Tiny Cars and 70’s Problems with Ben Sasse | GoodFellows | Hoover Institution

Summary

GoodFellows: Conversations from the Hoover Institution
Episode: Tiny Cars and 70’s Problems with Ben Sasse
Date: December 10, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode welcomes former Senator and current University of Florida president Ben Sasse to the GoodFellows roundtable—Hoover Institution's John Cochrane, Niall Ferguson, and H.R. McMaster—for a frank discussion on two embattled US institutions: Congress and higher education. The conversation traces the roots of congressional dysfunction back to the 1970s, explores the legislative body's abdication of authority, the performative nature of modern politics, institutional trust collapse, and prospects for reform. The discussion then pivots to higher education’s crisis in quality, innovation, and relevance—delving into failing public standards, problems of tenure and governance, and the need for bold new educational models. The latter half touches on broader policy matters: US national security, shifting automotive regulation, and, with humor, the arcane debate over what Americans call “football.”

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The State of Congress: Underreach, Abdication, and Trust Crisis

• Congressional Malaise:
  • Ben Sasse frames Congress as a body that has fundamentally lost its ambition and purpose. Instead of energetic legislative activity, members are "more interested in keeping their jobs than exercising power" ([03:28] Sasse).
  • The shift from Article I underreach is contrasted with the executive branch's increasing dominance.

“Congress isn’t very ambitious. The Congress doesn’t want to do very much. And so the executive branch fills a lot of that vacuum.”
— Ben Sasse [03:28]

• Rules of the Game & Media Distortion:
  • John Cochrane asks if structural fixes (like filibuster reforms or restoring party discipline) could help. Sasse emphasizes the toxic effect of constant cameras, noting only the camera-free Intelligence Committee functions well because “there’s really no way to grandstand for a sound bite.”
  • The perpetual performance for media undermines genuine deliberation ([05:52] Sasse).

“Deal making really doesn’t happen... The intel committee works really, really well... because we don’t have cameras.”
— Ben Sasse [05:52]

• Declining Public Trust:

  • H.R. McMaster highlights the collapse in institutional confidence, with Congress at the bottom or near-bottom of trust surveys. Sasse places Congress’s woes in a wider context: trust has declined in nearly all major American sectors except the military ([08:23] McMaster, Sasse).
  • Higher education is in even faster decline. Increased scrutiny and social media have exposed institutional failings, compounded by a lack of humility and poor crisis management (COVID-19).

• Budget Dysfunction & 1970s Legacy:

  • Sasse underscores Congress’s chronic failure to pass budgets through regular order (“only four times in 47 years”); instead, spending is locked on autopilot with “zero differentiation” ([11:40] Sasse).
  • The rise of the administrative state in the 1970s, beginning with agencies like the EPA, is highlighted as central to congressional power leakage.

“No organization, no bait shop in Nebraska, no large corporation ever operates like the way to spend money is exactly what we did last year, plus a little bit in every category.”
— Ben Sasse [12:00]

• Structural Critique on Power, Entitlements, and Future Crisis:
  • Breakdown of federal spending: entitlements (especially Medicare/Medicaid) now crowd out discretionary policy, a “giant insurance company that just happens to own a navy on the side” ([15:00] Sasse).
  • Sasse warns the real reckoning will only come with a deep fiscal crisis—likely when the market refuses to finance US debt.

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2. Congressional Reform: Term Limits, Committees, and Incentive Problems

• Term Limits:
  • Bill Whelan and Sasse debate the value of seniority vs. fresh blood in Congress. Sasse prefers limited terms (ideally 12 years), but notes the larger problem is members lacking a purposeful legislative agenda ([20:08] Sasse).
  • Cochrane pushes back on term limits, noting possible downsides: lame duck status and questioning whether structural fixes or deeper incentives are missing.

“Senator Grassley is a special, special man... he jokes that he’s been there since the end of Washington’s second term.”
— Ben Sasse [20:43]

• Committees’ Decline:
  • Sasse laments the shift in legislative work from committees to leadership offices. Real work happens in small leadership teams, eroding committee expertise and buy-in ([22:54] Sasse).

“The committees don’t work... The Senate is as weak as it’s been since the 1930s, but the leaders offices are far more powerful than they’ve ever been.”
— Ben Sasse [22:54]

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3. The Crisis in Higher Education: Competency, Governance, and Innovation

• Failing Standards & UC San Diego Example:
  • Sasse references UCSD data revealing that “1 in 12 freshmen cannot do middle school math”—a symptom of much deeper academic decay ([24:16] Sasse).
  • He points out three problems: broken admissions processes, poor K-12 preparation, and social promotion in schools with little accountability or real testing.

“There was almost nobody [who couldn’t do sixth grade math], and now something like 1 in 12 UCSD undergrads can’t do sixth grade math. How did we get here? — it’s admissions, under-preparation, and the fraud of social promotion.”
— Ben Sasse [24:45]

• Institutional Calcification & Need for New Entrants:
  • Sasse and Ferguson agree current university models are “calcified” and ill-suited to the dynamism of the digital age. Sasse is optimistic about disruption—citing initiatives like the University of Austin but says “we need 50 more new institutions” ([30:42] Sasse).
  • Ferguson notes the unique challenges posed by tenure, lack of accountability, and DEI policies spreading through universities.

“If you have an institution that hires senior employees and gives them permanent jobs for life, regardless [of] performance... that’s called tenure. It’s extremely hard to run the institution.”
— Niall Ferguson [28:56]

• Tenure and Evergreen Contracts:

  • Sasse explains the financial insanity of lifetime job security through tenure (“an NPV of about $9 million” at Harvard), arguing for renewable contracts instead ([33:00] Sasse).

• Liberal Arts, Core Curriculum & Humanities:

  • Sasse discusses the creation of the Hamilton School at University of Florida as an attempt to revive rigorous, broad education—including political, diplomatic, and military history ([34:20] McMaster, Sasse).
  • The problem: "nichified" disciplines have replaced foundational learning, leading to a “curriculum of self-loathing.”

“The opportunity cost of these institutions underperforming isn’t chiefly student indebtedness. It’s the waste of four of the most important years of people’s lives.”
— Ben Sasse [31:20]

• Federal Subsidies and Bureaucratic Bloat:
  • Cochrane points to poorly-designed federal aid inflating costs, subsidizing dubious majors, and increasing administrative bloat ([40:26] Cochrane).

“Fixed supply, subsidize demand — what happens to the price? But along with it comes this bureaucratic bloat, which is not all just bureaucratic bloat—it’s filling out federal forms and obeying federal rules...”
— John Cochrane [40:26]

• Board Governance & Accreditation:
  • Sasse emphasizes the need for university boards to reclaim oversight (“Boards have abdicated their responsibilities... when you ultimately net out what is the balance of requirements for graduation, generally educated people on the board ought to be able to stand up... and say this is why these things are required”) ([41:08] Sasse).

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4. Geopolitics & National Security Strategy (Post-Sasse segment)

• US Military Action in the Caribbean and National Security Doctrine:
  • McMaster and Ferguson discuss the latest US deployments, the challenge of congressional oversight on war powers, and the Trump Administration’s updated National Security Strategy ([45:44] McMaster, [49:21] Ferguson).
  • Ferguson provides context for how confusing media summaries of policy documents can be; McMaster describes the realities and missed opportunities in crafting and communicating grand strategy.

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5. Energy Policy & “Tiny Cars”: CAFE Standards

• Small Cars vs. Regulatory Incentives:
  • Ferguson playfully recounts his affection for his old VW Beetle, but all agree America’s diversity of climate, geography, and purpose means “tiny cars” aren’t a one-size-fits-all solution ([57:12] Ferguson).
  • Cochrane explains fuel economy regulations perversely encourage bigger vehicles by design, distorting market choices ([59:00] Cochrane).

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6. American “Football,” Language, and British Sports

• The Language of Football:
  • Panel has fun discussing the misnaming of ‘football’ in the U.S., the heritage of British sports, and the British Empire’s true legacies (citing a memorable, tongue-in-cheek quote).

“When the British Empire had vanished entirely from the scene, only two things would remain to remind us of its existence: the game of association football, and the expression F off.”
— Sir Niall Ferguson quoting Aden’s colonial governor [63:59]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Congressional Dysfunction:

  “Congress is a job a lot of people would like to get and stay in and therefore they don’t want to make anybody mad.”
  — Ben Sasse [03:28]

• On Camera Culture:

  “The Intelligence Committee works really, really well... Some of why it works... is because we don’t have cameras.”
  — Ben Sasse [05:52]

• On the Federal Budget:

  “Right now the budget has become a giant insurance company that just happens to own a navy on the side.”
  — Ben Sasse [15:00]

• On Higher Ed’s Decay:

  “We need 50 more new institutions... The opportunity cost ... isn’t chiefly student indebtedness. It’s the waste of four of the most important years of people’s lives.”
  — Ben Sasse [30:42, 31:20]

• On Sports and Empire:

  “When the British Empire had vanished entirely from the scene, only two things would remain: association football, and the expression F off.”
  — Sir Niall Ferguson [63:59]

• Comic Relief:

  “I feel like we’re literally driving around in a vagina.”
  — Ben Sasse, quoting The Other Guys, on driving a Prius [58:49]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Opening and Introductions: [00:00]
• Congressional Dysfunction: [03:11]–[22:54]
• Education/Higher Ed Crisis: [24:10]–[44:51]
• US Foreign Policy & Security: [45:16]–[54:59]
• Energy Policy/Tiny Cars: [57:12]–[60:40]
• Sports Naming & Cultural Commentary: [60:52]–[66:20]

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Final Thoughts

This GoodFellows episode offers a sharp, unsparing look at two pillars of the American experiment—Congress and higher education—at their moments of structural malaise and existential questioning. Through candid, occasionally humorous exchange, Ben Sasse and the panel illuminate where the real blockages are, who must act to fix them, and why American institutions still matter. As always, the GoodFellows blend insight, history, and wit with a chemistry that rewards every serious listener.

Transcript

[Bill Whelan]

Foreign.

December 8, 2025. And welcome back to Goodfellows. The Hoover Institution broadcast examining history, economics and geopolitics. I'm Bill Whelan. I'm a distinguished Policy Fellow here at the Hoover Institution, and I'll be the moderator today of a conversation featuring three of my colleagues we refer to as the Goodfellows. I'm talking, of course, about the historian Sir Neil Ferguson, the economist John Cochran, and former presidential national security advisor, Lt. Gen. H.R. mcMaster. Neil, John and H.R. are Hoover senior fellows. So, gentlemen, good to see you. Before we get off the show, I have a sartorial question to ask the three of you. Last time we were on the show, the three of you were in coats and ties. I was not. I felt ashamed. I made a point to wear a coat and tie. Brother Cochran's wearing a coat and tie. We shamed HR into wearing a coat and tie. But here's Sir Neil Son's coat and tie. So can we get a good fellow's dress policy here once and for all?

[Sir Neil Ferguson]

My policy is variety is the spice of life.

[Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster]

And you know, hey, what the colonials. The colonials are are, you know, are dressing up more than. Than you know.

[Sir Neil Ferguson]

Then sure.

[Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster]

Deal.

[Sir Neil Ferguson]

I mean, come on, context. The last show I was in London and I'd been doing very London things. I was in town. And in town I wear a suit and tie and black polished shoes. Today you find me in my study at home in the country. A man would be very unusual to put a tie on in that setting. So I think one just has to adopt horses for courses, as they say over here.

[Bill Whelan]

John, what do you think?

[John Cochrane]

I'm in Silicon Valley, so I'll go get my black turtleneck.

[Bill Whelan]

Well, we're joined today by someone who is also not wearing a tie, but we're honored to have him nonetheless. He is here to talk about the sad state of Congress and the dubious question of higher education in America. He's uniquely in a position about this because he has experience with both institutions. Joining us today, making his Goodfellows debut, is former Senator Ben Sasse. In addition to representing the great state of Nebraska for eight years, the United States Senate, Senator Sasse also has served as the President of University of Florida and Midland University, which is a private college in Fremont, Nebraska. He's the author of two books, the Vanishing American what he sees as a crisis of Prolonged adolescence in the United States. If you go on YouTube, you'll find a Uncommon Knowledge episode with Peter Robinson where Senator Sasse talks about this. His other book is titled why We Hate each and how to Heal. His contention is that a problem with today's society isn't so much divisive politics as it is loneliness and the need to rediscover roots and build human to human relationships. Ben Sasse joins us today to talk about what ails Congress and how to revitalize that branch of government. And based on his experience running universities, we want to hear his thoughts on how to improve higher education. Senator Sass, this is a long overdue welcome to Goodfellows.

[Senator Ben Sasse]

Bill, thanks for having me. And Goodfellows. Good to be with all of you. I am very sorry that I did not get the time memo. I wouldn't have followed Neil's lead on this had I known I could have chosen the other guys.

[Bill Whelan]

I think one of the beauties of leading the Senate is you can leave the tie behind you when you do that, Senator. So let's get right to it. So one month from today, January 8th, is the three year anniversary of you going to the well of the Senate and delivering farewell remarks. And in those remarks you said, and.

[Senator Ben Sasse]

I quote, senators, colleagues and friends, each of us knows that this institution doesn't work very well right now.

[Bill Whelan]

So here we are, nearly three years later. Senator, when you look at today's Congress, what about the institution? Is it about the same? Is it better or is it worse?

[Senator Ben Sasse]

Well, let me just start by saying thanks for having me. I am a longtime listener and fan, so I'm glad to get to be with you. Bill, you were inaccurate though. You said when I was coming here because I wanted to talk about Congress, you invited me on. Then later you guys slid the Congress topic in. I would have declined. I try to not talk all that much about that topic. But I guess from the vantage point of history, I'm the poor man's historian on the podcast, but from the vantage point of history, I think our founding founders would be super confused about how the Congress functions today because they thought that the three branches would check and balance one another because there would be so much ambition inside the branches. And I obviously am very critical of Article 2 overreach. But I think the more fundamental issue of our time is Article 1 underreach. The Congress isn't very ambitious. The Congress doesn't want to do very much. And so the executive branch fills a lot of that vacuum. Obviously that's partly uniquely the individual individual who serves as chief executive right now. But I think there's a more fundamental problem, which is that the Congress is a job a lot of people would like to get and stay in and therefore they don't want to make anybody mad. I think America's a lot healthier if following Washington's farewell address, people really want to be from the places they're from and they go and serve for a time in Washington D.C. but they don't regard that as the center of the world. But while they're there, they'd like to actually exercise some power. And right now the Congress doesn't really want any power.

[John Cochrane]

Well, I can ask. So we're going to make you talk about this because you know about it and we don't. As an economist, I'm often point to the rules of the game when something's not going well. And I'm curious if you see rules of the game that are obvious. I mean, on the agenda is the whole question of the filibuster, which isn't in the Constitution but has seemed in the past like a useful protection of minority rights. So we don't, you know, our founders did not envision 51% shove it down their throats. That's into that. Also, the, the decline of political parties seems to be important. Everybody is now a YouTube star at least. So. So it goes parties. You know, originally we didn't have open primaries, so, you know, maybe, maybe going back to parties pick their candidates with a view to the general election rather than being grandstanding. I don't know. What are the other. What are the top five ways to fix the. Just the rules of the game that you have in mind that might make this a more functional institution?

[Senator Ben Sasse]

Yes, I think you, John, you name a bunch of them. Let's pull on a thread a little bit More about your YouTube star aside, a lot of people seem like they want to use the Congress as a way to get on to the more important work of punditry. And it's a strange thing to have cameras everywhere because deal making really doesn't happen. The committees that I was most active on in the Senate were Intel, Finance and Judiciary. Judiciary is just a craptacular show for TikTok or YouTube every day. The intel committee works really, really well. Some of why it works is the subject matter and the people who are willing to put in the time and the homework required to serve well in the intel community and doing oversight of the ic. But I think one of the fundamental reasons why intel works so much better than almost all other committees is because we don't have cameras. So we meet in a skiff and there's really no to grandstand for a sound bite. Nobody gives A five minute speech masquerading as a question. And then as time runs out, ask some question. You say, director Burns, who was the last CIA chief when I was there? You just said X, but I kind of thought Y. And how does that make any sense in our long term geopolitical fight against the CCP? You get a lot of questions that are 12 seconds long that are a real question. I don't understand that. Explain it to me. Nobody does that in a public hearing because you don't want the sound bite to make you look stupid. But on a lot of things when you're conducting an oversight hearing, you as the member know the least, you're representative of the people. But having cameras there is super distorting social media. It's easy to blame everything on social media, but a huge part of why the Congress doesn't work right now is because we haven't gotten to an information ecosystem yet that makes sense in a world where people are living for constant sound bites.

[Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster]

Hey Ben, we were just together at the Reagan Defense Forum and remember how they showed up, showed that chart about confidence in institutions, what the trend has been? And Congress is at the bottom. So this kind of performative over formative approach the Congress is taking, it's not working. So in terms of overall confidence in the institution, hey, what do you think is a path to regain confidence of the American people in government? Because it's pretty damn important, I think because of that lack of confidence in our institutions, I think great space for our adversaries and diminishes our ability to compete effectively internationally as well.

[Senator Ben Sasse]

Yeah, great point. Before we get to the specifics on the decline of trust and why Congress is kind of at the bottom of a larger declining trust metric across all institutions, let's just focus for a minute on being together at the Reagan Defense Forum. I thought it was really amazing that you were willing to go shirtless to that whole event and both bench press and deadlift. And I just want to say, HR General, you still got game and it was really impressive what you pulled off. And valley back to trust. There are 10 sectors of the economy that Pew and Gallup have been studying on a decade by decade basis since somewhere between the 1930s and the 1950s. In nine of the 10 sectors, we have four consecutive decades of declining trust. In the public's view of those sectors. So academia, the judiciary, Congress, federal bureaucracy, Hollywood, corporate America, the. The only of the 10 sectors that doesn't have four consecutive decades of declining trust is the military. Roughly flat, but nine of the Other ten sectors are declining. So I think we need to make sense of that in general before we talk particularly or think particularly about why Congress is the worst. Actually, Congress is only second worst right now. Higher ed has the most rapidly declining public trust over the last 12 to 15 years. But Congress and higher ed are declining really rapidly. I think social media is a big part of it. But what social media really does is it allows a lot more information to bounce around from the periphery back to the center or up to governing institutions. And it turns out a lot of people that fake expertise don't really have a lot of expertise. And we've seen this in the declining trust in public health institutions since COVID There's obviously a lot that happens that's people grandstanding on social media and wanting to undermine trust. But it's also the case that public health institutions didn't conduct themselves very well. And so it turns out when you have a microscopic look at a lot of institutions, it turns out more humility was required from those institutions. And so when you think About Congress from 19, I'm making these numbers up. I'm sort of racking my brain to get them from 1952 until 2006. I think change of control in the House happened one time, the Gingrich Revolution of 1994. And basically over the last 20 years, from 2006 to the present, almost every midterm election, the non executive branch party tends to gain a lot of seats in Congress and the majorities in the Congress go away. And so we have this yo yo swing constantly now, where the Congress is turning over every four, six or eight years, where it used to happen only once per half century. I think a lot of that is about the information economy we live in or ecosystem we live in. But a lot of it's about the fact that Congress hasn't done its work. Well, just say one factual item here. The Budget Control act was passed, I think, in 1974. So after Watergate and after the sort of. I forget what the term was, forgetting the technical term when Nixon didn't want to spend funds that had been appropriated.

[Sir Neil Ferguson]

Impoundment process.

[Senator Ben Sasse]

Impoundment process. Thank you. So we ended up with a new Budget control Act in 1974. It worked for three or four years since 1978. Congress, which I was born in 1972, so I can do the math. For over a 47 year period, I think Congress has spent more than a third of the budget through regular order only four times in 47 years. One of the most fundamental purposes of The Congress is to say, what do we spend the people's money on this year? And probably we should have learned something from last year. Instead, what we do is we get to September 30 or September 27 every year, the end of the fiscal year, and people say, oh crap, the government's about to shut down. What should we do? Should we fund it at 00% of last year's level or 102% of last year's level? No organization, no bait shop in Nebraska, no large corporation ever operates like the way to spend money is exactly what we did last year, plus a little bit in every category. Undifferentiated, or let's shut it down and spend zero. Healthy people would say, hey, some things worked really well. The ROI on that was high. Let's spend 2x of what we spent last year. And some things didn't work that well, let's cut it by 30%. And we don't have an appropriations process that works. And so it turns out the public doesn't have a lot of confidence in the people who don't have a process that works.

[Sir Neil Ferguson]

I'm so glad you brought up the 1970s, Ben, because it strikes me that the structural problem in the American system of government can be traced back to that decade. Chris DeMuth wrote a terrific article some years ago, you may know it, on the rise of the Administrative State. And his argument was that it's really in the 70s that Congress starts to allow power to be handed to agencies, beginning with the epa. And it goes from there until there are so many agencies you can't count them. And I think it takes the public a while to realize that instead of the 70s being a time when Congress asserted its power, which it appeared to over Watergate, in reality the 70s were the decade when Congress stopped functioning as the founders had intended. And, and you've hit the nail on the head. A representative assembly that can't do the budget is fundamentally broken. It is not doing the core function of such a representative assembly. Now the problem is, how do you fix that? John came up with a bunch of suggestions at the beginning, but I don't think any one of them or even all of them together would put Congress back into the position that it should be in. Here's a classic example. It's incredible that the Trump administration has been imposing tariffs willy nilly in an entirely arbitrary way when the Constitution says absolutely, clearly and unambiguously, that's the job of Congress. And we haven't had a squeak from certainly Republican legislators About this pretty clear violation of constitutional order. Is that fundamental problem fixable or is the failure or is the impossibility to fix it the reason that you quit?

[Senator Ben Sasse]

Man, there's a lot there. We need whiskey. It's still before noon on a Monday. And so I don't, I don't want us to get to a place I think you just pounded some sort of straight shot caffeine that feels unfair. I don't want to get to a place where we're just hand wringing and we say, oh, we've identified six or eight great problems and we don't, we can't solve any of them. But let's keep going deeper into the problem morass for a minute. So first I'll agree with you about the 70s and the Congress's appearance of reasserting Article 1 counterbalancing on Article 2, where really they tried to create an Article 4 branch which was unaccountable to either Article 1 or Article 2. We happen to be convening today at a time when the Supreme Court is hearing some questions about executive power and about a unitary executive branch. I do think it's right and proper in a constitutional system to have three, not four branches of government. I also think it'd be really healthy if the Article 2 branch was humble about the fact that they shouldn't be making every decision decision on a short term political basis so you can tweet about it. So in general I want to see Article 4, the administrative state, not really Article 4 Branch 4 cabined back, but I'd like it to be done by an executive branch that's humble about how you do a small number of things really well and try to get the American people to trust you about them. I also think in addition to that 70s problem, in the 70s we realized that the 1960s calculations about the expansion of the entitlement state state didn't work and Congress started abdicating more and more responsibility. So obviously the welfare state as we know it stems from the Social Security act and from certain sort of unemployment programs from the 1930s. But the thing that will bankrupt us is Medicare. And So it's in 1965 that LBJ, in a torrent of legislation passed over a 24 month period after JFK's assassination, passes Medicare as the most massive expansion of the entitlement state. And I think we should probably go full budget nerd though it's dangerous to do it in front of Professor Cochran because he can correct all of the things that I'm going to get Wrong here. But I tried to tell my constituents in Nebraska that the way I approach the budget is in three giant buckets. There are entitlements, there is non entitlement defense spending, and there's non defense, non entitlement spending, which is what's really discretionary spending. And once upon a time we understood that the United States government or the budget of the US Government government is a giant army or a necessary army that also has a few social safety net programs. Over time, the budget has become a giant insurance company that just happens to own a navy on the side. Right. We're at about 71% autopilot in the budget. If you take Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, Social Security and interest on the debt, those entitlement programs where there aren't specific decisions made by the Congress every year are more than 70% of all spending. Less than 30% is discretionary, and the lesser half of that, less than 30% is national security, which is the fundamental thing that created a constitutional system for us. The reason we had to have the Constitution after the Articles of Confederation is because of problems around the currency and paying debts from the Revolutionary War and the ability to have a consolidated foreign policy of the 13 colonies. So the reason we went the Constitution is a very, very, very limited document about enumerated powers, but it's a more powerful central government than you had in the article Confederation because we needed a national security team, we needed a national security consolidated vision plan, policy and budget. And right now that's a rounding error on the budget. It's entitlements that are going to bankrupt us. And so the question is, do we get out of our entitlement problem, which is going to be Medicare over everything else. Do we get out of that problem by leadership or by crisis? And right now it sure looks like the most likely thing is a failed treasury auction some Tuesday morning where we can't refinance the 30 year T bills and we end up in a state of crisis. And then you figure out how the government responds. Boy, it'd be so much better to be doing this by leadership in advance. But to the tail end of your question, I'll pull up here. Neil, is serving in Congress right now a meaningful place? No. Almost everybody who's there is dissatisfied with the job because there's a massive collective action problem around the fact that the public doesn't really understand the magnitude of our entitlement crisis and it will eventually catch us.

[Bill Whelan]

Senator Staff Speaking of dissatisfaction, 51 members of Congress right now will not seek reelection next year, that's 10 senators, 41 members of the House. Only 12 of those members are running for the Senate. So they want to stay at Washington. The rest either want to go home or they want to become a governor. There was a time when being a senator, there was a joke in Washington. All senators, when they first run, they promised to serve two terms. They didn't spend their second term trying to figure a way how to weasel out of that promise and stay at Washington forever. But now if you look next door, say to Iowa, next door to Nebraska, you have two extremes. There's Chuck Grassley, who first came to the Senate when you were eight years old, I think in 1981. Then you have Joni Ernst, who is leaving after two terms. Which leads to this question of which is better for Congress? Is it amassing seniority or is it constantly replenishing it with new blood?

[Senator Ben Sasse]

Great question. I don't want to call it a false choice, but I think if you could wave a magic wand and say let's do six or eight or ten constitutional amendments, I'd probably do a single term, limited 12 year term in the Senate. So I think of those choices and nobody's ever going to want to fight Chuck Grassley because when you're pushing 100 years old and you're still the best guy at mowing of anybody any of us know, Senator Grassley is a special, special man. He often jokes that he's been there since the end of Washington's second term.

Grassley's a special guy, but I prefer people to go to Washington for a limited period of time and then go back home. But, but you need to run. Not trying to win a clickbait primary right now, but trying to persuade your constituents that there's a small number of things you're going to try to force the Congress to focus on. But right now I think the current data is over any two year period. The word Congress obviously just means meeting. The Senate is a perpetual body because only one third of it turns over every two years. The House of Representatives turns over in its entirety every two years. So a Congress is a two year meeting of the House. I think on average the joint House and Senate pass about 380 pieces of legislation. Per two year Congress, about 11,000 are introduced. So you have about a three and a half percent passage rate and about half of those are post office naming bills or other ceremonial things. So Congress is doing less than 2% of what it introduces every year. It ought to be focused on the most important 2% which involve things like passing a budget that makes sense. Reasserting congressional priorities over sources of revenue. So to Neil's point about tariffs, it is not an executive branch opportunity to just freelance and make up new sources of revenue and new tax policy. You ought to have fundamental questions about what the long term national security threats are in a way that tries to bring the public along. So I think 12 years is much healthier than 47. But you ought to run for those 12 years with a defined agenda about the things we're trying to get done.

[John Cochrane]

Term limits have notorious problems. You're instantly a lame duck this minute. You know how this job works. You have to leave. And it says that we don't trust democracy. We don't trust people to throw out people who aren't competent. What seems to be missing is the founders thought there would be Congress would want to preserve its power and its prerogatives. And the administration's very good at preserving power and prerogatives. And the administration agencies are, boy, are they great at raise the drawbridge and preserve the power and prerogatives. But Congress doesn't seem to have that.

Where would that come from?

[Senator Ben Sasse]

You know, I'll go back to what we said about intel versus Judiciary. If the committees. Neil was giving us the lesson on, you know, the Budget Control act in the early 70s. The committee structure comes from the end of World War II. I think 1946 48ish is where we got the committee structure. Right now the committees don't work. So the Senate is probably as weak as it's been since the 1930s. But the leaders offices are far more powerful than they've ever been before. So the legislation that does happen, that gets thrown into the few omnibus pieces of legislation that pass every year. They're not written in the committees, they're written in the leaders offices. And John Thune is a wonderful man, good friend of mine, special human being. So this is not an attack on him. But I think it's much healthier for the committees to do real work. But the committees would need to demonstrate a trustworthiness about focusing on big issues. And right now that doesn't happen because.

[John Cochrane]

We don't need more laws, we need better laws. The European Union parliament is really good at passing hundreds and hundreds of laws very efficiently and oh my God.

[Senator Ben Sasse]

We are aligned.

[Bill Whelan]

Let's shift and talk about education.

[Senator Ben Sasse]

You recently wrote a. Oh, to a happier topic.

[John Cochrane]

Yeah, something that's working better.

[Bill Whelan]

Right. Your column in the Wall Street Journal, Senator. UC San Diego in the Crisis of education. You're talking about a public Ivy. The UC San Diego makes everybody's top 10 list of best public universities in America. And yet in that very nice campus, 1 in 12 freshmen cannot do middle school math.

[Sir Neil Ferguson]

Math.

[Bill Whelan]

What is the problem here? Is it the problem with admissions that we're not properly checking kids credentials? Is the problem in education further down the road? We're just not teaching kids math. What's going on here?

[Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster]

Yeah.

[Senator Ben Sasse]

So Bill, before we unpack ucsd, let's say something positive which is that the big disruption that's coming in higher ed is going to have a lot of great things as a part of it. Right? We live in an unbelievably dynamic time. I tend to think that the way we talk about technology is too bifurcated between the accelerationist super optimist school and the safetiest let's regulate it all school. I think the question isn't whether or not living through the digital disruption is going to bring us heaven or hell, it's going to bring us both. When the marginal cost of compute falls to close to zero or so close to zero that we don't bother to meter it anymore, almost everything humans do we're going to be able to do more of and faster, cheaper. Which in the case of good things is great and in the case of bad things is horrific. And so the disruption that we're living through right now I think is going to bring a lot of terrible things and a lot of wonderful things. But the fact that our institutions of coming of age, the kinds of institutions that shape 15 to 25 year olds historically shaped only elite 15 to 25 year olds but lately have shaped the majority of 15 to 25 year olds. These institutions have calcified. Really, really great things can happen in higher ed but we need lots of new entrants. We need new institutions, we need new forms. We shouldn't have everybody going an eight semester long school that has four classes per semester, three contact hours per class. We need a lot more diversity in higher ed. And so the fact that higher ed is demonstrating itself to be fundamentally broken has a lot of beneficial side properties, which is I think we will get new entrants. To your specific point about UCSD and the data really is shocking and so credit to the faculty senate, not a phrase I use a lot, and to the administrative committees that decided to be honest about how broken it is. They've had a 30 fold increase in students at UCSD over a five year period that basically can't do middle school math in 2018, 2019, 2020, there was almost nobody. And now something like 1 in 12 UCSD undergrads can't do sixth grade math. How do we get here? I think there are three distinct problems. One, there's an admissions problem at UCSD that would allow you to admit people without any quality control about fact that they were not ready for high school, let alone for college. Number two, there is the problem of why were these students so underprepared? What is happening in the schools? And number three, there's the question of the fraud about how in the world these K12 institutions continued to socially promote seventh graders, eighth graders, ninth graders, tenth graders that couldn't do, not only algebra, couldn't do fourth grade fractions. And so I think all three of these are distinct problems. A lot of it is uniquely California, but we don't know how much. A lot of it is Covid learning loss, but we don't know how much. But I think the NEIEP has showed us. The National Educational Progress Report Card shows us that we've burned a lot of mass math knowledge which had been growing decade over decade from the 70s until about 2010. We've attributed most of that back away over the course of the last decade. And so we need, need a lot more testing. It's obvious that the parents of the elite, parents of a lot of highest end performing kids, know high stakes testing anxiety and they've sort of projected this onto the general population. We probably have way too much testing out there. It's obvious that we have way too little testing out there. There's something like 31 million 18 to 22 year olds in the country. And so if you work that backwards, if there are 30 million kids at every four year cohort, if you take four to eighth graders right now, those 30 million kids, we know very, very, very little about what their educational progress looks like from fourth to fifth to sixth to seventh grade. And that isn't in the interest of the kids, that isn't in the interest of the nation.

[Sir Neil Ferguson]

Can I just correct you on one point? When you said, Ben, there will be new entrants. There already are new entrants, or perhaps there's one at least, and that's the University of Austin. I just wanted to point out that this problem has been been festering for years and it's now four years since Joe Lonsdale, Barry Weiss and I said time to create a new university. I honestly think it's impossible to fix the incumbent institutions though all kinds of efforts are being made across the nation. There are very, very powerful institutional reasons why this will be hard. And I'll throw out a few and see if you agree. If you have an institution that hires senior employees and gives them permanent jobs for life, regardless performance, that's called tenure. It's extremely hard to run the institution. There is a chronic problem of governance in most universities. We just had a conversation about the U.S. constitution. But you won't find a judicial branch in any university except ours to correct the errors of the executive and legislative branches. And then finally, I think the idea of DEI as a basis for decision making is fundamentally antithetical to a university which should make all its decisions on the basis of intellectual promise and achievement. And if they're making decisions about anything else, I think it's amazingly rapid, the process of degeneration. Even if you introduced a little bit of diversity, equity and inclusion into decision making about just a few things, my observation is that it spreads throughout the institution extremely fast and destroys admissions all the way through to promotions of faculty. Do you agree?

[Senator Ben Sasse]

Yeah, I think I agree with all that. Let me first give you and Barry and Joe kudos for the work at the University of Austin. I'm glad it's there. We need 50 more new institutions. To your point about whether the incumbents are reformable, I mostly agree, though I don't want it to be true. I think we need. You can have subparts of institutions that can function separately or different than the larger institution. At the University of Florida, we've built the Hamilton School School, which is essentially a new liberal arts college inside the institution. But we need parents and we need employers in particular to care a lot about when students come out. Did their life change between 18 and 20 and 22 years old. There are very few moments in life that you'd ever want to go live again more than being 18 to 22. It's a pretty great time. The opportunity cost of these institutions underperforming performing isn't chiefly student indebtedness. It's the waste of four of the most important years of people's lives. And right now, pardon my throat, we have a lot of employers who are willing to just defer to the admissions process of higher ed as having created a filter where you find supposedly some of the most talented 18 year olds. And then you say, well, there are a bunch of network effects they got during those four years. I think there are very few employers that actually think enough life change happens for 18 to 20 to 22 year olds. And that's just, that's A Tocquevillean tragedy. In America, we need lots of really great things to be happening. And if you could, if I could. My kids are 24, 22 and 14. If I could rethink the 48 months of my older two or think ahead for my 14 year old for 48 months, what would you want? If you had no barriers to how they spent those four years, if money wasn't a constraint, if entry, entrance to different rooms, interesting places to listen and study and learn and wrestle weren't a barrier, what would you do with those 48 months? Well, one thing I'm pretty sure of is that I wouldn't want them to spend all 48 months in the same zip code. The world is really big and interesting. And if you could do a grand tour of work experiences and a small cohort of really interesting smart people that wanted to read two or three or four dozen important books together, I'd take them on the road for most of those 48 months. We need to break up the sense, sense that 48 months all in one geography is the right way to think about it. To your point about tenure. And then I'll pull up and let the other guys in. But Larry Bacow told me a couple years ago when he was president of Harvard, he thought the decision to tenure a faculty member at Harvard had an NPV of about $9 million. That was the expense of the long term employment contract you were signing into many folks in higher ed when you're 28 or 30 or 32 and getting a PhD have a lot of opportunities in front of them, and having a one year employ agreement isn't attractive enough to create the right kind of human capital in the sector. And yet the alternative, which is a $9 million lifelong decision, is also incredibly stupid. So somebody needs to be pioneering something that looks a little bit more like 36 month evergreen contracts in higher ed. So we could get to a place where we really evaluated people's productivity as both a teacher and a research scholar over the course of their life. But not the thing that you get the holy grail at 35 when you move from assistant to associate professor. And you can now just choose your own whether or not you do stuff that's meaningful for your neighbor in the future because you just got a $9 million long term contract.

[Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster]

Hey Ben, I know that you share a concern that we've voiced here many times about the atrophy of US political, diplomatic, military, history. And so could you maybe just talk a little bit about what you did at the Hamilton School to reinvigorate it, how you diagnosed the problem and then what you came up with as a cure. Because I think I've seen your model now influencing what's happening in a number of universities. We saw our friend Willem Bowden, you know, who's also at the Reagan Defense Forum, who's, I think, you know, taking that model to a certain extent.

[Bill Whelan]

Yeah.

[Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster]

To the University of Texas. So could you maybe just let our viewers know what you've been up to on that front and how you assess the efforts to sort of correct maybe, maybe, I don't know, the curriculum of self loathing that has been so dominant in many humanities departments and reinvigorate the study of history general.

[Senator Ben Sasse]

Really, really well said. So let me do. Thanks for the fastball, the big fat fastball. I'll give commercials for both Will and Bowden, my other favorite, bald guy, and for the Hamilton School at the University of Florida. So, first of all, I recruited Will from the University of Texas to come over to Gainesville and run the Hamilton School. And now he's been recruited to Texas and he is both provost and executive vice president of all of UT Austin and just doing amazing things there. So a lot of what we did at Hamilton, the credit goes to Will. But talking precisely about that, University of Florida is a strange institution because it's both flagship and land grant. It's the fifth largest university in the country. It's Texas and Texas A and M, or it's UVA and VA Tech in the same institution. And so because we're the Ag Extension School school, we have campuses or outreach posts in all 67 counties in Florida. But we're also the school that grants the PhDs in history, philosophy, English, et cetera. And so it's a giant hybrid institution. But of the 17 colleges and schools we have, five are very, very large. Four of those are kind of prevocational, business, engineering, health professionals, professions and agriculture. The fifth one that's really large is the College of Liberal Arts. And I don't want to air any dirty laundry or controversies here, but I think it's fair to say that some of the most broken parts of higher ed tend to be the colleges of liberal arts and sciences. And it shouldn't be that way. I'm a humanist by training. Most of my work history is in corporate strategy and disrupted spaces and now increasingly some national security stuff. But I'm a historian by training, so I love the humanities. But right now, what really happens at most schools is the College of Liberal Arts maintains demand by Controlling the faculty senates and controlling the curriculum committees that essentially say we own the general education or core curriculum requirements, but without having demonstrated a real sense of what it looks like to be a fully formed liberal citizen where you're broadly educated for life, life and for citizenship, not just for your next job. And so we have a lot of ridiculously nichified disciplines where you read scholars work that were written to be read by dozens of ideological activist faculty, not a claim that says to the general public, this is really important history. This is important. So to your point about national diplomatic history or military history or this is really important philosophy, these are the kinds of questions and literature that have sustained people for generations and the fact that we're all headed for our deathbed and the veil of tears and instead you end up with a lot of really narrow ideological activist nonsense. And so a huge part of what Hamilton is, is an attempt to course correct and say what does it look like to study the humanities in a big serious way that wrestles with important questions. And Hamilton, I think, has become a model for a lot of other places in the country where there's an attempt to rebuild a liberal arts college in a serious way that tries to take seriously the full humanity of 18 to 22 year olds that are not just heading to be workers, but they're heading to be moms and dads and neighbors and citizens.

[John Cochrane]

Other news, last week in higher ed, 38% of Stanford students are disabled one way or another, wanting extra time on test. Harvard gives out apparently all A's and nobody seems to know what to do. But about this. Chicago knew what to do about this. The computer won't take your grades at the end of the quarter. If it's not a B average, somehow that escapes Harvard. You mentioned zip codes recently. In Europe there's lots of American students wandering around seeing other zip codes. They party in Europe of junior year. I'm not sure that's getting much. So where am I going with this? It's not clear that they're learning that much at the fanciest universities. Yet the rewards for the brand name, the necessity of getting at the Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Science, so forth, have really shot up during our year. It was much easier to get. I don't think any of us could could have gotten into where we got into these days.

[Sir Neil Ferguson]

But we all have something in common that would count against us. Can you viewers guess what it is?

[Senator Ben Sasse]

Well, even an audio only podcast.

[John Cochrane]

Brother, I didn't, you know, all the extracurriculars. I didn't start A nonprofit. I didn't go to Guatemala to build houses for poor people. All the things, things you need to do to get in these days. Well, employers start figuring out that they were selected to get in, but they didn't really learn that much. And that you can get somebody from the University of Florida who's just as well as Harvard. That seems to be. That brand name seems to be fading slowly. And in part, as an economist, I always think of, before we start fixing things, let's get out of the way. We haven't mentioned the huge role of the federal government in this mess, who chose to vastly subsidize higher education. Education, but in a. In a not very thoughtful way.

[Bill Whelan]

All.

[John Cochrane]

So we give student loans to every major.

[Bill Whelan]

Private.

[John Cochrane]

Private lenders only gave student loans to majors that might actually want to have jobs. But we couldn't be, you know, discriminatory. Whatever silly major you want, we'll give you a student loan. What a disaster. The student loan program, you know, we remember, we took it over, the government took it over to save money. $400 billion later. And lesson number one, if I could economics, fixed supply, subsidized demand. What happens to the price? But along with it comes this massive bureaucratic bloat, which is not all just bureaucratic bloat, that's filling out federal forms and obeying federal rules and the federal kangaroo courts and so forth. So some of getting out of the way I certainly think might be useful to contemplate here.

[Senator Ben Sasse]

I'm a student of yours, Professor Cochran, so I agree with everything you said. Let me also say two positive things from here. The first is I do think that the tech disruption is going to create lots of new opportunities for hybrid institutions. And I think in the tech employer space, we see some of this. Palantir's experimenting right now. Mark Andreessen has been talking a lot about an A16Z kind of academy. I think those kinds of competitors will be important. We tend to. We tend to. We know that the new jobs are increasingly in the STEM space, but when AI AI makes free a lot of the stuff that we've thought required technical skills, the EQ edge of EQ IQ stuff is going to matter even more as well. And so it's a false choice to say, should we be educated for a job or should we be educated for life? Should we be educated in STEM disciplines or in the humanities? The right answer is more of both. And that requires more rigor on both. And so when you see Palantir and maybe Andreessenhof, what's thinking about programs like this that add humanities training to their first couple years and trying to hire 15 to 19 year old geniuses and just skip higher ed, it would have a positive effect. Breaking the network effects that might be an. An impetus towards some reform inside these institutions. The other thing to say is higher ed reform inside at least the privates shouldn't be this difficult. Right there there are levers that can be pulled, which is boards have abdicated their responsibilities all over the country and it's under the guise of ducking to the accreditor's language of shared governance. Well, let's parse for a second. I know we're at time, but let's parse for a second what shared governance means. What it's supposed to mean is presidents and boards are responsible for admissions, physical plant, fundraising, athletics, et cetera. And you want to have a shared curriculum. Curriculum between the faculty and the executive leadership of an institution. What it has come to mean in practice is that shared governance is the faculty plus executive leadership over admissions and maybe fundraising and maybe athletics and maybe physical plant. And the curriculum has been given over almost entirely to the faculty. The faculty. And I say this as somebody who's been a faculty member member at three or four different institutions. The faculty need to be involved in the discussion. They're the experts in their fields. But when you ultimately net out what is the balance of requirements for graduation, generally educated people on the board ought to be able to stand up in front of alums and in front of prospective parents and say this is why these things are required to have parchment from our institution. And we need a recovery of will on behalf of boards to say we're actually going to ask questions about who we tenure and why. We're going to ask questions about why there are core requirements and we're going to ask questions about whether or not when we're at the graduation ceremony, it's great to be in the football suite. It's great to be on the sidelines of a team going to the College World Series in Omaha. It's great to be wearing a robe at graduation. But the real question a board should be asking is when we look at the collection of kids who walk across the stage at graduation, do we think we change their life lives? And how do we know if we did? What is the quantification of whether or not there was enough meaningful life change that happened over the course of their 45 months that they and their parents entrusted their time with us? And not enough boards are asking those questions and that's not that hard a lift.

[John Cochrane]

Well, it's also because universities are. Universities are so protected. If it's a private company, you simply buy up the stock, take it over, fire the people and restructure it. And they're very protected against that sort of thing.

[Bill Whelan]

Well, Senator Sass, our time is up. We sure appreciate your candor when it comes to talking about Congress and higher ed. I want to wish your beloved Huskers all the luck in the Las Vegas Bowl.

[Senator Ben Sasse]

But as for down with the utes.

[Bill Whelan]

But as for a shirtless Goodfellow senator, that might be a bridge too far. Fair enough.

[Senator Ben Sasse]

We'll leave it to hr.

Thanks, guys.

[Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster]

Hey, Ben, thanks for having me.

[Senator Ben Sasse]

Glad this podcast exists. Thanks for the invite.

[Bill Whelan]

Gentlemen, onto the B block. Three topics I'd like to discuss with you. First, let's get into the use of US Military in the Caribbean and the question of national security strategy. HR I turn to you. What is going on in the Caribbean right now? It seems a combination of fog of war. We don't know exactly what is going on with the strikes. Secondly, it is a question of chain of command, who's issuing orders, and thirdly, a question of control. Congress now saying that it wants to seize the reins for the administration. So help us unpack what is going on here.

[Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster]

Yeah, I think the way to think about this is that, hey, in our democracy, we should have a say in a lot of things. And of course, when, when there are matters of life and death, war and peace, the American people should have a say. It relates to the discussion we've been having about Congress's lack of ability to assert itself and ask the right questions. I mean, the questions that I have just as a citizen now are what is the overall purpose of these missions? And I think we need more about that. Is it all about the narcotics trafficking or is this about drying up the cash flow to Maduro and that illegitimate criminal restriction regime in Venezuela? So there are issues of just cause.

In jusat bellum theory. What is the cause that brings us into this fight? And from Congress's perspective, there's kind of the right authority question of juice ad bellow theory in terms of.

Does the president have this authority under Article 2 of the Constitution? And then what everybody's been talking about lately with the strike, this one particular strike in particular.

Is the juice and bellow aspect of discrimination between combatants and non combatants. So I think what we need is more transparency across all of these and a better explanation on the part of the administration about what it's trying to Achieve. And by the way, if this is what you're doing, military, how are you applying other elements of national power to accomplish an objective that's in the interest of the American people?

[John Cochrane]

HR Came here. Why Venezuela, not Cuba? Didn't we try this in the 1960s and we kind of gave up on that project. It seems like there's a larger problem here.

[Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster]

Well, I think the analogy might be Panama. But now, of course, this is a problem that's orders of magnitude large, larger than, than Panama. And the Panama invasion, I think took something like, you know, 40,000 troops. And, and this is, you know, a problem set that's, you know, at least five times larger. But, you know, Maduro has, you know, he has really destroyed the country. You know, he completely stole, you know, the, the last election. He's driven 8 million people outside of the country. I mean, a quarter of his, of his population.

[John Cochrane]

So have the Castros.

[Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster]

Yeah, well, you know, this, but the way President Trump thinks about this is, is also so the migration problem associated with that. But he also sees the narcotics problem. Now, of course, most of the drug related deaths in the US Are due to fentanyl and that is coming from China in terms of the precursors which are then put together to make fentanyl in Mexico and then come across the border there. So this isn't directly related to fentanyl. But when President Trump sees how many Americans are dying from narcotics, he thinks, okay, well, shouldn't I employ the military to protect the American people? That's kind of the way he thinks about it. But I think there's an opportunity now to explain the American people what the hell's going on? Again, what is the objective, what are we trying to achieve? And what is the strategy that the administration is using to achieve an outcome that's in the interest of the American people at an acceptable cost and an acceptable risk.

To our military and so forth, but really risk to our reputation as well.

[Bill Whelan]

Well, Neil, speaking of strategy, the Trump administration has come out with a 33 page National Security strategy. You wrote a very brilliant column in the Free Press on this. I don't know why John Carkin got up this morning and read the 33 page report when he could have read your column. But tell us, Neil, what you found.

[Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster]

When you read it.

[John Cochrane]

I was shamed into reading primary sources.

[Sir Neil Ferguson]

Yes, well, the difference between the primary source and the media commentary is rarely as large as on this extension occasion. If all you went on was the commentary in elite newspapers and magazines, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, the Economist, you would have got a completely false impression of what this document was about, because the headlines were Trump administration rights off Europe. That was the essential message. 33 pages ranked Europe second in the list of strategic priorities. Interestingly, the Western Hemisphere, that is Latin America, comes first. That's the single biggest difference between this document and the one that HR masterminded back when he was national security advisor in 2017. Other elements of it closely resemble HR's document, particularly the sections that deal with the threat posed by China and its implications for national security. So I was startled when I read it by the enormous difference between what I saw saw and what was being written about in, in the press. It's a document I, I don't wholly like, but as I pointed out in my column, these documents are written not just by committee, but by committees, plural. In a bureaucratic bun fight, I use the Scottish term stramash, which you need to really have been National Security Advisor fully to understand. Right.

[Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster]

Hr.

[Sir Neil Ferguson]

I mean, it's not like somebody sits down and says, how shall I reconceive national security strategy? It's like a dozen plus people wrestle over multiple drafts, and the end result is, at some level, a kind of dog's breakfast crossed with a smorgasbord. But it's a document worth reading, if only because it shows what the priorities of the different elements within the administration currently are. I'd love to get HR's thoughts on it. In fact, I'm itching to hear them.

[Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster]

Well, just, just to address kind of how it's done. I mean, we, we did it in, I think, in a different way. Neil. Nadia Shadlow, who's one of our colleagues here at, at, at, at Hoover and is at the Hudson Institute, she did a fantastic job of pulling together the perspectives of various departments and agencies, but really from the very beginning, driving that process with clear guidance from the President. I went to President Trump about really the, the out outlined from the beginning and what he wanted to achieve with this, with the strategy, and, and had conversations with him multiple times about the content. So it was really, it was really his document. And what we didn't allow to happen in this process is it to be written by committee. So, I mean, as historians, if they're ever interested in how we did it, you know, we'll find pages and pages of legal pad with my, with my cursive handwriting on it, you know, going back and forth, forth with Dr. Shadlow about, about this, you know, and so it really was a document that hung together around, I think, really important themes related to big correctives in the fundamental approach we were taking to foreign policy and national security strategy. And I think what's important in the document is really how, you know, how it communicates and no kidding, real national security strategy to your own government. Right. Because really, you're, you're two turning a ship in a certain direction, but also to the American people. You're making the argument to the American people of how are you going to advance their interests through the application of all elements of national power, how you're going to allocate some of their taxpayer dollars to securing them, to advancing their prosperity, to extending American influence in the world. But really a big, big audience, Neil is a foreign audience because Americans will pay attention to it for a minute and then but I'll tell you, abroad, they'll read every and parse every single word of it. And this is where I think the document missed some opportunities, you know, especially to to describe the degree to which this axis of aggressors have coalesced and how the challenges to our security that are posed by the, by, by the ccp, for example, the Chinese Communist Party are interconnected with really significant challenges there that they're Putin has presented in fighting the first major land war in Europe since World War II that might have been worth a mention, as well as a degree to which it's a cause for concern that the only hereditary communist dictatorship of the world which didn't get a mention, North Korea, has soldiers fighting alongside the Russians on European soil and so forth. So I would have liked I think I look at it more as missed opportunity to communicate clearly, clearly what are the most significant threats and the nature of the threats to the American people, but more importantly, what the administration is going to do about it. I think I got a sense here that there still is this kind of deep sense of aggrievement among some people in the administration about Europe free riding on the largesse of American taxpayers, which it did. But, hey, they're winning that. I would like to see the administration take more credit for, for the responsibility sharing in defense and to really kind of assure Europe that Russia, China are not going to be able to do what they would like to do, which is rend the transatlantic relationship and break apart NATO. And this is really, I think, what Putin is trying to achieve in these sort of not pseudo negotiations or whatever going on over Ukraine.

[Bill Whelan]

John?

[John Cochrane]

Well, I'm going to yeah, as HR Points out, it's kind of an interesting document. It's not really about security. It's not about military it's not even about strategy. It's sort of a broad foreign policy and economic policy document. I found the back end pretty, pretty good. It talked about Europe's civilizational decline, something to be faced. It talked about Africa saying aid, trade not aid. That's an interesting approach. Talked about the Middle east including dropping America's misguided experiment with hectoring them into abandoning their traditions and historic forms of government. Oh, that's a interesting step backwards. But then the front part was really kind of funny.

Neil called it a dog's breakfast. I have to put in my weekly haggis reference it's the dog's not sausage, the dog's haggis.

It starts saying we want a concrete realistic plan, not a laundry list of wishes and vague platitudes. And then it goes on to but American policy is to be pro worker and prioritize our worker and the era of mass migration is over. And prioritize reducing trade deficits. Trade deficits, trade deficits. That apparently is the biggest problem for us. We'll re industrialize the economy reshore industrial production. Production. All of this is the minimum necessary for national security. I I loved also it started with American policy elites convince themselves that permanent domination of the world was in the best interest of our country. And then it goes on to we're going to restore energy dominance, expand exports, preserve financial sector dominance the rest of the world. I don't know why that's all absolutely necessary to national security but as as Neil point pointed out what ends up happening is sort of a self congratulatory policy blah. Even after you start with the introduction saying we're not going to do a self conductory policy blah.

[Bill Whelan]

All right, let's move on. Two automobile items caught our attention this week. First the Trump administration loosening fuel economy rules and then the President himself posting on social media that he's approved building of tiny cars in the United States. John, you have a lot of thoughts on CAFE standards. We'll get that to a minute. But sir, Neil Ferguson ask you what can I do to put you in a tiny car today?

[Sir Neil Ferguson]

Well, I own a tiny car as my colleagues will confirm. I drive an old Volkswagen Beetle around California and it's a car for which I'm sometimes teased as it is clearly the smallest car in the car park. I could fit two of them into the average car parking space on the Stanford cabin campus. So I need no persuasion. I like a small car. I live up a pretty windy road. If you try and do my road in SUV you can have Some very close encounters. You know, small cars are great in the right place. I just wouldn't like to be driving my little Beetle around, say, Montana, least of all in winter. And I. This is the thing that Europeans forget when they're complaining about the size of American vehicles. There's a lot of America for which you need big vehicles. And that's.

[Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster]

And that's.

[Sir Neil Ferguson]

That's my. My horses for courses message again. Yeah, get your Beetle out if you're in Northern California, but in Montana, that'll be a Suburban, sir.

[Bill Whelan]

HR, can you transition from a tank to a tiny car?

[Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster]

No. No, there's no way I could be in a tiny car.

[John Cochrane]

And, you know.

[Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster]

And. And of course, I wouldn't carry around great grandkids. But also, I mean, it may be too blue of a comment for our viewers, but I'm reminded of. Of the line that Mark Wahlberg uses in the Other guys when he's. When he's a passenger in Will Ferrell's Prius.

[Senator Ben Sasse]

The hell is this?

[Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster]

It's my car.

[Senator Ben Sasse]

It's a Prius. I feel like we're literally driving around in a vagina.

[Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster]

Oh, I can't. No, I can't say it.

[Senator Ben Sasse]

Arm.

[John Cochrane]

The issue isn't what kind of car is better or worse. I enjoy tiny cars in some cases, and I really enjoyed renting a Ford F250 to pull a glider trailer from here to Texas. Amazing, right? Car for the job.

[Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster]

The.

[John Cochrane]

The issue is how much finger we put on the scales of distorting people's choices. And it was interesting just to find out how rotten the fuel economy standards have become, which you would think that this is put in to raise fuel economy, but the way the rules work is that you get to have credit for being heavier, so they're adjusted for the weight of the car. So the one incentive you don't feel when you're facing fuel economy standards is the one to buy to use a smaller car if that works for you. So we've distorted it towards these big, heavy cars. And you might wonder, how is it after 40, 50 years of fuel economy standards, Americans drive these huge behemoths where the number one thing, if you want fuel economy is, where possible, move to smaller cars. It's part of our catastrophe of energy policy. Something goes in and you never can fix it. Corn ethanol. We're still making corn ethanol. Once we found out it doesn't save the climate.

[Senator Ben Sasse]

Why?

[John Cochrane]

Well, farmers vote the federal charging stations, which undermine people putting in other charging stations. Once you put something in like that, it Seems impossible. Impossible to fix. Well, finally, Trump is fixing these fuel economy standards. But it's just crazy that, you know, it's a miracle that they can make a Ford F150 that gets 22, not 20 miles a gallon. But if you want to save gas, you know, if that matters, buying the smaller car where it works would be nice. And the federal government wants us to buy Ford and GM cars.

[Bill Whelan]

We move on to our third and final item. The FIFA World cup has now announced its draw for the US Games, and the President, United States States, is quite concerned. What hasn't bothered, gentlemen, is the confusion over the word football.

[John Cochrane]

Football in the United States is, again.

[Bill Whelan]

Soccer in the United States.

[John Cochrane]

We seem to never call it that.

[Senator Ben Sasse]

Because we have a little bit of.

[John Cochrane]

A conflict with another thing that's called football. But when you think about it, shouldn't it really be called?

[Senator Ben Sasse]

I mean, this is football.

[Bill Whelan]

There's no question about.

[Senator Ben Sasse]

We have to come up with another.

[Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster]

Name for the NFL.

[Bill Whelan]

Yes.

[John Cochrane]

It really doesn't make sense when you think about it.

[Bill Whelan]

HR The President suggested that perhaps Americans give up the name football for something else. Neil, maybe you have some ideas for a replacement word. Keeping in mind, this is a family show. But first. HR Are you willing to give up football?

[Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster]

I don't think it's going to sell well. Hey, how about if we all just focus more on rugby? You know, let's, let's get President Trump interested in rugby, because we've got rugby. World cup is coming to the United States in 2031. All right, so, so it'll be in Australia in 2020. So. And then here in the United States in 2031.

[Sir Neil Ferguson]

We can agree on that. HR But I do think the President's right that a name change is long overdue. And so we should just refer to the American game that is played with an oval ball as armored rugby, because that's all it really is. And then everybody can call football football, and the confusion will finally be done away with. I thought the President got this right. I'm also inclined to agree with you that it's a vote loser. So, so I, I don't know what he was thinking, but, hey, if somebody was giving me a Peace Prize, albeit not the Peace Prize, but a peace Prize, maybe I would have been up.

[John Cochrane]

For it right now.

[Bill Whelan]

What is the FIFA Peace Prize, gentlemen?

[John Cochrane]

Oh, come. It's obvious what that is. It's a lot cheaper than a billion dollars worth of. Worth of somebody's crypto coins. I think we need to get Trump interested in gliding to Bring the world Glider Championships to the US and we'll be happy to give him the Soaring Society of America peace prize because we don't have the money for. Buy some crypto.

[Senator Ben Sasse]

Okay.

[Bill Whelan]

All right. So, Neil, do you have a replacement work for football?

[Senator Ben Sasse]

Armored rugby.

[Sir Neil Ferguson]

That's what it is. Although, of course, I mean, the term soccer is a legitimate term for describing the game of association football. Soccer is an abbreviation of association in the same way that rugby is sometimes called. Called rugger by the people who play it. This is an opportunity to reflect on the fact that these games were invented in the British Isles. The game of rugby invented at a school in rugby and football, a medieval sport that was codified in the 19th century and then exported from Britain to the rest of the world. These are all parts of the great British imperial achievement. And one of my favorite quotes on this subject came from the deputy governor of the colony of Aden, now I'm afraid Yemen, who said that when the British Empire had vanished entirely from the scene, only two things would remain to remind us of its existence. The game of association football ball, and the expression F off.

[John Cochrane]

So, Neil, I gotta correct your history. I mean, people bringing balls to one side or another of a playing field has been going on long before the British Isles. I gather the John Seize had a particularly interesting version of this.

[Senator Ben Sasse]

The codification, the one I want to.

[John Cochrane]

Bring back is the.

[Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster]

Is the historical.

[Sir Neil Ferguson]

I'm sorry, I have to override you. The codification of games with round balls and oval bowls happened in Britain. And then the rest of the world, you can trace the chronology, Began to create football teams. In the United States, a game of rugby was being enjoyed. But at Harvard, they decided that forward passes should be allowed. And that was the moment that American football deviated from rugby football, which is the correct name for the game of rugby. And so it all begins in Britain, and then it's adopted elsewhere. But for some reason, there's a kind of process of corruption that happens in North America. So you end up with this mutant game rugby with forward passes and armour. Armoured rugby. That's what it is.

[Bill Whelan]

HR we're overlooking a huge geopolitical question, and that is the Aukus angle here. If we're going to keep soccer as football and change the American game to something, something else. What happens to Aussie rules football?

[Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster]

I don't understand that. I don't understand Oscar's football. There are these. I agree. There are purer forms of sports. And. And in my case, I would say. I mean, I would argue for rugby union, you know, Rugby union over rugby league over Australian rules football. It is your sport, it's continuous. I think rather than you can maybe call American football armored rugby or you could call it discontinuous rugby because it just stops too damn much in terms of, you know, stoppages for, for plays and huddles and, and, and, and the worst of all, commercial breaks. I mean the best thing about rugby union, two 40 minute halves, continuous, a five minute halftime and, and everybody's got to run for the whole match. You know, there's no, you know, sprinting for a little while and going, you know, sitting on the bench to get some oxygen. You know, I mean I, so I think, I think of Americans understood and solved more rugby union, they'd be very enthusiastic about it.

[John Cochrane]

I have to recommend my father in law's way of watching football, which is tape it and then fast forward through all the stuff and just get the action.

[Bill Whelan]

Yeah, actually if you break down a football game to live action, it's about four minutes out of a 60 minute game. So. But speaking of stoppage and play, we're going to stop the show there. Gentlemen, lively conversation as always. Very much appreciated. We're doing one more Goodfellows in 2025. It's going to be next week actually. Our guest is going to be Andrew Ross Sorkin coming on the show to talk about, about his hit book 1929 and other economic matters. Christmas coming early for John Cochrane, I might add. So you don't want to miss that show. And the surest way not to miss Goodfellows is. Subscribe to us. While you're subscribing to things, sign up for Neil Ferguson on Substack and get his Free Press columns as well. H.R. mcMaster is on substack. John Cochrane of the AWS Excellent Grumpy Economist blog. You can also sign up for the Hoover Daily Report, which delivers the best of John and Neil to you in your inbox weekdays. On behalf of the Goodfellows, Sir Neil Ferguson, John Cochrane, HRMC Master, we hope you enjoy today's show. As always, thanks for tuning in. We'll see you soon.

[Senator Ben Sasse]

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