Joe Lonsdale

Stanford and Harvard have 1,600, 1,900 kids. I'd love to scale that over 20 years. It takes a while to get there. You don't want to go too fast because you want to have really top experiences for the students. There's going to be things that aren't perfect. There's going to be parts that are amazing that they love, and there's going to be parts that we've got to keep building, keep improving.

I want to launch a master's degree in a couple years. I want to compete with Stanford and Harvard Business School and have an innovation master's degree where if you want to be part of the innovation world and you want to work with people who have built the top companies, come here and we'll teach you how to be part of our innovation world and bring you as a leader there.

Obviously, there's a tech and STEM side, but again, we want to train leaders how to think about our civilization and how to be kind of fighters for America. We call them philosopher builders. We need more philosopher builders, people like Elon, who are going to fight for our civilization as well as build. Wow, how many applicants do you guys have? We got several hundred applicants.

It's interesting, the Common App is where most applications come through for most universities now. We're not allowed on the Common App until we're accredited. So our number of applications, even though it was still 100 in the first class, I think would have been a lot higher, but kids couldn't check it off on that. But we're still getting a lot of great people trying to come.

How are you vetting the professors?

uh so neil ferguson himself is a really great professor and then we have like we have a set of amazing people are we have a bunch of really really top deans who are who their job is help recruit the new professors and getting some pretty famous names applying right now and coming in so hopefully we'll announce some really great great new people but we have we have a really great set of about 25 really top professors that i'm yeah it's really fun for me actually get to learn from these guys too so it's it's a good set of people are you spending a lot of time there yeah i'm the chairman of the board and

trying to design this new master's degree, trying to make sure we create opportunities for the students, giving scholarships for really top students to come. Right now, all the students are on scholarship. I even give extra scholarships for really, really top students to turn down the very best places and come. And just trying to make sure it's a great experience for them. Wow. Wow.

Any scholarship? Was that? Any scholarships? Yeah, so basically everyone there gets their tuition covered right now, which is great. And we're giving scholarships beyond that, too, for great people.

60 Minutes was surprisingly positive. I really appreciate that they came and they looked at it and they gave it a fair treatment, which was great. Listen, when we launched, everyone attacked and mocked us. These other universities, they don't want competition. They don't want something else there. But we're getting a lot of positive news from a lot of people.

I think we have several thousand donors now. I think we have dozens of donors who have given over a million dollars each. So a lot of good supporters have come out of the woodwork and A bunch more are really helping us. It's a movement whose time has come. In America, it's what you do.

If things are broken, if things aren't doing what they can, you get together, you build something new, and it teaches everyone else. And so right now, you have dozens of other universities that are referring to us on their boards, that are saying, why don't we do this? Why don't we do that? Why don't we take these ideas? Which is great.

That's the whole point, is let's bring everything back in the same direction.

So basically what we do is we work in states, not in DC for the most part. It turns out there's 50 states in our country and our founders intended stuff to happen at the states. This is called the United States. This is an alliance of states. So that's supposed to be where most of government actually happens the most in our country.

Like obviously we have federal, state, and local, but states are supposed to be. Now federal has gotten too big, so it does too much right now. But states have a lot of power, and they're really important. And we've seen, obviously, people moving between states a lot, because some states are doing the right things, some states are doing the wrong things.

And so there's a lot of different ideas for how to make things work better. You can test and prove out at a state level. And what we tend to do is we like to fix broken systems. We like to fix things that governments usually have a stake broken or special interest is broken. So for example, I'll give you one I like is vocational education. Vocational education was a lot more prominent in the U.S.

in the 60s and 70s. And a lot of people said, no, let's send them to college instead. It's racist not to have everyone go to college. It's bad not to have all poor people go to college. And it turns out a lot of people went to college. They get these studies degrees. They don't come out with any real skills or any real jobs. I don't think everyone should be going to college necessarily.

I think they should be doing what they should to get a great job. And a lot of people agree with me. So we fund these vocational education schools. They're starting to come back up. The problem is, what if it's a badly run vocational education school? What do you do? How do you decide to fix it?

So for example, in Texas, there's 27 high-end technical vocational schools teaching you to be like a high-end manufacturing job, like really good jobs coming out of these if you do it right. But they weren't working that. They weren't working nearly as well as they could. And so what we did in Texas is, Texas said, we're going to fund these schools based on the average salary coming out.

So we're going to tell each of these schools, you better figure out how to get your students succeeding. And if you do, you're going to get more money. If you don't, you're going to get less money. And you know what happened is the school started saying, okay, what skills do we have to teach? What businesses do we partner with? How do we figure this out?

Salaries doubled coming out of these schools. No kidding. And so that's the example of where you could take a law. So we draft the law. We kind of go to the legislature, find the sponsors, go to the governor's administration, convince them it's right. We help write op-eds along with the people in the legislature. And we have to hire lawyers to draft the appropriate law for that state.