It's Tuesday, December the 14th, and welcome back to Goodfellows, a Hoover Institution broadcast examining social, economic, political, and geopolitical concerns.

I'm Bill Whalen. I'm a Hoover Distinguished Policy Fellow. I'll be your moderator today. That means I have a ringside seat to a assimilating conversation featuring three of my colleagues.

That would be the historian Neil Ferguson, the economist John Cochran, and the geostrategist slash Goodfellow.

Most likely to show up on your doorstep wearing an ugly sweater and singing Christmas Carol's Lieutenant General, H.R. McMaster,

the our Hoover Institution Senior Fellows

All. Gentlemen, good to see you on this, our last broadcast of 2021.

Oh, ho, ho, Bill. Good to see you.

So I was going to call you guys the Three Wise Men from the West, and that sounded a little sacrilegious,

and I was going to go with Three Kings, and that sounded out of place in the Republic of ours. And so can I go with three

Magi or is that a little too spiritual for this broadcast? Three Madmen. Three Madmen. Okay, Neil.

So here's a question, Neil, if the Magi show up in 2021 in California bringing gifts,

the book of Matthew tells us what, it's Frankencense, golden myrr. What are they showing up with in 2021?

This is California.

They bring in crypto and cannabis, or what do you think they have in tow?

How about a vaccine that works against the Omicran variant?

That would be good.

I speak with a certain bitterness on this subject as I tested positive this morning.

As a consequence, I'm going to sound rather guttural and indeed may lose my voice altogether.

So that would be one gift if we could have the wise men hurry up with that, because if they

can't, if they don't, an enormous number of people are clearly going to catch this

variant and start sounding like me.

Or maybe the FDA that would let us have said vaccine and treatments and all the rest of it.

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