Niall Ferguson

I mean, DeepMind's the most important AI company in the end.

It's a much more important, historically innovative company, but it's a British company that ended up

being acquired by Google, because there was no other way to scale it.

So I don't think these are cultural problems.

They're institutional problems.

And you can see these as, in a sense, Britain reverting to its 1970s bad habits, which Margaret Thatcher temporarily cured Britain of.

If you could bring Margaret Thatcher back to life and redo Thatcherism, then I think there would be a chance, at least, of revitalizing Britain's capital markets, which, you know...

are potentially extraordinarily broad and deep.

I mean, very liquid.

But institutionally, the incentives are terrible.

You know, the way, like, pension funds deploy capital in Britain would make you weep.

So I think there are fixes here that the next, and I hope it will be a conservative government, can address.

I want Kemi Beidenoch to be Black Thatcher and to do all the things again that we, the hard way we had to do starting in 1979.

Yeah.

Neil Ferguson, historian and public intellectual.

I love having you on.

I disagree with most of everything you say, Neil, and yet I learned so much, and you really do open my mind, and I'd like to think a lot of our listeners' minds, too.

You just have this unbelievable ability to thread history with economics and logic, even if you get to a place that kind of sends chills down my spine.

I just love speaking to you.

I really appreciate your time, and I appreciate how, quite frankly, like,