Like if you're in a kindergarten, you probably don't want little Joe in the kindergarten going up and telling people hard truths. We don't need that in our kindergarten. I get that, but this is not kindergarten, man.
And we need to stop that form of feminization from being involved in running anything because it is just so dysfunctional. And by the way, that's cancel culture too, is the feminine thing too, right?
Social ostracization. I love women. I have five daughters. I love girls. I want them to be very powerful women. But you don't want that kind of feminine energy being allowed to run how you run society. It's dysfunctional.
No, absolutely not. Gosh, there's so many directions we can go in. How do you think things got to this point? I feel like there's a change happening over the last couple years with the pendulum starting to...
It's happening in some areas and not others.
A lot of this again is tied to Marxists and socialists who are actively plotting to take over institutions. I think that's what they've done for the last 60 years. There's the very famous march through the institutions. A lot of people thought this was conspiracy theory when I first heard about it, but it's very clear they've done this very successfully. And you could think of it almost like a virus. In this case, I think the virus has learned to hide itself because anytime it's actually speaking out in too obvious of a way, it starts to get stamped out. So a lot of the people who run all of these conquered institutions haven't changed. The people in charge of the sociology department at Yale and the education school at Stanford are still goddamn socialists who hate businesses and are bad for our civilization, but they've learned not to say certain things. They've learned not to very publicly say we shouldn't have advanced math anymore, which is what the education department at Stanford was doing. They're going around getting rid of advanced math for equity purposes. Getting paid tons of money for it. It's crazy. So here's the problem with the intuition. A lot of people say, 'Oh, I'm not hearing this stuff anymore. It must be gone.' It's not gone. It's going to come out again as soon as they feel like they're safe. But right now they're hiding, and I think it's hiding everywhere. So we shouldn't fool ourselves. We probably live in similar information environments. We all have our own information bubbles. We're seeing things on X where they agree with us. In America our president agrees with us. Probably in the UAE the culture is very similar. I had a bunch of guys from UAE visiting this week. I was teasing a guy about getting into shape and it's like totally okay, nobody cares. Whereas in America you get in big trouble.
Yeah. Tell me about the creation or founding of the University of Austin.
You know, there's an idea we talked about for a long time. It's been very clear for a long time that universities have been going this way. If you believe maybe the British Empire wasn't all bad and there were some good things and some bad things, but some stuff was really helpful for the world, you cannot get hired in any history department in a top 100 school right now. If you have a strong view that markets are really powerful things for society and have helped western civilization, you probably could still get into an economics department but probably not a sociology department, probably not an anthropology department. You've got to hide those views if you want to be hired at the top levels of academia. So we've been watching this for a long time and we've all been really busy and things went really crazy with the George Floyd, BLM, and all the woke stuff in 2020. We can go back and look at what people said. Everyone pretends it didn't happen but it was really crazy. It was freaking out of this world. You couldn't even say that people born as men shouldn't be in girls' sports. There's all sorts of crazy stuff. That Tulsi Gabbard guy running for Senate, the craziest things he said back then trying to pretend he didn't do it. And he tries to justify it all with the Bible which makes it all worse. So these things were really crazy and it had gotten to a point where you couldn't ignore anymore how conquered all these places were. Niall Ferguson has been a friend for a long time. He's one of the world's greatest historians. Very thoughtful man who's written tons of books but he also advises people in the real world because he understands the world so well. So a lot of top people in global finance pay for his advice. We've been chatting about this and he got to the point where he was noticing anyone smart or competent couldn't get jobs in history departments anymore. The average IQ has just gone way down because you have to be dumb enough to go along with ideas that are not true. And then Bari Weiss, I've known her for quite a while. I was one of the first big investors in The Free Press. When we first got connected we were both aligned that our civilization needs to rebuild its institutions. You can't just go on the board of Yale and fix it. Yale is done for a generation, but we need a new Yale, we need a new Harvard. She was doing this in the media which I really admire. She had millions of listeners. And so the three of us got together, we had a couple others who were involved, and these things are hard to build but it's gone really well.
No, it was awesome. I had such a good — I was only there for maybe about two and a half hours, but I met dozens and dozens of the students, many of the staff, and obviously things are early days, but it just felt like what a university is supposed to be.
I love it. I love it. I want the students and our leaders in our society to have intellectual courage, to have the foundations of the intellectual traditions of the West, and to be able to debate and understand and explain those. But then we also have to have really strong STEM. We're building a STEM building next to Elon's buildings out near Bastrop, next to the Boring Company and SpaceX. We have robotics, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering. Right now one of my top former Palantir friends who built Palantir with me is teaching an agent programming course, teaching how to use AI in programming. It's cool, we have all sorts of good stuff out there.
Yeah, that's awesome. Do you think the West has been a victim of its own success in some ways?
Oh, always. There's always something like this. Our adversaries want to do things against us. Iran has crazy information plots and China has crazy information plots, but a lot of the problem is when you're too successful, you get soft. This is a theme throughout history. One of my favorite books that princes always used to read in Europe for a thousand years was the Cyropaedia about Cyrus the Great, a really great Persian leader. Ironically I really admire the Persian people and the Persian leaders, even though the current ones are bad guys. I don't think they represent their people very well. I really admire Cyrus and I'm hoping we can get good Persians in charge again. One of the big things he was really good at is eschewing luxury for himself, sleeping outside with the troops. This is a recurring theme in our history: luxury weakens you and softens you and makes you get screwed up. And that's definitely a challenge all of us face and have to be aware of. I'm not saying I'm as tough as my great-grandparents who fought in both world wars. Those guys were tougher than me. I wish I was as tough as them. But we still have to do our best even though we have this luxury that does weaken us. You forget why you're here in the first place and why you've had the success. It always happens.
Yeah. On a personal level and on a civilizational level, how do you avoid that or get out of that malaise?
There's all these frameworks that are pretty useful. One of my favorite historians is Carroll Quigley who wrote The Evolution of Civilizations. He plots the different stages civilizations go through in terms of this mixing of different cultural forces and new ideas and how they expand. What almost always happens is the forces that helped you grow really fast and were necessary to be functional become special interests and then start doing things for themselves, taking things for themselves versus for the growth of the empire as a whole. That always leads to bureaucratic sclerosis and decay, and at the end of the cycle they get invaded and wiped out. First of all you have to look out for those special interests. I think probably the worst types are government unions because we needed government workers and competent government, but then these people only exist for their own sake and they're incompetent. I was just in DC with my friends. There's an agency — I can see which one it is — they have over 5,000 programmers in this department. It's a very big thing for the United States. And they noticed that not very many seem to be doing anything, but they're not allowed to fire them. So they gave a really good retirement offer and 2,000 took it. So now there's over 3,000 left. My friend says, 'I'm not allowed to test them right now, it's against union rules, thanks to Democrats. Can't test them for hiring or firing, but you can test them for a reorg.' So he got the most basic programming test — something anyone in Silicon Valley in their first year would easily pass 100%. He did it himself three times to make sure it was easy. Then he said, 'We're going to test all 3,000 plus people for the most basic skills and see if anyone gets 70% on this thing that is super easy.' How many out of the 3,000 plus do you think? 68. Sixty-eight. And he's not allowed to fire these people. Then there's 40 DevOps people and they want to hire 10 more. He says, 'Why do we need 10 more? I don't even know if I need more than five of you. Let's get on Zoom and each say what we're doing.' He gets them on — there's 40 people on the Zoom. Only three of them would come off mute to say what they were doing. This is the Democratic base in DC. They literally will not speak because they know they're not doing anything. And despite that, he cannot fire them. Then when he tries to fire one of them who's doing really crazy stuff, people in the agency are protecting him and stopping the firing. So our society has much worse special interests. Government unions are probably the worst, and teachers unions are a version of that. But you have other special interests too. Corporations that have changed the law for crony capitalism, blocking others from their business and overcharging us. Healthcare is one of the worst. So we have to talk about them and be willing to fight them. For me, a lot of what I do with the Cicero Institute is we say we need courage from our leaders to identify special interests — corporations working with government in sketchy ways, government unions that are not getting things done, NGOs that are getting funded for hundreds of billions with very little outcomes. You've got to make them accountable. You've got to say, 'If we're paying you this much, we should pay based on outcomes.' Or if we need to fire people who aren't even getting off the Zoom to say what they do. The White House is working very hard on this under the Office of Personnel Management to make it legal again to fire people with a process. It takes courage, it takes hard work, and it takes overcoming unfortunately the politicians that are bought off. A huge part of the Democratic Party is completely bought off and will not ever want to let you fire these people, which is crazy.
So when the Republicans are in power, why do they not make these changes?
To change the law which was made in the 70s by the Democrats for the civil service, you need 60 votes in the Senate. And we don't have 60 votes in the Senate, so we can't actually change the full law. But we are making a bunch of changes, trying to eliminate a bunch of things DC is doing, using executive orders, using what we can within current law, trying to go back to the courts. A lot of the theories are that the Constitution was set up so the executive should be able to get rid of people who are incompetent and not doing things, and the legislature shouldn't be able to stop the president from doing that. So we're going to have to fight this fight in the courts as well. We are having these fights. We are doing it. It's slow. It's hard. It's like a very weird legal battle. It's like Harry Potter where the wizards fight. This is like the legal wizards fighting back and forth. It's not supposed to say that. [laughter] So whatever, man. That's what it is.
Well, this is one of those identity-based ones where I guess you are allowed to say it, right?
There's good ones. I don't know, man. [laughter] I guess I'm allowed to. It's DC for you. It's terrible. I got to stay out of that place.
