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the following is a conversation with
neil ferguson one of the great
historians of our time at times
controversial and always brilliant
whether you agree with him or not he's
an author of 16 books on topics covering
the history of money power war pandemics
and empire
previously at harvard currently at
stanford and today
launching a new university here in
austin texas called the university of
austin a new institution built from the
ground up to encourage open inquiry and
discourse by both thinkers and doers
from philosophers and historians to
scientists and engineers embracing
debate dissent and self-examination free
to speak to disagree to think to explore
truly novel ideas the advisory board
includes stephen pinker jonathan height
and many other amazing people
with one exception
me i was graciously invited to be on the
advisory board which i accepted in the
hope of doing my small part in helping
build the future of education and open
discourse especially in the fields of
artificial intelligence robotics and
computing we spend the first hour of
this conversation talking about this new
university before switching to
talking about some of the darkest
moments in human history and what they
reveal about human nature
this is the lex friedman podcast to
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in the description and now here's my
conversation with neil ferguson
you are one of the great historians of
our time respected sometimes
controversial you've flourished in some
of the best universities in the world
from nyu to london school of economics
to harvard
and now to hoover institution at
stanford
before we talk about the history of
money war and power
let us talk about a new university
you're part of launching
here in austin texas
it is called university of austin
uatx
what is its mission its goals its plan
i think it's
pretty obvious
to a lot of people in higher education
that there's a problem
and that problem manifests itself in a
great many different ways but i would
sum up the problem as being
a drastic
chilling of the atmosphere
that constrains free
speech free exchange even free thought
and i had never anticipated that this
would happen in my lifetime my academic
career began in oxford in the 1980s when
anything went one sensed that a
university was a place where one could
risk
saying the unsayable and
debate the undebatable
so the fact that
in a relatively short space of time
a variety of ideas critical race theory
or wokeism whatever you want to call a
variety of ideas have come along
that seek to limit and quite drastically
limit what we can talk about
strikes me as deeply unhealthy and i'm
not sure and i've thought about this for
a long time you can fix it with the
existing institutions
i think you need to create a new one and
so after much deliberation
we decided to do it and i think
uh it's a hugely
timely opportunity
to do what people used to do in this
country which was to create new
institutions i mean that used to be the
default setting of america we sort of
stopped doing that i mean i look back
and i thought why why why are there no
new universities or at least if there
are why do they have so little impact
it seems like we have the billionaires
we have the need let's do it so you
still believe
in institutions in the university in the
ideal of the university i believe
passionately in that ideal
there's a reason they've been around for
nearly a millennium
there is a
a unique
thing that happens
on a university campus when it's done
right and that is the transfer of
knowledge between generations
that is a very sacred activity and it
seems to
withstand major changes in technology so
this
form that we call the university
predates the printing press
survive the printing press
continue to function through the
scientific revolution the enlightenment
uh the industrial revolution
to this day
and i think it's because maybe because
of evolutionary psychology we need to be
together
in one
relatively confined space
when we're in our late teens and early
20s for the knowledge transfer between
the generations to happen that's my
feeling about this but in order for it
to work well
there need to be very few
constraints there needs to be a sense
that one can take intellectual risk
remember
people in their late teens and early 20s
are adults but they're inexperienced
adults
and
if i look back on my own time as an
undergraduate saying stupid things was
my mo
my way to finding good ideas was through
a minefield of bad ideas
i feel so sorry for my
for people like me today people age 18
19 20 today
who are
uh intellectually very curious
ambitious but inexperienced because
the minefields today
are absolutely lethal and you know one
wrong food
and it's cancellation i said this to
peter thiel the other day
imagine being asked now i mean we were
obnoxious
undergraduates
there's nothing
that peter did at stanford that andrew
sullivan and i were not doing at oxford
uh and perhaps we were even worse
but it was so so not career ending to be
to be an absolutely insufferable
obnoxious
undergraduate then
today if we if we
if people like us exist today they must
live in a state of of constant anxiety
that they're going to be
outed for some heretical
statement that they made five years ago
on social media so
part of what motivates me is that it's
the desire to give
uh
the means of today a shot at free
thinking and
really
i i'd call it
uh
aggressive learning learning where
you're really pushed
and i just think that stopped happening
on the the major campuses because
whether at harvard where i used to teach
at stanford where i'm now based i
i sense a kind of suffocating atmosphere
of self-censorship
that that means people are afraid to
take even minimal risk in in class i
mean just just take for example a survey
that was published earlier this year
that revealed
this is of undergraduates in four-year
programs in the us
85 percent of self-described liberal
students said they would report a
professor to the university
administration if he or she said
something they considered offensive and
something like 75 said said they do it
to a fellow undergraduate that's the
kind of culture that's evolved in our
universities so we need a new university
in which none of that is true in which
you can speak your mind say stupid
things get it completely wrong and live
to to tell the tale there's a lot more
going on i think because when you start
thinking about what's wrong with a
modern university many many more things
suggest themselves and i think there's
an opportunity here to build something
that's radically new in in some ways and
radically traditional in other ways for
example i have a strong preference for
the tutorial system that you see at
oxford and cambridge which is small
group teaching
and and highly socratic in its structure
i think it'd be great to bring that to
the united states where it doesn't
really exist but at the same time i
think we should be doing some very 21st
century things
making sure that while people are
reading and studying classic works
they're also going to be immersed in the
real world
of technological innovation a world that
you know very well
and i'd love to get a synthesis
of the ancient and classical which we're
gradually letting
fade away with the novel
and technological so we we want to
produce people who can simultaneously
talk intelligently
about adam smith or for that matter
shakespeare or proust
and
have a conversation with you about where
a.i is going and how long it will be
before i can get driven
here by
a self-driving vehicle allowing me to
have my lunch and prepare rather than
focus on the other crazy people on the
road so that's the dream that we can
create something which is you know
partly classical and partly 21st century
and we look around and we we don't see
it if you if you don't see an
institution that you really think should
exist i think you have a more
responsibility to create it
so you're thinking including
something bigger than just liberal
education also including science
engineering and technology i should also
comment
that
you know i mostly stay out of politics
and out of some of these
aspects of liberal education that kind
of been the most controversial and
difficult within the university
but there is
a kind of ripple effect of fear within
that space
into science and engineering and
technology
that i think
has uh has a nature that's difficult to
describe it doesn't have a controversial
nature it just has a nature of fear
where you're not
you know you're not just saying stupid
stuff as a young 20 year old
you know
for example deep learning machine
learning is really popular in the
computer science now as an approach for
creating artificial intelligence systems
it's
it is controversial in that space to say
that
anything against machine learning saying
sort of exploring ideas that saying this
is going to
lead to a dead end
um now
that that takes some guts to do as a
young 20 year old within uh within a
classroom to think like that to raise
that question in a machine learning
course it sounds ridiculous because it's
like who's going to
uh complain about this but the the fear
that starts
in uh
in a course on history
or
on the
some course that covers society the fear
ripples and affects those students
they're asking big out of the box
questions about engineering about
computer science and there's a lot you
know there's like linear algebra that's
not going to change
but then there's like applied linear
algebra which is machine learning and
that's when
robots and
real systems touch human beings and
that's when you have to ask yourself
these difficult questions about
about humanity even in engineering and
science and technology courses and these
are not separate worlds in two senses
i've just
taken delivery of my copy of the book
that eric schmidt and henry kissinger
have
co-authored on artificial intelligence
the central question of which is what
does this mean for us broadly
but they're not separate worlds
you know in cp snow's sense of you know
the the chasm between science and arts
because on a university campus
everything is contagious from a novel
coronavirus to the behaviors that are
occurring
in the english department
those behaviors if denunciation becomes
a norm
you know undergraduate denounces
professor teaching assistant denounces
undergraduate those behaviors are
contagious and will spread inexorably
first to social science and then to
natural sciences and i think that's
that's part of the reason why when this
started to happen when we started to get
the origins of
disinvitation and cancel culture
it was not just a few conservative
professors in the humanities who had to
worry everybody had to worry because
eventually
it was going to come
even to the most apparently
hard stem part of the the campus it's
it's contagious this is something
nicholas christakis should look at
because he's very good at looking at the
way in which
social networks like the ones that exist
in a university can spread everything
but i think when when we look back and
ask why did wokism spread so rapidly and
rapidly out of humanities into other
parts of universities and why did it
spread across the country and d beyond
the united states to the other
english-speaking universities it's
because it's a contagion
uh and and these behaviors are
contagious
the president of a university i won't
name said to me that he receives every
day at least one
denunciation one call for somebody or
other to be fired for something that
they said that's the crazy kind of
totalitarianism light
that now exists in our uh our
universities
and of course the people who want to
downplay this say oh well there only
have been 100 and something in dis
invitations or oh there really aren't
that many cases but the point is that
the famous events the events that get
the attention are responsible for a
general chilling that as you say spreads
to every part of the university and
creates a
very familiar culture in which people
are afraid to say what they think
self-censorship look at the heterodox
academy data on this grows and grows so
now a majority of students will say this
is clear from the latest heterodox
academy surveys we are scared to say
what we think in case
we get denounced in case we get
cancelled but that's just not the
correct atmosphere
for a university in a free society
to me what's really
creepy is how many of the behaviors i
see on university campuses today are
reminiscent of the way that people used
to behave in the soviet union
or in the soviet bloc or in maui's china
the sort of totalitarianism light that i
think we're we're contending with here
which manifests itself as
denunciations
people informing on superiors
some people using it for career
advantage
other people reduced to hapless
desperate apology
to try to exonerate themselves people
disappearing
metaphorically if not literally all of
this is so reminiscent
of the totalitarian regimes that i
studied earlier in my career that it
makes me feel sick and what makes me
really feel sick is that the people
doing this stuff the people who write
the letters of denunciation are
apparently unaware that they're behaving
exactly like people in stalin's soviet
union they don't know that
so they clearly have there's been a
massive educational failure if somebody
can write an anonymous or non-anonymous
letter of denunciation and not feel
shame i mean you should feel morally
completely contaminated as you are doing
that but but people haven't been taught
the realities of totalitarianism for all
these reasons i think you need to try at
least to create a new institution
where those pathologies will be
structurally excluded
so
maybe a difficult question maybe you'll
push back on this
but you're widely seen politically as a
conservative
hoover institution is politically
conservative
what is the role of politics at the
university of austin because some of the
ideas people listening to this when they
hear the ideas you're expressing
they may think there's a lien to these
ideas there's a conservative lean to
these ideas is there such a lien
there will certainly be people who say
that because the standard mode of
trying to discredit any new initiative
is to say oh this is a sinister
conservative
plot
but one of our
co-founders heather heing is definitely
not
a conservative
she's as committed to the idea of
academic freedom as i am but i think on
political issues we probably agree on
almost nothing
and at least i i would guess but but
politics max weber made this point a
long time ago
the politics really should stop at the
threshold of the the classroom of the
lecture hall and in my career i've
always tried to make sure that when i'm
teaching
it's not
clear where i stand politically though
of course undergraduates and insatiably
curiously want to know but it shouldn't
be clear from what i say because
indoctrination
on a political basis is an abuse of the
power of the professor as weber rightly
said
so i think one of the key principles of
of the university of austin will be that
barbarian principle that politics is not
an appropriate uh
subject for the lecture hall for the
classroom
and we should pursue truth
and enshrine
liberty of thought
if that's a political issue then i can't
help you i mean if you're against
freedom of thought then we don't really
have much of a discussion to have
and clearly there are some people who
politically seem quite hostile to it but
my sense is that there are plenty of
people on the left in academia i think
of that interesting partnership between
cornell west and robbie george
which has been institutionalized in the
academic freedom alliance it's
bipartisan this issue it really really
is after all
50 years ago it was the left that was in
favor of free speech
the right still has an anti-free speech
element to it look how quickly they're
out to ban critical race theory critical
race theory won't be banned at the
university of texas wokism won't be
banned everything will be up for
discussion but the rules of engagement
will be clear chicago principles those
will be enforced
and
if you have to give a lecture on well
let's just take a recent example uh the
dorian abbott case if you're giving a
lecture
on
astrophysics
but it turns out that in some different
venue you express skepticism about a
formative action well it doesn't matter
it's irrelevant we want to know what
your thoughts are on astrophysics
because that's what you're supposed to
be doing a lecture on that used to be
understood i mean at the oxford of the
1980s there were communists and there
were ultratories at cambridge there were
people who were so reactionary that they
celebrated franco's birthday but they
were also out and out communists down
the road at king's college
the understanding was that that kind of
intellectual diversity was part and
parcel of university life and frankly
for undergraduate it was great fun to
cross the road and go from you know
outright conservatism ultra tourism to
communism one learns a lot that way
but the issue is
when you're promoting or hiring or
tenuring people
their politics is not relevant it really
isn't
and when it started to become relevant
and i remember this coming up at the
harvard history department late in my
time there
felt deeply deeply uneasy that we were
having conversations
that amounted to
well we can't heart x person despite
their obvious
academic qualifications because
of some political
issue
that that's not what should happen at a
healthy university
some practical questions
will university of austin be a physical
in person university or virtual
university what are some uh
in that aspect where the classroom is
it will be a real space institution
there may be an online
dimension to it because there clearly
are a lot of things that you can do
uh
via the internet but the core activity
of of teaching and learning i think
requires real space and i've thought
about this a long time debated
sebastian throne about this many many
years ago when he was a complete
believer in let's call it the
metaversity to go with the metaverse i
mean the metaversity was going to happen
wasn't it but i never really believed in
the metaversity i didn't do moocs
because i just didn't think you'd a be
able to retain the attention b be able
to cope with the scale scaled grading
that was involved i think there's a
reason universities have been around and
that they're formed for about a
millennium you kind of need to all be in
the same place so i think answer to that
question definitely a campus in the
austin area that's where we'll start
and if we can
allow some of our content to be
available online great we'll certainly
do that
another question is what kind of courses
and programming will it offer is that
something you can speak to what's your
vision here
we think that we need to begin
more like a startup than
like a full service university from day
one so our vision is that we start with
a summer school
which will offer provocatively the
forbidden courses
we we want i think to begin by giving
a platform
to the professors who've been most
subject to council culture and also to
give an opportunity to students who want
to hear them to come so we'll start with
the summer school that will be
somewhat in the tradition of uh of those
institutions in the interwar period that
were havens for refugees so we're we are
dealing here with the internal refugees
of of the work era
we'll start there uh it'll be an
opportunity to test out some
uh some content see what uh students
will come uh
and spend time in austin to hear so
that's part a that's the sort of uh
if if you like the launch product and
then we go straight to a masters
program i don't think you can go to
undergraduate education right away
because the established brands in
undergraduate education are offering
something it's impossible to compete
with initially because they have
the brand harvard yale stanford and they
offer also this peer network
which is part of the reason people want
so badly to go to those places not
really the professors it's the
classmates so we don't want to compete
there initially where there is i think
room for new entrants is in
a masters program
and the first one will be
in entrepreneurship and leadership
because i think there's a huge hunger
amongst people who want to get into
particularly the technology world to
learn about those things and they know
they're not really going to learn about
them at business schools the people who
are not going to teach them leadership
and entrepreneurship are professors
so we want to create something that will
be a little like the very successful
schwarzman program in china which was
come and spend a year in china and find
out about china
we'll be doing the same essentially
saying come and spend a year and find
out about technology and there'll be a
mix of academic content we want people
to understand some of the first
principles of what they're studying
there are first principles of
entrepreneurship and leadership but we
also want them to spend time with people
like one of our co-founders joe lonsdale
who's been a hugely
successful venture capitalist and and
learned directly from people like him so
that's the kind of initial offering i
think there are other masters programs
that we will look to roll out quite
quickly i have a particular passion for
a masters in applied history or politics
and applied history i'm a historian
driven crazy by the tendency of academic
historians to drift away from what
seemed to me the important questions and
certainly to drift away from addressing
policy relevant questions so i would
love to be involved in
in in a masters in applied history
and we'll we'll build some programs like
that
before we get to the full
liberal arts
uh experience that we envisage for an
undergraduate program
and that undergraduate program is an
exciting one because i think we can be
innovative there too i i would say two
years would be spent doing some very
classical and difficult classical things
those old divides between arts and
sciences but then there would also be in
the second in the second half in the
junior and senior years
something somewhat more of an
apprenticeship where we'll have centers
including a center for uh technology
engineering mathematics
that will be designed to to help people
make that transition from the
theoretical to the the practical
so that's the vision
uh and i think like any
like any early stage
uh idea we'll doubtless tweak it as we
go along we'll find things that work and
things that don't work
but i have a very clear
sense in my own mind of how this
should look five years from now
and i don't know about you i mean i i'm
unusual as an academic because i quite
like starting new institutions and i've
done a bit of it
in my career
you got to kind of know what it should
look like
after the first four or five years to
get out of bed in the morning and put up
with all the kind of
hassles of doing it not not least the
inevitable flack that we we're bound to
take from the educational establishment
and i was graciously invited to be an
advisor to this
university of austin and one
the reason i would
love to help in whatever way i can
is several so one i would love to see
austin the physical location flourish
intellectually and especially
in the space of science and engineering
that's really exciting to me
another
reason is i am still a research
scientist at mit i still love mit
and i see this effort
that you're launching as a as a
beacon that leads the way to the other
elite institutions in the world
i think too many of my colleagues and
especially in robotics
kind of see
don't see robotics as a humanities
problem
but to me
robotics and ai will define much of our
world in the next century and for not to
consider all the deep psychological
sociological
human problems associated with that
to have real open conversations to say
stupid things to challenge the
ideas that
of how
companies are being run for example
that is the safe space it's very
difficult to talk about the difficult
questions about technology when you're
employed by facebook or google and so on
the university is the place to have
those conversations that's right we're
hugely excited that you want to be one
of our advisors we we need a a broad and
an eclectic group of people and i'm
excited by the way that group has
has has developed uh it has some of the
some of my favorite intellectuals are
there uh steve pinker uh for example
uh but but we're also you know making
sure that we have
people with experience in
academic leadership
and so it's a it's a
happy uh coalition of the willing
looking to try to build something new
which as you say will be complementary
to
the existing and established
institutions i think of the academic
world as a as a network i've moved from
some major hubs
in the network uh to others but i've
always felt that we do our best work
not in a silo called oxford but
in a silo that that is really a hub
connected to stanford connected to
harvard connected to mit
one of the reasons i moved to the united
states was that i sensed that there was
more
intellectual action in my original field
of expertise financial history and that
was right it was it was a good move i
think i'd have stagnated if i'd stayed
at oxford
but at the same time i i haven't lost
connection with oxford i recently went
and gave a lecture there
in honour of sir roger scrutin one of
the great conservative philosophers
and the burden of my lecture was
the idea of the anglo-sphere which
appealed a lot to roger will go horribly
wrong if
illiberal ideas that inhibit academic
freedom spread all over the anglo-sphere
and this network gets infected with
these i think deeply uh deeply damaging
notions so
yeah i think we're creating a new node
uh i hope it's a node that makes the
network overall
more resilient
and
right now there's an urgent need for it
i mean there are people
whose academic careers have been
terminated
uh i'll name two who are involved peter
bogosian who was harassed out of
portland state
for the reason that he was one of those
uh
intrepid figures who carried out the
grievance studies
hoaxes exposing the utter charlatan ray
going on in many supposedly academic
journals by getting phony
gender studies articles published was
genius and of course
so put the noses out of joints of the
academic establishment that he began to
be subject to disciplinary actions so
peter is going to be involved and in a
recent uh shocking british case the
philosopher kathleen stock has
essentially been run off the campus of
sussex university in england
uh for trans uh for violating the the
increasingly complex rules about
discussing
transgender issues and
women's rights she will be uh one of our
advisors and i think also one of our
founding fellows actually teaching uh
for us in our in our first uh iteration
so
i think we're creating a node that's
badly needed those people i mean i
remember saying this to
the uh the other founders when we first
began to talk about this idea uh to
barry weiss uh and to panic and losses
pano canelos as well as to heather heing
we need to do this urgently because
there are people whose livelihoods are
in fact being destroyed by these
extraordinarily illiberal campaigns
against them and so there's no time to
hang around and come up with the perfect
design this this is an urgently needed
lifeboat and let's start with that and
then we can build something spectacular
taking advantage of the fact that all of
these people have
well they now have very
real skin in the game they they need to
make this a success and and i'm sure
they will help us make it a success
so you mentioned some interesting names
like heather heing barry weiss and so on
stephen pinker somebody i really admire
he too was under a lot of quite a lot of
fire
uh
many reasons i admire him one because of
his optimism about the future
and two how little of a dam he seems to
give
about the like walking through the fire
there's nobody more zen about walking
through the fire than stephen pinker but
anyway you mentioned a lot of
interesting names jonathan height is
also interesting there
um who is involved with this venture at
this early days
well one of the one of the things that
that i'm excited about is is that we're
getting people from
inside and outside the academic world so
we've got
arthur brooks who for many years ran the
american enterprise very s enterprise
institute very successfully
has a harvard role now teaching
uh and uh and so he's somebody who
brings i think a different perspective
there's obviously a a need to get
uh experienced
uh
academic leaders involved
which is why i was talking to larry
summers about whether he would join our
uh board of advisors uh the chicago
principals
owe a debt uh to the former president
of chicago and he's uh graciously agreed
to be in the board of advisors i could
go on it would become a long and tedious
list but
my goal in in trying to get
this happy band to form has been
to signal that it's a bipartisan
endeavor it is not a conservative
institution that we're trying to build
it's an institution that's committed to
academic freedom and the pursuit of
truth
that will mean it uh when it uh takes uh
robert zimmer's chicago principles and
enshrines them in its its founding
charter and will make those
uh
something other than honored in the
breach which they seem to be at some
institutions
so the idea here is is to grow this
organically
we need
rather like the academic freedom
alliance that robbie george created
earlier this year we need breadth
and we need to show that this is not
some kind of
institutionalization of the intellectual
dark web uh though we welcome founding
members of that
that
nebulous body it's really something
designed for all of academia to provide
a kind of reboot that i i think we all
agree is is needed
is there a george washington type figure
who is is there a president elected yet
or is is who's going to lead this
institution hannah canelos the former
president of st john's is the president
of university of austin and so he is our
george washington
i don't know who alexander hamilton is
i'll lead you to guess
it's funny you mentioned idw
intellectual dark web have you uh
talked to your friend sam harris about
but any others he um
he is another person i really admire and
i've talked to online and offline
quite a bit for
not belonging to any tribe
he
stands boldly on his convictions
when he knows they're not going to be
popular
with like he based
he basically gets canceled by every
group he sort of he doesn't shy away
from controversy
and not for the sake of controversy
itself he is
one of the best examples to me of a
person who thinks freely
i disagree with him on a few quite a few
things but i deeply admire that he is he
he is what it looks like to think freely
by himself it feels to me like he
represents a lot of the ideals of this
kind of effort yes he would be a natural
fit sam if you're listening i hope
you're in
uh i think in in the course of his
recent intellectual
quests he did collide with one of our
founders heather hying so we'll have to
model civil disagreements at the
university of austin it's extremely
important that we should all disagree
about many things but do it
amicably
one of the things that has been lost
sight of perhaps it's all the fault of
twitter or maybe it's something more
profound is that it is possible to
disagree in a civil way and
and still be friends i certainly had
friends at oxford who were far to the
left of me politically and they are
still among my best friends so the
university of austin has to be a place
where we can
disagree
uh
we can disagree vehemently but we can
then go and have a beer afterwards
that's that's in my mind a really
important part of university life
learning the difference between the
political and the and the personal so
sam is a i think a a good example as a
you of a certain kind of intellectual
hero
who has
been willing to
go into the
cyber uh sphere the metaverse and carve
out an intellectual
space
the podcast
and
debate everything fearlessly his
uh
essay was really an essay on black lives
matter and the question of police
racism was a masterpiece of 2020
and
and so he i think is a
a model of what
we believe in
but we can't save the world with
podcasts good though
yours is
because there's a kind of
solo element
to this form of public intellectual
activities it's also there in substance
where all our best writers
now seem to be including our founder
barry weiss
the danger with this uh approach is
ultimately
your subscribers are the people who
already agree with you and we are all
therefore in danger of preaching
to the choir
i think what makes an institution like
university of austin so attractive is
that we get everybody together
uh at least part of the year
and we
do that informal interaction at lunch
at dinner
uh that allows
in my experience the best ideas to form
intellectual activity isn't really a
solo voyage historians often make it
seem that way but i've realized over
time that
i do my best work in a collaborative way
and scientists have been better at this
than people in the humanities
but what really matters what what's
magical about a good university is that
interdisciplinary serendipitous
conversation that happens on campus
tom sergeant the great nobel
prize-winning economist and i used to
have these
kind of random conversations in
elevators at nyu or in corridors at
stanford and sometimes they'd be quite
short conversations but in that short
serendipitous exchange
i would have
more intellectual stimulus than in in
many a seminar lasting an hour and a
half so
i think we want to get the sam harris's
and and lex friedman's out of their
darkened rooms
and give them a chance to interact in a
much less structured
way than we've got got used to again
it's that it's that sense that sometimes
you need some free willing unstructured
debate to get the really good ideas i
mean to talk anecdotally for a moment i
look back on my oxford
undergraduate experience and i wrote a
lot of essays and attended a lot of
classes but intellectually the most
important thing i did was to write an
essay on the viennese satirist carl
krause
for
a an undergraduate discussion group
called the cannon club and i probably
put more work into that paper than i put
into anything else except maybe my final
examinations
even although
there was only really one senior member
present the historian jeremy cato i was
really just trying to impress my
contemporaries
and that's the kind of thing
we want
the great intellectuals
the great intellectual leaps forward
occurred
often in somewhat unstructured settings
i'm from scotland you can tell
from my accent a little at least
the enlightenment happened in late 18th
century scotland in a very interesting
interplay between the universities which
were very important glasgow edinburgh st
andrews and
the coffee houses and and pubs of uh the
scottish cities where
a lot of unstructured discussion often
fueled by copious amounts of wine to
place
that's what i've missed over the last
few years let's let's just think about
how hard academic social life has become
that
we've reached the point
that amy chua
becomes the object of a full-blown
investigation and media storm for
inviting to
yale law school students over to her
house
to talk
i mean when i was at oxford it was
regarded as a tremendous honor to be
asked to go to one of our tutors homes
the social life of oxford and cambridge
is one of their great strengths there's
a sort of requirement to
sip unpleasant sherry with the dons and
we've kind of killed all that we've
killed all that in the us because nobody
dares have a social interaction with an
undergraduate or exchange an informal
email in case the whole thing ends up on
the front page of the local or student
newspaper so that that's what we need to
kind of restore the
the social life of academia so there's
magic we didn't really address it sort
of explicitly
but there's magic to the interaction
between students there's magic
in the interaction between
faculty the people that teach and
there's the magic and the interaction
between the students and the faculty and
it's it's an iterative process that
changes everybody involved
so it's like world experts in a
particular discipline are changed
as much as the students as the 20 year
olds with the
with the wild ideas
each are changed and that's the magic of
it that applies in liberal education
that applies in this in the sciences too
that's probably maybe you can speak to
this why so much
scientific innovation has happened in
universities there's something about the
youthful energy
of like young minds
graduate students undergraduate students
that inspire some of the world experts
to do some of the best work of their
lives yeah well the human brain we know
is at its most dynamic uh when people
are pretty young
you know this with your background in
math people don't get better at math
after the age of 30.
and
this is important when you think about
the intergenerational character of
university the older
people the professors have the
experience
but they're fading intellectually from
much earlier than anybody really wants
to admit
and so you get
this intellectual
shot in the arm
from hanging out with people who are
circa 20
don't know shit but the brains are kind
of like cooking yeah
i look back on
the career i've had in teaching which is
over 25 years where cambridge oxford nyu
harvard and uh
i have extremely strong relationships
with with students uh from those
institutions
because
they would
show up whether it was at office hours
or in tutorials
and disagree with me
and for me it's always been about
encouraging
some active intellectual rebellion
telling people i don't want your essay
to echo my views if you can find
something wrong with what i wrote great
or if you can find something i missed
that's new fantastic
so there is definitely as you said a
magic in that interaction across the
generations and
it's extraordinarily difficult i think
for an intellectual to make the same
progress
in a project in isolation
compared with the progress that can be
made in these very very special
communities what does a university do
amongst other things it creates a
somewhat artificial environment
of of abnormal job security that's the
whole idea of giving people tenure
and then a relatively high turnover new
faces each year
and an institutionalization
of
thought experiments and actual
experiments
and then you get everybody living in the
same kind of vicinity so that it can
spill over into 3 a.m conversation well
that that always seems to me to be
a pretty potent combination let's ask
ourselves a counterfactual question next
let's imagine let's imagine that
uh the the world wars happen
but but there are no universities
i mean how does the manhattan project
happen with with no academia to take
just one of many examples in truth how
does britain even stay in the war
without bletchley park without uh be
being able to crack the german
uh cipher the academics
are
unsung partly sung heroes of these
conflicts
the same is true in the soviet union the
soviet union was a terribly evil and
repressive system but it was good at
science and that kept it in the game not
only in in world war ii kept it in the
cold war so
it's clear that universities are
incredibly powerful intellectual force
multipliers and our our history without
them
would look very different sure some
innovations would have happened without
them that's clear the industrial
revolution didn't need universities in
fact they played a very marginal role in
the key technological breakthroughs of
the industrial revolution in its first
phase
but by the second industrial revolution
in the late 19th century
german industry would not have leapt
ahead of british industry if the
universities had not been superior and
it was the fact that the germans
institutionalized scientific research in
the way that they did that really
produced a powerful powerful advantage
uh the problem was that
this is a really interesting point that
friedrich meinecker makes in d deutsche
catestor for the german catastrophe
the german intellectuals became
technocrats homo faber he says they knew
a great deal about their speciality but
they were alienated from broadly
speaking humanism and that is his
explanation one of his explanations for
why this very scientifically advanced
germany goes down the path of hell led
by hitler
so when i come back and ask myself what
is it that we want to do with a new
university
we want to make sure that we we don't
fall into that that german pit where
very high levels of technical and
scientific expertise are decoupled from
the fundamental
foundations of
of a free society
so liberal arts are there i think to
stop the scientists
making fausty impacts and that that's
why it's really important that people
working on ai
read shakespeare
i think you
said the academics are unsung heroes of
the 20th century
i think there's kind of an intellectual
a lazy intellectual
desire to kind of
destroy the academics that the academics
are the source of all problems in the
world
and i personally believe that exactly as
you said we need to recognize that
the university is probably where
the ideas that will protect us from the
catastrophes that are looming
ahead of us
is that's where those ideas are going to
come from people who who work on
economics can argue back and forth about
john main arcanes
but i think it's pretty clear that he
was the most important economist
and certainly the most influential
economist of the 20th century and i
think his ideas are looking
better
today in the wake of the financial
crisis than they have at any time since
the 1970s but imagine
imagine john maynard keynes without
cambridge you can't
because someone like that doesn't
actually
doesn't actually exist
without the incredible hot house
that a place like cambridge wars in
keynes's life he was a product of a kind
of hereditary intellectual elite
it had its vices
but you can't help but admire the sheer
power of the mind i've spent a lot of my
career reading keynes and i i revere
that intellect it's so so powerful
but you can't have people like that if
you're not prepared to have
king's college cambridge
and and it comes with redundancy i think
that's the point there are lots and lots
of things that are very annoying about
academic life
that you just have to
you have to deal with they're they're
made fun of in that recent netflix
series the chair and it is easy to make
fun of academic life uh tom sharpe's
porterhouse blue did it it's it's an
inherently comical
subject
professors at least used to be amusingly
eccentric
but we've sort of killed off that
side of academia by turning it into
an increasingly
doctrinaire place
where eccentricity is not tolerated i'll
give you an illustration of this i had a
call this morning from a british
academic
who said can you can you give me some
advice because they're trying to
decolonize the curriculum
this is coming from the
diversity equity and inclusion officers
and it seems to me that what they're
requiring of us is a fundamental
violation of academic freedom because it
is
determining ex-ante what we should study
and teach
that's what's going on and that's the
thing that we really really have to
resist because that kills the university
that's that's the moment that it stops
being
the magical place of intellectual
creativity
and simply becomes an adjunct of the
ministry of propaganda
i've loved
the time we spent talking about this
because it's such a hopeful message for
the future of the university that
i still share with you
uh
the love of the ideal of the university
so very practical question you mentioned
uh summer
which summer are we talking about so
when uh i know we don't want to put hard
dates
here but what year are we thinking about
when is this thing launching what are
your thoughts on this we are moving as
fast as our resources allow uh the goal
is to offer the first uh of the
forbidden courses uh next summer summer
of 2022 and
we hope to be able to launch an initial
uh
albeit relatively small scale masters
program
in the fall of next year
that's that's as fast as is humanly
possible
uh so yeah we're really we're really
keen to get going and i think the the
approach we're taking is
uh
somewhat imported from silicon valley
think of this as a startup
don't think of this as something that
has to exist as a full service
university on on day one
we don't have the results of that you
need billions and billions of dollars to
build a university sort of as a as a
facsimile of an existing university but
that's not what we want to do i mean
copying copying and pasting harvard or
year or stanford would be a futile thing
to do they would probably you very
quickly end up with the same pathologies
so we do have to come up with a
different design and one way of doing
that is to grow it organically from
something quite small
elon musk
mentioned in his usual humorous way on
twitter
that he wants to launch the texas
institute of technology and science
tits
some people thought this was sexist
because of the acronym tits
so first of all i understand their
viewpoint uh but i also think there
needs to be a place for humor on the
internet
even from ceo so on this podcast i've
gotten a chance to talk to quite a few
ceos
and what i love to see is authenticity
and humor is often a sign of
authenticity the
the quirkiness that you mentioned is
such a beautiful characteristic of
professors and faculty and great
universities
is also beautiful to see as ceos
especially founding ceo so
anyway
the deeper
point he was making is showing an
excitement for the university as a place
for big
ideas in
science technology engineering so to me
if there's some kind of way if there is
a serious thought that he had behind
this tweet
not to analyze elon musk's twitter like
it's shakespeare but if there's a
serious thought
um i would love to see him supporting
the the flourishing of austin as a place
for science technology for these kinds
of intellectual developments that uh
that that we're talking about like make
make a place for free inquiry
civil disagreements
coupled with
great education and conversations about
artificial intelligence about technology
about
engineering so i'm actually gonna uh
i hope there's a serious idea behind
that tweet and i'm gonna i'm gonna chat
with him about it i do too i do too i uh
most of the
uh
biggest uh
storms and teacups of my academic career
have been
caused by bad jokes that i've made
these days if you want to make
bad jokes being a billionaire is a great
idea uh
i'm not here to defend elon's uh
twitter style or sense of humor
he's not gonna be remembered for his
tweets i think uh he's gonna be
remembered for the astonishing
companies that he's built and his his
contributions
in a whole range of of fields
from spacex to tesla
and solar energy and i very much hope
that we can
interest elon in this project we need
not only elon but a whole range of uh
his peers
because
this takes
resources universities are not cheap
things to run especially
if as i hope we can make as much of
uh
the the tuition
uh covered by scholarships and bursaries
we we want to attract the best
intellectual talent
to this institution
the best intellectual talent is somewhat
randomly distributed through society and
some of it is in the bottom quintile of
the income distribution
and that makes it hard to get to elite
education so
this will take resources
the last generation of
super wealthy plutocrats the generation
of the gilded age of the late 19th
century
did a pretty good job of founding
universities
chicago wouldn't exist uh but for the
money of that era
and so my message to not only to elon
but to all of
the peers all of those people who made
their billions uh out of technology over
the last couple of decades is this is
your time i mean and this is your
opportunity to create something new i
can't really understand why
the wealthy of our time are content to
hand their money
i mean think of the vast sums mike
bloomberg recently gave to johns hopkins
to his established institutions
when
on close inspection those institutions
don't seem to spend the money terribly
well
and in fact one of the mysteries of our
time is the lack of due diligence that
hard-nosed billionaires seem to do when
it comes to philanthropy
so
i think there's an opportunity here for
this generation of very talented wealthy
people to to do what their their
counterparts did in the late 90s and
early 20th century and and create some
new institutions
and they don't need to put their names
on the buildings they just need to do
what what the founders of
of chicago university of chicago did
create something new that will that will
endure
yeah uh mit is launching a
college of computing and um
steven schwartzman has
given quite a large sum of money i think
in total a billion dollars
and
as somebody who loves computing and
somebody who loves mit i want some
accountability
uh for mit becoming a better institution
and this is once again why i'm excited
about university of austin because it
serves as a beacon look you can create
something new
and this is what the great institutions
of the future should look like
and steve schwartzman
uh is also uh an innovator the idea of
creating a college on the tsinghua
campus
and creating a kind of rhodes program
for students from the western world to
come study in china was was steve's idea
and and i was somewhat involved did some
visiting
professing there
it taught me that you can create
something new
uh in that area of graduate education
and quite quickly attract really strong
applicants because the people who finish
their four years at harvard or stanford
know
that they don't know a lot
and i
having taught a lot of people
in that
group know how intellectual