Productivity, Innovation, and the New American Golden Age: a Fireside Chat with Joe Lonsdale

Thank you, John, for having me. Thanks, Francisco. It's nice to see all you. I'm great. I'm here in Miami for a day. I'm glad to come by.

Well, it's definitely a very exciting time. It's a huge weight off my shoulders for our civilization. I was very, very worried where things were heading, and this is a much... even though the way his election was, much too close given the implications for our civilization, it was very scary for me. And I'd say I'm probably most excited about the fact that we have an opportunity with this vibe shift in our civilization to push back on a lot of the illiberalism, to push back on a lot of the authoritarianism, to clean up a lot of this massive corruption with hundreds of billions of dollars going to NGOs that are run by activists that are not accountable and that are pushing the wrong ideas that push our civilization the wrong way. And I think I was saying outside, I was exchanging notes with Marc Rowan earlier, who you know, someone who runs global finance obviously, but someone who's very involved advising Trump on these things. And I think he's right. I think if we make the right cuts and when you model it out, I think you have enough growth that you actually can get deficit back to below zero and pay it off, especially that plus DOGE. And so yeah, the thing I guess I'm most excited about of the things going on, of course, is DOGE. I'm friends with Elon and Vivek for a long time, and this is just awesome. This is stuff that I've been posting about and writing about and obsessed about. It's just this broken thing that's been like this cancer that's been growing out of control and everyone's been ignoring. And I feel like a crazy person, like this cancer, we have to get rid of it, and everyone's like, 'Well, yeah, but we're busy with our everyday lives and we don't want to talk about it.' And finally, all these smart people are like, 'Yeah, we have to get rid of it,' and this is awesome, let's do it. There's just all this stuff to fix in government. It's just incentives are misaligned, things are unaccountable, things are being stolen, things are being wasted, things are being managed terribly. It's just like, yes, let's finally fix this, and it helps everyone. It's amazing.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's one really important thing. So it's about cutting wasteful spend, it's about cutting unnecessary wasteful bureaucracy, and it's about cutting unnecessary regulations. And all of those are related and all those are very important. So I think one of the issues that I wish more people would talk about when they talk about that is that there's really two things that happened in the late 70s. First of all, it wasn't even Jimmy Carter himself. We don't remember this, but Jimmy Carter was actually famous in Georgia for consolidating a bunch of bureaucracy. I don't think he was a great president, but he was famous for consolidating bureaucracy and he ran on wanting to cut red tape from the left and saying, 'Listen, I agree with the right, this is bad.' His Congress was completely captured by the unions. The Democratic party was completely captured by the unions in the late 70s, and they're the ones that passed in '79, '80 these crazy protections and make it impossible to fire anyone. So that's one of the problems that happened to our government, and that was really bad. And then the other thing that happened in the late 70s was the activist courts. And so the activist court basically said... so let's start for like, so you go back to 1883, you had the Pendleton Act. And so what happened in the US is that we had a very small government, Civil War happens, we start growing the government massively, create all these new departments. Just if you graph it out, the government grows a lot from that point on. There's a lot of federal power created, maybe for good purposes, but you know, something I don't love, obviously, having lots of extra federal power. And by the early 1880s, both sides, everyone agreed this is a mess. People are coming in, they're hiring 10,000 friends, our government's run by cronies, it's totally a broken thing. So there's the Pendleton Act which put in some basic protections, which by the way are fine, I'm fine with some protections for civil service that aren't crazy, and it put in tests. So from 1883 for about a hundred years, there was a really hard test if you want to run something in the government. So when we went to the moon, when we fought World War I and World War II, when we did some things that frankly were pretty competent in our government that we should be proud of in our civilization, you know, in the mid, early 20th century, the people running those things had to pass hard tests to be running those government departments. Come to the late 1970s, these courts run by crazy activist people on the left basically said these tests are racist. And they said, 'Oh, but the tests actually predict performance.' 'That's not racist.' They said, 'Well, no, just by definition of the fact that different races have different outcomes on these tests, they're racist. You must get rid of them.' And so we completely got rid of the tests. So not only can you not fire people, which makes them a lot lazier by the way, in any business, in any organization, if you can't hold them accountable easily, you also can't give tests to make sure you're hiring the smartest people. So our government, you know, and by the way, it was pretty smart, I think, in the 60s, 70s. I didn't love big government, but it was at least not completely dumb. It's just gotten stupider and stupider and stupider for 30 years. And then you had the woke stuff come in the mid-2010s and you prioritize DEI politics, and then it accelerates its stupidness for the next 10 years. So now it's just completely... it's a broken bureaucracy.

So I think that when you're looking at AI... see, shifting topics a bit here, I was going to talk more about DOGE, but that's probably... you got scared of my passion there. You look at AI, there's really, I think, five ways people are investing in AI at a high level. There's the bottom level, which is the chip companies. There's the next one, which is the data centers. Pretty much all my friends, family offices who made money the last 20 years in tech have been putting lots of money in data centers. It's become a very popular trade, which is great because you guys are funding stuff for me to build on top of. So I appreciate that, keep funding data centers. I don't know if it's going to work with this much money, but that's great because it's cheap for me. And then the level three is the model companies, which is like OpenAI, of course, famously, which is a for-profit company now too, and xAI and Anthropic and everything. And then level four is software infrastructure. This is how you deploy AI, and that's obviously... there's a ton of... I think San Francisco is probably the center of that. There's a ton of very, very powerful software infrastructure companies. We were invested, for example, in Ollama, which like over a million engineers use to deploy their Llama models. There's a lot of good stuff there that makes sense. Palantir does a lot of stuff level four. And then there's level five, which is actually applying the AI to services itself. Like actually doing the healthcare billing, doing the logistics, doing the new legal company, doing the new back end of the insurance or trust or estate or whatever it is. And so most of... I'm obviously invested in stuff like, I'm proud to be invested in stuff that like, you know, if Elon starts a company in level three, xAI, that's great, I want to be involved in that. Obviously, Palantir here and lots of level four things. But most of what I'm building and doing is level five right now. And the way I think about level five is there's probably about five trillion dollars right now paid out in wages in the services economy in the US, and about two of that trillion, about 40%, is in areas of the service economy that we've already shown we could double the productivity. This is very important. This is not like maybe when models get better, this is today. Based on things we're seeing, we've already shown these companies can work at least twice as well. And this is things like, you know, I have a healthcare billing company that's doing a bunch of stuff that we're big investors in, and it's already got, I think last quarter was like 50, 60% margins, and like most healthcare billing companies are between 15 and 25% margins, right? So it's already more than twice or three times as productive. A lot of our companies, thanks to not just sprinkling a little bit of AI, but thanks to building a lot of stuff and applying AI properly. And so this is a huge fact because even if AI gets no better from here, just by scaling these things, you should pull like a trillion dollars of spend out of the economy. And I think it gets better enough, there's probably a trillion and a half to two trillion you're going to pull out of the economy in the next 10 years. That's a massive, massive productivity boost, and you're going to make a lot of money. We're going to make America a lot richer.

Totally, totally. I think that's very, very hard. So there's two... I'm going to answer this in two ways. First of all, let's just think about the last 15 years of tech to put it in context. So after Palantir, I started Addepar, which is a leading wealth management technology company. It's a giant SaaS company. We sold OpenGov this year, which we built, and my friends invested in a bunch of... my friends built a lot of SaaS companies. And the SaaS companies that my friends built in the early 2010s had a very high success rate. And I could say it's because I'm some kind of genius or something, but what was actually happening with these is the cloud was newly possible, there's new things you do in big data, and our competition was stuff mostly from the 1980s, 1990s. So you can kind of be like... we have access to the best tech cultures in the world, that's my background, so it's kind of like being a bully. It's like we're taking the very best tech guys in the world, we're going and beating up on these poor things from 10 or 20 years ago. And by the way, it's good for the economy to do this. It's not like a morally correct thing, but you can kind of think of it, yeah, you're being a bully versus these old ways of doing things. Now, if you want to start a SaaS company, if anyone in here wants to start something and compete against something in one of the major areas of SaaS and cloud, you're mostly probably competing against the stuff my friends and I and others built in the early 2010s. And that's a lot harder because there's not going to be as big of a gap there. And by the way, all this AI stuff, our companies are going to use it too. So these 10, 15-year-old SaaS companies, they're also using AI. Like, good luck trying to start a new AI SaaS company against them. They also have 300 million of revenue and a thousand people, and they already have all the customers. So that's really hard. So that's a dumb thing to do, that's really hard. So the question is, what is there to do? So you go back to those five levels of AI. A new chip company, that sounds really hard. It's probably possible for a couple of geniuses to figure something out, but that's really tough. It's very expensive to do these things. The data center is fine, everyone's going to invest in that. I'd like you to do that for me. Level three is like... the only person I would have ever backed with a new one of those was Elon. That's great because Elon is Elon, so of course you're going to back xAI, even though it was a ridiculous price when he started, but whatever, it's Elon. And then he has top talent, he's probably going to figure it out. But yeah, I would not suggest trying to do that. So the question is level four, level five. Level four is really hard, and the problem with level four is that there will be some things that win, there will be some things that get bought, but it's like the smartest people in the world are all doing it. And you're right what you just said, level three is trying to eat level four. All these level three companies, they just want to own level four themselves. And so it's really hard, like how do you do something that OpenAI or xAI or Anthropic or something is not just going to eat, not just going to do themselves? It is possible, but it's tough. And you better be really the best in the world, and you better be really running fast. And it's not even clear to me yet which has escape velocity and what doesn't. So that's a very fair question. Level five, I think, is by far the best risk-reward place to build because you have a lot of other things we're doing there. And going back to the model I just gave you of those SaaS companies that were beating up from 20 years ago, when I'm starting a level five company right now, my competition is these guys from the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s. Like, we're literally competing against the logistics biller in Baton Rouge for a thing we just won, which is... and sure, they're great people, they've been doing this for 50 years, but they just don't have the same ability to build and apply tech the way we do and to service the customer the way we do. And so if you can build a great operational culture, you can compete and win there. And I do think there's moats and barriers to entry at having great operational cultures that build and apply AI. So I think level five is a great place to build. I think level four for a few geniuses is going to be great, but man, that's hard. I wouldn't want to try to do that now.

Obviously, the thing I've done the most in these areas... so I built a bunch of SaaS companies. The other thing we've done the most, probably this and uniquely, is defense. So I've been lucky to start six different unicorns, three of them in defense right now, and I'm working on a couple more there. And the reason this is really exciting is Palantir was like the worst thing to build in the sense that the government was not fair, was not letting in new competition. We had to be so persistent, we had to keep trying for years and years and years. Even when we won, they would use the thing that cost 10 times as much sometimes. It's just a very frustrating company. But I think the path that was paved by Palantir, by SpaceX, and now by companies like Anduril, which was started eight years ago and has grown really quickly, to create these new primes, has created an awareness with the generals, with the admirals, with the people on the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, that the old primes... because all the old primes consolidated after the Cold War ended in the 1990s and they became completely dominant, but they became very bureaucratic and slow and they lost a lot of talent and they're not as dynamic. And they're still great things, some of the primes do, but overall, there's just a lot of need for new possibilities. And warfare has completely changed. We could talk more about that if you want. And so I'm building a lot there right now.

That's high praise. Very high praise.

So I originally moved 60% of my firm to Austin, and I think now it's about half of my firm in Austin. So we did have to move a few people to be back participating in the AI boom. I have to admit there are some things happening in San Francisco that are unique to the entire nation and that are based there. That said, there are also some things happening in Austin, in Texas, and other states like that that are unique in the sense that, like, the Tesla manufacturing plant that Omni built with Elon took 18 months, the biggest plant in the world. We wouldn't have got... they would have got that permit in like five years or 10 years in California, who knows. And we're going to build 500 ships next year with one of my defense companies in Austin. I just don't think we could have scaled nearly as quickly. Again, the state kind of worked and helped us move obstacles out of the way for dumb rules in order to help us scale. And so there's some things that have to happen in Austin and have to happen in states that are kind of more aggressive about helping us with these things. Miami seems to be attracting a lot of amazing talent. I was saying earlier, I used to come here like every year or two. I think now I'm here four or five times a year. There's amazing people here to see. There's a lot of the best investors. I think one difference... so I think there's lots of things we can talk about when Florida has run very, very well. I think you guys have like the best legislature because everyone terms out after eight years. And so you get the speakers of the house and leaders of the Senate here that are really aggressive their last two years, they got put in and they just do amazing work. So I love your guys' government here. The one of the differences is there's probably not as many engineers or engineering culture. So Austin has a top engineering school, has a history of for 70 years of lots of big companies in tech world being built there for tough engineering. And so there is more... it is easier, I think, having it makes more sense that Elon's there and people like that are there because we're building lots of things with engineers. I think if I wanted to be around top investment minds just investing, I think this would be a really compelling place.

That's awesome.

Absolutely.

Well, school choice is big. We're a big fan of it. We tend to work on orthogonal things that no one else is doing. So our framework is we're fighting special interests, we're fighting things that are broken, and we're trying to fix stuff that's broken by aligning incentives. And so I'll give you a few examples really quick. I know I'm obsessed with this policy stuff, I know most people maybe want to talk about other things, but just a few quick examples. Vocational schools is something I think really matters. We used to have a lot more, better vocational schools by percentage of people in the 60s and 70s. And instead, we started sending them to get like studies degrees and whatever other degrees at universities that basically lead them to become protesters because they can't get jobs. And it doesn't make any sense at all to me. We should actually train them in skills to get them good jobs. And so that's what vocational schools do. The problem is people are in vocational schools, so they're not held accountable. They also start to get ridiculous, they also start to get broken. And so if you ask an average politician about this, like, 'Yeah, I want to fund vocational schools,' and they stop there. But if the vocational school's run by an idiot, what do you do? And so here's what you do: if you have 20 vocational schools in a state, or 27 high-end ones like Texas does, what you do is you say we're going to fund the vocational schools in proportion to the average salaries coming out of them. And you measure, you get them a number which is their average salary over three years, and then you give them more money if they're doing well and less if they're doing worse, and you tie their entire budget to that. And what this does is it means the school's incentive is to say, 'Okay, what skills do we teach to get people good jobs? What businesses do we partner with?' And guess what, like having done this in multiple states, you could double the average salary coming out of these places. Some of them will do worse and get less, some of them do better and get more. It just completely changes the whole culture of it. And you take that idea, by the way, it applies to lots of things. Let's do another one: prisons. Prisons are very controversial right now. If you're on the left, you're worried they're trying to make money with for-profit prisons and that's the root of the evil. It turns out only 8% of prisons are for-profit, and they have just as bad results as non-profit prisons. So they're actually, turns out, they're all actually bad. I think if you're on the right, you're worried people are not being put in prison enough, which I think is very fair. And on the left, maybe there's more concerns. I do think some people have been punished for a very long time and are very unlikely to commit a crime again. There's no reason to keep punishing them. I think both sides have some points that are legitimate. But here's the thing no one's talking about: we're not holding the people running the prisons accountable to anything. These prisons have terrible cultures, they have no useful goals. It's a total mess. Like, what if you... they say you want to get together with like 10 of your smartest friends on the left and the right, what can we all agree on? We don't want people coming out of prison to go back in. We want lower recidivism. And we don't want people to come out and be unemployed. We want people to actually come out with skills to get jobs, right? Those are two obvious things. So what we should be doing is we should be measuring these things. You should be rewarding the people running it doing it well, rewarding the programs that are working, and defunding things that are not working. And as best I could tell, the best politicians ever get to is just like coming up with their own one favorite pet idea for the prison and giving it to them. They're not... most of them, unfortunately, aren't smart enough to think at the system level. Let's create a system that competes and that measures things and iterates. That's the way markets work. And so it turns out if you apply this system, by the way, to probation, to parole, to prisons, you can massively reduce recidivism, massively increase employment, like fix these things. And so that's the kind of stuff that we're working on. And so we're trying to do this in a bunch of different areas and doing a lot of different things with markets and healthcare and fixing education. But just trying to put common sense and incentives and accountability. And by the way, the moderate left tends to agree with me, the right tends to agree with me. The far-left hates me, and the far-left is captured by the government unions and they do not want any accountability, any measurement, because that is totally against how the far-left works. And so what we need here is we need people both on the right but also the moderate left to say, 'Listen, we're going to stand up to these people, we're going to demand there is going to be accountability in our society because our government's a huge part of our society now. We have to hold it accountable to results that we all want.' And that takes courage. It especially takes courage on the moderate left. It's mostly not there in our society right now, but I'm hoping with this vibe shift we're going to get more of them to come along.

Okay, you joke, it's a big deal, man. It's a big deal. Making these systems work, it impacts hundreds of thousands of lives. And it's an ethical... it's like something we... it's our duty. We should be doing these things. Like just allowing... we all know these places are full of prison guards who hate the prisoners, prisoners who hate the prison guards, everyone's miserable. It's a total mess. It's a broken culture. And leadership is about not allowing those broken cultures. It's about going in and fixing them. And so everywhere in our society, there should be no room for broken cultures that aren't getting results.

So we started Palantir 21 years ago. I think a lot of you were mentioning you loved Alex Karp's clip at the Reagan Library this weekend. I'm very proud to be his co-founder. He's an amazing guy. Someone mentioned his hair keeps getting crazier as he gets richer. So he's a character. He's a PhD too. He not only is a PhD, he was the star student of the top philosopher in the world. So he's definitely... he was the only non-technical person who was full-time on the co-founding team. He was a Habermas student at one point. Yeah, exactly. Alex is a genius. He's taught me a lot about people and institutions in the world. It turns out you need kind of these philosopher-builder types for these things to work. And he had a big influence on me on that. You can't just have the best tech, you also have to understand the world and be interested and curious about how the world works, which Alex is. Palantir took some of the very... really one of the very top tech cultures in Silicon Valley, we created it, it was ranked number one for quite a while, and applied it to areas of our society that don't have functional tech cultures, didn't have functional cultures for a very long time, and solved some very important problems. Helped save the government billions of dollars, helped eliminate several thousand terrorists, helped block dozens of attacks, and then helped do that for about 40 of our allied countries. And it turns out the hard technical problems we solved by creating these ontologies and bringing the data and the workflows together in certain ways to build on top of, actually are very useful for AI. So not only did we do something I think that was very important for the world and built a unicorn, I think in some ways we got a little bit lucky because we had the best tech culture, we had this thing we built that it turns out is very useful for AI. So we're kind of in the right place at the right time with that. And then Alex sees the advantage and built on it. And so they're now going around and teaching hundreds of the top corporations how to do things in AI. I think one of the things that... you show up and these people have all been spending lots of time and money on this last two years, and so the IT guys are sometimes terrified of Palantir because you come in and say, 'Give us one week, and in one week we're going to do something that's much more useful to you and impressive than the last 18 months you just spent time on.' And we consistently do that with the pilots, and then you win it, and then you grow. And that's why Palantir is growing really fast. So it's in a really good position right now. But I think the moral kind of background of the mission for Palantir was after 9/11, let's make sure that does not happen again. And you know, it's not... you can't only credit Palantir, but I think we definitely played a critical role in making that happen.

I hate the TSA.

You want to keep the TSA though?

All right, well, maybe hire Palantir instead of TSA, that I'd be less concerned maybe. But it's like such a waste of everyone's time and money. And they don't... whenever we test them, they always fail.

Yeah, I think just listen, what they do... listen, so yeah, we mentioned this earlier. Warfare has fundamentally changed. If you want to fight a war today or in five years, it just does not look anything like the wars of the past. Like, very sadly in World War I, you have this kind of aristocratic class that had been kind of beaten by the progressives for a generation and was finally feeling it, really excited that it got to prove itself because the whole purpose of the aristocracy in Great Britain and in the past was to be the warrior class and to defend the civilization. And so these young men got on their horses and they took their swords and they charged to the front and they were all mowed down. It was very sad because warfare just totally completely changed and it was a huge mess. And there's a lot of things like that today that are analogous to that. I have to be careful what I say because I hang out with all the guys who run these things and they'll get pissed off at me. But there's a lot of stuff we're doing now that is equivalent to that. And what warfare should look like today is you need mass swarms of autonomous weaponized things, whether they're drones, whether they're overwater vehicles, which we're building with CACI. We're going to build 500 ships in Austin next year to build these very sophisticated ships that can coordinate with a fleet and attack together and separately, and they're weaponized different ways. Whether it's underwater stuff like the dive stuff that Anduril is building, where you're building 200 of them a year out of Rhode Island right now, hopefully going to accelerate that. Whether it's overland, which is the very best self-driving in the country winning all the awards, rather than sending 30 tanks to Ukraine which 21 are destroyed, you could send for the same cost 30,000 of these things that are intelligently swarming and weaponized. There's all that stuff. And then there's things like Epirus, which is a company I'm actually proud to have helped start. We kind of anticipated all the drone stuff seven years ago, but after Anduril started and we backed that, we started Epirus. And it's the best... it's like a four-field is the best directed EMP in the world. So you can shoot microwave radiation in a cone and you could turn off like 100 drones at once, or you could turn off a very powerful large Iranian drone, which I don't think these are Iranian drones over New Jersey, but we could turn those off too if someone wanted. And so there's things like that. They're really critical to the future of warfare basically. Like it's kind of like Star Trek, you do need to be able... if you're fighting swarms of these things on land, in the air, in the ocean, you also need to be able to turn them off and fry them in a distance. And so there's all sorts of these new things. They're just critical to how war is going to be fought. And it's critical to get our manufacturing base up. So this is... I am very pro-liberty, I'm very against most industrial policy, but we do need industrial policy from a defense perspective. Otherwise we're going to lose to China if we ever have to fight them. We have to be able to produce more of this stuff. So this is all really critical. I'm very against the adventures of wasting trillions of dollars in Afghanistan. I'm very aligned with...

Counterinsurgency warfare is more Israel's thing, but they did a great job, absolutely.

On the wealth tech side, Addepar just crossed $7 trillion this month. I'm very proud of the company. $7 trillion that reported through the platform. It's a very dominant company, I think about 1,200 firms using it, and that's going to keep growing. There's a lot of really interesting stuff we're doing with creating new ways that any RIA could offer in an aligned way really smart alternatives to their investors. So I do think wealth tech is getting to be smarter, more dynamic. There's just a lot of fun stuff we're building there. I think the estate stuff is going to be handled way better. You shouldn't have to know the smartest lawyer in New York. You should be able to automate whatever the Jewish guy is telling you from New York to do for everyone for their taxes, instead of having to all pay, I shouldn't just have to pay $100,000, everyone should get access to it. So there's things like this that are coming which are just smarter and better with AI that I'm very bullish on. But just like everywhere else, there's just a lot to build there, a lot to keep fixing. There's a lot of good accounts and finance guys in Miami too, for what that's worth. Not just New York. A lot of our New Yorkers have moved to Miami.

It's great. We have over, we have 90-something students there in the first undergraduate class. A lot of students turned down very top schools, have very top scores, that came in. They want to go somewhere I think that in some way is more patriotic. It's a place where you can pursue truth. It's a place where you're taught to be the philosopher-builders that we want to see in our world that are going to step up and fix things. It's really, I think there's all these classical virtues which are very important which we don't talk enough about. And my favorite classical virtue is courage. And there just, you're basically taught the opposite of courage now if you go to Yale or Harvard or Stanford. It's basically like, shut up, go along, don't try to speak out. Echo what you're told. If you speak out, if you're virtue signaling the thing we've told you to say, but if you disagree with us, don't speak out because you're just going to get punished and you're going to get hurt for it. And that is like the worst possible message that we could be teaching our youth. You want, you should go to college to have debates and to speak up, but then at the same time also, by the way, have the intellectual humility that you don't for sure know all the exact right answers and that you're going to listen to their side, you're going to learn that, you're going to be able to steelman their arguments. Like basically almost no one on the left who comes out of Harvard or Yale knows how to steelman smart people on the right. They literally have been not allowed to listen to that, which is pathetic. Like John Stuart Mill, one of the great classical liberals who shaped all of this, that if you don't know the other argument, then you don't actually know your argument. And this is just a dysfunctional set of affairs that's bad for our civilization. We live in a liberal civilization that is based on these open debates and it's based on frankly understanding the conversations of the last thousand years, especially the last 300 years with the Enlightenment, which are also not being taught at these schools. And so there's just a lot of stuff to fix. And University of Austin, I think our goal is for about half the kids to be STEM. I'd say it's about one-third STEM right now because we are starting really deeply with the kind of history, economics, philosophy, and great ideas stuff. But the idea is to have both great thinkers come out of there who are leaders in policy and politics and other parts of society, but also to have STEM leaders come out of there, but STEM leaders who are more well-rounded and who are going to fight, you know, and speak up and build cultures that are healthy.

Listen, I think Hillsdale is an important institution. I don't want to throw any shade at it. It's different in the sense that Hillsdale is explicitly a conservative institution. I don't know what cancel culture goes on there against left or not, but I do know the University of Austin does have people who, there's people on the moderate left, there's people on the right, there's all sorts of views. I think University of Austin has scores from students coming in that are similar to the other top 30 universities. So our goal is explicitly to compete with Harvard and Stanford and Yale and build like the next great university that's based on more of these traditional values. And I guess the other thing that's different is we have a talent network with over a hundred people in my community who've started and built the unicorns and built the top tech companies who are engaging with our students and are helping us design the new program and are figuring it out. So I think having this philosophical foundation combined with the innovation world is also pretty unique.

It's a very crazy entrepreneurial endeavor. We had to do like thousands of pages of regulation. Like all these things are set up to stop you from building new universities. It's really, like there's always moats in everything I build. These are some of the worst moats I've seen. We had to be very stubborn. Fortunately, people like Barry Weiss, Niall Ferguson, two of my main co-founders, and Pano who's been our president, they worked very, very hard and pushed this through. And it's amazing getting to work with those people.

I mean, of course everyone agrees it went too far. And it's great, and we won by only a very small amount. I mean, we won, which is great, and it's a rejection. I think a lot of people, a lot of moderates said this is enough. A lot of people I know who were moderates who support the other side actually came to me and said, actually, I'm kind of glad we lost because we do need to get rid of this nonsense. And so I do think a lot of people in America have had enough of this. Now, that doesn't mean that it's going to go away. I think these neo-Marxist philosophies have marched through the institutions. They've taken over most of our universities. There's hiring departments at our top universities where you can't even hire a moderate person, a moderate Democrat. You have to only hire Marxists. I mean, these places are completely broken in sociology, anthropology, history. You can't have a history person who believes, I mean, not believes in the British Empire, which would be great, but even believes in like the power of markets. I mean, it's just crazy how broken these things are. And so yes, America said it's gone too far, but does that mean it's going away? No. We actually have to go and fight the fights now. So here's what drives me crazy. There's something I'm thinking about with Cicero. Every red state in the country still has state-funded institutions where they're paying tax dollars where there's literally departments that everyone in that department is a neo-Marxist of some form who hates markets, hates Israel, hates America. Like these red states where the voters don't believe in this, and you tell them, oh, it's academic freedom. It's academic freedom to take my money in this freaking state, take your money, and to fund these Marxists. And that is how powerful they are in our society that we're still doing that. And by the way, all in K-12, if you're a teacher in pretty much every red state, you have to go get a master's degree from woke U in order to be brainwashed to hate markets, to hate America, hate Israel, in order to get paid more to then come back and indoctrinate the kids. And school choice is great, don't get me wrong. I love school choice. It's important. You guys started here in Florida first, thanks to Governor Bush and others, and it's just amazing. And we're going to try to do it in Texas next year. But school choice is not enough because no matter what, in 10 years there's still going to be a bunch of kids in these schools. And these red states need to stop telling these teachers to go get indoctrinated in order to get paid more at a workplace. This is crazy. It is crazy. And it's like a lack of courage. They say, well, Joe, people think it's controversial. It's just really hard to fix these things. I have lots of other things I'm doing. I'm like, no, if you are a governor or legislator and you are not fixing this, you are not doing your job. So we have a lot of work to do.

Oh no, of course. Everyone's now just shifting slightly on the new side and they're quietly firing a lot of the teams that were obviously totally insane people, but they couldn't admit they were insane people until about five minutes ago. And there's a big shift. And it'll come back and they'll do the next crazy thing because there's no courage in any of these companies. And it's fine. It's a good thing for our society that the people who are the NPCs and the people that don't have any courage are now going along with getting rid of this nonsense. But yeah, just the lack of backbone in all of these people and all these CEOs, it's disgusting. But you know, it's nice they're coming around.