I sat down with Ben Slivka, an early Microsoft executive who led the team that built Internet Explorer, served 20 years on Northwestern University’s Board of Trustees, and has spent decades since as an angel investor across biotech, space, and software startups.
We get into:
* How cowardice became the norm in university leadership
* Why the public school model fails so many students
* His 1995 Microsoft memo that correctly predicted the internet revolution
* The truth about the Microsoft antitrust case and why “monopoly” is a misleading term
* Why he believes that we’re in a massive AI bubble
* His investment in Stoke Space, SpaceX’s real competitor for reusable rockets
* What he calls the “four horsemen of the woke apocalypse”
* America’s historically unprecedented capacity for innovation
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Follow Ben Slivka on X (formerly Twitter): https://x.com/Katy_Faust?s=20
Learn more about Ben’s work: https://benslivka.com/
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Outline:
[0:00] What’s going on with universities?
[15:40] Cowards are running the show
[29:27] Flexible vs. rigid approaches to schooling
[39:15] Teachers’ unions want to destroy good schools
[42:52] The “expert class” is anti-human and anti-reality
[58:05] Building Internet Explorer
[1:06:49] The reality of anti-trust law and “monopolies”
[1:13:21] Is AI a miracle, a bubble, or a real threat?
[1:31:18] Space travel is about to get a lot cheaper
[1:39:42] We’ve lost historical perspective in our lives
[1:55:30] Can we afford to have sympathy for the other side?
[2:04:49] Universities have abandoned their purpose
[2:11:47] We know less about biology than we think
[2:14:03] Can Western civilization work without religion?
[2:20:45] Expose your kids to the real world
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