00:00You mentioned education system, which at this point, interestingly, means almost two different things.
00:05There's what is going on with universities, and there's what is going on with how we would actually train people in these kinds of skills that we need that would be good jobs.
00:16I guess it's a two-part question.
00:19On the university side, do you see what's going on there as mostly sort of just a sideshow minimizes it?
00:28It's incredibly important, but it is unrelated to the question of how we actually reskill correctly, or do you think these two things fit together somehow,
00:39that we need to get the universities more engaged in this process and also have other ways to do it?
00:45I think of it as extremely connected, though it's not necessarily obvious at the surface level.
00:50First of all, I never expect Harvard or Yale or the Ohio states of the world, they're not primarily going to be doing skilled craftsmen training.
01:03Some of the state schools, you might see that, but really this is going to be something that happens with particular unions are going to have a big role in this,
01:11community colleges are going to have a big role in this, industry is going to have a big role in this.
01:14I don't think the skilled crafts are going to be brought back by the four-year-plus university.
01:20That's just not their role.
01:21But what the four-year-plus university, one of the most important things that it does,
01:27obviously it trains hopefully very smart people,
01:29but it produces really the ground level of the innovation that the economy is going to run on for the next 10 or 15, 20 years.
01:38So if I want people in Indiana to be manufacturing the next generation pharmaceuticals,
01:45those pharmaceuticals have to get developed in the first place.
01:47And for them to get developed in the first place, I need places like Harvard to be doing really groundbreaking biomedical research.
01:55What I don't need out of Harvard is for the science to be so broken that 80% of the biology papers produced don't actually replicate.
02:04And that reproducibility crisis is one of the main reasons why I think universities are broken.
02:09What I really don't need to happen is I can't let Harvard have such an explicitly racist
02:16and in violation of the Civil Rights Act approach to how it funds and trains scientists
02:21that the best and the brightest are being cut out of that process altogether.
02:25So these things are very much connected.
02:29But I mean, look, I am not anti-university.
02:32I'm not anti-Harvard.
02:34What I am is a person who recognizes what should be obvious to every single person at every elite university in the country,
02:42which is the model is broken, it doesn't work,
02:45and they're violating the social contract they have with the people of the country.
02:49And the people are now saying, we need you to change.
02:51And these institutions are really going to be confronted,
02:54and thanks to President Trump, have already been confronted with a choice.
02:57You can accept democratic accountability and you can reform,
03:01or you can accept that the government is not going to treat you kindly,
03:06we're not going to fund your garbage,
03:07and we're not going to support you unless you do the job the American people need you to do.
03:11That is very well said.
03:20I found myself at one of these universities speaking to a faculty board
03:25the day after the $9 billion Harvard announcement.
03:30Did you tell them you knew me?
03:31It may have come up.
03:33It may have come up.
03:34I'm surprised you survived.
03:35You know, the thing about the faculty board in Ivy League University
03:39is it's not the most imposing environment in many respects.
03:45They're not known for their toughness.
03:47No, that is true.
03:49I'll let you stand on that particular point.
03:52But this actually happened a few times.
03:55I, in fact, also was scheduled to go to Canada
03:57two days after you made the Canada announcement.
03:59I may need to run my travel plans by some more folks.
04:03But it was fascinating to have this exact discussion
04:06and essentially to try to make the point,
04:10nobody wants you to fail,
04:12but you are, in a sense, a quasi-public institution.
04:15You are relying on enormous,
04:18both explicit and implicit public subsidy
04:21and participation in this contract
04:23that you have been violating wholesale for a generation.
04:28And so our preference would be that you guys decide to reform,
04:32but if you don't, this is the alternative.
04:37What do you think, what does reform look like?
04:39You described some of the things that, you know,
04:42are particularly problems.
04:43I guess to some extent the reform is just stop doing that.
04:47But what do you aspire to for our higher education system?
04:52Yeah, I'd say a few things.
04:53I mean, one most obviously is,
04:55why don't you just follow the civil rights laws of the country?
04:58Like, that's a very easy thing to do
05:00and that nearly every elite university in the country
05:02is explicitly not doing.
05:05Okay, so that's one thing that they might consider doing.
05:08I think the second thing is,
05:11they've got to be willing,
05:14and I have a friend of mine who's a geneticist,
05:17very bright, you know, very bright young scientist.
05:20We have got to have a scientific community
05:24that is more open to unacceptable inquiry
05:27and that actually encourages bright young minds
05:30to go wherever the truth leads them.
05:32And I think that's where the universities have become
05:34almost quasi-theocratic or quasi-totalitarian societies.
05:39I mean, the way that I think about this is,
05:41you know, I don't know what the voting,
05:44you know, the voting in the 2024 election
05:47of Harvard University's faculty was.
05:48Okay, my guess is that at least 90%
05:51and probably 95% of them voted for Kamala Harris, right?
05:56Very brilliant Kamala Harris, of course.
05:58But, you know, if you ask yourself
06:01a foreign election, a foreign country's election,
06:05you say 80% of the people voted for one candidate,
06:09you would say, oh, that's kind of weird, right?
06:11That's like not a super healthy democracy.
06:13If you said, oh, 95% of people voted for one party's candidate,
06:18you would say that's North Korea, right?
06:19That's totalitarian.
06:20That is impossible in a true place of free exchange for that to happen.
06:25And so I think the ideological diversity of these universities
06:28has to get much better.
06:29And I think that if that got better,
06:31if you actually had a place where people were open to debating these things
06:35and weren't terrified they were going to lose their job
06:37for saying something that was a little bit outside the Overton window,
06:40then I think the science would get better,
06:42the reproducibility would get better,
06:43the quality of the institution would be so much better.
06:46And that's what I want because we need high-quality universities.
06:50Right now the problem is we don't have them.
06:51Absolutely.
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