The Ledger, every show

“We saw through many examples in the past few years that our elites are, in some ways, failing us. We're talking, if we think about COVID, the summer of 2020, if we think about October seventh, and we think about what happened in the past few weeks these are ex…”

“No, no, but an university has a duty, I believe, in especially where we sit here in America, to be an institution that is pro-decivilization, that is trying to uphold the civilization and move the civilization forward. So that's a very opinionated position. Th…”

“Presidents doing exactly what you said, right? They speak with both sides of their mouths. Inside, they do one thing to the donors and boards that are coming with a particularly different worldview. They speak in a different way.”

“The military had to intervene in order to protect Brazil from going into a totalitarian regime. So you saw this paradox of, you know, an illiberal intervention was needed to provide, to protect against a much harder, more strong illiberal intervention.”

“A very important premise of a free society is inequality.”

“We have a number of journalists living in America right now that were critical of the government. And had to leave the country because the whole idea of combating fake news, for example, got into a, you know, if Biden was bad about trying to go into Twitter an…”

“I think that they are good efforts, but the reality is that they are very tiny little things inside of a, they are a little, you know, virus inside of a host that's rejecting it strongly. And they got forced upon the university by the political system outside,…”

“So if you think about what the Federalist Society had to do, imagine a world, America, without what the Federalist Society was able to do. We wouldn't know, we wouldn't have courts that would be very one-sided. Very, very one-sided.”

“UATX is definitely committed and standing for liberty, standing for debate, standing for free speech, standing for America. We're in the business of building a new elite.”

“Just free speech is not enough. the idea that we're gonna resolve this by just having more speech, I think is naive.”

“Understanding that tradition is a necessary condition for a new elite to arise and to arise to the challenge that we have in front of us.”

“So cannot just pretend that we haven't learned all these great things over millennia, right, and give up on those, instead thinking that, oh, let's start from scratch every time. That's a bad idea. That's an idea. That's something that leads to nihilism. That …”

“I mean, you know, a university should not be taking positions on the matters of the day, whether the tax rate should be 47% or 45%. That's left to the partisan.”

“We don't actually, we actually have this very meritocratic, perhaps the most meritocratic approach to admit students in the country. We don't care. We don't not, we don't want to hear your essay. To tell me about your views of social justice or whatever the ch…”

“When we're teaching our students economics, we start with Adam Smith, we go through Hayek, we go through Milton Friedman. We have a view that markets are a positive thing for society. And that view permeates the development of the curriculum.”

“I reject the label strongly in the sense that if you are pro-America, if you are pro-ideas of freedom, if you are pro-rigor, And if you have the American flag flying in your atrium like we do, if that is conservatism in 20, 25, call me conservative. But I don'…”

“So the societal push is there now, and I think it's happening primarily in the south of the U.S., in red states”

“I was able to, you know, from an American hero, give me some, a little bit of money to start a center to fight for those ideas internally. That was Charles Koch. So that's you know, through the Charles Koch Foundation.”

“If you study Jane Austen as an example of a scholar that we have, that's, there's not a lot of jobs for you in the world. Well, we like that. We like ninth century literature. And we wanted more of that. So, you know, we actually have a comparative advantage i…”

“It takes five minutes to apply and get a quick answer from us whether you know, cross the bar of admissions, and we can tell you right there. We might follow up with you with certain things, but that's the entry level, and that's very, very, very, very easy. T…”

“Because of AI, because of the technology that we have in front of us right now, the idea of a 40,000 student campus to me is completely broken. Why would you sit in a class with 300 people? Where, you know, you can engage with a bot and teach you probably bett…”

“Our students have to engage very rigorously With that throughout about a year, year and a quarter of their curriculum. Everybody, no matter if you want to study computer science, or if you want to study you know, literature, you're gonna have to go through thi…”

“We see some students in the first year selling a company, or engaging, or leaving to go work for some of our friends you know, after, after just one year, because they got to meet some of our, I mean, I, and that's just it was wonderful to see that we have the…”

“One is that we already have some journalists in our faculty, right? The practitioners. That's great. Journalists in our faculty. Michael Schellenberg is with us.”

“We're not taking money from the government. We're not taking money from them. We're saying your success in the future is our success, and we're going to create that, that, that philanthropic mentality that's going to, again, put us into a sustainable path in t…”

“So if we're very committed to this very high achieving Navy SEALs of the mind model, we're not going to be a huge institution because the Navy SEALs cannot It's not the Navy. We're building the Navy SEALs. I see, I think there's a, it's a two prong approach he…”

“We're trying to work with the Boring Company to build a sort of applied engineering type of type of classes that will send students to that facility, which is next door to their facility here in Bastrop, and, you know, get a lot of hands-on exposure to these p…”