#AIS: Joe Lonsdale on the problem with higher education

[Applause] all right next up um joe lonsdale we go joe lonsdale's gonna come up he's gonna tee it up for about five or ten minutes in a solo dolo he told me he's burning the house down [Music] and they've just gone crazy with them well hello miami it's good to be here from austin for a day we're uh it's the second second best tech city here it's not too bad how many people actually are live in miami i'm curious with the crowd we've been over that so everyone's flown in town like me that's pretty cool well you know i'm i'm generally an american optimist but i want to talk about

a lot of stuff that's broken right now that we know how to fix but we aren't and you know talking to these guys especially hearing from elon and everyone today it's just so exciting what our civilization is going towards what it could be doing but if you talk to a lot of our smartest friends uh you know you look at guys like dolly or bridgewater and others you know they see america and decline they see decadence they see decay and i think there's a lot of important questions we're facing right now like why do these happen to a civilization why when there's so many exciting things going on that we know can make a really

great future you know for our kids and grandkids and for humanity why is this stuff breaking and i want to tell you a little story a policy group in austin and we have you know we follow the homeless population there and we were going along with a middle-aged mexican gentleman who had just lost his job and he went into the homeless center he's really struggling and he says you know i really want to try to find a job i want some job training and the and the in the person working there she says you know sir you deserve a home and he said yeah that's great but you know what can i get some training and she said you don't need to worry about that you need to

worry about getting a home for people just like you what you deserve and and i want to back up about the situation in austin because we're seeing this all over the country right now you know in 2018 the mayor of austin went to san francisco in l.a and and you know he was asking him for advice that i wanted to do for homelessness there wasn't really homelessness downtown it's funny this is funny to me too but there's actually a reason he was asking him for advice and it's a special interest thing where there's actually hundreds of millions of funding that goes to these groups in sf

and la that work on this into all of their friends and to all the people with their politics and it's a huge money spigot for for politicians they're very powerful in those other cities in austin they didn't have that money spaghett and he wanted it and you know you know what they told him i heard this from both sides he said you know you have to show people that capitalism doesn't work you gotta put it in their faces uh and then you'll get funding and he went back to austin and he brought all the camps downtown uh homeless death spiked homeless trafficking spike sex trafficking spike drugs spiked but uh

the funding went way up for him and his friends uh they got massive new funding you know unaccountable sources of money for these people and and and then and then of course they start deploying the answers which is the housing first strategy and by the way this is not just like a right versus left thing i think housing first was first deployed under w bush so this is this is a general strategy you guys probably know in la they spend eight hundred thousand dollars per new home trying to solve this problem there's seven thousand non-profits right now you know funded by hud around our country with the same philosophy and the philosophy is no pay for performance no transparency no

accountability just build the homes and you know when i first heard about this a decade ago i thought wow that makes sense there's 5 000 homeless people let's build 5 000 homes uh it turns out that there's still about a couple percent of our society that really don't have a home but they're living kind of on the edge on people's couches with other family with friends so the actual demand for homes and it turns out maybe it's about 6 million 10 million it's effectively infinite there's infinite demand for homes in our society and who do you think gets these tones when we build them so so this guy we're following you

know a few hundred people with my philanthropy group and our team goes back in with him and he gets in line and he's been leaving between a camp that they helped him set up in downtown and uh in a relative's house but he's saying he's living outside in camp and he goes back and he's just missed getting a home and he's frustrated and they're explaining the points to someone he says wait a second so you're saying that if i was on drugs i'd qualify for a home and they said well we don't like to say it that way but that's true and he says you're saying if i committed a crime i'd qualify for a home and they're like well yeah but that's that yeah we don't like

to say it that way but that's true that would have given you enough points to qualify for a home and and and and what happens here if you try to bait this system there's you know 7 000 of these pro groups around around the country uh you you're streamed out as a racist you're streamed at without a homonym attacks there's three things one there's not the intellectual humility to see that there may be other answers that may be correct two there's no respect for the dignity of everyone in this conversations if you disagree you are a bad person and three there's no passion for the truth these people are not trying to pursue the truth these people already

have the truth and they're giving it to you as a dogma and this is true of pretty much every of these broken areas in our society and there's a lot of them there's a lot of them right now there's like we know we have 50 training programs that we spend a lot of money on the federal government they're not accountable they don't tend to work they're very broken there's no transparency there's no competition there's no debate you're forward or against it and you're a bad person if you're against it there's there's there's these vocational schools around the country texas vocational schools uh were really underperforming seven years

ago and uh you know what we did is we ended up actually changing them so that the schools were only going to be funded based on the salaries of the students coming out if you tie it to graduation rates doesn't work because they can graduate everyone we tied to the salary is coming out we got the we got the salaries coming out to go up 117 percent just by putting in that accountability but but most of the country doesn't do that most of the country there's vocational schools people go very low graduation rates they fail uh we're not going to go into the k to 12 issues you guys know about but one fact most people

don't know is the education inequality in this country is far greater than the wealth inequality far greater so so there's i mean you know and you guys probably see there's infant formula production thing which is a crisis right now there's really basic policy mistakes around that the way we run our prisons our probation and parole there's all sorts of ways to run a much better we're not doing it though uh you know i'll give you one other example because elon was speaking today austin infrastructure i'm very excited about his boring company and you know they on austin we passed a six billion seven billion dollar plan to

build really small amount of infrastructure it's already balloon and cost of 12 billion you know for for less than half the original money for three billion dollars you could do over a hundred times as many uh as many tunnels in terms of what they're building right now and and you do you know with with a hundred more stations and so basically for a tiny fraction of the cost and again i go and talk to the city and talk to the guys there's no intellectual humility uh you know we don't there's no they don't respect your dignity elon's a bad guy we don't like elon whatever because they're they're some kind of extreme version

and uh and they're not interested in the truth and they're really not they're just interested in like what they're going to do their way and so can you kind of come back to this like what what's going on in our society where is this coming from and you know say what causes decadence to can decline i think the more important question is what actually works like why is our society functional and yeah i think this you have to take it back to the enlightenment right i mean this if you look at the exponential growth that's happened that's created the wealth that all of us enjoy it really happened over the last few centuries kind of post enlightenment and and you had a society

that really cared about pursuit of the truth really cared about competition of ideas right i mean and you need the virtues for this to work right the classical virtues that we talk about our civilization justice wisdom temperous courage you need the courage to actually fight for the truth and so what in the long time ago you tended to have religious dogma uh which could be some form of virtue signaling some sort of some form of you know basically keeping out outsiders and then you had separately debate and substance and debate and substance generally lost to religious dogma and what was unique about the enlightenment was unique about our university system

which we which we created was the liberal universities were a place to have debates where substance could actually win against you know dogma and against you know people who people who disagree you actually had to disagree civilly and you actually had to pursue truth you had to have the intellectual humility to know that you don't have all the answers you had to expect the dignity of people who are debating and you had to fight for a passion for the truth and what's happened instead is that most of our universities have been conquered by dogma by religion they no longer have these things so once

again we have the idea of heretics and blasphemy we don't call that we don't use those words but that's what we're facing right now if you disagree with people you're a heretic and you're committing blasphemy if you speak against all sorts of these things you're not supposed to speak against if you say that dei is actually causing problems if you say that here's why esg is wrong that's like it's blasphemous you're not this isn't yourself you're not allowed to attack these days you're in trouble you're told not to speak against it again or else you're fired there's been about lots of corporations right now this happens all sorts of people and

this is happening first and foremost on our campus what's happened is this zero-sum historically illiterate and tolerant virtue signaling religion has completely taken over and is silencing people and you know our founders our founders were were quite fond of heretics i don't know if people realized that but that was kind of the equivalent debate 300 years ago to this to this woke religion is that benjamin franklin he said i think all heretics i have known have been virtuous men they are the virtue of courage or they wouldn't venture their heresy and they cannot afford to be deficient in other virtues to the numerous uh enemies they provoke and so you know i think thinking what's

going on here all of us first of all need to go back and think about like where where do we not have enough humility to try to learn more where where are we not expecting people who disagree and actually engaging them and debating them as opposed to calling them names running them off and frankly i think we should also remember it's actually really good to be offended uh it's the opposite of safe spaces there's this weird cultural thing with the millennial generation i guess i'm barely part of it unfortunately where you're basically supposed to protect people from being offended you're supposed to protect them from blasphemy

i think it has to be the opposite if our civilization is not going to decline i think we actually have to go out of our way to learn that when we're offended we have to be stronger it doesn't mean you're you're somehow like elevated as a victim if you're offended that's your problem if you're offended and you just stop and think about it and we need to use that to advance our civilization again so that's my that's my save for today jason wanted me to add a bunch more blast for me but i'm going to hold off on that i think you did enough i think it did enough let's talk let's chop it up get in here

let's talk about why people feel like they're victims what do you think in our country makes certain people feel that they've been victimized what are the valid reasons people might feel that they have gotten a raw deal in america i mean i think all of our answers have gone through us i'm jewish and irish there was when my ancestors came over they were signs saying no dogs are irish allowed my grandfather was only promoted to a certain level at abbott because he was a jew actually didn't realize they hired a g when they they laughed and said oops that was a mistake you can only get to this level yeah and so i mean i think i think there

has been some pretty horrible things everywhere in the world frankly not just not just america i think everywhere you look there's there's always been groups that have been treated pretty badly i'm irish as well irish need not apply yep we had a pretty horrific family and and i'm lucky and then and it's obviously a lot easier to be irish than it is to be someone who's black in america i think or jewish and the holocaust yeah yeah so that would agree that's true different people's experiences are on a spectrum of the suffering correct 100 and so people who've suffered more deserve a little more empathy and perhaps a little

bit more uh consideration they deserve more empathy but doesn't mean you should embrace philosophies that are wrong or harmful right so i mean if you look at the obviously like there's a lot of truth and positive parts of the blm movement the last couple years but it's actually led to thousands more deaths in the black community because of the things that it was pushing because of the bad ideas we got another one of these things we got one more one more how many more of these do we got to do this is like way more work than i thought i was signing up for way more work someone get this man a drink we should have had cocktails i never

agreed to be in the conference business when we started doing this pod i respect you for what you've been able to do but this is way too much work you guys said you wanted to do a look at yeah all these fans are here though you're doing the q a tomorrow okay sounds good uh i think you know joe uh candidly i think that is where the argument breaks down a bit is um people have had different experiences and i would disagree that people have to stop thinking like victims i think sometimes we have to think very deeply about the suffering people have had especially when it's different than the suffering that you and i have had but that that

it's so it's and i'm not virtual signaling here i'm just countering i think that i think that's fully true what i was really against is i gave 10 examples of ways in which our society is broken and hurting poor people hurting working class people like just wasting money on things in dysfunctional ways and all of that is happening because we're like going to this illiberal society where we're not able to actually like debate things logically sure and respect uh respect other people on the other side of the argument and it's all about demonizing people who disagree with us right and i think that's just really really scary right now do you um there's a website people have tweeted

this uh i think the website is called what the [ __ ] happened in 1971.com you know what i'm talking about where yeah if you go to this website i don't tell me so in 196 if you look back socioeconomically there's a whole bunch of charts and graphs of everything from gdp to you know uh labor participation rates etc and there is a a moment in 1971 where just trend lines break and uh you know dorsey tweeted this out a little while ago um a bunch of people talked about it and everybody has tried to figure out what actually happened there's a couple there's a couple really good explanations i think right i think i

think the two biggest ones i think the two biggest ones by far is one is tech driven globalization and the other one is going off the gold currency which over financialized economy so i think the gold currency one was important i think the one that people don't talk about whether you agree with it or not i'd love to get your perspective is you know the move to the great society had a whole bunch of um things that i think were meant to do uh meaningful good and then broke down the family as well which is a huge problem in america and this is yeah so i mean we talk about things that make civilization prosper i think you get the classical

virtues and you get a strong families uh which by the way for whatever reason i still can't tell blm was strongly against which i think is like just just horrible so so i think it's a problem in the white community as well by the way it's like almost half kids are born out of wedlock right now and if you statistically look at that those kids just on average vastly underperform this doesn't mean to say there's aren't one-off cases and you should get divorced if it's the right thing to do but but but but it's like it's like it's really bad for society as a whole statistically you can't argue against that and exactly we've accidentally

created the incentives towards divorce in the 1960s which obviously wasn't intentional but this is a huge problem you're not supposed to talk about it's like a conservative thing i guess um and talk about the the financialization and moving off the gold standard as well how did that change socioeconomic dynamics in america well basically it made it so there's like a lot more money around and so i think i think it over it put more returns into finance so i i benefit from this is is do you for as an investor uh so but but making things yeah i think i think i think it put more returns into finance and

because there's this explosion of credit and money relative to so i think finance outperformed uh labor in terms of it's an advantage for finance which is not what you necessarily want it also really really helped accelerate tech driven globalization which probably was good for india and china and southeast asia and even africa but it basically forced workers in the u.s to compete against all these people directly and so you had people paid like 15 times as much in the us these are people and and and then and it wasn't sustainable so over time these other people just out competed over the last 50 years which is really

tough you find it hard to find your tribe in silicon valley oh yeah intellectually has it become easier harder the same you know i've just given up on like having even a tribe so much as like let's work on this together let's actually make prisons have lower recidivism and higher employment and here's how we're going to do it we're going to put these transparency and accountability incentives and it's hard for anyone to really disagree with that unless you're running the prisons union and so like we're getting all these laws passed from probation and parole and that we're getting all these laws passed foreign vocational school work better yeah and

what's annoys me chamoth is that i feel like as people who've succeeded we all sort of have a duty to go and fix these problems and almost no one else is working on them that does annoy me um and then in terms of like for example i want to talk specifically because you mentioned higher ed but if you go a little bit before this um we have no real form of competition in the school system yes um you need to use some mechanism for good ideas to win a bad idea solutions and the the existing framework has been charter schools um but that's been attacked in under every you know sort of way shape or form how

how does that problem get solved how do we get kids um you know so so the problem if you just give everybody choice right now and you give them say funding take the money where they want it basically defunds the public schools which then hurts the poor kids the most uh and so i understand why people are against like total choice for everyone it's kind of it's kind of more like policy detail i think the way to get around that is you just give the poor kids choice because if you just give the poor kids choice and now it's very clear you're just doing it to help them but even them being able to choose

will put pressure and get rid of the hurt the bad schools and help the good schools so you see some mechanism let's do the mechanism through the poor kids because that helps them the most like that that's that's my view seems actually like a reasonable argument because why should the i mean my kids have choice where to go with my with with my wife and i why shouldn't poor kids have that choice so there's there's things that teachers usually are going to hate that but at least it's a way to kind of kind of maybe build support for it and is there a way for unions to to actually do the the part of the job which is about protecting workers with but disentangle some of the

financial incentives to aggregate you know dues participate actively you just got to change the power structure right now they're totally in charge they don't want to give an inch i get it because every time they give an inch they're going to lose more power later on if they see that they're losing some battles then they have to negotiate and they're going to be more reasonable yeah you're right we're going to get rid of the bottom 20 percent we're going to you know you got to get to a point where the power changes enough that they're willing to then work with you but i mean the bigger the bigger thing i think is we actually need leaders who are courageous who could speak up about

problems in in the midst of everyone yelling and screaming and saying you're not supposed to say things because they actually i don't care what you're not supposed to say this is my version of the truth and this is what's going to be the best in society and what we're teaching at universities right now is the opposite of that what we're teaching is joe just don't say that joe why are you causing problems for yourself joe you know you're not supposed to talk about these things and i'm so sick of it because like this is why all that stuff's broken is because no one's speaking up you bought a college [Applause] my my friends barry weiss and neil

ferguson and i uh along with a couple a bunch of others are starting a new university in austin yes did you buy an existing university [Applause] we got 500 acres in the water it's really pretty it's about 15 minutes from the tesla giant tesla plan about 30 minutes from downtown what are we going to build you teach what will the majors be and what will be the approach you know the the hypothesis you know as entrepreneurs our job is to find these gaps in the world where something should exist but it doesn't and it seems like for the first time in a few generations uh you could actually build a university

that competes with the other very top universities and attracts the very you know most talented kids one of my obnoxious views on this which i think the stage might might agree with because it's in our direction is that you used to be the smartest people in the world a lot of them became professors and now you get a lot of very smart people becoming innovators becoming builders like my smartest friends i got to drop out of their phds from mit and stanford and caltech actually found more intellectual expression and satisfaction you know in the entrepreneurship world than they did there and so therefore in order to compete you want not only the top professors but you want to involve a

lot of top innovators and you know we want to teach we want to teach the history of thought in into free civilizations you want to actually see like like how the alignment come about what were the books what were the debates that people were having when they're found in the country and kind of kind of learn that core uh and then we also want to have centers where you keep interdisciplinary there's one of the key things universities this is again somewhat technical but they're broken because you get these departments to get conquered by a certain ideology so you get certain people to only allow people who think like them to be in those

departments so you want to you want to spread it out keep interesting how much how much of this is because of tenure tenure is a big problem you want to have some protection 10 year old originally was a great thing protected you to say what you want in practice now it's usually it's usually the other way around and it's pretty and yeah it's just not good yeah but yeah no there's there's a huge gap there i think we could fix it and my goal obviously is not to have everyone educated through one great university it's to put pressure on other universities to change and to help build multiple new ones which i think we need

to do and the school that you start interdisciplinary by nature which means that not necessarily known as for technical people for mathematics they'll be like a center of like political economy and history they'll be a center of data science and innovation and you know et cetera there'll be centers you know of you know arts and writing and stuff so i think you want difference there are different skills i think everyone should get the kind of core isn't it for profit or is he going to no it's non-profit it's probably it's part of me wishes i made it for profits i need to make money because it'd be easier to raise money for it but we've talked to him we've

raised about 100 million dollars nonprofit for it we have the land uh so i mean it's it's gonna work i put my name on it so i'll pay for it raised a hundred million dollars for this yeah the non-profit yeah yeah and uh when do you plan on opening it fall of 2024 is our goal for the first class to be about the size of caltech at first is the hope it's pretty ambitious project yeah well a country our country needs some some more leaders right now who are courageous and know what i think how do you energy how do you uh how do you how do you think you'll recruit the first class how

do you get uh yeah you want you want to do much more active recruiting than most of a top colleges right now especially because we won't be as known at first but i'll tell you what we have a seminar this summer of 80 kids and we had 44 000 inquiries of from kids about it we have uh you know when we first the first two weeks after the story was out on twitter in november that we're doing this we had 4 400 professors apply because these professors are fleeing a lot of the professors by the way a lot of them on the moderate left they're being attacked by the extremes for again talking about

and saying things you're not supposed to talk about and say and so so a lot of them are trying to fleet other environments there's a huge demand for it right now it's it's super weird that college kids yeah are against having debates and discussions so much worse i just find it so weird like that was like one of the best parts of college because i don't have i mean i haven't been in college so the last five years just gotten totally crazy like we had a woman profess a really smart woman you know definitely on the left but like she was applying from nyu law school asking against her we're going to do a new law

school because she can't stand that anymore and we say well what's going on she said well for example we used to use the socratic method in my law school and i would ask tough questions from both sides of the kids and now in order not to trigger people i have to write them an email a week ahead of time to make sure i can ask the question and then i'm going to ask in class next week so if you were to need a lawyer this is to train a lawyer i mean it's just this is this is where we are at this point so that's nyu law school is nyu that's the policy of nyu i think we got a bigger cycle project i don't know but like this is this our universities have just gone crazy the last five years like

but is that is that an isolated incident or no yeah yeah has more administrators and students these administrators are on the whole more likely to be neo-marxists than to be than be republicans i mean it's just like these things have gotten very extreme what do you think sex [Laughter] about did you ever think it would get this bad when you were about the university and you know i mean you lived at a time i mean the time at stanford was uh a pretty bold time when you were there in terms of freedom of speech in terms of debate vibrancy yeah what basically happened is all those radicals are being

inculcated and trained and brainwashed at stanford that we were reacting to what have 25 30 years ago they all graduated and then they went off into society and took over all these institutions and that's the problem we have today matt taibbi and glenn greenwald were talking about it earlier today where if you actually look at polling the biggest divide in america in terms of political and cultural beliefs is whether or not you have a college degree so if you're basically a college graduate you're a member of the professional class if you're not a college graduate you're a member of the

working class that is the biggest divide and you know the the members of the professional class by and large have very very far left views on sociocultural issues that's just a fact i mean whether you agree with it or not um and that is creating a huge amount of tension in our society because two-thirds of the country is working class one-third is a professional class in a democracy the side that has the larger numbers should win so the working class has the votes but the professional class runs all the institutions and this is the source i think of all of our political strife

in america is that the people who are in charge of our institutions from the new york times to the washington post to the fortune 500 disney hollywood and you go go down the list they have views that are fundamentally in tension in conflict with the views in most of the country the working class of the country now if you remember that class you may think it's a good thing we're going to push our views onto the country whether they like it or not and we're going to convert them that's what you call the elite class right that's the elite and um and that's what's basically now like what i'm describing is not like a criticism i

think it's just like i think that's what i think this is a factual criticism what's happening well yeah i don't think it's partisan either i mean there there are people who are republicans or democrats there are elites there are elites in both parties and there are certainly working class people in both parties but what i would say is that the parties are now in the process of resorting around this sort of political and cultural divide and historically the democrats were the party of the working class they are now much more the party of the professional class um and they buy into the belief set of sort of the college educated the you know the those sort of

you call it the woke uh sensibility and the republicans are in the process of transforming into a working class sort of populist party yeah and um and look there are in both parties there are outliers who don't quite fit in anymore but um but that's the fundamental transformation that's happening yeah i mean you guys fit into that your people in the republican party who don't fit in it anymore i mean i wouldn't even necessarily mind that dynamic you described so much if they weren't breaking everything and if they weren't not allowing conversations about how broken things are and the better ideas right it's a very strange illiberal nature so i think and i

disconnected with what we were talking about with glenn you know greenwald and tybee is that look if if you're part of the elite and you control all these institutions all the this cultural high ground but the country is not with you and just in terms of the sheer numbers you are going to use the tactics that people in power always use to suppress the greater numbers that's where censorship comes from the people who are running these institutions don't they want the debate to be over they want the power to end the debate because they're not otherwise going to

win that debate [Applause] well we're very interested in seeing where you take it and we appreciate you taking the time to share your views ladies and gentlemen thanks we'll let your winners ride rain man david sacks we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy [Music] it's like this like sexual tension that they just need to release [Music] your feet [Music] i'm going on [Music]