually the second solo Goodfellow that we are doing.
The first was with John Cochrane and
we recorded on the dayof his 40th anniversary.
So we were joined by the lovely Mrs.Cochrane and today we're continuing it.
We're being joined now by the lovely,Ayaan Hirsi Ali, actually,
is she technically Lady Ferguson?
>> Niall Ferguson (33:35):
She is.
>> Bill Whalen (33:36):
Well, Lady Ferguson, welcome to Goodfellows.
>> Speaker 7 (33:38):
Thank you very much.
And I actually don't call myselfAyaan Hirsi Ali since September of 2011,
I've been calling myself Ayaan Ferguson.
>> Bill Whalen (33:46):
Ayaan Ferguson, thank you for correcting me.
Ayaan, tell us a little about NiallFerguson that the world doesn't know.
What makes Niall so unique.
>> Speaker 7 (33:57):
A number of things I would say first and foremost,
I don't know of anyonewho's more hard working.
So there are all sorts of differentaddictions that human beings have and
he's addicted to the virtue of hard work.
He's punctual,as we were just laughing about.
He is the greatest father I've ever seen.
He's got five children andhe's more devoted to those children.
(34:21):
And now we have a grandchild comingon the way, the great son I've seen.
We pretty much have Neil'smother either living with us or
we are going to live with her.
This is meant as Niall'sservice to his mother.
And then he's the greatest husband ever.
(34:43):
He's just the most patient,loving companion I know.
The only thing he doesn't like is mysense of time, which I'm learning.
I'm working on it [LAUGH].
>> Bill Whalen (34:55):
Okay, Niall, let's flip the question now,
what is special about Ayaan?
>> Niall Ferguson (35:00):
Well, my wife is the most extraordinary person I've ever met.
She has enormous uniquecombination of beauty,
that's the first thing one notices.
Bravery, that's the thing onerealizes she's had all her life,
(35:23):
brilliance, because she hasa phenomenal intellect.
And I'll go further and add boldness,
because bravery andboldness are different things.
To be brave is to overcome your fear.
(35:44):
To be bold is to go whereothers wouldn't think of going.
And Ayan has gone on an extraordinaryjourney in her life,
both intellectually and personally.
And all along she's shownan extraordinary boldness.
So I'm the luckiest man in the world.
(36:05):
And although it's very unBritish to say things like this,
I'm enough of an American not tofeel too embarrassed in saying it.
>> Speaker 7 (36:13):
[LAUGH] >> Bill Whalen
I live vicariously through mysister's four grandsons and
they are younger than your boys.
They're ages 9 to 7.
They're close, buta little younger in some respects.
And I'm very curious as to what it isto grow up as boys in this day and age.
So talk a little bit about how you'reraising your two boys in these,
(36:34):
what we agree are very complicated times.
I think I'll start first by just saying a little bit about
the educational challengeswe face in America.
During COVID, back then,was he just 9 years old or so.
(36:56):
When logging him on the longdistance zoom calls,
I would go through the material that hehad to go through and I was very alarmed.
And one thing that alarmed me was thestory that was told about America to this
boy who is half black,half white growing up in America.
And that was a terrible story.
(37:16):
It was the story of 1619,the story that America is really
a place that only was set up to exploitother people for white straight men.
And then as time went on andmy now 7 year old was about 4 years old,
another story came alongwhich was multiple genders.
(37:38):
And so we were going through thesehead scratches and saying to Niall,
we send children to school tosort fiction from fact and
both of us became American citizens andwe know the story of America.
Niall is a historian.
I know it through experience andI think it's a fantastic story.
It's how do we mitigate this?
And various conversations, not just withthe school that our boys went to, but
(38:02):
with many parents we were speakingto were alarmed about this.
And we thought,what are we going to do about it?
And I think it is the mostfortunate two little boys to have
Niall Ferguson as not just their father,but their educator.
And he came up with a solutionthat has worked for us now and
(38:24):
is one where our boys are exposedto academic rigor and
they're exposed to a great deal ofsports and also a great deal of humor.
And I mean,the school they go to has the most
delightful motto,which is courage and kindness.
(38:45):
And these were the things thatafter George Floyd in 2020,
these things were being called,they were being actively demolished.
And we were told that thesewere white supremacist ideas.
And so I'm a very happy mom.
>> Bill Whalen (38:59):
You're also trying to educate boys and girls of an older age.
Ayaan, I was watching a video of you wherewe recently were at the University of
Austin, and you were doingsomething exceedingly complicated,
you are trying to educate youngstudents on antisemitism, Islamism.
You're trying to essentiallyteach them history.
You're trying to teachthem current events.
(39:19):
You're trying to get them to thinkcritically all at the same time.
>> Speaker 8 (39:22):
Is there room for compromise between principals?
>> Speaker 7 (39:25):
If I want to kill you and behead you unless you convert to
the religion I dictate,what would be the place of compromise?
>> Speaker 8 (39:35):
Well, I would not mind converting as I myself am an agnostic.
So have no faith.
>> Speaker 7 (39:40):
Let's play with this thought for a while.
For us to have the attitude of,well, we'll see what happens.
And if we get to that point, I'll justconvert, I will say, are you sure?
Maybe you want to get educated onwhat would happen once you convert?
What would your life be like andthe life of your sisters and women?
(40:04):
What would they do to the Jews?
>> Bill Whalen (40:06):
How's that going?
>> Speaker 7 (40:09):
I think, I mean in terms of teaching history,
that's what Niall specializes in.
So I don't really
teach history.
As a young person you can pickup these different stories and
some stories are good andsome stories are bad.
And the stories of antisemitism,scapegoating other people for
(40:34):
your problems ora world that's too complex for you.
Islamism, which is one of the worst,if not the worst stories,
which just ends in nihilism.
This pursuit of a utopiacalled the caliphate and
in the process demolishing humanbeings and human happiness.
Or communism, that's neo Marxismthat has emerged Marxism.
People our age failed spectacularlywherever it was tried and
(40:59):
has in total,there are some figures that 100 million
people worldwide have beenthe victims of communism.
And yet it is back andit's very appealing and potent.
It's come back dressedup as identity politics.
So I tried to talk about these losingstories and why they're losing stories and
(41:23):
then tell a better story.
And I think the story of America,the story of Western
civilization in general,the story of Christianity,
I find these stories to be much more,not just humane,
but lead to successful, well lived lives.
(41:44):
And I think we're short changingyoung people if we don't share this
legacy with them.
>> Niall Ferguson (41:50):
I'm glad you mentioned stories and
I'm also glad that you're sittingin front of a great work wall
of books because another keypoint about education today and
about raising children isyou must make them readers.
The challenge that's novel to parentsof our generation is the onslaught,
(42:14):
the technological onslaught on childrenthat began with computer games.
And has now become an all-consumingset of devices and activities.
The most recent which artificialintelligence threatens to remove
children's ability to learn to read,to learn to think, to learn to write.
(42:35):
And so I think the most importantthing that we've come to
understand as parents,in addition to what Ayan said,
is you've got to kind of createspace away from screens.
Away from the technology wherechildren learn to love books.
Cuz our civilization is mostly encoded inbooks, that that's where it mostly lives.
(42:59):
And I hope that we've donea reasonably good job with our five
children of making them book lovers andmaking them readers.
This of course is astrue of girls as of boys.
And I do have one daughter.
But boys are actuallymuch more susceptible
(43:20):
to certain kinds of screen addiction,particularly the kind of
games that are designed to beaddictive to young male minds.
>> Bill Whalen (43:28):
And what is the Ferguson family policy with regard to screens and
also to that scary entitythat I would call YouTube?
My sister's four grandsons are hooked onYouTube, hopelessly hooked on YouTube.
It's a fight to keep them away from it.
What is your policy?
>> Niall Ferguson (43:42):
Our policy, and I'll hope that we agree on this,
is rationing, not prohibition.
Prohibition doesn't work,as we know from history,
but rationing and also supervision.
Because there are things on YouTubethat it's perfectly all right for
children to watch, butif you leave them unsupervised,
(44:05):
the YouTube suggestion bar is designedto lead them into dark places.
And so you have to be quite vigilant.
Do you agree, darling?
>> Speaker 7 (44:13):
Yes, absolutely.
Yeah, and I think what I've learnedfrom you is with boys, you negotiate.
And so the negotiating,plus the supervision.
Our son now is outside building a car,John Deere car,
[LAUGH] andhe's excited about riding around.
And then when he comes back in andasks for a skin, we've actually,
(44:34):
over the summer, we've now banned it.
So it's just books, games, physical games,these cars and other stuff.
And if you don't weaken when you come,I won't.
>> Niall Ferguson (44:46):
There's no chance of that.
>> Bill Whalen (44:48):
Speaking of cars, did you take that snazzy red Beetle with you?
>> Niall Ferguson (44:52):
I still own the snazzy Red Beetle, but
it couldn't live anywhere butNorthern California.
>> Bill Whalen (44:58):
Yes, your version of a Shaguar.
>> Niall Ferguson (45:00):
I don't want to in any way associate myself with Austin Powers,
baby.
>> Bill Whalen (45:06):
But wait a second.
There you are on social media,
Niall clearly drooling overwhat looks like a Shaguar.
>> Niall Ferguson (45:12):
I ran across that car at the wonderful Chalk History Festival,
which is one of the fewfestivals devoted to history.
And it was just such a beautiful objects,the kinda car I think
a man would love to receive on his 65thbirthday, that I took a photograph of it.
(45:33):
I'm sure they're highly unreliable,break down all the time, but
they are beautiful things.
>> Bill Whalen (45:38):
Ayaan, we started this conversation with by listing all
the things that Niall doesin the way of multitasking.
And I came up with 15 items,and Niall added a 16th sailing.
Are you out on the high seas with him now?
>> Speaker 7 (45:53):
I haven't done that with him yet, but the boys have, and
I have a very good excuse for that.
I had a knee replacement andthe reasons for the knee replacement.
So it wasn't great for me to go sailing,the kind of sailing that Niall does,
which is sort of that very manly.
I don't know, you strap yourself ontothe sails and climb up and down.
(46:16):
That wasn't something I was readyto do yet, but maybe next year.
>> Bill Whalen (46:19):
Did he introduce you to snow skiing?
>> Speaker 7 (46:22):
I was introduced to snow skiing by the former Mayor of Los Angeles,
Dick Riordan, at Sun Valley.
And then the next season, I met Niall, and
Niall told me that he was also a beginner,and we carried on skiing.
And I think he's now really a good skier.
And I'm still junior intermediate level,but
(46:45):
we both enjoy skiing andgo to wherever it's possible.
>> Niall Ferguson (46:51):
What a small world.
Because Mayor Riordan's name came up onthe most recent episode of Goodfellows
when we were talking to potentialfuture Mayor of LA, Rick Caruso.
>> Bill Whalen (47:01):
And I worked with Dick Riordan in a past life to close
the circle.
But so what other adventuresare two be looking at?
Do you wanna go whitewater rafting ordo some extreme sports together?
>> Speaker 7 (47:10):
I've done whitewater rafting, I have done it before, yeah.
And again, I mean,we go to Montana quite often.
And so I think,I wouldn't mind taking it up again.
>> Niall Ferguson (47:23):
I've always regarded as wildly reckless because of the lack
of control.
At least when you're sailing,
you have some control overthe direction the craft is going in.
So I'll be ducking out of that.
There are lots of things Iresolved a while ago never to do.
Another one is parachuting orfor that matter, hang gliding.
(47:44):
I think it's very important to rulecertain things out if one's aiming
at a decent span of life.
>> Bill Whalen (47:51):
That's well put.
All right, Ayaan final question.
So it is summertime,what do you and Niall do?
Can you unwind?
What do you do when youattempt to relax and unwind?
>> Speaker 7 (48:00):
Eat a lot of fish, go canoeing,
fishing with the boys,a lot of beach time.
Well, when you have a 7-year-old, I mean,
your life in the summer reallyrevolves around that 7-year-old.
So these are some of the things that I do.
That is only if I canprise Niall away from
(48:23):
his book writing andfrom his work [LAUGH].
>> Niall Ferguson (48:30):
Busted.
Guilty as charged.
>> Speaker 7 (48:35):
[LAUGH] But I've been bad too.
I mean, I'm going to Budapest, and
my new resolve now is this is don'tcome back our new resolve, actually.
So we should be home more anddo less until Campbell is old enough,
maybe to go to boarding school.
>> Bill Whalen (48:55):
Okay, well,
I want you both to know that you were verymuch missed around the Hoover campus.
Please come by more often,we like to have you around.
>> Speaker 7 (49:01):
I'm coming in November and
doing sort of counter grand strategyon radical Islam, the ideology.
So stay tuned.
>> Niall Ferguson (49:11):
And my resolve is of course to spend more time there.
But as you know, Bill, my elderly motherneeds our proximity for the time being.
So I'm going to be a little bit ofa Cheshire cat disappearing and
reappearing for the foreseeable future.
But always love being there andyou'll see that red bug when I'm back.
>> Bill Whalen (49:33):
Thank you, Niall and Ayaan.
Thanks for coming on the show today.
Thank you for putting up with metrying to pry into your lives, but
I think it is a fascinating life and
I think people would like to know evenmore about it than we got into today.
So thanks very much, not just forcoming on the show, but all you do for
the Hoover Institution.
>> Niall Ferguson (49:48):
Thank you, Bill.
>> Speaker 7 (49:49):
It's a pleasure.
>> Bill Whalen (49:50):
And that's it for this solo episode of Goodfellows.
Goodfellow, if you will.
But fear not, we will be back soon,in mid August actually.
Our guest will be the director ofthe Hoover Institution, Condoleezza Rice.
We're gonna talk a little foreignpolicy and a little education.
I think she and Niall and John and HR havesome disagreements on college life and
I wanna hear what she has to say.
So to keep abreast of us,follow us on YouTube,
follow us on whateverplatform you listen to us.
(50:13):
Sending questions we alwayslike to hear from you.
On behalf of our guest today,Sir Niall Ferguson and Lady Ferguson.
We hope you enjoyed the conversation.
Until next time,
take care, thanks for
watching.
(50:35):
[MUSIC]
>> Speaker 9 (50:58):
Ayaan, you're half hour early.
>> Speaker 7 (51:03):
I'm usually never early, so.
>> Niall Ferguson (51:05):
This has never happened in our entire lives together.
>> Speaker 9 (51:09):
Nice to see you, Ayaan.
>> Bill Whalen (51:10):
Hello Ayaan.
>> Speaker 7 (51:11):
Nice to see you.
>> Niall Ferguson (51:12):
Can't believe you're early.
This literally never happened.
>> Speaker 7 (51:16):
No, I'm actually giggling helplessly because it's true,
I'm never [LAUGH].
I'm Peter Robinson of Uncommon Knowledge.
(00:03):
To honor the remarkable scholarshipof Tom Sowell, renowned economist,
social theorist, public intellectual,and Hoover Senior Fellow,
we're inviting everyone inspired by hiswork to enter two national contests.
The Thomas Sowell Essay Contest isopen to high school students and
college undergraduates.
(00:23):
Students may explore a cultural issue ora policy issue through the lens of
Tom Sowell's work or reflect on how ThomasSowell changed their view of the world.
He certainly changed mine.
I imagine he may have changed yours.
The second contest,the Thomas Sowell Video Contest.
This is open to everybody.
(00:44):
It invites short, compelling videos,
up to three minutes that answerthe question, what lesson or
teaching from Thomas Sowell do Americansmost need to learn or remember today?
Winners of each competition will receivea $5,000 prize along with paid travel and
an invitation to a special celebrationof Thomas Sowell that will take place
(01:08):
here at the Hoover Institution onthe Stanford University campus.
All entries are due by August 31st.
Let me repeat that date.
That's an important one,all entries are due by August 31st.
To learn more and apply,
visit hoover.org/thomas-sowell-legacy.
(01:31):
hoover.org/thomas-sowell-legacy,
thank you.
[MUSIC]
>> Speaker 2 (01:47):
Welcome back to Goodfellows, a Hoover Institution broadcast examining
social, economic, political andgeopolitical concerns.
I'm Bill Whelan, I'ma Hoover Distinguished Policy Fellow, and
I'll be your moderator today.
Before I go any further,I should actually correct myself.
Today's show is not Goodfellows.
It is Goodfellow, singular.
We're going to talk to one of ourtrinity of Hoover Senior Fellows, and
(02:08):
today that honor goes tothe great Sir Niall Ferguson.
Sir Niall is the Hoover Institution'sMilbanke Family Senior Fellow.
He is, of course,one of the world's preeminent historians,
author of numerous books, columnists.
You mentioned it.
Niall, great to see you.
>> Niall Ferguson (02:21):
It's very good to be with you.
Though it feels a little strange,just the two of us.
>> Bill Whalen (02:25):
Does feel strange, but it also feels like deja vu, Niall, because
I'm looking at that background and I'mgetting very serious 2020 pandemic vibes.
Where are you?
>> Niall Ferguson (02:33):
Well, I am in Montana, and regular or early adopters,
I should say, of Goodfellows willremember that I spent more or
less all of the pandemic year 2020,
when Goodfellas came into existencein Montana in my log cab.
Bill wanted us to shake it up a bit.
(02:56):
And I'm going to do that now becauseI'm going to have to interrupt
my contribution to Shoota Woodpecker Yeah, a woodpecker.
Cuz right now, if you listen,
you can hear it drilling a holein the wall of my house.
This is Montana living.
And I think it's important that weshare the experience with our viewers.
(03:18):
So here goes.
And I love coming here.
It's beautiful in winter,it's beautiful in summer.
It's beautiful all the year round.
So this is one of my tranquil places.
>> Bill Whalen (03:31):
Not that I am wishing anybody ill, but
I missed the pandemic in two regards,Neil.
One, it was a lot easier to get you and
John at HR on the show because we had youunder what was basically house arrest.
Secondly, Niall, airline travel,
I have traveled three timesacross the US this year.
I've been slammed by cancellations anddelays each time.
It's rough out there.
>> Niall Ferguson (03:50):
Yes, it's of course, wrong to feel nostalgic for
a terrible time that caused notonly millions of premature deaths,
but also a great dealof economic hardship.
But there's no doubt that fora few of us, 2020 brought
a welcome relief from rushingaround in a kind of manic way
(04:13):
from pillar to post,from airport to airport, and it.
It obliged us to spendtime in one place and
indeed to spend time with our families.
And I remember vowing that Iwould never go back to the merry
go round of travel conferences here,speeches there.
(04:35):
And I've utterly broken the promise.
If anything, I've traveled more sincethe pandemic than I did before,
which just shows you that resolutionsare very, very hard to keep.
>> Bill Whalen (04:47):
Well, thank you for setting me up for my next question, Niall,
I'm a great admirer of peoplewho can multitask, and you, sir,
are a multitasker supreme.
In preparation for our show, Niall,
I came up with a list of howNiall Ferguson multitask.
I quit after item number 15, butlet me quickly blaze through these.
And you could add orsubtract a few if you'd like, Niall.
So there is your Hoover affiliation.
You're the managing director ofan advisory business called Greenmantle.
(05:10):
You are joint founder of a startupuniversity, the University of Austin.
You're currently writing a book,the second installment of Henry Kissinger.
By the way, Niall, I did a verykind of odd dive the other night.
And I was curious to where Henry Kissingeris buried, and I was actually quite
pleased to see it's Arlington NationalCemetery, I grew up in Arlington.
>> Niall Ferguson (05:25):
That's correct, and
I was there by the gravesidewhen he was laid to rest.
>> Bill Whalen (05:30):
Yeah, I think it's very fitting for him,
going on with your multitasking, Niall,you're the prolific writer of columns.
You run a substack, you give speeches,
you suffer fools like me gladlyin interview settings like this.
You are a incessant traveler,hence your moniker, the Flying Scotsman.
You read books going on.
You live anddie with the fortunes of Arsenal football.
You spend time in the UK withyour mother and your clan.
(05:53):
You maybe are spendingtime on your double base.
You try to get outdoors,you ski, you hike.
And last but really foremost, you areraising two boys with the remarkable eye
and Hersey Alley in an age whereit's not easy to be a young male.
So that's 15, Niall, did I miss any?
>> Niall Ferguson (06:08):
I think you omitted my new passion for sailing.
>> Bill Whalen (06:12):
Sailing?
>> Niall Ferguson (06:13):
I became an enthusiastic sailor in my 50s,
thanks to my dear friend Dom Ziegler andanother old friend, Charles Bayard.
And so one of the challenges isto fit that in to all the other
things that you've described.
And of course I have three olderchildren by my first marriage and
(06:36):
although they're grown ups now,they are still children to me.
And as two of them are in London andone is in Brooklyn,
that also entails a certainamount of travel because the most
important thing I do is beinga father by a long way.
That's the thing thatmeans the most to me.
(06:57):
And so if you're kind of listingactivities, that should go first.
>> Bill Whalen (07:03):
Yes. So what is the key to multitasking, Niall?
What is your advice to others who wantto live an active lifestyle like this?
>> Niall Ferguson (07:08):
Don't do it.
Don't do it, you'll die young.
You'll develop terrible ailments.
To be serious, I think the key to
a fulfilled life is to fill it full.
(07:28):
And I set out, I suppose,when I was in my final year at
Oxford as an undergraduateto become a historian.
But from the outset I realized I'd haveto do at least one other thing because
the prospects for a young scholar inthe 1980s weren't especially bright,
(07:50):
especially one who was alreadyseen as right leaning.
So I was a journalist at the sametime as I was a starter historian.
And that established the habitof wearing two hats and
toggling, as we now say,between the past and the present.
I've never stopped doing that.
(08:11):
I still do journalismalmost as a kind of habit,
because it forces me to thinkthrough what's happening now.
And that also, I think,informs the way I write about the past.
Now the trouble is, once you've gottwo hats, it doesn't take long for
you to start thinkingabout wearing a third,
because you've already establishedthat you can be two people.
(08:34):
Why not be three?
And so if I think back to just takethe case of green mantle to 2011.
I was then a professor at Harvard.
I'd written quite a few books andwas planning to write some more.
But there was somethingmissing in my life, and
it was a sense that I ought tobe offering insights not just at
(08:57):
One Night Stand events, butin a more iterative way.
And so I thought of setting up an advisorybusiness very loosely modeled on
the early years of S.G. warburg.
I'd just written a biographyof Siegmund Warburg, and so
I just copied what he'd done.
And that has proved a veryproductive third hat.
(09:18):
I won't go through all the other hats.
I would say that if you'regoing to try and do this,
that there are two prerequisites.
You have to be a workaholic.
You have to work every day, andyou have to work long hours on most days.
And the second prerequisiteis you have to have obsessive
(09:42):
compulsive disorder that sometimes OCD forshort.
But being really OCD, I prefer to putthe letters in the right order, CDO.
And if you are both a workaholic andhave OCD or CDO,
you'll be able to wear all these hats.
(10:02):
You'll be insufferable andvery hard to live with and
frustrating to work withbecause you'll be somewhere
else when you're supposed to be here.
But that's how it works.
>> Bill Whalen (10:17):
What if you shut it all down, Niall?
How would you spend your days?
>> Niall Ferguson (10:20):
I can't imagine doing that.
The thing that I learned from my father,who was a doctor and
a workaholic,was that all retirement is fatal.
It's fatal in 100 of cases.
And so there's no retirement in my future.
I'll work until I drop.
(10:43):
And I discovered in midlife thattaking holidays made me ill.
So I don't do that either.
I work in different places andthat's been a solution to the problem.
I'm content to go to seaside locations ormountain locations and
allow my family to frolic where theyplease as long as I can keep working.
>> Bill Whalen (11:09):
So, Sir Niall, I wanna shift gears now and
I wanna hack your phone for a minute.
To know you is to know that you haveall sorts of connections in this world.
I was reminded this recently when,of all people,
Chrissie Hynde went on social media andsaid a few words about you.
For those not familiarwith Chrissie Hinde,
she is the lead singer of the Pretender.
She has been, my God, Niall, she's beenwith that band for about a half a century,
(11:30):
hasn't she?
>> Niall Ferguson (11:31):
I'm too much of a gentleman to count the number of years.
>> Bill Whalen (11:34):
It's been a few years, so we can agree.
Anywho, she was on social media recentlyand she wrote the following about you,
Sir Niall Ferguson, and I quote, in caseyou're wondering what I've been doing,
I being Chrissie Hinde,I've been catching up on some reading.
I'm rereading Wuthering Heightsby Amelie Bronte.
What a great novel,one of the best ever written.
And of course, anything by our greatestliving historian, Niall Ferguson.
(11:55):
Or if you're too lazy to read,you can watch him on YouTube.
I had the privilege of seeinghim do a talk a few years ago.
In my opinion, he's the Jimi Hendrixof renowned historians.
So forget the bass,you're now playing a guitar.
>> Niall Ferguson (12:07):
I can die happy now.
Chrissie Hinde was a heroine of mine whenI was a youngster growing up in Glasgow.
I meant to see the Pretenderson several occasions and
I was rather astonished tofind myself on her radar.
(12:28):
It's deeply touching.
I guess it's a kind of indicationcuz I've always wanted my work
to reach beyond the academy.
But you kinda don't think you'regonna get through to the rock stars.
And then to be compared with Jimi Hendrix,
the greatest of all the rock guitarists,it's almost too much.
(12:49):
It's up there with a knighthood, isn't it?
I was deeply touched and it sent me rightback to my Pretender's vinyl collection.
>> Bill Whalen (13:01):
But here's the phone game,
I don't know if Chrissie Hyndeis in your phone contacts.
Well, I'm curious,if one were to look inside your phone and
look at all you have as contacts,who would they be surprised to see?
And you can pick,
Niall, a celebrity who we might besurprised as an acquaintance of yours or
maybe somebody who you don't see eye toeye with but whose opinion you value.
>> Niall Ferguson (13:19):
Well, I think my phone contacts wouldn't be a great place to
start a long time ago.
For reasons that are lost inthe mysteries of tech time,
an enormous number of contactspopulated that particular app and
it just became unmanageably large.
So what I do have is a spreadsheet.
(13:42):
This is the OCD, Niall,of the people that I really do
like to keep up with andpeople I send my journalism to.
And that does contain, I suppose,some surprising names.
Surprising perhaps froma political point of view.
I'll give you an example,Martin Jacques is an old friend.
(14:07):
He was at one timethe editor of Marxism Today.
And although he's now dead, I think EricHobsbawm's probably still on the list.
His daughter Julia certainly is.
And Eric was a card carryingcommunist more or less all his life.
I say this because it'simportant to remember that
(14:29):
politics is not a kind ofmatter of sectarian or
tribal allegiance which prohibits you from
fraternizing with anyonein the other tribe.
Most statements about politics havea great deal of uncertainty and
low confidence around them.
(14:50):
And one can have a set of principles, but
you can't be certain that those principleswill work wherever they're applied.
And I've always believed that we shouldtalk across ideological divides and
that's, I think,
one of the things that people mightfind surprising about my social network.
(15:10):
It's very heterogeneous andI follow on social media,
even people with whom I deeply andprofoundly disagree.
I think William Dalrymple,the historian and
I now disagree aboutjust about everything and
sometimes he drives me upthe wall with his social media.
(15:32):
But I've never unfollowed anybody onwhat used to be called Twitter and
is now X because one has to remainopen to contradictory ideas.
That's the essence of intellectual life.
So, I think, I'm an omnivoreintellectually and hope always to be one.
>> Bill Whalen (15:54):
I read an interview with you, Niall,
from a few years back that was reallyfascinating in a couple regards.
First of all, you mentioned that youonce served beer in a biker bar.
That's another topic for another day.
>> Niall Ferguson (16:04):
I didn't last long.
>> Bill Whalen (16:06):
But you talked about it, sound like it could have ended badly too,
if you weren't good at your job.
But you also talked about becominga historian, sort of a roundabout fashion.
You listed a lot of things that youwere not good at that had failed at, but
you found that you were good at historian.
So is that how yougravitated toward history?
You had tried other things andthen history came along?
Or was history always somethingin the back of your mind?
>> Niall Ferguson (16:26):
Well, history was in the forefront of my mind from my mid teens
when I read Tolstoy's War and Peace and
realized that the questions Tolstoyasked at the end of that great novel.
The greatest novel ever written, includingwhat is the power that moves nations?
Were the questions thatI wanted to address.
(16:48):
And that was what motivated me to applyto read history at Oxford when I was 17.
But when I got to Oxford, I realized that,and I knew this all along,
that beauty of the Oxford system was thatI could spend two years trying just about
everything else.
Because everything in those days rode onyour final examinations at the end of
(17:09):
the third year.
And so in the first and second year,I tried just about everything.
I tried acting.
I played the caterpillar in rather goodmusical version of Alice in Wonderland.
I tried jazz.
I took up the double bass andjoined a jazz band night in Tunisia,
(17:29):
which still exists to this day.
I was involved in film-making.
I really tried all the thingsthat I could have tried.
I tried politics.
I was highly unsuccessfulat the Oxford Union,
where British prime ministerstraditionally are trained.
And so by the end of the second year,I'd done all of these things and
(17:51):
was no good at them orwas at best average at them.
And then I realized, actually itwas an epiphany that came to me
while I was playingthe Caterpillar in Alice,
that I was only really any goodat writing history essays.
And I should probably get backto doing that, which I did.
>> Bill Whalen (18:06):
So what is exactly your worldview as a historian?
You mentioned earlier that you,
I think you said right ofcenter was the phrase you used.
Would you call yourself a conservative?
Do we need to really labelwhat a historian is?
>> Niall Ferguson (18:18):
Well, I was labeled from very early on conservative historian,
sometimes a Thatcherite historian.
I noticed that the newspapers that didthat never labeled anybody liberal
historian or socialist historian.
So it was obviously designed asa kind of subtle form of shaming and
deliberately intended to push people whowere right leaning out of the academy.
(18:41):
That was a part of the strategythat I can trace back to the 1980s.
But I don't think you should concealyour ideological proclivities.
I think authors should makeit clear where they stand so
that readers understand that.
At the same time, I don't think one shouldwrite history as a political project.
(19:02):
And I certainly have never donethat because, for example,
one of my earliest books, The Pity Of War,
makes the argument that Britain shouldnot have intervened in World War I.
At the time,that was an argument of the far left.
And so it's always beena little bit of a stretch for
my critics to say that it's all partof a vast right wing conspiracy and
(19:26):
yet that that argument has been made.
Counterfactual history asking whatmight have happened if things had gone
differently isn't a conservativeenterprise or shouldn't be.
It's only conservative insofar associalists or Marxist historians
think that there's only one deterministicway that history can work out.
(19:47):
I'm against that.
If that makes me a right wing historian,then okay.
But my own ideological orientations oweas much to the Scottish Enlightenment and
to classical liberalism as to conservatismas an American would understand it.
In fact,
I've just been reading Sam Tanenhaus'brilliant biography of William F Buckley.
(20:09):
I mean, if I had been born inthe same year as Bill Buckley,
I have disagreed with him about 50%of issues in Course of Our Lives.
So I'm not much of an Americanconservative on a broad range of issues,
and even in a British context.
Although I hugely admired Roger Scruton,the great conservative philosopher of,
(20:31):
of his generation, there werethings Roger and I disagreed about.
I disagreed with many of my conservativefriends about Brexit, for example,
when I actually was on the other side andvoted against it.
So I'm actually much harder topigeonhole ideologically than my critics
would like Duke Empire had the subtitleHow Britain Made the Modern World.
(20:54):
It's sometimes representedas a kind of imperialist,
colonialist nostalgia fest, butonly by people who've never read it.
Cuz if you read it, you'll see that itgives a pretty unblemished account of some
of the more horrendous episodes inthe history of the British Empire.
So I don't think history shouldbe a political enterprise.
And I think the more it's becomea political enterprise in
(21:17):
American history departments, the worseit's got from a scholarly point of view.
>> Bill Whalen (21:21):
And Niall,
what is the line Historians have todraw between advice and advocacy?
You advise world leaders,but when we go back and
look at how the Bidenpresidency became unraveled.
You could go back to thatmeeting in the Oval Office,
whatever room in the White House wherethe President sat down with historians.
They said, you can be FDR, you can be LBJ.
>> Niall Ferguson (21:40):
I think historians have to tread very warily in the corridors of
power.
Think of Arthur Schlesinger Jr becominga kind of shill for the Kennedys.
I think there's a role that one can play,but
one has to draw a distinction between it.
(22:00):
Max Weber drew a distinctionbetween politik and Wissenschaft,
between politics and scholarship,or science, if you like.
And I think these activitieshave to be kept separate.
So when I'm working on a history book,
I'm trying my very best to do as mysources of inspiration have taught me.
(22:23):
The great R.G Collingwood said,we're engaged in an exercise in trying
to recapture past thought from whateverremnants the people of the past
have left behind,to kind of reconstitute that past thought.
So that to quote Ranko, we can show howit actually was, how it essentially was.
That's the role of the historian.
(22:44):
That and nothing else.
But when you're asked foryour advice, as I periodically am,
then you must offer that.
Making clear that at some level it'sspeculative, because any advice is making
a series of assumptions or offeringa series of hypotheses about the future,
about the kind of policies that mightwork, and you can't have certainty.
(23:07):
This was what Kissinger calledthe problem of conjecture,
that in any bit of strategic advice,you've got to recognize that there's
great uncertainty, there are manymoving parts you don't control.
And the decision maker is at somepoint taking a leap of faith,
taking a kind of bet.
(23:28):
And so you operate differently whenyou're dealing with the future and
as opposed to the past.
>> Bill Whalen (23:35):
One thing about America, Niall, is we love to rush more everything.
And by that I mean we like to choosethe top four best of everything.
So with that in mind,
who was on Sir Niall Ferguson's Rushmoreof four great historians?
>> Niall Ferguson (23:47):
Well, I would put in order of the impression they made on
me the following names onhistorical Mount Rushmore,
the following faces, A.J.P.Taylor, the Great English
historian of great power relationsin the 19th and 20th century.
(24:08):
Then I think as an undergraduate,I was deeply impressed by
the work of Friedrich Meinecke,whose German Catastrophe
is one of the great essays of20th century historiography.
And I'd like a Germanhistorian to be up there,
because of the great impact Germanhistoriography had on me in my life.
(24:33):
You'd need to have Edward Gibbon,wouldn't you?
Because the Decline and Fall of the RomanEmpire is still one of the greatest works
of historical writing there's ever been.
And finally, David Hume,
whose History of England Idiscovered really quite recently.
Most people read Hume forhis philosophy, but
he was a brilliantly waspish writer anda true Tory in his approach to the past.
(24:56):
I highly recommend the History of England.
I could go on, butyou only asked for four.
>> Bill Whalen (25:01):
So according to the website, Niall, academicinfluence.com
the 10 most influential historians today,number one is David Christian, Russia.
Number two is Yuval Noah Harari.
And number three, Sir Niall Ferguson.
>> Peter Robinson (25:15):
Well, apart from the order, we can't really disagree.
>> Bill Whalen (25:18):
[LAUGH] Well put.
Right, Niall, if you're game,I want to switch topics now and
play a little game with you that we liketo call the Herbert Hoover questionnaire.
[MUSIC]
All right, Niall, here we go.
The Herbert Hoover question, ready?
(25:39):
Question number one,what is the best sandwich?
And you can choose Scottish,British or American.
>> Niall Ferguson (25:44):
Well, talking of fish, it's got to be smoked Scottish salmon
on brown bread with butter,lemon juice, and pepper.
>> Bill Whalen (25:54):
Okay.
What is the scariest animal?
>> Niall Ferguson (25:57):
The scariest animal?
>> Bill Whalen (25:59):
Two or four legs.
[LAUGH]>> Niall Ferguson: Well,
I think a grizzly bear is the animalyou'd least like to meet in Montana.
Okay, favorite action movie?
>> Niall Ferguson (26:11):
I think Goldfinger is the greatest of the Sean Connery Bond
movies.
>> Speaker 5 (26:17):
Do you expect me to talk?
>> Speaker 6 (26:19):
No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to buy.
>> Bill Whalen (26:22):
Do a little Sean Connery for us.
>> Niall Ferguson (26:25):
Well, that's certainly the film I'd recommend, Sean.
>> Bill Whalen (26:29):
[LAUGH] Well put.
Who's your hero of fiction?
>> Niall Ferguson (26:33):
It's either Edward Waverly in Waverly, Walter Scott's
great novel, orit's Pierre Bezukhov in War and Peace.
One of those.
>> Bill Whalen (26:44):
Apples or oranges?
>> Niall Ferguson (26:46):
Oranges.
I drink fresh orange juice every morning.
>> Bill Whalen (26:53):
What talent would you like to have that you currently do not possess?
>> Niall Ferguson (26:56):
One that our boss, Condoleezza Rice possesses.
I wish I were a concert pianist.
>> Bill Whalen (27:02):
Okay, which raises my question.
Do you play golf?
>> Niall Ferguson (27:04):
No, I hate golf.
I'm the only Scotsman who hates golf.
>> Bill Whalen (27:09):
And yet Cardi likes you.
>> Niall Ferguson (27:11):
It's one of the things I think we've agreed to disagree about,
the other one is Americanfootball a terrible game.
>> Bill Whalen (27:17):
Yes, exactly.
I know how you feel about that,we've had some run ins on that.
Let's see, when you fly,since you're the Flying Scotsman.
Window or aisle?
>> Niall Ferguson (27:25):
Window.
>> Bill Whalen (27:26):
Okay, favorite smell.
Favorite aroma?
>> Niall Ferguson (27:29):
The smell of Laphroaig,
the greatest of allthe Islay Malt Whiskies.
>> Bill Whalen (27:34):
[LAUGH] The most used app on your phone.
>> Niall Ferguson (27:38):
That's a good question.
I was going to say flightawareness [LAUGH].
The app you use to check if yourplane's going to depart on time.
>> Bill Whalen (27:51):
True.
Cats or dogs?
>> Niall Ferguson (27:53):
Dogs.
>> Bill Whalen (27:55):
Speaking of which, what is the latest on the dog front?
>> Niall Ferguson (27:58):
Well, this is really Campbell's realm because he has earned
a dog for his birthday to compensate for
the fact that Big Brother isgoing away to boarding school.
And he has set his hearton a chocolate Labrador.
>> Bill Whalen (28:14):
Gosh, I own a chocolate lab for 12 years, Niall.
>> Niall Ferguson (28:17):
We better talk about that offline.
>> Bill Whalen (28:20):
Does he have a name in mind?
>> Niall Ferguson (28:22):
I think he does, but I can't remember if I've agreed to it yet.
And I better not go on the recordin case that's binding.
>> Bill Whalen (28:28):
Yeah, it's like a birth announcement, so
I'll spill the beans on that one.
All right, you only get one song tolisten to for the rest of your life.
What is it?
And that sounds like hell, by the way.
>> Niall Ferguson (28:37):
Well, not if it's this one.
It's the Liebestod from Wagner's Tristan,which one could never tire of.
[MUSIC]
>> Bill Whalen (28:51):
Okay, describe the rest of your life in five words.
>> Niall Ferguson (28:55):
Well, I wish it were something like his longevity exceeded his
expectations, butI think it would be more honest to say.
And here I'm going to borrowfrom the Life of Gibbon.
Scribble, scribble, scribble,scribble, scribble.
>> Bill Whalen (29:13):
All right. Niall,
my father was getting in his final years,he was very obsessed about dying.
Not morbidly, but he wanted tomake sure his life was in order.
And one thing I asked him to do beforehe passed away is I asked him to write
his obituary.
Not because I wished him dead, butbecause I knew that when he passed away,
it would fall to me to make surehis obituary ran in newspapers.
And I didn't want to get anything wrong,as there is nothing.
(29:33):
When you become a journalist,Niall, what is the first thing you.
You do in a paper?
You put it on the obituary desk, why?
Because you have to learn the detail.
Because if you screw upsomebody's obituary and
you know you've done something terrible.
You've ruined a family.
So my father did his obituary.
So my question to you, Niall, is whenyou think about your legacy right now,
you're gonna be in the game fora long time, I assume.
I was looking at Bernard Lewis,for example.
(29:54):
Bernard Lewis was born in 1916.
He lives to be 101 years old, andhe's still working late into his 80s and
90s, still pumping it out.
So do you see yourself doing this?
Do you see yourself keeping up forthis for another 20 years or so
of intellectual thoughts?
>> Niall Ferguson (30:08):
I should be so lucky.
I think anybody who enters their 60s,
especially a male Glaswegian,needs to be aware that you're in,
as somebody said to me the other day,sniper's alley.
If you make it to 70, you'll probablymanage a good few more years.
But it's getting to 70that's the tough part.
(30:29):
And so I'm not making any assumptionsabout how long I'll last.
I think like your father about death,not out of fear,
because I was taught not to feel fear, but
because it would betremendously inconvenient and
(30:50):
I would be letting many people down.
So I wanna keep going forparticularly my children, but for
really all the people who rely on me.
But I don't take it for granted.
I think continuing to work is good foryou.
Henry Kissinger stopped working and wasstill working on a book on his deathbed.
(31:16):
But I don't think my DNA entitles meto the 100 years that he managed.
So I'll keep it up.
I certainly won't stop the scribbling,
but I'm trying to be a realist abouthow much longer I likely have.
At my father's funeral,one of the older women of
(31:36):
the family said, 77 a good age fora male Ferguson.
And I keep that in mind every day.
>> Bill Whalen (31:45):
What do you think happens when we die?
>> Niall Ferguson (31:47):
That's clear.
Our souls either go to heaven or to hell.
>> Bill Whalen (31:52):
By the way, a little detour for a moment.
Religion we did talk about.
We need to talk a littlebit about religion here.
Religion has become very much partof your life in the past few years.
>> Niall Ferguson (32:02):
That is true.
I'm a lapsed atheist.
That is to say,I was raised an atheist and
in the course of my late adulthoodhave come to Christianity.
And Ayaan and I and our sons were baptizedinto the Church of England last year.
Quite a journey.
>> Bill Whalen (32:22):
All right. Finally,
Neil August in the Hoover Institutionincludes what is called
the Summer Policy Boot Camp where youngcollege kids descend upon Hoover for
a week and they listen to the likes of youtalk about the great issues of the times.
And I think you've done these before andI imagine that afterwards somebody
approaches you and they ask youwhat is a very flattering question.
(32:42):
How do I become you one day?
>> Niall Ferguson (32:45):
Well, I'm looking forward to the boot camp and
perhaps somebody will come andask me that question and
I will give them an answer thatWinston Churchill gave a young American
when he was delivering a lecturesomewhere in the US after the war.
And the young man asked forthat kind of advice.
(33:06):
What advice would you give me if Iwanted to follow in your footsteps?
And Churchill replied,drink steadily, that's my advice.
>> Bill Whalen (33:16):
This is actually the second solo Goodfellow that we are doing.
The first was with John Cochrane and
we recorded on the dayof his 40th anniversary.
So we were joined by the lovely Mrs.Cochrane and today we're continuing it.
We're being joined now by the lovely,Ayaan Hirsi Ali, actually,
is she technically Lady Ferguson?
>> Niall Ferguson (33:35):
She is.
>> Bill Whalen (33:36):
Well, Lady Ferguson, welcome to Goodfellows.
>> Speaker 7 (33:38):
Thank you very much.
And I actually don't call myselfAyaan Hirsi Ali since September of 2011,
I've been calling myself Ayaan Ferguson.
>> Bill Whalen (33:46):
Ayaan Ferguson, thank you for correcting me.
Ayaan, tell us a little about NiallFerguson that the world doesn't know.
What makes Niall so unique.
>> Speaker 7 (33:57):
A number of things I would say first and foremost,
I don't know of anyonewho's more hard working.
So there are all sorts of differentaddictions that human beings have and
he's addicted to the virtue of hard work.
He's punctual,as we were just laughing about.
He is the greatest father I've ever seen.
He's got five children andhe's more devoted to those children.
(34:21):
And now we have a grandchild comingon the way, the great son I've seen.
We pretty much have Neil'smother either living with us or
we are going to live with her.
This is meant as Niall'sservice to his mother.
And then he's the greatest husband ever.
(34:43):
He's just the most patient,loving companion I know.
The only thing he doesn't like is mysense of time, which I'm learning.
I'm working on it [LAUGH].
>> Bill Whalen (34:55):
Okay, Niall, let's flip the question now,
what is special about Ayaan?
>> Niall Ferguson (35:00):
Well, my wife is the most extraordinary person I've ever met.
She has enormous uniquecombination of beauty,
that's the first thing one notices.
Bravery, that's the thing onerealizes she's had all her life,
(35:23):
brilliance, because she hasa phenomenal intellect.
And I'll go further and add boldness,
because bravery andboldness are different things.
To be brave is to overcome your fear.
(35:44):
To be bold is to go whereothers wouldn't think of going.
And Ayan has gone on an extraordinaryjourney in her life,
both intellectually and personally.
And all along she's shownan extraordinary boldness.
So I'm the luckiest man in the world.
(36:05):
And although it's very unBritish to say things like this,
I'm enough of an American not tofeel too embarrassed in saying it.
>> Speaker 7 (36:13):
[LAUGH] >> Bill Whalen
I live vicariously through mysister's four grandsons and
they are younger than your boys.
They're ages 9 to 7.
They're close, buta little younger in some respects.
And I'm very curious as to what it isto grow up as boys in this day and age.
So talk a little bit about how you'reraising your two boys in these,
(36:34):
what we agree are very complicated times.
I think I'll start first by just saying a little bit about
the educational challengeswe face in America.
During COVID, back then,was he just 9 years old or so.
(36:56):
When logging him on the longdistance zoom calls,
I would go through the material that hehad to go through and I was very alarmed.
And one thing that alarmed me was thestory that was told about America to this
boy who is half black,half white growing up in America.
And that was a terrible story.
(37:16):
It was the story of 1619,the story that America is really
a place that only was set up to exploitother people for white straight men.
And then as time went on andmy now 7 year old was about 4 years old,
another story came alongwhich was multiple genders.
(37:38):
And so we were going through thesehead scratches and saying to Niall,
we send children to school tosort fiction from fact and
both of us became American citizens andwe know the story of America.
Niall is a historian.
I know it through experience andI think it's a fantastic story.
It's how do we mitigate this?
And various conversations, not just withthe school that our boys went to, but
(38:02):
with many parents we were speakingto were alarmed about this.
And we thought,what are we going to do about it?
And I think it is the mostfortunate two little boys to have
Niall Ferguson as not just their father,but their educator.
And he came up with a solutionthat has worked for us now and
(38:24):
is one where our boys are exposedto academic rigor and
they're exposed to a great deal ofsports and also a great deal of humor.
And I mean,the school they go to has the most
delightful motto,which is courage and kindness.
(38:45):
And these were the things thatafter George Floyd in 2020,
these things were being called,they were being actively demolished.
And we were told that thesewere white supremacist ideas.
And so I'm a very happy mom.
>> Bill Whalen (38:59):
You're also trying to educate boys and girls of an older age.
Ayaan, I was watching a video of you wherewe recently were at the University of
Austin, and you were doingsomething exceedingly complicated,
you are trying to educate youngstudents on antisemitism, Islamism.
You're trying to essentiallyteach them history.
You're trying to teachthem current events.
(39:19):
You're trying to get them to thinkcritically all at the same time.
>> Speaker 8 (39:22):
Is there room for compromise between principals?
>> Speaker 7 (39:25):
If I want to kill you and behead you unless you convert to
the religion I dictate,what would be the place of compromise?
>> Speaker 8 (39:35):
Well, I would not mind converting as I myself am an agnostic.
So have no faith.
>> Speaker 7 (39:40):
Let's play with this thought for a while.
For us to have the attitude of,well, we'll see what happens.
And if we get to that point, I'll justconvert, I will say, are you sure?
Maybe you want to get educated onwhat would happen once you convert?
What would your life be like andthe life of your sisters and women?
(40:04):
What would they do to the Jews?
>> Bill Whalen (40:06):
How's that going?
>> Speaker 7 (40:09):
I think, I mean in terms of teaching history,
that's what Niall specializes in.
So I don't really
teach history.
As a young person you can pickup these different stories and
some stories are good andsome stories are bad.
And the stories of antisemitism,scapegoating other people for
(40:34):
your problems ora world that's too complex for you.
Islamism, which is one of the worst,if not the worst stories,
which just ends in nihilism.
This pursuit of a utopiacalled the caliphate and
in the process demolishing humanbeings and human happiness.
Or communism, that's neo Marxismthat has emerged Marxism.
People our age failed spectacularlywherever it was tried and
(40:59):
has in total,there are some figures that 100 million
people worldwide have beenthe victims of communism.
And yet it is back andit's very appealing and potent.
It's come back dressedup as identity politics.
So I tried to talk about these losingstories and why they're losing stories and
(41:23):
then tell a better story.
And I think the story of America,the story of Western
civilization in general,the story of Christianity,
I find these stories to be much more,not just humane,
but lead to successful, well lived lives.
(41:44):
And I think we're short changingyoung people if we don't share this
legacy with them.
>> Niall Ferguson (41:50):
I'm glad you mentioned stories and
I'm also glad that you're sittingin front of a great work wall
of books because another keypoint about education today and
about raising children isyou must make them readers.
The challenge that's novel to parentsof our generation is the onslaught,
(42:14):
the technological onslaught on childrenthat began with computer games.
And has now become an all-consumingset of devices and activities.
The most recent which artificialintelligence threatens to remove
children's ability to learn to read,to learn to think, to learn to write.
(42:35):
And so I think the most importantthing that we've come to
understand as parents,in addition to what Ayan said,
is you've got to kind of createspace away from screens.
Away from the technology wherechildren learn to love books.
Cuz our civilization is mostly encoded inbooks, that that's where it mostly lives.
(42:59):
And I hope that we've donea reasonably good job with our five
children of making them book lovers andmaking them readers.
This of course is astrue of girls as of boys.
And I do have one daughter.
But boys are actuallymuch more susceptible
(43:20):
to certain kinds of screen addiction,particularly the kind of
games that are designed to beaddictive to young male minds.
>> Bill Whalen (43:28):
And what is the Ferguson family policy with regard to screens and
also to that scary entitythat I would call YouTube?
My sister's four grandsons are hooked onYouTube, hopelessly hooked on YouTube.
It's a fight to keep them away from it.
What is your policy?
>> Niall Ferguson (43:42):
Our policy, and I'll hope that we agree on this,
is rationing, not prohibition.
Prohibition doesn't work,as we know from history,
but rationing and also supervision.
Because there are things on YouTubethat it's perfectly all right for
children to watch, butif you leave them unsupervised,
(44:05):
the YouTube suggestion bar is designedto lead them into dark places.
And so you have to be quite vigilant.
Do you agree, darling?
>> Speaker 7 (44:13):
Yes, absolutely.
Yeah, and I think what I've learnedfrom you is with boys, you negotiate.
And so the negotiating,plus the supervision.
Our son now is outside building a car,John Deere car,
[LAUGH] andhe's excited about riding around.
And then when he comes back in andasks for a skin, we've actually,
(44:34):
over the summer, we've now banned it.
So it's just books, games, physical games,these cars and other stuff.
And if you don't weaken when you come,I won't.
>> Niall Ferguson (44:46):
There's no chance of that.
>> Bill Whalen (44:48):
Speaking of cars, did you take that snazzy red Beetle with you?
>> Niall Ferguson (44:52):
I still own the snazzy Red Beetle, but
it couldn't live anywhere butNorthern California.
>> Bill Whalen (44:58):
Yes, your version of a Shaguar.
>> Niall Ferguson (45:00):
I don't want to in any way associate myself with Austin Powers,
baby.
>> Bill Whalen (45:06):
But wait a second.
There you are on social media,
Niall clearly drooling overwhat looks like a Shaguar.
>> Niall Ferguson (45:12):
I ran across that car at the wonderful Chalk History Festival,
which is one of the fewfestivals devoted to history.
And it was just such a beautiful objects,the kinda car I think
a man would love to receive on his 65thbirthday, that I took a photograph of it.
(45:33):
I'm sure they're highly unreliable,break down all the time, but
they are beautiful things.
>> Bill Whalen (45:38):
Ayaan, we started this conversation with by listing all
the things that Niall doesin the way of multitasking.
And I came up with 15 items,and Niall added a 16th sailing.
Are you out on the high seas with him now?
>> Speaker 7 (45:53):
I haven't done that with him yet, but the boys have, and
I have a very good excuse for that.
I had a knee replacement andthe reasons for the knee replacement.
So it wasn't great for me to go sailing,the kind of sailing that Niall does,
which is sort of that very manly.
I don't know, you strap yourself ontothe sails and climb up and down.
(46:16):
That wasn't something I was readyto do yet, but maybe next year.
>> Bill Whalen (46:19):
Did he introduce you to snow skiing?
>> Speaker 7 (46:22):
I was introduced to snow skiing by the former Mayor of Los Angeles,
Dick Riordan, at Sun Valley.
And then the next season, I met Niall, and
Niall told me that he was also a beginner,and we carried on skiing.
And I think he's now really a good skier.
And I'm still junior intermediate level,but
(46:45):
we both enjoy skiing andgo to wherever it's possible.
>> Niall Ferguson (46:51):
What a small world.
Because Mayor Riordan's name came up onthe most recent episode of Goodfellows
when we were talking to potentialfuture Mayor of LA, Rick Caruso.
>> Bill Whalen (47:01):
And I worked with Dick Riordan in a past life to close
the circle.
But so what other adventuresare two be looking at?
Do you wanna go whitewater rafting ordo some extreme sports together?
>> Speaker 7 (47:10):
I've done whitewater rafting, I have done it before, yeah.
And again, I mean,we go to Montana quite often.
And so I think,I wouldn't mind taking it up again.
>> Niall Ferguson (47:23):
I've always regarded as wildly reckless because of the lack
of control.
At least when you're sailing,
you have some control overthe direction the craft is going in.
So I'll be ducking out of that.
There are lots of things Iresolved a while ago never to do.
Another one is parachuting orfor that matter, hang gliding.
(47:44):
I think it's very important to rulecertain things out if one's aiming
at a decent span of life.
>> Bill Whalen (47:51):
That's well put.
All right, Ayaan final question.
So it is summertime,what do you and Niall do?
Can you unwind?
What do you do when youattempt to relax and unwind?
>> Speaker 7 (48:00):
Eat a lot of fish, go canoeing,
fishing with the boys,a lot of beach time.
Well, when you have a 7-year-old, I mean,
your life in the summer reallyrevolves around that 7-year-old.
So these are some of the things that I do.
That is only if I canprise Niall away from
(48:23):
his book writing andfrom his work [LAUGH].
>> Niall Ferguson (48:30):
Busted.
Guilty as charged.
>> Speaker 7 (48:35):
[LAUGH] But I've been bad too.
I mean, I'm going to Budapest, and
my new resolve now is this is don'tcome back our new resolve, actually.
So we should be home more anddo less until Campbell is old enough,
maybe to go to boarding school.
>> Bill Whalen (48:55):
Okay, well,
I want you both to know that you were verymuch missed around the Hoover campus.
Please come by more often,we like to have you around.
>> Speaker 7 (49:01):
I'm coming in November and
doing sort of counter grand strategyon radical Islam, the ideology.
So stay tuned.
>> Niall Ferguson (49:11):
And my resolve is of course to spend more time there.
But as you know, Bill, my elderly motherneeds our proximity for the time being.
So I'm going to be a little bit ofa Cheshire cat disappearing and
reappearing for the foreseeable future.
But always love being there andyou'll see that red bug when I'm back.
>> Bill Whalen (49:33):
Thank you, Niall and Ayaan.
Thanks for coming on the show today.
Thank you for putting up with metrying to pry into your lives, but
I think it is a fascinating life and
I think people would like to know evenmore about it than we got into today.
So thanks very much, not just forcoming on the show, but all you do for
the Hoover Institution.
>> Niall Ferguson (49:48):
Thank you, Bill.
>> Speaker 7 (49:49):
It's a pleasure.
>> Bill Whalen (49:50):
And that's it for this solo episode of Goodfellows.
Goodfellow, if you will.
But fear not, we will be back soon,in mid August actually.
Our guest will be the director ofthe Hoover Institution, Condoleezza Rice.
We're gonna talk a little foreignpolicy and a little education.
I think she and Niall and John and HR havesome disagreements on college life and
I wanna hear what she has to say.
So to keep abreast of us,follow us on YouTube,
follow us on whateverplatform you listen to us.
(50:13):
Sending questions we alwayslike to hear from you.
On behalf of our guest today,Sir Niall Ferguson and Lady Ferguson.
We hope you enjoyed the conversation.
Until next time,
take care, thanks for
watching.
(50:35):
[MUSIC]
>> Speaker 9 (50:58):
Ayaan, you're half hour early.
>> Speaker 7 (51:03):
I'm usually never early, so.
>> Niall Ferguson (51:05):
This has never happened in our entire lives together.
>> Speaker 9 (51:09):
Nice to see you, Ayaan.
>> Bill Whalen (51:10):
Hello Ayaan.
>> Speaker 7 (51:11):
Nice to see you.
>> Niall Ferguson (51:12):
Can't believe you're early.
This literally never happened.
>> Speaker 7 (51:16):
No, I'm actually giggling helplessly because it's true,
I'm never [LAUGH].
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