Joe Lonsdale

Everyone of all backgrounds was much more optimistic on how we're going to work and live together. And I feel like there were frankly these race grifters who just reignited a lot of stuff and cause a lot of trouble. That's the perspective from my perspective. And the woke stuff's not just about race, by the way.

The woke stuff is about just general illiberal energy and a general kind of like it's not about truth. It's about conquering things for the far left and demonizing anyone who stands in their way. And it's just a very scary time in our society in the last decade. And a lot of our universities have basically been been conquered by these forces, by these neo-Marxists.

It's all, like if you stand up and you speak out against anything that's part of their Omnicos, they do their best to crush you. And if you're a professor in a history department, in a sociology department, in an anthropology department, like you do not allow any professor to join who doesn't agree with your kind of woke view of the Omnicos and your neo-Marxist view.

for quite a long time now, we've not been graduating professors who even understand, you know, the history from the other perspective. And, you know, John Stuart Mill, one of the great kind of like,

liberal theorists, liberal in a pro-liberty sense, in a classical liberal sense, one of my favorite things he would say is that if you don't understand the other argument, you don't understand yours very well either. And this is the case now in most of our society, in these institutions, is they don't actually deeply understand the other side because they've demonized it and they've kicked it out.

And it's very dangerous. How are you combating this stuff? There's a lot of different ways. One way is as a leader to role model speaking out and role model courage. The classical virtues are really powerful against this stuff. The more one person shows courage, a few more people show courage, and it snowballs. Once people are showing courage, they can't get us anymore. They need us to be afraid.

Another thing, We got to create new media, right? You know, investor Barry Weiss is Free Press. I think that's really important what she's doing there. I'm an investor of my friend, something called Arena Magazine. We're trying to build more of these media sources.

Arena, A-R-E-N-A. Arena Magazine. Yeah, we're creating new, so basically what happened is there used to be all these things in technology world like Wired and Scientific American and TechCrunch, and they're all conquered by the crazy woke people who hate markets, hate America. And so I don't want my entrepreneurs going on a talk.

to this TechCrunch thing when it just constantly is attacking us online about us. Let's talk to something else. Let's build new media. So things like Arena, we're pushing, we're growing that quickly. And then I think University of Austin is based on this as well.

So my friends Barry Weiss and Neil Ferguson, Neil's probably the greatest living historian, taught at Oxford and Harvard, really, really bright guy. And Barry Weiss runs the Free Press. We thought, listen, there needs to be at least one top university in the country that's not conquered by these goddamn Marxists. Man, I mean, when did the University of Boston start?

Our first class actually just started. It took us three years to launch it, which is pretty fast because there's lots of barriers, thousands of pages of regulation. The new universities don't want competitions. They try to block you out. The creditors try to block you out. But, you know, in this case, we found one that's pretty good. And we've got 92 students in the first class.

A lot of these kids turned down the very top schools to be there. The idea is pursuit of truth. The idea is, you know, it's a patriotic institution, but we have people who think on both sides. This is not like a conservative institution. And I wouldn't want to be. That'd be a failure because you need to understand both sides, right? But it's an institution that

really is going to engage with the last thousand years of great ideas and the great debates that kind of built Western civilization. If you look at Western civilization for me, there's three great traditions you have to understand. You have to understand the classical virtues and the classical role in Rome and Greece and all the wisdom that comes from that.

That's a core base of who we are, amazing stuff. And you have to understand I think Judeo-Christianity. I think you have to understand what the wisdom came from that gave us modern Europe and really the dignity of the individual, right? So I think if you only have this aristocratic, like, uber-Manchinichian kind of classical view, then I think human life becomes very cheap.

And that's very dangerous because I think Christianity has a lot of wisdom in the fact that there's a radical dignity to every human life. And so you have that base. And then on top of those two traditions, you have the scientific enlightenment and the philosophical enlightenment, which really started in the 17th, 18th centuries.

They kind of gave us this understanding of the modern world with Adam Smith and the wealth of nations and how trade works with scientific revolution, that kind of led to the industrial revolution, led to what we have today. So we have these really important three traditions.

And if you want to be a top leader in society and you want to be an educated leader in society, I think our school should be teaching those traditions to these people. We should be engaging them, debating about them and applying them to today. And if we're not doing that with our leaders, by the way, that is what our leaders had who created our country.

Our founders of this country, they understood deeply and were well-read in all of those traditions. And they had a lot of wisdom that they used to craft our constitution. We're really lucky to have that. There's this amazing thing based on all that wisdom. And if we don't apply that, today to our modern problems.

Instead, we kind of go off in these kind of woker nonsense directions, like we're going to break our civilization. So let's have leaders who are courageous and who know these things, you know?

So 92 students is the first class. We're going to try to do more than 100 next class. You know, it's very funny. You're not allowed to be officially accredited fully until you've graduated the class. Interesting. So all the trolls are like, oh, the undercredited university. It's like, yeah, that's the rule, but we're doing our best, man. How big do you think it will get?