It's Tuesday, September 28th, and welcome back to Goodfellows, a Hoover Institution broadcast,

exploring social, economic, political, and geopolitical concerns. I'm Bill Whalen. I'm a distinguished

policy fellow here at the Hoover Institution. I'll be your moderator today.

That means I get to introduce you to the stars of our show. Three of my colleagues who we jokingly refer to as the Goodfellows.

That would be HR McMaster, John Cochran, and a convalescing Neil Ferguson. Neil, what happened to you today?

At a close encounter with the dentist, and so if I sound a little bit incoherent, it's not that I've

been having a quick scotch. It's just the after effects of Novocaine. All right. Well, thank you

for being a good soldier. And you don't have one of those old English hammocks around your head like

they have in the old 19th century movies.

I've never,

never been given one of those by a dentist,

certainly not here in California.

Well, that makes the verbal sparring much more even on our parts because we're nowhere near

as eloquent as you are normally.

You know or no,

though,

because Nova Kane has some very interesting side effects.

It numbs the mouth for a period of time, but I once discovered after going to a dentist for

emergency work and playing my double bass subsequently, that there are all kinds of benefits

to Novacaine, which explains a lot about what happened to jazz music and jazz musicians.

I was playing really the best I've ever played in my life. And so there's always a temptation before playing

to go and just get a quick shot from the dentist, but I've resisted it so far. Anyway, if I

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