E36: Joe Lonsdale on His Plan to Revitalize America's Declining Sectors

22:48right? So it's like, but we need people like that to try to push through, try to win. We need everyone else to wake up and start supporting confident people, you know, to get it and fix these things. Let's lastly focus on healthcare because this also illustrates, you know, a ton of waste. What's the real problem in healthcare, a misunderstanding about, you know, solving our healthcare system and what is potential solutions? Oh gosh, this is so big. It's like, it's like 20 % of our economy and it's massive. You know, I think monopolies and crony capitalism is a big part of it, right? So I think every area of healthcare has people who've changed the law and who've set things up to make it so that they benefit and so that the things that wouldn't actually happen that would make it cheaper and make it better don't happen.

23:30So I think the health systems are an obvious local monopoly. They block lots of competition. They basically make it really, really hard for new insurance companies and other things to break in because they control monopolies locally. So it's kind of their way or the highway. And they'll oftentimes charge five or six times for something. Now, sometimes they charge more for something because it's better, you know, but a lot of times they don't and they purposely don't want to be transparent. So even though we've passed laws trying to make it transparent, they're all in violation of those laws because there's not enough teeth.

23:56So that's like one issue. Then the payers themselves have the worst incentive. We could actually get through this and probably fix it if we were allowed to have payers make money by making healthcare better and cheaper, but payers have fixed 20 % margins. So the way it works, for example, our friend at UT Dell Medical, he showed better results for patients with 80 % less spend in musculoskeletal care this is not like a small amount it's 80 less spent right and then 30 40 less spend in many other key areas he's like this really smart neurosurgeon sorry neurosurgeon running ut del medical and and uh and none of the insurance companies want to work with them because by the way if you make 80 less money going through something then they're 20 of 80 less you know they're getting four versus 20 that's not good for the insurance company's profits so so the incentives are totally misaligned for payers and that's that's really corrupt um and then you have like doctors groups are very powerful listen we have a lot of amazing doctors we need more amazing doctors in the us but the american medical association uh has a lot of things where they'll lobby against using ai plus nurses a lobby against it's called scope of practice like any new way of doing something more efficiently like my friend uh is an allergist we were friends from stanford and from high school in the bay area and he's an allergist and there's a certain way of working and we've we've mapped it out he could see 20 you know there's a shortage of allergists in the bay area by the way it's a big problem yeah he could see 20 times as many patients by just hiring a few nurses a few frontline people you know handful of clients people building some processes building some basic tech he's not allowed to do that it's against the law any other industry he'd be he'd be seeing 20 20 20 is productive we bring the cost down everyone to get treated and get their allergist stuff it's against the law it's so there's always scope of practice doctor things that are ridiculous uh and then you know the drug companies have all these games they play to make things more expensive there's something called pbms which make tens to hundreds of billions of dollars as middlemen the way they've set things up for selling drugs.

25:39It just, it just, it goes on and on. Like the incentives are misaligned. You know, I think the best hope is there's a couple of things. One is like the self-insured route. So I think we're trying, the guy who was UT Dell Medicals, for example, building a company with us where we're partnering with a guy who built an aligned insurance company for self-insured. And we're doing a new one. We're building clinics, trying to bring down the costs, but then have people who are paying their own costs work with them. So you get better results for cheaper. So there's things like that. It's very hard to break through.

26:05The other really big one, Eric, I'll give you. I think this is really important, is we need the innovation ecosystem to be allowed into healthcare. So what's the key data? The key data is the medical records and the billing records. And if you could see that, you could change a lot. So one of the things we're trying to do is saying, rather than the health system owning your data, we think people should own their own data. And if people own their own data, then we could each decide to use whatever app we want. I guess I want to use this app with this payer. And once an app got a lot of people decide to use it, we'd have enough data, we could start doing preventative healthcare with AI.

26:35because they're helping them shop. There's all these things that you and I and others could figure out, you know, and smart 22-year-old kids who want to be entrepreneurs could figure out with that app to create new possibilities, new clinics, new payers, et cetera. So right now, the bottom administration cleverly try to put electronic healthcare records everywhere, right? They paid tens of billions of dollars, so everything would be in electronics. But Epic was a big company at the time Epic won. Epic's in 60 % of health systems and make billions of dollars cash flow a year. They are very hard to plug into they have very strong lobbyists they basically stopped us from from getting this data out and you know you know famously she was arguing with vice president joe biden at the time when he wanted data for his sons and she's like for his son he's on a cancer she's like why would you need to see the data you don't know what to do with the data and obviously he might not know what to do with the data but if you could have an app the app could then like i would get it and do things and i'm very frustrated to see him as president now not going after this i don't know if he's too old and forgot or what but uh you know this is a huge issue for our country to allow innovation in there and allow markets in there.

27:35So anyway, there's just all these things we have to fix in policy and we have to get the tech in and I think we can address healthcare better. Yeah. If our friend Balaji was here, he would agree that we need compelling leaders, but he would say, he would agree, he'd say, these institutions are so beyond, you know, screwed, the incentives are so messed up that we might as well just create new ones. Well, I mean, in this case, yeah, you can create new, like this is what the UT Dell guy is doing or creating new clinics and new things, but you can't just like, In real life, you can't just totally go around the system.

28:06I think biology is a great thinker and I really admire. I think he gives this really good push on this extreme on the side. But the reason, I'm someone who's actually started a lot of big companies in these areas and successfully built a lot of things in these areas, and it needs to be connected enough to the real world to actually get going. I think there's a little difference there where I actually think there's ways we can be very bold and create things that take the current system and transform it. it's very hard to build entirely outside of the real world. That's tough. And, you know, and, Bellagio, to the extreme, of course, but there's a broader question of when to reform an institution versus when to start a new one.

28:45You know, Elon Musk, you know, he could have started a new Twitter, but he just, he bought Twitter, and he's reforming it from inside out. And so maybe there will be other bold people who can come into an organization and say, hey, this is 80 % overstaffed, or people are myth-aligned with our organization or these rules don't make any sense and and can just well i think yeah i think to balji's point we probably do need some kind of new innovation zone there's literally tens of thousands of rules like blocking things from happening in health care that like make it things that be way safer way more productive just like this whole system could cost like a third as much and have better results right if so i do i am in favor of like bold new innovation zones we can build things from scratch.

29:25And I do think that's very valuable. I also think right now, there's a ton of companies that we're building that are working with the system to vastly improve it. And so I think a combination of the two would be valuable. Totally. Elon himself is an example with the companies, Tesla and SpaceX. No, of course. I mean, I started Palantir and instead of going to work for IBM and fixing it, right? Or Northrop or Lockheed or whatever. And we started OpenGov versus going to the old black and white companies in like in like fixing fixing the old software the cities were using for 30 years ago there's in many cases you just want to throw out a broken rod in culture and like recreate it in other cases you have something that's such a powerful moat and it's such a powerful system that you kind of have to work within it yeah um and by the way do talk about defense for a second because people often associate defense with the right and defense has its own challenges and government uh you know entrenched interests and stuff yeah i mean i guess if you want to associate defense with the right you can call 800 billion dollars of defense spending kind of like welfare on the right in the sense that it law is a jobs program.

30:23This is what the right doesn't like to admit is that there's actual defense we need against China and Iran. There's bad guys in the world. We need America to be strong, 100 % aligned with that. We could do that with half the defense budget and just getting rid of a lot of people and bases we don't need right now that are basically fighting wars from decades ago versus the wars we should be fighting and the deterrence we should be doing. So I'm very controversial on that. On the right, you're supposed to like only pay homage to the fact that we just need to spend more and more and more money on this stuff and it's just so wasteful and yeah listen i just probably only defense is very hard eric you have to basically be like 10 times better on the product side to break in then you also have to be really good at playing the game in dc so when i was 21 building pounds here we were like more than 10 times better on the product side we could see the government billions of dollars we can catch bad guys they wouldn't catch otherwise we can make everything work together with protect civil liberties like we're just way ahead of anything they've done um we had no idea how to the game in dc so it took us a long time and it was very frustrating eventually if we got to the point we're still not the best at palantir but we got to the point there's two billion revenue half that's in global government it's a good company it's doing really well um andrew which was started by three of my best palantir guys with palmer lucky like they kind of had already learned all the lessons and they'd also seen like giant gaps in defense hardware software side so they said you know what we'd be 10 times better in this other area kind of shame the government having to work with us here and now we know how to play the game on the hill so that was great so they VEC called EPRIS.

31:43And another gap I saw, which is that basically electronic warfare systems were not deploying kind of modern technology from Silicon Valley. And it turns out if you use AI on a chip, you can control power on nanosecond timescales to hit the electronic warfare emitter. So you can actually make these electronic warfare systems shoot 10 times farther for the same amount of power. And this was like a pretty cool thing my friends and I did. We proved it took us about 30, 40 million dollars to prove it. We just won a giant contest. These are competitors that, you know, L3 and Raytheon They do a lot of good stuff, but their systems, they spent billions of dollars on.

32:13Ours literally shot down the drones nine times farther away in the contest, in the field. We got our first big contract a couple months ago. EPRS is named after the bow of Theseus, which had infinite arrows. This thing could shoot millions of times because it's shooting blasts of microwave energy to turn off bad guys far away. But it's just amazing how much better you could be with a small group of people than these big companies. And that should scare everyone because there are bad guys in the world. There are really smart engineers working for the bad guys. so america had this advantage in the 19 you know in the in the 20th century really late 1920s century because we had this massive industrial base and we could spend more money we'd have more tanks more planes more missiles whatever that's not really what warfare is about as much anymore if you could have technology like if you get a little tiny like drones and androids and things that turn things off and then tiny little ships and they run all around coordinating and they're like 100 times smarter than these giant things like you could have like a tiny tiny country wipe out a bigger country's military, right?

33:11It's very asymmetric these days. And so it's really important that America partners with its elite top technologists and brings them in. And that's what I've been trying to do. So listen, I think eight companies have actually made it to become unicorns in defense the last 25 years. Two of them I started, three of them were started by people I backed early. So I've been pretty involved in that side of things. It's one of our five big sectors. And I don't like owning big defense companies at scale because I think it's like a super weird crony industry where you have to like go schmooze people and get contracts.

33:41So I've actually sold out when these things get big. Like I start them, I get them to be successful, have the right impact. And then I mostly sell out. Like I've sold, I'm not supposed to say too much, but I've sold, I'm still very bullish on Pounder, but it's not my main economic thing. Just because like, and Pounder is still doing really, really good work, but I just, it's not fun for me to like play that game at scale. It's fun for me to start the new best things and scale them up and make them functional. One of the things you said is that the way to have impact is on a state level, not a federal level.

34:05Does that mean, you know um like why is that if you're a ceo palantir um you can fire anybody you can change the rules of how the company works if you're the president of the united states what is the actual impact you can have what can you touch versus what can you not touch well sorry so so what i said is i am able to have the most impact policy wise it's the state level versus federal level so this way we have a new idea and this is not true for defense defense you have to do federal level so you know that's a tough question if you're asking about defense but if you're trying to figure out and teach people how our training program should work or how our prisons should work or how we should do regulatory processes using data and tech.

34:44Those things actually also exist at a federal level, but good luck getting that done through Congress. That's really hard. You know how hard it is to get people at the federal level to agree on something and get it done these days? My mentor, George Schultz, who passed away at 100 last year, he would always tell me stories of how he would convince Tip O 'Neill and Ronald Reagan of something that was each their idea. and he got tax reform that lower taxes and closed loopholes done with 97 votes in the Senate. That was maybe possible in the 80s, plus he was amazing. I'm not George Shultz. I have no idea.

35:14Maybe if I was a cabinet secretary, I don't know. I have no idea how to get these things down at the federal level. In states, there's a much lower bar. I mean, it's like you can walk in, you can give them a really good white paper, you can have them talk to a few experts, you can show them an idea that works, and you can say, let's partner, let's iterate, let's get something done. And there's not 10 other Joe Lonsdeals, you know, arguing with people about what to do in Tennessee or Arizona or Utah. And there definitely are more than 10 other Joe Lonsdeals all trying to get the attention of everyone in D.C.

35:45So I just think states are a great place to prove something, to partner on something a state could do that's great for the state. And then you can kind of teach others and you can teach the national government. That's my framework. Yeah. People, you know, often journalists will get scared at the power of Silicon Valley, the power of technology. And yet it's so surprising how Silicon Valley and technology has had such a little impact relatively on their own local government within Silicon Valley. You moved to Austin. There were a lot of things taking you to Austin. But let's say that you were dead set on reforming San Francisco and California more broadly.

36:16What is the play for super ambitious people who say, hey, this state and this city is beyond where it should be, beyond screwed. Are there levers that you can really pull? And what are those levers to make a difference? For a city or for a state? I mean, sure, you get involved, right? I mean, it's funny. The journalists are part of the core, right? So there's a frontier part of our society that's like the competent part. Most of these mainstream journalists reflect kind of the values of the core of the bureaucracy of the lawyers. Of course, they don't like it because there's a natural tension here, right?

36:46I mean, so one of my favorite historians of Rome I mentioned in my piece is Ronald Syme. And he remarked that the strength and vitality of an empire is frequently due to new aristocracy from the periphery. So the cycles of history, you get these cores that rot, and you get these peripheries that are still functional, still having to fight for themselves, still having to do things. Because on the periphery, on the frontier, things are still existential. So it's kind of like this process of evolution where things get stronger. Whereas on the core, they just aren't getting fed by everything going on, and so they just kind of rot.

37:15And so people who have really succeeded in new ways on the frontier are exactly who we want to come in and fix the core and to make it strong again, right? And Eric Schmidt and I don't have the same politics, but thank goodness he was involved going in and helping President Obama and in the White House all the time. And he was part of something. He was one of the new aristocracy from the periphery. He had done great things and been successful. He learned how to be a leader. He learned what was functional in the world at that time in technology, in business, in unrelated areas, and was able to apply those lessons and help, right?

37:46And that's my job as well. I don't want it to be about me. I want it to be about like, I wish like 100 other leaders like me were doing this. like i would love it if like moderate democrats ran the entire country uh through dc combined you know combined with like you know 100 really talented leaders who made it really freaking competent so we were one of the greatest countries in the world you know that that'd be fine i have 100 great tech people all wanted to go do that and like and like didn't put up with incompetence didn't put up with government unions that were failing right didn't put up with failing people in our prisons didn't put up a failing training programs like like go actually make it work right so so so yes i i think everyone who's competent should get more involved you know cities are very hard to get involved in.

38:23There's like super corrupt politics. You kind of have to control the city council, but I say get involved in your state, get involved in DC. And if you can get involved in your city and try to change it. And then I think these things are worthwhile. Yeah. It is interesting for people who are listening and want to get involved and want to make an impact. Like, you know, Trump famously said he wanted to drain the swamp and he didn't. There's a question as to what was, you know, first you need to find, of course, which swamp you're talking about. But I think draining a swamp is very hard to do. I'm not, I'm not a huge Trump fan.

38:51I don't want him to run again. I think there were a lot of good policies that did confront certain things in the swamp. I think there was some good things that got done for sure. It is just interesting to think just about what swamp is drainable versus what is actually just stuck and broken. You just can't change. Well, I mean, you can change it. Certain departments you should get rid of, right? If they're not broken, they're not doing anything useful. You get rid of them. In the State Department, I was just talking to Secretary Mike Pompeo who ran the State Department and he wanted to cut the budget by 40%.

39:19He's like, this is like, I mean, there's probably a lot of people in the States Department who hate our country, who are doing things against our country. It's become this like giant bureaucratic kludge. We should just cut them. I mean, I mean, and by the way, there's a lot of freaking cowards on both sides who won't do these things like this. But I mean, you have to either make bureaucracies accountable or you cut them. Yeah. And we desperately need our country to do this if we're going to get to be back to competence. Yeah. Back to competence of that. A lot of people will focus on wealth inequality.

39:44And it's my instinct to not focus on that more focus on overall, like, are people getting richer are people getting wealthier because focus on inequality can prefer that. But Ezra came on the podcast and he said, well, one reason you should focus on inequality is because wealth inequality can lead to political inequality. Are you sympathetic with that? Is there some truth to that? I remember to write, hey, government is like, you know, I think inequality, first of all, is a natural state of the world. So there's always going to be inequality um i think inequality gets more extreme with certain things right so what are the factors if you want to say like where would i give ezra some credit um i think we created inequality unfairly by making money too cheap and i think we made people who were in finance be able to make too much money versus a typical worker and i think that's bad for the country i think we should stop doing that so that's that's that's that's yeah so yes that is bad i think inequality comes from like i said from education system we have more educational inequality in this country than we have wealth inequality so like if you want to substantively fix it rather than trying to fix the results why don't you go and fix the core and actually fix education inequality which would require accountability for our education system which would require going against the biggest supporter of the democrats uh which is the government unions and education which is why they're not doing it so it's extremely hypocritical and so i don't think anyone has any credibility on wealth inequality if they're not talking about accountability and education fixing education inequality i think that's that's not a big one but I'll tell you what Eric if instead of working most of today and trying to get ideas out and then trying to build things to build companies because I'm getting an EIR later today for another company I'm building I started three multi-billion dollar companies before I started my fund I've started like four billion dollar companies in my fund if I stop starting billion dollar companies inequality will go down like I literally can go to the beach I can get a mistress my wife won't like it very much you know and I can spend lots of money buying her jewels and that would make inequality go down but this is an important point because because it's obviously not inequality we should be measuring here like we don't want me to go to the beach right i got a mistress not just because that'd be extremely rude to my wife my four daughters uh it's like it's actually good for the world for me to keep building companies yeah and so what are we really talking about here right it's like it's this huge confusion like like you want people to be immensely successful like in china the rich people right now are terribly afraid to build new companies like xi jinping is going to massively reduce inequality because he just like showed that it's like no not worth building another tech companies, you'll be in big trouble.

42:08And you might disappear. You might get in a car crash. You might have a heart attack. There's literally billionaires dying in China. And so they're terrified. They're not going to build stuff. That is not good for the world. It's not good for our country. Even though I'm a competitor to China, even though I want the U.S. to be stronger in China, it's not good for any of us overall, over the long term, that we didn't have the brightest people in this great civilization of China trying to create things right now because they're terrified. So no, I think Margaret Thatcher said it best that there's a lot of people people, they would rather the poor be poorer so long as the rich were not richer.

42:42That really is the case. And so what should we be doing? Yes, the dumb sources of inequality like cheap money and the Fed, we got to adjust how we do those things. The education, obviously, we got to fix. And then we got to do what we can to create opportunity. Training programs in our country are important. Rather than just spend money on stupid training programs, make them accountable. Like I've, I've helped double the salaries of probably a hundred thousand kids now with policies I've passed. Like that's how you address inequality is you make, make the bottom better off, you know, but, but, but inequality is a stupid word.

43:13I think, I think, I think it's more should be like success overall altogether is a key thing. And, and one thing I think people might have to cede is, is the term equality of opportunity, because when you really look at that term, you know, people can say, Hey, you know, I have different parents. I did a different outfit. You're never going to have equal quality of opportunity. no one's ever going to have the advantages my daughters have exactly they're just not they're not going to have the intelligence they're not going to have the looks they're not going to have a father who understands business and has mentored hundreds of ceos my daughters have usually unfair advantages i hope they use them i'm gonna do my best i can't promise they will and but but there's never going to be exact equality of opportunity but what we do need to work on rather than the quality of opportunity is we need to like work on giving the best possible opportunity to a lot of people in our society and that means fixing our criminal justice system so these communities are are working, you know, fixing education.

44:00There's all these things we can be doing to help these people. But this whole framework of framing it like equality and inequality, it's just a nasty framework. They're just trying to take people down. And it doesn't make any sense to me. And this is a vulnerability in liberalism is they too equally or too readily kind of concede equality of opportunity or that we should strive for some equality and then people go on and take that. Yeah, I know. So France has this whole obsession with like equality and fraternity. I don't think that's the American spirit at all. American spirit is equality under the law.

44:31It's nothing to do with equality of results. It's nothing to do with the fact that everything's the same. Like our job should be, you know, fairness and equality under the law. Equality of human dignity in terms of every life is worth an equal amount. But then we do everything we can to create opportunity for the least well off. I think, you know, Cicero is about the working class and the middle class and helping people and people in criminal justice. And it's about helping the least well off and taking ideas to fix that. And that's something that I think it's our duty, frankly, as leaders in society to help those people.

44:59That should be how we spend our marginal philanthropic time, right? That's the right thing to do. But to say that inequality itself is the issue, it's kind of a nasty, envy-driven thing. Totally. We saw people with guillotines outside Jeff Bezos' house, but people don't realize that when these companies are built beyond the services that they themselves provide, like Amazon or Facebook, et cetera, it's also more tax dollars and just more wealth in general. And people have no idea how economic surplus works, how positive sum stuff works. It's just like it's not intuitive to the average person. And yeah.

45:29I wonder if there was a, you can imagine almost like a UBI that's tied to the S &P 500 or something, like if there's a way to - Yeah, Alex Furstenberg is trying to do this. And a lot of people are talking about it. I think it's an interesting idea. So basically like low end workers, you want them to participate somehow in our economy and our, like we want everyone to root for the S &P 500 in the sense, right? You want equity markets to go up. You want GDP to go up. like everyone should be tied to that and i think everyone already implicitly has that interest but giving it to them explicitly saying like listen if you don't have a 401k if you're like a poorer person having government match to help you have a 401k and then kind of copying australia because australia has the best pension system where you can move your pension amongst things that way they kind of have to compete to get a competition of ideas right so i think that framework you're talking to a lot of people in dc a lot of friends are working on that i think i think it's reasonable I think we do want everyone in our society to kind of be part of that interest.

46:22Yeah. I do agree with your institution first approach and how, you know, focusing on accountability will solve some of these culture problems. But at the same time, I acknowledge that there are some institutions whose very end goals are deeply problematic. You know, maybe it's focused on solving inequality. And I'm grateful that they're so ineffective at that. And so it feels like, you know, some people say politics is downstream from culture. it feels like culture is important to to solve uh to solve too less we have culture gets fixed based on role models and based on people seeing what works like one of the most dangerous things about government getting involved and being the main thing responsible for poor people is what that does uh to to culture because basically like when you make a choice to help people when you're when you're deciding to help and your leader saying i'm going to do this to help people see that and people say i want to be like that person i'm going to make that choice too and it's like a positive feedback effect where people are all deciding to help in america it was by far it's still the most charitable country in the world but we were way ahead of everyone else in 19th century and it was this like positive cool thing that because we were free because we had the choice to do it and because people chose to do it it really created this extremely positive culture of helping your neighbor helping your community and anyone and i think accidentally when you put in a bunch of things force people to help instead they take a bunch of their money and say we're just going to do it for you i think you get rid of that role model and so i think you actually really, really hit our culture in a really nasty way starting about 60 years ago by trying to have government step in and replace that choice and replace that cultural impetus that it's our job to do it ourselves and our job to choose to do it.

47:51And it's actually fascinating. Again, I think a lot of modern Democrats I really respect, and I have a lot of views on the modern Democrat side as well as Republican side. But it's interesting, Republicans still give almost twice as much money to charity on average. And because they're still from that part of that free culture where it's our job. I think Democrats are much more from the, oh, it's a state's job side. And frankly, don't think that's healthy. So I think the way to improve culture is ironically, the government has to do less and has to let people step in and let people make these choices.

48:17Yeah, that makes sense. You focus, as you mentioned, mostly on statewide. Your peer and mentor in front of collaborator, Peter Thiel, has focused on more at the national level, it seems. Well, I don't think Peter's... See, everyone has mistaken on Peter. Everyone thinks Peter's focusing on it. He's not really focusing on it. He just backed two of his friends. if peter was focusing on it peter's a genius he has lots of money he could have like gotten involved in 26 races right like peter could have focused on it and you would have all noticed right because like it's like peter peter's a huge player if he wants to be and it's so funny they all want to talk about him as if he's like boogeyman he helped two of his friends yeah it's like one of them worked out one of them didn't the one that didn't pissed off everyone on the right because he gave the money the wrong way and the wrong time and the wrong candidate and everyone's angry at him and it's because he's an outsider just helping his friends you know yeah it is it um it is interesting whereas reed hoffman is more systematically across really massively systematic i mean reed was the one who like won the senate in georgia by taking trump's you know what trump said and like just like changing it around not changing it but like taking different clips finding what suppress the vote on the far right getting it to all the rural areas of Georgia you know a b testing like money spending and reed baffles me because we'll agree on like 80 90 of policy and then he'll just get like, it's like he wants to be popular with his far left friends and he'll just like get so aggressive and just do all this stuff.

49:37And I think it's a popularity thing. It's a game thing. I don't know. It's frustrating because he's not a dumb guy, but he's playing these really aggressive games for some reason. Yeah, no, he's brilliant and a lot on many topics for sure, but yeah, there's some differences, as you mentioned. It's a segue to what you're doing with UATX, the university you're building in Austin. I'm curious, because one approach you could have done, and maybe you're doing this to some degree, but it's to start kind of careerist first. You could have said, hey, this is a school where we will help you get jobs at Palantir or Tesla.

50:08And thus, you know. That's definitely part of it is that it's a great university. And Magonia's a great university. We're actually going to announce like 200 companies that are tied to it and that are trying to hire from it, right? So I think that's a big part of like attracting undergrads and doing that right. But what we're really trying to do, Eric, is we're trying to create the next great university we're trying to compete with harvard stanford mitel princeton we're trying to show that it's possible to have a great school that's more interdisciplinary it's not conquered by a crazy woke administration it's not run by neo-marxist you're allowed to speak up and have different views or debates you're going to have checks on power we actually have a supreme court separate from our board to enforce the free speech code so our board no matter who gets on there can't actually like push back on that and listen i want people running around being like crazy offensive i want humility and i want productive conversations and healthy conversations but But the reason we had 5 ,000 professors apply after we announced the UATX is because there's tons of people at these schools of all sorts that are terrified to speak up and that are getting in big trouble.

51:02We have one of our new professors who's a radical feminist. She's been on the left her whole career, but she has a different view on the transgender and what makes a woman than other people. And she got counseled from her campus, wasn't allowed to talk anymore. And I think we have to have healthy conversations and healthy debates about these things. And allowing both sides of these debates for our future is really important. So really proud to be building a great university. So we've raised over$120 million. We're going to launch our first class late next year. We have these really cool seminars we're doing with like top students from around the world.

51:28So it's going really well. That's great. Let's close the podcast with this question. You also close the American Optimist podcast you run also with this question sometimes, which is, you know, we can't just be anti-woke. You have to be pro something. What's the ideological vision that Americans can get behind? Because you and I, we could be techno optimists, but, you know, that the rest of the country or, you know, the masses are not really going to understand kind of the technology forward. like what's the vision that really gets people well listen america right now is in the best place of any country in the world we have like we have best resources we have we still have a very functional uh court system we sell we sell our freedoms unlike other places we're not to be scared to speak up like you do in like a lot of other major countries right now and you know we don't have like problems with assassinations like there's like things are actually quite functional relative a lot of times in history we're very very wealthy country uh i think listen the way we're going to fix things we're going to make everything competent again we're going to take Everything in your life is incompetent, and we're going to expose it to market and accountable forces.

52:23We're going to make it competent again. And in the technology world, not everyone needs to understand technology, but things are going to get a lot cheaper. We're going to use AI to manufacture things. They're going to get a lot, lot, lot cheaper. We're going to make houses cheaper. We're going to have transportation. We're going to have really cheap tunnels everywhere so you can get in and out of cities without traffic. So I think we're getting rid of traffic. I think we have flying cars that are working that are being approved the next couple of years. They're going to get really cheap. We're all going to be able to fly around electric vehicles.

52:46So I mean, I think we're going to have a golden age ahead if we can get this confidence right, if we can actually not let things decay and break. I think we have a very exciting next generation. We're all very lucky to get to live in a time where curing diseases. People are going to live longer.

53:03The environment's only gotten better as we got wealthier, right? It's like society gets more green when it gets wealthier. It gets more clean. Having a competent EPA. There's some people on the right they want to get rid of it entirely. Some people on the left just want this stupid kludge and tons of useless bureaucrats. Let's have a competent APA. We all want a clean environment. We all want competent regulators. We all want things that – but as we get wealthier, we're all on the side. I have four daughters who are very young. Of course, I want everything to be perfectly clean. This is bullshit.

53:30There's this weird caricature of anyone would want poison lakes or something. It's disgusting. We need to all do this correctly. But no, I think with technology getting better, with making our government competent, it, I think we could have a potentially have a very peaceful, you know, very, very positive next 20, 30 years with the right leadership. And we're going to solve some of the problems we've been outlining here, but it's homelessness or education and healthcare. The thing is, Eric, the reason I'm an optimist is that there's good answers to all of these things. Like you can look at what sister is doing, look at what others are doing.

53:58There are good answers that actually work to help people to address each of these things for less money than we're spending now in a way that's really positive for our country. So let's, let's get confident people in charge and let's address them with good answers. And I think that's the best thing for all of our families. That's a great place to wrap. You're doing that very important work with Cicero and HBC and your various other initiatives. I guess today's been Joe Lonsdale. Joe, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Thanks, Eric.