Niall Ferguson on October 7 and Our Changed World

Honestly with Bari Weiss

The Free Press

News, Society & Culture

4.6 • 7.8K Ratings

🗓️ 8 October 2025

⏱️ 73 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week commemorates the two year anniversary of October 7, 2023. That morning, Hamas invaded Israel. They slaughtered some 1,200 people and took another 250 hostage. Forty-eight hostages, some alive and some dead, are still being held in Gaza. In these last two years, the world has changed. In many ways, the past two years have felt like two decades. The world feels like it has tilted on its axis. There is nobody better suited to make sense of this moment—the lessons learned, the harsh realities that have been revealed, and America’s changing role in the world—than Niall Ferguson. Niall is a columnist at The Free Press. He is also senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, the author of 16 books, and one of the most influential historians of our time. This conversation with Niall was a Free Press livestream. To never miss those conversations, and to be able to join them as they unfold, become a subscriber at thefp.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, honestly, listeners. I have an amazing announcement. We're trying something different this week at the free press. We're calling it free press, free week. For one week only, everything we publish, every story, column, investigative report, live stream, podcast, you name it. It's going to be free to all from October 6 to October 12th. It's free access to our
0:23.4	fearless journalism to any user who creates a registered account. We're also curating a collection
0:29.0	of some of our favorite pieces from the archives, timeless stories that we think are worth
0:33.4	revisiting, and you'll be able to read all of those freely in one place. For Free Press,
0:38.5	free week, you can expect fresh columns and essays from some of your favorite writers,
0:43.2	like Matty Friedman, Abigail Shrier, Tyler Cowan, Jed Rubenfeld, Matthew Contenetti,
0:49.3	Coleman Hughes, Susie Weiss, and of course, Nellie Bowles' TGIF. We'll also invite you to join our live-streamed conversations, which are normally reserved for paid subscribers.
0:59.7	They'll include a conversation between me and Neil Ferguson, a conversation about the New York mayoral race with Ollie Weissman, Olivia Rheingold, and Mark Halpern.
1:09.6	There'll be a conversation with Abigail Schreier
1:11.9	and a TGIF live stream with Nellie Bowles and Will Ron. You are not going to want to miss any of this.
1:17.6	Again, this is only from October 6 to October 12th. So don't miss a story. Share this widely
1:23.3	and see for yourself what the free press is all about.
1:28.6	From the free press, this is honestly, and I'm Barry Weiss.
1:36.0	This week commemorates the two-year anniversary of October 7, 2023.
1:42.1	Everyone will know, of course, that on that morning, Hamas terrorists crossed over the border
1:47.3	into Israel.
1:48.5	They did so on hand glider, on motorcycle, on truck, and on foot.
1:52.5	And they slaughtered 1,200 people that day.
1:55.9	Another 250 were taken hostage by Hamas.
2:00.3	48 of those people still remain in Hamas captivity more than 730 days later, some alive and some dead.
2:10.6	So those are the facts, those are the numbers.
2:14.0	What those facts and numbers don't capture is the way the world has changed in the past two years.
	...

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