Speaker 1: Welcome.
Speaker 2: It is Verdict with Center Ted Kruz, Ben Ferguson with
Speaker 2: you Centator.
Speaker 1: This is really fun. We're getting to do back.
Speaker 2: To back evenings with a live audience, which is really exciting.
Speaker 2: And we've got a dear friend of yours and a
Speaker 2: guest with us tonight getting to talk about some really
Speaker 2: cool things, especially when it comes to education. Imagine starting
Speaker 2: a university. That's a pretty cool idea, and we have
Speaker 2: someone that's done that.
Speaker 1: I'll let you do the intro.
Speaker 3: Well, we're very proud to be in Austin, Texas tonight
Speaker 3: with a very good friend of mine and someone who
Speaker 3: I say, without hyperbole, is one of the smartest people
Speaker 3: on planet Earth. We are with Joe Lonsdale. Joe Lonsdale
Speaker 3: is a big tech entrepreneur. He is a venture capitalist.
Speaker 3: He runs a major venture capital fund that invests in
Speaker 3: tech companies across the country. He was the CEO of Pallanteer.
Speaker 3: He led the big tech exodus from California to Austin, Texas.
Speaker 3: And one of the amazing things we're seeing is Austin
Speaker 3: Tech is becoming a mecca for people in tech who
Speaker 3: were not insane socialists came into that and Joe came
Speaker 3: as sort of the search party. He was sent first,
Speaker 3: and I think probably Silicon Valley was curious the reception
Speaker 3: he would get, and they found the cannibals did not
Speaker 3: eat him, and so he wired back. Come to Texas.
Speaker 3: There's freedom here, there's sanity here, Joe. It is great
Speaker 3: to be with you. Welcome to Verdict.
Speaker 4: Thanks for being here, Ted, and thank you very much
Speaker 4: for including me. It's very kind of you, saye one
Speaker 4: of the smartest senators. I appreciate the line there.
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Speaker 2: You've got something that I think is amazing, and it
Speaker 2: deals with education. I want to start with that first,
Speaker 2: because not only did you leave California, but you also
Speaker 2: had this insane idea of Hey, I want to start
Speaker 2: a university.
Speaker 1: Where did that come from? And what is the goal emission?
Speaker 4: Oh, you know, we've been talking about the universities for
Speaker 4: a while. I mean all of us have seen over
Speaker 4: the years, so they've kind of gone the wrong direction.
Speaker 4: But you know, when I was in university, I'm I'm,
Speaker 4: I'm you know, I was there in two thousand and
Speaker 4: two thousand and four. They with problems. There was there
Speaker 4: was is you know, you'd get in trouble for being
Speaker 4: polically incorrect. You be told not to talk about things.
Speaker 4: They got my first B for trying to defend John
Speaker 4: Locke in a humanities course because that was, you know,
Speaker 4: not supposed to do that.
Speaker 1: But but it was famed that one, by the way.
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah, I know, you know, but it wasn't like.
Speaker 3: Joe that's called humble brag first B first that's true,
Speaker 3: but its freshman year.
Speaker 4: It was you know, but but you know, it wasn't
Speaker 4: totally crazy. And I think a lot of people who
Speaker 4: have not been at universities for a while don't realize
Speaker 4: like just how crazy these places have become over the
Speaker 4: last you know, five six seven years. There was I
Speaker 4: think it was like a shift in our society. Maybe
Speaker 4: it was around twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen, but I mean
Speaker 4: at Stanford Review, which Peter Thiel started and I was
Speaker 4: involved with, which is a libertarian and conservative paper. Like
Speaker 4: a lot of the kids there, it is like you
Speaker 4: can't even admit you write for it anymore. It has
Speaker 4: to be pseudonymous because it would ruin your social life
Speaker 4: and you'd be attacked for it. And like these departments
Speaker 4: have just gotten so radicalized and so broken, and it's
Speaker 4: so there's there's an you know, the administrators. Over the
Speaker 4: last twenty years, you've tripled the size of the administrations. There's
Speaker 4: more administrators now at Yelling. There our students, bat's many
Speaker 4: administrators at Harvard. This DEI thing has come in. It's
Speaker 4: anti merit. It's just it's just so broken. So I
Speaker 4: think people don't realize that, you know, I actually believe
Speaker 4: university has played a really important role in our society
Speaker 4: the last hundred years. And you know, I was really
Speaker 4: I'm really lucky to have friends such as Neil Ferguson,
Speaker 4: the great historian, Barry Weiss, you know who I think
Speaker 4: runs one of the most important media companies in the
Speaker 4: US today, as my two co founders and all of
Speaker 4: us realize, you know, American institutions are breaking, they're failing.
Speaker 4: It's bad for our country. You want you to do
Speaker 4: in America when these things are broken, you build new ones.
Speaker 3: And Joe, what you're doing here is incredibly important. So
Speaker 3: you founded the University of Austin. Tell listeners of the
Speaker 3: podcast what the University of Austin is and what's the vision.
Speaker 3: What is it trying to accomplish.
Speaker 4: You know, we're trying to build a new great university
Speaker 4: in America that competes with Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT.
Speaker 4: It competes for the best and brightest, and we want
Speaker 4: to have one of these places where it actually pursues truth,
Speaker 4: where it doesn't defer to who's offended, doesn't defer to
Speaker 4: a crazy ideology. You don't have a bunch of you know,
Speaker 4: administrators hounding you down. You actually are are focused on
Speaker 4: teaching young people to be courageous, to basically learn how
Speaker 4: to speak up, learn how to confront solutions in our society.
Speaker 4: If you can have even like a small number of
Speaker 4: the people who go on to run our elite to
Speaker 4: learn how to speak out, learn how to call out?
Speaker 3: Where is the university and the journey of its founding
Speaker 3: and becoming established and growing.
Speaker 4: So you know, it turns out, like a lot of
Speaker 4: other industries, there's a big cartel for starrying these things.
Speaker 4: We had to do two thousand pages of regulation, We
Speaker 4: had to you know, go through all sorts of things.
Speaker 4: But we were officially operating university, the first new private
Speaker 4: university in Texas in over sixty years. Where we're we've done,
Speaker 4: We've done all sorts of different events and seminars, and
Speaker 4: we have our first, our founding undergraduate class joining right now.
Speaker 4: There's gonna bee hundred students to join the fall. You know,
Speaker 4: we've had over five thousand.
Speaker 3: Professor, are they all freshmen or that are starting or
Speaker 3: how does how does it work in terms of the
Speaker 3: class coming.
Speaker 4: In, We're we're defining them as all freshmen, although we
Speaker 4: may admit a few people who who've gone to a
Speaker 4: couple of the top schools and are fleeing them, and
Speaker 4: so you know, we conclude them with us instead of course.
Speaker 3: Now are there particular majors that are being offered to
Speaker 3: start with?
Speaker 5: What? What are the students going to be studying.
Speaker 4: Well, you know, we want all the students to have
Speaker 4: a sort of intellectual foundations of like the Great Debates
Speaker 4: of Western civilization, kind of like the core what's called
Speaker 4: a classical liberal core. But then you have different centers.
Speaker 4: We have a Center for Economics, History and Politics, and
Speaker 4: we have people who've given up tenure at place is
Speaker 4: like University of Chicago and Columbia and other places like that,
Speaker 4: so I teach there. They have a center for STEM.
Speaker 4: Our friend Elon Musk built a lot of things here,
Speaker 4: and people who help run SpaceX and Boring Company are
Speaker 4: helping us shape some of the STEM to make sure
Speaker 4: these students are people they want to partner with. So
Speaker 4: we have multiple different electives as well.
Speaker 2: Just like any other college, raising money is something that
Speaker 2: obviously is vitally important. And then you have moments where
Speaker 2: you can see we're probably instead of you going to
Speaker 2: people telling them the story, they start coming to you.
Speaker 2: Did that just happen when we saw so much anti
Speaker 2: Israel rhetoric on college campuses, where then people that you
Speaker 2: know came to you and said, hey, maybe I do
Speaker 2: want to get involved in this idea.
Speaker 1: Maybe you're onto something here.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you know a lot of people like I haven't
Speaker 4: realized just help broken the universities are. They always thought
Speaker 4: it was something guys like Ted and I like to
Speaker 4: argue with the crazy people on the far left, and
Speaker 4: we've probably always called these places out. But they've gotten
Speaker 4: a lot worse since we were arguing with them twenty
Speaker 4: years ago, and so, and a lot of these people
Speaker 4: finally woke up after October seventh, and after they saw
Speaker 4: obviously the presidents of Harvard and MIT and whatnot like
Speaker 4: in Penn going and making total fools of themselves, and
Speaker 4: they started to look a little more closely. And then
Speaker 4: of course, like the plagism scandal comes out, and then
Speaker 4: if you're been paying attention, it turns out that it's
Speaker 4: not just clydeing Gay, it's all the leadership of the
Speaker 4: DEI and the Title Line Office all plagiarize all their stuff.
Speaker 4: Because guess what, if you have a philosophy that's anti
Speaker 4: merrit maybe you yourself aren't doing things that are meritocratic.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 3: Look, I don't know about you, Joe, but I for one,
Speaker 3: was really inspired when when former Harvard president Claudine Gay
Speaker 3: wrote the immortal words we have nothing to fear but
Speaker 3: fear itself.
Speaker 1: First time she's ever written that. It was amazing, you know.
Speaker 3: Then she said I have a dream, yes, and then
Speaker 3: eat pluribusunum.
Speaker 1: It's really brilliant.
Speaker 4: Let's just be honest, and it shows you how rotten
Speaker 4: these places are that we've they've now done an investigation.
Speaker 4: The board of Harvard didn't even look into her scholarship
Speaker 4: before making her president. They didn't even look into it
Speaker 4: at all. And it's clear because it's not She was
Speaker 4: not hired for being a great scholar. She was hired
Speaker 4: for obviously other reasons for her, for her gender and
Speaker 4: her sex.
Speaker 3: So how are you finding your faculty to assemble a
Speaker 3: new university. You've got people like Neil Ferguson, You've got
Speaker 3: Barry Weiss, who I would note if you have not
Speaker 3: read Barry Weiss's resignation letter from the editorial board of
Speaker 3: The New York Times. It is one of the most
Speaker 3: important things written in the past decade, and it is
Speaker 3: the most concise and effective indictment of the corruption of
Speaker 3: corporate journalism that I've read anywhere. So the two of them,
Speaker 3: how did you team up with them? And how did
Speaker 3: you find the other members of your faculty.
Speaker 4: You know, I have to have to give Marc and
Speaker 4: Drewson credit for introducing me to Barry. We both were
Speaker 4: talking to him about the need to rebuild our broken
Speaker 4: institutions in the US, whether it's media, whether it's universities,
Speaker 4: whether it's so much else we need to weed to fix.
Speaker 4: And I'm so inspired by her. Neil's been her friend
Speaker 4: for a very long time. I think he's the greatest
Speaker 4: living historian, and a lot of other people are attracted
Speaker 4: to working with people like that. So, you know, we
Speaker 4: announced this, We've had we had in the first few months,
Speaker 4: five thousand professors send us notes to try to inquire
Speaker 4: a boy working with us. So it's not been wild them.
Speaker 4: This is the place people want to be part of.
Speaker 3: Five thousand professors. That's worth underscoring. Look, there are, and
Speaker 3: I think this is true in every one of our
Speaker 3: institutions that is corrupted and captured by the left, there
Speaker 3: are people trapped within them who have not lost their minds,
Speaker 3: but they're scared. They still want to earn a living,
Speaker 3: they want a job that they know if they open
Speaker 3: their mouth they risk being canceled, being fired, being thrown out.
Speaker 3: But I think that's true at universities. I think that
Speaker 3: is true in entertainment. I think that is true in journalism.
Speaker 3: I think that's true in big tech. Let me shift,
Speaker 3: you know, the world a big tech Well, you know,
Speaker 3: I think back to big tech fifteen years ago, and
Speaker 3: I think at the time, big tech was really at
Speaker 3: a fork in the road, and it could have gone
Speaker 3: down the road of embracing a libertarian utopia, of saying,
Speaker 3: leave us the hell alone, we're gonna be entrepreneurs, We're
Speaker 3: gonna invent a new world, or it could have gone
Speaker 3: down the road they chose instead, which is nanny state
Speaker 3: to talitarianism. We have the power and we will use
Speaker 3: the power to silence anyone who dare.
Speaker 5: Speak speak out.
Speaker 3: Do you agree with that assessment, and if so, why
Speaker 3: did they choose road number two?
Speaker 4: I do agree with that. And to tie it back
Speaker 4: to what we're just talking about, Ted, these cultures come
Speaker 4: from our universities. Google is hiring thousands of PhDs out
Speaker 4: of these universities who've just grown up in that culture
Speaker 4: their entire life. Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook. These are these tech
Speaker 4: cultures and university cultures. They're one and the same. And
Speaker 4: you know, the university culture is that Roden. That's what
Speaker 4: these kids are up in their whole life. And it's
Speaker 4: interesting because you kind of learned these places like rather
Speaker 4: than a university teaches you to be courageous and speak up,
Speaker 4: you learn shut up, virtue signal, go along, or you're
Speaker 4: going to get in trouble. And you learn there's gonna
Speaker 4: be a five percent of crazy people on the far left,
Speaker 4: and when they shout, you obey because that's how you
Speaker 4: stay out of trouble. And that's the way these companies
Speaker 4: are run.
Speaker 5: Now, is there a tipping point there?
Speaker 3: There have been a handful of people who have shown
Speaker 3: real courage in the tech space. There's you, There's Elon Musk,
Speaker 3: There's Peter til there's Palmer Lucky, there's Larry Ellison.
Speaker 5: That there are a few how many others are there?
Speaker 3: And do you see a tipping point where others will
Speaker 3: feel like, wait, I can speak out in support a
Speaker 3: free enterprise, I can speak out in support of free speech.
Speaker 3: I can stand up to the borg the collective mentality
Speaker 3: of Silicon Valley.
Speaker 4: You know, I think a lot of people are scared,
Speaker 4: and they're scared for good reason. This is where I'd
Speaker 4: actually have a little bit empathy towards lat of these
Speaker 4: friends of mine. I get texts every time that we
Speaker 4: put something online that you and I like and we're
Speaker 4: speaking out or are being strong. I get texts from
Speaker 4: people who run multipillion dollar companies. I get texts from
Speaker 4: people whose companies support hundreds of thousands of other companies,
Speaker 4: and they're terrified if they're supporting one hundred thousand dollar
Speaker 4: companies that if they become you know, we drinking vodka
Speaker 4: with the name of a friend that Austin on it.
Speaker 4: He does not do politics because he knows that if
Speaker 4: he becomes controversial, it could hurt him. So there's a
Speaker 4: lot of fear right now in the community, and the
Speaker 4: far left very good at demonizing people who speak out.
Speaker 2: You moved a company from California to Texas. There's a
Speaker 2: lot of people that love that, but they also there saying,
Speaker 2: don't California my Texas? When people move here, I'm assuming
Speaker 2: you had people that didn't agree with your conservative values
Speaker 2: it came.
Speaker 1: Do they see life differently? I mean it's been a
Speaker 1: couple of years.
Speaker 2: Now do they come and go, hey, it's actually better
Speaker 2: way of life and they like freedom and they're starting
Speaker 2: to come around to it, or do they just move
Speaker 2: here because they say, Okay, well it's more freedom during
Speaker 2: COVID and I pay less taxes, But I'm still the
Speaker 2: same person voting.
Speaker 4: You know, I want to give you statistic you probably know,
Speaker 4: and obviously I'm a huge fan of this, sad Or.
Speaker 4: The last race you run was closer than it should
Speaker 4: have been. If it wasn't for people who had moved
Speaker 4: to Texas, the race would have gone the other way
Speaker 4: by the numbers. And so it turns out that on
Speaker 4: the on the whole, the people who choose to move
Speaker 4: here tend to be even more on the side of liberty,
Speaker 4: more on the side of freedom even than the people
Speaker 4: who were born here. So I think it's fair to
Speaker 4: be really worried about these crazy people coming in. But
Speaker 4: you should know the people who choose to come here, like,
Speaker 4: we're fleeing something that's bro and we're coming here because
Speaker 4: if America falls were screwed right, And a lot of
Speaker 4: my friends, by the way, have given up. I have
Speaker 4: billionaire friends who are living in Switzerland's we're living in Singapore,
Speaker 4: who are say, Joe, the woke guys are in charge.
Speaker 4: You're done. My wife and I are here in Texas
Speaker 4: because we are making a stand here for America and
Speaker 4: those are our values and there are a lot of
Speaker 4: our friends values.
Speaker 2: You've got kids, how much of that was your decision
Speaker 2: as well? I mean, when you've got young kids. You
Speaker 2: and I are actually the same age, graduated the same year.
Speaker 2: And I know for me that.
Speaker 3: By the way, Ben, he's made gazillions of dollars, he's
Speaker 3: been a major CEO. What the hell have you done
Speaker 3: with your life?
Speaker 1: Man, I'm a co host of Center Ted Cruz. I've
Speaker 1: got that going right, you know. But how much was
Speaker 1: it your?
Speaker 3: And I will tell you back in a moment, and
Speaker 3: I will tell you Joe does have a basketball corner
Speaker 3: and we are gonna shortly play hoops. I'm told Joe
Speaker 3: has a pretty serious hoops game. Ben in high school
Speaker 3: was a center, and you know, has got some mass.
Speaker 3: So we're gonna see how things play out.
Speaker 4: He's a little bigger guy. You I wouldn't talk too
Speaker 4: much Tress before a game.
Speaker 1: Somebody's going to be out of here.
Speaker 3: This is the only part of my game is trash shocking.
Speaker 5: If I give up on trash, I had zero game left.
Speaker 4: Ben. We're loving raising our four daughters here. I think
Speaker 4: this is a great place to raise kids. I think
Speaker 4: it's a lot more tolerant place of a lot of
Speaker 4: different views. It's funny to say, used to be Sanrancisco
Speaker 4: was quote unquote tolerant, but it actually is not like
Speaker 4: if you if you speak out and then they are aside,
Speaker 4: you're in trouble there. I think here is very accepting
Speaker 4: where we live in Texas and yeah, I mean, listen,
Speaker 4: you guys have all heard the stories. I had friends
Speaker 4: kids who were in first grade at the local private
Speaker 4: school that we had heard was the best one, and
Speaker 4: they came to us and they were distraught, and they said,
Speaker 4: you know, the teacher lined the kids up today and
Speaker 4: told them to be lining up by gender, and then
Speaker 4: she yelled at them for half an hour about how
Speaker 4: there's not only two genders and they're confused. And then
Speaker 4: he's like, I mean, I'm not obsessed with this stuff myself,
Speaker 4: but if the teachers are obsessed with it, that's kind
Speaker 4: of weird place to raise kids.
Speaker 5: What's the path to take them back?
Speaker 3: So with University of Austin, you were fighting to try
Speaker 3: to take back universities. I think that's incredibly important you know,
Speaker 3: I guess to say, as a parent, you know, you
Speaker 3: sit here and think, do you do you spend hundreds
Speaker 3: of thousands of dollars to send your kid to a
Speaker 3: school that will try to brainwash them to hate America
Speaker 3: and hate you exactly, And it's it's hard.
Speaker 5: To know what to do.
Speaker 3: But at the same time, you want your kids to
Speaker 3: do well in Education has been the key to success
Speaker 3: so often in America that I know a lot of
Speaker 3: parents that are just just almost paralyzed.
Speaker 5: What do I do?
Speaker 3: You're fighting to take that institution back. Do you have
Speaker 3: hope we can take universities back? And then I'm gonna
Speaker 3: ask you the same question on big tech.
Speaker 4: You know, on universities, we got to build some new ones.
Speaker 4: They're gonna they're gonna influence the broken ones to be better.
Speaker 4: I think it's gonna take multiple that we build and
Speaker 4: and uh, yes, I think we can shift the back.
Speaker 4: We're not gonna reconquer Harvard and Yale. I mean it's
Speaker 4: not you have basically realize these places. It's the administrators,
Speaker 4: it's the departments through their own hiring. It's it's the
Speaker 4: lawyers who are in charge. It's the board is in
Speaker 4: charge that you're not gonna reconquer those schools, but you
Speaker 4: can influence them to be better and you can build
Speaker 4: better ones. I actually think we have a better chance
Speaker 4: in case to twelve that we do in universities, and
Speaker 4: that's thanks to school choice. If we can get that done,
Speaker 4: and this is something I wish though, I think a
Speaker 4: law of rary Republicans are on our side now in Texas.
Speaker 4: They get it, they get how bad it is. I
Speaker 4: think a lot of people in the rural areas, you know,
Speaker 4: they know the teachers, they love them, and they're confused.
Speaker 4: They don't realize there's tons of schools, especially in our
Speaker 4: cities in Texas even here, that are brainwashing our kids,
Speaker 4: and we desperately need to give parents the right to
Speaker 4: get out of those schools.
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Speaker 2: You seem to be doing something that is really cool
Speaker 2: and fun. A lot of people do legacy late in life.
Speaker 2: They think about their country, they think about their grandkids,
Speaker 2: and then they kind of shift what they're doing. You
Speaker 2: seem to be in the fight right now and includes
Speaker 2: you working on legislation through I Think Tank.
Speaker 1: You even had an op ed that just came out
Speaker 1: this last week.
Speaker 2: Tell people about that aspect of what you're doing, because
Speaker 2: you seem to be all in on the fight again
Speaker 2: at a young age, in your early forties.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you know, I'm still building companies, are running my fund.
Speaker 4: So I'd be really nice just to be able to
Speaker 4: wait until I was sixty or seventy. I think maybe
Speaker 4: if this was twenty thirty years ago, I might have
Speaker 4: done that. It feels like this is a really critical
Speaker 4: time for our country and we can't just wait twenty
Speaker 4: or thirty years.
Speaker 5: Absolutely.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So so give given that given that we might
Speaker 4: not have a country left if we don't all fight
Speaker 4: for it right now. It's my job to do it.
Speaker 4: And you know, at Cerro Institute, we have teams in
Speaker 4: twenty States. We're fighting for liberty and accountability and going
Speaker 4: after all sorts of nonsense there. Yeah, the op ed
Speaker 4: was fun this week. I felt pretty strongly. I'm friends
Speaker 4: with Elon Musk and watching what's happening to him and
Speaker 4: the president with the weaponized courts, and you know, our country.
Speaker 4: One of the reasons is except as we have, you know,
Speaker 4: equality of justice under the law. And I'd be very
Speaker 4: against Republicans weaponizing courts to attack the left, and I
Speaker 4: was also very against the left weaponizing courts to attack them.
Speaker 4: I think it was great. Jeb Bush spoke up about
Speaker 4: that as well.
Speaker 3: Yeah, look, it is absolutely grotesque the weaponization of our
Speaker 3: justice system. We're seeing it against Donald Trump with four
Speaker 3: indictments all over the country, with a ridiculous civil verdict
Speaker 3: in New York, and we're seeing it against Elon Musk.
Speaker 3: I will say the Biden administration, watching the Biden administration
Speaker 3: weaponize every single federal agency against Elon Musk. And as
Speaker 3: you know, Elon, until like twelve minutes ago, wasn't a Republican.
Speaker 3: Elon had never voted Republican until just over two years ago.
Speaker 3: Elon voted for Hillary Clinton and for Joe Biden, and
Speaker 3: he said publicly the first Republican he ever voted for
Speaker 3: was Myra Flores here in Texas, just a couple of
Speaker 3: years ago. And the fact that he dared speak out,
Speaker 3: and especially the fact that he bought Twitter and has
Speaker 3: a loud free speech, the left has decided he must
Speaker 3: be destroyed. And even for someone with vast resources, having
Speaker 3: the federal government come after you, it is a daunting proposition.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's really disgusting to watch, like how open they are.
Speaker 4: It feels like a thorobold country tech And you know,
Speaker 4: I think you step back a little bit. There's this
Speaker 4: battle in our in our civilization for truth and justice,
Speaker 4: and it's very clear truth and justice have been losing
Speaker 4: a lot the last twenty thirty years. I think buying
Speaker 4: Twitter now X, I think hopefully what we're trying to
Speaker 4: do with some of these institutions, we can start to
Speaker 4: turn it around. I still think we're losing a little bit,
Speaker 4: but I think we're going to start turning things around.
Speaker 4: And I if more of us can get into the fight,
Speaker 4: more people like Elon, I think we have a chance
Speaker 4: to win.
Speaker 3: So how about big tech? Is their hope for turning
Speaker 3: big tech around is are there You mentioned five thousand
Speaker 3: professors wanting to get out. That's a really encouraging stat
Speaker 3: to me. Do you think there are likewise people in
Speaker 3: big tech that are quietly wanting some semblance of sanity
Speaker 3: but are afraid and is there a way that they
Speaker 3: can come out of hiding.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there's definitely a lot of them. And I'll tell
Speaker 4: you what. The way that this works, thank goodness, is
Speaker 4: there are market forces and you know, Google would have
Speaker 4: been way ahead of everyone else if they didn't have
Speaker 4: a completely corrupt I mean, it's a joke online, but
Speaker 4: it's like they put out these things they saw this
Speaker 4: week where they couldn't even do a picture of a
Speaker 4: white person. You'd ask eighteen twenties, show me a couple
Speaker 4: from the eighteen twenties America, and it's like it's like
Speaker 4: a black guy and a Japanese woman, and like that's nice,
Speaker 4: but it's probably not.
Speaker 5: I don't know if you've seen.
Speaker 3: It's actually very complex game theory, but if you ask
Speaker 3: Google to create a chessboard, it has only black pieces
Speaker 3: and it's very hard to know how to win or
Speaker 3: lose at that point.
Speaker 4: That the funny part is they only got in trouble.
Speaker 4: I want to make the point. But the funny part
Speaker 4: is they only got in trouble for this because somebody
Speaker 4: thought to say, show me a German Nazi soldier from
Speaker 4: the nineteen thirties, and it showed this Han Chinese woman,
Speaker 4: this Native American guy and not.
Speaker 2: Seeing it for him, and that was too far amazing,
Speaker 2: that was too far New York Times.
Speaker 1: It's like, Okay, now we actually know we need to fix.
Speaker 3: This lit the Chinese Nazis. That was a real problem
Speaker 3: history class.
Speaker 4: So but we're scayed.
Speaker 1: Did she actually cover that in paper? I don't know
Speaker 1: if you've read that one yet.
Speaker 4: Here. Here's the great thing about markets and about innovation
Speaker 4: is that when you start to focus so much on
Speaker 4: nonsense that you start to lose and you start to
Speaker 4: not track the best people, other people defeat you in
Speaker 4: the market, and those new things are very often you know,
Speaker 4: if you look at fast drawing startups versus these technopolies,
Speaker 4: the fast drawing startups are far less woke because they
Speaker 4: have to be focused on competence, and a lot of
Speaker 4: people who are joining them are fleeing these crazy broken places.
Speaker 4: So I do think it's going the right direction.
Speaker 3: Let me ask a business question. You know tech better
Speaker 3: than most people alive. Where are things going in terms
Speaker 3: of innovation ten years from now? What should we know
Speaker 3: now that we don't know, And how will the world
Speaker 3: be different in a decade.
Speaker 4: Well, the really positive thing that's happening right now. And
Speaker 4: I was never a huge crypto guy. I don't love
Speaker 4: fiacht currencies. I think there's a good use against like,
Speaker 4: you know, corrupt governments, but I was never that in
Speaker 4: a crypto AI actually, to me is actually very real. Uh.
Speaker 4: The way to think about it. We can talk all
Speaker 4: about sorts of complicated things, but the simple thing to
Speaker 4: think about is productivity is just really key in our economy.
Speaker 4: The reason we have more wealth is we do more
Speaker 4: with less. And there's all these industries in our economy
Speaker 4: where this this AI combined with operations can do things
Speaker 4: much more affordably, much cheaper. And so if you look
Speaker 4: at this like healthcare building, for example, we spend probably
Speaker 4: over a quarter trillion dollars a year healthcare building and
Speaker 4: you can probably cut that in the third over the
Speaker 4: next five or six years. There's tons of areas like that.
Speaker 3: So there are lots of cassandras painting stories of impending
Speaker 3: doom from Ai. Is AI gonna destroy us all? And
Speaker 3: do you know what year does Skynet go online?
Speaker 4: My do work a lot in defense, so I'm working
Speaker 4: on it. Said, but there's this. We can control all
Speaker 4: of you now we uh no, listen, there's there's two
Speaker 4: different conversations with AIS, my master, thank you, Downtown getting
Speaker 4: in trouble with there?
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 4: It does in charge the the uh. There's two different
Speaker 4: conversations with AI. One of them is productivity and wealth
Speaker 4: cre and it's actually extremely positive and that's really good.
Speaker 4: The other conversation with AI, it's very funny. A lot
Speaker 4: of people in the tech world are not religious. They've
Speaker 4: given up their religion, and so this is kind of
Speaker 4: like a form of their religion. The Singularity that taking
Speaker 4: over the world of AI, and it's very funny. It's
Speaker 4: a very missionic vision. It's very much like revelations in
Speaker 4: Judaism and Christianity, where this thing comes and it changes
Speaker 4: everything and it's effectively a new God because once it
Speaker 4: improves itself keeps getting better, and so it's like it's
Speaker 4: like a secular religion. In Silicon Valley, people are obsessed
Speaker 4: with it as They talk about end of times with
Speaker 4: it all the time. And it's funny because America has
Speaker 4: had a lot of other religious like revival movements over
Speaker 4: the last two hundred years where people were convinced that
Speaker 4: at times was coming very soon. This is quite a
Speaker 4: weird one based in Silicon Valley.
Speaker 3: All right, so we're going to wrap up momentarily, but
Speaker 3: I want to ask, so you are very engaged in policy,
Speaker 3: a policy question Washington is wrestling with right now. So
Speaker 3: as you know, I'm the ranking member on the Senate
Speaker 3: Commerce Committee, and AI is squarely within our jurisdiction. In fact,
Speaker 3: back in twenty fifteen, I chaired the first ever Congressional
Speaker 3: hearing on AI and have been focused on it for
Speaker 3: a long time now.
Speaker 5: There are a lot of.
Speaker 3: Voices in Washington, most notably Chuck Schumer, but also including
Speaker 3: some Republicans that are eager for a very heavy hand
Speaker 3: of government when it comes to AI, and Schumer and
Speaker 3: Democrats are proposing literally prior government approval before innovations in AI.
Speaker 3: I've been very vocal in saying that it's catastrophically stupid
Speaker 3: and if we put government in the position of prior approval,
Speaker 3: we will seed leadership of AI to our enemies, to
Speaker 3: China and other countries, and we will kill American leadership.
Speaker 3: I'm interested in your views because this policy discussion. I
Speaker 3: got to tell you a lot of big tech, the
Speaker 3: Googles and facebooks of the world, are saying yes, yes,
Speaker 3: regulate us because they believe they can capture the government
Speaker 3: and use it to shut everyone down. What's your take
Speaker 3: on how government should approach AI, because this is as
Speaker 3: hot as any question in Washington right now.
Speaker 4: Well, you know, mister Santa, one hundred percent agree with you.
Speaker 4: I'm really glad you're taking that that tactic. As you
Speaker 4: know that big companies, allot of them know they're losing
Speaker 4: some of their best talent. They know it's going to
Speaker 4: be hard to compete. But you know what they have,
Speaker 4: Like if I want to start a competitor, for example,
Speaker 4: to black Rock right now in New York, I've spend
Speaker 4: one hundred million dollars year on lawyers even just to
Speaker 4: do what they do. They love the fact that there's
Speaker 4: tons of rules regulations. These big companies would love it
Speaker 4: to make it impossible to compete against them in AI.
Speaker 4: So number one, one hundred percent keuth regulations as small
Speaker 4: as possible. Now, the thing I will give them, and
Speaker 4: we have to be very careful because this it's not
Speaker 4: why they're doing it. The thing I will give them
Speaker 4: is there probably are ways that some people could figure
Speaker 4: out how to use AI in bioterror in other areas,
Speaker 4: and so we have to watch it. We have to
Speaker 4: be very careful, we have to see as it goes along.
Speaker 4: But let's not give them the ability to make the
Speaker 4: whole thing crony and break it.
Speaker 3: Well, and look, there is no doubt there will need
Speaker 3: to be regulations applied to AI like to any other industry.
Speaker 3: Now many of our existing laws can apply. So are
Speaker 3: there risks of fraud? Are the risk of deception?
Speaker 5: Yes?
Speaker 3: So do you see things like Taylor Swift had the
Speaker 3: AI fake porn put put on, and because she was
Speaker 3: Taylor Swift and had such a prominence, she was able
Speaker 3: to get it pulled down. Well, what happened is if that's.
Speaker 4: Your kids, you yeah.
Speaker 5: And nobody would watch that.
Speaker 3: That's all right, that the market forces would take care
Speaker 3: of that all on its own.
Speaker 1: I was so ready to get in there, so ready.
Speaker 1: That was my moment, and you knew it, and you
Speaker 1: jumped in beforehand I'm okay, keep going, folks, go ahead.
Speaker 3: But there's no doubt there are going to be need
Speaker 3: to apply laws and rules, whether fraud, whether deception. The
Speaker 3: legal system will have to be applied. But but I
Speaker 3: think we should move slowly and understand what we're doing
Speaker 3: because the productivity benefits potentially are are are massive. And
Speaker 3: I will say, when you know, you talked a minute
Speaker 3: ago about how how the big tech companies want barriers
Speaker 3: to entry, and that is the most common one of
Speaker 3: the great lies of politics. It is the idea that
Speaker 3: that that conservatives are pro big business. The reality is
Speaker 3: big business loves big government. Big business usually gets in
Speaker 3: bed with big government, and big business loves when government
Speaker 3: puts barriers to entry to stop the next generation of entrepreneurs.
Speaker 3: And I'll say this, look, I have nothing for her
Speaker 3: against big business, but I am interested in the little guys,
Speaker 3: the next group of entrepreneurs. What the economist Joseph Schumpeter
Speaker 3: called creative destruction. And one of my favorite images on
Speaker 3: the Internet is a picture of the founders of Microsoft
Speaker 3: in nineteen seventy eight. And you have Paul Allen with
Speaker 3: long hair and a beard, and he looks like one
Speaker 3: of the begs. You've got Bill Gates with glasses the
Speaker 3: size of hip hubcaps and on. It's just that picture
Speaker 3: of a bunch of college dropouts, and it just asks
Speaker 3: would you invest money with these guys? And that is
Speaker 3: and they were taking on IBM, Big Blue, the giant behemoth,
Speaker 3: and they were there creative destruction.
Speaker 5: Now they're the giant.
Speaker 3: And I will say, let's do this to wrap up,
Speaker 3: talk about the importance of disruptors, of the innovation of
Speaker 3: the next generation, driving techs, driving productivity, driving our counties.
Speaker 4: I mean, this is one hundred percent how America works,
Speaker 4: as you say. And by the way, it's our biggest
Speaker 4: advantage against China as our adversary in China right now,
Speaker 4: the CCP, aside from just having killed a bunch of
Speaker 4: our billionaire Chinese tech friends, so everyone's terrified to build
Speaker 4: more tech if you're alredy sucessful in China, the other
Speaker 4: thing they have going against.
Speaker 5: Them, hold on, say that again.
Speaker 4: A lot of our tech friends died in the last
Speaker 4: or died under or fled in the last five years
Speaker 4: out of China there and a lot of them were
Speaker 4: taken away and disappeared and then came back and they
Speaker 4: won't talk about it anymore.
Speaker 3: So do we know names of people who are killed because.
Speaker 5: I give I don't.
Speaker 4: I'll give you a friend. And Andy Tan ran an
Speaker 4: Asian innovations group forty seven years old, about to go
Speaker 4: public last year after working hard for eleven years, and
Speaker 4: they told him they wanted to do things differently with
Speaker 4: the data and going in China. He said, I'm going
Speaker 4: to go talk to him Beijing. Next I heard he
Speaker 4: died in his sleep that night at forty seven years old.
Speaker 5: Wow.
Speaker 4: And there's a lot of stories like this. There's a
Speaker 4: lot of guys who built a lot of it, who
Speaker 4: fled and who are very sketish using thing. But I'll
Speaker 4: tell you the other big advantage we have though against them,
Speaker 4: other than them strewing that up, is basically all this
Speaker 4: productivity coming from AI. It's going to disrupt healthcare. It's
Speaker 4: gonna change of health care works. It's going to change
Speaker 4: how logisticsort. It's gonna change all these industries work. In China,
Speaker 4: the government people and their cronies they own those industries.
Speaker 4: They are not going to allow those to be disrupted.
Speaker 4: The question is is in America are we still able
Speaker 4: to disrupt things? Are we still going to be allowed
Speaker 4: by our government to go in and change how those
Speaker 4: things work. And it's going to be about because we
Speaker 4: have regulatory agencies that also want to slow it down
Speaker 4: with the big companies. But I still believe in America,
Speaker 4: with the right leadership, we actually can disrupt these things
Speaker 4: and we can grow. Well.
Speaker 3: Look, when AI replace this podcast, I hope that the
Speaker 3: computer that takes my place does a really fine job.
Speaker 2: I want to talk to you about how you start
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Speaker 2: first order. Fine, amy, Yeah, final question for you, and
Speaker 2: I want to go back to the university because there's
Speaker 2: gonna be a lot of kids that listen to this,
Speaker 2: a lot of parents, grandparents they're gonna and maybe even
Speaker 2: professors that may want to reach out.
Speaker 1: What does next year's class look like?
Speaker 2: Is there a cap on that if someone says I
Speaker 2: want more information, If there's a professor that's listening to
Speaker 2: this and says, hey, I want to leave this great
Speaker 2: institution that I'm at because of I'm being stifled or silence.
Speaker 4: I want to talk to you. How can they do that?
Speaker 4: So we're bidding our first class right now. This is
Speaker 4: just as competitive to get into as the other top
Speaker 4: ten schools. But if you have a really bright, young
Speaker 4: young student who's a founding personality, entrepreneur personality, it's pretty
Speaker 4: much one of the coolest places you can go. We
Speaker 4: have one hundred of my top tech friends who put
Speaker 4: their names on and advising it. We have all these
Speaker 4: tall academics. It's going to be very competitive to get in,
Speaker 4: but yes, please please please apply. You can go to
Speaker 4: you Austin dot org and Stritch University of all online
Speaker 4: uh professors, they're they're they're welcome to the email obviously.
Speaker 4: If they're amazing, we'll love to talk to and we
Speaker 4: have a pretty big line of people trying to get
Speaker 4: in these professors right now. But obviously it's very very
Speaker 4: interested in meeting great people.
Speaker 2: Thank you for coming on the podcast, Thanks for having
Speaker 2: us here. Thank you to everybody that's here in the
Speaker 2: audience as well. That don't forget we do the show Monday,
Speaker 2: Wednesday Friday. Hit that subscribe auto download button, and don't
Speaker 2: forget the Saturday week in review. Anything you may have
Speaker 2: miss during the week and the Cina and I will
Speaker 2: see you back here in a couple of days.