Earlier this year, the world’s elites agonized over climate change as the planet’s great existential crisis. And then along came a global pandemic. Hoover senior fellows John Cochrane, Niall Ferguson, and Hoover visiting fellow Bjorn Lomborg—this week’s guest “GoodFellow” and the author of a new book on the climate-change debate—discuss where the “environmental justice” movement is taking America and the world’s nations.

Something offbeat this week: the three “GoodFellows” hopping into a DeLorean time machine, aka Back To The Future, speeding two summers into the future and reporting back on what they saw. Hoover senior fellows John Cochrane, Niall Ferguson and H.R. McMaster foresee a 2022 in which the coronavirus seems “so 2020”, the cancel culture overplayed its hand, China suffers an internal backlash, and America pays a price for spending/currency choices.

This week the Good Fellows are joined by Hoover Institution Senior Fellow Victor Davis Hanson. The gentleman farmer from Selma, CA (and the author of The Case For Trump) is not known for pulling his punches, and this discussion is no different.

This week on GoodFellows, we tackle a very complex geopolitical topic: Russia and the effects the COVID-19 crisis has had on that country’s economy, internal politics, international relations and aspirations, and ability to influence other countries and regions. To help us, we are fortunate to have one of the world’s foremost experts on the subject, someone who has years of direct experience in dealing with Russia and with Vladimir Putin himself: Hoover fellow (and soon to be director of the Hoover Institution) Condoleezza Rice, the former secretary of state and national security director under George W. Bush.

Our guest this week is Francis Fukuyama, the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. His new article in Foreign Affairs, "The Pandemic and Political Order” provides the topic for this edition of GoodFellows.

In this special edition of GoodFellows, we’re joined by Roland Fryer, Professor of Economics at Harvard University. His work on education, inequality, and race has been widely cited in media outlets and in Congressional testimony. In this wide ranging conversation on the events of the past 10 days, the GoodFellows discuss Roland’s experiences with law enforcement as a teenager, which informed his future work researching the use of force by police departments and the disparities in how it is applied to African Americans. They also discuss one of the more radical proposals stemming from the George Floyd murder: defunding police departments.

Europe’s pandemic recovery includes a divided European Union struggling for consensus on a COVID relief plan. Hoover Senior Fellows Niall Ferguson, H.R. McMaster and John Cochrane discuss the health of the 27-nation EU, whose population surveys as economically progressive, more trusting of authoritarian states and less America-leaning.

Imagine the three “GoodFellows” in charge of America’s government—a modern (and democratic) twist on ancient Rome’s triumvirate. Hoover senior fellows Niall Ferguson, H. R. McMaster, and John Cochrane discuss the coronavirus-related steps they’d take if entrusted with deciding the nation’s health, economic, and geostrategic choices.

A simple question for this week: where will we be a year now, assuming the COVID-19 pandemic has been tamed?

The “war” on COVID-19 continues a trend of affixing that word to life’s miseries (poverty, drugs, cancer).