An Evening with Niall Ferguson

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>> Hello everybody and welcome to an evening with Niall Ferguson. Historian, writer, broadcaster and Harvard professor. Niall is actually the Laurence A. Tisch professor of history at Harvard of course, but he is also now on his way to Stanford as a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. No whether you are from the right, whether you are from the left, or whether that is not a meaningful description of you, Niall Ferguson is out to make you think. Some of you may have read one or more of his 14 books, Empire, Collossus, Civilisation, all books that bring history alive with dramatic relevance. You might even have worked your way through the meticulously researched House of Rothschild volume one and volume two. Well in his spare time, Niall does do documentaries with the sort of award-winning success that leaves some of us who have years in television quite exasperated. His passion for the [inaudible] leaves some of the world's top thinkers, especially those from the left very frustrated. Here's a comment from The Guardian, "In more than a dozen books and countless columns he's to dismantle certain accepted notions of history as well as the very concept of agreeing with Niall Ferguson." But above all, he is a [inaudible] man, educated at Oxford's most magnificent college of [inaudible] and tonight is very special for me because we were actually freshman together. We spent just a year down the corridor from each other at some rather basic [inaudible] digs and we shared the same kettle. My endearing memory of Niall in those days was the tightly pleated college gown that he wore that reflected his [inaudible] scholarly status at Oxford, unlike our rubbish black tea towels, and that also he was usually adorned with some gorgeous creature who reminded me recently of Taylor Swift. Three decades later he [inaudible] for the remarkable Ayaan Hirsi Ali and together they make an impossibly smart and thought-provoking couple. Niall has a sort of big brain to make some sense of the world, the very interesting times we live in 2016 and put it in context. He is here as a guest of the Centre of Independent Studies, and he's managed to fit in an Australian [inaudible] overnight. Niall will talk. We will have a chat, and then we'd like you to be asking the questions. Ladies and gentleman, Niall Ferguson. [ Applause ] >> Thank you very much indeed. It's rather extraordinary to go from those distant days, I wouldn't say exactly how distant in Oxford, to the Sydney Opera House. Perhaps it's appropriate because I decided to become a historian on stage. Admittedly, it was a rather more modest stage than this one. I was playing the caterpillar in a production of Alice in Wonderland that was a musical in the Deans Garden at Christ Church College, and it was one of a series of lousy parts that I'd landed in my Oxford dramatic career, and halfway through the run, sitting on a large painted toadstool smoking a hookah, I decided that I should abandon the theatre and indeed abandon all the other things that I'd and failed to do at Oxford, and go back to the one thing I seemed to be fairly competent at, which was to write history essays. Standing here all those years later, I know it's a little hard for some people to understand because theatre is glamorous. Look at this. And being a historian, let's be absolutely frank is not glamorous at all. It's not coincidental that the most boring teacher in the Harry Potter novels is Dr. Binns, the history teacher. So boring is Mr. Binns that he has died without realising it and continues as a ghost to lecture on the goblin wars. When you think about it, historians do have a slightly morbid [inaudible], don't they, because they are people who broadly speaking prefer to spend their time with the dead rather than with the living and if not with the dead than people who are really very, very old indeed. Now why would you prefer to spend your days turning the pages of the letters and diaries of the dead, of the really, really old. Isn't there something slightly sad about being a historian? Well, I thought what I would do tonight would be to explain why I decided to stop being a caterpillar, or a luff [phonetic], and become a historian, and I'm going to do it with reference to a couple of books. First the extraordinary autobiography of a philosopher of history almost none of you are likely to have heard of, R.G. Collingwood. And Collingwood was the very model of an Oxford don. He was entirely made of tweed, but he wrote a wonderful autobiography, which set out what I discovered when I came across it was my philosophy of history. Let me quote from this wonderful book, published just on the eve of World War II, "We study history in order to see more clearly into the situation in which we are called upon to act. Hence, the plain in which ultimately all problems arise is the plain of real life, that to which they are referred for their solution is history." I realised when I came across Collingwood's autobiography that he was talking my language. He was arguing for what I would call applied history, the study of the past with a view to understanding the present better. In another wonderful passage, Collingwood says that historians are like woodsman who are very familiar with a wooded landscape. Because they've read a lot about the past, they see things, he calls them tigers in the grass, that the unwary traveller may not see. Another exponent of applied history was and is Henry Kissinger whose biography I'm halfway through writing. The first volume was published just last year. And I wanted to begin by sharing the four things that learnt from writing that first volume. There are four insights which seem to me relevant to almost all of us and to illustrate why studying history is a way of understanding the present better. One of the first things that Kissinger pointed out to his contemporaries during the cold war was that nearly all decisions that would have to be taken in the cold war were between evils. And the moral challenge for the statesman was to choose the lesser or the least of evils. There were very few motherhood and apple pie type options likely to present themselves. The second thing that I learnt from writing this book was that any decision that might be taken by a strategist or for that matter a businessman was essential conjectural. It was based on a conjecture about the future. If you thought catastrophe was approaching and you acted to preempt catastrophe, the problem was that if you were successful, there was no real payoff because nobody is really grateful for disasters averted that therefore don't happen. Whereas it's much more tempting to kick the can down the road as we now say and hope that all will be well, hope that something will turn up, and of course sometimes you get lucky. So this problem of conjecture that Kissinger talks about I find extremely insightful. The third thing I learnt about Kissinger, and I'll probably talk about this a bit with [inaudible] in the discussion was that far from being the arts realist that he is often portrayed as being, the Machiavellian or Bismarckian figure, actually Kissinger was an idealist who spent most of his academic career writing critiques of ruthless, cynical Machiavellian types. [Inaudible] Bismarck were not his heros contrary to popular belief, and in fact Kissinger concludes his unpublished biography of Bismarck, which I found in amongst his private papers, that's the unpublished book. He concludes it really by arguing that Bismarck's career illustrates the danger of trying to base a foreign policy, base a strategy, on complete cynicism. But the fourth thing, which is most relevant tonight is Kissinger insight about history. Kissinger says at one point that history is to states what character is to individual human beings. You can't understand your counterparty in any negotiation if you don't understand the history of his or her country. This is a simple insight, you might even think it obvious, but it's become clear to me that the overwhelming majority certainly of American statesman have not approached the world in that spirit. Imagine trying to deal with the Russian President not knowing any Russian history. Imagine a meeting with the Chinese President without any real background knowledge of Chinese history. So history is for me a way of understanding and trying to solve contemporary problems. I've never studied it for its own sake, because I think I was told at Oxford I should. I've always been much closer to Collingwood and Kissinger in thinking about it. So then I decided tonight to do something very ambitious. I thought I'd try and summarise all this I have written about over 25 years in five minutes. Now I want to make it clear that this is not to excuse you from buying all 14 books, but it doesn't really matter if you don't read them, because you'll know what they say when I'm done. So the first point I think is that I believe that the spread of what we used to call Western civilisation. The spread of ideas and institutions from northwestern Europe to most of the rest of the world after around 1500 or maybe 1600 was on balance a good thing. Not an unmitigated good thing. It had many, many costs, but the benefits in my belief outweighed those costs. Now the extraordinary divergence that happened from around 1600 to about the 1970s, between the west and the rest, is one of the most staggering facts of economic history, and explaining it is one of the great challenges that a modern historian has to grapple with. In this weekend's Wall Street Journal, my old friend Deidre McCloskey has a go at explaining it. She and I agree on many things but differ I think on one point. In my view, the success of the west had nothing whatsoever to do with the things that people thought it had to do with a hundred years ago. A hundred years ago it was very common to explain western success in terms of race, but that was all nonsense. And it was nonsense too to try and explain it in terms of religion or culture. That doesn't work either. Nor with all due respect to Jared Diamond [phonetic] and others can we really explain it in terms of geography, otherwise why did it happen after 1600 and not after 600. The geography didn't change. So the argument that I have made in a lot of my recent work, such as the book civilisation, is that the great divergence has to do with ideas and institutions. Not just ideas, which is really what Deidre McCloskey argues, but institutions too, and the two need one another. The idea of competition is something legitimate. The idea of the scientific revolution and the institutions that made it possible. The idea of the rule of law based on private property and the law courts and noncorrupt judges that made that possible. The idea of a scientific approach to medicine and healthcare and the institutions like my father's profession, the doctors who made that possible. The idea of a consumer society. The idea that you should all have multiple cotton garments. And I know you all do. I don't need to look in your wardrobes to know that you have too many clothes actually, and you just keep buying more, don't you, and that's really important, because without that infinitely elastic appetite for clothing there would be no point in having an industrial revolution. And finally the idea of work itself, the work ethic, which Max Weber [phonetic] wrongly thought had something to do with Protestantism. Well he hadn't met my students at Singwa [phonetic] who have a work ethic that would make almost any Protestant I know weak at the knees. So these were what I call the six killer apps of western civilisation, and the point about it was to say that anybody could download these. They were open access software. They were not specific to white males. Anybody could benefit from these ideas and institutions, and most of the world's history is the modern period has been shaped by the downloading of the killer apps by the Chinese, by Indians, by a whole range of different societies that previous lacks these six extraordinary advantageous ideas and institutions. So the British empire was not itself a killer app. It was certainly a killer in some respects, but it wasn't an app in the way I'm using the term, because empire was the least original thing that people from northwestern Europe did. It was what everybody did. Most of history is the history of empire, get over it. And you can't explain the great divergence in terms of empire since everybody imperialism. What do you think the Aztecs were doing? What were the Ming doing? So it can't really be about empire, but what is true is that by creating in the course of the 17th, 18th and 19th Century, the largest empire ever, what the British created unintentionally was a transmission mechanism for their ideas and institutions. And in some places they forcibly imposed those ideas and institutions and in other places they didn't really have to. They just spread there because the empire let it happen. By the middle of the 19th Century, certainly in the second half of it, the British empire was an enormous engine of globalisation, promoting not only free trade but the free mobility of labour and capital on a scale that had never been seen before, and this country is to a very large extent a product of that process. [Inaudible] empire I tried to explain the costs and the benefits of British imperialism. It was published in 2002 or three I think, and it was at that point, of course, that the United States was embarking on an imperial project of its own. What was it about Afghanistan and Mesopotamia that seemed so familiar. But of course these were exactly the places that other empires had gone, not only the British but many before and after them. In Colossus I argued that the problem with American project of empire was that it was unlikely to be as successful as the British because of three deficits. The first was a fundamental manpower deficit. Americans unlike Scotsman do not like going too far away hot, poor, dangerous countries, whereas to us it just seems like an improvement in the weather. [laughter] Americans do not have this [inaudible]. They've already arrived somewhere where they want to be, and the notion of spending more than six months in somewhere like Iraq is really an unpleasant one to them. So it was a fundamental manpower deficit. Americans don't want to live in Iraq. They just don't. Then there was a fiscal deficit. It was already obvious in 2004 that the United States was going to spend much more on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan than anybody realised, and it already was in an unsustainable fiscal position. The third deficit though was the most important one. I was the guy who spotted that the U.S. empire suffered from attention deficit disorder syndrome. It had an attention deficit meaning that after around about at most four years, most people in the electorate would have lost interest in the project of trying to create some kind of stable democratic state in a place like Iraq. So this was really where my thinking was in the mid-Bush years. And it was thinking about the fiscal deficit that led me to start thinking about the financial institutions more broadly that shaped the world because there is a special subset of western institutions that got globalised in the age of empire. Institutions like banks. Institutions like bond markets, stock markets, mortgage markets, insurance products. In the sense of money, I try to show that one of the distinctive features of western globalisation was the spread of a system of financial institutions that was really quite unique, and this had been globalised by the mid-2000's to an unprecedented extent, and then I realised, this was in 2006, oh God, the whole thing is completely unstable and is going to blow up, and it's going to blow up because of something completely absurd, sub-prime mortgages in places like Memphis, Tennessee. You have to picture the scene. I'm in Channel 4's headquarters in London, shiny office, self-confident commissioning editor. I'm trying to sell the idea of a television series about the coming financial crisis, and it's a rather sneering response. Niall, you know, I just don't see why British viewers would be remotely interested in sub-prime mortgages. I said, trust me, trust me, this is going to matter a lot. And sure enough, but the time the [inaudible] was finished and the book was being published, the crisis had begun, which meant that I had to change all the tenses in the introduction and the conclusion. It's very inconvenient to do if you've ever had to change the tenses from the future to the present. Economic shocks on the scale of 2008 happen really quite rarely. There really have only been three depression-like events in the modern era. Everybody knows 1929, but there was also one in 1973, and I've been thinking a lot about that crisis as well as the crisis of the 1930's. The reason I think a lot about this is that after any major financial crisis, history tells us there's trouble. There's usually an enormous macroeconomic shock and unemployment and people lose money and for several years all anybody thinks about is how to cope. But then after a while as things begin to improve, they turn to politics, and they are looking for payback. Economic volatility of the sort that we have seen in what Australians call the GFC [laughter], nobody else calls it that. [laughter] If you say that in New York, they don't know what you're talking about. So events like that in the 1930's had cataclysmic consequences, and in a book called "War of the World" I argued that it was the economic volatility colliding with multi-ethnic societies in conditions of imperial decline that made central and eastern Europe the most explosive part of the world ever in the 1940's. The bloodiest, most destructive violence in human history happened there and then partly because of the economic shock that the depression administered. So obviously we need to understand and think carefully about whether or not the consequences of our financial and economic shock could be comparable. If "War of the World" implied anything, it implied that we should be concerned about the economic and political consequences of a major financial crisis. I'm going to speak for just 15 minutes more, and what I want to do in that time is apply history. I'm going to apply what I've learnt over 25, 35 years of studying the subject to our present situation. First I'm going to tell you a formula. It's not really a formula, it's a kind of recipe, because history is not a science, let's be clear. It's more like a cookbook, but the formula or the recipe is for populism, and I'd like you to follow me. I gather Nigela Lawson [phonetic] spoke here recently and also Jamie Oliver, so this is the moment for the historian to do the celebrity chef routine. So were going to do is we're going to take a little pinch of rising immigration, just add that into the pot, and then we're going to add some widening inequality, and then we're going to get some public perception of corruption, and then we're going to add a big financial crisis, turn the heat up on this, turn it up, get it boiling nicely, and then we'll finish the dish off by adding the demagogue. This is the recipe for populism always. That's how it works. And all over the world right now, we're seeing demagogues pop up in precisely the kind of boiling sauce that I've just concocted. And the one that everybody wants to talk about is Donald Trump. I'm almost a bit embarrassed to talk about him because he was of course, is of course, the son of a Scottish woman, [laughter] and while I like to lay claim to most of the world's great inventions, whiskey, I'm not so keen on golf, but golf, economic liberalism, Donald Trump I'm afraid is at least partly our fault. [laughter] Now you, like me, are succumbing to the temptation not to take Trump seriously. Arianna Huffington famously when Trump announced his intention to run for President said she would cover the Trump campaign in the entertainment section of the Huffington Post. Well I think a lot of people who were paid a lot of money for writing about U.S. Politics should be seeking gainful employment in some other field, maybe fast food, because they were all spectacularly epically wrong. And they are still being wrong. It's still very hard to get people to realise just how likely it is that Donald Trump becomes the next President of the United States. Let me tell you how like it is. The betting prediction markets give him a 28 percent probability right now, sort of one in four type chance. But three national polls appeared on Thursday comparing Trump and Clinton in a general election, and Trump was ahead by three point in one and by five point in another, and only behind in the third of the polls. Ladies and gentleman, there is a 50/50 chance, there's a one in two probability that he will be the next President of the United States. And so it really, really matters to ask the question, is this the 1930's all over again as some good friends of mine sincerely believe, or is this something else? Is that the wrong analogy. The 1930's got overused as an analogy because I sometimes think it's the only history some people know. And if you only know about the 1930's, then everybody looks like Hitler at least if you, you know, blur your eyes a bit. [laughter] I think it's the wrong analogy, and here's why. The economic shock of the 1930's was much worse than ours has been. The unemployment rates were three times as high as the peak unemployment rates in the major economies. And what we're seeing today is populism not fascism. What's the difference? Only a historian can tell you. Just don't bother asking the political scientists. They'll come back with a regression analysis that will be entirely worthless. Fascism is about uniforms, violence, and war. Populism is different. Populism is about restricting immigration, putting on tariffs to limit free trade, attacking banks and limiting free capital movement. It's distinctive in its tone, and its distinctive in its policies, and this is populism, not fascism. It's actually doing a violence to what happened in the 1930's to confuse these two things. I'd like to single out to illustrate the point, the case of Dennis Kierney [phonetic]. Put your hand up if you've heard of Dennis Kierney. Good for you sir. [laughter] Have you thought of applying to Harvard? Dennis Kierney was the Trump of the 1870's. Dennis Kierney led a movement, Californian-based movement to restrict Chinese immigration. The slogan was kick the Chinese out. He was very like Trump in a lot of respects including the fact that he himself was immigrant in origin. He was an Irishman. And the Kierney-ist movement has much more in common with what we see in America today than anything that happened anywhere in the 1930's. The reason I tell you this is that the style of populism should not lead us to underestimate it because Kierney achieved a very substantial part of what he set out to achieve before he vanished into oblivion. In particular, he achieved the 1882 exclusion act, he first of a succession of legislative measures that excluded the Chinese from the United States, ended the Chinese immigration to the United States. Populism is consequential. Those who say, what he says on the campaign trail is one thing, what he'll do in office is another. It's a coming to a delusion. Populists have to deliver to their fickle followers or they're done. That is why the wall along the Mexican border, the ban on Muslim immigration, all of these policy ideas are not simply throw away lines, they are the essence of a true populist project. So two further questions, and then I'm going to wrap up and go into a discussion with you all. Does populism lead to conflict? You see if you draw a slightly straight line from the 1870's and 1880's when populist movements like Kierney's sprang up all over the world, they existed in Europe as well. If you draw a line to 1914, you might be tempted to think populism leads to conflict, oh dear. But actually that would be wrong, because the road to World War I led through progressivism, not populism. A lot had happened in Europe and in the United States by 1914, and the decision makers of 1914 were actually not populists. The populists had really vanished from the scene by then. In Britain, Lloyd George had just passed his people's budget. He was a progressive if there ever was one. In the German Reich, the biggest party in the Reichstag was the social Democratic party, and in the United States, an earnest Princeton constitutional lawyer, Woodrow Wilson, was the man who would ultimately lead the United States to war. The fact of the matter is that it hasn't been populists who have tended to lead anybody to war because populists don't really like going abroad for any purpose at all. [laughter] Their dominant mode is isolationism, not war. It's amazing that Trump has revived the slogan America First. To me that was just a massively staggering moments of cognitive dissonance revealing just how historically ignorant many people are because surely that whole concept was discredited by its use as a slogan by isolationists in the 1930's, isolationists, some of whom were indeed fascist sympathisers. So American First doesn't imply conflict. At least I don't think it does. And now we come to the challenge, the really hard bit of doing applied history. And that is to do historical analysis in real time. We all have to make a judgement, at least those of based in the United States have to make a judgement about what exactly the Trump presidency would imply, if he has that 50/50 chance of winning it, if he's just a coin toss away from the White House. The only way of doing that I think is to analyse a document. Now Donald Trump's foreign policy has been articulated, if articulated is the word, in a variety of speeches, interviews, and in one particular speech in New York a few weeks ago that was designed to be the flagship speech on foreign policy with the finally honed skills of an Oxford-trained medievalist, I am now going to try to understand this document on your behalf. It matters. I think it means America First based on national interests, no more free trade, a revival of cold war bipartisanship. Two, increased military spending, reduce the debt somehow or other, revive manufacturing. Three, press Americas allies in Europe and Asia to contribute more. Four, do a "great deal" with Russia. I must say that great deal has me very worried already. What exactly is Trump going to do a deal with Putin about? So real estate seems like the obvious thing. There goes eastern Ukraine. Can you see Trump Towers Damascus? I think that's where he's going. Build the wall and make Mexico pay. So a kind of stimulus programme for the Mexican economy, and here's where it gets really interesting. China. Second largest economy in the world. The rising power. A place that you and Australia need to watch very closely indeed. Trump proposes to impose across the board tariffs on the Chinese economy, to force the Chinese government to reign in North Korea, and to end its island building or enlarging programme in the South China Sea. So that's interesting because I think it implies a much more confrontational stance towards Beijing than anybody in Beijing currently expects, and I've just spent two weeks there. And the standard Chinese response to Trump is this, oh, American politicians always bash China on the campaign trail and then when they get into the White House, it's fine. And he's a businessman so we can do a great deal with him. This is a mistake. This is a mistake. To imagine that Trump is not going to deliver on these pledges is a fundamental error. It comes with misunderstanding populism. Dennis Kierney didn't just say, I was just kidding about stopping the Chinese coming to California. He went after exclusion until it was legislated. Never underestimate the commitment of populists to their programme. The final and perhaps most puzzling potentially inflammatory part of Trump's foreign policy is that he intends to treat radical Islam as the primary enemy. To end or scrap the Iran deal, to have what he now calls a pause for reassessment of Muslim immigration, and in some unexplained way, to destroy Islamic state. ISIS's days are numbered. Trump wouldn't say why or how because "We have to be unpredictable." [laughter] So what I did there was essentially I tried to be a historian thinking of Trump's foreign policy as if it's 20 years down the line or 30 years down line and I'm sitting there trying to figure out how did we get into that incredible mess in 2017. Why was it that everybody underestimated the man's chance and become the Republican nominee, then then underestimated his chance of becoming the President, and then they underestimated the likelihood that he would actually do the stuff he said he was going to do. And what will the consequences be if something like this happens? We only have history to guide us. And we can't be sure. This is the intellectual challenge that makes applied history so rewarding ultimately. It isn't easy. What is ISIS anyway? A rag taggle of fanatics who could be taken out by special forces in a matter of weeks. I've heard that said. Or are they where the Bolsheviks were exactly a hundred years ago on the brink of becoming an authentic state with vast resources posing a mortal threat to our freedoms and actually gaining sustenance from Donald Trump's crass rhetoric. As I mentioned earlier, history is not a science. Perhaps it is closer to cooking than it is to physics, but it seems to me that applied history is something that we need to do more of, that our leaders need to study more. I'd love to see applied history central to the curriculum of all the major universities in the western world, and I'd like to see historians and history departments studying these issues rather than, I don't know, sex, class, identity and antebellum South Carolina, circa 1853, which doesn't seem to me to be the way ahead for our subject. Let me conclude with a quote from Kissinger. "History is not," Kissinger said in 1967, "a cookbook offering pretested recipes. It teaches by analogy not by maxims. It can illuminate the consequences of actions in comparable situations, yet each generation must discover for itself what situations are in fact comparable." Ladies and gentleman, that is why I study history and why I chose not to spend my career sitting on painted toadstools on stages less grand than this, and I hope tonight at least in some measure I've convinced you that we need to apply history much, much more. Thank you very much. [ Applause ] >> That's brilliant, otherwise we'll get every other word. Niall, that was a tour de force. Thank you very much. Can I start with Kissinger. You've already done something like this in terms of the most impossible task ahead of you, two volumes of the House of Rothschild. How did you come to decide to do Kissinger, volumes one and two? To be honest, [inaudible], I tried to avoid it. Having done one vast archivally based project in the Rothschild history and then a modest biography that was still very document heavy, a biography of Siegmund Warburg, I was very hesitant indeed about writing Kissinger's life, and when he suggested it to me, I said no. I should explain by way of background how this came about. I first met him years and years ago in London, and we had a very interesting conversation about a book I'd written on the first world war, the "Pity of War," and something extraordinary happened, which has always remained with me. In midsentence Kissinger vanished and reappeared on the other side of the room at least 25 feet away beside the super model Elle Macpherson, who had just walked in. And I remember thinking, I could learn something from this man. So we had a correspondence and a conversation, and out of it came the idea that he might commission me to write his biography, and I wasn't the first person he asked. And I may have even have been third, and I said no because I thought, A, it's just going to be a massive amount of work, huge piles of material, and then, then is more than 10 years ago now, and then Christopher Hitchens will write this really searing review of the book, so-- >> Indeed. Well sadly that's not going to happen now. >> It's very sad. I was very fond of Hitch, and I probably would have hated his review, although a little part of me imagines that perhaps just to spite his left-wing friends he might have given it a good review. In any event, I said no, and Kissinger wrote back this very Kissingerian letter, which went like this, I won't do the voice. How very disappointing. Just as I had made up my mind that you were the perfect man to write the book and just as I found 154 boxes of private papers that I had thought had been lost. I don't know if any of you engage in fishing as a pursuit, but a fly landed on the surface of the water, and the fish of Ferguson swam towards it and bit. So I went a couple of days later, and a couple of weeks later, I was sitting, going through these boxes, and the material was just so extraordinary, that I realised I had to, I realised-- >> And you talked to him, presumably you talked to him often? >> Yes, well I interviewed him early on not realising that Henry Kissinger is going to live to be 150. So you'll be there for volume 2. >> Oh, certainly. I expect him to give the memorial address at my funeral. [laughter] >> Niall, a little contrarian, unlike you, Kissinger the idealist. >> Yeah, some people think that subtitle was just designed to infuriate readers of the New York Times and maybe the Sidney Morning Herald, which it was, I have to admit, but it was based on an insight that hit me almost as soon as I began reading these, these early, many unpublished essays and letters and diaries, he wasn't the realist that I had expected. I had actually imagined subtitling the book American Machiavelli. That was my original book proposal subtitle, and within a very short period of time of reading the stuff I realise this is all wrong. The young Kissinger, and this first volume is the first half of his life, the young Kissinger was none of the things that I had been led to expect. He was not influenced by Machiavelli, never referred to-- >> This is perfect territory for Niall Ferguson. >> Well it was, I don't, I suppose I'm attracted to writing history because I always found out very quickly once I get to the document that everything that's been written before is wrong. And that's very exciting, and it's uplifting in a way, because then you realise, ah, there is a point to writing this book. I really have something new to say, and in at least three respects Kissinger turns out to have been an idealist. He was an idealist because he thought appeasement was a realist policy that had gone disastrously wrong. He was an idealist because he immersed himself in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant while he was at Harvard, and he was an idealist because he repeatedly defined the cold war as a battle of ideas. A battle between the idea of freedom and unfreedom defined by the Soviet system. He was not one of those people who thought it was a struggle between economic systems. In fact, he was clearly an antimaterialist in his philosophy, so no it's not just a provocation. I think it's absolutely clear that people have got him wrong. He's highly critical of [inaudible]. He's highly critical of Bismarck, and I see the early Kissinger as truly an idealist. >> All right. Well we'll forward to volume one and then volume two a little later. Let me get back to populism. I loved your recipe by the way. How did the United States end up with two of the most disliked candidates in history. I think that's what Huffington said, wasn't it? >> Yeah. Well I think because the political establishments in both parties completely underestimated the populist backlash. They didn't realise that there would need to be something much, much more compelling in the wake of the financial crisis than Jeb Bush or for that matter Hillary Clinton was offering. And so I think it was mainly a failure of elites, and elites failed to get it because they're so disconnected from ordinary Americans. This is a point my good friend Charles Murray made several years ago in his brilliant book "Coming Apart." American societies come apart so much that people who sit at Harvard or sit in Washington think tanks or who are running the major parties are in Congress, have almost no contact with the regular Joe six pack guy who is the core Trump voter. So they didn't hear it. They weren't in the bar. They weren't having conversation. And, you know, I have a curious advantage over these professional commentators. Because of my wife's courage, her work on the problem of Islamic extremism, she and therefore I also require security. We require protection. And it turned out that the guys providing our security were a better guide to the U.S. election than any of the professional commentators on CNN, way better, and they got early on the significance of Trump. He tells it like it is. I remember that phrase from early on. He's going to shake things up. That's really what it's all about. I think the policy detail, you know, the immigration changes, even the wall, I think that's much less important to the guys who support him than the broad idea that he is not this damned corrupt political establishment that was to blame for the crisis. >> So the last 24, 48 hours he's come out probably predictably with the RA on guns, actually suggesting that the Clinton administration would get rid of the right to bear arms. Now surprisingly perhaps, Hillary Clinton has come back at him. Now normally for populist reasons, the Democrats would run away from trying to position themselves. I'm just wondering whether this is something new. >> The [inaudible] is a bit eccentric because it's one of the odd things that Sanders is actually not left wing about, maybe the only thing he's not left wing about, so it's an opportunity for her to try to rally her left wing support, which is essentially fading away. If it weren't for the super delegates, Sanders would get the nomination. The super delegates are the only thing that's keeping Hillary Clinton in this game. And because the Democratic party is more rigged than the Republican party, the populists can't actually get the nomination, but when you think about it, that's why Trump is such a good shot at this. The latest polls show that Sanders would beat Trump, but they suggest clearly that he has a very much better chance against Hillary because the mood is so hostile to the establishment. And I think that's really the key to understanding this election. >> Let's go to promises and breaking promises because that's something that resonates here in Australia. Now your fellow, Dennis Kierney in 1870's California, a great orator I understand, now he actually said apparently that to shoot encouraged the crowd, to shoot the first man that goes back on you after you have elected him intelligently. >> Yeah. >> Now the breaking of promises and backflips. There's a video going viral at the moment of 13 minutes of Hillary Clinton lying, how significant, how significant and how damaging is that whole idea of breaking promises? >> Well I think it's the key to why we shouldn't underestimate Trump's readiness to do some of this stuff. People close to him have said publically, he will execute. He himself has said that within in the first hundred days the design for the wall will be done. He'll have all the CEOs into the White House, into the Oval Office, to tell them that if they outsource jobs they'll be fined. I mean I think there will be action. The grave mistake is to imagine that he's a sort of American Berlusconi, who's going to win power and then just throw bunga bunga parties. [laughter] Uh uh uh. Uh uh uh. This is not Italy, and this is not Berlusconi. And, you know, Trump, I think in that sense is going to act, and that's why the populism analogy is good. I was teaching for two weeks in Beijing, and I taught the case, the example Kierney and the exclusion acts of 1882, and I could see these young Chinese students were absolutely stunned to realise that a populist had with relatively, completely relative ease had got the U.S. Congress to pass this extraordinary blanket ban on Chinese immigration. So let's not pretend there couldn't be a blanket ban on Muslim immigration. That could-- it's one of the most popular things that Trump has proposed. >> You're warning strongly that Trump will actually deliver on what he promises. >> Yeah. >> And in a way that this will be very bad. >> Yes, that it will be very disruptive, and we can't really with any confidence or any certainty dismiss in the way that I hear him being dismissed, dismissed Trump is somebody who's in the campaign trail making all these noises, but when he's in power will be just-- >> Is it not possible he might be more of a chameleon than that, that he actually might be able to get into power and then convince the electorate that actually no, if the, you know, a pullback of free trade is not actually the way to go, that he will be able to manage them, perhaps like he can do between now and November on women. >> I think the lesson of the Trump experience is clearly that he can believe five contradictory things a day and nobody minds, and this is part of the reality TV, Twitter age that we live in, but I think that his supporters are not stupid people, and they are alert and will be alert to any abandonment of the core anti-globalisation essence of the Trump movement. It is an anti-free migration, anti-free trade, anti-free capital party, and if Trump doesn't deliver on those things, he will be a one-term President. And I always ask my students, what do you think the first question someone asks themselves is on the morning after they're elected President of the United States? And the answer to that question is how do I get reelected for a second term. Every single President asks that question, and he will be no different. >> So where does this leave the elites? Where does this leave the Republican party, and indeed if we look at our own Prime Minister here, the expectations that he would drive a reform agenda, that is not happening. What is it going to take for leaders to get up and lead? >> Well I was attending, along with your husband, the Australian leadership retreat in Hayman Island just before I came here, and I was very mystified by the invitation that I received because I misread it, and at first I thought I was being invited to the Australia leadership retreat. [laughter] I thought that was the essence of Martin Turnbull's campaign. [laughter]. So the problem is, to be serious, that leadership has been wholly absent. In the United States and in many European countries, political establishments are essentially led by subtle moves in response to polling. There hasn't really been any of the kind of leadership we saw in the 1980s when leaders, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, made decisive and difficult choices that ended up having enormously beneficial consequences for their countries and I think also for the world. Today's elites, whether they're on the left or the right, whether they're social Democrats or conservatives or liberals, in Australian terms, need to get to work redefining their agendas and offering the kind of leadership that has been conspicuous by its absence. People have a right to better answers to this very simple question. Why are things worse than they were say 16 years ago. For most Americans, I know for most Australians they're not worse, but for most Americans they are, the median household is significantly worse off. >> And Niall, the issue of inequality, it is such an important issue. That great Ted talk in 2014, the pitchforks are coming, that doesn't seem to have been addressed. The nexus between the political elites and the banks, we've got the, you know, royal commission into banking, a very, very strong idea that's being pushed by the opposition. At the moment it's a very popular idea. How do leaders get over or solve for inequality. >> Well let me answer briefly and then before the pitchforks come out, we should probably take some questions from the floor in the spirit of democracy, I think that the key to redefining the politics of our time in fact lies with the intellectuals. In the 1970s, there was a great rethink on the right. A fundamental rethink that Greg Lindsay, who is here tonight, was a part of in setting up the sense of independent studies, a reassessment of the marked rereading of higher, fundamental revitalisation of what became in the UK conservative politics in the [inaudible] era, but it had its versions all over the western world. And so it began in fact with the intellectuals. Nothing comparable has happened, at least in the U.S., in the last 10 years with the result that the establishment candidates went out on the campaign trail with very, very lame, dusted down versions of earlier policy platforms, tax cuts. In an age when inequality is the issue, and tax cuts have happened, tax cuts cease to be a salient proposition. They only lead to, in the case of the United States, noncredible fiscal programmes. So I think there needs to be a big rethink. Institutions like CIS will undoubtedly be a part of it, but until that happens, establishment politicians will essentially be without the kind of dynamic ideas they need to have to counter the populists. Donald Trump filled a vacuum. There were no credible answers to the question why did we get screwed over the last 16 years, and he provided them. His answers, I think, are wrong. I don't think that you can blame it on immigration. I don't think you can blame it on free trade. I think both those things were in fact very good for the United States, but I think you probably can blame at least some of the problem on a corrupt political elite. And precisely that energy that's being directed against a discredited elite is what could very well put him in the White House. >> All right, we would like as many people as possible to be able to ask questions. Now you'll see microphones numbered. There's two, four at the back, three and one. If any of you have a question would like to make your way towards them, I'll just have one more, if I may, while we're waiting for this, because you called it, and I think here, Niall, for the first time, on inflation, on deflation, sorry, you've future historians will look back on the first quarter of 2016 as the turning point, the end of the hangover. Boy that's a big call. >> Well if everybody believes in secular stagnation, which is now more or less where we are, then it's time for the contrarian, which is what I probably am by nature, to push back, and financial history leads us to expect the hangover to end at some point. I think it's ending around about now. I think that's already obvious in at least some indicators. I think the monetary policy is ultimately having the effects albeit after long lags that it was intended to have at least in the United States, and I think the idea that the world is going to flat line for the foreseeable future, which is the central idea of Larry Summer's Secular Stagnation is not very historically plausible, so yeah, it's a big call, I may turn out to be wrong. If you turn out to be wrong, one thing I have learnt, is don't dig in. Just don't dig in. [laughter] The data will come in over the next few weeks and months, and we'll see whether there was an inflexion point or whether Larry's right and we're in secular stagnation, but trying all these things in real time is part of what applied history should be. We should be looking to challenge anything that becomes conventional wisdom. That's what I was doing. >> Terrific. All right. Mike, number two, sir. >> Thank you. Niall, you made a case that the world should think more about history, and at the same time you talk about populism and these clearly fundamental changes between history of the elites, which really was the case until people were enfranchised and the era of the 140-character thought bubble. If you add to that, the democratisation of economics, with the middle class saving for its own retirement for the first time in the world's history, do we run the risk of relying on the crutch of what's gone before in order to solve the problems that are coming to the future. >> Well let me-- I'm going to give really short answers to try to get to as many people as possible in 12 minutes that remain on the clock. I think the central problem is in fact an old one. It's a problem Edmund Burke identified when he said that the real social contract is between the generations, between the dead, the living, and the unborn. And nearly every country including this one is guilty at this point of a transfer of resources from future generations to the current generation, and in particular it's already going on from young people to the people who are retired, and that imbalance, that generational inequity, is unsustainable, unjustifiable, and would ultimately produce a backlash, a reaction by young people against what seems like a system stacked against them. So one of the central projects in my mind for a new politics in the 21st Century addresses the problem of generational inequity and starts focussing people's minds on posterity instead of now. Instead of me, what about the grandchildren? What is our future of the long run? That is something that in modern democracy has sadly vanished. >> Number four. [ Applause ] >> This is a similar question, so with the rise of globalisation, the increasing free movement of people and of course the rise of China and then with the breakdown of the intergenerational social contract and also national-level social contract, what do you see as being the future of the western welfare state? >> It needs radical reform. And it will vary from country to country, but that reform must be based on creating generational balance. We can't possibly create a system and sustain a system which is this skewed against future generations. It can't be right that we should live off the future, that we should live off the unborn just because the unborn don't get to vote. So my appeal, and I'll simply reiterate this, to politicians is, could you please include those who are disenfranchised by their youth or the fact that they haven't been born in your calculations. Let's make policies for the long run, and that must imply some fundamental reform. Otherwise, it's one of two things. This is a point Larry Koflacov [phonetic] made, my friend at Boston University, years ago, either we are going to saddle future generations with far, far higher tax bills than we paid in our time, or they are simply not going to receive a fraction of the benefits that we received in our time, and it may be some combination of the two, but that's the way it's currently set up in nearly every democracy. And it's odd because previous generations did not make arguments that excluded posterity. My grandfathers thought when they went to fight in the world wars of me. They thought of me even though I didn't exist because they risked their lives fighting for freedom always with an eye on future generations. And for some inexplicable reason, the baby boomers deleted posterity from the speeches, and we need to change that. >> Okay. Number three. [ Applause ] >> Niall, good evening. My name is Cameron. You cast your argument about however we should be aware of Donald Trump, some of which I wouldn't agree with, but how do you suggest history might lead us to remove this blanket of political correctness, which is smothering us? [applause] >> Anybody who works in an American university lives under that blanket on a daily basis. The safe spaces, the trigger warnings, the dread moment when you'll be called on to check your privilege, and it's a slightly bizarre culture, it's like a sort of parody of the Chinese cultural revolution in which a relatively small number of [inaudible] students create an atmosphere in which free discussion becomes harder and harder. And the negative consequence of this is not just, it seems to me inside universities, broadly speaking it creates an appetite for plain speaking on behalf of ordinary people. Playing to the point of vulgar and brash. So Trump is in some measure a reaction against the PC constraints. What was to many people deeply exhilarating about Trump's speeches was their completely unfiltered quality, that every single thing that was politically incorrect was there, and I don't think it would have been as appealing, it would not have been as exciting if these had not become taboos. Now I can't condone the xenophobia, the misogyny, it's all in there, and it's malignant. But the reason that it's popular, the reason that it resonates is that we've created an almost stifling culture of self-censorship in our academies, in our universities, in the media, and I think ultimately will destroy itself. This will destroy itself as a culture. The absurdity of much of the research that is done in the humanities is simply self-destructive. These departments of post-modernist mumbo-jumbo will be gone in 20 years' time. They simply will not be able to sustain themselves because nobody wants to study this stuff, and the class sizes just keep shrinking. So I would be of good cheer. What you're witnessing right now is the sort of dialect taking action. You know, it's almost [inaudible]. This political correctness, the thesis, there's Trump, the antithesis, and presumably some grim synthesis will emerge over the coming years. >> Number one. [ Applause ] >> Niall, I don't think there'd be many people these days who would not agree that the United States and George W's actions in Iraq were a mistake in the way in which they were carried out. I'm wondering after 40 years now since the end of the Vietnam War, what Henry Kissinger's view is of the American involvement in Vietnam. >> Well, that I've already covered in volume one at some length. I'll say briefly that I think the two wars were very different, and of course Vietnam killed many more people than the Iraq war and was quite different in its character because it was embarked on by Democratic administrations and the belief that there were dominos that would fall right across Asia if North Vietnam overran South Vietnam. Iraq was different. It was a war of choice, which I think with the benefit of hindsight most people would admit it was a mistake or at least was carried out so ineptly that it would have been better if it had not been done. One of the things I show in the volume one of the Kissinger biography is that Kissinger was a critic of the Vietnam war much earlier than most people have realised. In 1965, he went to Vietnam for the first time. He was in no way an Asia expert. He'd already had deep doubts in '63 at the time of the coupe against the DM government in Saigon. On his trip in Vietnam, which he writes up in an amazing diary, which was one of the reasons I decided to do the book. It's just a great document. He identifies very accurately all that is going wrong with the American effort in South Vietnam and with the South Vietnamese government and comes back at the end of that trip essentially convinced that the U.S. will have to get out of Vietnam by diplomatic means, and for the next ten years, a very large and rising proportion of his time was spent on trying to achieve that. So I have the second volume still to write and the obviously crucial chapters still to write about Vietnam and about Cambodia, but yeah, I think I've already begun to make an important contribution on that issue. >> Back to number two. >> Hi there. You talked about the opportunity of using history and historians to better inform decision making. If that were the case, are you in favour of a more evidence-based approach to assessing our experts because there's always the danger that we spend a lot of time listening to eloquent people who are wrong a lot of the time and people who are not so eloquent or not so precise but are generally correct are ignored. So is this an intellectualising entertainment game or not? >> I think it's very good that you asked the question. [applause] I [inaudible] has been writing a lot about the problem of bogus expertise, and there's no doubt that in the realm of public intellectuals there's shockingly little accountability, and I can think of at least one eminent New York Times columnist who constantly claims to be right about everything, claims that it's very easy to disprove by simply reading back through the years. I, I hope hold myself to a higher stand than that. I have established the practice of assessing every prediction that I make and trying, you're desperate to interject, could I finish? And what I've learnt is that one needs to be extremely rigorous about identifying what one got wrong. If one's made a predictive statement of the end of the year, look back, see how it looks. So I've become much more formal in the way that I assess my own performance, when I'm commenting on current events, but don't let's hold people to impossible standards as is often the case. In the world of Twitter, a single error, even a tiny error, is somehow held up as evidence that you have bad faith and should be in every way discredited. Let me tell you, nobody is 100 percent right, and nobody can have 100 percent confidence in what they predict. The reality is that it is impossible to predict the future of human history. It is a process too complex to model, and most of what people say in settings like this or on shows on ABC is conjectural, and sometimes they will be right, and sometimes they will be wrong. The key thing is to be right more than you're wrong. No one's a hundred percent right. >> All right. >> I've got a brief-- >> No, no. Sorry, there are so many questions, number four, thank you. >> I have a question on the end of stagnation. Adjusted monetary [inaudible] for the U.S. dollar stands at four times what it was in September 2008. If you are correct, is it necessary for the U.S. Federal Reserve to start expanding its balance sheets soon and will that be difficult. >> No and therefore it doesn't matter. The evidence on balance sheet expansion through the ages, and for those of you who are not obsessed with monetary policy forgive us, but the evidence is very clear that central banks, for example, in world war II greatly expanded their balance sheets. They didn't really ever contract them nominally, over time economy's grew, and in relative terms the balance sheets contracted. I don't think there is going to be any sustained effort to reduce those balance sheets in nominal terms, and I think it would be futile to try to do so. >> Right. Number three. >> Niall, you mentioned China and Russia. They are countries with long-term strong, stable leaders, whatever we might think about their system of government and philosophy. In this country, we've had five prime ministers in five years. What do we need to change? [applause] >> Oh no. >> The one thing that I learnt from writing, another of the things that I learnt from writing the Kissinger book was that a Harvard professor in a foreign country should be extremely cautious about [laughter] offering opinions about local politics. Every single person in this auditorium knows more about Australian politics than I do, and so I'm not going to make the mistake that Kissinger made when he was on a lecture tour I think in Pakistan and was a question along these lines about Pakistan, and as he describes it, at the time, you know, I felt as a Harvard profession I was omniscient, and if somebody was asking me a question, it must be because I knew the answer. I really don't know the answer to that, nor am I going to attempt to confect or construct an answer off the cuff. It would be incredibly pretentious and arrogant of me to do that. >> Do we question from number one? [applause] Yes ma'am. >> Hi, you spoke earlier of I guess the demise of intellectualism and that there needed to be some sort of backlash. What do you envision saying of backlash. Well I think the backlash is happening in the sense that populism hates academic elites. I mean if I say I'm a Harvard professor to the average truck driver, the contempt that will cross his face is really blood curdling, so I think the disconnect is not just a disconnect in terms of [inaudible]. There's a kind of disconnect in terms of intellectual traffic. The people who are outside college America regard college America with distain and it's reciprocated by people like my colleagues who would never give the time of day to a truck driver. I think it's deeply unhealthy. I grew up in Glasgow, as you may still just about be able to detect in my accent, and one of the benefits of growing up in Glasgow was that I was taught by my parents and my grandparents to treat everybody equally and to regard the bus driver as much worthy of a conversation as the Duke of Montrose. And that was a fantastic preparation for life. It has meant that I've never ever hesitated to engage in conversation with the proverbial Joe six pack, and often those conversations are a lot more fun than the conversations I have with my more politically correct colleagues. I think one of the things that makes me feel at home in this town, in this country is that there is a somewhat similar spirit here, and travelling as I have done in the last couple of days back and forth and plains, I noticed immediately that there isn't the same sense of intellectual disconnection that seems to mar American public life today and explains, I think why, you know, why Trump has resonated in the way that he has. I think none of this would be possible if it hadn't been for the [inaudible], this fundamental betrayal by the intellectuals of the very working class that they always seem to claim to be acting on behalf of but never actually mix with. >> One from number two. [applause] >> Hi there. Australia is at an interesting crossroads. We company to the end of the, of an economic boom. I think heading to an election, the leaders will possibly be looking for new ideas so that the economic system [inaudible] improved. Was there a country in the past in a similar situation, and is there anything we can learn from them? >> This is a great question, and it's an opportunity to do applied history. I think that the prosperity that Australia has enjoyed has in fact been enjoyed in somewhat similar forms by a whole bunch of countries that found themselves on the right side of a resources boom, driven mainly by Chinese demand, and compared with some of the other players in this space, you have done much better. Think Brazil. Think Russia. So in fact Australia's boom when I take a step back and try to understand it was not too narrowly confined to the resources sector that others did not benefit from it. And Australia's economic policies , which I think were on a very secure foundation to begin with, going back to the time of John Howard. This country was put through a fiscal prenup that many another country wishes it had done, and that has given it a great deal of breathing space, and perhaps it might be said space to make mistakes. So the lessons are fairly obvious, and I don't think they're any different from the lessons that some of us were offering at the time of the boom. This is the chance, that was the chance to get the house in order for the long run and not to create the kind of fiscal imbalances I was talking about earlier. Any country that has resource wealth has to be very careful in managing it with the interest of posterity in mind because extracted industries by their very nature have a finite life, and that matters a lot if you're thinking in terms of the long run, Australia's next 100, 200 years. Paul Collier, my old friend at Oxford has written very eloquently about this, about mainly African countries, but the points he makes in books like "The Plundered Planet," actually apply equally well to developed countries with large resource sectors. And let me make a general point as I'm sneaking away from talking too specifically about Australia, just out of my own ignorance, we should hold developed countries to the same standards that for years we've been trying to hold less developed countries too. In the World Bank, in the realm of [inaudible] economics, over the last generation or so, there has been an argument that there must be greater transparency, that there needs to be budgeting for the long-term, that there needs to be rule of law, and so forth and so on. There needs to be explicit, constitutional, underpinnings for the management of resources, that there need to be really large sovereign wealth funds built so that the benefits of extraction now are not consumed solely by the generation living now. All of those arguments have been made about mainly developing countries. They should equally apply to wealthy countries. In the great degeneration, I made the point that it's one thing to improve the institutions of a poor country, and we're all in favour of that, but it's another thing to allow the institutions of a rich country to deteriorate. And that insidious process where institutions get worse imperceptibly because people are complacent, that has gone much further in the United States than here, but it could happen here. And sometimes I think what Australians need to do is a little bit more comparative [inaudible] economy. Ask yourselves the question, could our future end up looking like America's present. Could the middle class be hollowed out? Could the generational imbalances become completely unsustainable? Could the media and the intellectuals be so estranged from the rugby league fans that ultimately Trump emerges in some Australian incarnation. And those are the sorts of lesson that Australia should be learning while it still has time. >> [Inaudible] thank you. [applause] Now it pains me to say this, and I'm terribly sorry for those who are in the line to ask questions, but I'm afraid our time is up, and I would love to lock the doors right now and just keep you here for another 24 hours because everybody hangs off of what you day, and Niall, thank you so much. It's been the most wonderful evening. Thank you. >> Thank you [inaudible]. Thank you all very much indeed. [ Applause ]
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Channel: SOH Talks & Ideas Archive
Views: 105,942
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Keywords: sydney opera house, ideas at the house, Niall Ferguson, History, talks, ideas, lectures, documentary, ISIS, Donald Trump, American Politics
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Length: 81min 36sec (4896 seconds)
Published: Tue May 24 2016
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