markcases. >> as a follow-up to the recent hearings with facebook c.e.o. mark zuckerberg, the communicators looks at the privacy issues raised by lula o'connor at the center for democracy and lee, attorney and former chair of the federal election commission. >> look at all of those politicians who asked mark zuckerberg questions for 10 hours. every one of them has been uses data mind from american citizens to communicate with their constituents to build mailing lists, to target voters and a lot of this is for good and sound reasons. >> really, the metaissue 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 compress hencive and pervasive -- comprehensive and pervasive way.

>> watch "the communicators" tonight at 8:00 p.m. eastern on c-span2. 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? hat'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 nline. 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 world of conspiracy theory in which a secret organization dating back to the 1770's controls the world, controls the federal reserve, controls the trump administration. there are all kinds of variations on this theme. i have been writing about social networks much of my career. wrote a book about the rothschild banks, controlled by 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 for that too. the interesting thing about this genre which is popular, which a great many americans subscribe in one form or another, is that none of it is written by professional historians. looks kind of genre that like history and has some sort of historical 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. you name it. there is some history there but it's just very different history from the conspiracy theories and part of the point of "the square and the tower" is to say 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 assent 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 coming financial crisis. what struck me when i would spend time on 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 look of money" was say, here, wall street, 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 f 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. f you don't really under how

etworks 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 orld, 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 cottish 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. ut i think my family gave me a couple of advantages, at least two. ne was a tendency to think about the world with the framework of the scottish enlightenment. through my grandfathers, i was the heir 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 nspired 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 xford 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 ind 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. became one of them. we were a feisty minority who enjoyed making the case for the thatcher government. so i had a certain political education at oxford as well as an academic education. and oxford, 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 lectures. in fact, i went to hardly 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 talking

about networks in your book, oxford is a network, magdalen college i assume is a network. 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 he one of the most the most estigious, prestigious 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 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 the network that's sometimes called the establishment, that's 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. o 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 o 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 arvard 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 ime. 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 n 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 writers of that generation. and they look down from a great eight 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. actually, reading the younger keynes, 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 ccompanied 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 the victorians. o if you are a creme de la creme intellectually, 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 trategy 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. nd they succeeded. so there are these three of the cambridge spies who were

members of the apostles. and this guy buorges, was probably the most successful intelligence operation of the 20th century, f 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 oreign office. and they had really high caliber people on the payroll supplying intelligence from the british government to moscow in he 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 actually 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 keynes, lytton strachey, adrian stephen, and vanessa bell but also with david garnett, vanessa 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, lydia 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 apostles. keynes was a member of both groups. they were artists and writers who once they had left ambridge and moved to london initially lived in housing in the bloomsbury district of london. it was a social group. its impact on the history of english modernism was normous. 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. he 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 donne, the 17th century poet. "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 ocial 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 hat.

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 urn-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 >> at that position of the two central ideas this book is about. in the town square, the piazza, mingled, 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 staff use 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 chief executive or president or whatever the title is. as you go down the org chart, ou'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 whereas governments, states, hierarchies are versecal.

-- 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? in northern california? 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 lose to, an individual you know very well. and tell us how this person fits into your life. >> there is something within slam, 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 pent 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 combines brilliance with bravery and beauty and i am the luckiest man you've ever interviewed because i am haried to her. -- 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: that's 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. he network in question was a nth pill yea society, --

montepillar society, a network of economists who have a free market leaning, originated in the postwar period, founded by the economist, keynes's nemesis. 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. i was in a rather low point in my life, going through a divorce. what did i have to lose? to get out of cambridge and go to new york? by sheer good luck, my wife, who had left the netherlands where she had been a member of parliament after the security situation became intolerable to her, had became a fellow of the american enterprise institute and was living in the united states, came to that meeting as a fellowist at the american enterprise institute and there we met.

we were introduced by a delightful australian friend. if you read "war and peace," everything stopped, i had that moment that night. union league club in new york. clubs are important in the history of networks. the union league club is a new york club. there we all were, supposedly talk about the financial crisis. the only thought that i had in my mind that night, even as i was speaking about the financial crisis, how on earth could get her phone number. brian: she gave it to you that night? niall: it may have taken a little longer. brian: is there a fatwa 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? iall: one of the things they

tell you about security is not o discuss your security. suffice it to say, because she s 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 orking on a film together. his body was penned a note saying ayaan would be next. these threats of violence have een a recurrent feature of her life since then and therefore, we cannot drop our guard. we have to assume there is a charlie hebdo.

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 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 -- our sons safe. brian: is singwa university something you are associated with? niall: yes. i have gone to china a couple f 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 the problem of islamic extremism and the violence associated with it, the fundamental problem of, how does islam adapt or not? and the other is the rise of china. and while alyaan has devoted understanding 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 man. i do not speak the language but i have spent a lot of 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 schwartzman college? 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 list. sarkozy, tony blair, kevin rudd from australia, henry kissinger, colin powell, rick

would say that's the illuminati of foreign relations. what does that mean? niall: it means schwarzman is the brains and the money behind e schwarzman college rolodex. steve was able to bring this group 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 the council on foreign relations 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 dreamt up by conspiracy theorists. it's not an invention. mostly men. another one another. -- know one another. 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 dreamt up by steve as kind of a version of the rhoads scholarship which used to bring people to study in oxford. still brings people to oxford. steve schwarzman's vision was that we need to do something similar so there is no difference between the future leaders of china and the future leaders of the western country. i think it is a terrific innovation. i see when i go there terrific students from all around the

world -- not just americans -- from all around the world getting to understand china better and studying alongside chinese students at what is the equivalence of m.i.t. or harvard 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 42-second clip, 1981 was when this happened and this is a television -- this is just a television show. let's run. [video clip] >> what is the trilateral commission? >> an organization founded in 1973 by 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. hat they are really up to is a

scheme to plant 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. [end video clip] 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 improveeconomic policy coordination but they are actually hatching a plan to raise -- erase national boundaries and establish or world government under david rockefeller. so the stated objectives are the objectives and 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

bilderberg 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 strangely and appropriate. this network is commenting on the world, 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 power, 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. so then -- or, for example, take the financial crisis. the events of 2008, 2009. demob sat there at the bilderberg neat meting in 2018 saying, what i think we need is a massive financial crisis. what is striking when you spend time in the rarified 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 network predated the age of the internet and existed on a giant rolodex was one of the biggest networks of probably all time

in the sense with the limits of technology, there is only so many people to keep tabs 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 kiss injury's rise from being an -- kissinger's ise from being an 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. was in many ways global. 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 rothschild bank that i wrote in the the

1990's. yes, they were the richest people in the world and the banks were tremendously influential in the ways the bond market evolved 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 whether there was peace, that they controlled the strat banks, etc., well, i showed in my book "the world's banker "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, lots of 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 the question, when you were in the white house, what was the one thing you brought out that you didn't expect? and here is his answer from 2004. [video clip] >> we realized how there really isn't anybody in charge. that these are just human beings. that i believe before i went there that somewhere up there there was somebody in charge. things were being taken care f. 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 american journalism is

especially at the moment is hat it's all about the present president who has a cause monarch of power and every tweet determines the face of nations. one way of thinking about it, the presidency, is to think of it as a network. the white house itself is a collection of people working together. the president is the most important node in the network. he simply can't rule alone. he is not an absolute monarch. the recent article published in "the atlantic" i and my co-author for this piece did some network analysis of three administrations. we didn't look at carter's. we looked at nixon's and we looked at bill clinton's and we looked at donald trump's. 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's in the first year and nixon's looked quite different. partly because nixon was a really reclusive president who liked to sit in his study with his yellow notepad and hated interacting with people. bill clinton and donald trump are outgoing personalities who ike to be in the room where it 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 advisors, without his chief of staff, his gatekeeper, his cabinet, people running the major departments. there is a tendency in american journalism increasingly to talk

about the presidency as if it was a monarchy. this is a mistake because it doesn't work that way. i think anybody who enters the realm of power as hendrick kissinger went to 69 when he ork, 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 -- of any administration is a certain churn as most people who were prepped terrific in the campaign enter 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. i think this is a fascinating way to think about politics and a viable corrective in an age where the personality is given -- of the president is given

far too much importance. brian: we picked this up from one of your footnotes. and if somebody is born in sweden, he has a followship on youtube of 60 million people. his name is hootieanybody watching this things we have gone off our rails. pie. 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. ap, 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 figurine 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? well,the phenomenon of youtube stars , that you and i have never heard of is 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. hat would seem to old guys like us like but now it's self-indulgence has tremendous support and interest. people spend a lot of time watching this stuff and a lot of people do it. what does this tell us? it tells us the structure of the public sphere, where ideas are exchanged, has changed 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 being exemplified by youtube and we can say the same of facebook, which there is a great deal less centralization of decision-making. hootie pie went viral, acquired normous number of followers by posting individual yos without plan or direction from on high. it went viral because the name captured a certain mood at the time and the veering between occasionally 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 i ask have to make an effort to realize that 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 he go viral? followed than other teenagers posting their videos and going nowhere? it is impossible to say. it is not really about the content. things often go viral just because they enter the network at the right point. remember, the network is a complex of nodes 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 can go viral. that is the world we live in. it is 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. most people older than 30 or 40 certainly.

if you are in your 50's, like me, 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 in vietnam. here is henry kissinger in 1975. [video clip] >> 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 have an answer? niall: we are going to do our research. they are thinking before they come up with answers. i will give you a hypothetical. first thing to say is that it's true that kissinger identified it as a disaster in the late 1960's. he went there. i showed this in volume one. in a series of trips. and saw firsthand -- i think the first was in 1965, 1966. saw firsthand what was going wrong. and what was going wrong is relevant to this book because ere was the hire arcal entity --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's a key observation. kissinger understood that. his notes make it clear he identified the fundamental pathology of the american ntervention. second question is, was there some extremely easy way for the united states to exit in january, 1969, when he was national security advisor. 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 escalated by lyndon johnson. hat 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. he nixon administration -- the at the time the belief was you could do that and at the same time use airpower, bombing, to force the north vietnamese to the negotiating table and secure a diplomatic resolution. at the time, that did not seem like 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 at the time the belief was 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 how can you downsize the archives, 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. governments have understood since the beginnings of written record the 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 are you avoiding that with the kissinger biog

graphs -- by yog graphs? 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 important variable. in the vietnam war was in many ways the opposition to it within the united 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 like the anti-war movement, didn't really have a leader. who do call if you spoke to the

antiwar movement? tries to go oint talk to the proat the timers, he goes ernestly and meets them in washington. and it is a meeting of minds. tries to go talk to the 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 ould persuade them to see they -- that he was trying to end the war. brian: out of time. our guest has been neil erguson. the book is called "the square the book is called "the square and the tower" networks in power from the freemasons to facebook. we thank you very much for joining us. niall: thank you.

[captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2018] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] >> for free transcripts or give us your comments about this program, visit us at "q&a."org. "q&a" programs are also available at c-span podcasts. >> on the next "q&a," political activist and former rofessional basketball player, aton thomas, he discusses his book, we matter, athletes and activism. sunday night at :00 eastern and pacific on c-span. tonight, on landmark cases, brandenburg versus ohio. klux klan leader clarence

brandenburg was convicted of hate speech under an ohio law. but the supreme court unanimously ruled the skate law violated his first amendment right. our guest to discuss this case nadine straussen, former head of the american civil liberties union, and law professor at new york law school in manhattan. nd katie fallo, a senior attorney at columbia university's knight first amendment institute. watch landmark cases tonight. join the conversation. our #is landmark cases. follow us at c-span. we have resources on our website for background on each case. the landmark cases companion book, a link to the national constitution center's interactive constitution, and he landmark cases podcast at -span.org/landmarkcases. >> as a follow-up to the recent hearings with facebook c.e.o. mark zuckerberg, the communicators looks at the privacy issues raised by the spread of personal data by the president and

c.e.o. at the certainty for democracy and technology and lee goodman, attorney and former chair of the federal election commission. >> all of those politicians who asked mark zuckerberg questions for 10 hours, every one of them has been using data mined from american citizens to communicate with with their constituents, to build mailing lists, to target voters, and a lot of this is for good andal torrey reasons. >> the metta 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 the communicators tonight at 8:00 eastern on c-span2. >> on capitol hill, the house expected back briefly at 2:00 p.m. eastern before starting legislative work at 5:00 with several bills from the natural resources committee on the agenda. members are expected to spend

most of the rest of the week debating bills in recognition of tax day, which is tomorrow. measures intended to protect taxpayers. we could also hear speeches on the floor about the recent air strikes in syria. watch live house coverage here on c-span and the senate also back to work today working on a water rights bill and later in the week possible work on executive judicial nominations. you can can watch the senate live on c-span2. we got a look at the week ahead in washington earlier today on "washington journal." washington. mondays we look at the week ahead in washington. to do that, we are joined by sahil kapur with bloomberg news, and jeff mason for reuters. two stories that dominated the weekend driving the news into the week, the james comey book and the fallout from the syrian strikes. thented to talk about