The Megyn Kelly Show - Biden's Foreign Policy Failures, Rise of Woke Police, and the Value of Religion, with Niall Ferguson ｜ Ep. 534

00:00:00.480 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.

00:00:11.620 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show and happy Friday.

00:00:16.660 Today we bring you world-renowned historian, Neil Ferguson. I have been so looking forward

00:00:22.220 to talking to Neil. We have had many friends of Neil's on this show. Douglas Murray, Andrew

00:00:27.440 Sullivan, is not only his friend, but God's father, too, so one of his sons. And his wife

00:00:33.900 is a superstar and one of my idols, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the one and only. Now we finally get to talk

00:00:40.900 with Neil himself for the full show. One thing about Neil is his name is spelled in a way that

00:00:46.780 really makes you want to call him Niall. He's Scottish. Anyway, it's Neil. He's the Milbank

00:00:52.260 Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and author of many best-selling

00:00:57.240 books, including 2021's Doom, The Politics of Catastrophe. He has fascinating thoughts on

00:01:03.180 wokeism, religion, Trump, American foreign policy, and much, much more. Neil, great to have you here.

00:01:09.260 Megan, it's a great pleasure.

00:01:11.300 Yes. So I'm going to, it'll be easier for me to call you Neil since I'm looking at you,

00:01:15.040 but whenever I read your stuff, I'm like, Niall. Why? Is that the Scottish way of spelling Neil?

00:01:21.300 Well, it's, it's Gaelic. You'd encounter it in Ireland too, and there are versions of the name

00:01:28.760 even in Iceland. But the funny thing is that the Irish mispronounced the name, Niall. And that's

00:01:35.400 wrong in the same way that it would be wrong to call me Ayaan if my name was Ian. But can you imagine

00:01:41.360 how annoying this is? Imagine if everybody kept calling you Megayne. I mean, I've never called you

00:01:46.000 that, but imagine if somebody were to do that, you'd be kind of annoyed. So all my life I've had

00:01:52.220 to correct people. I'm sure it was character building. Right. You never considered just

00:01:56.940 converting to a more Americanized spelling once you moved here? No, I think it's important to stick

00:02:03.640 to your guns. Megan, I named one of my children, in fact, Andrew Sullivan's godson Lachlan, so that he

00:02:12.600 would have to go through life correcting people. And I think it's already showing signs of having

00:02:17.600 made him as, uh, as obstinate as his father. With my name, it's usually, they think it's

00:02:24.600 Megan or they don't know if it's Megan or Megan. I don't really know the answer either. I always try

00:02:30.320 to fudge the pronunciation of my own name because I don't, I don't know how to say it. It's, it's

00:02:34.160 confusing. I've never heard it pronounced any other way, but, but Megan, but that's because

00:02:38.780 you're famous. Yeah. Well, not exactly, but my mom gave me a little weird spelling of my own,

00:02:44.820 which is confused people. It's true that there are multiple ways. These are all, these are both

00:02:49.540 Celtic names. There are multiple ways of spelling them because, and I try to remind people of this

00:02:54.520 in the past, nobody knew how to spell. So if your name was Neil, your, your parents were taking a guess

00:03:00.260 when they filled in the birth certificate. So, yeah, I mean, we should be thankful that it's not

00:03:04.480 more complex. My father at one point wanted to call me Icarus. Can you imagine how my life would

00:03:09.340 have been different with that name? He had a healthy sense of humor. Um, and then you married

00:03:15.460 the beautiful Ayaan, which is really, I mean, not to define you by your wife, but you know,

00:03:19.940 my admiration for your wonderful spouse. And that's also difficult to pronounce. Ayaan Hirsi Ali,

00:03:25.320 people are probably like, what's going on? This is a really difficult family.

00:03:27.720 Well, I certainly heard people mangle Ayaan's name. That's never struck me as particularly

00:03:34.040 difficult to pronounce. I don't mind being defined as a husband of the more famous Ayaan. That's just

00:03:40.980 fine by me. It was Dennis Thatcher's view that Margaret Thatcher was more significant than he

00:03:46.200 was. And he never complained. I feel the same way. Ah, we'll get to her in just a bit because we

00:03:51.780 definitely have to spend some time on, on her and your union and what it's like being married to Ayaan.

00:03:56.480 But we have to start with this because there is news this morning. Joe Biden is running. ABC and

00:04:02.620 others now reporting that not only is he definitely running, but he will announce next week. They

00:04:06.700 believe the announcement will come on Tuesday. And, um, to this, you say what? I know you're not a fan.

00:04:14.800 You've been openly critical. Uh, what do you make of the fact that the 80 year old Joe Biden will run

00:04:21.260 for president for a second term? Well, I think I understand the game plan, uh, that the Democrats

00:04:28.600 have, which is essentially the game plan that they had in 2020. He's the candidate they can come up with

00:04:37.320 who can beat Donald Trump. And so they have decided to, uh, uh, uh, replay, uh, that particular script.

00:04:46.660 And I think it's very, very risky for them. Uh, and I'll tell you why. Uh, first of all, uh, a

00:04:54.260 significant proportion of voters are already aware that president Biden is, shall we say on the old side

00:05:01.320 for the world's most stressful job? Uh, secondly, and more importantly, between now and that day in

00:05:08.700 November of 2024, when the votes get cast, or at least most of them get cast, there's very likely

00:05:15.420 to be a recession. Uh, the probability of, of a recession starting sometime this year is certainly

00:05:22.560 north of 50%. Larry Summers told me the other day, 80%. So between now and the election, there's going

00:05:29.060 to be a recession and it must be said that presidents who go, uh, uh, for reelection with a

00:05:35.480 recession, uh, in the pipeline don't have a great track record. So my sense is that they think they

00:05:41.060 know what they're doing, but they're underestimating, uh, the downside risk because my own view is that

00:05:47.240 at this point, Donald Trump is the favorite to win the Republican nomination and whoever is the

00:05:51.880 Republican candidate is quite likely to win next year if there's a recession. Yeah. If there's a

00:05:57.220 recession, the thing about Trump is as many, as much baggage as he has, that economy under Trump

00:06:03.440 pre COVID is unforgettable. I mean, I, and he'll be there to remind people of it in case it is.

00:06:09.080 Megan, I think people have, uh, not fully grasped, uh, that the consequences of such significant

00:06:17.380 interest rate hikes by the fed in response to the huge inflation mistake that the Biden administration

00:06:22.720 made in 2021 have yet to feed fully through, particularly if the labor market, which is still,

00:06:29.200 still pretty hot, but there's a kind of chain reaction that happens when the central bank

00:06:34.600 tightens interest rates. Uh, and it takes a little while to, to hit the ordinary, uh, household, but I

00:06:41.680 think, uh, hit it, uh, it will. And, and when that happens, people are going to start looking back,

00:06:48.200 uh, on the Trump economy. Uh, they're no longer going to have such, uh, a sense that he mishandled

00:06:54.900 the pandemic because after all, more people died in 2021 of COVID than in 2020. And I think if

00:07:01.040 president Trump places cards, right, emphasizes that they had full employment under Donald Trump,

00:07:06.420 but pretty much no inflation problem. A lot of people who turned away from him in 2020 are going

00:07:13.340 to be tempted to turn back because the combination of much higher inflation, which we've had followed

00:07:18.760 by a recession is a combination that loses you elections historically. So I think this is

00:07:24.240 the way I'm seeing it right now. A lot can happen. Of course, we're a long way off, uh, from the

00:07:28.560 election. Uh, but the assumption that they've got a winning formula that, that will beat Donald Trump

00:07:33.840 under any circumstances, I don't think that's the correct lesson of 2020. 2020 was a very exceptional

00:07:39.480 year to hold an election. Donald Trump had mishandled the way, uh, he, he dealt with the

00:07:45.120 pandemic. He was in a weak position, uh, that he wouldn't have been in without the pandemic. I think

00:07:49.880 he'd have been reelected. Uh, and now we're all pretty much over the pandemic, apart from a few people

00:07:54.860 still clinging to their masks here in Northern California. And that means that the circumstances

00:07:59.640 in 2024 will be radically different. You seem to be pro-Trump in a lot of your writings. Ayan seems to 0.97

00:08:06.960 be more pro-DeSantis. She wrote a column not long ago saying we got to move past Trump. Is that still

00:08:12.440 where you are? You know, I was never unconditionally pro-Trump, Megan. I, I was ambivalent from the

00:08:20.040 outset. And when I look back on the things that I wrote in, in 2020, uh, I was, uh, undeaded in, in 2016,

00:08:27.280 I was ambivalent, uh, from the get-go. And, and I think there are many things about Governor

00:08:33.780 DeSantis that are appealing, uh, for those of us who found the Trump years exhausting, uh, because

00:08:40.380 of his, uh, chaotic approach, uh, to government. It would be lovely to have those elements of, of

00:08:48.260 Trumpism, the policy elements that worked well, particularly for the economy, but also I would say

00:08:53.160 for foreign policy, but without the chaos, without the sense that every day your hair was in fire from the

00:08:59.140 minute, the alarm clock went off. And I think that that's the dream that DeSantis, uh, is supposed

00:09:04.960 to represent. But at this point, I don't think he's succeeding in conveying that he's Trump with

00:09:09.780 competence. And that is why at this point, the polling is showing, uh, Trump establishing a

00:09:14.900 dominating lead. So I'm, I'm, I'm still ambivalent. I slightly kind of shudder at the thought of a,

00:09:20.740 of a second Trump term, but I think at the moment I shudder more at the thought of another Biden term,

00:09:26.460 because I do think that if one strips away all the fairly positive media coverage that this

00:09:31.720 administration gets, it's done shockingly on both the economy where we've had this inflation mistake,

00:09:38.020 uh, I think mistakes understating it and, and foreign policy where I think things have really

00:09:42.740 been pretty disastrous. Uh, if you asked me, uh, would I, I prefer DeSantis over Trump, uh, then I,

00:09:50.320 I think probably I, I would in common with a lot of, uh, conservative, uh, elites.

00:09:56.460 But that is not the way, where the primary voters are right now. As far as the polling shows,

00:10:01.600 primary voters are leaning ever further in the direction of, of re-nominating Donald Trump.

00:10:06.880 And in the end, it's not, it's not up to people like me, is it?

00:10:10.920 The thing about DeSantis, and I realize he hasn't actually declared yet, but he's, you know, he

00:10:16.000 basically came out this week that the Florida delegation, the congressional delegation delegation

00:10:20.840 is mostly backing Trump, not DeSantis. And DeSantis didn't have the foresight to make sure

00:10:25.780 that was lined up. You know, he should, he should at least have those guys. And it dovetails with

00:10:30.040 something, uh, I heard my friends on national review talking about it this week. And I've heard

00:10:33.920 others talk about it, about whether DeSantis can connect with people in a way that one must in

00:10:40.720 order to advance in presidential politics. And I think some, some friends of mine were at one of

00:10:48.080 these dinners with him, you know, he's not dumb. He's been having these muckety muck dinners with 1.00

00:10:54.020 very wealthy donors and they were at one of them and their comment on DeSantis who they really liked.

00:11:00.500 I mean, they, they like him on paper was that the entire dinner, he did not ask one question of anyone

00:11:08.520 there. It was all about himself. He was happy to talk about himself, but he showed zero interest in

00:11:15.220 the people around the table, which is a cardinal sin in how to run a dinner party, how to be at a

00:11:21.040 dinner party. Nevermind how to run for president. Trump is probably the opposite, right? Even as a

00:11:26.280 reporter, Trump would call me all the time. He'd send me notes all the time in newspaper articles

00:11:30.960 about him. And he wanted to make sure I saw, um, this, I actually think it could matter. I know it

00:11:39.000 sounds like small ball, but I actually think that that difference in dynamic is probably important.

00:11:43.260 Well, Megan, I'm, I'm a historian, not, not a political pundit, but, uh, I, I have observed the

00:11:49.460 same thing, which is that, uh, I I've seen, uh, governor DeSantis give a terrific stump speech.

00:11:56.080 He's really good at that. And he knows how to hit those, uh, talking points, but then sit down

00:12:01.840 at the dinner table in a, in a ballroom and not connect with the people at that table. And,

00:12:07.980 you know, American primaries, especially in the small states that matter early on, you know,

00:12:12.360 New Hampshire, Iowa, that those are, those are places where you need to press the flesh

00:12:17.060 and connect with, uh, ordinary folks. Another Ron, I'm thinking of Ronald Reagan here, uh,

00:12:23.300 of course, one, uh, in, uh, 1980 in the wake of a pretty dismal, uh, Carter presidency, I've

00:12:30.780 often compared the, the Biden administration to the Carter administration. Uh, and I kind of

00:12:36.440 thought for a while that it would end the same way with, uh, a governor named Ron, uh,

00:12:41.680 handily winning, but, but Ronald Reagan had those, uh, interpersonal skills. Uh, he could

00:12:47.980 fake interest, uh, in the people around him. I mean, typically you have to fake it, uh, because

00:12:52.980 if you're president, you meet a lot of people, uh, but Ronald Reagan was an actor, so he could

00:12:56.720 convey interest, uh, in the people around him. And this is the thing that the governor

00:13:00.600 DeSantis does not seem at all good at. And I have to say that that for me gives him a

00:13:05.020 glass jaw in boxing terms. And that's why I've, I've come to be somewhat skeptical that

00:13:10.080 he can, that he can do this unless there can be a reconfiguration of his whole personal

00:13:14.460 style. And as well, as well, I think as the campaign strategy, this thing is going to be

00:13:19.300 like Elon Musk's rocket.

00:13:24.420 Yesterday's rocket, right. Which did not go so well though. It was weird how the internet

00:13:28.320 instantly divided on that. People were like, that's it. It blew up and we're calling it

00:13:32.420 a success. And then other people were like, he tried, he's innovative. The whole point

00:13:36.360 was to learn. I'm like, I don't know what to think or say other than it didn't go up

00:13:41.820 very high.

00:13:43.260 The thing I've learned from studying, uh, exploding rockets, this goes back to the space

00:13:48.760 shuttle Challenger is that it makes a huge difference if it's manned versus unmanned.

00:13:53.260 And I think we'd be dealing with a completely different story here. If that had been a manned,

00:13:58.320 uh, rocket, uh, when, when you think back to the, the, the challenge of disaster that,

00:14:04.080 that dominated the news cycle, uh, uh, in the United States and indeed the world because

00:14:08.860 there were people on board. Uh, so I think he can get away with an experiment failing

00:14:13.000 like this for that reason. And that reason alone, it does make, give you some perspective

00:14:17.540 though, on why he doesn't get too heated about his employee complaints over at Twitter.

00:14:21.380 It's like, I, okay, I'm launching rockets. I have an electric car company and just take

00:14:26.440 a seat. You're, you're the least of my worries. I couldn't really care less about your, your

00:14:30.260 woke objections at Twitter. And that's exactly who we need running Twitter.

00:14:33.640 I call him Napoleon. He's the Napoleonic figure of our times. Uh, he bestrides the spirit of 0.91

00:14:42.500 the age, uh, metaphorically as Napoleon did in, in his day. And it, it means that you can't

00:14:49.420 expect, uh, the kind of normal yardsticks to apply this, uh, heroic quality, uh, to Elon.

00:14:57.100 There's a crazy quality, uh, to him. He can be completely, uh, infantile in his, in his humor,

00:15:03.140 but at the same time be managing, uh, these extraordinary feats of, of engineering ambition.

00:15:09.060 And, and that's, that is what makes him such a unique personality is as an historian. I wonder

00:15:14.420 how this story will end. Is it going to end with the triumph of Elon city on Mars?

00:15:19.400 Mars in future generations, uh, or is, is it going to end with, uh, all the shorts on Tesla

00:15:25.720 finally being, being vindicated as, uh, the Chinese eat Tesla's lunch? I don't know, but 1.00

00:15:31.800 I can't help, but admire his, uh, his courage. He is, uh, fearless, uh, when it comes to business

00:15:38.840 risk. Uh, he, he is a visionary and, you know, those of us who felt that Twitter had become,

00:15:44.800 uh, uh, under previous, uh, management, the exemplar of the surveillance censorship network

00:15:52.480 platform. We cheered, uh, when Elon took over though, I must say, uh, I warned him against

00:15:59.360 doing, doing, I said, you really, you really shouldn't do this. It's, this is a worse idea

00:16:04.060 than if you were buying, uh, an Italian soccer team, uh, or one of those other ways of losing

00:16:08.860 money that, that are out there. But, uh, as usual, he did not take my advice.

00:16:13.680 Well, the nation is grateful. He did not. At least those of us who are in the center on

00:16:17.520 the right are grateful because I think Twitter is a much more delightful place with him in

00:16:21.680 charge. And you can say what's real. You know, lately I've been on a tear about biological

00:16:25.860 sex being real and keeping men out of women's spaces and half the stuff I tweet. You couldn't 0.60

00:16:32.080 have tweeted two years ago, pre Elon. So I'm very grateful. I agree, Megan. I must say as a Twitter

00:16:38.020 user, I haven't noticed some great deterioration. I don't join in these, uh, endless hissy fits about

00:16:45.080 they took my blue tick mark away. All that stuff strikes me as, as nonsense. And, uh, uh, and at

00:16:50.780 this point, the really important thing is that systematic censorship that was going on is no longer

00:16:56.280 happening. I think it'll take a long time to figure out how to make this thing work in the,

00:17:01.540 uh, in the way that I think Elon imagines where you have, uh, real free speech without the thing

00:17:07.520 becoming a kind of hellscape of bots, uh, and, and fake, uh, identities. But, uh, but I think it's

00:17:13.820 moving in a better direction than it was before. Because if you think back to 2020, the really

00:17:19.560 shocking thing was the extent to which the network platforms worked against Donald Trump worked

00:17:26.900 against conservatives, worked against people who were dissidents on the issue of the pandemic,

00:17:32.600 uh, like my colleague here, Jay Bhattacharya. I mean, it really was quite shocking to see

00:17:38.400 a bunch of private companies working some, in some measure with, uh, political operatives,

00:17:46.380 create their own version of the Chinese surveillance state. So anything that breaks that trend up has to

00:17:51.760 be good. Yes. I thought the same thing. I was like, so for a hundred bucks a year, I'm going to support

00:17:56.340 Elon's new Twitter. Oh, that's fine. That's a no brainer. I give that to half the people I subscribe

00:18:01.120 to on Substack just because I want to support their effort. It's not what it actually costs. I just pay

00:18:05.660 more because I want to support the platform or the journalist. Thankfully I'm in a position to do

00:18:10.100 that. So for me, it was like a no brainer. People are absolutely melting down over the stupid

00:18:14.180 eight dollars a month. Like, okay, get over it. Um, yeah, that is, that is again, that's one of 1.00

00:18:19.780 these many non issues that one really should try not to waste time on when we consider all the

00:18:24.520 subscriptions that our lives currently require us to pay. I hate to think how many I'm mindlessly

00:18:31.000 paying without even making much use of them. Uh, the, the Twitter issue is a non issue.

00:18:37.820 I want to spend some time just a minute on foreign policy and DeSantis and Trump, if you don't mind,

00:18:42.280 because I know you've written a lot about, uh, foreign policy in China and the cold word 2.0 that

00:18:48.040 we may be in. And DeSantis, this is one Achilles heel for him potentially, you know, he's a governor.

00:18:55.180 He, yes, he did some spend some time in the house. So he's got some exposure to thinking about foreign

00:18:59.820 policy, but it's not really your thing. It's really a presidential thing and it's not something

00:19:04.080 a governor does. And his first step out of the block on that wasn't great. He called Ukraine a

00:19:09.640 territorial dispute in response to a request from Tucker for a statement on where he stood.

00:19:14.200 And of course that's what kind of Tucker's position. So he kind of gave Tucker, I think,

00:19:18.340 what he thought would go over well with Tucker because most of these GOPers are afraid of Tucker

00:19:23.160 because he has a lot of power on his platform. And, um, then he got hit by the more establishment

00:19:28.820 GOPers who do not see it that way, who see it more as an existential potential crisis. And that if we

00:19:35.400 don't, if, if we let Russia win this, we, the United States will be weakened, uh, and that it 0.72

00:19:41.340 has direct effects and implications on us foreign policy. So then he tried to back off of it. He

00:19:46.760 flailed a bit. Trump's more hardcore territorial, you know, he's, he's a non-interventionalist.

00:19:52.340 He's the opposite of a neocon. So how do you assess those two gentlemen when it comes to foreign

00:19:58.540 policy? I don't know where DeSantis will land. You know, if he were to actually win and be in the

00:20:02.700 governing position, I don't, I'm not sure. He hasn't given us enough info, but how do you see

00:20:06.880 it right now? Well, as a general principle, anybody who's a governor hoping to run for president has to

00:20:14.400 stake out some national security territory and, uh, and has to have credibility on, on the, on the

00:20:20.560 great global issues of the day. And that was what Ronald Reagan did so successfully, uh, in the course

00:20:26.000 of the 1970s, a great part of Reagan's rise to national, uh, fame was based, uh, on his readiness

00:20:34.040 to critique date haunt. Uh, and in many ways, he was the harshest critic of Henry Kissinger at that

00:20:39.160 time. Uh, Ron DeSantis hasn't really done that. Uh, he had opportunities, uh, but until, uh, Tucker

00:20:45.540 Carlson asked him the question and many others, the question about Ukraine, he'd said relatively

00:20:50.680 little now to be fair to governor DeSantis, he, uh, the reply, which I read carefully was not a bad

00:20:57.200 one that the, in, it looked to me like somebody had inserted that, that word territorial, uh,

00:21:04.460 uh, on the basis, perhaps of focus groups. And if you take it out, uh, this, the, the reply is

00:21:09.860 actually not bad, but that was an error of judgment because it made it sound, uh, as if governor

00:21:16.260 DeSantis was really, well, trivializing the nature of, uh, the conflict and particularly

00:21:22.420 misrepresenting Vladimir Putin's objectives, which are clearly stated, namely to eradicate

00:21:28.760 Ukraine as a nation and the Ukrainian people as a people. So that's not territorial. Uh, so I think

00:21:33.820 that was a, that was a mistake. The problem that Ron DeSantis has is that Donald Trump has a much

00:21:40.080 more straightforward story to tell voters about his foreign policy, which is based on a track record.

00:21:48.060 Donald Trump can credibly say that there were no wars started on his watch. He can credibly say,

00:21:55.180 uh, that he made both Russia and China much more nervous, uh, than Joe Biden did. I, I remember,

00:22:03.700 and you may also remember it, uh, Megan Trump on, on a phone call to some golfer,

00:22:09.240 claiming, uh, last year that if he'd still been president, Putin wouldn't have invaded,

00:22:14.800 uh, Ukraine. And for that matter, Xi Jinping wouldn't be threatening Taiwan. And, uh, he,

00:22:20.800 he made the following argument that when he'd been president, he'd said to Putin, don't invade

00:22:26.440 Ukraine or I'll bomb Moscow and all those lovely golden domes will be gone. Now, when I first heard

00:22:32.220 that, I thought that that can't be right. He's making it up. But I asked people who'd been in

00:22:37.040 Donald Trump's administration, is it plausible? He did say that. And they said, Neil, he said that

00:22:41.840 stuff all the time. So one of the things that's really interesting about Trump is that he seems

00:22:47.240 to illustrate Richard Nixon's madman theory, which was that if the other guys think you're a bit crazy,

00:22:53.180 they'll be deterred. They won't take risk just in case you do something crazy. This was of course,

00:22:58.920 the opposite, uh, of Joe Biden's approach was just to say, I'm, I'm really, I may be a little old,

00:23:04.660 but oh gosh, I'm really sane. And the most you have to fear for me is sanctions. That was what

00:23:09.300 the Biden administration said to Putin in 2021. And Putin said, well, I'm not afraid of your

00:23:14.240 sanctions. I'm going to invade. I think Trump can credibly argue that Putin would have been much

00:23:19.360 less ready to take that risk if Trump had still been in the white house. So this is the key. I think

00:23:25.400 Donald Trump has a pretty good foreign policy record to run on. And if he runs on that, I don't,

00:23:31.140 I don't see how Ron DeSantis can land a punch. And if he's up against Biden on that now it's a real

00:23:37.580 ball game because you've got, you know, this has not been Biden's forte at all. And I realized that

00:23:43.840 he just released this report claiming Afghanistan was all Trump's fault. Trump made the commitment

00:23:49.100 to get us out of there. And Trump, he actually said in this report, Trump left no game plan for us to

00:23:54.020 leave. So you just decided to march blindly into doing it, into withdrawing all the troops without

00:23:59.820 getting a game plan. We're supposed to blame that on Trump. That's really actually what happened.

00:24:03.880 So those two battling it out on foreign policy, Trump and Biden could be very interesting to watch.

00:24:09.660 Right. And I think it's clear that although Trump wanted to get out of Afghanistan,

00:24:15.200 he would not have done it in the way that the Biden administration did, which was extraordinarily

00:24:21.820 in there. I mean, withdrawing the special forces people first, not really telling your allies what

00:24:28.220 you're doing. It was tremendously badly executed. And, you know, if you can talk in private to people

00:24:35.680 in the administration, they'll admit they screwed it up. And that by doing so, they then created a

00:24:41.480 credibility problem for themselves with just about everything else. But, you know, Megan, that's not

00:24:46.780 the biggest mistake of Joe Biden's presidency so far. I don't think it's well enough understood how badly

00:24:54.480 they handled Russia's threats to Ukraine the year before the war. Because I think there were ways of

00:25:02.180 deterring Putin if you'd stepped up the arms deliveries to Ukraine. In fact, they did the

00:25:08.080 opposite. They reduced them. They took the sanctions off the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. And they explicitly said

00:25:15.780 that the only thing that Putin would really have to fear would be more sanctions. Now, sanctions in all

00:25:21.740 the history of sanctions have never deterred anybody from doing anything. They punish people for doing

00:25:27.000 things. But as a deterrent, they don't work. So I think if one asks again the question, how would this

00:25:33.420 have gone if Trump had been reelected? It would not have gone the same way. I think there were ways of

00:25:38.340 deterring Putin. We can see clearly that the Russian army was not ready for an operation where they faced

00:25:46.880 serious resistance from Ukrainians. And so they could have been deterred if it had only been made 1.00

00:25:53.440 explicit that in the event of Russian aggression, there would be full scale military assistance to

00:26:01.420 Ukraine. We never said that. The United States under Joe Biden said, we'll do sanctions. At one point,

00:26:08.120 the president even talked about an incursion into Ukraine as if you could do kind of a little bit

00:26:12.680 more invading. And it's just a minor incursion. That's one thing he said. This was just such

00:26:17.580 terrible communication. And say what you like about Donald Trump. One of the things that did

00:26:22.680 impress me when he was president was his ability to intimidate foreign leaders, whether it was with

00:26:28.660 talk of fire and fury that was, of course, directed at the North Koreans, or in the way that he played

00:26:34.320 Xi Jinping. I spent quite a bit of time in China in the period before the pandemic, was a visiting

00:26:40.120 professor in Tsinghua in Beijing. It never ceased to amaze me how Donald Trump could wrong foot the

00:26:46.760 Chinese leadership. They did not know what to make of him. They went from thinking it was a good thing

00:26:51.620 that he'd won to thinking that it was a terrible thing that he'd won to going back to thinking that

00:26:55.180 it was a good thing. I mean, they really didn't know what to make of him. And if you think about US-China

00:27:00.380 policy, Megan, one of the funny things to reflect on is that if he'd won in 2020, Donald Trump would

00:27:07.840 probably have done a trade deal with China the following year. Donald Trump doesn't care about

00:27:12.940 Taiwan. He made that explicit to John Bolton. You can read it in John Bolton's memoir. We wouldn't be

00:27:18.240 having showdowns over Taiwan if Trump were president, because that was never his focus.

00:27:23.220 So I think that the question that more and more Americans will be asking themselves in the coming

00:27:27.860 months is, you know, was Trump really as bad as they kept telling us? Turns out the collusion with

00:27:34.300 Russia was not, in fact, true. Turns out that there's a kind of sustained campaign against him

00:27:40.300 now through the law courts. I mean, people are going to start asking themselves, was he really as bad as

00:27:45.460 he was painted by liberal media at the time? In terms of outcomes, and this was something I said

00:27:50.700 again and again during Trump's presidency, if you just judged him by the outcomes of policy, not by the

00:27:56.340 tweets, not by the constant news cycle, but just by the outcomes of policy, the Trump administration

00:28:01.260 was really quite a successful administration. And that is the thing that I think more and more voters

00:28:05.860 are going to be remembering. Right. And some and the perception of Trump as erratic, which of course

00:28:11.720 wasn't at least in part real, could have been a boon to us, especially as you point out, when it comes

00:28:17.500 to the perceptions of foreign leaders who didn't know what they were going to get if they made a false

00:28:21.480 move that involved U.S. interests. On the subject of Taiwan, I'm interested in following up on that

00:28:25.900 because I know you believe, as many do, that's coming. That problem is coming at us within the

00:28:31.640 next couple of years. And we need to care somewhat because they make all the semiconductors,

00:28:36.780 which we need and we're trying to catch up. But there's zero chance we're going to catch up anytime

00:28:40.960 soon in making them domestically. So how how how would that play out if you had a President Trump who

00:28:48.080 didn't want to get involved in Taiwan or if you had a President Biden that did? You know what? How's that

00:28:54.520 going to look for the United States over the next couple of years when it comes to our dependence

00:28:57.960 on Taiwan for those semiconductors and on China for trade and a lot of other things?

00:29:04.760 Well, this is a hugely important issue, Megan. In Cold War One, we nearly blew the world up over an

00:29:11.120 island, Cuba, in 1962. And I don't want us to rerun that particular experiment with another island,

00:29:18.560 Taiwan, in Cold War Two, particularly as in many ways that the case is more difficult for the United

00:29:27.060 States. Cuba is really close to the United States. Taiwan is really close to China. And so getting

00:29:33.500 into a fight over Taiwan doesn't strike me as something particularly advantageous for the United

00:29:40.020 States. In fact, one of the things I keep telling congressional leaders is, why are you talking so tough

00:29:45.660 on this issue? Any war over Taiwan would be extraordinarily difficult for the United States

00:29:51.720 because of improvements in China's military capability. They now have missiles that can

00:29:56.420 sink our aircraft carriers, which they sure didn't in the 1990s. And it just would be hard for us to

00:30:02.820 sustain any protracted conventional war. Look at how quickly our stocks of missiles have been depleted

00:30:09.600 by the war in Ukraine. So I don't know why we talk so tough on this issue when there's such

00:30:15.580 risk implicit in it. Now, Taiwan matters economically way more than Cuba did. I mean, Cuba's economy was

00:30:22.140 nothing, a rounding error. Taiwan is the most important center for the production of sophisticated

00:30:28.720 semiconductors in the world because of TSMC, the great semiconductor manufacturer founded by

00:30:34.880 Morris Chang in Taiwan. And so it's really important for the world economy that it not become

00:30:40.420 Ukraine 2.0, another battlefield where TSMC would presumably be reduced quite swiftly to rubble,

00:30:49.860 possibly by us to make sure the Chinese didn't get a hold of it. So the stakes are extraordinarily high.

00:30:55.980 Now, there is, in fact, a quite simple way to avoid a conflict over Taiwan. And that is just to stick

00:31:02.440 to the strategic ambiguity that we have had on this issue since the 1970s. Since the 1970s,

00:31:08.920 going right back to Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon, we basically accepted the Chinese claim

00:31:14.700 that Taiwan is part of China. We don't treat Taiwan as an independent country. We just kind of go along

00:31:20.220 with this claim that there's one China. In practice, Taiwan's an independent country. In practice,

00:31:26.320 it's a democracy. But we kind of just accept the fiction that it's not. And we don't have an

00:31:33.600 unambiguous commitment to defend it in the event of a Chinese invasion. We just say that if the 0.72

00:31:40.560 Chinese try to change the status quo by force, then we reserve the right to take some unspecified 1.00

00:31:46.000 action. That's the strategic ambiguity we've had really since the late 1970s. What has been very

00:31:51.700 strange to me is that over the last three years, Democrats and various foreign policy think tank types

00:31:58.920 like Richard Haas have started to question strategic ambiguity. And they've started to say,

00:32:04.340 we should be unambiguous in our commitment to Taiwan. And we should carry on like it is an 0.93

00:32:10.220 independent country. I think that was the spirit of Nancy Pelosi's visit, that the president himself,

00:32:15.480 Joe Biden has said on more than one occasion, that there's an unambiguous commitment. Now,

00:32:20.240 the simple solution to avoiding the Cuban missile crisis happening over Taiwan is just to go back to

00:32:25.720 strategic ambiguity. And I think many Taiwanese people would welcome that. They're pretty nervous 1.00

00:32:30.020 that we're making these hawkish noises because they're the ones who would have to deal with the

00:32:35.740 sharp end of a war. So I don't think it's too hard to turn this down. You just have to revert to the

00:32:41.580 status quo and stop talking like a war over Taiwan is somehow inevitable, which seems to be the way that

00:32:47.720 some of the more reckless people in Washington are talking today.

00:32:50.640 Is there a lesson that the Biden administration may have learned from the soft talk on Russia and

00:32:56.780 Ukraine here? Do you think they thought that lesson could then be applied to a totally different 0.66

00:33:02.760 country and different set of circumstances and upped the rhetoric over Taiwan because of the failure

00:33:08.440 you just outlined earlier on Ukraine?

00:33:10.580 Well, I do think that some people in the administration regard these things as very much

00:33:15.840 interconnected, that they are, in a sense, backing Ukraine in this war against Russia and backing it

00:33:22.940 with considerable firepower and finance, partly in order to make a point to China, not just to erode

00:33:30.800 Russia's fighting capability, but to signal to Xi Jinping, hey, don't mess with friends of the West.

00:33:38.120 The problem with that theory, which sounds superficially quite cynical, maybe clever,

00:33:43.520 Machiavellian, is that I think China at this point is the net winner of the war in Ukraine. 0.93

00:33:49.840 I mean, it's reduced Russia to subservience on China economically, gives China an option to pose as 0.85

00:33:56.920 even a peacemaker while at the same time giving the Russians economic support. Meanwhile, the Chinese 0.92

00:34:04.000 can sit back and watch America run down its stockpiles of missiles and other weapons on a war over Ukraine,

00:34:11.320 which China doesn't really care about that much. And so I don't think that the administration is nearly

00:34:16.720 as clever as it thinks it is about this. But the thing about deterrence is, Megan, in the end, it's not

00:34:22.640 just about words. Talking tough is not going to deter anybody if you don't have the means to back up your

00:34:30.040 tough talk. It's that whole thing about speaking softly and carrying a big stick, Teddy Roosevelt's

00:34:37.000 famous line. We currently are in danger over Taiwan of speaking loudly and not having much of a stick

00:34:44.400 at all. And I think that's very, very dangerous. Historically, the most dangerous thing to do is to

00:34:50.100 talk tough, say that you'll fight over a territory if you don't have the military wherewithal to back up

00:34:58.620 the talk. And I don't think we currently deter China in military terms from at least imposing a 0.51

00:35:05.820 blockade on Taiwan. I'm not sure the Chinese would risk an amphibious invasion of Taiwan. That would 0.65

00:35:11.320 be very difficult for the People's Liberation Army to pull off because that's kind of the hardest thing

00:35:15.960 in war. But I can easily imagine them putting a blockade around Taiwan and saying to the United 0.53

00:35:21.600 States, what are you going to do about it? And that would pose a really major challenge to any US

00:35:27.220 administration. Because if you run that blockade, if you send aircraft carriers and submarines to try to

00:35:32.680 run that blockade, you are doing what the Soviets did in 1962. In other words, we'd be rerunning the 0.80

00:35:39.720 Cuban Missile Crisis, only we'd be the Soviets. Because remember, it was John F. Kennedy who

00:35:44.340 quarantined, he called it a quarantine, but it was a blockade around Cuba, and defied the Russians to run

00:35:50.460 that blockade. I do not think it's a smart thing to get yourself into the position of Nikita Khrushchev

00:35:56.180 in 1962. Because as you know, in the end, Megan, he backed down. And I think a scenario like the one

00:36:02.760 I'm describing over Taiwan might very well lead the US to back down because the alternative would be a 0.99

00:36:09.220 really huge war with China that nobody would know how to stop and how to prevent escalating.

00:36:16.880 And the American people are not ready to see our aircraft carriers go down under Chinese fire in the 0.87

00:36:24.220 sea over there. So there's just no appetite for that after 20 years of, you know, the forever wars

00:36:28.820 here. You mentioned Henry Kissinger in passing. Later, we'll get to the story. I think it was our pal

00:36:34.820 Douglas Murray, writing up about your wedding to Ayan and how he thought he was in the receiving line

00:36:40.300 to go see you and your beautiful bride and wound up realizing that the very long line he was in with

00:36:45.680 people queuing up to see Kissinger was there, which is very fun. So many great connections. And for a good

00:36:53.380 reason, because both you and Ayan are fascinating people. We're going to have more with Neil coming

00:36:57.280 up next. Don't you want to hear his thoughts on everything? He can explain everything in such

00:37:00.180 an easy to understand way. And he knows of what he speaks. More with Neil after this.

00:37:08.980 Neil, I've got to ask you about this in the news today. Speaking of President Biden,

00:37:14.160 he has got this new rule he is proposing now that is going to penalize homeowners who have good credit

00:37:21.040 rates. He wants them to pay more on their mortgages than those who have bad credit. And even

00:37:28.880 former President Obama's senior housing official in the Obama administration has come out to say

00:37:34.280 this is not the way his name is David Stevens saying this. This is going to penalize financially

00:37:40.680 stable homebuyers to subsidize those of higher risk. And here's from the Daily Wire. This is how

00:37:46.440 they describe it. Americans purchasing a new home or refinancing their existing mortgage can expect to

00:37:52.060 pay higher mortgage rates and monthly fees starting in May if they have a higher meaning better credit

00:37:58.480 score. Those with lower credit scores and smaller down payments will be provided better rates. Homebuyers

00:38:06.360 with credit scores above 680, for instance, would pay an additional $40 each month on a home loan of

00:38:12.620 $400,000. Homebuyers who make down payments between 15 and 20% will receive the largest fees. They will be

00:38:20.320 assessing you more if you pay 20%, which is a good number to put down. And this guy, Stevens, who worked for

00:38:25.380 Obama, said this is unprecedented. We can do better programs to help more minorities get into

00:38:30.240 homeownership. This is not the way to do it. This what mentality is this reflecting that we're now going to

00:38:38.860 punish people who paid their bills on time so their credit rates are higher.

00:38:45.000 Megan, I haven't seen this proposal, and so I'll watch what I say.

00:38:50.520 But by the way, Neil, that's because no one's covering it. Literally, that's because the mainstream

00:38:54.040 media will not touch this. It's certainly, as you describe it, an extraordinary and terrible idea.

00:39:03.200 I can't believe an idea like that will get past first base. I can almost see Secretary Yellen at the

00:39:11.780 Treasury falling from her desk chair. So I'm assuming this is not intended to become real policy. But I

00:39:22.400 think it's designed so often with the administration as a little bit of virtue signaling. You did use the

00:39:30.260 word minority there. And I infer that part of the goal here is to address perceived iniquities in the

00:39:38.580 housing market. So I'm assuming it's virtue signaling with that in mind. But I find it depressing that an

00:39:47.880 idea like that would even be aired, even as a trial balloon. But it's part of a long list of terrible

00:39:57.480 policy ideas that periodically surface. You'll remember when inflation was first really surprising

00:40:05.020 to the upside. We were told that, in fact, inflation was caused by profiteering businesses,

00:40:12.620 an idea that I thought had surely been killed off long ago by Milton Friedman and his generation of

00:40:20.120 economists. So bad ideas are back in fashion, particularly on these economic questions.

00:40:26.060 And you can only console yourself that they're unlikely to be put into practice and reflect

00:40:32.540 that what they're really about is essentially political signaling of a sort that is in itself

00:40:40.980 depressing, but probably not quite so harmful as the policies would be.

00:40:46.300 It's just it's it's it happens at every turn with this administration. The way this is going down is

00:40:52.200 the current director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency made a shift, lowering the fees being

00:40:58.300 charged to borrowers with low down payments and low credit scores and compensating that loss by raising

00:41:03.740 fees on better credit worthy borrowers who are putting down larger down payments. And there's been

00:41:09.060 a pushback. They delayed it till August under pressure from Fannie Mae and all those other housing

00:41:14.880 lender companies. But now it's in place and they're under pressure to reverse it because

00:41:21.100 it's unfair. But it's it continues a policy of the people who take out college loans who fall behind

00:41:27.460 on payments. Let's reward them by getting rid of the payments. Make the truckers who didn't go to 0.91

00:41:31.940 college and had the foresight to recognize I don't need that degree and I don't want to be saddled with

00:41:37.820 that burden. Make him pay for that. Like, let's look at the the rent abatement procedures that were

00:41:44.320 kept in place long after they were necessary following the covid pandemic, which he was told

00:41:48.940 the Supreme Court was not going to allow. And he did it anyway. He extended it at every turn. It's

00:41:53.600 Neil, you could even take it down to, you know, changing the messaging on obesity to be, oh, it's not

00:42:00.280 your fault. And it's absolutely healthy and beautiful to be 200, 300 pounds overweight. All of it is

00:42:07.200 looking for an excuse for people's life choices that, no, are not serving them well. But that used

00:42:14.200 to be somebody's private business. Now it's up to people who have made better life choices to bail

00:42:19.400 you out of those problems. You know, we're moving away from the age of cost benefit analysis when you

00:42:26.860 assessed a policy with the question, will this be net beneficial to society? And that, of course,

00:42:35.660 included to the economy, we kind of left that behind. And we now can see policies that are designed

00:42:42.740 on the basis of, are we going to hit key voters in our coalition, particularly in the key states that

00:42:52.500 are going to be in play? And this is the basis of which policy now gets designed. And it's extremely

00:42:59.820 harmful in two ways. First of all, we end up with economically suboptimal policies. It's obviously

00:43:05.300 a totally terrible idea to start penalizing people who have good credit scores and awarding

00:43:11.000 those who have bad or penalizing those who haven't got student debt in order to pay off

00:43:16.460 the loans of the beneficiaries with taxpayers' money. These are suboptimal policies. Economically,

00:43:24.880 they will have costs to our economic efficiency. They will create distortions that will ultimately

00:43:30.720 reduce our rate of growth. But the second thing, which I think in some ways is worse,

00:43:35.940 is that these are so politically divisive. These are policies that are designed to ensure that the

00:43:41.520 playing field isn't level. And in particular, to make sure that the particular groups are on the

00:43:50.540 wrong side of the trade nine times out of 10. And you're kind of signaling to middle America,

00:43:56.680 to middle class America, you're kind of signaling that discrimination is okay, as long as it's against

00:44:03.300 you. And that, I think, is deeply toxic politically, quite apart from the economic costs.

00:44:09.920 There's actually now a disincentive to keep your credit score high if you're about to apply

00:44:16.100 for a mortgage. You have an incentive to go blow off your Bloomingdale's bill or your car payment

00:44:22.300 or whatever it is that previously we understood we needed to pay all of our bills on time, especially

00:44:27.360 for applying for a mortgage, so we could get a nice credit card score, credit rating, I should say,

00:44:33.360 and get a very, you know, a correspondingly low mortgage rate. Exactly the opposite now. He's

00:44:39.020 absolutely incentivizing the wrong things and for the wrong reasons. I mean, this is the kind of stuff

00:44:45.160 that really drives me nuts. It's like the left will give him a pass because they'll say, oh, he was

00:44:49.480 trying to help minorities. Why? By encouraging bad, irresponsible behavior by the masses who were 0.99

00:44:54.700 previously behaving well. But Megan, this reminds me of some of what goes on in education, where we're

00:45:02.340 told that actually standardized tests are a bad thing. And we should we should get rid of those,

00:45:09.460 because so it's alleged, they're disadvantageous to minorities. Now, in reality, the creation of

00:45:19.420 standardized tests was a way of boosting social mobility by ensuring that we made decisions like

00:45:26.280 university admissions on the basis of some kind of objective measure of academic performance and

00:45:32.600 potential. And it's highly unlikely, in my view, that getting rid of those tests will benefit anybody in

00:45:38.840 the bottom quintile of the income distribution. I should think that that's almost certainly not

00:45:43.620 going to be the consequence. It's not. Just to add to that, Neil, we just had on Heather

00:45:46.880 McDonald, who I know, you know, she's brilliant. She just wrote a new book. And she had taken a hard

00:45:51.880 look at all of this, the getting rid of the SAT scores and the ACT scores at various colleges. And so

00:45:56.900 far, the colleges are complaining, it's done nothing to increase their diversity, nothing.

00:46:01.840 Well, in fact, it will probably have the perverse opposite consequence, because if you get rid of that

00:46:09.080 measure, what are you going to end up relying on? And I've witnessed experiments of this sort at different

00:46:16.000 universities, there was a time when Oxford got rid of its entrance examination, thinking that it would

00:46:22.020 somehow benefit lower class students. But it didn't at all, because when you get rid of the exam, or you get rid of

00:46:27.660 the standardized tests, you end up relying more on things like essays that can be absolutely fine-tuned

00:46:34.080 by the kids of wealthy families who can afford tuition and all the kind of things that go into

00:46:40.500 college applications. So I'm a meritocrat, Meg, and I passionately believe in meritocracy,

00:46:49.620 in admission and promotion on the basis of academic achievement, hard work plus skill,

00:46:56.540 plus talent. That's how we should organize our society. It doesn't produce a level playing field

00:47:01.420 outcome, but it should start with a level playing field to begin with. So we have equality of

00:47:07.120 opportunity. And what I'm really depressed by is to see the left dismantling the meritocratic system

00:47:14.020 and basically killing off the paths of social mobility that were carefully built up in the 20th

00:47:20.220 century so that people with talent and hard work who happened to be born into the bottom half or the bottom

00:47:28.060 fifth of the income distribution had a shot. And it's one of these things that's quite irritating if you are a

00:47:33.500 conservative. You kind of always get presented as if somehow you are on the side of the rich and privileged

00:47:40.000 against the poor and underprivileged. And the opposite is true. 0.98

00:47:44.040 Let's just spend some time on your background, Neil, because I didn't know a lot of this about

00:47:52.320 you as my team was getting me prepared on the Neil Ferguson life story. I mentioned you're originally

00:47:58.020 from the UK. So tell us about your upbringing. You had two very smart parents from the sound of it.

00:48:03.640 Well, I grew up in Glasgow in Scotland. I was very fortunate in my appearance. My father

00:48:11.060 and mother were the first in their families to go to university. Hence, my earlier remarks before the

00:48:18.460 break about the importance of social mobility through education. My father managed to become a

00:48:24.920 doctor. He was a dedicated internist all through my childhood, tremendously devoted to his work,

00:48:34.140 regarded work as a vocation. And my mother was a physicist, a physics teacher. 0.56

00:48:39.000 My father died a few years ago, but my mum is still alive and living in England. And I owe them

00:48:47.580 everything. Without them and, of course, without my grandparents who produced them, I would be

00:48:53.080 nothing and would have achieved nothing. They gave me their genes, but they also gave me something else,

00:49:00.320 which is the kind of upbringing that I try to give my own children, in which they instilled me with

00:49:07.520 sense of responsibility, of good fortune, and a sense that one should never waste that good fortune.

00:49:15.300 And I try not to waste the good luck I've been given.

00:49:19.700 Now, one thing they did not give you was a belief in any particular religion. And what was your mom's line

00:49:26.900 about how the universe was created or what we're doing here? It was some great line.

00:49:30.220 Well, my mother and father both left the Church of Scotland really on, I think, the principle that

00:49:37.940 Glasgow and much of Scotland was afflicted by sectarian division. This was the great curse of 1.00

00:49:44.120 the part of the world where I grew up. Catholics and Protestants not only hating and despising one 0.68

00:49:51.440 another, but in Northern Ireland, of course, engaging in violence. And I think that was a big part of the

00:49:55.180 reason that my parents stopped going to church. But my mother was also a kind of committed atheist. 1.00

00:50:01.780 She loved to tell me and my sister that life was a cosmic accident and that in that sense,

00:50:09.080 one shouldn't expect the world or indeed the cosmos to revolve around us. It was all a kind of

00:50:15.460 combination of Newtonian physics and Darwinian evolution. And that was how I was raised. We didn't

00:50:23.720 go to church. Although there was a chapel, there was a religious element to my education. I always

00:50:30.680 felt somewhat detached from it. And as I said, in a sectarian society like Glasgow's, there was a 0.96

00:50:38.900 Catholic football team, Celtic and Protestant football team, Rangers. But I found the atheist 1.00

00:50:44.440 football team, Partick Thistle. And the joke always was that if you do believe in God, when you start

00:50:49.840 supporting Partick Thistle, you'll soon stop. So that was my background. 0.86

00:50:54.460 You know, it's funny, it's all coming together for me. In New York, there's this thing called the

00:50:59.420 Kelly Gang. And it's a bunch of media personalities and some other well-known Kellys. And we raise money

00:51:06.840 for charity. And we get together on St. Patrick's Day every year. And I remember saying to Ray Kelly,

00:51:12.900 who was the police commissioner for a while, and Greg Kelly's dad, I said, what's the story?

00:51:17.860 How does one get into the Kelly Gang? What am I doing here? And he said, well, there are three

00:51:22.040 rules. He said, you got to have some juice. You got to, oh God, what was the second thing? Got to

00:51:30.420 have some juice. Got to something that said there was second, it'll come to me. And he said, and the

00:51:34.260 third thing is, you can't have that second E to your point about, because those of us without the

00:51:41.220 second E are Catholics. Yeah. You know, that kind of thing mattered a lot where I grew up. And I still 1.00

00:51:46.760 always marvel at the great self-confidence of the Irish Americans and vaguely grind my teeth at the 0.99

00:51:55.980 thought of the way that back in the day, they tend to sympathize with the provisional IRA who were

00:52:02.520 conducting terrorist operations in Northern Ireland and the UK. So that background kind of creates a

00:52:09.120 certain weariness about religion because it got so associated with politics and indeed at times with

00:52:17.600 violence and certainly was associated with prejudice. So I completely get why my parents took that

00:52:22.900 approach. I found that when I left Scotland and studied history, I became less and less convinced

00:52:30.560 of atheism as a way of life or indeed as a way to organize a society. And so these days you'll find

00:52:37.700 me a regular attender at church. So I love this. I love this. Because you believe in observance,

00:52:44.780 if not true belief. So tell us how, like, why, what are you doing with your children and how did you get

00:52:50.500 to that place? Well, I think, and I felt, I have five children. I felt this, uh, in, in, uh, for all of

00:52:56.580 them that one should at least educate, uh, children about, uh, religion. And as we are, uh, a society that

00:53:05.360 came out of, uh, of Christianity, it's extremely important that you'd understand what that is. Uh, so

00:53:12.300 there's, there's that part, but there's also a sense in which a life without spirituality, uh, is at some

00:53:19.320 level, uh, a life with a missing piece. I think that GK Chesterton, uh, said something very true.

00:53:27.520 He didn't quite say this, but that's usually how it's quoted. Uh, you know, the trouble with, with

00:53:31.440 atheism is, is not that men believe in nothing. It's that they'll believe in anything. Uh, and so if

00:53:36.960 you, if you kind of opt out of religion, it's quite possible that something else might be crazy

00:53:41.560 conspiracy theories will fill it, or it might be, uh, a secular religion like Marxism. So I've kind of

00:53:48.000 come to the view that even if I don't have a strong spiritual impulse and struggle a bit to,

00:53:53.200 uh, to have belief in, in God, I do think it's important to have a part of your life, uh, that

00:54:01.260 is devoted to spiritual reflection. I think going to church is good for you. It is good to think about,

00:54:07.640 uh, Christ's teaching. It's good to be part of that tradition. Apart from anything else,

00:54:13.680 Christ has some very radical things to teach us about how to be good, how to treat our fellow,

00:54:18.340 uh, human beings. And I think that's something I want my children to know. We're definitely not

00:54:23.300 naturally good. I mean, I don't think that we, uh, have evolved to be, uh, ethical. I think that's

00:54:29.920 something that society has to drum into people somehow. And over time, I've, I've come to feel

00:54:35.600 that this is a really important part of our lives. Now, this of course raises the, the thorny

00:54:40.420 question of how does a yarn feel? Because of course, my wife is a Muslim brotherhood. 1.00

00:54:46.060 She, she went through a period in her life when she was not only a devout Muslim, but had been

00:54:51.120 radicalized by the Muslim brotherhood. She too, uh, became an atheist, but by a very different route 0.61

00:54:56.800 from me. Um, and we find ourselves, uh, a most unusual, uh, family. Both these, uh, uh, atheists 0.99

00:55:05.440 have arrived at a consensus that we should go to church on Sunday. And, uh, and we took a while to

00:55:11.740 find the right church. Uh, Northern California has strangely politicized kind of, uh, uh, religion. I,

00:55:19.000 I, I, I got very turned off by church services, which included a mandatory anti-Trump sermon, but

00:55:25.380 there's a wonderfully, uh, traditional Anglican church that we now attend, which, uh, uses, uh, the,

00:55:33.380 the traditional, uh, order of service and, uh, avoids altogether politics, uh, in the sermons.

00:55:40.440 And this is, uh, this is a source of, of considerable satisfaction to me. And I think it's

00:55:45.520 good for us as a family, good for the kids and they can make up their own minds as they grow up,

00:55:49.860 what they, they want to do. But my eldest son was recently married, uh, in London last December.

00:55:55.820 I saw some pictures of that. Yeah. Ayan sent me a couple of those pictures. You had your

00:55:58.780 traditional Scottish dress on. I had my kilt on as did nearly all the Ferguson boys. Uh, 0.97

00:56:05.980 the bridegroom himself opted not to because he was marrying an English, uh, girl. And I think felt it

00:56:12.080 might be just a little bit too much of, uh, of, of a good thing if we all were decked out like Sean

00:56:18.140 Connery in our, in our kilts. But this was a religious, uh, service, uh, in an Anglican chapel

00:56:24.920 and a beautiful thing. And the great thing about Anglicanism is the aesthetics are so good. I mean,

00:56:29.160 you may not have very uplifting, uh, spiritual impulses, but you can enjoy the music if nothing

00:56:35.000 else. And that, that, that's itself meaningful. I think that's so great because you're a historian

00:56:39.560 and, uh, and just reading up on your, what you've said about this in the past, you recognize,

00:56:44.360 you know, atheist societies don't tend to end very well. It's not a very good blueprint for society in 1.00

00:56:50.440 which you'd want to live. And so there was as much as anything, an intellectual decision to try to

00:56:55.160 raise children who were not atheists, who had a commitment to a faith unlike yourself.

00:57:00.200 Correct. And, and it, it's not just that they end badly, they, they start badly. I mean,

00:57:04.280 the great experiments with that non-Christian, uh, systems, the French revolution did it. Uh, 1.00

00:57:10.680 so did the Russian revolution. Uh, so, uh, in its way did the Chinese revolution. I mean,

00:57:15.640 these very quickly became terribly bloodthirsty regimes. Uh, I remember reading Richard Pipes's

00:57:23.240 great history of the Bolshevik revolution when I was an undergraduate and being appalled at the

00:57:27.640 descriptions of the violence, the Bolsheviks directed against the clergy, uh, against, uh,

00:57:34.040 all religious institutions, the destruction that occurred at that time of, uh, of churches in,

00:57:39.400 in Russia. So, uh, it came, it came to me, uh, that atheism wasn't just this kind of

00:57:44.760 individual choice, uh, not to believe, but it could in fact be the operating system, uh,

00:57:50.600 for a totalitarian regimes and what they do. And this is the really interesting point is they,

00:57:55.560 they try to create their own religion, uh, an ideological, a political ideology,

00:57:59.560 which then replaces Christianity. And I'll add one final point, Megan. It's worth remembering that 0.77

00:58:05.240 the people who resisted Nazism most tenaciously in Germany were nearly all religious. And, and that has

00:58:14.440 to tell us something very important about the power of religion as a kind of vaccine and inoculation

00:58:19.880 against evil. And I think it is that. Hmm. The, um, the union between you and Ayaan,

00:58:27.560 which led to two of those five children you have, uh, was a second marriage. And as I understand it,

00:58:33.800 you met at the time, 100, you were both being inducted as two of the world's most influential

00:58:39.480 people. There was a writeup about it at the time in the daily mail. And I love this quote,

00:58:44.600 a friend of Ms. Hirsi Ali said, I think that's where they met for the first time. In all the years

00:58:50.360 I've known Ayaan, she's never had a boyfriend. She's gorgeous, but with a fatwa, it's tricky to 1.00

00:58:55.320 find guys. Ayaan, we laugh, but Ayaan remains with a fatwa on her, a fatwa on her from the Muslim 1.00

00:59:04.920 brotherhood from which she ultimately fled. She was now, you know, famously or infamously working

00:59:11.480 on this film that got its director, Theo Van Gogh killed shot, um, because it was critical of Islam

00:59:19.000 and, uh, on his chest was pinned a fatwa on Ayaan, a threat on Ayaan's life, a commitment

00:59:26.760 to kill Ayaan. And she has had to live with that every day thereafter. I mean,

00:59:31.640 she's the bravest, most courageous woman I know. And you, you know, I can see the woman's point who

00:59:37.800 gave this quote to, to daily mail. You walk into this, just like this powerhouse of a woman. I mean,

00:59:43.480 I can imagine you're bowled over by meeting the Ayaan Hirsi Ali, but then it's a little

00:59:48.840 complicated. Well, honey, I've got something to tell you. Well, um, remember, don't believe

00:59:56.360 everything you read in the daily mail. Uh, actually we, we, we were on a date when we

01:00:00.760 went to the time 100 dinner. We we'd met already at a much more obscure, but I think a cooler event,

01:00:08.680 which was the, uh, the, the emergency conference of the Mont Pelerin society at the time of the

01:00:15.080 financial crisis, the Mont Pelerin society, famously a gathering of, uh, of mostly Chicago

01:00:21.000 free market economists. And we've both been invited to attend. And indeed I gave a speech

01:00:26.440 about why the financial crisis shouldn't be blamed on free markets. And, uh, and that was when,

01:00:31.240 when I was introduced to Ayaan, I knew, well, it's certainly nerdy, isn't it? Um, and, and, uh,

01:00:39.080 and she wasn't wearing that blue dress either. Uh, but, but I knew of course who she was, uh, 0.99

01:00:45.080 when a lovely Australian man named Greg Lindsay, uh, introduced us, he was the unlikely Cupid.

01:00:51.320 By the way, if you've ever read war and peace, the moment when Pierre sees Natasha, everything stops,

01:00:57.080 uh, that's what the French called a coup de foudre. It happened to me then. So I knew very much, uh,

01:01:04.040 that she was under threat and, and indeed these threats don't have expiry dates. Uh, uh, there's no

01:01:10.200 statute of limitations and we have to accept that there are people, uh, out there, uh, who, uh,

01:01:16.520 would regard killing my wife as she's an apostate and somebody who's been highly critical of Islam

01:01:22.280 and particularly political Islam, they would regard it as a, uh, a holy act. I mean, we have to live

01:01:27.000 with that. Uh, the fact that Salman Rushdie was attacked last year, uh, when he clearly felt it kind

01:01:34.280 of was over, came as a huge blow, I think, to Ayaan, uh, who was deeply upset by the attack on Salman,

01:01:41.800 whom we know. I suppose I think about it this way. First of all, terrorism is designed to inspire fear

01:01:51.960 and is its purpose. Um, and I grew up, uh, in a culture, uh, which is highly resistant, uh, to

01:02:00.280 accepting fear. Uh, my grandfathers fought in the world wars, the Scots pride themselves in their

01:02:06.520 fearlessness. And I, uh, have never been afraid of these people because I despise them. I have

01:02:13.000 utter contempt for them and I don't fear them. Uh, and indeed I'd already made the choice to move

01:02:17.960 to the United States just after 9-11, uh, because actually 9-11 prevented me from giving a lecture

01:02:25.400 at New York university. Uh, it was supposed to happen the next day. I never flew. And it was

01:02:31.160 shortly after that, that I decided to leave Oxford, take a job at New York university.

01:02:35.560 So before I met Ayaan, I think I'd already made, made it clear, uh, that I was going to march towards

01:02:40.920 rather than away from the gunfire. My grandfathers had to fight, uh, at great cost, uh, to themselves.

01:02:47.960 Uh, they didn't, uh, pay the ultimate price, but my grandfather was very badly, uh, injured in

01:02:54.280 world war one. And my mother's father suffered, uh, significant health, uh, damage in world war

01:02:59.800 two fighting the Japanese. I haven't been asked to do anything as difficult as that.

01:03:03.880 My war is a small war. Uh, it takes place, uh, uh, here. And I just have to keep my wife 0.96

01:03:09.480 safe, uh, uh, and happy, uh, and make sure that she lives a long life. Cause that will be the ultimate 0.99

01:03:15.640 victory over all those cowards who threatened her over the years. That's my war. And it's a much easier 0.96

01:03:21.400 one than my granddad had to fight. Oh my goodness. And, but like those wars,

01:03:25.400 well worth the fight, you know, that's probably on some level, what attracted her to you, you know,

01:03:30.840 that, that Scottish background, that fighter background, and the feeling that this person

01:03:34.920 will help protect me. I'm sure as strong and brave as Ayaan is, there's gotta be a fear factor for,

01:03:40.840 even for her, knowing that these very effective killers are out there thinking about her wanting to

01:03:47.480 target her. Look, I think my wife's extremely, uh, brave and good at putting up a brave face, 0.94

01:03:55.880 but I would not be, uh, doing justice to this interview if I made it sound as if it was all

01:04:03.240 okay because the mental, uh, stress of being threatened, uh, has taken a heavy toll, uh,

01:04:10.680 a very heavy toll on my wife's wellbeing, happiness. Uh, it's been a, a struggle much harder than I had

01:04:18.600 foreseen. I, I thought the challenge would be just making sure that the bad guys, uh, couldn't get

01:04:24.600 close, but the real challenge when you're facing terrorist threats like this is actually making sure

01:04:30.200 that, that your, uh, your spouse's mental health, uh, is okay. Cause that, that's really what the

01:04:36.440 terrorists are trying to do. It's not just about threats and objective security. The thing that

01:04:42.200 really turns out to matter in life is, is the subjective security. And that, that terrorism

01:04:47.320 is designed to erode. And it's, it's been a much bigger challenge than I, I foresaw one,

01:04:52.920 one that we are overcoming, but not one that we should understate.

01:04:57.320 When she came out with her book, uh, she came to Fox news and I gave, I interviewed her. I think

01:05:03.240 I was her first interview on that. And it was shocking to me, the amount of security back then,

01:05:09.000 this would have been 2013, 2014. I can't remember the year that she had to travel with. I mean it,

01:05:14.920 and even, you know, I've visited her privately since then, and it's still like, she still has 0.90

01:05:19.000 to live like this because of these lunatics who are so delusioned by poor religion and what they 0.91

01:05:25.720 think it requires of them because she's been critical of Islam. I mean, a religion, you know, 0.98

01:05:29.720 in whose name she had to undergo mutilation of her genitals. I mean, it can cause some bitterness.

01:05:36.360 It can cause you to abandon the religion, not to mention all the other things that she's written

01:05:40.120 about and talked about so many times that have happened to her. It's just deeply wrong. And

01:05:44.120 most of us would be in a puddle crying for, for most of our lives are retreating into very

01:05:49.960 private lives where people couldn't find us. The mere fact that she's chosen to live a public life,

01:05:54.840 that you live a public life. You, the two of you, you've had kids. That's another factor. You got

01:05:58.920 to layer into the worries does speak to, you know, both of your courage, Scottish, whatever the

01:06:04.120 background. Well, it's still, I mean, it still beats being in Eastern Ukraine. I mean, it still beats

01:06:13.080 what so many people around the world have to contend with. And, uh, from that point of view, I, I,

01:06:18.600 I have no, I have no complaints. And, and as long as my wife is, uh, healthy and, uh, and, and safe and,

01:06:26.600 and happy, and the same applies to our kids, then, then I'm winning, I'm winning the war. Uh, but I think

01:06:33.320 the important thing, uh, that that's worth sharing is just the kind of, uh, damage that, that is done,

01:06:41.240 which is generally speaking, not seen. I think people who, who aren't directly affected by this

01:06:47.960 kind of threat underestimate the psychological consequences of it. Cause they kind of assume

01:06:55.160 that, oh, you get used to security and you get used to, uh, you know, coming in through the back

01:07:00.600 way rather than the front way. When you give a speech, you get used to all of that. And I think

01:07:04.600 you do get used to all of that. In fact, to a certain degree, it becomes slightly second nature,

01:07:08.680 but, but you don't get used to the psychological, uh, effects of the threat. And that's the thing

01:07:15.320 that I've come to learn. And it's, it's made me much more appreciative, Megan of, of mental health,

01:07:21.320 about which I thought very little again, not the not so sunny side of, of a Scottish upbringing is

01:07:27.320 the mentality that you, you never admit to weakness. You never admit to depression. You never admit to

01:07:31.640 any mental health problem. And if there's a problem, you kind of work your way out of it. And I think

01:07:35.960 that attitude isn't really the right one. I've become much more aware of, of, of mental ill health

01:07:42.840 as a problem throughout our nation and indeed throughout the world. And I'm, I'm much more

01:07:47.720 understanding than, than I used to be when, as a young man, I dismissed all that kind of thing as,

01:07:53.240 you know, just a sign of weakness. I'm, I'm, I'm a, I'm a wiser person. Thanks to Ayan.

01:07:57.800 Hmm. The, um, I'll tell you one funny story. So you talk about this sort of that, those Scottish 1.00

01:08:04.120 roots and my husband's both Dutch and Scottish, Scottish on his mother's side. And, um, they went

01:08:09.320 back to Scotland in the not too distant past, maybe five, six years ago with the family and they found

01:08:14.440 their clan and they found their motto, their, the family motto. And it translated, it was be fearless,

01:08:22.440 but cautious. Yeah. I think we didn't get the but cautious part at the, in the Ferguson clan. Uh,

01:08:30.840 but yeah, that sort of, uh, spirit does still animate me. It's been 40 years since I've lived in

01:08:37.080 Scotland. I left when I was 17 to go to college, but it's still kind of there, uh, as a, as an operating

01:08:43.960 system. And when I, when I read Scottish literature, I spent the pandemic reading all the novels of Walter

01:08:49.480 Scott. I realized that that's really still, uh, that's still home. And that culture is still,

01:08:54.440 uh, what I, I grew out of and the Scottish enlightenment, which after all produced, uh, 0.96

01:09:00.600 some of the greatest ideas human beings have ever had. Think of Adam Smith's contribution,

01:09:05.800 the wealth of nations, the theory of moral sentiments. That's the kind of intellectual

01:09:09.480 legacy that I think of myself as being, uh, uh, uh, responsible for. And if those ideas

01:09:15.880 are not carried on to the next generation, then we lose something incredibly precious that came from my

01:09:22.680 little cold, rainy country in, uh, in the North of Europe.

01:09:27.160 So now, so we have you with this background of fight, say what you mean, stand up for your

01:09:32.520 principles. We have Ayan who found a way to say exactly what she felt, notwithstanding the enormous

01:09:38.840 threat to her personal safety in doing so on the most controversial issues you could ever speak of.

01:09:43.240 And she was doing it at a time when, you know, this is post nine 11, when, you know,

01:09:47.320 that was a very fraught conversation to be having. Um, and you two wind up who would have predicted

01:09:54.520 in academia, which you probably didn't realize at the time would be the least tolerant place for any

01:10:01.960 of those values. And it's only gotten worse over the past 10, 12 years. And you're both now at the

01:10:08.040 Hoover institution, which is this little oasis within the university system, including at Stanford,

01:10:12.440 which is, you know, we do a story every other day. I'm sure you saw what happened

01:10:15.800 with the judge who went out there, Judge Duncan, but the Hoover institution is different. However,

01:10:20.120 you're still on, you're in academia and you're on a college campus. And so how, how's that going?

01:10:26.520 Well, I think if you told me back in the 1980s, when I was an undergraduate at Oxford,

01:10:31.240 that by the 2020s, there would be less free speech, uh, in American universities than, uh,

01:10:38.760 in American saloon bars, I would have been pretty incredulous because in the early eighties,

01:10:44.120 when I was at Oxford, there was almost no restriction on what we could say.

01:10:47.640 And there was incredible intellectual diversity in the university. You could go from talking to a

01:10:53.640 Marxist professor in the morning to listening to an ultra conservative, uh, in the afternoon,

01:10:58.680 Andrew Sullivan and I were, uh, undergraduates together. We were quite outrageous and highly

01:11:03.080 offensive and said a whole range of things that would get you canceled today in a heartbeat.

01:11:06.920 I, I never foresaw that there would be an atmosphere in universities where students would

01:11:14.200 denounce one another or denounce their professors for something that was said in class. I, I never

01:11:20.280 imagined a university world in which associate deans for diversity, equity, and inclusion would decide

01:11:27.640 what could be said, uh, on university premises. Uh, I find all this completely surreal. In fact,

01:11:34.280 I think it's probably the biggest surprise of my life because back in the eighties,

01:11:38.840 I guess working with historians like the late great Norman Stone, I learned that denouncing,

01:11:44.840 informing, cancellation, all that kind of stuff went on in totalitarian regimes like Stalin's Soviet

01:11:51.400 Union or Mao's China. And that kind of behavior happened because it was a dictator in charge. And that's

01:11:56.520 how people tend to behave in such a regime. The thing that's amazing is to see people behaving that

01:12:02.200 way with no dictator in sight. In fact, they're behaving that way in a completely free society.

01:12:08.760 Uh, and that's shocking to me because I can't imagine anything, frankly, more contemptible

01:12:13.720 than writing a letter, denouncing somebody to sending it to a higher authority, asking for them to be

01:12:20.280 disciplined. But that stuff goes on all the time in American universities. Stanford is not by any means

01:12:26.120 unusual. The same kind of things are going on at all the major universities and the minor ones too.

01:12:31.480 So this is a big surprise to me. I think it's pretty appalling. Uh, in fact, I think it's highly

01:12:37.240 dangerous that there is this, uh, assault on academic freedom and on free speech because our universities,

01:12:43.720 like it or not, produce the, uh, not only the elites, but a really large proportion, uh, of the,

01:12:49.800 the people who run America. And if they leave after four years, uh, at college with a, at least

01:12:57.560 a habit of self-censorship and at worst, a kind of indoctrination, uh, in what we call work ideology,

01:13:05.080 that's terrible for America and terrible for the world. So, uh, the situation is very bad. Uh,

01:13:11.480 I think there are things we are doing that are gradually improving it, creating new institutions,

01:13:17.240 uh, like the university of Austin, making sure that the few existing institutions that are healthy,

01:13:23.160 like the Hoover institution, stay healthy, making sure that we organize so that cancel cultures sort 1.00

01:13:29.240 of doesn't succeed. I was involved in creating the academic freedom Alliance to fight back when

01:13:34.600 individuals are targeted. There's a lot we're doing. Uh, and so in this part of my life has in other

01:13:40.040 parts, I'm trying to fight the good fight because I think it's hugely important.

01:13:43.320 Mm-hmm. They, I think it was, is it Harvard that just came out with a new group, uh, saying that

01:13:49.080 they're going to fight for academic freedom, uh, including, you know, professors ability to say

01:13:53.880 what is factual and not get piled on or canceled because of it. We'll see whether that's a real

01:13:59.400 commitment or not. You know, it used to be that Princeton was the place you'd go if you really

01:14:03.160 wanted that, but they've surrendered to the woke university of Chicago was another place.

01:14:07.160 They've surrendered to the woke one by one. They dropped like dominoes. 0.89

01:14:10.280 I was very glad to see, uh, that my old friends, uh, Steve Pinker and Larry Summers and others were

01:14:17.160 creating that new organization at Harvard. It's long overdue because, uh, actually Harvard's

01:14:24.200 track record on disciplining, uh, faculty and other university members for speech quote unquote

01:14:30.440 offenses is pretty bad. Uh, so this is good. I mean, these, these are good signs, Megan, that we're,

01:14:36.120 we're getting organized and we're trying to contest, uh, and fight back against these

01:14:41.720 really deplorable trends. But I, I, I really want to stress there's a long way to go. Uh,

01:14:47.080 and, uh, the, the kind of events that you're, you're covering and others are covering and

01:14:52.120 organizations like fire are monitoring. These events are happening a lot. I sometimes I'm told,

01:14:58.040 oh, there's a pendulum that will swing back to the center. And I, I don't see that pendulum. I,

01:15:03.800 I actually think that the pendulum, if there is one has been swinging to the left with every decade

01:15:09.480 since I was an undergraduate and there's no sign of it moving the other direction, quite,

01:15:14.600 quite the opposite. The tendency is for people to hire ever more ideologically to discriminate ever

01:15:20.920 more, uh, explicitly on, on political grounds. So we've a lot of work to do to create the kind

01:15:27.960 of university that I would want, uh, our young sons to go to. Thomas is 11, Campbell is five,

01:15:34.760 and we've got, uh, just about time to make sure that there's, there's a higher education worth

01:15:41.560 they're doing by the time they get to be 18. So explain University of Austin to me. I'm,

01:15:47.480 I'm confused by it. I love everybody associated with it, but I don't understand what it is or how

01:15:52.040 it works. It's not an online university. So what is it? Well, we are building a university that will

01:16:00.040 be located in Austin, Texas, uh, that will be founded on the principles of academic freedom,

01:16:07.800 intellectual freedom, as well as meritocracy. And we will institutionalize those principles so that

01:16:14.360 that they are constitutionally guaranteed by university constitution. Yeah. Creating a

01:16:19.080 university is not easy. It's not like, uh, doing an AI startup, which seems to take about three weeks

01:16:24.840 these days. You have to go through an accreditation process, which, uh, is quite laborious and time

01:16:30.360 consuming, but we will admit our first, uh, class, uh, all going well, uh, in the fall of 2024. That's

01:16:38.360 next year. We've moved it by academic standards, uh, lightning speed. Uh, we've raised $150 million,

01:16:45.080 uh, which is chump change by Harvard standards, but, uh, but we're a startup. We don't need to

01:16:51.800 have Harvard's budget. Uh, we just need to build, uh, and, and then scale this institution. And it's

01:16:58.760 extremely exciting. And I think very American to be creating a new institution. Once upon a time,

01:17:04.600 the university of Chicago was us once upon a time, Stanford was us, you know, you, you have to

01:17:09.480 remember that by Oxford standards, both Chicago and Stanford are quite young institutions, not even

01:17:14.840 close to 200 years old. Uh, and so we, we believe that, that America needs a new university and, uh,

01:17:21.640 and it's ultimately going to be good for the existing universities. If there's one that really models

01:17:28.120 academic freedom and really models, uh, a truly meritocratic, uh, culture, uh, in which, uh, in

01:17:36.200 which we only discriminate in favor of talent, that's what we're going to do. Uh, and I think if we get it

01:17:40.680 right, we're going to attract the most exciting students in the country, because I can assure you

01:17:47.080 students at the established universities are frustrated, downright depressed in many cases,

01:17:53.800 because academic life, student life is just no fun. It's no fun when the woke police are poised to,

01:18:01.240 to jump on you. If you use the wrong word in the wrong context, uh, building a university,

01:18:06.360 which will be truly intellectually free, uh, will be, will be fun. And I think we will very quickly

01:18:12.440 be a magnet for talent. And the minute we do that, the other universities are going to realize

01:18:17.000 we have to address our own illiberal, no fun culture. And ultimately, I hope 20 years from now,

01:18:24.280 I probably only have 20 years left judging by typical life expectancy for Scotsman. I hope 20 1.00

01:18:30.360 years from now, we've really made a difference. And I believe we will. Well, the other thing is,

01:18:35.320 I think there are a lot of employers who are thirsty for this kind of a product to recruit, uh,

01:18:41.560 graduates from a school like that who haven't been indoctrinated. Anyone who would choose the

01:18:46.440 university of Austin will have a certain set of ideals and principles and ways of approaching

01:18:51.720 thinking and problem solving that I, for one, as an employer would find very attractive. And I know

01:18:57.000 there are many just like me. So that's the other thing. Once people see that the graduates of this

01:19:01.560 university get great jobs, you know, it may not be with Bud Light, but they get great jobs with

01:19:07.880 great corporations that will employ and be loyal to them. That'll change, you know, the equation there

01:19:12.760 too. You are so right, Megan. And we absolutely intend to make sure that the message, uh, gets

01:19:19.000 out. Uh, and also that we make sure that as we devise our undergraduate and master's programs,

01:19:26.520 we devise them so that our people will be like the Navy seals of the mind. And that's an image I,

01:19:33.080 I really like. We, we, we see still elitism in our military, that the desire to be the very,

01:19:39.080 very best is something that motivates the, the seals and the other special forces, uh,

01:19:44.440 folks. But where is that in academia? Uh, well, we want to build it. Uh, and if,

01:19:48.840 if you can produce the Navy seals or the green berets of the brain, then you bet the top employers

01:19:55.480 are going to want to hire our people. And this is something that our wonderful president,

01:19:59.080 Pano Canelos keeps emphasizing. Uh, we've got to make sure that we are designing programs that are

01:20:05.080 fundamentally different in, in their aspiration. We want to produce leaders. We wanted to produce

01:20:11.800 people who dare to think and learn to lead. That's my kind of preferred motto for the University of

01:20:18.120 Austin. And, and so it's actually very invigorating to be involved in, in doing this because we can

01:20:23.720 learn from history. We can learn from what's gone wrong at the established universities and try and

01:20:27.720 come up with something that's fundamentally different. There won't be departments. There won't be a

01:20:33.080 system of tenured faculty who become dominant. There won't be an enormous bureaucracy of, of officers

01:20:38.760 policing, uh, what gets said and done. All of that will be, will be got rid of. It won't exist

01:20:44.760 in those forms at the University of Austin. I love it. Two plus two will remain

01:20:49.320 four. You won't have DEI policing your math, uh, volleyball and what else, whatever else they can dream

01:20:57.080 of. Um, it's exciting. So the first incoming full class begins in 2024, fall of right.

01:21:05.240 That's that's right. And, uh, and we will, I hope scale rapidly. You mentioned the online

01:21:10.120 piece. I think that's important. Um, it's not enough in the 21st century to build, uh, a liberal

01:21:16.280 arts college, uh, in, in Texas and hope to change the world. I think what we'll do once we've attracted,

01:21:22.760 uh, the, the, the elite faculty that I think we are gonna attract is we'll make sure that content,

01:21:28.760 uh, is available, not just to the fortunate few who get admitted, but more widely. Uh,

01:21:34.680 and so I'm, I'm hoping that we can be a new kind of educational institution, one that, that cherishes

01:21:40.040 and preserves the values of the great universities of the past, because I think the great, the greatest

01:21:45.880 teaching experiences do still happen in classrooms, uh, in relatively small groups. We got to preserve all

01:21:51.800 that because it's really powerful, but we've also got to make available content to people around the

01:21:56.600 world who don't have the good fortune to be able to spend four years, uh, in, in a U S university.

01:22:03.320 I, I really feel passionately about my egalitarian mission. My egalitarian mission is to get history,

01:22:10.840 which is my subject out to the greatest number of people possible. And that includes people living

01:22:16.200 in poverty, whether it's in sub-Saharan Africa and Somalia, where my wife was born or in the deprived

01:22:21.320 parts of Scotland. I, I want that kind of historical knowledge to be accessible to everybody because

01:22:26.920 history can help you live your life better. It will help you learn from the mistakes of that vast

01:22:32.520 population who died, who've moved on. The majority of human beings are dead. The majority, uh, have

01:22:37.800 passed on and we have to learn from their experience if we're to make a better job, uh, of the 21st century

01:22:43.800 than we're currently making. So we mentioned Douglas Murray. Um, I don't think my husband Doug would mind.

01:22:49.720 He's going to be interviewing him on his podcast, which is called dedicated with Doug run. It's it's

01:22:53.720 he's an author and he interviews other authors about their writing process, their books and so on.

01:22:58.200 And Doug has been reading, uh, my dog has been reading Douglas Murray's war on the west. And he's

01:23:04.360 of course got so many similar thoughts to your own on how the absurdity of writing off every,

01:23:09.400 every bit of history as, you know, terrible and not worthy of consideration because of colonialism,

01:23:14.440 because white men, because of all the things. And I want to ask you about a similar subject right

01:23:19.880 after this break, colonialism and King Charles's commitment to atoning for it. That's kind of sad.

01:23:27.640 That's kind of sounds like where he's going. I'll, I'll tell you what he said and get your

01:23:31.800 thoughts on it right after this more with Neil Ferguson in two minutes.

01:23:35.720 So Neil King Charles, uh, is about to go through his coronation across the pond. And in his first

01:23:45.800 big speech, um, in front of a foreign leader, which was in November, he signaled that the,

01:23:52.600 his monarchy will tackle the legacy of colonialism. He's made quite a few comments about this,

01:23:58.440 his sadness about the UK's role in the slave trade. He cannot describe the depths of his personal sorrow

01:24:03.240 at the suffering of so many as he continues to deepen his own understanding of slavery's enduring

01:24:07.960 impact, but he seems to be focused on some sort of atonement for the legacy of colonialism. Good

01:24:16.280 idea to make this any sort of a centerpiece of his reign? Well, Charles, uh, King Charles, as I must learn

01:24:25.640 to call him, has, uh, had a bad press on many occasions in, in the past. And, and I often think

01:24:33.320 has been, uh, misunderstood and misrepresented. And it's easy, I think, uh, to infer from this kind

01:24:41.800 of thing, oh no, here comes the woke monarch. Uh, and I don't think that's fair. First of all,

01:24:48.200 I think Britain has been dealing with the complexities of its imperial past for a long time.

01:24:54.520 It's not as if, uh, his mother, uh, disregarded this. In fact, one of the most striking achievements

01:25:00.200 of, uh, Queen Elizabeth II's reign was the way that the legacy of empire metamorphosed into the

01:25:07.880 Commonwealth, uh, an entirely different kind of organization in which the different members,

01:25:12.840 including former colonies, were, were equals. So this is not something that he's starting from scratch.

01:25:18.680 The key in this debate, Megan, is for us not to go down the road of on one side, there being people

01:25:26.520 who say every single thing about empire and particularly the British empire was evil. And

01:25:31.800 on the other side, people saying every single thing about it was great. 20 years ago, I wrote a book

01:25:36.120 called empire, how Britain made the modern world. And in that book, I pointed out that the Britain was

01:25:41.400 responsible both for some dreadful evils, uh, uh, the transatlantic slave trade to which Britain made

01:25:49.560 a major contribution, but also the United States of America. I mean, let's face it,

01:25:54.680 the United States of America starts out as a bunch of rebellious colonies. Uh, and most of the

01:26:00.040 institutions that, that get put together to produce the United States have a pretty visible British 0.68

01:26:06.280 imprint, uh, not to mention the language we're speaking. So you can't say it's all bad and you

01:26:11.720 can't say it's all good. You've got to recognize that as with all historical phenomena, the British 1.00

01:26:16.840 empire was a tremendously complex thing. It was responsible for great misdeeds, but then so were

01:26:23.640 all empires. I mean, give me an empire that didn't have some version, uh, of slavery. I'd be very

01:26:28.840 interested to hear about it. Uh, and one can't ignore the fact that unlike many empires,

01:26:33.720 and I mentioned one earlier, uh, Hitler's empire, the British empire did a lot of good. I mean, 0.92

01:26:38.360 I don't think of any good that Germany's empire did in the 1940s, but, but over the 200 plus years

01:26:43.960 of its existence, uh, there were some undoubted, uh, benefits to British empire. You can't say that

01:26:49.640 in certain circles these days because you have to maintain the fiction that it was all bad, but I'm

01:26:54.840 a historian and I'm here to tell you that history isn't all bad and it isn't all good. Sorry. It's

01:26:59.720 complicated. It's complicated. You know, I, for one was a little concerned when they fired that

01:27:04.920 lady, Susan Hussey so quickly when she had that exchange with, um, a black activist who was 1.00

01:27:11.320 there visiting and she, the lady kept asking her, where are you actually from? But the woman was in 0.79

01:27:16.760 African garb and she had an African name and she was lady. Susan Hussey was confused that she might 1.00

01:27:24.200 not actually be from great Britain. Anyway, they fired her pretty quickly. And I just wonder whether,

01:27:28.360 you know, you don't think we're in for a woke monarch. Well, I think that kind of performative

01:27:35.480 protest, uh, which always reminds me of footballers who dive in the penalty area, clutching their face,

01:27:42.600 uh, is going to be, uh, a pretty recurrent feature of, of British and American life for years to come. There

01:27:49.720 are people who are on the lookout for reasons to be offended. And, uh, it's, it's hard to deal with

01:27:55.640 those people, especially if you're a traditional institution with centuries of history. Uh, I think

01:28:01.000 the challenge, uh, for, for the monarchy is the same challenge it had when I was born gulp nearly 60

01:28:08.200 years ago. And that is, how do you justify an institution based on the hereditary principle,

01:28:14.920 uh, in the age of, of democracy and, and in the age of, of, of technology? And the extraordinary

01:28:22.040 thing about the British monarchy is how well that's gone so far. I mean, there was a time when

01:28:27.160 you think back to, I don't know, late 18th century, when the revolutions were happening,

01:28:30.840 not only here, but also in France, where it didn't seem like monarchy had a great future ahead of it.

01:28:35.640 But what I think, uh, King Charles will have learned from his mother is that there are in fact,

01:28:41.480 great virtues to having a non-elected head of state who personifies tradition. And this is the same

01:28:48.760 thing that I was saying to you earlier about religion. Uh, you know, at some level, the United

01:28:54.600 States feels a lot more divided politically and in other ways than Britain today. Wokeism has made

01:29:01.240 far greater inroads here than in the UK. And it's partly because there's so many parts of British

01:29:06.920 life that are kind of off limits. They're not really supposed to be political. Uh, and so the church,

01:29:12.520 the crown, these things, as my old friend, Roger Scruton used to say, are other things that,

01:29:18.120 that we as conservatives should really want to conserve because they're the things that preserve

01:29:23.000 part of our lives from the scourge of democratic politics. So as a historian and a conservative

01:29:29.480 looking around at America, seeing wokeism take over, seeing the loss of biology and reality, math

01:29:37.160 realities, seeing just this incredibly divisive anti-free speech rhetoric pop up in every one of our

01:29:44.200 massive institutions. Are we, are we looking at the end of days here for this great Republic?

01:29:51.000 Uh, where, where do we go from here? If based on what you've seen historically?

01:29:55.000 Well, my last book, doom, the politics of catastrophe takes this question on. Uh, I love

01:30:02.520 that, that feature of American life that we're always predicting American decline, uh, and we're always

01:30:07.960 predicting either the next civil war or the overthrow of the constitution. I think it keeps us, uh, on our

01:30:15.160 toes to worry about that stuff. And I, I'd be kind of concerned if Americans didn't occasionally ask

01:30:20.840 themselves, are we about to blow it? Now I tend to regard most of the, the kind of exaggerated prophecies

01:30:28.440 of doom as being a, uh, not worth the paper they're printed on. I'm, I mean, I, I, I got slightly

01:30:35.320 exhausted by the, the analogies that were constantly made between Donald Trump and Mussolini or even

01:30:41.800 Hitler. And that just seems to me ludicrous. Uh, I think there are two things that are important. 0.77

01:30:47.560 First of all, there's a populist tradition in American politics. Uh, and there's also a kind of nasty

01:30:53.560 tradition in American politics. Dickens was appalled when he came to the United States by how brutally

01:30:59.000 nasty, uh, American politics was. And we mustn't forget that that's kind of part of the way this

01:31:05.320 Republic has tended to roll. Uh, and there's a very 19th century character to a lot of what we see today,

01:31:11.000 including political machines, uh, which have got to be almost Tammany Hall in their efficiency.

01:31:17.640 Uh, the second point I'd make is that we should worry about the durability of Republican

01:31:22.200 institutions. There's a reason Rome turned into an empire. It's the thing that political history

01:31:27.960 and political theory tells us we should worry about, but I don't think we are near the end of

01:31:35.480 the Republic or much less the end of days. Americans have to remember that it was a lot worse in this

01:31:41.880 country. For example, in the late sixties and early seventies, much more division and a good deal more

01:31:47.080 violence, uh, than we see today. So let's keep calm as the British poster says it and carry on.

01:31:54.360 American institutions are extraordinarily well-designed and extraordinarily strong.

01:31:59.320 And the challenges we face like the people's Republic of China under the Chinese communist party,

01:32:04.920 those challenges are not the biggest challenge. The biggest challenge we face is within it. Are we

01:32:10.600 capable of sustaining those principles that have served us so well over two centuries? And as long as we

01:32:16.520 don't throw those out the window in a paroxysm of wokeism, I think the United States will be just fine.

01:32:22.360 As the Scottish might do, we must fight to preserve them. Neil, so great to talk to you.

01:32:29.320 Please send my love to your beautiful wife and thank you so much. Really enjoyed this.

01:32:33.560 My pleasure, Megan. Great to see you.

01:32:36.040 Before we go, I wanted to bring you the latest edition of the MK mailbag. If you would like to

01:32:41.560 email me, you can do so now. Megan, M E G Y N. That's really how you say it. Megan,

01:32:46.760 M E G Y N at Megan Kelly.com. Okay. Go there now. And you can sign up for our American news minute. 0.89

01:32:52.440 If you so desire while you're there, that's my email to you that I send out on Fridays.

01:32:57.000 Okay. Some great ones this week, uh, regarding the kappa kappa gamma sorority,

01:33:01.000 insisting that they admit this trans person who was like the six foot one man who's 250 pounds.

01:33:06.840 I can't, whatever. It's a nightmare. Uh, Claudia in Ohio writes, I was a proud KKG alumna until last

01:33:12.760 fall. Uh, I attended university of Utah in the eighties was pledged chairman and president.

01:33:16.760 I was also an advisor, blah, blah, blah. The national organization is fully responsible for this.

01:33:20.760 And I hope that they pay dearly. I'm considering returning my key and resigning as an alumna. Um,

01:33:25.960 another former KKK KKG or writes in saying this guy doesn't even have a high enough GPA to be a

01:33:31.880 member. Why was he even able to rush with that pathetic score? He has a 1.9. Uh, Candace writes 0.98

01:33:36.840 in, thanks so much for bringing up this case. If those young women choose to move forward with 1.00

01:33:40.360 their suit and let their names be known, they are absolute heroes. I agree on Dylan and Bud White,

01:33:46.760 but like Bud White, but light, somebody writes in Sasha. Thanks for sticking up for real women with 1.00

01:33:52.360 the XX chromosomes. My issues, not even Dylan, but the marketing woman in charge who said she wants 0.72

01:33:57.080 to appeal to women. You pick a man dressed as a woman to do so real women should represent and be 0.92

01:34:02.840 used to be used to appeal to women. Christie writes in, uh, Christie wrote this great email. I think is

01:34:09.160 the one who forwarded us her long email to Anheuser-Busch. Yeah, it was. And Christie,

01:34:12.920 I read the whole thing. You didn't think I was going to read it. I read every word. It was amazing.

01:34:16.280 She said, I never, I've never written to a company or a person for any reason. Uh,

01:34:20.840 I just never really thought it would do much good after everything that's happened. I couldn't sit

01:34:23.880 quietly by any longer. I sent an email to Anheuser-Busch today. I wanted to thank you for helping me to

01:34:28.440 find my voice and speak up and speak out. It was a great letter. Good for you. And then lastly, uh,

01:34:34.760 I love this one. Okay. Meg's going to tell me I screen grabbed it. What? And, uh, the name is

01:34:40.200 perfect. I think it's Michelle, uh, who wrote the center. Was it my Michael, Michael, finally about your

01:34:44.600 swearing? Please do not stop. My life's journey has exposed me to a lot of profanity and a lot

01:34:49.400 of people who use profanity like everything in life. The ability to use profanity effectively

01:34:53.320 has not been distributed fairly over the years. You come to be able to distinguish between people

01:34:57.080 who are simply nasty and those who possess a certain profane elegance. Ms. Kelly, you have a gift.

01:35:03.000 Don't change a thing. God bless you and your staff. Thank you so much for that, Michael. Yes,

01:35:08.520 Michael Andrews. I appreciate that. And I will keep on swearing, sir. Have a great fucking weekend.

01:35:16.120 See you Monday, guys. 0.99

01:35:19.880 Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.

The Megyn Kelly Show - April 21, 2023

Biden's Foreign Policy Failures, Rise of Woke Police, and the Value of Religion, with Niall Ferguson ｜ Ep. 534

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