Will Self & Niall Ferguson on a bit of everything.

[Applause] I wondered whether we could kick off Neil with an anecdote that I heard the other day which I think you'll enjoy I hope the audience will enjoy and which I think may serve to open up a lot of issues that preoccupy us both here's the anecdote a friend of mine was at a luncheon party being held in the Cotswolds at which members of a network known as the Cotswolds what are they called the Cotswolds Network mafia or whatever present including the the ex Prime Minister David Cameron after lunch Cameron was seen somewhat in his cups sitting in a winged armchair and rather loudly bemoaning his fate whereupon another attendee of this lunch party came up to the armchair he was sitting in put his hands either side put his face up to Cameron's and said I don't know children present I have not even my Golf Club changes its rules on a majority vote so the question really is why do you think the the brexit vote if you do didn't think this I don't want to put thoughts into your mind why do you think that the brexit referendum vote needs to be honoured above all other deliberations in our democracy at the moment or do you think that I don't think I do think that it seems to me that first of all we slipped into the error of a majority based referendum without quite think through and I look back on the 1970s Scottish devolution referendum different rules that rule would have been a much smarter rule to maintain in referendums but by the time we got to proportion proportional representation a decision had been taken that that wasn't fair and that the Scottish devolution referendum had been fair and I think we did not sufficiently explore the significance of that change it very nearly brought the union between Scotland and England to an end that rule in 20 of the close run thing in 2014 and that should have warned everybody that having a referendum on on British membership of the EU would be extremely risky I certainly came to think in the course of the year running up the referendum that it was going to be 50/50 at the beginning of that year I thought it'll be fine the status quo will be maintained the status quo tends to survive referendums the closer we got to it and the more time I spent in provincial Britain because you had to get out of London the more I realized it was going to be 50/50 and I think it's fair it's fair of course to question David Cameron's handling of the issue but I don't think that was the fatal mistake I think I'll put it this way the fatal mistake has already been made it would be very hard to have the referendum on any other basis because we've done several on the majority basis the big mistake and I haven't wrote about this in the Sunday Times today was actually not to call Angela Merkel's bluff when she failed to cut him any slack at all on the fundamental issue of migration and I think if he had simply said it was February of 2016 sorry that's not acceptable therefore I am going to recommend brexit then I think the Europeans would have folded so that was his mistake and when you nixed see him in the Cotswolds mafia which I've no doubt you now belong to will you must you must say that to him because that was that was I'm only a member of a much less a criminal network centered on the Chilton's I Chilton Kimura yeah yeah and that wasn't a sort of this happened to a friend of mine because it really happened to me really happened to a friend of mine I assure you had I been in a position to put my hands on either wing have Mr Cameron's armchair I don't think I'd have been quite so restrained because it seems to me that that I don't think a lot of thought went into it either strategically or tactically that this was a classic case of constitutional changes being dickard with in our polity on parties and grounds just as the the devolution votes were initially originally triggered by Blair's desire to race shore up his own incumbency I think that and I'm not going to be as harsh about David Cameron as you are I think the decision to promise a referendum was indispensable to the election victory that David Cameron then won I think if that pledge hadn't be made you kid would have become a far more dangerous force and more Tories would have defected there would have been a kind of revolt in the Shires of that form so I can understand why he did it I do remember thinking when he made that speech in which she committed to the referendum oh dear he didn't need to do that it seems to me that it was risky but I came to realise why he'd done it and that it was an essential way of winning the election and it works I mean they won that majority which is now easy to forget was rather a remarkable achievement but it was a Pyrrhic victory a classic Pyrrhic victory because and here's another mistake that I think was fatal they decided to run the campaign against brexit on economic grounds in the way that they had run the campaign against Scottish independence now if you say to The Scotsman look this is really going to cost you quite a bit of money the Scotsman naturally responds we're not doing it in that case how many pennies did you say and I think George Osborne seeing how affected that had been in the Scottish referendum campaign decided to play the same cards in the brexit campaign and the Treasury reports that were really the main ammunition on the remain side were designed to explain to English and Welsh voters that it'd be very expensive to leave the European Union and in my experience when I went to provincial Wales and provincial England talking about this the general response in the pubs for example in South Wales was fine we'd be very happy to pay in order to address the issue that you David Cameron and you George Osborne aren't talking about which is immigration I'll tell you it you want an anecdote where his Sunday afternoon lots of anecdotes um I was in a pub in place called puff coal and I was sitting next to the man who owns the biggest off-licence in Bridgend I've moved in old right circles this is my network he said you don't you you know what my best selling beers are I said no Gareth I I don't know what your best selling beers are these days do to put me in the picture he said polish and a few idiot beer I said I infer from that fact that you must be a great supporter of the remain campaign as these are your biggest customers he looked at me as if I'd lost my mind is it don't you see how much bloody money they're making here and I said after I'd had that conversation - George Osberg we have a problem because your economic argument doesn't matter to him his best customers are polish Polish and Lithuanian workers and he's gonna vote for brexit that's the problem because it's an issue of it's about immigration much more than it's about percentages of GDP like that was the other reason that it went the way it did so in your column today in the Sunday Times you're giving mud tea a slap over I would never hit a woman but they did write a kind of critique of her because I think she's massively overrated and I think it's it's time to recognize Merkel Angela Merkel is known as Meucci in case you're wondering Angela Merkel's fairly disastrous track record on a whole range of issues of which immigration is probably the most serious and that's the one you really focus in on the letting in of the 1 million Syrian refugees you point to increase in crime statistics of various sorts by the way they weren't all Syrian refugees probably about half of the people who came into Germany when she opened the gates in May 2015 until now were refugees and half were not hmm and the refugees only make about a third were from Syria mmm just just in your new book and I want to obviously get on to discussing your new contribution really to story ography to the you know a shift in your own work which I followed over many years from a kind of narrative of history that's based to some extent on individual actors or actors in various constellations this idea and and really no Marxist you but it struck me that what you're proposing in the square and the tower is a kind of dialectical relationship between networks and hierarchies in terms of historical developments and I do want to discuss that little Park Fair thought but but I also very much wanted that and I felt that it would be because there's not you know it I mean love isn't breaking out all over but there isn't any personal antipathy between us that it would be very useful and and important in fact in front of an audience like this to really drill down on this anxiety that I detect in your work it's not even an anxiety a kind of almost revulsion against what you see as the rising Islamic population of Europe and although you are pains throughout your journalism your published history to draw a distinction between Islamophobia and a robust critique or kind of it's really like your your friend up in Bridgend you do seem to have this idea that this is a a unilaterally bad thing more Muslim people coming into European society and just polled there for a minute and the other thing is I sorta find very difficult grasp about your thinking is what are what are we who are living in Britain meant to do in respect of our fellow British Muslim citizens how are we to comport ourselves in response to them given that you seem to view them as a Trojan horse for the destruction of our civilization well what you've said will it in in every conceivable way misrepresents my position right and then and egregiously yes number one I am not in any way prejudiced against Muslims my wife is a former Muslim and well former could be the operative word there I mean for example let me let me continue yeah there is no respect in which I have ever evinced prejudice racial or religious prejudice because I was brought up to believe in freedom of religion free speech free thoughts free worship racial equality was drilled into me by my mother and father I mean I'm gonna drill it into you will because I will not be accused implicitly or explicitly of racial or religious prejudice that is an Atma to me and my family and it always has been okay just to be clear so it's not about that okay it's not about that the issue is not immigrants I'm an immigrant I don't agree with the man in the pub in Wales it's absurd to be worried about immigration per se regardless of where people come from it doesn't matter fundamentally whether they're from Lithuania or Libya that's not the issue the two things that we need to get clear here number one history shows that any really large increase in immigration a big surge a change in the rates of migration nearly always has unintended consequences because not everybody has drilled into them the values of my mother and father gave me and so he it was entirely predictable entirely predictable that if really large scale increases migration occurred as they did to the United States in the last 30 years to Europe in the last 20 that there would be a political backlash and it was a foolish mistake of members of the political elite and the intellectual and academic elite to pretend that that was not going to happen and to talk as if there were only economic benefits to immigration and anybody who raised any other issues must be a bigot secondly there is a problem with Islam not Muslims Islam a problem that dates back a to radicalization if you want to call it that an increasing fundamentalism from the 1970s in both Sunni and Shia in Islam the radicalization of Islam in our time is one of the great phenomena of modern history it's completely against the trend that you would have expected if you thought that Islam was going to behave like Christianity secularization didn't show up in the Muslim world the opposite showed up a deep resat realization and an increasing literacy in the interpretation of the holy scriptures because islam has a problem and I'm here only quoting my wife who's been writing and talking about this since 9/11 we can't simply assume that the jihadist Network will go away when it is manifestly growing in most parts of the Muslim world if there is large-scale migration from Muslim countries whether it's to Europe or to North America it is highly likely the the network of dawah which is extreme ideology and jihad which is violent extremism will grow at a dispray the principal cause of terrorist violence in the world today responsible for between 80 and 90% of terrorist deaths every year is radical Islam worldwide wherever you look so are we simply going to pretend that's not the case are we just going to tell ourselves is all going to be fine and repeat nonsensical platitudes such as Islam as a religion of peace and anybody who discusses Islam problem is an Islamophobe I am NOT an Islamophobe I'm not a Muslim a folk anymore than my wife is but we are clearly concerned by the growth of organizations like Islamic state the obvious penetration of West European countries including the UK by that organization and the failure over 20 years the failure of counter radicalization initiatives which have nearly all run into the sand so that's the answer to question I'm not appalled by immigrants I'm appalled by the spread of jihadism and have a reasonable ground to be appalled by that when I'm married to a woman who is threatened with death by these people hmm I mean that seems to me to be a pretty good reason to be worried you cannot leave Islam apostasy is punishable by death look at the Pew report of a couple of years ago in which they polled people in Muslim majority countries asking them the question do you think the punishment for apostasy should be death very large majorities in Iraq in Pakistan in most Muslim majority countries they polled said yes now let me have one final point because this is such a fundamental issue if we had a coherent strategy to integrate newcomers into our economy into our society into our culture there would be much less cause for concern but what makes the German problem particularly concerning it's much worse than the British problem British economy is quite good at integrating immigrants not as good as the US economy but pretty good the North European economies and the continent are very bad at it the unemployment rate for non native born people in places like Germany Sweden is is more than twice that of the of the native-born population so they don't integrate well economically they don't integrate well culturally I know that I've lived in Germany I've seen the extent to which the even the Turkish communities which date back several generations now remained of mentally not well integrated into major German cities and I think at this point having run this extremely reckless experiment of essentially admitting around a million people and showing little sign of expelling those who's who's a asylum applications are rejected the Germans are taking a huge risk and the rest of us should be much more concerned about it than we are do you not think that the politicization they move towards more fundamentalist interpretations of the Koran that you identify in the 1970s do you think you're right to equate that with Islam qua Islam because you say the implication there is that Islam is unique of the monotheism Zinn having this tendency towards violence well not so that because it'd be easy to say that in most 18th century Christianity very violent but what very clear is Islam so what I'm saying well is not just Islam is different from Christianity and Judaism is not just a religion Islam is also a political ideology because the Prophet Muhammad did not recognize the separation of mosque and state the point about Sharia is is a code for living and present in Christianity as well as an idea but where are we now in the 21st century Christian I think it is the Austrian Constitution that says supreme authority will be vested in God but in practice in practice the separation of church and state in this country in most European countries is a firmly established reality and secularization of Christian communities is extremely far advanced situation in Islam is different partly because Islam is a newer religion and historically perhaps it will take a long it'll just take a few more centuries for these things to happen to Islam but it is designed differently well it's fundamentally designed differently it's designed differently because it does not recognize this separation between the secular and the temporal that is fundamental to Christianity so read the new tire you surrender I see a nail never says render onto scene are you saying you know that every British Muslim is a time bomb waiting to go off the kind of language which is irresponsible on your part of course not in fact only a minority it's clear a minority of Muslims are drawn into radical organizations and so no no it's not every Muslim that's absurd issue the issue is that the network is extremely effective at selecting vulnerable people in communities all around the world in Muslim communities as in Muslim countries as well as in Western countries and drawing them into a credibly destructive ideology which i think is profoundly dangerous and is certain on present trends to grow well there's a paradox though isn't there because I mean you talk about a I draw you back to this thing I teach in the British University that has the highest proportion of people from British Asian and African Caribbean and British African communities were 65 percent ethnic minority I often find myself in classes with young women in his jobs sitting in front of me while I'm teaching what should my attitude be towards these young hijab wearing women or young men with ah beards that are obviously influenced by some kind of if not jihadist militant Islamic tendency how should I respond to these people as a pedagogue I'm a leader of young men and women how should I respond to them in the classroom I've been teaching a lot longer than you will and I've taught in some extremely ethnically diverse student communities Harvard and at Stanford Stanford only around a third of the student body identifies as white there's substantial there's exploring ethnic diversity in most American colleges now it's a it's mandated it's something that their admissions policies pursue and the answers your question is very simple you should teach them exactly in the same way as you teach every student so our values lie in our openness as teachers not in it my my I'm simply channeling ion here because this is really a fight that she is fought and an argument that she has made much more eloquently than me but I I feel obliged to do it all she has ever argued for is that Muslims like Christians like anybody in your classroom should be allowed to engage in critical thinking about everything including their faith and just the way that Christians are able to think critically or Jews are able to think critically about their faith and if at the end of their semester with you will they decide you know what maybe I should be an atheist like will self they should be able to be that's all that's what a free society means and if the response is no no that's not actually that's not allowed as Muslims are not able to have that conversation and if you start to raise questions about oh I don't know the eternal Verity of the Koran there'll be trouble if that's the reality then we then we have a problem but if you should treat them exactly the way that you treat any student and they should be able to engage with your often blasphemous and pornographic books just as much as with my altogether less salacious literature [Applause] I'm not an atheist perhaps that's why I'm a little bit more tolerant than you [Applause] respects am i intolerant what have I said that's intolerant because like a lot of atheists since you believe in an article of faith as an article of faith in in the the truth of this statement and you judge everybody according to this truth okay I'm the under the least dogmatic atheist you'll ever meet I was brought up an atheist I never made a decision about that I go to church I'd quite like to have religious faith it'd be nice it's not something that's likely to happen but it seems to me that to infer from that intolerance is bizarre I am a devotee of the fundamental enlightenment skepticism of late 18th century Scotland and that skepticism I think should be applied to every faith and we should be as skeptical about it as Voltaire was sceptical about Christianity about Islamic faith we should be skeptical about atheism possibly no yes on that I'm not Christopher Hitchens I I'm absolutely it the most doubting of atheists all that seems to me to be required is a perhaps an Muslim enlightenment is the right way of putting it they are called it an Islamic Reformation in her last book a transformation is clearly necessary if this religion is to coexist peacefully with the rest of the world in the 21st century and I think that's possible by the way and it doesn't get nearly enough attention an increasing number of Muslims are thinking critically are challenging are the the clerics with their intolerant messages of anti-semitism and hostility to the infidel it's happening I I'm far more optimistic about that than I was 10 years ago and I think that there is a growing network of skeptical Muslims Maajid Nawaz in this town is one of them and what is fascinating is that they are going ahead with their free thinking even in the face of death threats from the jihadists and I salute their courage because that's not a risk I have to take I'm not an apostate nobody comes after me say I'm gonna kill you because you stopped being a presbyterian it's a big difference you say so I think in the new book you say that the government's prevent strategy hasn't gone far enough but it the government's prevent strategy is in direct contravention of ideas of intellectual and academic freedom in the context the university is a British academic I'm now asked to monitor my students behavior in a way that seems to me absolutely incompatible with the Enlightenment values that you promulgate that's a free society well you don't need to do anything well the universities prevent strategy in order to teach there well so you cannot be a teacher at a British university unless you act as a agent of the state in surveying your own students I think you should resign so in other words you think that prevent strategy has gone too far it's it's clearly gone too far for you I happen to think that if there were clear evidence of jihadist penetration of the student body that I was working with I want something to be done about it so you think it's acceptable within the university if a student is a member of a Muslim organization in the university to monitor their computer traffic for example that it's immediately acceptable no of course not but that is mandated under the prevents traffic the issue is whether groups like Islamic state are managing to penetrate Muslim communities including student communities because young people are especially vulnerable that's the issue what are you gonna do otherwise how are you actually going to prevent this network growing or perhaps you think it's not growing perhaps you think that we can simply live with the growing or perhaps you think not growing network of Dawa and jihad a few but I didn't think that then fine I think I hail that nobody ever blows up you or a member of your family oh well that's just tendentious argument and it's beneath you sir I don't see what's in dentists about it or maybe or maybe or maybe you think the tens of thousands people are killed every year by these groups simply where you and I differ is that you seem to feel that this is innate in an in a religious ideology and think it's innate at all I just said to you that it's perfectly plausible Islam will achiever and enlightenment or a reformation to be in your book you say in your book you say Islamic state is a true portrayal of Islam what I've done is to know that all the gotough if you like well actually the quotation is from Graham wood mm-hmm and it's Graham would not me who wrote that that's right you're quoting somebody else but the Brandon Graham woods Artland in the Atlantic approvingly I merely quoted in order that you recognized the literalism of Islamic state which Graham comment what she wrote about on the basis of firsthand observation in Iraq and Syria is it's an important thing you can't kid yourself well we don't they say they say constantly what we are doing is in line with the word of the Prophet they just you look at their texts you can say oh they're quoting out of context yeah selectively quotation is exactly what they do but that's what they say they say they're doing that and it's not surprising if people are drawn to that message when they feel on dissatisfied frustrated with the compromises of western western city reasoning this is a dial Ellis this is circular reasoning you're just moving for your premises back to your conclusions what are you saying well that there's no problem no you're saying that I think you're delusional I think there is a problem but I don't think it's by any means probably currently face and the one that you started talking the other thing is when you accuse me of being a bigot the other should we talk about more important things well the other I just just to finish off on this because you also are very want to point out that the errors in in Middle East and particularly you know I in common with many of the kind of liberal elite as you style them who you're most opposed to I was forgetting that you're a man of the promise areas will with your education liberal early weird weird guy okay when what's weird about my saying that you're a member of the elite nothing at all I just thought we were gonna have a sort of non ad hominem well we would have done if you hadn't started to misrepresent my position on him that's just an error of phat tonight you had the opportunity to create yourself perhaps you can do the same at this I mean I would see and I think a lot of people in this hall would see a lot of the problems as resulting from the post 9/11 aimed to bring democracy to regimes in the Middle East through the barrel of the gun but you seem to not regard the millions of displaced people in the Middle East the three failed States and rising as being productive as being the pom primer to Islamism you seem to want to locate it intrinsically in the faith and I I think that's a mistake I think we should be much more pragmatic about this and we should face up to what a disaster the post 9/11 interventions have been but rather wanting you to answer that directly it might be more interesting to say where we differ is that you're and I'm somewhat puzzles having read your new book as to is what it is you want do you want to return because in your comments on post 9/11 politics in the Middle East what you seem to abour a lot in world and this goes right back in your work is a power vacuum Natura bores this power vacuum and you you feel for example that Obama should have maintained true presences in Iraq I mean you wrote a whole book saying that America wasn't taken taking the responsibilities of it's you know quasi Empire seriously so do you think it's just being a lack of force that has ended us up with these failed states and these millions of pseudo refugees in Europe well their loss of nerve let's get a couple of things straight um 9/11 didn't cause al-qaeda no I made a cause 9/11 let's not confuse the chronology that the the extremist wave in Islam long predated the invasion of Iraq so that's number one and so to but indeed I mean really what most aided al-qaeda was the CIA's funding and the Mujahideen in the Afghanistan conflict which which which I I write about it we do book Colossus which perhaps you've read or perhaps you just read The Guardian Review the book said and it was published written just about the time that the decision to take to invade Iran was taken published more less as it was happening number number one this is going to go wrong and the argument of the book was it is highly unlikely the United States will make a success of his interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan because of three deficits a man part deficit as Americans really don't want to spend more than six months on any given tour of duty in those places a fiscal deficit because the u.s. is simply not fiscally capable of sustaining an imperial enterprise and an attention deficit because American voters will lose interest in this whole thing in about four years and that's completely accurate completely correct and so the idea that I was a cheerleader for the invasion of Iraq is a complete misrepresentation I was deeply critical of the neoconservatives at that time and I said this will fail that was why the subtitle of the book was the price of America's empire or in the UK of the rise and fall of America's Empire so I wish we could just for once finally lay to rest this cliche which is entirely wrong that I was in favor no I was high and never said that I said you seem to be in favor of maintaining what's the argument I made once they had done it hmm with all the consequences that were predictable to pull out as hastily as Obama did was very likely to lead to a return to that chaos that we'd seen at the time of Fallujah and that is that what happened Iraq was in fact pretty stable after Petraeus surge and the Bombers decision to pull all the US troops out and and simply hand it over to Maliki was a disaster and that was you know I wish we could all go back to I don't know 1920s and do this differently but we're here it's it's a hundred years since Ike speak Oh more than that then a hundred now we can't endlessly argue about whose fault it is that people are engaged in brutal acts of violence in Syria in Iraq the issue is how can we stop this how can we stop this and we failed not only did the Bush administration make a mess in Iraq the Obama administration allowed Iraq to descend back into into anarchy and then allowed Syria to descend into an even worse Anarchy how that can be regarded as a success is beyond my comprehension and yet European politicians including it should be said Angela Merkel essentially offered no no answer other than to criticize the United States and here we are with the massive refugee crisis which isn't over flows out of North Africa and the Middle East's are ongoing the roots are less easy than they were in 2015-16 but people are still traveling and more and more people are joining them heading from coming from furthest everything in in Africa this what a grave is a grave state of affairs the prospects are extremely troubling and you say what do I want what I want is for people in North Africa and the Middle East to have the kind of light and life or quality that we have the ability to sit in a hall like this and have the discussion we've had without fear that somebody's gonna blow the place up which is the fear that you have in a crowded room in the Middle East or North Africa today what we need to ask is how on earth can the rich countries of the world help to stabilize these countries but you like counterfactual history what do you think would have happened if coalition forces hadn't gone into Iraq in 2003 I've often thought about that indeed I made the argument that if you didn't do that if you simply left Saddam and in power that there would be a crisis sooner or later but not as severe a crisis is the one precipitated by his overthrow because clearly it wasn't a stable state of affairs we had no certainty about what his plans were but Saddam Husein was not a nice man and certainly the Middle East was not a state in a stable state in 2002 but I think it's clear that as I argued at the time the United States was taking on something that was beyond its power in trying to transform Afghanistan and Iraq into demands it's relevant to this poverty as well we had a military involvement that I needed ended with us losing in fact having to draw from Basra under the actual guard and I at the time will in an article in 2002 that the United States that the United Kingdom should not participate I strongly had urged the Britain not to become involved in the invasion of Iraq I said it would be a tremendous mistake because it was not not clear to me at all what quiet was in Britain's national interest to support so uncritically the American initiative so some change oddly on the part of people in the British and American governmental elites who who were involved in those decisions actually kind of shame might because I mean shame isn't a particularly constructive emotion there's plenty of it I mean lots of people have spent the last ten years beating themselves up for the decisions that they took I've have friends who've completely transformed their own political position on the basis that they think they made mistakes I think there's been plenty of of self-criticism and you don't hear terribly much these days from the more strident near conservatives who argued that it would it would be easy but I think the issue that is is really worth discussing is what can we do because at the moment there is no coherent plan in view and that seems to me from a European vantage point you were all geographically much closer to this than I am because I live in California there really needs to be a great deal more than what we currently have which is a rather feeble discussion along the lines of if we can only get more aid to these places perhaps they'll stop coming a macron seems to me to be thinking somewhat more creatively about these problems but that's partly because like most French leaders of the last half century he has a somewhat colonial view of West Africa but I don't think we have yet satisfactorily answered the question what is the responsibility of rich countries when poorer countries descend into anarchy whether we caused it or not what do we do we have singularly failed to solve the problems of poverty and misrule through aid the great effort of the second half of the 20th century to solve the problems of failed or failing States through various forms of aid I mean these things have been far less successful indeed it's very striking when one makes this comparison far less successful than what the Chinese are currently doing through their one belt one Road initiative which is just to build lots of infrastructure and isn't the previously wasn't there and I fear that gradually the initiative is slipping away from the Western world to China because the Chinese approaches and they abhor Anarchy even more than I do the Chinese approaches well if we can build an electricity grid if we can build a rail network of a traitor and a road network and if we can stabilize the security forces then what's not to like and at this point that's the way the world is going we drifted very far from the central thesis oh you do love the book but one of the central arguments of the square in the tower is that the Chinese have a vision of the 21st century which number one is coherent with respect to economic development and number two is coherent with respect to political development and that that development is not in the direction of democracy what is the today's news xi Jinping just became the permanent leader of China the Chinese understand very well the problems of Economic Development and social control and that's the thing that I find always absent from discussion in Europe there's no recognition of the extent to which the global geopolitical terms of trade are turning against this part of the world and in favor of a new and fundamentally undemocratic power if you think you are trouble doing your job as an academic in the UK you talk to some of my Chinese colleagues hmm and and that's that's progress for you I mean it's not a question of North European exceptionalism it's not you're not being paying glossing about the rise of European in the square and the tower you do think that there is something there's some kind of genius loci in this part of the world that is majorly responsible for a kind of step change in human development and you want to see that into the future what what the book civilization argues is that rather by chance a series of ideas and institutions began in northwestern Europe that work everywhere but they began here it was here actually right in this part of the world that the idea of competition economic and and political competition with autonomous corporations that were directly under imperial rule that idea too cold and it was in this part of the world that the Scientific Revolution happened which fundamentally changed our relationship to the natural world it was here in northwestern Europe that the rule of law based on private property rights evolved but I never argued that that was anything I think that's not but come let me finish because important point you subtly implied that I thought this was the result of some superior quality of North Western Europe no it's random and one of the key points of civilization is that when these ideas and institutions were copied in other parts of the world beginning with Japan and the major hero they worked there too hmm at the end of civilization says here comes China which is going to download four out of the six killer apps of Western civilization and we don't know whether that could work Chinese are basically downloading for they're not going to download the rule of law based on private property and they're not going to download the idea of political competition but everything else modern medicine the Scientific Revolution that they're done competition that consumerism the the work ethic that has all essentially been replicated from Western mob and that is that that is where we are I have argued throughout my work for those who bother to read it that there are ideas and institutions that are universally applicable hundred years ago people thought that people from northwestern Europe and the places where they had settled were richer because there was some racial superiority or cultural superiority and I have always said in my work that's wrong that's not the case it was actually cheered unlock that economic and political competition took root in places like England and it was partly because the crime in the monarchy was so weak in this country I mean that's that's there's nothing there's no superiority in that if anything it was the inferiority of English monarchy that made a more representative system of government risible I may not have read all of your work you are a very prolific historian I've read all of yours all of them well not not the journalism only the Bluetooth read all of my 23 published poems not all of them no thank you for that nearly what they're done was it it's like I said weird inverted kissing contest but you are very keen on I didn't read the one about Apes right if I had seen the movie you get to be a major motion picture but that wasn't you you are a narrative historian and sometimes then sometimes you've written a book on historical counterfactuals you certainly I think and you're gonna say I'm horribly misrepresenting you but that seems to be par for the course at the moment there is a poof so if so I'm sorry but it seems to me you do a lot of your work has been an S perhaps necessary kick back against Marxist historians against historians who place human development within a matrix of pressures over which the individual has very little control we think of Marx history is made by the great mass of individuals in content distinction to this you've tended to place you know what we might call great individuals you have an example in the current book of Napoleon's indefatigable 'ti as a worker putting him as a very powerful no dinner in a hierarchical kind of network as opposed to a distributed network you did the counterfactual histories they all seemed to have at their center an idea of what human agency is what human free will is and you know I sense that's not very philosophically well grounded on your part for example why are you so preoccupied by historical counterfactuals do you think they are that the displaying of contingency in human affairs somehow allows you wiggle room for human free will if so you're sadly deluded I wonder what the Arsenal score is I think that's a bit of a cheap way out of a debating point Neil is to try and pretend well think through English fashion to come a Philistine at the point B raise your game sir not not talk start talking about games remember what Montaigne said it's trust a man who takes games too seriously I think maybe doesn't take life seriously no I think games are very serious because we learn from games because I don't know the score that the future is uncertain and there is in fact no way of predicting whether Arsenal will defeat Manchester City or not and that is the state we are in at any given time with respect to the future and it relates to all the issues that confront us I don't know if Angela Merkel a week from now will still be the German Chancellor she might not be if the German Social Democrat Party members vote not to go into the great coalition I don't know whether Donald Trump will be a rep re-elected for a second term as president but you can't rule that out either no matter how much you despise him the true nature of the historical process is that it's uncertain and all attempts by philosophers of history including Marx to create some structure that makes the historical process simple and predictable are doomed to failure because history is too it's too complex to model Marx's model was a very crude one anyway borrowed from Hegel and Ricardo strange mix of political economy and German idealism and it doesn't work I actually have a lot of sympathy with Marx and I was joking the other day that I'm I'm a Marxist in some ways I'm just on the side of the bourgeoisie but in the end when you try to understand in any serious way historical change you realize how unhelpful Marxist categories were people don't in fact belong to mass classes whether you think there are two or three of these classes that's not ever how it looks when you get up close and do serious historical research which is the central the central part of what I do so the reason that I'm interested in counterfactuals is that we cannot know and most history is written it seems to me without sufficient respect for the ignorance of contemporaries about the future most historians are drawn into some form of teleology or other and whether it's Marxist or not when a lot of the historians who were writing when I was sadly see it in your work teleology adverse to it because constantly I remind people that there are multiple futures at any given point that was why I wrote virtual history it was why in the pissy of war I argued that there was a choice that Britain didn't need to intervene 1914 and that might actually had been an argument and a very good argument on the left by the way to stay out of that disastrous war there was a choice in 1938 Britain didn't need to appease Hitler it was in a weak position in 1938 ruction was right Chamberlain was wrong and so on so almost all my work is designed to say to people there were alternative paths and often it was it was sheer chance that sent history in the direction it it took right so we get rise of the West is not that strongly determined and it could indeed have been terminated if the Ottoman Empire had been better managed in the vital 16th and 17th century period when the Ottoman Empire could read him destroyed what was happening in northwestern Europe it got quite close to do now with two sieges of Vienna so I don't accept that there's teleology in my work on on the contrary I think I try my best to give you the reader a sense of what it was like then not to know not to know what was going to happen not to know what the future would be like as soon as you do serious historical and read the letters and diaries of people who lived the history you realize they didn't know the Jesus College betting book which I remember discovering one evening it's full of bets about what will happen in World War two made by the fellows of Jesus as the war unfolded they didn't know that it would end in 1945 with an Allied victory they had no certainty that Hitler would attack the Soviet Union and changed the entire course of the war that's what most history books are badass because historians are drawn into certain narrative fallacies they want to tell a story that makes sense often historians are drawn towards the rules and regulations of literature they want historical actors to be like characters in novels who have a kind of consistency not your novels admittedly but in in traditional novels they want literary form to be there to make history intelligible but the terrible truth about history is it's a total mess it's a total chaotic shambles and what the historian has to do is somehow to extract from this shambles a shape a shape that is intelligible but always to show the reader that the historical actors have great uncertainty they labor under massive uncertainty the only people who don't are the people who believe in some teleological ideology whether it's Marxism or Islamism the people who think history is on their side and they still exist today if anybody ever says to you in there or you hear them say in a speech the arc of history is bending my way run it's a terrible sign there is no arc of history have you finished okay yes forever so what I'm quite happy to go watch the football if you've had enough so what I wanted to do to probe here okay I accept your argument that your non teleological in that sense you don't see a purpose lying beneath all this but you didn't really answer the question what do you think the capacity of individual humans really is in terms of their free will well silly debate because the real issue is it's not a story shows it's a silly debate in war in peace the truth is that we have some agency but will constrain that's boring the interesting thing is that if one thinks of people as nodes in networks which is much more illuminating than members of the proletariat if you think about all the people in this room you asked me to raise my game and say in terms of speech time professor Fergusson in the last half hour you've dominated by about 70% to 30 when you agree like Scotland England yesterday's all about possession constant all about lasers about you know will you let me finish as if I'm hoping the timer actually you ridiculous being annoying you're really being annoying well I'm being annoying because I'm calling you to account in perhaps ways that you need to be accountable you say you start to answer questions to answer my question and in fact dismiss it in the first half pause you say Tolstoy said we're constrained in some ways and me friends that's boring there's no Neil it's not boring that's the absolute gravamen of what you're meant to be doing as a historian disentangling the extent to which individuals are constrained and the extent to which they can act that's not boring that's your job so no bothering back yeah football school so as I was trying to explain the argument in the square and the Terr is that you can't understand anybody on their own in isolation because no man is an island or hardly any people are completely disconnected most of us are connected to one to one of many networks and that connectedness is the analytically powerful tool that historians until very recently did not use we did not as historians think at all about networks in a rigorous way if we could graph the network of the people in this room because each of you is a node including the chief node here each of you is connected to others in the room we could graph the network we could find out quite a lot about the network of people who come to these events with information probably we could get it from Mark Zuckerberg if we asked nicely and that would be the way to think about why this event happened why it came into existence and what its purpose was if indeed it has any purpose so the key argument I'm trying to make in my recent work is that the individual is not it's not the individual versus great historical forces that's the boring thing that Tolstoy talks about at the end of war and peace and which people have been writing boring s is about for any number of years the interesting thing is that the individual is always connected to multiple networks usually and it's those not works that have powerful explanatory force and we can understand the structure of networks by analyzing we can look at how distributed decentralized they are we can find that which people in this room are the most connected obviously will with his Cotswolds and who was the other one Chilton mafia has a network but is he the best connected person in the room or is it John Gordon who introduced the event or is it somebody else maybe there's somebody in this room listening who's better connected than all of us maybe George Soros is sitting near the bag so we can I think use these new and there are quite new tools to understand how the individual operates in the context of the multiple networks to which he or she belongs that's interesting yeah it's an interesting book but it but like any historian you must be in some sense advocating how we should add even given the contingencies that faces you know you you you are known as a conservative historian I think that's not a tendentious thing to say or you know see you you have a message for how people should behave in terms of their actions within polities within other kinds of economic networks in terms of you have ideological preferences history has a purpose even if your history has a purpose even if history doesn't have a purpose so what is the message of your of the square and the tower well I'm not sure that it is the historians role to say this is how you should live that's er give up your very lucrative column in the Sunday Times it's not lucrative at all it's really the least lucrative thing I I do I always found sucking on mr. Murdoch's tailpipe was really lucrative it's just an offensive thing to say I've done it myself now that's an offensive thing to say to yourself the public sphere is the public sphere I mean one could comments on what happens and and I try to show that I think history has a way of illuminating our contemporary problems I think of myself as not as a conservative historian I've never been a member of the Conservative Party I'm not a member of the Republican Party I'd be called the conservative any number of times but I'm really just the classical liberal as I said my roots are in the Enlightenment and classical liberalism but I'm an applied historian I think politics is not really something that you bring into history as far as possible you should leave it Max Weber said this about lecturing I think it's true about historical scholarship put the politics aside I just add up I think the key thing is to apply history to try to learn from history what we can do about today that's what I'm really about I was repeatedly told when I was an undergraduate that we could learn nothing from history this was a current feature of the Oxford history faculty back in the 1980s Oh No how vulgar only journalists do that we're far too grand to learn from history what a kind of petty bourgeois thing to want to do what am I doing here if we're not trying to learn from history what's the point now we are trying to learn mystery there's nothing else to go on you can't solve any of the problems that you've raised what should we do about Islamic terrorism what what should we do about that the breakdown of states in North Africa the Middle East there's no other way of answering these questions than by referring to history and try to understand what it is that makes state faith states fail or what it is that causes in a violent ideology something to go viral in the book I try to show that we have some really good work still to do on why the ideas of Lenin went viral in the Russian Empire in 1917 18y the ideas of Adolphe hitler went viral in germany between around 1928 and 33 we don't really know nobody's really done the work on the Nazi network or the Bolshevik Network that research doesn't exist because for generations historians I think wasted time on non questions like was the key to Hitler's rise the petty bourgeoisie or the bourgeoisie or the that was such a silly debate but the main as I understand it the main arguments in have been between kind of Daniel Goldhagen and kind of German exceptionalism and Christopher browning ordinary men and the idea that no this could happen anywhere but maybe you regard that as a bit of a sideshow that today it's been it's now 20 years old the issue to me the really surprising thing is despite the fact that there is good work being done on social networks in other fields like 18th century selectional history nobody's actually bothered to analyze the Nazi Party all the Nazi vote in in terms of a network nobody's really tried to track why it was that Hitler's ideas went viral when they did and yet we could do that and I hope I hope to do that and then in the next year or so that's a really interesting question because if we can understand better why toxic ideas go viral and suddenly become believed by billions of people then I think we start to have a handle on what we can do about this this very toxic version of Islam which is being used to justify the violence right that's the kind of thing that interests me it's bit of a doorknob remark as if one we're leaving a therapists but but it might open up the debate if we've got a bit of time for questions from the floor I mean what struck me I enjoyed reading your book very much I enjoy reading all of the stuff of yours that I've read you write in a very engaging and accessible way unlike you unlike me because I mean I think James Joyce had a bad effect on you well that's the conclusion I came to as I read why we love Joyce I hate Joyce I hated Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake is impossible how about Dubliners do you like that flaner Brian was the more interesting and funny by James Joyce is overrated really job almost is overrated as Angela Merkel well it's good to see you here coming to us from your northern fastness but you really belong here in London Neil because your this is the native land of the philistine and you're proving to be a monumental one painting joints makes me a Philistine then I'm a Philistine if imitating Joyce makes you a good writer then I'm a bloody teapot more offensive first lady men in the book you say very little about climate change but I assume that you do believe in the International Panel on Climate change's predictions on the the rises in global temperatures by the middle of this century believe in them as an article of religious faith no not as an article religious faith but you believe that global warming is anthropic and will continue yeah I think there's a pretty high probability of that right and the other really big statement you make in the book is that you view the complex of technologies which I tend to call bi-directional digital media and and I think we're we at least agree on that the significant part about and there is one thing that we agree yeah is there by directionality but you don't view them as being fundamentally different to any other technologies networking technologies of the past I mean not really in other words you don't think there are a major game changer in terms of what's likely to happen in the world oh they're a game change I mean the but only in terms of their scale and speed fundamentally what the internet and the personal computer have done is is not different from what the printing press did in the sense that it's transformed the public sphere and as in the 16th century we we are tremendously naive in our thinking about what will happen when we all become or have become far more connected the the key argument of the book is that we've gravely underestimated the downside of this hyper connected world in just the same way that Luther underestimated the downside risk of a religious Reformation based on the printed word but I don't think it's qualitatively different it's quantitatively different that you know the printing press was quantitatively different from the written book was it was not qualitatively different okay I think I've had enough should we open it up for questions has anybody got any questions perhaps you could mate wait for the microphone to arrive I think you have to choose no no you have free will you have to choose thanks for your time guys I just wanted to ask a question about a term that Professor Scott Galloway references called the four horsemen so that is Google Facebook Apple Amazon I just wanted to get your two opinions on the influence of these massive companies that have massive amounts of capital massive massive influence on new technology and also they're sort of CEOs as these demagogue figures obviously you mentioned Zuckerberg and also sort of someone like Jeff Bezos whose other wishes man of all time I just want to get your opinions on these four companies in particular and how they shape our future and if there are any sort of historical comparisons to our the influence these private companies have Thanks well Scott Galloway has become very critical he's a New York University professor who writes a lot on technology issues but he's become extremely critical of these so-called four horsemen and has argued in in a recent our article in Esquire magazine that they should be broken up that there is essentially a problem of monopolies now in technology Facebook moon optimizers social media and Apple has a kind of monopoly at least in areas such as music Google as a mostly on searching Amazon has an awfully on online retail that's roughly the argument and he's now come around to the view that that that can only be addressed with antitrust they need to be broken up in the way that Standard Oil was broken up long ago so I I share his concern because I think there are clear problems of monopoly bars these are natural monopolies net Network economies produce winner-takes-all and it's not clear that an antitrust action against Amazon would be successful in fact I'm pretty sure that Jeff Beezus would like that action to be brought in order that he could win it and I think he would win it easily certainly with on what grounds would he win and because because will the law on antitrust since the 1960s is very clearly said the test is how far the consumer is better or worse on and there's no way that you're going to be able to show that the consumer is worse off because of Amazon it's clear that the consumer is better off in a whole range of ways the only way that you could bring an antitrust action successfully would be and it would need I think to happen at the Supreme Court level if there were a radical change in the legal definition of monopolies in the United States in in Europe of course there's different legal tradition and I think there will be more aggressive legal pressure on the big companies in Europe but I think it's probably a doomed venture to try to do antitrust I think the issue really is whether there's a full a level playing field in terms of regulation and there's not because in fact at least three of these companies I don't think it's true of Apple but at these three of these companies enjoy a tremendous advantage over their their terrestrial non internet competitors and that is that they are not treated as content publishers this is especially important for Google and Facebook they are not treated as content publishers in the way that your friend Rupert Murdoch is they are treated as a technology platforms and under obscure piece of legislation from the mid-1990s the communications and decency Act title 230 they are not liable for any of the content that appears on their platforms and that lack of any liability is a huge advantage to facebook facebook is now the biggest publisher in practice of content in the world and it is now the source of 45% of Americans news and yet it's not treated as a Content publisher it's treated as a network that's the anomaly so I think Scott Galloway is half right he's right that there's a problem but I think he's wrong to think that it's gonna be solved with antitrust is there no mirror in a way I mean you're eminent scholar also financial history do you not see some kind of congruence is between transnational capital flows and the impossibility of implementing antitrust law against the fame companies I mean that I'm not saying it a direct causal level but at the level of congruence you know in a sense and it also relates to this concept you bring up in the square and the tower of the administrative state you know that in a sense all states can do now is to throw out cheese pairing regulation but they can't actually stop these big companies moving their capital very rapidly away you know if there were any real attempt to clamp down on them they could evade it and also they could destabilize currencies fiat currencies in the process I don't know about that I think that we shouldn't exaggerate the power of any corporation relative to the state the administrative state maybe produces functional but as we saw with the for example with the tax bill you can pretty easily pull the levers of the US Treasury and the US Justice Department and change the way that those companies manage their assets so I don't know that there's there's we've reached that dystopian situation in which the corporations are more powerful than the state they're very powerful but ultimately the state is more powerful if it wants to exert its power and also it's very difficult indeed for me to imagine a facebook Google or Amazon or for that matter Apple relocating from the United States these are American corporations as much as General Motors was an American corporation and I predict that as they fight what will be an increasingly tough fight in Washington over regulation they will become more not less American they'll become less cosmopolitan and global at their ultimate argument I would predict is you can't do too much bad stuff to us because we have to compete with them meaning Baidu Alibaba tenzen and the bat companies the Chinese companies are now almost the equals of the two of the big American technology companies there are no European players in this game it is a two-player game US China and the internet is now essentially two worlds the American and the Chinese the question which will be resolved I think in the coming decade is who's going to control the rest of the world because we thought it was going to be the US companies and it kind of is at them at this point but the Chinese companies are making a huge push to expand especially in emerging markets and it's going very well so I think we'll see an increasingly national argument increasingly Apple and others will say we are American companies we need to work with you but at this point we have a conflict between Silicon Valley and Washington it's getting ugly I think it will ultimately resolve itself when the technology companies realize that they really need friends in Washington even if they're Republicans sorry off me okay I see you know waiting for a while let me a personal question how often do you think about counterfactual Niall Ferguson and secondly if how come you learn from history if if if history is one damn thing after another well I constantly think about counterfactuals in my own life and I see each day as just a succession of dilemmas of varying magnitudes it's clear that I could be in a completely different place tonight if I had not had the luck of going to a good school in Glasgow Academy getting into a good University if the luck had gone the other way and I hadn't gotten so probably not be sitting here and neither would he so I'm deeply conscious of contingency in my own life I mean the lot goes further back I can tell but I I think it's important to live with a sense of one's luck and be aware that it could turn at any point I'm haunted by the question what terrible thing is about to happen to me that I failed to think about that I didn't plan for so that's probably the answer to the the more autobiographical part of your of your question and I've forgotten the second part because yeah well you kind of answer it in the square in the tail the gentleman was saying what if history is just one damn thing oh yeah now that how can we learn well yeah you do you do address Alan Bennett you'll be unperfect yeah he revived that in in the history boys it was one thing after another yeah then in Bennett's framing well I think the answer is that that that that it's not that that history is not some kind of weird timeline of events big and small though it's often represented that way on wall charts I prefer to think of the historical process as this complex system or indeed a space been filled with multiple complex systems which we can't fully understand because they're not they don't work like with linear relationships that they're not at all predictable and so what we can learn from history is only really by by rough analogies so the the way I tend to think is that when you're confronted with a problem whether it's personal or historical you should ask the question what is this like it's not exactly like anything but what is it roughly like and if you can't think of a bunch of analogies you probably don't know enough history this was how I thought about the approach of the financial crisis 10 years ago I read a book called the ascent of money the ascent of money was written in the expectation that a financial crisis was going to have and it was right and the reason I thought it was going to happen was it just looked familiar what was happening in 2006-7 that extraordinary booming economic period that that culminated in the crash was recognizable to a financial historian it was like in the pre the previous years before any big crisis so I tend to think that that's the right way to approach it try to find those analogies and then think rigorously about them and I do that's really what I do for a living most of the time even when I was writing this column that you didn't like about Angela Merkel's policy my question was what is it what is this like what is it like when a really large movement of people occurs I mean there are plenty of analogies for that it's often happened in world history and we can I think compare and learn from the comparisons and that's how we should proceed what you can't do is what economists and political scientists have been doing for the last 50 or so years and say let's imagine a model of how this might work and let from first principles let's drop a model and then we'll try and cram the data to fit the model and and that pursuit of models with relatively linear relationships and predictable opens I think that will prove to have been almost as futile as medieval theology as an activity this young man can you wait for a microphone I'm gonna be a little bit boring and I mentioned Bitcoin which we're probably all bored of after the the winter they've just had he struck me and you're sort of listen to your views on it Neil and in the media that if not if you're not warm towards it you're at least room-temperature towards it which is quite unique as someone who is one of a better word mainstream commentator and I guess just then going back to your last answer what is Bitcoin like it starts and what isn't it like as well it's not like the Dutch tulip mania of the 17th century which is what everybody compares it to Jamie Dimon did that but but he was only one of many I think Paul Krugman has done it it's not like that and that that suggests they don't know anything about the Dutch tulip mania it's more like what happened in the 18th century when for the first time equity in corporations was traded that was in financial innovation without any real precedent the creation of the South Sea company in the Mississippi company in France allowed a huge experiment with with in effect the first stock markets to happen and of course what happened was a bubble in both in both cases and i think bitcoin is that kind of a financial innovation that is it's so game-changing in the sense that it really has this block chain is so game-changing bitcoin is just one iteration of this of this experiment it is so game-changing that it is cool subtracted a great flood of money and then as always happens in the bubble along come the charlatans with their initial coin offerings to do such things as we shall tell you about later just give us the money and the suckers so that all happened last year and you could see it in California I had a ringside seat people were coming to me with and they still are hasn't stopped initial coin offering ideas that they wanted me to endorse and it was like I would read the white papers and say but but you're just like one of those eighteenth-century speculators you you want the money but you won't really say why so a huge number of these things some of which have been Bitcoin based most have been etherion based will turn out to be scams but I'm look warm in the sense that I think out of this experiment as in the case of the 18th century equity finance experiment something will remain it's not quite clear what the ultimate end useful use case of blockchain is but I think there will be one I don't think I don't think blockchain is going to create new currencies that will replace fiat currencies and that since I don't think it's right to think of Bitcoin as a coin or for that matter of banknote I think it's better to think of these things as ways in which smart contracts could be could be used I mean I think that's probably where we go the blockchain can be used for a whole range of different things payments is probably the least efficient of these things but there are a bunch of different contractual exchanges that could be done through blocking governments I think could make their health care systems more efficient through blockchain that's already happening in Estonia so I think Bitcoin itself will seem like one of these prototypes that is that 10 years from now we'll think that was picturesque it'll be kind of a little bit of a museum piece in the same way that the South Sea company wasn't really the future of the British economy but equity finance survived and became central to finance and I think blockchain will become pretty central not just to finance but and possibly to bureaucracy generally in the coming 10 years very annoyingly I think that the hall is about to be invaded by rampaging theists who regarded as their place of worship so we're gonna have to wind up there I think Neal's gonna be around for a while in the foyer in we'll be signing his Magisterial work of history a noble successor to the works of McCool a a towel and I'll also be there signing my knock off modernist share take your pick [Applause]

Channel: How To Academy Mindset

Views: 111,352

Rating: 4.6209035 out of 5

Keywords: Niall Ferguson, Will Self, Brexit, Europe, EU, Trump, Donald Trump, Populism, How to: academy, how to academy, emmanuel centre, london, driftwood pictures, debate, author, Cameron, David Cameron, Cotswolds, Bitcoin, 2018, Cryptocurrency

Id: FQghUuH5n2M

Length: 84min 59sec (5099 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 11 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/mis3s]

Will Self is a narrow minded bigot who's contempt for anyone who thinks differently to him is obvious. His response after UK voted brexit is a good example of this. How he got a professorship in 'contemporary thought' is a mystery & proof of the mess the universities are in. I really enjoy his fiction however.

edit. Here is the brexit clip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9tcVBsxK30

[u/Jgrbot]

I enjoyed the recent podcast with NF (I know some of you didn't) and I'm always keen to hear his view points.

I know some of you dislike how SH doesn't really ever challenge his guests, so this will cure what ails you in that department, plus its very entertaining seeing a conversation between two people who really don't like each other.

Maybe SH can learn a thing or two about live conversations...

[u/kimchifart]

Cheers OP, that was some good popcorn shit!

[u/[deleted]]

Man that opening anecdote re. 'not even my fucking golf club changes its rules on majority vote' did not get the crowd response he was hoping for with that dramatic buildup. Can only imagine how cringey this gets...

[u/non-rhetorical]

I adore Will Self. Wonder if he knows or cares that Bill Self just made the final four.