Viewer Mail: The GoodFellows Answer Your Questions

>> Male Speaker 1: Can you walk us through your thinking about why you decided to put a 90 day pause?

>> Donald Trump: Well, I thought that people were jumping a little bit out of line. They were getting yippee, you know, they were getting a little bit yippee, a little bit afraid, unlike these champions, because we have a big job to do.

 

No other president would have done what I did. No other president. I know the president, they wouldn't have done it.

>> Bill Whalen: It's Thursday, April 10th, 2025, and welcome back to GoodFellows, a Hoover Institution broadcast examining social, economic, political, and geopolitical concerns. I'm Bill Whalen. I'm a Hoover Distinguished Policy Fellow.

 

I'll be your moderator today. And guess what? I have all three good fellows in the House with me today. And our good fellows are, of course, Sir Niall Ferguson, an eminent historian, the economist John Cochran, and former Presidential National Security Advisor, Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster. H.R. and John are all Hoover senior fellows.

 

So, gentlemen, we set up this show a few weeks ago to be a mailbag. We asked our viewers for questions. They more than rewarded us. I'd like to thank everybody who bothered to write in. If we didn't get to your question, I sincerely apologize. Just too many questions and too little time.

 

That said, we have a big news story on top of us as well, which is tariffs and the world economy, the United States future relationships with its allies as well as China. So we're going to try to wed the two. So let's begin by giving you two questions related to tariffs and then let's get into it.

 

So the first question, bear with me from John. It's a little lengthy, but he writes, president Trump seems to be basing his belief in use tariffs, at least in part on economic results from his first term. I'd like to hear the goodfellows, especially John, discuss how the US Economy did so well during Trump's first term.

 

Even though he imposed tariffs, was it that other economic factors were so good that they overpowered the negative impacts of these tariffs? If so, what were those factors and why would this time be different? And let's couple that, Niall, with the question from Will in London, UK, who writes, are Trump's tariffs effectively a way of denuding China of economic, manufacturing and military power?

 

Gentlemen, have at.

>> John H. Cochrane: Here we go. Well, let me start small. Why did they not cause so much damage the first time? A good principle is that the economic damage of a tax is proportional to the square of the tax rate. So small taxes applied to a few countries have much less damage than large taxes applied to lots of countries and this one clearly is designed to blow things up in a way that the last ones were more tentative.

 

Yes, many other causes were in there and the economy could have done even better without the tariffs last time. But I think this one is clearly much bigger and I think we'll get to is how it is a disaster economically and even worse politically and even worse in terms of foreign policy.

 

 

>> Bill Whalen: Nice and quick, Niall.

>> Niall Ferguson: So let's use numbers because John likes them. So do I. It's true that President Trump raised tariffs in his first term, but not by much. Let's ask what the average tariff rate on US imports was. Well on the year in the year he got elected, it was 1.55%.

 

So 1.55% by the end of Trump's first term was 2.85. So tariffs went up. They mostly went up on China and on particular categories, steel and aluminum. This was not a huge trade shock and in that sense we can see why tariffs were not a significant headwind. The tailwinds to growth that the Trump administration did in his first term were much more potent, particularly the combination of the tax cuts of 2017, the deregulation which really was a an important part of the story, and an environment in which there was low inflation, high employment.

 

The tariffs were not a major variable. The second Trump term is a completely different story. We're having this conversation less than 24 hours after yet another U-turn in a tariff policy. Since Trump's inauguration, there have been multiple increases in tariffs and changes in direction. Trade policy uncertainty is at some all time high.

 

But let me bring bring it back to the number. What's the average tariff rate? If President Trump had stuck with the plan that he unveiled last week in the Rose Garden, the famous Liberation Day plan in which so called reciprocal tariffs were imposed on multiple trading partners and Everybody was on 10%, then the average tariff rate would have risen to something like 22 or 23%.

 

That's to compare with 2 point something percent at the end of Trump's first term. So an order of magnitude larger, or to put it a different way, you'd have taken the average tariff rate back to where it was in 1909. Today, after the April 9th U turn which took all the reciprocal tariffs away again or at least stayed their execution for 90 days, we're still looking at an average effective tariff rate on imports around about where it was at the time of the 1930 Smoot Hawley tariff Act.

 

So this is a massively larger shock than anything that was contemplated in the first Trump term. And that is why we have seen such convulsions in financial markets in the last several days. And just to finish the point, we're not out of the woods because a 90 day stay of execution is a short time in which to negotiate what, 70 plus bilateral trade agreements, which even if they're all successfully achieved, still leave you at the 10% across the board tariff rate.

 

And we'll come back to this in the show, the US And China are still on a massive collision course with the tariff rate on Chinese imports to the United States now far above 100% as a result of multiple increments by President Trump. So that's the answer to the question.

 

This is a completely different ballgame from Trump One.

>> John H. Cochrane: Let me just exploit my short answer full time to pile on to what Niall said. Even the average tariff rate understates the damage, because you want the average squared tax rate, tariff rate. So the 125% is worse. That does more damage than the ones that are less than the average benefit.

 

You know, stuff in Walmart is going to double in price. That's a big deal, and it's a big shock to Trump's base when we get to the political and foreign policy ramifications. Just think about what that's going to do to Trump's political support. And the other thing Niall mentioned, it's beyond just the tariffs.

 

So there's the economic damage of tariffs, there's the political and foreign policy damage. But the uncertainty effect is something that we really should take for granted. Suppose you're thinking about building a factory, and that factory, you wanna do what Trump wants you to do. You wanna bring, I don't know, showing sneakers back to the US or something silly like that.

 

Well, the viability of that project depends on the tariff. And it takes five years to build the factory. You'd be a fool to build it now. Who knows what's going to happen, you know, within five years, the next Democratic president could issue executive orders under national state of emergence and get rid of the tariffs.

 

So the economic damage, just the perspective of the tariffs and the huge uncertainty is going to cause major economic damage. H.R.

>> Bill Whalen: Yeah, I was gonna say, does John and Palo Alto have a question for H.R. in Palo Alto?

>> John H. Cochrane: I'm ready to needle H.R. on H.R., how's that economic statecraft working out for you now?

 

 

>> H.R. McMaster: Hey, it's a really good study.

>> John H. Cochrane: We had fun talks about careful tariff policies, and this is what you get when you start playing that field.

>> H.R. McMaster: It's a really good study. But apparently nobody, you know, in the White House or the administration read it for sure.

 

But hey, hey, this could have happened in Trump 1. It easily could have happened in Trump 1, because, you know, President Trump is disruptive. He's had this long held sense of aggrievement that we've been taking advantage of. We need big adjustments, you know, in, in the, in the, in the trade balance, especially in goods.

 

That's, that's his big report card, you know, and, and this is what people like Peter Navarro fed him. But, you know, what we did in the first Trump administration is we said, okay, hey, what's the objective? What's the goal is as, as, as the, as our listener said, hey, does this have to do with China or.

 

Well, yeah, it actually, you know, that's what we said is if the problem's China, if the problem is that China, we don't want China to have coercive power over our economy. We don't want China to be able to atrophy further our industrial base that, such that it has big national security considerations.

 

We don't want them to be able to control critical supply chains that allow them to disrupt our economy or to disrupt our ability to secure ourselves. I mean, if that's the problem, then, hey, and what I would say to President Trump is if we shoot all of our allies to get to China, China wins.

 

And then Gary Cohen and I would be take turns jumping on, on, on, on the tariff or the blow up this trade agreement grenade that was being rolled into the Oval Office like every other day, you know, by, by Peter Navarro. But now, you know, President Trump's a hell of a lot less patient.

 

We tried, you know what we did in this case, we said, okay, if these are the proposals on trade or on trade agreements, let's get the President into the Roosevelt Room. We want to go across the Roosevelt Room. And we said, okay, what is our objective, Mr. President?

 

Well, based on that objective, this is a course of action, but it's probably going to be counterproductive. And by the way, you've got this great trade rep, Bob Lighthizer, who understands your agenda. He agrees with your agenda. Let's give him a shot at that, you know. But now my sense is there is no kind of formalistic decision making like this going on and what you're getting is just erratic decision making based on partial information.

 

And this is why the objective is so obscure too, right? We've heard so many different objectives associated with these various actions in the military. When you have this kind of disarray, you call it order, counter order disorder. And I think that's what we've got going on. And the President's a hell of a lot less patient.

 

He's less patient.

>> John H. Cochrane: It's not, there's a process thing and then there's a sort of a big picture thing. This is the classic answer in search of a question. Tariffs are the answer. And then we're wandering around thinking, what does it mean to China? Is it eliminate bilateral trade deficits?

 

Does it restore? I don't know what the hell it is. But I think this is a very good point on decision making. When you find yourself with a predetermined answer, and you're searching around for the questions, and it changes every day, obviously something chaotic is going on.

>> Niall Ferguson: Well, Will's question was, are Trump's tariffs effectively a way of denuding China of economic, manufacturing and military power?

 

So I think in some people's minds they are. But let's just ask the question, how exactly? So if you impose a barrier, which in effect these very high tariffs are on Chinese exports to the United States, what does that do to China? Well, it's certainly painful, but let's remember that only 16 or 17% of Chinese exports go to the United States.

 

I'm basing that on the 2021 data. And it's about 19% of US imports. It's a bit of an understatement though, because a much larger proportion than than before the first Trump term of Chinese exports to the United States go via third countries. And so the first so called trade war of 2018, 1920, really just rerouted Chinese exports so that they would stop off in Vietnam or in Mexico or in India before they reached the United States.

 

But they were still ultimately Chinese exports to the US. And US importers actually didn't use any fewer Chinese components in the things that they were making. And it's important to recognize this, I don't think many people do, to end the US reliance on Chinese components and capital goods.

 

This is an important point. It's not like we're importing sneakers from China anymore. This is not an important part of the trade flow. The Chinese are way up the value chain and the Chinese make capital goods now. So if John Wants that factory to get built. He'll actually need Chinese machinery to build it.

 

 

>> John H. Cochrane: Exactly.

>> Niall Ferguson: Make way more capital goods now than-

>> H.R. McMaster: Hey, this is an important point. Just quickly on this, on trans shipment like this, this is why you're getting a lot of the tariffs on, on allies, a lot of the blanket tariffs. I think what you're going to see are sectoral tariffs next, you know, on copper or whatever, you know what, or pharmaceuticals maybe.

 

And, and, and I think a big part of the bilateral trade negotiations are going to be to address the trans shipment issue as, as well as you kind of rules of origin, which is associated with that as well. So, yeah, I think you're going to see this continue to evolve.

 

And it's Chinese overcapacity, and dumping, and then transshipment of really critical materials. And I know John hates the thing. It's overcapacity, okay? I'm sorry, man, but that's.

>> John H. Cochrane: They're better than we are.

>> H.R. McMaster: It's meant to drive American critical businesses out of business. And so, but that's what he should address, right?

 

Not, not do the, you know, kind of the blanket approach that he's taken so far. But what, what. One of the impetus behind a lot of the blanket tariffs is the transshipment issue. And it's important to highlight that. Niall, thanks.

>> John H. Cochrane: I think we're making a mistake here, though, of imposing our question on Trump's answer.

 

This is not clearly stated. It's not clearly stated as anything, but this is not a geopolitical competition with China set of tariffs. Because, you know, really, why does, why does 125% tariffs on Chinese bicycles have anything to do with our geopolitical competition with China? It is mostly about a theory that this will improve the American economy somehow or other.

 

And that is just a fallacy of the flat earth level. We've understood since the 1750s that countries that are open to trade do better than countries that try to wall themselves off. The tariffs are doing to us what sanctions, what we do with sanctions to other countries. You know, when we're sanctioning other countries, we're trying to stop them from importing things.

 

We're trying to stop ourselves from importance. If tariffs were a good idea, then states should have tariffs, cities should have tariffs. We've understood that that is a terrible idea economically for a long, long time. And I think a, a lot of this is not narrowly focused on China, which is one question to which some tariffs might be an answer, but is in this attempt to drive.

 

They're explicit about it. We want zero trade balances, zero goods trade balances with each individual country. That's completely nuts.

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, we have a lot of questions to get to, so I'm gonna, unfortunately, do a little short shrift on tariffs. But I want to do one more question on this.

 

Let's make it an exit question for you gentlemen. David and Beverly Hills writes, this one's for Neopa. Let's make it for all three of you. Do you think Trump's messy approach to tariffs and overall handling of economic and foreign policy is diminishing the strength of the vibe shift that looks so promising in the first month of Trump's current term?

 

And let me tackle Onto this question, if we're looking at 90 days, a 90 day reprieve on the tariff, that's 12 more weeks of this. So tell me what the world's going to look like in the next 12 weeks leading up to July 8th. Whatever the magic date is for, for the 90 day freeze.

 

 

>> Niall Ferguson: This is an easy one because I remember writing about the vibe shift just after the election and making the point that it would end the minute Trump became president. Because then we'd go from the kind of fantasy world of Mar a Lago to where he was king to the real world where he was president.

 

And one of the points I made towards the end of that vibe shift piece was that there would be a Gotham City policy to this new administration. And sure enough, the problem about Trump unbound and compared with the Trump that HR Worked with, he is unbound and unconstrained in this second term is that he can do the things that, that HR Gary Cohn and others were able to stop him from doing.

 

And the, the extraordinary protectionism that we've seen, which took even me by surprise. I thought they would get to tariffs in the second half of the year and they would prioritize other things, but in fact, Trump has decided to go all in on the tariffs in the first hundred days.

 

This is going to have such adverse economic consequences already, even with the reversal of April 9, that it will very quickly filter through to the US economy, not just in the form of higher prices, which voters are not going to like, because that was one of the reasons that they voted the Democrats out on November 5, but also because jobs are going to be lost.

 

There are companies all over the United States that are going to start shedding labor because they are simply not going to be able to go through with the investments that they plan to go through with. And that is already happening at the highest level with the big tech companies canceling data center projects.

 

It's going to go right down to small businesses that had purchased orders for next Christmas from China. The toy business is still a heavy, heavily reliant on China. Those businesses are in deep trouble because they cannot afford to pay the tariffs on the orders that they already put in.

 

So the vibe shift ended the minute he was sworn in. I knew that would happen. But I think Trump's popularity, which is, you know, it's been drifting downwards the approval rating, as usually happens when a president sworn in. But it's gonna nosedive when the economic consequences of deep policy uncertainty make themselves felt, not only in inflation, but I think more importantly, in the labor market, it's gonna get ugly.

 

And you know what? Even now, it's very, very hard to undo the dam that has been done in the past week for the reason that John gave this uncertainty is toxic. The threat of tariffs on a Smoot Hawley level. Who would ever have thought we would have tried something so reckless, given the memory of what the Holly tariffs were associated with in the 1930s.

 

But that's what he's been able to do. And, yeah, the vibe shift is about to go in a very different direction, and the vibe is going to be a bad vibe.

>> John H. Cochrane: So I think the vibe shift did not end the minute he won the election, and that's the tragedy.

 

So let's focus on the political. And then I jumped in because I want to ask the question for HR of the foreign policy consequences, which I think are worse. The vibe shift was doing great until the tariffs came. And there was all sorts of great stuff coming out of the Trump administration.

 

Executive orders saving us from energy suicide. Executive orders saving us from AI regulation suicide. Just yesterday, there was an executive order reversing the tit for tat bans on shower heads. We now can get shower heads that actually wash you.

>> Donald Trump: In my case, I like to take a nice shower to take care of my beautiful hair.

 

I have to stand in the shower for 15 minutes till it gets wet.

>> John H. Cochrane: For the next four years, until the Democratic president comes in and puts the executive order on shower heads again. This was sort of a great start, but it needed to be institutionalized. We needed Trump to succeed politically so that these things became permanent.

 

And, of course, now they won't. I think you're exactly right. When the economic damage comes, when everything at Walmart costs twice as much as it does now, when the economy tanks, Trump's political popularity is going to tank, too. And not just the vibe shift, but the ability to get things done.

 

The rats will start leaving the sinking ship quickly, and that will be kind of the end of all the things we had hoped for out of a Trump presidency. And back we go again. So that political damage is. I think now there might be a silver lining here.

 

You said Trump unconstrained. We are still slightly a nation of checks and balances. We are still. We do not elect a king every four years who rules by executive order, by decree. In fact, these tariffs are strikingly. Well, I'm not a lawyer, but they look darn illegal. It's taken under a national declaration of national emergency.

 

What? Where's the national emergency on Bicycle imports from China, please. Or, or, or imports from France. Congress should, you know, when the damage happens and the rats start leaving the sinking ship, hopefully Congress will take back some of its authority and we'll get back to not being a country of executive orders or the courts will say, this is all crazy.

 

I mean, Trump is not unconstrained. And the extent to which you're constrained depends on your political popularity, which may. Well, which will tank if, if the economy tanks and foreign policy. So really, this, I think, is the largest one. We have just pissed off everybody around the world.

 

You can bully people to do what you want once, but then when China blockades Taiwan, you want to get on the phone and say, you know, we'd really like you to help help us enforce this sanctions on China and stop buying cheap electric cars from China. Everyone around the world is going to say, yeah, boy, now you're calling, asking for favors.

 

 

>> Bill Whalen: You had a question for HR, John.

>> John H. Cochrane: That was the question for hr.

>> H.R. McMaster: This is what bugs me, right? So, hey, like, news flash, like, Donald Trump's disruptive, okay? Everybody knows that, right? But, but what's sad about this is, you know, he's so disruptive that he disrupts himself and he becomes the antagonist in his own story.

 

And so, you know, this what bugs me so much. Like, I mean, I think I wake up every day now and I'm, like, a little bit agitated. Like, why am I agitated? Missed opportunities.

>> John H. Cochrane: Yes.

>> H.R. McMaster: So, you know, focus on what the real agenda is and put together in a reasonable policy and then build coalitions around that.

 

How about, like a positive agenda with Europe? Right? Hey, what is Trump about? Deregulation, you know, economic growth, you know, energy security. Hey, that sounds like the Draghi Report to me, right? I mean, that's a positive agenda with the eu. Now, do you have grievances associated with, you know, unequal access to their markets and everything?

 

Hell, yeah. But negotiate those, you know, Canada, Right? Canada. Really picking on Canada. I mean, I mean, gosh, you know, there's a very positive agenda there, too, which is in the area of energy dominance, missile defense, the golden dome. How do you have a golden dome if you can't shoot down missiles over the Arctic, which is where they come from?

 

You know, so there's an Arctic agenda with them. There's a strengthening North American defense broadly, all right? I mean, there's so much positive. But, you know, I'm reminded, you know, of Oddball in, in Kelly's Heroes when he says, hey, enough with the negative waves, Moriarty?

>> Male Speaker 1: Why don't you knock it off of them negative waves?

 

Why don't you dig how beautiful it is out here? Why don't you say something righteous and hopeful for a change?

>> H.R. McMaster: You know? I mean, we need. We need more, some positive waves here. You know, and, and, and, and stop missing opportunities.

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, let's shift to foreign affairs.

 

A question from Andrea and Luxembourg, who writes keen to hear a discussion on the future of Europe and the European Union as an institution. Is the continent destined to descend into geopolitical and economic irrelevance? Can the EU project survive as a peace and economic project? Niall, you're closer to this.

 

 

>> Niall Ferguson: Enough. This, this is a very hotly debated topic within the Ferguson household with my wife, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, very skeptical about the future of Europe and my take being somewhat more constructive. Her view is that Europe has crossed a certain threshold, particularly with immigration, that has created a real instability that will be hard to overcome in terms of the lack of cultural cohesion, the problem of radical Islamic.

 

And she's also a skeptic that European institutions are capable of adapting to the new world. I take a somewhat contrarian view, but you should know that we've been arguing about this for many years, certainly since the Brexit debates. She was a leaver and I was a remainer. I think the European Union gets a bad press in the US where there's a tendency, especially I notice, in Silicon Valley, to say, Europe, it's a museum.

 

We don't really have any use for it. All they do is manufacture regulations. But if one actually spends time in Europe, which in my experience Silicon Valley folks don't, except perhaps on vacation, you realize that really the European Union has surprised to the upside when they created a single currency.

 

Most economists can't remember if John was one of them, but certainly eminent figures such as Marty Feldstein predicted that it wouldn't last, that it wasn't an optimal currency area and it would at some point blow up. Well, guess what? Still here, even after the global financial crisis, European integration has continued.

 

New members have been added. NATO, which is the security arm of Europe, might well turn out to be viable without the United States, though it will involve, and HR will agree with this massive investment in defence capability to create European strategic autonomy. But that's what they're talking about doing right now in the face of successive crises, going right back to the financial crisis, then through Covid, the war in Ukraine, and now the crisis that Trump has created.

 

The tendency has been for Europe to integrate more, not less. And Britain's exits actually made European integration easier because Britain was the one country that really didn't believe in creating a United States of Europe. So my contrarian view, and I'll get hell at home for saying this, our good fellows is that Europe keeps surprising upside.

 

And now that it's doing rearmaments, and now that Germany in particular is investing in its defense capability, I think we might be surprised by how positive that is for the German economy and indeed for the Eurozone economy as a whole. So that's my contrarian view. Hate on me now.

 

 

>> Bill Whalen: HR.

>> H.R. McMaster: Hey, I think it's just important to consider what the European Union was for at the beginning, right? And, and really it was an answer to, to what, you know, Churchill had predicted after World War II is, hey, it's just going to be more of the same in Europe unless we do something fundamentally different.

 

I think when the EU has problems, it's when they set, you know, they become too ambitious. And I think what you're going to see from a defense perspective, you know, is that within NATO in particular, you're going to see subgroups within NATO that increase their cooperation on defense and security.

 

So think about really the Nordic states, the Baltic states and Poland. That's a group that really sees the threat from Russia is really geographically in a very good position for that kind of cooperation to strengthen deterrence and so forth. So, you know, I think it's just, we just don't want to expect too much of the European Union.

 

We should maybe be happy with what they were able to achieve. They should be happy themselves. And I think when they get into trouble is when they begin to assert the sovereignty of citizens within sovereign states who don't want their fate determined by faceless bureaucrats in Brussels. And, and that was the whole, you know, that that was the impetus behind the Brexit movement.

 

And it's why there is this certain feeling of kinship, I think, between those who are deep European skeptics and those in the, in the U.S. who are maybe on the, on kind of, I don't even know how to describe them, but kind of the retrenchers, the economic nationalists.

 

There is this kind of ecosystem that exists internationally now between European skeptics and, you know, what some people call the alt right.

>> John H. Cochrane: I'm a European optimist, Park, because I'm always an optimist. And I actually, I love visiting the museum part of Europe as well as my European friends.

 

I see possibility in Europe. Europe from an economic point of view. Their tragedy is they stopped growing 10 years ago and the US left them behind. And you look at numbers, the average European is, is 40% worse off than the average American. So this is a real big difference in, in living standards.

 

But Europe has figured that out. The Draghi report, which Niall Mentioned, said slap in the face, guys, we've overregulated this thing to death and overtaxed that to death. Now Draghi, Europe has some ways to figure out, you know, Draghi said, what we need to do is borrow a lot of money and throw it at stimulus.

 

We tried that guys, it didn't work. But the institutional reform part, let me advertise that I have a book on the euro coming out in June which takes a deep look at one institution and says actually it was set up very thoughtfully but has run into some problems and needs institutional reform.

 

So is Europe capable of institutional reform? Are democracies capable of institutional reform? And I think the answer has to be slowly, but yes. Now the institutional reform you clearly need in Europe is something like what the US went through. We had an Articles of Confederation which maintained a lot of state sovereignty and didn't work.

 

And then we had a constitution which formed an effective government. The European Union level government is set up as this very distant technocratic rule spewer outer, sorry for that dramatically, but very distant from the average citizens. So they, they do need to think about how to fix their institutions so their institutions are capable of reform.

 

And, and the, you know, the, the limits on speech in Europe, you know, people getting thrown in jail for what they post on the Internet. They actually, France actually threw a, a right wing politician in jail to stop her from being elected next. You know, those are, are very worrisome trends, but the average European citizen is growing skeptical and they are realizing what the damage of their catastrophic energy policy was.

 

They're realizing their catastrophic immigration policies. So I think there is hope for reform. And in the same way as the US that after trying everything else, sooner or later we'll do the right thing. Let us hope that both our societies aren't so stuck in, in obviously dysfunctional institutions that they're unable to fix them.

 

 

>> H.R. McMaster: Just a quick story. About a year and a half ago, I was walking through Mayfair with Stephen Cotkin on a chilly evening, and he goes, hey, is this decline? If this is decline, I want more of it.

>> John H. Cochrane: Wait, this is an important thing. When you look at numbers like 40% GDP, every country in the world, when you go down the Champs Elysees or the Central, even whatever the central street in Lagos, Nigeria is looks.

 

Pretty nice. But economics is about numbers. It's about how many people live that nice, nice lifestyle versus how many people. What's the economics is really about what does the average person live in? And in, you know, the US you live in a pretty big house and you got a pretty big truck.

 

I just went to Japan. Lovely country. Walking down the central streets of Tokyo. It's clean and clean public toilets, and everything looks wonderful. And then you look around at how big of a house does the average person live in and what kind of car. Many of them don't have a car at all.

 

Do they get to drive? And that is important to average people's lives. Not just what the Gucci store looks like.

>> Niall Ferguson: Though, to be honest, John, if you look past those metrics and ask about, say, public health life expectancy, the US Data are terrible in some of those domains.

 

And we've actually seen a decline in, in life expectancy. So, you know, the problems that we see that beset middle America are so often discussed when we're trying to explain populism, the rise of Trump, that there are no, no mass deaths from opioids in, in Japan. The problem barely exists in, in Europe.

 

I could go on.

>> John H. Cochrane: So they, they enforce laws on things like that.

>> Niall Ferguson: There are some important.

>> H.R. McMaster: That's what we need, ma'am. We need more sushi and less Popeyes Chicken. That's what we need.

>> John H. Cochrane: Also, you forget America is a very diverse country. If you look at Swedes in America, they have this better life expectancy than Swedes and Sweden.

 

So no other country tries to deal with the kind of diversity that the US Deals with.

>> Bill Whalen: Let's move on with this question from.

>> Niall Ferguson: Rock and I'd love to go further down that road. Let's save it for another episode.

>> John H. Cochrane: Yeah, I agree.

>> Bill Whalen: Thank you.

>> H.R. McMaster: I'm just glad you guys are stopped.

 

You're not talking about math anymore.

>> John H. Cochrane: Public health people shooting each other and, and, you know, eating themselves to death and so forth. It's. It's not a. It's not a. We don't have a public health system. But yeah, that'll be moving.

>> Bill Whalen: Moving on. Okay. A question from Rockenzerk, Sweden.

 

He writes, president Trump recently suggested that, quote, there are methods in which you can do it with regard to running for a third term. Some might fear that with the Republican appointed Supreme Court, checks and balances are gone. Others call January 6th and Doge's access to the federal payment system a coup during the election it was said Kamala's victory would lead to lawlessness and institutional collapse.

 

What is going on here? How resilient are the institutions, the United States, more than the will of any elected president. Rock, if you're listening, I'd point you to the Hoover Institution Revitalizing American Institutions initiative, which is something very important to Condoleezza Rice, our director. But, Niall, let's talk for a moment about American institutions.

 

 

>> Niall Ferguson: Well, it's a good question to ask, to take the specific question of a third term. Yes, there are indeed mechanisms you'd have to repeal the relevant amendment, and that's a constitutional amendment, which is a very difficult thing to do and I think is about 1% probable. So that that's not going to happen any more than Canada is going to become the 51st state.

 

And I think we just file it under Trump trolling. And this is part of his MO to say extreme things, and then you're kind of glad when something less extreme happens or grateful. Perhaps that was part of the rationale for the trade brinkmanship. I think there's a broader question at issue, which is how far the norms, which are an important part of a constitutional order, are being undermined.

 

And I would argue, and I've argued for some time, that both parties have been undermining these norms. Both parties, for example, have, I think, tried to use the legal system for political ends in ways that are different from what we saw in the past. I think the Constitution was brilliantly designed by the founders to prevent the typical way in which a republic descends into either anarchy or tyranny.

 

And it's worked for nearly a quarter of a millennium successfully. And I think it will work again, despite the bad instincts that politicians on both sides have, and specifically despite Donald Trump's strange impulses to be an imperial figure. My sense is, last thing I'll say, that the hubris of this early 100 days will be followed, just as the Greeks would have expected, by nemesis economically, in terms of popularity, in terms of political legacy.

 

And the Constitution won't seriously be troubled much beyond 100 days, precisely because the president's already done a lot of damage to his political brand.

>> Bill Whalen: Yeah. So, John, he asked about resiliency. That is a stress test.

>> John H. Cochrane: Well, I want to echo what Niall said. The norms and checks and balances are frank.

 

The lawfare is one of the things that I found outrageous. And just little things like presidents now routinely pointing at the Supreme Court justices during State of a Union speech or the harassing of the Supreme Court, the dirty tricks the Biden laptop embroglio in the last election, all sorts of misuse of the government and fraying of norms.

 

It's very important to be able, that you be able to lose an election. That's the key to democracy and, and more and more it's, you know, you're in trouble if you lose. Businesses ran to Washington the minute the election changed sides. So running a business is more and more politicized.

 

These, these are not good things. But as far as, you know, Trump and, and the fourth term. Yes, but I, I would, I would point out that everyone's gotten into this as a technicality. Could he seize power despite a tremendous unpopularity? No. This sort of thing would only happen if he had a 70% approval rating.

 

Everybody in the country really wanted him to stay and we were collectively looking for a way. If he was 30% popularity because he tanked the economy and spiked off a 1979 stagflation due to tariffs, everybody's going to be running away from him and politics is in the end.

 

Do you have support or not?

>> Bill Whalen: Hey, turn your moment to be optimistic.

>> H.R. McMaster: Well, I, I agree with Niall and, and John. I of course I worry about the military profession and the degree to which I think both political parties have endeavored to pull the military into partisan politics, which we have to just have hands off, right?

 

And I'm talking obviously about the, the Biden administration's advancing what I would call radical DEI agendas, which is equality of outcome instead of equality of opportunity, as well as, you know, various manifestations of postmodernist and critical theories in which, you know, you valorize victimhood and you judge people by various identity categories and, and the degree to which they fit into oppressor or oppressed and so forth.

 

That's destructive, you know, to the warrior ethos and to the professional military ethic. I just hope that the correction is not, you know, the cure is not worse than the disease. And, and in correcting those efforts to advance, I, I would call political or social agenda within the military institution should be removed, but not at the cost of trying to have like these loyal loyalty tests or, or to, to consider military officers who served under the previous administration is somehow, you know, biased politically, which they are not.

 

So anyway, I think the military profession is going to be okay because of the professionalism of our, of our officer corps and our soldiers and non commissioned officers, servicemen and women. And I think the message to really leaders in both political parties is man hands off, stop trying to drag the military in.

 

To kind of the vortex, That is spitting Americans apart from each other in just about every walk of life, including business, as John mentioned.

>> Bill Whalen: Well said. A question from Rick in Arizona. He writes, what periods in history, economic, political and chronologic history, most closely correlate to that of the United States in its current times?

 

Coupled with that, are there other periods in the history of Western civilization to which you draw attention as being worthy of consideration as possible outcomes to the current world situation? Similarly, Sir Niall.

>> Niall Ferguson: Well, as you may have figured out, I'm at the University of Austin this week, and I've been teaching some of the freshman students here, and one of the things I'm teaching them is the.

 

The origins of historiography. We're reading Polybius and reading Tacitus, and the part of Tacitus Annals that I've assigned is the part in which Tacitus describes the final years of Augustus's reign and the accession of Tiberius as his successor and what is fascinating about the text is that Tacitus deplores the way the institutions of the Republic decayed imperceptibly into those of the Empire.

 

And he blames this on the kind of moral failure of the elites, their readiness to be suborned by Augustus, and then to accept Tiberius as his successor. So if you want to kind of just keep your mind focused on the dangers to any republic, it is very well worth reading about how the Roman Republic descended into empire, because as I keep trying to encourage the students to see if there wasn't a day when Augustus said, I'm the emperor, the Republic's dead, that never happened.

 

He just said, I'm Prince's first citizen but all the institutions of the Republic, including the Senate, continued to operate. As Tacitus says, it was a sort of moral decay of the elites that allowed this death of the Republic imperceptibly to happen. So that's gonna make you feel nervous.

 

The good news is Americans have been worrying about this more or less since the founding. And one of the best things about this country is we're always worrying about being Rome and as long as we're worrying about it, it's probably gonna be okay. The other analogy which I'm really interested in is this Nixonian analogy where subliminally or perhaps consciously, Trump is doing a lot of very Nixonian things or trying to do them.

 

They're kind of very blunt instruments, this is like the Nixon shock of 71, but it's really crude and it's probably gonna backfire. It's like, I wanna do a reverse Nixon with Putin and split him away from China, except I don't think that's gonna work either. And by comparing us with the 70s, you get the good news that the 70s were a period of disorientation, of economic underperformance, when it seemed like the United States was losing its primacy.

 

It was just an interlude. And the United States bounced back starting in 1980. So those are the kind of analogies I think about a lot.

>> Bill Whalen: Niall, that's Nixon 68, over my shoulder right there. No, Henry Kissinger, he's not on the scene yet. But HR what period in history would you choose?

 

 

>> H.R. McMaster: You know, I think it's, it's really helpful to, to think about how other periods in history reflect kind of the geopolitical landscape of today. And there's a superb essay that was written in 2014 by a great historian, Margaret Macmillan, called the Rhyme of History. You can find it on the Brookings website.

 

And in it, she compares kind of the emergence of the China, Russia alignment to the early 20th century, in which you saw the dangers of a fight on the continent about who could, would dominate what great geopolitical theorists of Spikeman and Mackinder called the world island. And so I've been thinking about that period of time as well as the work that Sir Michael Howard did in a book called the Continental Commitment, because in this book he argues that a failure for Britain, for the United Kingdom to commit to continental security because of other priorities associated with the empire did not commit sufficiently and a world war resulted.

 

And I think we're seeing debates that evoke that kind of that same period or an analogy to that period in connection with this drive toward retrenchment and deprioritizing Europe for other theaters, for example and now the U.S Is in the position where we're debating whether or not we should maintain our continental commitment.

 

And I think if we don't, we're going to increase the danger of an even larger war in Europe. What we're seeing today is the first major war in Europe since the end of World War II.

>> Bill Whalen: John Cochran, historian, by osmosis.

>> John H. Cochrane: I hang out with historians, which is always a great pleasure.

 

Yeah, the obvious ones are we've always worried about, the end of the Roman Empire. Isn't it said that all men thinks about Rome once a day, the end of the Ottoman Empire, the slow decline in sclerosis, of the United Kingdom. And we're always worried about that, but yeah, I think periods of reform.

 

Let's get ourselves hopeful by also thinking about periods when great nations fell into decay and then were able to reform themselves. Yes, how Reagan followed, followed Nixon and Carter is a good example, in the U.S in the Roman Empire there were good and bad emperors. Even as we moved on into empire, I remember cycles of things falling apart and then then a good emperor would come in and fix things a bit.

 

So even Rome was able to reform under the empire. And we got our republics have always been been good about one thing, the transition of power and getting rid of the bad guys. We've been voting out incompetence for many elections for a while, not really voting in. We've never been that great at technocratic expertise, the good emperor was always good at that, but then was immediately followed by a civil war and a bad emperor.

 

But I think times we should study and this is more of a question because you guys know the history better, but times when countries have faced problems, faced stagnation and then been able to reform their institutions in a positive way. The economic, the other historical analogy I'm looking for this is largely a question because I'm not coming up with the answers.

 

But you guys know the history better. This whole tariffs business, was there ever a country that decided to go it alone to put up tariff barriers for national security even we're going to do it ourselves so that we're the national security state and that this has worked out or have large barriers and with a focus on national security just led to stagnation.

 

I think a lot of Latin American countries put up a lot of trade barriers, often citing national security. And boy, that car industry in Bolivia is not turning out the way I think it did. India lived under trade barrier, import substitution, we'll make India great again. We'll build cars in India, go look at those cars.

 

I can't think think of a successful country living under large trade barriers. I can think of many periods in history when where was the most prosperous society at any moment in history? What was the United kingdom in the 1800s? What was the Netherlands in the 1700s? What was Venice in the 1400s?

 

It was always the one that was open and doing the most trading. So that's the other historical.

>> H.R. McMaster: I think this is what's great about history. You have to be sensitive to continuity and change. Right, and so what Carl Becker said is that memory of past and anticipation of future should walk hand in hand in a happy way.

 

And I think what's changed, what's different is you have a massive statist mercantilist economy. Interacting with ours in a way that perverts that economic discourse in a way that I think might be unprecedented. I don't know, I mean, I mean, Niall, you're the economic historian, but I think this is where it kind of falls apart, is just China.

 

China is an aberration.

>> John H. Cochrane: But so what? The free market UK was faced with statist mercantilist, France, Germany, Russia, and everybody else.

>> Niall Ferguson: And let's not forget the United States, which was a protectionist country for most of its 19th-

>> John H. Cochrane: Grew despite, clearly despite that protectionism, not because of it.

 

 

>> Niall Ferguson: Yeah, I mean this makes the argument hard because you know, the British regime in the 18th century was also a, a regime without free trade. Britain only became a free trade empire really beginning in the 1840s. And in the same way the United States embraced free trade after it had become dominant economically.

 

So there is an argument and the Chinese make it, I always hear it when I go there, that we're just doing what you did and actually now we're much more of a liberal economy than you realize. This is the debate that you have. If you go to China right now and talk about automobiles, the Chinese will argue very heatedly that their automobile sector, which is now world beating, is a result not of state subsidies and protection, but of rampant cutthroat competition where about 100 companies have been a complete free for all to see who can build the most affordable and best EV with BYD currently winning.

 

So the great thing about doing this kind of economic history is that it immediately complicates your just so story that, you know, free trade all was good. China, very mercantilist. It's not as simple as that. I could even muddy the waters on Latin America. I mean, look at Brazil.

 

Brazil is a very big economy with a significant diversified industrial sector. It didn't do that with a free trade regime. So Bill, give us another question before we disappear into the darkest, deepest waters of economic history and confuse ourselves.

>> Bill Whalen: I'm going to give you a series of questions that we call the lightning round.

 

 

>> Male Speaker 2: LIGHTNING ROUND.

>> Bill Whalen: All right gentlemen, first question comes from MH in Akron, Ohio, who writes the United states will be 250 years old in 2026 Sir John Glubb in his 1977 essay The Fate of Empires, studied at least 11 empires and found 250 years to be the average length of national greatness.

 

What's the GoodFellow's opinion? And Niall, why don't you tell us who Sir John Glubb was, AKA Glub Pasha.

>> Niall Ferguson: Glub Pasha was for many years essentially the British military expert running the armed forces of the Kingdom of Jordan. He was war hero of the first World War who had a distinguished career but it was in the Middle east as the commanding officer of the Arab Legion that that he played a key role.

 

One of those classic imperial careers in which a man like Glub, who was from the north of England would spend his entire life in the Arab world and become better known there than at home. By the way, the essay is great and I'm really grateful to the listener for suggesting that we read it.

 

There's an answer to this question which I worked out long before I knew about Glubb's essay. There's no such thing as an average empire because the distribution of empires completely not normal that there are immensely long lived empires like the Roman Empire which is definitely more than a 1000 years in duration.

 

And then there are empires like Hitler's that are incredibly short lived because they kind of self destruct. And so to talk of an average 250 year span is completely misleading. They're just not normally distributed. And that means that it doesn't mean anything that the United States is, is.

 

Is approaching its 250th birthday. In any case the United States is a republic. It's questionable whether it at some point became an empire. I think it did but that was relatively recent. I mean the soonest you can really I think refer to it is late 1890s. At any event it's not a 250 year old empire even if that was a meaningful benchmark.

 

 

>> Bill Whalen: What day you, John?

>> John H. Cochrane: To riff on Niall's don't believe in averages, yes, this is a fat tailed distribution. What you want to know is is the probability of failure a function of age. Sorry to be mathy on you, but that's the way we think about these things.

 

Are older empires more likely to fall apart than younger empires? And I think no dysfunctional empires are more likely to fall apart. And yes the US is is very strange in this range. We are not an empire. When did any empire voluntarily leave or in this case voluntarily cut itself off from the world?

 

Very strange behavior for empires. And lastly, national greatness is I think overstated. We want to leave in a live in a peaceful world and we have the hubris to think that us running it makes it a more peaceful and prosperous world. But the Netherlands lost its national greatness a long time ago, it's still a very pleasant place to live.

 

So I'm a little worried about empire for the sake of empire rather than empire for the sake of peace and prosperity.

>> Bill Whalen: Now, HR Benjamin Franklin comes to mind, what did he say? A republic, if you could keep it.

>> H.R. McMaster: Well, absolutely, and I think that's what's different for us, is that I would argue we're not an empire.

 

Maybe we could save this argument for another day. We don't stay places where we're not wanted. And I think what's different about us is the radical idea of the American Revolution, that sovereignty lies with the people. And as a result, we have, I think, a tremendous capacity for self correction and for self improvement.

 

 

>> Bill Whalen: All right, a question from Alexander in Pira Pira, Umu, Washington. Yes, I had to look up that pronunciation. I'm not up on my area apparently. He writes, if you had to bet on one unexpected country becoming a future global power by 2050, who would it be and why?

 

HR why don't you go first?

>> H.R. McMaster: Well, you know, I'll say two, and it's really not unexpected. It could be India. But of course, there's been a broad literature on this in recent years about India's problems and how difficult it is. So it's a country with tremendous potential and also has a lot of obstacles in its way in terms of achieving that vision.

 

And then I'll say something, you know, I've been thinking about lately is what does Turkey look like after Erdogan and maybe after his wing of the AKP party? I think Turkey, just based on its gifts of geography and its strategic location and the degree to which it's important as a transit country for energy and so forth, Turkey has tremendous potential.

 

And we'll see if after Erdogan, it can grow its economy more effectively, ameliorate some of its internal difficulties and play, I think, a really critical role for the, for the Eurasia and the rest of the world, Middle East, so forth.

>> Bill Whalen: John?

>> John H. Cochrane: Distinguish power versus economics, because those are two very different things.

 

And one is the desire for military power. I mean, you want to place bets, you got to place your bets on China as the most likely. But as you look around the world, look at all the surprises economically. South Korea after World War II was desperately poor. Who would have thunk that they would grow?

 

So Japan had its economic miracle. Singapore, a nice comparison, looked essentially like Gaza in about 1960. And Singapore now has about double the GDP per capita of the United States. The potential for rapid One to two generations. Spectacular economic growth lies all over the place in the world.

 

Europe could do it and rejoin the US and pass us. India could do it. The economic model is fairly simple and straightforward. It's just a lot of people with vested interests lose along the way and stand in the way. And who knows, maybe Milei's Argentina will be the one to embrace free markets, free people, open trade, innovation, low regulation and will be the Singapore of the of the 2050s.

 

 

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, the old major power by 2050.

>> Niall Ferguson: From your lips to God's ears, John, one would love to see Argentina finally break out of that multidecade period of underperformance. You're right that China's the obvious one. And indeed I worry that many of the things that are currently being done by the United States will make China's rise more, not less likely.

 

You know, it's worth reiterating something you alluded to earlier is US trade policy towards China in effect. Chinese sanctions on the United States imposed by the United States. If you think about it that way, you can see why we might inadvertently help China into the number one position.

 

I'm not sure they can do it on their own, but if we help, it's possible. I come back to a paradoxical answer that put me in mind of Henry Kissinger. Towards the end of his life, Kissinger said to his great amazement, Ukraine had proved itself to be a European power and it had established itself in military terms in ways he had not foreseen.

 

If Ukraine can ride out the next year, it's possible that Ukraine could surprise us all because it is the experimental laboratory of the war of the future and they have done very, very well considering the massive odds against them. So I'm gonna go out on a wild GoodFellows limb and say by 2050 we'll be talking about Ukraine as one of the great European powers and marveling at how few people foresaw that apart from the great Niall Ferguson.

 

 

>> John H. Cochrane: I just wanna follow up on what Niall and H.R. said earlier. There was a vision we've talked about previously on GoodFellows of global trading blocks and it's our block versus the China block. By blowing up our block, we are sending a lot of people into the arms of China.

 

You want to ask Colombia whether it should buy Ford F150s or BYD amazingly cheap cars. It's a big ask to say you need to join us right now and especially after pissing people off. This could drive a lot of people into trading relationships with China. It's not about exports to the US Anymore.

 

China would be delighted to export, export to Latin America, to India, to Africa, to Europe, to Russia. And by cutting ourselves off, we may well be helping that global, the global trading blocks I think it was HR Envisioned may well be an America, a US Trading block, and everybody else with China.

 

And that would really be counterproductive.

>> Bill Whalen: Our final mailbag question comes from Jonathan in Houston, Texas. He writes, I'm a high school sophomore looking at a career in the government in some way. I recently read Plutarch's Lives for school, and I'm interested in what biographies y'all would recommend.

 

And yes, he wrote y'all. All right, Niall, pick a biography for Jonathan.

>> Niall Ferguson: Well, as I'm just down the road in Austin, you're welcome for that question, it's a great one. I think that wonderful Tom Holland has a new translation of Suetonius just coming out that will be a must read.

 

I can't wait to get my hands on it. And it will follow nicely on from what you're already reading, can I recommend my favorite of all historical biographies, Robert Blake's Life of Benjamin Disraeli, one of the most elegantly produced of all biographies and a wonderful insight into one of the most quirky figures of the 19th century, man who is in all respects really, except observance, Jewish, who became the British prime minister and one of the great founders of modern conservatism.

 

It's a beautiful book. And we can all, Americans, even yes, Texans, can learn from the life of Disraeli.

>> Bill Whalen: HR, pick a book, and the Chuck Bedargic biography does not count.

>> H.R. McMaster: Yeah, I've got it right here behind me, I don't know if you can see it, The Binary Biography, last of the 60 Minute Man.

 

But hey, it's the 250th anniversary this year of the United States Army, who is a year older than our Republic even. And so it's quite a commitment. But I've been rereading Ron Chernow's Washington, which I recommend. And, but if you want to write about a real scrapper, you know, and, and probably one of the best combat generals in the Revolution, Don Higginbotham's Daniel Morgan, American Rifleman.

 

And, and when you read about Daniel Morgan's life, you will just, you'll just be amazed at the broad range of experiences, his leadership ability. And I think, you know, maybe we don't win the revolution without Daniel Morgan, you know, in terms of the impact that he has broadly, the British should never have let him out once he was captured in the attack on, on Quebec.

 

But hey, just for our listener, really quick, because it's a great question, he made me think of Jeffrey Rosen's book called the Pursuit of Happiness, and it's about how classical writers on virtue influenced the founders of our republic. And I think he'll enjoy that and it'll be a bridge maybe from what he's reading now into the, into the Washington biography.

 

 

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, John Cochran, drum roll please, you get the last word.

>> John H. Cochrane: Man. Well, since poor Jonathan thinks he wants a career in government, what can we recommend to change my topic. I'm currently listening to Steve Kotkin's wonderful biography of Stalin, which of course I have to recommend cuz I'm listening to and we're watching Wolf Hall series on PBS.

 

Wanna understand cutthroat politics? Literally, that period is a good one. But if you're going to go to Washington and work in government, understand politics, of course, Robert Caro's biographies of Lyndon Johnson are a must. And then you'll really understand how power works, or did in that case, in the American government.

 

 

>> Bill Whalen: All right, there's actually one last question that comes from Bill in Palo Alto, yours truly. What Bill wants to know is, do Niall, John and HR know that we have just passed the five year mark for GoodFellows?

>> Niall Ferguson: Once the public health crisis is under control and we suddenly realize we fired the bazooka, you can't unfire a bazooka.

 

HR will confirm this. HR I want to really draw on your military expertise. Once you've fired a bazooka, you can't put the shell back in, am I right?

>> H.R. McMaster: That's correct, and that's the same for tank rounds also.

>> Niall Ferguson: Well, that's the problem.

>> H.R. McMaster: I would say it is more of a tank round than a bazooka.

 

 

>> Niall Ferguson: Yeah. Yeah.

>> Bill Whalen: Gentlemen, this is episode number 152. Who'd have thought it? So, question to each of you, beginning with you, John, tell me one thing you've Learned in the 5 plus years of doing this. Other than hair styling and lighting and microphones and all that kind of stuff that people don't see behind the scenes.

 

 

>> John H. Cochrane: I just gotta say, I so much enjoy these weekly chats because my colleagues are wonderful, but they're very busy and so finding them at Hoover is hard. And when we just get together, we tend to throw things around. So sitting down with you guys and having a focused, thank you, Bill, conversation and a frank exchange of views and the things we disagree about, I learned from you guys every day.

 

And I hope you're finding that interchanges as useful as I'm finding it. And my, how time flies when you're having fun.

>> Bill Whalen: HR Are you having fun?

>> H.R. McMaster: I'm having a lot of fun. I mean, I'll tell you, what I've learned is how damn fortunate I am to be at the Hoover Institution with all of you and our colleagues.

 

I imagine that our listeners are committed like we are to lifelong learning. I learned so much from these discussions and just being, you know, being at Hoover and at Stanford and, and hey, love you guys and damn, you get, you get better looking every year, you guys, I'll tell you.

 

Can't believe it's been five years.

>> Bill Whalen: What say you Niall?

>> Niall Ferguson: I've learned that when you're trying to navigate the constantly shifting seas of our world history in real time, one of the best ways to do it is with a good crew. If I'd spent the last five years just trying to figure this all out on my own, it would have been much harder.

 

But we've been forced by the format of Goodfellows to meet regularly and exchange ideas, and we've always done it in a spirit of friendship. But we've never hesitated to disagree when there have been disagreements, nor have we hesitated to change our minds when the facts have changed. So what I've learned is, and it seems to me of general applicability that you need to have discourse between equals to navigate in a really stormy sea.

 

If you're just sat there as a CEO, it may be yes men around you, you don't know. There are no yes men on Goodfellas. Because the four of us are always equals and we can correct one another, we can disagree with one, or we can correct ourselves. And that's what I've learned.

 

It's extraordinarily valuable, and there's not enough of that. There's not enough of this kind of conversation going on in America. If we had more of it and less social media hysteria, think the country would be making better decisions collectively?

>> Bill Whalen: You know what I've learned in the last five years?

 

That I am a freeloader of the highest order. Why is that? Because I sit here as the moderator. You know what a moderator does? He tries to keep time, which I generally fail at. He writes copious notes, Niall, but it goes into post production, don't worry. But I sit here and I listen to you guys and I learn.

 

So let's do the math here. If I've been doing about 150 of these shows, that's over 1500 hours of wisdom that I benefited. So I've learned God knows how much economics from John and history and geopolitics and national security from Niall and HR. And I thank you gentlemen for the education, I know our viewers feel the same.

 

So let me thank our viewers for hanging in with there with us for five years. I'd thank our crack marketing team here at the Hoover Institution for coming up this in the first place. Our director, Condoleezza Rice for being a champion of the show as well. And we hope everybody enjoy watching this is enjoying it, and who knows how long we'll keep going, maybe another five years from now, time will tell.

 

So behalf on the Goodfellows, Niall Ferguson, Sir Niall Ferguson, John Cochrane, HR McMaster, all of us here at the Hoover Institution, we enjoyed today's show. We'll be back in a couple of weeks. Until then, take care. And as always, thanks for watching. If you enjoyed this show and are interested in watching more content featuring HR McMaster, watch Battlegrounds also available @ hoover.org.