way. Hello and welcome to the portals first episode today I'll be sitting down with Peter Thiel. Now if you've been following me on Twitter or perhaps is a podcast guest, another podcasts, you may know that I work for teal capital, but one of the things that people asked me most frequently is given that you are so different than your boss and friend Peter Thiel. How is it the two of you get along? What is it that you talk about? Where do you agree and disagree now? Oddly, Peter and I both do a fair amount of public speaking, but I don't believe that we've ever appeared in public together, and very few people have heard our conversations. What's more, he almost never mentions me, and I almost never mentioned him in our public lives. So hopefully this podcast will give some indication of what a conversation is like somebody who I find one of the most interesting and influential teachers of our time,

somebody who has influenced all sorts of people in Silicon Valley involved with technology and inventing tomorrow and who is often not seen accurately, in my opinion by the commentariat and the regular people who a pine is pundits in the world of science and technology. I hope you'll find Peter as fascinating as Ideo. Without further ado, this is the first episode of the portal. Thanks for joining. Hello and welcome. You found the portal. I'm your host, Eric Weinstein. And I think this is our first interview show to debut. And I'm here with my good friend and employer, Mr Peter Thiel. Peter, welcome to the portal.

Well, Eric, thanks for having

me on your program. No, this is a great honor. One of the things I think it's kind of odd is that, uh, lots of people know that I work for you, and many people know that we're friends. But even though we both do a fair amount of public speaking, I don't think we've ever appeared anyplace in public together. Is that your recollection as well?

I can't think of a single occasion. So this this proves we're not the same

person. We're not the same person, huh? You were not my alter ego, but, you know, on that front, I think it is kind of an odd thing for me. I mean, we met each other. I think when I was in my late forties and if you'd ever told me that the person who would be most likely to complete my thoughts accurately would be you, I never would have believed it. Never having met you, we have somewhat opposite politics. We have very different life histories. Um, how do you think it is that we've come to share such a lot of thinking? I mean, I have to say that a lot of my ideas a cross pollinated with yours. So you occur in a lot of my my standard riffs. How do you think that is that we came to different conclusions but share so much of a body of thought.

It's always hard pressed to answer that since the conclusions all seem correct to May. So you know, it's ah on and it's always mysterious. Why, why we're so what it feels like we're the out liars, and we're the only or among the very few people that reach some of these conclusions about the relative stagnation in science and technology, the ways in which this is deranged ing our culture, our politics, our society on then how we need to try to find some us and bold ways. I'm out some bold ways to find a new portal toe Different, different world. And ah, and I think that they're sort of different ways to of us came at this. I feel like you got you got to some of these perspectives at a very early points in the mid 19 eighties that something was incredibly off. I probably got there in the early mid nineties when I was from this tract law firm job in New York City, and somehow everything felt like it was more like a Ponzi scheme. It wasn't really going towards the future.

Everyone had promised you in In the serve elite undergraduate and law school education had gone through. And so, yes, I think I think we're sort of point. We we got to these insights, but it's still striking how you know how, how out of sync, they feel with, uh, with so much of our society, even even in 2019.

Yeah, I mean, it's a very striking thing for me, and it's also something that's frustrated me. Sometimes when I look forward to you being interviewed is that it often feels to me that so much time is spent on the initial question like, Are we somewhat stagnating in science and technology? That rather than assuming that is a conclusion, which I think we can make a pretty convincing argument that there has been a lot of stagnation? It seems to me that a lot of these conversations hang at an earlier level. And so one of the things that I was hoping to do in this Ah, just I think your second long form podcast you did Dave Rubin show some time ago is to sort of Presuppose some of the basics that people will be familiar with, who've been following either one of us or both of us. And to get to the part of the conversation that I think never gets explained and discussed because people are always so hung up with the initial for, um, frame issue. So with your indulgence, uh, let's talk a little bit about what you and I see in any differences that we might have about this period of time that we find ourselves in in 2019. What would you say is the dominant narrative before we get to what might be our shared kind of counter narrative.

Well, um, you know, the dominant narrative is probably Frank has been fraying for some time, but it is something like, you know, we're in a world of generally fast scientific and technological progress. Things air getting better all the time. There's some imbalances that maybe need to be smoothed out. There's some corner case problems. Maybe there's some dystopian risks because the technology is so, so fast and so scary. It might be destructive. But it's, ah, it's a generally acceleration ist story. And then there's some sort of micro adjustments within that that that one would have toe would have to make.

It is, um, there's no there. Sort of are all sorts of ways that I think it's Frank. You know, I think 2008 was a big, watershed moment, but but that's still what's what's largely, largely been holding together on. And then, you know, they're sort of different institutions. When you look at ah, you can look at the universities where it's sort of this attract thing. It's costing more every year, but it's still worth it.

It's still an investment in the future, and, uh, this was probably ready questionable in the 19 eighties 19 nineties college debt in United States in 2000 was $300 billion an ounce, around 1.61 point seven trillion. And so there's a way in which the story was shaky 20 years ago, and today is his much shakier. It's still sort of holding together somehow.

So in this story, in essence, the great dream is that your Children will become educated, that will receive a college education. They will find careers. And then in this bright and dynamic society, they can look forward to a future that is brighter than the future that previous generations look forward. Yes,

I think now again, I think I think people are hesitant, actually articulated quite that way, because that already sounds not

quite true. Tomorrow, the easier to your point. They've been adding episode. Eichel's for

something. So so it's maybe it's a bright future, but it's really different from the parents, is we can't quite Ah, no. And they have all these. Ah, these new devices. They have an iPhone and they can text really fast in the iPhone we can't understand with the younger generation is doing so so Maybe it's better on a better house from an objective scale. Maybe it's just different and unmeasurable, but better and Servan unmeasurable waste their serve our ways. It's gotten modified, but that would still be a very powerful e intact narrative. And then, um, and then that there are sort of straightforward things we could be doing, the systems basically working,

and it's basically gonna continue to work. And there's a global version of this. There's a U. S version. There's, Ah, upper middle class US version that a lot of different variations on this

So it always strikes me that, um, one of the things that you do very well is that you're willing and you know you're famously a chess player. You're willing to make certain sacrifices in order to advance a point. And in this case, I think you and I would both agree that there's certain areas that have continued to follow the growth story Maur than the general economy, and that you have to kind of give those stories they're do before you get to see this new picture. Where do you think the future has been relatively more bright in recent years?

Well, again, I I sort of date the this era of stagnate relative stagnation and slowed progress all the way back to the 19 seventies. So I think it's been close to half a century that we've been in this in this era of seriously slowed slowed progress. Obviously, a very big exception of this has been the world of bits, um, Computer's Internet, mobile Internet software. And so Silicon Valley has somehow been this up in this dramatic exception. You know it, Um, and where is the world of atoms? It has been, has been much slower for something like 50 years. And, you know,

when I was an undergraduate at Stanford in the late 19 eighties, almost all engineering disciplines, in retrospect, were really bad fields to go into. People already knew at the time. You shouldn't go into nuclear engineering. Aero Astro was a bad idea, but, you know, chemical engineering, mechanical engineering. All these things were we're bad fields. Computer science was would have been a very good field to go into, and and that's been sort of an area where there's been in tremendous growth. So that's that's Ah, that's sort of the signature one that I would I would Ah,

I would cite their questions about you know how healthy it is at this point, even within that field. So, uh, so you know, there's the iPhone is now looking the same as it did 78 years ago. So that's the iconic invention, Not not quite so. Sure, so that it's been sort of Ah, definitely a change in the tone, even within Silicon Valley in the last 56 years on on this. But that that had been that had been one that was very, very decoupled. Um, the decoupling itself had had some odd effects.

Where, where If you have sort of a narrow cone of progress around this world of bets, then the people who are in the those parts of the economy have more to do with Adams will feel like they're being left behind. So there was something There was something about the tech narrative that had ah, this very didn't necessarily feel inclusive. Didn't feel like like everybody was getting ahead in One of the ways I've described it is that we live in a world where, you know, we've been working on this Star Trek computer in Silicon Valley. But we don't have anything else from Star Trek. We don't have the warp drive. We don't have the transporter. We can't, you know, reengineer matter in sort of this cornucopia in a world where there's no scarcity and ah, and then you know how good is a society where you have a well functioning Star Trek computer, but nothing else from Star Trek?

Yeah, incredibly juicy. I mean, one of the ways that I attempted to encode something which in part I got from you, was to say, Of course, your iPhone is amazing. It's all that's left of your once limitless future. Because if the collision of the communications in the semiconductor revolutions that did seem to continue, I date the sort of break in the economy to something like 1972 73 74. It's really quite sharpen my mind. Is it that way? And yours? Yes, it's

It was probably like I'd say, 1968 people. Still, you know, the narrative progress seemed intact on 73. It was somehow over. So someone that in that five year period, you know, one I've sort of had the 1969 version was We landed on the moon in July of 1969 and no Woodstock starts three weeks later. And maybe that's that's one way to describe the cultural shift. You can describe it in terms of the oil shocks of 1973 of the at the back end, the probably, you know, with the benefit of hindsight, there were things that already framed. By the late 19 sixties, the environment was getting dramatically worse. You have the graduate movies should go into plastics that was 1968 or 69 that would have you know that would have. So they were sort of things were where the story was fraying, but But it was still broadly intact in 1968 and somehow seemed very off by 73.

Now something that actually, I'm scanning my memory, and I don't know that we've had this conversation. So I'm curious to hear your answer. One of the things that I found surprising is that I think I can tell a reasonably decent story about how this is a result of a scientific problem rather than the mismanagement of our future. Do you believe that if we assume that There was this early 19 seventies structural change in the economy that it was largely a sort of man made problem, which is what we seemingly implicitly always assume. Or might it be a scientific one? And and let me give you the one iconic example that really kind of drives it home for May. I think corks were discovered in 1968. And to find out that the proton and neutron are comprised of up and down courts is an incredible change in our picture of the world. Yet it has no seeming implications for industry, and I I started thinking about this question. Are we somehow fenced out of whatever technologies are to come that we sort of exhausted one orchard of low hanging fruit and haven't gotten to the next?

Yes, Um, yes, there's always think 111 way to parse this question of scientific technological stagnation is sort of nature versus culture. Didn't ate three ideas in nature run out, or at least the useful ideas. Maybe if I make some more discoveries, but they're not useful

for the easily

useful, easily useful that sort of nature. So it's a problem with nature and then the cultural problem is that there was actually a lot to be discovered or a lot that could be made useful. But some of the culture had gotten gotten deranged, and I sort of go back and forth. And those two explanations, I thinkit's very complicated. Obviously, we had nothing in physics, you'd say, even though, you know, I mean, probably the fundamental discovery stopped after the mid 19 seventies. But but certainly the translation didn't have the corks. Don't matter for chemistry, and chemistries would matters on a on a human level,

I would say there was a lot that happened in biochemistry, so sort of the, you know, not chemistry down but chemistry up the interface between chemistry and biology. Uh, and that's where I would be inclined to say. There's a lot more that could happen on. Dhe has not quite happened because maybe the problem's air hard, maybe, but maybe also the cultural institutions for researching them are restrictive. It's too heavily regulated in certain ways, and and it's been just somewhat slower than one would have expected in the 19 seventies.

So maybe it's really just a constant dialogue between nature and culture. Yes, obviously

because obviously, if nature has stopped, then the culture is going to do range. So there's a way in which cultures linked to nature. And then, you know, the culture do ranges. It also will look like nature's stop. So I think these things are there's probably elements of both. But I am. I am always optimistic in the sense that I think we could have done better. I think we could do better. I think there are no it's not necessarily the case that we convince on all fronts in every direction, but I think there is more space on the frontier than just in this world of bets. So I think there are various dimensions on Adam's where we could we could be advancing, and we just we just

have chosen not to. Why do you think it's so hard to convince people that, um, because both of us have had this experience where we sit down, let's say to an interview and somebody talks about the dizzying pace of change and both you and I see almost I mean it's almost objectively true. I have this test which is go into a room and subtract off all of the screens. Yes. How do you know you're not in 1973. But for issues of design, there aren't that many clues.

Yes, there are. Well, let's all sorts of things. One can one point. I mean, you know, I always point to the productivity data and an onyx which aren't great. Then get into debates. You know how accurately those being measured. You you have this sort of inter generational thing where, um you know, our generation Gen Xers had a tougher time. The boomers, the millennial, seem to be having a much tougher time. Then you know,

either us or or the boomers had. So that seems to this generational thing. So there are some of these sort of macroeconomic variables that seem that seem pretty off the direct scientific questions I think are very hard to get a handle on. And the reason for this is that in late modernity, which we're living in, there's simply too much knowledge for any individual human to understand all of it. And so you know, and so the the And so in this world of extreme hyper specialization, words narrower and narrower subsets of experts policing themselves and talking about how great they are. The string theorists talking about how great string theory is the cancer researchers talking about how they're just about to cure cancer. The quantum computer researchers are just about to build a quantum computer. That would be a massive breakthrough. And then, if you're to say that all these fields, not much is happening, people just don't have the authority for this is somehow very different.

Feel for science or knowledge, then you would have had in 1800 or even in 1918 100 go to could still understand just about everything where 1900 Hilbert could still understand just about all of mathematics. And so this sort of sort of specialization, I think, has made it a much harder question. To get a handle on the political cut I have on the specialization is always that that if you analyze the politics of science, the specialization should make you suspicious because it's gotten harder to evaluate what's going on Then it's presumably gotten easier for people to lie and to exaggerate, and then one should be a little bit suspicious, and that's that's Ah, that's sort of my starting by starting

bias. Why in mind? Mine as well. And I think perhaps sort of the craziest idea to come out of all of this. And again, you met your version of this in a law firm, which is predicated upon the idea that a partner would hire associates and associates would hope to become partners. We could then hire associates. And so that has that pure middle structure. And in the university system, every professor is trying to train graduate students to become research professors to train graduate students. And I think that, you know, the universities were probably the most aggressive of these sort of things. I've called embedded growth obligations. Um, but the implication of this idea that we structured almost everything on an expectation of growth and then this growth that was expected,

ran out it wasn't his high and stable and is technologically letters before has a pretty surprising implication, which is I mean, well, it's not dancer ended. It feels like almost universally, all of our institutions are now pathological

or sociopathic, or whatever you wanna call them. Yes. Yes, I suppose there sort of 22 ways one could imagine going if you know you have these expectations of great growth, great expectations. He's the Charles Dickens novel from the 19th century, had great expectations. And then you can try Thio, be honest and say the expectations are dial down or you can continue to say everything's great and it just happens not to be working out for you. But it's working out for people in general and and somehow it's been very hard to have the sort of honest reset and ah, and the incentives have been for the institutions to range in tow life. So there's a part that's probably away. The university's could function if they did not grow. You know, you'd be honest. Most people in PhD programs don't become professors,

maybe to make the PhD programs much shorter. Maybe you'd be much more selective. You let fewer people in. There would be some way you could sort of adjust it, and the institutions could still be much healthier than they are today. But that's that's not the path that that seemingly was taken. And, uh, and, you know, something like this could have been done in the law firm context for maybe maybe you, uh, you still let the same percent of people become partner. But the partners don't get don't make quite as much money as before or something like that, so that there would have been ways when one could have gone. But those were generally not the choices that were made.

Yeah, I wonder if that's even possible. Because if you had a law firm that was honest or university, that was fairly honest and you had one that was dishonest. It seems to me that the dishonest one could attempt to use its prestige toe out, compete the honest one, and so that would become a self extinguishing strategy. Uh, unless you somehow have, like, a truth in advertising program. Yeah, I don't know. You know, I do think the truth.

You know, when it breaks through, you're better off having told it that not not having on So it's always a cz, Long as everybody was dishonest, it could work with this on. That's but you know, it's Look, it's tze mysterious to me how long it worked we had you know, we had these crazy bubble economy's in the you know, we have the the tech bubble in the nineties, the housing bubble in the two thousands. You know what I think is government debt bubble, You know, this last decade and, um and so if you've had this sort of, you know, up down bubble,

that's that's that's harder to see that if things were just flat. So if the growth in 1970 things just flatlined and you had 40 years of no growth, that would have been problematic, and you might have noticed that very quickly. But you know, in a sense, simplifying a lot you could say we had, you know, the seventies were down. The eighties were up, the nineties were up. The two thousands were down, so to down to up net flat. But it didn't feel that way internally. There's a lot of excitement. A lot of stuff happened.

And so yeah, there's in California was like a even more extreme version of this. You know, the last. The last three recessions in California were much more severe than in the country as a whole. The recovery's were steeper, and so California's felt incredibly volatile. Volatilities gets interpreted his dynamism and then um and then people and then, before you know it, 30 or 40 years have passed.

One thing that I I'm very curious about is how this discipline seems to have arisen where almost everyone representing the institutions tell some version of this universal story, which I'll be honest to. My way of thinking can be instantly invalidated by anyone who chooses to do so. It's just that the cost of invalidating it is quite high. Um, you know, Paul Krugman wrote This column called a protectionist moment where he said, Let's be honest, the financial elites case forever Freer trade has always been something of a scam. And so you had people who are participating in this who seemed to have known all along that there's no way of justifying this on paper but yet were willing and able to participate with seemingly very few consequences to their careers. Like didn't give opportunities to people who were heterodox and saying, Hey, aside from a few bright spots, more or less, we've actually entered a period of relative stagnation. How did this How did this happen? I How is it that this he feels so well? I

think the individual incentives were very different from the collective and sent the collective and Senator we should have an honest conversation and right level. Set things and get get back to a better place. I think the individual incentives were often you pretend that it's it's working great for you. It's like if you're 20,000 people a year, moved to Los Angeles to become movie stars, about 20 of them make it. And so you could say, Well, it's been really hard. Nobody wants to hire me this a terrible city. Or you could say, You know, it's been wonderful and all the doors are being open to me on Dhe, that's the 2nd 1 is more fictional, but that's that's the sort of the thing you're supposed to say if you're if you're succeeding and this, I think there's a way. That's how we've been talking about globalization,

where it's have a glib globalization. It's working great for me on, and I'd like to have more people more talented people come to the U. S. I'm not scared of competing with um and and on on this sort of is Is this Yeah, or academia? If you're if you're professor in academia, so the 10 year system is great, it's just picking the most talented people. I don't think it's that hard at all. It sze completely meritocratic. And if you don't say those things well, we know you're not the person to get

tenure. Yeah, so I think so.

I think I think there is sort of like this individual incentive where, um you're supposed if you if you pretend the system is working, you're a simultaneously signaling that you're one of the few people who should succeed it.

So one image that I have and you know, you and I have talked. I used the word K favor for the system of nonsense that ah undergirds professional wrestling. And you've taken to using Lar Ping live action role playing. It strikes me that we have to separate parallel systems. Now, this podcasting experiment that you and I are now part of, um provides for a very unscripted, out of control narrative. And then there's this parallel institutional narrative that seems to exist in a gated form where the institutions keep talking to each other and ignore this thing that's happening that has reached more and more people s O. That you effectively have multiple narratives, one of which, I think almost no one needs to believe. It's just that the institutions need to trade kind of lies and deceptions back and forth amongst themselves. How is it that these two things could be kept separate? It's like a really wrestling league and a professional wrestling Reid league side by side, where somehow they just don't come into contact with each other.

Well, I, um well, I think if they came into contact something they could, then they wouldn't both be able to exist. So I think that's not surprising that they can't can contact I. I don't think it's a terribly you know, I don't think it's ult ultimately stable. So I think ultimately, you know our account is going to prevail. Thean Stitch Tuchel account is so incorrect that it will ultimately fail. I've probably been more hopeful about how quickly truth prevails than it has, but for I would still I would still be very hopeful that that our account is really gonna break through in the next few years. I have been talking about the text stagnation problem for for, you know, the better part of a decade, And I think when I was talking about this in 89 6010.

This was still a fringe Eve you. It was very friendly with in Silicon Valley, and I think even within Silicon Valley, there's sort of a lot of people who have come around to it have partially come around to it. There's a sense that tech has a bad conscience. It feels like it's not delivering the promises. You know, Google had this propaganda about the future has now seen as the self driving cars or further away than people expected. And I think I think there is sort of a sense that things have shifted a lot over the last decade.

But even like five years ago, I mean, if it feels to me, I, Ah, I moved out to work with you in 2013 and I had never seen a boom before me. This was one of the things that was really important to me. Is that being in academics? Um, the academy had been in a depression since this change around 1972 73 seeing a boom and seeing people with, like, flowers and dollar signs in their eyes, you know, talking about a world of abundance and how everything was gonna be great. It seemed like everybody was the CEO or CTO of some tiny company, Um, and then very,

very quickly. It all started to change, and I felt like a lot of people moved back into the behemoths from their little startup. Having failed, Ah, lot of the ideology felt poisonous, like Don't be evil was not even something you could utter without somebody snickering behind your back. There's like a self hating component where the engineers have been recruited ideologically and are like not actually there to do business. How did this happen so quickly? Well, it's always it's my

wrong about. It's It's striking how fast it's happened. It's striking how much it's happened in the context of a bull market. So if you describe this in terms of psychology, you think that people people be is angry in Silicon Valley as they are today in the stock market, must be down 40 or 50%. It's like people in New York City were angry in 2009. They were angry at the banks. They hated themselves. But, you know, the stock market was down 50 60% the banks have gotten obliterated and that that that that sort of makes sense psychologically. And, ah, and the strange thing is that on a in terms of the sublime, the macroeconomic indicators that stock markets evaluations of the larger companies, it's it's like way beyond the dot com peaks of 2000 all in all sorts of ways.

But the mood is not like late 99 early 2000. It has this very different mood, and the way I would would explain this is that for the people involved, it is sort of a look ahead function. So it is, you know, yes, this is where things are. But are they gonna be worth a lot more in five years? 10 years? And that's gotten that's gotten a lot harder to t tell on. So there's been growth. But people are unhappy and frustrated because they don't see that much growth going forward, even within tech, even within this world of of bets, which had been very, very decoupled for such a long time.

No. One of the things that's interesting to me is, is that when we talk like this, a lot of people are gonna say Wow, That's a lot of gloom and doom. So much is changing. So much is better. Um, And yet what I sense this is that both you and I have an idea that we've lived our entire life in some sort of intellectual Truman show where everything is kind of fake and something super exciting is about to happen. Do you share? Is that a fair telling that? Well, I think that Ah,

I think there's been the potential to get back to the future for a long time and you're there. There have been breaks in this Truman show. At various points. There was a big break with 9 11 There was a big break with the 2018. You know, you could say some sort of break with Truck Brexit and Trump. And in the last few years, it's still, like a little bit undecided with what that all means. Um, but I think I think there were a lot of reasons toe question this and reassess this for some time. The reassessments never quite happened, but But I would say I think we're now at the point where where this is is really gonna happen in the next, you know, Um, you know, two years to five years toe decade,

I don't think the Truman Show can keep going. Keep going that much longer. When I was, you know, and again, I've been wrong about me to know I've

been very wrong. I've

called and we had been off site When I was running PayPal and spring of 2001 the NASDAQ had gone from 7000 back to 2000 dot com. Bubble was over, and I was explaining that we're battening down the hatches. At least one little company has survived. We're going to survive. And, ah, but the in sort of insanity that we saw in the dot com years will never come back in the lifetimes of the people here because it's psychologically you can't go that crazy again while you're still alive in the 19 twenties didn't come back till the lesson of the 19 eighties or something well, long generationally a was over and yet already in 2001 had the incipient housing bubble and and somehow some of the show is kept going for offer for

20 years. Well, with the crazy narrative like the whole narrative behind the great moderation. I mean, I remember just like clutching my head. How can you tell the story that we've banished volatility?

Yes, it's always, I always think of the 1990 Eights narrative was the new economy and you lied about growth. And then the two thousand's narrative was, Ah, the great moderation and you lied about volatility. And and maybe this is the 2000 ten's. One is a secular stagnation where you lie about the real interest rates because the other two don't work any more than sort of a complicated way. These things connect, but ah, yes, New economy sounded very bullish. The nineties great moderation. I was still a reason belong stocks, but sounds less bullish. And then secular stagnation in the Larry Summers forms to be specific. But we're talking about a means again that you should be along the stock market. The stock market's gonna keep going up because things are so stagnant. The real rates will stay low forever. So said they are equally bullish narratives, although they sound less bullish over time

so that effectively we need what happened with the roaring twenties, followed by the Depression, was that there was a general skepticism and hear the skepticism seems to be specific to something different in each incarnation that you let you keep having bubbles with some why you have yet to tell? Yes, But I think And of course,

I think the crazy cut on the twenties and thirties was that we didn't need to have his big of a crash. You could. You could have probably done all sorts of intervention because the 19 thirties was still a period that was very healthy in terms of background, scientific, technological innovation. For just rattle off what was discovered in the 19 thirties that had real world practical things was the aviation industry got off the ground. The talkies, movies got, um, got going. You had you had the plastics industry. You had the ah, um you know, you had secondary oil recovery, you had household appliance, it's got developed. And as you know,

by 1939 there were three times as many people had cars in the U. S. As in 1929. And so it was. There was this crazy tailwind of scientific and technological progress, but then somehow got, you know, badly mismanaged financially by whoever you blame the crash on, uh and so I think that's that's what actually happened in the thirties. And then and then we try to sort of manage all these financial indicators much more precisely in recent decades, even though the tailwind wasn't there at all.

So let me focus you on two subjects that, um, are important for trying to figure out the economy going forward. I'm very fond of perhaps over claiming but making a strong claim for physics. That physics gave US atomic devices in a nuclear power and ended World War two def. It definitively it gave us the semiconductor, the World Wide Web, theoretical physicists invented molecular biology, the communications revolution. All of these things came out of physics, and you could make the argument that physics has been really underrated, is powering the world economy. On the other hand, it's very strange to me that we had the three dimensional structure of DNA in 53. We had the genetic code 10 years later, and we've had very little in the way of, let's say,

gene therapy to show for all of our newfound knowledge, I have no doubt that we are learning all sorts of new things to your point about specialization in biology. But the translation hasn't been anything like what I would have imagined for physics. So it feels like somehow we're in a new orchard and we're spending a lot of time exploring it. But we haven't found the low hanging fruit in biology, and we've kind of exhausted the physics orchard because what we found is so exotic that you know, whether it's two black holes colliding or, you know, 1/3 generation of matter or cork sub structure, we have been able to use these things. Are we somehow between revolutions? Well, I e I would

say the question of what's going on, but I'm I wouldn't bet I wouldn't be pessimistic on physics generalists, that sort of be my bias on that one. Um, biology. I continue to think we could be doing a lot more. We could be making a lot more progress. And ah, you know, the pessimistic version is that no biology is just semis much harder than physics, and therefore therefore it's been slower going. The more optimistic one is that the culture is just broke and we have had very talented people go into physics. You go into biology if you're if you're less talented. You know, it's sort of like you can sort of think of Darwinian terms. You can think of biology is, ah,

selection for people with bad math genes. If you're good at math, you go into physics, go to math or physics, or at least chemistry on biology. We have selected for, you know, all of these people who are somewhat, somewhat less talented. So that might be It might be a cultural explanation for why it's been been slower progress.

But, I mean, we had people from physics we had, like Teller and Fineman and Creek. There's no shortage of I mean, you know, to my earlier point. Molecular biology, anyway, was really founded by physicists more than in more than any other thing, I think, um, why is it that in an era where physics is stagnating, we don't see these kind of minds? Look, I'm a little skeptical of that. That theory. Well, I I'm not I'm

not so sure like if you in. If you're a string theory person or even sort of an applied experimental physicist. I don't think you can that easily reboot into biology. Thes. You know, these disciplines have gotten sort of MME. Or more rigid. It's It's pretty hard to transfer from one area to another. I had when I was an undergraduate. He still had some older professors, were polymath who knew a lot about a lot of different things. This is This is, I think, the way one should really think of, you know, Watson and Crick or fine men or, you know,

or tell her they were certainly world class and in their field. But also, like, incredible in the water, really transgressive. And, um, and the cultural or institutional rule is no Polly maths allowed. You know, you could be you could be narrowly specialized. Andi, if you're interested in other things, you better keep it to yourself and not tell people. Because if you say that you're interested in computer science and also music or studying the Hebrew Bible Wow, that's Ah, that's that's just Ah, that must mean you're just not very serious about computer

science. Well, so I totally want a refund on this point because I think you've hit the nail on the head to my way of thinking. The key problem is if you go back to our original contention, which is is that there is something universally pathological aboutthe stories that every institution predicated on Growth has to tell about itself. Um, when things are not growing, the biggest danger is that somebody smart inside of the institution we'll start questioning things and speaking openly. And it seems

like the Holy Mass would be the people who could connect the dots and say, You know, there's not much going on in my department is not much going on this department over here, not that much going on in this department over there. And those people are very, very dangerous. You know, one of my one of my friends, Ah, studied physics at Stanford in the late nineties. His adviser was this professor at Stanford, Bob Laughlin, who in the late nineties, brilliant physics sky late nineties. He gets the Nobel Prize in physics, and he suffers from thes the supreme delusion that now that he has a Nobel prize, he has total academic freedom and he can do anything he wants to.

And he decided to directed at, you know, I mean, they're all these areas play shouldn't go into space in question. Climate science, They're all these things one should be careful about. But he went into an area far more dangerous than all of those. He was convinced that there were all these people in the in the university who were doing fake signs for wasting government money on fake research. That was not really going anywhere. Any started by investigating other departments. Start with the biology department at Stanford University. And you can imagine this ended catastrophically for Professor Laughlin. You know his graduate students couldn't get PhDs. He no longer got funding. Nobel Peace Prize. A certain Nobel Prize in physics. No protection

whatsoever. Julian Schwing er, um fell out of favor with the physics community despite being held in its highest regard and having a Nobel prize. And he used the epigram in AA book where he wanted to redo quantum field theory around something he called Source three. He said, if you can't join them, beat him. And I think it comes as a shock to all of these people that there is no level you can rise to in the field that allows you to question the assumptions of that field,

right? It's It's like, you know, you're sort of proving yourself. You're you know, you're getting your PhD or getting your tenured position, and and then at some point, you think you think that you've proven yourself and you can you can talk about the whole and not just the parts would you're never allowed to talk about more than the parts, you know, like the the person in the university context, the core of a class of people who are supposed to talk about the whole right. I would say our university presidents, because they're presiding over the whole of the university, and they should be able to speak to what the nature of the hole is. What sort of progress the hole is making is the what is the health of the progress of the whole and ah, and you? No way. Don't you know we certainly do not pick university presidents to think critically about these these questions at all.

Well, I remember discussing with a president of ah, very highly regarded university, uh, came to me said, Can you explain how your friend Peter Thiel thinks? Because I just had a conversation with him and I could not convince him that the universities were doing fantastically in this university in particular. How does he come to this conclusion? And I said, Well, look, Peter, the doesn't come, you know, with a PhD. But let me speak to you in your own language. I started going department by department, talking about the problems of stagnation. It was very clear that there was no previous experience with any kind of informed person making such an argument. I mean, this was a date,

but it's cold. But you know, in some sense, if you're a president of the university, you know you should. You probably don't want to talk to people that dangerous. You want to avoid them. And you don't want to have such destructive thoughts because you have to convince the government or alumni or whoever to keep donating money, that everything's everything's wonderful and great, and, ah and no, I think one has to go back quite a long time. Teoh even identifying any university presidents in the United States who said things that were distinctive or interesting or or powerful Well, you know there was. There was Larry Summers at Harvard, a decade and 1/2 ago and try to do like the most minuscule critiques imaginable and got crucified. But,

ah, you know, I don't think of, you know, I don't think of Summers as a particularly revolutionary thinker.

Well, he he was possessed of an idea that the intellectual elite, which he undoubtedly saw himself a part of, had the right to transgress boundaries. And I think what's stunning about this is the extent to which this breed of out spoken, Um, disruptive intellectual has no place left inside of this system from which to speak, but it's, you know, but this it's

not that surprising. Like a healthy system. You could have wild descent, and it's not threatening because everyone knows the system is healthy and unhealthy. System, um, the descent becomes much more dangerous. So, uh, so you know, this is and I think that's it's it's It's not that surprising that there's always a 11 riff I have on. This is always, you know, if you think of a left wing person as someone who is critical of the structures of our society, right, there's a sense in which we have almost no left wing professors

left me there. That's right in the gnome. Trotsky still is still there as sort of a last remnant of some clay, just a little

longer left wing, in the sense of listen, just being critical of the institutions they're part of right. And there may be some that are much older. So if you're maybe in your eighties, we can, you know, we can pretend to ignore. You are. It's just what happens to people in their eighties. Sure, and but ah, but I don't I don't see, you know, younger professors, and they're safe Ortiz, who are deeply critical of the of the university structure.

I think it's just, um it's just not, you know, you can't have that. It's like if you come back to something as as reductionist as the ever escalating student debt, right? You know, the bigger the debt gets, you conserve. Think what is the 1.6 trillion does it pay for? And in a sense, it pays for $1.6 trillion worth of lies about how great the system it's. And so the more the debt goes, the crazier the system gets, but also the more you have to tell the lies and these things, things sort of go together.

No, it's It's not a stable sequence at somewhere this breaks. Um, you know, again, I would I would bet on a decade,

not a century. Well, that this is the fascinating thing. You, of course, famously started the Thiel Fellowship, a za program which correct me if I'm wrong on this. 2005 is when student debt became non dischargeable in bankruptcy.

The Bush 43 bankruptcy revision

right Now that yes.

And so if you if you don't pay off your student loans when you're 65 the government will garnish yourself. Security wages. Thio, pay off your student debt.

Right. This is this is amazing that this existed in a modern society. And, of course, well, so let me ask, am I right that you were attacking what was necessary to keep the college mythology going? And you were frightened that, um, college might be enervating some of our sort of most dynamic minds? Um, well, you think

that I think there's a lot of different critiques when one should have the university's. I think the debt one is a very simple, very simple one. it's it's, uh, it's always dangerous to be burdened with too much debt. It's what does limit your freedom of of action. And it seems especially pernicious to do this super early in your career. And so, if you if out of the gate, you $100,000 you know it's never clear you can get out of that hole. That's, um, that's going to either de motivate you, or it's gonna push you into, ah into maybe slightly higher paying, very uncreative professions of the sort that are probably,

you know, less good at moving our whole society forwards. And so I think, uh, yes, I think I think the whole thing is is extraordinarily pernicious.

So it is. It

was one of these things where, you know, I started talking about this back in back in 2010 a 2002 dozen. It was already it was already like it was controversial, but it was not Ah, like, you know, younger people agreed with me. The younger people didn't you know, and it's a decade later. It's a lot crazier. It hasn't, you know, we haven't yet completely one, but ah, but I think they're sort of more and more people who agree with

us. I think I

think at this point on the gen X parents of college students tend to agree. Whereas I would say the baby boomer parents, you know 15 years ago would not have agreed the 2008 crisis was a big watershed in this to wearing where you could say the tracking debt, you know, roughly made sense as long as everything all the tractor careers worked in 2008 really blew up. You know, consulting, banking. A certain number of the more track professions got got blown up. Um, and so that was kind of watershed.

Now something that she is. I mean, this is incredibly dangerous, but also therefore quite interesting. If you imagine that the baby boomers have, in some sense, in order to keep the structure of the university going have loaded it up with administrators have hiked the tuition much faster than even medical inflation. Little on general inflation. Um, this becomes a crushing debt problem for people who are entering the system. I saw a recent article that said that the, um, company that, uh, things called seeking arrangements which introduces, um, older men and women with money to younger men and women with the need for money for some sort of ambiguous,

hybridized dating, companionship, financial transfer. And the claim was that lots of students were using this supposed sugar daddy ing and sugar mommy and don't don't know what the terminology is, um, in order to alleviate their debt burden, it's almost a Ziff. The baby boomers in so creating a system are subjecting their own Children to things that are pushing them towards a gray area. A few clicks before you get too honest, prostitution annoy. Okay, I don't

I don't want to impute too much intentionality. Don't know how this happened. You know, I think that would emerge a lot of these. It was mostly emergent, mostly Ah, mostly these things, people, you know, Um uh, yeah, that we had sort of somewhat cancerous. We don't distinguish real growth from cancerous growth. And then, you know, once the cancer's metastasized sizes at a certain size, you know,

you have Easter of some. I try to keep the whole thing going, and it doesn't make that much that much sense. Um, but yes, I Look,

I think. I think one of

the reasons. One, the challenges and right on our side. Let's let's be a little more self critical here on on on this. Is that the question? We always are confirmed? Well, what is the alternative? How do you actually do something? And, um and it is, You know, it's not obvious what the individual alternatives are on an individual level. If you get into a elite university, it probably still make sense to go. It doesn't make sense to go to number 100 or something like that. But there is sort of ah waken still work individually,

even if it does not work, you know, for for a country as a whole, um, and and and so there are certain all these all these challenges in, in, in, in in, you know, coming up with alternate tracks like I think, I think in software. There's some degree to which people are be hard if they're just good at coding and it's not quite as critical that they have a computer science degree, you can do this and other other careers. Other fields, um, I would tend think one could. It's been it's been slow to happen.

Well, so you and I have been excited about a great number of things that have been taking place outside of the institutional system. But one of the things that I I'm continuing continued to be mystified by is that we're somewhat politically divided where you are well known as a conservative, and I really come from a fairly radical progressive, um, streak. So we have this common view of a lot of the problems that sometimes we come to very different ideas about how those problems should be solved. Do you wantto maybe just try riffing on figuring out, like, assume that we somehow found ourselves a position of some some degree of power with an ability to direct a little bit more than we have currently? What would you do to create the preconditions? Um, so not necessarily picking particular projects. But what would you try to do to create the preconditions where people are really dreaming about futures? Both a technological level family formation, making our a civil society healthier. Where would you Where would you, uh, start to work first?

Well, there are a lot of things that so I was always a little bit uncomfortable sort of question because

he's been turning on me

too, because, um, you know, I feel like, uh, you know, we're not gonna be dictators of the United States, And then, you know, they all sort of things you could do for dictators If, um ah. But but certainly. Look, I would I would I would I would look at the college debt thing very seriously. I would say that. Ah,

you know, it's dischargeable in bankruptcy. And, um and if and if, If, if people go bankrupt, then part of the debt has to be paid for by the university that did it. There has to be some sort of local accountability. So this would love that. That would be sort of a more right wing answer. The left wing answers. We should socialize the debt in some ways. And the universities should never pay for that, which would be more than you know, Sanders Warren approach. But But but But that there'll be there'll be one version.

I think you know, I think there is, um, I think I think there is. You know, I think one of the main ways inequality has manifest in our society last 2030 years. I think things more stagnation than inequality. But just on the inequality side, it's Ah, it's the runaway housing costs. And there's a baby boomer version. We have super strict zoning laws so that house prices go up and the house is your nest egg. It's not a place to live. It's your nest egg for retirement. And I would, uh,

I would try toe figure out some ways to die. I'll do all that stuff back, back massively and on. And that's probably intergenerational Transfer words bad for the asset prices of baby boomer homeowners. But better for younger people to get started. Ah, in ah sort of family formacion or starting else households.

What do you think about the idea of a C e d. A college equivalency degree where you can prove that you have a level of knowledge that would be equivalent, Let's say to a graduating Harvard chemistry major right? Or or a fraction thereof, where you have the ability to prove that through some sort of online delivery mechanism you created.

I love it. Yeah, I think very hard to implement again. I think I think these things are hard to do it again, but

great idea. There's a possibility of way.

Have all these people who have something like Stockholm Syndrome, where they they? You know, if you if you got a Harvard chemistry degree, right, And if you suspect that, you know, actually, the knowledge could be had by a lot of people and if it's just a set of tests, you have to pass that your degree would be a lot less special. You will resist this very, very hard. You know, if you're if you're in an in an HR department or in a company hiring people, you will want to hire people who went to a good college because you went to a good college. And if we broaden the hiring and said we're gonna hire all sorts of people, maybe maybe that's self defeating for for your own positions. I think I think there are. You know, I think one should not underestimate how many people you know have a have a form of Stockholm syndrome here.

So some other ideas at some point when we were talking about and I should have said earlier that the Thiel Fellowship, for those who don't know is a program that is historically at least began. Paying very young people who had been admitted to college is to drop out of those colleges. So they got to keep the idea that they had been admitted to some fairly prestigious place. But then they were given money to actually live their dreams and

not the model. Yes, it was. It has been an extremely successful, an effective program. It's not scalable, right? So, uh, so we had a hack. The we had a hack, the prestige status thing, where was as hard or harder to get a teal fellowship than to get into a top university, and, uh and so that's that's part. That's that's very hard to scale.

Well, So when when I was looking at that program for you, one of the things that I floated was the idea that if you look at every advanced degree like a um, a J. D or an MD PhD, none of them seem to carry the requirement of having a B A, which is quite mysterious. And if you fail to get a PhD, let's say there's usually an embedded master's degree that you get is a going away present. And therefore, if you could get people to skip college if you give them perhaps four years of their lives back and you could use the first year of graduate school, which is very often kind of a rapid recapitulation of what undergraduate was. Everybody's on a level playing field, and then the worst comes to worst. People would leave is a mass with the Masters. They would in general, get a stipend because a lot of the two tuition eyes remitted to them in graduate programs. Is that a viable program to get some group of people who are highly motivated, Um, to avoid the be a entirely a sort of the administrators degree rather than the

professor's degree? Um, let me see. Yes, I mean all the different subtle critiques. I can have our disagreements, but yeah, I think, look, I think I think the B A is not as valuable as it looks. I also think the pH she's not as valuable as it looks. You know, I think I sort of feel it's it's, it's, it's, it's it's a it's a problem across the board. It strikes me that what you're proposing is a bit of an uphill struggle because at the top universities,

the B A is the farm or prestigious degree than a PhD at this point. So if you're at Stanford or Harvard, um, you know, it's it's pretty hard to get in. Um, tow the undergraduate. Um, and then you have to have more PhD students than you have undergraduates. There are all these people who are Come on, you know, a very questionable track. They made a vegetable choices. It's not clear, you know, Um,

you know, and it's a few sort of, uh and and and and, uh, they're probably probably are gonna have some sort of psychological breakdown in their future. You know, the dating prospects aren't good. They're all these things. The are a little bit off. So in theory, if you had a super tightly controlled PhD program right, that might work. But you have to least make those those two changes, you know, as it is the people in in graduate school. It's like it's like tribbles and Star Trek and you know it Z.

You know, we have just so many and they all feel expendable and unneeded, and it's it's sort of Ah, it's just Ah, that's That's not a good That's not a good place to be, you know, And, uh, and where's I think the undergraduate conceit is still that it's Maur, you know, K selected instead of our selector that it's Maur that everybody is special and valuable. You know, that's often not true either I'd be critical of both right and Ah and I think, But if we could, if we could have a real PhD that was required, you know there was was much harder and that actually led to sort of an academic position or some other comparable position.

That would be that'd be good, you know, when the questions I always come back. And this is what is the Teeley ology? These programs, Where did they? Where do they go on and on and what I think has gone, you know, and one of the analogies I've come up with, I think undergraduate elite undergraduate education is like junior high school football. You know, it's your physical

football. I did not see that coming. It's it's playing

football in junior high schools, probably not damaging for you, but it's not going anywhere because if you keep playing football in high school and college, and then ah, professionally, that's just bad. And the better you are, the more successful you are, the less well it works. And, ah, and then the question is, what's the motivational structure? And when I when I was an undergraduate in the 19 eighties, there was still a part of it where you thought the professors were cool. It might be something you'd like to be at some point in the future, you know,

And they were role models, just like in junior high school football, and an NFL player, you know, would have been a role model. But I just think there's a brain damage in both. Now. Now I think it's it's it's you're just you're just doing lots of brain damage and, uh, and it's It's a track that doesn't work, and therefore the Tilly ology sort of has broken down. So undergraduate part of the ideology was that it was preparing you for graduate school, and that part doesn't work. And that's what's That's what's gotten deranged. Who in graduate school. Well,

it's preparing you to be a post stock, and then, well, that's the post duck apocalypse, whatever you wanna call it. Post apocalypse, postdoc lifts, put stock. You heard it. Here. Folks post on lips and and so but just every step, I think the Tilly ology the system is isn't really bad shape. It's of course, this drip all these institutions with fake growth that associate PacifiCorp pathological. But the university's it's striking is very bad. And I think this was already true in important ways.

You know, back in the eighties, early nineties, when I was going through the system and when I think when I think back on it, um, I think I was most intensely motivated academically in high school because the till ideology was really clear. You were trying to get into a good college. And then by the time I was at Stanford, it was a little bit less clear by the time I was a law school, really unclear where that was going and ah, and I was, by the time I was, you know, 25 I was far less motivated than that at age 18. So, uh, and I think these dynamics were just in a more extreme than ever today.

What I find so dispiriting about your, um your diagnosis is first of all, that I agree with the second of all. Um, if we don't train people in these fields like if we don't get people to go into molecular biology or bioinformatics or something like that, we're never going to be able to find the low hanging fruit in that orchard. So it seems to me that we have to find some way that it makes sense for a life to explore these questions. One of the things that I don't understand and I don't know if you have any inside go

and you go. Go ahead.

Go on. Well, I was gonna say, is that, um it feels to me that almost all of our institutions are carbon copies of each other at different levels of quality and that there are only a tiny number of actually innovative institutions. It used to be that Reed College was sex, drugs and Greta and you had, you know, ST John's with the great books curriculum that didn't look like anything else or Deep Springs. And the University of Chicago was crazy about young people. But the diversity of institutions is unbelievably low is that wrong? I think that's

that's fair. But I I would say, Yeah, theon the bigger problem with a lot of these fields, it's Yeah, I think we have to keep training people. I think we need to keep trained people in physics or even these feels that seem completely dead. I'm not, you know, super. But I think the question we have to always ask is, how many people should we be training? And my intuition is, you want you want. You want the gates to be very tight. One of my friends is a is in the professor of Stanford Economics Department, and,

ah, the way he describes it to me is they have about 30 graduate students starting PhDs in economics. Stanford. Every year it's, you know, 6 to 8 years to get a PH. D. At the end of the first year, the faculty has an implicit ranking of the students where they sort of agreed to the top three or four are the that the ranking never changes. The top three or four have it are able to get a good position academia, the others, not so much and and you know this is it. We're pretending to be kind to people who were actually being cruel, incredibly cruel on. And, uh and and so I think that,

ah, that if there are going to be, it's a supply demand of labor. If they're gonna be good, good positions in academia where you can, you know, have a reasonable life. It's not a monastic vow of poverty that you're taking to be an academic. If we're gonna have that, uh, you want, you don't want this sort of Malthusian struggle. If you have 10 graduate students in a chemistry lab, you have toe have a fist fight for a Bunsen burner or a beaker. And you know somebody says one politically incorrect thing. You can happily throw everyone.

I'm all out of the overcrowded bus. The bus is still overcrowded with nine people on it. That's that's what's unhealthy. And so, yes, it's it's It would be a mistake to say we should dial us down and have, you know, zero people, right? This feels that this is what's scary. That's that's not that's That's not what I'm advocating or what is being advocated here, but, uh, but But there is a There's a point where if you just add more and more people in in a in a starvation Malthusian context, that's not healthy. Well,

this gets to another topic, which I think is really important. And it's a dangerous one to discuss, which is, um, if it seems to me that power laws those distributions, um, with very thick tales where you have a small number of out liars that often dominate all other activity are ubiquitous and that particular with respect to talent, whether we like them or not, they seem to be present where a small number of people do a fantastic amount of all all of the innovation. What do we do if power laws are common? Two. Make people more comfortable with the fact that there is a kind of endowment inequality that seems to be part of species makeup. I don't even think it's just limited t humans.

Well, I I'm not convinced he sort of Power laws are are equally true in all all fields of activity. So I think there are, you know, when the United States was a frontier country in the 19th century, right? Um and you know, most people were farmers and presumably some people were better farmers than others. But, you know, everyone started with 140 acres of land, and Ah, and there was this this wide open frontier. Even if you had some parts of the society had more of a power law dynamic. There was a large part that didn't and that was that was what What? Ah, I think gave it a certain certain amount of health and Ah,

yeah, the challenges If we've here's our society saying that all that matters is education and, um, and PhDs and academic research and that this has this crazy power law dynamic. Then then you're just going to have a society in which there are, you know, lots of people playing video games and basements or something like that. So that's Ah, that's Ah, that's that's That's the way I would frame it. But yes, I think I think there are definitely are some areas where this is the case. And, uh and then, you know, we just need,

you know we need we need more growth for the whole society If you have growth. Ah, you have a rising tide lifts all boats, and so it's always No, it's the stagnation is the problem. Well,

you know, I I've joked about this as we're not even Communistic in our progressivism because the old ah formulation of communism was from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs and the inability to recognize different levels of ability. I mean, like almost every mathematician and physicist who encountered John von Norman's just said the guy's smarter than I was not necessarily the deepest or he did all of the great work. But you know, when you're dealing with somebody who's able to employ, ah, skills that you simply don't have, I mean, I know I'm not a concert pianist, and, um, look, I I don't I don't know how

you solve the social problem, right? If everybody has to be a mathematician or a concert pianist that that that, like I want a society in which we have great mathematicians and great concert pianists, um, that that seems that that would be a very healthy society, right? It's very unhealthy. If every parent thinks their child has to be with a mathematician or in this is a pianist and and that's that's that's the kind society we unfortunately

have. Well, this is why. So this is where Why I try to sell you sometimes on a more progressive view of the world, which is I want deregulated capitalism. I want the people who have the rare skill sets to be able to integrate across many different areas. And to be honest, you mean that this is the thing that that I wish more people understood about what you bring, which is that you're able to think in 15 different idioms that most people only have one or two of. And so whatever it is that you're doing to integrate these things as an investor into direct research and direct work is really something that, you know, I've watched firsthand for six years. Um, the problem that I have is we are going to have to take care of the median individual, and I less think that the median individual is going to be reachable by the market over time as some of these things that are working in silicon in terms of machine learning like,

but then then you're being you're being more optimistic on on on progress in in tech than is because I look

I think, I think Yes. Look,

if if we had if we have a runaway automation, right, Um and you know, if we're building robots that are smarter than humans and can do everything humans could do, uh, then we probably have to have a serious conversation about a universal basic income er or something like that. And you're gonna end up with, you know, a very, very weird society. I don't I don't see the automation happening at all. And I think the question of automation in my mind is identical to this question of ah, of productivity growth. Um, there is, you know, we've been automating for 202 150 years since the Industrial Revolution.

Agriculture and industry manufacturing and the sort of society we have in the early 21st century is one in which most jobs, our nontradable service sector jobs. They're not easily automata ble. So it's like a waiter in a restaurant. It's a yoga instructor. It's a nurse, it's a kindergarten teacher. And that's what that's what most jobs in our society are. And because they're so they've been so resistant to automation that Ah, this may be one of the reasons why the product, if the numbers are, are slowing down. Even if we're still innovating us fast and manufacturing and even we're still improving agriculture. They're smaller and smaller part of the economy. And so even 5% of your productivity growth in manufacturing. That means a lot more in manufacturing 60% of the economy that it doesn't say 20% of the economy.

So that's that's roughly ah, that's roughly what I what I think would happen. Um, and, uh, you know, if you just if you just look at the current, the current dynamic in the US is we have, you know, unemployment. Like 3.63 point 7% right? It's super low. It's still there doesn't seem to be that much wage pressure that there doesn't seem to be that much growth. The productivity numbers still aren't great. You think they'd be enormous. Incentives quite severely limited. Me, Yeah, but I think we'll get Mike Mike. My read on it is just the automation story's been

oversold. Like I agree. The automation,

sir, has been over like it's possible it's going to happen if possible, is just around the corner, and it's about about to happen. Well, that's what we've been told in a lot of these areas over the last 40 50

years. So I have a couple questions about this. One is sort of if I think about how common retail occupations are, is there something about retail that is resistant to Amazon ification? If you will, UM, where people actually want to go shopping a physical place are willing to pay a premium that we haven't understood what to have human contact. Maybe there's some information exchange. Maybe there's a recreational aspect that's bundled. That's one of my two questions. The other one surrounds the idea that we've always focused on. Like, When is a G I coming? And the robots that will do everything And part of the lesson for me about machine learning is how many things humans were doing that don't require anything like artificial general intelligence. Just some specialized neural net seems to be good enough to do the job. So those would be two questions in my mind as to how yes, yes,

but I think all these things you know, you have to You have to concretize, right? And yes, I I think retail is is a sector that's under, you know, re quite a bit of pressure is going to stay under quite a bit of pressure. Um, that may be the top. That's the top one. I would pretty looks vulnerable to me, but that's the, um and, um, you know, and that's sort of that's like Amazon is the is the most threatening of the big tech companies and that it's, you know,

threatening a lot of other companies elsewhere in the industry and disrupting them and making things more efficient. But, ah, you know, probably with a lot of sheer forces at work in that process. So So I agree that that's a candidate for, you know, automation or productivity improvements or things like that. I'm still not convinced that it's in the arrogant, shifting things that much, you know, and then go through and go through all sorts of individual job descriptions where, you know, uh, uh, people used to have secretaries because typing was a skill and,

you know, the word processor. You don't quite need this. You two short e mails, you don't quite know his secretary. People still have executive assistance that sort of somehow do slightly different set of responsibilities. But it's not clear if you're executive assistance that we used to have secretaries on. So when one actually concretize, is it? It's Ah, it's It's not quite clear how much, Um, you know, how disruptive the automation that's happening. Really? Yes,

it's Ah, it's always strike is and this is It's a version of the text stagnation. It's always last 40 50 years. Things have been slow. We're always told it's about to accelerate like crazy. That may be true in some ways. I hope that's true. Um, but if one was simply extrapolating from last 40 to 50 years, perhaps the default is that we should be more worried about the lack of automation than excess automation. That's really interesting. And so if if and again, I think if we had the sort of runaway automation, I mean you could get to like 34% GDP growth and at 3 to 4% GDP growth, we can solve these problems socially.

You would be willing to have like, you know, this thing that I've been talking to Andrew Yang about has been the idea of hyper capitalism, which is a deregulated hyper cap hyper capitalism where you can doom or experimenting. We're playing, um, Cupper couple to some kind of hyper socialism where you recognize that the median individual might not be able in the future too easily. Defend Ah, position needed for family Formacion.

Well, let me rephrase this a little, but you're not gonna get a conversion experience on your first podcast

here to make me wait for the next

Maybe really a little longer than that to. But ah, I would say if we can get the GDP growth back to 3% a year on a sustainable basis without fudging without fudging without lying about productivity numbers, et cetera, then there will be a lot more room for for various social programs. I wouldn't want them to be misdirected all sorts of ways, but there would be a lot of things that we weigh Could d'oh! I should say, And I'm and, um, I would be very uncomfortable starting with the social programs without the growth. And, uh and that's that's the That's the sort of conversation that I often will see happening in Silicon Valley, where, where it's we start with you, B, I write because we're lying about automation.

If automation of automation is happening, then we'll see in the productivity numbers. And eventually maybe we need something like you. Be I If automation is not happening and you do you B I then you just, you know, blow

up the economy, right? I should say, And you know it because there's

a question. You know, it's you

come somewhat toward coming them doing them in parallel. I'm okay with that. No, no, no,

I'm not. Not okay with, uh, starting with

the socialism. Well, s o, I appreciate it. Even

a Marxist wouldn't believe this. Even a Marxist thinks the have to first get the capital to do things before you can redistribute stuff, right? I know. And you can't start with the redistribution before we've done the automation.

I'm not even a Marxist, Peter, But the thing that I was going to say is that as you talk about the fact that we can solve some of these problems socially, I want to talk about from the progressive side. I'm not interested in using social programs where markets continue to function. I mean, the idea of making people personally accountable for their own happiness in their own success and path through the world is incredibly liberating, and I view markets as providing most of the progress that we now enjoy. So there is something that's very weird and punitive about the desire for redistribution. I mean, there's almost a desire to tag the wealthy that has nothing to do with taking care of the unfortunate. And what I really am talking about here is how do we get a conversation between left and right, which isn't cryptic, which isn't.

You know, of course, I have a much more cynical view of this where I think the redistribution rhetoric. It's mainly not even targeted the wealthy. It's targeted at the lower, lower middle class at the deplorables, or whatever you wanna call them. And it's a way to tell them that they will never get ahead. Nothing will have been in their life, and, um, and that's That's actually why you know, a lot of people who are lower middle class or middle class are viscerally quite strongly opposed to welfare because it's always an insult to them. He's always heard is an insult and ah, and I'm not sure they're wrong toe feel that

well, and I feel that a lot of the talk about redistribution is actually ah, families of high eight through 11 figures, um, trying to figure out how to target families of six. Figure through low eight figure wealth, a cz the targets of the redistribution that the very wealthy will be able to shelter assets and protect themselves. Or maybe even, you know, switch switch nations. Whereas people who are dentists and orthodontists on accountants are going to be the ones viewed as the rich. We're going to be incapable of getting themselves out of the way. So I think that partially would What good faith conversation between left and right opens up is is that we have a shared interest and uncovering all of the schemes of the people who enjoy pushing around pieces of paper and giving speeches in order to engineer society for their

own reasons. So, the one way I would I would ah, restate what you just said sure would be that Ah, um, you know, redistribution from the powerful to the powerless from the rich. The poor is like from the powerful to the powerless. And so using power to go after those with power, and that's almost oxy moronic. It's almost self contradictory and so on. There may be some way to do that. I think most the time you end up with with some fake redistribution, some sort of complicated shell game of one sort or another, right? And, ah,

you know, the very end. I know the causation stuff is much, much trickier. But if we if we look at societies that are, you know, somehow further to the left on on some scale, right, um, the inequality, you have to go really far to the left before and maybe just destroy the whole society before you really start solving their the inequality program problem. California, when I first moved here as a kid in 1977 would have been sort of a centrist state in the US politically and was broadly middle class. Today, California is the second most Democratic states a D plus 30 state. It's a super unequal and,

ah, and at least on a correlated basis, causation, at least on a correlated basis. The further to the left it's gone, the more unequal to become. And there is something pretty weird about that. There

is you know something that sort of fits in here? Is that in part? I've learned from you. Um and you can tell me whether you recognize that this formulation or not is start with any appealing social idea. That's step one step to ask, What is the absolute minimal level of violence and coercion that would be necessary to accomplish that idea? Now, add that to the original idea. Do you still find your original idea attract? And that this flips many of these, um, propositions into territory where I suddenly realized that something that people see is being very attractive, actually can, on Lee be accomplished with so much misery, right? Even if it's done maximally efficiently, that it's no longer a good idea. And I think that this influence I mean, this has been very influential in my thinking. Um, what I've

looked The visceral problem with communism is not it is not. It's redistributive tendencies. It's the extreme violence that you have to kill tons of people. You know, there's always there's always a one of the professors I studied under Stanford of Rene Girard was this from great philosophical sociological anthropological thinker, and, uh, you know he had this observation that he thought communism among Western intellectuals became unfashionable. You could dated to the year 1953 the year Stalin died. And the reason was they were They were not communist. In spite of the millions of people being killed, they were communist because of the millions of people who were being killed. As long as you're willing to kill millions of people, that was tell a sign that you were. You were building the utopia. You were building a great new society. And when you stopped,

you know, it was just gonna be like lethargy of the Brezhnev era or something like that, and that that was not inspiring. I mean, people shift from stalling to Mao or Castro or but Ah, but the, um the violence was charismatic, I think, very charismatic. And then But then also, you know, if you think about it's very undesirable,

I think that there is so fascinating that we actually finally get to something like this. I think that that is a correct description of part of the communist movement, but not all of the Communist movement. There were a lot of people, I think, in that just my own family was certainly involved in far left politics, and some of it probably dipped into communism. What my sense of it was is that there was a period in the thirties where people realize that there had to be coordinated social action and that there were people who were too vulnerable and that that somehow got wrapped up in all of the things that Stalin was talking about. That sounded positive if you didn't know the reality. So, for example, Paul Robes and, um, you know, a hero of the of the of the left. It was extolling starlet Stalin's virtues openly. My guess is,

is that he didn't fully understand what had happened, that he'd gotten involved in an earlier era, and that as things became known and progressed, there was a point which many people suddenly opened their eyes and said, I've been making excuses for the Soviet Union because at least it had the hope. I mean, you know, there were American blacks, for example, who moved to Moscow because of the hope that it was going to be a racially Maur equal society. My own family, you know, I would say, was talking about, um, you know,

interracial marriage and homosexual open, uh, support of homosexuality, female access to birth control. Those things were associate ID with the Communist Party, and a lot of those ideas are now commonplace. But we forget that, you know, once upon a time on Lee, the Communists were willing to dance with these things. Yes,

I Look, I What? I don't make this to add harmony, but I want to say that people like your family. Yeah, we're likely. Very intelligent. People were somehow still always the useful idiots, and Ah, and there was no no country where the communists actually came to power, where people like those in your family actually got to make the decisions. No, I I think so. And somehow somehow, like maybe maybe, yeah, maybe they were indirect ways that it was helpful or beneficial in countries that did not become communists, but in countries that actually became communist, Um, you know it it didn't actually ever seem to work out for those people.

I definitely think that there was some sense that they were fooled and duped in this situation, but by the same token, not wanting to make this to ad hominem. Um, you know, as a gay man, I think that a lot of your rights would have been seen much earlier by the communists who were earlier to that party. I think that, um, to an extent, Ah, some of the things that we just take for granted is part of living in a tolerant society were really not found outside. And so if you were trying to dine Ala Carte, maybe you could take something from a comedy buffet. You could take something from the anti Communist buffet. Um, and you could steal a little from regular party politics. Of course, the Dixiecrats were not exactly the most racially progressive group in the world. Things were very different and there was no clear place to turn.

Yes, always. It's always easy for us to judge people in the past two too harshly. So I think I think that's Ah, that's a That's a good generalization. Uh, I I would I would say that, Thea, you know that there's something about the revolution in the extreme revolutionary movements that always seem to be from my point of the violence was always too much, and I and and you know, it's a it's a, uh, it's a package. It's a package deal. But I don't like the violence part of the package. That's that's That's the That's the part that, at the end of the day makes me think the package would not have been worth

it. So what I would like to do is to take a quick break. And I would like to come back on exactly this point because it's the point where I feel that perhaps you are least understood by the outside world with in terms of what we've been talking about, both a growth and progress on the one hand and violence on the other. So when we come back, we'll pick it up with Peter Thiel. Thank you. Thanks. Welcome back to the portal. I'm here with my friend and employer, Peter Thiel, for this, our inaugural interview episode. And we just got into a point which I think, um, I hope people who have been tracking your career, your books,

your thought process are gonna find interesting because I think it's the thing that if I had to guess, would be the thing that people at least understand about you. Or maybe they have wrong the most. Ever since I've known you, um, your focus has weirdly been reduction of violence across a great number of different topics at a level that I don't think has leaked out into the public's understanding of you. And what causes you to make the choices you make. How do you see growth as attached to reduction of violence?

Um, well, I think that Ah, it's, um it's very hard to see how anything like the kinds of societies we have and, um, Western Europe, the United States could function without without growth, I think. And I think the way sort of parliamentary Republican democracy works is you have a group of people sitting around the table. They craft complicated legislation, and there's a lot of horse trading, and as long as the pies growing, you can give something to everybody. When the pie stops growing, it becomes a zero sum dynamic. Um,

and the legislative process does not work. And ah, and so the ah sort of democratic types of parliamentary systems we've had for the last 202 150 years have mapped onto this period of, um of rapid growth we had sort of a very bad experiment the 19 thirties, where the growth stopped A T's, certainly economic sense and the system, you know, systems became fascist or communist. It didn't. It doesn't actually work. And so I suspect that if we're in for a period of long growth, I don't think I don't think our our kind of government can work. Uh, I think there is a prospect of all sorts of forms of violence, more violence by the state against its citizens. There may be,

ah, more zero sum wars globally, or there may be other ways things are super deformed to pacify people. So, you know, maybe everyone just smokes marijuana all day, but that's that's also kind of deformed. But I think I think a world without growth is either I'm going to be a much more violent or a much more deformed world. And again it's ah, you know, it's not the case that growth simply solves all problems so you can have very rapid growth and it can still you can still have the problem of violence. You still you still have bad things that can happen, but that's our only chance without growth. I think, uh I think it's very hard to see how you have a good future.

Now, in some sense, whenever I hear you interpreted in the prime meat look, you you have to know that there is a version of of you that exists in the minds of pundits and you know, the commentariat that just loves to paint you as if you were a cartoon villain. And I always think that for those people who are actually confused about you as opposed to those who wish to be confused about you, it says, If you're looking through a window and they're looking at the reflection in the window not understanding what it is that you're focused on, why do you think it is that almost nobody sees your preoccupation with violence reduction?

Well, it's, um I think, um, I think I was always. It's hard for me to come with a good answer, these sort of sociological questions. I think that, uh, I think people generally don't think of the problem of violence as quite a central as I think I think it is. I think it is. Ah, I think it's, you know, a very deep problem. You know, on a human level,

if you think of sort of this mimetic element of human nature where we copy one another, we want the things other people want. Um, and, uh, there's a There's a there's a lot of room for, ah, conflict on DA that if it's not channel very carefully a violent conflict in human relationships and in human societies between human societies. And ah, this this is sort of, I think, a very, very deep problem and sort of thing. It's not sort of Christian anthropology, but you also have the same in Machiavelli. Or,

you know, this is a sort of their arse of a lot of different traditions where you know human beings are, if not evil there at least dangerous. And I think, uh, I think the sort of softer anthropological biases that, uh, that a lot of people have in, you know, sort of late maternity or in the Enlightenment world are that, you know, humans are by nature good. They're by nature peaceful. Um, and, uh,

that's not the norm. So there's that. That might be sort of Ah, General biased people have is that people can't be this violence, not it's not the steep problem. It's a problem other people have. There's some bad people violent, but it's not a general problem.

You know, one of the things that I think has been fascinating to me in, you know, I mean effectively. I didn't know you when I was young, and this feels like a lifelong friendship that got started way late in my life. And one of the things that that kind of was surprising to me is that my coming from a Jewish background, you're coming from a German background. I think both of us were sent this sense sensitized by the horrors of World War Two, which I mean, obviously the problem for the Jews is very clear. But the fact that Germany never really recovered its proud intellectual traditions that have gotten bound up in a level of mechanized and planned violence, you know, the decimation of a great intellectual tradition and one of things we've talked about in the past is whether the twilight of living memory of the Holocaust should be used for some more profound German Jewish reconciliation that these air too communities that have held somewhat similar thought processes from the perspective of my medic competition. Maybe, you know, there was.

There was there was a problem that they were doomed to run into each other. But that in some sense, um, there are two wounds that need to be healed now that all of the original participants are either quite elderly or gone, Do you think that that is informing our conversation? Well, I think,

uh, I think there's certainly an element of that between between the two of us. I I think that Ah, there's there's probably a degree to which, um, the history was so traumatic that ah, that people still understate that this aspect there was there was something about, you know, late 19th century early 20th century Germany, where the Judaism was better integrated into the society than many other places and was something ah, very synergistic, very, very generative about that. And ah, and ah, and and then, you know,

getting it all these ways that ah, at the that it was lost are very, very hard to d'oh. You know, it's ah, it's ah, you know, sort of a the sort of social democratic response to the Hitler era and the Holocaust was sort of radically egalitarian. It's everybody's equal, shouldn't kill people. Everybody's equally valuable. And yet, in some ways, what was? Hitler killed the best people. And so there's a way in which the social Democratic response to,

ah toe what happened doesn't even come up to the terrible thing that happened. So in egalitarian society will. We don't have many people, girl equal. Nothing's really changed. But, ah, but But maybe you have no Jewish people left in Germany and there's a lot less dynamism in the society as a result. And that's something that people still can't say in Germany,

because that's the right. You feel like it's,

uh, you know, like, if I say it, people won't they won't be one contradicted or anything, but, um, but it's, Ah, it's, you know, it's sort of profoundly, profoundly uncomfortable. So I think I think there is a sense, Uh, yeah, that that Ah,

you know, it's there, sort of all these strange ways that Germany is still under the shadow of Hitler. Even even you know, the ways that people are trying to, you know, exercise Hitler in some ways have deformed society where you can't, uh, you can't go back to the things that it worked incredibly well in a pre World war Germany. It's like there was a lot was unhealthy and wrong with it, too. But But yeah, there's a sense that something, um, you know something? Ah,

something very big has been lost. There probably are a Jewish version of this that one could one could articulate, um, as well. But, uh, yeah, I think there's something about the synergy that's Ah, that's that's very powerful. And ah, that's quite missing.

So, you know, from my side of the fence, I was just listening on NPR to a description of Fiddler on the Roof being put on by Joel Grey in Yiddish and the sound of, you know, Jewish, middle High German. Ah, there's something about it that is shocking in today's era. Ah, so there's been a Jewish loss. You know, I I felt this a couple of times. I avoided, to be honest, going to Germany, Um,

because I didn't want to run into old people and wonder where they had been. But eventually Ah ah Saurus invitation found myself at a conference in Berlin. And when I checked into the hotel, I heard my last name pronounced in impeccable German. And it was both horrible feeling and a wonderful feeling, like somehow, weirdly something was Homer. I went to a restaurant near Checkpoint Charlie with my wife, and I was missing a fork like the person spoke. No English, and I remembered from, ah, some old story of my father and I asked for a couple which I guess is the Yiddish for fork. And it was close enough. And somebody brought me a fork. And by uttering a word that I got gobble,

gobble, gobble. Okay, Sherman. Yes. Bye Bye. Going through that exercise, I found that when this fork was brought to me, I realized that there was some part of my experience. In fact, that was missing that this uncomfortable relationship which, you know, my grandfather when we when we went through Israel driving ah, north to south, um, was singing Ah,

leader. He was German, was the language of the culture That was the language of the intellectual, and that never left him. And so I think that weirdly, um, this is the first time because I think it'll be too late if we wait for 20 more years because there will be no one to remember, but that there is some opportunity to recognize a dual wound.

Yeah. No, I, um I think, uh, I think the I think the challenge on the on the Germany side is that it's it's ah, it's it's sort of I had had someone of the idiosyncratic background here where we I was born in Germany. But we emigrated when I was about a year old and, uh and and, you know, spoke German at home and lived in Africa in Namibia, where it went to German speaking school. But, ah, uh, it was it was very different, I think,

from the, uh from from the er General post, World War two Ah, German experience. And ah and I, um And so there are other all these things that I could see from the outside looking into Germany that I think are, um, you know, it's still like sa have a connection to it in this of all these ways. No, you visited as a child many times, and this is something that I connect with minutes. It's obviously like like super different, you know, And the, uh uh the ah sort of,

um, you know, the contrast of Germany in California always like to give is that California is optimistic but desperate, and Germany's pessimistic but comfortable. But Thea, from a California perspective, the pest that this incredibly deep pessimism is is really, really striking. And ah, and even that one dimension, I think, uh um, you know, Jewish culture is super different.

Well, and I feel like Jewish culture is in part starting to attenuate that we don't feel, um I mean, this is this is crazy talk, but we never thought that there was anything positive about anti Semitism and obviously it's not a positive thing, but there were positive externalities in that it allowed us to push ourselves very, very hard because we always knew that we weren't going to get a fair shake and that a tiny moment you might need to flee to someplace that was less dangerous. And I feel that as we become comfortable, we've lost some of the dynamism, which is a hard thing to admit. But I do think that that is in part true, just as I see you know, and I see this in Germany. Germany's intellectual contribution was so profound that nothing post World War two seems to suggest the same nation. And I I think that that loss is a profound loss not to Germany but to the entire world.

Yes, it's, uh it's, you know, And of course, one of the challenges. You know, we can you describe these things Wouldn't speculate on, you know, You know, some of the causal things. It's Ah, I think it's a it's somehow we don't want to go back, We we can't go back

and and don't want to

agree And, um and so yeah, there is there is a history and, you know, e think something's been lost in both Germany and Jewish culture. Ah, and how one how on recon constitutes this is ah is even we could convince people of, you know, the causes and the losses. Ah, what you actually do about it is is super hard to say. And that's ah, that's sort of always the the strange dynamic of us.

Um, something I'd be open to us working on it some future point if we can find the time. But let me switch gears slightly and come back a little bit to the violence point. But one of the things that I think has become kind of interesting in our relationship is that a a certain class of theories that are not popular in the general population are traded back and forth between us. Ah, partially around the idea of how do we restart growth? How do we avoid violence? And I wanted to sort of alert people who are interested in the portal concept to this idea of orphaned or unpopular theories that are traded among a few but maybe not are among the many. So if we could go through a few of these, one of them has to do with how you and I both, um, were much more. Um, I think we believe that Trump was much more likely to get elected in the general population did. And this has to do with the theory of preference falsification that people well broadly lie about what their true preferences are. So they'll keep one set of public preferences but a hidden set of private preferences. And then in our culture that gets revealed every four years where you might have a Schrodinger's cat experiment. You find out where the country actually is.

Yes, I Yeah, I felt this was a dynamic that was going on in all these strange ways. In 2016 there was a dinner I had in San Francisco about a week before the election with a group of center right people ones very prominent angel investor in Silicon Valley. And he said, You know, I'm voting for Trump in a week, but because I'm in Silicon Valley, I have to lie. And so it was unusually honest about lying and and And the way the way I lie is that I tell people I'm voting for Gary Johnson. Couldn't say he was gonna vote for Hillary Clinton like the facial muscles wouldn't work or something would go wrong. But Gary Johnson is sort of the lie that you could could tell. And and then if you actually look at what happened in the month before the election, the Gary Johnson support collapsed from minor. Some like 6 to 2% or whatever. And as far as I can tell, all of that went Thio Trump and Ah,

And the question has to ask is, Were these people, you know, lying all along with a lying to themselves. Did they sincerely change their mind in the last month or some? Some combination of that. But yet 11 sort of vehicle for this preference falsification was that you had got 1/3 party candidate is sort of a gateway to the transition's what happened with Ross Perot, where the people when you know, eventually went to Clinton in 92 or John Anderson in 19 eighties. That's been That's been a sort of repeated pattern, and that's I think that was one element of whipped was going on. But then I think there were also all these all these aspects of of the Trump candidacy, that Ah, uh, people are super uncomfortable about polite society. And ah,

and so when would you know that the preference falsifications somehow perhaps much greater than in many other other past context. And so, you know, even even the day of the election, the exit polls suggested that Trump was going to lose. And there's still a 2 to 3% effect like this literally the day of

the voting. Well, I look, I have voted for Bernie in the primaries, and I felt that both you and I had realized that the Clinton neo liberal story was a slow motion. Ah, one way ticket to disaster if it kept going on election after election so that both of us recognized that we had to

get off that train. Of course, before one of the complicated question all this is, um, you know, did people actually already sense this? And were they lying about this? So, like everybody was saying all the way throughout 2016 most of people saying, There's no chance that you know Trump's gonna win. This is absolutely impossible. And I didn't really connect this before the election. But with 2020 hindsight, I wonder, was the fact that everyone was clicking on the Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight statistical polling rattle site a few times a day to reassure themselves that Hillary Clinton was still ahead and was gonna win? Was that some sort of acknowledgment that on some maybe subconscious or barely conscious level, people sense that Ah,

it wasn't really has done a deal as, ah, they they were. They were constantly saying so. So there's even a version of that question that I wonder about, Yeah, you because there's something about the polling that took on this unusually iconic role in 2016. It was so important on there was no truth outside the polls. I remember this, You know, one of the Democrat, uh, talking heads saying something like, You know, Republicans don't believe in climate change. They also don't believe in polls.

That's why they're going to lose and generally pulls. All right. But there is something about how all important they were in 2016. That might have been a tell that something. Something was a little bit of mess.

I think people knew for my from to my way of thinking, I think people knew that there was something very bizarre about this election. I think that the Bernie Scare that if the Democratic Party hadn't been so skillfully in skillful in sidelining Bernie and where the party regulars were clearly backing Clinton, Um, my sense is that it could well have been burning versus Trump, and that would have been enough to say the neo liberal story is over. So I think there was that fear that this was coming to an end. Um, my sense of it was that the major reaction to Trump was sort of a class reaction that it was. You're rejecting the entire concept of a an educated group that knows the right things to say. And you know, you're clearly sort of not the kind of person who should be in the Oval Office much more than the issue of whether or not Trump was going to be a warmonger turned the US into a police state. Which, of course, doesn't seem to have happened as of this moment in 2019. But I guess what my sense of it was is that people really were shocked. I was, because I live in a left of center universe

the day after. They certainly pretended to be shocked. No, there's no I. Look, I'll concede your point. They were They were pretty shocked, little town shocked. But you know if, But I still have my question why, you know, why were they clicking on the dancing little interest a

few times a day? One version of it was, let's say, even if Hillary Trance Trump, but it wasn't enough. That would be a scary thing, given what Trump had been built up, too, which is a orange Hitler. Um, you know, if you imagine that your country is supporting. Somebody thinks all Mexicans are rapists is going to take the country back. Thio the Middle Ages It would be very disconcerting if such a person could get 20% of the vote. So I think that the pole had his own significance. Um, however,

you know, uh, I think that one of the things about preference falsification is that when you start to believe that this is a robust phenomenon, that all of the economic models that assume that your privates preferences and public preferences of the same um you start to see the world very differently. And so this is one of the portals into an alternate way of seeing the universe. So is not to get surprised by revolutions.

Well, it's always, um, you know, it's always this question in my mind, this question of preference, falsification of the tumor, crime theories tightly coupled to this question of you know, how intense is the problem of political correctness, where you know how, how much pressure is there on people to say things they don't actually believe, And and, uh and I you know, I I always come back to thinking that the problem of political correctness in some sense is our biggest political problem that that, you know, we live in a world where people are super uncomfortable saying what they think that it's it's sort of dangerous. Teams use the Silicon Valley context.

Um, it's a problem that Silicon Valley has become a one party state. But they're two different senses in which you could be a one party state. One senses that everybody just happens to believe this one thing, which, you know, um uh, you know, uh, is one thing, and then the other one is in which 85% of people believe one thing and the other 15% pretend to and, you know, it's it's like a It's a dynamic with the super majorities where you know we as a democracy, we think 51% of you will be something that probably right, 70 80% believe something. It's almost more certainly right.

But if you have 99.99% of people believe something at some point you shifted from Democratic Truth toe North Korean insanity and, uh, and so there is. There's a sub subtle tipping point where the wisdom of crowds, Um um, shifts in tow into something that sort of softly totalitarian or or something like that in my mind. It it maps very much onto this question of, you know, the problem of political correctness. It's always hard to measure how how big it is, you know, politically correct society, of course. You know, we're just saying we think we all love stalling. We all of Chairman Mao and ah, maybe we're just singing these songs because we're all enthusiastic about it. And ah, and I think my read on it is that that's the problem has gotten more acute a lot of parts of our society over the last few decades.

Yeah, I think that's gotten well. As you know, I started this whole intellectual, dark Web concept in part to create kind of, ah broad based on bipartisan coalition of, um, people who are willing to speak out in public and take some risk. Speaking for a large number of people, I would never have understood how many people feel terrified to speak out if I hadn't done that because people come up to me all the time and say thank you for saying what I can't say it work. And then when I asked them Well, what is it that you can't say it work? It's absolutely shocking, Uh, completely commonplace things. Things that are not at all dangerous. Not not superior.

Frightening. One of the things I believe and I don't know whether you're gonna you're gonna agree with this, is that, um you start to understand that a lot of the people who are enforcing the political correctness suspect that they're covering up dangerous truths. So, for example, if you believe that I q equals intelligence, which I do not I mean, let's just be honest about it. Um, you're going to fear anything that shows variation in I Q between groups. If you don't believe I Q equals intelligence. If you believe that intelligence is a much richer story and that no group is that far out of the running, you're not terribly frightened of the data because you have lots of different ways of understanding what's happening, and also you generally find that the truth is the best way of lifting people out of their situation. So I secretly suspect,

to be blunt about in this kind of horrible that a lot of Silicon Valley is extremely bigoted and misogynistic, and it can't actually make eye contact with the fact that it secretly thinks women aren't as good programmers where I happen to think, you know, fish Arian equivalents suggests that males and females one protein apart S r Y protein are not likely to be. I mean, they might have different forms of intelligence in different forms of cognitive strengths. But if you don't actually worry too much about an intellectual difference, you'd be willing tohave an intellectual conversation that was quite open about it. So maybe I can

turn that around. Yeah, absolutely. See, that's sort of a lot of different things that want to react to the right. Um, yeah, I suspect that it's it zey distraction of sorts. You know, I think I think, um, I'm very superficial layer and we wanna have We wanna have debates, won't have debates in a lot of areas. A lot of you know, hard questions and the questions in science and technology and philosophy, religion. They're all these questions.

I think it would be healthy to debate. And there's a way in which political debates are sort of a low form of these questions. And there's one sense in which I think of these political questions as less important or less elevated than some of these others. But there's also a sense in which these questions about politics are ones that that everyone can have access to. And so if you can't even have a debate about politics, you can't say, You know, I like the man with a strange orange hair do or I like the mean grandmother. Yeah, um, if you can't even say that, then then we've sort of frozen out discussion on a lot of other areas, and that's that's always one of the reasons I think, Thea, that that political correctness starts with correctness about politics. And that's it is that when you that when you aren't allowed to talk about that area,

you implicitly frozen out a lot of others that are maybe more important and no on where, you know, we're certainly not gonna debate about string theory. If we can't even have a common sense debate about politics or something like that, you know, it's it's I'm I'm very sympathetic to the sort of distraction theory that that you know a lot of these sort of, uh, the what's going on. Our society is like a psycho social magic, hypnotic magic trick where you know we're being distracted from from something something very important and political correctness, identity, politics and maybe American exceptionalism. Sort of these. These various ideological systems on you are distracting us from things the the you know, the thing. I keep thinking.

It's the main thing is distracting us from is the stagnation and is that you know, that there are these problems that we don't want to talk about in our society. It's possible is also a way to distract us from bad thoughts that we have about people with sword use, you said. But the one I would I would go back to first is just that it's distracting us from dealing with dealing with problems. You know the reason. The reason we have a new speak, the sort of Orwellian newspeak in politics with the zombie politicians. And, you know, you know Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush or whoever it might might be is Ah, we're certain not supposed to talk about the real issues, and maybe they have a bad conscience, and I think they're bad people. But it's just I think the primary thing is just too dangerous to talk about what's actually going on. They don't know what to do about it and better not

talk about that. Yeah, I think there's another take on it which, you know, if I'm honest about it, probably originates from my side of the aisle, which is that I have a sense that if you believe that productivity and growth is over, you don't wantto emphasize issues of merit because you don't really think that the marriage is gonna translate. And so therefore, all you can focus on, like, you know, AA board of a company is just a bunch of slots at a trough. And so you have to make sure that every group has its slots at the trough because it doesn't actually matter. The board isn't doing anything to begin with, and so it's only a question of receiving the wealth. It is already there.

And so I worry that that is, um you know, I guess where I break with a lot of progressives is that I believe that most progress comes from progress. Rise technologically lead and informational E lead that the more we know in, the more we can do, the more we can take care of people.

Yes. I mean, again, this is always maybe naive hope on my part or or or something like this. But I I always think that when we can't talk about things you can't solve and that this is exactly so that you may be, these are Maybe these are the calculations you make. And this is, you know, this is the way we had people on the head, even though they're never going to get ahead or something like that. But ah, you know, it's never going to work. It's and swinging. People aren't that stupid. They will eventually figure it out. And so, uh, that's that's That's sort of why I'm under motivated

to play that game. Yeah, yeah, And I have to say that one of the things that I've learned from you is that it's one thing to hold it, have a contrarian position. It's another thing to hold it. When the whole world starts hating on you, for example, I watch the world go from viewing. Removing Gawker is removing a nuisance or worse, that was threatening people selectively. Ah, to a concern. You know, about, um, like first Amendment rights and silencing Ah,

you know, free speech. And, you know, I do have this strong sense that people are willfully misinterpreting. Ah, these actions that are necessary to sort of self correct in our society and our not being terribly honest, There's a lot of bad faith acting in our system at the moment.

Yeah, but, you know, again, I'm always I'm over this. Look at this again, where I'm I'm always quite hopeful that people realize there's a lot of bad faith acting and they

discount they grow

out of it accordingly. And I You know, um, you know, I don't know how many people disagree with me on the support for Trump. You know, we'll be more open to it in five years or 10 years, and we'll see on the gawker matter. I'm you know, I'm gonna win that one. And, uh and I think that Ah, you know, I think people understand that when it gets criticized by people in the media who have themselves are up against super challenged business models, where they have to act in sociopathic ways to get clicks by their readers Write that thing is just the game they have to play. I think people, this is more than understanding, then you think and, uh and therefore you know, it's it's ah, it's not quite what it what it looks

well, but But there's also a way in which boat? In both of these cases, there's this thing

I think I was. I was extremely disturbed by Gawker a decade, decade and 1/2 ago because I think it was a really powerful thing at the time where it worked because people didn't understand how it worked. It was this hate factory, this scapegoating machine. But people didn't see it as such, Um, and because of that it was It was super powerful once you once you see how it works, once you understand it, it is it is less powerful. So, you know, even, you know, had I not succeeded in litigation against against Gawker? I think it would be a weaker version of that today because, you know, there are, of course, equally nasty things on the Internet, but they're not as powerful because

a well organized

people people can sort of us that there's more transparency into them into the motives and people get it. And the hate factory only works when it's not perceived a

such well. I think that there is a way in which some of this stuff is slowing down because people are getting tired of the constant state of beheading, figuratively of people via their reputations, that we've moved from honest physical violence into reputational and economic violence against people that are considered undesirable. But I think that, like there's a story with both Gawker and Trump, which the rest of the world will never see, and I wouldn't have seen it. Um, if I hadn't been working with you In the case of Gawker, I don't think anybody even knows the story about how much you sweated the ethics internally of How do I do this, right? How do I make sure that I don't hurt anybody that I shouldn't be hurting? How do I make sure that this represents something narrow and not something broad? Which is the story so far as I know that hasn't been told. And then there's the story with Trump where I think if you remember this, um,

when Trump won Ah you had a gathering at your house and you did not invite me. And I was so pissed at you that, uh even though I was tooth and nail against Trump and I remained really pretty close to a never Trumper, Um, I knew why you did what you did. I knew that you felt that it was a reduction in violence. And I think that you had theories that nobody believed at the time. If I look out at this world up through these windows, Trump has not changed mostly day to day life except for the phenomena of Trump. But it's not theirs to get, you know, Ah, policemen on every street corner with an automatic rifle. We're not in some sort of siege fromthe White House. And you said, I think much less is going to happen than people imagine.

And I think we're gonna be in a much less interventionist moke mode. Then we were previously and whether or not you were right or you're wrong. So far, I think you've been born out to be right on both of those points. Um, I knew that you had a good idea that we had to shake things up or we were going to be and some very dangerous situation.

It was this i e. You had two speeches in 2016. When was that? The Republican convention? When was that? The Washington Press Club. About a month before the election and in in both speeches, I you know, I underscored the ways in which I think Trump would represent a break from the interventionist neo conservative new liberal foreign policies of You know that. Ah, you know, Bush, 43 that Obama still continued and that Hillary was likely would have been likely to continue. And ah, and I still think that Ah, that's roughly what's happened. It's not been it's not been as a CZ as far away from interventionism is,

I would like, but it's directionally directionally that's happened. And I think, um, and I think that Ah, you know, I do think we're not going to go back to that on the Republican side, just like a very important thing. We're not going to go back to the Bush foreign policy ever. Yeah, that's that's That's That was an important thing. You know, it was ah, it was when in the primaries, when you know, Republican primaries when Trump spoke out against the Iraq war,

right? That was that was a very important moment. For my point of view. Yeah, on I think, you know, I think you know, we always think of the you know, I think the weight one way to think of the president, United States, is that you're sort of the mayor of this country and mature the dictator of the world. Because in the U. S, your power is very limited outside the U. S. You can do, you know, a great number of things. And that's why I think these these foreign policy questions are actually, um are very important ones in assessing a president.

Well, um, may I guess my my take on the great danger of Trump was that there were certain sorts of standards and agreed upon cultural aspects, which I've likened to the aural tour of the United States, where the Constitution is our written Torah. And my concern is that Trump has had an effect on degrading certain expectations where it does matter how one comports oneself as a president. Maybe not as much as some of my friends would like to think, and I do think that we needed some dynamism. But my concern is is that it's gonna be very difficult to recover from the kind of damage to our sense of what can and cannot, he said, and done. Not that I did think. I didn't think that we needed to break out of our Overton window, if you will. On many topics, I just the way that Trump touched those words. Not comfortable for me? Yes. Well, look, I

don't I agree. They're certain ways in which President Trump does not act presidential in the way in which the previous presidents and

I agree on things

that needed and then maybe said. But then maybe there's some point where it was too much acting and, ah, the acting was counterproductive. And that's that's, you know, it's it's e. I think there is something extraordinary about, uh, how it was possible for someone like Donald Trump to get elected and ah, and probably a useful question for people on both the left and the right would be toe to try to think about. You know, what the underlying problems were with with some of the solutions to that R and, um and, ah, you know, it's,

uh, you know, I think I think I think the, um left or the Democrats, you know, they think they can win. They can win in 2020 but they have to have more of an agenda than just telling the Republicans to hurry up and die. Well, that has to be

more than that. This is the thing that convinced me that I didn't get the trump thing, which was I was convinced that Trump was gonna be such a wake up call that the Democratic Party was gonna, you know, go behind a closed door and say we cannot let this happen again. We have to look honestly at how we got beat. What? This represents what it means and what we're gonna do next time. And the idea that we were going to double or triple down on some of the stuff that didn't work never even occurred to me. I had no idea that that party was so far gone. Um, that it couldn't actually, you know, if you imagine he's orange Hitler, you would think orange Hitler would be the occasion to think deeply in question hypotheses and I really have been shocked the extent to which that didn't happen. So maybe I got my own party wrong on that front. I didn't know that we were this far gone, but

yeah, I mean, it's it's I think it's a lot of time to to do that. And I I keep thinking that, you know, we are at some point where where the distractions aren't going to work as well. And I think the big distraction on the left over the last 40 50 years have been forms of identity politics where, you know, we don't look at the country as a whole. We look at parts of it and ah and sort of. It's sort of been a way of, you know, I think obscuring these questions of of stagnation, right? I would say the right the right ah wing distraction technique has been would say something like American exceptionalism, which is interesting, which is this doctrine that the US is this singular,

exceptional country. It's so, so terrific, so wonderful. It does everything so incredibly well that you shouldn't ask any any difficult questions, any questions at all? Uh, no, it's if you want Thea, it's it's, I think it in theological or pissed. Um, a logical terms. You can compare itto the radical monotheism of the God of the Old Testament, where it means that Ah, God is so radically unique that you can't know anything about him.

You can't talk about God's attributes. You can't, you know, say anything about him whatsoever. And if the United States is radically exceptional, then in a similar way you can say nothing about it whatsoever. And maybe all these things on the ground that seem crazy. Where were, you know, we have people who are exceptionally overweight. We have, Ah, we have subway systems that are exceptionally expensive to build. We have universities there, exceptionally sociopath. I commend your of the student debt problem.

Any other country. Um, you know, we have a trade regime that's exceptionally bad for our country. No other country are a self destructive. This all these things that we somehow don't ask. I think exceptionalism, um somehow led to this country that was exceptionally unself aware and strange. And that's Ah, that's, um so you know, there's, um, you know, greatness is adjacent exceptionalism, but it's it's actually still quite different because many countries can be great and great is Maur.

It's more a scale. And there's some something you measured against multiple areas where is exceptional. It's just completely in commensurate with anything else. And ah and Ah, and I think that's that's gotten us into a very, very bad cool to sack me. I think that Ah, there's a way in which that sort of exceptionalism has ended on the right and there's been we've moved beyond that. And I'm hopeful that in a similar way, the left will move beyond identity politics. Even though, you know, right now, it feels like the monsters flopping about more violent than ever. And even I think it might be its death throes. But maybe

not. Yeah, it could be that it's gotten very stronger. Could be on its last legs, and it might as well go for broke. Yes. So let me return back to the line of ah, inquiry and business. Sorry. Just enjoying so much hearing what you have to say. Some of it's new to me. The, um that the theories that might be portals into a different way of looking at the world, one of them that you brought into my I've never Heard of before was Gerard's various theories, and I wonder if you might say You've often credited your success in business toe how you understood and you applied your Army. Obviously, he didn't have this kind of level of business success. So can you talk a little bit about your personal relationship? To Rene Girard's theories as a portal into a different way of seeing the world?

Well, it's a sailor, but about the theory. So it's ah, sort of. This theory of human psychology has deeply mimetic where you sort of you, uh, you copy other people.

So just for the folks at home Medic as in mime rather than me medic is in Mim. Yes,

well, they're punishing closely related. Okay, you imitate people, but you imitate. That's how you learn to speak as a child. You copy your parents language. That's how. But you also imitate desire. And then there are sort of all sorts of aspects of mommy says that can lead toe sort of mass violence mass insanity. So it has its both what enables human culture to function, but it also it also is is, quite, uh, quite dangerous and, you know, when I came across this sort of consolation of ideas is under graduated Stanford.

My my bias is worse with libertarian classic liberal. You know, only individuals exist. Individuals are radically autonomous, Can can think for themselves. And so this was Ah, it was both. It was sort of a powerful, um, corrective to that intellectually. But then it also worked on existential level where you realized, while they're all these ways that I've been hyper medic, I've been hyper tracked. Why might Stanford, Why does this matter so much? Why,

uh you know, why am I doing all the things I'm doing? And ah, and and that's it is a prism through which 11 looks at a lot of things. That's, ah, that I found to be quite helpful over over over recent decades. I think the preference falsification you can think of in dramatic terms where you know, everybody goes along with what everybody else thinks. And then you can get these sort of chaotic points where all of a sudden things can shift much faster than you would think possible. Because they're all these dynamics that are not not simply rational, it's not quite Correcto to model people as these sort of classical Adams or something like that entangled

do what would be a good way for people listening at home to start to get into Gerard's philosophy if they were interested.

Well, there are, you know, it's there's a number of different books that Gerard wrote. I think the the magisterial one's probably things Hidden says Foundation of the World. Is this truth of Mommy sis and violence in the ways? So it's part psychology, part anthropology, part part history,

you know, all portal. I should point out the visits were

all hit. It's It's a portal onto the past, um, to human origins. It's Ah, it's Ah, our history. It's a portal onto the present on tow, the interpersonal dynamics of psychology. It's ah, it's, you know, it's a portal onto the future in terms of, you know, you know, are we goingto let thes mimetic desires run amok and head towards apocalyptic violence. For,

you know, even the entire planet come no longer absorb the violence we can unleash. Or are we gonna learn from this and transcend this in a way where we get to some some very different place. And so it has. It has a sense that you know, both danger and and hope for the future as well. So it's a it is sort of this, you know, panoramic theory on a lot of ways, super powerful. And, ah, and just extraordinarily different from from what 11 would normally hear there was, there was there, sort of like almost a cult like element where you had these people who are followers of Gerard and was sort of a sense that, you know,

we had we had figured out the truth about the world in a way that nobody else did and that, you know, that that was generative and very powerful. It was always this parts of their unhealthy, but But ah, it was, uh, it was it has sort of incredible dynamism and just you're aware that maybe things are so different from how how they appear to be that Ah, you know, it's you know, there may be a portal out there. Maybe, you know,

it was shocking to me. I mean, the first time I heard about it, you invited me to a conference that you were keeping quiet and I was in the news, and there was quite a lot of anger and fewer that I had done something wrong. And you waited a few days to give a talk, and you talked about scapegoating and the mechanism by which violence that might be visited upon the many is visited upon the one. And then you also started talking about the king as if he is sort of scapegoating waiting so that the king is not necessarily something that one wouldn't want to be. And I found it absolutely fascinating because it turned so many ideas on their heads that I got angry at you. Why hadn't you told me this earlier when I'd been through three sleep sleepless nights before I'd heard the theory. So I found it instantly applicable, particularly if you're the sort of person who is likely to get scapegoated by not taking refuge in the herd. Do you think it has more relevance to people who are struggling to, like, break out his individuals because of the possibility of being picked off?

You know, I I think, um well, I think it has universal thing. I think it is universally true. Yeah, has some sort of universal relevance. I think the problems of violence and scapegoating are are universal problems. It is, um, it's probably the case. They're certain types of people who are more likely to become scapegoats. But ah, but it's not an absolute thing. Yeah, And so there is. You know,

there's always you could say. There's an arbitrariness about scapegoating because the scapegoat is supposed to represent to stand in for for everybody. And so, uh, the scapegoat has to be perceived as someone who's radically other, but then also has to somehow emerge from from within the group. And so there are there times when the scapegoat is this sort of outlier, you know, extreme insider, extreme outsider, you know, king slash criminal or, you know, whatever personality. And that's that's probably a dangerous sort of things like Abraham Lincoln, the incredible orator who's also grows up in a log cabin.

So, you know, this sort of extreme contrasts are often often, um, you know, people who are at risk of of this, maybe more more than others. And then at the same time, you know, because these air sort of mob like dynamics there is sort of a way in which, you know it's not like anyone's really safe from the violence, right? Ever No one. No one's completely safe.

I think that's quite quite true. Um,

but yes, it's Ah, it's it's it's Ah, yes. But there is a thought that, uh, one of the sort of history ideas that Gerard had that, uh is that, um is that there's a dynamic to this process where scapegoating it only works when people don't understand it. And so they're sort of, as you understand it better. It works less well, or it has to get displaced into other other dimensions and so on. You know, if you have a, um if you have a witch front, say,

you know, we need to find a witch to bring back peace to the community, that sort of, ah, psycho social understanding of what you're doing is actually counterproductive of the witch hunt itself. You know, the witch hunt is supposed to be supposed to be a theological epiphany, right? God's telling you who the witch is if you think of it, is some sort of so psycho social control mechanism and it won't work anymore. And so, uh, so that Ah, no The metaphor that Gerard uses is that, Ah, you know,

the sacred is like Fla Justin. And violence is like oxygen. And so you know, but But it only works in a world where it's misunderstood. And so if you understand scapegoating, you end up in a world where it works less and less well, and the kind of political and cultural institutions that are that are linked to it, we'll tend to unravel. You know, I think one of the one of the sort of on ways in which this this has happened a great deal and you know in modernity is that we we escape, go to Scapegoat er's sort of go up one level of attraction thing, and, um and that sort of always makes it a little bit more complicated. And so if we go after the people who were the historical oppressors, the historical victimizers, that's Ah,

that's often, um, you know, that's often a super powerful way, and it's like slightly too complicated. There's a There's a Bill Clinton formulation of this, you know, we must unite against those who seek to divide us and which is on some level of self contradictory but then it's just a little bit too hard for people to fully disentangle. And that's that's that's sort of one way that that I think it's still still sort of works even though you know it's it's again when everyone sees these moves, whenever understands them, it just doesn't work that well anymore.

So it's like it's like it's like saying we like Would you like me to prescribe you a placebo? Ah, in

other words, yes, that probably does

not work very well. It doesn't

work very well. It probably does not work very well. And ah,

but then the other part of it that I find terrifying, which is but also interesting, is that implicit in this framework is that there is a minimal level of violence needed to accomplish an end and that the scapegoating mechanism, well, entirely unjust has the virtue of being minimal. And just that the horror is visited upon the individual.

Yes, yes, or the theological terminology Gerard would use would be the scapegoating is satanic and that archaic cultures were a little bit satanic, but not very, and they were sort of satanic in an innocent way because the violence was actually a wayto limit violence that that, you know, we violence is both, You know, it's both the disease and a cure for the disease. We need violence to drive out violence. And this is this is how this is how our societies, um, how our societies work on dhe Then it's not quite clear how things will continue to work. So there's yeah, So you could always say that, um, there's a sense in which is a super broad brushstroke type argument.

There's a way in which you can say that, um, the left is more focused on unjust on the unjustified nature of violence. And the right is more focused on how a certain amount of violence is needed for society. And ah, and they're on their ways in which they're both right and then their ways in which they're both deconstructing each other. I suppose you could say the nation state, a nation state, um, um contains violence in both senses. The word contain because it's good, it contains it as ah, it limits it a channels it in certain ways. Well, then it's also part of part of its very being, and,

uh, and you get in tow. Yeah, all these questions when you know when it's appropriate, when it's when it's not. And that's why you know, I I don't like violence. I think it's a very serious problem, but ah, just a regular hands instrumental. Maybe if you said we're going to get rid of all violence tomorrow, it's going to stop.

Um, you be talking about nothing

Or I think I think so. Use

no way in which that can.

Well, that might require a tremendous amount of violence to enact. Or or if we're gonna have no more violence at all. Uh, you know, maybe you'll have just total chaos and, ah, a lot of violence. Well, in that form. So it's it's ah, it's a It's an interesting problem toe. Yeah, there were all these interesting descriptors, but then howto practically translate into action.

Very, very tricky. Yeah, I think that one of the things on the left that people don't get right I don't know whether you agree with me or not, is that I think we on the left are somewhat divided between two camps. One camp is quite open about wanting to end depression, and the other camp is cryptic about wanting to reverse it. In other words, you've oppressed for long enough. It is your turn to be oppressed of my, uh, Sameer, actually envious of oppression. And there is something of a civil war. I mean, I would say this is the way in which the idea W's left wing or left flank is misunderstood, which is that almost none of the left wing members of the I D.

W r um interested in oppressing anybody. So there's no the Camino payback period that that sounds like fun to us. And one of the things I hadn't understood until it was said to be quite starkly, um, progress is messy, and you gotta break a few eggs to make an omelet. There is this just tolerance, bordering on excitement, about the opportunity to stick it to those who have stuck it to you from your perspective that this is an aspect of justice. Where's the cessation of oppression is interesting to another part of that group?

Yes, much less, um, yellow. The disturbing thing is that it's of course, much less exciting and much less energizing. So I often think if you if you listen to political speech, right. The applause lines are always the ones we are going to go after. The other side. Yeah, we're we're gonna go after the bad people. We're going to stop them. And if you try to construct a political speech in which it was we're gonna unite people, we're gonna get everybody on to the school. And there were no bad people. Um,

it would be It's almost impossible to have a speech that has any energy at all. Well, on DSO, you know, it's it's ah, let me

take issue with that slightly. My excite, I agree, was a political speech just exactly what you said. So I don't think I miss King. I'm going to mischaracterize it. I think that the problem is the reason I pour energy into trying to stop the political correctness and the rules about what can be said mostly has to do with the fact that I'm incredibly excited, except I'm excited about something non political, like if what I'm excited about is pursuing technological product progress, scientific progress, more people being able to form families, etcetera. That's where the excitement is. It's not coming from the politics. It's coming from what the politics facilitates. So I think that the problem with these speeches is, if you don't believe that,

there's something that we're keeping the space clean four. We might as well riot or something, because at least that's exciting, and that's got some energy behind it. Then it's my team versus your team. But I think that would both you and I have been folks. I mean, look at some level. Anybody is focused on technology as you are is a progressive in the sense of carrying about what is actually progress. And I think that that the danger comes from when politics becomes your entertainment and, you know, you read very correctly. I learned this from you, that when you look at a bunch of candidates debating on a crowded stage, look at where the energy is and the energy is something that is not, in my opinion, a good indicator. It's not a good proximate for the ultimate that I care about.

Yes, Look, I I'd like it to be just the way you describe it. I just

wanted to write, but

I do. It often is not. And, uh and so yes, scientific technological progress in awaken hope is it can lead towards a more corn Akopian world in which there's less malthusian struggle, less less violence. And then at the same at the very same time. You know, an honest account of the history of these things is that, you know, a lot of it was used to develop or advanced weapons. It was in the pursuit of violence and, ah, one sort of account of the text stagnation, the scientific text stagnation is that, you know, the breakthrough thing was the atom bomb.

And then, you know, we on Then you built the rockets to deliver the bombs more quickly. And by 1970 we had enough bombs and rockets destroy the world 10 or 20 times over or whatever, and the whole thing made no more sense. And ah, And so if one of the big drivers of scientific and technological progress, um, was was actually just the sort of military dimension when that ah became absurd, you know, Did the whole thing slow down to the space age and, you know, not in 1972 when Apollo left the moon, but was it was the key moment. 1975 when you had the Apollo Soyuz docking. And,

like, if we're just gonna be friends with the Russians are we doesn't really make sense, Really? Working 80 hours 100 hours a week around the clock, Um, and again, I don't think it's all that. But I think one of the one of the challenges that we should not understate how big it is in resetting science and technology in the 21st century is how do we tell a story that motivates sacrifice incredibly hard work, deferred gratification for the future? That's Ah, that's not intrinsically violent. Yeah, and Ah, And it was It was combined with that in all these

powerful ways. Well, you know you. So when I think about the way in which the nation let's say, came around

because I think this is this is like, this is one of the reasons, you know, if you sort of take people you know, a lot of people deny that there's a tech science stagnation going on. Sure, but then, you know, one of the other things one hears is, Well, you know, maybe it's not progressing as fast, But do we really want it to progress this fast? isn't a dangerous and isn't it? You know, we're just gonna build the eye that's gonna kill everybody. Or it'll be,

you know, biological weapons, or it's going to be a runaway nanotechnology or, you know, and I don't think we should, you know, dismiss those fears. You know, completely. They're not

completely. The fear is that it's going to make these things cheap and easy, whereas right now you're like, you still need a state to do a lot of this work. I mean, you know, like the Elon Musk is one of the first people private individuals with the space program. Yeah, that's a version

of it. But I think in general it's just that that somehow you will lose control over over the violence. You think you can control it? Maybe it's a large state. Maybe it's maybe it's autonomous ai ai weapons, which in theory are controlled by a state. But in practice, not quite. So it's Yeah, they're sort of all these. All these scenarios where this stuff can conspire a lot of control. You know, I I I'm more scared of the one. We're nothing happened, right? So I'm more scared of like, stagnation world I feel ultimately goes. This is straight to apocalypse. This is much more scared of that. But ah, we have toe understand why people are scared of the non stagnant world.

It's a very strange I mean, boy, there a couple of threads here that is super important, One of which is that one thing that I sense that both of us get frustrated with is that if you think about growth as necessary to contain certain violence and you think about growth is largely also being, um, how much fossil fuels you're able to burn. Ah, climate is not paired with kind of a reduction in opulence. It's paired on the other side with, um, with war. And if you over focus on climate and you result in a situation in which growth has slowed to a halt. Now growth doesn't need to be the amount of fossil fuel you burn. But it has largely been that up until the present, you actually see that the trade off that you're facing is very different than the one that's usually portrayed by either side. And somehow we never get around to that conversation, which would be if we were very serious about climate. Would we be plunged into war?

Yeah. Obviously you can't have a Nikon me without an environment. But it may also be the case that you can't have in our environment without an economy, right? And ah, and ah, And then if both of those statements are true, um, maybe maybe you know, the set of solutions. The set of best solutions looks really different than if you just focus on one and not the other way. So

yeah, it doesn't why it's so important for me tohave environments in which people who don't agree on things but agree on what constitutes a conversation can sit down with an idea that nobody is going to leave the table. So but the reputation is in tatters. To the extent that they can't find a job on Monday, to some worth themselves is that you have to actually way both of these things simultaneously. And the great danger is people trying to solve either problem in isolation.

Will, you know, um, if one goes with the general climate change narrative that its its anthropogenic, it's it's 02 levels are rising in a in a way that's dangerous and has a serious risk of some kind of big, big, runaway process on. And I think always Thea political question. My mind is, um you know, what do you do about China and what do you do about India? Because thes air, the countries that are, um, you're trying to catch up to the developed world have enormous way to go to catch up and, uh, and you know,

it's it's a political consequence. I think Western Europe, you're I think Europe has something like 8% of the carbon emissions in the world. And ah, and then way have to have more than just the sort of magical political thinking where it's something like, uh, you know, we're gonna have a carbon tax in California and this will be so charismatic and so inspiring that people in China and India will copy us and follow suit. People are They're not going to actually say that literally, because it sounds so crazy. Um, but if you say that that's not the way things actually work, then then somehow you need you need to do some really different things. We need to find energy sources that are not carbon dioxide intensive A We fixed need to figure out ways, engineer Carbon sinks. Uh,

you know, the It was all sort of crazy Jew engineering stuff that maybe should be on the table. Maybe we should be more open to, ah, nuclear power. It's sort of like a range of very different debates and pushes you towards

let me take a slightly different tack. Two statements that I found later in life unfortunately, but have both been meaningful to me. One is Vabres definition that a government is a monopoly and violence and the other one the guy I can never remember. Um, who said I think it's a French political philosopher, said A nation is a group of people who have agreed to forget something in common. And if you put these things together, if you imagine that somehow we've now gone in for the belief the transparency is almost always a good thing and that what we need is greater transparency to control the badness in our society, we probably won't be able to forget anything in common. Therefore, we may not be ableto have a nation, and therefore the nation may not be able to monopolize violence, which is a very disturbing but interesting causal chain. Can we explore the idea of transparency? Given that people seem to now associate certain words with positivity, even though normally we would have thought about privacy, transparency, tradeoffs, let's say

yes. Well, I always do things the privacy, transparency, tradeoff, Onda and Ah, and there's it's always it's always a one thing's always confusing about. Transparency means there's transparency in theory, which is like this Panopticon like, um, thing where the entire planet gets illuminated brightly and equally everywhere all at once, And so that's in theory. But in practice, it is often sounds more like a weapon that will be directed against certain people. Where on you know, it's It's a question of who gets to render who else transparent and who gets. And maybe it's even a Secret path dependent sequencing question where if you do it first,

first trip for strike. Transparency is very powerful. And see the thing about like, you know, Mr Snowden against the N s A. And then the NSA trying to expose Mr Snowden Swedish sex cult, whatever you wanna describe it as, and ah, and I think a lot of it ends up having having that kind of having a Sanches. Sorry, sorry. Sorry to something. Asan. Yeah. Salinger's Swedish sex called songs against the U. S.

A. U S. A. Against Assange's Swedish sex called something like that. And that's, um uh, Yunnan and ah. And so I think it's, I think, in practice, um, full transparency. It assumes people can pay attention to everything at once or equally, and that seems that seems politically incorrect. Then even if you had this much greater transparency in all these ways, um,

they're all these ways that that would seem creepy totalitarian way. If you stated in terms of the problem of violence, you can think of the trade off between transparency and privacy is ah, no transparency is, um, you know, we're looking at everybody, and therefore they can't be that violent, But this state, maybe very violent and enforcing all this transparency and privacy is you know, you get to have a gun and you get to do various dangerous things in the dark, and no one knows what they are, um, and so there's probably more violence on the individual level, but then less control in the state and its again this question of Are you more scared of the violence of individuals, form or scared of centralized violence?

And you probably one should not be too categorical or to absolute about this. But, uh uh, you know it can show up in both places, and that's why it's a wickedly hard problem, wickedly

hard. It does seem to be. And I have to say, I've just I've started to hate the transparency discussion because if you'll notice there's a vote in 2019 for simply saying while I believe that sunlight is the best disinfectant, as if that constituted an argument that first of all, one thing that people don't understand is that there are infections like brucella that are actually accelerated by someone. So it's comical. It's not even true. Bleach is probably a better disinfect, but the idea that that constitutes an argument in our time to me speaks to the fact that we're living in a very strange moment where if you, if you go back to Ecclesiastes, is in the inspiration for turn, turn, turn, there was an idea that there was a purpose to everything and inclusion or exclusion. We're both needed a time to kill the time to die, a time to refrain from killing.

There does seem to be sort of an absolutist mania in which it would be hard to imagine writing a song about a time to kill. Um, in the modern era, you know, and let likewise. I'm not positive that people recognize how imperative it is for a well functioning government to have places where it doesn't have to constantly count

for it. So you have everything you know, if you sort of have no back room deals, maybe that's less corrupt. But maybe nothing. That's phenomenal. You know, it's the U. S. Supreme Court still doesn't televise its hearings, And, uh, I suspect that's that's the right call. Even though, you know, it's it's, there's always and that there is something very strict,

and I think part of it is that you know, if you know that everything is going to be transparent, you will censor yourself and you won't say things. So it's not like the same thing happens in a transparent way, maybe just stops happening altogether. If you're if you're If you're ah, politician or aspiring politician on, do you want to? You know um you're not going to engage in bold ideas. You're not going to experiment with different, different ways about thing about things. You're gonna be super conventional, super curated, and ah, and so it's it's not like we get, you know,

all the benefits of transparency with none of the costs. They come with me, come with a very, very high cost on, And, uh and I I do You know, I I do wonder if, uh, you know, one of the strange dynamics with the younger generations in the U. S. Is that there's a sense that you're just constantly watched There's this great I have sore on to use the Tolkien metaphor that's looking at you at all times and ah, you know that, Yeah, it would be good if you could act the same way. And,

you know, something bad happened we could take care of you, but, uh, if you're always being watched, I suspected really changed your behavior.

You know, it's interesting, Um, in a moment where I wanted to make sure that my son didn't misbehave, I toured him around our neighborhood and pointed out all of the cameras that would track anybody on the street where we live. Um and you know, I'd never noticed them before, But sure enough, there they were in every nook and cranny that we don't realize that if it has to be stitched together, there's an incredible web of surveillance tools that air surrounding us at all time. Are you familiar with the theory of Jennifer Fried called institutional betrayal?

Uh, no, you've mentioned to me, but I don't know all the details. So tell me a little about

it. Well, I don't know all the details either, but I think what she isolated was that people who have been betrayed by institutions that have a responsibility of care, like a hospital, for example, Or if you trust a sense making organ like your newspaper, and then you find that you've been betrayed by that institution that had something of a like a principal agent problem where you had to trust Ah, your agent, in order to take care of you that the quality of trauma is in fact different and that it leads to a universal fear of the infrastructure of your society. That's sort of what I picked up. What I was gonna ask you about is given our, um, central belief that there was something about growth that lead to, um, universal betrayal by institutions, which is compromised experts in the minds of most people.

Do you think there's a, um, preferred way of waking up as a society out of the kind of universal institutional betrayal if we're excited about the next chapter when I'd love to talk to you about in a future episode is what we're excited about it. What comes next? Is there a way of waking up from this most gracefully?

Don't know don't know about that. It strikes me that there are ways we don't wanna wake up. And ah, we don't want Thio wake up in a way where it d energizes us and, um um, de motivates. And so, uh, you know, So I think I think one of the one of the ways I think these institutions worked was, you know, they they took care of people, but it was also motivational. You study, you get good grades, you'll succeed in our system, right.

And, um and so one way, you know, you sort of deconstruct these institutions. You know, the sort of 11 direction that I think is always very dangerous, that it just shifts people into sort of much more nihilistic, very low energy moat where it's just well, there's no point. Nothing can be done. Um, and, uh and that's the way I that's That's the That's the way that I definitively do not wantto wake people up. So I think it has to always be coupled a little bit too, you know? Yeah,

that they're these paths that aren't really going anywhere, and you shouldn't go down these paths. But then there's some other paths here that you take. There's a portal here that you need toe you need to look at. And if you, uh if we are just saying all the paths are blocked, um, you know, I think probably the risk is people just sit down where they are and stopped moving altogether. And that's that. That feels like the very wrong way toe to wake

people up. That's that Sounds very wise. Let me just ask, since you have been attached to some of the highest energy ideas, whether it's, you know, crazy sounding stuff, let's see studying or radical longevity Ah or, um, some other ideas from your background and venture capital and as a technologist yourself, What are the things that you're most excited If we could move them back into the institutions where they probably belonged all this time? What? What are the first sort of subjects in people that you would move back into institutional support to re energize our society? Um, people or programs? Well, I do. I

do think, uh, there is something about, um, basic science that has, you know, it doesn't all have this sort of for profit character. Someone has this non profit, um, character building up this knowledge base for all of humanity. And ah, and and so I don't get no how we do basic science without some kind of institutional context. And, uh, that's one that's that would seem absolutely critical. I'm super interested in the problem of longevity, radical life extension.

And you know, my my sort of disappointment and nonprofit institutions. A nonprofit world has directed me more and more over the years toe. Just invest in biotech companies and try toe find these sort of better functioning corporate solutions. And then I always have this worry in the back of my head that maybe there are these basic research problems, that they're being sidestepped because they're too hard. So I think I think basic science is is one that that you would have to do. And but you have to somehow also reform the institutions they don't have. This Gresham's law, where the, you know the politicians replace the scientists.

That sounds like a great wedding. I was very surprised to see that your friend Aubrey de Grey, who you funded to sort of get the radical longevity thing, was in the news for having solved a hard math problem in his spare time that nobody even knew he was working on. And so it seems like even though people would treat him is crazy, he certainly has a lot on the ball and probably is exactly the kind of a person who might energize the department, even if you might infuriated.

If you can get him back in you. If you were able to get him back and I think you'd be able to solve a lot of problems

well, Peter, it's been absolutely fantastic having you thank you for very generous gift of your time, and I hope that you will consider coming back on the portal to talk about some of the specifics about the things that you and I most excited about doing. Next will do. Thank you so much. All right, Peter, you've been watching the portal with Peter Thiel, and I'm your host, Eric Weinstein. Thanks for tuning in. And please subscribe to the podcast and let us know your thoughts in the comments section below on YouTube.