Joe Lonsdale on the Problem with Higher Education
An excellent, live-recorded All-In episode with guest Joe Lonsdale, one of the founders of the new University of Austin. Lonsdale talks about the pursuit of truth as essential to a functioning society, what’s happening on campuses today (“this zero-sum, historically illiterate, intolerant virtue signaling religion has completely taken over and is silencing people”), the need for intellectual humility, the benefits of being offended, and why the smartest people are dropping out of their PhD programs. Panelist Sacks discusses the working vs. professional class as the biggest divide in America, and how the Elite Class must silence and censor to suppress the masses and end debates they can’t win.
Lonsdale is an entrepreneur, investor and philanthropist who has been part of founding more than a dozen companies, including Palantir, Addepar, OpenGov, Affinity, Epirus, Resilience Bio, and 8VC. The All-In podcast features industry veterans Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Sacks & David Friedberg.
Joe Lonsdale (6:40-10:18)- excerpts on society and the university:
“What actually works, why is our society functional? You have to take it back to the Enlightenment…and post-Enlightenment…you had a society that really cared about the pursuit of truth, really cared about the competition of ideas…and you need the virtues for this to work, the classical virtues…justice, wisdom, temperance, courage, you need the courage to actually fight for the truth…”
“What was unique about the Enlightenment was unique about our university system which we created was the liberal universities were a place to have debates, where substance could actually win against…dogma…you actually had to disagree civilly and you actually had to pursue truth, you had to have the intellectual humility to know that you don’t have all the answers. You had to respect the dignity of people who are debating you and you had to fight for a passion, for the truth, and what’s happened instead is that most of our universities have been conquered by dogma, by religion…so once again we have the idea of heretics and blasphemy…”
“This is happening first and foremost on our campuses. What’s happened is this zero-sum, historically illiterate, intolerant virtue signaling religion has completely taken over and is silencing people…”
“All of us first need to go back and think about where we don’t have enough humility to try to learn more… [where we’re] actually engaging…and debating…as opposed to calling [people we disagree with] names…I think we should also remember it’s also really good to be offended…it’s the opposite of safe spaces…there’s this weird cultural thing…where you’re basically supposed to protect people from being offended, you’re supposed to protect people from blasphemy. I think it has to be the opposite if our civilization is not going to decline…we actually have to go out of our way to learn that when we’re offended we have to be stronger…we need to use that to advance our civilization.”
A panel discussion then begins at 10:18 in which the hosts discuss everything from the spectrum of suffering (scalable empathy) to the site wtfhappenedin1971.com (1971, “when trend lines just break”), the need for strong families, prison reform, charter schools and school choice only for those who need it.
Starting at 18:40, Lonsdale talks about our broken universities and starting the new University of Austin (with FAIR advisors Weiss, Ferguson and others), which now has 500 acres 30 minutes from downtown Austin. Fall of 2024 is the goal for welcoming a first class the size of Caltech.
“As entrepreneurs, our job is to find gaps in the world where something should exist but doesn’t, and it seems like for the first time in a few generations you could actually build a university that competes with the other, very top universities and attracts…the most talented kids…”
“One of my obnoxious view on this, which the stage might agree with…is that it used to be the smartest people in the world became professors and now you get a lot of very smart people becoming innovators, becoming builders…like my smartest friends…[who] drop[ped] out of their Phd’s from MIT and Stanford and Caltech actually found more intellectual expression and satisfaction…in the entrepreneurship world than they did there…so…in order to compete, you want not only the top professors but you want to involve a lot of top innovators…”
“My goal obviously is not to have everyone educated through one great university…it’s to put pressure on other universities to change and to help build multiple new ones.”
Starting at 24:24, David Sacks gets into the professional class vs. working class— a fascinating close to the conversation.
“If you’re basically a college graduate, you’re a member of the professional class. If you’re not a college graduate, you’re a member of the working class, and that is the biggest divide… The members of the professional class by in large have very very far left views on sociocultural issues, that’s just a fact…and that is creating a huge amount of tension in our society because 2/3 of the country is working class, 1/3 is professional class. In a democracy, the side that has the larger numbers should win so the working class has the votes but the professional class runs all the institutions, and this is the source, I think, of all our political strife…”
“In America…the people who are in charge of our institutions, from the New York Times to the Washington Post to the Fortune 500, Disney, Hollywood…they have views that are fundamentally in tension and in conflict with the views of most of the country, the working class of the country. Now if you’re a member of that [professional] class, you may think it’s a good thing, we are going to push our views onto the country whether they like it or not, and we’re going to convert them. That’s what you call the Elite Class…[and] there are elites in both parties, and there are certainly working class people in both parties, but…the parties are now in the process of re-sorting around this political and cultural divide...”
Lonsdale — “I wouldn’t even mind this dynamic if it weren’t breaking everything and if they weren’t not allowing conversations about how broken things are…it’s a very strange, illiberal nature.”
David Sacks— “If you’re part of the elite and you control all these institutions, all this cultural high ground, but the country is not with you, and just in terms of the sheer numbers, you are going to use the tactics that people in power always use to suppress the greater numbers, that’s where censorship comes from. The people who are running these institutions, don’t they want the debate to be over, they want the power to end the debate, because they’re not otherwise going to win that debate.”
