The Ledger, every show

“All of that's become much harder, because our educational system has been captured, now almost from the very bottom, from kindergarten to grad school, by an ideology which is profoundly hostile to the scientific method, and increasingly regards science itself …”

“Jewish students are being intimidated and threatened, singled out in some classes on the Stanford campus.”

“So unlike, say, Chicago, which has great principles, we have even better principles, and they're enforceable, which in practice they really aren't, even at the University of Chicago.”

“And the reason why I think ultimately this system will lose legitimacy, especially as the growth rate comes down.”

“At the end of civilization, I said the principal threat to Western civilization is not from outside. It is not from China. It is from within. And if we choose in our schools and universities to relentlessly attack our civilization and its values, then we'll on…”

“Making large donations to established institutions really is the wrong way to go. Because very likely the money will be used for things the donor disapproves of”

“To have been in the first class, the founding class of the University of Austin, that is something that will be worth so, so much more than just going into the sausage machine, ah, of New England and coming out the other side with a credential that cost a lot …”

“You've got a new millenarian movement at the moment, which is the radical environmentalist movement, which says the world is going to end in 10 years, I think.”

“Once the Chinese figured that out, they downloaded at least four of those killer apps. They didn't really want political competition, and they definitely don't want the rule of law, because the Chinese Communist Party can't survive with those things.”

“And it seems like the Biden administration is just going to add to these systems of entitlement that end up, in fact, trapping people in the bottom quintile.”

“We have a Pathologically dysfunctional system of education, particularly in public schools, because the power of the teachers' unions is too great. It's a vested interest. It's hurting our kids, especially poorer kids.”

“It's obvious that the fiat system is reaching some kind of critical threshold. Massively rapid monetary growth, the explicit financing of government deficits that are running in trillions of dollars every year, as far as the eye can see, you sense that the sys…”

“There's some very interesting research showing that sites where there were anti-Semitic attacks in the 13 forties were also sites centuries later of support for National Socialism during the rise of Hitler.”

“Well, I actually think Marxism-Leninism is much more important to Xi Jinping than most Western observers realize. I mean, they are still reading Marx and Engels on the Politburo Standing Committee. I had That was explained to me recently by the head of researc…”

“We know this from heterodox academy surveys. These have been showing for years that 60% of students don't feel they can speak freely in class.”

“That's the kind of thing that I think every well-educated person should know, and yet the reality is that tiny percentages of current graduates of elite universities understand that question.”

“We got accustomed to a very low risk environment. We have a culture of safety that has become all pervasive in most Western civilizations. We have a bureaucracy that's principle objective is to minimize risk.”

“Except decline is reversible. I mean, you go through bad patches, but that doesn't mean you're going to kind of expire.”

“The real pattern in history is not rise to zenith and then gradual decline. It's quite different from that. A complex system can have a very rough patch, then it can stabilize, it can seem to be in equilibrium, And then it can fall apart very suddenly.”

“It can choose to decline and fall by making the wrong decisions, but it's certainly not too late to fix the pathologies of the administrative state.”

“The rule of law is really the rule of lawyers now. It's very expensive to use the US legal system. There's a great deal of abuse of taught law, and so we don't really have the rule of law in its original common law design.”

“I'm very skeptical that the investments such as they are Will significantly increase the product productive capital of the United States. In fact, it may, in fact, be a wash.”

“Although income distribution has clearly widened to the point that it's reminiscent of the 19 twenties, wealth distribution has not got as unequal as it was in, in the 19th century.”

“The United States has a bunch of secret sauces. It has a unique operating system politically that despite those who predicted Weimar America withstood the upheavals of the last few years, just as the founders intended. So I'm an optimist about the political sy…”

“I think outside the United States it is much harder than some of my more radical libertarian friends imagine to create a new state. Small states are very vulnerable. That's one of the lessons of history. It's big empires that call the shards. And you're only a…”

“So I think one of the first principles of the University of Austin is going to be, ah, that, that the Chatham House rule applies, and what you say in the classroom must stay in the classroom.”

“When we're confronted with a sudden increase in our risk of death, we go from complacency to panic. Without really finding the middle ground in between.”

“Interestingly, it was the very tech savvy Taiwanese government, which has its own technology minister, the amazing Audrey Tang, that was able very quickly to figure out how to do mass testing, Had a contact tracing system they didn't even need to use last year…”

“I think technology is the way we get away from the 20th century bureaucratic system, which I think has now become a real impediment to the stable functioning of the United States, to something that's much more responsive to citizens' needs.”

“So in some ways, I think of Bitcoin particularly, but crypto and decentralized finance generally as a new tech-enabled version of that stateless monetary system that evolved to finance trade.”

“If mRNA vaccines were the key to defeating COVID, which I think they were, there's a whole lot more that that technology still has to do. My sense is that there are still many more extraordinary breakthroughs to come.”