#AIS: Joe Lonsdale on the problem with higher education

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:00)
All right, next up, Joe Lonsdale.

**Joe Lonsdale** (0:04)
Here we go.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:05)
Joe Lonsdale is going to come up. He's going to tee it up for about five or ten minutes in a solo dolo.
He told me he's burning the house down.

**Joe Lonsdale** (0:30)
Well, hello Miami. It's good to be here from Austin for a day. We're the second best tech city here, it's not too bad. How many people actually live in Miami? I'm curious, there's a crowd, we've been over that. So everyone's flown in town like me, that's pretty cool. Well, I'm generally an American optimist, but I want to talk about a lot of stuff that's broken right now that we know how to fix, but we aren't, and you know, talking to these guys, especially hearing from Elon and everyone today, it's just so exciting what our civilization is going towards, what it could be doing. But if you talk to a lot of our smartest friends, you know, you look at guys like Dahlia or Bridgewater or others, you know, they see America in decline, they see decadence, they see decay, and I think there's a lot of important questions we're facing right now, like why do these happen to a civilization?
Why, when there's so many exciting things going on that we know can make a really great future, you know, for our kids and grandkids and for humanity, why is this stuff breaking? And I want to tell you a little story. I have a policy group in Austin, and we have, you know, we follow the homeless population there, and we're going along with a middle-aged Mexican gentleman who had just lost his job, and he went into the homeless center, and he's just really struggling, and he says, you know, I really want to try to find a job, I want some job training, and the person working there, she says, you know, sir, you deserve a home. He said, yeah, that's great, but, you know, can I get some training? She said, you don't need to worry about that. You need to worry about getting a home for people just like you and what you deserve.
And I want to back up about the situation in Austin, because we're seeing this all over the country right now. You know, in 2018, the mayor of Austin went to San Francisco and LA, and he was asking them for advice on what to do for homelessness. There wasn't really homelessness downtown. It's funny. This is funny to me, too, but there's actually a reason he was asking them for advice, and it's a special interest thing, where there's actually hundreds of millions of funding that goes to these groups, NSF and LA, that work on this, and to all of their friends, and to all the people with their politics. And it's a huge money spigot for politicians, because they're very powerful in those other cities. In Austin, they didn't have that money spigot, and he wanted it. And you know what they told him? I heard this from both sides. He said, you know, you have to show people that capitalism doesn't work. You've got to put it in their faces, and then you'll get funding. And he went back to Austin, and he brought all the camps downtown, homeless death spiked, homeless trafficking spiked, sex trafficking spiked, drug spiked, but the funding went way up for him and his friends. They got massive new funding, you know, unaccountable sources of money for these people. And then, of course, they start deploying the answers, which is the Housing First strategy. And by the way, this is not just like a right versus left thing. I think Housing First was first deployed under W. Bush. So this is a general strategy. You guys probably know in LA, they spend $800,000 per new home trying to solve this problem. There's 7,000 nonprofits right now, you know, funded by HUD, around our country, with the same philosophy. And the philosophy is no pay for performance, no transparency, no accountability, just build the homes. And you know, when I first heard about this a decade ago, I thought, wow, that makes sense. There's 5,000 homeless people, let's build 5,000 homes.
It turns out that there's still about a couple percent of our society that really don't have a home, but they're living kind of on the edge, on people's couches, with other family, with friends. So the actual demand for homes, it turns out maybe it's about 6 million, 10 million. It's effectively infinite. There's infinite demand for homes in our society. And who do you think gets these homes when we build them? So this guy, we were following a few hundred people from my philanthropy group, and our team goes back in with them, and he gets in line, and he's been leaving between a camp that they helped set up in downtown and a relative's house, but he's saying he's living outside in a camp. And he goes back, and he just missed getting a home, and he's frustrated, and they're explaining the points to someone. He says, wait a second, so you're saying that if I was on drugs, I'd qualify for a home. And they say, well, we don't like to say it that way, but that's true. And he says, you're saying if I committed a crime, I'd qualify for a home. And they're like, well, yeah, we don't like to say it that way, but that's true. That would have given you enough points to qualify for a home.