How We Re-Capture Big Tech & Universities: One-on-One with Tech Entrepreneur Joe Lonsdale - podcast episode cover

How We Re-Capture Big Tech & Universities: One-on-One with Tech Entrepreneur Joe Lonsdale

Feb 28, 202434 minEp. 352
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Speaker 1

Welcome.

Speaker 2

It is Verdict with Center Ted Kruz, Ben Ferguson with 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. And we've got a dear friend of yours and a guest with us tonight getting to talk about some really cool things, especially when it comes to education. Imagine starting a university. That's a pretty cool idea, and we have 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 with a very good friend of mine and someone who I say, without hyperbole, is one of the smartest people on planet Earth. We are with Joe Lonsdale. Joe Lonsdale is a big tech entrepreneur. He is a venture capitalist. He runs a major venture capital fund that invests in tech companies across the country. He was the CEO of Pallanteer. He led the big tech exodus from California to Austin, Texas.

And one of the amazing things we're seeing is Austin Tech is becoming a mecca for people in tech who were not insane socialists came into that and Joe came as sort of the search party. He was sent first, and I think probably Silicon Valley was curious the reception he would get, and they found the cannibals did not eat him, and so he wired back. Come to Texas. There's freedom here, there's sanity here, Joe. It is great to be with you. Welcome to Verdict.

Speaker 4

Thanks for being here, Ted, and thank you very much for including me. It's very kind of you, saye one of the smartest senators. I appreciate the line there.

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slash verdict, and talk to them. Receive if you qualify for up to ten thousand dollars in free silver one eight hundred and sixty fivey five eight eight four three. You've got something that I think is amazing, and it deals with education. I want to start with that first, because not only did you leave California, but you also had this insane idea of Hey, I want to start 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 a while. I mean all of us have seen over the years, so they've kind of gone the wrong direction. But you know, when I was in university, I'm I'm, I'm you know, I was there in two thousand and two thousand and four. They with problems. There was there was is you know, you'd get in trouble for being polically incorrect. You be told not to talk about things.

They got my first B for trying to defend John Locke in a humanities course because that was, you know, 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, but its freshman year.

Speaker 4

It was you know, but but you know, it wasn't totally crazy. And I think a lot of people who have not been at universities for a while don't realize like just how crazy these places have become over the last you know, five six seven years. There was I think it was like a shift in our society. Maybe it was around twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen, but I mean at Stanford Review, which Peter Thiel started and I was

involved with, which is a libertarian and conservative paper. Like a lot of the kids there, it is like you can't even admit you write for it anymore. It has to be pseudonymous because it would ruin your social life and you'd be attacked for it. And like these departments have just gotten so radicalized and so broken, and it's so there's there's an you know, the administrators. Over the last twenty years, you've tripled the size of the administrations. There's

more administrators now at Yelling. There our students, bat's many administrators at Harvard. This DEI thing has come in. It's anti merit. It's just it's just so broken. So I think people don't realize that, you know, I actually believe university has played a really important role in our society

the last hundred years. And you know, I was really I'm really lucky to have friends such as Neil Ferguson, the great historian, Barry Weiss, you know who I think runs one of the most important media companies in the US today, as my two co founders and all of us realize, you know, American institutions are breaking, they're failing. It's bad for our country. You want you to do in America when these things are broken, you build new ones.

Speaker 3

And Joe, what you're doing here is incredibly important. So you founded the University of Austin. Tell listeners of the podcast what the University of Austin is and what's the vision. What is it trying to accomplish.

Speaker 4

You know, we're trying to build a new great university in America that competes with Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT. It competes for the best and brightest, and we want to have one of these places where it actually pursues truth, where it doesn't defer to who's offended, doesn't defer to a crazy ideology. You don't have a bunch of you know,

administrators hounding you down. You actually are are focused on teaching young people to be courageous, to basically learn how to speak up, learn how to confront solutions in our society. If you can have even like a small number of the people who go on to run our elite to learn how to speak out, learn how to call out?

Speaker 3

Where is the university and the journey of its founding and becoming established and growing.

Speaker 4

So you know, it turns out, like a lot of other industries, there's a big cartel for starrying these things. We had to do two thousand pages of regulation, We had to you know, go through all sorts of things. But we were officially operating university, the first new private university in Texas in over sixty years. Where we're we've done, We've done all sorts of different events and seminars, and we have our first, our founding undergraduate class joining right now.

There's gonna bee hundred students to join the fall. You know, we've had over five thousand.

Speaker 3

Professor, are they all freshmen or that are starting or how does how does it work in terms of the class coming.

Speaker 4

In, We're we're defining them as all freshmen, although we may admit a few people who who've gone to a couple of the top schools and are fleeing them, and so you know, we conclude them with us instead of course.

Speaker 3

Now are there particular majors that are being offered to 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 a sort of intellectual foundations of like the Great Debates of Western civilization, kind of like the core what's called a classical liberal core. But then you have different centers. We have a Center for Economics, History and Politics, and we have people who've given up tenure at place is like University of Chicago and Columbia and other places like that, so I teach there. They have a center for STEM.

Our friend Elon Musk built a lot of things here, and people who help run SpaceX and Boring Company are helping us shape some of the STEM to make sure these students are people they want to partner with. So we have multiple different electives as well.

Speaker 2

Just like any other college, raising money is something that obviously is vitally important. And then you have moments where you can see we're probably instead of you going to people telling them the story, they start coming to you. Did that just happen when we saw so much anti Israel rhetoric on college campuses, where then people that you know came to you and said, hey, maybe I do 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 realized just help broken the universities are. They always thought it was something guys like Ted and I like to argue with the crazy people on the far left, and

we've probably always called these places out. But they've gotten a lot worse since we were arguing with them twenty years ago, and so, and a lot of these people finally woke up after October seventh, and after they saw obviously the presidents of Harvard and MIT and whatnot like in Penn going and making total fools of themselves, and

they started to look a little more closely. And then of course, like the plagism scandal comes out, and then if you're been paying attention, it turns out that it's not just clydeing Gay, it's all the leadership of the DEI and the Title Line Office all plagiarize all their stuff. Because guess what, if you have a philosophy that's anti merrit maybe you yourself aren't doing things that are meritocratic. You know.

Speaker 3

Look, I don't know about you, Joe, but I for one, was really inspired when when former Harvard president Claudine Gay wrote the immortal words we have nothing to fear but 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 eat pluribusunum.

Speaker 1

It's really brilliant.

Speaker 4

Let's just be honest, and it shows you how rotten these places are that we've they've now done an investigation. The board of Harvard didn't even look into her scholarship before making her president. They didn't even look into it at all. And it's clear because it's not She was not hired for being a great scholar. She was hired for obviously other reasons for her, for her gender and her sex.

Speaker 3

So how are you finding your faculty to assemble a new university. You've got people like Neil Ferguson, You've got Barry Weiss, who I would note if you have not read Barry Weiss's resignation letter from the editorial board of The New York Times. It is one of the most important things written in the past decade, and it is the most concise and effective indictment of the corruption of corporate journalism that I've read anywhere. So the two of them,

how did you team up with them? And how did you find the other members of your faculty.

Speaker 4

You know, I have to have to give Marc and Drewson credit for introducing me to Barry. We both were talking to him about the need to rebuild our broken institutions in the US, whether it's media, whether it's universities, whether it's so much else we need to weed to fix. And I'm so inspired by her. Neil's been her friend for a very long time. I think he's the greatest living historian, and a lot of other people are attracted

to working with people like that. So, you know, we announced this, We've had we had in the first few months, five thousand professors send us notes to try to inquire a boy working with us. So it's not been wild them. This is the place people want to be part of.

Speaker 3

Five thousand professors. That's worth underscoring. Look, there are, and I think this is true in every one of our institutions that is corrupted and captured by the left, there are people trapped within them who have not lost their minds, but they're scared. They still want to earn a living, they want a job that they know if they open their mouth they risk being canceled, being fired, being thrown out. But I think that's true at universities. I think that

is true in entertainment. I think that is true in journalism.

I think that's true in big tech. Let me shift, you know, the world a big tech Well, you know, I think back to big tech fifteen years ago, and I think at the time, big tech was really at a fork in the road, and it could have gone down the road of embracing a libertarian utopia, of saying, leave us the hell alone, we're gonna be entrepreneurs, We're gonna invent a new world, or it could have gone down the road they chose instead, which is nanny state

to talitarianism. We have the power and we will use the power to silence anyone who dare.

Speaker 5

Speak speak out.

Speaker 3

Do you agree with that assessment, and if so, why did they choose road number two?

Speaker 4

I do agree with that. And to tie it back to what we're just talking about, Ted, these cultures come from our universities. Google is hiring thousands of PhDs out of these universities who've just grown up in that culture their entire life. Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook. These are these tech cultures and university cultures. They're one and the same. And you know, the university culture is that Roden. That's what

these kids are up in their whole life. And it's interesting because you kind of learned these places like rather than a university teaches you to be courageous and speak up, you learn shut up, virtue signal, go along, or you're going to get in trouble. And you learn there's gonna be a five percent of crazy people on the far left, and when they shout, you obey because that's how you stay out of trouble. And that's the way these companies are run.

Speaker 5

Now, is there a tipping point there?

Speaker 3

There have been a handful of people who have shown real courage in the tech space. There's you, There's Elon Musk, 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 feel like, wait, I can speak out in support a free enterprise, I can speak out in support of free speech. I can stand up to the borg the collective mentality of Silicon Valley.

Speaker 4

You know, I think a lot of people are scared, and they're scared for good reason. This is where I'd actually have a little bit empathy towards lat of these friends of mine. I get texts every time that we put something online that you and I like and we're speaking out or are being strong. I get texts from

people who run multipillion dollar companies. I get texts from people whose companies support hundreds of thousands of other companies, and they're terrified if they're supporting one hundred thousand dollar companies that if they become you know, we drinking vodka with the name of a friend that Austin on it. He does not do politics because he knows that if

he becomes controversial, it could hurt him. So there's a lot of fear right now in the community, and the far left very good at demonizing people who speak out.

Speaker 2

You moved a company from California to Texas. There's a lot of people that love that, but they also there saying, don't California my Texas? When people move here, I'm assuming you had people that didn't agree with your conservative values it came.

Speaker 1

Do they see life differently? I mean it's been a couple of years.

Speaker 2

Now do they come and go, hey, it's actually better way of life and they like freedom and they're starting to come around to it, or do they just move here because they say, Okay, well it's more freedom during COVID and I pay less taxes, But I'm still the same person voting.

Speaker 4

You know, I want to give you statistic you probably know, and obviously I'm a huge fan of this, sad Or. The last race you run was closer than it should have been. If it wasn't for people who had moved to Texas, the race would have gone the other way by the numbers. And so it turns out that on the on the whole, the people who choose to move here tend to be even more on the side of liberty, more on the side of freedom even than the people who were born here. So I think it's fair to

be really worried about these crazy people coming in. But you should know the people who choose to come here, like, we're fleeing something that's bro and we're coming here because if America falls were screwed right, And a lot of my friends, by the way, have given up. I have billionaire friends who are living in Switzerland's we're living in Singapore, who are say, Joe, the woke guys are in charge.

You're done. My wife and I are here in Texas because we are making a stand here for America and those are our values and there are a lot of our friends values.

Speaker 2

You've got kids, how much of that was your decision as well? I mean, when you've got young kids. You and I are actually the same age, graduated the same year. And I know for me that.

Speaker 3

By the way, Ben, he's made gazillions of dollars, he's been a major CEO. What the hell have you done with your life?

Speaker 1

Man, I'm a co host of Center Ted Cruz. I've got that going right, you know. But how much was it your?

Speaker 3

And I will tell you back in a moment, and I will tell you Joe does have a basketball corner and we are gonna shortly play hoops. I'm told Joe has a pretty serious hoops game. Ben in high school was a center, and you know, has got some mass. So we're gonna see how things play out.

Speaker 4

He's a little bigger guy. You I wouldn't talk too 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 this is a great place to raise kids. I think it's a lot more tolerant place of a lot of different views. It's funny to say, used to be Sanrancisco was quote unquote tolerant, but it actually is not like if you if you speak out and then they are aside, you're in trouble there. I think here is very accepting where we live in Texas and yeah, I mean, listen,

you guys have all heard the stories. I had friends kids who were in first grade at the local private school that we had heard was the best one, and they came to us and they were distraught, and they said, you know, the teacher lined the kids up today and told them to be lining up by gender, and then she yelled at them for half an hour about how

there's not only two genders and they're confused. And then he's like, I mean, I'm not obsessed with this stuff myself, but if the teachers are obsessed with it, that's kind 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 to take back universities. I think that's incredibly important you know, I guess to say, as a parent, you know, you sit here and think, do you do you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to send your kid to a school that will try to brainwash them to hate America 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 do well in Education has been the key to success so often in America that I know a lot of 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 hope we can take universities back? And then I'm gonna ask you the same question on big tech.

Speaker 4

You know, on universities, we got to build some new ones. They're gonna they're gonna influence the broken ones to be better. I think it's gonna take multiple that we build and and uh, yes, I think we can shift the back. We're not gonna reconquer Harvard and Yale. I mean it's not you have basically realize these places. It's the administrators, it's the departments through their own hiring. It's it's the

lawyers who are in charge. It's the board is in charge that you're not gonna reconquer those schools, but you can influence them to be better and you can build better ones. I actually think we have a better chance in case to twelve that we do in universities, and that's thanks to school choice. If we can get that done, and this is something I wish though, I think a law of rary Republicans are on our side now in Texas.

They get it, they get how bad it is. I think a lot of people in the rural areas, you know, they know the teachers, they love them, and they're confused. They don't realize there's tons of schools, especially in our cities in Texas even here, that are brainwashing our kids, and we desperately need to give parents the right to get out of those schools.

Speaker 2

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Speaker 1

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Speaker 2

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Speaker 1

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Speaker 2

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Speaker 4

How easy is it to switch?

Speaker 2

Just go to Patriotmobile dot com slash verdict that's Patriot Mobile dot com slash verdict or call them nine seven to two Patriot make the switch and make a difference with that bill every month free activation when you use the offer code verdict. That's nine seven to two Patriot nine seven two Patriot or Patriot mobile dot com slash verdict. You seem to be doing something that is really cool and fun. A lot of people do legacy late in life.

They think about their country, they think about their grandkids, and then they kind of shift what they're doing. You seem to be in the fight right now and includes you working on legislation through I Think Tank.

Speaker 1

You even had an op ed that just came out this last week.

Speaker 2

Tell people about that aspect of what you're doing, because you seem to be all in on the fight again at a young age, in your early forties.

Speaker 4

Yeah, you know, I'm still building companies, are running my fund. So I'd be really nice just to be able to wait until I was sixty or seventy. I think maybe if this was twenty thirty years ago, I might have done that. It feels like this is a really critical time for our country and we can't just wait twenty or thirty years.

Speaker 5

Absolutely.

Speaker 4

Yeah, So so give given that given that we might not have a country left if we don't all fight for it right now. It's my job to do it. And you know, at Cerro Institute, we have teams in twenty States. We're fighting for liberty and accountability and going after all sorts of nonsense there. Yeah, the op ed was fun this week. I felt pretty strongly. I'm friends with Elon Musk and watching what's happening to him and the president with the weaponized courts, and you know, our country.

One of the reasons is except as we have, you know, equality of justice under the law. And I'd be very against Republicans weaponizing courts to attack the left, and I was also very against the left weaponizing courts to attack them. I think it was great. Jeb Bush spoke up about that as well.

Speaker 3

Yeah, look, it is absolutely grotesque the weaponization of our justice system. We're seeing it against Donald Trump with four indictments all over the country, with a ridiculous civil verdict in New York, and we're seeing it against Elon Musk. I will say the Biden administration, watching the Biden administration weaponize every single federal agency against Elon Musk. And as you know, Elon, until like twelve minutes ago, wasn't a Republican.

Elon had never voted Republican until just over two years ago. Elon voted for Hillary Clinton and for Joe Biden, and he said publicly the first Republican he ever voted for was Myra Flores here in Texas, just a couple of years ago. And the fact that he dared speak out, and especially the fact that he bought Twitter and has a loud free speech, the left has decided he must

be destroyed. And even for someone with vast resources, having 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. It feels like a thorobold country tech And you know, I think you step back a little bit. There's this battle in our in our civilization for truth and justice, and it's very clear truth and justice have been losing a lot the last twenty thirty years. I think buying Twitter now X, I think hopefully what we're trying to do with some of these institutions, we can start to

turn it around. I still think we're losing a little bit, but I think we're going to start turning things around. And I if more of us can get into the fight, more people like Elon, I think we have a chance to win.

Speaker 3

So how about big tech? Is their hope for turning big tech around is are there You mentioned five thousand professors wanting to get out. That's a really encouraging stat to me. Do you think there are likewise people in big tech that are quietly wanting some semblance of sanity but are afraid and is there a way that they can come out of hiding.

Speaker 4

Yeah, there's definitely a lot of them. And I'll tell you what. The way that this works, thank goodness, is there are market forces and you know, Google would have been way ahead of everyone else if they didn't have a completely corrupt I mean, it's a joke online, but it's like they put out these things they saw this week where they couldn't even do a picture of a

white person. You'd ask eighteen twenties, show me a couple from the eighteen twenties America, and it's like it's like a black guy and a Japanese woman, and like that's nice, 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 Google to create a chessboard, it has only black pieces and it's very hard to know how to win or lose at that point.

Speaker 4

That the funny part is they only got in trouble. I want to make the point. But the funny part is they only got in trouble for this because somebody thought to say, show me a German Nazi soldier from the nineteen thirties, and it showed this Han Chinese woman, this Native American guy and not.

Speaker 2

Seeing it for him, and that was too far amazing, 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 history class.

Speaker 4

So but we're scayed.

Speaker 1

Did she actually cover that in paper? I don't know if you've read that one yet.

Speaker 4

Here. Here's the great thing about markets and about innovation is that when you start to focus so much on nonsense that you start to lose and you start to not track the best people, other people defeat you in the market, and those new things are very often you know, if you look at fast drawing startups versus these technopolies, the fast drawing startups are far less woke because they have to be focused on competence, and a lot of

people who are joining them are fleeing these crazy broken places. So I do think it's going the right direction.

Speaker 3

Let me ask a business question. You know tech better than most people alive. Where are things going in terms of innovation ten years from now? What should we know now that we don't know, And how will the world be different in a decade.

Speaker 4

Well, the really positive thing that's happening right now. And I was never a huge crypto guy. I don't love fiacht currencies. I think there's a good use against like, you know, corrupt governments, but I was never that in a crypto AI actually, to me is actually very real. Uh. The way to think about it. We can talk all about sorts of complicated things, but the simple thing to think about is productivity is just really key in our economy. The reason we have more wealth is we do more

with less. And there's all these industries in our economy where this this AI combined with operations can do things much more affordably, much cheaper. And so if you look at this like healthcare building, for example, we spend probably over a quarter trillion dollars a year healthcare building and you can probably cut that in the third over the next five or six years. There's tons of areas like that.

Speaker 3

So there are lots of cassandras painting stories of impending doom from Ai. Is AI gonna destroy us all? And do you know what year does Skynet go online?

Speaker 4

My do work a lot in defense, so I'm working on it. Said, but there's this. We can control all of you now we uh no, listen, there's there's two different conversations with AIS, my master, thank you, Downtown getting in trouble with there?

Speaker 2

Uh.

Speaker 4

It does in charge the the uh. There's two different conversations with AI. One of them is productivity and wealth cre and it's actually extremely positive and that's really good. The other conversation with AI, it's very funny. A lot of people in the tech world are not religious. They've given up their religion, and so this is kind of like a form of their religion. The Singularity that taking over the world of AI, and it's very funny. It's

a very missionic vision. It's very much like revelations in Judaism and Christianity, where this thing comes and it changes everything and it's effectively a new God because once it improves itself keeps getting better, and so it's like it's like a secular religion. In Silicon Valley, people are obsessed with it as They talk about end of times with

it all the time. And it's funny because America has had a lot of other religious like revival movements over the last two hundred years where people were convinced that at times was coming very soon. This is quite a weird one based in Silicon Valley.

Speaker 3

All right, so we're going to wrap up momentarily, but I want to ask, so you are very engaged in policy, a policy question Washington is wrestling with right now. So as you know, I'm the ranking member on the Senate Commerce Committee, and AI is squarely within our jurisdiction. In fact, back in twenty fifteen, I chaired the first ever Congressional hearing on AI and have been focused on it for a long time now.

Speaker 5

There are a lot of.

Speaker 3

Voices in Washington, most notably Chuck Schumer, but also including some Republicans that are eager for a very heavy hand of government when it comes to AI, and Schumer and Democrats are proposing literally prior government approval before innovations in AI. I've been very vocal in saying that it's catastrophically stupid and if we put government in the position of prior approval, we will seed leadership of AI to our enemies, to China and other countries, and we will kill American leadership.

I'm interested in your views because this policy discussion. I got to tell you a lot of big tech, the Googles and facebooks of the world, are saying yes, yes, regulate us because they believe they can capture the government and use it to shut everyone down. What's your take on how government should approach AI, because this is as hot as any question in Washington right now.

Speaker 4

Well, you know, mister Santa, one hundred percent agree with you. I'm really glad you're taking that that tactic. As you know that big companies, allot of them know they're losing some of their best talent. They know it's going to be hard to compete. But you know what they have, Like if I want to start a competitor, for example, to black Rock right now in New York, I've spend one hundred million dollars year on lawyers even just to do what they do. They love the fact that there's

tons of rules regulations. These big companies would love it to make it impossible to compete against them in AI. So number one, one hundred percent keuth regulations as small as possible. Now, the thing I will give them, and we have to be very careful because this it's not why they're doing it. The thing I will give them is there probably are ways that some people could figure out how to use AI in bioterror in other areas,

and so we have to watch it. We have to be very careful, we have to see as it goes along. But let's not give them the ability to make the whole thing crony and break it.

Speaker 3

Well, and look, there is no doubt there will need to be regulations applied to AI like to any other industry. Now many of our existing laws can apply. So are there risks of fraud? Are the risk of deception?

Speaker 5

Yes?

Speaker 3

So do you see things like Taylor Swift had the AI fake porn put put on, and because she was Taylor Swift and had such a prominence, she was able 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 of that all on its own.

Speaker 1

I was so ready to get in there, so ready. That was my moment, and you knew it, and you jumped in beforehand I'm okay, keep going, folks, go ahead.

Speaker 3

But there's no doubt there are going to be need to apply laws and rules, whether fraud, whether deception. The legal system will have to be applied. But but I think we should move slowly and understand what we're doing because the productivity benefits potentially are are are massive. And I will say, when you know, you talked a minute ago about how how the big tech companies want barriers to entry, and that is the most common one of the great lies of politics. It is the idea that

that that conservatives are pro big business. The reality is big business loves big government. Big business usually gets in bed with big government, and big business loves when government puts barriers to entry to stop the next generation of entrepreneurs. And I'll say this, look, I have nothing for her against big business, but I am interested in the little guys, the next group of entrepreneurs. What the economist Joseph Schumpeter

called creative destruction. And one of my favorite images on the Internet is a picture of the founders of Microsoft in nineteen seventy eight. And you have Paul Allen with long hair and a beard, and he looks like one of the begs. You've got Bill Gates with glasses the size of hip hubcaps and on. It's just that picture of a bunch of college dropouts, and it just asks

would you invest money with these guys? And that is and they were taking on IBM, Big Blue, the giant behemoth, 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, talk about the importance of disruptors, of the innovation of the next generation, driving techs, driving productivity, driving our counties.

Speaker 4

I mean, this is one hundred percent how America works, as you say. And by the way, it's our biggest advantage against China as our adversary in China right now, the CCP, aside from just having killed a bunch of our billionaire Chinese tech friends, so everyone's terrified to build more tech if you're alredy sucessful in China, the other 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 or died under or fled in the last five years out of China there and a lot of them were taken away and disappeared and then came back and they 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 Asian innovations group forty seven years old, about to go public last year after working hard for eleven years, and they told him they wanted to do things differently with the data and going in China. He said, I'm going to go talk to him Beijing. Next I heard he 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 lot of guys who built a lot of it, who fled and who are very sketish using thing. But I'll tell you the other big advantage we have though against them, other than them strewing that up, is basically all this productivity coming from AI. It's going to disrupt healthcare. It's gonna change of health care works. It's going to change

how logisticsort. It's gonna change all these industries work. In China, the government people and their cronies they own those industries. They are not going to allow those to be disrupted. The question is is in America are we still able to disrupt things? Are we still going to be allowed by our government to go in and change how those things work. And it's going to be about because we have regulatory agencies that also want to slow it down

with the big companies. But I still believe in America, with the right leadership, we actually can disrupt these things and we can grow. Well.

Speaker 3

Look, when AI replace this podcast, I hope that the computer that takes my place does a really fine job.

Speaker 2

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Speaker 1

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Speaker 1

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Speaker 5

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Speaker 2

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Speaker 1

What does next year's class look like?

Speaker 2

Is there a cap on that if someone says I want more information, If there's a professor that's listening to this and says, hey, I want to leave this great 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? So we're bidding our first class right now. This is just as competitive to get into as the other top ten schools. But if you have a really bright, young young student who's a founding personality, entrepreneur personality, it's pretty much one of the coolest places you can go. We have one hundred of my top tech friends who put their names on and advising it. We have all these tall academics. It's going to be very competitive to get in,

but yes, please please please apply. You can go to you Austin dot org and Stritch University of all online uh professors, they're they're they're welcome to the email obviously. If they're amazing, we'll love to talk to and we have a pretty big line of people trying to get in these professors right now. But obviously it's very very interested in meeting great people.

Speaker 2

Thank you for coming on the podcast, Thanks for having us here. Thank you to everybody that's here in the audience as well. That don't forget we do the show Monday, Wednesday Friday. Hit that subscribe auto download button, and don't forget the Saturday week in review. Anything you may have miss during the week and the Cina and I will see you back here in a couple of days.

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