Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben

25:11Well, yeah, but you set it up. Like, people don't unsee. Like, I apply, I check, you know, my Asian box or whatever that I'm checking. I know there's other boxes. And then like, I read the news. So I know like how that works. And so like that kind of whole design based on trying to to achieve a goal so that the New York Times says, I'm not racist as a trustee or a faculty or whatever, gets you to that outcome. Now you contrast that. So how would you design it if you're designing for the customer? Well, I can tell you, because we started the firm, and this was, it's important to note, this is pre, me too, pre, George Floyd, pre, when anybody cared about any of this stuff in Silicon Valley.

25:52And so what we kind of said was like, how do we get competitive advantage on town? And we thought, well, there are certain talent groups that don't get recruited and certain talent groups that are over recruited in Silicon Valley. Computer science students from Stanford are heavily recruited MIT students and so forth. So we started with, well, what about the second tier, the top students, the second, third tier universities in computer science can we go after those? And we put them on our list. The second one was veterans. Veterans don't make their way to Silicon Valley often, because they just don't know that they're welcome there or whatever, you know, whatever reason.

26:31So that could be an advantage and, you know, they tend to be good at things that we need, like very loyal, trained and leadership and kind of process development, things that we really kind of lacked in technology. So we had a team to recruit veterans and then the other kind of two that if you just select the numbers that were way lower, like lacks in a span since we had teams for that. So I was in charge at that point. By the way, like note that because it's a talent program, we can hire anybody to run diversity. And you know, like these colleges to run the programs they have have like hundreds of people.

27:05But if it's just talent, then the people who are in charge of talent, which is like, of course, you know, people run the firm. Okay, so early on, like we're probably 2010, 2011 now, I'm kind of working on this problem. And you know, I'm getting kind of input from people I know who have recruited from those populations who know them, know the special skills that might exist, how to attract people and so forth. And this is a very funny story to me. So I'm at lunch in Menlo Park at a restaurant called Stacks, which you know well, with Steve Stout, who kind of came from the entertainment industry is kind of a music in particular and rap music in particular, so like dominated by African Americans.

27:51And you know, I'm talking to him about it. He says, Ben, do you know why there are no black people in Silicon Valley? Just like that. He says, I said, no, why are there no black people in Silicon Valley? He said, look around. There are no black people in Silicon Valley. And like literally, he was the only black person in all of this stacks as a pretty big restaurant. It's the only person. And so I was like, oh, that's interesting. And I looked up, you know, so the United States is 14 .3 % black but Palo Alto, Menlo Park, you're talking 2%. And so like right away you go, okay, this is even an attractive place to live or for whatever reason, people haven't even moved here.

28:27So like, maybe we need to start there. And so what did we do? We did film screenings and gatherings and meetups and barbecues and kind of tried to get to know the people that we wanted to recruit, know what would make for a good work environment for them by just spending like regular time. And then we started to go, okay, here's a place in the firm where we need this talent. We already know all the people. We know who's the best we've spent like we've invested the time and we're going to get them. And so then you come to the firm and our retention, our promotion rates and so forth are very good because we were always focused on the talent.

29:07We never cared about the New York Times because at that time the New York Times didn't care about it. And so like you just get to a very different outcome when you focus on a different customer. And I'm going to kind of tell the last part of the story just so I can map it back to the university. So a few years ago, maybe five years ago, Henry Lewis Gates, who was the very famous, very talented professor of African -American history at Harvard, called me up because He wanted to basically raise money for me and has this thing the hip -hop archive at Harvard He said Ben I want to create a fellowship called the Horowitz hip -hop fellowship at Harvard And I go we'll skip like if you call anything that then everybody's gonna hate me because Horowitz hip -hop Like sounds like really you know F .D.

29:56I said, but I have a friend Nas who deserves to have a hip -hop fellowship named after him and and I'll call Nas and see if he wants to do it. And we go through that and we call it the Nas Hip Hop Fellowship. So then they want to have a big event at Harvard and invite Nas there, which I do. And I get a call leading up to the event from Lisa Neu, who you may know, she's Mary Thalerie Summers, who was interestingly fired as president of Harvard for saying something non -diverse. And she said, Ben, you know, I've been reading Naz's lyrics. I said, you've been reading his lyrics. She said, yeah, I said, you haven't been listening to his album.

30:38She's like, no, no, just reading the lyrics. I'm like, okay, you know, the albums are good too, but whatever. And she said, you know, like he's so good. Like I can't even believe how good this guy is like, I'm talking like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, he's like that level good. And I was like, wow, that's amazing. But the thing that I realized when she said that is Harvard never recruited NOS or anybody like NOS. And if you think about it right, black people dominate, dominate music in the United States. So why aren't you looking for the talent doing the right things to recruit them? Why are you looking for the color?

31:16And that's I think a lot of the things at the universities, if you're going to take a system to view of it, you've got to start back there and say, like, how do we find the talent that we just our regular process doesn't get to, change our process, change our way of doing things to get to that talent, and then it's going to be better for us, better for the talent, better for the mission, all those kinds of things, as opposed to letting some outside forest tell us what we should be doing. And I think that's really emblematic of a lot of the things that I think have gone sideways in the university when it comes to diversifying the student body.

31:54Yeah, so let me steal man the question, right? You'll get a response to this. I'll use my special skill here. I'll use my special skill here of obsessive on all these topics. And so I try to be able to think about it from all the points of view as well. I'll play Super World Care for a second. Which is like, look, Ben, like, you know, the whole point of the DEI programs, like the universities, is to try to like make sure that every field, like engineering as an example, has like equal representation by population. Yeah. It feels like you're arguing that we should give up on that in favor of an approach that sounds like it involves stereotyping, which is we should take away the focus of recruiting Black people in engineering program.

32:25We should increase the focus in taking Black people in music program and we should do that on the basis of a stereotype that Black people are better at music than an engineering. Like how do you explain that given the moral framework people are starting with? Well, I think the truth of the matter is, look, everybody is in it. First of all, everybody is an individual and should be treated as such in that sense. But I think anybody with half a brain, well, who's observant, can observe some very obvious things about different populations that they're interested in different things. like people have different interests.

33:09So forget about even talent or this or that. And it goes by group and by culture and so forth. And this is, you know, there are things like every comedian makes jokes about, you know, men like to sit around and watch sports and, you know, women like to watch other things and so forth. And that's very bad to say these days, obviously. But if you look at just job categories, you know, I think veterinarians are 80 % women. And nurses is like much higher than that.

33:44Those are good paying jobs. Psychologists, by the way, it's a university level. We were just a psychologist, sir. It's like to add a something like 90 or 95 % women now. Yeah, and I think there's something wrong with that. And then, you know, similarly like coal miners, they're almost all men. you know, people work and like oil rigs are almost all men, you know, MMA fighters are mostly men, although there are women who do it and there's nothing wrong with that. And so like there are, I think you do have to, you know, in any kind of program where you're trying to get, you know, in the whole point of diversity is a diverse interest, diverse talent, right?

34:20Or ought to be anyway. And so if you're going into, you know, a population that's got a different culture and very likely different interests. And you know, and by the way, everybody's got different genetics to then you kind of have to be a little more creative about just saying we're only gonna like if you if you say we're only gonna look at you know these test scores and these grades and these kinds of courses then obviously like those populations aren't showing up on that. That's why you have the program. So you can either go, well, we'll just still put them there where they haven't shown an interest or an aptitude yet, or like, or some of these students have whatever, or we can broaden our criteria to things that make big contributions to society and are important.

35:13And people may be able to do better than our friends, though, white nations, like over here. And so like that's the choice you have. I mean, you know, like, and I think it's just a better choice. So yes, you're not going to get equal distribution, just like, you know, like you don't get equal distribution in almost anything in life. It doesn't even make sense math wise, by the way, right? Like because the population is 14%, first of all, like 14 % in total across age groups, not 18 year olds, so like, you're already fucking off. And then we're going international. So you're way off. And so you're mapping to a number that's a fake number.

35:56And now you're not just mapping it to the university. You're trying to map it into every subject. And this is just like it's just it's almost the American epidemic and enumeracy is kind of affecting the whole logic of how these programs work. And the problem is it's to the detriment of the people you're trying to recruit. I give you a very good anecdote on this. So you and I just had breakfast with a kind of prominent trustee at one of the most important universities in the world. And he made it like a very off -hand comment, which he thought was the most obvious thing in the world, that really kind of stopped me in my tracks, which he said, like, even if we accept it every black applicant, we went hit 14%.

36:38Right. And so you're so unattractive as the top university in the world to that population that you came and touched that number. So your problem is obviously, you know, like not in, you know, making race a great deal. Your problem is you don't even know what you're looking for. You don't know what they're interested in. You don't know how to create an environment. You know, that that that's beneficial where they're going to have great careers coming out of it, you haven't done any of the real work. You're just trying to like meet some number that doesn't even make any sense. And that's, to me, that's the issue.

37:16Well, take it a step further, just a double value, because this is a real issue right now and real issue for many people, including, as you said, the people that everybody's trying to help. So your friend Henry Luskates, longtime professor at Harvard actually was pointed out 20 years ago, I think, all the way back in like 2004. There was a big article in in the New York Times archives is really interesting from that era. And the two sources for it were him and then Lonnie Gweneer, who was one of the top black law professors in the country at the time. I think also a harbour, maybe also a harbour professor.

37:42And later she was like a almost supreme court at one point. So these two very highly respected black scholars, you know, experts professors. And they made this case the time. They said, look what these institutions are actually doing. Is there bringing in African and West Indian immigrants to satisfy the African American quotas? Yes. Well, that is exactly what's happening, right? There are more Nigerians, I believe there's more Nigerians at Harvard than African Americans. Right. Right. And of course, look, at an individual level, you know, fine, you know, great, you know, great, you know, so I'm totally in favor of having like highly talented Africans.

38:14But I mean, Nigerian, nothing to do with Somalians, like genetically. This is the other one. The weird thing about this race theory that people are kind of promoting is Yes. They're not even related to actual racists. I mean, you're actually genetics, right? And it's just some weird government category. COVID, COVID, over, over, over categorization. And then, you know, specifically back to like what everybody thinks they're trying to do, which is if you're trying to help African Americans, right? And your answer to it is we have to bring in lots of like literal Africans and West Indians or other, other population goes to do it.

38:48And you've, like, something, again, to your point, like something has gone wrong in pursuit of the goal of helping African Americans. Yeah, I think it's clearly not working also in the, yeah, I mean, they're with the kind of ruling on affirmative action. There were so many studies that showed that it didn't actually help African Americans 50 years. Forget whether you think it's a good idea or bad idea or fair or not fair, the results were really bad. And I think part of the reason the results were bad is the kind of programs were designed and the, you know, and that like most of the people were African anyway, not African -American.

39:23Right, so. Exactly. Well, so, well, the other benefit to the Africans is they pay, they're more likely to pay full freight, right? So they're from a University of Financial standpoint. The banks are an international head. Well, that's right, the other incentive, if you're taking expenses through the roof, you need some people paying full freight. Which turns out to be immigrants. Okay, good. So that's obviously a big chunk of the reform fix the university thing. But let's walk through the rest of the fix the university turnaround plan. Yeah, so one big thing is the credentialing system, right?

39:58Which, again, this is probably the most important thing to the student is that once I pay all that money, Once I spend all that time that at the end of it, I've got something that's very valuable. And I think there was just a report that like half of companies are dropping their like bachelor degree requirement, which kind of says, well, the credential no longer means much. And so I think that, you know, if you don't like the SAT part, then you probably need to fix the SAT part. So it, you know, like make it better, but it does prove something to employers. And it's very hard to, you know, get rid of a measure like that because, you know, what are you replacing it with?

40:59you're replacing them with grays if you talked about last time there's massive great inflation so that doesn't really work. You know you're doing recommendations like what are you doing that that an employer can't do themselves and the brilliance of the SAT by the way is as an employer it's actually illegal to do a general aptitude test so if you're looking for just whatever and as you know we sometimes call them in sales and all around athlete then or a all around kind of mental athlete, you know, you'd like to have some aptitude measure. And if you don't like the aptitude that's being measured, then you know, like enhance that.

41:38But to get rid of that is kind of nutso from the student perspective. And then the second thing is grade inflation itself. And in a way, it's easy to fix because you just go mandate a grading curve and just go back and see his average. F is fail. A is two standard deviations up. B is one standard. Like just have it mean something very straightforward. The grade. Are you talking about trying to zero in on the absolute quality? The absolute grades want the indicator. You're talking about literally grading on a curve and having a first -generation. I like laterally grading on a curve. So creating on a curve used to be more common, I think both in educational settings and also in employee evaluation settings and companies like Microsoft used to do it kind of famously and GE and then it It feels like it's gone very much out of style.

42:29Yeah, because the criticism, the criticism right is it sort of forces you, it's sort of guarantees that you're going to have people who don't make it. And so the criticism is like, you know, what if everybody in the class is actually really good and then you're are singling out people who have to be cut from the bottom because you're forcing the grid on the curve thing. And so isn't that unfair? And so I haven't seen anybody grid on the curve in many, many years. And so how would you kind of re -explain that to people in a way that they would think it's a good idea to bring it back? Yeah, so I think it's different companies and in universities, by the way.

43:00So I think it actually works probably in some ways better in universities in the sense that the trouble you run into companies is your, You're relative to the next employer. So if you hire the top thousand employees in the industry, and then you rank them on a curve, and then you fire the bottom 10%, those are better than the people on the market. And so like you get into that kind of thing and so forth. So there's this need to mix in the absolute level. The other thing is that companies that were famous for it, Intel and Microsoft would actually fire the people at the bottom of the curve. And that has implications and so forth.

43:53One could argue, you know, Intel and Microsoft did pretty well. You know, they started with those programs before they were giant monopolies and they became giant monopolies. So that actually kind of worked. So you know, it's kind of a retrospective that stuff is bad. But in the university, you know, I think if you grade it that way, you don't actually, I mean, you know, if you feel like, okay, the failing point should be lower than the whatever two standard deviations below the average, then you can do that. But the meaning of who's a top student at Harvard to have clarity on that is pretty powerful And then also to have clarity on, oh, this is what it takes to get through four years and get a degree, a bachelor's degree, to your point last time about conscientiousness.

44:50It really kind of fulfills that promise. And so, you know what, we've gone into this self -esteem is all that matters thing, but the result of that is massive student debt. We just lied everybody. So you're doing fine, you're doing great. It's all good. Give us your money and then oh guess what you owe $300 ,000 and you can't get a job and You know that's the problem. So I to me that's a much bigger problem than the self -esteem problem or the you know You know your three deep standard deviations below the average and you fight for class You you know at that point you probably don't know the material well enough You know to get a pass in grade let alone what you get now, which is an A - Yes.

45:34Right. Sorry. Well, the other response I think would be like, look, every professor, every teacher and every manager and every employer are fully aware that you have a distribution of talents and capabilities and results and performance in every group, right? So there is no player that does what you just said a few minutes ago, which is they hire the thousand best people. Yeah. And nobody ever does that. I mean, everybody would love to. Nobody ever does. You always have a distribution of experiments. You're always on a center. Okay. There's also, it's not just smart. It's effort. You know, effort is a big thing.

46:02that goes into, you know, not only a grade in school, but goes into like performance on the job. And, you know, and look, I would say the other thing, you know, just in life that you learn when you employ people and every employer knows this is, you know, not everybody is good at everything. So like the important thing is like, what are you great at? And then like, where, how can we put you in a position for your highest investee use? We use this term all the time. You know, like where can you make the biggest contribution and let us get you there and not have you do something you're no good at and I think this whole You know anti -credential Kind of way that we've gotten universities.

46:44We did yeah people come out of school We don't know what they're highest invests used to they they might get you know They may be like the greatest I tight Robert Smith is who's the I guess CEO of Vista, he's the founder of Vista, he's kind of rented. It's very, very sharp on this. He's a person I probably rely on most for ideas in this area. And one of the things he says is, look, we get guys, we kind of have to reclassify them because, well, I got somebody as an engineer, but when we kind of look at their personality and so forth, they'd be way better in sales. and we reroute them and their career goes much better.

47:26And so if you're a genius, you know, psychologist, social network, or like, you know, these kinds of things, and we force you into STEM, that's not good for you, it's not good for anybody. But that's what these ideas do, right? Like they force people into things that aren't their talent, their skill, their passion, their interest. And then, you know, they don't enjoy it. I'd be resentful if somebody did that to me. And then I'm not gonna make much money. And I'm gonna be like a low performer wherever I am. And there's no need for it because I'm super talented person. Like, why are you doing this to me?

48:05And I think, you know, and it's these ideas of people who wanna make the world fair that they impose this thing on people where like life is not, it's not fair in that. Not everybody is exactly the same amount of good at everything, but there's so much variety that there's a place for everybody. You know, like I do believe that, there's a place for everybody who can contribute, and we got to find that for them. And that's what the university should be doing. It's finding people's contribution, not, you know, channeling them into something they don't want to do, or like, didn't test into, or whatever, because, you know, oh, we need another person of your race doing this.

48:46So we're going to make you do that. Yeah, there's something in, when you dig into the data on like representation different groups of different professions, there's something in the data that was a social scientist who studied this referred to as a Scandinavian paradox, which is that it's very counterintuitive. It's consistent with what you're saying, but it's very counterintuitive, which is the societies that are most egalitarian have the greater dispersion, but the greater difference between our representation of groups, but for example, by profession. And more women go into STEM in like Kazakhstan, then in Sweden.

49:23Exactly. And so the true, like for example, for STEM, the truly, the truly representative STEM systems at the educational level and at the professional level for like science and math and engineering, where the Soviet Union and then apparently even still today Iran. There are much fewer rights. Women have much fewer rights. Yeah. And then by the way, everything else that women might want to do is much more dangerous. Right? Like, so like being a literature professor in Stalinist Russia was like super dangerous. Very good point. Right? But being a nuclear physicist was like, you know, super, super privileged position.

49:58Yeah, yeah. Right. Exactly. I need you. Right? And so if you're like a highly capable person who happens to be a woman who would love to be a literature professor. But in that system, you can't do that. You're not going to do that. And so you go do the thing that you'd rather not do, because it's the same thing to do. And then in contrast, if you do this rank ordering of societies by gender egalitarianism, the Scandinavian countries are kind of top of the heap. And I think it's the case in the Scandinavian countries today that like engineers are like 85 % man and nurses are like 85 % women. And so it's a much more unequal outcome.

50:30And so the explanation for it turns out to be very subtle. It's in the statistics for what's happening, which is if you take out all of the societal bias or all the societal level determinism and you take out all, you know, whatever. If you take out every possible restriction on what people can do and you let them fully express themselves, then what you're left with is pure choice. Right. Right. Right. Right. And so, and so at that point, the differences in the outcomes that based on pure choice, maximize. Yeah. You don't minimize. Yeah. They maximize, right? And so the freer people are, the more you're going to have dispersion.

51:07And exactly the way that makes kind of prevailing morality, just like completely freak out. But to your point, the reason we're going through all this, your point is you can imagine a university. You can imagine a university that has this polar opposite view and would have these spectacular programs in things, music and many different areas of everything for me. arts, poetry, and then all these different psychology and all these different things and so forth and so on and then have sort of equally good You know engineering programs or math programs or whatever and they have just like Everybody and every program is there because it's the thing that they really want to do in life and that they're the best at Without the kind of trying to force fit everything to be equal representation across all fields is that the sounds like that Yeah, and I think that's clearly the right approach and looking I mean I have to say like in business is like, you look, we're a technology venture capital firm.

51:58And we end up needing all those things. Like, you know, part of our advantage is that like, we're a firm that has some poetry to them that can tell a story that can do these kinds of things. That's how we built the whole brand. It had nothing to do with math. And, you know, like that's kind of one aspect. Then we're a network. And so we've got to make friends. like a lot of friends and not just friends in Silicon Valley. We've got to make friends in Washington, DC. We've got to make friends in Hollywood. We've got to make friends on Wall Street. And like this is a great job for an engineer. And so like there may be engineers who are good at it, but I'll bet you I can find like somebody else who's way better at it.

52:45And we have. And so like, and that's why I point about the world. like the world is very diverse in terms of things that need doing. And to kind of force people into a path because they're not your customer, your customer is, you know, some, you know, buddy who's covering diversity at the Washington Post or the New York Times or whatever, and you're like, okay, the last thing I want to be doing is getting tagged with racism for there. And by the way, those organizations are not the person that way either. So they're telling you how to run your business, they don't know how to run their fucking business.

53:24The whole thing is just stupid. But you get into these abstract ideas that at the very surface level makes sense. Look, there's talent everywhere. Yes, people are different. and you're like, not even people are different. Like, you know, people are, there's racism out there, yes. So therefore, every job, every category and every company's gotta be exactly, you know, the percentage that are represented by the population. Well, how'd you get all the way there? Like, that's the dumbest thing I ever heard. Yeah. So, if you wanna just, yeah, that was something I would do for fun sometimes is if you just Google newsroom, diversity crisis.

54:08Yeah, there are these just absolutely hysterical reports just like excoriating the news, the same news organizations that criticize everybody. The animal research excursion. A quick thing, yeah, a quick time everybody wants to be a damn, you know, journalist. You know, so anyway, so an equal amount, their representation of the population. I'm like, what are you talking about? Exactly. So to go back to the credentialing, to go back to the, you know, why we're talking about this, go back to credentialing. So then I think what you're saying, see if this is right, what you're saying is you want to think harder, leading one of these institutions, you want to think harder about the credentialing on the way in in terms of how you're actually sourcing talent and how you're thinking about talent and how you're thinking about bringing in lots of different kinds of people.

54:52And then correspondingly, you also want to think about the credential out. So the value of the credential that you're then generating, and they're related, right? Because to your point on the SAT, the income of credential is actually part of the outgoing credential. Yeah, and so anyway, so you want to think hard ultimately about how that all translates downstream to the potential employer Yeah, and by the way look if you want to diversify What you're getting through that credentialing system then widen it you know wide and bar take more things have them do a poetry test Like see what their rhyming skills are like actually, you know add music to it like the these this isn't these are real tangible things, right?

55:35Like, you know, add, you know, like, I think it would be very helpful for us if they would say, like, how good are you at, like, human relationships? Right. That would be something. I'll give you one. I would love to know that coming in. Nobody's testing that. Yeah. Like, fine, if you only want to test writing and math in history, but you're going to get people are good at writing and math and history and interested in it and whose culture puts them that way. And so like, yes, if you kind of mix up the population, throw the cultures together, do a freaky Friday and everybody, and then have them take a test, maybe it'll work better, but like you're kind of dealing with what you're dealing with.

56:16And so if you're going to go find talent, go find talent. But don't make talent being the color of your skin or your gender like that's done. Yeah. So there's a psychologist there that I read about one. There's a psychologist that has a creativity test, a creativity assessment battery test. And the test, if I remember correctly, works roughly as follows, which is, it's sort of two -dimensional. So it's 15 different kinds of creativity. And it's like poetry and literature and, you know, art, visual art and music. And, you know, and you can, by the way, it can be computer coding, you know, you know, whatever, you can do whatever.

56:51It's list all the different potential kinds of creativity. And then I think it's, you had it, It's seven layers, seven degrees of sort of, sort of, you know, sort of aptitude or potential. And it's like degree one is, you know, like let's take just a poetry example. I have written a poem on my own in my notebook that nobody else has ever seen. And then all the way up to, I have won a National Poetry Award, right? Right, and the same thing, classical music, you know, I don't know, you know, you play, playing classical music instruments, you know, I like to practice rounds from time to time for fun, and I performed a Carnegie Hall, it's sort of the scale from one to seven.

57:29And he said, if you apply this test to any kind of broad based, I represent sort of a group in the population, the average result, the mean result is, the average result, overwhelmingly, the result is zero. Yeah, right, right, right, right. Yeah, so it's a real thing. Most people have never done any of those things, right? Most people have no interest in doing any of those things. Or by the way, maybe most people haven't been encouraged to do those things because they're not valued highly enough. Or because they don't think that it translates to having a future path in life. But for people who have done those things or might want to do those things, you could have a completely different kind of criteria.

58:07Yeah, absolutely. And I guarantee it comes out very different across different populations. And I guarantee it's not the same populations that score high on the SAT. right? And so you get into these, you know, like, okay, and you know, to me, this is probably my greatest disappointment about the lack of evolution of the universities is, you know, we kind of rely on them to help us, like the idea of like, we're going to help you get to much more of the population and get to much more of the talent. And we're going to it really help you kind of map our students to your needs. Rather than doing that, they just wanted to pass this political witness test.

58:57And it's just a blown opportunity and really unfortunate because, look, I mean, I can tell you just like in my friend groups, the interests are just so different, right? like people like people in my white friend group or my Asian friend group or my are always surprised at how much I know about popular music. Nobody in my black friend group is even surprised at all about that because like that interest in music is just higher in the population. So like can we take it? These things are different cultures are different things that are important in the conversation are different. Yeah, so let me give you my other credential thing, which is like on the other side of this, which I think you'll find very entertaining.

59:48So, um, so one of the things that came out, you know, one of the one of the, you know, there was this big, big Supreme Court case on admissions and so and Harvard just happened to be the university that was the target of it, although I think frankly they were just representative of the entire, you know, category. But it just turned out we got just a tremendous amount of data, you know, from the inside of at least one of these places in terms of how they do all this. and a lot of that now is public record. And one of the things that became very clear, because these universities are constantly asked, why don't you just basically admit on the basis purely of objective criteria, why even do the rest of this, why don't you just admit on the basis of, quote, academic merit, therefore SAT score.

1:00:26And actually one of the very interesting responses, there are now too many kids who score 800 on the SAT. What they'll say is if we only recute the basis of SAT, it still doesn't help, it still doesn't get us all the way there, because there are too many kids who score 800 on the SAT or 1600 on the SAT. And in particular, and then this gets to the Asian thing, and this is why this came out as a cream court case, which is there's specifically, there are too many Asians who score 800 on the math SAT and do very well on the verbal SAT. And so it's no longer an effective testing method to even get to the cream of the crop for people in STEM.

1:00:58Now, here's what's interesting. There's no reason why, for example, the math SAT has to cap out of 800. The test is designed and calibrated deliberately by professionals who do this for a living. They can make the test arbitrarily difficult. They can make the scale arbitrarily high. You could have a math SAT test that just had harder and harder and harder and harder questions. And then all of a sudden... Exactly, right? Well, so this is almost the opposite of the grand inflation. This is like grade capping. Right, grade capping. Yeah, well, it's a capitated 100, yeah, yeah, right, right, right.

1:01:33Yeah, a capitated 100 is kind of like capping and saying, my students can only get a B plus in the class. So you just can't, like, there's just, there's just, because I'm not presenting complex enough material where they would be able to, you know, validate getting an A, right? But you could, you could have a version of the SAT that basically has like much, much, much harder questions as the test, you know, goes on. And then basically you could have kids, you could just have a scale that goes from, you know, 800 to 2000. And, and you could basically, you could identify within the crop of people who are at 800 level, you could identify the 10 % that are like at like a much higher level.

1:02:02And then it gets to the question of like why is it capital -date 100? It's capital -date 100 because there's just constant pressure on the SAT to equalize itself by demographic group. And so the overwhelming priority at the company that does the SAT is to actually try to reduce group distinctiveness as opposed to unearthed talent. And so they already get just tremendous criticism for group dispersion of results. And if they let it go further up, you know, it would be just, you know, the logical they expect is based on everything we know that, for example, you'd have incredibly high Asian representation, right, among the people who have higher than 800 math SAT.

1:02:37But in the view of the world in which we're looking for a special one different, right, you would say, wow, that's fantastic. In the world where we need everybody to be the same, you would say, oh, that's horrible, right? But that opportunity is there. And then of course, there's nothing keeping a university from developing a test like that for itself, right? Like, or an employer, right? diversity is our strength. This is a thing that's so weird about the politics now is we want diversity but we want everybody to be the same and like we want to make a performance. And if we have diversity then we've got to be able to measure diverse talents and degrees of diverse talent and distinguish in all those kinds of things.

1:03:21If we don't want diversity, then why have education at all? Like just keep us all dumb as we ever were. So we can all be the same, that's the goal. The goal isn't to invent new things or build new stuff or create new ideas or write new movies, the ideas that everybody's the same. And this is where I think like the logic gets really wacky. And I think that, you know, what universities got caught in their own underwear because they weren't willing to have that conversation, which is crazy because the whole idea of the or like a big idea in the university is, you know, free speech marketplace of ideas, these kinds of things.

1:04:07But those ideas got shut down. Right. So let's keep going. Let's see. We are to cover the fair amount of the fix it thing. We could probably spend a lot more time on it. Let's go to the other another option though, which is basically starting new competition. Yeah. And so you could start you could you could start new universities and it is worth saying, of course, some people are trying to do this, right? And so our friend Joe was Dale and and a bunch of our friends actually do. I'm just going to say very wise, you'll Ferguson. Well, Lambda School is a for -profit version, Austin Allred is doing, and then there's a non -profit version University of Austin, which our friends, which our friends, Joe Lanzdale and his colleagues are doing.

1:04:43And then there's another one called Minerva. People do try to start in universities. And so let's talk about that for a second. So let me just kind of frame the thing. So the obvious pro for doing this is sort of, the advantage of starting something new, which is sort of clean sheet of paper, you can learn all the lessons from the people who have come before you, you can do what makes sense for today. You know, and then look, probably this would be that just given the issues in the world today, this is probably the best time in 100 years to try to do that, right? Because you have, you know, a lot of people, you have actually quite a few donors at the moment, as well as, you know, quite a few parents and students, you know, including by the way, students who, according to the current policies, are actually very capable that can't get into top universities right now, because of the, you know, sort of very radical changes in admission policies.

1:05:28So you have like, you know, this is probably like the biggest golden moment in probably in a hundred years to think about doing this. Some people are trying to do it. There's a bunch of reasons to think that, you know, this would also be very difficult. I'll just list three reasons why this would be very difficult. Number one is existing institutions just have very powerful network effects, which is why they, you know, they're so, you know, which is why the big ones are like hundreds of years old. Two is it would take a lot of money for a long time because of the network of, you need You need to boot up a network of fact, and that would just be very expensive.

1:05:58In other words, it's hard to get the great students until you have the great faculty. It's hard to get the great faculty and have the great students. And so, for example, you'd have to really overpay faculty to get them to come over. And you'd probably have to have a much cheaper student proposition. And so you'd have upside down economics for a while. While you're booting at, which means you would need a lot of funding. And then third is you'd be trying to break into a cartel. And so we talked about the accreditation process last time. But maybe you could get accredited. You could access to federal student loan funding and federal research funding.

1:06:24maybe you could, maybe you just get boxed out, which again would just translate to you, you would need a lot more money to get started. So Ben, think about, yeah, so kind of what your entrepreneurial had on and your venture capitalists had on, like is starting new universities in the shape and form and kind of equivalent bundle to the current universities, is that an idea that we would encourage or that we would warn people away from? I would probably warn people away from that idea that it's the same bundle. Although, you know, like today is probably the right time to come at that idea. I think from a venture capital standpoint, that is a very long shot.

1:07:05So it's kind of like, you know, it's a difference between like Tucker, Delorean, and Tesla, right? So by the way, to be clear, the reference is to you, Tucker automotive. Not to not to any other Tucker.

1:07:27But, you know, like I think it's really, and we talk about this a lot, is, you know, like taking on, you know, an existing incumbent at what they do is tough. Taking them on on something that they really don't do like electric cars tends to work better. And I think that with universities kind of there is such a huge opening for you know different lengths of degrees. So like the four -year degree is really something that doesn't make much sense to me. So to adopt that as like what's your degree length is, given that people who aren't scholars need kind of skills and then new skills and new skills and new skills.

1:08:18I mean could you imagine if we were trying to do our jobs based on just what we learned in college, right? Like it taught me to program in Pascal, you know, and see like neither of which anyways a few times you you see, but not often. And you know, like said, oh, like these things don't last that long anymore. These kind of things that your taught, knowledge is evolving very fast, which is great. So like the four -year degree, you know, like that's one thing you might bring into question. And then if you had a shorter degree where you could get just as high paying a job, and there's something Lambda School does, of course, then all of the sudden you have a value proposition that's starting to look really good.

1:08:58Oh, maybe like 10 grand, you know, you've lent me 10 grand for a year, this is Atlanta, Lambda School does, and then you pay me back if and only if you get a job. Well, okay, that starts to sound pretty good. So like I think there's things that would be much more attractive to students potentially that weren't like a full frontal assault on Harvard. So just from a VC standpoint, I think that now, like I think there's something very noble about building a new full out for a year, Ivy League of the Future type thing, because if you believe these schools have lost their way, then it's time to build a new thing.

1:09:42But I'm not sure that you know, the first university was invented so long ago. Like, why don't we invent one for today? Let's take it out of the realm of pure venture capital, where we think about generating returning to so far. Let's just take it off in the realm of maybe let's say sort of philanthropy as an example or just somebody who really wants to make this happen. So, you know, luckily we just happen, you know, there's a donor strike at some institutions right now, and there's a very depocative donor, you know, very depocative donors that are on strike. Yeah, they go with these ones. That's what I've read.

1:10:14So, um, so let's just hypothesize, and I don't know, by the way, I don't know whether this is happening, maybe I don't know, but let's just suppose a group them get together and they're just like, look, we're going to put $2 billion or $5 billion or $10 billion and we're going to build from scratch. And we're going to do the direct frontal thing. We're just going to build the parallel thing. And then the logic we're going to have for doing that is number one, we have the money. We have the resources. So soon we have the money and resources at the level of some number of billions of dollars to do that.

1:10:46Let's say up to the $5 or $10 billion level, just to swag it. And then let's say that, you know, look, we actually want to go for a full frontal kind of assault because we don't want people to have to rethink their assumptions. Like we want to just be able to bring the faculty over, we want to bring the students over, we want the parents to be totally comfortable, right? We want the government to understand how to deal with us. Like we just, we want to fit into the existing industry structure and we don't want to take the risk of innovating, we just want to be like the others and we're just going to be a new, we're just going to be a new and better version of the things that already exist.

1:11:18Like how would we advise them? You know, given those goals and given that level of funding, like would we at that point say, you know, while that sounds like it might be a good idea, and here's how you might do it, or would we still say? Yeah, no, I mean, I like, as you know, our whole mission in life is we're dream builders, not dream killers. So we would have for sure encouraged them. And actually got me thinking about like, What would I advise Joe Lanzdale to do? Like one thing I should probably call him, is he should wire University of Austin straight into us and straight into everybody in venture capital who's building new companies and kind of hiring lots of employees and all these kinds of things.

1:12:04And ask us what we're looking for and then let's do a partnership and recruit straight out of there and so forth. And then that will really enhance the proposition to new students. So if I'm a new student, I'm going like, OK, I get a Harvard degree or I could get a university Boston degree. Why am I going to university of Boston? Well, what if, like, during the recruiting process, like they come see us? And we are like, we rather have you out of university of Boston than out of Harvard. That would open my eyes. I'd go like, OK, that's something. I may take that seriously. So I probably really lock in on how can I attract the best students and what does that take?

1:12:50And I think it's partly a function of faculty, but it's partly a function of who's paying, who understands enough about that university that they go, I'm all in. And by the way, I can be as big a help to you when you come out as anybody. So kind of artificially create what's like the alumni network, but better than an alumni network, because you're doing it with people who 100 % have jobs like the top of the job market. You think that that's probably where I would start, and then I kind of design the system to feed us, and then to kind of feed the students in that way into all the most kind of interesting jobs that line up with the curriculum now.

1:13:36You know, like, and if you're doing like, if university at Boston was like, had a whatever a big focus on creativity then I would, you know, wanna like wire them into some kind of creative output or whatever, like, so what happens after the university of Austin? Like I would start with that. Like what's gonna happen when I graduate? Is basically when you go to school, you're like, what are you looking for? you're looking for like, my life isn't gonna be like, you know, for me, it was like my life's not gonna be working at a fucking restaurant. Because I had been a bus boy and I was like, I do not wanna do that my whole life.

1:14:17I can't do it, I'll shoot myself in the head like I can't take it. And I think that's a lot what people are looking for when they go to college is like, how can I have a life that kind of has more variety is interesting where I'm learning and, you know, lifelong learner, all that kind of thing. And so if you can guarantee me that life, or if you can give me a better product, to give me that life, that's what I want. Right, right. So you sent me on the same topic building from scratch. You sent me a thing as we were prepping for this. I'll just read your own quote back to you. Today's universities are built on industrial revolution technology that are there for completely outdated for the information age, both in how they run and the product they offer.

1:15:01And so again, how would we advise this hypothetical new institution on what to do on that for like, what is that mean in practice? Yeah, so like I think industrial revolution technology means you can build big buildings, right? You can drive there in your car. We're on a train, you don't have to ride a horse.

1:15:24And it's a inter -lighting at night. It's worth it. And inter -lighting at night, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not too hot, not too cold. Yeah, this is sort of the platform. So what do you get? You get classrooms within instructors. You get dorms that you can live in, you know, big cafeteria, you know, with a meal plan, all that kind of thing. But like in the information age and a giant library, of course, multiple libraries, and if you're an Ivy League school. You know, in the information age, you have like AI, you can ask it any question. You've got, you know, you have access to the internet. You've got all these other things.

1:16:13And then, you know, your school experience, you know, right now in an industrial age world, as you have instructors and you've got like administrators filling out forms and you've got you know very little you know I don't know about University of Illinois but it's certainly a Columbia and at UCLA it's very little kind of career guidance you know kinds of things help you help you find your highest and best use the university didn't really do that So I think that in a information age, AI university, all that form filling out, all that, a lot of the kind of instruction is taken care of, but what you really need is the university to help you find your purpose and then guide you through your purpose with a team of other students who have a similar purpose and you know to help you study the right things, prove yourself in the right ways, get the credential and so forth, and using all the best tools to do that as opposed to you know waking you up at eight in the morning, walk to a class in your pajamas because you were drinking too much the last night you know sitting a class very bored, not really, you know, kind of be integrated into the AI and the internet to get the rest of the information.

1:17:39So I just think there's like a whole ring thinking of the way your day would go. And, you know, like 45 minute or hour and a half lectures are pretty hard. It's pretty hard to pay attention the whole time and retain everything. Whereas like smaller or chunks of work, I think have been proven out. And then a test to go, like, OK, did you retain the information that you got or some interactive part every 10 minutes? Is it much better? Like, just in terms of these things. And then, like, as you said, one to one tutor, that kind of thing. But maybe the machine is the one to one tutor in some ways.

1:18:20Because you can ask questions now in English or in Chinese or whatever language you speak. So I think that I would definitely make it that and give the professors the megatuters the kind of tools to both identify the capabilities of the students and then help them maximize those abilities and then kind of then map it further into people like us or it could be us, it could be the could be whatever part of society works. But like I said, we take people with all kinds of talent. All kinds of different things is very valuable. Like extremely valuable for us at the firm. In fact, I'd say argue where 550 people, which probably makes us the biggest venture capital firm in the world, why?

1:19:20Because we do the most things. Why? Because we have the kind of people who can do lots of different things. And that's a heck of an advantage when as an employer you have people who can do all kinds of different things because then you have more capability as an institution. Right. Right. And so, yeah, so when the topic of technology and education comes up, a lot of people sort of reflexively assume that you must mean just like the whole thing moves online and everything's over the internet, that's not what you're saying. No, no, no, no, no. They were continuing to be a real world experience comparable to what they want today.

1:19:55I have to be a world experience. I actually think it's good for most students, maybe not for you, but for most students. They're different personality types too. But like I think there's something very motivating to be around purists, right? Like here you are. Here's my cohort of people who are going to be in the world with me. And what are they doing? And what can I learn from them? You learn as much kind of from your classmates as you do kind of I think from the university and that's hard to do, though I could much harder to do online. So I think that the college experience, which is, you know, to Joe and university of Austin's credit, is a real thing with real value, you know, particularly for a young person, for most young people.

1:20:40But I think you have to modernize it. You know, like we're not in 1910 anymore. Yeah. Yeah. And so within a mine, let's go more radical from that. So let's let's talk about on bundling. So my our old French embark sale has his famous line. It's two ways to succeed in life in business. One is you can bundle the others you can unbundle. Yeah. And so let's let's talk about the unbundling. So I'll just go through them in order. So we had our dozen functions of the major university. I stripped out three, which we can talk about the end, but that leaves nine, which seems to me at least there's a case You could be great for unbuddling.

1:21:16So let's walk through them and let's think about these as like you know actual potential start Aschal potentially their startup ideas like actual for profit startup ideas or by the way, maybe nonprofit or fall through our Ideas so credentialing agency like yeah, so we talked a lot about credentialing so far, but like you know all the different Asch Bess of credentialing and again this concept of credentialing and credentialing out like both the credential the way that you're deciding who to credential and then the actual credential that you're giving them. Is that, Ben, in your view, is that something that could be abstracted out and turned into its own thing?

1:21:47Well, I think this may be the best startup idea of everything in education in that. that, like if somebody had an organization that aptitudeed personality tested people in, you know, not just, you know, a general test, but like in very specific things as well, like, you know, if you think about Silicon Valley, everybody gives every engineer some kind of test, you know, in their interview, right? like write this piece of code, figure out this algorithm, this kind of thing. I think every job has some of that. So if you had a place that could reliably differentiate people's capability and things you needed to hire for, that would be something that I think would be very attractive to employees.

1:22:46I mean, one of the SAT was invented because it used to be only like nobles, the elite, the aristocrats, people from rich families got to go to college. And then you think, well, like, what if I'm like, you know, some poor kid from New Lisbon with Wisconsin? How do I show? I can go to University of Illinois as well. Like, take this test. That's a fucking miracle. And I think that was a specific reform at a specific moment in time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And then if you think about that, you know, among employers, people are worried about bias and this and that well like you know like you know to have the ability to show your capability in any dimension and then having an employer know about that and have it be like valid you know we'd be incredibly interested in that and I think that you know people who didn't have college degrees who might have gone to a state school or something like that that you know, was a little cheaper that they could afford.

1:23:47All the sun, well, and then that would actually help fix the university system in a way in that. Now I can go to San Francisco State and I can go get credentialed here and I'm actually more interesting to Andrews and Horowitz than the person from Harvard who's got this degrading credential. Like how about that? And I spent a hell of a lot less money to go to San Francisco State. That would be incredible. So I think that to me this is such a great startup idea. I've been thinking about since we started a podcast like, how do we fund that one? Like that's awesome. You know, you'd have to do a great job on it.

1:24:23That, you know, it would have to be unfudgable. You know, you really like nobody's bringing chat GPT into the thing with them like whatever it is or maybe they are like, I don't know, you know, maybe you just have to know what to ask. But something that was like you knew if they could do that, then they would have that capability. And then as an interview, you're just really going understanding motivation, cultural fit, these kinds of things as opposed to, can they do the job? Cause you know they can do the job. Yeah. There's also something I'm not a lawyer, but there's also something in the lot.

1:24:59So as you pointed out earlier, like it's illegal, there's a famous Supreme Court case, made it illegal. Companies used to do generalized aptitude testing in the old days. And the original pre -part case. General test and rule them out of a specific job on a general test. Right. That's right. And that basically killed IQ testing at the employment level. And that was when the university degree took off because the SAT score was an implicit IQ test and it wandered through. So employers outsource the IQ test to the university credential. But as we discussed, the university, 1700 universities and colleges in the US have stopped using in standardized testing as an admission criteria.

1:25:38So the value of that is going to zero as an IQ test. And in fact, they're doing everything they can to get away from that. But the employer still can do what's interesting, but this is a startup idea is that the thing that the Supreme Court has said specifically as a legal, as an employer can do this. But here you could have any kind of aptitude testing IQ or otherwise. You could have a dozen or 100 different ways of measuring aptitude in whatever domain you want, including creativity everything else we talked about and it would all be it's all completely voluntary it's completely legal you know it's because it's not tied to employment right yeah and so I right so you could do like a super version of even what the employers universities did in the past and actually have it be a fully a fully legal thing and by the way you know we it would really help get people into the right jobs as well because you know sometimes people get miscast like this is you know life is like that sometimes you know you get they'll sign one thing and you really should be something else.

1:26:33And these kinds of, this kind of rigorous assessment might identify that and then, you know, like you can kind of find something that you're better at and that you're do better at in your career. And then like, you know, we could use more, which would be great for us. The thing you could do is like, this is a definitely high on that. It would be great for us, great to read. Yeah, yeah. Okay, good. Good. All right, second is actual actual educational coursework itself. And of course, you know, again, here there have been attempts. There was, you know, kind of the MOOC, you know, kind of online course movement, a while ago, of course, there, uh, uh, Udacity.

1:27:09And then, um, you know, yeah, you do me or Udemy, which is another startup that I can start. And then it's the Khan Academy, which is kind of a different format of it. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And then, um, I'll just give you a couple of couple thoughts on this one. Um, so number one, actually, this This has already happened, specifically this is happening in Korea. And so there are actually, like teaching superstars in Korea that actually makes big courses. I've had this idea for a long time, which is, if you figure you've got a million kids who are going to take Math 101 fresh when you're college, you get them each to do $100 for that.

1:27:46It's $100 million revenue. And then, I wish Steven Spielberg to make Math 101 as a video mini series. right? Yeah, I'm sure. I'm probably the most committed. Right. Of course, we're all times, yeah. Yeah, like I'm, literally, get Steven Spielberg, Christopher Nolan, these, I'm literally, yeah, the most, the most like, mind blowing incredible, like, of course, yeah, of course, lectures you've ever seen with like, full, you know, three effects and graphics and everything perfect. And so you could do that. And then, you know, we talked about the tutoring thing, but you could potentially have a thing where you have like the super high production value general courses and then you a couple with AI tutoring, or you couple it by the way with in -person tutoring or matching grad students to undergrad or whatever.

1:28:28And again, people have been trying to do variations in this for quite a while. How would we think about that as an entrepreneurial opportunity today? Do you think? Yeah, it's interesting because of the ones we named, the one that has worked the best is probably Khan Academy, which had the least amount of money going to it and is in its own format. right? Like it's a it's not a university course format thing. It's like these little lessons. You know, I couldn't even remember, you know, when AI started taking off, I had a hard time remembering like how to do linear algebra or how hard it was. And I did the Khan Academy.

1:29:04I was like, wow, I forgot how easy it was, you know, as much easier than actual algebra. It sounds it sounds harder, but it's easier. And so like it is kind of like a magical thing. And I think that challenge with the full college experience, unless you get to the Christopher Nolan version, is that it's a very big thing to sign up and commit to without a well -known credential, right? Like, okay, I'm gonna go learn, right? You know, whatever calculus, or I'm gonna learn advanced, like machine learning or something like that. If I'm really coming from outside the job market, even if I learn it, will anybody believe me and how does that work?

1:29:57So I think completely decoupling that one from credentialing or jobs, maybe tough, but if you could link it into, like you take this class, you get a job, then I think that could definitely work. But otherwise, I just think it's a very small market of people who just really want to learn that much about a subject. Right. Right. So yeah, when you talk to Stan, we like a little bit about subjects. Yeah. So when you when you talk to professors, put on a cynical hat here from when you talk to professors, university administrators about this kind of thing, basically what they tell you is like, look, like you can't be naive about actual real -world students.

1:30:42They say look like in practice, it's your point of like the advantage of having a physical presence like a natural physical campus. But what's out tell you is like look, a lot of students actually don't want to learn. Like are they're not motivated to or like it's not something they would actually do and they're not driven to do it. And like they're going through the motions and to the extent that they're actually like showing up to class and doing the work it's because they're in a specifically structured environment where the expectations are set high to do that. And they're gonna get kicked out if they don't and you know their parents are paying for it.

1:31:07and like, it's like, they're basically pressured, basically pressured into doing it. And of course, you know, a lot, when I went to college and I went to Columbia. So like, and Columbia is like a pretty high end. So I imagine at like regular school, that's even more the case. So I think, I think that, I guess my response to that would be, I think there might just be two different kinds of students. There might be the ones that like are actually super, it's super intrinsically motivated as the psychologist say, where they're just like, you know, and you, by the way, you talk about yourself as an example of this, which is like, I wasn't a bus boy, I didn't want to bus, I was a dishwasher, I didn't want to be a dishwasher.

1:31:41And like, we're going to go do this because like, we know we need to do this because we're doing it for intrinsic, we're doing it for ourselves. Like we're doing it for intrinsic reasons. And so those students exist, but then there is this other kind of student that arguably more populates, especially the upper ranks, ironically of American education, which is like where they actually need to be like. And not even me pressured, it's maybe overstating it, but you know, maybe it's, let's just say they need to be in a highly structured environment. Yeah. And I agree. That's most students, I agree.

1:32:06Yeah, yeah. And so, or it's this weird thing, which is it's almost like the more privileged, the more privileged the student, the more pressure needs to be put on them or something like that. It's a, you know, it's a... Oh, I can't say that if your life is really fun. Right. You know, if you've got lots of money and, you know, like when you're young, life is incredibly fun. Everything is new. Every movie is amazing. Every experience is incredible. So like, I'm gonna take those years and I'm gonna fucking sit in a classroom, listening to somebody drone on about, you know, whatever, the Iliad, like, I don't want to do that.

1:32:41So I think that's right. Whereas on the other hand, if your life is kind of, you know, it's misery without getting something out of this experience, then that's a little more motivating. Yeah, so I always wonder with these things. I always wonder if people should be more specifically, you know, sort of addressing that category. And I don't know even know, you know, self -motivated, intrinsically motivated, and just like not try to appeal to the people who need more structure and more pressure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And anything that's a very specific market, like you'd have to kind of identify those and get them through, yeah, interesting.

1:33:19But again, to your point, if you then linked that to the credential, then they would see the cause and effect, and then that would be very clear. And we mentioned lambda school, this is basically describing lambda school in a lot of ways. So this makes sense. OK, third is the research bureau. So this one freaks people out because any time you bring up is there a different way to do research fund research. Basically, everybody in the research complex, generally they freak out because they're basically the steel man case against any change to how research is funded is basically you don't understand the whole point of research.

1:33:54The whole point of basic research is that it doesn't have an end goal in mind and identified. and it can't because how do you know you're doing some research experiment in physics or some new math theorem or whatever and like higher biology to coding the genome and how do you ever know like yeah maybe there's a commercial use case for this thing 30 years from now but like You have no idea and that's what makes research different than development right the reason that This is from research and development is because you know development has a specific goal to like ship or product and make money research is like trying to come up with new do knowledge.

1:34:25So it's like, okay, Annie, and then, you know, the argument, you know, the modern research university was constructed. The research part of it was constructed originally by Vannevar Bush and his peers 70, 80 years ago to provide a kind of environment in which that kind of basic research can happen. And there you get into, you know, ideas like tenure, like, why do professors have tenure? A big reason for that is so that they're free to do whatever research they want. You know, they don't, they don't, they're not risking getting fired if they quote, don't deliver something, let's say practical useful.

1:34:54And then the other is government funding of research. It's like the government, companies won't fund basic research because it doesn't have an end commercial target. But the government will because it presumably has this long term perspective. And so you get, in my experiences, you get tremendous pushback out of the gate in this conversation. Having said that, I think there are a bunch of very interesting things that you could maybe explore as ways to do research outside of the university context them and by the way some people are doing this and we can talk about them but so there's a couple of issues with the current research complex we talked about last time so one is just there's a massive replication crisis and so depending by field up to 75 % of the research in a lot of fields doesn't replicate so massive incentive complex or like a massive incentive problem yes how do you get a grant you publish a research result that seems to validate additional investigation.

1:35:47And how do you get that result? Well, you get it legitimately or you do data mining and how do you get tenure? How do you get tenure? You publish papers that you may or may not have written or for whatever. So so there's that. And then there's a friend of mine and I won't I won't name him, but he's a very experienced guy who's been in the sort of leadership positions across this entire spectrum. And he always he always whenever he and I talk about this, I'm always going on about the replication crisis because I think it's such a scandal and he's like, look, it's not even the problem. He said the problem is 90 % of the research is just useless.

1:36:20It's just like it's just not helpful. And basically, and again, this is the guy just. Right. The matter, right? That's what he says. He says, look, whether it's right or not, it's actually secondary to whether it would even matter if it was right. And this, by the way, is a guy who has run a major, he ran a major at one point, major government research funder. And so this is a guy who was in a position to be able to hand out the money. And so this is not like some sort of anti -establishment guys. This is like somebody who's been on the inside seeing how the sausage is made and running it himself.

1:36:47And he said, he said, look, he said, look, the practical reality, this is his argument. The practical reality is in any given field of research. And it's anything from quantum physics to, you know, any good psychology, anything else, computer science, whatever. He said, look, there are five institutions that are on the leading edge. And everybody in each of those fields knows who those five institutions are and those five institutions generate, you know, essentially all of the useful output that actually moves the field forward. But it's just, it's five institutions. It's, you know, whatever number of, you know, therefore, I don't know, depends on the field, 100 professors or something like that, 200 maybe by field.

1:37:27and then it's, you know, some number of grad students. And then it's the research budget for those people. And he said, look, he's like, and it's not as like, well, why does the government just fund that? Like, why fund the other? And he says, that's like 10 % of the money. And I was like, well, then why spend the other 90 %? He's like, well, you know, because like, it's not enough. Like, it's this weird thing of like, it's not enough for the government because there's like too many, there's too many miles to feed, there's too many constituent, there's too many congressmen that have universities and there's districts, you know, there's too many people who get tenure, who expect this, there's too many incumbent colleges that have research programs, even if they're not productive, they don't cancel them.

1:37:58And so he said the system is kind of wired to overfund every category by like a factor of 10. And so he said, look, he said the thing the thing to do in his view is like the first thing you would do is you said you would just narrow it down to the 10%. And so you would just figure out like what is the actual 10 % of the useful work to be done? What is the actual 10 % of the people who could do that work? And so he says look the aggregate dollar amount involved here is literally a tenth of what everybody thinks it is to do the actual quality work. And then he said and then he makes it further made a further argument that he said, look like you don't, Yeah, you don't always know that there's going to be commercial applications for research, but a lot of times there is.

1:38:30And so if you have some material science breakthrough or something like that patent is probably going to be super valuable. And by the way, universities are in the business of patents and patent licensing and they get revenues from that, even though it's not their main thing. And so it's like, look, you could either have these new, you could either have new nonprofit research institutes that would have to be funded with philanthropic dollars, but maybe it's not, you know, maybe that's actually tractable because it's just not that much money for the high quality work. Or you said, look, maybe it should be a venture capital model.

1:38:56It should be for profit. And you just basically make money. It's a long -dated revenue thing where you're making money in the long run on commercial product development and on patent licensing coming on the other side. And you should actually just apply, you should actually apply a VC mindset to that. So anyway, so it really, and then I'll just mention like so our friend Patrick Carlson has, you know, his funding fell inthropically program, you know, to do independent medical research associated with Stanford, called ARC, but set up as a separate thing. we know well the folks at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute that does specific grant funding to individual young researchers in the biomedical field and a set of standard results with that.

1:39:35So there are new cuts on this that people have. Yeah, Parker, I'm on the board of his institute, which is similar. Yeah, describe what he does. Yeah, so Sean's institute is called PICE PICI, is, or it's initials, Parker Institute Cancer something, I can't remember, but I'm on the board of it. But, you know, they, so they fund researchers to do kind of breakthrough work on cancer and, you know, they do have, they've got both, they spend the ideas out into, there's a venture model, so they spend the amount into companies and the institute invests in them. They do generate patents, so like it is, you know, it's originally, he, I mean, he made an incredibly generous $250 million, I think donations to start maybe bigger than that, probably bigger than that.

1:40:26But anyway, some enormous amount of money. But his vision has always been that it will become self -sustaining over time because the things that it's doing are so incredibly important. And I think that's probably right. I do think it's going to end up working. And they've We spent out some very, very interesting companies already, some of which we've invested in, by the way. And then there's the Chan Zuckerberg Institute, which is another one, right? Friend Mark Zuckerberg and his wife for cellachan are trying to cure disease, like all disease, which is an incredibly great ambition, and that's something you would necessarily do in a company, but something that will probably have a lot of commercial results coming out of it as well.

1:41:13So, you know, look, I think we're definitely at a point where Philanthropy can do it. The other thing is, right, like there was research before the current complex and, you know, got us some pretty interesting results like, say, the theory of relativity, you know, kind of came out of that. But I think where was Alan Turing when he did his proof? That's a good question. And then of course, Claude Shannon was a master student, and you know, which isn't, I mean, a master's thesis, which is considered like of nothing in academia, which is probably more important than almost any PhD thesis in the last hundred years, where he mapped Boolean logic.

1:42:06It was the first time anybody did anything with Boolean Logic, which is the algebra of zeros and ones onto a circuit. And that is the beginning of computers for those who don't follow that kind of thing. And so there's real research that can obviously happen outside of the way the current university system works. That's been very powerful. So yeah, no, I think, look, I think that it would be great if there were, you know, a couple 100 of these in different categories and there'd be certainly something that you know I would love to you know put more money into. So I think that's a quite a good idea.

1:42:48Whether they make money or not like I think they're very kind of film -tropically fundable. Yeah that's right yeah that's right. Yeah so I think yeah I think agreeing with you I think but yeah I think that I think there there may just be a I mean look there may be certain areas like you know particle physics or look whatever where you used to do government money, but like I think a lot of the current complex actually might be fundable. The quality work happening in it might be fundable separately. Let's see, policy think tank, you know, that's, you know, there are policy think tanks that are not associated with universities.

1:43:17And so, you know, it's certainly a viable thing to do separately. People doing that today. Moral instructor is my favorite one to think about breaking out separately, which is, you know, look, there are many social movements that are not associated with University, there are many social organizations, activist groups, churches, like new religions, old religions, right exactly, which are maybe coming back a little bit right now. And so yeah, I don't know, it seems like society has a lot of different ways to organize moral instruction that's not necessarily having a take place in a research university context.

1:43:58Yeah, and I think that the university one is very, very tricky because it is counter to a lot of its other goals potentially, particularly, you know, marketplace of ideas, freedom of speech, freedom of thought. And, you know, I just think it's not the right people to be doing it. You know, look, the, you know, pastors and priests and so forth have come under fire. But in a lot of ways, they're much more of the right people to be giving more instruction because they actually spend time with their congregation. They deal with the, you know, their actual trials and tribulations of kind of going off the moral path and how to get people back on it.

1:44:45And they're like hands on. It's a tangible thing. Whereas, you know, in a university, a professor can spout off whatever ever that F .E. wants or she wants and then has no tie to that down the road. They don't live in their community, don't have parents who go to the church and donate and so forth. I think in some of my universities it's a worse place to do moral instruction. Now that it's no longer like a religious institution and if there's one thing I would take out of a university would probably be that. And look, I think I'm a big believer in kind of an intellectual kind of discussion and instruction about ethics and morality.

1:45:36Like I actually believe in that a lot. And I mean, look, I do it at work. Right. Like one of the things we talk to employees about is like, you know, when this situation, what are we going to do? Are we going to do like what's transactional? Are we going to do what's long term? Are we going to do what's right? Are we doing what makes us money in the short term? And like, that's like real moral instruction. And with real consequence, that's going to have a real impact. And like, I've got to live with the consequence. They've got to live with the consequence. And in a way, it's a better context to do it than a university where you don't have any accountability, any moral accountability.

1:46:16So I think you're better off doing it almost anywhere than in a university. Or you can, or and or, and you can also, you can reconstitute the original religious university, the original idea of religious university. You could go back, you could go back to the future, you could go back to the original idea, right? The original idea. I'd be like, shut Galway, ask down, you know, do that kind of thing. Well, no, no, no, no, no, like it's even further back. I'm not suggesting going that far back. But no, like the original hardware business plan, which was like to instruct moral leaders, right? Instruct masters and moral leaders.

1:46:52And you just have a, you can imagine a institution that just does that and just doesn't do all the other things that have been added on for the last 400 years. I think that would be very good in the sense that in my lifetime our society is degenerated no place more than what's right than right and wrong. There's no agreement on right and wrong anymore. You know, it's stealing right? Well, it's right if you're hungry. Okay. You know, there's certainly no right and wrong about marriage or these kinds of things. And I think that's caused a real degeneration of society, quality of life, you know, outcomes of the world.

1:47:44And so like fixing that would be great, but I think the way we do it now is bananas. It doesn't fit into the current bundle, I would just say. So having an independent moral university be fantastic. There are certainly overtly religious ones. The ones that we've lost, yeah, the ones that we've lost, I think are maybe the ones that are kind of moral and ethical without being overtly religious, which is a real challenge, a real challenge in general. But anyway, so I'll keep going. So Sports League, I think you'd probably argue that the sports function could just be its own thing. Yeah, I think that like this the sports league is immoral just like fundamentally I think in retro University, you mean the university the university based for us.

1:48:26We talked about that last time. The big time college sports I think is gotten to a point where it's clearly immoral on that it's very clearly professional sports where they don't pay the employees and that generates a colossal amount of money. And so I think you've got to fix that. And I don't know that you can pay kind of like it, probably the right way to fix it is to spin it out and have it continue to be affiliated with the university but not run by the university but run, you know, kind of by by owners of the various teens or something, you know, work into the NFL or the NBA, because that's what it is.

1:49:12And, you know, then the athletes need to get paid. It's just crazy. It's really wild that they don't. That South Park did the very hilarious episode on this, called the National Crack Baby Association. And they went, but the funniest part was Cartman went to go see the, you know, one of the kind of present at the universities and he goes, and he's dressed like an old Southern slave master and he goes, how do you get away with paying, with not paying your slaves? And he goes, slaves, you mean our student athletes? And he goes, oh, yes, student athletes. And you're watching and you're going, yep.

1:49:51That's exactly what's going on. Now, like I said, it's not all, like not all school's athletic teams make that that kind of money and not all athletic teams, but the ones that do, I think need to be reformed. Like in retrospect, this is one of those things where people 20 years from now we're gonna go, like I can't believe you guys did that. You know, that's gonna be bad. Yeah, that's right. And then the two other ones, these are serious topics, but also a little bit fun. So at all daycare and dating site, right? And so, you know, like the adult daycareist, let me look, a lot of people just like graduate at high school and go get a job, right?

1:50:31And so, you know, maybe that's, maybe that's overblown or maybe you can imagine like new like design communities, contacts, maybe even entire buildings, where you have a sort of social cultural, you know, kind of matrix that people can plug into. Yeah, like I mean, some degree like the ARM services have a, you know, or that function in a way, you know, where you, okay, you get to be 18, what are you gonna do with your life? You go to the army, you go to college, you know, like it's, it's kind of this community that you step into that's not your family, but you know, you can't stay here. Kind of thing.

1:51:07I, or you know, the corporate campus, you know, for a lot of, for a lot of, you know, even post -college, a lot of corporate campuses are kind of designed to perpetuate adult -day care. Yeah. Right. I'm just trying to think of the proposition to the parents who are paying for it, you know, at that point. Yeah. Like that seems hard. Well, we have a company. There was something else that came out of it, you know, like that you want to adult daycare. And then you got a job. Yeah. Well, we have a company. So we have a company where I, you know, he would certainly not pitch it as adult daycare, but we have a company that's intended to provide a much more, you know, pleasant and interesting and enjoyable experience for, you know, especially people new in their lives and careers as adults from a housing and community at the STEM point.

1:51:47Yes, yes. Yeah, oh, that, yes. So that is, that's a very good idea on it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I would pre -announce it, but yeah, there is a, there is a new idea on the portfolio that creates a place that is like a college dorm, from a living perspective, and has a community, and so forth, and so on. You pay rent there, but rent some way that you would, you know, in any apartment, but it kind of is a nice, bridge from coming out of high school or college or what not in into the world in a way where you're not just living by yourself somewhere lonely. And then a dating site, you know, I'm just absolutely furious that the dating apps took off after I was dating.

1:52:32After I was finished dating. I put so much. This is a hard one to make. I haven't been on a date in over 35 years. Exactly. So I would just observe there are new ways for people to date today that are much easier than when we were in college. And so the dating site part of it might already be solved. Yeah, there are certainly tools, although, you know, that physical proximity is not something you can simulate online. And there's a lot of things. And then the understanding is there's a lot of fake photos and whatnot. It's just like better in their photos, perhaps. Well, it's also credentialing.

1:53:12So then there's also a psychiatric credentialing, which is one of the reasons why college campuses are, I mean, one of the reasons a college campus is a high house for dating is just it's a lot of young people who are together physically. But another reason is because they all have a shared sense of identity, right? They all have a shared credential, which is they're all, they're all at X college, right? And so they've all been validated, at least to some extent. And then by the way, that's also true later on in life. A lot of people who are college graduates that's not only want to date other college graduates or only want to date people who went to certain kinds of schools or whatever.

1:53:44So the credentialing thing actually reflects itself into this other area of actual real life, which is dating and then ultimately marriage and offspring. And so we should probably both not underestimate the actual utility of an existing college environment for that, but also think about like, yeah, but for example, the credentialing agency, your independent credentialing agency also credential, credential USA, potentially. Has a viable marriage prospector dating plans? Exactly. So I love that part of the thing. OK, and then we'll close. We're at two hours, and so we'll close here quickly. But I think there's basically fifth, the fifth thing that could happen is just basically just the existing system could just devolve.

1:54:27Just you just unwind. And the way that I'm unwind is so the credentialing agency, credentialing function shifts to the employers, the education courses shift to you know, the allocate, internet options, research bureau shifts to the function shifts to the kinds of things you know, we're just talking about policy think tank on wines shifts to the independent think tanks, you know, moral instructor part loses credibility of just whithers over time, social reformer whithers is arguably happening already, immigration agency. Maybe that continues, maybe that's the ultimate business model is just get to have high paying immigrants.

1:55:00Sports leagues, you know, breakout, out, go independent, become professional sports. You know, there's, as we're saying, at all, they care dating side, people just find other ways to live and date. So it just may, it may be that, you know, it just simply may be that just things just like unwind. And, you know, in the scenario of sitting here 50 years from now, these institutions still exist in some form, but they look increasingly just like, you know, kind of archaic and, you know, kind of, you know, kind of just like, I don't know, just like not. You know, they're just, I don't know. It's like, you know, there's lots of institutions in life where it's just like, wow, you know, He dragged down the street and there's a, you know, I won't pick on anybody, but there's a, you know, whatever.

1:55:34And he's like, wow, that thing still exists. You know, that's interesting. And they're just like much less important because they kind of, they sort of isolate themselves, sort of socially and economically, sort of wall themselves off from the general progress of society. And so is that, yeah, how would you think about that? Yeah, like, I mean, I think that it's pretty fragile now, you know, in terms of the value proposition and that it's so expensive and got, you know, the the cost relative to the value is so precarious. And just like as an example, like if the US government said we're not going to guarantee college loans anymore, that would be, you know, cataclysmic.

1:56:17And then if employers were like, we're not gonna, there's no SAT score, there's no grades at mean anything, there's no rigor, we're just gonna not value college degrees anymore that would close. So there's things that are actually reasonably close to happening that could collapse the system, or at least really alter it irrevocably. So I think that, you know, the universities very much have to think hard about like shoring themselves up on the value proposition in particular. I just think it's getting very weak for students and that's a dangerous place to be in if you're in university. Yeah. And then the other thing I'd nominate is like, I, you know, this sounds a little bit crazy right now, but like, I, you know, I don't think we're necessarily that far away from a full a little fledge political revolt, which is the constituency of these places is just, it's not a majority of society.

1:57:16It's a small minority in terms of the people who actually benefit from the system today in the popular, in the voter base. And then, a lot of these places become so politicized and they inject themselves so directly into national politics. Right. And so they sort of declared themselves, and you see this in every metric and every number distribution of professors ideology and all the social activism that happens and so forth is just like overwhelming indications and then increasingly public, right? And like, you know, just to, since we're at the two hour mark, I'll just, you know, kind of be blunt.

1:57:51It's like, I mean, look like right -wing media, for better or for worse, is just consumed with story after story after story of just like crazy bananas, you know, crazy hostile things that universities are doing. And so, you know, like, you could imagine, it hasn't happened, but you could imagine a point where just basically like, you know, the, you know, half or more of the country just at some point puts its foot down and it's elected representatives, but they're foot down and they're just like, we're just not doing this anymore. We're not paying for it anymore. Yeah, right. If the country took a sharper, maybe even a not so sharp right turn, then you could imagine an administration in a Congress going, why are we going to this?

1:58:30Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it's just, it's a small number a pro, the really cautionary note here would be, it's a small number of programs that pay for the whole thing, right? So it's federal student loans, it's federal research funding. It's a couple of things in the tax law and a few other things. And so it's not like it would take, it would not take two years to figure out how to kill these things from a legislative standpoint. It would take about two minutes. And so it feels like that, and look, maybe that never materializes because maybe these things just are so important and they have such existing credibility and, you know, they have so much political stroke and you know they're graduates have so much power and so forth and so maybe that never happens or maybe it's one of those things where there's a tipping point and at some point people are just like I'm not gonna I'm not gonna tolerate this anymore.

1:59:13I would register that for anybody still listening as a good all right good we I think covered it we as as predicting the beginning we did not get to Q &A, so Ben, if you're up for it, we will continue collecting questions. And if there's popular demand, we will do one more. We'll do part three, maybe next week and we'll do Q &A. And then we will, that'll be six hours of content from us on this topic. And that'll probably be enough for a while. But we have enjoyed talking about it. And hopefully you've enjoyed listening to it. Yes. Thank you. Thank you, everyone.