Peace Through Strength: The Good Fellows on Harvard, Europe, Warfare, & Niall Gets Busted

>> Bill Whalen: It's Tuesday, May 6, 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 and I'll be your moderator today. Most amiable task, because I now get to kick back and benefit from the collective wisdom of three of the brightest individuals I know.

We call them the Goodfellows. They are the historian, Sir Niall Ferguson, John Cochrane, AKA the Grumpy Economist. Grumpy and blog name only, he's actually a delightful gentleman and former presidential National Security Advisor and our resident optimist, Lt., Gen. HR mcMaster. In addition, there are many distinguished accomplishments, Niall, John and HR are all Hoover senior fellows.

Gentlemen, we're doing something different today, something we haven't done in a while. It's what we call a BYO show or more to the point, a BYOT show, as in bring your own topic. We've got chase you to come ready and loaded with a matter for conversation. John Cochrane, I turn to you.

This week is coincides with the 80th anniversary of VE Day in Europe, Victory in Europe Day and you have Europe on your mind.
>> John H. Cochrane: Yes. Well, part of that is I want to advertise I have a book coming out with my co authors Luis Garcano and Klaus Masoch on how to reform the euro.

>> Bill Whalen: Title?
>> John H. Cochrane: Crisis Cycle and the theme is that the Euro is actually pretty well set up but then a sequence of crises broke all the rules and now they need to get the rules going again. So I won't give you a book breakdown. It's just a reason to be on my mind.

It's on my mind, another reason too. Europe is having an economic reckoning as well as its foreign policy and military reckoning, which I think HR will talk about. And how does it deal with trade. Another reckoning. But from the Mario Draghi report to many other voices, it is recognizing that it stopped growing in 2010.

Much of Europe income per capita has not grown. Some of my favorite parts, namely Italy has gotten worse and they can kind of see that Europe produces regulations and the US produces innovation and they're energy policy in particular is causing deindustrialization pretty fast. Electricity costs three times in Europe what it does even in California, which it's already pretty expensive.

Spain and Portugal had a blackout owing to poor integration of renewable stuff with a quickly diminishing baseload capacity. So it's beginning to recognize that it's really shot itself in the foot and that long run growth matters and it doesn't have any long run growth anymore. So I hope Europe is able to reform itself but it's hard cuz Brussels exists to issue regulations and they didn't go from their Articles of Confederation to their constitution.

So it's not very politically accountable. So I'll just tee up that question. I'm sure Niall and HR have other ideas and how can you affect itself? I certainly hope it does.
>> H. R. McMaster: John, I look forward to reading the book. But I'm just thinking as the optimist here. You've got the crisis in your title, Niall's got the doom book.

I think we need to write something a little bit more positive in the future.
>> Niall Ferguson: But I think in a way John's book is positive, though I haven't yet read it because many people, if you think back to the founding of the euro, said it was doomed to fail.

I remember Marty Feldstein, great Harvard economist, saying it couldn't work, it wasn't an optimal currency area. And that view was quite widely shared. Whereas John's point is it worked. There is a single currency. It survived a succession of crises, of which the worst was the Eurozone crisis that came after the US financial crisis.

And I think people have stopped debating whether it lives or dies. It's here to stay. It's a long time since anybody in Europe said to me, we need to get the lira back or gee, I missed the deutsche mark or what if we could have some francs again?

So I think it is a good news story and it's important for Americans because the success of the Euro does create a meaningful competitor for the dollar. It's no longer the only game in town in terms of international transactions. The volume of euro transactions is pretty large already.

And I think that the European Central bank, after a kind of rocky start, is now regarded as a highly professional central bank with independence certainly from the European Commission and the national government. So John, I guess my question is, do you think of your book as offering fine tuning to a system that has basically worked or is there still in your mind some existential threat that could resurface?

>> John H. Cochrane: I think it's much like the US existential threat. The Euro was, as you point out, remarkably well set up. And I learned that from my co authors and from studying it. The central problem of a common currency is that governments might say, we'll borrow a lot of money and then when they get in trouble they say, ECB print money and bail us out.

And they thought about this very well. That that was, I think, one of the central problems that Feldstone was worried about. It was quite well set up with a few little things to be figured out later because you don't do a lot of writing. The prenuptial on the wedding night and we'll figure that out later, honey, was a lot of what they did.

So some of the little pieces were left for later. Then, of course, a sequence of crises came and they did break a lot of the rules. So it was kind of a patchwork, and the ECB has really expanded what it does. It now routinely holds down interest rates on sovereign debt.

And there's an incentive then for governments to borrow and waste it all. And now you got this huge balance sheet and this promise to bail everybody out. Kind of the rules that constrain things got broken. We got through the crisis, but after the crisis is when you need to reform.

So I think halfway between the two visions, a bunch of patchwork that kind of kept things together, a great initial structure. But now time to put the moral hazard back in the model and reform, which I think is Europe's larger question. They called themselves a big problem with their energy policies.

Well, time to maybe allow some nuclear power and reform that. Their immigration policies are causing a lot of problems. It's time to reform that and their overregulation. The tragedy really of Europe is a common market should have led to spectacular growth. And instead we all kind of believe in trade around here, except maybe HR Just me.

>> H. R. McMaster: Come on.
>> John H. Cochrane: We'll get to the threat, the geostrategic threat that French movies pose, in just a minute. But I believe in trade. And yet this opening of the market did not lead to an explosion of prosperity. Now there's a lot of barriers still left in there.

So I think a great set of institutions that I heartily endorse, but that need fixing and reform. Well, that sounds a lot like the US and welcome to Europe.
>> Niall Ferguson: For you, John, when Larry Kotlikoff and I wrote about the euro, right at the beginning, right at its launch, we said, nice monetary union.

Pity you don't have a fiscal one, because there really wasn't meaningful fiscal Fiscal integration at that point, that's changed somewhat since then. But it's still basically not anything like a Federal system. And most of what goes on in the realm of the public sector is done by national governments, and there is no real mechanism to coordinate national fiscal policies.

Is that something that you think is an unsustainable discrepancy, that you've got a monetary union but nothing resembling fiscal union? Or do you think that's something that's basically stable?
>> John H. Cochrane: Well, that was one of the little things that we agreed to brush over when the Europeans started it.

You do not need fiscal union to have monetary union. Europe had a monetary union for centuries, it was called gold coins, without fiscal union. But in that circumstance, national governments are just like businesses. And if they can't pay back their debts, they default. So this is the thing that they really kinda papered over.

Are we a monetary union without fiscal union? Governments default if they can't pay back their money, and we have a mechanism to allow default. And we don't let banks invest in sovereign debt and call it risk free. Or is sovereign debt sacrosanct, we will always print money to avoid default, and therefore, we will have a fiscal union to make sure that governments can always pay back their debt?

And we will really enforce debt and deficit rules so that they never get in trouble in the first place. They never made up their minds, really about which of those two things it is.
>> Bill Whalen: Well, I've been doing a lot of thinking about Europe in 2025 versus Europe in 1945.

And words not said in 1945, H.R., it's time for Germany to step up its military.
>> Bill Whalen: So let's talk a bit about Europe's military role, the relationship with NATO, and the threat that is Russia.
>> H. R. McMaster: Yeah, well, I think this is related to the economic relationship with the European Union and the tendency, I think, to view Europe mainly as an economic competitor.

Or for the Trump administration to really see Europe as engaging in unfair trade and economic practices, especially with unequal access to markets and that sort of thing. So maybe before we go into defense, if I just ask John, are you optimistic, about a common agenda between the EU and the US?

I mean, when you read the Draghi report, it sounds like a lot of Trump's priorities in terms of unleashing economic growth and deregulation and energy security, or what the Trump administration calls energy dominance. Are you optimistic about a better relationship with the EU after the initial lecturing at Munich and the statements about the EU as a competitor?

>> John H. Cochrane: Well, that involves as much Trump as it does the EU. I think there's a natural relationship. We are the advanced Western democracies, we ought to be getting along. I do think Europe has some problems with free speech, then I think Vance was good to point that out.

>> Vice President JD Vance: But what German democracy, what no democracy, American, German, or European, will survive is telling millions of voters that their thoughts and concerns, their aspirations, their pleas for relief are invalid or unworthy of even being considered.
>> John H. Cochrane: It has some big problems with assimilation, which is worth pointing out.

It does protect its internal markets, which is why Europe is shockingly poor compared to the US. Typical, even the advanced European countries are 40% GDP per capita less than the US, which is too bad cuz they ought to be along with us. So the natural place is cooperation.

I, of course, don't believe that people shooting themselves in the foot with subsidies and tariffs does any damage to the US. Although, it would be lovely to have an open trading system between the US and Europe and all of us benefit from that together. Is that gonna come out of either Trump or Europe?

I mean, the Draghi report did say all sorts of nice things about we're over-regulated, but it also went into some of the classic European solutions. What we need is to borrow lots more money and throw it down, what I would call, rat holes. And that was the Biden approach.

But the Trump land, there's a part of Trump land that seems to say we need to borrow more money and throw it down our own rat holes, too. Which is hopefully not where Europe will go cuz they have the same debt problems we do. In fact, if anything, a little bit worse.

>> H. R. McMaster: Yeah, I think this connection between the economic relationship and the defense relationship with the EU and, of course, NATO is important. Because I think what a lot of Americans are frustrated by is the fact that Europe represents, I think, about 17% of the world's GDP and about 50% of the world's social spending.

So a lot of Americans have concluded, hey, we're underwriting European social programs by covering their defense bills. So I think that's the dynamic that we're seeing play out with, remember the Signal conversation about the Houthis, yeah, I hate to bail out the Europeans again and so forth. So I'd like to just ask both of you, maybe Sir Niall, our European American.

>> H. R. McMaster: And John, how do you see the relationship evolving from a defense perspective as well, based on this kind of general resentment among many of Trump's most strident and stalwart supporters?
>> Niall Ferguson: Well, I'll go first with a couple of thoughts. I guess, I'm an ex-European since Brexit, my British passport-

>> H. R. McMaster: You're a knight, man, you're still a knight. If you're a knight.
>> Niall Ferguson: My British passport is worth no more than my American passport when I'm trying to go to Paris.
>> Niall Ferguson: I think, that there are elements of the Trump administration, not least Vice President JD Vance, who are really hostile to the European Union.

And I kinda feel like saying be careful what you wish for. Because the more you beat up on the Europeans, justly, I think, on the defense issue, the more you risk contributing to the centrifugal forces that are already at work. I mean, I think it's good that the Europeans, mainly under pressure from President Trump, are spending more in defense.

This has been, I think, one of the President's great achievements cuz it was something that eluded other presidents. But then you look at JD Vance giving encouragement to the alternative of Deutschland, the far-right party. And the general attitude of members of the administration that, the European Union is basically an enemy, it's basically not our friend.

The trouble is, if you look at the German situation right now, where the newly elected German chancellor can't, in fact, get himself through a majority vote in the Bundestag, an incredible, unprecedented event. The AfD is polling far ahead of the two major parties in his putative coalition. I'm not sure I really think it's in American interest for the Europeans to go down the populist path, which I think leads to, if not the breakup of the EU, then certainly it's paralysis.

It doesn't seem to me to be something that the US should want, given that the obvious principal beneficiary of a very weak EU would be Vladimir Putin, John.
>> John H. Cochrane: Let me also push back a little bit. I think Ferguson got Ferguson's Law wrong. France spends 58% of GDP, that's total government spending.

3% of GDP on defense is just couch change. So this idea that if we spend 1 or 2% of GDP to halve their defense that this is enabling their welfare state, their welfare state's 58% of GDP. Now, it is true, the welfare state is what has soaked up A lot of defense spending.

But it's really, the numbers are so vital. There's plenty of room for defense money if you just reform your welfare states slightly. I do worry. I think the thing that Niall picked up on is a big political worry for Europe, the right. America had the ability to bring the MAGA right into our political system, as turbulent and difficult as it may be.

In German, the AFD is treated like complete pariahs, and they're trying to keep them out of parliament. They're trying to keep them out by legal means. Marine Le Pen was, they're trying to keep her out by legal means. This is the strategy the Democrats tried against Trump, and it backfired immensely.

I think that was a lot of the reason people voted for Trump. And I think treating the right as complete pariahs that we can't talk to, we can't allow, we must stop by any means. Even legal, not voting is dangerous because if you're not allowed in the political system, then you express your views in other ways.

And Europe's been through that before. So this is politically a dangerous moment.
>> Bill Whalen: So I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings, but we need to shift to another segment. So since we are talking about military obligations, HR, let's go to your topic, which is the future of warfare and how the Trump administration is approaching it.

>> H. R. McMaster: Well, it's tied to the European discussion as well. And really, I think the loss of the consensus that we've been able to prevent large-scale war, great power war, for 80 years. Because we've had forward positions capable, joint US forces operating as part of alliances that communicate to potential enemies that they can't accomplish their objectives through the use of force.

And I think there is this drive toward retrenchment, toward just protection of the homeland at the shores of the Atlantic in the Pacific or maybe over the Arctic with the Golden Dome missile defense. And I'm concerned that this will erode deterrence further at a critical moment for Europe, in particular, Europe that now has seen the return of large-scale warfare for the first time since World War II in Ukraine.

So I'm worried overall about kind of the worldview that is driving retrenchment, the effect that might have on military capabilities, especially forward-positioned forces that are critical for a number of reasons. I would recommend to our viewers to take a look at Chris Cavoli's testimony. This is the Supreme Allied Commander Europe, the European Command commander, an extraordinary officer who I've mentioned other times on this show.

He gave, I think, very compelling testimony to the Senate on April 3 about the importance of European command. I think paying attention to kind of the other combatant commanders and what they've been saying about efforts to deter conflict, preserve peace, to counter various forms of aggression in their theaters is important as well.

I mean the Pacific Command, of course, is quite busy coping with heightening Chinese actions, acts of aggression in the South China Seas vis-à-vis the Philippines and Taiwan. And so, hey, I think the overall point it's a heck of a lot cheaper to prevent a war than to have to fight one.

I would like to see more of that kind of peace through strength philosophy. But when you look at the defense budget and you look at maybe some of the initiatives within Department of Defense, I think they indicate this impulse toward retrenchment. I'm for a lot of what Secretary Hegseth is doing.

I think refocusing our Department of Defense on its mission to be prepared to fight and win wars is important and long overdue. Reversing kind of the radical DEI reified philosophies like women, peace, and security that we're trying to foist on the US military is important. But what I'm concerned about is this kind of impulse toward retrenchment, potentially cutting off the capacity in some of our armed forces, I think, which don't have the capacity now to deter or to respond to conflict.

So I'm concerned about it. It's worth watching. It's worth watching the president's budget is an opening bid and to see how that develops. I'm also kind of optimistic about the ability to reform some of the procurement systems and to achieve a higher degree of efficiency in fielding effective weapons systems and equipment and maybe addressing some of the defense industrial base issues.

These are reforms that are long overdue in the Pentagon. But I think some of the people who have been appointed to those positions, like the Deputy Secretary of Defense, Steve Feinberg, are very well equipped to finally make some gains in this area of procurement reform and contracting reform.

But what I'd like to do is ask you in terms of the defense budget, defense spending. I think what you see is some of this tension between budget hawks and those who are advocating for peace through strength and addressing the bow wave of deferred modernization and some of the capacity issues in our armed forces.

And I mean, how do you see that playing out in the administration? And then also maybe a reminder to our viewers about how really the defense budget isn't the problem when it comes to deficit spending and the growth of the national debt.
>> Niall Ferguson: HR I guess the thing that might connect our conversation with John to our conversation with you is the lessons of the war in Ukraine.

I think pretty the Russian invasion. We probably underestimated significantly the way that drones would become the dominant technology of the battlefield. And that drones, instead of being big, kind of expensive pieces of equipment of the sort that the US was deploying, say, in Afghanistan and Pakistan, would become, as people in your world like to say, attritable, like cheap, disposable, but very, very numerous items.

I'd like you to talk a bit about that. There is a kind of school of thought that says the war of the future is basically gonna be unmanned weaponry, not only in the air, but under the sea, on the surface of the sea. They were pretty important in the Black Sea theater of the war.

You're a tank guy. How do you think about this new technology, and how dramatically does it alter the nature of war itself?
>> H. R. McMaster: Yeah, I really don't think it changes the nature of war, but it certainly has shifted dramatically the character of warfare. And I think many of us saw this coming right in terms of cheaper, slow, low-flying drones and the need to defend against them.

When I had the job of writing kind of requirements or helping to write requirements for the future army back in 2015 and 2016, we had an urgent requirement for invigorating our air defenses and to ensure that our air defenses were capable of taking out these low, slow, small drones and swarm drone capabilities as well.

But we haven't fielded those systems quickly enough. And those systems include the one is called the IFPC, which is a integrated air defense system with Multiple capabilities on one platform, but also electromagnetic warfare, which we divested ourselves from in the army in the 2000s because we thought, we'll always have air supremacy.

We'll get the air force and naval aviation to do electronic warfare force, and of course this is one of the most important drone countermeasures. Same thing with directed energy systems, lasers essentially that can shoot down these drones quite effectively. But what I think you're gonna see, Niall, is this continuous interaction between offensive and defensive capabilities like you always see in war, right?

Machine gun, tank, anti tank, missile, submarine, sonar, bomber, radar, and so now you have really the significant drone capability. But tens of thousands of drones are being shot down destroyed, because they are attritable, but in their manufacturing at massive scale in Ukraine. But I think what you're gonna see is the defensive capabilities catching up to them.

And then what you'll see are more resilient drones developed that will have computing power at the edge that will allow them to engage in autonomous target identification and classification and maybe even automate your decisions to take human life, I think that's coming. And with sort of mesh communication systems and self healing networks that can make these swarm drone capabilities more resilient to electromagnetic warfare, for example.

But this will be a continuous interaction like there always is in warfare, and what I think is gonna be the constant, Niall, is what war is really about, it's about the control of territory, populations and resources. And I think there's this idea today that drones will become like the strategic bombers were supposed to be in the 1920s, they gonna solve the problem of future war, we don't need land forces for example, anymore.

When I think the lesson of Ukraine is kinda the opposite, actually, it has been the ability to project power outward from land that allowed the Ukrainians to drive the Black Sea fleet away from its shores and sink its flagship and many other vessels. So I think what we have to do is think about warfare across the domains of aerospace, maritime, land, cyber, and the degree to which you have to be able to project capabilities across all those domains simultaneously to seize and retain the initiative over your enemy.

Because no matter what the range of capabilities are, what you really want to do is to gain a psychological and temporal advantage that gives you the initiative where the enemy is reacting to you, rather than the other way around. Part of that will be a major effort to restore mobility to the battlefield, I mean, when you look at Ukraine, I mean, it looks like the western front a little bit, right, in 1915, 1916.

And you see the Russians kind of adapting hoosier tactics or infiltration tactics like those that were used in the Ludendorff offensive in 1917. They're not able to get very far, but that's the only way they can avoid the firepower of artillery and the drone capabilities. In the future, our force is gonna have to blind our enemies so that we can retain our freedom of maneuver and action.

But ultimately it's gonna come down to close combat, again, Niall, I mean, I think this is where the US Marine Corps made a mistake. I mean, they divested themselves of mobile, protected firepower, reduced their infantry, and, I think you see in other conflicts, like in Yemen, right. I mean, what could really defeat the Houthis, really, only if you controlled that territory could you do it, and you just can't do that from the air.

So anyway, I think I see big shifts in the character of warfare, certainly. But what I think you're gonna do is see some of these countermeasures catch up and we have to develop a new range of capabilities to restore our freedom of movement and action in combat.
>> John H. Cochrane: Yeah, you asked me to chime in on the economics of it, and I will, even 3% of GDP is not that much money compared to everything else we do.

So military budgets, what like 900 billion federal budget, seven and a half, so it's like one eight of federal spending, but federal, state and local spending in the US is in the 40 to 45% of GDP range, so it's actually small. But I think concentrating on how much you spend is not a good idea, it's, do you get value for your money?

You can spend a lot of money on DEI consultants and you've spent money and that doesn't get you any tanks. So getting value for money, I think is the most prominent thing, and so much of what goes in the defense budget is veterans affairs and just salaries for people and so forth, it does, you do bring up.

So clearly we wanna avoid the disasters of the past, which is getting to the war with the wrong weapons, showing up at World War II with battleships and not aircraft carriers, showing up with tanks that have gasoline engines and blow up. And then what that means is much quicker cycles of development, I think the P-51 took about a year from idea to flying, and I don't think you can get from idea to requisition form in a year anymore in the US.

Clearly the one thing we know right is that we're gonna show up with all the wrong stuff, and it will be lovely if the wrong stuff didn't cost $10 billion each, if aircraft carriers are completely uses, the next one, but you wanna be able to adapt quickly. So I'm curious, you mentioned that a little bit, how can you speed up the cycles of procurement, the learning and not avoid showing up to the next more with the wrong things?

For example, at the end of World War II, we kinda decided, well, nukes, you mentioned the solve all your problem thing. The drones are not gonna solve all our problem, and that's what we've seen in Ukraine, is this quick adaptation? Well, they're shutting them down, we'll have fiber optic drones, they're really good at that, I hope we're sharing technology with them and keeping them on our side.

But yeah, so after World War II, nukes will solve all this problem, Korea, no, and that's the thing I wanna ask you a little bit about. You give a vision of an all out war, war at war, boom, win, seize the initiative and so forth, but isn't what's likely to happen say with China, not an all out war with China, which is World War III?

It's kinda like the end of civilization if that happens, isn't it more likely to be a slightly hot cold war, a protracted period in which there are small but limited conflicts because they got nukes and we got nukes, and are we prepared for that as well as are we prepared for the will?

And, it's not just the capacity, it's the will to use them, and that does worry me about America. We lasted in Iraq despite all your wonderful efforts, we kinda lost interest in that in a couple years, we lost interest in Afghanistan a couple years, we lost interest in Ukraine in a couple years.

So, you paint this picture of a big all out war, kinda like World War II, but that's not, we're gonna have, it's a long, slightly hotter cold war. Do we have the mechanisms, the adaptability, the will that, how are we gonna fight that thing?
>> H. R. McMaster: Hey, I think this is a great question, John, and I think what you do is you prepare for the worst case because that's what you wanna prevent.

But as the historian Conrad Crane has observed, there are two ways to fight asymmetrically and stupidly, and you hope that your enemy picks stupidly and plays to your strengths, like Saddam Hussein did in the 1991 Gulf War. But what you're seeing are a whole range of asymmetric strategies and capabilities being aimed against us, for example, like the Houthis.

In Yemen. And so what you have to do is, you have to build a force that can operate across what we used to call, the range of combat operations. And so you have to build into that force a pretty high degree of flexibility and adaptability. Our track record in predicting precisely the demands of future war is perfect because it's 0%, right?

And so the historian, Sir Michael Howard has observed that the key is to not to be so far off the mark that once the demands of that war are revealed to you, that you can't adapt to those demands. And this is why joint force capabilities, combined arms capabilities, are extremely important to maintain and to not buy into these assumptions that, hey, the nature of war has changed fundamentally.

We fall into this trap over and over again. I wrote an essay years ago in which I called this the Vampire Fallacy, right? That future war really next time will be fundamentally different from all those that have gone before. It'll be fast, cheap, efficient. It'll be a war that really falls into the realm of certainty rather than uncertainty, and will mainly be able to fight and win the war from standoff range, right?

And take essentially the George Costanza approach to war, and just leave on a high note after we target a lot of the enemy. Of course, what war requires is the consolidation of those gains to get to sustainable political outcomes. War is profoundly human. And so it involves, as you mentioned, the emotions that can unleash an escalation of the war and a future course of events that you didn't want or that you didn't anticipate at the outset.

War is uncertain because of that interactive nature of the conflict. The enemy has a say in the future course of events. And war is, as you mentioned as well, fundamentally a contest of wills. And so, if you're to prepare for war, as George Washington said, the most effectual way to prevent wars, to prepare for it, then you have to prepare for the nature of war, right?

And that's societal preparations, that's military preparations. And also I think it's preparation in the area of strategic competence, which we have lacked. I mean, I think in many ways the orthodoxy of the revolution in military affairs is quite similar to what you hear of the conventional wisdom today about the effect of artificial intelligence and autonomy in future war.

And again, I'm not a Luddite on this but I think that we have to recognize that there are countermeasures, right? That there are continuities in the nature of war, but that RMA orthodoxy. I wrote an essay about this when I was at the National Security National Security Affairs Fellow at the Hoover Institution from 2002 to 2003.

If anybody's looking for some beach reading for this summer, you can find it. It's called Crack in the Foundation, Defense Transformation, and the Underlying Assumption of Dominant Knowledge and Future War. It's a real page, Turner, but I think that we're falling into some of the same traps these days.

>> Bill Whalen: Sir Niall Ferguson, I turn to you and I wanna know what your topic is today. But first I wanna note that John Cochrane is doing this show from the University of Austin. And John is informing me of a most interesting characteristic of the University of Austin's landscape.

John, would you like to tell us what that is?
>> John H. Cochrane: Yes, as we head into talking about universities, it is fun that I am visiting the University of Austin, which has marble statues of famous people, including our own Sir Niall Ferguson. I must say a very nice and flattering marble statue.

I hope they make them of visitors cuz I would love to have one too.
>> Niall Ferguson: I must correct-
>> H. R. McMaster: It's not a nude. Is it a nude, John?
>> Niall Ferguson: It is a bust.
>> John H. Cochrane: Its a bust.
>> Niall Ferguson: And I remember saying three and a half years ago when we founded the University of Austin.

Higher Education Reform or bust? I didn't expect to get both, but it is a bust. And as you say, John, not an unflattering one, somewhat in the socialist realist style, but I insisted when it was unveiled that a baseball cap be placed upon it. I hope that cap hasn't been removed because I think there's always a danger of being seen as somewhat self-important and I'm always highly resistant to that tendency.

So if you could put the baseball cap back on, I'd appreciate it.
>> John H. Cochrane: I will put a baseball cap back on, and of course, I will put in a plug for realistic figurative oil paintings to go along with marble busts.
>> Niall Ferguson: Well, it's definitely our aesthetic, but I must say the students at the University of Austin are so reverent that the real signature art form is the cartoon.

There's a wonderful series of cartoons being done by one of our talented undergraduates making rather good fun of us. And I think that's part of what makes this new university so distinctive. There is an atmosphere of fun, irreverence, and a readiness to say what you think and not worry about been cancelled or otherwise punished.

And it's in marked contrast, he said, with an effortless segue to the topic du jour, with the culture at the university where I taught for 12 years, Harvard. Harvard is in the sights of President Trump. You thought he had a game of chicken on with Xi Jinping and China over trade.

It's not nearly as exciting as the game of chicken that the administration is now playing with Harvard. Which, for those who aren't following the story, has taken the form of, I think now, three letters from the administration to Harvard University telling it in no uncertain terms, that it is likely to lose its tax exempt status and certainly will lose really large amounts of government money in the form of federal grants for research.

Because, according to the administration, Harvard has not lived up to its obligations as far as public funding is concerned or tax exempt status is concerned, because it hasn't protected Jewish students since the events of October 7, 2023. Which were followed by pro Palestinian protests on the Harvard campus, some of which clearly did shade over into anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic behavior.

And there's also a question mark over whether Harvard has in fact been engaged in racial discrimination in its admissions and its hiring. So it's one of those really classic fights between a populist president and the ultimate elite liberal institution. And what you're supposed to say, if you're an academic, as we all are, is how dreadful that the Trump administration is threatening the sacred principles of academic freedom by trying to interfere in the governance of university, which is a foundation, a corporation rather, not a government agency.

That's really the debate that's raging at the moment in academia. And I'm going to say that this isn't the time, I think uncritically, to line up in defense of Harvard. I do think the administration has fired a bazooka where a scalpel might have been more effective. I do think that Harvard's vulnerable to the kind of action that was taken against, wait for it, Bob Jones University, not quite as illustrious an institution, but a university which in the late 70s and early 80s, was clearly engaged in racial discrimination.

It had rules against interracial dating on its campus that were in violation of civil rights legislation. And Bob Jones University lost its tax exempt status, and that was upheld by the Supreme Court. I don't think there's any big difference between what was going on at Bob Jones Jones University in the 70s and 80s.

And the kind of thing that's been going on at Harvard for years, where candidates for application to be undergraduates or for jobs were discriminated against if they were white or Asian. I mean, the evidence that discrimination was going on at Harvard seems to me pretty cut and dried.

And I think it's a pity the administration didn't just kind of focus on that, because by firing the bazooka and saying, you got to change this, you got to change that, you got to accept this and that, I do think the administration's overreached. But does Harvard deserve this, did Harvard have it coming?

I think it did. And the best piece of evidence is the report that Harvard itself just published on the problem of antisemitism on its own campus, which is a damning document. So it's not quite a pity, they both can't lose. I actually really hope that something positive comes of this and that Harvard can be induced into mending its ways, but I'm just a little doubtful that the bazooka was the correct weapon.

>> H. R. McMaster: Hey, for John and Niall, how do you see this playing out, do you think there's gonna be just continued litigation? Do you think there'll be a settlement of some kind, is it going to involve a lot of other universities? Because, if Harvard loses its tax exempt status, I mean, you could imagine that many others would as well.

Why are some universities under the gun and some aren't, like Dartmouth, for example, how do you see the Harvard issue in broader context of other universities?
>> Niall Ferguson: HL, there's no doubt that Harvard is being made an example of pour encourage les autres. This is designed to send a signal to every university, better be careful with your DEI program.

Because if you carry on with the kind of thing that has been going on right across the country, I mean, there's new story just come out today on UCLA essentially engaging in racial discrimination in one of its programs. And I think the goal here is to make an example of Harvard with the intention of making everybody change their ways.

And they've picked on Harvard for the obvious reason that, that Harvard's very big, it has a very large endowment. But more importantly, its reputation in the world is of the ultimate bastion of liberalism, not to say support for the Democratic party.
>> H. R. McMaster: Right.
>> Niall Ferguson: So one of the things that's really interesting about Harvard is not only that it had an anti-Semitism problem in the last 10 years or so, but it's also had an anti-conservatism problem.

There are barely any conservatives left now on the Harvard faculty, and amongst the students, there are very, very few, or at least few who will admit to being conservative. This is an institution that has been politicized in ways that I think are highly questionable, quite apart from the whole issue of civil rights, and so you can see why they've picked Harvard.

I don't suppose there are many Trump supporters, Trump voters, MAGA voters, who feel anything other than loathing for Harvard insofar as they ever think about it. So that's the game plan, the thing about it is, HR though, that if you go in as hard as the administration has with the three letters, essentially demanding kind of government control over what Harvard does.

You allow all the elements in Harvard that were to blame for all that I've just described suddenly to reposition themselves defenders of academic freedom. And I will make a bet on the show now with all of you that within two weeks, Claudine Gay, the disgraced former president exposed plagiarist and clear opponent of academic freedom in her time as president will come out with an op-ed in the New York Times or the Boston Globe, positioning herself as a defender of academic freedom against wicked Donald Trump.

So the worst case scenario for me, HR, is that this all backfires. And the elements that were to blame for taking Harvard down this path away from academic freedom and towards intolerance and discrimination. I think those people might actually emerge as heroes, at least in their own minds and in the minds of many liberals, as a result of the tactics the administration has adopted.

>> John H. Cochrane: I think, Nial, put your finger on it. So racial discrimination is the topic of the lawsuit, but in fact, the larger problem is that so much of Harvard and the university system has turned into highly partisan political, political advocacy. And that is the job of institutes, centers and so forth, well, really, do we need to pay for that?

We had a great discussion at our classical liberalism seminar with Alan Dershowitz on this topic, who, by the way, was not allowed to speak at Harvard, he had to go speak at the Chabad House, you know. And yes, academics are in a high dudgeon free speech, academic freedom.

Wait a minute, I forgot to close down our microaggression seminar where I was persecuting some poor people for using the wrong pronouns. And onto free speech, Alan pointed out there, there is a history to this. In the 1950s and the post Brown era, a lot of educational institutions in the south, K-12 and universities wanted to use their academic freedom.

And we get to decide what we teach to teach that slaves were perfectly happy in the antebellum south. And of course the war was the war of Northern aggression, and the federal government said, no, you don't get to do that. And in fact, so I think this is a slippery slope and one worth.

Each point in the slippery slope is worth thinking about what you're allowed to do as a private institution that doesn't take government money is much more generous than what you get to take government money for. And that is I think one of the central issues, even there restaurants are not allowed to discriminate by race even if you're completely private and take no government money.

So that's not, you don't get perfect freedom even there. And then there's 15 different kinds of public money that go to universities. There is, we give a lot of money to students in the form of grants and loans. Well, should we be subsidizing your education if you choose to have complete academic freedom and teach political advocacy as part of your teaching?

Well, you may be have the right to do that, as if Hillsdale College, which doesn't take any money, wants to teach, they can teach what they. But we don't have to pay for it necessarily, we pay for research. Should we be paying for research with hefty overheads when that research has turned into political advocacy for highly partisan courses?

Tax exemption is another lever, universities, they get to run, they get to borrow at tax free rates and put it into a hedge fund that they then earn tax almost until recently tax free on. Well, do you get to be tax exempt, do you get to have donations from wealthy, from, from wealth people be tax exempt?

That's another lever, and the appropriate amount of public control over what you do in return for different kinds of subsidy actually is not as clear as just pure academics. So if you want your pure academic freedom, we can enforce, we can enforce microaggressions if that's what pleases us today.

And we can advocate for eliminating all the Jews in the world tomorrow if that's what we wanna do, which is kind of like the position of a lot of people in subsidized part of campus. Okay, but you can't take public, that's a First Amendment thing.
>> Bill Whalen: Niall, you're a product of British higher education, is this a uniquely American problem or is there any parallel to this back in the UK?

>> Niall Ferguson: Well, it's a good question because Oxford and Cambridge have certainly shown signs of wanting to imitate the Ivy League and to have their own version of of DEI. It's just that they don't have the resources of a $50 billion endowment. As Harvard does to do at scale.

And so you get kind of 10 DEI offices rather than 100, and that slowed down the process. But there are another couple of things that are really important about why it's not so bad at the elite British institutions. One is that they're pretty decentralized. I think, well understood in the US that the colleges are really quite powerful.

It's a kind of confederal structure, especially at Oxford. And that makes it hard for the university to impose a five year plan for DEI, especially on the more conservative colleges. Secondly, admissions is meritocratic in a way that would stagger the Harvard admissions office. You basically have to do really well, get really good test scores in A-levels.

And there's an exam too and an interview which is guess what? Handled by the professors and not by administrators. And I do think that that's actually the most important difference. And one of the things we're doing at the University of Austin is purely meritocratic admissions. Let's see your test scores, that's it.

We don't care about your essay in which you claim that you deserve a Nobel Peace Prize. We don't wanna read the phony AI generated CV. We just want to see how you did in your SATs. And that I think is at the heart of it all. If you can have academic freedom plus real merit based, excellence based decision making in admissions, in hiring, then the university I think can heal itself.

But Harvard has a very long, long way to go. As do all the major universities before they remotely resemble the great universities they once were.
>> Bill Whalen: Time to move on. But Niall, I have to ask before we leave, what is the ball cap on top of the Niall Ferguson.

It's not a mag ahead, is it?
>> Niall Ferguson: It's not and it wouldn't be. We're very deliberately non-political. Universities shouldn't be political. It shouldn't be a conservative university or a Democrat university.
>> H. R. McMaster: I'll send you a Phillies cap.
>> Niall Ferguson: I would even settle for a Red Sox, the nearest thing to a baseball team I ever had.

As long as we don't A take ourselves too seriously and B start being political. Because I do think that's fatal. Max Weber, the great German sociologist, said there are two different vocations. One is politics and the other is scholarship. And if you start to merge the two, you have violated the academic equivalent of a Hippocratic oath.

So John, I mean I hope notice in your visit that there's a kind of interesting, eclectic, heterogeneous quality to the students that there are students who are probably willing to wear a MAGA cap, though I haven't seen any lately. But there are students on the left. There may even be the odd blue haired student, look around.

But it seems to me that, that what's really striking about the University of Austin is just the atmosphere in the classroom, which is so much more free and fun than the classrooms at the major universities that I'm really encouraged. There's definitely a market for academic freedom amongst the Generation Z.

We hear a lot of negative things about that generation. What really strikes me is that if you build a university with free speech and academic freedom and meritocracy at its core, then young people love it. And that's so reassuring. If they'd all turned up and started canceling one another, that would have been kind of depressing.

But that's not what's happened.
>> Bill Whalen: All right, gentlemen, time for the lightning round.
>> Bill Whalen: All right, our first question. President Trump has moved Mike Waltz from National Security Advisor to UN Ambassador, calling it a quote, unquote promotion. And he made Secretary of State Marco Rubio his interim National Security Advisor for the next six months or so.

Rubio also the acting administrator for USAID and acting Archivist of the National Archives and Records Administration. HR, you're a former Trump National Security Advisor. Niall, you literally wrote the book and are currently writing another book on the last gentleman to be both Secretary of State and National Security Advisor.

I asked the two of you, is this a good idea?
>> H. R. McMaster: Well, I don't think it's a good idea if it sticks because there's just too much work to be done by Secretary Rubio, as the President's principal diplomat and he has a reform agenda for the State Department.

And I remember Henry Kissinger telling me, Niall, I'm sure he said this to you. He said, whatever you do, do not let foreign policy be run by the State Department. And of course, the National Security Advisor is the person who's best positioned because of the capabilities on the National Security Council staff and the ability to coordinate and integrate across all the departments and agencies.

To give the President best analysis and to give the President multiple options so the President can determine his own agenda, right? And so I think that it's important obviously as well for the National Security Council staff and the National Security Advisor to help integrate all elements of national power, right?

The other departments don't work for the State Department, right? They work for the President. And if The National Security Advisor is doing his or her job well, right? They are helping the President with the sensible implementation of his decisions.
>> Niall Ferguson: On the lightning round principle, let me just tell you what Henry Kissinger himself said about merging the two positions.

Quote, when I became Secretary of State, I also remained National Security Advisor. It did not work.
>> John H. Cochrane: So can I ask, I'm a little bit skeptical because as I see our government, we keep having institutions become dysfunctional and then we just throw more institutions at them. And your book HR was great on, and we have at least Defense, State and National Security Advisor all trying to make foreign policy and all bickering with each other all the time.

In economics, we have treasury, we have the CEA, and we have now the NEC that when CEA was dysfunctional, Clinton invented a new one and threw some more spaghetti at the wall. Now they all squabble with each other. We had, in trying to do a budget, we had first a Treasury Department that didn't work.

We had an OMB under Coolidge. Well, that's not working, a Budget Control act that didn't work. We then have an OIRA to try integrate stuff. How many different offices of things with overlapping remits do you really want in a White House? Or is it time to just Marie condo the whole thing and figure out a much more sensible structure?

>> H. R. McMaster: Well, this is the argument that Hedrick Smith makes in an old book called the Power Game about how diffuse government has become. And again, I think what that does, at least in the near term, John, is put a premium on the coordination and integration function of the NEC, the National Economic Council and the National Security Council.

I think what's happened is the President, because from his view, he had a bad experience with the National Security Council staff and his impeachment and the complaints that generated his impeachment about the Ukraine phone call episode and so forth. That he sees the National Security Council staff as the problem to advance his agenda when actually it's the best mechanism to help drive his agenda.

And there's been an effort really across now two Trump administrations to diminish the role of the National Security Council staff. Now of course, those staffs can be overbearing, they can over centralize decision making. But it's important not to do that, right? It's important for every one of these organizations to understand their role, right?

That's when we get into trouble is when the heads of these organizations, these are the secretaries of some of the major departments or the National Security Advisor don't understand his or her role.
>> Bill Whalen: All right, gentlemen, on the Trump front, we also have news reports that the president wants to have a military parade on June 4th, 14th, which is the 250th anniversary of the United States Army.

And by the way, is President Trump's 79th birthday. So I asked the three of you, good idea, bad idea?
>> H. R. McMaster: I think it's a fine idea, man, I mean, it's okay to have a parade, right? And it's the 250th anniversary of the United States Army. What could be a better occasion for a parade than that?

But I do think that, I mean, I tell the story at war with ourselves. The president, he loves a parade, he loves a show. We were in Paris for the end of World War I, I think it was no 100th anniversary of US entry into the war, I think it was.

And it was a massive parade, the president loved it. And then he told me, general, I wanna parade like that. And I'll tell you, I was very happy to pass that on to Secretary Mattis to have that be his problem.
>> Niall Ferguson: But HR what uniform should President Trump wear?

Since it's customary on such occasions in other countries for the President, even if he's not a military uniform, anything in mind for him?
>> H. R. McMaster: President Macron was just in his suit. I think it's just his suit is fine.
>> Niall Ferguson: How about papal vestments? The President's been trying those on, at least with the help of AI.

>> H. R. McMaster: Talk about the height of distastefulness, man. I mean, I can't believe that, really, I mean, geez. I mean, just putting like, I mean, definition of megalomania is that what goes next to that?
>> Niall Ferguson: I'm waiting for the equivalent, the field marshal's uniform.
>> John H. Cochrane: So, yeah, Latin American presidents do this.

And Russians had those big hats always and lots and lots of medals. I'm all for a military parade, especially with lots of airplanes, to celebrate the, US army. I was kinda shocked at how little celebration there was of the 200th anniversary of Lexington and Concord, which occurred just a little bit.

There's a good one in Lexington where my daughter now lives, but there wasn't one in Palo Alto.
>> H. R. McMaster: If you wanna read this book is fantastic, The British are Coming, Rick Atkinson's. And now I'm getting into his second volume, which just came out. It's gonna be a Trilogy of the Revolution.

So damn good, so good.
>> John H. Cochrane: The people in Lexington reenacted this thing at 5 o' clock in the Morning, the historically accurate time, which I thought was really good. But in Palo Alto, nobody even knew about this. So that remembering that sort of thing is. But we are a country that very much values the separation of civilian control from the Army.

So I'm nervous now. Does having a politician at the head of the parade remind us that the military is subject to civilian command? If so, okay, but wear a suit, no funny hats and medals, or is it dangerous to send symbolism of too much military and political together?

So I don't know how to do symbolism of parades, but I'm happy to have one, so long as it's clear what our symbolism is.
>> Bill Whalen: All right, new item, the Oracle of Omaha Warren Buffett is stepping down as CEO of Berkshire Hathaway a few months shy of his 95th birthday, though he'll stay on as chairman of the board.

John and Niall, very quickly, your thoughts on Buffett and the legacy of value investing. Go first, John.
>> John H. Cochrane: Okay and you don't get to ask the questions to just two of us. If HR wants to say something, he gets to.
>> H. R. McMaster: That's okay, I'm still pretty far away from my degree in economics.

>> John H. Cochrane: Buffett was remarkable for both skill and luck. And let's remember, if you pick the winner at the end of the race, you're also likely to pick a guy with luck. He was ahead of the game. So value investing was considered carefully academically, and it does actually work.

It's now called a factor. But he was way ahead of the academics on recognizing that. Also quality factors and all the things he looks for in a company. He got a couple of lucky breaks, buying Apple at the right time, buying BYD. I just learned that he made a lot of money on the Chinese car company, which is about, inevitably gonna clean America's clock.

They can make stuff that at prices we can't even get on. So, there was some luck, there was some deep knowledge. And of course, he buys for the long run. His preferred holding period is infinity. And that's an important lesson for American investors. You buy stocks for the dividends, not for short term price appreciation.

He also invented a very interesting structure. Berkshire Hathaway is a company, it's not a mutual fund. And it pays taxes, seemingly needlessly on dividends, earnings, but then it just reinvests it all and lets you take it out when you want to and pay capital gains taxes on it.

So he invented a very interesting structure, and it's interesting that nobody else has copied that structure. So that one's quite unique.
>> Niall Ferguson: The passing of his leadership of Berkshire Hathaway has given me a kind of prompt to study his career. I'm a bad investor, I'm almost like the opposite of Warren Buffett.

I get the timing wrong. I don't good luck. I really suck at this. And so this is a great moment. I was discussing it with Bill Amman just the other night to actually sit down and study Buffett's record. I don't think the Apple purchase or the BYD investment, I don't think that was luck.

I think there's an extraordinary process of judgment that he and Charlie Munger have perfected. So my resolution is study Buffett and get a bit more Buffety myself.
>> John H. Cochrane: It's actually not. The studies I've seen of him is that it's not stock selection. He doesn't reliably outperform the style of buying value growth companies on certain metrics.

So it's not sort of the brilliant insights of him. He seems to do as well now. Those styles do very well, and the discipline of not buying and selling all the time does very well.
>> Bill Whalen: HR, John was right in shaming me to not including on this. Any thoughts on Warren Buffet?

>> H. R. McMaster: No, not really. I mean, I think you were right to exclude me from that one.
>> Bill Whalen: I stand vindicated.
>> John H. Cochrane: Well, you'd invest in tanks if you were in charge, right?
>> H. R. McMaster: Hey, no, I did, I made like one investment decision in my life, it was disastrous.

And so I called my friend afterwards, who actually knows what he's doing about this. He goes, let me tell you something. You know, if I'm going to invade a country, I'll call you next time before you make an investment decision, call me, just call me.
>> John H. Cochrane: This is interesting for all three of us.

I was a professor of finance for many years, and I don't buy and sell meal. Every time I get the impulse, I wait for it to go away, because it's always wrong.
>> Bill Whalen: All right, gentlemen, final topic, Mother's Day. This is a sore subject for me, my mother passed away in my second year in college.

She was only 45-years-old. And that was 45 years ago, so each may I think about her, I miss her. And I become very melancholy at the thought of how much she missed out on life. Not seeing her children reach maturity or whatever, whatever I reached, not saying, grandchildren, great grandchildren, and so forth.

So I turn to the three of you for a more optimistic note here. HR why don't you start and either talk about the mother who brought you into the world or the remarkable woman with whom you have raised children, who, by the way, fed me a very nice steak the other night.

>> H. R. McMaster: So, my mom was a fantastic human being, so I've got this whole thing on my to remind me of her. Only the best moms get promoted to Mimi, her name was Mimi. My friends called her the Memes. She was a force of nature. She taught public school in Philadelphia, was charismatic.

Her students tested out top in the city, even though they were from the most disadvantaged neighborhoods. She instilled in me kind of an intellectual curiosity and a desire to learn from history and to serve and she was fantastic and just Niall will pretty much appreciate this, I tell the story and it were with ourselves I was hosting Henry Kissinger for the first time in my office since my books had arrived.

He had visited a couple times previously, but now my books were arrived and they were in my office and I pulled down the White House years. And I asked him to sign it and when I opened it up there was a note from my mom who had given me the book in the early 1990s and then it dawned on me.

It was the anniversary of my mother's death also in May. And so, I told Henry Kissinger about my mom. He told me about his mother, an extraordinary woman as well, and we shared a nice moment there, and I think about her all the time. I'm grateful that my daughters got to know her and love her, and are still inspired by her but she was just a fantastic woman, a great role model.

>> Bill Whalen: Jonathan.
>> John H. Cochrane: I wanna celebrate three, my mother was a also a fortune force of nature. Just an amazing woman, married this crazy historian taught herself French and Italian as they wandered around Europe and and then really encouraged us to develop our own interests and follow. And when she died hundreds of people came to the funeral cuz she was such a, so kept her intellectual and personal life going so well.

My wife who brought up our four kids and reminds me there's something women can do uniquely that none of us will ever experience or really understand, bringing new life into the world. Her curse has been, she knows how to run everybody's life if they would only listen to her, but she's right.

And my daughter Sally who just gave birth to our second grandchild. So I was just out watching this wonderful process who has also taken on the responsibilities of motherhood in ways I could never imagine that my own children would be able to do. So a way to go and wonderful to see that new life being brought into the world again.

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, so Niall, I turn to you, I know part of moving to the UK for you is to be closer to your mother.
>> Niall Ferguson: A very, very large part. My mother's still alive and very much with it at 87, it's impossible to overstate how much I owe her.

And of course, my late father. She was also a teacher, a physics teacher in a different era in our time someone like my mum would have had many more career options than to be a teacher. She had a first class degree from Glasgow University, but we were the beneficiaries of her being a teacher, not a career woman.

My sister and I couldn't have had a better start in life than the one my mom gave us because of her attention, her encouragement, and also the subtle and very Scottish pressure. When I was very young, I came home from school filled with pride because I had come second in the class.

They used to rank kids even at a very early age in those olden days. And I said, mom, dad, great news, I came second in the class. And my mother's comment was, who was first? And I think that's great parenting because I never came second again, thanks, mom.

>> Bill Whalen: And she was at your investor, correct?
>> Niall Ferguson: She was indeed, that meant a lot to her. And indeed, I mean, I joke a little bit about the absurdity of being knighted, but it meant an immense amount to her. And, you know, it's prompted me to add a thought to our show today.

We haven't mentioned it, but the 80th anniversary of victory in Europe this week. And my mother's one of that generation who were kids in World War II. And what's really important and where I'm lucky is that I've been able to get my mother through her long life to communicate some of the lessons of her life to my children.

The key thing about mothers is that, as grandmothers, they are like this vital connective tissue between the generations. And so, one reason for going back was not just for me to be close to my mother now that she's quite elderly. But also for our sons, Ayaan and my sons, to get to know her and learn from her in a way that they just couldn't if it was just a case of occasional vacations.

So, yeah, Mother's Day and Grandmother's Day, it's a really, really important thing.
>> Bill Whalen: Well, HR we got away from doom and crisis and we actually ended on a very nice sentimental note.
>> Niall Ferguson: Wipe away the tears if you can.
>> Bill Whalen: Gentlemen, thanks for a great conversation, gentlemen, we will be back very soon with a new episode of Goodfellows.

Our guest will be former Wisconsin Congressman Mike Gallagher, so I suspect we're going to be talking a lot about China and national security. If you worry about missing these shows, there's an easy way to avoid that. Subscribe to us on your podcast network on you on YouTube. Also go to the Hoover website, hoover.org and sign up for the Hoover Daily Report, which comes to your inbox weekdays.

It means every time that Niall, John, and HR on the news, Hoover reports on it for you. Our three good fellows also are quite active on social media, they have X feeds, we'll follow those too. On behalf of the Goodfellows, Sir Niall Ferguson, HR McMaster and John Cochrane, thanks for joining us today.

We hope you enjoy the show and we will see you soon. Till then, take care.
>> Presenter: If you enjoyed this show and are interested in watching more content featuring HR McMaster, watch Battlegrounds also available at hoover.org.