We might think of this as the war in Ukraine or the Russian invasion of Ukraine,

but maybe it's just the first part of World War III and part 2 is going to be in the Middle East

when Iran escalates its war against Saudi Arabia and part three is Taiwan and if those

things happen in roughly the same time frame then we're looking at something much more alarming than Cold War II. I'm fine with

Cold War II. Cold War II is good because Cold Wars, where we don't actually do that much

fighting, are an incentive to innovate technologically.

It's better for us to recognize we're in Cold War II

and that it is primarily a technological race and we can't lose it.

But if you end up in World War III where you actually have to have an enormous number of shells available,

missiles available, where you have to replace the ships that get sunk in the Taiwan

straight very fast. Then the United States is in a very weak position, I think. As we cross our 1 million download, we wanted to look back at history as well as into the future. We'll

do that by focusing on two areas today China and also the Russia-Ukraine war.

Nobody better to do that with than historian Neil Ferguson. If this

podcast, going back to its earliest days, has a cast, Neil's been a starring member of

it. As a professor he's taught at Oxford, Harvard, and Stanford, he's a weekly

columnist for Bloomberg News. He's published numerous books, 17 in total,

including The Square in the Tower, Networks in Power,

from the Freemasons to Facebook, and also doom the politics of

catastrophe, which is a deeply researched history that raises serious questions about whether the West can anticipate and cope with future catastrophes.

He also wrote the first of a multi-volume biography of Kissinger, the first one was called

Kissinger in 1923 to 1968. of Kissinger, the first one was called Kissinger in

1923 to 1968, the idealist, and he's currently

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