Uncommon Knowledge

Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, US Army, ret., the former national security advisor and the Fouad and Michelle Ajami Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution discusses his latest book, Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World, a re-examination of the most critical foreign policy and national security challenges that face the United States, and an urgent call to compete to preserve America’s standing and security. McMaster takes us through a world tour of hot spots and outlines the threats to our security, freedom, and prosperity, including nuclear proliferation and jihadist terrorism. McMaster also discusses his upbringing, his career as a soldier and an officer, and his new life as a policy expert at the Hoover Institution.  Recorded on March 13, 2020

Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson is proud to present the first interview with Condoleezza Rice in her new role as Director of Hoover Institution. After a storied career that includes Provost of Stanford University (1993-1999), United States National Security Advisor (2001-2005), and United States Secretary of State (2005-2009), the author of numerous books, and an inaugural member of the College Football Playoff selection committee, on September 1st, 2020 Director Rice became the Hoover Institution's eighth director in its 101 year history and the first woman to hold the position. In this wide ranging conversation, Peter Robinson and Director Rice discuss Hoover’s mission in the 21st century, the role of think tanks in crafting public policy, her views about the current geo-political situation regarding Russia and China, and her personal thoughts about the national conversation currently underway in the United States about racial relations and how we look back at the country’s founding and history. Rec

Recorded on September 4, 2020 This is our third conversation with Hong Kong entrepreneur and freedom fighter, Jimmy Lai in less than a year. During that time, Lai has been arrested twice, his family and his employees and colleagues have been harassed and in some cases forced to leave Hong Kong, and Lai himself has been incarcerated. Currently free on bond and facing a trial and an uncertain future, Mr. Lai gets philosophical in this conversation. He describes how his faith has given him strength and comfort and that he is willing to make whatever sacrifice required in order to maintain democracy in Hong Kong. We discuss the political situation in Hong Kong, the precarious position of Hong Kong Executive Carrie Lam, and how the United States and the world can apply pressure to the Chinese, and what’s at stake if Hong Kong becomes just another Chinese city. For further information: https://www.hoover.org/publications/uncommon-knowledge Interested in exclusive Uncommon Knowledge content? Check out Uncommon K

Recorded on July 29, 2020   On the occasion of his new book, Defender in Chief: Donald Trump’s Fight for Presidential Power, Hoover visiting fellow and Berkeley Law School professor John Yoo joins the show to make a spirited case against the criticisms of Donald Trump for his supposed disruption of constitutional rules and norms. The conventional wisdom is that Donald Trump is a threat to the rule of law and the US Constitution. Mainstream media outlets have reported fresh examples of alleged executive overreach or authoritarian White House decisions nearly every day of his presidency. In the 2020 primaries, the candidates have rushed to accuse Trump of destroying our democracy and jeopardizing our nation’s very existence. In his book and on this show, John Yoo argues the opposite: that the Founders would have seen Trump as returning to their vision of presidential power, even at his most controversial and outrageous. It’s a fascinating and often humorous discussion that could not be more timely.

Recorded on July 24, 2020    This week, a conversation with Bjorn Lomborg, a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, the president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, and one of the foremost climate experts in the world today. His new book, False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet, is an argument for treating climate as a serious problem but not an extinction-level event requiring such severe and drastic steps as rewiring a large part of the culture and the economy. Bjorn responds directly to some of the most vociferous climate policy critics, including Greta Thunberg, author David Wallace-Wells (The Uninhabitable Earth: Life after Warming), and proponents of the Green New Deal. We also discuss some promising emerging technologies and why worst-case scenarios are often just that—scenarios that are used to motivate the public into action but are not in fact likely to occur. It’s a sobering and even-handed discussion on climate that does not incl

The day before this show was recorded, Dr. Thomas Sowell began his 10th decade of life. Remarkably on one hand and yet completely expected on the other, he remains as engaged, analytical, and thoughtful as ever. In this interview (one of roughly a dozen or so we’ve conducted with Dr. Sowell over the years), we delve into his new book Charter Schools and Their Enemies,  a sobering look at the academic success of charter schools in New York City, and the fierce battles waged by teachers unions and progressive politicians to curtail them. Dr. Sowell’s conclusion is equally thought provoking: If the opponents of charter schools succeed, the biggest losers will be poor minority children for whom a quality education is the best chance for a better life. Recorded on July 1, 2020

As the United States and the world embark on fraught conversations about race, history, law enforcement, and the underpinnings of our very civilization, Ayaan Hirsi Ali joins Peter Robinson for an enlightening conversation. A refugee from Africa, Hirsi Ali fled to Europe to escape an arranged marriage, becoming an activist, (now former) member of the Dutch Parliament, and now a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. With a different set of life experiences and perspective from American-born Blacks, Hirsi Ali discusses how, as a Somalian, she views America as the best place on earth for minorities to grow up and achieve their potential. While acknowledging the hardships and miseries that American Blacks have endured and that racism still exists in many quarters of American society, Hirsi Ali emphatically believes that America is more than capable of solving racial inequalities, provided it preserves the institutions that ultimately ended slavery and empowered the protest movements of the 1960s that birthed

Recorded on June 18, 2020 Dr. Scott Atlas is the Robert Wesson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, an accomplished physician, and a scholar of public health. For several weeks, Dr. Atlas has been making the case in print and in other media that we as a society have overreacted in imposing draconian restrictions on movement, gatherings, schools, sports, and other activities. He is not a COVID-19 denier—he believes the virus is a real threat and should be managed as such. But, as Dr. Atlas argues, there are some age groups and activities that are subject to very low risk. The one-size-fits-all approach we are currently using is overly authoritarian, inefficient, and not based in science. Dr. Atlas’s prescription includes more protection for people in nursing homes, two weeks of strict self-isolation for those with mild symptoms, and most importantly, the opening of all K–12 schools. The latter recommendation is vital for restarting and maintaining the economy so that parents are not housebound trying to w

Recorded on June 8, 2020 When Hong Kong democracy advocate Jimmy Lai last appeared on Uncommon Knowledge in October of 2019, the situation in Hong Kong was dire but still hopeful. Now, eight months later, the situation has gone from bad to worse, and since that interview, Lai has been arrested twice. In this conversation, Lai explains the widening crackdown the Chinese Communist Party is imposing on Hong Kong, including his interpretation of the recently proposed national security law, which Lai believes will give China the ability to control all aspects of Hong Kong’s freedoms and culture and destroy the city’s financial and media businesses. Lai also makes a plea to the United States and the rest of the world: help Hong Kong by sanctioning China, because in the wake of COVID-19, the country is at its most vulnerable moment in the last 40 years. Says Lai, “If we surrender, we will lose [our] freedom, we will lose the rule of law—we will lose everything.” Whether the world will hear Lai and the rest of the H

Mitch Daniels is the former governor of Indiana (2005–13), former director of the Office of Management and Budget (2001–03), and current president of Purdue University (since 2013). In this wide-ranging conversation with Peter Robinson, Daniels discusses his insistence on keeping Purdue’s tuition below $10,000 and how he does it, his vision for Purdue that includes a mix of online and onsite education, and his efforts to hire an ideologically diverse faculty and recruit students from various backgrounds and ethnicities. He also shares his thoughts on the recent civil unrest, protests, and looting across the United States, and his plans on how to open Purdue and keep it open this fall amid the continuing COVID-19 crisis.

Recorded on May 28, 2020 In his new book, The Decadent Society, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat presents a theory: “Western society stopped advancing in the second half of the 20th century, and the combination of wealth and technological proficiency with economic stagnation, political stalemates, cultural exhaustion, and demographic decline creates a strange kind of ‘sustainable decadence,’ a civilizational languor that could endure for longer than we think.” Against this backdrop, Peter Robinson and Douthat discuss movies, TV shows, the iPhone, SpaceX, and the 747, with some detours into the COVID-19 crisis and our current political situation.

Recorded on May 6, 2020 A true Renaissance man, Matt Ridley is a British journalist, a member of the House of Lords, a businessman, and the author of many publications, including The Rational Optimist, his very influential book about the innate human tendency to trade goods and services, which he argues is the source of all human prosperity. Ridley’s new book, How Innovation Works, chronicles the history of innovation and argues that we need to change the way we think about innovation, to see it as an incremental, bottom-up, fortuitous process that happens to society as a direct result of the human habit of exchange, rather than as an orderly, top-down process developing according to a plan. Ridley also discusses the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on the world’s economies, the real story of Thomas Edison and why he was one of the greatest innovators in human history, why China may not be the threat it appears to be (at least not technologically), and some predictions as to what the world may look like in 2050

Recorded on May 8, 2020 Dr. Jay Bhattacharaya from Stanford Medicine makes his third appearance on Uncommon Knowledge in eight weeks, this time to discuss a new COVID-19 survey of Major League Baseball employees he co-authored. The survey tested more than 5,600 employees across all 26 Major League Baseball clubs across the country. The results are yet another data set showing how COVID-19 spreads across geographical and economic lines. Dr. Bhattacharya also discusses the very real health risks associated with a prolonged lockdown and answers some of the questions raised by his last survey of Santa Clara County.   

Recorded February 25, 2020 Yuval Levin is director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the America Dream. The book and this conversation lay out the importance of institutions—from the military to churches, from families to schools—as these institutions provide the forms and structures we need to be free. Levin also explains why political correctness is rampant in the culture, why America’s elites have created a closed-off aristocracy in order to transmit privilege generationally, and why it is vitally important that we as a society recommit to rebuilding and maintaining the institutions that provided the foundation for American society for 200 years. Programming note: this interview was recorded before the COVID-19 crisis reached the United States, so it is not mentioned.

Recorded on April 28, 2020 In this special plague-time episode of Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson, two of the nation’s most brilliant and accomplished humorists have a good time—and say some serious things. P. J. O’Rourke and Andrew Ferguson on COVID-19, their wasted youth, Trump versus Biden, the state of journalism, and why they’d both bet on the United States over China any old day.

Recorded on April 23, 2020   Victor Davis Hanson is both a classical scholar at the Hoover Institution and a farmer in the San Joaquin Valley of California. He’s also a defender of the president (his book The Case for Trump spent weeks on the bestseller lists in 2019) and a close observer of the scientific and medical communities. These disparate interests and fields of study give him unique perspectives and insights on the current COVID-19 crisis. We discuss the current situation with him in great detail, including the difficulties encountered by farmers and by research scientists and doctors, why some areas of the country are affected more than others, his theories about when the virus actually first appeared in the United States, and, finally, what plagues of the ancient world can teach us about how to best manage and get past the situation the entire world finds itself in.

Recorded on April 15, 2020 Douglas Irwin is the John French Professor of Economics at Dartmouth College. He is the author of a number of books, including the definitive history of American trade policy, Clashing over Commerce. In this sheltering at home edition of Uncommon Knowledge, we delve deep into the issues around the Trump administration’s imposition of huge tariffs on goods from China and elsewhere, and the impact of a health crisis that has businesses across the country re-examining their investments abroad. Also, what’s the right way to think about international trade? Is free trade still the best policy? We get deep into the weeds of the issues around imports and exports with Professor Irwin.

Recorded on April 17, 2020 A month ago, we interviewed Dr. Jay Bhattacharya just as the COVID-19 crisis was shuttering the economy and governments were ordering citizens to shelter at home. In that interview, Dr. Bhattacharya mentioned that he himself would soon be conducting tests for COVID-19 in Santa Clara County, California, one of the most active hotspots in the country. Today Dr. Bhattacharya returns to discuss the results of that study and one currently under way in partnership with Major League Baseball. We also discuss some signs of hope, and specifics about how the economy can be restarted safely and efficiently. Dr. Bhattacharya also gives some (unsolicited) advice to Dr. Anthony Fauci, California governor Gavin Newsom, and president Donald Trump.

Recorded on April 9, 2020 As a columnist for the Wall Street Journal and a commentator for Fox News, Kim Strassel is a card-carrying member of the mainstream media. But Strassel is appalled by the media’s treatment of Donald Trump, and not just by journalists from the left. She describes the “resistance” in detail in her recent book, Resistance (at All Costs): How Trump Haters Are Breaking America. She and Peter Robinson discuss the Trump administration's handling of the COVID-19 crisis and the way the media has covered it and disseminated the information to the public. They also discuss the upcoming presidential election (yes, we are still having one) and the politics of the $2 trillion stimulus bill, with more spending on the way, and the realities of restarting the economy in a post- or partial-post-COVID-19 world. Finally, they discuss the pluses and minuses of Donald Trump’s temperament, and the possibility of something good coming from this current crisis.

Recorded on April 1, 2020 Stephen A. Kotkin is a professor of history at Princeton and a fellow at the Hoover Institution. Kotkin is one of the nation’s most compelling observers of foreign affairs, past and present, and is now working on the third and final volume of his definitive biography of Josef Stalin. From that perspective, Peter Robinson and Kotkin discuss Trump’s response to the COVID-19 crisis, Kotkin’s thoughts on the Chinese leadership class and the advantages they may seek to exploit, and which country—China or the United States—will come to represent the more successful or compelling model to other nations.