reporting at ap.org, and your twitter handle. thank you so uch. to target voters. >> the meta issue for me is how data is collected used secured and processed pi the companies with which we engage in the online world in a very comprehensive and pervasive way.

announcer: this week on "q&a" author and hoover institution senior fellow niall ferguson. mr. ferguson discusses his book "the square and the tower: networks in power from the free masons to facebook." brian: niall ferguson, in your new book, you open up with this sentence, "the suspicion grows that the world is controlled by

powerful and exclusive networks, the bankers, the establishment, the system, the jews, the free masons, the illuminati." "nearly all that is written in this vein is rubbish." what are you getting at here? what's the point? niall: there is all this rumor, some of it conspiracy theory. some of it is in the book shops, more of it is online. you will find it if you type in any of those names as a search item, the illuminati. if you type in illuminati, you will be taken into a wonderful weary -- world of conspiracy theory suggests that they droll -- suggests that they control the world, the trump dministration. there are all kinds of variations on this theme. i have been writing about social networks much of my career. i wrote it book -- a book about the rothschild banks, one of the most successful jewish banking families of the 19th century. there are conspiracy theories

about the rothchilds that match up with the illuminati conspiracy theory. or suppose you want the freemasons of the american revolution, there is a conspiracy theory about that, too. the thing about the genre, to which a great very many americans subscribe to one form or another, none of it is written by professional historians. it's a kind of genre that looks like history and usually involves some historic narrative. but it's nearly always detached from any scholarship. there is fake history as well as fake news and most conspiracy theory history is fake history. this makes it very difficult for the professional historian to write about these subjects. who wants to write about the illuminati if most of what is out there is crazy stuff? who wants to talk about the freemasons of the american revolution? if you write about that, wouldn't you find yourself on the same shelf in the book shop as the crazy books? so i've noticed over my career that these actually quite interesting and important

subjects have been abandoned by professional historians and left to the cranks and the conspiracy theorists. that's a pity. because there are stories to be told about all of them, all of them about the illuminati, about the rothchilds. there is some history there, but it's very different from the conspiracy theories and part of the point of "the square and the tower" is that we should be able to talk about these subjects without being classified with the cranks and the conspiracy theorists. brian: before we get too far into the book, let's catch up about you. you are well known in some circles in this country for things like "the ascent of money," pbs series documentary series. when was that? niall: 10 years ago, i published a book and produced "the ascent of money" the financial history of the world. this series was designed to give people the historical context for the crisis that i saw coming.

in 2006-2007 i was writing quite a lot about the financial -- the coming financial crisis. what struck me about wall street was that the people who were running the investment banks knew no financial history beyond their own careers. they certainly weren't prepared for a financial crisis on the scale of 1929, which is what they got with the failure of lehman brothers. i am a great believer that historians can help us with the present and even with the futures that we contemplate. what i tried to do in "the ascent of money," was say, the chances are high that a major financial crisis will happen. that's what history leads us to expect. what can we learn about the financial system from history? i don't really understand anything until i know history. that's how i operate. i wanted to tell the story of money, where do banks come from, what is the bond market, what is the stock market, why do we buy houses with loans called mortgages. so, i wrote a book that

essentially gave the reader a sense of where the financial system came from and why it was very likely to suffer a major crisis. the crisis happened just after the book came out. i think lehman went bust just a few weeks after the publication of the book which was interesting. and meant that i had at least something to say about what was happening in real time as financial history was being made. 10 years later this book was -- is trying to do something similar for silicon valley. that is to say, i'm saying to silicon valley, history applies to you. history didn't begin with the google ipo or the founding of facebook. history goes a long way back. and it's relevant to you. but i'm also saying to readers interested in history, you know, network science is pretty important and historians need to understand it. if you don't really under how networks work, you will not only fail to understand the present but you'll have some trouble understanding the past. it's a bit like "the ascent of money goes to silicon

valley." that's a rough characterization of this book. any of your viewers who enjoyed "the ascent of money" will, i hope, enjoy this book. brian: where did you grow up? niall: in glasgow in scotland. i come from that peculiar part of the british isles, scotland, which is one of those countries with a superiority complex rather than an inferiority complex. but the scots have long thought that they invented the modern world, that they run the united kingdom, and that wherever they go, they will find traces of their forefathers' endeavors, including the united states with its many traces of scottish influence. that's where i grew up and i was encouraged to think that scotland had a special mission to transform the world. brian: what were your parents doing? niall: my father was a doctor. my mother, now retired, is a physicist who taught physics.

so, i come from a relatively scientific family. my sister is a professor of physics at yale. she is the clever one. i was the black sheep of the family in that i drifted into what some people think of as a social science and others think of as one of the humanities, history. i studied the strange particles called human beings and the way in which they behave. but i think my family gave me a couple of advantages, at least two. one was a tendency to think about the world with the framework of the scottish enlightenment. through my grandfathers, i was the air of a certain intellectual legacy that goes back to adam smith and david hume and the great thinkers of 18th century scotland. and i think the other advantage that they gave me was to think of history as a branch of

literature. so there were history books in the house, but side by side with the great works of fiction. and so i was introduced as an -- at an early stage to the idea that above all history must be literature. it must be readable. a.j. p. taylor was a historian who occupied some pace on my parent's book shelf and that inspired me to find history attractive as an intellectual endeavor, but also as a literary endeavor. brian: your college education, how extensive was it and where was it? niall: well, extensive was a funny word to use. because, in some ways, an oxford education is intensive. one reads history. i spent three years as an undergraduate at oxford reading history. that was a wonderful opportunity. i had grown up in glasgow. to me oxford was nirvana, a kind of promise land of not only stunning architecture, but

also brilliant minds. i couldn't believe that it was possible to be employed to sit in a book line study and divide one's time between reading books, writing books, and talking about books with -- with students. these oxford dons, we would call them professors in the united states, seemed to me the luckiest human beings alive. and all i wanted to do once i saw their lifestyle was to have it myself, to have a lifetime spent in this realm of books. it was very inspiring to be at oxford in the early 1980's for another reason. britain was in a great state of -- margaret thatcher was prime minister. most universities lent in the direction of the left, to be a -- to be pro-factor was to be in a minority.

i became one of them. we were a feisty majority who enjoys making the case for the thatcher government. so i had a certain political education at oxford as well as an academic education. it being oxford, unlike american universities, there is only one exam. it is at the end, finals. everything hinges on that. what you doing the preceding years is up to you. i didn't go see many ectures. in fact, i went to hard any lectures. i did learn to play the double bass. i dabbled in student journalism. i found that i couldn't act. i tried pretty much everything except sport and found that i wasn't really good of any of the things other than writing history essays. at the final -- in the final phase and in the final year, i reverted back to being a historian just in time. brian: when you're talk about networks in your book, oxford is a network, magdalen college

was a network. absolutely -- niall: absolutely. brian: there are some 35 colleges or more at oxford. what does it mean for you that you were at magdalen college as far as networking? niall: absolutely. to go to oxford and to go to the one of the most prestigious, the most college magdalen is to be admitted into the network of the british elite right there. the contemporaries that you meet will include future leaders, will include future editors. there's a sense in which britain is still, as it has been for centuries, run by people who went to oxford and cambridge. you go to the oxford union which is the debating society. what you're really seeing is students preparing for the house of commons. practicing, getting the hang of standing at the dispatch box. some of my near contemporaries

have gone on to great things. rather to my own incredulity, boris johnson is the secretary. -- the foreign secretary. that's not something i would have predicted back then. it's probably something that he would have predicted. so, i think oxford admits you to network that is sometimes called the establishment, that still to a surprising extent runs britain. i didn't really appreciate that at the time, i think. i only retrospectively appreciate the extent to which that was admission into a very important network that extends into politics, that extends into the media, and that extends into business. and from that point onwards in your life, without even necessarily being aware of this, when you meet somebody at a cocktail party in london, a transaction occurs which goes like this.

oh, did you go to oxford? oh, which college? when were you there? do you know x? oh, yes, i know y. now, people who haven't been admitted to that network can't play that game. it's the central activity of --of social networks. exchanging information and building a connection that then has utility in the present because of course, if you and i went to magdalen, we have a set of common experiences. and that builds a kind of trust. so the chances are that any future transaction that we embark on or project that we decide to do together will -- will be based on that underlying mutual understanding. that's how social networks work. and oxford introduces me to that world. brian: in your book, you talked about oxford and how it relates to cambridge.

i want to get back to this in a second. i want you to tell us about the apostles. that after you graduated and came to this country, how many different places have you taught in the united states? niall: i first taught at new york university for a couple of years. and then went to harvard. and i was a professor at harvard for 12 years. and only recently moved to stanford. so three. i've given multiple guest lectures here, there, everywhere. but those three institutions are the ones where i've spent time. brian: so who are or were or can be an apostle? what are they? niall: cambridge has a very remarkable institution that doesn't really have equivalents anywhere else. the cambridge apostles were -- are, because it still exists, a society of extreme intellectual exclusivity. it dates back to the 19th century. it was an intellectual discussion society.

members would meet, give papers, be brilliant. eat sardines on toast. that's about it. doesn't sound like much, does it? but it was really and remains one of the most prestigious societies that one could be elected to. and the process of election was an arduous one. only rarely were elections made. so the apostles remained relatively few in number. it was probably the height of its intellectual influence in the 1910's and 1920's when john -- john maynard keynes was a member along with his friend one of the great iconic classic riters of that generation. and they look down from a great height on everybody else. they regarded themselves, not without some cause, as very clever, indeed.

brian: you write, they were, in a word, insufferable. niall: they were pretty insufferable. it makes you realize that a very exclusive network has a nasty side effect. it was quite misogynistic. the apostles of the 19th century tended gay. nothing wrong with that. a kind of misogyny that accompanied that particular chapter in cambridge history doesn't look well today. but they were primarily an intellectual group. one interesting consequence of their elitism and that's the word for it, was a disdain for all the conventional wisdom that britain had inherited from he victorians. so if you are a creme de la creme intellectualy, you're far too clever to believe in free trade or the gold standard or any of the things that the victorians believed in.

the british empire. the interesting things about the apostles is by the 1920's they were questioning most of the conventional wisdom of the previous generation. but what then happened this is, and really why i write about the apostles in the book, was something surprising. they got hacked by the russians. sounds rather like a contemporary problem. nothing new under the sun. the soviet intelligence agency, the kgb, had a very ingenious strategy in the 1930's. and that ingenious strategy was to try to recruit agents from within the commanding heights of the english establishment. and they hit on the idea, the agent who did this, of recruiting at cambridge and trying to get members of the apostles.

and they succeeded. o there are these three of the cambridge spies who were members of the apostles. and this was probably the most successful intelligence operation of the 20th century, of the sense that, by getting these recruits from the exclusive intellectual elite, they got access to key institutions in the british establishment, including the intelligence services and the foreign office. and they had really high caliber people on the payroll supplying intelligence from the british government to moscow in the 1930's, 1940's, 1950's. and the quality and quantity of the intelligence were astonishing. so, what does this illustrate? well, it illustrates one important feature of

networks. they're not very good at defending themselves. the apostles never considered the possibility that the kgb would penetrate them and ctually recruit members of the society to work for soviet intelligence, but it happened. and it proved an enormous vulnerability for western intelligence in the early phase of the cold war as well as in world war ii. it took a great deal of effort to expose the cambridge spies. why was it so difficult? was it because they were incredibly good at covering their tracks? no. they actually made lots of mistakes that should have given them away. but because they were who they were, because they had the seal of approval of not just cambridge university, not just trinity college, but the apostles, people found it impossible to believe that they would be spies. and that credibility that they had from their network -- and the protection that they enjoyed from other members of the network explains why the cambridge spies were able to operate for so long and took so long to be detected and so long

to be exposed. brian: you also talk about the bloomsbury group. and i want to read this long couple of sentences because you talk about networking. you have to describe some of these people later. "as with apostles, it was sexual relationships that define the network. grant slept not only with eynes, lytton strachey, adrian stephen, and vanessa bell but also with david garnett, anessa bell slept not only with grant but roger frye and sometimes even her own husband clive. keynes slept with grant. garnett, strachey, and the russian ballerina, lidia lopokova." what in the world is that about? give us the background. niall: the bloomsbury group were very advanced in their sexuality. brian: who were they?

niall: they were connected with the apolls. keynes was a member of both groups. they were artists and writers who once they had left cambridge and moved to london initially lived in housing in the bloomsbury district of ondon. it was a social group. its impact on the history of english modernism was enormous. but i think what's fascinating about the group as a social network is their complex relationships. -- the curious complexity of their sexual relationships with one another. keynes had sex with men and women. in a sense, quite modern. you could probably do a network graph of hollywood in the recent past that might look a ittle bit like this.

but the reason for analyzing the network is it was so influential. and people still think of virginia woolf as one of the most important figures of british literature in the 20th century. she was very much part of bloomsbury. just as keynes was a towering figure in economics. these people shaped modernism in britain and their influence was certainly felt across the atlantic in the united states. i think what made them impactful was not just that they as individuals were very talented, though they definitely were, it was the fact that the network -- bloomsbury network, projected the talent and promoted the talent through publishing, through the media, and with keynes ultimately in government. because he became a very important civil servant in the first and second world wars. so, networks matter because they can take an important individual and force multiply

as we might say today. their influence as individuals was significantly enhanced by their membership of the network. no man is an island. that's an old observation. it goes all the way back to john dunn -- donne. "the square and the tower" describe how important this is that even the most towering genius and this -- there's no question that keynes is a -- has a phenomenal intellect -- is embedded in some sense in a social network. some networks are more effective than others. bloomsbury was very effective at an fencing -- at advancing its collective interest to the great challenge to victorian ideas that was so important to the 20th century. brian: let me put a picture of the tower and the square." tell us why you named your book that. where is this tower and square?

niall: the title of the book is an important thing. because without the right title your book may fail. if i called the book "networks and hierarchies," we probably wouldn't be sitting here because that's kind of a turn-off title. i was racking my brain for a better title. i suddenly remembered siena. your viewers will include people who have been to that lovely italian town and who will have walked around the piazza del campo and they would have stood in the shadow of the tower of la mancha. this is a perfect just a position -- juxtaposition of the two central ideas this book is about. in the town square, the piazza, the sienese exchanged, trade and even engaged in horseraces. it is the realm of social networks. there is nothing structured about what happens there except

maybe the horse race. in the tower and the plaza publica, that's where statues of -- statutes of governors existed. that's where power resides. and power tends to be heir --hierarchically structured. even c-span probably has an org chart, and at the top there would be the president or whatever the title is. as you go down the org chart, you'll find yourself and that's how most organizations and certainly most governments are constructed. hierarchically. networks have a completely different architecture. they don't necessarily have somebody at the top. if you want, you can think of them as being horizontal, flat am aware as states, hierarchies are vertical. "the square and the tower" is about the relationship. "the square and the tower" reside in the tower where

hierarchical towers are. brian: where do you live now? niall: i live now in northern california not far from the stanford campus. brian: what do you do? niall: i'm a fellow at the hoover institution which is part of stanford university. and so i spend my days apart of the stanford campus, though i mostly engage in research now, i'm not teaching. brian: i want to show you a video of somebody you are very close to, an individual you know very well. and tell us how this person fits into your life. >> there is something within islam, inherent in islam that inspires, incites, and mobilizes millions of people to engage in what our president

calls nonviolent -- no, he calls it violent extremism. brian: that was in 2015 during the obama administration. who is that? niall: that is my wife who has spent most of the last, let's see, 17 years thinking, writing and talking about the problem of islamic extremism and the difficulty that we have and have had since 9/11 in dealing with networks of terrorism, of violence, but also networks. she used the phrase of "nonviolent extremism." the networks that preach radical ideas without necessarily putting them into practice, those nonviolent extremists are in some ways a necessary precondition for the violent extremists. people don't go straight to

terrorism. they have usually been radicalized beforehand. my wife works on this incredibly important subject, these terrorist networks kill a lot of people every year, tens of thousands around the world. and she's a very courageous woman. she's my heroine. she combined brilliance with bravery and beauty. and i'm the luckiest man you ever interviewed because i'm married to her. brian: how many children do you have? niall: she and i have two children. i have three older children by my first marriage. so, i have a grand total of five. brian: you say in your book that you thought maybe by the time the book was published you would have another campbell in the family. do you have another campbell in the family? niall: happily, that came true. our youngest son was born last october. brian: why a campbell? niall: my father's name was campbell. my father died a couple of years ago. when we heard the wonderful news that my wife was pregnant,

it seemed suddenly self-evident when we knew it was a boy. but of course, we could have called her a girl if she had been a girl because campbell seems to be one of these names that works well for both sexes. but for me it will always be a male name because that was dad's name. it suddenly seemed obvious that we should call our son campbell. brian: how long have you been married to her? and what did network have to do with marrying her? niall: what a good question. we'll be celebrating our seventh anniversary this year. we met in new york city. and i'll remember it as long as i live. it was the depth of the financial crisis. i had been invited by a particular network to give a speech. the network in question was a society, a network of economists who have a free market leaning, originated in the postwar period, founded by the economist, keynes's

emesis. his archrival. i was invited to give a speech about the financial crisis. to answer the question, was this crisis the fault of the free market, the kind of question you would be worried about in early 2009 if you were an economist of that persuasion, i agreed. is invited to give a speech bout the financial crisis. -- i was invited to give a speech about the financial crisis. it was a question you would be worried about in early 2009 if you were an economist of that persuasion. i agreed. i was in another low point in my life, going to -- going through a divorce, what did i have to lose? by sheer good luck, --, who had left the netherlands and been up member of parliament after the security situation had become intolerable for her, she was living in the united states, came to that same it meeting as a fellow of the american enterprise institute and there we met. we were introduced by an australian friend.

if you have read "war and peace" you would remember when pierce sees natasha and everything stopped. i had a moment that night. very important in the history of networks. their real were area supposedly to talk about the financial risis. the only thought i had in my mind was how on earth i could et her phone number. brian: she gave it to you that night? niall: it may have taken a little longer. brian: there is still a -- issued against her. niall: yes, and the death threats continue to be made. brian: she has to be physically protected by security? niall: yes. brian: she lives at with you in northern california? niall: one of the things they

tell you about security is not to discuss your security. suffice it to say, because she is a former muslim who speaks out against the extremists, she has faced recurrent death threats. the most spectacular was when theo van got was murdered in amsterdam when they were working on a film together. there was a note saying she would be. these threats of violence have been a recurrent feature of her life since then and therefore, e cannot drop our guard. we have to assume there is a risk after the murders of these eople. we had to redouble our vigilance because her name is on the same list of 11 people. it was published by al qaeda in

2013 under the heading of a bullet for a lot. this -- allah. this is no laughing matter for us. the threat is a real one and we have to take all the cautions we can to keep ourselves afe. brian: is -- university still something you are associated with? niall: yes. i have gone to china a couple of times a year to go to one of the big two universities in beijing. for me, there are two huge questions that historians will have to grapple with one they write about our time. one of them is that islamic extremism and the violence associated with it or it how does this -- with it. how does this lamp a job or not? when she has devoted so much of her life to the islam problem i see myself as able to contribute more to the question

of china's rise. one can only really understand this by going there. i wish i were better educated. i do not speak the language. but i have spent the last 10 years trying to understand modern china better. since i am an economic historian and it is a fundamentally economic question, it preoccupies me a good deal. brian: are you involved with the shorts and column? niall: yes. brian: the reason i bring it up is because it seemed to me to be one of the great networks they put together. i'm going to read down the ist. sarkozy, tony blair, kevin rudd from australia, henry kissinger, colin powell, rick levin, condi rice, richard haas, yo-yo ma and others. if i run outside and look in and say -- the alumina not a -- illuminati. what does that mean?

niall: it means schwarzman is the brains and the mind behind the rolodex. steve was able to bring this roup together. as well as me to do the teaching. there are two points one can make. the first is clearly there is an enormously important network and you have just listed some of the key nodes in that network. you could find similar names and combinations of names if you want to the world economic forum. or you just hung out in new york at the four seasons. this is a real elite network

and it is very important to recognize that it exists and is not trumped up by conspiracy theorists. second point, this is an elite that seems in this case to be trying its best to do something i think is good, mainly to build a new kind of network that connects china to the west. the schwarzman scholarship program was a kind of version of the roads scholarship, which used to bring people to study in oxford. schwarzman's vision was that we need to do something similar so there is no difference between the leaders of china and the leaders of the western country. i think it is a terrific innovation. i see terrific students from all over the world getting to understand china better and

studying alongside chinese students and what the equivalence of m.i.t. or arvard in china. brian: have you been to the meetings? niall: yes. brian: have you been a member of the trilateral commission? niall: no. brian: barney miller, the television show, this is a lip. this is just a television show. >> what is the trilateral commission? >> an organization founded in 1973 i david rockefeller to bring together business and political leaders of the united states, europe, japan so they can work together for better economic and political cooperation between the nations. >> that's what they would like us to believe. what they are really up to is a scheme to plan their own loyal members in position of power in this country to work to erase

national boundaries, to create an international community and in time, bring about a one world government with david rockefeller calling the shots. brian: what do you think? niall: there you have the conspiracy theory we were talking about earlier. they say they are meeting in order to improve the world and economic policy coordination but they are actually hatching a plan to raise -- erase national boundaries and establish or world government under david rockefeller. the notion that there is going to be a world government is a fantasy. i can't speak for the trilateral commission. i'm not involved with that. but i can assure you that although the meetings of the group are closed, nobody ever mentions one government to me at these meetings. on the contrary, i'm always -- at the extent of at such gatherings, the reactions -- here is another fine mess the

world is in, is there anything we can do about it? you don't have a strong sense of there being control. even the word power seems extremely -- seems strangely inappropriate. they are exchanging ideas. i'm sure there is an element of business involved, too. but we shouldn't exaggerate the power that even the most exclusive networks, what is striking to me when i interact with these groups is not their ower, but often their sense of powerlessness. if you think about the events of 2016, just to take an example, not many members of the supposedly government planned that britain would vote to leave the european union and that donald trump would become president of the united states.

donald trump is not somebody who gets invited to these meetings. take the financial crisis. the events of 2008, 2009. nobody there was saying, what i think we need is a massive financial crisis. what is striking when he spent times in these were fight circles is the -- rarefied circles, is the lack of power. the people involved are very influential people, but i think their power tends to be exaggerated. if there is a world government being put together, it is not doing very well. it is not going very well. i don't think that has ever been the project. it is interesting to mention david rockefeller. i read the other day that his work predated the internet and existed in a giant rolodex, one of the biggest networks of probably all time in the sense that with the limits of technology, there is only so

many people to keep a caps on. 100,000 names are on the index cards, henry kissinger was in that list. i'm in the midst of writing his biography. for me, part of the way to understand his rise from being an epidemic and public intellectual -- academic and public intellectual to secretary of state is to understand that work and understand the ways it worked so his influence extended the on governments and across borders. this is historically very interesting. one has to write about it without exaggerating the power of the network. the influence, yes. but the power was more circumscribed. much was true in the bank in the 1990's. yes, they were the richest people in the world and the banks were tremendously

influential in the ways the bond market involved in the way governments could borrow. but at the time, conspiracy theorists said they had total power over the world and they determined whether there was war or peace but they controlled the central banks, etc. i showed in my book that was mostly untrue. rothschild couldn't determine war and peace and very often would be frustrated and which struck -- would suffer losses one wars broke out. i think the challenge for the story is striking that balance between delineating the influence, trying to measure it and calibrate it, and identify the limits of the network's power. brian: 14 years ago, henry hertzberg was here. he had a book. he had been a speechwriter in jimmy carter's administration, spent time at the new yorker magazine. this comment he made in the

middle of the interview has always stayed with me. it is the reverse of what we are talking about when it comes to conspiracy. i asked him, when you are in the white house, what is the one thing you brought out you didn't expect? and here is his answer from 004. >> we realized how there really isn't anybody in charge. that these are just human beings. that i believe before i went there, somebody was in harge. things were being taken care of. and i don't think this is just carter. i think this is true of every white house. you learned that it is just people and they are not that different from people you know. brian: what do you think? niall: i think that's about right. one of the great illusions of the american journalist, especially at the moment, is

that it is all about the president, who has a cause i'm a knock local -- monarch of power and every tweet determines the face of nations. one way of thinking about it, the presidency, is to think of it has a network. the white house itself is a collection of people working together the president is the most important mode in the network. he simply can't rule alone. he is not an absolute monarch. the recent article published in the atlantic, i and the co-author of this piece. he did some network analysis of three different administrations. we looked at nixon's, bill clinton's, and donald trumps. and we simply tried to map the network of power. because the structure of politics is as important as the personality of the president, especially in a republic.

what was striking is the similarities between trump's administration and bill clinton in the first year. and nixon's looked quite different. partly because he was a reclusive resident who liked to sit in his study with his yellow notepad and hated interacting with people. bill clinton and donald trump are outgoing is nowadays like to be in the room where happens. network analysis is an important tool for helping understand the structure of politics. clearly there is power in the white house, but it is not entirely vested in the president. the president cannot act without his advisers, without his chief of staff, his gatekeeper, his cabinet, people running the major departments. there is a tendency in american journalism to talk about the presidency as if it was a

monarchy. this is a mistake because it doesn't work that way. anybody who enters the realm of power as hendrick kissinger did, discovers that it is different than they imagined it and this structure of this network around the president is really the key. it was something kissinger worked at quickly for himself. not everybody figures this out and i think part of what happens in the first year is a certain turn as most people who were prepped terrific on the campaign entered the realm in power and find they can't make it work. steve bannon comes to mind in the case of the trump white house. but there were similar figures who came in with clinton and have been part of the campaign and did not go the distance. this is a fascinating way to think about politics and a viable corrective in an age where the personality is given

far too much importance. brian: we picked this up from one of your footnotes. and if somebody is born in sweden, he had a follow ship on youtube of 60 million people. his name ishootie pie. anybody watching this things we have gone off our rails. let's give 23 seconds of what people are drawn to on youtube and you can explain how it fits. >> weeeeeeeeee. hey guys, what's up? welcome to another video. tap, tap, tap, tap tap. i'm sick. which is ok because i wanted to make this chill video for quite some time showing off my figuring collection. brian: there is a lot more where that came from. niall: far too much. brian: why is that

important? niall: why did he make it into the footnotes? the phenomenon of youtube stars s quite interesting. it is a young person's genre. and young people consume a lot of content via youtube, google, and online tv channels like that. what would seem to old guys like us like but now it's self-indulgence has tremendous -- banal self-indulgence has tremendous presence. a lot of people do it. hat does this tell us? it tells us the structure of the public sphere, where ids are exchanged, has exchanged radically in our time. we go from a world of tv networks, which are relatively controlled things.

decisions are made on content up high and that's how it works. to a new kind of network, which is example five by youtube, but one could also say the same of facebook, in which there is a great deal less centralization of decision-making. hootie pie went viral, acquired a number of followers by posting videos without plant or direction from on high. it went viral because the name captured a certain mood at the time and the veering between unity and the controversial has a great appeal it would seem. inexplicable though i would find it. understanding the public sphere of our time, all the people have to make an effort to realize new things are happening that are qualitatively different than what we are accustomed to when it comes to content.

content has been thrown out and in a strange evolutionary process, some of it goes viral. why did it go viral? why is he more followed than other teenagers posting their videos and going nowhere? it is impossible to say. it is not really about the contents. things often go viral just because they enter the network at the right point. remember, the network is a complex of notes, some better connected than others. it is a look and a good person who has a lot of followers and says i like this video, then suddenly that video and go viral. even if the content is he back qs. that is the world we live in. decentralized in the sense that google didn't say we need somebody to do this video and he has to wear headphones and have a beard and let's make the background pink. nobody made that decision or

gave that command at google. in that sense, the content is generated to the users. but then, google and youtube algorithms determine their readiness in which you will find that content through the search engine. the search engine ranks everything. and it tends to rank it not only by popularity, by the number of people who viewed it, but also by you as an individual. your preferences as a user. which google and youtube know from your past behavior. so we now are in a new world where algorithms responsive to each individual user's behavior decide what gets ranked in search. that is a completely different model from the public sphere than anything we have seen in the past. ost people older than 30 or 40 certainly.

they struggle to understand this. brian: in your chapter on kissinger, you wrote a book already about him. niall: volume two is pending. brian: there was this quote and i want to show you video from 1975. the best illustration of kissinger's argument was the abject failure of u.s. strategy n vietnam. here is henry kissinger in 1975. >> i have always considered indochina a disaster. perhaps partly because we did not think through the implications of what we were doing at the beginning. >> you included? >> pre my being in office. brian: if he thought it was a disaster, why didn't he get us out of there after the elections? niall: that's a question for volume two, so i should probably hold my fire.

brian: you going to answer? niall: we are going to do our research. they are thinking before they come up with answers. i will give you a hypothetical. it is true kissinger thought of it as a disaster in the late 1960's. i show this in volume one. he went there on a series of trips and saw firsthand in 1965, 1966, saw firsthand what was going wrong. and what was going wrong was relevant to this book because here was a great hair racal entity -- hierarchal entity intervening between north and south vietnam. and failing to completely understand the networks like the viet cong, that were going to be so hard, ultimately impossible to defeat. there was a collusion between a very hierarchal military that was operating on the same basis in the korean war and world war ii, with the command structure

that was centralized. this hierarchal could not win the vietnam war. that is a key observation area kissinger understood that. his notes make it clear he identified the fundamental pathology of the american intervention. brian: second question is, was there some extremely easy wait for the united states to exit in january, 1969, when he was national security adviser? and i think, hypothesis to be decided as i write volume two, that nobody at the time seriously believed that you could just up and leave when the scale of the american resence was at its peak. it had been excavated by lyndon johnson. what did they do? they rapidly reduce the military presence. the nixon administration -- the

conflict and it is dramatically reduced. at the time, kissinger had his doubts about it. it wasn't his policy. at the time, you believed you could do it and used air bombing to force the vietnamese o the negotiating table. at the time, that did not seem ike such a crazy strategy. and it was only really a relatively radical campus leftists that made it seem simple, as in let's stop the war and come home. no decision-makers, including amongst democrats, and they had gotten the u.s. into the war, were arguing for cutting and running. how can you downsize the involvement and arrive at peace? that's how kissinger thought. brian: when is that book going to be out? niall: within three years.

brian: let me ask you one thing. you start off writing about this. the archives, the historical rchives, and hierarchy and the way history is written that you don't like. niall: i think historians go where the archives are and sources tended to be in archives produced by hierarchal organizations like government. that is just the way the world his ordered. since the beginning of written record, power is in written records. that is how you understand the business of government, refer back to the decisions of previous governments. so historians naturally go to archives. that's where the data and sources are. social network has played a strong part in history and they don't have a department you can consult. brian: how do you avoid that with the kissinger biographies? niall: doing my best to not

only look at multiple governments -- i'm looking at as many governments as possible -- overwhelming myself with material, but also looking at the student movement, the most mportant variable. it was the opposition to the vietnam war and the note states. that was a network of campus radicals that were antiwar but anti-a bunch of other things. there was a range of issues they were mobilized about. i want to study that network. it circumscribed what kissinger and nixon were able to do in ways that in the beginning they underestimated. once the history of hierarchies and governments and corporations and networks of those in formally organizing might be antiwar movements, didn't really have a leader. who do call if you spoke to the antiwar movement? nick's and tries to talk to protesters and he goes

earnestly and meets in ashington. and it is a meeting of minds. kissinger had been a professor and understood the futility of this endeavor. there is something poignant about the president of the united states, who stands at the top of the most hierarchal of the structures, trying out to connect with hippie antiwar protesters, trying to establish a connection, believing he could persuade them to see they were stranded and the war. brian: out of time. our guest has been neil ferguson. the book is called "the square and the tower" networks in power from the freemasons to facebook. we thank you very much for oining us. >> thank you. [captioning performed by

national captioning institute] [captions copyright national able satellite corp. 2018] captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption contents and accuracy. visit ncicap.org >> next sunday, political activist and former rofessional basketball player, etan thomas. sunday night at 8:00 eastern here on c-span. >> as a follow-up to the recent earings with facebook ceo mark zuckerberg, the issues of

spread of personal data. >> all of those politicians who asked questions for ten hours, every one of them has been using data mined from american citizens to communicate with their constituents, to build mailing lists, to target voters, and a lot of this is for good and salutory reasons. >> the meta issue for me is how data is collected, used, secured, and processed by the companies with which we engage in the online world in a very comprehensive and pervasive way. >> watch tonight at 8:00 eastern on c-span-2.