← The 47 Morning Update with Ben Ferguson
The 47 Morning Update with Ben Ferguson
How We Re-Capture Big Tech & Universities: One-on-One with Tech Entrepreneur Joe Lonsdale
00:34:27
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- [00:02]
Ben Ferguson
Welcome. It is Verdict with Senator Ted Cruz. Ben Ferguson with you. Senator, this is really fun. We're getting to do back 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. I'll let you do the intro.
- [00:24]
Senator Ted Cruz
Well, we are very proud to be in Austin, Texas tonight with a very good friend of mine and someone who I say without hyperbole, 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, invests in tech companies across the country. He was the CEO of Palantir. He led the big tech exodus from California to Austin, Texas. And one of the amazing things we're seeing is Austin, Texas is becoming a Mecca for people in tech who are not insane socialists.
- [01:07]
Ben Ferguson
Amen to that.
- [01:08]
Senator Ted Cruz
And Joe came as, as sort of the, the search party. He was sent first and I think probably Silicon Valley was curious the reception he was get 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.
- [01:30]
Joe Lonsdale
Thanks for being here, Ted. And thank you very much for including me. It's very kind of you. Say from one of the smartest senators, I appreciate the line there.
- [01:35]
Ben Ferguson
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- [03:35]
Joe Lonsdale
Oh, you know, we've been talking about the universities for a while. I mean, all of us have seen over the years how they've kind of gone the wrong direction. But, you know, when I was in university, I'm, you know, I was there in 2000, 2004. There were problems. There was, there was, you know, you'd get in trouble for being politically incorrect. You'd be told not to talk about things. I got my first B for trying to defend John Locke in a humanities course because that was, you know, you're not supposed to do that.
- [03:56]
Ben Ferguson
But, but it was frame that one, by the way.
- [03:57]
Joe Lonsdale
Yeah, yeah, I know. You know, but it wasn't like, Joe.
- [04:00]
Senator Ted Cruz
That'S called a humble brag.
- [04:01]
Ben Ferguson
First B.
- [04:02]
Joe Lonsdale
First B. That's true. But it was freshman year. 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 2014, 2015. But I mean, the 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's 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 so the administrators. Over the last 20 years, you've tripled the size of the administration. There's more administrators now at Yale than there are students. About as many administrators at Harvard. This DEI thing has come in. It's anti merit. It's just so broken. So I think people don't realize that I actually believe universities played a really important role in our society the last hundred years. And I'm really lucky to have friends such as Neil Ferguson, the great historian Barry Weiss, 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 know, what you do in America when these things are broken, you build new ones.
- [05:14]
Senator Ted Cruz
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?
- [05:26]
Joe Lonsdale
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 the crazy ideology. You don't have a bunch of administrators handing you down. You actually 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 we can have even a small number of the people who go on to run our elite, to learn how to speak out, learn how to call.
- [05:59]
Senator Ted Cruz
Out, and where is the university and the journey of its founding and becoming established and growing?
- [06:05]
Joe Lonsdale
So, you know, it turns out, like a lot of other industries, there's a big cartel for starting these things. We had to do 2,000 pages of regulation. We had to, you know, go through all sorts of things. But. But we were officially operating university, the first new private university in Texas in over 60 years where 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 be 100 students that join in the fall. You know, we've had over 5,000 professionals.
- [06:27]
Senator Ted Cruz
Now, are they all freshmen or that are starting or how does. How does it work in terms of the class coming in?
- [06:32]
Joe Lonsdale
We're defining them as all freshmen, although we may admit a few people who've gone to a couple of the top schools and are fleeing them. And so, you know, we include them with us instead, of course.
- [06:40]
Senator Ted Cruz
Now, are there particular majors that are being offered to start with? What are the students going to be studying?
- [06:45]
Joe Lonsdale
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 a 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 places like University of Chicago and Columbia and other places like that to teach there. We 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. Just like any other college.
- [07:17]
Ben Ferguson
Raising money is something that obviously is vitally important. And you have moments where you can see where 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. Maybe you're onto something here.
- [07:40]
Joe Lonsdale
Yeah. You know, a lot of people, like, I haven't realized just how broken the universities are. They always thought it was something guys like Ted and I like, 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 20 years ago. And so a lot of these people finally woke up after October 7th 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 plagiarism scandal comes out. And then if you're paying attention, it turns out that it's not just Clyde and 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 merit, maybe you yourself aren't doing things that are meritocratic.
- [08:20]
Senator Ted Cruz
You know, Look, I don't know about you, Joe, but I for one was really inspired when Forbes former Harvard president Claudine Gay wrote the immortal words, we have nothing to fear but fear itself.
- [08:33]
Ben Ferguson
First time she's ever written that.
- [08:34]
Senator Ted Cruz
It was amazing, you know, then she said, I have a dream. And then E pluribus unum.
- [08:43]
Ben Ferguson
She's really brilliant. Let's just be honest.
- [08:45]
Joe Lonsdale
And it shows you how rotten these places are that 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 and for being.
- [09:00]
Senator Ted Cruz
So how are you finding your faculty to assemble a new university? You've got people like Neil Ferguson. You've got Bari 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. 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?
- [09:33]
Joe Lonsdale
You know, I have to give Mark Andreessen 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 there's so much else we need to fix. And I'm so inspired by her. Neil's been a 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, when we announced this, we had, I think the first few months, 5,000 professors send us notes to try to inquire about working with us. So it's not been hard to find them. This is a place people want to be part of.
- [10:02]
Senator Ted Cruz
There's 5,000 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 of Big Tech. Well, you know, I think back to big tech 15 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 going to be entrepreneurs, we're going to invent a new world. Or it could have gone down the road they chose instead, which is nanny state totalitarianism. We have the power and we will use the power to silence anyone who dares speak out. Do you agree with that assessment? And if so, why did they choose road number two?
- [11:14]
Joe Lonsdale
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 tech cultures, university cultures, they're one and the same. And, you know, the university culture is that raw. Then that's what these kids have been brought up in their whole life. And it's interesting because you kind of learn at 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 gonna get in trouble. And you learn there's gonna be a 5% 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.
- [11:54]
Senator Ted Cruz
Now, is there a tipping point? 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 Thiel, there's Palmer Luckey, there's Larry Ellison. There are a few. How many others are there? And do you see a tipping point where others will feel like, wait, I can speak out in support of free enterprise, I can speak out in support of free speech. I can stand up to the Borg, the collective mentality of Silicon Valley.
- [12:27]
Joe Lonsdale
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 a lot 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 being strong. I get texts from people who run multi billion dollar companies. I get texts from people whose companies support hundreds of thousands of other companies. And they're terrified if they're supporting $100,000 companies that if they become, you know, we're drinking vodka with the name of a friend in Austin on it. He does not do politics because he knows that if he becomes controversial, it could hurt him. So there's, there's a lot of fear right now in the community. And the far left is very good at demonizing people who speak out.
- [13:02]
Ben Ferguson
You moved a company from California to Texas. There's a lot of people that love that, but they also the saying, don't California my Texas? When people move here, I'm assuming you had people that didn't agree with your conservative values that came. Do they see life differently? I mean, it's been a couple of years now. Do they come in and go, hey, it's actually better way of life and they like freedom and they're starting to come around to it. Or 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.
- [13:31]
Joe Lonsdale
You know, I, I want to give you a statistic you probably know. And, and obviously I'm a huge fan of this. I know 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. On the 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, we're fleeing something that's broken. And we're coming here because if America falls, we're screwed. And a lot of my friends, by the way, have given up. I have billionaire friends who are living in Switzerland, who are living in Singapore, who 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 those are a lot of our friends values.
- [14:18]
Ben Ferguson
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, graduate the same year. And, and I know for me that.
- [14:28]
Senator Ted Cruz
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, man?
- [14:32]
Ben Ferguson
I'm a co host with Senator Ted Cruz. I've got that going.
- [14:35]
Joe Lonsdale
Right.
- [14:35]
Ben Ferguson
You know, but how much was it?
- [14:40]
Joe Lonsdale
Your.
- [14:43]
Ben Ferguson
Back in a moment.
- [14:44]
Senator Ted Cruz
And I will tell you, Joe does have a basketball court and we are going to 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.
- [15:00]
Joe Lonsdale
He's a little bigger guy. I wouldn't talk too much trash. Right before our game here, somebody's gonna.
- [15:04]
Ben Ferguson
Be limping out of here.
- [15:06]
Senator Ted Cruz
This is the only part of my game, is trash talking. If I give up on trash, I have zero game left.
- [15:14]
Joe Lonsdale
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 it used to be San Francisco is quote, unquote tolerant, but it actually is not. Like if you. If you speak out and on the other side, 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 line the kids up today and told them to be lined 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 a weird place to raise kids.
- [15:52]
Senator Ted Cruz
What's the path to take them back? So with University of Austin, you were fighting to try to take back universities. I think that's incredibly important. You know, I got to say, as a parent, you know, you sit here and think, 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?
- [16:13]
Joe Lonsdale
Exactly.
- [16:14]
Senator Ted Cruz
And it's hard to know what to do, but at the same time, you want your kids to do well. And education has been the key to success so often in America that I know a lot of parents that are just almost paralyzed. What do I do? You're fighting to take that institution back. Do you have hope? We can take universities back. And then I'm going to ask you the same question.
- [16:33]
Joe Lonsdale
On big tech, 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, yes, I think we can shift the back. We're not gonna reconquer Harvard and Yale. I mean, it's not. You have to basically realize these places it's the administrators, it's the departments through their own hiring, it's the lawyers who are in charge. It's the board is in charge. 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 and K to 12 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 lot of rural 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, 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.
- [17:23]
Ben Ferguson
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- [19:22]
Joe Lonsdale
Yeah, you know, I'm still building companies, running my fund, so it'd be really nice just to be able to wait until I was 60 or 70. I think maybe if this was 20, 30 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 20 or 30 years.
- [19:36]
Senator Ted Cruz
Absolutely.
- [19:37]
Joe Lonsdale
Yeah. So 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 Cicero Institute, we have teams in 20 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 watching what's happening to him and the president with the weaponized courts. And, you know, our country, one of the reasons is exceptional is 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. To attack them. I think it was great. Jeb Bush spoke up about that as well.
- [20:11]
Senator Ted Cruz
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. 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 12 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. 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 allowed free speech, the left has decided he must be destroyed. And even for someone with vast resources, having the federal government come after you is a daunting proposition.
- [21:16]
Joe Lonsdale
Yeah, it's really disgusting to watch how open they are. It feels like a third world country, Ted. And I think you step back a little bit. There's this battle in our civilization for truth and justice. And it's very clear truth and justice have been been losing a lot the last 20, 30 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.
- [21:43]
Senator Ted Cruz
So how about Big tech? Is there hope for turning big tech around? Is are there? You mentioned 5,000 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?
- [22:07]
Joe Lonsdale
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 Google would have been way ahead of everyone else if they didn't have a completely corrupt. 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 1820s, show me a couple from the 1820s 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 you.
- [22:31]
Senator Ted Cruz
I don't know if you've seen. 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.
- [22:42]
Joe Lonsdale
The funny part is they only got in trouble. I'd 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 1930s. And it showed this Han Chinese woman, this Native American guy in Nazi uniform.
- [22:54]
Ben Ferguson
And that was too far. It was amazing.
- [22:56]
Joe Lonsdale
That was too far for the New York Times.
- [22:57]
Ben Ferguson
I was like, okay, now we actually know we need to fix it.
- [23:00]
Senator Ted Cruz
Listen, the Chinese Nazis, that was a real problem. It was a huge problem in history class.
- [23:04]
Joe Lonsdale
So, so. But Ms.
- [23:05]
Ben Ferguson
Gay, did she actually cover that in a paper? I don't know if you've read that one yet.
- [23:08]
Joe Lonsdale
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 attract the best people, other people defeat you in the market. And those new things are very often, you know, if you look at fast growing startups versus these tech monopolies, the fast growing 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.
- [23:31]
Senator Ted Cruz
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?
- [23:47]
Joe Lonsdale
Well, the really positive thing that's happening right now, and I was never a huge crypto guy, I don't love fiat currencies. I think there's a good use against like, you know, corrupt governments. But I was never that into crypto. I actually, to me is actually very real. The way to think about it, we 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 billing, for example, we spend probably over a quarter trillion dollars a year healthcare billing, and you can probably cut that in a third over the next five or six years. There's tons of areas like that.
- [24:27]
Senator Ted Cruz
So there are lots of Cassandras painting stories of impending doom from AI. Is AI going to destroy us all? And do you know what year does Skynet go online?
- [24:38]
Joe Lonsdale
I do work a lot in defense, so I'm working on it, Ted. But there's, there's, we can control all of you. We. No, listen, there's there's two different conversations with AI.
- [24:49]
Senator Ted Cruz
Yes, my master.
- [24:50]
Joe Lonsdale
Thank you. Don't, don't get in trouble there. Ted's in charge. The, the, the, the, there's two different conversations with AI. One of them is productivity and wealth creation. 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, the taking over the world of AI. And it's very funny. It's a Very messianic 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 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's had a lot of other religious revival movements over the last 200 years where people were convinced at times was coming very soon. This is a quite a weird one based in Silicon Valley.
- [25:39]
Senator Ted Cruz
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 2015, I chaired the first ever congressional hearing on AI and had been focused on it for a long time. Now, there are a lot of 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 opposing, are proposing literally prior government approval before innovations in AI. I've been very vocal in saying that is catastrophically stupid. And if we put government in the position of prior approval, we will cede 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, this policy discussion, and 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.
- [26:56]
Joe Lonsdale
Well, you know, Mr. Senator, I 100% agree with you. I'm really glad you're taking that tactic. As you know, the big companies, a lot of them know they're losing some of their best talent. They know it's going to be hard to compete. But what, you know, what they have, like if I want to start a competitor, for example, to BlackRock right now in New York, I have to spend $100 million a year on lawyers even just to do what they do. They love the fact there's tons of rules and regulations. These big companies would love it to make it impossible to compete against them in AI. So number one, 100% keep the regulations as small as possible. Now, the thing I will give them. And we have to be very careful because this is 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 bio terror and 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.
- [27:40]
Senator Ted Cruz
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 there risk of deception? Yes. Or do you see things like, 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 happens if that's your kid? Yeah. And nobody would watch that. That's all right. The market forces would take care of that all on its own. I was so ready to get in there.
- [28:14]
Ben Ferguson
So ready. That was my moment. And you, you knew it and you jumped in beforehand. Okay, keep going. That was all me folks. Go ahead.
- [28:25]
Senator Ted Cruz
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 I think we should move slowly and understand what we're doing because the productivity benefits potentially are massive. And I will say when, you know, you talked a minute ago about how the big tech companies want barriers to entry and that is the most common one of the great lies of politics is the idea 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. I have nothing for or against big business, but I am interested in the little guys, the next group of entrepreneurs. What, 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 1978. And you have Paul Allen with long hair and a beard and he looks like one of the Bee Gees. You've got Bill Gates with glasses the size of hip hubcaps. And 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 the creative destruction. Now they're the giant. And I will say so let's do this to wrap up talk about the importance of disruptors, of innovation, of the next generation, driving techs, driving productivity, driving our economy.
- [30:14]
Joe Lonsdale
I mean, this is 100% 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 already successful in China. The other thing they have going against them.
- [30:29]
Senator Ted Cruz
Hold on, say that again.
- [30:31]
Joe Lonsdale
A lot of our tech friends died in the last. Or died and. Or fled in the last five years out of China. And a lot of them were taken away and disappeared, then came back and they won't talk about it anymore. So.
- [30:40]
Senator Ted Cruz
So do we know names of people, people who were killed? Because I don't.
- [30:44]
Joe Lonsdale
I'll give you a friend. And Andy Tian, ran Asian Innovations Group, 47 years old, about to go public last year after working hard for 11 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 in Beijing next. I heard he died in his sleep that night at 47 years old.
- [30:59]
Senator Ted Cruz
Wow.
- [31:00]
Joe Lonsdale
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 scared of Xi Jinping. But I'll tell you, the other big advantage we have though against them, other than them screwing that up, is basically all this productivity coming from AI. It's gonna disrupt healthcare. It's gonna change how healthcare works. It's gonna change how logistics works. It's gonna change how 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, in America, are we still able to disrupt things? Are we still gonna be allowed by our government to go in and change how those things work? And it's going to be a battle 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.
- [31:38]
Senator Ted Cruz
Well, look, when AI replaces podcast, I hope that the computer that takes my place does a really fine job.
- [31:44]
Ben Ferguson
Want to talk to you about how you start your morning off. If you're like me and you're a coffee drinker, I get up early, I get on the radio at 7am and I have got to have not just a cup of coffee. A really good cup of coffee. And I have a 2024 New Year's resolution. I am not giving my money to woke coffee companies. That is something I have gotten rid of. Blackout coffee is the coffee that I drink. It is amazing. This is a hundred percent America and zero percent woke coffee. Blackout coffee is 100% committed to conservative values as a company. From sourcing their beans to the roasting process, customer support and shipping. They embody true American values and they accept no compromise on premium taste and premium quality. If you want a great cup of coffee, not good, not kind of good, not pretty good, but amazing. You need to go to blackoutcoffee.com verdict now here's the cool part. Use the promo code verdict for 20 off your first order. So try it. You're going to be hooked like I am and you'll never go back to those other woke brands. Blackoutcoffee.com verdict Be awake, not woke. That's blackoutcoffee.com verdict promo code verdict for 20 off your first order. Final question for you and I want to go back to the university because there's going to be a lot of kids that listen to this, a lot of parents, grandparents, they're gonna and maybe even professors that may want to reach out. What is next year's class look like? Is there a cap on that? If someone says, I want more information. If there's a professor that's listening this and says, hey, I want to leave this great institution that I'm at because of I'm being stifled or silenced, I want to talk to you. How can they do that?
- [33:38]
Joe Lonsdale
So we're admitting our first class right now. This is just as competitive to get into as the other top 10 schools. But if you have a really bright young, young student who's a founding personality, entrepreneurial personality, it's pretty much one of the coolest places you can go. We have a hundred of my top tech friends who put their names on and advising it. We have all these top academics. It's gonna be very competitive to get in. But yes, please, please please apply. You can go to uaustin.org, and search for University of Austin online professors. They're welcome to email. Obviously if they're amazing, we're love to talk to them. We have a pretty big line of people trying to get in as professors right now, but obviously very, very interested in meeting great people.
- [34:10]
Ben Ferguson
Thank you for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having us here. Thank you to everybody that's here in the audience as well. Don't forget we do this show Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Hit that subscribe auto download button and don't forget the Saturday week in review. Anything you may have missed during the week and the center and I will see you back here in a couple of days.