Official Notes:
In this episode of the Waking Up podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Niell Ferguson about his new book "The Square and the Tower." They discuss his career as a writer, networks and hierarchies, how history gets written, the similarity between the 16th century and the 21st, the role of social media in the 2016 Presidential election, the influence of advertising on the public sphere, Trump, the Russian investigation, Islamic extremism, counterfactuals, what would have happened if Clinton had won the presidency, immigration in Europe, conspiracy theories, capitalism, globalization, communism, wealth inequality, universal basic income, Henry Kissinger, the prospect of a US war with China, cyberwar, and other topics.
Here's a crazy idea: the counterfactuals if Clinton were elected may be even grimmer than our Trump factuals.
I'm not sure I believe that, but it intrigued me enough to check Fergeson's book out of the library. And I'm glad I did--he's a wonderful writer and historian. Plus he didn't drink the Obama Koolaid, so you can actually read an intellectual and a scholar who doesn't gush mindlessly over the Obama years.
The episode was stimulating, I suppose, but nothing in it leapt out at me. But read the book. Or at least a few chapters of it.
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