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Niall Ferguson (@nfergus), MA, DPhil, FRSE, is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a senior faculty fellow of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard. He is the author of 16 books, including The Pity of War, The House of Rothschild, Empire, Civilization, and Kissinger, 1923\u20131968: The Idealist, which won the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Prize.

He is an award-winning filmmaker, too, having won an International Emmy for his PBS series The Ascent of Money. His 2018 book, The Square and the Tower, was a New York Times bestseller and also adapted for television by PBS as Niall Ferguson\u2019s Networld. In 2020 he joined Bloomberg Opinion as a columnist.

In addition, he is the founder and managing director of Greenmantle LLC, a New York-based advisory firm; a co-founder of Ual\xe1, a Latin American financial technology company; and a trustee of the New York Historical Society, the London-based Centre for Policy Studies, and the newly founded University of Austin.

His latest book, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe, was published last year by Penguin and was shortlisted for the Lionel Gelber Prize. 

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[05:45] How Niall's multi-faceted career has gone according to plan.

[08:00] The license to be outrageous in academia ain't what it used to be.

[14:53] High table, dregs of Ch\xe2teau Lafite, and hyperbolic references.

[20:26] A.J.P. Taylor and the philosophy of history.

[25:00] How does a historian find an "ear" for historical resonance?

[29:48] What Niall would ask A.J.P. if they were Ch\xe2teau Lafite drinking buddies.

[34:30] An appetite for tweed.

[36:40] Historical contingency.

[43:40] A.J.P. Taylor reading for beginners and counterfactual history.

[46:41] Dan Carlin, Elon Musk, and Gavrilo Princip.

[48:39] What Niall gets out of digging deep into historical correspondence.

[54:04] Cold War II \u2014 what can we do?

[1:10:44] Keeping Cold War II from heating up into World War III.

[1:16:37] Economic interdependence does not preclude conflict.

[1:20:02] Ways Niall is using his grasp of history to change the world for the better.

[1:26:11] How Niall's toolkit for enacting change has evolved over the years.

[1:28:55] Thoughts on fatherhood.

[1:36:15] Why someone raised as an atheist takes his kids to church.

[1:42:42] Has marriage to ex-Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali changed Niall's view of Western philosophy?

[1:46:22] Life under fatwa.

[1:51:00] Parting thoughts.

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Past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Bren\xe9 Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, Margaret Atwood, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Dr. Gabor Mat\xe9, Anne Lamott, Sarah Silverman, Dr. Andrew Huberman, and many more.

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