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The Rule of Law and the Economics of Freedom · Liberty + Leadership

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Liberty and Leadership Podcast, a conversation with TFAS alumni, faculty, and friends who are making an impact today.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Roger Reim.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: I'm delighted to have Dr.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: Ikaterina Brancado join me on Liberty and Leadership.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: Dr.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: Brancado is a member of the TFES faculty and this summer is teaching the course Economics for the Citizen in our Washington, D.C.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: Academic Internship Program.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: She has been teaching economics at the university level for nearly two decades and at institutions including George Washington University, New York University, and George Mason University, where she has been since 2009.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: Outside of teaching, Dr.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: Brancado's experience as an analyst and economist has supported the Department of Defense, Department of Energy, and the Department of Homeland Security.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: She is the author of Markets versus Hierarchies, a political economy of Russia from the 10th century to 2008, which uses a transaction cost perspective to illustrate how hierarchies influence both the structure of markets and the behavior of individual businesses and cartels in Russian and Soviet history.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: Dr.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: Bankado grew up in the Soviet Union and brings first hand experience to her work and teaching.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: Dr.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: Brankado, welcome to the show.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for having me.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_01: Happy to be here.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: I think we should start with the fact that you grew up in the Soviet Union.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: You made a conscious decision at a point to leave.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: Could you talk about that experience, how old you were, and what led you to that choice?
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_01: So, as you said, I grew up in the Soviet Union.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_01: I saw firsthand the restructuring and the perestroika of the whole system, and then the collapse of the Soviet Union.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_01: The year was 1993.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_01: I was 17, and I came to the US for the first time on Bill Bradley Future Leaders Exchange program, the FLEX program, which was authorized under the Freedom Support Act.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_01: So the idea was to bring young people from the former Soviet Union to the U.S.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_01: for a year to live with a host family and go to high school, have them absorb Western values and carry them home.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_01: But you had to go back for at least two years afterward.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_01: So I followed the law.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_01: I went back.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_01: I studied at a university in Russia for three years.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_01: And then I found that business courses and economics courses they were trying to teach us were lacking for me.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_01: And I'd realized I'd better come and study economics and business in a country where free markets thrive, where businesses thrive in a free market environment.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_01: So fortunate circumstances led me to Hillsdale College, now second time in the US, and I was 21.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, why leave?
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_01: It's a very hard choice.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_01: It's a very hard decision to leave one's family, your culture.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_01: People here were incredibly kind to me, but I had real hardship.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_01: Both times, though, I left for freedom.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_01: And the first time, freedom was in the air.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_01: It was early 90s.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_01: You probably remember Scorpions wrote the song, The Wind of Change.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_01: It was everywhere.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_01: It was literally our anthem.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_01: We lived by it and we wanted to breathe the freedom.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_01: So I wanted to come to the US to experience freedom, to know the world.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_01: We had such hunger to know the world because we were a closed society.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_01: We wanted to be friends with Americans.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_01: However, that was a big risk.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_01: My mom, who had to let me go, had no idea what the host family was even like.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_01: There were no Google Maps, no internet.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_01: Once she was sharing a story that I was going to Chicago with a friend, and the friend waved her arms and exclaimed, not that Mafia town.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_01: So coming in, I had very little idea of what people even wear to school.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_01: And I was incredibly shocked to find out that American men wear shorts.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_01: That was one of the cultural shocks I experienced.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_01: So again, the second time though, I came because of a more conscious choice.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_01: The second time I chose freedom, specifically because I knew I could shape my destiny.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_01: But what that means is you own everything, including your mistakes and failures.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_01: And this is the point I like for the students to understand is that here in a free country, that's what you own.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_01: You own everything, including your failures.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_01: If you are an unfree society like Russia, you're a part of the system, you're a cog in the machine.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_01: It's very easy to blame someone for their failures, blame the system, someone else.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_01: Here, though, in the freedom, you have responsibility.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_01: And that's a hard way to live.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_01: Very hard.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_01: But look deep down, and everybody will agree.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_01: We would prefer the harder, freer path.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: I am a little curious about how you ended up at Hillsdale, because it's a great school.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: But also when you left to come there, did you realize you might not be going back, that you'd be staying in the United States?
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_01: Honestly, I did not think that far.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_01: I was really interested in the business and the economics aspects in the free market.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_01: And having been in the United States before, I realized what exactly was lacking.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_01: That was the primary reason, the education, the professional and personal development.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_01: So I had no idea I would stay.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_01: Once I was at Hillsdale, I had great influences upon me, and I became very interested in the academic aspects, and that led to graduate school.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_01: But as coming the second time to college, I did not anticipate that.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_01: I applied to many different schools, and of course, I needed scholarship.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_01: We weren't wealthy.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_01: And that was a problem.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_01: There were a lot of quotas and stipulations across many schools.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_01: Hillsdale, however, being the school that doesn't take any federal money, they were pretty free to make their own choices.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_01: And I was introduced to Hillsdale through a common connection.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_01: My host, family's business partner, knew someone who had gone to Hillsdale, and that's how I was introduced.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_01: And they liked me, I loved them, and that was a match made in heaven.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, wonderful.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: Now, one theme that runs through this story of yours, of your life and your teaching in our classroom is the importance of institutions and that contrast.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: And you've touched on the point about taking responsibility versus being a cog in a machine.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: But you've often said that human nature doesn't really change.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: It's the institutions that shape the incentives we face that are so important to study.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: How do you kind of convey that to students in the classroom?
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_01: Before I studied institutional economics formally, I had lived through a lot of the things that made me receptive to what I studied later.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_01: And that's actually one of the methods I use through stories and trying to find personal connections for the students with what the theory tells them and what they've experienced.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_01: So human nature doesn't change.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_01: Same ambitions, same motivations like self-interest, providing for one's family around everywhere.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_01: We sometimes call them in institutional economics fundamental human values.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_01: Everybody pretty much wants the same.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_01: But what the difference is, is which institutions are dominant in a particular society or a community and how they channel that human nature.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_01: So the same motivation of self-interest or ambition under the Soviet system can create corruption and gatekeeping.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_01: And under free market institutions, under rule-based economy, you could create very successful corporations and companies that produce goods for consumers and value for their owners.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_01: That's all the difference.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_01: One of the things that is absolutely precious, and there are many institutions that are precious to our society, to our free society.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_01: One of them I'd like to identify is rule of law.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_01: A rule of law is not a default thing, it's a remarkable achievement that our free society, and America is very special here, has achieved, and it's fragile though, and it must be preserved at all costs.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_01: Nothing has taught me that faster than having this particular experience the year I had come back to Russia from my first tour in the US.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_01: And this is the story where I'd come back and I was very influenced by the ideals of fairness and law.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_01: Justice for everyone, equality before law for everyone.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_01: And I had witnessed a local mafia shooting.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_01: A um local mafia boss, everyone called him Stepanic, was shot with Kalashnikov rifles in broad daylight, right in my apartment courtyard.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_01: I saw the gunman.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_01: Inspired by my idealism, I volunteered to provide a witness statement.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_01: You can imagine my mother was terrified, but the mafia wasn't really the danger here, and you'll see why in a minute.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_01: The real problem was that the whole legal system, the whole justice system had broken down.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_01: I came to the precinct to sign my statement, and the police officers had no interest in using my witness report and investigation.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_01: They were sitting and chatting around, they started showing me the photos that they had confiscated from the boss's apartment, showing me his luxury vacations, his lifestyle.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what happens when the state loses monopoly on justice.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_01: The point I try to make to the students is that society needs rules to function.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_01: It's not possible to have no rules.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_01: It depends who you want or who you let write the rules.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_01: Because if you have a vacuum, then the criminal violent elements will definitely step in and write the rules for you.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_01: What you want is the just system and the fair system.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_01: And that's why a rule of law is precious and must be preserved.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: One of my great fears today in this country is the threats to the rule of law, which are a bedrock of a free society.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: You've said your goal in the classroom isn't simply to teach economics, but it's to help students see that economics is everywhere.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, we like to say at TFAS, we're teaching the economic way of thinking, and that it's something you can use throughout life and many of the decisions you make.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: I also know in your course you have the students visit museums and historic sites and theaters and kind of do the experimental learning aspect of a classroom.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: Can you walk us through your kind of your teaching philosophy and what you hope TFAS students will take away from the classroom experience with you?
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_01: So this is the fun part.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, these trips are optional, these field trips are optional, but I provide plenty of options for students to have a conversation wherever they want to on whichever topic they want to.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_01: TFAS typically has a large class.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_01: It's 80 plus students.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_01: And the first year I started, it was, I thought it would be very challenging because I like to learn my students by name and I like to talk to at least a couple of times to them individually just to understand what they care about so I can show them where economics lives and what they care about.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_01: But I found out that they're very interactive.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_01: TFAS students, they're interactive.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_01: And so I learned their names and I learned who they are, and that's been wonderful.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_01: So the museums and the field trips.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_01: We do about five to seven field trips, depending on how the holidays line up.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_01: We go to Hillwood Museum, we go to the National Gallery, we go to the Aerospace Museum, we go to the Victims of Communism Museum, and we go to the Synetic Theater.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_01: And beyond that, of course, there are plenty of coffee hours, Zoom sessions, or other opportunities.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_01: They can just call me to chat.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_01: What do we do on these field trips?
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_01: I tell them that economics is not just a subject that you study and you graduate and you forget about it.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_01: What you take away is the lens, the outlook, how you look at the world.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_01: And I like to take them places that, again, they might be interested in personally, and places that they wouldn't think calling economics.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_01: We were just last weekend with the summer group, we were at the National Gallery, and we were standing in the Hall of Wehrmeers, and that's the quiet pre-industrial era paintings.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_01: And we had a wonderful conversation about industrial revolution and how it changed everything.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_01: We talked about bourgeois virtues, prudence, referenced some of Didier McCloskey work, and it was a wonderful conversation.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, the Victims of Communist Museum, that's very personal for me because they get to connect with what I had lived.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_01: And then again, going back to National Gallery, after the gallery, we walked over to the Shigal Mosaic that sits there in the garden.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_01: And we talked about uh immigration stories.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_01: That's where we got to share our personal experience.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: Wonderful.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: I know the students remember it.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: I remember last year them talking about their trip out to the Air and Space Museum, I think the annex out near Dulles Airport, where you took some students.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_01: It's to tell them that the world is not just a model, that they themselves, each of them, is more than one profession or one label.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_01: That curiosity is awesome to have.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_01: That's the most valuable thing.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_01: Breadth of experience is a differentiator.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what I hope they take away from it.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if you want to say anything more about incentives, because incentives are so powerful.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, I don't think most people, particularly students in their 19, 20, 20 years old, understand that incentives are such a powerful influence in their lives.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: And while they make choices, they're influenced so heavily by institutions and incentives, right?
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_01: Depending on how the incentives are channeled, people can make very different decisions.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_01: That's one of the fundamental principles.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_01: They basically the first lecture we start with is we talk about the fundamental principles of economics.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_01: And there's 10 plus of them.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_01: And I try to give them vivid examples.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_01: I try to tell them, hey, look, um, if I told you that you're all going to get A's in class, do you think you're going to work as hard as you would otherwise?
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_01: So I say, no.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_01: And then they they they get it.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_01: They get it.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_00: What are some of the texts and authors you try to expose students to in the course of uh one of the classes you teach?
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_01: The issue today, I think, is there are many classical texts that are absolutely wonderful that have been largely forgotten in academia and they're not taught.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_01: So my method is to resurrect those classical texts.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_01: And to contrast, frankly, a lot of things that are written today in academia are pretty dry, and they don't have very much to say about why humans do what they do.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_01: And these texts, this classical text that I use, they talk about real humans doing real things and they bring real problems up front.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_01: And that I think is what connects students to economics, even if they don't do it professionally later.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_01: That's the basic toolkit they can take away.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_01: So I start with economics as a social science.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_01: And their particular article by Makloop, if matter could talk.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_01: And by the way, I didn't get to talk about the people who influenced me.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_01: That influence comes from the great Richard Abeling, who taught me at Hillsdale College.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_01: And if not for him, I would not be an economist.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_00: And he's now at the Citadel.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_01: Correct.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_01: And so that's part of his influence.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_01: I've adapted that into my classroom.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_01: So that article talks about economics as a social science, with humans being the subject matter, and that's what makes all the difference.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_01: Because a physicist studying atoms does not study their opinions.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_01: Atoms don't have opinions, they don't intentionally change their behavior if they're being watched.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_01: They don't lie about their motives.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_01: We study people in economics, and people do all these things.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_01: And sometimes they lie, and sometimes they lie without knowing that they lie.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_01: And the economist, as a scientist, is left to sort out all that mess.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_01: And what I tell the students is that the hope is we have the same mind, so we can understand our subject matter.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_01: That article, by the way, starts with a parable, pretty humorous, which a lot of the current dry literature doesn't even try to do.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_01: And then we move on from there to articles that make spontaneous order unforgettable.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_01: I absolutely love the article by Radford.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_01: We call it the cigarette currency, but it's the prisoners of war camp, showing how cigarettes became the currency.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_01: Markets and trade happen everywhere.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_01: People's innate uh want is to trade and to exchange when their valuations are different.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_01: And it's looking how markets happen in a microcosm of prisoner of war camp.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_01: Money is an institution and it can be anything, whatever people accept as currency.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_01: So we do a lot of other articles too.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_01: We we talk about Mises' anti-capitalist mentality.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_01: Very well explains why people hate capitalism.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_01: We bring up Tim Koran's preference falsification, Kramer's O-ring theory, Tallock's work on rent-seeking.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_01: We even do a quick recap of the calculus of consent.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_01: Gordon Tullock and Jim Buchanan.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_01: And then, of course, beyond that, there is a whole host of recommended readings.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_01: And they can look at it, they can call me, we can talk about it.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_01: And many of them do.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_00: You mentioned that many of your students face the challenge in this current political and cultural environment of the risk of being misinterpreted or canceled for comments they make.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm sure that's something you have to guard against in your own classroom, that students don't feel intimidated by other students who are there.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_00: How do you address that?
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_01: Aaron Powell To be frank, there were problems in the past, different places, different classes I've taught.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't seem to be a problem with TFAS students.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_01: And that goes to who they are, I think, and also how I try to set up the classroom.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_01: As you mentioned, that's a real challenge nowadays that young Americans describe a version of something which I would associate with the country I left.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_01: The gap between public lies and private truths.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's very sobering to hear in a free society.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_01: And we should take that very seriously.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_01: What I bring into the classroom is Timur Kuran's framework on preference falsification, which is one misrepresents what they really think under social pressure.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_01: And the way I put it to them is it's not unique to any place.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_01: Like that can happen anywhere where the cost of honesty goes up.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_01: And when you look at it as a mechanism, not as a personal failure, that takes away some of its power.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_01: And from there, I tell them one has to decide what is worth standing up for and what is just noise.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_01: And then once you've decided that, then you have to find people and spaces.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_01: And so the classroom is supposed to be one of those spaces where you can do open inquiry, where it's welcome.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_01: And I put that right up front.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_01: Like one of the first things, rules in class, that's what I say.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_01: You can say anything you want to say respectfully, obviously, and keep an open mind, right?
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_01: So once we have that, then we can have a conversation, then we can have discussion.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_01: But I think it's very important for them to understand that there is a cost of silence, right?
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_01: So what happens when people are hiding their preferences?
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_01: So let's say I'm in the Soviet Union and there is a prevailing public opinion, and I disagree, but I'm afraid to speak up.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_01: I know I disagree.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if you, Roger, disagree, right?
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_01: Because we haven't talked about it.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't know if it's maybe 10 other people who disagree, or there could be millions of others, and maybe those millions, maybe we're actually majority and we could do something, but we don't know about each other.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_01: So then what happens?
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_01: There could be one small thing that sets the balance off and the society collapses all of a sudden.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_01: This is what Tim Koran talks about in his article.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_01: We don't want that because those types of sudden collapses of societies, they're always cataclysmic.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: So protecting open inquiry is not just personally healthy.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_01: It matters for functioning, well-operating, free society.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_01: And that's how we approach it.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_00: I wish we had more time to delve into the concepts you teach in the classroom.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to have to have you back on at some point.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_00: I think our students are just very fortunate to have you in the classroom.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_00: I know you enjoyed the experience of teaching.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_00: I think you said that you look in anticipation to our summer coming around where you'll have a class of TFAS students in the classroom.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_00: Do you think the kind of students you have that we bring to you are students who will develop into courageous leaders in the future?
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_01: So I could not wait for this semester, for this summer semester to start.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_01: I even had a countdown.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_01: I was preparing, I was getting my materials ready, I was thinking what I would add to this class because I like to change it up.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_01: When I get the roster of students, I look at who they are, what their interests, and I do change up things a little bit for every class.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_01: These students are wonderful.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_01: It is an absolute joy to teach them.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_01: They come from different backgrounds, different states, different majors.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_01: They are deeply thoughtful.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_01: They're not afraid to sit down with a hard problem.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_01: I think some of them may be cautious at first.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, they may be too shy, but once you kind of give them the tools and say, this is what we're doing, we're gonna talk about it.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_01: There's no issues.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_01: They're not afraid to have a discussion, even knowing there's gonna be disagreements.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_01: They have all the raw material that makes future leaders.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_01: One thing to say about leaders and leadership in particular is leaders aren't just the ones who are presidents who are in the Senate floor or the CEOs.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_01: Leaders come in all shapes and sizes.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_01: There is leadership everywhere.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_01: It's a concept.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_01: Each and every one of them has their role in place, and I could see potential in every single person that walks into my classroom.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_01: It's just a matter of helping them to find where that would be.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_00: That's a perfect statement to end this on.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much, Dr.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_00: I.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_00: Katarina Brancado, for joining the Liberty and Leadership Podcast.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for devoting your time to our classroom and to our students and these future leaders we're developing.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_00: I'm glad that the audience for this podcast had a chance to be introduced to you and the marvelous work you do with us.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_01: It's my pleasure.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening to the Liberty and Leadership Podcast.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_00: If you have a comment or question, please drop us an email at podcast at tfas.org.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_00: And be sure to subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast app and leave a five star review.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_00: Liberty and Leadership is produced at Podville Media.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Roger Reim, and until next time, show courage in things large and small.