Mixed Signals and Emerging Technology with Amy Zegart

>> Mike Waltz: And we're gonna figure out how this happens.

>> Laura Ingraham: So you don't know what staffer is responsible for this right now?

>> Mike Waltz: Well, look, a staffer wasn't responsible. And look, I take full responsibility, I built the group to make. My job is to make sure everything's coordinated.

>> Bill Whalen: It's Wednesday, March 26, 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 of today's show. I wanna welcome back to the show. He missed the last show, but we have it back in our good graces. That would be the international man of history himself, the historian Neil Ferguson.

 

Sir Neil Ferguson, I should say. And also joining us, one of our regular Goodfellows, former presidential national security advisor, Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster. We are not with John Cochran today, John is in Japan. Kinishiwa, John, wherever you happen to be right now. But standing in for John, taking his place, welcoming her back to the show.

 

She hasn't been with us for a while is Amy Segart. Dr. Zegaert is the Hoover Institution's Morris Arnold and Nota Jean Cox Senior Fellow as well as a Professor of Political science by courtesy at Stanford University. Amy is also a co chair of the Stanford Emerging Technology Review, which we're gonna talk about today.

 

This is a partnership between the Hoover Institution and Stanford School of Engineering, its purpose being to better educate policymakers on how artificial intelligence, robotics, material sciences. And all other kinds of cool, cutting edge stuff is gonna change the world. Amy is recently on Capitol Hill with Hoover's director Condoleezza Rice, discussing emerging tech with lawmakers, I'm curious as to how that went.

 

Amy, you'll have to share your insights on that. But today she is indeed a jolly good fellow, Amy, welcome back to the show.

>> Amy Zegart: Thanks for having me, I guess I have to channel my inner grumpy economist today to try to stand in for Cochrane.

>> Bill Whalen: Just don't take notes.

 

 

>> H.R. McMaster: No, Amy, he's the huggy economist. He's actually huggy, as you know, I mean, he's not really.

>> Amy Zegart: Yes.

>> Bill Whalen: So, Amy, before we get into emerging technology, let's talk about what we might call errant technology, and that is the current mess in Washington involving the Trump national security team.

 

Apparently taking to the chat app signal to have conversations about upcoming military strikes in Yemen. This is the classic Washington whodunit. What did they know? When did they do it? What did they discuss? And the key question here, Amy, how did a journalist by the name of Jeffrey Goldberg, he is the editor in chief of the Atlantic, which is hardly a pro Trump publication, I would add.

 

Somehow he got occluded into the chain. So, Amy, your thoughts on what is going on here? And perhaps you'd like to pose a question to General McMaster, who I think has been through a few chats like this.

>> Amy Zegart: I for sure wanna pose a question to General McMaster, since he's lived through this.

 

Look, the reality is, Bill, as you know, it's bad, we can debate the niceties or the specifics of what's classified, what's not, who did what, when did they do it? Is it bad to have specifics of targeting on a signal chat? How did Jeffrey Goldberg get involved? But the reality is this is incredibly valuable information.

 

And I think lost in the shuffle in the hearings this week in the Senate Intelligence Committee was a question posed by the head of Cyber Command and NSA General Hawk. And the question was, if this were a foreign government and we had access to that information, would that be considered valuable?

 

And his answer was undoubtedly, yes. So if it's incredibly valuable to collect, it's incredibly valuable to protect. And so that's what we're dealing with here. But I'd love to know from HR, your view of how serious this is and how you dealt with these communications challenges.

>> H.R. McMaster: Well, we had our own kind of problems in Trump 1 early, and our biggest problem was deliberate leaks by people, and so what the dilemma that puts you into is do you bring your circle even tighter?

 

Right, and exclude a lot of people for security reasons, but then you deny your ability to access their points of view, what they can contribute to the analysis. I think in this particular case, where there's a very significant security breach, it's really three issues, I see. The first is the decision to use signal at all.

 

And the reason they're doing that is for convenience, right? And maybe there's some traffic you could put on an app like that. But what we really need is you need a government designed, government developed app that gives you some degree of encryption for routine, not sensitive communications, right?

 

And we don't really have that now that conforms with the Presidential Records Act. So the decision to go on to signal, first of all was a bad decision. But I kind of understand they were doing it for convenience. But the second key thing is, what were you putting on there?

 

When you look at the sensitivity of that information, at least what appears clear from Goldberg's reporting that he left out being a responsible journalist, he didn't put it in his report. Certainly that was way too sensitive for anything less than our highest level of government based encryption and hardware and everything that you can secure from any kind of potential breach.

 

But the third thing, and I'd love to hear what you and Neil think about this is, is the nature of that discussion and the degree to which it wasn't really a very effective deliberative process. It was after the President's decision. But still those discussions are best had in kind of like a semi formal setting.

 

And a lot of times that's not Donald Trump's, that's not Donald Trump's style. But you need to be in the situation room and you need to say, hey, the purpose of this meeting is to determine whether or not to employ military force against the Houthis. To ensure freedom of navigation in the Red Sea.

 

And then go through the intelligence, what is at stake, draft goals and objectives, and then present the President with courses of action that integrate all elements of national power. And then assess the risk and so forth, the cost and the potential for accomplishing the objectives. But anyway, I think that's the way I'm thinking about it.

 

Why you signal it all, the decision then to put sensitive information on it and the fact that, hey, it's not a good venue or mechanism for deliberation.

>> Amy Zegart: I think that also raises the question of what don't we know? We don't know what devices were used. We don't know whether they have malware on them.

 

We don't know what other conversations may be taking place on signal and whether there are sensitive things that are being discussed there, which gets to your point, HR. And I think your book really lays out very well at war with ourselves structured process to deliver options to the President.

 

That's what the President deserves, that's what the President needs. Is that happening or are we seeing sort of an erosion of that fulsome discussion in a room? We tell our students, right, this is a conversation, this is not a chat. Don't email me this, talk about that, it's the same thing in the NSC.

 

You wanna be in the room together hashing through the pros and cons of different options. And when you're doing that via chat in the middle of the day, it's really hard to get a coherent conversation.

>> H.R. McMaster: Stories.

>> Niall Ferguson: I have a question for you Amy, because this is really right up your street technology has changed in our lifetimes extraordinary rapidly.

 

But in a way, the the problems are familiar, it's easy to mock Mike Waltz and Pete Hegseth and JD Vance, because this conversation ended up all over the Atlantic. And it does seem absurd that Jeffrey Goldberg, of all people, should have accidentally been brought into the conversation. As Bill said, the Atlantic has been tearing chunks at the Trump administration in round one and in round two, so it's bizarre that he was in the chat.

 

But it seems to me we shouldn't be too quick to rush to judgment. Because blunders with communications technology have been happening to Republican and Democratic administrations for a long time. I happened to be in the midst of poring over the Nixon tapes. Now, the Nixon tapes make this look like a completely trivial thing, because hours and hours and hours of incredibly sensitive presidential conversations, Stations were taped by Richard Nixon in the belief that at some point they would be valuable when he came to write his self aggrandizing memoirs.

 

But it turned out to be a catastrophe that brought his presidency down. Hillary Clinton's emails spring to mind as another example. It feels to me as if we've been failing to manage new technologies for at least half a century inside the White House and inside the federal government.

 

And so I'm a little disinclined to just heap scorn and opprobrium on these guys cuz this is not new. It feels like every administration has at least one major fail with technology, right? I mean, we've seen this before.

>> Amy Zegart: Neil, I always love talking to a historian about these kinds of issues, you're absolutely right.

 

Although I would argue that Nixon's a different case, right? Nixon deliberately chose to use technology. He banked on the idea that would help him, it turned out that it hurt him. With respect to Hillary Clinton's server and her house and what we're seeing now, I think it's a different challenge.

 

It's the need for speed and decision making which is ever present, the availability of technology that facilitates that, and then the countervailing demands for security. So we see this across the government, right? Things are happening faster than ever, events are moving faster than ever, we all deal with this.

 

Do I have to do two factor authentication? Do I have to log into the secure network? And it's a productivity killer, right? So it slows down the process at a time when decision making needs to accelerate. That's the broader challenge, you're absolutely right that this administration is grappling with, how do we get to a decision quickly?

 

And we have technological tools that enable us to do that, but there are downsides to that. And so you're seeing to HR's point, we don't have good technological options to optimize the security and the speed and we need to develop those.

>> H.R. McMaster: Well, the other thing, Amy, I would say too is, they've been on the road, all of them, right?

 

And of course this is one of the aspects of the security risk here is that, Steve Wykoff was maybe in Moscow, at the time. But you've got the Vice President who's off on it, given an economics talk, they're all every scattered everywhere. Now there are ways you can do this though, with secure communications, you have staffs who can do it.

 

But one of the things that surprised me when I was National Security Advisor is a degree to which there's really no training or orientation for people when they come in to a new administration. Because they hit the ground running, right? They just got confirmed and there's not really time, a lot of times for the staff to say, hey, here are your communications capabilities.

 

Here's how you can use your staff to rapidly connect you with anybody. And of course they will default to what is easiest, as you mentioned, and security does make it a little bit harder. I'm thinking of, you know that scene in Maxwell Smart when he's talking to Chief in the cone of silence, right?

 

Which was very secure, but they couldn't hear each other.

>> Chief: I am deeply concerned about the conference room,

>> Maxwell Smart: but

>> Chief: I'm concerned about the conference room.

>> H.R. McMaster: What you need are technological capabilities that provide you security but have a high degree of convenience.

>> Niall Ferguson: I wonder, Amy and Hr, is there a kind of element of ideology here that this administration is a coalition between the MAGA movement and red pill Silicon Valley, in many ways.

 

Personified by not only Elon Musk, but others in the tech community who strongly back Trump last year. And J.D. Vance, before he decided on politics as a vacation, did his time in the valley as a venture capitalist with Peter Teal. I sense that the whole atmosphere in this administration is the bureaucracy sucks, whatever they recommend is tired, but we're wired, so we are on signal.

 

Is that part of the problem here that kind of protect the fundamental assumption is. If the guy in state or defense comes up to you and says sir, this is the way in which we are gonna encrypt your every communication with 10 factor authentication and your response is, duh.

 

This is exactly what Doge is here to stop, we go with signal because that's how we communicate in tech bro world. Is that part of it?

>> H.R. McMaster: I think so, I'd like to ask Amy about this too because you're very much attuned to the tech culture here in Silicon Valley and broadly.

 

But I just kind of see a parallel again, hashtag predictable for historians to look for the historical analogy with John F Kennedy and the Kennedy administration coming in in 1961. The whiz kids disregarded kind of the formalistic decision making and policy making process of the Eisenhower administration. They were gonna move fast and break things.

 

They were gonna put into place a fundamentally new approach to national security and they had a very small group decision making with very informal discussions. And I mean, sadly, what came out of that is the Bay of Pigs. So I think there is a tendency early in administration to say, hey, we're not gonna do things the old way, we're just gonna forge ahead on our own.

 

And then I think we got off light or they got off light on this. What I'm hoping for is that I don't want to see anybody's heads roll out of this. I wanna see them just say, hey, we learned from this, right? And we're gonna adjust our procedures and we're gonna have decision making with a much higher degree of security, pay more attention to operational security and so forth.

 

But yeah, I think this is like the whiz kids. The first chapter in a book I wrote about how why Vietnam became an American war is entitled the New Frontiersman and the Old Guard. And the New frontiersmen of the Kennedy administration were really anxious to disregard the procedures and the decision making processes of the old guard.

 

But Amy, do you think there's a cultural aspect here?

>> Amy Zegart: I think there's partly a cultural aspect here which is just as Neil described this is we're gonna do things differently, we're gonna move fast, that's the Silicon Valley way. And by the way, there's real merit to that approach that the bureaucrats get in the way, they slow things down.

 

But the historical period that springs to mind for me is Barack Obama when he came into the White House. Remember the President's daily brief, the single most important, highly classified document that goes to the President every day used to be delivered only on paper. And Obama's like, you gotta be kidding me, can't you bring me an iPad?

 

Why can't I interact with this in a more modern way? And that's what prodded the bureaucracy to say, you know what, maybe we need to get into the 21st century. So I think bureaucracies like to do things the same old ways, that's why we have them. There's some merits to standard operating procedures, but the downside is they don't adapt fast enough, even when they need to.

 

 

>> Bill Whalen: If I remember correctly, I think one of the first fights Obama had with his aides was over whether or not he could keep his own iPhone or not. Had a big back and forth.

>> H.R. McMaster: It was his BlackBerry.

>> Bill Whalen: It was a long time ago, wasn't it?

 

 

>> Niall Ferguson: Different era.

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, let's close out the segment with this question to the panel. One, do we think this deserves a gate on the end of it, that classification of scandals in Washington, if it gets a gate. But secondly, how do we get all the answers to this?

 

Should Congress look into it further? Should Susie Wiles, the chief of staff, investigate? How do we get all the answers here, HR?

>> H.R. McMaster: Well, this is tough, right, because it involves executive privilege in the White House, right? And one of the things no president wants, and we've seen how bad this can be in the early Trump administration when the FBI misused its power with trapping Mike Flynn.

 

And everything else is you don't want the FBI. Coming into the White House, right, there's no White House counsel who wants that to happen. And so investigations involving the White House are really tough. I really think that the White House needs an investigative team. I mean, this is something that I wished I had when I was National Security Advisor, again, mainly because of the leak situation that I inherited.

 

You might remember I came into the job about a month after the administration came in and two presidential phone calls had leaked, one with the one to Australia and one to Mexico. I was very much interested in making sure we knew how the hell that happened and shut down the possibility for the leaks.

 

But, man, I was never able to beat it because of some of the dynamics there. We used to joke like, hey, how long is it gonna take this meeting to leak? So I think that there's a real gap in capability and there needs to be an investigative body in the White House that the President has confidence and trust in and can use for these kinda things.

 

But you know what I'd like to see? I'd like to see them just come clean on it like, yeah, we screwed this up, this was bad, okay. We just came into this job. We're gonna learn from this. Instead of the kind of just the denials that you've heard from some of the people who are on the chat.

 

 

>> Niall Ferguson: Yeah, this is no big deal. And I think the media, desperate for a scandal, we're not even 100 days in. These are inexperienced players with, if you think of the accumulative years of experience in the executive branch, it's a pretty young. It's a pretty green team, and I think they should just admit they screwed up and learn from it.

 

I don't think it's a scandal. In fact, I think it's noise. The real signal that isn't really being addressed is what it tells us A, about their attempt to restore deterrence. I thought that was a very interesting part of the conversation and I think a legitimate concern. There's been a chronic failure to deal with the Houthis.

 

Secondly, very interesting to see the divisions of opinion about what it implies for the US Policy towards Europe. I'm more interested in that content which we got a glimpse of than I am in the fact that they inadvertently got Jeffrey Goldberg on their chat, by the way, and we're all on chat groups.

 

I'm in multiple chat groups, and half the time I have no idea who the other people in chat group are. Amy, HR, I'm I audible.

>> Amy Zegart: You're not making decisions that put soldiers in harm's way. So I think I disagree with you a little bit. Look, yes, it's a new team.

 

The key word here is learn. Is the team gonna learn and fix the problems that are evident now? So it's not that it's nothing, it is something. But the key is what's the administration gonna do? What's the most productive path forward to make sure this was a near miss, right?

 

Fortunately, it was Jeffrey Goldberg, it wasn't Xi Jinping or it wasn't someone from a hostile power in the Middle East that could have taken action that could have killed Americans involved in this operation. So Lindsey Graham said it yesterday, we dodged a bullet. And so the key thing is, if Congress investigates, it's gonna be a political circus.

 

So how can there be a thoughtful investigation to figure out how to learn and improve, right? The best teams in any sport, look at what they did wrong and they fix it and they learn from it and they get better. And that's what we want. And I think that's best done inside the administration.

 

 

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, well put. All right, let's shift and let's move on to the Stanford Emerging Technology Review, which Amy is a co-chair of. They came up with a report in February. As I mentioned, Amy went to Washington with Condi Rice to talk to Congress about this. In the report itself, Amy, you identified, I quote, 10 key technologies and their policy implications.

 

I'm not gonna put you on the spot and ask you to name all 10, that would be cruel. I will quickly rip through the 10 for the panel. They are alphabetically. Artificial intelligence, biotechnology and synthetic biology, cryptography. Nobody's taking notes here. Lasers, material sciences, neuroscience, robotics, semiconductors, space, and sustainable energy technologies.

 

Okay, Amy, 10 key technologies. Is any of those ten paramount does one rule over the other nine? And among those 10 technologies, Amy, is there one that we might call a sleeper? In other words, we'll be thinking 20 years from now, why were we more focused on that back in the day?

 

 

>> Amy Zegart: Yeah, thanks for the really easy question there, Bill. I love all my technologies like I love all my children, so there's not one that's more special than the other. The one that's getting all the attention right now is obviously artificial intelligence. And so I often like to say it's all about AI and it's not all about AI.

 

So AI is an enabling technology. It's a general technology that is super powering scientific discovery. So AI enhances bioengineering, AI enhances material science, but the arrows go the other direction too. These technologies affect each other. So AI relies on semiconductors. So semiconductor technology is crucial. Semiconductors in turn rely on advances in materials science.

 

And so one of the challenging things and the exciting things about this moment is that these technologies affect each other. It's not just all about one driving progress in all the rest of them. So if I had to pick, I would say in the near term, AI is the critical enabling technology, but we can't lose sight of the others.

 

And in terms of what's the sleeper hit of the summer that we should be paying attention to, but we're not, biotechnology, both in terms of the opportunity to biomanufacture goods that are currently made by regular manufacturing processes today. And by the way, biomanufacturing can happen anywhere. So think answers to your supply chain problems, right?

 

And the biorisks of you can manufacture good things and you can manufacture really scary things. So I would say biomanufacturing, bioengineering.

>> Bill Whalen: Neil.

>> Niall Ferguson: I wanna ask you, Amy, about space, because I have been doing some reading recently, including a manuscript by Hoover fellow Eyck Freyman on the Indo-Pacific military challenge the United States faces.

 

And the thing I came away thinking was, gee, our whole military capability is highly dependent on satellites. In fact, without those satellites, our armed forces are blind. And I had underestimated the extent to which the US military has come to rely on those satellites for everything, for targeting, for communications, for surveillance of the enemy, I could go on.

 

So talk a bit about that, because I feel as if we talk relatively little about this issue. But when it comes down to, I don't know, the war games that I hear discussed, the classified ones that I just here alluded to, the point of failure often seems to be Chinese or Russian knockouts of our satellites.

 

Talk a bit about that.

>> Amy Zegart: So I'm so glad you mentioned space, Neil. So in the Tech Policy Accelerator, which is the umbrella outfit that I lead, space is a major line of effort understanding developments in space. So historically, and HR knows this even better than I do, we've relied on a handful of very expensive space satellites, right?

 

So a billion dollars apiece, the size of a bus, and they were not designed to be protected in space, right? Because the thinking was space is hard. We don't need to think about having them be mobile. We don't need to think about defenses because once they're up there, they're ours.

 

That is no longer true. And so what we've seen is an increasing reliance on On space based capabilities, as you say, but also a decentralization of capability across countries. So lots of countries are in space now, we've seen a massive proliferation of space based assets in the commercial sector Think Elon Musk, Starlink, for example.

 

And so space has become congested, space has become contested with all sorts of military maneuvers in space is that really a satellite that's moving around? Or is that a offensive weapon that the Russians just launched, for example, or that the Chinese have launched? And so we're dealing with a lot of challenges at the same time, it's not just the military that relies on space based assets for everything.

 

It's all of us, your banking, your GPS, your communications, the financial system. We are incredibly reliant on space, and we take it for granted that it's always gonna be available when in fact it is very much a battleground between countries today.

>> Niall Ferguson: Hr, you must have thought about this too.

 

 

>> H.R. McMaster: Well, one of the first briefings I asked for when I was National Security Advisor was on space. And what we did is, we very deliberately shifted our approach to space, because even under the Obama administration they had clung to the hope, right, that space could remain an uncontested domain.

 

And it was already contested, right. We knew that with the Chinese anti satellite demonstrations, but also we knew that what the time was classified a lot of this has been declassified since then. A whole range of offensive capabilities that the Russians and the Chinese were developing. So we convened the Space Council the Vice President, Vice President Pence did a fantastic job with this by the way.

 

And one of our senior directors in our Defense Division, later Lt Gen Bill LaCourre, who became the first deputy commander of the Space Force, right? And a lot of time in space command, fantastic guy. And that strategy, there's a public one that you can look at, I think was extremely well done on the defense side.

 

And there was a classified part of it that we put resources on. Of course, we had all the OMB people, the office of management budget people involved in all these discussions to ensure we could get the resourcing we needed, to make our space capabilities more resilient. And ensure our continuous and unobstructed access to these critical assets.

 

And Amy mentioned what those are for, communications and surveillance capabilities and so forth. So we're in a much better place for a number of reasons because I think that strategy has been resourced and I would imagine the Trump administration will continue. But also what Amy mentioned is the commercialization of space, and the degree to which private sector capabilities like Starlink for example, give you a degree of redundancy.

 

To understand the situation, I think you should go to, there's a company called LEO Labs, which is right down the street from us here, which has terrestrial based space surveillance capabilities. And it's unbelievable what they built, in terms of visibility in space. And when you look at their products, you just think, how can so much stuff be up there?

 

And so you have the threat, you have the congested nature, which Amy mentioned. But now you've got increasingly a space debris issue as well. So, hey, it's a fascinating area to track, I'm glad you brought it up Neil. And we take it for granted, we take it for granted, and we can't afford to.

 

 

>> Niall Ferguson: Can I ask the target audience for the Stanford Emerging Technology Review? Because, my sense is that the policy community knows about this. There are people who live and breathe this at the Pentagon, but the public, and indeed the academic world has essentially not taken it seriously. Indeed, I think when you say space force to the average undergraduate or the median voter, they're more inclined to joke about it than take it seriously.

 

So, is part of the point of the Stanford Emerging Technology Review to just widen public understanding, and reach an audience that is currently a little bit asleep at the wheel?

>> Amy Zegart: Anil that's part of our objective, but it's not the main one. So you mentioned policymakers in Washington.

 

So one of the main thrusts of our effort is the idea that policymakers aren't just in government offices anymore. Policymakers include leaders, you mentioned universities. So the people inventing these capabilities need to understand the geopolitical context in which they're operating. And private sector leaders, we just talked about the commercialization of space, are you a combatant or a non combatant if things go bad in space?

 

Who's protecting your assets? What responsibilities do you have? How do you collaborate with foreign countries or the US government? So private sector leaders are policymakers today. You've written about this I know Neil. They have the power of states, countries in times gone by. So, Elon Musk is deciding whether and where Starlink can be used on the battlefield between Ukraine and Russia.

 

He alone is making that decision. So it's an expansive set of decision makers that need to understand both the technology and its implications, and the geopolitical context in which they're operating. So our audience is both government and private and academic leaders. And we're trying to translate between the scientific developments, and the geopolitical realities.

 

 

>> Bill Whalen: Amy, can you talk a bit about the synergy between research and government funding in this regard? We're in a state California, which has been trying to build a train for 15 years now and has barely laid track, it's just pathetic. The technology world does not deal in years as does government, it deals in months.

 

So you're going to Washington, you're talking about getting the government involved in emerging tech. The lawmakers understand the necessity, the speed at which this works in other words, when you talk to these lawmakers, in fact, I'm curious about this as well. You're talking to lawmakers, how many of them get emerging tech, understand this?

 

Or are you and Dr. Rice unfortunately in there with hand puppets trying to explain a lot of this stuff?

>> Amy Zegart: Well, some get it very well, many are learning, right. We only have a handful of engineers in the entire U.S congress. And so it's hard to understand, and so one of the reasons we have this flagship report, Stanford Emerging Technology review, is it's 101.

 

Here's what this technology is, here's how it works, here's what's happened recently, here's what's over the horizon. So we need to do a better job of communicating these developments in near real time, to decision makers who need to know. So there are some people that are very focused on these technological issues you see.

 

And we have Senator Young in the Senate, Senator Rounds, Senator Booker. There's a bipartisan group of people in congress that actually are very interested in this, but it's small to be sure. So one of the things that we found when we were in Washington, and this is true by the way in the Valley, there tends to be a thought that all investment is the same, all research and development is the same and that's not true.

 

So what does our innovation ecosystem actually look like that has made the US the innovation superpower of the world? It has two parts to it. The first part, which is the part we often forget, is the federal government funds risky, long term foundational research mostly in universities. And that is no commercializable product that you can foresee in the future.

 

It's basic things like, what are the laws of physics and how do they operate in the universe? How does the human immune system work? Only the federal government can invest at scale and over long periods of time. That's part one of our innovation model. Part two is, universities then publish that research openly and the baton goes to the, Private sector, and the private sector does its thing.

 

So almost nobody, to your earlier point about the public, almost nobody would know that the federal government invested for years in fundamental research and universities about this thing called a digital library. Sounds very boring, right? But everybody knows google, and that's what resulted from those years of fundamental research at universities.

 

So, I think we need to do a better job in the university community of explaining what the innovation model is and how universities and fundamental research are a core part of our economic innovation engine. When Condi and the team and I were in Washington, and by the way, the team included engineering colleagues, the chairman of the electrical engineering department at Stanford, Mark Horowitz, Fei-Fei Li, computer scientist, Al godmother, and Allison Okamura, who's a mechanical engineering professor and a robotics expert.

 

And when we went around town, we kept getting asked, what's your ask? What do you want? And our answer was, we're here to help. Tell us what you need, and we will provide the expertise to help you understand these technologies and assess what policies might be best suited to advance American interests and values.

 

And that was in some ways surprising to us that that was new to them but has proven incredibly valuable. And so a lot of our follow-on work with the emerging technology review is responding to those requests in very specific policy domains and technological areas.

>> Bill Whalen: What we have here is a unique, one of its kind program in academia.

 

The question would be why is it a one of a kind program? Why is only Stanford doing this, and why Stanford and the Hoover Institution?

>> Amy Zegart: I think Stanford is uniquely positioned in three key ways to lead an initiative like this, and there's a reason no one else has done it.

 

The first is we have the best engineering school in the world. This is a partnership between the Hoover Institution and our School of Engineering. Each of us is more than 100 years old, and this is the first time we've collaborated in such an integrated way. And that's very exciting.

 

So, we have the technological expertise in all of these emerging technology areas, and so we can lead the policy discussions with experts in those fields. And that's critically important. So that's advantage number one. Advantage number two is our neighborhood. We're not just anywhere in the US. We're in the heart of Silicon Valley.

 

And as I often say to policymakers, we don't just happen to be here. We made Silicon Valley. Our ties to industry, to investors and inventors, and executives, are deep and they are broad. And so we can harness that ecosystem in understanding across sectors how technology is moving and what the implications could be.

 

And then the third is that we're the Hoover Institution. And so we have deep policy expertise. We have a combination of social scientists, even some historians, right? And others across technological fields where we care about the policy impact that we have. Those three things are an invaluable and, in my mind, unique combination that give us a leadership role in these areas.

 

 

>> Bill Whalen: H.R, could you tie this into something that you've done recently, written about you and your colleague AJ Grotto? I had the pleasure of doing a podcast with him recently on this.4 And that is the concept of economic statecraft.

>> H.R. McMaster: Right, well, Andrew Grotto did a fantastic job on that.

 

It was fun to work with him. And essentially what we did is try to lay out principles for employing the tools of economic statecraft. And really the main problem that we took on, and so many Hoover fellows and people who are expert in this helped us with this, and Hoover economists who are skeptical about any application of the tools of economic statecraft helped us tremendously.

 

Is really to address the problem of how to compete with China's status mercantilist economic model effectively without stifling any of the advantages associated with our free market economic system and our sort of unbridled entrepreneurship. And I think this is really an important question to ask. And what we provided is really guidelines for employing the tools of economic statecraft and doing it in a way that accomplishes those objectives.

 

But, Amy Neal, I know you're aware this is a debate we have on Goodfellas, and John Cochran was very helpful to us in sort of providing his perspective and strengthening that report. But, Amy, how do you see the landscape in Washington in terms of applying those tools? You mentioned the importance of investment in basic research.

 

That's under kind of some duress right now. But where do you see the pendulum swinging in the areas of export controls, inbound and outbound, investment screening, and maybe efforts to secure the research enterprise, which you mentioned, the tendency for scientists is, hey, publish it. They want everybody to know, and they wanna collaborate internationally.

 

But now we have adversaries who could weaponize a lot of the technology that we're developing against us. What are your feelings about that?

>> Amy Zegart: So it's a broad landscape, H.R I'll take a stab at it. So, I think there are many things that are happening at the same time with economic statecraft.

 

And I think, at the risk of offending my historian colleagues on this show, I think we are stuck in antiquated thinking about our policy tools. So, history is beneficial for some things and counterproductive for others. So, for example, export controls. What's the purpose of export controls? Well, in the Cold War, as you know, the purpose was to deny capabilities to our adversaries.

 

Deny them fissile material, deny them weapon systems. Well, today, export controls are designed to delay our adversaries from accessing technologies. We've seen this play out with DeepSeq, and it's a real question, did export controls work? Did they backfire? How do we know? And the answer is we don't know yet, right?

 

But you can certainly see that DeepSeq, right, the Chinese startup that really revealed some pretty sophisticated engineering outputs where they could have a frontier large language model with less compute than the hyperscalers in the US we can debate how much less compute they use. But they did use orders of magnitude less computer.

 

Well, that was with an export control regime. So, now I've heard everything from we didn't export control enough to we export controlled too much. So there's a real debate there. And what we need to do is actually figure out what is the evidence that we need to collect to make a decision one way or the other.

 

You mentioned H.R, this question of research security. I think one of the tendencies we have is to think it's only our decision whether the best and brightest foreign talent comes to the United States. And we need to now make sure that our research enterprise is secure. It's no longer our decision, right?

 

So, foreign talent from China in particular is going to other places. They don't have to come to the United States anymore. I did, with a research assistant, did a wonderful analysis of the talent behind the DeepSeq papers. There were five papers, there were 211 authors. And she found all publicly available information about where they went to school, where they worked, when they did it, what countries.

 

And guess what? It is a homegrown talent story. Half of the authors of those five DeepSeq papers, half of them, were educated and trained nowhere outside of China. Nowhere. So, I think we need to face facts that everyone will always want to come to the United States. We'll get the best and brightest foreign talent has a vote.

 

And we need to think not only about securing the research enterprise, but attracting the best foreign talent from countries that are allies and partners and developing our own expertise. K12 is a national security issue in a way. It's It's never been before and so there's a lot of talk on the immigration side and not enough talk, in my view, on the crisis in K12 STEM education, that is a national security risk to us.

 

 

>> Niall Ferguson: If I can just defend the historical profession against your scathing commentary, Amy actually, a really nice bit of historical research by my former student Chris Miller in his book Chip War, showed that it wasn't export controls that stopped the Soviet Union being able to build computers. They stole all the semiconductors that they needed, but they just couldn't do it, and so with the idea of Jake Sullivan's small yard with a high fence.

 

If the fence has got a hole in it called Singapore, and the GPUs are getting through, which they clearly are, then ultimately the whole strategy of technological containment doesn't have a strong historical foundation at all. In fact, I struggle to think, and I'm often asked this question, so I'm forced to think about it, of successful enterprise, strategic enterprise, based on technological containment.

 

I mean, it was tried repeatedly, people throughout history have thought, we have the wonder weapon. Now we must just make sure, or the wonder technology must just make sure that the dastardly Spaniards or the Dutch don't get it, and it never, ever works. Because if something is as valuable as, say, artificial intelligence, large language models, you're not gonna stop the Chinese being able to develop them.

 

Especially, as you said, because the Chinese have massive homegrown AI talent. By the way, this was anticipated by some excellent work done in the Macro Polar reports, which you may know, showing that the flow of AI talent, which was initially massively from China to the US is much less decisively from China to the US now.

 

So I've just been in Asia and here's a question for both of you, I came back struck by, not just the confidence over AI, I mean, Kai Fu Lee's line is pretty clear. We may not be able to compete on training, but we can win on inference and adoption and I think that's turning out to be true.

 

The other thing that is really striking is that China thinks it's won the automobile competition, it's won the EV race, and BYD is gonna eat the world, including Tesla. There's immense self-confidence in China about their capacity to win these technological races, and I must say I'm struggling to think of why they won't.

 

There's mounting evidence that they're ahead in multiple domains, the Australians have a great study on this, which you probably very familiar with. How worried should we be? How worried are you, Amy? You think about this more than I do, I mean, I just came away from my Asia trip thinking we're losing in many, many domains that we thought we would win in.

 

 

>> Amy Zegart: Well, Neil, as you know, I naturally go to the dark corner of every room. So, yes, I'm very worried, I think we should be even more worried than you say. Not just because of the BYD's of the world, but where is China investing, right? So China is investing in fundamental research.

 

This is, we harvest the seeds that we plant in fundamental research 25, 30 years earlier, and so, yep, they've conquered batteries. They look like they're ahead in parts of AI, but they are investing, investing, investing in biotech and fundamental research across the board. So the US Is spending, the US Federal government is spending a third of what it spent in fundamental research, as we did in the 1960s, one-third of what we used to spend.

 

China is spending six times faster than the United States and will overtake us in funding and fundamental research within a handful of years. So, you don't have to guess what the CCP thinks, they tell you what they think and where they think the battleground is. So not only I think are we falling behind in today's battleground technologies, we're falling further behind in tomorrow's battleground technologies and that really concerns me.

 

 

>> Bill Whalen: Amy, let me close out the subject with the question to you. Time flies by here in California, Silicon Valley, and before you know it, you're gonna be looking at another review put out by the Stanford Emerging Technology Review, another report. The question to you, Amy, is, a year from now, if you're looking at the next review, the next report, what would you like to see in the way of progress?

 

 

>> Amy Zegart: So, Bill, I think the report is our flagship product, but it's not our only product. So let me talk a little bit about what we wanna do and then what progress I'd like to see just on the policy domain. One thing that we wanna do is, the review in many ways I think of as a first date, right?

 

We're sending it out to Washington, we're briefing officials in Washington and in the Valley, and then we wanna know, give us homework, right? What more can we help you with? What second dates can we get? Right now we're inundated with second date requests, that's a good thing, it's a good problem to have.

 

Second date requests from industry, second date requests from the administration and from Congress. And I think that's a really positive development, because we want our experts to weigh in on policy, to help decision makers make better policy, so it's inbounds. The second thing we wanna do is scale, right?

 

We wanna scale our outreach, we have a podcast that we launched with the Council on Foreign Relations called the Interconnect, which looks at specific technologies and their implications. We have a great Hoover team that has a terrific go-to-market strategy, so we're gonna be coming soon to a theater near you with the Stanford Emerging Technology Review, and hopefully you'll see it in lots of places.

 

And we wanna build the stable of engineering leaders here at Stanford that wanna work with us at Hoover to help policymakers. So this is all about human talent, and we need to harness the human talent across this campus. And there's tremendous enthusiasm from the engineering side of campus to do this work with us, so I think that's exciting.

 

What do I wanna see on the policy side a year from now? I think the Trump Administration is already heading in that direction, the Vice President gave a fantastic speech on AI opportunity soon after he came into office. I think that is the right frame, we need to run faster, not regulate more, and so I think the administration is heading very much in the right direction.

 

The second thing I'd like to see a year from now is a rejuvenation of the contract between the federal government and universities on scientific research. We're at a crucial moment here, universities have done themselves no favors with the political issues on our campuses and the protests after October 7th.

 

But science has to continue and we have to ensure that we're investing in the technologies of tomorrow. So if I got those two things, AI opportunity, investment in fundamental research, I would be a happy woman.

>> Bill Whalen: Sounds good, for those who wanna know more about the Emerging Technology Review, there's a website, it is SETR.stanford.edu, SETR.stanford.edu.

 

Amy, thanks for the conversation, I enjoyed it.

>> Amy Zegart: Thanks so much.

>> Bill Whalen: But don't go anywhere, we wanna have some more fun with you, okay?

>> Amy Zegart: Anytime.

>> Bill Whalen: Let's now shift to our B block and what I call the art of the, not art of the deal, but the art of the cave.

 

And i like to play a game with the three of you, if you're willing, a game that we call. Big Deal, Little Deal, or No Deal at all.

>> Bill Whalen: And Amy, the way this works is I give you a policy matter and you tell me, is it a big deal, a little deal, or no deal at all?

 

I think Neil likes to play this game. So, here we're gonna go, two issues here I want you to discuss, number one, Columbia University, facing a $400 million cut in federal funding. It caves into Donald Trump and it agrees that in the future, when there are pro-Palestinian protests on campus, protesters cannot wear a mask.

 

Columbia will beef up its security force and if Colombia doesn't go along, it loses its federal funding, Neil, big deal, little deal or no deal at all?

>> Niall Ferguson: It is a big deal, partly for what we've been discussing. I mean, if universities have been central to research and development in the United States.

 

If they were key to American success in the first Cold War, it's kind of a problem if the federal government and universities are in a kind of war with one another. I hear great protests from the scientific community about what is happening. And I must admit, my response is the universities had this coming.

 

They brought this upon themselves. And it's not good enough to say, but I was in my laboratory when crazy stuff was happening. If crazy stuff was happening on your campus and you were a tenured professor, where were you? This has been a long time in the making, over 10 years.

 

The elite universities, it's not just since October 7th, it's been a decade long. The elite universities have turned themselves into clown shows over of woke activism. And Donald Trump signaled throughout the campaign that they were gonna pay a price for this. This is no big surprise. There were clear statements in the Trump campaign that the universities were going to be hit hard.

 

And this is just the beginning. There's way more to come and nobody should be under any illusions. The endowments are gonna be on the hit lists too. It's not just gonna be the kind of funding that Colombia has been threatened with losing. So I think this is a huge deal and I'm not gonna sit back and have it all blamed on Donald Trump.

 

This is something the universities have brought upon themselves because of a decade of abysmal governance and total irresponsibility on the part of academics. As well as administrators who seem to have forgotten that universities are not a political project. So that's my view. It's a big deal and the universities have brought it on themselves.

 

 

>> Bill Whalen: HR yeah.

>> H.R. McMaster: I think it's a big deal. I think the pressure's being applied to research and sciences, but of course, the problem is in the humanities where the curriculum of self loathing has become prevalent. So, I think it's important to administer a corrective and again to incentivize.

 

I think university leadership to be responsible, to recognize that the mission of the university has been compromised by their failure to lead and their failure to call out this behavior. Which was to advocate for violence against members of the student body and then to obstruct the very mission of the university by occupying buildings and intimidating students.

 

 

>> Bill Whalen: Amy?

>> Amy Zegart: Big deal but for some different reasons that what my colleagues have said, I completely agree universities have brought this on. We have a freedom of inquiry problems on university campuses, not just free speech, free inquiry. Some views are tolerated and celebrated, and other views are not.

 

We have a monoculture on our campuses by the way our students want to hear disagreement, they want to hear contending views. They ask in class for more of that, and universities haven't given it to them. And that's the essence of education, is to examine issues thoughtfully, rigorously, from a variety of perspectives and be able to debate them civilly.

 

And we have lost our way on that completely agree with that. But there's a question about what's the right approach to correct for this endemic problem. And I am concerned that the Trump administration's approach, which is single out individual universities, hold them hostage for hundreds of millions of dollars of funding.

 

I agree with the merits of what the Trump administration is asking Columbia to do. Let's put that aside for a second. But when you hold universities hostage, you're not just punishing Columbia, you're punishing America. Because you're impeding the research that is going to enrich our economy, advance our science, find cures for cancer, and you're setting a precedent.

 

So let's imagine a Democratic president comes into office, and they too want to hold universities hostage for hundreds of millions of dollars to pursue particular policy aims. I think we have to imagine that a future president would use the same tools in the same way. While I might agree with the president today, I would not agree with the future president in using that method to exact change.

 

There are other ways that could be more productive to get Columbia to do the right thing.

>> Niall Ferguson: But, Amy, what are these other ways? Because all one saw over the last 10 years was continual failure by trustees, by presidents, by provosts, by tenured faculty, by administrators. They didn't reform themselves when they had the chance.

 

 

>> Amy Zegart: We've seen the president use at least two really powerful mechanisms to great effect already in quite a short period of time executive orders, right? And the bully pulpit. Most of America agrees with a lot of the policies that he's talking about with respect to higher education, he's articulating them and people are agreeing with him.

 

So you're seeing a lot of change already before he decided to withhold the $400 million of funding for Columbia. I agree universities have been moving far too slowly, but I think the president's Justice Department investigations of Title 6 violations absolutely should move forward. Executive orders and using the bully pulp.

 

I think those have been really productive in a short period of time.

>> Bill Whalen: HR, do you see a similar outcome in Philadelphia, where the University of Pennsylvania is looking at losing, I think, $175 million if it doesn't change its policies on transgender sports?

>> H.R. McMaster: Yeah, I do. And, I think this is an area also where the private sector got involved.

 

A lot of money was pulled from those universities by individuals who were dissatisfied with the leadership of those universities. Yeah, I mean, I think that this is a really important period of change. I hope it administers a corrective. I think it's important with all these measures to make sure that the cure is effective.

 

You don't want the cure to be disruptive as Amy said, there's a downside to it. But I think there's a way to mitigate that, a way to, like with Columbia, incentivize them to make the decisions that the leadership of the university should have made long ago. And then once they make those decisions, they're on a path then to be able to restore funding for research in particular.

 

 

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, I want you to tell me if it's a big deal, little deal, or no deal at all. The law firm Paul Weiss, is tied historically to Democrats and Democratic causes. The President signs an executive order banning lawyers in that firm from representing clients doing federal business.

 

It takes away security clearances, I think, for partners as well. And then the law firm turns around and lo and behold, it agrees to do $40 million in pro bono work for Trump friendly causes. Neil, big deal, little deal, no deal at all.

>> Niall Ferguson: It's a little deal because it revealed them to have no courage whatsoever.

 

I mean, there are moments where you have to stand up, and they decided to lie down. So, kind of pathetic, really, but not a big deal in the way that the last topic was.

>> Bill Whalen: HR, you want to pile on the lawyers, too?

>> H.R. McMaster: No, not I mean, not real.

 

I'm related to too many lawyers. Hey, but I think as Amy said it's important to evaluate the objectives, right? In which case this is might be a good objective, but also to pay attention to the means that are employed. Because it's not gonna just be the Trump administration who employs these kind of tactics in the future.

 

It could be another future administration who has much different agenda. So, I mean, I'd just be cautious about these kind of coercive measures because they could establish a new precedent and we could be unhappy with the way they're applied in the future.

>> Bill Whalen: Yeah, Amy, Goose and Gander, right?

 

 

>> Amy Zegart: Yep, I mean, I would. It's a little deal for. I mean, this is the private sector, and they can you see different law firms taking different approaches to the same challenge. So I think we're always better off when we have a robust set of institutions that have Have the capabilities to ask questions of the state, right?

 

 

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, now let's turn our attention now to three nations, three lands that may or may not cave to Donald Trump down the road, first up, Neil Greenland.

>> Niall Ferguson: Well, I can't tell if this is trolling or for real, I think it's some combination of the two. My take on this is that we have to look behind the facade of imperial bravado, that the attention is, of course, caught when the President of the United States lays claim not just to Greenland.

 

But also to Canada and the Panama Canal. But I don't think that's really the most important thing about the national security strategy of the second Trump administration. Which is much more about trying to limit the commitments of the United States relative to its big adversaries, whether it's in Eastern Europe or the Middle east or potentially in the Far East.

 

So I, I struggle a bit to see it as a big deal, I don't think it's entirely serious. I think we've just seen Vice President Vance take a step back in his trip to Greenland, and I'm guessing we won't be annexing Greenland in the next three and a half years when all is said and done.

 

 

>> Bill Whalen: HR Venezuela and here, the issue here is the President threatening trade tariffs against countries that buy Venezuelan oil.

>> H.R. McMaster: Yeah, I like it, I think we need more pressure on Venezuela. And of course, this is one of the areas where President Trump has heard from a wide range of people.

 

People who, I would put the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio in this camp, who believe that it's important to isolate the Maduro regime from sources of strength and support. Including the cash flow that's necessary not only for him to maintain power, to fund these kind of militia organizations which keep him in power.

 

Even though the vast majority of Venezuelans voted him out in the last election. But also Maduro is funding what I would call progressive authoritarian regimes, dictatorships in the Western hemisphere. It's really Venezuelan money that has supported a lot of the far left parties. I mean, from Da Silva and Petro in Colombia to, to Ortega, he keeps Ortega and the Cuban army on life support.

 

And so I think anything that can be done to restrict the resources available to Venezuela is important. And it's also important to US Influence in the hemisphere because Venezuela has become kind of a platform for Russia, who provides security for China, who provides financial wherewithal. And Iran, who actually provides some refined petroleum products that Venezuela needs.

 

So, yeah, I'm all for it, and I hope that that side of the argument wins out over Chevron and various energy brokers in a particular one in Florida who want the President to alleviate sanctions on Venezuela.

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, Amy, your chance to wave the maple leaf flag Canada.

 

 

>> Amy Zegart: All the poor Canadians, right? I mean, I would separate Canada from Greenland, and we haven't talked about Panama. So I think with Panama and Greenland, there are real strategic imperatives for greater US involvement. For example, the Panama Canal, I think the President was right. I'm deeply uncomfortable with Hong Kong based companies controlling the port operations at both ends of that canal.

 

The President has a nose for real estate in Greenland. Greenland is strategically important to the United States, not just because it's on the Arctic, which is thawing and becoming a new ocean that can dramatically reduce shipping time. But because of the rare earth minerals on Greenland and its location, right?

 

There is a competition for influence in the Arctic. The Chinese, which aren't even in the Arctic, claim to be an Arctic power. The Russians are very much there in earnest. And so Greenland is strategically important for the United States. Will it be acquired by the United States? I doubt it, but I suspect if I were a gambling woman, I would say by the end of the Trump administration, there will be more close ties between the United States and Greenland.

 

More capabilities of the United States and perhaps more natural resources that the United States will be accessing in Greenland. And that is to the good of the country. So Canada is a different story, right? Canada is one of our largest trading partners. And I think the Canadians are alarmed, right, about the idea that the rhetoric, that they're the 51st state.

 

And so our allies and partners are some of the strongest assets the United States has in our competition with China. China has customers, we have allies and partners. And one of the benefits we have is that we have very good relations in our own neighborhood so that we can focus on economic development.

 

And so my concern with Canada in particular is, it's unnecessary to poke the Canadian bear that we have plenty of adversaries in the world. And we should be focused on bringing our friends closer to combat China abroad.

>> H.R. McMaster: And Amy, just a quick point on this too. Hey, we're missing an opportunity, as you alluded to, for a positive agenda with Canada, right?

 

Countering Chinese influence, but how about Arctic security, which is what drew President to Greenland? How about reinvigorating North American defenses? The Golden Dome? That's not possible without Canada because the threat from missiles comes across the Arctic Circle in large measures. So hey, I just think we're blowing an opportunity for a positive agenda, and it's regrettable.

 

 

>> Niall Ferguson: The law of unintended consequences, a very powerful thing in history. And when you look at the consequences on Canadian politics of President Trump's attacks on Canada, they've been absolutely seismic. Mark Carney, a very accomplished central banker, is now Prime Minister, which seemed like an absolute long shot just to few months ago.

 

When the Conservative leader Pierre Polievre was the hot favorite to win the next election. I don't think it can be entirely in the interest of the United States to prolong the Liberal Party's dominance of Canadian politics, but that's actually been the principal consequence of all of this.

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, and finally, Neil, in our conversation about Benny to Trump's will, two individuals who are not usually mentioned in the same sentence, but they both tie into Trump's success.

 

And that would be Jerome Powell, the Chair of the Federal Reserve, and Vladimir Putin.

>> Niall Ferguson: Well, at the moment, we seem to be caving to Putin. I don't know if my colleagues watched the Steve Witkoff interview with Tucker Carlson, but I'm just glad Henry Kissinger didn't live to witness that debacle.

 

He must be turning in his grave. So if, if caving is what we're talking about, it sounded a lot like the prelude to a cave, that interview. Jay Powell has experience of being tweeted at by Donald Trump. Back when he was raising rates in 2018, he was bombarded with at least 100 critical tweets from President Trump.

 

So nothing was more eminently predictable than that at some point Donald Trump would start sending tweets Jay Powell's way, and he started last week. I think Jay Powell's well used to that, and as he approaches the end of his time as Fed Chair, he's got a pretty impressive record to look back on.

 

Hasn't been a recession in all the time he's been there, plenty of people have predicted recessions, they haven't happened. So yeah, I think he's in a relatively strong position at this point.

>> H.R. McMaster: Okay, and we're going to end up the conversation there, thanks so much, we enjoyed it very much.

 

Amy, great to have you on the show, you got to come back more often.

>> Amy Zegart: I'm happy to come back, talk to you guys anytime, it was really fun.

>> Bill Whalen: And once again, the Stanford Emergency Technology Review, setr.stanford.edu. By the way, while I'm doing plugs, we are doing a mail show in April.

 

If you have a question for Neil HR John, any or all combination of them go to the following website. Which is hoover.org Ask Goodfellows, that's hoover.org Goodfellows by the way, we have an anniversary coming up guys. April 1st I think is our five year anniversary, can you believe that?

 

 

>> Niall Ferguson: An appropriate date perhaps.

>> Bill Whalen: There's no fool like a good fellow's fool. All right, all great conversation, go back to your go back to your spotlights to see what chats you've been missing.

>> H.R. McMaster: Take care, thanks Amy.

>> Bill Whalen: On behalf of the Goodfellows, Neil Ferriss and H.R. McMaster, the truant John Cochran and our very Special guest today, Dr. Amy Zegart.

 

We hope you enjoyed the show, as always, we appreciate your support. Please send in our comments, your suggestions, your questions for us till next time, take care and we will see you soon, thanks for watching.

>> Presenter: If you enjoyed this show and are interested in watching more content featuring HR McMaster, watch Battlegrounds also available @ hoover.org.